Gang Violence at Rikers Seizes Spotlight During Guards’ Trial in ’12 Beating

Abstract: The defendants are nine New York City correction officers who have been charged in connection with the brutal beating of an inmate at the Rikers Island jail complex. But like a bit player who steals the show, the notorious Bloods street gang has drawn much of the focus in the officers’ trial, in State Supreme Court in the Bronx. The inmate, Jahmal Lightfoot, who was beaten in July 2012, was associated with the Bloods and jailed alongside other members in an area that was known as a Bloods stronghold. The Bloods and its various subgroups have emerged as some of the largest and most violent of the gangs that thrive behind the walls of Rikers, according to law enforcement officials and others familiar with the jail. These sources said the Bloods, along with the Crips, the Latin Kings, the Trinitarios and many lesser known groups, pose a growing threat to security at the jail, where they have incited violence among inmates and run an underground network of drug dealing and other illicit activities both on and off the island. The reach of some gangs has extended to correction officers, some of whom have been recruited to smuggle contraband into the jail for inmates in exchange for bribes or other benefits, law enforcement officials said. A two-year investigation of corruption at Rikers Island, led by the city’s Investigation Department, has resulted in the arrest of 31 correction officers and staff members, some on suspicion of gang-related crimes. The most recent arrests include those of two officers who were accused of smuggling in scalpels and drugs as part of an operation that city investigators said was run mainly by three subgroups of the Bloods — the Blood Hound Brims, Gorilla Stones and Mac Ballas. “Gang activity at Rikers is a significant problem,” said Mark G. Peters, the commissioner of the Investigation Department, which, along with the Bronx district attorney’s office, has led the inquiry at Rikers. “It is central not only to some of the violence we’re seeing, but also to some of the smuggling operations and corruption.” Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney, who has made prosecuting crimes at Rikers a priority, said she was establishing a prosecution bureau on the island, in part to gather intelligence more quickly on criminal activity by gangs. “Rikers Island is the hub of criminal networks,” Ms. Clark said. “Our investigations into violent gangs have uncovered murder conspiracies emanating from inside and extending well beyond the walls of Rikers. All too often, inmates successfully interfere with witness cooperation from inside jail, and a lot of the gang leaders continue to run their organizations from inside. Jail walls crumble away when it comes to these types of crimes because of the hold that the gangs have over our jails.” Across the nation, jails and prisons have struggled to control gangs that many correction officials and gang experts say have grown bigger, stronger and more violent. “They’re all over,” said Daniel B. Vasquez, a correction consultant who was a warden at San Quentin State Prison in California for 10 years. “It’s a serious problem for the officers and administrators to try to manage these prisons with so many gang members.” In New York, gangs have fueled an increase in violence at the city’s jails. In the 2015 fiscal year, there were 108 stabbings and slashings of inmates in city jails — most of which involved a gang member as either an assailant or a victim, or both, according to correction officials — compared with 41 in the 2011 fiscal year. The number of fights among inmates also rose during the same period, to 4,542 from 3,669. In May, the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, the union representing New York City correction officers, filed a lawsuit against the city , claiming that it had failed to provide adequate training and equipment and had not taken other measures to protect officers from the most violent inmates. The lawsuit specifically identified two reputed members of the Bloods who were “responsible for dozens of correction officers being treated for potentially life-altering injuries.” Correction Department officials said they would not comment on pending litigation. But they emphasized that, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, they had spent nearly $200 million to improve officer safety, including hiring additional officers, increasing training and buying safety equipment and gear. Nearly 2,000 correction officers have completed training on ways to de-escalate conflict and improve safety, the officials said. There has been a recent decline in the most serious violence in city jails. There were 79 inmate assaults that resulted in serious injuries to correction officers in the 2015 fiscal year, down from 92 the year before. At the same time, instances of force against inmates that resulted in serious injuries also dropped to 141 from 161. Rikers Island’s nine operating jails house about 8,000 inmates. Each jail is divided into sections, known as housing areas, with 50 to 100 inmates supervised by two officers. While the Correction Department does not intentionally place members of the same gang together, that is often what happens, in part because it can be difficult to identify gang members or parse out inmates’ affiliations with various subgroups, according to law enforcement officials and others familiar with Rikers. When inmates first arrive at the jail complex they are asked about gang affiliations, but it is unclear how forthcoming they are. Any tattoos are photographed. If inmates are determined to belong to a gang, they are classified as belonging to a “security risk group.” Despite such efforts, some housing areas at Rikers have become known as gang areas — say, a “Bloods House” or a “Crips House” — raising concerns among officers who say it is more difficult, and more dangerous, to enforce order when they are outnumbered by gang members. Correction Department officials said last week that they had intensified efforts to gather intelligence on gangs and adopted a more sophisticated system for housing inmates that considers factors including their affiliations with particular gangs. Those deemed to be more prone to violence are placed in individual cells, are more closely supervised and are subject to more precautionary measures. “We are moving aggressively to stop gang activity through better intelligence, safer housing of inmates and a concerted push to arrest those involved in crimes in our jails,” Joseph Ponte, the correction commissioner, said. Martin F. Horn, who was commissioner of the department from 2003 to 2009, said he would try to break up gangs and spread out members to prevent any one gang from dominating a housing area. “Giving one group or gang control of a housing unit is a bad practice,” Mr. Horn said. “It is tantamount to ceding control of order in that housing area to the gang rather than to the city officials. By the same token, controlling it is difficult, too, because it arises sub rosa.” David M. Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and director of the National Network for Safe Communities, a group within the college that works with cities to prevent gang violence, said gangs at Rikers and other jails and prisons could be more dangerous than their counterparts on the outside because they tended to be stronger, better organized and more cohesive. Some gangs, such as 415 — named after the San Francisco area code — were started in jails and prisons before spreading outside. Others exist exclusively in confinement. In the case of the Bloods, Professor Kennedy said, there have been gangs in New York City that claimed the Bloods name but operated independently without any centralized leadership. “Things can be different in lockup, where suddenly there can be a good deal more solidity and even real hierarchy,” he said.

Rikers
Prison Guards,Corrections Officers
Gang
Jahmal Lightfoot
Assault
Correction Department NYC
Mark G Peters
Darcel D Clark
Joseph Ponte
Prison


As Michael Cuddyer Walks Away, He Cites ‘Aches and Pains’

Abstract: Four days after the Mets’ season ended, Michael Cuddyer had surgery to repair a core muscle injury, and in the following days he started thinking about retirement. His first season with the Mets had been marred by knee and wrist injuries. Over the last four years, he had missed nearly 40 percent of his teams’ regular-season games because of injury. Cuddyer, 36, announced his retirement on Saturday in an essay for The Players’ Tribune , even though he had a year remaining on his Mets contract. “It wasn’t just the D.L. stints,” Cuddyer said in a conference call with reporters on Saturday. “It’s the aches and pains every player goes through over the course of 162 games. They started to get harder to come back from. They started to get tougher to rehab. It started to get harder to get into the gym to strength train because you have all these aches and pains going on. It’s hard to overcome those.” The Mets signed Cuddyer to a two-year, $21 million deal in November 2014, hoping he would be a middle-of-the-order hitter and provide leadership in the clubhouse. An old friend of Mets third baseman David Wright’s, Cuddyer was widely respected by his teammates and coaches. Midseason, he created a ceremony in which the player of the game was awarded a pro-wrestling-style championship belt. But his output was largely disappointing, in part because of his injuries. In 117 games, he had a .259 batting average with 10 home runs. By August, the fast-rising rookie Michael Conforto had supplanted Cuddyer in left field. Even so, Cuddyer, a two-time All-Star and the 2013 National League batting champion with Colorado, accepted his diminished role without complaint, setting an example for his young teammates. “As far as I’m concerned, it was a highly successful season,” Cuddyer said, because the Mets reached the World Series. With Conforto’s emergence, the Mets would have had no logical place to play Cuddyer next season, even though he was set to make about $12.5 million. Asked if the Mets had bought out a portion of his contract — presumably to make it easier for Cuddyer to walk away — Cuddyer declined to say. Cuddyer’s decision could have ramifications for the Mets’ off-season plans. After acquiring Neil Walker and Asdrubal Cabrera last week, without adding too much to their payroll, the Mets still want to add a left-handed-hitting center fielder, a few relief pitchers and, perhaps, a starter. Without Cuddyer, who ended his career with a .277 batting average and 197 home runs, the Mets have more financial flexibility. “In handling this situation, the Mets were first class the whole way,” Cuddyer said when asked about a buyout. “This is obviously a unique situation that nobody foresaw coming.”

Baseball
Michael Cuddyer
Michael Conforto
Mets


N.H.L. This Week: Clearing Up the Playoff Picture

Abstract: Every Tuesday, The New York Times will look at the week ahead in the N.H.L., highlighting hot — or not so hot — teams and players. (All times Eastern.) Games to Watch Blackhawks at Wild, Tuesday, 8 p.m. Winner of five in a row, Minnesota has built a 3-point lead over Colorado for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference. Zach Parise has led the charge, with five goals and two assists in the last three games. The Wild are 4-0 this season against Chicago, which has eliminated them from the playoffs the past three years. The Blackhawks are causing concern of late, losing five of six before two wins in Western Canada over the weekend. They have slipped to third in the Central Division and are only 4 points ahead of Nashville, which is in a wild-card spot. Goalie Corey Crawford has missed the past four games with an upper-body injury, and Coach Joel Quenneville could only say the Blackhawks “think” Crawford will be back in time for the playoffs. Capitals at Flyers, Wednesday, 8 p.m., NBCSN Washington clinched the Presidents’ Trophy on Monday, with seven games left. But the Capitals are the only Eastern Conference team that has secured a playoff berth. Philadelphia is staying in the hunt, earning points in 11 of its past 12 games. The Flyers enter Tuesday’s action in the East’s second wild-card spot by virtue of having a game in hand on Detroit, which plays Tuesday in Montreal. Rangers at Hurricanes, Thursday, 7 p.m. Eric Staal, a longtime Hurricanes star, returns to Carolina for the first time since being traded to the Rangers before the deadline. Staal is coming off a two-goal game Sunday against Pittsburgh, but has only three goals and two assists in 14 games with the Rangers. Penguins at Islanders, Saturday, 1 p.m. Pittsburgh wrapped up its season series against the Rangers with an overtime victory Sunday and has won eight of its last nine. The Penguins head to Brooklyn this weekend trying to stay ahead of the Islanders for third place in the Metropolitan Division. They then have a chance to thwart the playoff chances of the rival Flyers on Sunday at home. Stars at Kings, Saturday 4 p.m. Dallas and Los Angeles are still in tight battles for their respective division titles. But the Stars, who lost the star forward Tyler Seguin two weeks ago, have won four of five, while the Kings are sputtering, losing four of five. Women’s World Championship, Through April 4 The women’s hockey world championship tournament began Monday in Kamloops, British Columbia. Round-robin group play in the eight-team tournament continues through Thursday before the quarterfinals Friday and semifinals Sunday. There is no reason to believe the gold medal game on April 4 will not be between the United States and Canada, who have met in every final since the tournament began in 1990. Canada has won it 10 times and the United States has won six, including the last two. The Americans beat Canada, 3-1 , in round-robin play Monday. In Case You Missed It The Blues are making a run for the top seed in the Western Conference, winning four in a row and 10 of 12 to tie the Stars with 99 points. St. Louis has done it with stingy goaltending. Brian Elliott and Jake Allen have combined for four straight shutouts, and entering Tuesday’s game against Colorado, the Blues have not allowed a goal in 240 minutes 18 seconds, a franchise record. The shutouts have been an emphatic response to giving up 13 goals in two games to the Flames and the Oilers before the streak began. The Blues are the first team with four shutouts in a row since Brian Boucher of the Coyotes set an N.H.L. record with five straight shutouts from Dec. 31, 2003, to Jan. 9, 2004. Get to Know ... Jimmy Vesey As the season winds down, the Nashville Predators (39-24-13) are one of the hottest teams in the league and can claim a playoff spot Tuesday with a win and a Colorado loss. But when the playoffs arrive, the Predators may not have their preferred lineup on the ice. In 2012, Nashville drafted left wing Jimmy Vesey in the third round. In the years since, Vesey became a star at Harvard. He has been a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award, given to college hockey’s best player, for the past two seasons, during which he compiled 56 goals and 48 assists in 70 games. Image Jimmy Vesey (19) compiled 56 goals and 48 assists in 70 games at Harvard the past two seasons. Credit Elise Amendola/Associated Press Last year, in a somewhat surprising move, Vesey decided to play his senior season at Harvard rather than sign with the Predators, but they expected him to join them after Harvard’s season ended this year. They expected it so much, based on conversations with Vesey and his family, that it affected their plans at the trade deadline in February. General Manager David Poile said Vesey, who is from the Boston area and whose father works as a scout for the Maple Leafs, had been offered a spot on one of the team’s top lines. Harvard lost in the N.C.A.A. tournament over the weekend, with Predators officials in attendance. But by Monday it appeared that Vesey, 22, would test free agency rather than sign with Nashville for the rest of this season. Under the collective bargaining agreement, an N.H.L. team retains the rights to a drafted player who spends four years in college until Aug. 15 of the player’s graduation year. After that, the player can become a free agent. “We’ve been a big part of his development,” Poile told reporters Monday. “We’ve invested a lot of time. Our relationship is good. The fit and opportunity remain very good here for him in Nashville, and I am going to continue to see whether we can try to persuade him to change his mind.”

Ice hockey
Chicago Blackhawks
Minnesota Wild
Zach Parise


Vatican Issues Instruction on Bioethics

Abstract: The Vatican issued its most authoritative and sweeping document on bioethical issues in more than 20 years on Friday, taking into account recent developments in biomedical technology and reinforcing the church’s opposition to in vitro fertilization, human cloning, genetic testing on embryos before implantation and embryonic stem cell research. The Vatican says these techniques violate the principles that every human life — even an embryo — is sacred, and that babies should be conceived only through intercourse by a married couple. The 32-page instruction, titled “Dignitas Personae,” or “The Dignity of the Person,” was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, and carries the approval and the authority of Pope Benedict XVI . Under discussion for six years, it is a moral response to bioethical questions raised in the 21 years since the congregation last issued instructions. It bans the morning-after pill, the intrauterine device and the pill RU-486 , saying these can result in what amount to abortions. The Vatican document reiterates that the church is opposed to research on stem cells derived from embryos. But it does not oppose research on stem cells derived from adults; blood from umbilical cords; or fetuses “who have died of natural causes.” The document does not prohibit the use of vaccines developed using “cell lines of illicit origin” if children’s health is at stake. But it says that “everyone has the duty” to inform health care providers of personal objections to such vaccines. The church also objects to freezing embryos, arguing that doing so exposes them to potential damage and manipulation, and that it raises the problem of what to do with frozen embryos that are not implanted. There are at least 400,000 of these in the United States alone. “Our advice is that freezing should not take place,” said Bishop Elio Sgreccia, president emeritus of the Pontifical Academy for Life. “Because once it is done, you’re in a situation where to correct the error implies a further offense. Once you have them, what do you do with them?” The Vatican’s intended audience is not only individual Roman Catholics, but also non-Catholic doctors, scientists, medical researchers and legislators who might consider regulating stem cell research and other recent developments in biomedical technology. In the United States, President-elect Barack Obama has said he will end the restrictions on federal financing of embryonic stem cell research that were instituted by President Bush. Among the new developments discussed in the document are the attempts by scientists to find alternative techniques of producing embryonic-like stem cells that could ultimately be used in medical treatments, without involving human embryos, said the Rev. Thomas Berg, executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person , a Catholic ethics institute in New York. He said such techniques could “allow us to get past this cultural divide on stem cell research.” Father Berg said he was pleased to see that the Vatican document did not prohibit such techniques, although it cautioned that there must be absolute assurance that human embryos were not destroyed in the process. The document does little to clarify the Vatican’s position on whether couples can “adopt” surplus embryos that have been frozen and abandoned. Such “prenatal adoption,” although rare, has been promoted by some Catholics and evangelical Christians. The document says that while “prenatal adoption” is “praiseworthy,” it presents ethical problems similar to certain types of in vitro fertilization — in particular, surrogate motherhood, which the church prohibits. Experts said that there was little new in this document, but that it might still come as a surprise to many Catholics who were unaware of the church’s ban on in vitro fertilization. Kathleen M. Raviele, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Georgia who is president of the Catholic Medical Association , said she tells her patients: “God creates through an act of love, and that’s not what’s happening in the laboratory. It’s the technician who’s creating. What in vitro does, is it separates the creation of a child from the marital act.” But the Vatican’s opposition to in vitro fertilization seemed neither moral nor intuitive to Josephine Johnston, a research scholar at the Hastings Center , an independent bioethics research institute in Garrison , N.Y. “For a married couple who go to get in vitro fertilization, the Vatican’s idea that it’s not done with a serious amount of love and commitment is very bizarre to me, because it’s such a deliberate act, done in the cold light of day, with enormous amounts of thought and intention attached to it,” she said. “The idea that it’s not done within the spirit of marital love, I find very strange.” Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, a Jesuit who is secretary of the doctrinal office, said at a news conference in Rome that the document would probably “be accused of containing too many bans.” Nonetheless, he said that the church felt a duty “to give voice to those who have no voice.”

Catholic Church
Medicine and Health
Reproduction
Stem cell
Cloning
Infertility


BP to Sell Colombian Unit for $1.9 Billion

Abstract: LONDON (Reuters) — The oil giant BP said Tuesday that it would sell its Colombian assets to a consortium of Talisman Energy of Canada and Colombia’s state-run Ecopetrol for $1.9 billion. The deal is the latest in a string of BP divestitures as it seeks to raise up to $30 billion to pay for its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Ecopetrol and Talisman said they would pay $1.9 billion, including around $145 million in a working capital adjustment, for all shares in BP’s Colombia subsidiary. Talisman will get 49 percent and Ecopetrol 51 percent. BP will receive a cash deposit, which its local Colombian unit said would be $1.25 billion. Ecopetrol, which is 89 percent state-owned, said BP’s Colombian oil and gas fields had proven reserves of 94 million barrels of oil equivalent and estimated 2010 production of 24,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day. Producing properties on the licenses include the Cusiana oil and gas field and the Pauto and Florena fields. The deal includes BP’s stake in four pipelines totaling 994 miles of crude and 250 miles of gas pipelines, the companies said. The joint venture will have BP’s stake in gas plants. For its part, Talisman will pay $858 million for what equates to production of about 12,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, and for reserves of 123 million barrels. Talisman, which is based in Calgary, has connections to BP that run deep. It started up in the early 1990s as a spinoff of the British company. Talisman’s chief executive, John A. Manzoni, is a former BP executive. Ecopetrol said it planned to take on $23 billion in debt and issue $6 billion in shares to help finance its $80 billion expansion plans for 2011 through 2020. Last month BP agreed to sell a bundle of assets in the United States, Canada and Egypt to the Apache Corporation for $7 billion, and said it planned to sell its assets in Pakistan and Vietnam, which analysts estimated at $1.7 billion. Last week, BP announced a charge of $32.2 billion in its second quarter related to the spill. Analysts said the final bill was likely to be much higher.


Where Tuesday’s Tide Was All Republican

Abstract: OKLAHOMA CITY — The sign over the table at the Arrow Cafe in Tecumseh, a rural town southeast of this state capital, said, “World’s Problems Solved Here,” and beneath it sat five older white Democrats with their coffee, talking politics in the golden afternoon light. Only two had voted for Barack Hussein Obama for president. “I just couldn’t vote for anyone who has Hussein in his name,” joked Bob Cook, a 68-year-old poultry farmer, stretching and smiling. At the other end of the table, Jim White, 65, said he opposed abortion and so could not vote for a candidate like Mr. Obama, who favors abortion rights. Among Oklahomans, Mr. Cook and Mr. White are hardly alone. Though the state’s Democrats still outnumber its Republicans, you would never know it by looking at the election results. Oklahoma voters went for Senator John McCain by almost two to one, bucking the tide that swept Mr. Obama to the presidency. Not a single one of the state’s 77 counties backed Mr. Obama, despite his endorsement by the popular Democratic governor, Brad Henry. Oklahoma Republicans also made significant gains down the ticket. They picked up two seats in the State Senate and four in the Oklahoma House, giving them a majority in both houses of the Legislature for the first time in the state’s century-long history. In addition, the party hung on to a United States Senate seat and solidly defeated challengers for the four Congressional seats held by Republicans. “This is a consolidation of what’s been going on for a long time,” said Keith Gaddie, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma. “The systematic creep toward the Republican Party , and it’s been happening for 30 years.” Perhaps nowhere else in the country is the conflict between Southern rural Democrats and the national Democratic Party more starkly evident than in Oklahoma, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964. “Oklahoma Democrats, with very few exceptions, are the old-line white Southern Democrats,” said David Ray, another political scientist at the university. “They don’t like liberals or liberalism.” Indeed, the state has a political landscape closely resembling that of the old solidly Democratic South, especially in its southeastern corner, known as Little Dixie, where many Southerners settled after the Civil War. When conservatives of the Old South began abandoning the party decades ago, Oklahoma’s Democrats lagged behind the historical trend. Further, the state has relatively small black and Hispanic populations, and so the Democrats did not absorb as many new voters from those groups as in the states of the old Confederacy. These days Oklahoma Democrats dread running for local office in presidential election years, for fear of being associated with liberal nominees at the top of the ticket. “Being liberal in Oklahoma, with the exception of a few legislative districts, will not get you elected,” said State Representative Joe Dorman, a conservative Democrat. Ivan Holmes, chairman of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, said there had been no ballot initiative or outcry on any state or local issue that would explain why conservatives of both parties rejected many Democratic candidates this week. But, Mr. Holmes said, Mr. Obama was badly hurt in the state by rumors that he was not a Christian, that he sympathized with terrorists and that he would take away people’s firearms, a buzz that could not have helped Democrats down the ticket. In addition, Senator James M. Inhofe, the Republican incumbent, whipped up anti-liberal sentiment in his successful race against a Democratic challenger, State Senator Andrew Rice, accusing him of being “too liberal for Oklahoma” in opposing a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and voting against tax cuts. Another Republican, State Representative Sally Kern, who recently declared that homosexuality was a greater threat to the nation than terrorism, easily won re-election. But Mr. Gaddie said that perhaps the most important factor in Mr. McCain’s strong showing here was religion. An Edison/Mitofsky exit poll found that more than half of Oklahoma voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and that a heavy majority of them had voted for Mr. McCain. Mr. Gaddie, himself a pollster as well as a college professor, said: “A question we always ask in our polls is ‘How often do you attend church services?’ If a Democrat is not going to vote for a Democrat, they are a frequent church attender.” Another advantage for Mr. McCain was that the state’s economy, based mostly on the oil and gas industry, has been buffered somewhat from the national economic slowdown. Unemployment remains low, the housing market stable. For all of that, the Democratic Party is far from dead in Oklahoma, especially in the state’s southeastern section, where, despite the social conservatism, many people still talk about the New Deal and revere Franklin D. Roosevelt. Democrats currently hold not only the governorship but also most other statewide offices. And rural voters often register as Democrats because the party’s primaries for sheriff and county commissioner continue to be more important than the general elections for those posts. But the blows of the recent past have been unmistakable. For the last 14 years, the state’s two senators, and four of its five representatives, have been Republicans. Riding President Bush’s coattails, Republicans also won control of the Oklahoma House in 2004. Now they have won the State Senate. “If America voted for change, Oklahoma voted for reform,” State Senator Glenn Coffee, the Republican who is soon to be majority leader, said of Tuesday’s elections. “For a long time you had a single-party state.” At the Arrow Cafe, several lifelong Democrats said they could remember a time 25 years ago when no one would admit to being a Republican, for fear of being ostracized. These days, few people advertise that they are Democrats, though Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the county by two to one. Reflecting on the Oklahoma vote in the presidential election just past, Gordon Belshe, a 67-year-old manufacturer of trailer homes who said he had voted for Mr. Obama, suggested that racism had played a role. “I still think we had a lot of antiblack votes in this state,” Mr. Belshe said. “I had several people ask me how I could vote for him.” And Mr. White, the man who had said he could not vote for Mr. Obama because of the abortion issue, also acknowledged that he would not have been comfortable voting for a black candidate. “I’m prejudiced,” he whispered. “This is a problem I have to personally work through.” In truth, it is impossible to tell if racism was a significant factor in Mr. Obama’s poor showing here. According to a statewide exit poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky, he got the support of 59 percent of white Democrats in the state, compared with the 84 percent he garnered from white Democrats nationwide. Four years ago, however, Senator John Kerry fared little better among white Oklahoma Democrats, getting only 62 percent. In any event, most of the older Democrats who stopped by the cafe the other day said Mr. Obama’s race had had nothing to do with their decision to support Mr. McCain. Mr. Cook, the poultry farmer, said Mr. Obama had been insufficiently religious for him. “He don’t believe like a lot of us do,” he said. And Bill Straughan, a 70-year-old former civilian employee at nearby Tinker Air Force Base, said Mr. Obama “doesn’t have any real résumé.” “McCain was a prisoner of war longer than Obama was in the Senate,” Mr. Straughan said. “The last reason I would not vote for him was because he’s black.”

Oklahoma
Presidential Election of 2008
Republican Party
Democratic Party


E.C.B. Warns Lenders Over Dividends and Executive Pay

Abstract: FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank, asserting its new role as the eurozone’s chief bank supervisor, advised lenders on Thursday not to dispense too much of their profits in dividends to shareholders or in pay packages to executives, in order to gird themselves for global financial stress. Banks should be restrained in paying out dividends, the central bank said in recommendations issued on Thursday, because of “a challenging macroeconomic and financial environment that puts pressure on banks’ profitability.” Lenders should be preparing for regulations that will require them to use more of their own money, or capital, to do business, the central bank’s new supervisory arm said. Banks that failed stress tests last year — mainly in Italy — were also told not to distribute dividends at all until they had met capital requirements. The central bank also said it would begin a thorough review of lenders’ executive pay, another measure intended to ensure that banks are not distributing money that should be used to increase capital. “Banks should base their dividend policies on conservative and prudent assumptions,” Danièle Nouy, head of the supervisory unit , said in a statement, “so that after any payout they can still fully cover their current capital requirements and prepare themselves to meet more demanding capital standards.” The European Central Bank took responsibility for supervising banks in November, as part of an attempt to ensure that lenders in all 19 eurozone countries are subject to equally rigorous oversight. The central bank’s oversight unit, formally called the Single Supervisory Mechanism, concluded a comprehensive review of eurozone banks in October, including stress tests of their ability to withstand a severe economic downturn or other crisis. But the central bank has since faced criticism for not putting enough pressure on banks to raise more capital. Thursday’s statement could be a sign, though, that the central bank will be more aggressive than national regulators have typically been in urging lenders to operate more prudently, while also speaking more openly about what it is telling banks to do. The European Central Bank said it had sent letters to the 123 large banks that it supervises directly, and asked national supervisors to deliver the same message to smaller banks in their jurisdictions. The review of bank bonuses and other pay is intended to make sure that executive compensation is “consistent with a bank’s ability to maintain a sound capital base,” the statement said.

Banking and Finance
Executive Compensation
European Central Bank
Daniele Nouy


Newark: Insurance Company Settles With Doctors

Abstract: New Jersey ’s largest health maintenance organization, which was accused of shortchanging physicians, has reached a settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2002 on behalf of at least 40,000 doctors, the company and lawyers for the doctors said yesterday. Under the proposed agreement, which requires approval by a state judge, the company, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, agreed to continue significant business practice improvements. Horizon, which insures more than 3.2 million people in New Jersey, did not admit wrongdoing, and it gave no money to the doctors, although it will pay lawyers’ fees, said Eric D. Katz, a lawyer for the doctors.


Supreme Court Rules Against Retirees in Union Health Benefits Case

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a chemical company may be able to cut the health benefits of its retired workers, unanimously reversing an appeals court ruling that said the benefits had vested for life. “Courts should not construe ambiguous writings to create lifetime promises,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court, adding that “retiree health care benefits are not a form of deferred compensation.” The Supreme Court returned the case to the appeals court, telling it to use ordinary principles of contract interpretation to determine whether the collective bargaining agreement at issue had granted free lifetime health care. The appeals court erred, Justice Thomas wrote, “by placing a thumb on the scale in favor of vested retiree benefits in all collective bargaining agreements.” The case concerned a union contract at the Point Pleasant Polyester Plant in Apple Grove, W.Va. Like many other collective bargaining agreements, it did not directly say whether health benefits for retirees would vest for life. M&G Polymers USA bought the plant in 2000. A few years later, it announced that it would require retirees to contribute to the cost of their health care benefits. Several retirees sued, saying they had been promised free health care for life. When the case, M&G Polymers USA v. Tackett, No. 13-1010, was argued at the Supreme Court in November, several justices seemed puzzled that the contract had not nailed down such an important point. “Both sides knew it was left unaddressed, so, you know, whoever loses deserves to lose for casting this upon us when it could have been said very clearly in the contract,” Justice Antonin Scalia said. “Such an important feature. So I hope we’ll get it right, but, you know, I can’t feel bad about it.” The appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled for the retirees in 2013, relying on its own 1983 decision , which put a thumb on the scale in favor of vesting. Justice Thomas’s opinion was an extended critique of that decision, which he said had been applied “indiscriminately across industries,” mentioning automobiles, electronics and steel. He seemed to suggest that the retirees from the chemical plant were now likely to lose when the case got back to the appeals court. “When a contract is silent as to the duration of retiree benefits,” he wrote, “a court may not infer that the parties intended those benefits to vest for life.” In a concurrence, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the case that the retirees could prevail under the new, stricter standard. “No rule requires ‘clear and express’ language in order to show that parties intended health care benefits to vest,” she wrote. She urged the appeals court to consider other factors. One signal that the health benefits had vested, she said, was that the retirees had vested pensions. The contract tied health benefits to those “receiving a monthly pension,” she said. Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined Justice Ginsburg’s concurrence.

Supreme Court,SCOTUS
M&G Polymers USA
Health Insurance
Labor Unions
Collective bargaining
Decisions and Verdicts


8 Die in Iraq in Suicide Bombing, Apparently by Woman

Abstract: BAGHDAD — At first, a car bomb seemed the only explanation for the huge blast on Thursday on one of Baquba’s main thoroughfares that killed a pro-American Sunni militia leader, an Iraqi police captain, a local politician, and five other people. But Iraqi security officials soon found evidence suggesting another theory. There was a pair a legs — from a woman, the officials said — sheared from the rest of her body and lying near the blast site, among the dead and the 30 wounded. And there were the perforations in some victims from shrapnel that appeared to come from ball bearings that often are used in high-powered explosive vests worn by suicide bombers. An explosion a month ago before a cluster of police officers in central Baquba also was so huge, some witnesses said that it had to have been caused by a car bomb. In that case a female suicide bomber carried out the attack. This time the target was Naim Abdul Jabbar al-Dulaimi, the leader of an Awakening militia group in western Baquba, according to Abu Muhammed, one of the militia leaders. Mr. Dulaimi was killed, he said, when the bomb detonated at 6 p.m. in front of the Rukn al-Azam restaurant, a popular hangout for Baquba policemen nestled among a crowded marketplace. If the explosion proves to have been carried out by a female suicide bomber it will be at least the 16th time that a woman has donned a bomb and exploded herself in Diyala Province since last year. Wearing billowy, black head-to-toe garments, the female bombers have been able to conceal powerful explosives and slip into crowded areas too heavily guarded for a male suicide bomber to ease through undetected. While men often undergo physical searches, Islamic rules do not allow male security officers to pat down women. It was not immediately clear how many of Mr. Dulaimi’s guards and militia fighters were among the victims in Baquba. The dead also included two police officers, and six police officers were among the wounded. A local council member was also killed, according to an Iraqi security official. Pro-American militia fighters also came under attack in the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya, in northern Baghdad, early on Thursday. At least three of the Sunni militiamen were killed by gunmen speeding through the district and waving machine guns, according to witnesses. In the first attack, the gunmen shot and wounded Ahmed Ali al-Neimi in the shoulder as he guarded one checkpoint. His cousin Omar Raad, standing guard at the same checkpoint, returned fire. But the gunmen fired back, killing Mr. Raad. “The gunmen came when the street was empty,” said Mr. Neimi, who lamented how vulnerable he and his cousin had been. “We as Awakening members have not gotten any support, no aid, no vehicles. We don’t even have a way to keep us safe from the sun.” Two other Awakening guards were killed in Adhamiya, according to an official at the Interior Ministry. Bassim al-Azawi, a leader of the Adhamiya Awakening, said he believed that the attackers either had been from outside Adhamiya or had recently returned after being pushed out of the neighborhood after the invasion.


2 Athletes Worried They Broke Law

Abstract: TURIN, Italy, Feb. 21 - Austrian ski team officials said Tuesday that the two team members who fled after a police raid last weekend had confessed that they possibly "used illegal methods" in preparing for their Olympic events. On Saturday night, the Italian police raided five residences in the Alps where Austrian biathletes and cross-country skiers are staying. The police said they had confiscated syringes, glucose drips and other medical equipment. Italian law bans drugs that can be used to enhance an athlete's performance. The biathletes Wolfgang Perner and Wolfgang Rottmann, hastily returned to Austria after the raid. They were subsequently kicked off the team and could not be reached for comment. Markus Gandler, a top official with the Austrian ski federation, said at a news conference Tuesday in the mountain town of Sestriere that Perner and Rottmann had indicated to him that they might have done something wrong. "They were scared of Italian law, and they preferred to leave because something was confiscated, only from them and not from the others," Gandler said. "They were worried it may have been illegal." The police conducted their raid amid reports that Walter Mayer, a coach implicated in a doping incident at the Salt Lake Games in 2002, was staying with skiers. After the raid, Mayer fled to Austria, where he was arrested on unrelated charges of crashing into a police checkpoint. Peter Schröcksnadel, president of the Austrianski federation, said the police had taken Mayer to a psychiatric facility, where he was staying because it was feared he might commit suicide. Mayer appeared in an Austrian court Tuesday and pleaded guilty to several minor charges relating to his arrest. Mayer was barred from the Turin Games and the 2010 Vancouver Games after blood transfusion materials were found at the Salt Lake Games. At their news conference, the ski federation officials seemed to be attempting to limit damage to the reputation of Austrian athletes, who have been chastised here and at home after the raid. Salzburg, in central Austria, is pushing to play host to the 2014 Winter Games. "I'm angry to answer such questions," Felix Gottwald, an Austrian skier, told reporters who asked him about Mayer after Gottwald won the Nordic combined Tuesday. It was his second gold of the Games. He has also won a silver. "I won a gold medal today, and I have to answer these questions." On Tuesday, Austrian athletes competed in biathlon and cross-country events, placing last out of 17 teams to cross the finish line in the 4 x 7.5-kilometer biathlon relay. "We're drained," the Austrian biathlete Christoph Sumann said. "Physically and mentally, we're not here." The Austrian officials said their own doping tests had cleared eight athletes. But results from the tests on the 10 Austrian athletes and on the seized medical equipment had not been released. It was unclear when they might be made public. Col. Angelo Agovino, regional head of the Carabinieri police force, said tests on the equipment generally take up to a week. On Monday night, the police returned to the room where Mayer had been staying. Agovino called it an inspection, and several police officials denied reports that more syringes had been found. Blood and urine samples were taken from the Austrian athletes Saturday night and early Sunday. Since then, the International Olympic Committee laboratory at the Turin Games, comprising scientists from a Rome lab accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, has been running tests. The screenings include tests for performance-enhancing drugs like erythropoietin, known as EPO, and for evidence of homologous blood doping. Those methods are used to increase red blood cells, which transport oxygen to the muscles and boost endurance. There is no test for autologous blood doping, which is when an athlete removes blood, stores it and concentrates the red blood cells, then reinfuses closer to the competition. The scientists testing the syringes, glucose drips and other paraphernalia will test the blood and fluids found in those items to see if they came from any of the Austrian athletes. The used bags of glucose drips that the police said they had found could have been used for simple rehydration, but they also could have been used to administer a number of banned drugs. Another use could be to increase blood volume and lower hematocrit and hemoglobin levels, red flags for drug use. Drug-testing experts say that the tests for synthetic hormones like erythropoietin take two to five days. Tests to determine whether an athlete has had a blood transfusion, which also increases red blood cell count, can take two to three days. Even if the lab finds nothing amiss with the athletes' blood and urine samples, the Austrians could still face punishment. In a briefing here Tuesday, Giselle Davies, a spokeswoman for the I.O.C., raised the possibility that Austrian athletes could be sanctioned if the tests on seized medical equipment come back positive. "Antidoping rules can be violated not just by a positive test, but also by attempted use or possession of prohibited substances," Davies said. "According to our rules, there are any number of ways the rules can be broken."

AUSTRIA
ROTTMAN WOLFGANG
PERNER WOLFGANG
OLYMPIC GAMES (2006)
SKIING
WINTER GAMES (OLYMPICS)
OLYMPIC GAMES
ETHICS


An Embassy in Jerusalem? Trump Promises, but So Did Predecessors

Abstract: JERUSALEM — America’s top diplomat in Jerusalem lives in an elegant three-story stone house first built by a German Lutheran missionary in 1868, a short walk from the historic Old City. But he is not an ambassador and the mission is a consulate, not an embassy. For decades, those distinctions have rankled many Israeli Jews. The United States, along with the rest of the world, has kept its primary diplomatic footprint not in Israel’s self-declared capital, Jerusalem, but in the commercial and cultural hub of Tel Aviv to avoid seeming to take sides in the fraught and never-ending argument over who really has the right to control this ancient city. Until now. Maybe. President-elect Donald J. Trump vowed during his campaign that he would relocate the mission “fairly quickly” after taking office. That in itself is nothing new: For years, candidates running for president have promised to move the embassy to Jerusalem, and for years, candidates who actually became president have opted against doing so. But just as Mr. Trump broke all the rules of campaigning, some of his supporters say no amount of hand-wringing by the State Department will change his mind. Jason Greenblatt, an Orthodox lawyer who is advising Mr. Trump on Israel, told Army Radio after the election that the president-elect was “going to do it” because he was “a man who keeps his word.” Already, many Israelis and Palestinians are buzzing about the prospect. Where would the embassy go? Would it straddle the line between West Jerusalem, which is predominantly Jewish, and East Jerusalem, which is predominantly Arab? Would it touch off street protests in Palestinian cities or a backlash among Arab allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia ? “Jerusalem is a symbolic, emotional and real issue,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and president of the Israel Institute. “It matters to many Israeli Jews because it would indicate that the United States actually recognizes Jerusalem as Israel ’s capital, which now it effectively does not.” Which is why Arabs object so strenuously to such a move. “This is a sign that he’s going to side with Israel,” said Mustafa Alani, a scholar at the Gulf Research Center, a research organization with offices in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. “If he does it, it’s going to be a wrong start for his relationship with the Arab world.” The status of Jerusalem has always been one of the thorniest issues dividing Jews and Arabs. In 1947, the United Nations recommended that the city be declared a “corpus separatum,” meaning an international city, rather than incorporated into either the Arab or the Jewish states then being contemplated on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But in the war that followed its declaration of statehood in 1948 , Israel captured the western portion of the city while Jordan seized the east. Israel took control of East Jerusalem in its 1967 war with its Arab neighbors and annexed it, declaring that the city would remain whole and unified as its eternal capital (and later building many settlements there that most of the world considers illegal). The United States and most other countries refused to recognize the annexation and kept their embassies in or near Tel Aviv. The last two countries with embassies in Jerusalem, Costa Rica and El Salvador , moved out a decade ago. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both promised during their presidential campaigns to move the embassy to Jerusalem. Both later backed away from those promises, convinced by Middle East experts that doing so would prejudge negotiations for a final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. In 1995, Congress passed a law declaring Jerusalem to be Israel’s capital and requiring the embassy be moved there by 1999 — or else the State Department building budget would be cut in half. But the law included a provision allowing presidents to waive its requirement for six months if they determined it was in the national interest. So every six months, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush and eventually President Obama signed such waivers, fearing a violent response in the Arab world if the embassy moved. Image The American Consulate in Jerusalem. The status of Jerusalem has always been one of the thorniest issues dividing Israelis and Arabs. Credit Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images “Every president who reversed his campaign promise did so because he decided not to take the risk,” said Dennis B. Ross, a longtime Middle East envoy who advised multiple presidents, including Mr. Obama. “Jerusalem has historically been an issue that provoked great passions — often as a result of false claims — that did trigger violence.” Whether such advice might sway Mr. Trump is unclear. Despite Mr. Greenblatt’s declaration, another Trump adviser on the Middle East, Walid Phares, told the BBC that Mr. Trump would move the embassy “under consensus.” He later clarified that he meant a “consensus at home,” since no one could imagine a consensus including Arabs at this point. Elliott Abrams, a former Middle East adviser to Mr. Bush, said Mr. Trump should follow through because even if East Jerusalem is eventually ceded to the Palestinians as the capital of their own state, no plausible settlement would deny West Jerusalem to Israel. “There is simply no reason not to put a U.S. embassy there,” he said. The issue remains so delicate that the Obama administration went all the way to the Supreme Court to block a law passed by Congress allowing American parents of children born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace on their passports. When Mr. Obama came to Jerusalem in September for the funeral of Shimon Peres , the former Israeli president and prime minister, the White House initially released a transcript of his eulogy that listed “Jerusalem, Israel” as the location of his remarks. A few hours later, it issued a “corrected” transcript that literally crossed out the word “Israel.” The consulate currently in Jerusalem, run by the consul general, Donald Blome, a career diplomat, deals mainly with the Palestinians while the embassy in Tel Aviv, run by Ambassador Daniel B. Shapiro, an Obama appointee, handles relations with Israel. Mr. Trump could simply declare the consulate to be an embassy and move the ambassador’s home as a stopgap, but there are other logistical challenges. The embassy’s 800-person staff could not fit in the consular offices near the Old City, nor in the large, fortresslike building that processes visa requests and is surrounded by stone walls and tall metal fences along the line that divides Jerusalem between Jewish and Palestinian residents. Israeli Jews cite a long history in Jerusalem dating back thousands of years, and even many on the left who support a Palestinian state think the embassy should be housed there. Gilead Sher, who worked as a peace negotiator for Labor Party leaders, said, “It seems abnormal that the city, which is home to all of Israel’s governmental, legislative, judicial and national institutions, does not host foreign embassies.” But Oded Eran, a retired Israeli diplomat now at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, noted that Israel has not invested “much political capital” in the matter because of “a sober assessment that few, if any, will move their embassy to Jerusalem.” Indeed, with other perhaps more urgent priorities, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have made little comment on the possibility since Mr. Trump’s election. “That has been a constant commitment by many administrations, and one would expect it will be acted on at the right time,” said Dore Gold, a longtime adviser to Mr. Netanyahu who just stepped down as director general of the Foreign Ministry. Palestinian officials presume Mr. Trump ultimately will follow the course that his predecessors did and leave the issue to final-status negotiations. “I don’t think he’ll move the embassy, and I don’t think he’ll legalize settlements,” said Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization. “I’m confident we’ll work with President-elect Trump and his administration to achieve peace and to achieve the two-state solution.”

Jerusalem
Diplomats Embassies and Consulates
Donald Trump
US Foreign Policy
Judaism
Arabs
Israel


Astronauts Let Go of Refurbished Hubble

Abstract: Practicing a kind of catch-and-release astronomy, the astronauts of the space shuttle Atlantis oh-so-gently let the Hubble Space Telescope slip back into the heavens on Tuesday. Reporting to mission control in Houston about 9 a.m. as the telescope and shuttle slowly drifted apart, Scott D. Altman, the Atlantis commander, called the last mission to refurbish the fabled telescope “an incredible journey” that demonstrated how humans could overcome challenges by working together. “And that’s the thing that I think about Hubble — we’ve done it together,” Mr. Altman, a retired Navy captain, said. “And now Hubble can continue on its own, exploring the cosmos and bringing it home to us as we head for home in a few days.” In five spacewalks over the last week, the astronauts brought two ailing instruments on the telescope back to life, installed two new ones and replaced the orbiting observatory’s gyroscopes and batteries. The refurbished telescope, astronomers and engineers say, should be good for five to seven more years in space. “If I didn’t know better, I would have said that a miracle has happened here,” wrote Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in an e-mail message. “But ‘miracles’ simply happen when you combine the ingenuity of scientists and engineers with the resourcefulness and determination of astronauts and their trainers.” Since its launching in 1990, the Hubble telescope has been reborn five times, by 16 astronauts performing 23 spacewalks, at a cost of $9.6 billion, according to NASA . For that, as the astronaut and Hubble repairman John M. Grunsfeld has said, humanity gained groundbreaking science and an icon of exploration. Robert Kirshner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said of the telescope’s cosmic postcards: “Those fantastic images communicate the joy of finding out how the world works. I think this seeps into everything — and it makes us take more pleasure in knowing where we are in the universe, where we came from and where we are going.” The telescope’s controllers say it will be late summer before the new and repaired instruments are calibrated and beaming down science again. Once it was far enough away from the telescope, the shuttle fired its engines to drop down to a lower orbit where the danger from micrometeoroids was less than the 350-mile-high orbit of the telescope. The astronauts then inspected the shuttle’s heat shield to make sure it was safe for their return to Earth, which is scheduled for Friday. Although the spacewalking is done, the astronauts have more on their schedule before then. On Wednesday, they will hold a news conference in orbit. And Thursday they will testify from space before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science, whose chairwoman is Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, an indefatigable supporter of the Hubble telescope.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration


Swiss Bankers Back a Broad Withholding of Taxes

Abstract: ZURICH — Swiss bankers on Thursday called for the introduction of a broad withholding tax on earnings generated by foreign investors, a move aimed at ending international pressure on bank secrecy. “The model would generate tax revenues while respecting the privacy of bank clients and it would represent an efficient alternative to a system of automatic information exchange,” Urs P. Roth, chief executive of the Swiss Bankers Association, said at a news conference. Mr. Roth said the tax system would cover dividends, income from collective investments and capital gains. It would apply to private individuals as well as legal entities, and be broader than a planned new European Union savings-tax directive. It eliminates the risk of criminal prosecution or civil sanctions, the banking association said. Switzerland’s bank secrecy laws have come under attack by Western countries in the wake of the financial crisis and Bern had to make concessions to avert international sanctions. A U.S. tax investigation of UBS, the largest Swiss bank, this year led the government and UBS to agree to disclose thousands of client names to end litigation. Switzerland, the world’s biggest banking center for foreigners, opposes automatic sharing of account and client data with foreign tax agencies, fearing that such an arrangement would kill its already weakened bank-privacy laws. But it agreed in March to cooperate more on tax evasion with other governments. The E.U. already has a withholding tax agreement on interest payments made to its citizens’ accounts in Switzerland.

Economic Conditions and Trends
Switzerland


John Tierney on Online and Speed Dating

Abstract: ABSTRACT. In this meta-analysis of online dating and speed dating, we propose a corollary to the Flaw-O-Matic theory of romantic revulsion. Current research reveals that the Flaw-O-Matic, a mechanism in the brain that instantly finds fault with any potential mate, can be reoriented positively in certain conditions through a newly identified process, the Sally Field Effect. When I first identified the Flaw-O-Matic, in a 1995 column , it seemed primarily a mechanism to kill romance. After studying picky daters — like a guy who couldn’t tolerate dirty elbows, and a woman who insisted on men who were at least 5-foot-10 and played polo — I predicted that they would remain permanently single. Today I’m more hopeful. Thanks to a revolution in dating research over the past decade, the Flaw-O-Matic now looks like a more versatile mechanism than we theoretical pioneers imagined. My early work was done using personal ads, a crude tool (although state of the art in 1995). I found that people looking for love in New York magazine listed far more prerequisites (like polo skills) for a partner than did people advertising in other cities. Based on these numbers, and many dinners with friends who could never find anyone good enough, I concluded that the high percentage of single-person households in New York was due to New Yorkers’ hyperactive Flaw-O-Matics. This new theory of a neural mechanism did not immediately gain wide acceptance in the social-science literature. By my count, it has been cited a total of one time (in a psychotherapist’s treatise on the “avoidant lover”). But the study of romantic revulsion has expanded because of the rise of online dating services and speed-dating events — gold mines of data. Instead of asking people about their mate preferences, scientists can now watch mating rituals in real time. They’ve tracked who asks out whom — and who says yes — at online dating services by watching the customers’ clicks and scanning their messages to look for telephone numbers and phrases like “let’s meet.” They’ve analyzed the courtship choices of more than 10,000 customers of a commercial speed-dating service. On campuses, they’ve even organized their own speed-dating events, at which you talk for several minutes apiece with perhaps a dozen people, sometimes two dozen. You discreetly mark on your scorecard which partners you’d like to see again, and the organizers match you afterward with any of them who reciprocated your interest. Just as Darwin could have predicted, the researchers have found that women are pickier than men. While men concentrate mainly on looks and will ask out a lot of women as long as they’re above a certain threshold of attractiveness, women focus on fewer prospects. They’re less willing to date someone of another race. When using online services, they pay more attention than men do to a potential partner’s education, profession and income. They prefer taller men, but they’re willing to relax their standards for the Ron Perelmans of the world, as revealed in a study of more than 20,000 online daters by Gunter Hitsch and Ali Hortacsu of the University of Chicago and Dan Ariely of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They found that a 5-foot-8 man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6-footer if he made more money — precisely $146,000 a year more. For a 5-foot-2 man, the number was $277,000. [For more of these trade-offs, see nytimes.com/tierneylab .] Online dating reveals the most exquisite calibrations of the Flaw-O-Matic because the daters fill out questionnaires listing more attributes than could ever fit in a personal ad. They can spend all day finding minute faults in hundreds of potential partners. But that’s also why so many people never make a lasting match. “When you have all these criteria to consider, and so many people to choose from, you start striving for perfection,” Dr. Ariely says. “You don’t want to settle for someone who’s not ideal in height, age, religion and 45 other dimensions.” It’s the same problem afflicting New Yorkers: with so many prospects in the big city, they refuse to stop searching. Customers of online dating services typically end up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they study online. But something very different happens at a speed-dating event. The average participant makes a match with at least 1 in 10 of the people they meet; some studies have found the average is 2 or 3 out of 10. Women are still pickier than men, and in some speed-dating experiments they still prefer affluent, well-educated men, but the preference is less strong — and in some other studies they don’t discriminate at all by income or social status. What happens to speed daters’ Flaw-O-Matics? The people at these events realize that there aren’t an infinite number of possibilities. If they want to get anything out of the evening, they have to settle for less than perfection. They also can’t help noticing that they have competition, and that their ideal partner just might prefer someone else. But these speed daters don’t simply shut down their Flaw-O-Matics. They still have their standards, as demonstrated in speed-dating sessions organized by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel at Northwestern University. The researchers, working with Daniel Mochon and Dr. Ariely of M.I.T., analyzed the preferences of more than 150 students at the sessions. The students were particularly turned off by prospects who exhibited what the researchers call “unselective romantic desire.” Another way to put it would be “desperate.” The speed daters were very good at guessing which of their partners were indiscriminately friendly — willing to go out with lots of the other people — and which dates had eyes only for them. They much preferred the ones with “selective desire.” Being able to make this distinction in a four-minute speed date, the researchers write in the April issue of Psychological Science, “suggests that humans possess an impressive, highly attuned ability to assess such subtleties of romantic attraction. In fact, the need to feel special or unique could be a broad motivation that stretches across people’s social lives.” The scientists don’t propose a name for this phenomenon; nor, as usual, do they deign to mention the Flaw-O-Matic when discussing this “impressive, highly attuned ability” to make snap romantic judgments. But to me this clearly looks like a redirection of the Flaw-O-Matic’s power, because of what I call the Sally Field Effect. These speed daters were looking for someone who shared their distaste for the others in the room: someone who was just as picky as they were. When they found that person, and neither one of them sneered or bolted, that hectoring little voice in the brain was suddenly transformed into a purring engine of love. They gazed dreamily into each other’s eyes, channeled a certain actress on Oscar night, and thought: “Your Flaw-O-Matic likes me! It really likes me!” That may not be enough to sustain the relationship through the trials of dirty elbows and long, polo-less weekends. But it’s a start.

Dating (Social)
Computers and the Internet
Psychology and Psychologists


Justices Curb Postal Service's Immunity From Lawsuits

Abstract: WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 - The Postal Service may be sued by people who trip over packages or other mail that letter carriers have carelessly left in their path, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. The 7-to-1 decision rejected the government's argument that the service, which delivers some 660 million pieces of mail a day, is immune from lawsuits for negligent delivery. The ruling permits a woman who tripped and fell over packages left on the porch of her suburban Philadelphia home to proceed with her suit for $200,000 in damages for serious injuries to her wrists, chest and spine. The suit, brought by Barbara Dolan, was dismissed by two lower federal courts in Pennsylvania under what is known as the "postal exception" to the federal law that generally permits negligence suits against the government. That law, the Federal Tort Claims Act, waives the government's sovereign immunity from suits in circumstances under which a private individual would face liability. The postal exception, one of 13 specific exemptions to the law, bars "any claim arising out of the loss, miscarriage or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter." The question in this case, Dolan v. United States Postal Service, No. 04-848, was how broadly to read the exemption. The outcome turned on the phrase "negligent transmission," or, more specifically, on the single word "transmission." If transmitting mail meant the same as delivering mail, as the government argued and the lower courts held, then negligent mail delivery would be covered by the exemption and could not give rise to a lawsuit. Transmission of mail "includes the ultimate act of delivering mail to a postal customer," the government argued in its Supreme Court brief, adding that Congress had intended the postal exception to insulate the Postal Service from lawsuits for its "performance of the quintessentially postal function of directly delivering the mail to a postal patron." But in his opinion for the court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy took a different approach. Citing the maxim that "a word is known by the company it keeps," he said that "transmission" had to be understood in the context of the exception's other words, "loss" and "miscarriage." "Mail is 'lost' if it is destroyed or misplaced and 'miscarried' if it goes to the wrong address," Justice Kennedy said. He added: "Since both those terms refer to failings in the postal obligation to deliver mail in a timely manner to the right address, it would be odd if 'negligent transmission' swept far more broadly to include injuries like those alleged here -- injuries that happen to be caused by postal employees but involve neither failure to transmit mail nor damage to its contents." Consequently, Justice Kennedy said, "we think it more likely" that Congress meant to immunize the Postal Service only for injuries caused when mail arrives late, damaged or at the wrong address, or does not arrive at all. He said the "specter of frivolous slip-and-fall claims inundating the Postal Service," a prospect that the government had raised in its brief, could be dealt with by applying "ordinary protections against frivolous litigation." He noted that Congress had not immunized the Postal Service against suits from negligent handling of its delivery trucks, a potential liability that poses the same risks of frivolous litigation, and also pointed out that this type of liability was "a risk shared by any business that makes home deliveries." This last point was stressed in a brief filed on Mrs. Dolan's behalf by the Washington Legal Foundation, a pro-business group, which told the court that the Postal Service "should not operate at a competitive advantage over private carriers." The legal foundation, which more often takes the government's side in Supreme Court cases, said it was "in the public interest to hold the Postal Service accountable for its negligent acts to the same extent that private carriers would be liable," except for the limited exceptions specified by Congress. The only dissenting vote was cast by Justice Clarence Thomas, who said that "the crux of my disagreement with the majority is its failure to assign the term 'transmission' its plain meaning." Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. did not vote, because he was not on the court when the case was argued on Nov. 7. Whether the Postal Service was in fact negligent for the way it left packages on Mrs. Dolan's porch has not yet been resolved, because the case has not gone to trial. The Supreme Court agreed to decide this case because the question had produced conflicting answers in the lower courts. In 2004, the federal appeals court in New York decided a nearly identical case, in which a woman sued after tripping on a package left outside her door. That court held that the case was not covered by the postal exception and could proceed.

PHILADELPHIA (PA)
UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE
SUPREME COURT
DOLAN BARBARA
ACCIDENTS AND SAFETY
IMMUNITY FROM PROSECUTION
SUITS AND LITIGATION
POSTAL SERVICE
DECISIONS AND VERDICTS


Unearthing China’s Past at a Market Whose Raffish Air Is a Selling Point

Abstract: BEIJING — The vast antiques market is awash in jewelry, snuff bottles, old clocks, brass paperweights, ceramics, and slabs of jade of many hues and dubious quality. It has the same feel as flea markets all around the world that advertise antiquities but do not always deliver the real thing. Yet when strolling through the Panjiayuan market, a huge open-air space in southeast Beijing, the question of whether the wares are authentic is beside the point. At its heart, the market is a raucous hub for unearthing the past 100 years or more of China’s turbulent past. There are 20-foot-tall stone statues of Buddha, busts of Confucius, Ming-era lions and huge urns suitable for the gardens of a palace. There are old books, posters and vintage photographs. Collectors of rare books and posters of China find gems in the ramshackle alleyways devoted to old paper items. Or they make discoveries in the more exclusive little shops in the grandly named Panjiayuan Exhibition Hall, a dowdy gray building that was added to the market in the last decade. A favorite haunt of treasure hunters as well as Chinese and foreign tourists, the market was threatened with a shutdown this spring when the state company that manages it clashed with merchants over renting rights for tiny spaces — often amounting to a patch of ground measuring just 4 feet by 6 feet. Image Stalls at the Panjiayuan market. Credit Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times Scuffles broke out between the police and some vendors. Many stalls closed in protest over rumors about plans to move the market to a spot in Hebei Province, 160 miles to the west. Then the vice mayor of the city, Li Shixiang, backed off, and said about 1,000 of the estimated 4,000 stalls would be closed as part of a plan to upgrade the market, an idea that goes against the popular grain. Most fans agree that a raffish spirit is one of Panjiayuan’s most appealing features. It remains a standout from the city’s gaudy malls that sell silk, pearls and fake designer goods. The vendors are standing firm against the city’s edicts, insisting they will not budge. And the buyers keep coming. “I have been here since 1995,” said Ren Guibin, 55, as he sat in his book-lined nook with glass-fronted cabinets in the more upscale section of the exhibition hall. “I am not moving. My customers know where to find me.” Behind his desk, a framed poster of a young Chinese woman — her cheeks flushed with enthusiasm, her hair tied back and her arm thrust skyward in a revolutionary salute — leaned against the wall. It was one of his prize pieces from the Cultural Revolution, the period from 1966 to 1976 when Mao Zedong’s Red Guards were in the vanguard. Image Books, coins, and Mao-era objects at Panjiayuan. Credit Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times “I was offered $25,000 for it, but I turned it down,” Mr. Ren said. Even though he had owned the poster for eight years, he was in no rush to sell it. That is because a wealthy Chinese collector of Cultural Revolution memorabilia prepared to pay more would be sure to buy it, he said. The recent surge of patriotism combined with astonishing new wealth has created a new kind of buyer: the serious and affluent Chinese collector. “Twenty years ago, Americans bought all this Cultural Revolution stuff. It was like buying cabbage for them, it was so cheap. Now rich Chinese are going to buy it all back.” Down the corridor, another vendor was doing business with Marien van der Heijden , of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which owns a large collection of Chinese propaganda posters that is displayed on chineseposters.net . By midmorning, Mr. van der Heijden, a visitor here for the past 15 years, had amassed about 50 posters, neatly rolled inside a fat tube to hand carry back to Europe. His best find of the morning was something quite rare: a poster of young Chinese women getting ready for work in the 1950s, a period of poster art when the style was more casual than the high social realism of the Cultural Revolution. “In the ’50s posters you see human beings, not robots,” he said. “In the early ’50s you even see ugly people. I am always looking for posters with individuality and humanity.” In the more unprepossessing stalls in the outdoor section of the market, books are scattered on the ground in disorderly piles, and vendors sit at the back keeping an eye on their displays from small stools just six inches off the ground. Ruben Lundgren, a Dutch photographer who has lived in Beijing for a dozen years, scoured the stalls looking for photography books of the last days of the Qing dynasty, the Kuomintang years, and the various phases of Communist rule. Many of the books he found illustrate a coffee-table production called “The Chinese Photobook,” published in New York last year by Aperture. It describes and depicts the changing styles of Chinese photo books with many examples from the post-1949 Communist era. “In the 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution, there was a massive flow of books onto the market,” he said. “Libraries that had been closed in the ’60s and ’70s just pushed books onto the market for very little.” In the past few years, rare books in mint condition have been harder to find at Panjiayuan. The best often get sent to auction, where they fetch higher prices. Image A delivery worker napping on his cart next to a stall selling Mao-era memorabilia at Panjiayuan. Credit Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times Still, on a recent visit Mr. Lundgren uncovered the photo book of the funeral of Premier Zhou Enlai, who died in 1976, a good find because of the more candid style of photography. At another stall, in the back row of books haphazardly piled on the ground, he unearthed a highly stylized propaganda volume of color photos of Chinese soldiers who served in the Korean War. Kang Xuesong , a former news photographer, runs a popular shop for old photographs of China called Da Kang Photography Studio. He embarked on a new profession 20 years ago as a purveyor of sepia and black-and-white images of Shanghai and Beijing before World War II. He specializes in photos of bourgeois families from the 1930s who, dressed in traditional Chinese finery, posed in studios with European backdrops that featured Bugati cars and Art Deco furniture. His briskest trade is in the Mao era . Collectors like the nostalgic feel of the photos, he said. From his connections as a news photographer, Mr. Kang said he knew where to find old file photographs from Xinhua, the state-run agency whose photographers were granted wide access to the leaders of the Communists from the moment they entered Beijing in 1949. The most valued photographs, Mr. Kang said, were the more informal ones. A popular image showed a barefoot Mao in a swimsuit in 1954, sitting on the sand with his daughter Li Na and nephew, Mao Yuanxin. A beach umbrella behind them, they were relaxing at the beach at Beidaihe, the summer resort not far from Beijing. A bargain at $50, Mr. Kang said.

Beijing
China
Antique
Flea market
Collecting
Cultural Revolution
Poster
Art
Propaganda
Photography


Caroline Kennedy Is Seeking Seat Held by Clinton

Abstract: ALBANY — Caroline Kennedy , the deeply private daughter of America’s most storied political dynasty, will seek the United States Senate seat in New York being vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton . Ms. Kennedy ended weeks of silence with a series of rapid-fire phone calls to the state’s leading political figures, including Gov. David A. Paterson, in which she emphatically and enthusiastically declared herself interested in the seat, according to several people who received the calls. “She told me she was interested in the position,” Mr. Paterson said at a news conference outside Albany on Monday. He added, “She’d like at some point to sit down and tell me what she thinks her qualifications are.” The governor, who has sole authority to fill the Senate vacancy, insisted that he had not yet chosen a successor to Mrs. Clinton and said that Monday’s conversation with Ms. Kennedy was the first he had had with her since an initial discussion almost two weeks ago. But several people who have counseled the governor on the pending vacancy said that Ms. Kennedy has emerged as a clear front-runner, if she proves able to withstand the intense scrutiny and criticism that her decision to seek the seat is likely to provoke. Still, some have questioned whether Ms. Kennedy is qualified for the job. Ms. Kennedy is now launching a public effort to demonstrate that she has both the ability and the stomach to perform the job, with plans to visit parts of the upstate region. The governor, who has expressed frustration with other elected officials for campaigning too openly, has done nothing to discourage her, said a person who has spoken with Ms. Kennedy. In addition, a person with direct knowledge of the conversations said that Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Paterson had spoken several times in recent days and that the governor had grown increasingly fond of her. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the governor, said that Mr. Paterson also had come to see Ms. Kennedy as a strong potential candidate whose appointment would keep a woman in the seat and whose personal connections would allow her to raise the roughly $70 million required to hold on to the seat in the coming years. Under state law, Ms. Kennedy would have to run and win in 2010, to finish out the last two years of Mrs. Clinton’s term, and again in 2012, to win a term of her own. Another person who had advised Mr. Paterson said that Ms. Kennedy could offer political advantages to the governor, who was elevated to his position after Eliot Spitzer resigned in March and in two years must ask voters to actually elect him as governor. “The upside of her candidacy is that the 2010 ballot will read Kennedy - Paterson,” said one of those advisers, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the governor’s thinking. “David craves national attention and money. If you connect the dots, it leads to her.” For Ms. Kennedy, an appointment to the Senate would open a historic and exceedingly high-profile chapter to a life largely shielded from public view, and comes at a poignant time for her personally. Her uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, is struggling with terminal brain cancer, and his illness has forced members of his extended family to contemplate the possibility that the Senate could be left without a Kennedy for the first time in a half century. Mr. Kennedy has encouraged his niece, to whom he talks nearly every day, to pursue Mrs. Clinton’s seat, a spokesman for the senator, Anthony Coley, said. Associates of the senator say he has made it clear he would not pressure her to do so. Still, they said nothing would make him happier or prouder than having his niece in the Senate, which — far more than the White House — has been the core of the family’s long record of public service. Other members of the family, especially her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have also strongly encouraged Ms. Kennedy, who, if she were appointed, would become the first woman to lead the Kennedy dynasty, whose most successful and visible members have been men. Her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, had once been urged to run for the seat, which was held by their uncle, Robert F. Kennedy. Ms. Kennedy, who initially seemed taken aback by questions about whether she would be interested in the position, has grown increasingly excited about and focused on the opportunity in recent days, those who have talked to her said. She has moved aggressively into campaignlike mode, albeit with careful attention to political protocol. On Monday, she called dozens of political figures to let them know she was interested in the job. Besides Mr. Paterson and Christine C. Quinn, the New York City Council speaker, Ms. Kennedy called upstate officials like Representative Louise M. Slaughter and Byron Brown, the mayor of Buffalo; the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader; and Charles E. Schumer, New York’s senior senator. (One name who may or may not have been on the list: Mrs. Clinton. Through spokesmen, Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Kennedy declined to say whether or not they had spoken. While Mrs. Clinton has said that she would leave the decision to Mr. Paterson, some officials close to her have publicly questioned Ms. Kennedy’s credentials for the job.) Moreover, friends said, Ms. Kennedy, whose own mother assiduously shielded her from scrutiny when she was young, has become less worried about subjecting her three children to the spotlight now that they have grown older. Ms. Kennedy’s two daughters — Rose, 20, and Tatiana, 18 — are in college. Her son, John, turns 16 next month. “The kids are a big part of it. But part of it is she knows she can really do a great job at this,” said Ellen Alderman, a law school classmate of Ms. Kennedy and her co-author on two books. Ms. Kennedy has also retained Knickerbocker SKD, a well-connected political consulting firm founded by Josh Isay, a former chief of staff to Mr. Schumer. The firm counts among its clients Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Ms. Quinn, and Mr. Brown, and enjoys close ties with some of New York’s powerful labor unions. Several of those called by Ms. Kennedy said that she had not asked for their endorsement, but merely expressed her interest in the job and willingness to earn it. Those discussions seemed intended to soothe some of the feathers already ruffled among the many elected officials, including some in New York’s Congressional delegation, who are seeking the seat. “What we need, obviously, is someone of great stature to follow Hillary Clinton,” said Ms. Slaughter, who said she would support Ms. Kennedy’s bid for the office. And, in a move that carries an unmistakable echo of the “listening tour” that jump-started Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy in 2000, Ms. Kennedy has made plans to visit parts of upstate New York, where she is perhaps least well known, and where her candidacy may draw the most skepticism. Mr. Brown said that he expected to meet with her in western New York in the coming weeks. “She wanted a lay of the land, she wanted to talk about some of the issues that are important to people from Buffalo and upstate,” Mr. Brown said. Some friends said that they saw Ms. Kennedy’s interest in the seat as part of an evolution in recent years, one that has seen her grow more comfortable with the spotlight. In recent years, she helped raise millions of dollars for New York City schools. She also spent weeks campaigning for Barack Obama on the presidential campaign trail this year, an experience that friends say left her with a greater appetite for public life. “I think what she learned from it was that she found it to be work that she liked and was excited about and it got her blood flowing,” said Joel I. Klein, chancellor of New York’s public schools. Though Ms. Kennedy’s interest in the seat has already garnered enormous attention, several other elected officials who have expressed interest in the job said privately on Monday that they would continue to seek it. And even if Ms. Kennedy does win the nod from Mr. Paterson, she will eventually face a much broader and tougher audience: New York voters, who expressed excitement, skepticism and every emotion in between as word of Ms. Kennedy’s decision spread. Shannon R. Berkowsky, a teacher from Ms. Kennedy’s neighborhood on the Upper East Side, noted that Ms. Kennedy’s positions on many issues were all but unknown, unlike those of many elected officials who have expressed interest in the seat. “There are people who have worked hard their whole lives for the greater good who don’t have the name, and should they be passed over?” Ms. Berkowsky said. But Marie Owen, 69, a flute player who lives on the Upper West Side, expressed admiration for Ms. Kennedy. “I somehow can’t see her as being corrupt. It’s not her legacy,” she said. “I kind of like the idea, maybe because I’m old.”

Schlossberg Caroline Kennedy
Clinton Hillary Rodham
Senate
Democratic Party


Portugal Clears the Way for Extradition of Ex-C.I.A. Agent to Italy

Abstract: ROME — A former undercover C.I.A. agent will be handed over to Italy , where she was convicted of taking part in the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in one of the renditions ordered by the George W. Bush administration, after appellate courts in Portugal, where she lives, turned down her appeal this week. In January, a Portuguese court ruled that the former agent, Sabrina De Sousa , should be handed over to Italy, but the order was stayed pending appeal. On Friday, her Italian lawyer, Dario Bolognesi, said in an interview that the appeal had been denied, and that Ms. De Sousa would be extradited after May 4. News that Portugal’s Constitutional Court had turned down her appeal this week was also reported on Friday by The Washington Post and by the Portuguese newspapers Diário de Notícias and Expresso . Her Portuguese lawyer, Manuel de Magalhães e Silva, did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. De Sousa, who holds dual American and Portuguese citizenship, has denied any wrongdoing or involvement in the kidnapping, which took place while she was working undercover for the C.I.A. as a diplomat in Milan. She resigned from the agency in 2009 and avoided trial by leaving Europe, but was convicted in absentia that year. Despite the risk of arrest, she returned to Portugal last year to be closer to her family. Last October, the Portuguese authorities briefly detained her and confiscated her passport so that she could not leave the country, though she was freed pending the court proceedings. Ms. De Sousa has exhausted her appeals in the Italian judicial system. It is not clear that if she is sent to Italy whether she will immediately begin serving her prison term, which would last a minimum of four years. Portuguese courts, including the Constitutional Court, have stated that Ms. De Sousa, upon being sent to Italy, should have the right to a new trial, or at least the opportunity to present new evidence and witnesses in an appeal. But Armando Spataro, one of the Italian prosecutors who helped secure criminal convictions of around two dozen Americans, including Ms. De Sousa, in connection with the kidnapping, said he saw no legal grounds for a new trial. She would be sent straight to prison, “and that’s that,” he said. Mr. Bolognesi, her defense lawyer, said the situation was less certain. He said he would soon meet with Italian magistrates to discuss the possibility of a pardon from President Sergio Mattarella. Some of the other C.I.A. operatives convicted in the case got either full or partial pardons, while others have asserted claims to diplomatic immunity (Ms. De Sousa’s attempt to do so was not successful ). And still others have simply stayed away from countries that might extradite them to Italy. As of yet, none of the Americans have been imprisoned in Italy. The top Italian agents involved in the kidnapping were acquitted after important testimony was ruled to be a state secret. Because some of Ms. De Sousa’s co-defendants have been pardoned and some of the Italian agents have been acquitted, she should be pardoned, too, Mr. Bolognesi said. “We’re going to insist on this point,” he said. The cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr , also known as Abu Omar, was seized in Milan in February 2003 as part of the United States’ practice of rendition , in which a terrorism suspect is captured and delivered to another country for interrogation. Mr. Nasr was taken to a military base before being transferred to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured. The case riveted Italy and became a major source of friction in relations between the United States and Italy. Within the field of international law, the prosecutions of the C.I.A. agents for their role in renditions were closely watched . In 2013, an Italian court sentenced Mr. Nasr in absentia to six years in prison for terrorism activities. He remains in Egypt.

Sabrina De Sousa
Kidnapping and Hostages
US Foreign Policy
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr
George W Bush
Egypt
Milan
Portugal
CIA
Extradition