Francisco Rodriguez Charged With Criminal Contempt Over Text Messages

Abstract: Francisco Rodriguez , the Mets’ embattled closer, was back in Queens Criminal Court on Wednesday, this time to face charges that he sent dozens of text messages to his estranged girlfriend in violation of an order of protection. The text messages came to light during a Sept. 14 court hearing on misdemeanor assault charges that Rodriguez faces as a result of an altercation at Citi Field with his girlfriend’s father, Carlos Pena. On Wednesday, those messages led to Rodriguez’s being charged with seven counts of criminal contempt. Prosecutors sought $25,000 bail, but only $7,500 was imposed. In arguing for the higher bail, Scott Kessler, an assistant district attorney, told Judge Ira Margulis that Rodriguez had violated a similar order of protection in 2005 in Venezuela in an incident that left the same girlfriend, Daian Pena, hospitalized. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Christopher Booth, was asked about that assertion after the hearing and declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Queens district attorney’s office would not elaborate on Kessler’s assertion. Kessler and Booth sparred over the text messages on Sept. 14 and covered some of the same ground Wednesday. Kessler said that only a week after Rodriguez was arraigned on the assault charges on Aug. 12, he sent Pena a text message that stated, “I know this message could get me in trouble again, but I lost you, my house and my children.” Kessler told the judge that a flurry of 17 text messages that followed on Aug. 23 became a “bit more manipulative and a bit more angry.” He read out aloud from a Aug. 30 text message in which Rodriguez said “greed is the first step towards treason.” The complaint that accompanied the new charges cites messages Rodriguez sent to Daian Pena in early September from Venezuela. In one, he says that he knows he made a mistake, that he was fired from his job and that her parents “have what they have” because of him. As he maintained in the previous hearing, Booth said the text messages were not threatening and were simply a case of Rodriguez “professing his love” for Pena and their children. As was the case at his previous court appearances, Rodriguez, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and wearing a gold chain, did not speak. He did nod when Margulis told him to “have no contact with the complainant.” Booth told reporters that “sensitive” plea negotiations were under way with the district attorney’s office, which declined to comment on Booth’s remark. Rodriguez tore a ligament in his pitching hand during the August altercation. The Mets have said they will not pay him while he recovers and will no longer guarantee his contract, which runs through 2011. The players union is contesting those actions. Booth said Rodriguez wanted to remain a Met and “help them win a World Series.”


Temple’s Juan Fernandez Took Unusual Path, and Has Shot to Match

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — Of the six flights that Temple guard Juan Fernandez took during his round-trip journey home to Argentina and back to campus last week, one was postponed by snow and another because of engine problems. As he prepared to board for the last leg out of Miami International Airport, he was detained for four hours. He had forgotten part of his paperwork. “Delays have kind of become my thing,” he said. Fernandez, 19, whose family followed his father, Gustavo, around Argentina to six cities during a 17-year professional basketball career, was unsure of his itinerary two years ago. Several teams in Spain’s B or C leagues had made him offers to play, but his interest was in the United States. To gauge his son’s value there, the father called the national team member Pepe Sanchez, a former Temple star, about the college route. “Most go the easy path of making the European money,” Sanchez said in a phone interview from his hometown, Bahia Blanca. “To go to school is a sacrifice for them.” After deciding on Temple, Fernandez, a low-key sophomore with a disheveled hairdo, finished high school last December and made his debut on his third day in the United States. Fully adjusted now, Fernandez leads the No. 18 Owls (9-2) in assists per game (3.5) and is second in scoring (14.3). When they host No. 1 Kansas (11-0) on Saturday, his two-handed jumper and expansive vision will be on display. “If he’s killing with that jump shot, it gives them that big-time weapon down the stretch,” said Siena Coach Fran McCaffery, whose Saints saw Fernandez score 20 points on 4-for-6 shooting from behind the arc in November. Fernandez’s follow-through is far from textbook. He gets little elevation on jumpers, but the release includes a snapping motion by both wrists. After he hyperextended his left thumb in a collision with his teammate Michael Eric during a recent practice, Fernandez listened to his father joke about the positive that could come from it. “Maybe it will make you more conventional,” he said. Three weeks later, few questioned the motion during the Owls’ upset of third-ranked Villanova. Fernandez, who is 6 feet 4 inches, was 7 for 9 from 3-point range and scored a career-high 33 points. “He’s really not a scorer,” said one N.B.A. scout, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not violate league rules about commenting on underclassmen. “Passing and smarts are his strengths. He lacks N.B.A. quickness.” Fernandez’s game conforms to the team-oriented model of his countrymen. Like San Antonio Spurs guard Manu Ginobili, whom Fernandez was introduced to and had dinner with last winter, and other Argentines, Fernandez focused on skill development when he was young. One-on-one play was limited to nonpractice time, and strength and conditioning were rarely, if ever, stressed. “There are times when we’re going to need him to go outside the structure of the offense or another team will isolate a quicker guard against him,” the Temple assistant Matt Langel said. “It’s important he knows who he is and plays the angles.” Lifting weights was a foreign concept to Fernandez before last winter. He wore gloves to his first session, which drew laughs from teammates. “None of us were on that level,” the freshman T. J. DiLeo said. As a 6-year-old, Fernandez asked his father to teach him how to play basketball. Playing then for the Boca Juniors, the elder Fernandez brought his son to a youth practice before his game. On the first possession, the boy did the unexpected. “He just picked up the ball and looked like an American football player running the other way,” said Fernandez’s mother, Nancy Fiandrino. Gustavo Fernandez, a pass-first point guard, straightened out his son and related locker room lessons. Each season, an American played on his team. The elder Fernandez would listen to the expatriates’ music and learn English from the lyrics. “He was the brain,” Sanchez said of the father. “He left the game a legend here.” The United States has embraced Fernandez, too. Each time he connected on a 3-point attempt last week against Bowling Green, the student section in McGonigle Hall chanted, “Ole, ole, ole!” Some of the soccer chants have been lost in translation. Two weeks ago, Seton Hall fans repeatedly yelled, “Messi, Messi,” in a taunting tone. “They did not know that Messi is one of my favorite soccer stars,” Fernandez said, referring to the Argentine striker Lionel Messi, who has been compared to Diego Maradona. “It was a compliment to me and served as motivation.” In Fernandez’s hometown, Rio Tercero, a farming and textile area of 50,000 residents, his family projects Temple games on a wall in their restaurant, Pino Grigio, and locals follow games on finicky Internet feeds. “Everyone knows you when you leave your town,” Juan Fernandez said. Fans have begun to follow Fernandez into the airports. In line before his first return flight near his home last week, one man, whom he had never met, approached Fernandez and congratulated him on the Villanova outburst. “Everyone kind of knows,” Fernandez said. “TV brings it everywhere.” For those tuning in, it was clearest sign that he had arrived.

Fernandez Juan
Temple University
College Athletics
Basketball


Plan to Train Iraqi Soldiers Is Hampered by Lack of Recruits, Defense Chief Says

Abstract: The United States has fallen behind its goal of training 24,000 members of Iraqi security forces by this fall because the Iraqi government has not provided enough troops to train, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said Wednesday. Mr. Carter told the House Armed Services Committee that the United States military had trained only 9,000 Iraqis so far. “Our training efforts in Iraq have thus far been slowed by a lack of trainees,” Mr. Carter said. “We simply haven’t received enough recruits.” Last week the White House said the United States was adding another training site in Iraq, near Ramadi, where some 450 American troops would train Iraqi fighters, particularly Sunni tribesmen, in the war against the Islamic State group. Defense officials said the effort to train Syrian fighters to take on the militant group on the Syrian side of the border was also going slowly.

Iraq
US Military
House Committee on Armed Services
Military Recruiting and Draft
Ashton Carter


Fischer’s Roots in City Tangle With His Legacy

Abstract: Before he became notorious for his anti-American and anti-Semitic ravings, and before he became an icon for dominating, and then dismissing, the cloistered world of chess, Robert James Fischer was just Bobby, another young New Yorker on the make. His world was the city, and friends say that before he made comments supportive of the 2001 World Trade Center attack and before he lived in exile, New York had held him in thrall — from the streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he went to high school and rooted for the Dodgers, to the Upper East Side, where he ate on the cheap, to downtown, where he mastered the game. Mr. Fischer died on Friday, far away from those places, of kidney failure at 64 in a hospital in Iceland. Joseph Virovatz, 85, a retired physicist and Jewish Holocaust survivor, said he still remembered a day in 1961 when he, Mr. Fischer and Pal Benko, a chess grandmaster who, like Mr. Virovatz, emigrated from Hungary, were in Mr. Benko’s apartment on the Lower East Side. “It was a beautiful, sunny day outside, but Bobby was sitting in the dark watching Westerns; he loved Westerns,” Mr. Virovatz said on Friday at the Village Chess Shop, where he was playing speed chess. “He was eating Hershey bars Benko had given him. He was aspiring to be a world champion, but he was broke.” The three men began to spend evenings together. Often, they would eat at one of the Hungarian restaurants that used to line Second Avenue, what Mr. Virovatz called “Goulash Avenue.” A place called the Tip Top Restaurant was a favorite. Mr. Virovatz said he often wound up picking up his young friend’s tab. Mr. Fischer would talk about chess, of course, but also about other things, like favorite volumes from his extensive comic book collection, which included a first-edition Superman. Instead of holding a steady job, he said, Mr. Fischer would virtually encamp at a table at the New York Public Library. “He would be spending 12 to 14 hours a day in the library studying the games of the old chess masters from the 1850s,” said Mr. Virovatz, who said he empathized with Mr. Fischer’s unhappiness in his later years, and thus took phone calls from him despite Mr. Fischer’s public anti-Semitic comments. “He was an example of Yankee ingenuity; he largely taught himself.” Although Mr. Fischer was born in Chicago, he learned the game of chess in Brooklyn and became a star in Manhattan, at the outdoor tables in Washington Square Park and at the Manhattan Chess Club, which was at 100 Central Park South when he became its youngest member as a 12-year-old in June 1955. The club moved around Manhattan before closing in 2002. One of his early feats came at a simultaneous exhibition in 1955, when he defeated 12 chess players competing against him at the club. Four years earlier he had been among a group of players who had challenged a chess master at a similar exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. After he was defeated in less than 15 minutes, he began to cry. But he had been noticed by Carmine Nigro, president of the Brooklyn Chess and Checkers Club, where Bobby soon was playing most Friday nights. Part of Bobby’s training included accompanying Mr. Nigro to a tournament between the United States and the Soviet Union at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan in June 1954. At one point, Bobby’s mother became so concerned about her son’s obsession with chess that she took him to the children’s psychiatric ward at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where the doctor pronounced him healthy, according to “ Bobby Fischer Goes to War,” by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Bobby attended Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue, where he was said to be friendly with Barbra (then spelled “Barbara”) Streisand. He dropped out to concentrate on playing chess. The school is now closed. Frank Brady, 73, the chairman of the mass communications department at St. John’s University and the president of the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, where Mr. Fischer would sometimes play, said he first met Mr. Fischer at a tournament when Bobby was about 10 and Brady was in his late teens. The two played hundreds of matches — a few of which Mr. Brady said he won — but had virtually no contact after the early 1970s, when Mr. Fischer rose in prominence. Mr. Brady wrote a book, “Profile of a Prodigy,” about Mr. Fischer, which strained their friendship after Mr. Fischer became angry that his Jewish heritage had been mentioned, Mr. Brady said. “About then is when Fischer started to go bad,” Mr. Brady said. “He began to see almost a kind of conspiracy against him. I wouldn’t call it clinical paranoia, but it was a kind of paranoia.” In his later years, Mr. Fischer became nearly as well known for his anti-Semitic rants and problems with U.S. immigration officials as for his chess. During a radio interview after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, “What goes around comes around, even for the United States.” Mr. Fischer’s legacy in New York might be the most enduring among the prodigies of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, winner of seven national high school chess championships, including the last four. Eliot Weiss, the team’s coach, said that he owns many of Mr. Fischer’s chess books and that his teams learn chess by studying Mr. Fischer’s games. But he said he had mixed feelings about Mr. Fischer. “His influence on chess is bipolar,” he said. “He was a genius and his contribution is unmatched, but he brought chess down to a horrible level in his later years.” Mr. Virovatz said part of Mr. Fischer’s bitterness, particularly late in life, can be attributed to being forced to live outside the United States, where he faced arrest after playing a chess match in Yugoslavia in 1992 that violated an American law that prohibited conducting business with Yugoslavia while it waged war on Bosnia. “If you can understand how upset he was to be rejected by his country, exiled, you can understand his belligerency, his ill feelings,” he said. “He was a cold war hero. I don’t know who to blame. But since he was a genius, he should have been treated differently.”

Fischer Bobby
New York City
Chess
Anti-Semitism


Roddick’s Resurgence Continues at Wimbledon

Abstract: WIMBLEDON, England — With only two rounds complete, this Wimbledon is already an improvement over last year for Andy Roddick . Shaken and close to unrecognizable in a second-round loss to Janko Tipsarevic in 2008, Roddick was in command on Court 1 on Thursday when he defeated Igor Kunitsyn, 6-4, 6-2, 3-6, 6-2. It has been a reassuring sort of season for the slimmer, newly married Roddick and his new coach, Larry Stefanki. “It’s been consistently better; the form has kind of been there most weeks,” Roddick said in a conversation with a small group of American reporters. “I think the French Open was the first time I lost before the quarters and even that was a better result for me. Larry and I, during the off-season, we said, ‘O.K. let’s get back into the conversation a little bit.’ And we’re getting there. It’s not there yet, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction, and it’s a better start than I’ve had maybe since ’05.” Roddick, who will next face Jürgen Melzer of Austria, received a jolt when he had to retire at Queen’s Club after spraining his ankle. Roddick said, “There was inflammation at a very specific point, but nothing to cause a lot of alarm.” CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

Wimbledon Tennis Tournament
Tennis
Roddick Andy
Tipsarevic Janko
Melzer Jurgen
French Open (Tennis)


Blake Griffin’s Out, and Clippers Are Crushed by the Thunder

Abstract: The Los Angeles Clippers announced before their game at Oklahoma City on Sunday that the All-Star forward Blake Griffin would be out indefinitely because of a staph infection in his right elbow. Without him, the Clippers fell to their most lopsided defeat of the season, a 131-108 loss to the Thunder. Griffin is set to have surgery Monday in Los Angeles and will be re-evaluated after the All-Star break. “We’re depleted right now, but no one feels sorry for us,” Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said. “I don’t feel sorry for us.” Kevin Durant scored 29 points for the Thunder, who moved above .500. It was announced that Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, had chosen Portland Trail Blazers point guard Damian Lillard to replace Griffin on the Western Conference’s All-Star team. RAPTORS 87, SPURS 82 James Johnson scored 20 points, and host Toronto topped San Antonio to deny Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich his 1,000th career win. Image Kevin Durant scored 29 points for the Thunder, who moved above .500. Credit Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press GRIZZLIES 94, HAWKS 88 Mike Conley had 21 points and 6 assists, Marc Gasol added 16 points and 10 rebounds, and Memphis beat visiting Atlanta. TRAIL BLAZERS 109, ROCKETS 98 LaMarcus Aldridge scored 24 points, and Damian Lillard had 23 to help Portland hold off host Houston. James Harden had 45 points for the Rockets. CAVALIERS 120, LAKERS 105 Kevin Love scored a season-high 32 points, LeBron James came close to a triple-double, and host Cleveland topped Los Angeles. James had 22 points, 10 rebounds and 8 assists in three quarters. BULLS 98, MAGIC 97 Pau Gasol dunked the rebound of Derrick Rose’s missed layup with 9.4 seconds left, and Chicago rallied for a road win over Orlando. KINGS 85, SUNS 83 DeMarcus Cousins made a jumper at the buzzer and finished with 28 points, leading Sacramento to a home win over Phoenix. PACERS 103, HORNETS 102 George Hill’s layup with 4.9 seconds left lifted visiting Indiana over Charlotte. T’WOLVES 112, PISTONS 101 Nikola Pekovic scored 29 points to lead Minnesota past host Detroit. Kevin Martin added 24 points for the Timberwolves.

Basketball
Blake Griffin
Doc Rivers
Kevin Durant
Clippers
Oklahoma City Thunder


North Korea Threatens South Korea Over 13 Defectors

Abstract: SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Tuesday accused South Korea of kidnapping 13 of its citizens who had been working in a restaurant in China, and it demanded their repatriation. The response was the first by North Korea to a highly unusual group defection last week. The 13 North Koreans were the largest single group to defect to South Korea during Kim Jong-un’s reign. Mr. Kim has been trying to stem the flow of North Koreans fleeing to the South. South Korea welcomed the restaurant workers’ defection last week as a major coup and quickly dismissed North Korea’s demand that they be returned. South Korean officials said that United Nations sanctions were squeezing the revenues of restaurants and other enterprises that North Korea operates abroad to earn badly needed cash. North Korean trade officials, diplomats and workers abroad are finding it increasingly hard to meet the government-set goals in earning foreign currency, the officials said, and some are tempted to defect rather than be recalled home for punishment. On Tuesday, North Korea said the South’s intelligence agents “lured and abducted” the 13 North Koreans by using “all sorts of appeasement, deception and gimmicks.” “Unless they apologize for the hideous abduction and send those abductees back, they will face unimaginable serious consequences and severe punishment,” a spokesman for the North’s Red Cross Society was quoted as saying by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. South Korea’s Unification Ministry said the North Koreans had defected of their own free will. Mr. Kim’s government has also been trying to make up for lost revenues in arms sales and other activities that are banned under United Nations sanctions by increasing the number of workers it sends abroad to earn cash. Under Mr. Kim, the number of North Korean restaurants in 12 countries has grown to 130, a majority of them in China, South Korean officials said. They earn around $10 million a year, much of it from South Korean tourists cherishing an opportunity to sample North Korean food and music. But in January, after North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test since 2006 , South Korea asked its citizens not to visit North Korean restaurants abroad. The North Korean government was believed to have selected loyal and relatively affluent citizens to send abroad as workers, assuming that they would be less vulnerable to foreign influence. The 13 defectors — 12 women and a male supervisor — are children of the North’s party and administration elites. They were sent to China to raise money needed to complete the 105-floor Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, Daily NK, a website based in Seoul, South Korea, reported on Tuesday, quoting sources within the North. “If North Korea persists in its wrong path, like its nuclear weapons development, this kind of incident will continue to happen in the future,” South Korea’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, warned in a speech on Tuesday, referring to the group defection. Many details of the defection remain unknown, including how the restaurant workers were able to plot their escape while under constant surveillance by supervisors. They had also been trained to spy on one another for signs of disloyalty. South Korean officials said the male supervisor appeared to have played a crucial role in the defection. The defectors left China last Wednesday and arrived in South Korea the following day, traveling through Thailand. On Tuesday, North Korea did not hide its discontent with Beijing, saying that it knew “which country connived” to enable the group defection. Lu Kang, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, had earlier distanced China from the case, saying that the restaurant workers carried valid travel documents and left China “normally.”

South Korea
North Korea
China
Defection
International relations
Pyongyang
Seoul
Embargoes Sanctions


Making Tires From a Desert Shrub Found in the U.S.

Abstract: For years, tire industry executives, as well as government officials and scientists, have sought a domestic source for natural rubber to escape the price fluctuations of imports and, more recently, to avoid petroleum, which is used to make synthetic rubber. Now, Cooper Tire and Rubber Company has reached an important milestone in that effort, and is expected to demonstrate tires this week with components made of rubber from the guayule plant, a desert shrub cultivated in the Southwest. Cooper Tire executives, who are leading a consortium to develop and market the substance, say they expect to make a complete tire from guayule-derived parts by early 2017. The group includes PanAridus, which is growing the plants and manufacturing the rubber, as well as Cornell and Clemson Universities. “In two years,” said Mike Fraley, chief executive of PanAridus, “we’ve traveled from test tubes to tires.” The effort is one of several underway as companies work to develop a domestic guayule industry. Bridgestone opened a bio-rubber research and manufacturing center last year and Ford has a partnership with Ohio State University to help use the substance in automotive applications. Another start-up, Yulex, is also growing guayule and making rubber for a variety of products, including a special line of wet suits at Patagonia . Yulex had previously worked with Cooper Tire on the development of the guayule plant-based polymers before being replaced by PanAridus.The Cooper Tire program is part of a $6.9 million Biomass Research and Development Initiative grant under a joint effort by the United States Agriculture and Energy Departments to spur the development and analysis of feed stocks, biofuels and bio-based products. In addition to producing a latex that can be processed into rubber, the guayule plant produces resin that can become adhesives, flavors, fragrances, and biofuel, and fibrous matter that can become biofuel or construction materials. Though the biomass research project began relatively recently, the nation’s interest in guayule reaches back to the beginning of the last century. In the early 1900s, historians say, American industrialists began producing rubber from guayule in Mexico, but the Mexican Revolution put an end to commercial production there and the Depression later halted the efforts that had moved to the United States. Interest in guayule as an alternative returned during World War II, when the Japanese cut off access to hevea-based rubber, spurring the Emergency Rubber Project, which involved thousands of scientists, technicians and laborers, some of them Japanese internees. Interest fell off again with the end of the war and the development of synthetic rubber, but was rekindled after the oil crisis of the 1970s, which led to a new round of government-supported research. Tire executives say that global demand for tires, which use as much as 70 percent of the world’s rubber supply, will expand as less developed nations industrialize, requiring roughly 21 million additional acres of hevea, the source of natural rubber, by 2024. Although guayule grows much faster than hevea, hevea’s rubber has certain attributes that have proved tricky to replicate, including resistance to cracking and the ability to prevent high heat buildup. Cooper has so far managed to make a number of tire components with 100 percent guayule, and said work for all of the components that would be replaced is either complete or in the advanced stages. “It’s easy to replace a little bit of the rubber in a component,” said Howard Colvin, a senior scientist at Cooper. “When you replace all of it, everything shows up.”


Study Finds Genetic Key to a Kind of Glaucoma

Abstract: Researchers have discovered the genetic flaws that underlie a major type of glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness. By pinpointing what goes wrong, their finding may provide a basis for devising new treatments. The finding is part of a continuing wave of discoveries about the genes underlying common diseases. The wave began this spring as researchers reported the first results using a new device, DNA-scanning chips containing information on up to 500,000 genetically variable sites across the human genome. By comparing the genomes of patients with those of people in good health, researchers can identify which of the variable sites are associated with the disease and so locate the causative genes. Many efforts to locate disease genes have proved unreliable, but most geneticists are confident that the new method, known as whole genome association, is working. In the last few months, studies using whole genome association have identified genes or genetic elements involved in at least 10 major diseases. The finding on glaucoma, reported yesterday in the journal Science, is from researchers at the Icelandic gene-hunting company deCODE Genetics, the National University Hospital in Reykjavik, Iceland, and Uppsala University in Sweden. By studying 16,000 patients in Iceland and Sweden, the researchers have identified two variant sites on the genome that confer risk for a common type of the disease, known as exfoliative glaucoma. Both sites lie in the same gene, known as the lysyl oxidase-like 1 gene, or LOXL1, and together account for more than 99 percent of the disease. This means that defects in a single gene account for essentially all cases of exfoliative glaucoma, said Dr. Kari Stefansson, chief executive of deCODE Genetics. The finding is surprising, Dr. Stefansson said, given that most common diseases analyzed so far are caused by several genes. Exfoliative glaucoma can occur when fibers of connective tissue break off into the fluid-filled front chamber of the eye and block the drainage channels through which the fluid circulates, resulting in damage to the optic nerve. The protein made by the LOXL1 gene is produced in many tissues of the body, including the eye, and helps build the network of fibers and elastin that weaves the body’s tissues together. The effect of the genetic variants now detected in the LOXL1 gene seems to be to lower the production rate of the protein it specifies. The production rate is only slightly lower and cannot matter much, at least in the early and middle years of life, because the variants are very common. About 50 percent of people in Sweden and Iceland carry one copy of a variant LOXL1 gene, the researchers said, and 25 percent carry two copies, one from each parent. The incidence is much the same in European-Americans, Dr. Stefansson said. But though a slightly lesser production rate of LOXL1 may be harmless throughout most of life, the deficit may accumulate through many decades, explaining why exfoliative glaucoma is most common among the elderly, Dr Stefansson said. Up to 20 percent of people over 60 have an accumulation of flaked-off fibers in the eye, and half of these develop glaucoma. DeCODE Genetics is developing a diagnostic test to improve the efficiency of diagnosis. Given that LOXL1 is “the whole story of the disease, not just the first chapter,” it may also be worth trying to develop treatments based on increasing its rate of production in the eye, Dr. Stefansson said. Dr. Paul R. Lichter, director of the Kellogg Eye Center at the University of Michigan, called the research “very impressive.” If patients with higher genetic risk could be identified with a cheap diagnostic test, “maybe we would look at those patients more carefully,” he said. As to why Scandinavians have the same incidence of the risk-conferring genetic variants but a higher reported incidence of exfoliative glaucoma than European-Americans, Dr. Lichter said ophthalmologists in Europe look for the disease “much better than we do.”

Genetics and Heredity
Glaucoma
Eyes and Eyesight


Knicks Rout Detroit, but Stoudemire Leaves With Sore Back

Abstract: It was a Saturday night affair that felt as if it had a case of the Mondays for most of the first half. It was the Knicks , playing their fourth game in five nights, against a Pistons team that had lost four straight, including a Friday night defeat at the hands of the Miami Heat. The Pistons were also playing without their co-leading scorer and most consistent backcourt force, Rodney Stuckey, who was out with a sore left big toe. So after a 13-0 run late in the second quarter that helped the Knicks to a 12-point halftime lead at Madison Square Garden, they were presented with an option. They could give the Pistons a chance by regressing to plodding, stylized rugby, or they could cruise while playing something resembling entertaining basketball. They chose the more aesthetically pleasing course, winning in a rout by 101-79 , bouncing back immediately after having a five-game winning streak snapped on Friday night against the Toronto Raptors. The Knicks have won six of seven games since Mike D’Antoni stepped down as coach and Mike Woodson replaced him. It is rare for a Knicks game to yield only good outcomes for the team, and Saturday’s good vibes were seemingly dashed when Amar’e Stoudemire left in the third quarter with a sore lower back. Stoudemire, whose back problems knocked him out of the playoffs last season and prevented him from playing in the off-season, had his playing status listed as questionable after he went back to the locker room. But Stoudemire and his teammates, including Tyson Chandler and Carmelo Anthony, played down the injury after the game. “It’s just got a little tight, that’s all,” Stoudemire said. “We just took precautionary measures. Just came in the back and got treatment.” Jeremy Lin also left the game with an injury in the third quarter. He had a sore left knee and returned to the bench. He was available but was not needed with the outcome in hand. Lin said his knee was “good to go,” and said the team was taking a precaution because of “overuse.” No Knick scored more than 17 points, but Stoudemire, Lin, Chandler, Anthony and J. R. Smith all finished in double figures. Anchoring a defense that held the Pistons to 37 percent shooting, Chandler tied a season high by snagging 17 rebounds. The Knicks overcame eight turnovers to build a 4-point advantage after the first quarter on the strength of good shooting and solid defense. The Pistons, their offense lacking without Stuckey, scored 10 of their 17 first-quarter points off those turnovers. Both teams flew to New York after losses Friday, and the sloppy play reflected that, with the ball bouncing off feet, fingers and faces. Sequences of back-to-back turnovers were common occurrences in the first half. “But I am concerned, from a basketball standpoint, the turnovers,” Woodson said. “It’s just ridiculous, I think. We’re just too nonchalant with the basketball and not reading it.” The Knicks said before the game that a magnetic resonance imaging test had confirmed inflammation in the right knee of Jared Jeffries, and that he would miss about two weeks. “It gives other guys an opportunity to step up, like Josh,” Woodson said, referring to the rookie Josh Harrellson. In 12 minutes on Saturday, Harrellson (4 points, 7 rebounds) fit in well, and the team played solid defense. A bigger test comes Monday against a lightning-quick Milwaukee Bucks backcourt that will demand pick-and-roll switches and constant harassment from the Knicks’ big men. The coaching matchup was intriguing because under different circumstances, Woodson and Lawrence Frank might have been on opposite benches. Frank was D’Antoni’s first choice to become the Knicks’ defensive coach last summer. When the Pistons hired Frank as their head coach, D’Antoni turned to Woodson, who had interviewed for the top coaching jobs in Detroit, Minnesota and Houston. “I struck out three times this summer,” Woodson said. Frank avoided the topic, saying, “I’m happy where I’m at.” The Knicks were forced to evaluate where they were after the game, as Woodson had pictures of the Larry O’Brien Trophy — given to the N.B.A. champion — taped above every player’s locker during the third quarter of Saturday night’s game. “I have no idea what the story is,” Stoudemire said. “But I’m a visual guy, so I love to see it. So whenever you got those type of trophy posters over your locker, it gives you that visual, that you can achieve that goal, so it’s great to see.” Stoudemire, whose improved play has spurred the Knicks during their recent surge, will have to remain healthy for those visual aids to have any significance. Rebounds Ben Wallace (0 points and 7 rebounds in 19 minutes) played what was most likely his last game at the Garden. Wallace was the anchor and Mike Woodson the architect of the defense that propelled the Pistons to the 2004 N.B.A. championship. Wallace has said that he will retire after the season. ... J. R. Smith and Iman Shumpert connected on a spectacular give-and-go alley-oop late in the fourth quarter. Shumpert said it was the first time he had executed such a play in a game situation.

New York Knicks
Detroit Pistons
Stoudemire Amar'e
Lin Jeremy
Basketball


U.N. Security Council Urged to Act on Humanitarian Aid to Syria

Abstract: UNITED NATIONS — The hard-won humanitarian cease-fire in the Syrian city of Homs — the sole success that occurred during the peace talks in Geneva — cannot be considered “progress,” the United Nations’ top official for emergency operations said Thursday evening as she urged the Security Council to ensure that aid reach those who need it and aid workers can do their work without getting shot. “Even wars have rules,” said Valerie Amos, the United Nations official, after briefing members of the Security Council, as the 15-member body weighed two competing resolutions on humanitarian access to areas ravaged by the Syrian conflict, and the United Nations mediator for Syria warned that the peace talks in Geneva were close to collapse. In the Security Council, Australia, Jordan and Luxembourg proposed one draft, calling for punitive measures on individuals and entities that obstruct aid delivery and naming specific besieged communities in need of aid. Russia, which had just days earlier dismissed that text as “a nonstarter,” proposed its own late Wednesday, lacking enforcement language and making no mention of the besieged communities. Security Council diplomats said they hoped the two texts could be reconciled. That could allow Russia to avoid vetoing a resolution on aid during the Winter Olympics in Sochi. On Thursday, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly I. Churkin, demurred when asked about the differences. “We would not say we are too far apart,” he told reporters. “One thing which unites us is the realization that the humanitarian situation in Syria is very grave and additional efforts need to be taken in order to improve it.” His American counterpart, Samantha Power, likewise declined to discuss details. Last October, the Council unanimously approved a presidential statement urging humanitarian access, though it lacked an enforcement mechanism. Since then, Ms. Amos said in her strongest remarks on the subject to date, 15 aid workers have been killed, little help has reached those in need and humanitarian laws have been “intentionally and flagrantly violated” by all parties in the war. Ms. Amos stopped short of calling for a resolution with enforcement measures. She said only that the Council should exercise “levers” and that it should be different from last fall’s presidential statement. The debate occurred as the mood darkened in Geneva, where it was clearer than ever that modest humanitarian gains had yielded no political progress. Lakhdar Brahimi, the Syria mediator, told senior United States and Russian officials in a “very grim” meeting that the Syrian government has so far refused to compromise even on the agenda, two Western diplomats said. Mr. Brahimi was “very blunt,” said one diplomat, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. He added that he believed Mr. Brahimi might call off the talks rather than risk his credibility presiding over an empty process if Russia cannot push the Syrian government to compromise. The Russians made no promises, the diplomat added. A local cease-fire allowed United Nations convoys to deliver a month’s worth of food to people trapped by a two-year government blockade of the rebel-held Old City of Homs, and to evacuate 1,400 people. Several hundred, however, were then held for questioning by security forces in a nearby shelter. “I find it difficult to describe it as progress. Our people were under fire,” Ms. Amos said. “We evacuated 1,400 people. There is nearly quarter of a million more people to go. We provided food and medicines to 2,500 people. There are over three million people in hard-to-reach communities.” Hours earlier, the top United Nations official in Syria, Yacoub El Hillo, said that he hoped the warring parties would strike similar deals elsewhere, as long as they allowed not only evacuations but also aid delivery to residents who wish to stay. Yet critics say that framing the Homs deal as a confidence-building step to jump-start political talks served chiefly to give an empty process the veneer of substance while leading only to a modest delivery of aid. Advocates of Mr. Brahimi’s choice to pull the Homs aid talks into the Geneva spotlight contend that without the added international scrutiny, perhaps no aid would have reached Homs at all. Mark Malloch-Brown, a former United Nations deputy secretary general, insisted that while the truce was useful, the only way to go forward was a Security Council resolution with teeth. “There has to be consequences for noncompliance,” he said. The Homs deal was a victory, if a modest one, for international aid workers who had insisted that humanitarian principles required delivering food to the blockaded area, not just letting civilians leave, as the government had initially proposed. As long as aid delivery continues to be twinned with evacuations, said Mr. El Hillo, who personally supervised the Homs deliveries and evacuations, the deal should be used as a model. “We certainly would like to do that,” he said in a telephone interview from Damascus, Syria, adding that future deals should be supported internationally and will mean little unless aid deliveries continue regularly. He said the Homs deal was successful in insisting that civilians should be allowed to leave war-torn areas and also that aid must be delivered to those who wished to stay — principles that should be applied to aid everyone under blockades, including by rebels. Yet other United Nations officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to express concerns about policy, said that given the poor record of aid access, deals could end up lopsided, with more evacuations than aid deliveries. The deal “puts all of us in a difficult position,” a United Nations official in Geneva said. “There’s deep unease about where it will end.”

Syria
UN Security Council
Valerie Ann Amos
Humanitarian aid
Homs Syria
Arab Spring
Bashar al-Assad
Lakhdar Brahimi
International relations
UN


France’s Conservative Parties Show Strength and National Front Gains in Local Elections

Abstract: PARIS — French voters turned toward right-leaning parties in local elections held Sunday across the country, signaling their disappointment and frustration with France ’s governing Socialist Party. However, they did not appear to flock in droves to the far-right party, the National Front, although it appeared to make a stronger showing than in any previous local elections, according to exit polls and some early returns on the Interior Ministry’s election website. “This is the first layer of the 2017 presidential election,” said Michaël Darmon, the chief political editor at the news network i-Télé. Exit polls showed the mainstream conservative party, the Union for a Popular Movement, and allied center-right parties taking about 30 percent of the vote and the National Front about 25 percent. About 20 percent went to the Socialists, while other left-leaning parties had far smaller numbers. If those figures prove accurate once complete returns are in, they will mean that the National Front advanced considerably from the 15 percent it received in the first round of similar local elections in 2011 and that the Socialists lost ground, dropping from 25 percent in 2011. Voters on Sunday chose 4,108 representatives on local councils in France’s 101 departments, which are administrative subdivisions somewhere between a state and a county but with relatively little power in the highly centralized French government. Parties could put forward a two-person ticket; if no team received more than 50 percent of the ballots, the top pairs in each district will head to a runoff next Sunday. Leaders from each of the three main parties claimed a victory of sorts. Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a Socialist, said that even if the Socialists did not do well, the total number of voters who cast a ballot for left-leaning parties was the same as those on the right. Mr. Valls and former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was recently elected to lead the Union for a Popular Movement, or the UMP, called for a “mobilization” of voters next week to defeat the National Front. Mr. Sarkozy stopped short of calling on voters to support Socialist candidates in the runoffs in order to stop a National Front candidate from winning. In contrast, Mr. Valls said voters should vote for anyone who was running against the National Front. He also implored left-leaning voters to band together “and adopt a clear position against the extreme right.” Before the election, many analysts noted that while the conservative and center-right parties had managed to form coalitions, the left remained fractured. Some French analysts also saw the Socialists’ losses as a referendum on the presidency of François Hollande, who has been unable to make significant progress on promises to improve the economy, reduce unemployment and overhaul the system of social benefits to make them more sustainable. The National Front, once seen as a fringe party, has sought to broaden its appeal in recent years, seizing on dissatisfaction with Mr. Hollande and the economy, disarray within the UMP, and widening resentment of immigrants in France. Its leader, Marine Le Pen, projects an image as a pragmatic nationalist who is tough, patriotic and accessible. What emerged clearly in this election is the “tripolarization” of the French political landscape, said Thomas Guénolé, a political analyst. He pointed to the development of three distinct strands: the mainstream right and left parties, both contending with internal troubles, and the National Front, which has gained ground over the last few elections. Nearly half of France’s eligible voters cast their ballots on Sunday. It is difficult to get a clear sense of voters’ bottom line, however, until after the runoffs. While the National Front historically does well in the first round of voting, it has not in the past been able to maintain that momentum into the second round. Although it will be a contender, few people believe it will even win enough seats to control any department in France.

France
Election
Socialist Party
National Front France
Union for a Popular Movement


Dancing With the Start-Ups

Abstract: Since at least Sarah Bernhardt’s time, celebrities have looked for ways to parlay their name recognition into extra cash. Back in the 19th century, Bernhardt — the most celebrated actress of her day — endorsed a popular brand of soap. “I have used Pears’ Soap and find there’s nothing in the world so pleasing and satisfying,” she enthused in one ad. Today, celebrity endorsements are everywhere. It’s no surprise to see people like Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry lending their star power to ads for cars, bottled water, makeup and a host of other products. Now some celebrities — both established and up-and-coming — are lavishing their promotional love on start-ups rather than big brands. Often, those deals involve equity. In exchange for a small percentage of a company, a celebrity investor agrees to provide publicity, feedback and valuable connections. Celebrities who have taken this route include Ashton Kutcher, Tyra Banks, Bono and Drew Barrymore. With equity, of course, there is a risk of losing money. But if a celebrity picks a company that turns out to be a hit, it’s a gift that keeps on giving, unlike most endorsement deals. And investing in a start-up generally requires less legwork than, say, starting a clothing line or opening a restaurant — other celebrity pet projects. The new trend could also be a matter of celebrities seeing start-ups stealing the California spotlight. “When you look at Hollywood stars, they make a certain amount of millions, and they’re used to being the ‘it’ kids,” said Anjula Acharia-Bath, who helps stars make start-up investments. “Now you see that the ‘it’ kids are these people who are building these start-ups and walking away with billions of dollars.” Timothy Karunaratne, who pairs emerging companies with influential investors, put it this way: “I think it’s a fair statement to say most people would rather be Mark Zuckerberg than Will Smith. I think that’s a fair statement, and that’s pretty fascinating.” Ms. Acharia-Bath and Mr. Karunaratne are part of an informal network that has sprung up to bridge the financing gap between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Mr. Karunaratne, in addition to serving as the C.E.O. of Parkt, an urban parking start-up, is a founder of the Startup Agency . Housed in a business incubator and accelerator in a 10th-floor penthouse on Sunset Boulevard, the agency’s open office is divided up by what appears to be the side of an airplane that’s been dipped in chrome. In an earlier era, Hugh Hefner crashed here after late nights downstairs at his Playboy Club. Mr. Karunaratne and his co-founder, Jonathan Gonen, recently united Gyft , a gift card management platform, with Mr. Kutcher, the actor. A-Grade Investments, Mr. Kutcher’s four-year-old venture capital fund, invested in Gyft. “The network that A-Grade has is very, very powerful,” said CJ MacDonald, a founder of Gyft. “They’re very well connected and they can open up doors that other people can’t.” If “Ashton picks up the phone and calls someone, that person calls back,” Mr. MacDonald added. For people like Ms. Acharia-Bath and Mr. Karunaratne, star value means little without strategic action, which might mean making introductions to potential business partners. Celebrities might also provide feedback on a product, or discuss it on a talk show. Social media also plays a part, with stars singing their products’ praises on sites and services like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. But building this bridge involves artful negotiation and deep knowledge of two very different spheres. Egos abound in both. Mr. Karunaratne cut his teeth in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs. He was always interested in the entertainment industry, particularly in making Hollywood more diverse. At 26, he left his finance job to work in the mailroom of the talent agency William Morris, now William Morris Endeavor. He left his job as an agent trainee in 2012 with the intention of starting his own company, which crystallized into the Startup Agency after he met Mr. Gonen. “A lot of people think that you can just connect” a celebrity and a company, Mr. Karunaratne said. “And, yes, connecting is great, but there is still a lot of other stuff that has to be done.” Image Tim Karunaratne’s agency connected a new company with Ashton Kutcher’s venture capital fund. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times The network of connectors extends beyond Los Angeles. In San Francisco, for example, there’s Shervin Pishevar, a founder of the venture capital fund SherpaVentures and a strategic adviser for Uber, the ride-sharing service. In New York, there’s Nathan Coyle, a former talent agent for Creative Artists Agency who now leads business development for the lifestyle and e-commerce website Refinery29 . (He helped bring Ms. Barrymore on board as the website’s editor at large earlier this year.) For some, like Ms. Acharia-Bath, advising stars about their investments isn’t a full-time job. After working for the Forsyth Group, an executive search firm that hires talent for start-ups, she became C.E.O. of DesiHits , which connects Hollywood producers with South Asian stars. Her work in the music industry helped her cultivate ties with celebrities who now help fund many of the companies in which she also has a personal investment. The stars include Priyanka Chopra , the singer and actress, and Siva Kaneswaran, a singer and a member of the Wanted , the pop band. Mr. Kaneswaran invested in the Muse , a career search tool, after Ms. Acharia-Bath told him about it. This summer, he moved from London to Los Angeles in part to connect with accelerators there and to learn about more emerging companies. “I wanted to get more involved in start-ups so I could actually be part of developing a concept and help it grow,” he said. Janina Gavankar , an actress who stars alongside Debra Messing in “The Mysteries of Laura,” a new TV series, invested in the Hunt in 2012 on Mr. Karunaratne’s advice. Ms. Gavankar called herself an “honest, savvy user” of the Hunt site, which helps people track down and buy items they see online or on the street. She said she shared her Internet-scouring methods with Tim Weingarten, the Hunt’s C.E.O. “I’m a hunter,” Ms. Gavankar said. “Somebody posts something and I say: ‘Ha! I’m going to find it.’ I go down the rabbit hole.” Mr. Weingarten says he takes Ms. Gavankar’s input into consideration, adding that his No. 1 goal when looking for celebrity investors is to “find somebody who is influential and will use the product organically and have passion about it, so their usage doesn’t become about just having equity in the company.” His investors include Ms. Banks and Christina Milian, the singer and actress. Ms. Milian said her personal affinities guided her equity investments in the Hunt and in French Girls , an iPhone app for drawing portraits. “You can go with your gut feeling,” she said. “As a consumer, what do I want to download? What do I want to spend money on?” Not all pairings come together seamlessly. Before linking Gyft with A-Grade Investments, Mr. Kutcher’s firm, Mr. Karunaratne tried to forge a connection between Gyft and a television personality who saw her main value as a tweeter. But “the conversion on Twitter is pretty low,” Mr. Karunaratne said. “We’ve seen things tweeted out to 20 million people with a link in it and maybe 500 people clicked on the link.” Ms. Acharia-Bath finds herself fighting the expectation that every start-up will have a Hollywood ending, with a heady initial public offering and huge payouts. “Now people are so savvy about big exits to the point where it’s unrealistic because everyone thinks everything will be like Facebook or WhatsApp,” she said, referring to Facebook’s recent acquisition of WhatsApp, the messaging platform, in a deal worth as much as $19 billion. One could blame — or credit — Rohan Oza for setting a high bar. In 2004, as head of marketing at Vitaminwater, Mr. Oza brought the rapper 50 Cent, formally known as Curtis Jackson, on board as an equity partner. When Coca-Cola bought Vitaminwater’s parent company for more than $4 billion in 2007, Mr. Jackson made an estimated $100 million. “He integrated it into his life, the brand blew up, and he made an enormous amount of money, much more than what people get from endorsements,” Mr. Oza said, adding that the partnership emphasized “authenticity,” with Mr. Jackson consulting on a flavor named after him, Formula 50. That personal element remains crucial in celebrity-start-up collaborations. The trend may seem to offer yet another way for the rich to get richer. Then there’s the question of whether fans ought to know if a star has a financial stake in the product du jour, or if her exclamation point and emoji-laden tweet about it was typed without any dollar signs in mind. “It’s a little bit murkier” than the traditional endorsement model, said David Bell , a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. But with social-media-skilled consumers and news-hungry blogs ready to call out stars for doing anything seemingly untoward, it’s in a celebrity’s best interest to promote products and services they genuinely support, he said. “There’s a built-in reputation defense mechanism,” he said. “If I already have an engaged base of fans and I start endorsing things that aren’t that good, presumably that information would travel pretty quickly. If you’re doing something that’s underhand, odds are it would end up on TMZ or something like that.”

Celebrity
Venture capital
Startup
Actor
Computers and the Internet
Tech Industry


U.S.A. Basketball Is Already Cruising in Rio. Now, to Take the Court.

Abstract: RIO DE JANEIRO — Every four years, the same questions tend to surface before the Summer Olympics: Will the host city be ready? Is Usain Bolt still the world’s fastest man? And what sort of cushy digs will the United States basketball players find for themselves? The Games are underway, Bolt is back to defend his sprinting titles, and once again, the men’s and women’s basketball players from the United States are avoiding the athletes’ village. Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant, Diana Taurasi and the rest of their high-profile teammates are staying on a luxury cruise ship, docked at a pier on the other side of the city. If the team’s lodging seems standoffish, that is by design. U.S.A. Basketball, the organization that oversees the national men’s and women’s teams, has shunned the athletes’ village since 1992. The team stayed on a ship at the 2004 Games in Athens, then used hotels in Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012. “The boat we’re staying on is very nice, very secluded,” said Angel McCoughtry, who is playing in her second Olympics. “Let’s be honest — how can our men’s and women’s teams stay in the village? They would get bombarded, especially the men’s team. They won’t have peace.” The players, particularly the men, are exceedingly well paid as professionals. But other highly compensated athletes seemingly have no qualms about mixing with the other Olympians in the village. Bolt, probably the biggest star of these Games, checked into the village the other day. Michael Phelps, the world’s most famous swimmer, ran into Novak Djokovic, the top-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, in the village and asked for a selfie. The United States women’s gymnastics team, the showpiece of the American delegation, is also in the village. In fact, a majority of the 554 American athletes stay there. Jerry Colangelo, the director of U.S.A. Basketball, said keeping the basketball players in seclusion was a matter of security. “Our players are probably the most recognizable athletes in the world,” he said, explaining the “extra precaution” being taken. “We have our own idea of how to do that,” Colangelo said. “We can’t just throw them in with — once the International Olympic Committee decided they wanted pro players, to allow pro players to play, we have to protect them. They’re very valuable assets.” Image Kevin Durant, right, and DeAndre Jordan, of the United States men’s basketball team, boarding the Silver Cloud cruise ship. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press Fans are kept at a distance behind a guarded fence with metal detectors, but they have been sticking their cellphones through the fencing to take photographs of the ship — the Silver Cloud, part of the Silversea Cruises fleet, which can accommodate 296 people. U.S.A. Basketball officials are circumspect when asked about the accommodations. Reporters are invited to tour the athletes’ village, but not the ship, bobbing in place at the Pier Mauá. There are 46 N.B.A. players and 26 W.N.B.A. players at these Games representing many countries. Several who do not play for the United States seemed to be enjoying life at the village last week. Andrew Bogut, a couple of months removed from playing in the N.B.A. finals with the Golden State Warriors, was sitting in the village on Thursday, decked in a Team Australia warm-up suit, eating food from McDonald’s with two teammates. Leandro Barbosa and Nene are staying there, too, along with all the other Brazilian Olympians. Manu Ginobili of Argentina posted on Twitter a view from his room in the village. Pau Gasol, Ricky Rubio, Jose Calderon and the other players of Spain snapped photographs around the village grounds all week. Tina Charles, who won a gold medal with the United States women’s team in 2012, said the team’s accommodations meant that “you’re not able to interact with athletes, you’re not able to see them every day, build relationships, build friendships that way.” Maya Moore, appearing at her second Games, said she understood the pros and cons, but she said the ship made it easier to focus. “There is a level of socialization that happens in the village that takes energy,” she said. “Over the course of two weeks, it can wear on you, even if it’s a little bit.” The Plaza Mauá, on the city’s eastern waterfront, where the ship is docked, was revamped as one of the legacy projects of these Games, with new museums and areas for outdoor activities. Warehouses along the pier are now used as event and party spaces. Taurasi, one of the women’s team captains, lightheartedly described the ship as having “a nice, 19th-century Russian décor.” Jimmy Butler, a member of the men’s team, said there were a pool, a gym, social rooms and conference rooms. Players can order room service anytime. “Same thing we’d do in a hotel,” Butler said. “It just floats.”

2016 Summer Olympics
Ships and Shipping
Basketball
USA Basketball
Rio de Janeiro


Gunmen Allowed to Flee After Hostage Standoff at Pakistan School

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A mass hostage-taking ended peacefully on Monday when a group of armed men released more than 200 schoolchildren after holding them for several hours in northwestern Pakistan, officials said. The gunmen, who the government said had previously been involved in ransom kidnappings, were allowed to flee, local officials said. The children, ages 8 to 12, were taken hostage along with their teachers in the Bannu District of the North-West Frontier Province after the armed men briefly kidnapped a top local health official in the neighboring Karak District. The police in Karak gave chase and, in a firefight, killed one gunman. The others released the local official, Dr. Hussain Jan, along with his driver, the officials said. The gunmen then forced their way into a primary school in Domail, in Bannu, the local news media reported. Police officers and security forces surrounded the school compound, urging the gunmen to surrender and to release the children and their teachers. But the gunmen threatened to blow themselves up and kill the children if they were not provided safe passage, news agencies reported. There were conflicting reports of how many children were held. The Interior Ministry said the number was 200 to 250, but some reports said there were fewer than three dozen. A delegation of tribal elders eventually went into the school to negotiate. Javed Iqbal Cheema, a retired brigadier who is the head of national crisis management in Islamabad, said the elders had persuaded the gunmen to surrender. “All children have been freed,” Mr. Cheema said. “No one was hurt.” The elders allowed the gunmen to leave, according to news agency reports based on interviews with some of the negotiators. The Interior Ministry characterized the gunmen as “criminals” in what seemed to be an effort to distinguish them from pro-Taliban tribal extremists. Bannu District lies adjacent to the restive, semiautonomous tribal areas along the Afghan border in northwestern Pakistan, where pro-Taliban extremists have been battling the Pakistani Army. Government and army installations in Bannu have come under repeated attack as the militants’ influence has spread across the tribal areas into the settled districts of North-West Frontier Province. President Pervez Musharraf, who was in London on a visit to Europe, called the situation “an act of desperation.” Separately, an American diplomat was found dead in Islamabad on Monday in what is suspected to be a suicide, Pakistani and Western officials said. The United States Embassy identified the man as Keith Ryan, 37, a senior special agent in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mr. Ryan had been serving in the United States mission in Islamabad since November 2006, according to a statement released by the embassy. He leaves a wife and three young children. “Mr. Ryan was a well-respected, trusted and longtime member of the U.S. Mission in Pakistan,” the embassy statement said. “His death is a great loss.” The police officials in Islamabad said Mr. Ryan’s body had been found in the bathroom of his residence in an upscale neighborhood. There was a bullet wound on his head. The embassy statement said that there would be an investigation but that there did not appear to be any foul play.


Canadian Official Resigns

Abstract: Marcel Aubut, a member of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, has resigned as president of the Canadian Olympic Committee while under investigation following a sexual harassment complaint.

Canadian Olympic Committee
Marcel Aubut
Olympics
Sexual harassment
Canada


Microsoft’s Board Meets on Yahoo Bid

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft ’s directors met Wednesday to discuss how to proceed with the company’s attempted takeover of Yahoo , according to a person briefed on the discussions. The board was expected to consider a range of options, including Microsoft raising its offer in an attempt to break the stalemate between the companies, this person said. In recent days, Microsoft has considered increasing the bid, currently valued at $29.06 a share, to $32 or $33, said this person, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the discussions. Microsoft’s chief executive Steven A. Ballmer , has personally called some large Yahoo shareholders to get their support for a bid in that range. But Microsoft executives have been frustrated by signs that such shareholders are holding out for an even higher offer — in the range of $35 to $37 a share. Without that higher offer, those shareholders have been unwilling to press Yahoo’s management into entering serious negotiations, this person said. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. Earlier in April, Mr. Ballmer threatened to start a proxy fight to oust Yahoo’s board if the two companies did not reach a negotiated deal by April 26. The deadline passed without an agreement or substantive negotiations between the companies. Last week, Mr. Ballmer raised the possibility that Microsoft could drop its bid altogether. Other Microsoft executives have said publicly that in the apparent absence of alternatives for Yahoo, their company would be unwilling to increase its offer, and said they planned to announce a decision this week. Analysts maintain that if Microsoft abandons its bid, Yahoo’s share price could be expected to drop substantially. This would not preclude Microsoft from trying to reach a negotiated merger agreement with Yahoo at a later date. Yahoo has repeatedly rejected Microsoft’s offer, originally valued at a total of $44.6 billion, saying it substantially undervalued the company. With a decline in Microsoft’s share price, the value of its stock-and-cash offer has fallen to $41.8 billion. Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang , has said his board is not opposed to a sale to Microsoft at a higher price. Yahoo continues to explore other options that would allow it to remain independent, including a combination with the AOL Internet unit of Time Warner and a search advertising partnership with Google, according to people close to the company. Spokesmen for Yahoo, Google and Time Warner declined to comment. Google and Yahoo recently conducted a two-week test in which Google delivered ads alongside Yahoo’s search results. The test was intended to determine how much more Yahoo could earn by outsourcing some of its search ads to Google, whose technology is more effective. The results have been positive, according to people close to Yahoo. Antitrust experts have said that a broader search advertising partnership between the companies would be likely to raise objections from regulators, and the Justice Department has begun asking questions about the test. But executives from Google and Yahoo have said it would be possible to structure the deal in a way that would placate regulators. A person close to the discussions said no deal between Google and Yahoo was imminent.

Microsoft Corp
Yahoo Inc
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Computers and the Internet
Antitrust Actions and Laws
San Francisco (Calif)
Ballmer Steven A
Yang Jerry


Scheduling Oddity Is Product of Rainout

Abstract: Two of the oldest franchises in baseball took the field Sunday at Yankee Stadium to take part in one of the pastime’s fading traditions. Fans in yellow Roberto Clemente jerseys and pinstriped Mickey Mantle shirts walked through the turnstiles holding a rarity in their hands: tickets to a single-admission Sunday doubleheader. Friday’s rainout against the Pittsburgh Pirates gave patrons with tickets to Sunday’s contest the opportunity to watch two games for the price of one. The last time the Yankees played a single-admission doubleheader at home on a Sunday was April 13, 1997, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. For years, fans could only yearn for the nostalgic pleasure of watching 18 or more consecutive innings during a single afternoon. But few thought such an event was possible in 2014, because of personal or professional obligations, both for the players and those in attendance. Fathers had games of their own to coach in Little League. Others, like Greg Stanton, had different plans — in Stanton’s case, tickets with his wife for an evening performance of “Kinky Boots” on Broadway. For them, the musical tale of Charlie and Lola trumped the prospect of a pitching duel between Gerrit Cole and Vidal Nuno. Several players and coaches had honed their skills playing in doubleheaders. Pirates Manager Clint Hurdle said that he was so accustomed to playing in back-to-back games on the same day in the minor leagues that he was not aware of the term “split doubleheader” until he was called up to the majors. Growing up in Florida, Hurdle was a bat boy for the Cocoa Astros of the Florida State League. Back then, he watched doubleheaders featuring future All-Stars like Bob Watson and John Mayberry. “To me, that was the coolest thing ever,” Hurdle said, “to go watch two games and hang out.” Yankees Manager Joe Girardi, who remembered playing in afternoon doubleheaders in college at Northwestern, said it was unusual for the Yankees to schedule a single-admission doubleheader. They last did so on Sept. 29, 2004. “You have to be careful of some of the guys, make sure you don’t run them into the ground today,” Girardi said before the first game. Brendan Ryan, who has mainly been a backup utility infielder for the Yankees the last two seasons, said he liked the format, in part because he expected a larger crowd. “It’s definitely a benefit for us,” he said. “It beats a 1 o’clock and a 7 o’clock and being here for 15 hours or something. I don’t have to change or anything.” Brian Roberts took a different view. “I don’t think anybody likes doubleheaders, period,” he said with a chuckle. The Yankees are not the only franchise to have abandoned the single-admission doubleheader. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the last one played in the majors was on April 17, 2011. In the 1964 season, there were 103 single-admission doubleheaders. Players cited travel concerns and the compact 162-game schedule as possible causes for the change. Hurdle, however, said he thought economics had played a role. As a young player, he said, it was explained to him that split doubleheaders were “basically gate fuel.” Many stadium employees, including ice cream servers and ushers, were working both games. Some beer vendors, who normally have to stop serving two hours into a game or at the middle of the seventh inning, whichever comes first, said they had been instructed to enforce that rule for both games. Sunday provided an ideal backdrop for fans. The temperature was 66 degrees at the 1:08 p.m. first pitch. By the fourth inning, the 200 level was near capacity, and the only noticeable empty sections were in the field level behind both foul poles. The first game, a 4-3 Yankees win, lasted 2 hours 52 minutes. But by the 4:38 p.m. start of the second game, a 5-3 loss, it appeared as if two-thirds of the fans had left. Kevin Kuntz, a Pirates fan who grew up attending weekend doubleheaders at Three Rivers Stadium and now lives in Connecticut, brought his 5-year-old son, Ryan, and his father-in-law, Mark Mason. Mason said he had watched Mantle play in doubleheaders at the old Yankee Stadium. Fans in the bleachers would dress in white T-shirts and shorts in hopes of altering the batter’s vision. Kuntz and Mason were willing to stay for both games, but their decision would ultimately depend on Ryan’s stamina. “My guess is we’re going to be here for about five innings,” Kuntz said before the first game. They made it until the third inning.

Baseball
Yankees
Yankee Stadium NYC
Pittsburgh Pirates


Thousands Protest on Anniversary of Hong Kong’s Return to China

Abstract: HONG KONG — As Hong Kong marked the 18th anniversary on Wednesday of its handover from Britain to China, thousands of residents took to the streets in what has become an annual tradition of rallying for greater democracy. But in contrast to last year, when by the organizers’ estimate the turnout was more than half a million, the crowd this year was tiny. Its notably smaller size — the police estimate was 20,000, which would make it the smallest since 2008 — seemed to speak to the demonstrators’ exhaustion, after months of intense but unfruitful political bickering, and to their frustration over the way ahead. “I’m so upset. None of my friends would come with me this year,” said Lam Ip, a 30-year-old civil servant who in the end came on his own. “They said that the government wouldn’t even give in to the massive protests last year. ‘Why would they fear a march?’ ” Daisy Chan, a spokeswoman for the march’s organizer, the Civil Human Rights Front, said: “There’s no longer any urgent topics on the table that could draw many people to the streets. We need some time to contemplate our next step.” Last year , the throngs who braved sweltering heat and intermittent tropical downpours to pace through the skyscraper-lined streets of the city’s commercial center had hoped that dogged persistence would win them a free and democratic election of the city’s next leader. That hope, which ebbed and flowed for nearly a year, reached a dead end two weeks ago when a vote in the local legislature ensured that only 1,200 people among the five million adults in Hong Kong would have a say in the choice of a new chief executive in 2017. Despite the uncertainty over how and when Hong Kong’s democratic system will evolve, many of the demonstrators on Wednesday were pleased with the government’s failure on June 18 to enact what Beijing had called “ the most democratic system ever ” in Hong Kong, a plan that would have given residents a direct vote for the city’s leader for the first time. The catch was that voters would be able to choose from among only two or three candidates approved by a committee dominated by people loyal to Beijing. More than a third of the city’s legislators rejected the plan, enough to defeat it. At an official event Wednesday morning celebrating the anniversary of the handover, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying expressed his resentment that “Hong Kong has missed a valuable opportunity.” With the 2017 election fated to follow the same procedure that handed him a five-year term in 2012, Mr. Leung said his government would now focus on Hong Kong’s economy and living standards, instead of dwelling on democratic development. Image Protesters marched Wednesday during an annual demonstration commemorating Hong Kong's handover to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Thousands took to the streets to call for full democracy, but crowds were noticeably smaller than in previous years. Credit Kin Cheung/Associated Press “As the experience of some European democracies shows, democratic systems and procedures are no panacea for economic and livelihood issues,” he said, as a debt crisis in Europe rattled financial markets and threatened European unity. Later in the day, thousands of marchers streamed into the commercial heart of Hong Kong. Most of them were young, and many had participated in the Occupy movement last year, which paralyzed parts of the city for 79 days in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to force the authorities into making political concessions. While Beijing may take heart at the smaller pro-democracy march this year, it nonetheless faces a new generation of activists who have proved their readiness to defy the law and the police for their political ideals. Many young demonstrators, like Karkar Chin, a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who turned 18 at the height of the protests last year — a day after the police used tear gas against protesters — said that she had registered as a voter to put more democracy advocates in Hong Kong’s legislature. People who were born as late as 1997, the year of the handover, will be old enough to vote in local elections this year, potentially empowering even more politicians skeptical of the Communist Party’s authority. An increasing number of these young people eschew a Chinese identity and are gravitating instead to a “Hong Konger” identity. Several groups fund-raising on the sidelines of the march on Wednesday, like one called Civic Passion, were the product of such “localist” sentiment. The group and its overwhelmingly young followers advocate more confrontational tactics to combat what they see as mainland Chinese influences in Hong Kong that are detrimental to the city’s values. On Sunday, clashes broke out in the Mong Kok district when several localist groups confronted women who were singing and dancing to songs in Mandarin, the language of the mainland, rather than the local language, Cantonese. The authorities are left with limited tools to win over these young people. An attempt by the Hong Kong government in 2012 to mandate “national education” in local schools, an effort to build Chinese identity among Hong Kong students, instead led to huge protests. It also catapulted Joshua Wong — who was only 14 when he joined, and later led, the efforts against the proposed curriculum — to international fame. Mr. Wong went on to become a prominent leader in the street protests last fall, and the education plan has been shelved indefinitely. In addition, a plan in 2003 to enact an internal security law known as Article 23, which would punish sedition offenders in Hong Kong with long prison sentences, created the tradition of a large, pro-democracy march every July 1. On Wednesday afternoon, after the Chinese government announced that it had passed a broad national security law asserting the importance of guarding the Communist Party’s interests in all corners of the globe, and even outer space, Mr. Leung promptly clarified that it did not apply to Hong Kong and that his government did not have any plan to enact Article 23 during its current term. “C.Y. Leung would not touch these sensitive issues,” said Willy Lam, a history and China studies professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “I think he remembers 2003 very well, when half a million people demonstrated. He might provoke another Occupy movement if he tries.”

Hong Kong
Civil Unrest
China
Democracy
Communist Party of China
Leung Chun-ying
C.Y. Leung
Joshua Wong
Civic Passion
Great Britain


Federal Contracts Plunge, Squeezing Private Companies

Abstract: The big business of Washington — federal contract work — is losing some steam. After spiraling higher for much of the last decade, the value of federal contracts awarded to companies is falling rapidly. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the total fell by $58 billion, or roughly 11 percent. It was the steepest decline — in percentage and nominal terms — in at least a decade, according to an analysis of federal contract data by The New York Times. The federal government is still awarding hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts. For the 2013 fiscal year, the total was $460 billion. On Wednesday, the House approved a $1.1 trillion spending bill for the current fiscal year, which would include a sizable amount of contracts. But for many businesses — particularly small ones used to lucrative contract work — the trend is worrying. Even for major corporations like Boeing, the cost of Washington’s budget battles is coming into sharp focus. Few expect contract work to rise broadly in 2014 and many expect the decline to continue, given the politics of the budget. Small-business owners like Lisa Harris, who runs an environmental consulting firm in Tucson, are feeling the reductions most acutely. As federal contracts have slowed, Ms. Harris said, she has let go half of her 35 workers. The rest have had to take brief furloughs. “I am down to the bare bones,” she said. The latest decline largely reflects cuts in military spending related to Iraq and Afghanistan, and efforts to squeeze the budget with voluntary cuts and the broad reductions known as sequestration. Contract spending had been declining since President Obama took office, but not as sharply. The decline during the Obama administration contrasts with the administration of President George W. Bush, when contracts more than doubled after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Contracts at the Defense Department fell most last year. The Pentagon awarded about $308 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2013. That was about $54 billion less than in the 2012 fiscal year. Though contracting figures can fluctuate after the government makes awards, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, which oversees contracting, confirmed that no significant changes were expected. Joseph G. Jordan, who will resign as administrator of the office on Friday for a job in the private sector, attributed some of the decline to agencies employing “smarter, strategic buying techniques.” The procurement office is trying to ensure that cost-saving measures, such as bulk purchasing, become part of the normal contracting process, he said. But Daniel I. Gordon, who led the office during Mr. Obama’s first term, said reduced government spending could hold back the nation’s fragile economy. He predicted that federal spending would continue to decline in coming years. “This is the new reality,” said Mr. Gordon, who is associate dean for government procurement law studies at the George Washington University Law School. “In 2014, you could see another drop of 10 percent.” Like Ms. Harris in Tucson, Heather Cotter said the decline has been trying for her Washington consulting firm, which focuses on public safety. She began working with federal agencies in 2009. Initially, the money was good. “The first two years were pretty rock ’n’ roll,” Ms. Cotter said. Roughly 90 percent of her small firm’s revenue came from federal contracts, she said. Then the work dried up. Last year, she changed her business model and began focusing on web seminars, mostly for local law enforcement. Federal contracts now account for a fifth of her business. Eric DeMarco, chief executive of Kratos Defense and Security Solutions, which produces electronics, and satellite and other security products, saw his company’s contracts fall last year. “Our commercial business went up, thank God,” Mr. DeMarco said. He said the thinning of the budget will ultimately be good for Kratos, which is based in San Diego and derives more than half of its $1 billion in revenue from the government. Agencies, he said, will favor firms that can deliver innovative products for reduced prices. “It’s giving us a shot that we didn’t have before,” Mr. DeMarco said. “I’m going to figure out how to deliver that widget for $20. There is some good here, as well as pain.” Major corporations are feeling the pinch, too. Boeing and Raytheon, two of the largest recipients of federal contracts, had declining awards last year. “I caution against drawing too broad of a conclusion from year-over-year data,” said Todd Blecher, of Boeing. “There’s a regular ebb and flow to government contracting that can cause what otherwise would be notable fluctuations in annual data.” A Raytheon spokesman declined to comment. But Lockheed Martin, the top recipient of federal contracts, won about $43 billion last year, an increase from $35 billion the previous year. While small businesses received about 18 percent of federal contracts in the last two years, total dollars awarded to the companies tumbled to $83 billion from about $90 billion. The total impact on small businesses is difficult to determine because many rely on subcontracts from large companies, which are hard to track. As large companies feel squeezed, they may be less likely to dole out jobs to smaller suppliers, or the work may become too competitive for little companies to survive. Kathryn Waldron, who owns KAU Inc., a general contracting company in Fredericksburg, Va., said dozens of contractors often vie for work that pays relatively little. And some are submitting bids that seem impossibly low. “There is no point in doing a project if you are not going to make any money,” she said.

Government procurement
Federal Budget
Defense contractor
Small business
Boeing


Mayor Details New Hurricane Sandy Aid Reforms

Abstract: For thousands of New Yorkers whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, the rebuilding process has been a slog of navigating the federal bureaucracy and an alphabet soup of municipal agencies, with residents of Staten Island and the Rockaways accusing the city of paralysis and, in some cases, neglect. Mayor Bill de Blasio has pledged to overhaul the city’s recovery efforts, and on Thursday he announced an initial set of reforms that he said would jump-start the process, even as he acknowledged that his newly installed hurricane recovery team had more work to do in the months ahead. Under the new rules, about 4,000 more residents than initially planned will be eligible to receive compensation from the government for repairs they have already performed on damaged homes. Hundreds more will be eligible to receive the full value of their property if they decide to vacate. By the end of summer, the mayor said, the city planned to have started construction on 500 new homes and to have mailed out 500 reimbursement checks for previously performed repairs. As of Thursday, only 30 residents had received the payments. Mr. de Blasio was setting relatively modest goals — thousands of homeowners are expected to eventually participate in some aspect of the city’s recovery efforts — but housing advocates said it was a productive step after a period of relative inactivity from the city. “Anything that helps expedite the assistance to the homeowners who are still in need, I think is very positive,” said Brad Gair, a former director of the city’s housing recovery operations in the Bloomberg administration. “The challenge really becomes how you implement and process that.” Image Mayor Bill De Blasio hosts a press conference on Hurricane Sandy relief in Staten Island. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The mayor did not dispute that challenges were still ahead, as the city and residents alike attempt to steer through a labyrinth of federal regulations and red tape designed to protect against fraud and abuse, and ensure that any reconstruction is consistent with new, storm-resistant standards. “This is an ongoing process to say the least,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference held in a former automobile dealership in the Midland Beach section of Staten Island. The city has spent very little of the $648 million in federal aid it has set aside for housing recovery, and is hoping to get $1 billion more in federal funds later this year. Mr. de Blasio affixed his own reputation to the success of the relief efforts, telling his Staten Island audience that we “will be coming back here personally” with updates on the progress. To expand eligibility for government compensation, Mr. de Blasio’s team waived certain income ceilings that had been in place. Mr. Gair warned that the city would have to be careful to avoid breaching certain guidelines, because some federal recovery money is earmarked for recipients with low and moderate incomes. The de Blasio administration also said it would be reassigning workers at the Buildings Department to focus exclusively on hurricane relief, waive some city water bills for empty homes and look to employ residents from storm-affected areas to aid in construction and repairs. Mr. de Blasio received a warm reception at the news conference, but one of the other speakers, James S. Oddo, the Staten Island borough president, vented some of the frustration that his constituents have experienced in the nearly 18 months since the storm came ashore. “Staten Islanders and those impacted by the storm have been inundated with words,” Mr. Oddo said. “Lots of words, and haven’t seen a whole lot of action. And I frankly don’t want to add to that.” He pledged “to implore and to beg” Mr. de Blasio to personally oversee the recovery. “Forgive me for being defensive,” Mr. Oddo added. “When you become an elected official on Staten Island, you don’t stop being a Staten Islander.”

Hurricane Sandy
Federal Aid
Bill de Blasio
Staten Island
NYC


Yankees Sign Reliever (Matt Thornton) and Cut Outfielder (Vernon Wells)

Abstract: With a glut of outfielders and a shortage of left-handed relief pitchers, the Yankees swapped out one for the other Friday, cutting Vernon Wells and signing Matt Thornton. Thornton, a durable left-hander, agreed to a two-year, $7 million deal earlier this off-season. Wells, 35, who was designated for assignment to clear room on the roster for Thornton, is set in 2014 to make $24,642,857, paid out by three teams. Toronto, which signed Wells to a seven-year, $126 million contract in December 2006, owes him $18.6 million. The Los Angeles Angels owe him $3,642,857, and the Yankees owe him the final $2.4 million. The Yankees acquired Wells toward the end of spring training last year. In his first 38 games, he batted .301 and hit 10 home runs to keep the Yankees competitive. But in his final 92 games, he batted .199, with one home run. In part because of Wells’s drop-off, the Yankees added Alfonso Soriano over the summer, and this off-season, they signed outfielders Jacoby Ellsbury and Carlos Beltran, reinforcing expectations that the end was near for Wells. “Thank you @Yankees for the opportunity to be a part of such a storied franchise,” Wells wrote on Twitter on Friday. Thornton, 37, pitched for the Chicago White Sox and the Boston Red Sox last season. He will replace Boone Logan, who signed with Colorado, as the main left-hander in the Yankees’ bullpen. Thornton is the only major leaguer to have pitched in at least 55 games in each of the past nine seasons. The Yankees last signed a left-handed reliever with a notably heavy workload before the 2011 season, when they brought in Pedro Feliciano. He never threw a pitch for them because of injury. But Feliciano’s workload was far more extreme. He had appeared in 92 games in 2010, 88 in 2009 and 86 in 2008. Thornton has never pitched in more than 74 games (2008 and 2012). Last year, he pitched in 60 games and limited left-handed hitters to a .235 batting average.

Baseball
Yankees
Matt Thornton
Vernon Wells