Hard Times in Venezuela Breed Malaria as Desperate Flock to Mines

Abstract: THE ALBINO MINE, Venezuela — The 12th time Reinaldo Balocha got malaria, he hardly rested at all. With the fever still rattling his body, he threw a pick ax over his shoulder and got back to work — smashing stones in an illegal gold mine. As a computer technician from a big city, Mr. Balocha was ill-suited for the mines, his soft hands used to working keyboards, not the earth. But Venezuela’s economy collapsed on so many levels that inflation had obliterated his salary , along with his hopes of preserving a middle-class life. So, like tens of thousands of other people from across the country, Mr. Balocha came to these open, swampy mines scattered across the jungle, looking for a future. Here, waiters, office workers, taxi drivers, college graduates and even civil servants on vacation from their government jobs are out panning for black-market gold, all under the watchful eyes of an armed group that taxes them and threatens to tie them to posts if they disobey. It is a society turned upside down , a place where educated people abandon once-comfortable jobs in the city for dangerous, backbreaking work in muddy pits, desperate to make ends meet . And it comes with a steep price: Malaria, long driven to the fringes of the country, is festering in the mines and back with a vengeance. Venezuela was the first nation in the world to be certified by the World Health Organization for eradicating malaria in its most populated areas, beating the United States and other developed countries to that milestone in 1961. It was a huge accomplishment for a small nation, one that helped pave Venezuela’s development as an oil power and fueled hopes that a model to stamp out malaria across the globe was at hand. Since then, the world has dedicated enormous amounts of time and money to beating back the disease, with deaths plummeting by 60 percent in places with malaria in recent years, according to the W.H.O. But in Venezuela, the clock is running backward. The country’s economic turmoil has brought malaria back, sweeping the disease out of the remote jungle areas where it quietly persisted and spreading it around the nation at levels not seen in Venezuela for 75 years, medical experts say. It all starts with the mines. With the economy in tatters, at least 70,000 people from all walks of life have been streaming into this mining region over the past year, said Jorge Moreno, a leading mosquito expert in Venezuela. As they hunt for gold in watery pits, the perfect breeding ground for the mosquitoes that spread the disease, they are catching malaria by the tens of thousands. Image Ana María Padrón with her two sons, who were fighting malaria, in May at their home in El Dique. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times Then, with the disease in their blood, they return home to Venezuela’s cities. But because of the economic collapse, there is often no medicine and little fumigation to prevent mosquitoes there from biting them and passing malaria to others, sickening tens of thousands more people and leaving entire towns desperate for help. The economic breakdown has “triggered a great migration in Venezuela, and right behind it is the spread of malaria,” said Dr. Moreno, a researcher at a state-run laboratory in the mining region. “With this breakdown comes a disease that is cooked in the same pot.” Once out of the mines, malaria spreads quickly. Five hours away in Ciudad Guayana, a rusting former industrial boomtown where many are now jobless and have taken to wildcatting in the mines, a crowd of 300 people packed the waiting room of a clinic in May. All had symptoms of the disease: fevers, icy chills and uncontrollable tremors. There were no lights because the government had cut power to save electricity. There were no medicines because the Health Ministry had not delivered any. Health workers administered blood tests with their bare hands because they were out of gloves. Maribel Supero clutched her 23-year-old son as he trembled, unable to speak. José Castro held his 18-month-old daughter as she screamed. Griselda Bello, who works at the clinic, waved her hands helplessly and told yet another patient to hold on a bit longer. The pills had run out. There was nothing she could do. “Come back tomorrow at 10 a.m.,” she said. “My God,” the patient said. “Someone might die by then.” “Indeed, they might,” she said. In the nearby town of Pozo Verde, residents said malaria had swept in after miners began returning home sick, the government fumigators having vanished two years ago. Now, the public high school has become an incubating ground of its own: A quarter of its 400 students have contracted malaria since November. “You would think we would do something — a cordon, a quarantine,” said Arebalo Enríquez, the principal of the school, who contracted malaria, as did his wife, mother and seven other members of his family. Officially, the spread of malaria in Venezuela has become a state secret. The government has not published epidemiological reports on the disease in the past year, and it says there is no crisis. Image In Ciudad Guayana, hundreds of people, all with symptoms of malaria, overflowed a clinic in May. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times But the most recent internal figures, obtained by The New York Times from Venezuelan doctors involved in compiling it, confirms a surge is underway. In the first six months of the year, malaria cases rose 72 percent, to a total of 125,000, according to the figures. The disease cut a wide path through the country, with cases present in more than half of its 23 states. And among the malaria strains present here is Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the most fatal form of the disease. “It is a situation of national shame,” said Dr. José Oletta, a former Venezuelan health minister who lives in the capital, Caracas, where malaria cases are now appearing, too. “I was seeing this kind of thing when I was a medical student a half-century ago. It hurts me. The disease had disappeared.” In El Dique, a rural town where malaria was largely unknown until two years ago, Juana García, 66, sat outside her home, newly widowed since her husband fell ill with the disease and died. She hardly spoke or moved from her chair. “She will keep fighting,” said her daughter Ana María Padrón. Inside Ms. Padrón’s adobe home, her two sons were fighting malaria, too. Almost like clockwork, their fevers began in the morning: at 8 a.m. for Omar, who is 8; at 11 for Aristides, who is 7. The family has found no medicine. The boys have only painkillers. “We pray,” their mother said. Lure of the Mines The illegal mines spill out over dozens of miles, leaving a pockmarked stretch of earth where the jungle gives way to countless craters and scars. Some are no more than tiny pools where two men sift the mud with pans, like a scene from the California goldfields more than a century ago. Others drain wide marshes with tangled networks of tubes and pumps. In another spot, hundreds of wildcatters had dug out a gaping maw of red and white soil. It sinks 15 stories deep and runs the length of a football field. They call it Cuatro Muertos, or Four Dead Men. It was not supposed to be this way. The gold reserves were once controlled by a Canadian company before President Hugo Chávez expropriated them and pledged to use their profits to fund his Socialist-style revolution. But the expropriation followed the pattern of mismanagement and neglect that many others did during the Chávez era. The state eventually abandoned the territory around the mine, and the potentially lucrative profits. Wildcatters have moved in, and so have the armed groups that now call themselves the law here. Image Soraya Rodríguez’s ear was pricked during a blood test for malaria at a clinic in Tumeremo. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times But at least there is food. As the country convulses from food shortages and riots, as hungry mobs ransack grocery stores, restaurants and bakeries, the mining town of Las Claritas, only a short drive from the mines, lives in a state of relative plenty. Restaurants offer full menus. Street markets are packed with fruit. Pickups drive by loaded with pumpkins. In a country where soap is in short supply, a dozen brands are on sale in a Chinese-owned grocery store, where seven models of flat-screen televisions are also available. Miners dish out fat wads of their gold earnings in cash, which run through a bill-counting machine. The promise of a different Venezuela — one where there is ample food and work that pays enough — led Yudani González to abandon a program to become a preschool teacher in Ciudad Bolívar, the provincial capital, where unemployment is rampant. Instead, she headed to a ramshackle jungle camp, where she cooks for miners with one hand and cares for her two young children with the other. “Here, you can get ahead,” Ms. González said, washing her 1-year-old daughter in a plastic bucket on the counter as she cooked. Danneris Flores, a government employee moonlighting as a mining camp cook, sat nearby. She is an administrative assistant in a state-run health clinic, but Venezuela’s currency has tumbled so far that her salary amounts to only about $1 a day at the current street value. So she asked for a vacation — and used it to work for a couple of weeks at the mines. Her brother-in-law, who works for the state oil company, Pdvsa, does the same thing. In a short stint at the mines, Ms. Flores said she could earn twice her monthly wages. She counted the days until she would be home to see her three children, whom she had left after “closing my eyes and making my heart small.” “I never imagined that I would work in a mine,” she said to Ms. González as they served a meal. “Before, people thought of going to school.” A miner walked in to greet the women and said he had recently watched someone collapse and die of malaria on her way to a market. Ms. González said she had come down with it four times herself. Her 4-year-old, she said, has had it three times. “They charge you two grams of gold for medicine,” she said. “You pay what they ask.” Not everyone can find medication, even with gold earnings. Image At a Ciudad Guayana clinic, slides with blood samples from patients with malaria symptoms. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times José Yoel Castillo stumbled to the doorstep of the malaria clinic in Las Claritas, carried on the shoulders of two relatives as he convulsed and was unable to speak. He had been making a living in the town of Caicara del Orinoco, driving passengers on the back of a motorcycle. But an armed gang took the vehicle, and Mr. Castillo could not afford a new one. So he came to the mines. He quickly found work and money — even malaria medication the first time he became ill. But when the symptoms came a second time, he could not find treatment anywhere. “Some people can just keep working through it,” said his brother-in-law, Alejandro López. “But others can’t.” Even with money in their pockets, the miners know the dangers of going back home. Josué Guevara, 20, gave up last November on his university studies in industrial engineering in a city about 10 hours away. He once pictured himself as a manager at the state-owned aluminum company, Alcasa. But his family members who worked there could barely afford food, he said. “Now I have other goals,” he said, standing at the edge of the Cuatro Muertos mines, where he lives and works today. Using gasoline and other chemicals to extract the gold, Mr. Guevara earned 500,000 bolívars — around $500 at black-market exchange rates, about 33 times the country’s minimum wage — during a lucky two-week stretch. But when he got malaria this spring, he did what many miners do: He returned to his hometown to recover, bringing the disease with him. “Everything has its risks,” he said. On the other side of the vast pit, Pedro Pérez, 38, sat in a structure made of tree poles and tarp where he sleeps with 10 other miners. He tested positive for malaria twice in March. The third time he fell ill, he did not bother to get tested. “I was lying here and I felt the same symptoms,” he said. He, too, went back home — to the provincial capital, Ciudad Bolívar, where his mother eventually caught malaria, as well. Image Maribel Supero clutched her son, an illegal gold miner who had been sick with malaria for 21 days. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times “It’s coming from us,” Mr. Pérez said. Mr. Pérez remembered his life before he came to the mines last fall: He was a supervisor at a state-owned metal refinery, he said. He owned a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house and a 2005 Ford Focus. He and his wife, a lawyer, once jetted off on last-minute getaways to Isla Margarita, a tropical island off the north coast of Venezuela. Yet even before he lost his job last year and was unable to find another, Venezuela’s plummeting currency had whittled his salary down to about $26 a month. He eventually left home for the mine. “I am still not used to washing myself every day in a river of dirty water,” he said. “I thought I had a good life.” A few weeks ago, his wife came to Las Claritas to buy the food and soap she could not find in Ciudad Bolívar. The couple spent three nights together in a miner’s hostel. After she left, Mr. Pérez felt the strains on their marriage. “‘I know it’s hard for you,’ I tell her, ‘but we have to accept this new reality,’” he said. Back in Las Claritas, at a table in a dark brothel that smelled of alcohol, sat Angélica, a young woman with long black hair whose parents do not know she has turned to prostitution to make her living. She left the eastern city of Maturín three months ago when riots erupted because food had gone scarce. “Before, you waited in line for hours, but you got something,” said Angélica, who did not give her last name, ashamed of her work. “But now there is nothing there.” Today she earns the equivalent of $40 when a miner wants to spend the night with her. More often, the money comes in increments of $8, when a customer wants to have sex and leave a short time later. Image The Albino Mine in May. With the economy in tatters, thousands are streaming into this region. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times At times, she said, it may be a stranger who is trembling with fever, unable to perform because of malaria. Other times, it is the owner of one of the Chinese grocery stores. The men come from all corners of the country. “The most difficult part of this life is being with someone who you do not love,” she said. A Resurgence Ignored Venezuela rose only after malaria declined. It was the 1920s and another resource had set off a bonanza — the black gold of oil, discovered in massive supply. But a vast malaria hot zone, then two-thirds of Venezuela, stood between the country and its riches. The deadly scenes were later immortalized in “Dead Homes,” a 1955 Venezuelan novel about the rural epidemics of malaria and the waves of migration to the country’s oil fields. Freeing the country of malaria became pivotal to Venezuela’s development, said Dr. Oletta, the former health minister. “Only once malaria was gone, roads could come, industry,” he said. “This was a sick country, and when it got well, things changed.” That transformative effort was led by Dr. Arnoldo Gabaldón, the former health minister who began one of the world’s first large-scale efforts to eradicate malaria and who became a national hero during his age. Teams across the Venezuelan countryside built irrigation ditches to drain pools of standing water, distributed quinine and constructed cinder block homes in rural areas so that mosquitoes had fewer places to breed. Dr. Gabaldón founded a research center in the city of Maracay, outside of Caracas and itself a malaria zone at the time, to broaden the mission and train officials from Latin America and Africa. But it was his use of insecticides — initially DDT, then other substances — that began to turn the tide. The walls of nearly every rural home in the country were sprayed, a technique that killed mosquitoes when they landed to rest. Fumigators would leave an envelope showing the date they would return. Image Carlos Freydel said he has had malaria 60 times during the nine years he has worked illegally mining for gold. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times By 1949, malaria deaths had fallen drastically: to nine per 100,000 people from 300. By the time Mr. Chávez assumed the presidency 50 years later and began to carry out his Socialist-inspired vision for Venezuela, the regimented system of Dr. Gabaldón had long faded, though malaria still appeared to be confined to a few rural areas. But the restructuring of the economy under Mr. Chávez and his followers, including a growing dependence on oil revenue and a system of currency controls restricting American dollars, would eventually change that. In 2014 and 2015, as oil prices collapsed and the government scrambled for money to pay for goods, services and imports, there were long shortages of chloroquine and primaquine, two drugs used for Plasmodium vivax, the most prevalent malaria parasite in the Americas. By 2016, doctors said there were shortages of nearly all anti-malaria drugs, most notably a drug cocktail for the deadly falciparum strain that costs just several dollars for a full round of treatment. Though debilitating and even fatal, malaria is easily treatable with the proper medication. Dr. Leopoldo Villegas, an international malaria expert in Bangkok, said the government also relied on outdated methods like outdoor fogging with insecticides, which had unproven effects on adult mosquitoes that transmit malaria. And because it was not publishing epidemiological reports of new malaria cases or deaths, it was unclear how much medicine was needed each year. “This is an emergency, this is an outbreak, and it’s not being dealt with by the government this way,” Dr. Villegas said, adding that the Venezuelan government had repeatedly denied the extent of malaria’s resurgence to international organizations that could help prevent its spread. Gustavo Bretas, a Brazilian malaria expert, said that Venezuela once trained people throughout the region in malaria prevention. But Venezuela’s inability to contain its own outbreak means that it now plays the opposite role: It poses a threat to the countries around it, particularly Brazil, where there are also illegal gold mines. “It’s starting to spill over into neighboring countries,” he said, adding that the lack of government statistics made the extent of the problem hard to assess. Venezuela’s Health Ministry did not respond to requests for an interview, including a letter delivered to its offices. Oscar Noya now works in Dr. Gabaldón’s old laboratory in Caracas under a picture of his mentor in a suit and bow tie. On a recent day, malaria patients once again sat on the steps, most having arrived from the mines. Fifteen had come on a recent morning; 12 of them tested positive for the disease. Image The watery pits of the mines, perfect mosquito breeding grounds, are spreading malaria to miners. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times Dr. Noya tries to make do without many vital drugs, like artesunate, listed by the W.H.O. as an essential medicine for the treatment of severe cases of falciparum malaria. He has only three vials of it left. He needs six to treat a single patient with a serious case. One recent night, a gang entered one of his malaria laboratories and stole the computers, one of about 20 attacks this year against the Tropical Medical Institute where he works, Dr. Noya said. He wonders if the groups are aligned with the government. “We believe this is no more than intimidation because we’re not quiet and we won’t be quiet,” he said, referring to public advocacy about malaria and the spread of other diseases. Dr. Noya put away his vials of artesunate as more patients gathered outside. He looked up with an air of desperation. “Dr. Gabaldón would have died of a heart attack if he’d seen what is happening,” he said. Order Outside the Law Despite the constant churn of workers from across Venezuela, there is a clear order to the mines. It is enforced by an armed group known as the Union. One of the Union’s bosses came to the mines years ago to work as a dentist. He still does. But the squads of patrolmen on motorbikes who dominate this place are the real source of his wealth and power. He sports gold chains, two gold teeth — and brass knuckles made of gold. After the government abandoned them, the mines soon grew again, this time at an unruly pace as wildcatters plowed into the forest, creating pools of stagnant water and a population of easy prey for the mosquitoes that breed in them, paving the way for the explosion of malaria. Sitting on his patio, the boss, who declined to be named because he could be arrested by the government, took pride in what he said was the Union’s ability to fill in for the vacuum left by the state. Yes, he acknowledged, the punishments the group meted out could be gruesome, like shooting off a man’s hand when he stole, or tying others to posts at the entrance of town with a sign detailing the offense committed. But he argued that the discipline kept crime in the camps low and allowed miners to go about their business in peace — another aspect of life that has steadily eroded in Venezuela’s dangerous cities. Image The leader of the armed group known as “the Union” showed his brass knuckles made of gold. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times “To get justice from the police is a joke,” he said. “You have to get your own justice.” Eduardo Medina agreed. A former pharmacist, he said he had left the drugstore where he worked in the state of Zulia a year ago to start mining because he saw the economic crisis spread and law and order slip away. “At any time, you might go out and someone would put a pistol in your face for your phone, or knife your mother,” Mr. Medina said in his tent. “Crime is under control here. They charge us, but they solve the problems, too.” But the appearance of calm is deceiving. Storms rage in other places where rivals vie for control of the mines. In March, at least 17 miners were killed in what the authorities believed was one such dispute. Mr. Medina, on a break, looked down into the pit where his fellow miners labored. “At any moment, you can be killed in Zulia,” he said. “But you can be killed here, too.” For all the challenges of keeping order, the boss said, malaria was even harder. “On malaria, we are screwed,” he said. The task of monitoring the disease seems to have been delegated to people like a state health employee named Miguel Martínez, who sat at a lonely post a short walk from a brothel near the mines, examining blood samples from miners. Under his microscope, a dye had stained the malaria parasite a dark purple. The log beside him showed that half of the patients who had visited him that day had tested positive for malaria. Like many health workers in this country, Mr. Martínez was exasperated. “Just as there are no rice and beans in this country, there are no medicines,” he said. Evening approached at the mine, the time when the Anopheles mosquito begins to feed. Dusk settled over a clapboard Pentecostal church, where parishioners speak in tongues, and past a red-and-blue circus tent promising alcohol and a strip tease. Under a tarp, five men hammered away at a vein of quartz, which they would grind down and sift for gold. Others waded up to their shoulders in pools laden with heavy metals like mercury, angling tubes to pump the mud. Tropical birds flew in the distance. Image Cuatro Muertos. When miners return home to Venezuela’s cities to recover from malaria, there is often no medicine. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times “Is the malaria really coming from the miners?” asked Aníbal Flores, 28, a miner who sleeps in a hammock between two poles beside the mine. “But where else can we go to make money? The city? There is no food there.” Lately, many Venezuelans have taken matters into their own hands. Five hours away in the newly infected town of El Dique, residents were collecting 100 bolívars from each household to hire a fumigator to come spray their homes. In the mine, where malaria tests are sometimes unavailable, miners said they had developed an exam of their own: Drink two bottles of beer. If a sharp pain is felt afterward in the liver, where the parasites reside, then the patient has malaria, the test goes. Health officials said the measure was futile. Still, Mr. Balocha, the former computer technician who works in the Albino Mine, lives by it. Miners call it an “artisanal test.” He was sick once again, waiting for medicine at a chain-link fence on the edge of a clinic. He recalled the words of his uncle, who phoned him a year ago when Mr. Balocha found his salary as a computer technician to be worthless in the city of Valencia. “There is money here,” said the uncle, who was mining then. “You have to know how to find it.” Mr. Balocha started as a “palero,” a stone breaker, getting the smallest cut of the take. But it was still more than what his salary bought in the city after inflation had whittled it away, he said. He recalled the first time he got malaria, too, the “chills like you were lying down between two blocks of ice.” “The first time you get malaria is the ugliest,” Mr. Balocha said. “You can’t control the tremors. You feel like you will die. You feel like you are a zombie.” But he would become a millionaire here, he joked, and one day he would head to Europe — with a Latin American woman, he added — far from the mines, the malaria and the Union. He sighed, looking up at the sky. “In the mine, happiness is only temporary,” he said.

Venezuela Malaria Gold Economy Mining Mosquito Epidemic


Limiting Teenage Drinking, or Trying

Abstract: ONE morning at the crack of dawn, when my twin boys were 5 years old, they bounded into our bedroom in their striped pajamas and started singing a “Say No to Drugs” song they had learned at school. This alarmed me. Not because I wanted them singing a say yes to drugs song. But wasn’t this a little young to start the indoctrination? “What’s drugs?” I asked. They looked at each other. Clearly, this had never occurred to them. “Are we saying no to aspirin?” I asked. “We give you aspirin when you’re sick.” “Why don’t we say no to bugs?” I suggested, improvising a few bars. They were stunned, speechless. “Or how about say no to hugs?” and I jumped out of bed and chased them down the hallway threatening to hug them to smithereens while they sang their new “Say No to Hugs” song. Annie, my youngest, was about the same age, when, on the way home from a T-ball game, she asked if I had noticed that one of the girls’ mothers was smoking. “Dad is she ...you know... a bad person?” Annie asked. Now, I’ve never smoked a cigarette and don’t want my kids smoking, but given all the world’s stresses, if other people want to smoke, as long as they’re not blowing it in another person’s face, that’s their business, as far as I’m concerned. In both cases, the schools were starting early teaching the dangers of drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Whether it was the way the subject was presented, or what a young child is able to absorb, it had been turned into a war of good versus evil. As my boys grew into teenagers, they started to understand that these things were complicated. They realized that what they had been taught was “evil,” must not actually be “evil,” since they saw friends and adults whom they knew to be good human beings doing some of those things. And that brings me to one of the hardest challenges I’ve encountered as a parent: How to deal with my three teenage sons (ages 17, 17 and 19) on the issue that’s been the stickler in our house, drinking. I want to be clear, I think they are pretty typical, and what I’m talking about is occasional social drinking with their friends. According to the University of Michigan’s annual behavioral survey of 50,000 high school students, 47 percent of male seniors (41 percent of female seniors) report alcohol use in the previous 30 days; 32 percent of male seniors (and 26 percent of female seniors) report being drunk in the previous 30 days. As a parent, I don’t know what’s O.K. All of it is illegal; they’re not 21. Is any drinking all right if they’re breaking the law? If, on the other hand, teenagers will be teenagers and some drinking is fine and normal, how much is? How often? It’s not O.K. if they get sick, as all have done at least once and been grounded. Is it O.K. if they come home and I can’t tell from 10 feet away? I’m not talking about drinking and driving or getting in a car with a kid who’s been drinking. That’s easy for a parent. That’s black and white: You don’t do it. They know about the designated driver, a public education campaign that was not around when I was a kid and, I believe, has made an enormous positive impact. I’ve told my kids that if for some reason, they go some place in the car and drink, they are not to get back in the car. Call home and we’ll come pick you up at any hour. Take a taxi or train, we’ll pay for it. Just DO NOT DRIVE. In fact, I have a pretty good idea when they may be planning to drink. They don’t take the car. They go out for the night on their bikes. On a Friday or Saturday night, when I see them getting the bikes out of the garage, I ask, “Are you drinking?” and they roll their eyes, “Come on, Dad.” And before I can respond, they’re around the corner. How do you teach a teenager moderation? Of course, you try to model behavior. My wife and I don’t drink excessively, don’t drink that often, and when we do, it’s a couple of beers, or a glass of wine. And while I have confidence this may be the best weapon in the long run, I do not in the short run when it comes to teenagers. There are just too many hormones involved. I know there are teenagers who don’t drink. I was that kid in high school. I didn’t drink or smoke pot until college. I truly don’t know why I didn’t, lots of kids in my hometown did. For whatever reason, I was slow to develop on many fronts. For whatever reason, my boys are moving faster. I don’t think the legal drinking age has a lot to do with any of this; when I was a teenager and the legal age was 18, teenagers drank a lot, and they do now, when it’s 21. I don’t know exactly where they get it — an older kid, I assume, or a parent’s liquor cabinet — but it’s clearly not hard. In the 2007 Michigan survey 92 percent of high school seniors said alcohol was “very easy” to get. Nor do I think this is about positive self-image or having too much free time. All three boys are good students and athletes who play a sport every season, and in the summer work six days a week, 10 hours a day. I worry, because as a reporter, I’ve covered too many stories where very bad things happened to very good kids who drank too much. I’m particularly haunted by a piece I did a decade ago. An honors student at the University of Virginia, who passed out from drinking, was left in her bed by friends, and when she came to, alone and in a fog, fell down a flight of stairs and died. My kids know the story, and I’m pleased that all three at various times have gotten help for kids they knew who were either staggering drunk or passed out. A therapist I consulted suggested setting a limit of, say, two beers. This made me uncomfortable. I felt I was condoning something that in my heart, I didn’t want to condone. But since they had drunk to excess, I tried it. I told them I could put up with a couple of beers a night, a couple of times a month, but if it was any more — basically if they’d drunk enough so I could tell they’d been drinking — they’d be grounded. It’s turned into a cat-and-mouse game. Twice, my wife and I have come home from a night out and they’ve failed the sandal test. If I walk around on our hardwood floors and my sandals stick, I know they’ve spilled beer and they’re grounded. A couple of times they’ve come in and I can tell from sniffing or by their speech that they’ve had more than two, and they’re grounded. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t happen that often. They’re wonderful kids. They’re usually home by their midnight weekend curfew and call if they’re going to be late. Often (but not always) when I ask, they tell me the truth even though they know they’ll be punished. “Four or five, Dad.” “I had plenty, Dad.” “Grounded, boys.” I hate this. I feel like I’ve handled it badly. Trying to find a middle, moderate ground — I’m not happy and they’re not. They tell me I’m “psycho.” They tell me other parents are much better about trusting their kids. They tell me they’re sick and tired of living in Nazi Germany. If any of you has had more success, I’d love to know. For now, if it’s Friday or Saturday night, and I hear the garage door open and see them hop on their bikes, I dread it, because I know, come midnight, I’ll have to play detective.

Children and Youth
Alcoholic Beverages
Winerip Michael
Accidents and Safety
Drunken and Reckless Driving


Isner Hopes to Finally Solve Kohlschreiber at U.S. Open

Abstract: It’s déjà vu time for the top American John Isner. Isner successfully navigated his second-round match at the United States Open on Thursday against a potentially dangerous German opponent, and will next face another one. Isner defeated 77th-ranked Jan-Lennard Struff, 7-6 (5), 6-4, 6-2, improving as the match developed, which pleased his coach, Michael Sell. In the third round, Isner will play Philipp Kohlschreiber, who has defeated Isner at the same point in the Open draw the past two years. Talk about a recurring nightmare. The 6-foot-5 Struff proved to be a solid opponent, especially the first set and a half, when there were no breaks of serve. Isner stepped up and saved the only break point he faced for the match at 3-3, 30-40 in the opening set, sending down a 128-mile-per-hour ace out wide that Struff did not even move for. The battle then cruised to an inevitable tiebreaker, with Isner building a 6-3 lead before winning it, 7-5. Isner finally broke Struff’s serve at 4-4, Ad out, in the second set when he gambled and ran around a second serve to crush an inside-out forehand from the alley that Struff could not get back over the net. This was the turning point of the match, and Isner broke twice in the third set as the increased pressure got to Struff. He double-faulted twice on break points at 1-1 and 2-4. Sell liked what he saw as the match developed. “I thought he served well, hitting his spots and mixing serve speeds to get him deflated,” Sell said. Isner served exceptionally well, hitting 30 aces and had a staggering 61 percent of his serves unreturned. “Once the opponent starts to guess on serve direction and it didn’t work, then his spirits were going down,” Sell said. He added that he was happy with how Isner’s return game improved as the match went on. “John kept giving different looks returning and applied more pressure as the match unfolded,” Sell said. His focus working with Isner is not so much on the actual return of serve, but where his student is standing for the first shot after the return. “His court position after the return is very important regarding how much ground he is giving up,” Sell said. “That’s actually more important for John than the return.” Isner did return well, making 68 percent of all returns, winning 56 percent of Struff’s second-serve points. Sell liked the dress rehearsal for the third-round encounter against Kohlschreiber, who defeated Isner by 6-4, 3-6, 7-5, 7-6(5) in 2013 and by6-4, 3-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 in 2012. They have played six times over all, with Isner winning four, all best-of-three-set matches. These two players, for numerous reasons, happen to match up very evenly. “Kohlschreiber takes the ball earlier than most players, redirects it really well and is good at countering John’s power,” Sell said. “He returns John’s serve well, does not give up any ground and makes John react quicker than he wants to.”

Tennis
US Open Tennis
Philipp Kohlschreiber
John Isner


G.O.P. May Regain New York Senate Majority

Abstract: ALBANY — Two years after seizing control of the State Senate for the first time in more than four decades, New York Democrats are in grave danger of losing their narrow majority on Tuesday. Despite a huge financial advantage and a popular candidate for governor at the top of the ticket, a half-dozen Democratic incumbents are trying to stave off defeat and help the party hang on to its 32-to-30 advantage. The Democratic victory in 2008 opened the door for a tide of left-leaning policies; Senate Democrats voted to enshrine rights for domestic workers, legalize no-fault divorce and ease Rockefeller-era drug laws. But they have found themselves on the defensive in recent weeks, facing Republican accusations of overspending and abandoning upstate New York, and a series of scandals involving the Senate Democratic leadership. Republican advertisements hammer the message that one-party rule — Democrats also control the governor’s office and the State Assembly — has led to a tide of corruption and incompetence that has made the state a laughingstock. “The economy, taxes and spending, that’s what’s resonating with people,” said Senator Dean G. Skelos of Long Island, leader of the Republican caucus. “But they’re also not happy when you have every top leader within one conference under state or federal investigation now. It’s breathtaking.” A poll released by Siena College on Saturday suggested that Republicans may have the edge heading into the election, with Democrats in danger in four of the most competitive races, including two seats held by Democrats. On Long Island, Senator Brian X. Foley, whose victory over a 36-year incumbent, Caesar Trunzo, in 2008 helped propel Democrats to power, has fallen behind his challenger, Lee M. Zeldin. In northern New York, Senator Darrel J. Aubertine, another Democrat elected in 2008, is also trailing his Republican challenger, Patricia A. Ritchie, though the gap was within the poll’s margin of sampling error. “Foley crushed Trunzo in 2008,” said Steven Greenberg, a spokesman for the Siena Research Institute. “Voters were ready for a change. Now voters are saying maybe they made a mistake here, time to get this guy out.” Because the new Legislature will redraw the lines of New York’s Congressional districts for the next decade, the national Republican Party has made retaking the Senate a priority, mobilizing donors in all 50 states to spend about $1.3 million to win a legislative chamber in New York. “We look at this as a significant investment,” said Thomas N. Reynolds, the former Buffalo congressman who is the vice chairman of the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national party organization dedicated to financing state races. “I am always cautious, and I know a week is a lifetime in politics, but I like our candidates.” Despite the interest, Senate Democrats have exploited their majority and amassed money from practically every special interest in Albany, and so far have outspent Republicans $31.1 million to $23.5 million, according to an analysis by the New York Public Interest Research Group. Democrats are spending heavily on “get out the vote” efforts, along with advertising and relying on the help of their union allies to help mobilize voters. Noting that Republicans have raised less money, Austin Shafran, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said: “The only thing they have going for themselves is the anti-incumbent political climate and the fact Democrats are the party in power. But they have never had the political operations in New York to draw massive amounts of voters to the polls.” Republicans were given fresh ammunition on Oct. 21, when the state inspector general, a Democratic appointee, released a report accusing the Senate leadership of manipulating the bidding process for the right to build a casino at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens. The inspector general, Joseph Fisch, said he lost count of the number of times the Senate leader, John L. Sampson of Brooklyn, said “I don’t recall” in his testimony; Mr. Fisch referred the case to federal and local prosecutors. In the campaign’s closing days, Republicans are trying to tar all Democrats by association with the leadership; a recent advertisement from Mr. Zeldin highlighted the hundreds of thousands of dollars his opponent had received from party leaders to aid his campaign. The 30-second spot also twice used a clip of one of Mr. Foley’s colleagues, Senator Eric Adams of Brooklyn, bellowing, “Show me the money!” on the Senate floor, a clip that has been used many times, out of context, since Mr. Adams made the comment during a debate about pay increases for lawmakers. The Aqueduct report is only the latest embarrassment for Democrats: one senator, Hiram Monserrate, was expelled after a domestic violence episode, and the majority leader, Pedro Espada Jr., was engulfed by a host of scandals. Republicans, to be sure, have had their own troubles. Last year, Joseph L. Bruno, the longtime Senate majority leader, was convicted on two federal corruption charges. During his trial, prosecutors revealed that rank-and-file Senate Republicans were encouraged to hand-deliver ethics forms to state regulators in order to avoid running afoul of federal mail fraud charges. While the battles to decide the Senate are generally outside Democratic-dominated New York City, in Queens, former City Councilman Anthony Como, a Republican, has seized on the Aqueduct report, which depicts the incumbent Democrat, Joseph P. Addabbo Jr., as out of touch with the bidding process for a casino in his own district. Another Democrat, Senator Darrel J. Aubertine, has his hands full in the 48th Senate District, a heavily Republican district that stretches over three counties north of Syracuse. His opponent, Patricia A. Ritchie, the St. Lawrence County clerk, has been playing up her opposition to a canceled plan by the Paterson administration to require New Yorkers to buy new license plates. One of her recent advertisements also shows a photograph of Mr. Aubertine surrounded by photos of Gov. David A. Paterson and the Senate president, Malcolm A. Smith of Queens, who is also implicated in the Aqueduct scandal. “Albany politicians say they’ve raised and created jobs?” a narrator says, over ominous-sounding music. “The truth: they’ve raised taxes that kill jobs.” Two years ago, there was a sense of elation and purposefulness among Democrats when they took over from Republicans, who had run the State Senate since 1965. They were able to move legislation that had been blocked for years, even allowing the chamber’s first vote on same-sex marriage. (It failed to pass.) They promised to reform Senate rules and allow the minority party a modicum of influence for the first time, but it did not take long before the two parties were squabbling over resources and rules much as they had before. Certainly, there are a number of crosscurrents this year. On the one hand, Republicans nationally are expected to put up a strong showing. On the other, the Republican nominee for governor, Carl P. Paladino, has run what many political analysts see as a disastrous campaign against the Democratic nominee, Andrew M. Cuomo, and Democrats are expected to comfortably keep the governor’s mansion and the state’s two United States Senate seats. And, of course, the battle for the Senate does not necessarily have to have a winner. What happens if the chamber is left in a 31-to-31 tie? “Everybody asks that question,” Mr. Skelos said. “I don’t think it’s going to happen, but if it does, we’ll figure out a way to govern.”

New York State
State Legislatures
Elections
Democratic Party
Republican Party


2007 Was Unpredictable, but Let’s Brave 2008 Anyway

Abstract: Like baseball or the weather, the economy can be a difficult thing to predict. In March, Bernard Baumohl of the Economic Outlook Group wrote that “the prospect of a Fed easing this year looks quite remote” and predicted an interest rate increase by the end of the year. Six months and one subprime collapse later, Mr. Baumohl had turned doomsayer, forecasting “a synchronized global economic slowdown in 2008, and that, I’m afraid, is being optimistic.” Mr. Baumohl’s change of heart was not uncommon last year among the economists, investment strategists and other would-be clairvoyants who try to divine economic trends before they start. “The housing turndown turned out to be much more serious than any economist had forecast,” Mr. Baumohl said on Monday. “Nothing can throw a forecast off course faster than an economic shock.” Even though the collapse of the housing bubble had been long predicted, the crisis in the home loan market nonetheless took most economic prognosticators by surprise. “Any economic forecast is subject to a myriad of risk factors,” wrote Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at the research firm MFR. “One extending out a little over a year is almost begging to be disrupted in some manner by what could be a completely surprising event.” Mr. Shapiro correctly forecast growth and inflation levels for 2007. But he said in December 2006 that the housing crisis was “far from an apocalypse,” and that bloated supply levels among home builders would be “digested quickly.” Oops. “Anybody who says they weren’t surprised this year is a liar,” Mr. Shapiro said, chuckling, in a recent telephone interview. He meant no malice; it was just a simple statement of fact. Most analysts did not expect a mortgage crisis to disrupt financial markets as it did during the summer. “The buzzword at the beginning of this year was ‘contained,’” said Quincy Krosby, chief investment strategist at The Hartford, a financial services company, referring to the subprime mortgage sector. “And it sounded logical because it was 12 to 15 percent of the mortgage market. How could it have mushroomed into something that is global and basically knows no boundaries?” Many of the analysts interviewed for this article readily acknowledged their mistakes, and a few even acknowledged the futility of their annual task. Brian Gendreau, investment strategist at ING Investment Management, opened a recent PowerPoint presentation with a quote from the physicist Niels Bohr: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Mr. Gendreau argues that accurate forecasting is not all that important, anyway. “We find a very loose connection between our forecast and our performance,” he said, referring to his firm’s portfolio. “In 2005, we got everything right except the exchange rate and our performance was below the benchmark.” In 2007, Mr. Gendreau said he was “spectacularly wrong on the price of oil” (he predicted the price of a barrel would hover between $50 and $65), but he said he closed out his financial portfolio in late September, before the markets suffered the autumn’s steep declines. All this is to say that the following forecasts should be taken with more than a grain of salt. Read on for a sampling of what economists expect for 2008. But consider yourself warned. Growth “Taken as a whole, 2008 is going to be another tough year,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com . On average, economists are forecasting a modest pace of 2 percent growth for 2008, down from 2007’s expected growth of about 3 percent, which is likely to be dragged down by a sharp deceleration in the pace of economic activity during the final quarter of the year. While analysts say the first half of the year may be grim, many predict a pickup in activity after the summer. According to Mickey Levy, chief economist at Bank of America, the cumulative effect of lower interest rates and alternate sources of liquidity — from foreign investors to the Fed’s new auction system, which encourages banks to borrow directly from the government — will help ease lending and spark new demand among consumers. Analysts also expect the housing slump to bottom out in the middle of next year, as steep price discounts and better mortgage availability lure consumers back into the market. “Home-building can only go so low; house prices only need to fall so far until housing affordability is restored,” Mr. Zandi said. “The write-downs in the financial system will have occurred. Some of the problems that are weighing on psychology and activity will have been washed out of the economy by midyear.” Mr. Shapiro said export sales and foreigners attracted by a weak dollar will also provide some stimulus to domestic growth. “You can go into Macy’s and see European tourists treating us like a third-world bargain basement,” he said. Inflation Though core inflation has begun to tick up, under pressure from costly food and oil, many analysts say it will be less of a problem in 2008. The slowing economy will curb wage growth, making consumers less willing to spend and leaving businesses little leeway to increase prices. With inflation contained, the Federal Reserve will feel more confident about easing interest rates, though analysts say a summer upswing in growth could lead to rate increases in the final months of the year. Employment Mr. Zandi predicted that the labor market, which steadily slowed in 2007, will run into problems in the first half of 2008. Businesses “are now being more aggressive in curtailing hiring and laying off workers,” he said. When the economy weakens, labor growth tends to slow, “and that keeps measured unemployment down,” he added. December’s employment numbers are due out Friday. In what may be a gloomy portent for 2008, economists are predicting the economy will add only a sluggish 70,000 jobs, down from 94,000 in November. Stock Markets Some analysts are expecting a recovery among beleaguered shares of financial firms, as bargain hunters grab stocks down more than 10 percent from previous highs and Wall Street brokerages shovel out from the subprime mess, often with billion-dollar aid packages from foreign investors. Others are more skeptical. “We still have billions of dollars in write-downs that have to be announced by the banks,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief United States economist at IDEAglobal. “Financials still have to come clean and account for increasingly devalued portfolios. Until we get through all of that, we’re going to have volatile markets.”

United States Economy
Economic Conditions and Trends
Mortgages
Housing
Banks and Banking
Interest Rates
Stocks and Bonds
Federal Reserve System
United States
Wall Street (NYC)


Plot Raises Questions About Airport Security

Abstract: The body scanners widely used for airport screening have raised concerns about privacy, health risks and long lines at security checkpoints. But now, a more fundamental issue is getting attention from lawmakers: whether these scanners are effective at detecting explosives that could bring down a plane. At a Congressional hearing last Wednesday investigating how the Transportation Security Administration acquires and deploys security equipment, members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee sharply criticized the agency for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that they said had not been properly tested. A report released by the two committees that day called the advanced imaging technology scanners being used in about 180 airports in the United States “ineffective.” And members of Congress who are privy to classified reports about the machines, including one issued in January by the Government Accountability Office, are getting more vocal about their concerns. John L. Mica, chairman of the House transportation committee, said in an interview on Friday that he had been briefed a few days earlier on the latest scanner tests and found the results so disappointing that he had asked the Appropriations Committee not to approve future purchases of the machines. “Unfortunately, the performance hasn’t improved,” he said. “It’s at such a poor level we need dramatic changes in the whole program.” The Transportation Security Administration argues that the scanners, which have cost about $170 million and may reach $1 billion annually with staffing expenses, routinely identify prohibited items. “While there is no silver bullet technology, advanced imaging technology is very effective at detecting metallic and nonmetallic threats on passengers, including explosives,” David Castelveter, an agency spokesman, said in an e-mail. “T.S.A. completed comprehensive operational testing and evaluation of this technology and is confident that it will significantly increase our detection capability at the checkpoint.” In light of the disclosure about a foiled plan by Al Qaeda to make an underwear bomb that could blow up an aircraft, government officials have disagreed about whether advanced imaging technology would have detected such a bomb. “The latest device, which was designed specifically to thwart what we’ve got in place, probably would’ve gotten through rather easily,” Mr. Mica said, explaining that he was drawing that conclusion from the confidential reports he had reviewed. But John S. Pistole, the T.S.A.’s administrator, said Monday night that “no one knows without equivocation whether that kind of device would get through until we test it.” He said that the scanners were one of the layers of defense against potential bombs. He added that the agency was aware of the questions raised about the effectiveness of the scanners and said, “We’re working with the manufacturers to improve the technology.” Other government reports have suggested that the scanner technology has flaws. In 2010, a G.A.O. report said “it remains unclear” whether advanced imaging technology scanners would have detected the bomb used in the attempted airliner attack by a Qaeda operative on a flight bound for Detroit in December 2009. A 2011 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general identified vulnerabilities in the screening process based on tests of the machines. (The details of those tests are classified.) More recent G.A.O. reports fault the security agency for inadequately testing the body scanners before buying them and underusing the machines it has installed. At last week’s hearing, Representative Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, raised another issue: the high false alarm rate of some newer scanners that use privacy software to display a generic body outline, rather than a graphic image. Mr. DeFazio said he routinely sets off an alarm when passing through the body scanner at Eugene Airport in Oregon and recently watched 12 out of 15 people after him trigger the alarm and require a pat-down. In an interview last week, he said he asked regional T.S.A. staff about this issue and was told that some newer scanners have a “uniformly high false alarm rate” and that the agency was working to fix the problem. “Why would they have gone into final acquisition and deployment of these machines if they knew this problem existed?” Mr. DeFazio asked. He said he believed that airport security was better than it was before the T.S.A. was created, but had questions about the equipment the agency was buying, although he declined to elaborate on how well the scanners work in detecting actual threats. “Unfortunately, I’ve had classified briefings on this issue, so I can’t really comment on their effectiveness, or lack thereof,” Mr. DeFazio said. Other information has come to light through a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center in Washington that focuses on civil liberties issues. The group obtained documents outlining details about the body scanners’ capabilities. “The technical specifications indicated that the machines were not designed to pick up powdered explosives like PETN,” said Ginger McCall, director of the center’s open government project, referring to pentaerythritol tetranitrate, an explosive used in the “shoe bomb” plot in December 2001 and in other plane bombing attempts.Although Ms. McCall said she doubted that a Freedom of Information Act request would be successful in getting the G.A.O. report released — particularly if it revealed a security vulnerability — EPIC had challenged the T.S.A.’s withholding of other documents revealing how well the scanners work. “Millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on these machines,” she said. “The public deserves to know whether their money is being put to good use.” But the T.S.A. has engaged in little cost-benefit analysis before investing in new security measures — a recurrent criticism cited by G.A.O. reports, which the T.S.A. has acknowledged. To some degree, Congress has also not analyzed the numbers. John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University, and Mark Stewart, an engineering professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, have written multiple papers about balancing the costs and benefits of aviation security as well as a book on the subject, “Terror, Security, and Money” (Oxford University Press, 2011). They have analyzed measures like hardened cockpit doors (“cost-effective”), the Federal Air Marshal Service (“not worth the money,” they say, noting that the cost of the program almost “equals the whole budget of the Los Angeles police force”) and advanced imaging technology (“not cost-effective”), Mr. Mueller said. The professors have shared their conclusions with Congressional staff members. Their work relies on calculating factors like the likelihood that a scanner would miss a bomb and that the device would detonate properly and bring down the plane. They then weigh the cost of the program against the likely damage caused by a successful attack ($26 billion, including the value of lives lost : $5 million to $10 million per person is the government standard). “The scanners would have to protect against one attack every two years to be cost-effective,” Mr. Mueller said. “That doesn’t seem plausible.”

Airport Security
Airlines and Airplanes
Terrorism
Airports
Transportation Security Administration
House of Representatives


At Italian Open, Serena Williams Ends a Long but Lean Drought

Abstract: ROME — Nine months removed from her last title, Serena Williams won the Italian Open on Sunday and then played down the significance of ending the drought, one of the longest of her career. Williams, who had played in only four tournaments over that stretch, said her 7-6 (5), 6-3 victory over Madison Keys in Sunday’s final was satisfying but not necessarily a relief. “It’s only four tournaments, so it’s not like I was playing every week,” said Williams, 34, whose last WTA Tour title had come at the Cincinnati Masters in August. “So that’s kind of how I look at it. But it feels great to win a title, especially on clay.” Williams, who won the tournament for the fourth time and earned her 70th career singles title, had lost her two previous finals this year, at the Australian Open and in Indian Wells, Calif. She had not lost consecutive finals since 2004. Williams had another slow start in Sunday’s final, the first clay-court final between American women since Williams beat her sister Venus at the 2002 French Open and the first between two American women in Rome since 1970. Image Andy Murray won his first Italian Open title, beating Novak Djokovic for only the second time in their last 14 matches. Credit Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Keys, 21, broke Williams at love in the opening game and extended her lead to 3-1. But Keys cooled as the temperature dropped and the wind kicked up, with the weather forcing spectators to reach for their jackets and hats. Keys double-faulted twice, and Williams broke back in the sixth game. Little separated the two from there, with Keys sometimes able to overpower Williams, especially on her forehand wing. But after Keys hit one of her best forehands to pull even in the tiebreaker at 5-5, Williams eked out the next two points, and she quickly pulled ahead in the second set. As the two met at the net after the match, Williams told Keys that she would one day be No. 1. “Yeah, too bad what she says doesn’t just happen,” Keys said, smiling. “But yeah, I mean, it’s always great to hear that from her. She’s obviously an amazing champion, and she’s won so many matches and tournaments. Hearing that is definitely something that makes me just want to work harder.” Williams’s own hard work was crucial in her victory, said her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou. “For me, she wasn’t there mentally — zero,” Mouratoglou said, referring to Williams’s play in March at the Indian Wells and Miami tournaments. “It happens. A career is long, especially hers, and you go through different stages, and you have to find solutions to different problems in certain stages. So that was one of those moments. “But the reaction here was really good. This win happened because of her focus, her motivation, everything.” Mouratoglou said he expected Williams’s strong form to carry into the French Open, where she will have another chance to tie Steffi Graf’s Open-era record of 22 major titles. Williams was defeated in her two previous chances to match the mark, at the United States Open last year and the Australian Open in January. “The last steps are always the most difficult,” Mouratoglou said. “But it’s not so difficult that she’s not going to make it.” He added, “She’ll get through it, whether at this one or the next one or the next one.” In the men’s final on Sunday, Andy Murray defeated a clearly tired Novak Djokovic, 6-3, 6-3. Djokovic had battled late into the night on Saturday to beat Kei Nishikori in a third-set tiebreaker. He had also needed more than two hours to oust fifth-seeded Rafael Nadal in the quarterfinals. On Sunday, with his energy flagging, Djokovic grew increasingly frustrated with the chair umpire, Damian Steiner, over court conditions he considered dangerously damp. Murray, who won his first Italian Open title and his 12th Masters title over all, had lost 12 of his previous 13 matches against Djokovic, including the final last week in Madrid. ”I knew that physically I was fresh, but I also hadn’t been pushed that hard, whereas he had been,” Murray said. “That’s why I was really happy with the second set in particular, because he did have chances and I was behind in some of my service games and I responded well.”

Tennis
Serena Williams
Madison Keys
Andy Murray
Novak Djokovic
Italian Open


Andy Pafko, Who Watched Thomson’s Shot, Dies at 92

Abstract: Andy Pafko, the All-Star outfielder who played on four teams that won the National League pennant but who also watched a once-sure Brooklyn Dodgers pennant disappear over a Polo Grounds wall in one of baseball’s most memorable moments, died Tuesday at a nursing home in Stevensville, Mich. He was 92. His death was announced on the Major League Baseball Web site. Swinging right-handed from a distinctive squatting stance, Pafko was an outstanding hitter with good power over 17 seasons playing for the Chicago Cubs, the Dodgers and the Milwaukee Braves. In his second full major league season, he hit .298 and drove in 110 runs while playing center field for the 1945 Cubs, the franchise’s last pennant winner. One of the Cubs’ most popular players, he was voted an All-Star five times and hit 36 home runs in 1950, second in the National League, before being traded to the Dodgers in June 1951. The first-place Dodgers led the New York Giants by 13 1/2 games in mid-August 1951, but the Giants caught them. On Oct. 3, in the finale of a three-game pennant playoff, Pafko was playing left field at the Polo Grounds when the Giants’ Bobby Thomson connected off the Dodgers reliever Ralph Branca in the ninth inning for a three-run, pennant-winning home run into the left-field stands. Image Left fielder Andy Pafko and the Brooklyn Dodgers lost the National League pennant to the New York Giants on Bobby Thomson’s three-run, ninth-inning home run at the Polo Grounds on Oct. 3, 1951. Credit Associated Press Captured in a long-remembered photograph, Pafko was a helpless figure pressed against the wall and looking up as “ the shot heard round the world ” landed a few rows above him. In Roger Kahn’s book “ The Boys of Summer ,” Pafko recalled Branca’s stroll from the bullpen to relieve the Dodgers starter Don Newcombe: “Branca walked by me in left field. I hit him in the back. ‘Go get ’em, Ralph.’ But I was doubting. Branca threw a ball. Then came this shot. I started back. In Ebbets Field I might have gotten it. In the Polo Grounds it was gone.” (The Polo Grounds’ left-field fence was only 315 feet from home plate.) The moment was “my biggest letdown ever,” Pafko said. It turned out to be the stuff of literature as well. The novelist Don DeLillo described the scene in “ Pafko at the Wall, ” which appeared in the October 1992 issue of Harper’s Magazine. With minor changes, it became the prologue to Mr. DeLillo’s novel “Underworld,” published in 1997. Pafko played for the Dodgers when the team won the pennant in 1952 but was traded to the Braves before the 1953 season, when the organization moved to Milwaukee from Boston. Pafko, who was from Wisconsin, became a mainstay in the Braves’ lineup with the future Hall of Famers Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews. During his tenure, the Braves won the World Series in 1957 and the National League pennant in 1958. For several seasons Pafko played alongside Thomson, who had been traded to the Braves by the Giants in 1954, and they roomed together on the road. Image Pafko in 1952. Credit Associated Press “I had to ask him how he felt personally when he hit the home run,” Pafko once told The Journal-Sentinel of Milwaukee. “But he was such a modest guy, he didn’t want to talk about it.” One of six sons of Czech immigrants, Andrew Pafko was born Feb. 25, 1921, in Boyceville, Wis., and grew up on a dairy farm there. He was signed by the Cubs out of a tryout camp and made his major league debut in 1943. He retired after the 1959 season with a career batting average of .285 and 213 home runs. He was later a coach for the Braves and managed in their minor league system. Pafko’s wife, Ellen, died in 2000. They had no children. His brothers Mike, John and Lud died before him. He is survived by his brothers Frank and Edward. Nearly 40 years after his last major league season, Pafko was astounded to learn that one of his 1952 Topps trading cards had sold for $83,870 at an auction in Washington. The card, found by a collector in an unopened pack for which he paid $1,000, according to Sports Collectors Digest, was in mint condition. Pafko lamented with a laugh that he had received boxes of cards from Topps in the 1950s but never kept any. “I just gave the cards to the kids in the neighborhood and they put them in their bicycle spokes,” he told The Associated Press. “And there went the money — click, click, click.”

Baseball
Obituary
Brooklyn Dodgers
New York Giants Baseball
Chicago Cubs


New York City’s Jobless Rate Rises to 9.5 Percent

Abstract: Throughout the recession , New York City has appeared to be holding up better than the rest of the country. But by one important measure — the official unemployment rate — that is no longer true. In June, the city’s unemployment rate jumped to 9.5 percent, matching the national rate and suggesting that the city’s economy is still weakening a year and a half after the national recession began . The rate of joblessness in the city had not been as high in almost 12 years. In May, it was 8.9 percent, significantly lower than the national rate of 9.4 percent for that month. More than 380,000 people in the city were unable to find work last month, an increase of about 170,000 from a year before, according to data released by the State Department of Labor on Thursday. The last time so many city residents were unemployed was in the early 1990s, in the wake of the long, deep recession after the 1987 stock market crash, said James Brown, a Labor Department economist. The city’s unemployment rate was higher in 1997 than it is now, he said, but the overall job market was stronger then. Mr. Brown said that mounting job losses in financial services and other professional fields “suggest that the city’s economy will remain weak for the immediate future.” He said hiring was weak in June in construction and retailing, but it continued to rebound in leisure and hospitality businesses, in part because those have been attracting tourists by discounting heavily. Statewide, 854,000 people were unemployed in June, the highest number in the state since the department began keeping records 33 years ago. The state has now lost 235,900 jobs in the private sector since August, more than half of the 400,000 jobs that were added during the expansion that preceded this recession, said M. Patricia Smith, the state’s labor commissioner. The state’s unemployment rate remained below the national rate, but jumped to 8.7 percent in June from 8.2 percent in May. The Labor Department adjusts the rates for seasonal fluctuations. As usual, the recession is taking its greatest toll on less educated workers who were earning lower wages, Ms. Smith said at a news conference in Manhattan, where she and other officials announced $12.7 million in grants to train low-income workers for jobs in energy-saving construction techniques and health care. “Nearly half of all unemployed New Yorkers were earning less than $23,000,” Ms. Smith said. One trainee, Derek Wyatt, a single father from Harlem, exemplifies how tenuous the grip on a better-paying job can be. Mr. Wyatt, 31, said he had been earning high wages selling cars at a Dodge dealership in Brooklyn until it closed last fall. He has spent this year learning how to weatherize buildings through a state-funded Career Pathways program. Now, while waiting for his first construction job, he is making $10 an hour as a customer service representative at the Chelsea Piers recreational complex in Manhattan, he said. “You have to just cut back on your lifestyle,” Mr. Wyatt said. Rising unemployment is continuing to put a strain on the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund, which Ms. Smith described as “broke.” She said the state expected to borrow about $3 billion from the federal government this year to pay unemployment benefits, which have repeatedly been extended as the recession has worn on. The rise in New York’s unemployment rate in June prompted an additional extension of seven weeks of benefits for the long-term unemployed. Standard benefits last for 26 weeks, but New Yorkers can now collect for as long as 79 weeks. While the number of new claims for unemployment benefits has been falling nationally in recent weeks, it has risen sharply in New York in each of the last two weeks. More people filed new claims for unemployment benefits in New York last week than in any other state except California, according to data released on Thursday by the federal Department of Labor.

New York City
Unemployment
Economic Conditions and Trends
United States Economy


Myanmar Abolishes Censorship of Private Publications

Abstract: BANGKOK — The government of Myanmar said on Monday that it would no longer censor private publications, a move that journalists described as a major step toward media freedom in a country where military governments have tried for decades to control the flow of information. The announcement was made to editors on Monday and posted on a government Web site. “All publications in Myanmar are exempt from the scrutiny of Press Scrutiny and Registration Department,” the government said in a terse statement. Private publications in Myanmar have been thriving since President Thein Sein began taking steps last year to open up the country’s economy and move the country toward democracy. “This is a very significant step — a big change,” U Ko Ko, the owner of The Yangon Times, said by telephone. “It is in line with a democratic society. We have been working with censorship for almost five decades.” U Tint Swe, a top official in the Press Registration and Scrutiny Department, told journalists that government censorship had been in place for 48 years and 14 days, according to one participant in the meeting. The news media have been one of the most assertive sectors of Myanmar society since democratic reforms began last year. Journalists have held protests against government interference in their work, and this month five senior journalists refused to participate in a government-sanctioned press council. The Myanmar Journalists Association, which has 800 members, held its first congress on Aug. 11 and made a point of telling government officials that they were not welcome. “We said, ‘Sorry, you’re not invited — don’t come,’ ” U Thiha Saw, vice president of the association, said by telephone from Yangon, the country’s largest city. “We wanted to prove that we are an independent body.” Mr. Thiha Saw, who is the editor of two private weekly publications and spent years battling with censors, sees media freedom as a “barometer for the reform process” in the country. He said he was optimistic that a series of changes, including a press law being drafted by the government, would allow Myanmar a level of press freedom unimaginable during the days of military rule. “We won’t be as free as the Philippine press or the Thai press,” Mr. Thiha Saw said. “But we will be much more liberal than Cambodia, Vietnam or Singapore.” In preparing to draft the law, the government consulted with experts from Unesco. The press law will be introduced in Parliament in the coming weeks. But Mr. Thiha and other journalists say the battle is not yet won. Until now, private media companies were banned from publishing daily newspapers, which was the preserve of the state media. U Maung Myint, president of the Burma Media Association , which advocates media freedom, said he believed that the government wanted to maintain a measure of control over the press. “It is too early to say that this is a genuine reform because there are still quite a few media-unfriendly laws remaining in place that could send a journalist to prison,” he said. Among the most repressive laws in the country is the Electronic Transactions Law, which carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years for distributing information in digital form that is deemed “detrimental to the interest of or that lowers the dignity of any organization or any person.” The law has been used by the military government to jail dissidents and is still in force. Mr. Ko Ko said the news media, while testing limits, remained cautious on several sensitive subjects. “There are still some areas we have to exercise self-censorship — military affairs, ethnic conflicts, corruption,” he said. “We have to be very careful reporting on this.” Like the democratization process itself in Myanmar, the government has scaled back censorship gradually. In June 2011, articles dealing with entertainment, health, children and sports were taken off the list of subjects requiring prior censorship. In December, economics, crime and legal affairs were removed. Education topics were taken off the list in March. The only two topics remaining on the list — religion and politics — were freed from censorship on Monday.

Myanmar
Freedom of the Press
Censorship
News and News Media
Thein Sein


With a Stunning Shot, Jason Day Almost Sanctifies His 2-Iron for the Ages. Almost.

Abstract: SPRINGFIELD, N.J. — There was Jack Nicklaus’s 1-iron. Now there is Jason Day’s 2-iron. The difference is that one helped win a major championship at Baltusrol Golf Club. The other came awfully close. Forty-nine years after Nicklaus hit his famous shot from 237 yards on the 18th hole in the final round of the 1967 United States Open, Day stood about 20 yards shy of the plaque in the fairway that commemorates that shot. He gripped a 2-iron in his hand. He had just used it off the tee, leaving him 258 yards to the green at the par-5 closing hole. And he was going to use it again for his second shot. Day said he did not know at the time that he was three shots behind the leader, Jimmy Walker. He thought he trailed by two. Regardless, when his shot landed just a few yards from the cup and rolled to within 14 feet, Day knew his Hail Mary had given him a chance to send the 98th P.G.A. Championship into a playoff. “Probably one of the best 2-irons I’ve ever hit,” Day said, “especially under the circumstances.” There have been two notable 1-iron shots in majors at Baltusrol: Nicklaus in 1967; and John Daly in 1993 on the 630-yard 17th hole, where he used a 1-iron to become the first player to reach that green in two shots at the Open. But that shot occurred in the second round. And Nicklaus held a three-stroke lead over Arnold Palmer in 1967 when he used his 1-iron to birdie, breaking the U.S. Open record of 275, previously held by Ben Hogan. Day’s magic with the 2-iron might be more easily forgotten because he wound up losing to Walker by one stroke. But considering the magnitude of the stage, and after playing 35 holes in 12 hours, Day’s shot was as dramatic as it gets. Walker knew it. He could hear the crowd roar from the green at 17. “I thought I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Grillo that hit the shot that everybody was so pumped about,” he said, referring to Day’s playing partner, Emiliano Grillo. “I figured it was Jason.” Day buried the putt for an eagle, the fifth of the day on No. 18. The final hole at Baltusrol was the easiest on the course, with players averaging 0.65 of a stroke under par in the fourth round — with only one bogey. After Day’s eagle, Walker needed to make par to win. After aggressively going for the green on his second shot but landing wide to the right, he managed to scramble from the rough beside the bunker on his third shot and make two putts to earn the clutch five. “That’s brutal sometimes,” Walker said, “when you know all you have to do is make a par. I haven’t made a bogey all day. You come to the last hole and just didn’t want that to happen.” Afterward, Day lamented some missed opportunities that could have cost him the chance to repeat as P.G.A. champion. He especially bemoaned a missed birdie putt on No. 17 that would have turned up the intensity on Walker even earlier. “I really read it left to right and it went dead straight,” Day said. “I hit a good putt. Can’t do anything other than hit a good putt.” When he arrived at the tee on No. 18, he elected to hit the 2-iron off the tee instead of a wood, just as he had done earlier in the day in the third round. “The play, you think, is to hit driver,” Day said. “But I hit a great 2-iron and I just said, ‘Let’s try and finish off with a bang.’” For his second shot, everything seemed to go right. “As soon as I hit it, it felt perfect,” Day said. “It was cutting up against the wind. It was going to land soft. It was going to be really nice.” Any nicer, and there might have been a new plaque in the 18th fairway at Baltusrol.

PGA Championship
Jason Day
Golf
Jimmy Walker


Child Migrants Strain Makeshift Arizona Shelter

Abstract: PHOENIX — Immigration officials overwhelmed by a flood of women and children from Central America who illegally crossed the border from Mexico are moving hundreds of unaccompanied boys and girls this weekend to a makeshift detention center in Nogales, Ariz. The move is the latest effort by the Obama administration to cope with the tens of thousands of women and children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras who it says have fled violence and poverty in their countries and have streamed into Texas in recent months. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, who has criticized President Obama for releasing some of these migrants at a bus station in Phoenix, said federal officials had told her office that the policy “will continue into the foreseeable future.” Since Memorial Day, federal immigration officials have flown hundreds of women and children to Tucson, where they were given medical and other tests. They were then sent by bus to Phoenix and left at the Greyhound station to find their relatives around the nation. They were told to report to an immigration center within 15 days of reaching their destination, officials said. Immigration advocates have criticized the federal government for stranding the women and children in extreme heat with no money or food. Volunteers have stepped in to help them reach their families. The government may continue to drop off women and children in Phoenix, but it has also opened a facility in Nogales to temporarily house children before they are sent to other holding centers. Ms. Brewer said that 432 children were sent to Arizona on Friday and that an additional 734 were expected to arrive during the weekend. “I am disturbed and outraged that President Obama’s administration continues to implement this dangerous and inhumane policy, meanwhile neglecting to answer crucial questions our citizens demand and deserve,” the governor, a Republican, said in a statement late Friday. A spokesman for Ms. Brewer, Andrew Wilder, said Arizona officials were sending federal supplies to Nogales. The Associated Press reported that the shelter there was running out of essential materials, that children were sleeping on plastic cots and that portable toilets and showers had been taken to the center. The warehouse in Nogales can hold about 1,500 people, Mr. Wilder said. The children will be vaccinated and given a medical checkup, then sent to shelters at military facilities in Oxnard, Calif.; San Antonio; and Fort Sill, Okla. “This is a way-station, and they’re just coming through and shipping in and shipping out as soon as they can,” Mr. Wilder said. “We heard this facility was chosen because it was not being used and could be converted easily.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement has only one facility for children, in Pennsylvania. Since October, more than 47,000 children traveling without parents have been caught trying to cross the Southwest border, a 92 percent increase over the similar period a year earlier. Federal officials predicted that at least 60,000 minors will try to cross into the United States without their parents this fiscal year. But according to an interagency memo from a Border Patrol official, that number has been revised up to more than 90,000.

Nogales AZ
Illegal Immigration
Immigration and Customs Enforcement,ICE
Jan Brewer
Children


2014 Goals for Ebola Treatment May Not Be Met, U.N. Health Officials Say

Abstract: GENEVA — The World Health Organization expressed doubt on Monday about achieving important United Nations benchmarks in battling Ebola , saying the year-end goals of isolating and treating all patients and safely burying all the dead would be major challenges. However, the W.H.O. said, significant progress has been made in reversing the upward trajectory of Ebola cases in many places across the three West African countries ravaged by the disease. Among the biggest challenges now, the agency’s top official for the Ebola response said, is to track down every person potentially exposed. To do this, the organization plans to nearly double the number of its experts on the ground to assist 20,000 community health workers. “To get to zero you have to find every case,” the official, Bruce Aylward, assistant director general for emergencies, told reporters at a briefing here. The geography of Ebola has shifted, further complicating the efforts to eradicate it: For instance, in Guinea, Ebola is now thought to be in nearly twice as many districts as it was just two months ago, when the United Nations established a new mission to coordinate the international response. And in Sierra Leone, Ebola is ravaging the western part of the country, while only a handful of new cases are surfacing in previous hot spots. “We need to move like a school of fish or a flock of birds,” said Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy for the Ebola response, speaking by telephone from Monrovia, Liberia. “As the situation changes we all need to shift how we respond without a long lag period.” Last week, the W.H.O. estimated, there were 1,100 new Ebola patients across the three countries most affected by the outbreak — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — slightly higher than the roughly 1,000 per week at the beginning of October. But the number of new cases is not rising as fast as it was during the summer. “We are no longer seeing exponential growth of this and in some areas we are seeing steep decline,” Dr. Aylward said. Video A World Health Organization assistant director general, Dr. Bruce Aylward, said the prognosis for Ebola in Sierra Leone is “very good” because of plans for building more treatment centers there. Credit Credit Denis Balibouse/Reuters How residents of the worst affected countries are burying their dead also has clearly changed, reflecting growing awareness that the corpses of Ebola victims are extremely infectious. In all three countries, more than 70 percent of those known to have died from Ebola are buried safely — although, W.H.O. officials caution, there are certainly others who have not come to their attention. Sufficient numbers of safe-burial teams are now in place in the vast majority of areas, Dr. Aylward said. But he said a few unsafe burials could accelerate the contagion, sending the number of new cases skyrocketing again. The reported death toll has so far reached nearly 6,000. The vast majority of deaths were in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Ebola has most recently been reported in Mali, where six people have died. As for meeting the United Nations’ interim treatment goal, Guinea and Liberia are believed to be treating more than 70 percent of known Ebola patients. However, even as donors add treatment capacity, the virus is racing ahead in some places. And so, in Sierra Leone, the W.H.O. said it had not met the 70 percent treatment target set by the United Nations because Ebola is spreading fast in the west of the country, where sufficient treatment units have not yet opened. Even now, patients sometimes have to be transported over long distances and are dying in transit. Dr. Aylward speculated that some Ebola victims were not coming forward over fears about the lack of treatment capacity near their homes. The agency has found a significant survival advantage in early treatment: About 40 percent survive with the right care, compared to under 20 percent without. The goal of treating all Ebola patients by the end of the year is crucial to ending transmission, but is unlikely to be met. “That’s a huge challenge,” Dr. Aylward said. “You may have to extend that out a bit.” He said there was no room for optimism even though the caseload was no longer shooting up. “It’s about zero. We have got to get to zero.” He added: “It all began with just one case.” A funding shortfall also looms as a problem. Of the $1.55 billion the United Nations system needs to support its programs through next spring, only $920 million has come in.


Yankees’ Replacements Come Up Empty in Loss to Rockies

Abstract: DENVER — Undermanned as they are from a long list of injuries, the Yankees have managed to survive the first few weeks of the season with relative success. But as more players go down, and the Yankees reach deeper to find replacements, that success may prove more elusive. Tuesday night’s game seemed to demonstrate that the injuries are catching up to the Yankees, who were blanked, 2-0, by the Colorado Rockies under rainy conditions at Coors Field. The starting pitcher Hiroki Kuroda pitched well and was as stingy as he has been all season. But he had no run support from a lineup bereft of dangerous hitters, and one mistake by Kuroda to Carlos Gonzalez in the sixth inning proved the difference. Gonzalez hit a two-run homer, and that was the game. Combined with Sunday’s loss to the Oakland Athletics, the Yankees have lost two games in a row for the first time since April 21-22. More than at any time during the season, they seemed to miss their star players like Curtis Granderson, Mark Teixeira, Kevin Youkilis and Alex Rodriguez, who are all rehabbing their injuries in Tampa, Fla., plus Derek Jeter who is in New York, still wearing a walking boot on his left ankle. “The last thing you can do is start thinking, We don’t have this guy, we don’t have that guy,” said Robinson Cano, the only true star left in the Yankees lineup. “We’ve just got to go out there and keep ourselves in the race until we get the rest of the guys.” The critical moment in the game came with two outs in the sixth inning when Rockies second baseman Josh Rutledge singled to center field, bringing Gonzalez, one of baseball’s most dangerous hitters, to the plate. Gonzalez worked the count full, and then pounced on a fastball right over the plate, sending it over the wall for his seventh home run of the season. Kuroda had struck out Gonzalez with the same pitch, a four-seam fastball, in the fourth inning. But in the sixth, Kuroda left the pitch right over the plate for Gonzalez to crush. “He made one mistake to Gonzo and he made him pay for it,” Manager Joe Girardi said. “But he pitched well enough to win, that’s for sure.” But the Yankees managed only four singles, drew two walks and went 0 for 5 with runners in scoring position, not a recipe for victory. “It’s hard to win games when you get four hits and don’t put any runs on the board,” Vernon Wells said. The Yankees took the field with a lineup so sparse of stars that before the game a local television reporter asked Girardi if he felt sympathy for local fans who might have purchased tickets months ago still expecting to see a lineup that included Jeter, Rodriguez, Teixeira and Granderson. Even a Kevin Youkilis or Eduardo Nunez sighting might have sufficed. Instead, it was Jayson Nix, Chris Nelson, Ben Francisco and Chris Stewart populating the lineup. “It’s still the Yankees,” Girardi claimed before the game, without too much evidence to back it up other than the gray road uniforms. As it is, the Yankees have backups replacing backups, and at times like Tuesday, it has started to show. INSIDE PITCH Eduardo Nunez said his strained left rib cage muscle was much better, but Joe Girardi said Nunez probably would not be available for at least another day or two. ... Ivan Nova, who is on the disabled list with inflammation in his right triceps, is scheduled to start an extended spring training game in Tampa, Fla., on Wednesday, after which he may be recalled to rejoin the team. The Yankees will need an extra starter for their makeup doubleheader at Cleveland on May 13. ... Girardi was presented with a replica of his 1993 Rockies No. 7 jersey before the game. “Twenty years is a long time,” he said. ... Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning was on the field for batting practice.


Google Will Sell Brand Names as Keywords in Europe

Abstract: PARIS — The Internet giant Google said on Wednesday that it would change its search policy for most of Europe to allow advertisers to buy and use as keywords terms that have been trademarked by others. Previously, brand owners could file a trademark complaint with Google to prevent third-party ads from being returned alongside the results of a search of a trademarked name, like Louis Vuitton or Prada. The decision will be effective Sept. 14 and extends to the rest of Europe changes that were made in Britain and Ireland in 2008. In the United States and Canada, Google has been using the policy since 2004. Google’s move stems from a decision by the European Court of Justice in March. The court broadly ruled that Google had respected trademark law by allowing advertisers to bid for keywords corresponding to third-party trademarks. Brand owners, led by the French luxury goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, had argued that only they or authorized sites should be able to buy and use such trademarked terms in searches, so as to protect their brand value. They now face the prospect of having the ads of third-parties offering their products being displayed in search results. Trademark owners who feel that third-party ads confuse users as to the origin of the goods and services will still be able to file complaints with Google, and the search company said it would take down the ads if it agreed that they were confusing. Dominic Batchelor, a corporate partner at the legal firm Ashurst based in London, said the decision “will come as a blow to rights holders” in the battle “over policing content in a challenging online environment.” “The onus will be on rights holders to monitor and assert their rights,” he said. “How readily Google responds to complaints about infringing use remains to be seen.” Ben Novick, Google’s communications manager for the region, stressed that the company would continue banning ads for counterfeit goods. “We work with multiple brands to identify counterfeit goods,” he said. Google’s clients are now being informed of the changes. Legal experts have said that the European ruling stopped short of the definitive precedent that Google and brand owners alike had sought. Instead, it contained caveats that could result in a new flurry of lawsuits over the sale of “sponsored links” generated by Google searches. Google argues that selling brand names as ad keywords to multiple bidders helps consumers because it allows them to find product reviews, sellers of second-hand goods and other information. It stressed that the new policy would not extend to the actual display text in search findings. “Users will benefit from seeing more relevant ads following a search on Google,” Mr. Novick said. After the introduction of the changes in Britain and Ireland, there was disquiet among some advertisers, he said, followed by “a period of calm within a few weeks.” The changes will benefit the company’s hugely successful AdWords service, through which advertisers bid for keywords; their ads are ranked based on the price paid and other variables. The system works on a pay-per-click basis. The company would not speculate how much additional revenue the decision might bring. AdWords is the bedrock of the company’s success, accounting for approximately 95 percent of revenue. Last month, Google said its second-quarter revenue rose to $6.82 billion, from $5.52 billion in the equivalent quarter a year ago. Net profit rose to $1.84 billion, from $1.48 billion.

Google Inc
Trademarks and Trade Names
Online Advertising
Europe


China Arrests 3 for Selling Tainted Milk Powder

Abstract: SHANGHAI — The Chinese police arrested three people on Tuesday, accusing them of selling milk powder contaminated with melamine , the same toxic chemical that was blamed last year for killing 6 children and sickening over 300,000 others in one of the country’s worst food safety scandals. The three men, all of whom worked for Jinqiao Dairy Company in north China ’s Shaanxi Province, were accused of producing and selling toxic food, according to China’s official Xinhua News agency . Investigators said the milk powder was confiscated in November, before it could reach stores. There is no indication that Jinqiao Dairy’s products are exported. The arrests came just a few weeks after two other men were executed for their role in producing and distributing three million pounds of melamine-tainted milk powder in 2007 and 2008 in another part of northern China. That case rocked China’s dairy industry and led to nationwide and global recalls of Chinese-made dairy goods. More than 20 farmers and dairy executives, including the head of Sanlu, the nation’s biggest milk powder producer, were later convicted their role in the schemes. Although the contaminated milk powder did not reach stores this time, the case is likely to raise new concerns about the country’s food safety system. This is the third consecutive year that regulators have caught food producers selling goods that were apparently intentionally doctored with melamine. Two years ago, melamine-tainted animal feed contaminated American pet food, sickening thousands of cats and dogs. Regulators and industry officials say that Chinese food producers have periodically used the industrial chemical as a cheap additive because it appears to show that food is rich in protein, even though it is not. Experts say it is virtually impossible for regulators to test all Chinese food and dairy products for melamine, which can cause renal failure in children. The three men arrested Tuesday were initially detained on Dec. 2, and formally arrested this week, according to the state-run news media. The police accused three men of selling more than five tons of melamine-tainted milk powder in September to the Nanning Yueqian Food Additive Company in southern China’s Guangxi Province. A spokesman for Nanning Yueqian, which produces milk powder for big cities like Shanghai and Nanjing, said they discovered the milk powder was contaminated in September and informed the government. “We contacted Jinqiao immediately to inform them about the problem, but they denied it and sent us a report saying that the milk powder was already tested and turned out to be safe,” said Chen Mingmei, a sales manager at Nanning Yueqian. “We didn’t trust them because last year’s Sanlu case was so heartbreaking.”

China
Infant Formulas
Melamine
Food Contamination and Poisoning