Public Defender Says Prosecutor Denied Him Access to Ahmad Rahami

Abstract: Since he was captured on Monday, Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man accused of carrying out bombings last weekend in Manhattan and on the Jersey Shore, has been hospitalized in Newark, recovering from gunshot wounds he sustained in a confrontation with the police. From his bed at University Hospital, he has been charged by three different prosecutors: the United States attorneys in Manhattan and New Jersey, for his alleged role in the bombings; and the Union County, N.J., prosecutor, for allegedly trying to kill police officers who tracked him down on Monday in the city of Linden. A New Jersey judge has ordered him held on $5.2 million bail on the state charges. Yet despite the burst of legal proceedings and litany of charges made public this week, Mr. Rahami has not had a lawyer for almost the entire time he has been in custody, and even now, the question of his legal representation remains unsettled. On Thursday, Peter A. Liguori, a state public defender in Union County, sought to meet with Mr. Rahami but was prevented by a lawyer with the Union County prosecutor’s office, according to a filing Mr. Liguori submitted to a judge in Superior Court in Elizabeth, the county seat. “I attempted to meet with or at least see Mr. Rahami to confirm his condition,” Mr. Liguori wrote to the judge, Regina Caulfield. But, he said, a prosecutor, Ann Luvera, told him that Mr. Rahami was “unconscious and unable to speak,” and she “would not give me permission to visit.” Earlier in the week, Mr. Liguori had said that neither Mr. Rahami nor his family had sought representation from the public defender. But since then, Mr. Rahami’s father had asked the office to represent his son, who had been found to be eligible as an indigent defendant, Mr. Liguori said In the court filing, Mr. Liguori said he was formally entering his appearance in the case, the latest twist in a flurry of unusual activity to secure legal representation for Mr. Rahami. Usually when people are arrested on federal or state charges, they are taken to court promptly, informed of their rights and, if they cannot afford a lawyer, appointed one. But the delay in providing Mr. Rahami a lawyer has raised concerns among legal rights advocacy groups as well as lawyers who have been seeking to represent him. “It is outrageous that the prosecutor is refusing to give permission to the public defender to visit Mr. Rahami,” said Udi Ofer, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, which is not involved in the case. “It is vital that the public defender be given access to his client so that Mr. Rahami’s medical condition may be verified and his rights are protected.” A spokesman for the Union County prosecutor’s office could not be reached for comment late Friday afternoon after the public defender’s filing was released by a court official. Image Ahmad Khan Rahami is accused of carrying out bombings last weekend in Manhattan and on the Jersey Shore. His legal representation remains unsettled. Credit Union County Prosecutor’s Office It could not be learned on Friday whether Judge Caulfield had acted on Mr. Liguori’s request to represent Mr. Rahami. But much of the debate over the bombing suspect’s legal representation has come amid great mystery about his medical condition. Law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the continuing investigation, have said that Mr. Rahami was shot multiple times. He remained intubated as of Thursday. When was he taken to the hospital, a senior law enforcement official said, investigators questioned him briefly in the ambulance, asking for his name and whether he had any weapons, but gathered little useful information. The official said Mr. Rahami was not questioned under the so-called public safety exception to the Miranda rules. Under the exception, investigators interrogate a suspect for intelligence purposes without advising the suspect of his rights, a tactic used in previous terrorism cases. A suspect is only then advised of his rights and questioned for law enforcement purposes. David E. Patton, the chief federal public defender in New York City, where Mr. Rahami is expected to be prosecuted first on the federal charges, wrote to a judge in Manhattan on Tuesday, asking that Mr. Rahami be brought there “at the earliest possible time” for a court appearance. If he was unable to travel because of his medical condition, Mr. Patton said, the office could meet with him in the hospital and represent him via videoconference. The office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, opposed the request, arguing that Mr. Rahami had not been arrested on federal charges and therefore the right to a speedy court appearance and to a lawyer had not been triggered. A magistrate judge, Gabriel W. Gorenstein, ruled for the government, agreeing that there had been no federal arrest. On Wednesday, Richard Coughlin, the federal public defender for New Jersey, made a similar request in the United States District Court in Newark. The office of Paul J. Fishman, the United States attorney for New Jersey, opposed that request, and it was denied on Friday by a magistrate judge, Mark Falk. Mr. Liguori, in his letter to Judge Caulfield, noted that but for Mr. Rahami’s “apparent incapacity, he was due to be produced before the court for his original appearance” on Thursday. “Except for these extraordinary circumstances, I would have entered my appearance” at that proceeding, he wrote. Mr. Patton, the public defender in Manhattan, said the questions surrounding Mr. Rahami’s representation were “starting to look like a game of three-card monte.” “I don’t care where his lawyer comes from,” he added. “He just needs a lawyer.”

Chelsea Bombing
Ahmad Khan Rahami
Peter Liguori
Civil Rights
Bombs
US Attorney
Terrorism


Financial Crisis Tames Demand for World’s Oldest Service

Abstract: PRAGUE — On a recent night at Big Sister, which calls itself the world’s biggest Internet brothel, a middle-aged man selected a prostitute by pressing an electronic menu on a flat-screen TV to review the age, hair color, weight and languages spoken by the women on offer. Once he had chosen an 18-year-old brunette, he put on a mandatory terry-cloth robe and proceeded to one of the brothel’s luridly lighted theme rooms: an Alpine suite decorated with foam rubber mountains covered with fake snow. Nearby, in the brothel’s cramped control room, two young technicians worked dozens of hidden cameras that would film the man’s performance and stream it, live, onto Big Sister’s Web site. Customers can have sex free of charge at Big Sister, in return for signing a release form allowing the brothel to film their sexual exploits. But even with this financial incentive, Carl Borowitz, 26, Big Sister’s marketing manager, a Moravian computer engineer, lamented that the global financial crisis had diminished the number of sex tourists coming to Prague. “Sex is a steady demand, because everyone needs it, and it used to be taboo, which made a service like ours all the more attractive,” said Mr. Borowitz, who looks more like Harry Potter than Larry Flynt. “But the problem today is that there is too much competition and our clients don’t have as much disposable income as before.” In the Czech Republic , where prostitution operates in a legal gray zone, the sex industry is big business, generating more than $500 million in annual revenues, 60 percent of which is derived from foreign visitors, according to Mag Consulting, a Prague-based research firm that studies the industry. Big Sister is not the only brothel suffering the effects of a battered global economy. While the world’s oldest profession may also be one of its most recession-proof businesses, brothel owners in Europe and the United States say the global financial crisis is hurting a once lucrative industry. Egbert Krumeich, the manager of Artemis, Berlin’s largest brothel, said that in November, usually peak season for the sex trade, revenues were down by 20 percent. In Reno, Nev., the famed Mustang Ranch recently laid off 30 percent of its staff, citing a decline in high-spending clients. Big Sister is not struggling as much as some of its more traditional rivals, since its revenues are largely derived from the 30 euros a month, or about $38, its 10,000 clients pay to gain access to its site. But Mr. Borowitz said Big Sister hoped to offset a 15 percent drop in revenues over the past quarter by expanding into the United States. The brothel also produces cable TV shows that air on Sky Italia and Britain’s Television X, as well as DVDs like “World Cup Love Truck.” Ester, an 18-year-old prostitute at Big Sister who declined to give her last name, said that big-spending clients had diminished, but that she was still earning nearly 2,000 euros a month — enough to pay the rent and buy Louis Vuitton bags. “The reason to do this is for the money,” she said, after gyrating half-naked on a pole. Being filmed, she added, made her feel more like an actress than a sex object. Since the fall of Communism in 1989, the Czech Republic has become a major transit and destination country for women and girls trafficked from countries farther east like Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Moldova, according to the police. For nearly 20 years, tens of thousands of sex tourists have streamed into Prague, the pristinely beautiful Czech capital, drawn by inexpensive erotic services, an atmosphere of anonymity for customers and a liberal population tolerant of adultery. According to Mag Consulting, 14 percent of Czech men admit to having sex with prostitutes, compared with a European Union average of 10 percent. Dozens of cheap flights to Prague have also ensured a flow of bachelor parties from across Europe, with multiple daily flights from Britain alone. Jaromir Beranek, an analyst with Mag Consulting, said the strength of the Czech crown against the euro, lower spending power and competition from lower-cost sex capitals like Riga, Latvia, and Krakow, Poland, were threatening one of the country’s most thriving sectors. Many Czechs are more than happy to see Prague shrug off its reputation as one of the world’s top 20 sex destinations. But some in the hotel industry are so alarmed by the drop in tourists that they are lobbying the government to legalize the trade, in the hope that it will help lure more clients. While some critics have warned that legalization would effectively transform the Czech state into the country’s biggest pimp, the Czech government is considering whether to emulate the Netherlands and Germany by regulating prostitution like any other industry. It is considering passing legislation by the end of the year that would require the Czech Republic’s estimated 10,000 prostitutes to register with the local authorities. Dzamila Stehlikova, a minister from the Green Party, who is shepherding the bill through Parliament, argued that by forcing the business out into the open, it would make it harder for human traffickers to thrive, while helping to ensure mandatory health checkups for prostitutes. Other advocates argued that legalization would generate millions of euros in lost tax revenue from an industry that was largely underground. Not everyone is enthusiastic; the prostitutes themselves say that being issued prostitution identification cards would further stigmatize them. Hana Malinova, director of Bliss Without Risk, a prostitution outreach group, said she feared the current credit crunch was pushing more poor women into prostitution, since they could make more money selling their bodies — about 120 euros for a half-hour session at some upscale sex clubs in Prague — than flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Even with the downturn, she added, prostitution was far more resilient than other industries, though the downturn was discouraging adultery. “An Austrian farmer from a remote area who is not married will still cross the border to the Czech Republic looking for sex,” she said. “On the other hand, the recession is helping to keep husbands at home who might otherwise be cheating on their wives.” In Czech towns near the German border in northern Bohemia, long blighted by a daily influx of sex tourists, many are happy that the business is suffering. Only a few years ago the town of Dubi was so overrun by prostitution that a nearby orphanage was opened to provide refuge for dozens of unwanted babies of prostitutes and their German clients. Sex could be purchased for as little as 5 euros — the price of a few beers in Dresden — drawing a daily influx of more than 1,000 sex tourists. Today, more than three dozen brothels have been winnowed down to four; several were converted into goulash restaurants or golf clubs. Petr Pipal, Dubi’s conservative mayor whose zero-tolerance policy was a key reason for the change, said that installing surveillance cameras and police officers at the entrance of brothels had deterred sex tourists. Rising prices for sex services and the global financial crisis, he added, were also helping to tame demand. “Two or three years ago, we would get 1,000 men coming here for sex on a Friday night, which is a lot for a town of 8,000 people,” he said. “The one good thing about the economic crisis is that it is helping to keep sex tourists away.” In Prague, even brothels in the most touristy areas complain they are suffering from economic hardship. On a recent night near Wenceslas Square in Prague, dozens of young men loitered outside a row of neon-lighted sex clubs, beckoning passing tourists with offers of complementary alcohol and racy strip shows. Inside Darling, a multilevel cabaret famous for cancan shows modeled on the Moulin Rouge in Paris, young women gyrated on a stage, surrounded by leopard skin couches, flashing disco balls and paintings of naked women. Suzana Brezinova, the club’s marketing director, said some high-spending businessmen still visited Darling to shrug off economic doldrums. “People have less money,” she said. “But hard times also mean that people want to be cheered up.”

Europe
Prostitution
United States Economy
Women
Economic Conditions and Trends
Recession and Depression
Prague (Czech Republic)
Czech Republic


Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Says Wife Struggled With Depression

Abstract: Friends remembered the capture-the-flag games, the signature event at Mary and Bobby Kennedy’s forested estate with the pool, treehouse and sprawling grounds in the green reaches of northern Westchester County. Like a variation on eternal Kennedy themes, they brought out famous families — Glenn Close , Christopher Reeve , Chevy Chase and their spouses and children — and many less pedigreed friends, neighbors and schoolmates for long afternoons of lemonade, Oreos and spirited rambles through the woods. It was, friends said, the unpretentious essence of Mary Richardson Kennedy, who led an adventurous life, but whose greatest gifts seemed to be for friendship, good spirits and building the family nest. And, stunningly, it became yet another backdrop for what seemed like the perfect life gone awry when Ms. Kennedy, 52, facing a divorce she dreaded, a recent history of drug and alcohol problems and a long fight with depression , was found hanging on Wednesday in a barn behind the three-level red-brick house she had painstakingly rebuilt. “A lot of times I don’t know how she made it through the day,” her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , said Thursday. “She was in a lot of agony for a lot of her life.” The Westchester County medical examiner’s office said Thursday afternoon that the cause of Ms. Kennedy’s death was asphyxiation due to hanging. Mr. Kennedy said that contrary to earlier reports, there was no note found at the scene. The Bedford Police Department, which was investigating the death, declined to provide any details on Thursday. There was no indication that it was anything other than a suicide. Mr. Kennedy, in a somber interview, recalled meeting Mary Richardson when she was 14, not long after her father, a college professor in New Jersey , died. (After his death, she ran away with a puppet theater group for six months, he said.) She had met Kerry Kennedy, a sister of Mr. Kennedy’s, at the Putney School in Vermont , a boarding school where they bonded over being two of very few practicing Roman Catholics. They became close friends, with Kerry Kennedy introducing Mary to some of her 10 siblings, including Bobby, and with Mary accompanying some of the Kennedys on white-water rafting trips in South America . The two young women roomed together at Brown University , where Mary studied architecture and design. Kerry Kennedy, who is the former wife of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo , said her friend never did anything halfway. She learned how to make her own curtains and dust ruffles; when Mr. Kennedy’s uncle Edward M. Kennedy ran for president in 1980, she got Andy Warhol to make a print that was sold to help the campaign. “You know, you sometimes hear things like ‘I’ve lost my right arm’?” Kerry Kennedy said Thursday. “I feel like I’ve lost half my body, half my soul.” After college, Mary worked for Warhol and as a white-water rafting guide for an outdoors company owned by another Kennedy sibling, Michael Kennedy, who died in a 1997 skiing accident; she also worked as an architectural designer. “Every member of my family, long before I married her, considered her a Kennedy,” her husband, an environmental lawyer, said Thursday. After his first marriage broke up, Mr. Kennedy and Mary saw each other at an event at an art gallery. He asked her for a date, and in 1994, soon after his divorce became final, they were married. Friends, for the most part, saw an accomplished, generous, nurturing woman, exemplified by the nearly open invitation to the capture-the-flag afternoons. Peter T. Michaelis, who knew her and others in the family in high school, overlapped with her for a year at Brown and was a neighbor and friend, took photographs documenting the green redesign of her home in Bedford. “She really relished her friendships, and if she was your friend, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for you,” Mr. Michaelis said. He said he saw her a week ago, at a party for a friend’s 50th birthday, and photographed her, smiling. “This whole thing comes as a total shock to me and to anyone who knows her,” he said. But if Ms. Kennedy’s death was a shock, her personal problems had found their way into public view in recent years. In 2010, Ms. Kennedy was arrested twice, once on a charge of driving while intoxicated, and later on a charge of driving under the influence of prescription medication. The first charge was reduced to a violation. Ms. Kennedy was ordered to undergo alcohol treatment, and her license was suspended for 90 days. The prescription drug charges were dismissed. The Journal News, a Westchester newspaper, reported after the drunken-driving arrest that Mr. Kennedy, concerned about his wife’s mental state, had tried to drive her to Northern Westchester Hospital to see a psychologist in 2007, but that she resisted and ran from the car into the road. Her problems became awkward for those around her, said one person who knows the family well but declined to be named because she did not want to upset them. The person said Ms. Kennedy’s family often had to cancel events or appointments on short notice, saying by way of explanation, “Mary is sick.” “She had good moments and bad moments,” this person said. “She could be at times absolutely beautiful and outgoing and engaging and professional in one respect, and in other times she just seemed like she was out of it.” Her marriage was also failing. In 2010, Mr. Kennedy filed for divorce, and he said Thursday that he and his wife had been living separately for almost four years. Mr. Kennedy, who has recently been dating the actress Cheryl Hines, lives in a home a few hundred yards from hers, he said. They had been in a custody battle over their four children, who range in age from 11 to 17; Mr. Kennedy also has two children from his first marriage. Kerry Kennedy said Mary, who participated in Alcoholics Anonymous, had been sober for five months. But that was not her only battle. Mary Kennedy also suffered from depression, people close to her said, and had talked of suicide in the past. “She fought with every ounce of her mission to overcome that horrible disease,” Kerry Kennedy said. “It was not something that she asked for; it was something that she was dealt.” Mary Kennedy’s siblings declined to talk about her death other than through a statement issued by her brother Lawrence Richardson. “We deeply regret the death of our beloved sister Mary, whose radiant and creative spirit will be sorely missed by those who loved her,” it said. “Our heart goes out to her children, who she loved without reservation.” Mr. Kennedy said that despite her problems, she continued to do extraordinary work for causes like the environmental group Riverkeeper , of which he is vice chairman, and the Food Allergy Initiative (their oldest child, Conor, has severe allergies ). “My sister once asked her to help her find money for earthquake victims in Nicaragua , and Mary got on the phone and cold-called over 200 C.E.O.’s over five days, and I think they got 80 truckloads of supplies to Nicaragua,” Mr. Kennedy said. Kerry Kennedy said that the two sides of Mary Kennedy, the seemingly extraordinary one and the deeply troubled one, coexisted for years, but that she fought to the end to try to make things work. “As so many people who suffer from mental health issues,” she said, “she was unable to do the things that she desperately wanted to do, and she was fighting, fighting, fighting with every ounce of her being to beat back those demons.”

Depression
Suicide
Robert F Kennedy Jr
Mary Richardson Kennedy
Westchester


Edward Gramlich, 68, Dies; Ex-Governor of Fed

Abstract: Edward M. Gramlich, a former governor of the Federal Reserve who warned of a looming crisis in home mortgages and who ran a federal board created to aid the airlines after the September 2001 attacks, died yesterday in Washington. He was 68. Mr. Gramlich’s death, from acute myeloid leukemia, was announced by the Urban Institute, a Washington research organization where Mr. Gramlich was a senior fellow. He was named to the Federal Reserve by President Bill Clinton in 1997 and served until 2005. “His contributions to the Federal Reserve were broad and significant,” Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in a statement yesterday. As chairman of the federal Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, he urged legislators to better protect consumers against predatory lenders and to toughen regulation of mortgage lenders and banks. His efforts met resistance within the Fed and on Capitol Hill, and he said later that he could have pushed for reform sooner. In June, the Urban Institute published his book, “Subprime Mortgages: America’s Latest Boom and Bust,” which offered solutions for the mortgage crisis. Mr. Gramlich was too ill to attend a Fed economic symposium held in Jackson Hole, Wyo., last week. But in a speech delivered for him at the conference, Mr. Gramlich said the subprime market had become a “Wild West” of loans made without any federal supervision. “The predictable result was carnage,” Mr. Gramlich said in his remarks. Mr. Gramlich aroused unusual controversy for a Fed member during his tenure as chairman of the Air Transportation Stabilization Board, which was created by Congress to oversee loan guarantees for the struggling airlines after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Gramlich twice voted with other board members to reject a loan package for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes that were hijacked that day. Mr. Gramlich said he was convinced the airline could reorganize itself without federal help. United, which had filed for bankruptcy protection after its first application was rejected, sought deep cuts from its unions after its bid was turned down a second time. It eventually emerged from bankruptcy last year, without a loan package. Edward Martin Gramlich was born on June 18, 1939, in Rochester, where his father was an engineer for the Eastman Kodak Company. A former minor league batboy, he was later staff director of an economic study commission on Major League Baseball, in 1992. Mr. Gramlich attended Williams College and received a master’s degree and a doctorate in economics from Yale. Starting in 1965, when he joined the research division at the Federal Reserve, Mr. Gramlich’s career spanned the academic and government worlds. Mr. Gramlich served as deputy and acting director of the Congressional Budget Office, and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor he was a professor of economics. He headed the university’s public institute and served as interim provost in 2005 and 2006. Mr. Gramlich is survived by his wife, Ruth; a son, Robert; a daughter, Sarah; and six grandchildren, as well as his parents, Jacob Edward Gramlich and Harriet Williams Gramlich. Mr. Gramlich had survived acute lymphocytic leukemia, a relatively treatable form of blood cancer, but in March he found that he had the more lethal type. In an interview published on Aug. 18, he discussed his decision not to undergo an experimental treatment. Last month, Mr. Gramlich discontinued the treatment he had been receiving; on Friday, he entered the Washington Home and Community Hospices, where he died. As the author of a book on cost-benefit analysis, Mr. Gramlich said, he had weighed the pros and cons of the treatment offered him by Johns Hopkins, which he was told would not prolong his life and might shorten it. There also was no chance of remission, Mr. Gramlich said. Having made the decision, he said he had no regrets. “I’ve already had a long ‘saying goodbye’ period,” he said.

Gramlich Edward M
Deaths (Obituaries)
Federal Reserve System
Mortgages


Sandy Socolow, CBS Newsman During Heady Days, Dies at 86

Abstract: Sandy Socolow, a longtime executive at CBS News who worked closely with Walter Cronkite and helped shape television coverage of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 86. The cause was complications of cancer, his sons, Michael and Jonathan, said. Mr. Socolow worked for CBS almost without interruption from the mid-1950s until 1988. He arrived as a writer for the morning news and shortly thereafter began working with Cronkite, first on a midday news program and later on “Eyewitness to History,” a series of news specials that evolved into a weekly prime-time half-hour that lasted until the “CBS Evening News,” with Cronkite in the anchor seat, expanded to 30 minutes, from 15, in 1963. For several years Mr. Socolow was a co-producer of the “Evening News,” in charge of, among other things, Vietnam coverage; according to CBS, he was the New York segment producer of the shocking 1965 report by Morley Safer that showed American Marines setting fire to Cam Ne, a village near Da Nang, and that helped awaken Americans to the escalating calamity of the war. Mr. Socolow produced Cronkite’s coverage of the moon landing in 1969. In 1971 he hired the program’s first female producer, Linda Mason. He became vice president, deputy news director and executive editor of CBS News in New York, and in 1972 was involved in one of the news division’s most controversial episodes. Less than two weeks before the presidential election, the “Evening News” broadcast Cronkite’s two-part summation of the unfolding Watergate story, largely following the reporting in The Washington Post by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The first installment, which detailed the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington and a dirty tricks campaign orchestrated by the committee to re-elect President Richard M. Nixon, appeared on Friday, Oct. 27, absorbing an extraordinary 14 minutes of the 22 minutes or so devoted to the news. The Nixon White House put pressure on CBS corporate executives to cancel the second installment of the report, which was to focus on the financing of the illicit doings and on the ways figures involved in the Watergate scandal were connected to the president. According to an account in David Halberstam’s 1979 book, “The Powers That Be,” William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS, encouraged Richard S. Salant, the president of CBS News, not to show the second segment. But Mr. Salant, working with Mr. Socolow and others, merely cut it back to eight minutes, just over half its original length, and it was broadcast on Tuesday, Oct. 31. Mr. Socolow, who was afraid he would lose his job for defying Mr. Paley, according to Mr. Halberstam, was the one charged with doing the cutting, a thankless task resulting in what Daniel Schorr, who wrote the report, recalled in a memoir as “a nasty argument,” not to mention bitter feelings that the network had caved in and betrayed its principles. The CBS report nonetheless had a significant impact, not least because it gave the Watergate story the imprimatur of the nation’s most authoritative newsman, Walter Cronkite. Less than two years after Nixon was resoundingly re-elected, the Watergate scandal forced his resignation. “The fact that Cronkite did Watergate at all (let alone at that length) gave the story a kind of blessing, which is exactly what we needed — and exactly what The Washington Post lacked,” Ben Bradlee, the editor of The Post during the scandal, wrote in Newsweek after Cronkite died in 2009. “It was a political year, and everyone was saying, ‘Well, it’s just politics, and here’s The Post trying to screw Nixon.’ We were the second-biggest newspaper in the country trying to scramble for a good story — whereas Cronkite was the reigning dean of television journalists. When he did the Watergate story, everyone said, ‘My God, Cronkite’s with them.’ ” Mr. Socolow was born in the Bronx on Nov. 11, 1928. When he was very young his family moved to North Franklin, Conn., where his immigrant parents — Adolfo Socolovsky, an Argentine who had trained as a classical violinist, and the former Sarah Mindich, a Ukrainian — tried their hand at dairy farming. They disagreed about what to name their son; his father called him Saint, the name that appears on his birth certificate. Registering her son for school, however, his mother called him Sanford, which is how news organizations often referred to him. Mr. Socolow rarely used either name, however; he was always known as Sandy, for his hair color as a baby. The dairy farm experiment lasted until Sandy was 10, and the family returned to New York, where he attended Stuyvesant High School and worked for its newspaper. A family friend, the business executive and former ambassador Carl Spielvogel, said in an interview that Mr. Socolow had told him that that was where the journalism bug bit him. He attended Baruch College and later City College of New York, where he studied history and was a campus correspondent for The New York Times. He became a copy boy at The Times and served in the Army, working in a broadcasting unit in Japan during the Korean War. Afterward he worked in the Tokyo bureau of the International News Service, a Hearst news agency, which later merged with United Press to become United Press International. Mr. Socolow married Anne Krulewitch in 1960; they divorced in 1977. In addition to his sons, he is survived by a daughter, Elisabeth Socolow; a brother, Alfred; and four grandchildren. In 1974, Mr. Socolow moved to Washington, where he oversaw CBS’s coverage of Nixon’s resignation and the trials of the Watergate conspirators. He returned to New York in 1978 as executive producer of the “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite” and briefly maintained control over the program after Dan Rather succeeded Cronkite in 1981. Mr. Socolow was later London bureau chief and a producer for “60 Minutes.” After leaving CBS in 1988, Mr. Socolow worked for the Christian Science Monitor program “World Monitor” and produced programs for the Discovery Channel and the Public Broadcasting Service. In a 2008 interview with the Archive of American Television, Mr. Socolow was asked what advice he could offer to an aspiring news producer. “If you hear of a story, especially a foreign story that has an American quotient to it, in a misbegotten place — I’m not talking about Rome, Paris, London,” he said, instead naming as examples Vietnam in the 1960s and Central America during the early years of the Reagan administration, before picking up the thread: “Just get there as fast as you can.”

Obituary
Sandy Socolow
News media,journalism
CBS News


Young Offensive Players Give Raiders Fast Start and Bright Future

Abstract: The Oakland Raiders are one of the surprise N.F.L. teams of 2015. With a 2-1 record, they have a winning record after three games for just the second time in the last 11 seasons (the Raiders also began 2011 with a 2-1 record). In Week 1, Oakland was embarrassed in a fashion that has become all too familiar in recent years. The Raiders’ 33-13 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals was their 35th loss by at least 20 points since the start of the 2005 season, the most in the N.F.L. But the Raiders surprised the Baltimore Ravens last week, and continued that success Sunday against the Cleveland Browns. And with the Bengals now 3-0, the Week 1 loss does not look quite as bad. Oakland has been powered by an offense featuring three young players who could emerge as the foundation for the next Raiders playoff team: quarterback Derek Carr , running back Latavius Murray and wide receiver Amari Cooper . Carr, 24, was Oakland’s second-round pick in 2014, and has a 102.4 passer rating through three weeks. Murray, 25, was a sixth-round pick two years ago, and ranks fourth in rushing yards with 248. Cooper, who turned 21 in June, was the fourth overall selection in the 2015 draft, and is coming off back-to-back 100-yard receiving games. If the Raiders wind up hitting on those three picks — and the early returns in 2015 are very good — Oakland’s offense has a very bright future. Against the Browns, Carr threw for 314 yards, Murray rushed for 139 yards, and Cooper gained 134 receiving yards. It was the first time the Raiders had a 300-yard passer, a 100-yard rusher and a 100-yard receiver since 2010 . But perhaps more impressive, this game marked only the 12th time since 1970 that any franchise had a 300-yard passer, a 100-yard rusher and a 100-yard receiver, with all three being 25 years or younger. Add in the standout defender Khalil Mack , the team’s first-round pick last year, who had two sacks Sunday, and the Raiders are suddenly a franchise with some young cornerstones.

Football
Raiders
Derek Carr
Amari Cooper
Khalil Mack
Latavius Murray


Second Longtime Director Resigns at Bank of America

Abstract: A longtime director at Bank of America resigned on Friday, the latest in a series of changes on the company’s board. O. Temple Sloan, 70, had served on the bank’s board for 13 years, much of it as the lead director, giving him influence second only to the chief executive, Kenneth D. Lewis. In recent months, Mr. Sloan, a strong ally of Mr. Lewis’s, had become the focus of shareholder complaints over the bank’s merger with Merrill Lynch. Mr. Sloan lost some of his power after the bank’s annual meeting last month, when shareholders voted to appoint an independent chairman, stripping Mr. Lewis of that title. The board chose a director other than Mr. Sloan to become chairman. Soon afterward, the new chairman, Walter E. Massey, created a committee to review board activities; Mr. Sloan was not named to the panel. Some shareholder groups that have been critical of the bank responded favorably to Mr. Sloan’s resignation. “As the lead independent director, he bears primary responsibility for the board’s failure to independently oversee management,” said Michael Garland, a spokesman for the CtW Investment Group, which helps invest union pension funds. Mr. Sloan is the second longtime director to leave. Meredith Spangler, a large shareholder who had been a director for two decades, retired this spring. Both Ms. Spangler and Mr. Sloan were supporters of Mr. Lewis, who said in a statement that he would miss Mr. Sloan. “Temple has been a trusted adviser who has made an invaluable contribution to the success of our company," Mr. Lewis said. More changes could occur. When the government released the bank’s stress test, Mr. Massey said he was reviewing the makeup of the board to ensure its members had enough financial expertise.

Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations
Bank of America Corp
Sloan O Temple


Cost of Driving May Work Where Politics Failed and Keep Cars Off City Streets

Abstract: Soaring gas prices and higher tolls seem to be doing for traffic in New York what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s ambitious congestion pricing was supposed to do: reducing the number of cars clogging the city’s streets and pushing more people to use mass transit. In May, with gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, traffic at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s bridges and tunnels dropped 4.7 percent compared with the same month the previous year. Preliminary data for June shows a similar decrease in traffic, and officials say the change is largely because of higher prices at the pump. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has recorded a similar decline in travel across its bridges and tunnels since early March, when it raised tolls. The greatest decline was in April, when traffic fell by 4.2 percent. (The transportation authority also increased tolls in March, but by a much smaller amount.) At the same time, subway, bus and commuter rail ridership has increased. Weekday subway ridership was up 6.5 percent in April, compared with the same month a year ago. April ridership increased 5.5 percent on the Long Island Rail Road, 4.3 percent on the Metro-North Railroad and almost 9 percent on PATH trains between Manhattan and New Jersey. Use of the subways and rail lines also increased in May, compared with the previous year, but in most cases by smaller amounts. New Jersey Transit ridership, including bus, commuter rail and light rail, was up about 4.6 percent in April and May combined. “We’re at the point where people really are changing habits,” said Sam Schwartz, a transportation consultant. He said that if gas prices stayed high, the result could be close to the goal set by Mr. Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan, which, if it had been approved, was expected to reduce traffic in much of Manhattan by 6.3 percent. “If we start eclipsing $5 a gallon, which we might over the summer, I think we might get very close,” Mr. Schwartz said. Throughout the country, rising gas prices have had a broad economic impact, hitting especially hard in many cities and suburban communities where people are more dependent on cars than in the transit-dense New York City region. And while there is no denying that increased costs mean a certain pain for drivers in New York, they may also have the unique effect of meshing with the city’s goal of cutting traffic and, as a consequence, lowering pollution. Bloomberg administration officials, however, said the actual impact may be slight. “The magnitude here is by no means comparable to the effect that congestion pricing would have in reducing traffic,” said Bruce Schaller, deputy transportation commissioner for planning and sustainability. “What congestion pricing does,” he added, “is it focuses traffic reduction on the most congested places and times, whereas gasoline prices spread the impact out.” Still, the new numbers do bolster a central point of the Bloomberg plan: that higher prices can motivate commuters to give up their cars. “It shows that pricing matters and that people respond to it,” said Jeffrey M. Zupan, a senior fellow for transportation at the Regional Plan Association. It is hard to say exactly what the impact of lighter bridge and tunnel traffic has been on the streets of Manhattan — or other boroughs — since the city does not take traffic measurements that show changes from month to month. But there are other indications. The Metropolitan Parking Association, which represents garage and parking lot owners, said that its members had seen about a 10 percent decrease in daily customers. And gas station managers interviewed in Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey said that the number of drivers buying gas had also declined. Interviews with drivers and transit riders indicate, however, that a change in habits has not come easy — and might be reversed if gas prices fall. “When prices went over $4, I stopped driving,” said Scott Pisciotti, 41, a real estate portfolio manager from Somers, N.Y. Mr. Pisciotti said he used to drive daily to his office in Midtown Manhattan but now rides a Metro-North train from White Plains to Grand Central Terminal. It is a new routine for him, and he has not fully embraced it. “If prices dropped,” he said, “I would drive a lot more.” Commuter trains have also become more crowded, riders say. At the Secaucus Junction train station of New Jersey Transit, Brian Simmons, 30, said that it had become much harder to get a seat on the train in recent months. “It’s like the New York City subway,” he said. Gas price-induced traffic reduction might have a downside. Mr. Bloomberg’s plan was intended, among other things, to raise hundreds of millions of dollars a year for mass transit improvements by charging cars an $8 fee to enter the area of Manhattan below 59th Street. The plan was defeated in April when legislative leaders in Albany refused to bring it up for a vote. In contrast, the current reduction in traffic at bridges and tunnels could actually take money away from transit, because a large portion of the tolls collected at the transportation authority’s crossings helps to finance the subways, buses and commuter railroads. In May, toll revenues were more than $4 million below budget projections, and Gary J. Dellaverson, the authority’s chief financial officer, said that June toll revenues appeared to be down even further. So far, the drop has been more than offset by an increase in fare collections generated by higher transit and rail ridership, but Mr. Dellaverson said that the combination of slipping toll revenues and the increased cost of fuel for the authority’s buses and trains could eventually outpace ridership revenue gains. The rise in gas prices may also be increasing something that congestion pricing was meant to eliminate: the incentive for drivers to avoid tolls by using the free bridges over the East River, causing heavier traffic in the surrounding neighborhoods. The congestion pricing plan called for a 6.3 percent reduction in the total miles traveled by all vehicles in the pay zone. That is different from simply taking cars off the street since some vehicles, like taxis, are responsible for a higher share of the total miles driven. Mr. Schaller said that to achieve the program’s goal, the city would have needed at least a 10 percent reduction in the number of cars entering the zone. Mr. Schwartz estimated that a 4 or 5 percent drop at the bridges and tunnels might mean just a 2 or 3 percent reduction in Manhattan traffic. While some drivers have given up and switched to trains or buses, those who are sticking with their cars say they are driving less. Singh Bridgemohan, 50, was putting some gas, at $4.35 a gallon, in his red 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee on a recent morning at an Exxon station in Bay Terrace, Queens. Mr. Bridgemohan, who runs a small construction company, said he used to drive his wife, a nanny, from their home in Jamaica to her work in Bayside every day. Now he does it rarely, to save on gas, while she makes a much longer commute by bus. At a Shell station on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel, Peter Lin, 54, a sales executive from Holmdel, N.J., paid $56.18 to fill up his 2005 Toyota Camry before heading to work in Manhattan. Mr. Lin echoed several drivers who said that an unexpected benefit of higher driving costs was that there are simply fewer cars on the road. “Do I like the traffic?” he said. “Yes. Do I like the cost of gas? Forget about it.”

Roads and Traffic
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Congestion Pricing
Commuting
New York City


New York Haitians See Chance to Coalesce and Gain Clout

Abstract: After a week of watching news coverage of the Haiti earthquake , Nadege Fleurimond, a Haitian-American event planner in New York, fired off an e-mail message to about three dozen friends and associates. Though she was moved by the outpouring of help from local Haitians, she was frustrated that the effort had not coalesced into something larger and more visible. “No major press conferences, no major vigils, no major anything with a statement,” she wrote. “Nothing being written about us besides the fact that we were sad and shocked.” The problem, she suggested, was that Haitians, for all their history and achievements in New York, had not emerged as a discernible entity, with prominent leaders, a united presence, a public face. The e-mail message provoked a spirited debate in Ms. Fleurimond’s circle. And as the initial shock of the earthquake begins to fade, the disaster has touched off similar discussions among Haitians all over New York. As awful as the news has been, they say, it has given them an opening to talk about the shape and direction of their community. In the long term, many hope, the magnitude of the emergency will bring them more coherence and clout, and deepen an involvement with their homeland that has weakened with each new generation. “A conversation defining who we are as a community has been needed for a long time,” said Carolle Charles, a Haitian-American sociologist at Baruch College. Haitians are a sizable presence in New York City, the ninth-largest immigrant group, having settled here in large numbers as far back as the 1960s. About 268,000 residents in the New York region were born in Haiti or are of Haitian descent, according to Census Department data, though Haitian-American groups estimate that there are tens of thousands more, many of them illegal immigrants. Social service agencies have proliferated to help the poor and the newly arrived, as have predominantly Haitian church congregations. A robust professional class has emerged, and since 2007 the City Council has included a Haitian-American, Mathieu Eugene . Haitians and Haitian-Americans in New York contribute a large part of the more than $1.3 billion in remittances that flow each year to Haiti from around the world. But in interviews over the past week, several prominent Haitians in New York lamented that the local population is amorphous, lacking the array of established leaders, either elected or informal, and well-financed institutions that they would expect from an immigrant group their size. They said they saw more cohesive Haitian communities elsewhere — in Miami, or even nearby, in suburban Spring Valley, N.Y. In New York, which has more Haitians than any other American city, the population has pulled together to help the homeland in past natural disasters or political upheavals, and to organize in response to AIDS. But those coalitions, many say, must be reinvented with each new crisis. “We have a great capacity to mobilize at any moment, but we don’t have a great capacity to institutionalize,” Ms. Charles said. “We don’t have organizations that are long-lasting. We don’t have the ability to create a pool of resources.” One reason is geography: Haitians are scattered across Brooklyn, Queens and the suburbs. By contrast, South Florida has dense concentrations of Haitians in a Miami neighborhood, Little Haiti, and in nearby North Miami, lending them a visible profile and helping to stimulate commerce, political organizing and other relationships. Though Haitian-born residents in South Florida are, on average, poorer and less educated than in New York, they are represented by Haitian-Americans at many levels of government. In a sense, New York’s Haitians may be victims of their own success: Many who have climbed into the middle class have migrated to the suburbs. “We’re so focused on fitting in and assimilating and moving away from the community,” said Ms. Fleurimond, 28, who immigrated at age 7 and graduated from Columbia University. “We succeed as individuals, not so much as a community.” Building a sense of community has also been complicated by political rifts mirroring those that have divided Haiti for decades. Animosities can run so deep, some Haitian-Americans say, that they dictate whom people befriend, whom they do business with, and even where they shop. Among the hardiest organizations in the New York diaspora have been the hometown associations, which organize and finance construction and social service projects back home. But of the 43 associations that united under an umbrella group a decade ago, only about 17 remain active, said Carolle Certulien, coordinator of the organization, the Federation of Regional Associations of Haitians Abroad. The main problem, she said, is a lack of fresh leaders to replace those who have stepped down or returned to Haiti. “When the old people retired, they did not designate any successors,” she said. Though Haitians have not wanted for troubles to address — from the violent dictatorship of François Duvalier, beginning in the 1950s, to the destructive storms of 2008 — the succession of crises has led to a kind of leadership fatigue, said François Pierre-Louis Jr., an associate professor of political science at Queens College, who immigrated from Haiti in 1974. “Some people are tired,” he said. What has been missing, prominent Haitians say, is a single, enduring issue — a void that many believe may be filled by the earthquake and the long reconstruction. “We’re going to make sure this country is rebuilt and rebuilt better, which is a little bit more complex than, ‘Let’s get the bad guy out,’ ” said Jocelyn McCalla, adviser to Haiti’s special envoy to the United Nations. Carine Jocelyn, executive director of Diaspora Community Services, in Brooklyn, said the disaster had created an opportunity to braid together various networks. “There are so many folks doing such great work in Haiti,” she said. “I think this is an opportunity to make it more collective.” The catastrophe has energized many second- and third-generation Haitian-Americans. Some have had little or no direct contact with Haiti, but are finding a way to connect meaningfully. “It has awakened them and made them more cogent and thirsty to understand,” said Edna Bonhomme, 25, a graduate student in public health at Columbia who was born and raised in Miami. Some civic leaders hope that if younger Haitians maintain that commitment over the long haul, they will strengthen social and political networks in New York. “Those children are U.S. citizens; they feel more entitled to ask for things that we didn’t ask for,” said Mr. Pierre-Louis, the Queens College professor. “They know how the system works.” An influx of Haitians is expected, but it will be limited by restrictions on immigration . And though the recovery effort is likely to draw some New York professionals to Haiti, they could be dissuaded from long-term involvement by legal and cultural impediments there, including a wariness of expatriates and laws against dual citizenship. Any attempt to build community in New York, Mr. Pierre-Louis said, will ultimately be measured by change in Haiti. “No matter how much you try here,” he said, “if things do not evolve in Haiti, then you feel like you haven’t made progress.”

Haitian-Americans
Immigration and Emigration
New York City
Haiti


Ducks-Blackhawks Series Has a Pair of Rare Story Lines

Abstract: ANAHEIM, Calif. — Ryan Getzlaf celebrated his 30th birthday last Sunday with the only gift he really wanted: The Anaheim Ducks clinched a trip to the Western Conference finals. His longtime linemate and hockey soul mate, Corey Perry, turned 30 on Saturday. Having spent so many years with Perry, Getzlaf knew exactly what to get him. “Nothing,” Getzlaf said. “Same thing he got me.” They have been together from the first day they pulled Ducks jerseys over their heads nearly 12 years ago, and they won the Stanley Cup together in 2007. Getzlaf and Perry have persevered through slumps, injuries, a revolving cast of linemates and every normal pitfall of young adulthood to find themselves still together — and on the brink of another chance to play for the Cup. But to get back to the Stanley Cup finals, they will have to get past one of the few current N.H.L. partnerships to have accomplished even more. The players in that partnership, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks, share many of the same serendipitous parallels in their careers, also making simultaneous N.H.L. breakthroughs and winning a first Stanley Cup title. Then they won another. Two of hockey’s best twosomes in a generation will meet in the postseason for the first time when the Ducks host the Blackhawks on Sunday at Honda Center. All four forwards are among the N.H.L.’s top five playoff scorers this spring, and they relish the spotlight on their chance to add another banner to their accomplishments. “This is the time of year that means the most to everybody, not just Getzy and me,” Perry said. “I think anytime you play against the best players in the world, you get a little bit more fired up. The adrenaline starts kicking in, and you get ready to play because it’s going to be that much harder.” Image Chicago’s Jonathan Toews, left, and Patrick Kane began together in the 2007-8 season. Credit Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press Partnerships of this magnitude and length are rare in a 30-team league. It is tough enough to keep two world-class players on the same roster from their youth to the prime of their careers, and even more unusual for both to stay at such an elite level of performance. Yet Toews and Kane have been growing together since their first N.H.L. season, 2007-8, evolving into two of the most exciting young forwards in hockey. Getzlaf and Perry have been together even longer, cracking the Ducks’ lineup in 2005 and earning full-time jobs shortly thereafter. “You don’t see that happen very often in hockey, just because it’s tough to keep guys together unless they want to be together,” Anaheim Coach Bruce Boudreau said. “That’s what you have to admire about” Getzlaf and Perry. Boudreau added, “They grew up together, but they’re committed to that partnership and to this team — to seeing this thing through and winning.” The Ducks won the Stanley Cup in 2007 with Getzlaf and Perry playing significant roles. While Toews and Kane have carried the Blackhawks to the top of the league, Anaheim has not been back to the Western Conference finals since, yet its two stars steadily evolved. “I think it’s one of those things when you play with someone for so long, you’re going to develop some chemistry,” Kane said. “It seems like even when they have the puck possessed and there’s nothing there, it seems like they tend to send it back down to the net. Sometimes it’s tough to get the puck against those guys.” Getzlaf and Perry still play on the same line, as they have done for all but a few games of their N.H.L. careers. Chicago Coach Joel Quenneville broke up Toews and Kane, spreading their offensive skill across the Blackhawks’ top two lines. Getzlaf and Toews are team captains, and they were nominated this season for the N.H.L.’s Mark Messier Leadership Award. Getzlaf and Perry share an extra bond with Toews: They all played for Canada at the Olympics in Vancouver and Sochi, winning two gold medals together. “He works hard,” Getzlaf said of Toews, “and he tries to throw that team on his back a lot of times, so we’re going to have to go out there and outwork him. When he’s out there, he’s on a mission a lot of times. That’s why they like playing with him, and it’s going to be a good challenge.”

Ice hockey
Playoffs
Chicago Blackhawks
Anaheim Ducks


Unions Support Halter to Defeat Senator Lincoln in Arkansas Runoff

Abstract: CONWAY, Ark. — They have knocked on 170,000 doors, made 700,000 phone calls, sent 2.7 million pieces of mail and spent almost $6 million on television and radio advertising. That is how badly labor unions, by their own count, want to defeat Senator Blanche Lincoln , a Democrat they once supported. Even though Arkansas’s labor force is one of the least unionized in the country, labor has thrown huge support behind Mrs. Lincoln’s primary challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter , in a runoff election on Tuesday. The unions have made the race here the centerpiece of a new effort to hold union-backed candidates accountable for their votes after they are elected. The push is fueled by a frustration that goes back years but that peaked in the health care debate and in the failure of the Democratic-led Senate to bring far-reaching pro-union legislation to the floor. Even as unions lose members and bargaining power across the country, their campaign against Mrs. Lincoln shows that they are determined to flex their political muscles more than ever before. “We’re sending a message here,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. “Our members have had it — not just in Arkansas, they have had it across this country.” Mrs. Lincoln, who has received more than half a million dollars in labor money in her career, has done much to anger unions. She opposed a public option in the health care bill; helped block the confirmation of Craig Becker, a union-backed nominee to the National Labor Relations Board; and, in what they viewed as a reversal, opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier to unionize workers. Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and chairman of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political panel, criticized Mrs. Lincoln for supporting President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, including an end to the estate tax ; for opposing a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies; and for backing the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements. “All that kind of stuff convinced us that she was a Democrat basically in name only,” he said. Union advertisements have accused Mrs. Lincoln of being a Washington insider who takes Wall Street money and rarely comes back to Arkansas. Mrs. Lincoln has countered that the labor attacks prove that she is not a tool of special interests like “Washington unions and Wall Street banks” who want to “bully Arkansas voters.” In a recent campaign ad she says, “I approved this message because I’d rather lose this election fighting for what’s right than win by turning my back on Arkansas.” Former President Bill Clinton, a Lincoln supporter, has also warned voters that unions are “using you and manipulating your votes.” On Friday, Mrs. Lincoln’s campaign complained about a union flyer that juxtaposed photos of Mr. Halter and Mr. Obama and was distributed in black areas, when Mr. Obama has endorsed Mrs. Lincoln. Jim Nickels, the state director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said discontent with Mrs. Lincoln began locally, not nationally, with members becoming very sensitive to health care issues after municipalities tried to cut benefits to retirees and dependents. Mrs. Lincoln, Mr. Nickels said, seemed to be swayed by Tea Party members more than workers. “The frustration came about in that she was for the public option and then she was against the public option,” he said. Only about 47,000 of Arkansas’s 1.1 million workers are union members, while about 330,000 people voted in the three-way Democratic primary last month. But union leaders say labor’s voting power is augmented by union spouses and retirees. And the unions have reached out to nonunion voters through Working America, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. affiliate that focuses on workers who are not unionized. It has 25 to 30 paid canvassers on the ground every day. On Thursday afternoon, Liz Larson, a switchboard operator who lives in a middle-class neighborhood in Conway, about 30 miles north of Little Rock, opened her door to Corey Spangler, 21, a canvasser wearing a red Working America T-shirt. “I’ve been very impressed with these guys,” Ms. Larson said after chatting with Mr. Spangler about the runoff (she said she was undecided). “They’ve been the only ones to come out.” Working America has visited her three times, she said. At the state, county and municipal employees’ union headquarters in Little Rock on Thursday night, union members folded mailers and made calls around two large tables. “This is pretty new for Arkansas,” said Justin Nickels, the communications director for the state A.F.L.-C.I.O. “It’s sort of like we’ve been thrown into the N.F.L.” Bill Vickery, a Republican political consultant in Little Rock, said he was impressed by the effort of the Service Employees International Union and other unions. “I can say that the ads, the messaging and the continuity of the messaging and the impact of the S.E.I.U. and other labor ads have been nothing short of brilliant,” he said. “Bill Halter has been positioned as a Washington outsider, and Blanche Lincoln has been unable to portray him as a liberal accepting liberal support. It’s a colossal mistake on her part.” Mr. Vickery said Mr. Halter’s support from labor and left-wing groups was a perfect setup for Republicans, who would portray him as ultra-liberal in the general election. But Mr. McEntee said unions were confident about this November because Arkansas is a heavily Democratic state. Labor’s push to defeat Mrs. Lincoln is its most prominent but by no means only effort to punish Democrats who it says have turned their backs on workers. In Maryland in 2008, the S.E.I.U. spent $1.3 million to help Donna Edwards defeat the business-friendly Democratic incumbent, Representative Al Wynn, in a primary. She went on to win in November. In North Carolina this year, the service employees sought to create a third party that would field candidates against three Democratic members of Congress who voted against the health care overhaul. They failed to gather enough signatures, but still plan to recruit a candidate to oppose Representative Larry Kissell, who is serving his first term. In New York State, the service employees had threatened to run candidates against two Democratic members of Congress in swing districts, Representatives Michael E. McMahon of Staten Island and Michael Arcuri of Utica, who voted against the health care bill. But the union was unable to recruit challengers. Nonetheless, labor leaders say many union volunteers who worked hard to elect those two men as well as Representative Zack Space, Democrat of Ohio, are not likely to campaign for them this year. Mr. Arcuri won by just 10,000 votes in 2008, so a lack of labor support could endanger him. “We go out and support these Blue Dogs all over the place,” said Mr. McEntee, the union leader. “We give them all kinds of ground support, radio support, and then they get in there and they’ve lost our phone number. For God’s sake, what’s the use of having them in there?”

Lincoln Blanche Lambert
Arkansas
Organized Labor
Elections
Senate
Halter Bill


Concern for the Defense Replaces Concern for Manning’s Shoulder

Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Sept. 16 — Eli Manning ’s introduction elicited the biggest of the pregame roars. A week of speculation about the severity of his sprained throwing shoulder ended Sunday with Manning starting at quarterback for the Giants , and any doubts about his effectiveness ended after a series of strong throws. It was the rest of the team that appeared less than stable. By the time Manning left the game late in the fourth quarter, most of the fans at Giants Stadium were driving away and the Giants were going nowhere. A 35-13 loss to the Green Bay Packers handed the Giants their first 0-2 start since 1996. It promises to awaken the latent doubts lingering from last season’s collapse, when the Giants lost seven of their final nine games. “I think we are a better football team than we have shown,” Coach Tom Coughlin said. “Obviously, I don’t have any real grounds for saying that; it’s just a belief. I do believe we are all in it together, and I do believe that we are all embarrassed.” Now the Giants look toward a trip to play the Washington Redskins as a way to rescue their sagging season. Last year, the Giants needed — and got — a victory at FedEx Field in their final regular-season game to interrupt a slump and make the playoffs. “We’re not going to get any worse, that I can promise,” defensive end Osi Umenyiora said. “I’m not necessarily guaranteeing we’re going to win the game, but I guarantee we’re going to play better.” The Giants’ offense looked effortless in spurts, but it was slowed in vital spots, often by mistakes. Manning and his sore shoulder were less a detriment than drive-killing dead-ball penalties called on Jeremy Shockey and Amani Toomer, turning touchdown possibilities into field goals long before the outcome was decided. But it is the defense, already maligned after the first week’s 45-35 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, where the greatest concern is aimed. The unit, under the first-year coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, has allowed 80 points in two games, the most for a Giants team in consecutive games since 1973. Against the Packers, 2-0 for the first time since 2001, the pass rush rarely brushed 37-year-old quarterback Brett Favre , who picked apart the Giants with short passes and an occasional, well-timed deep throw. Favre earned his 149th victory as a starter, breaking a tie with John Elway for the most among N.F.L. quarterbacks. He completed 29 of 38 passes, including 14 in a row to start the second half, for 286 yards. His three touchdown throws gave him 417 for his career, three shy of matching Dan Marino’s N.F.L. record. Favre completed all 11 third-quarter passes, including a 2-yard touchdown throw to tight end Bubba Franks that gave the Packers a 14-10 lead. His 14th straight completion, less than 90 seconds into the fourth quarter, was a 3-yard touchdown lob to tight end Donald Lee that made the score 21-13. The Giants’ Ahmad Bradshaw fumbled the ball to the Packers on the ensuing kickoff. Five plays later, Favre threw a 10-yard touchdown pass over the middle to Donald Driver, and Green Bay had a 28-13 lead with 11 minutes 41 seconds remaining. The stadium exits began to get crowded. In two games, Favre and Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo combined to complete 44 of 62 passes for 631 yards, 7 touchdowns and 2 interceptions, a rating of 120.2. They were sacked twice, for 6 yards. “No hope is lost here,” defensive end Michael Strahan said. “We’re professionals. You take your whipping like a man. We took our whipping today, and we took our whipping last week. But the one thing that you can’t do, you never quit. It just takes one turning point, one confidence builder, and I’ve seen that in the past.” Manning completed 16 of 29 passes for 211 yards, with a touchdown and an interception. His afternoon ended ingloriously when, chased by a pack of Packers, he threw into the hands of defensive tackle Corey Williams. Manning was pounded to the ground by a block on the interception return. Manning’s availability was not confirmed until 90 minutes before the game. After the game, he acknowledged that doctors told him last Monday that he might miss a few weeks. “That doesn’t mean I believe it,” Manning said, adding that his shoulder “didn’t bother me at all” during the game. On the Giants’ first play, Manning lobbed a screen to Shockey, who rambled for 19 yards. Derrick Ward, who was playing for the injured Brandon Jacobs, followed by gaining 19 of his 90 rushing yards on the next play, and a personal-foul penalty on the Packers carried the ball deep into Green Bay territory. But momentum stalled, and a 34-yard field-goal attempt by Lawrence Tynes was hooked left. It came to symbolize the play of the Giants — well built in one stretch, unglued the next. The Giants settled for three field-goal attempts in three trips inside the 20, and only reached the end zone on Manning’s 26-yard pass to Plaxico Burress, who later left the game with an ankle injury. A third-and-4 at Green Bay’s 30 in the second quarter highlighted their inconsistencies. With the score tied, 7-7, Manning completed a pass to Shockey across the middle for 14 yards and an apparent first down. Shockey punctuated the play by spiking the ball. Under an N.F.L. rule added this season, that constitutes delay of game, and the play was erased. The Giants settled for a 48-yard field goal and a 10-7 halftime lead. The Giants’ best chance to regain the lead in the second half ended with an uncharacteristic personal foul on Toomer. On second-and-goal from the Green Bay 8, Manning threw incomplete to Sinorice Moss. But Toomer had received a shove from behind from linebacker Nick Barnett, and retaliated by diving to cut-block Barnett. The two were separated by officials, and Toomer was flagged for taunting, a 15-yard penalty. “I don’t even know what I said,” Toomer said. “It must have been bad, though.” Tynes soon kicked another field goal. The Giants trailed, 14-13. And it was fast becoming obvious that they had far bigger issues than Manning. EXTRA POINTS The Giants backup quarterback Jared Lorenzen entered the game in the waning minutes, and hurt his ankle on the second play. He played six more plays before heading to the X-ray room. The Giants did not divulge the nature of the injury. ... The rookie receiver Steve Smith left the game in the first quarter with a fractured shoulder blade. ... The former Giants defensive lineman George Martin was honored at halftime before beginning a planned 3,200-mile walk across the country to benefit ill 9/11 rescue workers. Called a Journey for 9/11 ( ajourneyfor911.com ), the trip is expected to take four months. It began Sunday at the George Washington Bridge and is scheduled to end at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

New York Giants
Football
Green Bay Packers
Manning Eli
Favre Brett


In Albany, Budget Talks Stay in Dark

Abstract: ALBANY — Sunshine Week in the capital this year offered little reason to break out the sunscreen. The seven-day period — a nationwide initiative promoting openness in government — was marked by Gov. David A. Paterson’s closed-door lunch for legislative leaders at the executive mansion on Thursday, where they discussed the $120 billion-plus budget, but declined to share details with reporters afterward. The top Republicans in the Senate and the Assembly walked out of the luncheon early, griping on their way back to the Capitol that Democrats — who control both houses and the governor’s mansion — were intent on conducting the entire budget process in secret. Meanwhile, the Senate planned to commemorate the week by passing a resolution calling on the governor to issue an official state proclamation recognizing Sunshine Week. But Senate Democrats decided at the last minute not to bring the resolution forward, depriving Republicans of the opportunity to criticize Mr. Paterson and Democratic leaders for excluding them from budget negotiations. Complaints of secrecy in government have long been a refrain of the opposition in Albany. But legislators and watchdog groups have said that this year is the worst in decades as Democratic leaders have forgone even a semblance of open government. In a typical budget process, the Legislature convenes a series of public conference committee meetings for rank-and-file lawmakers, focusing on the biggest areas of the budget like health, education and public safety. Those meetings are followed by public meetings of the Legislature’s top leaders, who then debate their spending priorities. The governor and the majority and minority leaders of the Senate and Assembly also hold open discussions of their own, known as leaders’ meetings, to debate their spending priorities. But this year, so far, none of those things have occurred. To be sure, most of the substantive legislative horse trading typically happens behind closed doors. But the fact that Democrats have stopped even going through the motions is troubling to some. “Basically they’re saying, ‘We don’t need openness or transparency,’ ” said James N. Tedisco, the Republican Assembly leader who spoke to reporters on Thursday through the locked iron gate outside the governor’s mansion. Though lawmakers have sometimes failed to meet the March 31 deadline to complete work on the next fiscal year’s budget, typically the Senate and the Assembly by this point would have put forward their own spending plans. That has not happened yet. Transparency, of course, is a relative term in politics. Senate Democrats have accused the Republicans of hypocrisy, considering that they controlled the Senate for more than four decades, until this year, and left Democrats almost entirely out of the decision-making process. But Democrats are offering no apologies. “We are going to deal with the budget in the most appropriate way,” Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the Assembly, said when asked on Thursday if any part of the budget process would be conducted in the open. Malcolm A. Smith, the Senate majority leader, said that nothing had come out of the budget negotiations so far that the public would be interested in knowing. When that happens, he added, he will let the public know. “At this point,” Mr. Smith said, “we want to get to a place where we can have information that’s worthwhile for the public.” For his part, Mr. Paterson has repeatedly offered his view that the need for openness in government is essential to have a properly functioning democracy. “We have to put an end to the secretive budget process that has dominated the State Legislature for decade,” Mr. Paterson said in 2006, when he was the minority leader of the Senate. Then, approximating a famous quote from Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Mr. Paterson added, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” On Friday, Mr. Paterson said that more openness in the budget process would come, but only after he and legislative leaders had arrived at a compromise that they were ready to reveal.

New York State
Politics and Government
Budgets and Budgeting
Legislatures and Parliaments
Sunshine Week


In Georgia, Crowd Attacks Mikheil Saakashvili’s Allies

Abstract: TBILISI, Georgia — An angry crowd attacked allies of President Mikheil Saakashvili outside the site for an annual address to the nation on Friday, as Georgia’s five-month-old power-sharing experiment deteriorated into open conflict. A mob surged toward Gigi Ugulava , the mayor of Tbilisi, as the police looked on, unable or unwilling to control a crowd that had taken shape hours earlier and vowed to prevent Mr. Saakashvili from entering. At least five lawmakers from the president’s party were reported injured in the brawl. Mr. Saakashvili’s party, which had dominated Georgian politics for nine years, lost a parliamentary election last year to an opposition coalition, Georgian Dream. It was the first constitutional transfer of power in this country with a long history of civil unrest, and Western leaders hailed it as a breakthrough for the post-Soviet region. But that moment quickly soured. Since Mr. Saakashvili’s presidential term does not end until October, he must serve alongside Bidzina Ivanishvili, the prime minister, who loathes and distrusts him. The new government has cut Mr. Saakashvili down to size, stripping him of his private plane and reducing his household budget, but the president retains the right to dissolve the government and call for new parliamentary elections, levers his opponents fear he will use. Friday’s confrontation began when lawmakers from Mr. Ivanishvili’s coalition canceled Mr. Saakashvili’s address to the nation, which is traditionally delivered in the Parliament chamber. Mr. Saakashvili, defiant, said he would deliver the speech at the national library in Tbilisi. By midday Friday, several hundred protesters — many of them prisoners newly freed by an amnesty that the president had opposed — had gathered outside the building, seething with anger. One of them, Giorgi Gorelashvili, 57, said he had served two years after he was convicted of spying for Russia. “He has no right to make speeches, and we will not allow him in,” he said. “Saakashvili is not the president anymore.” When Mr. Saakashvili’s central allies arrived, 10 minutes before the speech was to begin, protesters began pelting them with eggs. The library’s front door had been decorated with brooms, in a grim reference to a prison abuse scandal last fall, which featured video of a man being sodomized with a broom. Two men repeatedly punched Chiora Taktakishvili, who served as a campaign spokeswoman for Mr. Saakashvili’s party, leaving her dazed and with blood running from one nostril. The fracas ended after about 10 minutes when Mr. Saakashvili’s allies left. Each side has blamed the other for provoking violence. David Usupashvili, the speaker of Parliament, described it to reporters outside as “another spectacle and provocation of Saakashvili, which the protesters unfortunately succumbed to,” the Interfax news agency reported. Among those who had already entered the building when the brawl began were diplomats who had come at Mr. Saakashvili’s invitation, like the United States ambassador, Richard Norland. “There are certain basic principles in democracy, and no matter how strongly you feel about an issue or how much you feel you’ve been wronged, there is no excuse for using violence, for punching parliamentarians as they go in to hear a speech by the president,” Mr. Norland told reporters outside. He warned of reports that crowds were moving toward Mr. Saakashvili’s palace. Mr. Saakashvili made no effort to get into the library. Instead, he invited his loyalists and the assembled diplomats to hear his address two hours later in the president’s palace. At a fruit stand near the site of the brawl, people crowded around a small television to watch coverage of the melee and discuss what had happened and who was to blame. “The only thing left for us, ordinary people, is to pray for peace to return,” Aleksandr Makharashvili, 45, said. “I am afraid there is no way they will be able to shake hands of each other after this.”

Georgia country
Speeches
Mikheil Saakashvili


9th-Grade Dropout Goes Back to School

Abstract: Reading her notes on the No. 3 train, Tamara Gonzalez did all she could to push the doubts out, out, out of her mind. Yes, it was only a quiz, but it had been a while since she had taken one. And then there was the matter of her “advanced” age. “I’m 27 years old!” she said, with the perkiness of, well, a 27-year-old. As part of her Introduction to Hospitality course at Star Career Academy , this first quiz was an important step toward what Ms. Gonzalez called “getting myself together.” And by doing well, she hoped to instill in her daughters, Taliyah, 9, and Talanah, 21 months, the confidence and determination she never felt when she was younger. Ms. Gonzalez said she was bullied while growing up in Brooklyn: “I had the real big eyebrows, big glasses, the teeth.” Then, in junior high school, she came into her pretty, as she says. The attention she got from her male classmates seemed to make up for what she felt she lacked at home. Ms. Gonzales said she had had a fractious relationship with her mother, who had become deeply religious a few years before and had separated from her father, who favored late nights in the clubs. Neither parent objected when she stopped going to school in the ninth grade, she said, or when she moved out a year later to live with a friend. Then, at 16, Ms. Gonzalez discovered she was pregnant. When she went to her mother’s house to tell her, she said, she discovered that her mother no longer lived there. Ms. Gonzalez gave birth to Taliyah in 2002. Things fell apart with Taliyah’s father, so she tried to pursue public-housing options. She found the sight at the intake office in the Bronx unnerving. “I wasn’t used to seeing anything like that, families all over the floor,” she said. “So I kept leaving and coming back to my mom’s house and fighting again.” Bouncing around shelters on Staten Island and in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn, Ms. Gonzalez somehow managed to earn her G.E.D. “I didn’t even consider college; I just thought about working,” she said. “It should have been education; I wish I’d thought like that.” Ms. Gonzalez worked low-wage restaurant jobs and dealt with her financial pressures by hanging out and drinking. Her mother began caring for Taliyah. “That’s when it started sinking in my head: I don’t have my daughter,” Ms. Gonzalez said. “Something’s got to give.” But instead came another surprise pregnancy, in 2009. It could have created further despair; instead, Ms. Gonzalez said, it served as a catalyst for her to change her life. She decided she would not settle for “becoming a statistic”; she would do everything to leave the shelter and secure an apartment and an education for herself and her children. After months of rejections from potential landlords, luck broke her way. With the help of a monthly $839 city rental assistance voucher, Ms. Gonzalez signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in September 2010. She came to the attention of Brooklyn Community Services , one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The agency offered home-based services to the young family and drew $564.93 from the fund for Ms. Gonzalez to buy a bed and furniture for Talanah. But the jubilance over her new apartment was short-lived. On Talanah’s first birthday last March, Ms. Gonzalez received a letter stating that the voucher program was in jeopardy. The family lives on $264 a month in public assistance and $367 a month in food stamps. Her monthly Con Edison bill is about $70 to $100, her gas bill, $65; diapers come to $30 a month; and she contributes $50 toward rent. Each month, anxiety mounts for Ms. Gonzalez until that rental voucher arrives. She is currently pursuing legal options to get child support for her children, she said. In November, she decided to do something she had not done since she was 14: go to school. Talking about her classes in hotel management brought tears to her eyes: “I love what I am doing,” she said. Now, when Taliyah struggles with math homework, Ms. Gonzalez said, “I try to encourage her to be positive.” “Then,” she said, “when something comes up for me in school, I try to remember what I told her and apply it to myself.” Ms. Gonzalez would like to work in hotel management and set an example for her girls. “Just show them that I did it, you know,” she said, “that I was by myself and it took some time, but I did it.” And that quiz? She got an 85.

Brooklyn Community Services
New York Times Neediest Cases Fund
Philanthropy


A Harvester of Trees Offers to Save an Indonesian Forest

Abstract: TELUK MERANTI, Indonesia — From the air, the Kampar Peninsula in Indonesia stretches for mile after mile in dense scrub and trees. One of the world’s largest peat swamp forests, it is also one of its biggest vaults of carbon dioxide, a source of potentially lucrative currency as world governments struggle to hammer out a global climate treaty . The vault, though, is leaking. Canals — used legally and illegally — extend from surrounding rivers nearly into the peninsula’s impenetrable core. By slowly draining and drying the peat land, they are releasing carbon dioxide, contributing to making Indonesia the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States . The leaks were evident to a family of fishermen from this village, just south of the peninsula, as they paddled up a creek in a dugout canoe . “I can tell the peat land’s leaking because the water here is getting browner and more acidic,” said Amiruddin, 31, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, as his wife, Delima, 29, scooped up the creek’s coffee-colored water to drink. Forests like the one on the Kampar Peninsula are at the center of a growing battle over the shape of a new climate treaty and efforts to curb the destruction and degradation of forests. Though countries are expected to reach only a broad agreement at next month’s summit meeting in Copenhagen , governments, scientists, businesses and environmentalists are already arguing over what kinds of forests should qualify as carbon reducers and what kinds of projects should be rewarded financially. The arguments over the Kampar have become particularly heated, not just because of its ecological importance, but because, so far, the most detailed plan to stop the leaks from the peat land comes from an unlikely source: a giant paper and pulp company that, according to its critics, has been one of the driving forces of deforestation in Indonesia. The company, Asia Pacific Resources International Limited , or April, says it wants to create a ring of industrial tree plantations around the peninsula’s core to preserve it. What is more, it hopes to receive carbon credits for doing so under a United Nations program to reward nations for conserving forests and reforesting degraded ones. The program, Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, is expected to be part of a new climate treaty. Unlike the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a new treaty is expected to tackle deforestation, which alone accounts for 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Halting deforestation in tropical forest nations like Indonesia and Brazil , the world’s fourth biggest emitter, is considered crucial to reining in global warming . Developing nations that preserve forests would be paid with carbon credits that they could sell to industrialized nations seeking to meet emissions reduction targets. Though the program’s specifics will probably take months or years to be worked out, more than a dozen projects of the United Nations program are already under way in Indonesia, backed by such diverse entities as conservation groups, the Australian government and Merrill Lynch , in addition to paper and pulp companies. Environmental groups say the paper and pulp companies, after years of despoiling Indonesia, should not be rewarded under the program. “They are the ones that did the damage,” said Michael Stuewe, an expert on Indonesia at the World Wildlife Fund . “Now they’re saying: ‘We were bad boys. Now we’re good. So give us the money.’ ” The companies argue that the United Nations program could provide them with the financial incentives to preserve forests even as they expand their operations, a goal supported by the Indonesian government, which sees the paper and pulp industry as a mainstay of the country’s economic development. “We could perhaps reduce the annual Indonesian emissions by 5 percent with this one project,” said Jouko Virta, April’s president of global fiber supply, referring to the company’s plan to ring the peninsula’s core. “It’s so significant. One project.” Everyone agrees, at least, on the importance of saving the Kampar Peninsula, a nearly one-million-acre peat bog on the equator inhabited by Sumatran tigers, bears, monkeys, crocodiles and other wildlife. Most of the peninsula remains free of humans, though small fishing camps can be found up its creeks. More significantly, illegal loggers can be seen operating in bases set up along some canals and creeks. And east of here, near a village called Pulau Muda, more than a dozen houses flank a long canal jutting into the peninsula, in what appears to be the biggest human settlement on the Kampar. Made up of decomposed trees and plants, sometimes as deep as 50 feet, the waterlogged land stores billions of tons of carbon dioxide. But once drained or cleared, the peat land releases many times more carbon dioxide than the deforestation of rain forests . Most experts believe that, as with rain forests, the protection of peat swamp forests will be eligible for carbon credits under the United Nations program. The Kampar Peninsula is one of the last tracts of green left in central Sumatra, where forests have been cleared to make way for palm oil plantations and industrial tree plantations, especially those belonging to April and its chief rival, Asia Pulp and Paper, both owned by Indonesian conglomerates. According to the World Wildlife Fund, here in Riau, the province where the two companies have their main mills and plantations, two-thirds of the area’s forests have disappeared in the past quarter century. Illegal loggers have also clear-cut vast chunks of forest. Migrants often slash and burn land for farming, sometimes inside national parks; like people elsewhere in Indonesia , they are often encouraged by local governments seeking to populate areas for economic or political reasons, in defiance of officials from the understaffed Forestry Ministry. April, which, with its partners, has government-issued concessions across a third of Kampar, says its ring of acacia plantations around the core will block off any such encroachment, though it says it needs to acquire more land to complete the circle. On plantations already in operation, the company uses a sophisticated network of canals and dams that minimizes leakage from the peat land, environmental groups acknowledge. If April acquired control over the core, it could be paid for protecting it. The company says it believes that it can be, at the very least, rewarded for the ring, about half of which would be turned into acacia plantations and half left as natural forests or what it calls “conservation areas.” “The carbon we are storing in the conservation areas could be financed through REDD,” Mr. Virta said in an interview at April’s 4,300-acre mill, about two hours west of here by car. Agus Purnomo, who leads the government’s National Council on Climate Change, said it would take months or years of negotiations after next month’s climate conference to determine whether April’s ring would be entitled to carbon credits. Much will depend on whether an agreement includes stipulations against the conversion of natural forests into industrial tree plantations. Indonesia, like other countries with paper and pulp industries, counts industrial tree plantations as forests. Environmental groups caution against any project of the United Nations program involving the conversion of natural forests into industrial tree plantations. Bill Barclay, policy director at the Rainforest Action Network , said the priority in Indonesia should be to “halt further conversion of natural forests” and “further draining of peat lands.” But that kind of argument finds little traction in a nation with an economy that is still developing. Mr. Purnomo, of the country’s climate change council, said government officials were worried that Indonesia’s ranking as the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases would increase pressure to reduce emissions. “Are we going to remain underdeveloped because of that?” he asked. Since starting operations on a new concession near here in September, April has brought jobs to Teluk Meranti. As part of its community outreach, it has brought a new generator to increase the supply of electricity and construction material to renovate two mosques. Still, Teluk Meranti had yet to buy April’s vision of the future. Villagers remained overwhelmingly opposed to the company’s presence here, opponents and supporters of the company said. “We don’t know what we’ll get,” said Firdaus, a 39-year-old man operating a makeshift convenience store. “What rights do we have?” He was unaware of April’s ring project. But, yes, he had heard of the importance of peat from environmental groups. “We were told,” he said, “to protect the peat for the climate.”

Greenhouse gas
Carbon dioxide
UNFCCC
Indonesia
Climate Change Global Warming
Paper


Devils Lose in Shootout

Abstract: David Desharnais scored the tying goal with 37 seconds left in the third period and added a goal in the shootout as the Montreal Canadiens rallied for a 4-3 victory over the host Devils. The rookie Reid Boucher, making his N.H.L. debut, scored for the Devils in the shootout, breaking a string of 20 straight missed chances by the Devils, who are 0-5 in shootouts this season.


Two Would-Be Yankees Reacquaint Themselves With Baseball

Abstract: PEORIA, Ariz. — When Greg Bird gathered his equipment, getting a grip on his batting helmet, bat, batting gloves and a baseball proved a bit elusive. When he dropped a glove, he bent over to pick it up. As he did, he dropped a ball. After missing the entire 2016 season because of shoulder surgery, Bird is in the Arizona Fall League, getting reacquainted with the rhythms and routines of playing baseball again. “I’m just getting comfortable again, getting used to the every day thing again,” he said. “Because it takes some getting used to, playing again, seeing where I’m at. I didn’t play for a long time, really a year, from the time we played our last game until the time we got out here.” Bird is among a large contingent of Yankees playing for the Scottsdale Scorpions, who are part of the seven-week league that is generally reserved for some of the top prospects in baseball, regardless of which major league team they belong to. The league allows the players, and scouts, to see how they stack up against the best of the best. But for Bird, a 24-year-old first baseman, and for another top Yankees prospect, the 22-year-old pitcher James Kaprielian , the league is an opportunity to get something out of what has been a mostly lost year and get their legs under them for 2017. The league’s season concludes Saturday. Kaprielian, the 16th overall pick in the 2015 draft, made just three starts last season for Class A Tampa before a strained flexor tendon in his right forearm sidelined him for the season. “I take my vitamins every day, and I’m 100 percent healthy,” Kaprielian said. “No problems in the arm. Haven’t had a problem since I picked up the baseball again.” Image Pitcher James Kaprielian, the 16th overall pick in the 2015 draft, made three starts for Class A Tampa before a strained flexor tendon in his right forearm sidelined him for the 2016 season. Credit Bill Mitchell If the goals for Bird and Kaprielian in this league are modest, their progress here is still important to the Yankees in the near term. After all, first base in the Bronx next season ostensibly belongs to Bird. But he needs to prove in spring training that his debut late in 2015 — when he hit 11 home runs, drove in 31 runs and had a .871 on-base-plus-slugging percentage over the final 46 games — was not a mirage. Kaprielian, meanwhile, will begin the 2017 season back at Class A Tampa. But with so many questions about the Yankees’ starting rotation, and with the way Kaprielian has pitched when healthy, General Manager Brian Cashman did not dismiss the possibility that he could make it to the major leagues at some point next year. “He’s got great ability, and any player that’s got great ability and performance, they usually move quicker than the norm,” said Cashman, who noted that the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Cleveland Indians had called on young, untested pitchers — Jose Urias and Ryan Merritt — to start games during the recent postseason. Cashman added: “I can’t tell you that’s going to be him or not. Teams do what they have to do, and if a need arises, who’s the best for the job and who’s earned the opportunity? If Kap puts himself in that position, we’ll make that call.” As Kaprielian sat and watched the Yankees go through a number of young pitchers in 2016 — Luis Severino, Bryan Mitchell, Chad Green and Luis Cessa ended up in the rotation — he wondered what might have been had he not been injured. “It’s always something in the back of your head,” Kaprielian said. “I want to be a big-leaguer, and I want to pitch for the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and I want to do what I can to contribute and help the team win.” Kaprielian made his sixth Arizona Fall League start on Thursday, his fastball regularly ticking 96 miles per hour and his changeup and breaking pitches keeping hitters largely off balance. His one big mistake came after the Mets’ Tim Tebow, a Scorpions teammate, overran a routine fly with two out in the first inning. The next batter, the Cincinnati Reds prospect Brandon Dixon, belted a home run over the left-field wall. Kaprielian was more upset with himself for losing his concentration than he was with Tebow for missing the ball. Though Kaprielian has struck out just under one hitter per inning, he has given up four home runs in his last 13 ⅓ innings. “It’s tough because baseball is such a results-based game, and I think the biggest thing for me right now is the test of whether my arm is going to make it through every five days or every six days, whatever it is,” said Kaprielian, who will have one more start. “That’s the most positive thing. I’ll have a short time to shut it down, but once spring training rolls around, we’ll be ready to go.” Kaprielian will meet soon with the minor league pitching coordinator Scott Aldred and the pitching coach Larry Rothschild to go over an off-season plan, but Cashman said Kaprielian would be on an innings limit next season. Cashman declined to say what the limits would be because of the uproar that ensued when the Yankees detailed how their once-top pitching prospect Joba Chamberlain would be used after his rapid ascent in 2007. “It created such a stupid firestorm of ignorance that blew back, which was, ‘What are they doing?’” Cashman said. “We were doing the same thing everybody does. We were just very honest and open about it, and it created T-shirts and stupidity, so now I’m like, you know what? I’m not going to put ourselves back in that position. I’m just not going to invite that type of scrutiny and allow people to dissect whether that innings limit is the right one or not.” Bird’s arm has been carefully protected as well. The surgery was on his right (throwing) shoulder, and he has played here only as a designated hitter. On Wednesday, he worked on throwing to bases with Joe Espada, the Yankees’ infield coach, and planned to do similar work on Friday. At the plate, Bird was hitting only .179, even with two hits on Thursday — a single he looped into right-center field and a bunt he pushed toward third base against a shift. The numbers pale to those he posted two years ago, when he was the most valuable player in this league. “The last time, I was still trying to prove I could play in the big leagues,” Bird said. “This time, I’m trying to get healthy and be ready to play in the big leagues. For me, this is about trying to get ready for spring training and the season and seeing what I need to work on going into the off-season. Obviously, you want to do well, but this isn’t about the numbers. It’s about feeling good and kind of knowing where I stand going into spring training. I’m happy with what I’ve done. I’m right where I need to be.”

Baseball
Yankees
Greg Bird
James Kaprielian