Storybook Land, Family-Run Amusement Park, Endures

Abstract: EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. — At the beginning, you meet Mother Goose. She is a 25-foot tower of concrete, rheumy-eyed but smiling, standing beside a goose almost as gargantuan as a giraffe. “You are now entering a storybook world,” says a sign beside her purple skirt. “Follow this path, and it will lead you well.” Nearby, rosy-cheeked animatronic bruins greet you with wide smiles at the kitchen table in the Three Bears House. Mama Bear in her frilly pink apron and Papa Bear in snug blue overalls tell you their story, while Baby Bear seems pleased to discover Goldilocks in his bed upstairs. A few steps away, you can walk into Moby-Dick’s cavernous mouth and hear him laugh as your feet tickle his tongue. Go farther, and you’ll see the Old Woman’s Shoe, a cow jumping over the moon, and a crooked man with a crooked cat and a crooked mouse in their little crooked house. This is Storybook Land , a family-owned amusement park outside Atlantic City that is meant for children up to 10 years old. At other parks you get Kingda Ka and Top Thrill Dragster , roller coasters at Six Flags in Jackson, N.J., and Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, that send riders rocketing faster than 100 miles per hour and plunging 400 feet. At Storybook Land you get Bubbles the roller coaster, a happy sea serpent that sails at 18 m.p.h. over a 15-foot drop. Such pint-size thrills have given Storybook Land a niche as larger corporate-owned theme parks have chased ever faster, taller and louder adventures. “We like the smaller children,” said Esther Fricano, 90, who started Storybook Land with her husband, John, in 1955. “We wanted a place just for them.” Mr. Fricano was a World War II veteran, a father of two and a house painter with asthma living in Vineland. Looking for a job that would give him more fresh air and frustrated by a lack of activities for his young children, he decided to create a park for families. He bought five wooded acres on the Black Horse Pike, then a main thoroughfare to the Jersey Shore, and cleared the land by hand. Esther, who had been a secretary on a chicken farm, sewed curtains and otherwise decorated the small features her husband built. Storybook Land was born. In the early days it was just a gravel lot, a luncheonette, unpaved paths through the oak and pine trees and a nursery rhyme-themed playground. It was a stop on the way to the beach to stretch the legs and let the kids blow off steam. One of the original attractions was the Little Red Schoolhouse, which the Fricanos, avid antique collectors, filled with old desks and blackboards. Mary’s little lamb, the one who followed her to school one day, still greets visitors beside its jaunty front door. But otherwise Storybook Land looks nothing like the black-and-white photographs that chronicle the history on the walls of the Dining Depot. Today 15 rides are spread over 20 shady acres, including a carousel, old-fashioned cars that meander along a track, a train that chugs around the park and a small Ferris wheel. Relics of the region’s past dot the park, including four seats salvaged from the long-gone Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, which are flanked by sky-high Phil and Phyllis statues, the pre-Phillie Phanatic mascots of the Phillies. The family even brought in a tiny 127-year-old chapel from a Vineland farm, complete with a recording of the original owner’s daughter playing the organ for the enjoyment of those who pause in the few pews. The park has live animals that are all tied to nursery rhymes, including chickens and peacocks (“Hickety Pickety”), geese (“Goosey, Goosey Gander”) and goats that live in a house on stilts (“The Three Billy Goats Gruff”). Storybook Land stays open through the winter holidays so that Santa and Mrs. Claus can turn on a dazzling light display and hear children’s wish lists. Outside Santa’s house is the North Pole, a six-foot pole of ice that somehow stays frozen all summer long, drawing plenty of triple-dog dares from children channeling Schwartz, Flick and Ralphie from “A Christmas Story.” Mr. Fricano died in 2009 at 87, but Esther Fricano still visits the park every day to do bookkeeping or to dote on her adult grandchildren, Jessica and J. J., who now help run Storybook Land with their father, John Jr., and their aunt JoAnne. They own 30 acres beyond the park and are considering improvements, like expanding a small splash area that opened in 2006. “We don’t want to get too big; we don’t want anything we can’t handle,” Jessica Fricano said. “But this is like a blank slate to me. The possibilities are absolutely endless.” Esther Fricano, laughing, added: “Now we have our grandchildren working, and we’ll wait for the great-grandchildren to come help out too. By that time, I’ll be walking around with two canes.” More than 30 amusement and water parks are in New Jersey and New York alone. Family ownership can be an advantage with all that competition in a slow economy, said Chip Cleary, the president and chief executive of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. “They can turn on a dime,” he said. “If they want to make a decision, they don’t have to get a board of directors together to discuss it and vote on it. They’re more nimble; they can just make a very quick pivot and head in a new direction.” But a tried-and-true path has worked for Storybook Land. Sure enough, many of the displays impart time-tested lessons. Don’t talk to strangers, for instance, is the takeaway when Little Red Riding Hood visits her “grandma.” “It’s just so simple, isn’t it?” said Dermot Nolan, a 41-year-old from Ireland who read about Storybook Land online and decided to visit with his wife, Ann, and their sons Ben, 4, and Tom, 2, midway through their recent vacation in Ocean City. “For years we’ve been doing the nursery rhymes with the kids, and it’s just so nice to bring them alive for them now.” “Alice in Wonderland” came alive for Sara Montagno, 4, of West Deptford, who wheedled her mother, Susan, into cutting lunch short so they could return to Alice’s cavelike structure covered with hallucinogenic murals made more vivid by glow-in-the-dark paint. “Like I fall down a rabbit hole, a real rabbit hole,” Sara told her mother. “I want to do that right now.”

Amusement and Theme Parks
Storybook Land
New Jersey
Fricano Esther
Fricano John


More Upsets in Citi Open

Abstract: Steve Johnson, who beat fifth-seeded John Isner on Wednesday, knocked off another seeded player in the Citi Open in Washington, beating ninth-seeded Ivo Karlovic, 3-6, 7-6 (4), 7-6 (7), to reach the quarterfinals. Vasek Pospisil beat top-seeded Tomas Berdych, 6-2, 6-4. In women’s play, fifth-seeded Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova beat Hiroko Kuwata, 6-3, 6-3, and sixth-seeded Svetlana Kuznetsova beat Kirsten Flipkens, 6-4, 7-5. ■ Ana Ivanovic advanced to her first Bank of the West quarterfinal, beating the qualifier Carol Zhao, 6-1, 6-1, in Stanford, Calif. The 11th-ranked Ivanovic will face top-ranked Serena Williams on Friday.

Tennis
Ivo Karlovic
Steve Johnson
Ana Ivanovic


Judges Release 5 British Muslim Youths

Abstract: LONDON (Reuters) — Five British Muslim youths jailed for downloading terrorist propaganda were freed on Wednesday after a three-judge panel headed by the country’s most senior judge overturned their convictions. The five, jailed last July after being found guilty of possessing articles for terrorism purposes, were found by a jury to have propaganda from Al Qaeda on their computers. The three-judge Court of Appeal panel led by Lord Chief Justice Nicholas Phillips said the jury should have been told the men would be guilty of a crime only if it were proved that the material was intended to incite terrorist acts. “We do not consider that it was made plain to the jury, whether by the prosecution or by” the judge, “that the case that the appellants had to face was that they possessed extremist material for use in the future to incite the commission of terrorist acts,” Justice Phillips wrote. “We doubt whether the evidence supported such a case.” Abdul Malik, the father of one of the released men, praised the ruling. “It is great that the whole nightmare is over,” he told Channel 4 News. “It is a victory for common sense and justice.” Asked on the same program if he supported Jihadism, his son Usman said he declined to discuss his personal views in public. The Islamic Human Rights Commission also welcomed the ruling and said it had been wrong to penalize people for simply gaining access to material that was available on the Internet. Four of the five were students at Bradford University in northern England. One was an East London schoolboy who briefly ran away from home to meet the others after making their acquaintance on the Internet. The schoolboy, Irfan Raja, had left a note for his parents saying he would meet them in heaven if not in this world.

Terrorism
Decisions and Verdicts
Great Britain
Propaganda
Computers and the Internet


Saving a Korean District

Abstract: SEOUL — The leafy hillside neighborhood is called Bukchon, a district in central Seoul that constitutes the city’s last remaining collection of traditional courtyard houses. For all its outward calm and quietly elegant architecture, Bukchon is also a place of anger and suspicion. The preservationists, you see, are at each other’s throats. “They want to kill my husband and drive us out,” said one resident, Jade Kilburn, a Korean entrepreneur, who, alongside her British husband, David, has battled their neighbors, the police, the courts and a range of city technocrats in an effort to protect Bukchon’s traditional houses from being tarted up or demolished outright. One of the Kilburns’ rivals is Kim Hong-nam, a Yale-educated art historian and the former director of both the National Folk Museum and the National Museum of Korea. She lives nearby and finds Mr. Kilburn to be “overly righteous.” “He’s a complainer,” said Ms. Kim, sipping at a coffee and smoking a cigarette in her sun-filled home on a recent afternoon. “The people here don’t like him.” Ms. Kim and the Kilburns live — and proudly so — in hanok, the one-story, tile-roofed, traditional Korean houses. Seoul’s hanok suffered badly under the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, when courtyard homes were divided and rebuilt as smaller dwellings; the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, when many were destroyed; and a building frenzy that started in Seoul in the 1970s. While they are not exactly ancient structures, Bukchon’s refashioned hanok from the 1920s and ’30s are what pass for historic residential architecture here. Not so long ago, Bukchon had 2,500 hanok. Now there are barely 800, and only one street in the whole neighborhood remains untouched. Preservationists believe the original hanok are now as endangered as any whale or panda. Bukchon, for them, is the last rain forest in a city of chainsaws. Mr. Kilburn, who has a gentle and courtly manner, said he was photographing the demolition of a hanok in 2006 when he was struck in the chest by the project’s supervising architect. He fell back into the street, cracked his head and spent a month in the hospital. In the end, he himself was convicted of assaulting the architect. Feuds between neighbors are mostly banal, whether they occur in Seoul or Paris or New York. But the enmity in Bukchon also speaks to larger themes, like whether Koreans are so smitten with the new that they have ignored or debased their own architectural heritage. The parallel, perhaps, is Beijing’s wholesale destruction of its own traditional courtyard houses. “People here would willingly destroy these houses to build up, higher and higher, to increase their floor space and get higher rents,” said Doo Jin Hwang, a noted architect in Seoul who has restored hanok, written a book about them and developed an iPhone application about the Bukchon houses. A national obsession with modernity and a mania for fancier buildings, Mr. Hwang said, has led to the destruction of thousands of hanok. Seoul has too eagerly razed the old and raised the new. “You can lose your history,” he said. Even Seoul’s mayor, Oh Se-hoon, is aware of the hostilities in the tiny wedge of Bukchon. In an interview, Mr. Oh dismissed as “quite exaggerated” the Kilburns’ view that a conspiracy among municipal officials, property developers and a well-connected circle of wealthy women (including Ms. Kim) led to many old homes being snapped up through deception and intimidation about 10 years ago. In the Kilburns’ view, this campaign has turned Bukchon — once a residential area for courtesans and royal hangers-on at two adjoining 15th-century Chosun dynasty palaces — into a Potemkin-like enclave of third or fourth homes for the rich. Postage-stamp lots with 900-square-foot, or about 85-square-meter, houses can go for $2 million or more. Architects say there is no precise or accepted definition of a hanok. But there are common design elements. The homes are L- or U-shaped, with high exterior walls that create private interior courtyards. They have pine beams and framing inside, under-floor heating and paper-covered doors and windows. Old hanok also featured mortise-and-tenon construction, rather than nails and screws, and each home was essentially handcrafted by experienced woodworkers and tradesmen. Ms. Kim has restored half her hanok in the traditional Korean manner, using handmade materials and old-school carpenters. The other half is more Euro than Asian. The small kitchen is sleek and stainless. A Frank Gehry cardboard armchair is the signature piece in the sitting area. It could be Milan or New York. “I have an immense love and respect for our Korean things, yet I’m also a contemporary person,” said Ms. Kim, who said she wrangled with Bukchon’s design-review board for more than a year to get her renovation plans approved. “I’m not going to be a monk or an 18th-century Chosun woman. This house is a summing-up of my life, my sense of taste and beauty. You can keep a balance between the traditional and the modern.” The “modern” part is what really seems to get to Mr. Kilburn. Gutting the interior of a hanok, adding a basement or putting on a second story are the kind of architectural insults that he abhors, and he worries that the purity of the hanok idiom is slipping away. “Everywhere you can see exceptions being made now, one at a time,” he said. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.” Mr. Kilburn rails most angrily against any sort of demolition or tear-down. A moldering and neglected hanok being replaced by a new house, even one that alludes to the hanok style, is beyond both his understanding and tolerance. He can barely look at the hanok that have morphed into coffee bars, pizza parlors and trendy shops for jewelry and folk art. He points with contempt at a new garage with carved wooden doors that attempts to mimic hanok design features. The garage was built, he harrumphs, to stable a neighbor’s Lamborghini. “We just want to retain the architectural heritage of Bukchon,” said Mr. Kilburn, a journalist who chronicles his preservation efforts on his Web site, kahoidong.com . “The fine for demolishing a hanok is only $300. So people just pay it. It’s a tragedy.” But Mr. Hwang, the architect, said that if something traditional no longer makes practical sense — clay and dirt as insulation, for example — he is willing to update it with a modern material, such as Tyvek insulating wrap. “The traditionalists think I’m ruining every house,” Mr. Hwang said. “Sooner or later I am going to offend someone in the architectural community here,” he said. “But you can’t preserve everything on every level. That kind of symbolism doesn’t work for us anymore in Korea.” The city government began fiddling with preservation laws in Bukchon about 35 years ago, initially ruling that no improvements could be made to any hanok there. Roofs went unrepaired, concrete outhouses were built in courtyard gardens and heating systems fueled by charcoal bricks were defeated by Seoul’s notorious winters. As a result, Bukchon turned shabby. Even deliverymen avoided the area because of its confusing, twisting, narrow lanes. The city’s overzealous protectionism eventually led to organized protests by the residents, many of whom were elderly or working-class. In response, in 1995, most previous restrictions were lifted, resulting in hundreds of hanok being demolished, replaced by blocky medium-rise apartment buildings and suburban-style houses that clashed badly with the elegant style and proportions of the hanok. By the time the city reversed itself six years later, the damage had been done. “More than half the village was gone,” Ms. Kim said glumly. “Six years was enough to ruin the place.” On this, at least, she and Mr. Kilburn agree. The neighborhood, now heavily promoted by the city as a historic district, is overrun most days by nosy, noisy tourists. At night, because of so many absentee owners, it feels deserted. “It used to be a living village,” Mr. Kilburn said. “It didn’t feel like a movie set. It felt genuine. People were living their lives. “But now, neighbors never stop by. If you need to borrow a cup of something, there are no neighbors to go to. Walk the streets at night, and there’s not a single light in any of the houses. No kids. No little old ladies trudging up the hill carrying their cabbages. That’s all gone.”

South Korea
Seoul (South Korea)
Architecture


Syrian Children Speak of Revenge Against Alawites

Abstract: ZAATARI, Jordan — Like all the small children in the desert refugee camp here, Ibtisam, 11, is eager to go home to the toys, bicycles, books, cartoons and classmates she left behind in Syria . But not if that means living with Alawites, members of the same minority offshoot of Shiite Islam as Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad . “I hate the Alawites and the Shiites,” Ibtisam said as a crowd of children and adults nodded in agreement. “We are going to kill them with our knives, just like they killed us.” If the fighters seeking to oust Mr. Assad sometimes portray their battle as a struggle for democracy, the Sunni Muslim children of the Zaatari camp tell a much uglier story of sectarian revenge. Asked for their own views of the grown-up battle that drove them from their homes, child after child brought up their hatred of the Alawites and a thirst for revenge. Children as young as 10 or 11 vowed never to play with Syrian Alawite children or even pledged to kill them. Parroting older relatives — some of whom openly egged them on — the youngsters offered a disturbing premonition of the road ahead for Syria. Their unvarnished hatred helps explain why so many Alawites, who make up more than 10 percent of the Syrian population, have stood by Mr. Assad even as the world has written him off. They see him as their best protection against sectarian annihilation. The children’s refusal to share a playground or a classroom with Alawites dramatizes the challenge of ever putting together a political solution to the conflict. And the easy talk of blood and killing from such young children illustrates the psychic toll that the revolt and repression are taking on the next generation of Syrians. “We hear it all the time from the kids, but also from the parents — that this is not political at all, and not a call for democracy, but is about people fed up and angry at rule by a minority, the Alawites,” said Saba al-Mobaslat, director for Jordan of the nonprofit group Save the Children, which provides toys to refugee children and tries to teach them understanding. “There is a concern that this is a whole generation that is being brought up to hate, that can’t see the other’s side.” The roots of the animosity toward the Alawites from members of Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, who make up about 75 percent of the population, run deep into history. During the 19th-century Ottoman Empire , the two groups lived in separate communities, and the Sunni majority so thoroughly marginalized Alawites that they were not even allowed to testify in court until after World War I. Then, in a pattern repeated across the region, said Joshua Landis, a Syria scholar at the University of Oklahoma, French colonialists collaborated with the Alawite minority to control the conquered Syrian population — as colonialists did with Christians in Lebanon, Jews in Palestine and Sunni Muslims in Iraq. The French brought Alawites into the colony’s military to help control the Sunnis. And after Syria’s independence from France, the military eventually took control of the country, putting Alawites in top government positions, much to the resentment of the Sunni majority. “Now the Alawites believe — possibly correctly — that the Sunnis are going to try to kill them, and that is why the Alawite Army now is killing Sunnis in this beastly way,” Professor Landis said. “The Alawites feel justified in brutality because they fear what may be in store for them if they lay down their guns.” “I don’t see any way out of that,” he said, “except to say that we are in for a long, difficult ride, and you pray that the Syrians are going to get over this somehow.” At the Zaatari camp, a desolate tent city where nearly half of the 25,000 residents are younger than 12 and desperately bored, many of the children retain a disarming innocence. “Who will rule Syria next? Another president, but we will choose him,” Rahaf, 11, said confidently. “I don’t know who yet, because we have not seen the names.” Just as the Syrian uprising began as a peaceful protest movement inspired by calls for democracy around the Arab world, some children at the Zaatari camp sought to describe the struggle in ideological terms. “Why are they bombing us?” Ahmed, 12, from the Hauran region near the border with Jordan, asked rhetorically. “Because we are asking for our freedom.” His father interrupted to explain what freedom might mean. “The biggest general in Hauran, a young Alawite soldier can step his foot on the general’s head,” his father said. “A young Alawite soldier can humiliate the biggest officer.” His son picked up the theme. “The Alawites say, ‘Kneel in front of my shoe,’ ” Ahmed said before looping the subject back to the revolt. “We can’t be free with Assad because he kills us.” The convictions of Heza, 13, were blunt. “We will never live together,” he said. “All the Alawites are security agents. After the revolution, we want to kill them.” Even if it might mean killing a Syrian child his own age? “I will kill him,” Heza said. “It doesn’t matter.” Ms. Mobaslat, of Save the Children, said aid workers with her group avoided bringing up sectarian feelings directly because they tried not to start conversations they could not resolve. She also said she believed that some children at the camp were Alawites, Shiites or other minorities who were pretending to be Sunni Muslims for their own safety, so raising the issue in a group could create trouble. She said her group’s workers tried to talk about children accepting one another, making their own decisions and deciding for themselves whom to trust, to hate or to love. The goal is to encourage children to see others as individuals rather than part of a group, she said, “but that doesn’t happen overnight, just because of an uprising.” “Sunnis are Muslims, and Shiites and Alawites are the ones who kill us,” Salem, 12, explained matter-of-factly. Ranya, 13, insisted that “there will always be a problem between Sunnis and Alawites, because they are the ones who are doing this to us.” She hates the Alawites, she said, but not exclusively. She also hates Hassan Nasrallah — the leader of the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, which supports the Assad government — as well China and Russia, Mr. Assad’s other foreign backers. A few yards away, a 41-year-old mother was swaying with her 2-year-old daughter, Malek, in her arms so the baby could sing for a visitor to the family’s dusty tent: “Heaven, heaven, heaven, Syria is heaven.”

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )


New York City Board Set to Vote on Rent Freeze After State Legislators Reach Deal

Abstract: Just days after state legislators agreed to extend rent regulations for another four years, New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board is scheduled to vote on Monday evening on whether to increase rents for more than one million rent-stabilized apartments. The board, which voted for its lowest-ever rent increases last year, has a chance to make history again. It is considering freezing rents for the next year. The board has never voted for no increases. The vote, to be held at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in Manhattan, will be the first test of a rent board appointed entirely by Mayor Bill de Blasio. The mayor asked for a rent freeze last year, when a majority of the board were de Blasio appointees, along with some holdovers from the Bloomberg administration. But the board, which consists of two tenant representatives, two landlord representatives and five members of the public with experience in housing, finance or economics, resisted the mayor’s call. Instead, the board passed the lowest increases since it was established in 1969 — up to 1 percent for one-year leases and 2.75 percent for two-year leases. Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, seems to have taken a hands-off approach this year. “What we’ve made very clear is, under this administration, the Rent Guidelines Board will assess the specific expenses that landlords have, and will make a decision based on that,” he told reporters this month. “I don’t think it has happened consistently enough in the past.” Rachel D. Godsil, the board’s chairwoman, said, “The mayor trusts that we can analyze the data and make a decision.” The board’s decision is supposed to be based on changes in tenants’ and landlords’ economic conditions. This year, the board is looking at research by its staff showing that landlords’ operating income, after expenses, has grown for nine consecutive years, most recently by 3.4 percent. Their operating costs grew by only 0.5 percent because of significantly lower fuel costs, a report by the board staff said. At the same time, the staff reported that tenants’ incomes have not kept pace with housing costs. For rent-stabilized tenants, the median gross rent-to-income ratio, meaning the percentage of a household’s income that goes to pay for rent and utilities, rose slightly to 36.4 percent last year. Under federal standards, an apartment is considered affordable if that ratio is 30 percent or less. At public hearings leading up to the vote, tenants and their advocates have argued that the numbers do not support rent increases, and may even justify a reduction, saying that earlier rent increases had not been justified by landlords’ expenses. (In 2013, the board voted for 4 percent increases for one-year leases and 7.75 percent for two-year leases on rent-stabilized apartments.) “The numbers are much clearer this year than last year,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, a Brooklyn Democrat and former housing advocate. “It’s become more profitable to operate rental housing. The numbers justify a rollback, certainly a freeze.” One renter, Kimberly Morales, 20, a college student, said she may have to quit school to help her mother pay the $1,154 monthly rent on a two-bedroom apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which also houses three younger brothers. Ms. Morales said the landlord has been looking for ways to raise the rent. “I’ve been fighting for this apartment with my mother since I was 14 years old,” she said at the same hearing. But landlords argue that the data does not include expenses like the cost of financing and that they need increases to maintain aging buildings. If the city wanted to help tenants, some argued, it could compensate landlords by lowering expenses it controls such as real estate taxes and water and sewer charges. “I take care of them and they take care of me,” Andrew Latsko, a Brooklyn lawyer, told the board in arguing for “adequate increases.” Board members have submitted eight proposals , five of which include a rent freeze or a reduction. The board votes on one proposal at a time and stops once a proposal gets a majority. The board is expected to stay within a range of 0 to 2 percent increases for one-year leases, and 0.5 to 3.5 percent for two-year leases. The board was originally supposed to vote on Wednesday, but postponed its meeting while Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, and state legislators in Albany negotiated the renewal of the state rent law. The outcome, announced last week, disappointed Mr. Blasio and tenant advocates who had wanted to eliminate a provision that lets landlords charge market rates once an apartment becomes vacant and its rent is above a certain threshold. But the new law did raise that threshold by $200, to $2,700 a month, and for the first time, the Rent Guidelines Board will have a role in raising that amount. Whatever increase the board approves on Monday for one-year leases will also apply to the threshold starting next year.

Real Estate
Housing
Rent Control
Rent
Bill de Blasio
Rent Guidelines Board
NYC


Islamists Press Blasphemy Cases in a New Egypt

Abstract: DEIR EL GABRAWI, Egypt — Egypt’s prosecutors have been flooded with blasphemy complaints since 2011 as Islamists exercising their new societal clout have pushed for prosecutions and courts have handed down steep fines and prison terms for insulting religion. This month alone, a Christian teacher in Luxor was fined $14,000 for insulting the Prophet Muhammad in class, a writer was given five years in prison for promoting atheism and a Christian lawyer was sentenced to one year for insulting Islam — in a private conversation. Blasphemy cases were once rare in Egypt, and their frequency has increased sharply since the revolution. More than two dozen cases have gone to trial, and nearly all defendants have been found guilty. At least 13 have received prison sentences. The campaign is driven at the local level, where religious activists have also forced officials to suspend teachers and professors. In at least 10 cases, Christian families have been expelled from their homes after perceived insults, according to Ishaq Ibrahim of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. Blasphemy complaints have been lodged across the society, against poor teachers in villages, a deputy prime minister, Egypt’s richest man, and some of its most prominent writers and journalists. A firebrand Muslim preacher who tore up a Bible at a protest was sentenced to 11 years in prison. His son received eight years on similar charges. “Contempt of religion, any religion, is a crime, not a form of expression,” said Abdel Moneim Abdel Maqsoud, a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood, which has not been instrumental in filing the cases but does not oppose them. “Is setting fire to the Bible freedom of expression? Is insulting religion freedom of expression?” He attributed the rise in cases to abuse of the “unprecedented freedom of expression” since the revolution. The increase in blasphemy lawsuits reflects how profoundly the old order has been upset since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted. Under Mr. Mubarak, the security services often dealt with Islamists and other dissidents outside of the courts. Blasphemy prosecutions were rare and usually aimed at prominent intellectuals. Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow in 2011 removed those constraints and allowed for deeply conservative currents in Egyptian society to assert themselves in public life. On the local level, Islamist groups now face few restrictions from weakened state institutions, and the vagueness of laws banning contempt of religion allows for wide interpretations. Image Wafdi Saeed, right, a brother of the secretary, Makarim Saeed, with a Coptic priest. Credit Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times Most blasphemy cases have been directed against Egypt’s Christian minority and filed by ultraconservative Muslims known as Salafis. Many lack clear evidence. Last July, a Christian teacher, Beshoy Kamel from Sohag in central Egypt, heard that someone had created a Facebook page using his name and photograph and was posting messages insulting Islam and President Mohamed Morsi, his family said. Mr. Kamel told the police about the page, his family said, and posted a warning that still stands on his personal page that the other account was not his. But when a local Salafi received a private message from the account insulting him and his religion, he filed a complaint against Mr. Kamel, who was arrested soon afterward. Local Islamists heard about the case and spread copies of the texts from the insulting page, causing protests that twice forced the police to delay hearings. The day the trial opened, Mr. Kamel was sentenced to six years in prison: three for contempt of religion, two for insulting the president and one for slander, court documents say. Islamists protested outside the court, and a video shows them rushing to attack Mr. Kamel as the police led him outside. Mr. Kamel’s family now worries that any perceived infraction could lead to prosecution. “There was none of that before the revolution,” said Mr. Kamel’s father, Kameel. “The Salafis started to breathe after the revolution, and some of them are taking advantage of the situation.” Court documents show that prosecutors never tried to prove that Mr. Kamel had administered the insulting page, which has since been removed but whose contents were quoted in case files. Egypt’s Interior Ministry filed a report saying it could not determine the page’s owner. That made no difference to Salah Khanous, a Salafi lawyer involved in the case, who said there was a “systematic campaign” among Egypt’s Christians to insult Islam. Image Like the Deir El Gabrawi case, blasphemy cases often target Christians. Credit Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times “They should have cut his throat for it,” Mr. Khanous said. Other cases, too, did not reach the courts until the Islamists mobilized. The ordeal of Makarim Saeed, a school secretary in Deir El Gabrawi, a poor Christian farming village in central Egypt, started in February 2012 with a conversation with two Muslim teachers and within earshot of the Christian principal. According to court documents, all four, including Mr. Saeed, testified that he said he had denigrated the Prophet Muhammad. But for two weeks after the conversation, no charges were filed, and Mr. Saeed continued to work alongside his Muslim colleagues, his family said. Then word of the conversation reached another teacher who belonged to the Salafi Call, an ultraconservative group, whose members went to the police. Mr. Saeed was arrested that night. Six days later, as hundreds of Islamists protested outside, he was sentenced to six years in prison. Chants of “God is great!” echoed in the courtroom. A local spokesman for the Salafi Call, Mohammed Arafat, said Islamists could not press such cases before the revolution because of the security apparatus. “Before the revolution, if two guys with beards walked in the street together, that was a terrorist organization,” he said. He saw the case as a legal matter, saying Mr. Saeed had broken the law and probably would have been killed by local Muslims had he not been arrested. “When the issue touches the prophet, our beliefs, our religion or the Koran, a Muslim will go out to get justice or die,” Mr. Arafat said. In a written response to a request for comment, Mr. Morsi’s office said it did not comment on judicial rulings. It said the “freedom to litigate” had been one of the revolution’s benefits, but hinted at the need for reform. Mr. Saeed’s family does not know what he said in school that day, but guessed that he had been joking or asking a question. His family doubts he meant harm. His brother Wafdi said that Mr. Saeed had worked alongside Muslims for three decades, but that since the revolution, relations between Muslims and Christians had changed. “It used to be that if you had a fight with a Muslim, you would reconcile with the help of a sheik or a priest,” he said. “But now if there is a conflict, they use the law against us.”

Islam
Criminal Sentence
Muslim Brotherhood Egypt
Human Rights
Fines
Egypt


Time Running Out for Top Soccer Teams to Make Big Deals

Abstract: LONDON — These are the last days of summer trading in Europe, and still there are clubs willing to throw a hundred million dollars or more to get a single player. Ángel di María, the flying Argentine winger, was reportedly on his way from Real Madrid to Manchester United. Mario Balotelli, the brilliant but volatile Italian, was headed from A.C. Milan to Liverpool. The stars and the teams that want them have one week to get through the medical examinations and tie up the fine points of salaries and payments between the buying and selling clubs. Only then, with the season already up and running, will these coveted individuals start playing catch-up. There will be new colleagues, new environments, new demands, new expectations and new managers — all of whom are trying to gain an edge by hiring the players they think can make the difference with their team philosophy. At the last count, a billion dollars or so has changed hands so far in the summer trading window. For di María, it has been a complicated affair these past few months. He helped Real Madrid win the Champions League, then was injured at the World Cup. By the time he returned to training at Real Madrid, the club had already recruited Germany’s playmaker, Toni Kroos, and Colombia’s bright new striker, James Rodríguez, who both play his area of the field. Madrid’s line is that di María asked to leave, and the club wouldn’t stand in the way of a reluctant player. Diego Costa has already departed the Spanish capital, going from Atlético Madrid to Chelsea. Diego Costa, the Brazilian who changed allegiance to represent Spain at the World Cup, has benefited from the one precious thing that humans need in life: time. Diego Costa shares the same business agent as Chelsea Manager José Mourinho. Mourinho, who was not involved in the World Cup, did his business early in the transfer window. He moved old players out, recruited what he wanted, and in particular began working to integrate Diego Costa as his main striker. The result is that Diego Costa has scored in each of Chelsea’s games this season, both wins. Goals define strikers, and with his strength and height and relish for physical contact, he already looks to be the finisher that Chelsea lacked last season. Mourinho has changed other parts of the lineup, but striker was the problem for the Blues last season. Samuel Eto’o and Demba Ba have departed, while Fernando Torres is still there, but struggling even to make the bench. And Didier Drogba is back, older, wiser and ready to bide his time on the bench until he can again play for the team. Image Mario Balotelli is headed from A.C. Milan to Liverpool. Credit Bob Levey/Associated Press But this isn’t a Chelsea story, other than extolling its virtues in identifying the targets they wanted to buy and then having the acumen, money and contacts to get the deals done. Manchester United — a bigger name, though perhaps not a bigger club at this moment — has struggled for two years to sign big-name players. United is, this year, not in the Champions League, which weighs heavily on the club’s income and just as heavily on the willingness of top players to sign. Luke Shaw, a teenage defender from Southampton, has arrived. Marcos Rojo, the Argentine defender, joined United last week. Now di María appears to be on his way from Madrid to Manchester, though there is many a slip between a headline and the completion of a deal. He will, when the sale is final, figure third on the list of the top swaps between major clubs. Luis Suárez left Liverpool for Barcelona despite his ban on playing anywhere until late October after he bit an Italian player at the World Cup. Rodríguez, who started the tournament in Brazil as a Monaco star, soon became a full-fledged Madrid “Galáctico” once he had shown his fine feathers. After those came the moves of David Luiz from Chelsea to Paris St.-Germain; Alexis Sánchez from Barcelona to Arsenal; and Diego Costa and Cesc Fàbregas to Chelsea. The hiring of workers, in any walk of life, is a gamble. The difference is that moves in soccer are made on the whim of managers who might themselves be gone before the fruits, or folly, of those expenditures can be measured. Amid this instability comes Balotelli. For a man of his size, his remarkable ability and his age (24), you might imagine Super Mario being right up there at the top of the costliest transfers. Far from it. Liverpool would recycle less than a quarter of the fee it received for Suárez — reportedly just 16 million pounds, or about $26 million — to buy Balotelli from Milan. It would make Balotelli just another of the nine players that Liverpool has signed over the summer. “It was the time to divorce from A.C. Milan,” Balotelli’s agent, Mino Raiola, told Corriere dello Sport, an Italian sports daily. “I had always been negative on the return of Mario in Italy — the pressure, the expectations, the press. But Mario insisted, he wanted to leave Manchester City and go to Milan.” The story back then was that pressure in England was against Balotelli, and that Milan was the team that would liberate him. Raiola now agrees that this might be the move that makes or breaks his client. Liverpool will either get a bargain or risk damaging the team ethos built up by its coach, Brendan Rodgers. But there is a place, and a time, for anyone. Reports have it that Alessandro Del Piero, a wonderful player at his peak in Italy, is moving from Sydney to the Delhi Dynamos in the new Indian Super League. Del Piero turns 40 in November.

Soccer
Chelsea Soccer Team
Liverpool Soccer Team
Manchester United
Milan Soccer Team
Barcelona Soccer Team
Real Madrid


Protesters and Police Clash at Lunar New Year Festivities in Hong Kong

Abstract: HONG KONG — The police and protesters clashed in Hong Kong early on Tuesday, leaving several people injured and a district on lockdown. Police officers used batons and pepper spray to disperse protesters. The police also fired at least two warning shots, the local broadcaster RTHK reported. On Tuesday morning, officers and protesters continued to face off in the Mong Kok district, a dense, busy shopping and residential area. A fire burned in a street cordoned off by the police. People gathered in the district late Monday to visit food stalls on the first day of the Lunar New Year, a holiday tradition. The confrontations began after officers tried to shut down unlicensed food vendors. A police spokeswoman said that 48 police officers had been hurt, many hit by glass bottles and other objects. Forty-seven men and seven women, ranging in age from 17 to 70, were arrested on charges that included assaulting the police, resisting arrest and other related crimes. The Hong Kong government “strongly condemned” the protesters, saying that the group had set fires and thrown bricks at the police, including injured officers on the ground. “The mobs would be apprehended and brought to justice,” a government spokesman said in a statement. Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, said: “If a similar incident happened in any city, the society, not just the government, would designate it a riot.” In 2014 , demonstrators occupied several roads in key Hong Kong districts, including Mong Kok, to protest proposed changes to the system for electing Hong Kong’s chief executive, the city’s leader. The authorities in Beijing had earlier ruled out a proposal for open nominations, deciding that voters could select from among only two or three candidates approved by a nominating committee. Mong Kok was also the setting of a violent outburst during the pro-democracy demonstrations in 2014 when thugs attacked protesters in an effort to break up a camp they had established. After those demonstrations, a so-called localist movement became increasingly active. Localist groups have protested against traders from the Chinese mainland who cross into Hong Kong to buy goods in bulk. Localist groups also protest acts that they see as impinging on Hong Kong culture, like the shutting down of unlicensed street vendors at traditional markets. “I believe that the food stalls should be kept; it’s the Lunar New Year and a holiday,” said Emily Tse, 20, a student at the Mong Kok protest. “These food stalls are part of our local culture and should be protected.”

Hong Kong
Civil Unrest
Lunar New Year
Food
Attacks on Police
China


Stranded Drivers Rescued in Canada

Abstract: OTTAWA — Even in a country that prides itself at shrugging off winter, it was an exceptional storm. Several hundred drivers spent more than 24 hours stranded in their cars and trucks snowbound a major Ontario highway before the police and military rescuers extricated them on Tuesday. More fortunate drivers were trapped in that most ubiquitous of Canadian landmarks, a Tim Hortons doughnut shop. And even an armed forces search and rescue team was stymied by the gusting winds at times. By Tuesday afternoon, police and troops reported that they were removing significant numbers of people from the highway, No. 402, near Sarnia, Ontario. The highway was closed on Monday after high winds and rapidly falling snow squalls eliminated visibility. A state of emergency remained in place on Tuesday and the Ontario Provincial Police estimated that about 360 vehicles holding an unknown number of passengers had spent the night on the highway. The highway is part of the main route between Toronto and Chicago and the stranded drivers included Americans. While the area around Sarnia is familiar with sudden snow squalls, particularly in December when Lake Huron is not frozen, the intensity of the sudden storm swiftly overwhelmed snow-plow operators and police. Chris Scott, a meteorologist for The Weather Network, a Canadian cable channel, said that the one to two feet of snow that fell along points of the highway was not extraordinary for the area. But when combined with relatively cold 10 degree Fahrenheit temperatures and 40 to 50 mile an hour winds, the storm became “exceptional.” The conditions created snow drifts exceeding six feet. The highway largely runs through a sparsely settled rural area, leaving many drivers and their passengers with only their vehicles for shelter, although some farmers used tractors to perform impromptu rescues. Police, often traveling by snowmobile, could do little more than encourage drivers clustered in small groups along the highway to consolidate into a single vehicle for greater warmth. On Tuesday morning, a Canadian Forces Hercules search and rescue plane was scanning the ground for vehicles and two military helicopters began airlifting people from cars. Police and troops had brought 237 people to shelters by the early evening and snowplows were slowly clearing the road. The initial fright created by the whiteout turned to tedium for many drivers, particularly after 24 hours. “What can I do?,” one driver, Colin Stewart, told the Canadian Press news agency. “I’m not impressed — it’s Canada .” Mr. Stewart later reported later in the day that he was on his way again.

Canada
Snow and Snowstorms
Roads and Traffic
Weather


Giants Lose as Defense Outscores the Offense

Abstract: Cam Newton led two field-goal drives in his N.F.L. debut, and Jimmy Clausen threw a touchdown pass to Greg Olsen to help the host Carolina Panthers beat the Giants, 20-10, in their preseason opener on Saturday night. Newton, the Heisman Trophy winner from Auburn and top overall pick in the N.F.L. draft, had mixed results. He struggled with his accuracy and twice failed to get the Panthers into the end zone on promising first-half drives. But he also showed plenty of zip on his throws and brought some big-play potential to what was the league’s worst offense last season. Michael Boley returned an interception 56 yards for a score in the game’s opening minutes for the Giants’ only touchdown. It was a forgettable night for the Giants’ offense. Lawrence Tynes missed two field-goal attempts and another was blocked. Eli Manning did not lead a scoring drive in his five series, completing 4 of 9 passes for only 36 yards. He also slightly overthrew Hakeem Nicks on what could have been a big third-down gain on the Giants’ first possession, forcing Tynes to try a 56-yard field goal. Manning’s final series ended when the Panthers stopped Brandon Jacobs on a third-and-short carry midway through the second quarter. Then, after recovering a fumble from Mike Goodson in Carolina territory, the Giants came up empty again when Tynes missed a 37-yard kick. PACKERS LOSE OPENER The Super Bowl most valuable player Aaron Rodgers threw a touchdown pass before swapping his helmet for a baseball cap in the first quarter as the defending champion Green Bay Packers opened the preseason with a 27-17 loss to the Browns in Cleveland. Rodgers and most of Green Bay’s first-string offense played only two series in the first quarter, when the Packers and the Browns had long scoring drives. TITANS 14, VIKINGS 3 Jake Locker threw a 45-yard touchdown pass in his debut, and host Tennessee made its new coach, Mike Munchak, a winner in his preseason opener. Donovan McNabb made his first start for Minnesota, and completed four of his first five passes before having the sixth knocked down by the rookie linebacker Akeem Ayers. McNabb came back for a second series before leaving the game 6 of 11 for 40 yards. BILLS 10, BEARS 3 Jay Cutler played one series and watched as Chicago beat visiting Buffalo even though the offensive line did little to ease any lingering concerns. The Bills got two sacks from Shawne Merriman and nine over all. The newcomer Marion Barber did make a good impression, however, running for 45 yards and leading the Bears to a second-quarter touchdown. He carried six times for 37 yards on that drive, setting up a 4-yard run by backup quarterback Caleb Hanie that put Chicago ahead, 7-3. RAMS 33, COLTS 10 Sam Bradford produced 17 points in four possessions with help from a defense that jumped on Peyton Manning’s backups for two early interceptions in St. Louis. Josh Brown’s 60-yard field goal capped an almost perfect first half not just for the offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels’s rebuilt Rams attack but for all the team’s units. Brown added a 53-yarder in the third quarter. QUARTERBACK QUESTIONS Chad Henne is still the Miami Dolphins ’ quarterback, even after a rough start to the preseason, but the rookie Colin Kaepernick will get his shot to compete with Alex Smith for the San Francisco 49ers’ starting job. Coach Jim Harbaugh said he still considered the job Smith’s to lose, but he added that no one had earned the position so far. In fact, he said San Francisco would consider adding an experienced backup on the heels of a 24-3 loss at New Orleans on Friday night in their exhibition opener. Dolphins Coach Tony Sparano said Saturday there was no quarterback competition going on with his team. Henne remains in charge of the Miami offense despite going 4 for 8 for 78 yards with two interceptions and one touchdown in the Dolphins’ 28-23 preseason loss at the Atlanta Falcons on Friday.

Football
Miami Dolphins
Henne Chad
Carolina Panthers
New York Giants


In Long Island City, Now Arriving in No Man’s Land

Abstract: On a recent Saturday night, more than a dozen people found themselves in the industrial wilds of Long Island City, Queens, looking for a line of yellow paint. They had been invited by email, and when they arrived at the appointed intersection, at 11 p.m., they were instructed by text to follow the paint, as though in Oz, until the end. “The doorman awaits,” the text said. “Be discreet.” It added: “Bring a sunflower if you see one.” The yellow line was easy to miss if you weren’t looking. A mere dribble at points, it veered away from the art venues and coffee shops of Long Island City and into a dark warren of warehouses. It ran past delivery trucks and Dumpsters and, yes, an improbable patch of sunflowers. Then it stopped, at an overpass. Or seemed to stop. At the overpass, it ran up a retaining wall. A man waved from above: the doorman. The guests clambered up, clinging to a chain-link fence, and at the top, they took in the view. Tall weeds swayed, growing high between the railroad tracks. The Manhattan skyline twinkled. They had been summoned to an elevated rail line, no longer in use. This was the latest work by N. D. Austin, a creator of the Night Heron , a speakeasy set inside a water tower atop a Chelsea building, in 2013, and the leader since then of countless expeditions into New York’s abandoned and neglected places. Like all of Mr. Austin’s projects, this one, which ran for five nights in late November, was staged in a little-known corner of the city; it was ephemeral, and exclusive. But unlike the settings for those previous happenings, this corner had not been forgotten by its owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. This fall, the authority asked the public for “reuse concepts” for the stretch of elevated rail line , known as the Montauk Cutoff. Mr. Austin’s stunt was unrelated to the call. He had heard about the spot from a friend and picked it for his year-end get-together on the hunch that it might not be accessible for long. “It could be turned into anything,” he said. That night, Mr. Austin played the doorman. He stood on the tracks and told guests to walk until they met a woman. They passed a few billboards, the silhouette of a concrete plant. A woman stood at the bridge over a creek, Dutch Kills, at the end of the Montauk Cutoff. She asked guests to cross, carefully, and go down a staircase. At the bottom, in a reed bed on the banks of the creek, sat a shipping container. They slipped inside, through a heavy curtain, into the glow of candlelight. The 20-foot-long container was outfitted with a barrel-vaulted ceiling, a bar, a piano and a candelabra chandelier. A sign read “Jackpin II.” (The first “Jackpin” was held last year, in an elevator shaft in Midtown Manhattan.) Image The speakeasy, in a 20-foot-long shipping container, was outfitted with a vaulted ceiling, a bar, a piano and a candelabra chandelier. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times The bartender, Jesse Sheidlower, wore a trilby equipped with a headlamp. “By now,” he said of the event, “when you hear about one of these, you don’t ask, ‘Is it going to be a sex club, or a trivia night, or a speakeasy?’ You pretty much know it’s going to be a speakeasy.” Guests were handed a Negroni-inspired cocktail, called a Montauk Cutoff, and asked to turn off their cellphones. The Montauk Cutoff runs about a third of a mile through the industrial district of southern Long Island City, atop an embankment 16 feet above street level. Starting around 1910, the spur served to shuttle freight trains between the Long Island Rail Road’s Lower Montauk Branch and the Arch Street Yard. It was decommissioned this year because a new freight yard was built that offered trains easier access, according to the transportation authority. The last freight train rolled though in March. The authority put out its call — technically, “a request for expressions of interest” — in October. Among possible “innovative adaptive reuse concepts,” it listed “public open space, urban farming, or museum or sculpture garden space.” Authority officials said it would also consider commercial uses. The agency says its conditions are specific: The right project would finance itself, including funds for the access and safety features required to bring the line up to code. The authority would reserve the right to reclaim the space if needed. Wishing to rein in any visions of a new High Line, officials pointed to the short reach of the cutoff, its proximity to a network of active rail lines and the highly industrial setting. Nevertheless, the authority said several groups had shown interest and requested tours, including a community group called the Newtown Creek Alliance and the Smiling Hogshead Ranch, a nonprofit community farm at one end of the line. The farm began as an unauthorized project on an adjacent decommissioned rail spur but now rents its half acre from the transportation authority. A co-founder, Gil Lopez, said the farm was serving as a model for the cutoff, turning what had been a dumping ground into a place with fruit trees and flower beds. The farm is drawing up a plan for the elevated rail line. “It’s an opportunity,” Mr. Lopez said, “but also a challenge. If we don’t do something, it could be taken out from under us.” A spokesman for the transportation authority, Aaron Donovan, said that after all submissions have been received in February, it will decide whether to put out a request for proposals. “We’re hoping that somebody with the wherewithal to manage the space will step in, to basically take care of it,” Mr. Donovan said, adding, “We’d like to make it useful to the public so it’s not sitting empty and prone to vandalism.” Image The Smiling Hogshead Ranch is a nonprofit community farm at one end of the Montauk Cutoff. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times When asked if he knew about the speakeasy in the shipping container, Mr. Donovan said no. “The man with the shipping container is welcome to throw his hat in the ring,” he said, “if he would like to return legally.” During its brief existence, around 180 people visited Jackpin II, in groups of about 20. On its final night, several of Mr. Austin’s collaborators on previous projects appeared; they were two set designers, an emergency room doctor, the musical group Amour Obscur and the bartender, Mr. Sheidlower, who by day is a lexicographer . The guests that night also included an immersive experience designer, a magazine editor, a comedian, a yoga teacher, someone who had just quit a job in finance and a person who was starting a co-working space on a boat in Newtown Creek. As they settled onto the sofas, some ventured comparisons. The room looked like a dining car, a room on the Titanic. “It’s surprisingly warm,” one guest said. “The candles,” another replied. Mr. Austin first visited the container in early November with Charles Philipp, a media producer for technology companies. The two built it out over the course of a few weeks. They furnished the bar with found materials; the piano came from a Dumpster. “One night we hoisted a piano up there and schlepped it down the tracks,” Mr. Austin said. The site served as inspiration for the décor: Mr. Philipp arranged archival photos of the area’s rail lines on the walls and along a shelf, amid some railroad spikes. Using similar methods, Mr. Austin and his longtime collaborator, Ida C. Benedetto, have staged events in abandoned resorts, hotels and factories, in vacant apartment buildings, tunnels and unused subway stations. They scour building violation records, consult maps and talk to fellow explorers. When they find a promising site, they act fast and work on the cheap, always at night. They have been held up as proof that the underground scene is not dead in New York City, and that there is still a lot left to discover. So far, none of their found locations have been opened to the public. Sometime after midnight, Mr. Austin climbed onto the piano with his guitar and sang a raspy “New York, New York.” Amour Obscur played their late-night abandoned-space classic, “Only the Whiskey,” about what you most often take home from a night on the town. As people stomped and banged on the ceiling, flakes of paint sprinkled to the floor. When the music died, Mr. Austin announced last call and explained to his guests that they would depart on the tracks that curved away from the elevated line. “Those are active lines, but not very often,” he said, and the group laughed. Someone began playing “Stand by Me.” A few hours later, the shipping container had gone quiet. Everything was gone but the vaulted ceiling and the piano.

N D Austin
bars,nightclubs
Long Island City Queens
MTA
Public Transit


Blame the Fish Guy

Abstract: Dear Diary: Every Friday I go to my local bodega on Columbus Avenue to buy clam chowder. I keep it for my Sunday night ritual: clam chowder and toast, a perfect, quiet, food-for-the-soul menu to wrap up the weekend. If I don’t buy the chowder on Friday, chances are there will be none left by Saturday, and the arc of my culinary plans for the weekend will be destroyed. True to habit, I showed up at the bodega last Friday. No chowder. “What’s up with clam chowder?” I asked the man at the counter. “Blame the fish guy,” he said. “The fish guy?” “Yeah, the fish guy,” he said. “Without the fish guy, there ain’t no fish. And without the fish, there ain’t no chowder.” “I get it. Blame the fish guy.”


Ireland Aids Breezy Point, Queens, After Hurricane Sandy

Abstract: For generations the residents of Breezy Point, Queens, have clung to their emerald roots. The gated community they called the Irish Riviera — or to those who prefer the language of the Old World, “cois farraige,” Gaelic for “beside the sea” — has remained one of the most proudly Irish communities in America. So when Hurricane Sandy tore through the coastal enclave, sparking one of the most destructive residential fires in New York City’s history and leaving behind hundreds of charred or flooded houses, all that love for the homeland was suddenly reciprocated, roaring back from across the Atlantic. Breezy Point has become something of a popular cause in Ireland, its plight an urgent topic in newspaper headlines and radio dispatches more than three months after the storm. Gaelic rock stars threw fund-raisers, Irish companies sent money and other donations, the country’s consulate bused thousands of volunteers through Breezy Point’s gates for “Irish Days of Action” and pop stars made pilgrimages, including the Irish Tenors, who serenaded local residents over a Christmas lunch and bade them “the luck of the Irish.” “It has become a huge Irish-American issue,” said Aine Sheridan , 53, the executive producer of the Adrian Flannelly show on the Irish Radio Network USA, which has covered the recovery of Breezy Point and the city’s Irish nonstop since October. “It’s another county of Ireland.” New York has always been dotted with a changing mix of ethnic enclaves. And while it is common for the diaspora to come to the aid of the motherland during hard times, the events playing out in Breezy Point remind that on rare occasions the roles are switched: the homeland will come to the aid of its diaspora. But complicating the current embrace from abroad is the gated community’s extreme insularity. Breezy Point is the whitest neighborhood in the city, a demographic makeup that critics say illustrates the enclave’s entrenched xenophobia, a dark flip side, perhaps, to all that ethnic pride. The consul general of Ireland, Noel Kilkenny, said he and others had made special efforts to avoid the impression of “the Irish looking after their own.” Image The basketball court at Breezy Point’s athletic center, whose rebuilding was aided by a $50,000 gift from the Irish government. Credit Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times The government has pledged a total of $320,000 in aid to places across the region that were hit by the storm, which included other neighborhoods known for their large concentration of people of Irish heritage, like Belle Harbor, just down the peninsula. “The Irish connection is so strong, it’s totally appropriate,” said Brian Hayes, a minister of state in Ireland’s government, while touring burnt-out sections of Breezy Point in early February. “This isn’t a hard sell at home.” Mr. Hayes was accompanied that day by a convoy of only-in-Ireland sports stars — strapping present and former players in the country’s beloved Gaelic Games, which include native sports like hurling, a high-speed precursor to field hockey. With them came a giant championship chalice called the Sam Maguire — which many local residents recognized on sight. The 18 athletes spent several days sawing joists in the damaged Catholic Club and sleeping on cots in the Rockaway Point Volunteer Fire Department’s firehouse. In a ceremony heralded by bagpipers of the Breezy Point Catholic Club Pipes and Drums in spats and tufted beanies and covered by a gaggle of Irish reporters, the area’s athletic center, the St. Thomas More Parish Center, which had been destroyed by the storm, was officially reopened. The basketball court, paid for in part by a $50,000 gift from the Irish government, is emblazoned with a giant shamrock. “It makes you feel very wanted,” said Tim Devlin, 50, a contractor and former Gaelic Games athlete who lives in Breezy Point and organized the players’ trip. “We don’t feel so alone after the storm.” The population of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland combined is just over six million. In America over 34 million people boast Irish ancestry. And while the nucleus of American Irishness is a tossup between Boston and New York, the towns of the Rockaway Peninsula have long been seen as jewels in the crown of the Irish abroad. There were even songs written about the Irish experience of “Old Rockaway.” Over 63 percent of the 4,381 people in Breezy Point and nearby Roxbury are of Irish descent, including a large number of police officers and firefighters who live in bungalows and one-bedroom homes. That connection became well known in Ireland after Sept. 11 , 2001, when the community lost dozens of residents in the attack. Image Brian Hayes, second from right, an Irish official, at a burnt-out section of Breezy Point. “This isn’t a hard sell at home,” he said. Credit Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times “After 9/11, we became very aware of where the Irish were living,” said Anthony Kearns, a member of the Irish Tenors who sang at the Christmas luncheon. “After Hurricane Sandy it became highlighted even more.” Its ethnic and racial makeup has also been a source of controversy. It was once called an “an apartheid village ” by the Rev. Al Sharpton during a protest. Steve Greenberg, the former chairman of the Breezy Point cooperative’s board, said that to his knowledge, no black family had ever held a share in the private community. Even in the days after the storm, volunteer firefighters in the community repeatedly told a visitor as she left to beware of the residents of Far Rockaway, the predominantly black neighborhood at the other end of the peninsula. Concerns over the community’s insularity have been privately broached by the Irish coming to the aid of Breezy Point. Participants were conscious of this issue at storm-relief planning meetings at the Consulate General of Ireland in Midtown Manhattan in November, said Owen Rodgers, the secretary of the Emerald Guild Society, an organization of Irish and Irish-American building managers. He said he felt it was important that any help go beyond just Breezy Point and into the wider community hit by the storm. Organizations like the Aisling Irish Community Center in Yonkers, which was one recipient of the Irish government’s donation, have aided relief efforts in a variety of places. Mr. Rodgers compared it to his own history growing up in Northern Ireland, which weathered a bitter era of sectarian strife. “I was vocal in saying we have to help everybody in the community,” he said. “I understand the issues of discrimination, because I myself was discriminated against.” Mr. Kilkenny, the consul general, said the government also chose groups that aided diverse communities to receive most of its donation, and the 1,500 volunteers for the “Irish Days of Action” after the storm were purposefully fanned out to areas like Far Rockaway. “New York has been good to the Irish,” said Mr. Kilkenny, explaining the move. “The Irish are giving back to New York.” Even as the Irish have responded in droves to a crisis they view in many ways as their own, so, too, have people with no connection at all. Thousands from New York and beyond have showed up to help the gated community, which usually has its private security force keep out strangers. Somewhere in that outpouring of support, said the Rev. Michael Gribbon, associate pastor at the Blessed Trinity Parish in Breezy Point, was a lesson. “People from every race have helped out,” he said. “The diversity has been a blessing.”

Hurricane Sandy
Breezy Point Queens
Ireland
Irish American


Idaho Senator to Push Gay Rights Bill From Outside

Abstract: BOISE, Idaho — Lawmakers next door in Washington State just voted to legalize same-sex marriage . Here, they will not allow a bill to be formally filed that would protect gay people from basic forms of discrimination in areas like education, employment, public services and real estate transactions. Next door, the lawmaker who leads the Senate’s most powerful committee, Ways and Means, is the same one who led the gay marriage bill to passage. The lawmaker, Senator Ed Murray of Seattle, is gay. In the final floor debate, he invited all of his colleagues to his wedding. Here, the lawmaker who has spent eight years working for what might seem far less controversial goals is the only openly gay member of the Idaho Legislature. Now with the session well under way and a gay rights bill again showing little sign of getting a hearing, the senator who has been its champion, Nicole LeFavour, plans to become the former only openly gay lawmaker in the Idaho Legislature. Ms. LeFavour, 48, has decided not to seek re-election, for what she says is a very painful reason: she has had enough and she expects things to only get harder. “My partner Carol has put up with a lot of stress and has stood by me as I dealt with a lot of loss,” Ms. LeFavour wrote in a blog post last month. “She’s so smart and keeps me laughing through the hardest times but you can only ask that of someone for so long.” It was not startling when Ms. LeFavour, a writing teacher and a longtime activist on human rights issues, was elected to the State House in 2004, and then to the Senate in 2008. Her easy victories reflected shifting demographics in Boise, which in recent years has become more liberal, relatively speaking. Yet her district, which encompasses the Capitol and gentrified historic neighborhoods nearby, is just one of 35 Senate districts in a state that remains very conservative, and Ms. LeFavour has constantly found herself outnumbered on issues she cares most about, whether she has been fighting cuts to schools or promoting anti-bullying legislation. This year, the state is moving to closed Republican primaries, a shift that even Republicans say is causing some lawmakers to sharpen their conservative positions to preserve their seats. Ms. LeFavour has lost patience. “People are just being politically unbelievably spineless,” Ms. LeFavour said in an interview. And so Ms. LeFavour has made the human rights bill her priority. She has been joined by a campaign called Add the Words, Idaho, which has brought hundreds of people to the Capitol to place handwritten notes on windows and doors urging lawmakers to pass the bill. (The words that would be added to state discrimination laws are “sexual orientation, gender identity,” inserted between “race, color, religion, sex” and “or national origin.”) Yet last month, the Senate State Affairs Committee, in a voice vote led by Republican leadership, refused to allow the bill to be introduced. “My colleagues are not discriminators in their hearts,” said Senator Denton Darrington, a Republican from Declo first elected in 1982. “But some people think this is a step toward gay marriage. I would expect that that’s a logical progression. It has been in other places.” Ms. LeFavour will leave a legacy. This fall, Nate Murphy, a 22-year-old school board member from Pocatello who is openly gay and views Ms. LeFavour as a role model, is considered a strong candidate to win an open seat long held by Democrats. Mr. Murphy said that he had been “surprised by the disrespect” the gay rights bill had been shown by Republican leaders this year. “If I end up getting elected,” said Mr. Murphy, who would assume the role of the only openly gay lawmaker in the Legislature, and the youngest, “that is certainly an issue I’ll fight for.”

Same-Sex Marriage Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships

Human Rights and Human Rights Violations


Exposés of China’s Elite a Big Lure in Hong Kong

Abstract: HONG KONG — Visitors from mainland China climb the narrow stairs to a cramped room here filled with forbidden delights: shelves of scandal-packed exposés about their Communist Party masters. The People’s Recreation Community bookstore and several others on Hong Kong’s teeming shopping streets specialize in selling books and magazines banned by the Chinese government, mostly for their luridly damning accounts of party leaders, past and present. And at a time when many Chinese citizens smolder with distrust of their leaders, business is thriving. “We come here to buy books that we can’t read in China,” said Huang Tao, a salesman of nutritional supplements from southeast China, who picked out a muckraking volume recently about corruption among senior party leaders. “There are so many things that we’ve been deceived over,” he said, waving toward books on the devastating famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s, an episode that official histories have muffled in euphemisms. “We can’t learn the truth, so black becomes white and white becomes black.” Such publications smuggle corrosive facts and rumors into the bloodstream of Chinese political life. The contraband flow is reinforced by a flow of online publications and downloadable pirate copies. The trade shows the thirst for information in a society gripped by censorship, and the difficulties that party authorities face in trying to stifle that thirst, especially when, people in the business say, officials are among the avid readers of banned books. “These books are playing a big role in raising the consciousness of the Chinese people,” said a Beijing journalist who visits Hong Kong several times a year and buys armloads of exposés. He asked that his name not be used, fearing punishment. “It’s impossible to stop everything getting through.” They contain accounts of every conceivable scandal of the past. Then there are the gloomy prophecies about China’s future. One book foretells a war with Japan in 2014, another a toppling of the current leadership that same year. The strongest seller among these feverish jeremiads, “2014: The Great Collapse,” says the fall of the Communist Party is assured, citing what it says are secret party documents. “This is not gossip or soothsaying,” the preface declares. Image The People’s Recreation Community bookstore in Hong Kong, which carries scandalous books about Communist leaders. Credit Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times “Some people take these books very seriously. I had a phone call just yesterday for 20 copies of this book. He seemed to be a Chinese businessman,” said Paul Tang, the proprietor of the store, which in Chinese goes by the more ironic name of the People’s Commune bookstore. “Right now, more than 90 percent of our sales come from mainland visitors,” said Mr. Tang, 38, who formerly worked for fast food chains. He and three partners opened the store in 2002 and two years later shifted its focus to banned books for visitors from mainland China. “The most frequently asked question is not about the content of books,” Mr. Tang said. “It’s how they can get the books back to China.” That game of hide and seek takes place daily, as Chinese travelers return from Hong Kong and other destinations, sometimes with contraband. Customs officers are sometimes instructed to stop particular titles, people in the trade say, but often anything with a political edge that is discovered is scrutinized, and decisions on what to confiscate are made on the fly. Zhou Qicai, a businessman from northeast China, was lugging a suitcase stuffed with 400 copies of a Chinese-language magazine from Hong Kong into China in March when a customs officer inspected his luggage. The magazine, Boxun, had a report about court officials in his hometown who are suspected of being corrupt that he wanted to share with friends. “He took one look at the magazines and said, ‘These are reactionary publications, they’re illegal,’ ” Mr. Zhou said. The officer seized the magazines, took down his personal details and warned him not to smuggle again. “That didn’t matter,” Mr. Zhou said. “I came back and tried again a couple of days later and brought in 93 copies without a problem.” A former British colony, Hong Kong became a self-administered region of China in 1997, and despite pressures from Beijing, remains free of state censorship. In 2012, Hong Kong hosted 34.9 million visits by Chinese nationals, many on shopping sprees. Chinese customs officials often confiscate publications about forbidden themes. But prosecutions of caught travelers are virtually unheard-of these days, because the government would have difficulty explaining its secretive censorship practices, even before tame, party-run courts, said Bao Pu, the head of New Century Press, a Hong Kong publisher of many books by ousted and retired Chinese officials. Image Books at the store featuring Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Credit Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times “They can never openly justify their rules, because there’s no public list of banned books and these people make their own arbitrary decisions,” said Mr. Bao, the son of a purged Chinese official. “There would simply be too many people to prosecute; there would be a backlash.” The illicit flow includes memoirs and studies of events and people that the Communist Party would rather forget, like the Great Leap famine and brutal Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, and the upheavals that culminated in the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Former officials whose memoirs cannot be published in China, among them the late ousted party leader, Zhao Ziyang, often turn to Hong Kong for an outlet. Then there are the magazines and books offering salacious accounts of party officials’ private lives. Few members of China’s political elite escape having a book, or at least a chapter, devoted to their suspected plots, mistresses or ill-gotten fortunes. Some of the hastily written potboilers appear fanciful, even by the generous standards that China has recently set, with a real-life scandal involving a Politburo member, Bo Xilai, who fell from power after his wife, Gu Kailai, was arrested on charges of murdering a British businessman. “It’s like when your National Enquirer becomes your only form of political discussion,” said Geremie Barmé, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra who studies Chinese culture and politics. “This is a tragedy that the party has generated for itself. Its processes are all cloaked from the public.” Yet many readers of banned publications from Hong Kong are themselves Chinese officials, often eager for gossip that can help them navigate treacherous political shoals. The books and magazines are surviving the onslaught of online material in part because so many of their readers are officials who fear using the Internet to look at forbidden material or lack the skill to thwart censorship, said Mr. Tang. “You don’t have to read the People’s Daily, because that won’t tell you what’s really going on, but you have to read these,” said Ho Pin, an exiled Chinese journalist who runs Mirror Books, a company based in New York that publishes muckraking books and magazines in Chinese. Chinese officials visiting Hong Kong often buy them as gifts for fellow officials, he said. “In the past, you’d give a mayor a bottle of liquor. But that’s nothing these days, and so is a carton of cigarettes,” Mr. Ho said. “But if you give him one of our books or magazines, he’ll be very happy.”

Hong Kong
China
Books
Censorship
Communist Party of China


Group Asks Whether Cuomo’s Girlfriend Should Reveal Finances

Abstract: ALBANY (AP) — A conservative group wants a ruling on whether Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s girlfriend, the Food Network star Sandra Lee , should disclose financial information as if she were the governor’s wife. The group, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms , asked the state ethics commission on Thursday for the ruling. The request came after the commission authorized Ms. Lee to use state aircraft with the governor on official business; it deemed her a “domestic partner” in the “first family.” The commission does not require Ms. Lee to file financial data intended to flag potential conflicts of interest involving elected officials, and says the Legislature would have to change any requirement. Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, declined to comment.

Sandra Lee
Finance
New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms
Andrew Cuomo
New York


Dilma Rousseff Targeted in Brazil by Lawmakers Facing Scandals of Their Own

Abstract: BRASÍLIA — Paulo Maluf, a Brazilian congressman, is so badly besieged by his own graft scandals that his constituents often describe him with the slogan “ Rouba mas faz .” Translation: He steals but gets it done. But like an array of other scandal-plagued members of Brazil’s Congress, Mr. Maluf says he is so fed up with all the corruption in the country that he supports ousting President Dilma Rousseff . “I’m against all the dubious horse-trading this government does,” said Mr. Maluf, 84, a former São Paulo mayor who faces charges in the United States that he stole more than $11.6 million in a kickback scheme. The drive to impeach Ms. Rousseff is gaining momentum . A pivotal vote to send her case to the Senate for a possible trial is expected over the weekend, and several of the political parties in her governing coalition abandoned her this week, leaving her especially vulnerable. But some of the most vocal lawmakers pushing to impeach Ms. Rousseff are facing serious charges of graft, electoral fraud and human rights abuses, uncorking a national debate about hypocrisy among Brazil’s leaders. “Dilma may have dug her own grave by not delivering on what she promised, but she is untainted in a political realm smeared with excrement from top to bottom,” said Mario Sergio Conti, a columnist for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. “She didn’t steal, but a gang of thieves is judging her.” Video Protesters in Rio de Janeiro marched to show their support for impeaching President Dilma Rousseff. Credit Credit Reuters Ms. Rousseff is deeply resented in Brazil, having presided over the worst economic crisis in decades, a huge corruption scandal engulfing the national oil company and the fall of millions of middle-class Brazilians into poverty. In the impeachment case, she is not facing charges of graft. Instead, she is accused of using money from giant public banks to cover budget gaps, damaging Brazil’s economic credibility. Ms. Rousseff, then, is something of a rarity among Brazil’s major political figures: She has not been accused of stealing for herself. Eduardo Cunha, the powerful speaker of the lower house who is leading the impeachment effort, is going on trial at the country’s highest court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal, on charges that he pocketed as much as $40 million in bribes. Mr. Cunha, an evangelical Christian radio commentator and economist who regularly issues Twitter messages quoting from the Bible, is accused of laundering the gains through an evangelical megachurch. Vice President Michel Temer, who is expected to take over if Ms. Rousseff is forced to step aside, has been accused of involvement in an illegal ethanol-purchasing scheme. Renan Calheiros, the Senate leader, who is also on the presidential succession chain, is under investigation over claims that he received bribes in the giant scandal surrounding the national oil company, Petrobras. He has also been accused of tax evasion and of allowing a lobbyist to pay child support for a daughter from an extramarital affair. Image Vice President Michel Temer, who is expected to take over if Ms. Rousseff is forced to step aside, has been accused of involvement in an illegal ethanol-purchasing scheme. Credit Adriano Machado/Reuters Altogether, 60 percent of the 594 members of Brazil’s Congress face serious charges like bribery, electoral fraud, illegal deforestation, kidnapping and homicide, according to Transparency Brazil, a corruption-monitoring group. The issue has even become a part of the president’s defense strategy. In particular, Ms. Rousseff and her supporters have argued, how can the impeachment process be directed by someone who is going on trial for corruption himself? On Thursday, José Eduardo Cardozo, the solicitor general, said that his office had appealed to the Supreme Federal Tribunal in an attempt to block the impeachment proceedings. He said the effort to oust Ms. Rousseff had become so sprawling that it was “a true Kafkaesque process in which the defendant cannot figure out with any certainty what she is being accused of or why.” In a session that went past midnight and into the early hours of Friday, a majority of justices on the high court rejected the Rousseff administration’s request to annul this weekend’s impeachment vote. No one can dispute that Ms. Rousseff is very unpopular around the country, as reflected in her nearly single-digit approval ratings, the broad ire over bribery and kickbacks within her Workers’ Party, and the regular street protests demanding her ouster. Image Paulo Maluf, a Brazilian congressman, supports efforts to impeach Ms. Rousseff. He faces charges in the United States that he stole more than $11.6 million in a kickback scheme. Credit Paulo Whitaker/Reuters Even so, some Brazilians argue that the impeachment upheaval has less to do with stamping out corruption than with an effort to shift power by lawmakers with questionable records themselves. Ms. Rousseff’s opponents in Congress include Éder Mauro, who is facing charges of torture and extortion from his previous stint as a police officer in Belém, a crime-weary city in the Amazon. Another congressman aiming to impeach Ms. Rousseff: Beto Mansur, who is charged with keeping 46 workers at his soybean farms in Goiás State in conditions so deplorable that investigators say the laborers were treated like modern-day slaves. Almost daily, prosecutors reveal accusations involving Ms. Rousseff’s allies and adversaries in Congress, saying they pocketed bribes in the colossal graft scheme surrounding government-controlled energy companies. Graphic photos even circulated this month of prostitutes operating in a wing of Congress reserved for committee deliberations, reminding Brazilians of the institution’s circuslike atmosphere these days. Luis Almagro, secretary general of the Organization of American States, criticized the impeachment process, saying the accusations against Ms. Rousseff “are not crimes, but they are related to poor administration.” Brazil Impeachment: The Process for Removing the President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, is facing removal from office. Here is a step-by-step explanation of the proceedings. He said that the president’s missteps were “actions that other presidents in the past took themselves,” but that Brazil’s politicians were “judging her differently.” Mr. Almagro also criticized the politicians who were pushing for impeachment but facing corruption accusations themselves. “I am worried about the credibility of some of those who are going to judge or decide this impeachment process,” he said. Mr. Maluf, the former mayor who supports the president’s removal, spent weeks in jail a decade ago on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. But he was released under a law allowing people older than 70 to face such accusations at home. Then Mr. Maluf won a seat in Congress, giving him the privileged judicial standing that keeps nearly all senior Brazilian politicians with such privileges out of jail. Despite Mr. Maluf’s claims in recent days that he could travel outside Brazil without being arrested, he remains wanted by Interpol for the case against him in the United States, according to the United States Justice Department. France also has an outstanding warrant for his arrest in a separate case involving organized money laundering. Image Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of the lower house, is leading the impeachment effort. He is going on trial at the country’s highest court on charges that he pocketed as much as $40 million in bribes. Credit Andressa Anholete/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “My public life was always the opposite of all that,” Mr. Maluf said last week, criticizing the bad deeds in Ms. Rousseff’s government, including her scramble to offer cabinet posts to legislators on the fence over impeachment. Scholars note the sweeping legal protections enjoyed by about 700 senior officials, including cabinet ministers and every member of Congress. Only the Supreme Federal Tribunal can try them, producing years of appeals and delays. “Winning election to Congress is a license to steal for certain figures,” said Sylvio Costa, the founder of Congresso em Foco, a watchdog group that tracks legislative corruption. “In this grotesque system, the biggest thieves are those who wield the most power.” Claims of misdeeds among other lawmakers do not bother some of the politicians wanting Ms. Rousseff impeached. Roberto Jefferson, a former legislator who went to prison after his conviction for his role in a vote-buying scheme, said that Mr. Cunha’s talent for political double-dealing served as a strategic advantage . “The bandit I’m rooting for the most is Eduardo Cunha,” Mr. Jefferson said. (Several lawmakers seeking to oust Ms. Rousseff, including Mr. Cunha, either declined requests for comment or did not respond.) One prominent supporter of Ms. Rousseff is Fernando Collor de Mello, the disgraced former president who resigned in 1992 over an influence-peddling scandal. He resurrected his political career as a senator, only to face charges now of taking bribes in the graft scheme around the national oil company. Mr. Collor’s father, Arnon de Mello, set a precedent after fatally shooting a fellow senator on the Senate floor in 1963. Arnon de Mello managed to avoid prison after a court ruled that the episode was an accident — because he was aiming at another senator. As tempers flare over impeachment, some cite the example of Ivo Cassol, a senator from the Amazon. He was sentenced to more than four years in prison in 2013 by the Supreme Federal Tribunal on corruption charges related to contracts granted more than 15 years ago. (Mr. Cassol considers himself innocent in the case, a spokesman said.) Despite the ruling, Mr. Cassol remains in the Senate, keeping the high court’s decision at bay with appeals. He is now delivering some of the most impassioned speeches in favor of Ms. Rousseff’s impeachment, calling her government “disgraceful.”

Dilma Rousseff
Brazil
Impeachment
Eduardo Cunha
Paulo Maluf
Corruption
Legislature


Yankees Are Grasping for Starters

Abstract: The first four times through their pitching rotation, the Yankees’ staff was a formidable group, with five starters all presenting imposing challenges for their opponents. But one by one three of those starters fell into various states of ill health, and the one area that had been the most dependable for the Yankees has become the most uncertain. C. C. Sabathia, who received a cortisone shot with stem cells Thursday as treatment for a degenerative condition in the cartilage in his right knee, is not expected back until the end of June, General Manager Brian Cashman said Monday. Cashman said he learned when Sabathia had the injection Thursday that the cortisone and stem cell treatment would take six weeks. “It could be sooner,” Cashman said. “But the normal recovery period for him to get back on a major league mound is six weeks.” Sabathia’s right knee bears the impact of his weight as he comes down on the mound during his windup and delivery, time and again. A durable pitcher throughout his career, Sabathia has never made fewer than 28 starts in a season, and averaged 32.5 before this season. But the continual wear and tear over 423 starts and almost 3,000 innings may be taking its toll. Sabathia was relieved to learn that the meniscus, which was surgically repaired in 2010, was not at issue. But the condition in his knee could eventually require surgery. The hope is that the injection, which was performed by Dr. James Andrews, will sufficiently reduce inflammation and help the healing. But once Sabathia’s knee is determined to be sound, he will still have to rebuild arm strength, which will take several weeks. In the interim, the Yankees will most likely have to rely on young, inexperienced pitchers. Other than Masahiro Tanaka, the rookie starter from Japan who is scheduled to pitch against the Chicago Cubs on Tuesday, the former strength of the Yankees is now a weakness. Ivan Nova was lost for the season when he tore an ulnar collateral ligament in his fourth start and required Tommy John surgery. Michael Pineda is out with a strained muscle in his upper back, near his right shoulder, and is not expected back until the second week of June, Cashman said. “We’ve lost 60 percent of our rotation,” Cashman said. “We’re always looking to upgrade, whether it’s internally or externally. But don’t hold your breath expecting an external solution this time of year.” It is difficult to find trading partners this early in the season, especially for quality pitchers, because most teams still consider themselves contenders and are not looking to give up quality pitchers. Even if a team decided to trade a starter, it would not likely do so this early in the season. The more profitable route for trading away a good pitcher is to wait until a market develops closer to the July 31 trading deadline, and then promote a bidding war. The internal solutions so far have provided mixed results. Vidal Nuno was called upon to replace Nova and is 1-1 with a 5.82 earned run average. David Phelps has made three starts in place of Pineda and is 1-0 with a 2.93 E.R.A., but opponents have hit .276 off him in his starts. Sabathia’s injury, which he first revealed after his last start May 10, prompted the Yankees to call up Chase Whitley, who pitched very well in his debut Thursday against the Mets. He allowed two hits and no runs in four and two-thirds innings. They could also choose to go with Adam Warren, who has pitched well in relief. Often, teams prefer not to interfere with the success of a pitcher in a given role, but when asked last week if he might consider Warren to start, Cashman said he was open to all possibilities. He also said that Manager Joe Girardi and his staff would continue to determine which replacement starters would be used and when. Although Sabathia has not pitched well since last year, the Yankees believe in his ability to rebound. Even when he struggles, his fierce competitiveness leads to longer outings than his younger teammates can give, which takes pressure off the bullpen. There have been other encouraging signs, despite his 3-4 record and 5.28 E.R.A. For instance, his swings and misses by opponents are up to 17.4 percent, compared with 15.6 percent last year.

Baseball
Yankees
C C Sabathia
Sports injury
Brian Cashman
Ivan Nova
Michael Pineda