Sprouts, Poster Plant of Health Food, Can Pack Risks

Abstract: Sprouts are a fixture of salad bars and the epitome of health food to many people. But the reality can be very different. As a horrified Europe learned over the past month, sprouts are a high-risk food for carrying harmful bacteria like salmonella or the toxic forms of E. coli, according to public health experts. This year, at least two American growers have recalled sprouts contaminated with salmonella, and outbreaks of illness from tainted sprouts have occurred so often in the United States that health investigators have a special name for them: sproutbreaks. Many sprout growers try to kill pathogens by soaking their seeds before germination in a concentrated chlorine solution, similar to but much stronger than the disinfectant used in swimming pools. While the Food and Drug Administration recommends a sanitizing step like the chlorine treatment, it does not require it and some growers skip it or use less stringent methods. German authorities said on Friday that they had conclusively identified sprouts as the cause of the E. coli infections that have swept Europe since early May, killing at least 31 people and sickening about 3,000, including more than 700 with a severe kidney complications. Epidemiologists in the United States said they were perplexed that it took German authorities so long to identify the culprit. “I’m just staggered,” said William E. Keene, a senior epidemiologist of the Oregon Public Health Division. “This is basic outbreak investigation 101. This is on the high end of suspect vehicles. You always rule out raw milk, you always rule out ground beef, you always rule out sprouts. It just happens in the beginning steps.” After a series of outbreaks of sprout-related illnesses in this country and abroad in the 1990s, the F.D.A. began encouraging sprout growers, known as sprouters, to take steps to sanitize their seeds and test their products for pathogens before sale. The agency also warned the public that uncooked sprouts were a risky food, saying that children, the elderly, pregnant women and those with weak immune systems should not eat raw sprouts. The bacteria that can contaminate sprouts can be destroyed by cooking. The F.D.A. says there have been at least 30 outbreaks of disease associated with sprouts in this country since 1996. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group that tracks food safety , said that its review of government data revealed 45 sprout-related outbreaks since 1990, including 2,500 illnesses. The group said that it was aware of one death, in a salmonella outbreak in 2003. One of the most severe E. coli outbreaks ever recorded, in Japan in 1996, was associated with radish sprouts. About 10,000 people, many of them children, fell ill. Bob Sanderson, president of Jonathan Sprouts in Massachusetts and the head of the International Sprout Growers Association , said that it would be wrong to draw conclusions about the safety of American sprouts based on the German outbreak, since growers there may use different methods than their counterparts here. “Fresh food is the most nutritious food and inherently prone to these problems,” Mr. Sanderson said of sprouts and other vegetables. “That’s what makes it fresh. It’s not sterile.” Mr. Sanderson’s company recalled alfalfa and some mixed sprouts in April after routine federal testing found salmonella in them. Mr. Sanderson said that no illnesses had been associated with his products. After the recall, he said, he improved his testing methods. Some sprout growers complain that the strong chlorine mixture recommended by the F.D.A. to sanitize seed can be dangerous for workers to handle. Mr. Sanderson said that he used a lower concentration of chlorine for that reason, but he feels that the tests his company conducts on sprouts as they are growing are sufficient to catch any problems. Sidney Chang, the owner of Chang Farm, another Massachusetts sprouter, recalled some of his sprouts two years ago after tests found listeria, another dangerous bacteria. Since then, he has built a new, more modern facility and now sanitizes his sprouts with a hot-water process. He also uses a less concentrated chlorine wash. Experts say they believe sprout seeds can become contaminated in the fields where they are grown. Bacteria can hide inside damaged seeds, where sanitizing steps may not always be able to reach them. Michelle Smith, an F.D.A. senior policy analyst, said that a single bacterium surviving in a kilogram of seed can be enough to contaminate a batch of sprouts because the way they are grown allows bacteria to spread. Dr. Smith said that the F.D.A. expected to include new rules for sprouts as it wrote regulations as part of a major food safety law that went into effect this year.

Food Contamination and Poisoning
Salmonella (Bacteria)
E Coli (Bacteria)
Sprouts (Seed)


U.S. Faces Choice on New Weapons for Fast Strikes

Abstract: WASHINGTON — In coming years, President Obama will decide whether to deploy a new class of weapons capable of reaching any corner of the earth from the United States in under an hour and with such accuracy and force that they would greatly diminish America’s reliance on its nuclear arsenal. Yet even now, concerns about the technology are so strong that the Obama administration has acceded to a demand by Russia that the United States decommission one nuclear missile for every one of these conventional weapons fielded by the Pentagon. That provision, the White House said, is buried deep inside the New Start treaty that Mr. Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev signed in Prague two weeks ago. Called Prompt Global Strike , the new weapon is designed to carry out tasks like picking off Osama bin Laden in a cave, if the right one could be found; taking out a North Korean missile while it is being rolled to the launch pad; or destroying an Iranian nuclear site — all without crossing the nuclear threshold. In theory, the weapon will hurl a conventional warhead of enormous weight at high speed and with pinpoint accuracy, generating the localized destructive power of a nuclear warhead. The idea is not new: President George W. Bush and his staff promoted the technology, imagining that this new generation of conventional weapons would replace nuclear warheads on submarines. In face-to-face meetings with President Bush, Russian leaders complained that the technology could increase the risk of a nuclear war, because Russia would not know if the missiles carried nuclear warheads or conventional ones. Mr. Bush and his aides concluded that the Russians were right. Partly as a result, the idea “really hadn’t gone anywhere in the Bush administration,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates , who has served both presidents, said recently on ABC’s “This Week.” But he added that it was “embraced by the new administration.” Mr. Obama himself alluded to the concept in a recent interview with The New York Times , saying it was part of an effort “to move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons ” while insuring “that our conventional weapons capability is an effective deterrent in all but the most extreme circumstances.” The Obama national security team scrapped the idea of putting the new conventional weapon on submarines. Instead, the White House has asked Congress for about $250 million next year to explore a new alternative, one that uses some of the most advanced technology in the military today as well as some not yet even invented. The final price of the system remains unknown. Senator John McCain of Arizona , the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a hearing on Thursday that Prompt Global Strike would be “essential and critical, but also costly.” It would be based, at least initially, on the West Coast, probably at Vandenberg Air Force Base . Under the Obama plan, the Prompt Global Strike warhead would be mounted on a long-range missile to start its journey toward a target. It would travel through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound, generating so much heat that it would have to be shielded with special materials to avoid melting. (In that regard, it is akin to the problem that confronted designers of the space shuttle decades ago.) But since the vehicle would remain within the atmosphere rather than going into space, it would be far more maneuverable than a ballistic missile, capable of avoiding the airspace of neutral countries, for example, or steering clear of hostile territory. Its designers note that it could fly straight up the middle of the Persian Gulf before making a sharp turn toward a target. The Pentagon hopes to deploy an early version of the system by 2014 or 2015. But even under optimistic timetables, a complete array of missiles, warheads, sensors and control systems is not expected to enter the arsenal until 2017 to 2020, long after Mr. Obama will have left office, even if he is elected to a second term. The planning for Prompt Global Strike is being headed by Gen. Kevin P. Chilton of the Air Force, the top officer of the military’s Strategic Command and the man in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal. In the Obama era — where every administration discussion of nuclear weapons takes note of Mr. Obama’s commitment to moving toward “Global Zero,” the elimination of the nuclear arsenal — the new part of General Chilton’s job is to talk about conventional alternatives. In an interview at his headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base , General Chilton described how the conventional capability offered by the proposed system would give the president more choices. “Today, we can present some conventional options to the president to strike a target anywhere on the globe that range from 96 hours, to several hours maybe, 4, 5, 6 hours,” General Chilton said. That would simply not be fast enough, he noted, if intelligence arrived about a movement by Al Qaeda terrorists or the imminent launching of a missile. “If the president wants to act on a particular target faster than that, the only thing we have that goes faster is a nuclear response,” he said. But the key to filling that gap is to make sure that Russia and China , among other nuclear powers, understand that the missile launching they see on their radar screens does not signal the start of a nuclear attack, officials said. Under the administration’s new concept, Russia or other nations would regularly inspect the Prompt Global Strike silos to assure themselves that the weapons were nonnuclear. And they would be placed in locations far from the strategic nuclear force. “Who knows if we would ever deploy it?” Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top adviser on unconventional weapons, said at a conference in Washington on Wednesday. But he noted that Russia was already so focused on the possibility that it insisted that any conventional weapon mounted on a missile that could reach it counted against the new limit on the American arsenal in the treaty. In a follow-on treaty, he said, the Russians would certainly want to negotiate on Prompt Global Strike and ballistic missile defenses. If Mr. Obama does decide to deploy the system, Mr. Samore said, the number of weapons would be small enough that Russia and China would not fear that they could take out their nuclear arsenals.

US Military
Nuclear weapon
Missiles and Missile Defense
US Foreign Policy
Barack Obama
Pentagon
Russia
US
George W Bush


Jet Hunt Focus Shifts From Air to Under Sea

Abstract: SYDNEY, Australia — Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia announced on Monday an end to the search by air for debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but he said the underwater search would be intensified and expanded. “It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface,” Mr. Abbott said at a news briefing in Canberra, the capital. “By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk. Therefore, we are moving from the current phase to a phase which is focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area.” Mr. Abbott said that while the United States Navy’s Bluefin-21 submersible vehicle would continue to search the ocean floor for wreckage from the jet, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, the search coordinators were arranging to hire private contractors that would use a different type of equipment. The next phase of the search could take six to eight months, he said. The authorities said the technology being envisioned for the new phase had advantages over the Bluefin-21, which must be recovered and its data downloaded every 20 hours. The Bluefin-21 was better suited to work with the pinger locator towed by the Australian naval vessel Ocean Shield. Towed side-scan sonar can cover a larger area, picking up imagery in a way not possible with the autonomous underwater vehicle. Mr. Abbott’s announcement followed the failure of the Bluefin-21 to find any sign of the plane’s wreckage on the seabed despite 16 deep-sea missions in a remote part of the Indian Ocean, about 1,000 miles off the coast of the state of Western Australia. Flight 370 veered off course on March 8 during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, for reasons that remain unknown. Satellite data later indicated that the plane had headed south, and searchers believe it crashed in the Indian Ocean.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Tony Abbott
Plane Crashes and Missing Planes
Australia
Indian Ocean
Malaysia Airlines


North Carolina: Marine Sentenced in Desecration

Abstract: A Marine Corps sniper shown with three other Marines on a YouTube video urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan is being reduced in rank after pleading guilty at a court-martial. Sgt. Robert W. Richards of Seminole, Fla., was tried Wednesday at Camp Lejeune and was reduced one rank to corporal. Eight Marines have been punished for their involvement in the 2011 episode.

Robert W Richards
Criminal Sentence
Afghanistan War
Taliban
US Military
US Marines


Commander Burge of Chicago Police Convicted of Perjury

Abstract: CHICAGO — Three decades after criminal suspects interrogated at a South Side police station began complaining that they were being tortured into making confessions, a jury on Monday found a former police commander who led the unit guilty of crimes related to the abuse. The former commander, Jon Burge, was not convicted of abusing prisoners — crimes for which the statute of limitations had passed — but of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about the abuse in a civil case. Yet the message for this city’s South Side — where relations between the police and black residents, especially, have been scarred by stories of suspects burned, suffocated with typewriter covers and shocked with electrical devices — was the same: Mr. Burge, whose name had become a symbol of police brutality, will face punishment. “We are elated that finally, 25 years after this evidence came to light, there is some modicum of justice in this case,” said Flint Taylor , a lawyer who has represented men who reported abuse. Still, any joy was tempered by the fact that the prosecution had taken so long, that the conviction was not for torture itself, and that some 20 men here, according to Mr. Taylor, remain behind bars because of confessions that grew from abuse. Outside court, Mark Clements sobbed and said he had spent almost 30 years in prison after being tortured into confessing to four murders. “I sat in a prison cell, and I prayed for this day,” he said. Mr. Clements then asked, “What are we going to do about other people who are sitting in those prisons?” Mr. Burge, who is 62 and in ill health, was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. He faces up to 45 years in prison. His effect on this city had many chapters. In 2003, George Ryan, then the governor of Illinois, pardoned four death row inmates who long said they had been abused by Mr. Burge and his officers. Then, four years ago, special prosecutors issued a report supporting the accusations that dozens of suspects had made. At his monthlong trial, Mr. Burge vehemently denied wrongdoing, and his lawyers described him as a hero whom the city’s South Side would be better off to still have on the force. The lawyers presented the jury’s decision as a choice between whether to believe the accounts of police officers or the tales of five men the defense team described as a “murderer’s row.” Prosecutors portrayed Mr. Burge as a brash, boastful officer who attached shock devices to suspects, played Russian roulette by pointing guns at them and expected detectives to adhere to a “code of silence.” Though prosecutors had focused on five men, it was clear more was at stake. “Today,” David Weisman, an assistant United States attorney told jurors in closing remarks, “Chicago police officers are working hard to regain the trust that the defendant took away 20 years ago.”

Burge Jon
Chicago (Ill)
Decisions and Verdicts
Police Brutality and Misconduct
Confessions
Police
Perjury


DNA Tests Rejected for Inmate Facing Tuesday Execution

Abstract: The State of Mississippi has denied requests for DNA testing of evidence made by a prisoner set to be executed on Tuesday, potentially setting up what experts said would be a rare case in recent years in which a person is put to death with such requests unmet. The Mississippi Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, ruled in April that the existing evidence tying Willie Jerome Manning to the murder of two college students in 1992 was so strong that the findings of DNA tests would not make a difference. Lawyers for Mr. Manning say that there are flaws in the prosecution’s case, which is almost entirely circumstantial, but that at the very least tests of the available physical evidence should be conducted before his execution. They are now lobbying the governor. Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center , said that fights over testing were not uncommon but that if testing were not eventually allowed before the execution, “that would be very rare indeed.” “Today I think it’s become increasingly rare not to go through the whole bank of tests because of what’s at stake,” Mr. Dieter said. In December 1992, Tiffany Miller and Jon Steckler, students at Mississippi State University, were found shot to death just outside Starkville, Miss. The way Ms. Miller was found suggested sexual assault, though a rape kit analysis at the time turned up no evidence of seminal fluid. The police discovered at the scene a gold-colored token used to open restroom doors. The same night, someone had broken into a car at Mr. Steckler’s fraternity house, where the couple had been earlier, and stolen several items — including a token very similar to the one at the scene of the killings. Mr. Manning was implicated when witnesses told the police that he was trying to sell items from the car, including a CD player later found in a pawnshop and traced back to him. Several witnesses offered accounts at trial that tied Mr. Manning to the killings, including a man who said Mr. Manning had confessed while in jail and a former girlfriend of Mr. Manning’s who linked him to the murder weapon. In a decision on April 25 denying the request for DNA testing, the State Supreme Court said that “conclusive, overwhelming evidence of guilt” was presented at the trial, and that even if the DNA evidence failed to turn up a match, it would not “preclude his participation in the crimes.” Image Willie Manning Lawyers for Mr. Manning have argued that the case has serious holes. Some of the trial witnesses gave accounts inconsistent with known facts, they said, and one key witness, the former girlfriend, was given a favorable plea deal on fraud charges as well as nearly $18,000 in reward money after testifying for the prosecution, details not fully disclosed to the trial jury. Mr. Manning’s lawyers also pointed to fingerprints found in Ms. Miller’s car, which had been driven elsewhere and abandoned after the killings. None of the prints matched Mr. Manning’s, and multiple prints were found that did not match those of the victims. An F.B.I. expert testified that hairs found in the car belonged to an African-American — Mr. Manning is black, the victims were white — though on Thursday the Department of Justice sent a letter to Mississippi officials with some qualifications to that testimony, and an offer to conduct DNA tests on the hairs. Mr. Manning’s lawyers, who obtained access to the rape kit and other physical evidence years ago, are pushing to submit this evidence for DNA testing and to compare the unknown fingerprints with those in a national database. In a dissent, Justice James W. Kitchens of the Mississippi Supreme Court agreed, writing that “whatever potential harm the denial seeks to avert is surely outweighed by the benefits of ensuring justice by the scientific analysis of all the trace evidence.” There have been many instances when seemingly strong cases — even some where defendants themselves confessed — fell apart after DNA testing, said lawyers for the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted prisoners that filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Mr. Manning’s case. More than a dozen exonerations have involved evidence from a rape kit that had initially tested negative, said Peter J. Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project. Nationally, 306 prisoners have been exonerated by DNA testing since 1989, six of them in Mississippi. Two of those, including a former death row inmate, Kennedy Brewer, were prosecuted by Forrest Allgood, the district attorney who also led the case against Mr. Manning. Mr. Allgood said his involvement in Mr. Manning’s case was so long ago that he could not comment on particulars. But like other Mississippi officials, he said the push for a DNA test was probably a stalling tactic. “There will be something else after that,” he said. “I think there has to be an end sometime.”

Capital punishment
Mississippi
Forensic science
Murders
False arrest
Mississippi University
Willie Jerome Manning
Tiffany Miller
Jon Steckler
DNA


12 New York City Council Members Form Liberal Bloc

Abstract: Frustrated by what they say are plutocratic policies that have squeezed the neediest New Yorkers, the City Council ’s most liberal members are establishing a new bloc to champion a progressive agenda on housing, economic development, labor and civil rights issues. The new group, called the Progressive Caucus, is starting with a membership of 12, who are all Democrats, or almost one-quarter of the 51-member body . A formal announcement will be made at the Council’s meeting on Thursday, said the two leaders, Councilman Brad Lander, a freshman member from Brooklyn, and Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito of Manhattan, who is in her second term. The creation of the group, which includes seven members just elected in November, is meant to send a message to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn , its organizers said. “The mayor has done some good things — on the environment, on gun control,” Ms. Mark-Viverito said. “But there are some other issues where he hasn’t done a good job, and he’s lost sight of the poor, working class and middle class. So yes, this is a response because we don’t feel the city is going in the same direction as the majority wants.” The caucus will be the first in recent memory to coalesce around ideology rather than racial or sexual identity, according to Council members. And by voting yes or no as a bloc, the caucus could establish a liberal litmus test for all Council members that could be easily tracked by future Democratic primary voters, who tend to skew left. The group also demonstrates the clout of the labor-backed Working Families Party, which supported most of the members. In addition to the two leaders, the members are Annabel Palma, from the Bronx; Letitia James and Jumaane D. Williams, from Brooklyn; Margaret Chin, Rosie Mendez and Ydanis Rodriguez, from Manhattan; Daniel Dromm, Julissa Ferreras and James G. Van Bramer, from Queens; and Deborah Rose, from Staten Island. In an interview on Monday at Ms. Chin’s office in Chinatown, the members said that their distaste with Mr. Bloomberg’s successful push to rewrite term limits helped motivate them to organize. But more important, they said, was a desire to form a strategic alliance to accomplish their goals. The caucus is now working on a set of by-laws. But the group has already drawn up what it calls a statement of principles . These include creating an economic policy that puts a focus on living-wage jobs and paid sick days, strengthening rent regulations, pushing for more housing for the poor, emphasizing police accountability and community input in criminal justice, supporting same-sex marriage and pushing for more accountability in budgeting and contracts. “This is not necessarily antagonistic toward the speaker,” Mr. Lander said. “But of course the goal is to raise these issues so leadership pays real attention.” When asked about the new caucus, a spokesman for the mayor, Stu Loeser, said: “One reason Mike Bloomberg has been able to get so much done is he doesn’t think that disagreeing with someone on one issue means you can’t work closely with them on others. “We look forward to working with this new caucus on priorities we share, like the nation’s biggest affordable housing program and the furthest-reaching sustainability program at any level of government anywhere.” Ms. Quinn, meanwhile, said in an interview that she did not view the caucus “as a threat.” By contrast, she said she anticipated agreeing with caucus members a vast majority of the time. “I am a progressive,” Ms. Quinn said, “and I have an incredibly long record as a progressive I am extremely proud of.” She later added: “I support any and all efforts or movements to help members become more effective, and get more done. That’s not a challenge to me; that’s exciting to me.” But when asked about term limits being a factor in the group’s formation, Ms. Quinn, who helped Mr. Bloomberg amend the term limits law, said: “That’s an issue that was dealt with in the last session. I assume that the caucus will focus on the issues of this session.” It is too early to tell whether other Council members will join, or whether some may react adversely. Indeed, caucus members say it is possible that centrist Democrats and the Council’s five Republicans could form their own caucus. That kind of internal dynamism may turn out to be good for the Council, and even for Ms. Quinn, especially if she runs for mayor in 2013 and needs to tend to the liberal base of her party, said Kenneth Sherrill, a political scientist at Hunter College. “If they stay cohesive, then they could become a party within a party,” Professor Sherrill said. “And for something as touchy as budget negotiations, they could be a strong organizational force. It’s certainly something that’s designed to get her attention, and that may be something that she welcomes.”

City Councils
Quinn Christine C
Bloomberg Michael R
Lander Brad
Mark-Viverito Melissa
City Council (New York City)


Growing Left, Growing Right – How a Body Breaks Symmetry

Abstract: One day in 1788, students at the Hunterian School of Medicine in London were opening a cadaver when they discovered something startling. The dead man’s anatomy was a mirror image of normal. His liver was on his left side instead of the right. His heart had beaten on his right side, not his left. The students had never seen anything like it, and they rushed to find their teacher, the Scottish physician Matthew Baillie, who was just as stunned as they were. “It is so extraordinary as scarcely to have been seen by any of the most celebrated anatomists,” he later wrote. His report was the first detailed description of the condition , which came to be known as situs inversus and is thought to occur in about 1 in 20,000 people. Baillie argued that if doctors could figure out how this strange condition came to be, they might come to understand how our bodies normally tell the right side from the left. Over two centuries later, the mystery of left and right still captivates scientists. “I know what it is, you know what it is, but how does the embryo learn what it is?” asked Dominic P. Norris, a developmental biologist at the Medical Research Council in Harwell, England. Now Dr. Norris and other scientists are beginning to answer that question. They have pinpointed some of the steps by which embryos’ organs develop on the left or right. And their research may do more than simply solve an old puzzle. Mutations that cause situs inversus can lead to a number of serious disorders, including congenital heart defects. Deciphering the effects of mutated genes could lead to diagnoses and treatments for those conditions. “Understanding how you put this axis together has a lot of implications for understanding congenital heart disease,” said Rebecca Burdine, a molecular biologist at Princeton. Our bodies start out symmetrical, the left side a perfect reflection of the right. “Visible signs of left-right asymmetry in the human body are apparent around six weeks,” said Sudipto Roy of the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore, an author of a review of left-right asymmetry that was published last week in the journal Open Biology. The heart shows the first visible asymmetry. Starting out as a simple tube, it loops to the left. The heart then starts to grow different structures on each side, producing the chambers and vessels required to pump blood. Meanwhile, other organs start moving. The stomach and liver each move clockwise away from the midline of the embryo. The large intestines sprout an appendix on the right. The right lung grows three lobes, the left only two. But these visible changes arise long after the embryo has developed differences on its left and right. Experiments have revealed that the early embryo produces different proteins on each side while it still looks symmetrical. Biologists have pinpointed a single spot where this symmetry breaking starts: a tiny pit called the node, on the embryo’s midline. The interior of the node is lined with hundreds of tiny hairs, called cilia, which whirl round and round at a rate of 10 times a second. These whirling cilia are tilted, pointing away from the head. The tilt is essential to their ability to divide the body into left and right. Recently Kathryn V. Anderson and her colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center disabled genes required to tip the cilia in the node. As they report in the journal Development, that mutation led to some mouse embryos’ developing a mirror-image anatomy. The tilt of the cilia is so important because the embryo is bathed in a thin film of fluid; if they were upright, they would push the fluid in all directions, creating no flow at all. “It’s like a blender,” Dr. Norris said. “It just goes round and round.” Tilted, they all push the fluid in one direction, from right to left. When scientists reversed that flow in mouse embryos, it resulted in reversed organs. It takes only a very weak flow to the left side to start an embryo on its proper development: Last year, scientists at Osaka University in Japan reported that the whirling of just two cilia were enough to get the job done. And that raises another question: “What on earth are we doing with all those cilia if we don’t need them?” as Dr. Norris put it. “We don’t know.” Image Situs inversus, a condition in which the major organs are on the reverse side of what is normal, as seen in an X-ray. Though it is the most dramatic of the left-right disorders, it is not harmful. Credit Claudio Souza/Radiopaedia.org Once the fluid starts flowing, it takes only three or four hours for the left and right sides to be determined. Scientists have only a patchy understanding of the steps in between. In the first step, the fluid flows across the node until it reaches the left side of the rim. The rim is ringed by cilia that do not spin. Somehow, they respond to the flow. They may physically bend, or the flow may deliver some protein to them. “We don’t know the nitty-gritty,” Dr. Norris said. “We don’t know the actual mechanics in these cells of what is happening.” Regardless of those details, the cilia on the rim of the node respond to the flow — possibly by releasing calcium atoms that then spread to surrounding cells. Those cells respond by spewing out a protein called Nodal, which spreads through the left side of the embryo, in turn spurring other cells to spew out Nodal of their own in a kind of feedback loop that leaves the left side loaded with Nodal and the right with almost none. “Nodal begets Nodal, and then we’re off,” Dr. Norris said. Scientists are still working out how Nodal helps determine the anatomy on each side of the body. In recent years, many researchers have focused not on mice but on zebra fish, which have the advantage of having transparent embryos; cells in the embryos can be engineered to glow so the organs can be observed taking shape. Dr. Burdine, at Princeton, studies how Nodal shapes the anatomy of the zebra fish heart as embryonic cells migrate around the organ. “Nodal seems to be directly telling the cells on the left side to move faster than the ones on the right,” she said. As she and her colleagues reported in the January issue of PLoS Genetics, the fast-moving cells on the left side drag the entire heart clockwise. From that initial twist, the heart then develops its distinctive left and right sides. Some studies suggest that these early signals also influence brain development. Scientists have long known that the two sides of the human brain have some important differences. The right hemisphere, for example, plays a big role in understanding the mental lives of other people; the left hemisphere is important for focusing attention. Other vertebrates also have left-right brain differences, but the origins of the imbalance are mostly a mystery. “I think that in vertebrates, it is zebra fish where we know the most details,” said Joshua T. Gamse, a biologist at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Gamse and other researchers have found that Nodal prompts a small part of the fish’s brain to grow differently on the left and right sides. That difference then radiates outward to other parts of the brain. But it is not clear whether humans and other mammals develop in a similar fashion. As they look at these biological signals, scientists are also studying disorders that may be tied to their disruption. Situs inversus, the complete flip of the organs that Baillie described in 1788, may be the most dramatic of these disorders, but it is also one of the most harmless. “People can walk around with their axis completely inverted, and no one knows until your doctor figures out your heart’s not where it should be,” Dr. Burdine said. The reversal is relatively safe because all the organs line up with one another. “You look at yourself in the mirror, and you look perfectly normal,” Dr. Norris said. “You don’t stop looking like a human being just because you see yourself backward.” The real danger, it appears, is in incomplete reversals — “when you get a confusion, when you get things not quite meeting,” as Dr. Norris put it. Most worrisome are cases in which the heart is affected. “If you put the heart in the wrong place, and everything else is correct,” Dr. Burdine said, “that’s almost always fatal.” In other cases, the heart grows correctly on the left side of the body, but the structures inside the heart — the valves and chambers — grow on the wrong side. These disorders may not be immediately fatal, but they can become dangerous later in life, requiring complex surgery to rearrange the heart. Dr. Burdine hopes that research on left-right disorders will lead to genetic tests that can predict the risk of these hidden heart defects. She even sees an application to attempts to rebuild damaged hearts with stem cells. “It’s going to be more than just making the right cells,” she said, adding that they would need to be placed in the proper three-dimensional structure and given the correct signals on where to go. “And one of those signals,” she said, “is the left-right signal.”

Anatomy and Physiology
Brain
Biology and Biochemistry
Heart
Dominic P Norris
Rebecca Burdine


Now That ‘Sugar Man’ Is Found, Lawsuit Focuses on Missing Royalties

Abstract: The documentary “ Searching for Sugar Man ” tells the story of Rodriguez, an obscure singer-songwriter from Detroit whose albums were commercial flops when released in the early 1970s, but — unknown to Rodriguez and everyone around him — later became gigantic hits in South Africa. One of the most intriguing questions raised by the film, which was released in 2012 and won an Academy Award, was why the singer never received the proper royalties for an estimated half-million album sales in South Africa. That question is still not resolved, but a lawsuit filed on Friday involving two Detroit music executives who had worked with Rodriguez could provide some answers. The case, which is being heard in Federal District Court in Detroit, concerns the songwriting rights on Rodriguez’s first two albums, “Cold Fact” (1970) and “Coming From Reality” (1971). In the suit, the producer Harry Balk contends that he signed Rodriguez — whose full name is Sixto Rodriguez — to a five-year songwriting contract starting in 1966, but that when the singer made those albums, his new producer, Clarence Avant, had Rodriguez use a false songwriting name to circumvent the agreement. The name those early albums gave as the author of most songs was Jesus Rodriguez, “purportedly Sixto Rodriguez’s brother,” the suit contends. Mr. Balk’s company, Gomba Music, accuses Mr. Avant and his company, Interior Music, of copyright infringement, fraud and tortious interference with the 1966 contract, and seeks unspecific damages. Rodriguez himself is not a party to the suit. The existence of the lawsuit was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter . Mr. Balk and Mr. Avant are well-known executives in the world of soul and R&B music, and both had associations with Motown at different times. Mr. Balk, who produced Rodriguez’s first single in 1967, worked as a creative director at Motown in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mr. Avant, an entrepreneur whose labels included Sussex and Venture, was chairman of Motown in the 1990s. Mr. Avant did not respond to a voice mail message left at his Los Angeles office on Friday. What the case means for Rodriguez himself is unclear. Since the film was released, he has gone on to tour in major arenas and festivals, selling hundreds of thousands of reissued copies of his albums. But his own share of the royalties from the South African sales has not been resolved. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Mark A. Levinsohn, said on Friday that his client was “still keenly interested in finding out what happened all those years ago and where the money went.”

Royalties
Music
Rodriguez
Detroit
Searching for Sugar Man


Prisoners Say They Were Raped on Job Detail

Abstract: OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Prosecutors are investigating accusations that two former state employees at the Oklahoma governor’s mansion raped three female prison inmates assigned to work on the mansion’s grounds. Neither man has been charged, but the Department of Central Services fired both of them on Sept. 29 for violating departmental policies after a three-month Department of Corrections investigation. The accusations raise questions about security at the chief executive’s residence and about the oversight of a program meant in part to reward good behavior by allowing inmates to leave prison for the day and work off site. Department of Corrections officials believe the state workers who supervised the inmates at the governor’s mansion committed sexual battery, forcible sodomy and rape against inmates from the Hillside Community Corrections Center, a department spokesman, Jerry Massie, said Monday. The department recently turned its findings over to the office of the Oklahoma County district attorney, David Prater. Assistant District Attorney Scott Rowland said Monday that prosecutors met with Department of Corrections investigators for two hours Friday and that the investigation was continuing. Neither of the employees responded to phone messages seeking comment. The inmates, two of whom have since been released from prison, say the assaults happened between March 2008 and January 2009. The Department of Corrections did not begin investigating until June 1, after one woman came forward after her release, Mr. Massie said. The women said they were attacked in a storage building outside the security fence that surrounds the mansion’s 14-acre grounds, Mr. Massie said. Janet Roloff, a lawyer for one of the women, said her client had endured a “violent, bloody rape” that left her with emotional and physical scars. It is illegal for a supervisor and an inmate to have sex, and Ms. Roloff scoffed at the notion that any sex between her client and the state workers was consensual. “My client was dragged down, held down by one and raped by another,” she said. “That doesn’t sound very consensual, does it?” Ms. Roloff said her client had been afraid to report the attack until after her release, for fear of retribution. She said the woman had come forward to try to persuade prison officials to stop sending female inmates to the governor’s mansion. The Corrections Department is interviewing other women who took part in the program, Mr. Massie said. The program was suspended after the accusations surfaced but has since resumed. The accusations came a month after three state troopers assigned to guard the mansion were disciplined for falsifying hours, saying they were working when they were not.

Sex Crimes
Prisons and Prisoners
Oklahoma
Department of Corrections
Women and Girls
Government Employees
Assaults


Jeremy Lin May Not Return to the Knicks

Abstract: Five months after introducing himself to the world, Jeremy Lin is still inspiring various forms of passion and hysteria. This is not Linsanity as we knew it in February, when the word was synonymous with joy and wonder, but some horrific mutation of the phenomenon. In this version, Linsanity is a Knicks franchise willfully extinguishing the joy. It’s a fearful, frantic fan base raging against another indignity, after a decade full of them. If you had suggested five months ago that the Knicks would let Jeremy Lin — their most popular player in a decade — simply walk away, you would have been called worse than insane. Yet it appears the Knicks will. Or they might. As ever, their intentions are not altogether clear. And there is more speculation than tangible fact. Multiple news outlets, citing anonymous sources, reported over the weekend that the Knicks intended to let Lin leave for Houston, by declining to match a three-year, $25.1 million offer sheet from the Rockets . The reason is money. The Rockets’ offer includes a third-year balloon payment of $14.98 million. Under the N.B.A.’s new luxury-tax system, which punishes teams that wildly exceed a determined threshold, that salary could cost the Knicks an additional $35 million to $45 million in tax payments. Although the Knicks were carefree with their payroll over the last decade, even Madison Square Garden has a limit. This contract might be it. A person with knowledge of the Knicks’ deliberations said it was “more likely than not” that the team would decline to match the offer. The same person cautioned, however, that “it’s not definitive.” Lin played brilliantly for most of February. He electrified the Garden and saved the Knicks’ season. He is a global marketing machine. But $60 million is an extraordinary amount, even in N.B.A. terms, to spend for a player who has started only 25 games. Knicks officials have been typically silent, and they are under no obligation to tell anyone anything until Tuesday night — the deadline for matching Houston’s offer. It is unlikely there will be any clarity until then. (It is a well-established tradition for N.B.A. teams to wait until the last minute in these matters.) The Knicks’ intentions appeared to be telegraphed Saturday night, when they unofficially reached a deal to acquire Raymond Felton, a veteran point guard, from Portland. Although Felton could simply be an insurance policy — a hedge against Jason Kidd’s age (39) and Lin’s inexperience — the move was widely interpreted as the first step in cutting ties with Lin. Lin himself told associates that he believed Felton was acquired to replace him. Yet even Lin is not sure what the Knicks will do, those associates said. He has been told nothing directly by team officials. And no one in the Knicks’ hierarchy is talking, leaving fans to speculate and fret. “I’m going for a walk. Perhaps off a cliff. I don’t know, we’ll see,” Jim Cavan, a Knicks fan and blogger, wrote on his Twitter account Sunday morning. Comments like those were common as distraught fans grappled with the news. An online petition calling for the Knicks to keep Lin was already circulating. It had more than 2,000 signees by midnight Sunday. The decision was never supposed to be this complicated or stressful. Lin is a restricted free agent, which allows the Knicks to match any offer. He has early Bird rights, which give the Knicks greater flexibility to pay him without regard to the salary cap. And because of an obscure cap provision, no rival was allowed to offer Lin more than a $5 million starting salary. That provision, commonly known as the Gilbert Arenas rule, was created to ensure that teams could re-sign a breakout star like Lin without fear of being outbid by a team with cap room. The well-intentioned rule is having unexpected consequences. The Rockets cannot outbid the Knicks, but because they are under the cap, they are permitted to give Lin a balloon payment — a so-called poison pill — in the third year of his deal. Houston originally set that figure at $9.3 million and then increased it to $14.98 million, close to the maximum allowed. For cap purposes, Lin’s three-year salary would count as an average for Houston, or $8.4 million a year. But the Knicks would be charged the full amount in 2014-15, costing them $50 million to $60 million in a combination of salary and luxury taxes, rival executives said. That said, Lin would arguably be undervalued in the first two years — at $5 million and $5.4 million — and the Knicks would have time to either rework their payroll or, as a last resort, to trade Lin by the third year, when his expiring contract would become a commodity. Those are considerations the Knicks are still weighing. Lin’s salary would be the Knicks’ third highest in 2014-15, behind those of Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire. He would make slightly more than Tyson Chandler, the reigning defensive player of the year. Even for N.B.A. players, who are used to seeing outlandish contracts fly every July, the offer to Lin appeared staggering. Anthony, speaking to reporters covering the United States Olympic team, said as much Sunday. “It’s not up to me,” he said. “It’s up to the organization to say that they want to match that ridiculous contract.” The salary may indeed be ridiculous. But to a legion of Knicks fans, in New York and well beyond, the idea of letting Lin leave is pure Linsanity, and not the good kind.

Lin Jeremy
New York Knicks
Houston Rockets
Felton Raymond
Basketball
Anthony Carmelo
Free Agents (Sports)


Starfish: Keeping an Eye on the Prize

Abstract: Starfish use the primitive eyes at the ends of their arms to navigate toward food, say researchers from the University of Copenhagen who observed starfish with eyes moving toward a food source while those without eyes did not. This is the first time starfish have been observed using them.


Troubled Chinese Property Developer Says Total Debt Exceeds $10 Billion

Abstract: HONG KONG — The troubled Chinese developer Kaisa Group disclosed on Monday that its debts now total more than $10 billion and that it urgently needs to restructure its borrowings if a proposed rescue deal by Sunac China Holdings is to proceed. Kaisa said in a stock exchange notice that its debt stood at 65 billion renminbi, or $10.4 billion, at the end of 2014, which includes trade creditors. As much as 35.5 billion renminbi of this debt could be due before the end of 2015. The company had previously reported that on June 30, 2014, its borrowings amounted to only 29.8 billion renminbi, though this number would not have included trade credit. Kaisa’s problems rattled Asian corporate debt markets at the start of this year after it failed to make a timely repayment on a loan from HSBC of 400 million Hong Kong dollars, or $51 million, and was late on a $26 million bond coupon payment. Bondholders had hoped Sunac’s proposed acquisition of a 49.25 percent stake in Kaisa would help bring its debt under control, but Monday’s disclosure indicates the borrowings could be higher than they had feared. Kaisa bonds due in 2020 have dropped to 60 cents on the dollar, 15 points off the highs they struck after the news of Sunac’s proposed stake purchase. Trading in its shares was suspended earlier on Monday. Kaisa’s liquidity will be tested once again next month, as it has coupon payments due on its bonds with 2017 and 2018 maturities. The company also warned on Monday that it would experience a substantial decline in its net profit for 2014 and that its cash flow could be hit by an continuing block by the government on sales at some of its developments in Shenzhen. The company’s problems escalated late last year after it was hit by the block and the subsequent departure of a string of senior executives, including Kwok Ying Shing, its chairman. Mr. Kwok’s exit set off the mandatory prepayment provision in the HSBC loan, creating panic among investors after the company said it might default on other obligations. It missed a Jan. 8 deadline for paying a coupon on its bonds due in 2020 but subsequently paid up within the 30-day grace period. Kaisa said it would hold a meeting with its onshore creditors later on Monday and said it hoped to engage offshore creditors on a restructuring proposal as soon as is practicable. Kaisa added that it hoped to reach a debt restructuring agreement by the end of March and to complete the process in April.


Petraeus Appointment Could Inflame Relations With Pakistan

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The appointment of Gen. David H. Petraeus as director of the Central Intelligence Agency puts him more squarely than ever in conflict with Pakistan , whose military leadership does not regard him as a friend and where he will now have direct control over the armed drone campaign that the Pakistani military says it wants stopped. Pakistani and American officials said that General Petraeus’s selection could further inflame relations between the two nations, which are already at one of their lowest points, with recriminations over myriad issues aired publicly like never before. The usually secretive leader of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani , has made little secret of his distaste for General Petraeus, calling him a political general. General Petraeus has privately expressed outrage at what American officials say is the Pakistani main spy agency’s most blatant support yet for fighters based in Pakistan who are carrying out attacks against American troops in Afghanistan . Officials on both sides say they expect the two nations’ relationship to become increasingly adversarial as they maneuver the endgame in Afghanistan, where Pakistan and the United States have deep — and conflicting — security interests. Repairing the frayed ties between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s primary spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, will be difficult, American officials say. “In its current form, the relationship is almost unworkable,” said Dennis C. Blair , a former American director of national intelligence. “There has to be a major restructuring. The ISI jams the C.I.A. all it wants and pays no penalties.” One American military official sought to play down the animosity with Pakistani officials, noting that the general had regularly met with the Pakistanis for nearly three years, most recently on Monday. Still, the official acknowledged that with General Petraeus leading the C.I.A., “the pressure may be more strategic, deliberate and focused — to the extent that it can be.” A Pakistani official described the mounting tensions as a game of “brinkmanship,” with both Adm. Mike Mullen , who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been the Obama administration’s point man on Pakistan policy, and General Kayani growing impatient because they have little to show for the many hours they have invested during more than two dozen visits over the past three years. Admiral Mullen surprised Pakistani officials by publicly accusing the ISI of sheltering fighters from the Haqqani network, a Taliban ally that has long served as a proxy for Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment in Afghanistan. American commanders in eastern Afghanistan say they have killed or captured more than 5,000 militants in the past year, but fighters continue to pour across the border from sanctuaries in Pakistan to Paktia, Khost and Paktika Provinces in Afghanistan. In a private meeting here in Islamabad last week, Admiral Mullen told General Kayani that the C.I.A. would not reduce the drone strikes until Pakistan launched a military operation against the Haqqani network in Pakistan’s tribal areas, an American official said, pleas that the admiral has been making for the past two years with nothing to show for them. Pakistan’s military and its intelligence agency are increasingly embarrassed by the United States’ drone campaign, which they publicly condemn but quietly allow. They have asked the C.I.A. to remove its personnel from Shamsi air base, about 200 miles southwest of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, where some of the drones are based, a senior American official said. The withdrawal has not occurred but is expected soon, the official said. The drone attacks would then be flown out of Afghanistan, where some of them are already based, the official said. There have also been sharp disagreements over a proposed code of conduct that would define what American soldiers and intelligence agents can do in Pakistani territory, a Pakistani official said. The Pakistanis have, for now, dropped the idea of such an accord, fearing that the Americans are looking for “legal cover” for intelligence operatives like Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. contractor who killed two Pakistanis in January, a Pakistani official said. “The relationship between the two countries is very tense right now,” said Representative William M. Thornberry of Texas , a senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, who visited Pakistan last week. “And the Pakistan government fuels the anti-American public opinion to increase pressure on us.” Newly disclosed documents obtained by WikiLeaks have also stoked tensions. One of them, from the prison at Guantánamo Bay , Cuba , lists the ISI along with numerous militant groups as allies of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, an indication of how deep American suspicions run when it comes to Pakistani intelligence. The document is undated but appears to be from 2007 or 2008. A former general said the alliance established after 9/11 to get rid of Al Qaeda on Pakistani soil was built on shaky ground, with few aligning interests beyond stopping the terrorist group. Tensions over issues big and small — like accounting for American grants to the Pakistani military and the failure of the United States to deliver helicopters that would help in counterterrorism efforts — clouded the hastily arranged alliance from the start, he said. But now the collision of interests over how to end the war in Afghanistan, and the bitterness over the Davis affair, have exposed deep-seated differences, he said. The drone campaign, which the C.I.A. has run against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas since 2004, will now become the preserve of General Petraeus, and it has moved to center stage, at least for the Pakistanis. Since Mr. Davis’s release from custody in Pakistan after the killings, the C.I.A. has carried out three drone attacks, each one seemingly tied to sensitive events in the United States-Pakistan relationship and aimed at Afghan Taliban militants that Pakistan shelters. The day after Admiral Mullen left Pakistan last week, a drone attack in North Waziristan killed 23 people associated with Hafiz Gul Barhadur, whose forces are fighting NATO in Afghanistan. Earlier in April, after Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the ISI chief, left Washington, a drone attacked another group of Afghan Taliban. Another former Pakistani general who speaks to General Kayani said he believed that the Pakistan Army’s leader had concluded that the drone campaign should end because it hurt the army’s reputation among the Pakistani public. Those being killed by the drones are of midlevel or even lesser importance, the general said. The Americans say the drones are more important than ever as a tool to stanch the flow of Taliban foot soldiers coming across the border to fight American and NATO forces. The easy access into Afghanistan was on full display last week in Wana, the main town of South Waziristan, according to a local resident. There, militants loyal to Maulvi Nazir, a Taliban leader who maintains a peace agreement with the Pakistani military and whose forces often cross into Afghanistan, showed high morale and were moving around freely in front of the Pakistani Army, the resident said. “It looked,” he said, “as though the army was giving them a free hand.”

David H Petraeus
US Military
Pakistan
CIA
Barack Obama


Virginia: Electrocution Measure Advances

Abstract: The State Senate on Monday approved a bill that would allow the state to execute condemned inmates in the electric chair when it cannot find lethal-injection drugs. The bill passed the Republican-controlled Senate 22 to 17 after a passionate debate. Before going to the governor, the measure faces a final vote in the House of Delegates because of a minor amendment approved by the Senate. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, has not indicated whether he would sign the bill. Virginia is one of at least eight states that allow electrocutions, but it currently gives inmates the choice of lethal injection or the electric chair. If they do not choose, they receive the injection. Like many states, Virginia has struggled to obtain lethal-injection drugs because drug companies have protested their use in executions.


‘Straw-Purchasing’ Gun Bill Passes Senate Committee

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a measure that would make the practice of illegally buying a gun for someone else a felony, and increase penalties for the crime. The measure, which addresses a practice known as straw purchasing, passed the committee by 11 to 7; the only Republican to vote in favor was Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa. Mr. Grassley’s nod on the measure, which already had two Republican co-sponsors, was significant because he is the most senior member of the committee. The panel is made up of 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans. Some Republicans on the committee spoke out against the bill, including Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who said the legislation seemed intended “to show we are doing something,” but in the end would not be effective in halting gun crimes. Image Senator Charles E. Grassley backed a proposal to increase penalties for illegally buying a gun for someone else. Credit Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Preventing people from buying guns for people with criminal records and others who cannot pass a background check, which also leads to illegal gun traffic across state lines, is but one part of President Obama’s regulatory agenda for guns. Mr. Obama has also called for the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban, a limit on the capacity of magazines and the expansion of background checks to private sales of guns. The assault weapons ban, which has been championed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, was one of four measures the committee set out to consider Thursday. Citing support for a ban from law enforcement, medical, women’s and other groups, Ms. Feinstein, sounding frustrated and depressed at the political momentum against her bill, said, “And yet it’s as if we have a minority insubstantial piece of legislation.” The committee is also considering reauthorization of a program that provides matching grants for school safety improvements, as well as a measure that would greatly expand background checks for gun buyers, with the goal of preventing sales to people with criminal records or a history of mental illness. Video The Times's Jennifer Steinhauer reports from Capitol Hill, where new gun measures leave all sides disappointed. The main sponsor of the bill dealing with background checks, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, has had trouble finding a Republican strongly supportive of gun rights to join him because of disagreements over record keeping in private sales. The committee will probably vote to pass the measure without the support of any Republicans; the bill would then have to be amended on the Senate floor or replaced with a bipartisan consensus measure if Mr. Schumer can persuade a Republican to join forces with him. Most gun safety experts say they believe that straw-purchasing and background check measures work in tandem. A failure by Congress to pass more than a modified straw-purchasing bill would be a victory for the National Rifle Association, which opposes each measure. Shortly after their vote on the straw-purchasing bill on Thursday, the committee ended its work, apparently to accommodate a classified briefing for some of the members, and completion of its work was postponed until next Tuesday. Mr. Grassley’s support for the straw purchase bill came in part for an agreement on his amendment requiring a high-level person at the Department of Justice to personally sign off on future “gun-walking” sting operations similar to the Fast and Furious investigation. A gun that was allowed to pass into Mexico during that investigation was later found at the scene of a shootout in which a Border Patrol agent was killed.

Gun Control
Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Charles E Grassley


Amid Economic Woes and Public Discontent, Putin Critic Sees Opening

Abstract: MOSCOW — Glancing out the window at the swirling snow, Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition activist, mused aloud about how mounting economic problems, along with some public antagonism toward the Kremlin’s role in the war in Ukraine, may have damaged President Vladimir V. Putin’s administration enough to make it vulnerable. He is gambling that they have, leading a drive by the fractious, somewhat anemic opposition movement to organize an anti-crisis demonstration on March 1, testing its conviction that Muscovites — if not the broader Russian public — are fed up. “The number of people who will be ready to listen to us will increase,” said Mr. Navalny, 38, wearing a dark blue-gray sweatshirt and bluejeans, his previously lean frame reflecting the past year spent confined by house arrest to his 800-square-foot, three-room apartment. “We can see that people support Crimea and all this stuff, but they don’t want to pay for that.” Having been Russia ’s leader for the past 15 years, Mr. Putin can no longer entirely blame the deepening economic crisis on his predecessors or even on foreign hostility, Mr. Navalny said in an interview, after months of being barred from speaking to the news media. “It is much easier for us to explain that within these 15 years, Putin actually did nothing,” he said. “All the time they told us that they are reconstructing the great Russia, they are reconstructing the great Soviet Union and blah blah. But now oil prices dropped and everything is falling apart.” The government has tried to extend his house arrest, despite the sentencing in December. Mr. Navalny plans to pick up where he left off, trying to weaken the centralized authority of Mr. Putin and the ruling United Russia party by highlighting accusations of corruption and mismanagement. The president may enjoy an 84 percent approval rating for returning Crimea to Russian control last March, he said, but polling by Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation indicates that 87 percent want government corruption curbed. Despite Mr. Putin’s huge personal support, “he cannot delegate this support to the lower level, that is why this system is so weak,” Mr. Navalny said. The headquarters of his anti-corruption campaign are in an upscale office block. They could be the disheveled offices of a campaign anywhere, except one whiteboard details the interrogation schedule of employees hauled in for questioning by the security services — 12 sessions in three days. Mr. Navalny, a father of two who trained as a corporate lawyer, lives in permanent legal twilight. He has been convicted twice in court, while the appeal against a third conviction , on Dec. 30, for criminal fraud will start Feb. 17, it was announced this week. His three-and-a-half year sentence was suspended, but his younger brother, Oleg, 31, was sent to jail for the same term. “Their idea was to punish me by imprisoning my brother and keeping me quiet and isolated in my apartment,” he said. “They have a long history and long experience of torturing people, so I guess that they are good psychologists in such situations.” Navalny on Putin, Being Bugged and Revolution Aleksei A. Navalny rose to prominence as an anticorruption blogger with a special knack for turning a memorable phrase. His brother remains in good spirits, he said, brandishing a recent letter in which Oleg had sketched Mr. Putin as a toad sitting on an oil spigot, a reference to one of Mr. Navalny’s earlier speeches. Still, the criminal cases against Mr. Navalny multiply. The latest accusation is that he received a stolen piece of street art from the nearby city of Vladimir that neither the janitor who painted it nor the municipality that regularly trashes such works claims was stolen, he said. An active case means the security services can legally continue to follow him, monitor his telephone calls and Internet traffic, and the like, he said. Mr. Navalny is not quite sure why he was spared jail, but guesses that Mr. Putin has larger concerns right now and does not want another prominent political prisoner to become an international cause célèbre, after releasing the oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky in December 2013. House arrest generates far less sympathy, he said. Mr. Khodorkovsky joined other opposition figures in endorsing the March 1 rally, and Mr. Navalny said the two men share similar ideological outlooks. “I consider him an ally,” he said. Both men want to be president of Russia one day, yet share similar handicaps. For one, their convictions bar them from running for office for many years. (Before the convictions, Mr. Navalny was released from jail while one case was on appeal and allowed to run for mayor of Moscow in 2012, winning a surprising 27.2 percent of the vote.) In addition, both are viewed with some suspicion by Russian liberals: Mr. Navalny for his occasional nationalistic pronouncements and Mr. Khodorkovsky for getting stupendously rich through what many considered the dubious acquisition of state assets. Opposition to Russian involvement in the war in Ukraine is the main theme of the March 1 rally. The rally needs a permit, and Mr. Navalny thinks it may get one for a location on Moscow’s outskirts, but not in the center. “Everyone understands that war with Ukraine is just crazy,” he said. But other issues include some major political and economic demands: reducing the 32 percent of the government budget dedicated to defense and public security; canceling the sanctions on Western food imports, which fuel inflation; and loosening election laws to give more parties a chance, including his own, the Progressive Party. Mr. Navalny said he thought Western sanctions on certain sectors, like banking, had had some influence on the Kremlin, while personal sanctions had been too easy to circumvent. If the West really wanted to influence the discussion inside the government, it could quietly impose a complete travel ban on the 1,000 or so most important Russians and their families, Mr. Navalny said, many of whom own property abroad. “That would increase the split in the elite,” he said. “All these guys want to drink coffee in Paris.” Such measures would be popular with ordinary Russians, he added. Although many opposition figures have fled into exile, Mr. Navalny said moving abroad has no appeal. He admitted, however, that he was no longer as naïve as when he first started about how fast change can happen. “I still live here, my children live here and I am not going to leave,” he said. “It is my country.”

Aleksei Navalny
Russia
Ukraine
Vladimir Putin
Civil Unrest
Mikhail B Khodorkovsky


At Manhattan College, Memories of Gonzalez Are Not So Fond

Abstract: To illustrate just how difficult Bobby Gonzalez was to manage when he coached at Manhattan College from 1999 to 2006, Athletic Director Bob Byrnes told a story about the bus company Manhattan used to travel to games. “The guy who runs the bus company called me and said something to the effect of: ‘I have 131 drivers that drive for us. But we’re down to one guy that will drive for Bobby Gonzalez,’ ” Byrnes said. In a 45-minute interview at the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament on Saturday, Byrnes alternately paced, muttered and shook his head at the memories of Gonzalez. Byrnes is in his 22nd year as the athletic director of his alma mater, and his track record includes hiring Fran Fraschilla and Steve Lappas there. But Gonzalez’s tenure came with continual problems. “It was him and the team against the world,” Byrnes said. “It was a war. Everything was a war.” Byrnes received letters from sports editors threatening to stop coverage because of Gonzalez’s treatment of reporters. He said the only effective management style was “by threat.” Byrnes said Gonzalez would ask campus security, “Do you know who I am?” and routinely broke campus speeding and parking rules. From secretaries to assistant coaches, Gonzalez had issues in dealing with people. “Some people hated him, and there were days I hated him, absolutely,” said Theresa Carmody, who was Gonzalez’s secretary at Manhattan from 2001 to 2003. “I just think he’s kind of obsessed and has O.C.D. when it comes to basketball. But I’m not going to crush him. There were plenty of jerks when I worked down on Wall Street, too.” Manhattan has not achieved nearly the same success under Gonzalez’s replacement, Barry Rohrssen, but Byrnes quickly answered “no” when asked if he would bring Gonzalez back. Gonzalez said of his own mentality: “I’ve never cared about being liked. I don’t care what people think of me.” Byrnes said that when he was informed that Gonzalez was leaving for Seton Hall, he said: “Good luck. I had him for seven years. I used to have a lot of hair. I’m almost bald now.” He said he had seen Gonzalez only once since he left, at a dinner, but did receive a bobblehead of Gonzalez in the mail recently from him. “I don’t talk to you for four years, and you send me a bobblehead?” Byrnes said. “Save the postage.”

College Athletics
Basketball
Manhattan College
Gonzalez Bobby
Byrnes Bob


Toyota to Pay $10 Million to Settle Suit Over Lexus Crash

Abstract: LOS ANGELES (AP) — Toyota Motor agreed to pay $10 million to the family of four people killed in a runaway Lexus crash that led to recalls of millions of the automaker’s vehicles, lawyers said Thursday. John Gomez, a lawyer who represents the victims’ family, and Larry N. Willis, who represents the dealership that lent the Lexus to the family, confirmed the settlement amount. Toyota, which did not admit or deny liability in the settlement, fought to keep the settlement amount confidential, but The Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press argued that the public’s interest in the case outweighed confidentiality concerns. A Superior Court judge on Monday agreed, but imposed a gag order in case the family wanted to appeal. They did not appeal, allowing lawyers to release the amount. Toyota said in a statement it was disappointed the amount had been made public. “As is common in these cases, these parties agreed to keep the amount confidential, in part to protect the families from unwanted solicitations and to allow them to move on from this difficult period,” the automaker said. A crash in August 2009 killed Mark Saylor, 45, an off-duty California highway patrol officer; his wife; their daughter; and Mr. Saylor’s brother-in-law Chris Lastrella. They were killed on a suburban San Diego freeway when their car reached speeds of more than 120 m.p.h., struck a sport utility vehicle, flew off an embankment, rolled several times and burst into flames. Investigators determined that a wrong-size floor mat had trapped the accelerator. Toyota recalled millions of cars to replace floor mats that it said could cause the accelerator to jam. The carmaker later recalled millions more vehicles to replace gas pedals that it said could stick. The case was considered the strongest of hundreds of lawsuits that have since been filed and consolidated before a federal judge in Orange County over claims stemming from sudden acceleration in several Toyota models and brake malfunctions with the company’s Prius hybrid.

Automobiles
Accidents and Safety
Toyota Motor Corp
Saylor Mark


Federer Wins Madrid Open, Defeating a Run-Down Nadal

Abstract: MADRID (AP) — Roger Federer got a badly needed confidence boost ahead of the French Open, beating top-ranked Rafael Nadal , 6-4, 6-4, on Sunday to win the Madrid Open for his first title of the season. The second-ranked Federer broke a sluggish Nadal once in both sets before firing his sixth ace to win his 15th Masters Series title on the second match point. Federer also won in Madrid in 2006 when the event was played indoors on a hardcourt. “There are no positives; there is little to analyze,” Nadal, the 2005 champion, said. “He broke and broke, and I went home.” It was Federer’s second victory on clay against Nadal, his top rival; the other was at the Hamburg final two years ago. Federer also ended a five-match losing streak to Nadal, a stretch that included losses in the finals at Roland Garros, Wimbledon and Australia. Federer called this victory, his first against Nadal since the 2007 Masters Cup, “very satisfying,” especially after being left in tears after his loss to Nadal at Melbourne in February. “I thought I took all the right decisions today,” Federer said. “In the end, it was a perfect game for me.” Federer drew even with Nadal in Masters titles and also ended Nadal’s 33-match winning streak on clay. Nadal will be going for a fifth consecutive French Open title beginning May 25. “I don’t think he’s going to take any damage away from this,” Federer said. “I’m sure he’s going to be rock solid in Paris again.” Nadal’s loss was his fifth in his last 155 matches on clay. “To me, this tournament has nothing to do with Paris,” said Nadal, who was troubled with the odd bounces and faster pace brought on by the higher altitude. “This tournament is practically another surface compared to Paris.” The two met in a final for the 16th time, with Nadal having won 11 times. He leads the overall series, 13-7. Only Ivan Lendl and John McEnroe have met in more finals — 20. Federer, who is also the only top-10 player to have beaten Nadal on clay, saved two Nadal break chances before converting his first try in the ninth game. Federer slapped a forehand winner down the near line to set up the point and converted when Nadal weakly backhanded into the net. Federer served out to love to take the opening set. “He was simply better than me,” Nadal said. Nadal’s grueling semifinal win against Novak Djokovic took its toll as he failed to reach many balls he would normally get. “It doesn’t help to play four hours yesterday,” Nadal said. Federer netted his first match point but replied with his 25th winner to close it out. Nadal, who has won five titles this season, had only 12 winners. “Things are falling into place, and of course it’s the right time to get the victory,” said Federer, who will try for his first French Open title. Earlier, top-ranked Dinara Safina of Russia won her second straight title on clay by beating the Danish teenager Caroline Wozniacki, 6-2, 6-4, in the women’s final. Safina overpowered Wozniacki with 24 winners. “Since I became No. 1, I’m playing better and better,” Safina, 23, said.


In Albany, Senate Said to Be Mulling Stopgap for M.T.A.

Abstract: ALBANY — A proposal to add tolls to bridges over the East and Harlem Rivers to help finance the beleaguered Metropolitan Transportation Authority appears to be dead in the State Senate, as the Democratic majority is preparing to offer on Tuesday a scaled-back, short-term alternative to bail out the authority, two people briefed on that plan said. Long the third rail of interborough politics in New York City, the tolls were at the heart of a comprehensive plan drafted by Richard Ravitch , a former authority chairman, to stave off severe service cuts and fare increases for the city’s subways and buses. But after weeks of debate and deliberation, several Democratic senators from Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx remain adamantly opposed to the tolls. And with Democrats holding a bare 32-30 majority in the Senate, and Republicans refusing to provide any votes for the plan, the Senate majority leader, Malcolm A. Smith, has been forced to come up with an alternative plan that could win enough support to pass in his chamber, said one of the two people briefed on the plan. The two people insisted on anonymity because the proposal was not complete. The Senate proposal, which was presented privately to Democratic Senators on Monday afternoon, includes a 4 percent fare increase, half of what Mr. Ravitch had proposed. It would also impose a tax of 25 cents on every $100 of payroll on employers within the 12 counties served by the authority. That is significantly less than the 34 cents that Mr. Ravitch had proposed. “The immediate impact would be, all service cuts are restored, fare increases would be cut in half, and there would be no tolls,” said one of the two people briefed on the plan. Democratic staff members reviewed some of the authority’s finances in recent days and concluded that a scaled-back plan would suffice in the short term. But the Senate proposal would require the transportation authority to submit to a deeper forensic auditing, a step lawmakers from both parties have demanded as a condition of laying out more taxpayer money for the authority, long dogged by waste and corruption. Senate staff members have not finished calculating how much revenue their plan would generate. However, it would be far less than Mr. Ravitch’s plan, requiring lawmakers to return to the issue again within months. But one of the two people who were briefed said that since the authority’s capital spending plan was already financed through the end of this year, Senate Democrats believed there was time to return later to find a more comprehensive solution. Mr. Ravitch has insisted that any short-term or stopgap solution would only exacerbate the authority’s fiscal woes and create a bigger budget hole next year. In an interview last week, Mr. Ravitch said that the defeat of his plan would be “disastrous to the economy and the people of the M.T.A. region.” Mr. Ravitch declined to comment Monday night on the Senate’s counterproposal, saying he did not know the details. H. Dale Hemmerdinger, the transportation authority’s chairman, said on Friday that a 23 percent increase in fares and deep service cuts would soon be on the way if lawmakers did not come up with a full rescue plan by March 25, when the authority’s board will meet for a vote. Gov. David A. Paterson also did not appear ready to accept the Senate plan. He is scheduled to hold a news conference with transit advocates on Tuesday, when he is expected to call for passage of the full Ravitch plan. The Ravitch plan was designed to spread the fiscal pain by requiring financial contributions from several groups. Businesses would pay a payroll tax. Riders would pay an 8 percent fare increase. And drivers would pay new bridge tolls. The rationale was that all three groups should pay because they all benefited from the transit system, including drivers, who would find roads heavily congested without it. Mr. Ravitch hoped his plan would command wide support and head off critics who might complain that one group or another was being singled out. But while that approach won support from some business groups, including the Partnership for New York City, which represents the city’s large corporations, it did not win much favor in the Capitol. Last month, Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, proposed an alternative to Mr. Ravitch’s plan that included $2 tolls on the East River and Harlem River bridges — less than what Mr. Ravitch wanted, but the same price as the subway fare. He also advocated adopting the full payroll tax proposed by Mr. Ravitch. That compromise, however, did not win many more converts in the Senate than Mr. Ravitch’s plan. It was not clear how the Senate plan, with the payroll tax and without the tolls, would fare in the Assembly, where there is also opposition to tolls. Each 1 percent increase in fares and tolls brings about $50 million a year in additional revenue to the authority. Therefore, if the authority imposed an 8 percent fare increase on June 1, it would raise an additional $233 million during the remainder of this year and $399 million next year. On Monday morning, at the opening ceremony for the new South Ferry subway station in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Paterson said he had been working with Mr. Smith to build support for the Ravitch plan in the Senate. “I’m not making any trades with legislators,” Mr. Paterson said. “I think that the issue is serious and is important on its own value and for that reason that the Legislature’s got to come forward, got to come forward now.”

Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Tolls
Bridges and Tunnels
Ravitch Richard
New York City
New York State
State Legislatures
Politics and Government


Nike Reaches Deeper Into New Media to Find Young Buyers

Abstract: NIKE has been no slouch when it comes to using nontraditional media to help sell shoes and athletic apparel. Now, the company is expanding those efforts to introduce the next version of its successful line of sneakers endorsed by the basketball star LeBron James . The sneakers — formally known as the Nike Air Zoom LeBron IV — are receiving a sendoff that will include the first episode of “Sports-Center” on ESPN to be sponsored by a single advertiser, scheduled for 6 p.m. tomorrow; the distribution of 400,000 copies of DVDs about the making of the shoe and the ad campaign; saturation advertising on espn.com and mtv.com ; a so-called pop-up retail store in Manhattan; video clips appearing as short programs on the MTV2 cable network; and a retro-chic neon billboard near Madison Square Garden that will show a continuously dunking Mr. James. The campaign also features traditional elements like television commercials and print advertisements. They include Mr. James as “the LeBrons,” characters who represent four sides of his personality and who first appeared last year in ads for the Nike Air Zoom LeBron III shoe. But the new-media aspects of this campaign are much more prominent than they were when versions III, II and I of the James sneakers were brought out. “We’re not afraid to try new things,” said Adam Roth, director for United States advertising at Nike in Beaverton, Ore. “We focus on flying out on the bleeding edge.” “Our marketing model is evolving pretty quickly,” Mr. Roth said. “It’s fair to say we’ve gone deeper into pushing content into the world consumers are already living in.” The decision by Nike to add so many unconventional elements to its ad buys is occurring amid increasing interest among major marketers in exploring the brave world of new media. For example, the Dove line of products sold by Unilever is sponsoring a video clip, “Dove Evolution,” that appears not on TV, but on YouTube. American Express is offering fans of the TV series “Prison Break” a chance to watch a preview of the season-premiere episode on a Web site, fox.com/prisonbreak . And Ford Motor is trying to burnish its tarnished brand image through a series of articles, blogs and films available only on a Web site, fordboldmoves.com . “There’s still a little fear out there about shifting away from the traditional marketing tactics,” said Doug Scott, who recently joined the North American operations of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, part of the WPP Group, as executive director for branded content and entertainment. Even so, Mr. Scott said, more advertisers “are interested in how to build this content and own it, entering into a dialogue with consumers and marketing in a more direct way.” Marketers like Nike, which aim a preponderance of product pitches at younger consumers, are particularly eager to rewrite their media plans to include more new-media outlets. “The younger consumer digests media in so many different ways,” Mr. Roth said. “It presents more opportunities, but it’s also a challenge because you can’t drive them to any one channel. “So we use TV now as a catalyst to extend a larger idea into different areas.” That is the idea behind having the new shoe be the sole sponsor of the 6 o’clock episode of “SportsCenter” tomorrow night. Between the commercials will be segments featuring Mr. James, in makeup and costume, being interviewed as two of the characters he plays in the spots: an old-school version of himself called Wise and the entrepreneurial side, known as Business. “We hear every day from advertisers, ‘Bring me ideas I haven’t heard before that will help me break through,’ ” said Ed Erhardt, president at ESPN/ABC Sports customer marketing and sales, part of the ESPN unit of the Walt Disney Company. To assist the shoe spots in their quest to be noticed, ESPN is reducing the commercial load during the hourlong episode of “SportsCenter” to about 10 minutes from the typical 15 minutes, Mr. Erhardt said. The cutback is being made through steps that will include eliminating network promotions, he added. Sean R. H. Bratches, executive vice president for sales and marketing at ESPN, said it was coincidental that Nike, the first sole sponsor of an episode of “SportsCenter,” uses the same ad agency as the network. The agency is Wieden & Kennedy, which handles Nike from its flagship Portland, Ore., office and ESPN from its New York office. Wieden & Kennedy is creating the television and outdoor elements of the campaign. Deep Focus, an interactive agency based in Brooklyn, is handling the digital aspects. Nike spent just under $1 million last fall for ads in major media to introduce the Air Zoom LeBron III, according to data from Nielsen Monitor-Plus, part of the Nielsen Media Research unit of VNU. The budget for the LeBron IV is being estimated at two to three times that. The online saturation ads for the LeBrons, in what are called home-page takeovers, will appear on Web sites that include — in addition to espn.com and mtv.com — Bet.com, CBSSportsLine.com , LebronJames.com , nba.com and nikebasketball.com . Those ads are scheduled to start appearing today. The DVDs, with about 15 minutes of content, are to be distributed inside the November issue of Slam magazine, which will also carry print ads for the sneakers. The magazine’s Web site, slam.com , ran teaser spots last week to whet reader appetites for the full campaign; other Web sites carrying the teasers included youtube.com . The pop-up store is planned to remain open for a week, beginning on Nov. 11. It will be located at 476 Broome Street in SoHo, between Greene and Wooster Streets. The store will sell James apparel along with limited-edition versions of the new shoe. The neon sign, at Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, is scheduled to be activated on Nov. 12, the day before Mr. LeBron and his team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, play the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. The sign’s image of an animated Mr. James in perpetual dunk mode is meant to evoke classic neon billboards in locations like Times Square and Las Vegas. Mr. Roth of Nike said it was important in producing a campaign as varied as this to “try to tell different parts of the same story in different ways” in the different media outlets. “We can reach consumers 24/7,” Mr. Roth said, “but we don’t want to be such a presence in our consumers’ lives to the point it becomes an annoyance.” At ESPN, Mr. Erhardt said, now that the ice has been broken in offering episodes of “SportsCenter” to single sponsors, the intent is “to do it on a limited basis, to keep it special.” That would be “probably every five or six weeks,” he estimated.

Advertising and Marketing
Nike Inc
Computers and the Internet
James LeBron
Magazines
Television
Cable Television
Basketball
Retail Stores and Trade
Shoes and Boots


Egyptian Court Formally Breaks Up Mubarak’s Party

Abstract: CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Saturday continued the process of dismantling Hosni Mubarak ’s institutions of power when it formally dissolved the political organization that ruled the nation for decades, the National Democratic Party. In practical terms, the decision appears to simply formalize what had already occurred. Most of the party’s top leaders, including Mr. Mubarak and his son Gamal, are under arrest; its offices around the country were burned during the days of the popular uprising; and it had already been renamed the New National Democratic Party by those who had taken it over. But the move, by the Supreme Administrative Court, was seen as another effort by Egypt ’s military leaders to appease public opinion, which grew angry and frustrated with the slow pace of change and the initial delay in holding former officials accountable. “Practically and realistically, the party was already dead, but this decision was like issuing the death certificate,” said Amar Aly Hassan, a popular columnist with the independent newspaper Al Masry Al Youm. “It would be very hard to build a new democratic system as long as it continued to exist.” The court decision, which cannot be appealed, satisfies a specific demand of people who had grown increasingly hostile toward the military council leading Egypt. The tension led to a confrontation last weekend , with demonstrators retaking Tahrir Square and for the first time calling for the downfall of the top military leader, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. Security forces stormed the square, killing two demonstrators and injuring more than 70, setting up what appeared to be a looming clash between the street and the armed forces. But while the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces continued to rule by decree and continues to show little tolerance for criticism, it has moved aggressively in recent days to break with the former Mubarak government. The court’s decision is seen as another step in assuring the public of that break with the past. There had been concern that the National Democratic Party would hold an organizational advantage in parliamentary elections scheduled for September because other parties have not had much time to organize. The Supreme Administrative Court said in a statement, “It’s illogical for any instruments of the regime to remain, now that the regime itself has fallen.” The court also ordered that the party’s assets be turned over to the state because, the statement said, “This money is actually the money of the people.” The N.D.P. was founded by Anwar el-Sadat and became one of the two primary pillars of the Mubarak era. The second was the security services. The military council, which took control after Mr. Mubarak resigned on Feb. 11, also formally dissolved the much maligned office of state security. But in that case it appears to have been more of a renaming, from state security to national security, because it seems to still be functioning as before. Under Mr. Mubarak, the National Democratic Party was more a collection of special interests, its primary appeal being its direct control of Parliament and the government. When the party issued a policy paper, it became government policy. When it ran candidates for office, they almost always won. In local council elections in 2008, 99 percent of the seats nationwide went to the party. In elections in 2010, opposition groups won fewer than 20 of the 518 seats in the lower house. It was possible to create a political party only with the approval of a special government-appointed committee, which was led by Safwat el-Sherif, the National Democratic Party’s longtime secretary general. “This party oppressed Egyptians, ruled through rigging and it corrupted political life,” said Mr. Hassan, the newspaper columnist, adding that even if the court’s move was largely symbolic, it was still important.

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )


Investment Consortium Buys Germany’s Tank & Rast

Abstract: LONDON — A group of investors led by the private equity arm of German insurer Allianz agreed to acquire Autobahn Tank & Rast Holding, the German motorway service area operator, its owners said on Monday. The investment consortium will pay more than 3.5 billion euros, or about $3.8 billion, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The acquiring investors include Allianz Capital Partners; Borealis Infrastructure Management; Infinity Investments, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority; and MEAG, Munich Re’s asset manager. “The acquisition is an important step in our ambition to substantially grow our portfolio of high-quality infrastructure companies and to diversify across sectors and countries,” said Christian Fingerle, the chief investment officer overseeing Allianz Capital’s infrastructure investments. “We are committed to support management in sustainably growing Tank & Rast in close cooperation with all stakeholders and to further improve its essential services for all customers,” Mr. Fingerle said. Terra Firma Capital Partners, the private equity firm founded by British financier Guy Hands, bought Tank & Rast in 2004 from Allianz Capital and two co-investors. In 2007, Terra Firma sold a 50 percent interest in the company to Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management, Deutsche Bank’s investment arm. “Since purchasing Tank & Rast in 2004, it has proved to be a very successful investment,” Mr. Hands said in a news release. “Terra Firma returned more than five times the original investment to our investors in 2007, and the sale of its remaining stake will increase that multiple further.” Tank & Rast operates a network of service areas along Germany’s motorways, including 350 gas stations and 50 hotels. It provides services to 500 million visitors each year and posted revenue of 506 million euros in 2014.

Mergers and Acquisitions
Autobahn Tank & Rast Holding
Terra Firma Capital Partners
Allianz SE
Guy Hands


Argentine Bank President Is Formally Dismissed

Abstract: SÃO PAULO, Brazil — President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina formally dismissed the president of Argentina’s central bank on Wednesday and vowed to follow through with her plan to tap $6.59 billion of the country’s reserves to pay down foreign debt, a demand that the bank president had refused to heed. Mrs. Kirchner announced in a news conference that Mercedes Marcó del Pont, 50, would replace the central bank’s president, Martín Redrado. Mrs. Kirchner also vowed to keep pushing to use bank reserves to help pay $13 billion of Argentina’s foreign debt that is due this year. “It makes sense to pay the debt with reserves,” she said, contending that doing so would help lower interest rates and help Argentina to tap global finance markets again. The move is the latest in a continuing struggle among Mrs. Kirchner’s government, the central bank and Argentina’s courts over her decision in January to tap a part of the bank’s $48 billion in reserves by presidential decree. When Mr. Redrado refused, citing the bank’s autonomy, she fired him, only to have a federal judge rule days later that she could not take either action without congressional approval. After being barred by the police from returning to his office at the bank, Mr. Redrado resigned on Friday. But the Kirchner government said it would not accept his resignation without hearing from a three-member congressional committee. The committee delivered its recommendation to Mrs. Kirchner on Tuesday, but it did not comment publicly. On Wednesday, Mrs. Kirchner finally replaced Mr. Redrado with Ms. Marcó del Pont. She was previously the president of the state-owned Banco de la Nación Argentina and served as a congresswoman as a member of Mrs. Kirchner’s Front for Victory Party from 2003 to 2007. Mrs. Kirchner said that while in Congress, Ms. Marcó del Pont had proposed a bill that sought to redefine the role of the central bank so that it would work more closely with the government on enacting economic policy. Argentina’s Congress is expected to take up the question of tapping the reserves to pay down debt when it reconvenes in March after a summer recess.

Argentina
Kirchner Cristina Fernandez de
Politics and Government
Banks and Banking


3-on-3 Overtime Proposed for N.H.L.

Abstract: The N.H.L. plans to play three-on-three overtime next season. The league’s general managers and the players’ association agreed to change its regular-season overtime period from four on four to three on three. The Board of Governors still must approve the change.