Modern Singapore’s Creator Is Alert to Perils

Abstract: SINGAPORE , Sept. 1 — Lee Kuan Yew, who turned a malarial island into a modern financial center with a first-world skyline, is peering ahead again into this city-state’s future, this time with an idea to seal it off with dikes against the rising tides of global warming . “Let’s start thinking about it now,” he said during an interview in late August, in what could be the motto for a lifetime of nation building. Ever since Singapore’s difficult birth in 1965, when it was expelled from Malaysia, he said, the country has struggled to stay alive in a sea of economic and political forces beyond its control. “If the water goes up by three, four, five meters, what will happen to us?” he said, laughing. “Half of Singapore will disappear.” For all his success, Mr. Lee, 83, remains on the alert for perils that may exist only on the distant horizon: the rising role of China in the region as the United States looks the other way, the buffeting of the world economy, even climate change. A British-educated lawyer who led Singapore for 31 years, Mr. Lee is one of Asia’s remarkable personalities, a world figure whose guest book is filled with the names of international political and financial leaders. His creation, modern Singapore, is an economic powerhouse with one of the world’s highest per capita incomes and high-quality schools, health care and public services that have made it a magnet for global labor. Foreigners make up roughly a fifth of its 4.5 million residents. In his office in the former headquarters of the island’s British colonial rulers, Mr. Lee sat back in a zippered blue jacket, sipping small cups of hot water and laughing often, seemingly as different as could be from the bare-knuckled political infighter he has described himself as. “I’ve done my bit,” said Mr. Lee, who stepped down as prime minister in 1990 and now watches over the country — and occasionally takes part in political disputes — with a seat in the cabinet and the title of minister mentor. His eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong, is prime minister. “To understand Singapore,” he said, “you’ve got to start off with an improbable story: It should not exist.” It is a nation with almost no natural resources, without a common culture — a fractured mix of Chinese, Malays and Indians, relying on wits to stay afloat and prosper. “We have survived so far, 42 years,” he said. “Will we survive for another 42? It depends upon world conditions. It doesn’t depend on us alone.” This sense of vulnerability is Mr. Lee’s answer to all his critics, to those who say Singapore is too tightly controlled, that it leashes the press, suppresses free speech, curtails democracy, tramples on dissidents and stunts entrepreneurship and creativity in its citizens. “The answer lies in our genesis,” he said. “To survive, we have to do these things. And although what you see today — the superstructure of a modern city — the base is a very narrow one and could easily disintegrate.” Asked whether, looking back, he felt he might have gone too far in crushing his opponents, sometimes with ruinous lawsuits, sometimes with long jail terms, he answered: “No, I don’t think so. I never killed them. I never destroyed them. Politically, they destroyed themselves.” One of his concerns now, Mr. Lee said, is that the United States has become so preoccupied with the Middle East that it is failing to look ahead and plan in this part of the world. “I think it’s a real drag slowing down adjusting to the new situation,” he said, describing what he called a lapse that worries Southeast Asian countries that count on Washington to balance the rising economic and diplomatic power of China. “Without this draining of energy, attention and resources for Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine , there would have been deep thinking about the long-term trends — working out possible options that the U.S. could exercise to change the direction of long-term trends more in its favor,” Mr. Lee said. As the United States focuses on the Middle East, Mr. Lee said, the Chinese are busy refining their policies and building the foundations of more cooperative long-term relationships in Asia. “They are making strategic decisions on their relations with the region,” he said. And this is where tiny Singapore sees itself as a model for China, the world’s most-populous country. “They’ve got to be like us,” Mr. Lee said, “with a very keen sense of what is possible, and what is not.” Every year, he said, Chinese ministers meet twice with Singaporean ministers to learn from their experience. Fifty mayors of Chinese cities visit every three months for courses in city management. Singapore’s secret, Mr. Lee said, is that it is “ideology free.” It possesses an unsentimental pragmatism that infuses the workings of the country as if it were in itself an ideology, he said. When considering an approach to an issue, he says, the question is: “Does it work? Let’s try it, and if it does work, fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.” The yardstick, he said, is: “Is this necessary for survival and progress? If it is, let’s do it.” Hoping to attract more tourists, for example, Singapore is building two huge casinos, despite Mr. Lee’s expressed distaste for them. “I don’t like casinos,” he said, “but the world has changed and if we don’t have an integrated resort like the ones in Las Vegas — Las Vegas Sands — we’ll lose. “So, let’s go,” he said. “Let’s try and still keep it safe and mafia-free and prostitution-free and money-laundering-free. Can we do it? I’m not sure, but we’re going to give it a good try.” Even on social issues on which he has tended to seem inflexible, Mr. Lee sounded almost mellow. “I think we have to go in whatever direction world conditions dictate if we are to survive and to be part of this modern world,” he said. “If we are not connected to this modern world, we are dead. We’ll go back to the fishing village we once were.” For example, on the issue of homosexuality, he said, “we take an ambiguous position. We say, O.K., leave them alone, but let’s leave the law as it is for the time being, and let’s have no gay parades.” Although gay sex remains technically illegal in Singapore, the government has indicated it will not actively enforce the law. China, Hong Kong and Taiwan already have more liberal policies regarding gays, he noted. “It’s a matter of time,” he said. “But we have a part Muslim population, another part conservative older Chinese and Indians. So, let’s go slowly. It’s a pragmatic approach to maintain social cohesion.” As for people’s adherence to the “Asian values” — hierarchy, respect and order — that Singapore is founded on, he said: “It’s already diluted, and we can see it in the difference between the generations. It’s inevitable.” In his own family, generational values are changing. From father to children to grandchildren, he said, command of the Chinese language has weakened, along with the culture it embodies. “They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values,” he said of his children, two sons and a daughter. “Not my grandchildren.” One grandson has just begun studies at M.I.T., he said; the other is heading to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. This well-educated younger generation reflects the social dichotomy of Singapore, Mr. Lee said, in which the top 20 percent of the population is as cosmopolitan as any, surfing the Internet and traveling the world without constraint. “This is not a closed society,” he insisted. But at the same time, he said, the government must protect the less affluent, less educated people from information that might upset or confuse them. These are people “who are not finding it so comfortable to suddenly find the world changed, their world, their sense of place, their sense of position in society.” They are the ones who he said had to be pulled into the future as he seeks to make Singapore “a first-world oasis in a third-world region.” “We built up the infrastructure,” he said. “The difficult part was getting the people to change their habits so that they behaved more like first-world citizens, not like third-world citizens spitting and littering all over the place.” So Singapore embarked on what Mr. Lee called “campaigns to do this, campaigns to do that.” Do not chew gum. Do not throw garbage from rooftops. Speak good English. Smile. Perform spontaneous acts of kindness. Paradoxically, he said, if Singapore had not been so poor it might never have transformed itself and prospered as it has. His warnings about vulnerability and collapse are a constant theme to persuade his people to accept limits on their freedoms. “Supposing we had oil and gas, do you think I could get the people to do this?” Mr. Lee said. “No. If I had oil and gas, I’d have a different people, with different motivations and expectations. “It’s because we don’t have oil and gas and they know that we don’t have, and they know that this progress comes from their efforts,” he said. “So please do it and do it well.”


Decathlon History Is His in the Making

Abstract: The 2012 Olympic decathlon — Ashton Eaton’s first, if all goes according to form and plan — will not begin until August. But Eaton is experiencing the Olympics far from London with help from his coach, Harry Marra. At 24, Eaton has no major decathlon title to his name, but he won the silver at the world championships last summer, behind his American teammate Trey Hardee, and is among the favorites for the London Games. At each meet this season, Marra has taken Eaton on his own to the pole-vault pit and set the bar at a challenging height. “Big meet, average meet, whatever,” Marra said. “I say: ‘O.K., Ashton, this is the Olympic Games. This is your opening bar; let’s go get over it.”’ The most recent simulation was last month at Stanford University in California. “We went there on purpose because Stanford can have crosswinds and be a tough place to pole-vault,” Marra said. “But anybody who thinks an Olympic stadium won’t be a tough place to pole-vault doesn’t realize the winds in the circular nature of a stadium aren’t consistently at your back,” he added. “So I said, ‘Ashton, you’re in London; you’ve got a great meet going’ — I painted some sort of scenario — and then, ‘Here it is, first attempt.’ Boom, he went right over it. And I said, ‘Ashton, whatever you do the rest of this meet today, you’ve accomplished what we wanted to accomplish here.’ ” Although Eaton has only recently acquired a taste for decathlon history, Marra, 64, has been coaching the sport since the 1970s and has an indelible memory of what happened to Dan O’Brien in 1992. Despite holding the world record in the decathlon and despite a “Dan and Dave” advertising campaign built around his rivalry with his compatriot Dave Johnson, O’Brien did not qualify for the Olympic team after failing to clear a height in the pole vault at the national trials. Disaster is never to be excluded in a draining event that presents its competitors with 2 days and 10 distinct opportunities to crack. But Eaton is the decathlon’s fastest-rising star, a smooth-talking, big-leaping prodigy who broke the 8,000-point barrier in only his sixth competition and is preparing to take aim at 9,000 points as one of the favorites for the London Games. The other leading men — the reigning world champion, Hardee, and the reigning Olympic champion, Bryan Clay — are also Americans, which means that a United States sweep of the decathlon medals is hardly out of the question, although they must first safely negotiate the trials next month. “We can collectively do it; we just have to stay healthy and just all be there,” Eaton said of a possible sweep. “The specialness will happen if we’re all there prepared to accept it.” Eaton, a former N.C.A.A. champion at Oregon, is the youngest and least decorated of the three but is considered by many to have the biggest upside and the potential to break Roman Sebrle’s world record of 9,026 points, set in 2001. Eaton’s best remains 8,729 points, his total at last year’s United States championships on his home track in Eugene, Ore. O’Brien, whose American record of 8,891 dates to 1992, said that Eaton is “the next great American decathlete.” But O’Brien also urged restraint. “When a guy has scored 8,700 as a personal best and people start talking about 9,000, I kind of roll my eyes a little bit,” O’Brien said. “It’s just like he’s got a long ways to go. You’re talking about another 300-point improvement. I think he can definitely do it. I certainly think he can break my American record in time. But at the same time, putting him in championship meets and expecting 9,000 points is a little bit unrealistic at this particular time. “ Clay, married and a father of three, is trying to rebound from injuries and make his third Olympic team at 32. Hardee, 28, had his own pole-vault nightmare become reality at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, where he failed to clear a height. But Hardee, a commanding presence at 6 feet 5 inches and 210 pounds, has recovered in style. He won the last two world outdoor titles and defeated Eaton last summer in Daegu, South Korea, where they finished first and second but hardly on acrimonious terms. “Trey helped me a lot, a lot, a lot in Daegu,” Eaton said. “When I was down on myself, he kind of said: ‘Hey, I no-heighted at the Olympic Games. You’ll get through it. Just keep going on.’ But at the same time, we’re trying to beat each other as well.” Hardee trains in Austin, Tex., where he competed for the University of Texas. Clay trains at his alma mater, Azusa Pacific University, near Los Angeles. Marra coaches Eaton and his fiancée, Brianne Theisen, a Canadian heptathlete who is still competing for Oregon as a fifth-year senior. She and Eaton share a house in north Eugene, about a 10-minute drive from the track. Their wedding is set for July 2013, shortly before the next world championships and well after the smoke from this angst-and-hope-ridden Olympic year has cleared. “The Olympic Games is like the biggest event in our life right now,” Easton said. “And then once that is completed, then our wedding will be the biggest event, so that will be cool.” They represent different nations, but Eaton said there was no doubt that he and Theisen were feeding off each other’s Olympic obsession. “Sometimes we’ll have bad days on the same day and just be so frustrated that we’ll have to try to do something else,” he said. “But sometimes we both have really good days, like the other night we were talking really late and excited about javelin because we started talking about feeling it and how certain things are supposed to be. “So I think it would be way worse if I had, say, a normal job and I wasn’t athletic and I didn’t know anything about track or the Olympic Games and just cared about her because it was her thing,” Eaton added. “It’s so much better because we know how it feels: ‘Oh I got so lactic on those 300s, and I missed my time.’ It’s just different.” Marra, who has never before coached a couple exclusively, said the two also feed off each other’s results, with Eaton winning the long jump on his final leap in a recent meet in Texas after delaying his attempt to watch Theisen clear a personal-best 6-2 in the high jump. Eaton was raised in Bend, Ore., by a single mother, with whom he remains exceptionally close. In March in Istanbul, he won the world indoor championship in the seven-event heptathlon, crushing his own world record with help from the longest long jump ever recorded in a heptathlon: 8.16 meters, or 26.8 feet, which would have placed him fourth in the individual long jump. The heptathlon, which does not include javelin and discus, suits him particularly well. The throws have been his relative weakness in the decathlon, but he has recorded personal bests in the javelin and shot-put this season. Still, the emphasis has been on making his strengths even stronger with the focus on the 100 meters and the long jump, which happen to be the first two events of the decathlon. “If you start a decathlon out with those high performances and start it out consistently, I think you put a lot of people on their heels,” Marra said. “They start pressing and thinking, Oh. my God, I have got to catch up to you in the shot-put or the high jump or something. And when you try to catch up and pull yourself out of your rhythm, then all of a sudden it’s like swinging the golf club too hard. It’s going to go far, but it will go straight into the woods.” Marra is intent on helping Eaton avoid the woods in London. That explains the pole-vault playacting and also explains his encouraging decathlon greats of the past to reach out to Eaton. Those include Rafer Johnson, the 1960 Olympic champion, who had an extended meeting with Eaton this year, and O’Brien, the 1996 champion, who has much in common with Eaton and talks to him more regularly. O’Brien and Eaton are from Oregon, and from mixed-race backgrounds. Eaton’s mother is white; his father, with whom he has had little contact, is African-American. O’Brien said: “The connection I probably feel most with him is our Oregon connection, the fact we grew up just 150 miles away from each other; there is something in that. And I was in kind of the same boat as Ashton. We both were great sprinters, good jumpers, but over the long run we’ve got to work on those throws. We always have to work on those throws.” As he works, Eaton has been learning more about the decathlon’s rich past in the United States, where it was once a signature event before the decline in track and field’s news media footprint. At the Olympic trials next month in Eugene, the organizers will honor the 100th anniversary of the first Olympic decathlon, won in 1912 in Stockholm by the American Jim Thorpe. “I’m definitely proud because there’s a big history behind it,” Eaton said. “To have the first Olympic Games decathlon be won by an American and as American as they come, a Native American, is a big deal.” But Eaton has not restricted himself to learning the success stories. He has also read Frank Zarnowski’s book “Glory Denied and a Final Opportunity for Glory Restored,” which focuses on O’Brien’s 1996 gold and the great decathletes through history who faltered at the Games. That is, naturally, not part of Eaton’s plan. He remembers the regrets he felt on the medal stand at last year’s outdoor world championships, where his thoughts were not on the moment in Daegu but the future in London. “It sounds bad, but it’s almost like until Daegu I felt desensitized to success in a way, because everything was just going really well,” he said. “When I was on the medal stand, that’s when I really knew what I was doing track for. I felt it. It was like a rekindling. The Olympic Games are even bigger, the benchmark, the maximum. And I couldn’t wait to get back and start training.”

Eaton Ashton
London (England)
Olympic Games
Olympic Games (2012)
Athletics and Sports
Track and Field


So Much to Learn About the Oceans From Sand

Abstract: CORVALLIS, Ore. — As a young geophysicist in the 1980s, Rob Holman attended a conference in San Francisco that included a field trip to a beach. Dr. Holman, who grew up inland, in Ottawa, stared at the ocean, assessing the strengths and vectors of the waves and currents. But when he looked around, everyone else was studying the sand. He realized, he recalled, that “sand is not the same everywhere.” So he started collecting it. “I collected a few samples and put them in jars,” he said. “Then I had so many I built a rack. Then I built three more racks. Then I built four more.” Today Dr. Holman is best known as a coastal oceanographer at Oregon State University whose computerized photography system, called Argus, has given researchers new ways to observe and measure beaches. But he still collects sand, which he displays on shelves in the corridor outside his office. By now he has almost a thousand samples. They come from his travels and from geologists and amateurs all over the world (including this reporter) who send him grainy shipments in envelopes, plastic bags, paper towels and other wrappings. Each offering is dried and transferred to glass laboratory jars a few inches high, which Dr. Holman labels by latitude and longitude of their site, as best he can determine them from the sometimes sketchy information his contributors provide. The collection includes sand from all continents, including Antarctica. “Dutch colleagues are particularly good” at mailing in sand, Dr. Holman said. “Africa is lacking in samples,” a deficiency he attributes in part to an unfortunate accident. “Early on, I had a rack collapse,” he said. Though these offerings have not necessarily ended up in the formal display, he has also received a bottle containing a gimmick portrait in purple sand, Hawaiian sand samples sold in packages to tourists, salt and pepper (“that was actually my secretary”) and all kinds of other things that were found on beaches, or might have been, including jelly beans and M&Ms. He accepts contributions of sand from inland riverbeds and places like Ayers Rock, in the Australian Outback, and even from hotel lobby ashtrays “if it’s a high-class place,” he said. These are listed as “miscellaneous.” Occasionally offerings come from the community of psammophiles (formally, plants that live in sand) — people who collect sand for fun. There are more of them than one might think. Sand collecting “is not a new hobby or a passing fad,” according to the Web site of one group, the International Sand Collectors Society ( www.sandcollectors.org ). Its motto: “Discovering the World, Grain by Grain.” Dr. Holman watches some sand sites, but from a distance. “I don’t participate in the chats,” he said. For Dr. Holman, what started almost as a joke has become a valuable teaching tool. Geology students at the university study his collection, and they can learn a lot from it. “This row is a north to south transect along the East Coast,” he said one day recently, pointing to tubes containing samples collected at sites from Cape Cod to Key West. “It just gets lighter and finer.” That is because most of the time sand is not stationary on the beach. On the East Coast, “the big waves come in from the northeast, and they drive the littoral drift predominantly from north to south,” Dr. Holman said, referring to the longshore movement of sand. By the time a grain of sand washes up on a beach in Florida, it has been battered by waves for a long time. “The physical action of being continually beaten causes the grains to break down, the angular corners to break off,” he said. “They become more rounded.” And relatively dense mineral grains, like garnet, have settled out. The result is a row of samples shifting from the relatively dark, coarse grains of the Northeast to the fine white beach sand of the Southeast. Dr. Holman keeps about two dozen especially telling samples in a portable “teaching rack” for use in classes and at lectures. Some are dark volcanic grains. One vial, from the Banzai Pipeline, a surfing mecca in Oahu, “is all broken up shells with rounded edges,” he said. “This sand cannot last very long.” The rack “illustrates a lot of the things we need to know about how beach sands are different,” he said. “I have occasionally taken in sand to a student exam and said, ‘Tell me about this beach.’ A good person can do very well. There are a number of characteristics you can look at — the nature of the sand and the shape, where would the minerals come from, different transport and aging. Those all affect the sand you see on the beach.” Dr. Holman also takes the teaching rack with him when he gives talks to the public, an effort to encourage people “to think about what they see on beaches.” “Then I show them some Argus pictures, which always make them think about sandbars and how mobile they are,” he said. Argus is the system Dr. Holman developed in research he began about 20 years ago at the Army Corps of Engineers research pier on the coast at Duck, N.C. Researchers assigned to the Duck pier regularly send instruments into the surf to make precise measurements of the underwater topography in the surf zone, particularly the formation and movement of sandbars along the beach. Understanding these sandbars is critical to study of beach erosion and climate-related sea level rise, but the surf zone is a notoriously hostile research environment. Setting up and maintaining instruments there is almost impossible unless the equipment is so sturdy it distorts its own data, by interfering with the flow of water and sand. As a practical matter, the measurements made routinely at Duck are unobtainable almost anywhere else, and certainly not here in Oregon, where the wave climate is the harshest of any coastline in the Lower 48. Dr. Holman used the Duck instrument data and time-lapse film from a camera he mounted on a tower at the Corps installation to figure out how to correlate photographic information to changes in the topography under the surf. The results were surprising. For one thing, sandbars were not moving in simple patterns, as many coastal scientists had thought they did. “The biggest thing we learned is how much more complicated it is than we thought it was,” he said. “There is a richness of morphologies.” Using Argus data, scientists can watch, almost in real time, as sandbars appear, disappear, curve, drift, breach and otherwise act up under the camouflage of breaking waves. The system can even be used to spot rip currents in real time. The lesson of Argus, he said, is “never give up observing” S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal geologist with the United States Geological Survey, called the system “a critical piece of new technology.” “The Argus system allows us to quantify and document visually the changes that take place along the coast on a variety of different time frames,” he said. Dr. Williams, a contributor to Dr. Holman’s collection, said that without the system, these observations would be difficult or even impossible. “A lot of the changes take place during storms and at times when it is difficult to have people out on the beach making observations and taking measurements.” At one time, Dr. Holman said, coastal scientists thought that if they understood all the underlying physics, they would understand everything about beaches. “The pendulum has swung back,” he said. “Argus has been part of that. Argus helped us realize that our simple concepts were simple.” While it is true that all beaches “live by the same rules” in that the movement of wind, water, waves and sand is always a matter of F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration), beaches behave differently. “We hope to figure that out,” he said. Today, there are Argus installations at Duck and in Oregon, California, Hawaii, England, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy and Brazil. Dr. Holman has also begun working with NATO in hopes of adapting routine reconnaissance images, most of which are discarded, to the Argus system. Meanwhile, sand keeps piling up. When he first displayed the collection, Dr. Holman said, “the dean was a little queasy” about investing in shelving. But now it may be time for another infusion of money. Though he installed shelves with what he thought was ample room, he said, “we have run out of space.”

Sand and Gravel
Oceans
Science and Technology
Holman Rob


Florida: Major Storm Season Is Forecast

Abstract: The Atlantic hurricane season is likely to be a busy one that may spawn as many as 23 named tropical storms, including up to seven major hurricanes , the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday. It predicted that 8 to 14 storms would strengthen into hurricanes, with winds of 74 m.p.h. or higher. Three to seven of those could reach Category 3 status or higher — meaning they bring sustained winds of at least 111 m.p.h. “The greater likelihood of storms brings an increased risk of a landfall,” said Jane Lubchenco, the agency’s administrator. “In short, we urge everyone to be prepared.”


Ford Maintains Earnings Streak and Raises Profit Forecast for the Year

Abstract: DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford Motor said on Thursday that its net income fell 22 percent in the third quarter, to $1.27 billion, as the company took charges related to revamping its European operations and its United States pension obligations. Still, Ford, the country’s No. 2 automaker behind General Motors, beat analysts’ expectations by setting a record for third-quarter pretax profit of $2.6 billion, up $426 million, a performance that led Ford to raise its profit forecast for the year. It was the company’s 17th consecutive profitable quarter. The $498 million in special items included $250 million for charges related to plant closures in Europe and $145 million as part of Ford’s voluntary lump-sum pension payout program for salaried retirees in the United States. Per-share profit was 31 cents. “We continue to expect strong results for the full year,” Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, said in a conference call on Thursday. The automaker posted a combined profit for regions outside North America for the first time since the second quarter in 2011. A $159 million pretax operating profit in South America beat Wall Street’s expectations, while a $126 million profit in Asia-Pacific, though a third-quarter record for the company, came in below analysts’ estimates. “It was a really, really great quarter,” Bob Shanks, Ford’s chief financial officer, told reporters at its Dearborn headquarters. The company’s performance was “encouraging from a number of perspectives,” he said, with growth in wholesale volume, revenue and market share in North America, South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Ford’s market share in South America, where Mr. Shanks said inflation in Venezuela and Argentina could pose a problem, grew more than a full percentage point to 9.5 percent. The automaker raised its full-year forecast for South America. It now expects to turn a profit or break even. “The overall environment in South America remains uncertain,” Mr. Shanks said. Ford now expects to record a pretax profit and an automotive-related operating margin higher than last year’s. Previously, the company said it expected its performance to be on a par with 2012. “The progress and the direction is what’s really exciting,” Mr. Shanks said. But the fiscal standoff in Washington and the deferment of a long-term decision on the federal budget until early next year sent consumer confidence downward this month, Mr. Shanks said. “Clearly, I think they were affected to some extent,” he said. “It’s not great that it’s a kick-the-can process. It’s one of the areas we’re concerned about to some extent.” Ford’s revenue rose 12 percent , to $36 billion, with its strongest results in North America and the Asia-Pacific region, where the company reported a 3.7 percent market share, a third-quarter record. Ford’s sales rose 31 percent in the Asia-Pacific region for the first nine months of the year, with most of that growth coming from China, Ford’s second-biggest market after the United States. David L. Schoch, group vice president and president of Ford Asia Pacific, said the automaker hoped to double its market share in China to 5 percent this year. The company continued to lose money in Europe, with a pretax loss of $228 million for the quarter, though that was 51 percent less than a year ago, suggesting that the losses are easing there, Mr. Shanks said. “All the leading indicators indicate that it has stabilized,” he said. Ford said this quarter that it planned to introduce at least 25 new vehicles in Europe by 2017. Over all, Ford has changed course from the days when Mr. Mulally mortgaged the automaker’s assets to borrow more than $23 billion in a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy, analysts said. That turnaround was symbolically completed last month when Standard & Poor’s became the last of the three major credit ratings agencies to confer investment-grade status on Ford’s debt, which the agency had rated at junk-bond levels for the last eight years. “It’s hard to overstate how much they’ve done for cost reduction since 2009,” said Dan Picciotto, a corporate ratings analyst with S.& P. Ford is in a more stable position after working to close its gap in underfunded pensions and reduce incentives on new vehicles sold at dealerships, Mr. Picciotto said. “But it’s all been done in the context of a growing market,” Mr. Picciotto said. “If there is a downturn, how does Ford operate in a different scenario?”


In South, Republicans Find That Dominance Does Not Ensure Solidarity

Abstract: BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The featured speaker before the Kiwanis Club of Birmingham was Judge Roy S. Moore, well known for having lost his job as the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after setting up a two-and-a-half-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the courthouse rotunda. Calling the United States Constitution a “restriction on the fallen nature of man” and quoting Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, among others, Judge Moore was making his case as the Republican nominee, once again, for the state’s highest judicial office. It was not exactly a plea for harmony and unity. There is a great moral divide in the country, he said, a division “not just between Democrats and Republicans, but between Republicans and Republicans.” There are plenty of Republicans in the state who may take issue with the particulars of Judge Moore’s overall message, but on that last part they would agree. Many in the Alabama business and legal establishment, a community that is overwhelmingly and faithfully Republican, are privately despondent over the prospect of a Moore victory and its effect on the state’s image. Some are the same people who spent the last year quietly lobbying the governor and state lawmakers to tone down Alabama’s strict immigration enforcement law, with limited success. Like many other urban and suburban Republicans across the Deep South, they consider economic growth, not social issues, the priority. That motivated their longtime efforts to help create a Republican-controlled South. “You’ve got to be careful what you wish for,” said Tom Ingram, a Republican political consultant in Tennessee. As the South is settling in once again to an era of one-party dominance, many Republicans are learning that governing is not quite the same as campaigning, and that total control does not always equal total agreement. “I’ve been in politics for 30 years, and I saw firsthand after I was elected the split within the Democratic Party,” said Eric Johnson, who was in the Georgia legislature for 15 years. “Now you’ve got the rural conservative Republicans and the suburban moderates and libertarians. I don’t think you have as broad an ideological split as the former Democratic majority had, but you certainly have a broader one than the Republicans are used to.” It is hard to find anyone who believes that the different currents within the Republican Party will lead to anything like the battling factions that characterized the old one-party Democratic rule. Even before the civil rights era irreparably fractured Southern Democrats, the party was a collection of divergent and sometimes contradictory agendas, often pitting populists against conservatives. But students of politics in the South have long predicted that similar, though less pronounced, fissures would develop when the Republicans gained dominance, said Glen Browder, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama and an emeritus professor of political science at Jacksonville State University. Since the rise of the evangelical right, there has been a divide in the party between “the chamber and the church,” he said, or between the Chamber of Commerce interests that were once the heartbeat of Southern Republicans and the more populist, socially conservative electorate that fueled the party’s rise to power. With a one-party South, the chamber element has learned that while they may have the money and the history, the social conservatives have the votes. “It was easy for the business community to be a leading voice when they were a minority voice and trying to establish themselves,” Professor Browder said, adding that the business community would learn to use its leverage with more savvy in future campaigns, when candidates come looking for money. In Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Haslam’s Republican agenda of economic development and education reform has been overshadowed by lawmaker crusades against Shariah law and the teaching of evolution and climate change , fund-raisers are learning this lesson, Mr. Ingram said. Long accustomed to giving money in statewide and federal races, some donors have begun to realize the need to put up money for state legislative races as well. “Here you’ve got one party, one set of donors looking at their standard-bearers’ agenda and saying: ‘The fact that he’s got a Republican majority may not be enough. It’s got to be the right majority,’ ” he said. The race for Alabama chief justice is a rather extreme version of this dynamic. Among the lawyers and reliably Democratic groups in the campaign finance records of Mr. Moore’s opponent, Judge Robert S. Vance Jr. of State Circuit Court, are a number of surprising names. There is, for example, the Alabama chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors, with a $5,000 donation. Since 2004, over 90 percent of its donations in state races have gone to Republicans. “While ABC of AL traditionally supports Republican pro-business candidates, we feel Judge Vance is the most qualified candidate for the chief justice of the Supreme Court,” Tim Hightower, a member of the group’s executive committee, wrote in an e-mail. “Is this a trend we are seeing among other associations in the state? Most certainly.” Judge Moore’s victory in the primary was a shock to many, because his opponents were well-regarded by both Republicans and Democrats and because he was badly beaten in his two runs for governor. Judge Moore’s initial Democratic opponent was a lawyer named Harry Lyon, who has run for offices on both party lines and was the only Democrat to qualify. Mr. Lyon proceeded to insult gay people as “freaks,” jokingly suggest the execution of illegal immigrants and call Judge Moore a demented devil worshiper. This ultimately became too much for the state Democratic Party, which in August revoked Mr. Lyon’s nomination. The party then backed Judge Vance, who entered the race late but whose name is prominent in state legal circles: his father, a federal judge and an early advocate of the civil rights movement, was assassinated in 1989 when a vengeful ex-convict sent a mail bomb to his home. After entering the race, Judge Vance quickly raised nearly a half-million dollars, much of it from donors within his hometown, Birmingham. Judge Moore has kept pace, and while he can count on some big-money benefactors (including the wife of the actor Chuck Norris, who gave $5,000), many of his donations are coming in small amounts from all over the country, $100 or $200 contributions from California, Maine, New York, Wyoming, even Hawaii. In conversation, supporters tend to agree with his description of a basic divide in the country’s moral life and say he is on the correct side of that divide, even if they do not always like his methods. “I don’t think the judicial system is really the place to promote any sort of religion,” said Calvin Poole, a lawyer in Greenville. But he said he still considered Judge Moore better than the alternative — that is, the Democrat. “If we’ve got to pick between Image A and Image B, I would rather for our image to be that we’re going to be outspoken and unapologetic on our view on the sovereignty of God,” Mr. Poole said. “I’d rather be wacky on that side than wacky on the other side.”

Birmingham (Ala)
State Legislatures
Elections
United States Politics and Government
Southern States (US)
United States
Elections


Shareholder Calls for Check of Sumner Redstone’s Condition

Abstract: One of the largest shareholders in Viacom and CBS voiced concerns on Wednesday about the health of the 92-year-old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone and whether he should continue in his role as executive chairman of the companies. One week ago, a former companion of Mr. Redstone filed a lawsuit challenging his mental competence. Mr. Redstone’s lawyers have asked the court to dismiss the suit, calling the claims a “meritless action, riddled with lies.” On Wednesday, a Viacom director said Mr. Redstone was “mentally capable.” Mario Gabelli, whose investment firm, Gamco, is the second-largest voting shareholder in Viacom and CBS behind Mr. Redstone, said that he sought more information about Mr. Redstone’s health and involvement at the companies after reading through the suit. The court filings included claims that Mr. Redstone was incontinent, required suctioning to remove phlegm up to 20 times a day and was “obsessed with eating steak” even while on a feeding tube. Mr. Gabelli said that if Mr. Redstone “got paid anything in 2015, it would have a hard time passing any smell test” based on the descriptions in the suit. “Do I think he should be drawing any money?” Mr. Gabelli asked. “Clearly, one has to look at how much a chairman gets paid relative to the value added.” Mr. Redstone controls about 80 percent of the voting stock in the two media companies, which have a combined market value of $45 billion. His total compensation for the 2014 fiscal year was $13.2 million at Viacom and $10.8 million at CBS. His compensation for the fiscal 2015 year will be disclosed in regulatory filings. Mr. Gabelli added that he had received calls from clients about Mr. Redstone, which spurred him to ask Viacom for clarification about Mr. Redstone’s role at the companies. “They have got to say something,” he said. “You can’t run a public company like this.” He said that the same questions applied to CBS, but that he did not call the company. In response, Viacom released a statement on Wednesday from William Schwartz, chairman of its board’s governance and nominating committee. “As has been widely and publicly disclosed, Mr. Redstone’s physicians have publicly attested that he is mentally capable, and this information is consistent with other medical and other information available to me,” he said in the statement. Court filings from Mr. Redstone’s lawyers also included statements from his doctors who said that while Mr. Redstone had various ailments, the results of a recent brain scan were “quite good.” A statement from Philippe Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive, said that Mr. Redstone was engaged and attentive. A spokesman for CBS declined to comment.

Sumner M Redstone
Viacom
CBS
Mental Health
Mario Gabelli
Appointments and Executive Changes


Sudan Erupts in Deadly Protests as Gas Prices Rise

Abstract: KHARTOUM, Sudan — This time, it was not the organizing by activists on Facebook and Twitter that made people take to the streets in such numbers. They did not need it. The anger was already widespread enough. “The people want to bring down the regime!” and “No, no, to high prices!” young protesters shouted this week as they marched in Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city across the Nile. Deadly protests have rocked several Sudanese cities since Sunday, when the government lifted subsidies on gasoline, nearly doubling the price in an increase that is bound to create a domino effect on other goods. “The economic situation is just painful,” said one protester, Moyasser, 25, who did not want his full name used out of fear of government reprisals. The demonstrations broke out across greater Khartoum, with some leading to the destruction of public property like buses and gas stations. One witness saw at least six burned cars on Africa Road in Khartoum; another saw protesters throw rocks at cars and block a road with burning tires and bricks. The government has responded forcefully. A statement by the authorities promised to act “with an iron fist” to “destructive actions.” Sudan’s police forces said 29 people, including members of the police, had died in the violence, blaming “trained elements” and “rioters.” But activists say that at least 100 are believed to have been killed, mostly by the government, with hospitals flooded. Security and police forces have used live ammunition as well as tear gas and batons to break up the protests. “I know two who were killed,” Moyasser said. “One was shot, and the other beaten to death.” As the protests escalated, Internet services were shut down on Wednesday and early Thursday. The authorities said that rioters had attacked and destroyed equipment belonging to a local online provider, but activists say it was a deliberate act by the government to create a blackout on events in Sudan. The lifting of gasoline subsidies was the latest step in the difficult economic adjustments Sudan has experienced since South Sudan became independent two years ago, taking with it nearly 75 percent of the oil revenue the two countries once shared. Inflation has reached nearly 40 percent, and the value of the Sudanese pound has spiraled downward. “The removal of subsidies must be accompanied with widening the social safety net,” said Abla el-Mahdi, an economist. “But the government has failed to compensate the poor through direct transfers and increasing the minimum wage.” Despite promises for assistance to the poor and an increase in the minimum wage, “there is little confidence in the government,” she added. The Sudanese government, however, said it would continue with its economic overhaul policies. “A government that backs down from taking the right decision for the benefit of society is not a government worthy of the trust and support of the people,” Vice President Ali Osman Taha told a group of graduates on Wednesday. Sudan’s political opposition has been quick to criticize the government. “We are against the increase in fuel prices,” said Kamal Omer of the Popular Congress Party. “This shows the failure of the ruling party.” Thirty-five activists belonging to various political parties have been arrested since the beginning of the protests, Mr. Omer said. He said the current wave of protests represented “a revolution of the hungry.” “This is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Mr. Omer added. Amjad Farid, 29, an activist with the Coalition of Sudanese Revolutionary Youth, warned that the protests would continue. “After what happened, we cannot back down,” he said. “The blood of Sudanese is not cheap.” Attempts by Sudanese dissidents in 2011 and last year to organize and set off an Arab Spring-like revolution in Sudan failed. But popular uprisings in 1964 and 1985 succeeded in bringing down military governments. Abdel-Latif el-Bouni, a columnist, was cautious to not describe the current events as a revolution. “This was all expected, but thus far, it’s been a reaction,” he said. “Anger is not enough for change.” But, he added, “if geared into political momentum, it has the potential to become a revolution.” Five days of protests have taken an economic toll on the city of Omdurman as well. In the usually crowded Al Shuhada Square, an intersection for buses, shops were closed or only partly open. Salih Ibrahim, 47, a conductor, said that while 250 drivers of minivans used for public transportation usually showed up for work, “only 30 showed up.” Many of the drivers, Mr. Ibrahim said, feared that protesters would attack their vans. Others simply could not find gasoline, as a number of gas stations in Omdurman had been burned down. “The guys who came bought gasoline from the black market, not for 21 pounds, but 30 pounds,” Mr. Ibrahim said. “So they’re charging passengers up to three pounds,” or about 68 cents, double the normal price. “I have no choice; I need to get home,” said Abdel-Munim Ismail, 37, who got on a van. Some grocery store owners also felt the brunt of higher gasoline prices and their expected trickle-down effect. “The price of transporting goods to my store went from 20 pounds to 40 pounds,” or about $9.11, said Abdel-Aziz Ahmad, 40. “The prices of flour, cooking oil, tomato sauce and onions are starting to go up,” Mr. Ahmad said. “I know people who don’t buy from me anymore.”


Hunters Are the Least of the Grouse’s Worries in Britain

Abstract: SNILESWORTH MOOR, England , Aug. 10 — By long tradition whose roots seem opaque, the season for shooting grouse on Britain’s heathery moorland begins each year on what is called “the glorious 12th” of August. For some — and not just the grouse, to whom glory might be an elusive concept — the season will not be so glorious this year. For two years, grouse populations have been under threat from worms and weather, although, on this stretch of 11,000 acres of rolling purple upland in north Yorkshire, the chief gamekeeper, Jimmy Shuttlewood, reckons his clients will do pretty well. (At upward of $4,900 a day for the privilege of hunting the fleet-winged, 80-mile-an-hour birds — Lagopus lagopus scoticus, to give them their scientific name — the shooters’ hopes for a plentiful bag may seem justified.) Elsewhere, though, stocks are way down after what conservationists call a crash in 2005 when some populations of grouse fell by 95 percent, according to David Baines, a scientist from the not-for-profit Game Conservancy Trust. It was, he said, “an all-time low.” Indeed, said Simon Bostock, chairman of the Moorland Association, a group representing the owners of grouse moors, 2005 was “a disaster for the grouse.” This year, the Moorland Association said in a statement, “the most optimistic reports from the hills suggest estates will operate only one out of every four days shooting” in the season, which runs from Aug. 12 to Dec. 10. “But this represents an increase of nearly 50 percent from last year’s severe crash.” Nonetheless, “for many grouse moors, there may well be little or no grouse shooting again this year” to permit breeding stocks to recover, the association said. If grouse are recovering, it might seem something of a mini-miracle, considering the threats — quite apart from the hunters — that face the red grouse, a species unique to Britain. First of all, there are predators — foxes, crows and weasels. Ticks can be something of a problem, too. Then, consider the climate and the question that preoccupies many people: has global warming changed the climate forever, not just melting ice caps but also threatening birds on British moors? Mild, wet winters, for instance, encourage the proliferation of a parasite called the strongyle worm, which lodges in the grouse’s intestines. Then, come spring, grouse like warm, dry weather to breed. This year brought rain, “some of it torrential,” that washed away many nests, Mr. Bostock said. Still, summer looked a little better, until July, when the heat wave came. By late July, “the moors had been tinder dry for days and devastating moorland fires” broke out, Mr. Bostock said. To make matters worse, a warning system seems to have failed to deliver the requisite warning. At one point, he said, the system indicated “lower levels” on the fire-hazard scale “even though the moor was ablaze.” For the survivors among the birds, the beginning of the shooting season may seem anticlimactic. Usually, according to Mr. Baines, the scientist, grouse populations swell and shrink on a five-year cycle. When the grouse are abundant, their large populations are prone to parasites that reduce them to lesser numbers. The cycle, therefore, depends on cold winters that wipe out the parasites. “It is a concerning trend that there have been 10 or 15 years of mild, wet winters,” Mr. Baines said. “So many would suppose that it’s a symptom of broader climatic change.” Historically, of course, grouse shooting has been seen as the preserve of the upper crust — aristocrats in plus-four tweed breeches lofting matching Purdey shotguns from their blinds as local residents act as beaters, driving the birds into the open. “Grouse shooting is elitist, there’s no getting around that,” said James Chapel, who manages an estate on Snilesworth Moor, northeast of York, on behalf of an American owner, Bob Cieslukowski. “Whether it’s still the British aristocracy, I think it’s less and less, but that’s a reflection on society as a whole.” These days, though, he suggested in an interview, the principal threats to grouse are poor management and lack of investment in the measures needed to preserve heather — the main diet of adult grouse — from encroachment by bracken and to protect grouse from predators. By managing the moors, Mr. Chapel and others said, other species like curlew, golden plover and lapwing also prosper. In some ways, Mr. Chapel acknowledged, private landowners have been inconvenienced by government measures in recent years to open up vast areas of nonagricultural land to public access, permitting ordinary people — and sometimes animals rights protesters — to venture onto terrain that was once the closed preserve of the wealthy. “I wouldn’t say there isn’t a conflict” with people seeking free access to moorland, Mr. Chapel said. But, he said, moors could nonetheless be closed to public access during the grouse’s nesting season in May and on shooting days, when stewards warn hikers to stay clear of the guns. On those days, the hunters assemble and are allocated to their blinds, spaced about 100 yards apart in a line across the moorland. Each is accompanied by a loader to keep the guns loaded and to ensure safety to avoid hunting accidents. Then, with dogs in tow, the beaters press forward and the flankers move in from the side to oblige the birds to fly toward the waiting guns. Once the beaters come within 200 yards, said Mr. Shuttlewood, the gamekeeper, a horn is blown to ensure that the hunters do not aim their guns toward the beaters. Most hunters, Mr. Chapel said, “do have a certain knowledge of what’s required of them” in such potentially hazardous circumstances and do not simply blaze away. “You tend not to get the Wild Bill Hickok effect,” he said.

Great Britain
Hunting and Trapping
Global Warming
Parasites
Weather


One of 4 Defendants Is Freed in Brooklyn Rape Case

Abstract: The allegations that the Brooklyn district attorney announced in June were shocking: Four men were accused of abusing a young woman for a decade, raping her and forcing her to have sex with others beginning when she was 13. But this week, the office made another disturbing announcement that upended part of a case that had already drawn notice for its twists and turns. Shortly after she made her accusation, the woman recanted her allegation against one of the men in an interview with detectives, a fact that was not shared with defense lawyers for nearly a year. That defendant, Darrell Dula, 25, was immediately released on Tuesday after 10 months in custody. Although the district attorney’s office said it planned to continue the prosecution of all four defendants on charges including rape, sex trafficking and compelling prostitution, the surfacing of the police report will probably lead the authorities to drop all charges against Mr. Dula, officials familiar with the case said. He was charged with rape. The recantation was reported on Tuesday by The New York Daily News. The paper quoted a detective in the police report as saying: “I once again asked [her] if she was raped. She told me ‘no’ and stated to me, ‘Can’t a ho change her ways?’ ” On Wednesday night, Mr. Dula was back at home in Crown Heights. “I’m overjoyed,” he said. “I’m relieved that the truth came out.” The case attracted significant attention because of the severity of the allegations and because the accuser, an Orthodox Jewish woman, was not likely to have had much interaction with the defendants, adult black men in Crown Heights. Many neighborhood residents had expressed skepticism about the allegations, saying that the woman’s relationship with the men seemed more complex than prosecutors had described. Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for Charles J. Hynes, the district attorney, said that the office learned of the woman’s exculpatory statement this month, after a new prosecutor assigned to the case, Rebecca Gingold, saw records of an interview with detectives in which the woman said that Mr. Dula had not raped her. The original prosecutor assigned to the case, Abbie Greenberger, did not ask the police to turn over a file containing that document, Mr. Schmetterer said. When Ms. Gingold took over the case on April 5, Mr. Schmetterer said, she began reviewing evidence and saw an indication that information might be missing. Ms. Gingold contacted the Police Department, received the file containing the interview with the accuser and turned it over to defense lawyers on Friday. Mr. Schmetterer would not comment on Ms. Greenberger’s handling of the case. She has left the district attorney’s office, though her departure had nothing to do with the rape case, he said. Efforts to reach Ms. Greenberger for comment on Wednesday were unsuccessful. Investigators will “review the entire case,” Mr. Schmetterer said, and most likely interview the accuser again, but he emphasized there was enough evidence to continue the prosecution. The other defendants, Damien Crooks, Jamali Brockett and his brother Jawara Brockett, are still in custody. Mr. Hynes said that his office had acted promptly when prosecutors became aware of the report. “When we discovered the recantation we immediately informed the defense attorneys,” he said in a statement. A lawyer for Mr. Dula, James Phillips, did not return a call for comment. When word of the case began spreading through Crown Heights last year, some in the neighborhood who said they knew the woman said they doubted the account outlined by prosecutors. Sometimes, they said, she changed out of her traditional clothing, then drank alcohol and joked with a group of young men as if she were among friends. In any case, the woman was under the legal age of consent while some of the sexual contact she reported was occurring. Jeff Kern, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former prosecutor in Brooklyn, counseled the woman, who was a student in one of his classes, to speak with the authorities. Mr. Kern did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

Dula Darrell
Brockett Jamali
Crooks Damien
Brockett Jawara
Sex Crimes
Police Department (NYC)
Crown Heights (NYC)


Directors Say Volkswagen Delayed Informing Them of Trickery

Abstract: At least three members of Volkswagen ’s board said they were left in the dark about the company’s emissions cheating for two weeks after top executives admitted the deception to American environmental officials. During that period, the board was completing the terms of a contract extension for the automaker’s chief executive, Martin Winterkorn. He was pushed out five days after the use of the cheating device became public, though he insisted he had known nothing about it. The board members’ statements shed new light on flaws in the management structure and lines of communication at Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker. Volkswagen’s stock has lost about a third of its value since Sept. 18, when the cheating was made public by the United States Environmental Protection Agency . Volkswagen has admitted that some cars were programmed to disable their pollution controls unless the software detected that emission tests were being conducted. With the controls off, the vehicles had better acceleration and fuel economy, but emitted far higher levels of nitrogen oxide, a pollutant linked to lung ailments. How VW’s Scandal Unfolded Events leading up to, and in the weeks that followed, the admission by Volkswagen that it had deliberately designed its diesel engines to cheat on emissions tests. If Mr. Winterkorn did not know about the communication with the American regulators, he was unaware of a fundamental threat to the company. If he was aware, he withheld significant information from members of his 20-member supervisory board. “That they were not informed about a problem of this dimension, that points to a huge communications problem,” said Markus Kienle, a Frankfurt lawyer who is on the board of a shareholder-advocacy group known by its German initials SdK. Mr. Winterkorn did not respond to requests for comment Thursday and Friday. A spokesman for Volkswagen declined to comment. Stephan Weil, a board member who is also prime minister of the German state Lower Saxony, where Volkswagen is based, said he learned of the cheating while watching television news. Babette Fröhlich, another board member and an official with the IG Metall labor union, said she also learned of the scandal from the media. A third board member, Olaf Lies, the Lower Saxony economy minister, has said he was not informed by company officials and read about it online. How Volkswagen’s ‘Defeat Devices’ Worked Volkswagen admitted that 11 million of its vehicles were equipped with software that was used to cheat on emissions tests. This is how the technology works and what it now means for vehicle owners. The board’s executive committee, which includes Mr. Weil, had formally recommended to the full board the extension of Mr. Winterkorn’s contract by three years. That recommendation was made on Sept. 2, the day before Volkswagen officials told the E.P.A. about the emissions cheating. It was a “grave mistake” for Volkswagen executives to withhold information as long as they did, Mr. Weil said on Friday in a statement. He noted that American regulators had raised red flags about Volkswagen emissions in 2014. “Talks took place for a full year before Volkswagen admitted the deception,” Mr. Weil said. “This confession should clearly have occurred much earlier.” Critics of the company previously have said that top managers in Wolfsburg, Germany, where the company is based, hoarded power while discouraging open discussion of problems. Matthias Müller, Volkswagen’s new chief executive, has acknowledged the flaws and promised a more open style of management, although changing a company with 600,000 employees could take years. The consequences for Volkswagen have been severe. About 11 million cars have the illegal software, mostly in Europe and the United States, and recalling or repairing them is likely to cost billions of dollars. The company faces dozens of lawsuits on both continents from shareholders and customers. Volkswagen has suspended five high-ranking executives who were involved in motor development and is conducting an inquiry. Image Stephan Weil, left, and Olaf Lies, right, members of Volkswagen's supervisory board. Credit Jochen L¸Bke/European Pressphoto Agency After the Environmental Protection Agency made public its accusation on Friday, Sept. 18, Mr. Winterkorn acted to quell the crisis. That Sunday, and again the next Tuesday, he publicly apologized on behalf of the company. Those moves did not save him from the angry board. The next day he was out of a job. “I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group,” Mr. Winterkorn said in a statement accompanying his resignation. “I am not aware of any wrongdoing on my part.” Some outsiders expressed surprise that Mr. Winterkorn, known for his attention to detail, would have been unaware that E.P.A. officials had been asking for more than a year why Volkswagen diesel cars had far lower emissions in laboratory tests than on the road. “I find it very improbable,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen who follows Volkswagen closely. “He was always the one who wanted to know everything.” Volkswagen initially contested findings by independent researchers and the E.P.A. in 2014 that showed big discrepancies between the pollutants that its cars generated on the road compared to lab tests. Then, on Aug. 21, 2015, at a conference in Pacific Grove, Calif., organized by the University of California, Davis, a Volkswagen official informally mentioned to a senior E.P.A. official that the company had been deceiving regulators. The revelation surprised the official, Christopher Grundler, who runs the agency’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality. Standing next to him at the time was a regulator with the California Air Resources Board, according to an E.P.A. official who confirmed the events, earlier reported by Reuters. In a Sept. 3 conference call with officials from the E.P.A. and the state of California, company executives detailed how Volkswagen vehicles were programmed to trick emissions-testing equipment. An E.P.A. spokeswoman declined to identify the Volkswagen officials who have been in talks with the agency. Initially, as the scandal broke, Volkswagen’s board avoided criticizing Mr. Winterkorn. When he resigned, the executive committee said in a statement that it had “great respect” for him and that he “had no knowledge of the manipulation of emissions data.” How Volkswagen’s ‘Defeat Devices’ Worked Volkswagen admitted that 11 million of its vehicles were equipped with software that was used to cheat on emissions tests. This is how the technology works and what it now means for vehicle owners. Subsequently, several members expressed displeasure with Mr. Winterkorn’s failure to keep them in the loop. Mr. Weil, the prime minister of Lower Saxony, complained about it in a speech last week to the state Parliament. Volkswagen is the largest company by far in the state and employs about 110,000 people there. The state government owns a 20 percent stake in Volkswagen, and by law has veto power over major decisions. Under German law, at least half of the seats on a company supervisory board are held by labor representatives. A spokesman for members of Volkswagen’s workers’ council, which is separate from the union and also has seats on the board, said he did not know how they learned of the emissions scandal and could not comment. At Volkswagen, four of the 20 board seats are held by descendants of Ferdinand Porsche, designer of the original Beetle. The family owns a majority of Volkswagen shares through a holding company. A spokesman for the holding company declined to comment. Volkswagen executives had a duty to inform the supervisory board of the emissions problem, said Ulrich Hocker, a Düsseldorf lawyer who is president of a shareholder advocacy group known by its German initials, D.S.W. But he said only the supervisory board would have legal standing to seek damages from Mr. Winterkorn, who has kept a low profile since leaving. Some shareholders have complained that Volkswagen did not follow German laws requiring it to publicize information that could affect the stock price. Mr. Hocker said shareholders are angry and want changes. “The whole company was run from Wolfsburg,” he said. “They have to get away from this centralized management.”

Volkswagen
Vehicle Emissions
Diesel engine
Martin Winterkorn
Fraud
Cars
EPA
Air pollution
Automobile safety


Annuities Not for Everyone, but They Have a Place

Abstract: SIMPLE, useful ideas have a way of becoming more complicated — and less useful — as the urge to improve them takes hold. Annuities may have succumbed to this tendency, financial advisers warn. Annuities, which at their most basic are periodic, lifetime payments by insurance companies made in return for lump-sum contributions, originally were a way for retired people to receive regular, guaranteed income without outliving their money. These “single-premium immediate annuities” are probably what laymen think of when someone mentions an annuity. Then insurers branched out and created annuities with payments or cash values that vary with movements in the financial markets and have smaller guarantees or none at all. One type, variable annuities, pays income based on the performance of a basket of investment funds and may be structured to provide a minimum payout each year — at a price — until the annuity is redeemed for cash or converted into a single-premium immediate annuity. A second type, indexed annuities, ties payments to movements of an underlying stock index and promises at worst to return the full amount invested after a certain period, say 10 years. Variable and indexed annuities accounted for 80.8 percent of the $688.2 billion of annuities sold in the three years through 2013, compared with 74 percent in the previous seven years, according to Limra, a financial services trade group once known as the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association. Although financial advisers consider these vehicles suitable for certain investors in certain circumstances, some contend that variable annuities and especially indexed annuities offer most buyers a poor deal — even if they can figure out what the deal entails. These annuities tend to be overly complex, in their view, as well as expensive and hard to understand, and they often are riskier than investors realize. “I hate variable annuities,” said Scott Hanson, a senior partner at Hanson McClain, a Sacramento investment advisory firm. “There are times to use them,” he added, though “as a general rule I think they’re garbage.” He reserves particular scorn for versions whose contracts feature a rider guaranteeing an annual payout, now typically 4 to 5 percent. It sounds like having your cake and eating it, too — you are sure to get that amount, and perhaps more if the return from the investment portfolio is sufficiently high — but in his view the cake is too expensive. About 10 years ago, when the insurance industry was eager to attract annuity investors, it cost 50 basis points, or half of one percentage point, a year to get the guaranteed payout, he recalled. Since then pricing has risen, and “the cost of the guarantees has gone up like crazy, to around 200 basis points,” Mr. Hanson said. For Brian Hayes, chief executive of Hayes Advisory Group, a firm based in Kokomo, Ind., it is not just how much a guarantee costs but how little it covers. Typically the income is guaranteed, but if the value of the investments tied to the annuity decline, the surrender value — how much cash the annuity can be converted into — may go down, too, he pointed out. “A lot of times clients get confused, especially if they bought riders that they think protect them from a loss,” he said. “In most cases that’s not true. What’s becoming a problem is that people think the rider protects their account balance, but it doesn’t.” Whatever the shortcomings of variable annuities, Mr. Hanson said he disliked indexed annuities even more. Investors may feel protected by a promise to get their money back after 10 years in the stock market, but he points out that the same amount of money will probably be worth less after a decade because of inflation, and in any case the market seldom has a net decline in any 10-year period, especially when dividends are factored in. It’s extremely rare, therefore, for the guarantee to come into effect, and the cost of providing it tends to be exorbitant, in his opinion, just as with variable annuities. Insurers often extract the fee for the guarantee and other expenses, such as commissions for agents who sell the annuities, by disbursing only a fraction of a stock index’s gain, say 60 percent, or by capping the gain in any year to a fixed percentage. “An indexed annuity has caps, your money is tied up for 10 years and there’s no guaranteed income,” Mr. Hanson said. “They’re ridiculous. A variable annuity is going to be much better for you than an indexed annuity.” Brian Ashe, a board member of Life Happens, a life insurance industry association, acknowledged the high expense of some annuities, even placing the upper limit on the cost of income guarantees at three percentage points, not two. But he noted that such a guarantee was worth more to some investors than others. “The protection offered by variable or indexed annuities has helped a lot of people at or near retirement,” he said. “Having something in the portfolio that provides downside protection can be a valuable part of a person’s financial plan.” Mr. Ashe urged investors to view annuities as part of a whole, not as discrete products. Investors or their advisers should determine how much income they need to cover their bills, consider an annuity for that and use different vehicles for growth or other purposes, he suggested. Even advisers who avoid variable and indexed annuities for most of their clients prefer them for some. Mr. Hayes pointed out that the assets in an annuity accumulate tax-deferred, as they do in 401(k)s and other retirement accounts. Contributions to annuities are not tax-deductible, as they are for many pension plans, but there is no limit on the amount that can be used to fund an annuity, so it can be a useful tool for savers playing catch-up. “They’re a good fit for someone who is trying to grow a lot for retirement and has maxed out on everything else,” he said. Because of annuities’ inherent complexities, Mr. Hayes encouraged anybody interested in one to “get all the details you can and look at several different options.” Mr. Ashe agreed. “Keep an open mind and ask a lot of questions,” he said. “Annuities can be complex financial tools, and you need to have a good understanding of how they operate.”

Retirement
Annuities
Personal finance
Pensions and Retirement Plans
Old age,elderly,senior citizens


M.L.B. to Recognize Glenn Burke as Baseball’s Gay Pioneer

Abstract: EMERYVILLE, Calif. — Glenn Burke was 27 when he walked out on Major League Baseball, his promising career as an outfielder undone mostly by the burden of being a semicloseted gay man. It was 1980, and it was more important, Burke later explained, to be himself than to be a professional baseball player. “It’s harder to be gay in sports than anywhere else, except maybe president,” Burke said in 1982, when he came out publicly in an Inside Sports magazine article. “Baseball is probably the hardest sport of all.” More than three decades later, and nearly 20 years after Burke’s death, Major League Baseball still has not had an active player publicly disclose that he is gay. There probably are several gay men currently playing, but the sport awaits its Robbie Rogers, its Jason Collins, its Michael Sam. In the meantime, Major League Baseball is trying to ease the way for those surely to come. As part of a concerted effort to demonstrate an atmosphere of tolerance and inclusion, the league invited Burke’s family to Tuesday’s All-Star Game in Minneapolis — its first official recognition of Burke’s early role in a movement just now gaining traction across the sports landscape. “He was a pioneer, and should be recognized,” Pat Courtney, a Major League Baseball spokesman, said. Attending the game will be Lutha Burke, one of Glenn Burke’s five surviving siblings, who cared for Burke in his final months as he withered and died from the effects of AIDS, and her daughter Alice Rose. Burke died in 1995. “It was overdue, and Glenn has a story that needs to be told,” Lutha Burke, 66, said over a cup of coffee, sitting beside Rose. “Glenn wouldn’t be upset that it took this long. He’d just say, ‘It’s about time you guys showed up.’ ” Burke and Rose were scheduled to attend the game and its surrounding festivities, including a gala Monday and a news conference with Commissioner Bud Selig on Tuesday. The league will also announce that Billy Bean, who played six seasons in the majors and came out publicly in 1999, four years after he retired, will work with the league on its inclusion efforts. Image Burke was struck by a car in 1987, breaking his leg in three places, exacerbating a downward cycle of drugs, homelessness and crime. Credit Mark Hundley/Associated Press Bean followed a path first walked in baseball by Burke. Raised in Oakland and a star athlete at Berkeley High School, Burke was drafted by the Dodgers in 1972 in the 17th round. After a few seasons in the minor leagues — a time when Burke came to realize that he was gay — he made his debut with the Dodgers in 1976 at 23. One coach who noted Burke’s combination of strength and speed compared him to Willie Mays. But Burke might have been more like Rickey Henderson — also raised in Oakland — whose Hall of Fame career began with the Athletics in 1979. Yet Burke’s major league career lasted only 225 games, scattered over four seasons. He appeared, mostly as a defensive replacement and pinch-hitter, in more than half of the Dodgers’ games in 1977, when they reached the World Series. He started Games 1 and 4 of the National League Championship Series against Philadelphia, and Game 1 of the World Series against the Yankees. Few knew he was gay, but rumors percolated. Burke was wildly popular in the clubhouse, known for playing loud music, dancing and spot-on Richard Pryor imitations. He is widely credited with inventing the high-five. The Dodgers were less enamored. Burke had a strained relationship with Manager Tommy Lasorda, whose son, Tom Lasorda Jr., befriended Burke. (The younger Lasorda died in 1991 from complications from AIDS, though his father routinely cited other illnesses, from pneumonia to cancer, and denied that his son was gay.) Al Campanis, the Dodgers’ vice president, offered Burke bonus money if he married, something he later said was not a bribe but a gesture rooted in tradition, as the Dodgers encouraged family stability and maturity on their roster. In May 1978, just as teammates began realizing that Burke was gay, he was traded to the A’s for the veteran Bill North. It was not a popular move in the clubhouse. “He was the life of the team, on the buses, in the clubhouse, everywhere,” Davey Lopes, a teammate, said of Burke the next day. When Burke came out in 1982, Lopes was among several former teammates who said that Burke was traded because he was gay. Back home in Oakland, Burke increasingly spent time across the Bay Bridge, in San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of gay culture. Suspicions about his sexuality swirled. A friend tried to steer him and his story to the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, but Burke declined. Caen wrote only that a local ballplayer could be found on Castro Street. Burke started regularly in the outfield for the A’s in 1978, but a pinched nerve in his neck in the 1979 season kept him off the field. He refused to take cortisone shots to get back on the field, and simply left the team. He was 26. “I probably wouldn’t have left if there hadn’t been the other problem, the gay thing,” Burke said in the 1982 Inside Sports article. “But put it all together, and it was too much.” He returned the next spring. The team’s new manager, Billy Martin, reportedly addressed Burke with homophobic slurs in front of teammates. A knee injury in spring training led Burke to the minor leagues. Living as a gay man in Ogden, Utah, his dream of starring in the major leagues as far away as ever, he walked away. Image Lutha Burke, Glenn Burke's sister, said his family did not know Burke was gay until shortly before it was revealed publicly. Credit Ariel Zambelich for The New York Times “The browbeating got to him,” Lutha Burke said last week. “I’m more than sure that being gay cost him his baseball career.” Much of Burke’s family did not know that he was gay until shortly before it was revealed publicly, but everyone was supportive, Lutha Burke said. She recalled getting a call from their father on the day that her brother was telling his story to Bryant Gumbel on television. “Don’t I have a handsome son?” he said. Burke, freed from the secret, starred in gay baseball and softball leagues and won medals at the Gay Olympics. He lived off his personality and fame. But in 1987, he was struck by a car, breaking his leg in three places. The accident exacerbated a downward cycle of drugs, homelessness and crime. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to grand theft and possession of a controlled substance, and was sentenced to 16 months in prison. He was released after six months, then returned for a month because of a parole violation. By 1994, he was found to have AIDS. Lutha Burke searched for him on the streets of San Francisco and brought him home to Oakland, knowing he would die. “All I do is lie in bed and cry and holler for Lutha,” he told The New York Times. He died at age 42. For nearly 20 years, the Burke family heard nothing from Major League Baseball (though the A’s, Lutha Burke said, were always supportive, helping raise money during Burke’s illness). That changed recently, when Alice Rose received a call that she relayed to her mother. Baseball wanted to recognize Burke’s contribution to the sport. “I had to get off the phone and catch my breath,” Lutha Burke said. “I called back and told her: ‘That’s wonderful. It’s time.’ ” For most of the years since Glenn Burke’s playing career, gay athletes continued to shield their sexuality over concerns of everything from job security to marketability. Burke could be considered an outlier, not a trendsetter. “People are missing out when they decide to let a segment of our society not be what they can truly be,” Lutha Burke said. But the past couple of years have seen a surge in coming-out stories in sports, as gay athletes recognize a shifting, friendlier environment. Major League Baseball, without an out active player, has decided that it should not idly wait. For more than a year, the league has worked with Athlete Ally, a group with a mission to stamp out homophobia in sports. The call to Burke is a big step forward, Lutha Burke said. “Maybe he didn’t get a chance to live out his dream,” she said. “He used to sleep in his baseball uniform, and Mom used to have to peel it off him. But make sure that other little boys get a chance to live out their dream. Glenn would be very proud. Something good has come out of it in the end.”

Glenn Burke
Baseball
Gay and Lesbian LGBT
MLB
Oakland Athletics
All-star game


Paterson’s Appointment of a Lieutenant Governor Is Ruled to Be Unconstitutional

Abstract: Gov. David A. Paterson acted beyond his authority last month when he named Richard Ravitch lieutenant governor, a state appeals court ruled Thursday in blocking Mr. Ravitch from serving in the post. The decision, which was unanimous and unambiguous in its rejection of the governor’s arguments, dealt Mr. Paterson both a legal and political setback. A four-justice panel issued the decision, refuting all of Mr. Paterson’s key legal claims and leaving the administration open to criticism that it had gone outside the bounds of the State Constitution. “The governor simply does not have the authority to appoint a lieutenant governor,” the decision said. It concluded, “The governor’s purported appointment of Mr. Ravitch was unlawful because no provision of the Constitution or of any statute provides for the filling of a vacancy in the office of lieutenant governor other than by election.” The Appellate Division of the Second Judicial Department, in Brooklyn, which heard arguments in the case on Tuesday, was the highest so far to decide on the constitutionality of the governor’s appointment. The decision moved the case, Skelos v. Paterson, before the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. A spokeswoman for the governor said that Mr. Paterson had not decided whether to seek a stay to temporarily allow Mr. Ravitch to serve while the Court of Appeals considers the case. The appointment has been in dispute since the governor appointed Mr. Ravitch on July 8, while state government was paralyzed by a political power struggle that left Republicans and Democrats both making claims to control the State Senate. Mr. Paterson on Thursday said he was dismayed by the ruling and offered, as a compromise, to have the State Legislature vote to confirm Mr. Ravitch. “I’m obviously disappointed,” he told reporters outside his Midtown Manhattan office. “I chose Richard Ravitch, an outstanding citizen for the last two decades who’s been a public servant and a civic leader. And I think at this time, so as to avoid what went on in the Senate in June and July, that a lieutenant governor would be the solution.” Senate Republicans, who brought the case against the governor, hailed the decision and predicted they would ultimately prevail before the Court of Appeals. “The appellate court today upheld the position I have taken all along, that the governor acted recklessly and unconstitutionally when he put his own political interests ahead of the public interest,” Dean G. Skelos, the Senate minority leader, said in a written statement. Republicans have argued that by appointing a lieutenant governor, whose powers include presiding over the Senate and casting tie-breaking votes in some cases, Mr. Paterson threatened their free speech. A presiding officer has the power to recognize speakers on the Senate floor. Mr. Paterson argued that state law allowed governors to appoint a lieutenant governor in the event of a vacancy. He pointed to a provision of state law that says governors can fill vacant positions unless the Constitution explicitly defines how those position should be filled. The Constitution is silent on how a vacancy in the lieutenant governor’s office should be handled. Mr. Paterson also argued that such an extraordinary move — no governor had ever before tried to appoint a lieutenant governor when the post became vacant — was necessary because of the extraordinary circumstances facing the state. Not only was Albany mired in political crisis when the governor made the appointment, but the state also remains in a severe economic downturn. The appeals court panel rejected those claims outright. The panel disputed Mr. Paterson’s reading of the law that governs replacement appointments, saying that in the case of a vacancy in the lieutenant governor’s office, the Constitution says that the duties are to be carried out only by the Senate president. The panel also dismissed the governor’s argument that extraordinary circumstances legitimized his move. “No considerations of the state’s financial difficulties or of political strife in the Senate allow us to find authority for Mr. Ravitch’s appointment where none exists,” the opinion said. Despite the court’s ruling that his appointment was unconstitutional, Mr. Ravitch worked from the governor’s office in Midtown all day on Thursday and was still answering the phone at his desk into the evening. “It’s a roller coaster — sort of a hard way to live,” he said of the legal battles over his position. Then, bristling at Mr. Skelos’s comment that the governor had appointed him for political purposes, Mr. Ravitch said: “This isn’t political. I have no constituency.”

Paterson David A
Ravitch Richard
Decisions and Verdicts
Politics and Government
Constitutions
New York State


For Your iPhone 5, a Personal Photo and Extra Juice

Abstract: Battery cases and phone cases customized with photos you have taken are both staples of the phone accessory world. But not a battery case featuring a photo you have taken. That’s where Uncommon comes in. The company claims to make the first battery case for the iPhone 5 that can be imprinted with your own photo — the Power Gallery . The case contains a 2,200 milliamp-hour battery, which just about doubles the battery life of an iPhone; the company says it provides an extra 10 hours of talk time. On the back of the phone goes a photograph that wraps partway up the sides. You can pick a design from Uncommon’s gallery or upload a photo of your own. The company said it uses a proprietary method to print the photo on the case so that it resists scratching. In a test it took a gouge to dig under the photo. To mount the phone in the case you remove a plastic bumper from the edges of the case, slide the phone onto the Lightning connector, then reattach the bumper so that the holes align properly with the phone’s buttons and ports. The case is quite slim and light, and seems to offer some bump-and-scratch protection, but I wouldn’t count on it in a 15-foot drop test, like those used for some so-called Mil-Spec, or military specification, protective cases. Although the case has an Apple Lightning connector inside, it has a USB connector on the outside. Even though the case has a USB jack connection, it can still sync your phone while it’s in the case. The Power Gallery is $120 from Uncommon online. ROY FURCHGOTT


New York City Health Board Repeals Rule on Consent Forms for Circumcision Ritual

Abstract: The New York City Board of Health voted on Wednesday to ease regulations on a controversial circumcision ritual practiced in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, fulfilling a priority of Mayor Bill de Blasio . The vote repealed a Bloomberg-era rule requiring parents to sign a consent form before the ritual, which involves a person performing a circumcision, known as a mohel, to use his mouth to suck blood away from the incision on an infant’s penis. The practice has been linked to herpes infections in infants. The city’s health department will instead ask hospitals to distribute a brochure to Orthodox families that warns of the risks involved in the ritual, known as metzitzah b’peh. City Hall officials said they were finishing up an agreement with Orthodox leaders so that the mohel would be tested for herpes if an infant was infected. But those tests, and any penalties for mohels found to be infected, would not be mandated by law. In effect, Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, is betting that collaborating with Orthodox leaders — a group that has long felt alienated from government — will do more to protect infants’ health than in previous attempts to impose regulations on a cherished practice, even one linked to two deaths. The consent forms had infuriated leaders in the city’s politically influential ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, which called the requirement an infringement on religious freedom. As a candidate, Mr. de Blasio had pledged to remove them , and the mayor has noted that herpes infections stemming from the ritual had continued to be reported even after the forms were introduced. Leading health organizations have long warned about the risks of the ritual, and some health officials have expressed concerns about Mr. de Blasio’s approach. The mayor added numerous allies to the Board of Health, including several campaign contributors , as the panel began considering his plan. On Wednesday, nine of the 11 board members voted in favor of ending the consent forms, including the health commissioner, Dr. Mary T. Bassett. One member, Sixto Caro, opposed the measure, and another member, Lynne Richardson, abstained; both were appointed by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a political independent. At a meeting in Manhattan, some board members who previously supported the use of the forms conceded that the policy had eroded relations with the Orthodox community, making it more difficult to educate parents. Still, some wondered if the new hospital brochures would make a difference. “I remain concerned that even this new education campaign will not necessarily be effective at preventing exposure for these kids,” said Dr. Joel Forman, who voted for the regulation’s repeal. A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, Ishanee Parikh, said the city expected Orthodox leaders to assist in banning mohels who were found to have infected an infant. “We’re confident that if we do this in partnership with the community, they’ll hold up their end of the bargain,” Ms. Parikh said. The city has not yet completed a formal arrangement with Orthodox leaders, and any agreement on the ritual would ultimately rely on self-policing in a community still distrustful of secular officials. A case involving a herpes infection in an infant who had undergone the ritual was reported to city health officials in April. So far, the mohel who conducted the circumcision has not yet been identified. Ms. Parikh said the parents, who are Orthodox, would not identify the mohel to officials. At the meeting on Wednesday, Karen Redlener, a board member appointed by Mr. de Blasio, asked Dr. Bassett if Orthodox leaders would be willing to identify mohels to the city for further medical testing. “That would be most welcome,” Dr. Bassett said. “Do you expect that to happen?” Ms. Redlener asked. “It would be most welcome,” Dr. Bassett replied.

Circumcision
Judaism
Herpes
Board of Health NYC
NYC
Bill de Blasio


Giants Focus on Playoffs Chance, but Talk of Off-Season Changes

Abstract: One day after a deflating blowout loss that kind of, sort of, maybe felt like the end of the season (but actually wasn’t), it was difficult to know which way to look with the Giants. Among some of the players, the focus was already on next year. Defensive end Osi Umenyiora prefaced his remarks to reporters on a conference call by saying he would be as focused as anyone on the Giants’ Week 17 game, but he also offered a preview of changes that might be waiting in the off-season. Among other considerations, he acknowledged a “high probability” that he would not return to the Giants in 2013. Quarterback Eli Manning was pivoting to the future as well, though he chose to focus on the more immediate task. The Giants are clinging to a shred of possibility when it comes to the playoffs, and Manning parsed a series of potentially negative outcomes when he pointed out that “the worst feeling we could possibly have” would be for the Giants to receive all the help they need in other games but they “don’t handle our business” against the Philadelphia Eagles . “All we can do is worry about improving our own performance and get back to playing solid football,” Manning said. To do that almost surely requires some reflection on what has happened to the Giants over the past few weeks. Yes, the Giants still can make the postseason — they need to beat the Eagles at MetLife Stadium, and both Minnesota and Chicago must lose and Dallas must lose or tie. That series of events, though, begins with a Giants victory, and given the results the Giants have produced in their last two games, there are few obvious reasons to imagine that happening. After beating New Orleans, 52-27, on Dec. 9, the Giants lost their next two games against Atlanta and Baltimore by a combined score of 67-14, dropping them with a thud to the precipice of elimination. “Let’s face it, we’re holding out hope that you can turn this thing right back again,” Coach Tom Coughlin said. “We’re hoping that a game at home is going to allow us to do that.” Coughlin, of course, is the one who will ultimately have to answer for what has been a disappointing final two months of the season, regardless of whether the Giants slip into the playoffs. Coughlin promised a full evaluation of player personnel and strategies in the off-season, and there will be no shortage of areas for him to address. At the top of that list will be the Giants’ defense, specifically their pass rush. Getting to the quarterback has long been a staple for the Giants, and last season, when the Giants surged to the Super Bowl title, the defensive line continued to be a significant part of the team’s success. This season, however, it has been mostly anonymous. Justin Tuck, who did not play on Sunday because of a shoulder injury, has languished during one of his worst seasons. Jason Pierre-Paul has been decent but hardly the standout he was a year ago. And Umenyiora, who lost his starting job to Pierre-Paul, has been mediocre. Because Umenyiora is in his 10th season and has had contract issues with the Giants in the past, he is hardly the only one to speculate that he will not return. “We’re not going to kid ourselves,” he said. But Umenyiora also defended the defensive line, saying that if Coughlin and team management looked to make changes after the season, “it has to be wholesale” and not just a tweak or two. “It has to be changes for everybody, because nobody played above average this year,” he said. Certainly Manning could not say the offense shone, as the Giants struggled to score — or even move the ball, really — at critical junctures. In Sunday’s loss to the Ravens, the Giants recorded their second-lowest total yards of the season and held the ball for just 20 minutes. The star receivers were invisible, too; Victor Cruz caught three passes for 21 yards, and Hakeem Nicks was held without a catch for the first time in his career. Manning acknowledged the slowdown in the team’s passing game and pointed to Nicks’s limited practice time because of lingering injuries as a potential explanation for the lack of crispness between the two players. Whatever the cause, though, the Giants’ failure to generate the sort of big plays that defined them last season has been crucial. Now they must hope to rediscover it in time. “This is our job,” Manning said, and it is true: on Sunday, they will play one more game, hope for one final victory and then count on good fortune to save them. Otherwise, they will have nowhere to look but next season.

Football
New York Giants
Philadelphia Eagles