Still Fading, Giants Fail to Exploit 49ers’ Slips

Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The San Francisco 49ers fumbled four times Sunday. They failed to recover a Giants onside kickoff. They botched a field-goal attempt with a bad snap. The 49ers were all but giving away the game. To make it even easier for the hapless Giants, the San Francisco defense was wilting in the fourth quarter. With about five minutes left in the game, the Giants had a first down at the 49ers’ 4-yard line. A touchdown and extra point would give them the lead. The Giants’ offense — remodeled in the off-season because the old offensive system lacked imagination — ran the same corner fade into the end zone on three consecutive plays. Since the 49ers were hardly surprised by such predictable play-calling, each pass fell incomplete. On fourth down, with no receiver open, Eli Manning tried to force a pass into coverage and was intercepted for the fifth time. How bad are the Giants this season? With the game on the line Sunday, they could not advance the ball an inch. With nearly a year to revamp the all-important goal-line offense, they called the most basic pass play in any team’s arsenal and, embarrassingly, did it over and over and over. Facing a bungling, compliant opponent, the Giants could not get out of their own way and lost their fifth successive game as the 49ers staggered away with a 16-10 victory. How bad are the Giants this season? The 2013 Giants, a belly-flop of a team that started the season 0-6, had a better record after 10 games. “Four shots from the 4-yard line — it’s inexcusable that we didn’t score,” said Coach Tom Coughlin, whose team is now 3-7. “I could be standing here with a 17-16 win; instead, we’re standing here with a loss.” There were exasperation and vexation in the Giants’ locker room late Sunday afternoon, as well as a numbing understanding that the defeat meant the team was all but certain to miss the playoffs for a third consecutive season. “We’re just a desperate team,” safety Antrel Rolle said. “Postseason? I’m not even sure what’s attainable or not right now.” For all the errors committed by both teams, the game came down to the Giants’ last meaningful drive — the one near the goal line that left the MetLife Stadium crowd stunned when the Giants never seriously threatened to score. A spectacular, acrobatic 37-yard reception by the rookie Odell Beckham Jr. gave the Giants the football at the 49ers’ 4-yard line with the score 16-10. On first down, Manning had several choices, a corner fade route among them. A running play was an option, but Manning said the 49ers had eight defenders “in the box,” a defensive formation that suggested they were expecting a run. Manning opted to throw toward Beckham in the right corner. Beckham was not open. On second down, the 49ers were double-teaming Beckham to the right of the formation, so Manning threw the same type of pass to the left corner for wide receiver Rueben Randle, who was in single coverage. But the pass was a little out of Randle’s reach, the coverage was good and Randle barely got a hand on the ball. Image Giants quarterback Eli Manning releasing a pass under pressure from San Francisco 49ers linebacker Aaron Lynch. Manning, who came into the game with only six interceptions this season, threw five interceptions. 1 / 12 When Manning came to the line for third down, he was trying to change the play — he did not say later what play was called or what he was trying to change the play to — but the play clock was running down. Manning called a timeout with one second left on the play clock. He went to the sideline to consult with Ben McAdoo, the new offensive coordinator. When he came back onto the field, Beckham was again drawing two defenders. Tight end Larry Donnell, who was split wide left, was covered only by 49ers safety Eric Reid. Manning lofted another fade pass. Donnell had his hands on it but never had possession, and Reid knocked the ball to the ground as both players tumbled to the turf. Looking despairing and unnerved, the Giants went to the line for fourth down. Manning had three wide receivers and two tight ends in the formation, but the 49ers dropped eight players into coverage. In the condensed area near the goal line, no Giant was open. Manning, under pressure, scrambled briefly and tried to fire to Preston Parker at the goal line. The pass was deflected and intercepted by Chris Borland. There were 4 minutes 43 seconds remaining in the final quarter, but the 49ers moved the ball enough to use up valuable time. In the final 1:09, the Giants had time for one last, futile possession. There are at least two obvious questions to ask about the their decision-making near the goal line. While they were not having a good day with the ground game, they did average 3.1 yards per rushing attempt. Even one running attempt on first or second down would have put some doubt in the minds of the 49ers about whether the Giants were going to run or pass in the succeeding downs. That doubt might have made a play-action pass fake viable, which often frees up a receiver over the middle. And why did the Giants not turn to wide receiver Corey Washington, the 6-foot-4 rookie who had a touchdown catch on a corner fade route against Indianapolis on Nov. 3? “In hindsight, we should have run the ball,” Coughlin said. But he also defended the corner fade routes. “That’s how we’ve scored a bunch of times,” he said. Said Manning: “They weren’t giving us great looks to run the ball. Maybe on first down, we could have run the ball right there and possibly got closer, where on second and third down it gives you that run-pass option.” Typical for him, Manning, who came into the game with only six interceptions for the season, took the blame. “I’ve got to make better throws there,” he said. It was not the first time Sunday that the Giants’ offense failed deep in 49ers territory. Earlier in the fourth, Manning led the Giants to the 49ers’ 32-yard line. But a wayward pass in the direction of Randle was intercepted by Chris Culliver, halting a promising drive. That was Manning’s fourth interception. At least one of Manning’s other interceptions did not appear to be his fault. One came on a miscommunication with Randle, a common occurrence. But another interception occurred when Borland seemed to read Manning’s eyes and stepped in front of a pass intended for Beckham. That led to the last of three Phil Dawson field goals that put the 49ers up at halftime, 9-7. San Francisco quickly extended its lead to 9 points early in the third quarter. A 43-yard field goal by Josh Brown cut the 49ers’ lead, but the Giants did not score again. “We’ve had a defensive fiasco,” Coughlin said, apparently referring to last week’s loss at Seattle. “We’ve had an offensive fiasco. Perhaps maybe now we’ll be able to go and put something together.” The 3-7 Giants have six games left.

Football
Eli Manning
Odell Beckham Jr.
Colin Kaepernick
Michael Crabtree
Josh Brown
Giants
49ers


Czech Premier Candidate Seen as Honest but Inexperienced

Abstract: PRAGUE — Miroslava Nemcova, the governing party’s candidate to become the next prime minister of the Czech Republic, is a former bookshop owner who has never held a ministerial position, but has a reputation for moral rectitude and can restore confidence in the scandal-hit nation, analysts said Thursday. Ms. Nemcova, 60, currently the speaker of the House in the country’s lower house of Parliament, was nominated Wednesday by the center-right Civic Democrats to replace the departing prime minister, Petr Necas, who resigned on Monday amid a corruption scandal. Ms. Nemcova, a popular and modest figure who is known for a free-market economic outlook, would be the first woman to serve as the country’s prime minister. The Czech news media on Thursday were already calling her the Iron Lady, the nickname of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain. But analysts said Ms. Nemcova was a far more conciliatory person, who had seldom sought out power or influence. Jindrich Sidlo, a commentator at Hospodarske noviny , a leading economic newspaper, said Ms. Nemcova had limited experience in foreign policy and the day-to-day thrust of policy making and was chosen primarily because she had never been tainted by scandal. “She is the best choice because she is not connected with any scandal during her entire political career,” he said. “The only scandal attributed to her is that she once lent her son an office car, and that is hardly a big deal.” Last week, after a series of nationwide raids, prosecutors charged seven people — including the prime minister’s chief of staff and the current and former heads of military intelligence — in the most extensive anticorruption crackdown since the overthrow of Communism in 1989. The prime minister’s chief of staff, Jana Nagyova, a close confidante, was charged with abuse of power and bribery after prosecutors said she ordered a military intelligence agency to spy on three people, including Mr. Necas’s wife. Prosecutors said she had also offered posts in state-owned companies to three rebellious members of Parliament in return for their agreeing to leave their parliamentary seats. Ms. Nagyova, through her lawyer, has denied some of the accusations, saying she acted in good faith. Ms. Nemcova, a native of Vysocina, in the southeastern, predominantly agricultural part of the country, has been speaker of the House since 2010. She is a longstanding member of the Civic Democrats, the party that presided over the country’s transition to a market economy in the aftermath of Communism. She became a lawmaker in 1998 and is viewed as dutiful party loyalist. She is the mother of one adult son. Her appointment is far from assured, as she needs the approval of President Milos Zeman, who has the power to appoint the prime minister. She also needs the support of the Civic Democrats’ coalition partners and would be subject to a vote of confidence in Parliament. If there is no agreement on a new government, early elections will be called. The next parliamentary elections are scheduled for June 2014. “When there is a big crisis, one has to rise to the occasion,” she said Wednesday in an interview with the online version of the newspaper Mlada fronta DNES. Ms. Nemcova is the country’s fourth most trusted politician, according to a poll by the Public Opinion Research Center, a polling institute. The poll, in which 1,049 people were interviewed by phone, had a margin of sampling error of three percentage points. The most trusted politician, according to the poll, was Karel Schwarzenberg, the pipe-smoking foreign minister, whose conservative TOP09 Party was in coalition with the Civic Democratic Party and whose support is deemed vital for her to ascend to the top job. Mr. Schwarzenberg was quoted Thursday in Mlada fronta DNES as praising Ms. Nemcova as a “wonderful lady.” But he said that her nomination also showed that the governing party did not have many qualified candidates for the job. Mr. Sidlo, of Hospodarske Noviny , said that her reputation for incorruptibility was her best asset at a time of public outcry over graft and lawlessness. She has not been linked to special interests or lobbyists. But he cautioned that she had a low profile and was largely untested.


Iran’s Leader Rejects Direct Talks With U.S.

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , rejected any idea of bilateral talks with the United States on Thursday, in a speech in which he seemed to dismiss the views of Iranian officials — including the country’s foreign minister — who had advocated for such negotiations. “The Iranian nation will not negotiate under pressure,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. Noting the international sanctions against Iran, which were bolstered on Wednesday by new American financial restrictions that essentially reduce Iran to using its oil for barter trade, he added: “The U.S. is pointing a gun at Iran and wants us to talk to them. The Iranian nation will not be intimidated by these actions.” “Direct talks will not solve any problems,” he concluded. His statement was considered particularly important because, as one senior Obama administration official put it, “we believe Khamenei now holds the entire nuclear file.” But the White House did not immediately react to the statement, and some officials said that history — including during the Iran-Iraq war — demonstrates that Iran can change its position quickly. Despite the ayatollah’s comments, it appears that talks scheduled to begin Feb. 26 between Iran and six nations, including the United States, will go ahead in Kazakhstan. But American officials have said repeatedly in recent months that they believe negotiating in that multinational forum can be awkward, partly because of differences with Russia and China over Tehran. That is one reason Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. went to a security conference in Munich last weekend to publicly reinforce President Obama’s private offer of direct talks. It was at that conference that the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said he was open to such talks , although Mr. Biden noted that they could proceed only if the ayatollah showed serious interest. Mr. Salehi had been one of Iran’s top nuclear negotiators, and while he has often projected a moderate tone, he has also made it clear that his authority is limited. An effort to negotiate a deal early in Mr. Obama’s presidency resulted in an agreement that Ayatollah Khamenei rejected. The ayatollah’s objection is an edict to which other Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , must adhere, and it comes after several high-ranking Iranian officials, including Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Salehi, said that the Obama administration had been taking positive steps toward Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei’s wording was quite direct in his speech before air force commanders at his Tehran office, and his comments were reported on his personal Web site. “I’m not a diplomat; I’m a revolutionary, and speak frankly and directly,” he said. “If anyone wants the return of U.S. dominance here, people will grab his throat.” Image Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Tehran would not be intimidated by Washington. Credit Caren Firouz/Reuters He said that while some “simple-minded people” might be eager for the prospect of bilateral talks, Iran had seen nothing from the Obama administration other than conspiracies. Those comments are in accord with American intelligence assessments of the supreme leader’s views, which include, officials say, a belief by the ayatollah that the sanctions are hurting the United States more than they are hurting Iran. Other officials close to the ayatollah have said in recent days that the real goal of America’s negotiations, the sanctions and the sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities is to bring down the Iranian government. Under the new restrictions on Iranian oil payments announced Wednesday, when countries still buying Iranian oil pay for their purchases, the money must be put into a local bank account, which Iran can use only to buy goods within that country. It is a way of keeping the money from being transferred to Iran, and the Treasury Department said on Thursday that it would strictly enforce the provisions, barring any banks that violate the new sanctions from conducting transactions with the United States. In Tehran, the comments were met with some sense of resignation — and suggestions that Mr. Obama’s openness to negotiation was a ploy, intended to set international opinion against Iran. “There is no room for any optimism,” said Hamid Reza Taraghi, an influential politician. Pointing to the new sanctions, decisions by American courts to seize Iranian assets and the American support for the opposition in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad is Iran’s last regional ally, he said, “We haven’t seen anything good from the U.S.” Iran experts outside the country said they were not surprised that Ayatollah Khamenei had ruled out dialogue with the United States, given his longstanding antipathy toward the Americans. “This is expected from Khamenei; his ideological view of the United States is getting in the way,” said Alireza Nader, a senior policy analyst at the Washington offices of the RAND Corporation. “Khamenei may be reluctant to negotiate — perhaps he does not want to from a weak position — but his hand is going to get weaker as time goes by.” Trita Parsi, the author of a critical account of the Obama administraton’s diplomacy with Iran, “A Single Roll of the Dice” (Yale University Press, 2012), wrote in a post Thursday on The Daily Beast that the ayatollah sees little advantage in breaking the current stalemate. “As long as the West does not put offers on the table that meet Iran’s bottom line, the calculation goes, Iran should play for time and seek a game changer that enables it to set the terms for a deal,” he wrote. “Even though the price of stalling will be high, the price of failed talks will likely be equally high, leaving Tehran better off seeking to press the West to improve the deal — rather than participating in talks that are doomed to fail.”

Iran
Ali Khamenei
Nuclear weapon
US Foreign Policy
Sanctions
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad


Mouse Study Discovers DNA That Controls Behavior

Abstract: The architectural feats of animals — from beaver dams to birds’ nests — not only make for great nature television, but, since the plans for such constructions seem largely inherited, they also offer an opportunity for scientists to tackle the profoundly difficult question of how genes control complicated behavior in animals and humans. A long-term study of the construction of burrows by deer mice has the beginnings of an answer. Hailed as innovative and exciting by other scientists, the report , in the current issue of Nature, identifies four regions of DNA that play a major role in telling a mouse how long a burrow to dig and whether to add an escape tunnel. The research could eventually lead to a better understanding of what kind of internal reward system motivates mice to dig, or tells them to stop. And although humans do not dig burrows, that, said the leader of the three-person research team, Hopi E. Hoekstra of Harvard, could “tell us something about behavioral variation in humans.” Dr. Hoekstra, an evolutionary and molecular biologist, said the work, largely carried out by graduate students in her laboratory, Jesse N. Weber, now at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and Brant K. Peterson, showed that “complex behaviors may be encoded by just a few genetic changes.” While other genes have been found in various species from worms to voles that govern various kinds of behavior, like mating and aggression, Dr. Hoekstra and her colleagues took on an unusually complicated behavior with an approach that involved nearly a decade of work on ecology and evolutionary biology as well as genetics. The result, said Cori Bargmann, who studies the genetics of behavior in roundworms at Rockefeller University, is “really exciting.” She added that “it was done with great intelligence. The genetics are beautiful.” Robert Anholt, a specialist in behavior and genetics in fruit flies at North Carolina State University, said it was “courageous to undertake this particular work” for Dr. Hoekstra because of the great difficulty of dealing with complicated behavior, and that the approach was innovative and pushed forward what was possible in behavioral genetics. Dr. Hoekstra started with a species called the oldfield mouse (Peromyscus polionotus), the smallest of the deer mice. For 80 years or more, field scientists have documented its behavior, including excavating characteristically long burrows with an escape tunnel, which the mice will dig even after generations of breeding in cages in a laboratory. Dr. Hoekstra treated tunnel length and architecture as a physical, measurable trait, much like tail length or weight, by filling burrows with foam that would produce a mold easily measured and cataloged — behavior made solid. She and her students did this in the field and repeated it in the laboratory by putting the mice in large, sandbox-like enclosures, letting them burrow and then making molds of the burrows. They did the same with another deer mouse species, Peromyscus maniculatus, that digs short burrows without escape tunnels. The team bred the two species together (they are close enough to interbreed) and measured the burrows of the offspring. Their tunnels varied in length. Further breeding crosses between the hybrids and the original short-burrow species were conducted and the tunnels measured again. They showed a blend of characteristics, varying in length and with and without escape tunnels. Then the scientists matched variations in tunnel architecture to variations in DNA. What they found were three areas of DNA that contributed to determining tunnel length, and one area affecting whether or not the crossbred mice dug an escape tunnel. That was a separate behavior inherited on its own, so that the mice could produce tunnels of any length, with or without escape tunnels. All complicated behaviors are affected by many things, Dr. Hoekstra said, so these regions of DNA do not determine tunnel architecture and length by themselves. But tunnel length is about 30 percent inherited, she said, and the three locations account for about half of that variation. The rest is determined by many tiny genetic effects. As for the one location that affected whether or not mice dug an escape tunnel, if a short-burrow mouse had the long-burrow DNA region, it was 40 percent more likely to dig a complete escape tunnel. Both Dr. Anholt and Dr. Bargmann said that for complex behaviors, which can be affected in ways too small to measure by many other genes, the effects of these DNA locations were very significant. These are, however, regions of DNA, not actual genes. Next comes the attempt to find the specific genes and then the pathways from genes to behavior. Dr. Anholt said “this is really only a first step,” and that the next phase would be even more difficult. Dr. Bargmann said “the hardest thing about studying natural traits is that end game,” getting from the region of DNA down to a particular gene. But Dr. Hoekstra is confident and said the research that should lead to identifying the actual genes is already going on. “We know exactly how to do it,” Dr. Weber said. “We’ve always had the intention of finding these genes.”

Genetics and Heredity
Science and Technology
Mice
Nature Journal
DNA


Man, 84, Dies After Boat Capsizes Off Staten Island

Abstract: An 84-year-old man who had gone out fishing with a friend drowned on Tuesday after the boat they were in capsized more than two miles off Staten Island, the authorities said. The victim was identified by the police as Anthony Accardo of Staten Island. A rescue boat from the New York Fire Department approached the men’s capsized 18-foot fishing boat shortly before 11 a.m. after getting a radio call for help from a nearby vessel. At that point, the crew saw a man identified as Ivan Delistovich clinging to the bow, said Lt. Ed Poli, a member of the Fire Department who took part in the rescue effort. By then, Lieutenant Poli said, Mr. Delistovich, 82, had been in the water for some 15 minutes. “He was close to going under,” Lieutenant Poli said, adding that Mr. Delistovich, also of Staten Island, did not have a life jacket on. After tossing Mr. Delistovich a rope, the crew aboard the 33-foot rescue boat decided to pull alongside him. Lieutenant Poli said that he and a firefighter then pulled Mr. Delistovich aboard. Mr. Delistovich told the crew that Mr. Accardo had “gone under,” Lieutenant Poli said. After being spotted floating face down in the water about 25 feet away, he was brought onto a Police Department boat but could not be revived, the lieutenant said. Lieutenant Poli said the men had been fishing earlier near Lemon Creek on Staten Island’s south shore. He said the Coast Guard later found that the boat’s anchor line had wrapped around the outboard engine. The boat most likely got swamped in choppy water and then rolled, he said.

Boat Accidents
Drowning,drownings
Staten Island
Boats
Fire Department NYC
Anthony Accardo


Inside Some Kickers Beats the Heart of a Linebacker

Abstract: As a high school senior, Jeff Feagles was encouraged by his football coach to play free safety. Feagles stood 6 feet 1 inch and weighed about 200 pounds, the perfect size for the last line of defense. “I was supposed to make a lot of tackles,” he said. “I hated it. I was always getting the wind knocked out of me. That stuck with me: I am not going to do this.” So he doesn’t, ever. Feagles, the Giants ’ punter who is in his 21st N.F.L. season, has made only 11 tackles in the past 15 years. It makes him among the active players most desperate to avoid contact. Kickers and punters have long been snidely considered something less than football players, and Feagles actually embraces the life apart. He considers himself a specialist. But he may soon be obsolete: The most recent generation of kickers and punters seems to have made a philosophical choice to reject its reputation and dive into the pile. Jay Feely of the Jets, regarded by his peers as the most aggressive and perhaps craziest tackler among today’s kickers, recently notched one against San Francisco. It was his fourth of the season and the 27th of his eight-year career, according to Stats LLC. Feely and his counterpart on the Arizona Cardinals, Neil Rackers, enjoy tackling so much that they made a friendly wager before their teams played in September over who would make more tackles in the game. Neither was credited with even an assist, although Rackers has six tackles this season to lead all kickers. In November, Jacksonville punter Adam Podlesh proved the folly of having a kicker channel his inner Ray Lewis when he sustained a season-ending knee injury in his money leg while trying to make a tackle. Podlesh said he had since experienced fleeting thoughts that maybe he should avoid tackling to keep himself healthy. Then again, he doubts he will shy away next season. “It’s kind of cool getting down there and living the glory days of high school,” said Podlesh, who was a starting linebacker in high school and has been relatively prolific with five tackles the past two seasons. “At the same time, it’s also a job. In my mind, I might as well try. One thing I don’t like is people questioning my effort.” Pride seems to drive all of those kickers and punters in their quests to stop returners, who are usually the best athletes on the field. After all, nobody wants to flail at a returner. Kickers note that the sideline erupts when they make a tackle; a routine field goal means a pat on the back, at most. Kickers and punters were once tough guys, like Lou Groza and Jerry Kramer, who also played on the offensive line. But the arrival in the 1960s and ’70s of foreign-born soccer-style kickers, few of whom had ever played American football, was soon accompanied by plenty of laughs. Garo Yepremian of the Dolphins is remembered less for being on the perfect team of 1972 than for a comical attempt to throw a pass in Super Bowl VII. It did not help when the comic actor Adam Sandler released a song in 1997 called “The Lonesome Kicker,” with the lyrics: “Kickoffs can be so very scary. Especially, if the returner breaks on through. And I’m the only guy on the playing field left to tackle him. I don’t want to get hurt. So I pretend to tie my shoe.” Before a preseason game against the Chiefs in the 1970s, the returner George Atkinson of the Raiders joked with Kansas City kicker Jan Stenerud, who did not play football until his senior year of college, that he was not a real player because he never tackled anybody. Stenerud tackled Atkinson twice during that game. Stenerud said an angry John Madden, the Raiders’ coach at the time, was said to have asked this about Atkinson, “How could you get tackled twice by a Norwegian skier?” Pittsburgh Steelers kicker Jeff Reed, who has made 16 tackles in seven seasons, is used to bullying people because he was frequently the biggest player in high school soccer. In a game of giants, he now stands a modest 5-11 and weighs 225 pounds. “You don’t want to hear ‘Oh, he’s just a kicker,’ ” Reed said. “You want to be a football player.” Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin has occasionally told him to stay away from pileups. Because kickers and punters have no backups on the active roster during games, a serious injury is problematic. But most kickers said coaches encouraged them to cover on returns because having 11 defenders is better than having 10. As football has grown more lucrative, high school and college athletes who are not big or fast enough to play other positions at a higher level have drifted to kicking. Coaches advise them to avoid contact but to steer returners toward a sideline or to get in their way long enough for others to catch up. “I want the guys to get down in there and be a factor in the coverage,” said Bobby April, the special teams coach for the Buffalo Bills. “I might not be real smart making that statement, but that’s what I want for our coverage units.” April joked that he remembered how older kickers actively avoided tackling. “Sean Landeta probably doesn’t even have an assist,” April said. Actually, Landeta — whose single-bar facemask said plenty about how often he tackled — claims to have made between 5 and 10 tackles in his career. “But I probably missed at least a dozen,” he added. Landeta recalled one tackle he did make. The plastic bar on his facemask snapped, leaving a jagged edge millimeters from his face. Kickers and punters get almost no practice tackling during the regular season, making them vulnerable to injuries resulting from bad form or rarely used muscles. Feely tries to counteract the inactivity by covering his own kicks during practice or by returning punts when practice is over. Colts kicker Adam Vinatieri (33 tackles, 13 seasons) said that when he was in New England, kickers would do tackling drills to learn how to take a good angle or to make a proper stop. During his rookie year, Vinatieri tackled Herschel Walker. Still, injuries happen. Stenerud, the only pure kicker inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, said he probably made 19 tackles in his 19-year career. Once, while trying to make a tackle in 1977, Stenerud said he was hurt but took a pain-killing shot and played on. He discovered the extent of his injury a dozen years later, when he went for an X-ray after hurting his chest while skiing. The image revealed that he had already sustained a break in the same spot. When Feely was with the Giants, he ran down the middle of the field in a game against New Orleans. He hit the returner Fred McAfee but also was drilled in the pileup by three of his own teammates. “I could barely walk,” he said. “Now I can’t kick off. You’re thinking, I wish I’d let my teammates get that one. But I did cause the fumble.” For his part, Feagles is not terribly interested in such heroics. He is content to acknowledge that his job is to punt, which he does exceptionally well. “I’m not afraid to say it — call me whatever,” Feagles said. “For every tackle a specialist makes, he’ll be sore as heck the following week. I think kickers and punters, we’re not football players.” Said Feely, “That’s why he’s had a 20-year career.”

Feagles Jeff
Football
Feely Jay
New York Giants


For the Braves’ Uggla, Luck Is Not a Statistic

Abstract: Friday night offered a wonderful object lesson in the capriciousness of streaks. In Houston, Milwaukee Brewers infielder Craig Counsell entered the game as a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning and shot a single into right field, snapping his streak of hitless at-bats at 45, one short of Major League Baseball’s record. In New York, Atlanta Braves second baseman Dan Uggla stepped to the plate in the eighth inning and rifled a single into left field against the Mets, thus extending his streak to 26 games with at least one hit. (He made it a 27-game streak Saturday.) By all rights, neither of these streaks should have lasted nearly so long. Counsell is almost 41, ancient by baseball’s standards. But he entered the season with a .257 career batting average, and batted .250 as a part-time player with Milwaukee last season. The day before his hitless streak began, Counsell collected three hits and lifted his batting average to .236, which is about what was expected from him this season, considering his long track record and his age. But sometimes, baseball does not care about track records. Before this season, Uggla ranked as one of the game’s more consistent players. Upon reaching the major leagues as a relatively unheralded rookie with the Florida Marlins in 2006, Uggla did the same things every year: he struck out a lot but drew his share of walks and hit about 30 home runs every season. His batting averages fluctuated because that is what batting averages do. But Uggla was essentially a .260 hitter, within the usual boundaries of good or poor luck. Contrary to popular opinion, a hitter’s luck does not necessarily even out over the course of the season. In Ichiro Suzuki ’s prime — which is to say, 2001 through 2010 — he batted .331 but with season averages as low as .303 and as high as .372. Did his ability change much over those 10 years? Not much. He was essentially a .331 hitter for a decade. In some years a few extra hits eluded the fielders, and in some years a few extra did not. But with Suzuki, as with nearly all established players, he enters a season with a pretty good idea of how he is going to produce. Well, except not this year with Suzuki, who is batting .269. And not with Uggla, either. After last season, his fifth with the Marlins, Uggla was traded to the Braves for a couple of less expensive players; Uggla was heading toward a huge raise via salary arbitration and presumably would have left Florida after this season via free agency. So instead of paying him many millions this year and losing him anyway, the Marlins traded him. Shortly after the trade, the Braves signed Uggla to a five-year, $62 million deal. Considering Uggla’s track record, he seemed like a pretty safe bet to be worth that much. But in Uggla’s case, baseball has been particularly capricious this season. After he went hitless July 4, Uggla’s batting average was .173, the lowest in the National League among qualifying hitters. The lowest by a lot. “I felt like I was the unluckiest person in the bigs,” Uggla said Saturday. “I’m sure there’s other people that felt that way too. But that’s the way that I felt. Whether I hit the ball hard, or whether I hit the ball soft, it didn’t find any holes.” What was wrong with him? It was, as he said, mostly poor luck. He was not striking out more than usual. One useful measure of a hitter’s fundamental performance is line-drive percentage. Most good hitters hit plenty of line drives. Uggla entered this season having hit line drives in roughly 17 percent of his at-bats. This season, his line-drive percentage dropped to about 15 percent. That is meaningful but could hardly explain his .173 average. At the same time, Uggla’s ground ball percentage went up, which is not a good thing. But again, the increase — to 43 percent from about 38 percent — did not explain his .173 average. What mostly explained it was another measure: batting average on balls in play, which is simply a player’s average on batted balls that are not home runs. That number can fluctuate wildly from year to year, almost entirely because of luck. Uggla entered this season with a career batting average on balls in play of .302, a perfectly normal number for a player with his skills. For Uggla through July 4 this season, that measure was .187. There are bad seasons, and there are terribly unlucky seasons. Uggla’s 2011 has been mostly unlucky. Or rather, it was a terribly unlucky half a season. Because Uggla’s luck turned on July 5. That day, Uggla collected two hits in four at-bats, and he has not stopped. In addition to collecting 11 home runs in his first 26 games since July 4, Uggla batted .364 on balls in play. “There comes consistency with putting together good at-bats and giving yourself a chance on a more consistent basis, rather than just battling, as I was battling, hoping to make good contact, rather than knowing I was going to make good contact,” he said. Even so, Uggla is not the sort of hitter one would expect to see with a 27-game hitting streak. In the last 10 years, the list of players with 26- or 27-game streaks consists of Suzuki, Manny Ramirez, Casey Blake, David Wright, Kenny Lofton, Nomar Garciaparra, Vladimir Guerrero and Emilio Bonifacio. Most of those players will eventually be elected to the Hall of Fame or looked like future Hall of Famers at some point in their careers. But then there’s Bonifacio, the generally light-hitting Marlins third baseman who hit in 26 straight games this season. He is a .264 career hitter. Uggla is a .258 career hitter, after lifting his batting average to .220 during his streak. You might say that baseball can be awfully capricious, especially when it comes to hits and streaks and averages. Or as Yogi Berra might say, “In baseball, you don’t know nothing.”

Uggla Dan
Counsell Craig
Baseball
Luck
Suzuki Ichiro
Major League Baseball
Atlanta Braves
Milwaukee Brewers


Meat Processors Look for Ways to Keep Ground Beef Safe

Abstract: LEXINGTON, Neb. — In the last decade, Tyson Fresh Meats has transformed its slaughterhouse here to combat a potentially deadly type of food poisoning , adding huge chambers to scald carcasses and wash them in acid, steam vacuums to suck away microbes and elaborate gear to test hundreds of meat samples a day. In all, the beef industry says it spends upward of $350 million a year to keep harmful pathogens out of the meat it sells to the public. But even as expenditures keep rising, the industry appears to be losing ground. Late last month, the Agriculture Department announced its 20th recall of beef this year because of contamination with a toxic strain of the bacterium E. coli. That is only one recall shy of a record set in 2000 and matched in 2002. No one knows for sure what is causing the jump in recalls, though theories abound, from the cyclical nature of pathogens to changes in cattle-feeding practices caused by the popularity of ethanol. This much is clear: Fifteen years after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants made people aware that hamburgers could kill them, the American beef industry is still searching for a practical method to prevent the toxic E. coli strain from contaminating ground beef. “If you gave me a million, zillion dollars and said give me a plant that doesn’t have E. coli, I couldn’t do it,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s not about the will. It’s about the ability.” What makes this year’s spate of recalls so surprising is that it comes after several years in which the number of recalls dropped sharply, to eight in 2006 and five in 2005. And it includes not just small and midsize firms with less rigorous food-safety protocols — like Topps Meat of New Jersey, which recalled 21.7 million pounds of frozen hamburger because of potential E. coli contamination — but also large companies that have spent tens of millions of dollars to prevent E. coli contamination. Topps closed its doors on Oct. 5, and declared bankruptcy late last month. Tyson Fresh Meats, for one, has had two relatively minor recalls this year; there were no reported illnesses. Cargill Meat Solutions, which has won plaudits for its efforts to combat E. coli, has had two recalls, including one in October affecting about 845,000 pounds of ground beef that had made more than a dozen people sick. The Agriculture Department issued new guidelines in October urging the meat industry to adopt the latest technology to combat harmful forms of E. coli — essentially the measures that Tyson already has in place. But department officials acknowledge that short of irradiating the meat, there is no magic bullet to prevent E. coli contamination. “The big challenge for them is you are dealing with people and biological systems,” said Kenneth E. Petersen, assistant administrator for field operations for the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. “To execute the program consistently every hour of every day they operate, that’s the challenge. They do a pretty good job at it. You can’t take your eye off the ball for any period of time or you get into trouble.” The federal government says it believes that exposing meat to radiation is a safe and effective way to kill E. coli and other pathogens. But meat companies have been hesitant to use irradiation because of fears that it would make meat more expensive, change the taste and color, and provoke consumer opposition. Escherichia coli bacteria are commonly found in the lower digestive tract of humans and animals, and they are usually harmless. But one strain, E. coli 0157:H7, produces a toxin that can make people sick, typically after eating ground beef or produce that has been contaminated by cattle feces. It is difficult to say whether the amount of E. coli in ground beef has increased this year, since the number of recalls is an imperfect measure. Limited sampling by the Agriculture Department has found a slight increase in the level of E. coli 0157:H7 this year over recent years, though it remains lower than it was five or six years ago. But some meat industry officials say they are sure that more E. coli is turning up in cattle this year. That impression is shared by William Marler, a lawyer in Seattle who specializes in food-borne illness and who has seen a marked increase in clients who say they became sick from eating E. coli-contaminated meat. “This is real stuff,” he said. “It is a fundamentally different year than ’06, ’05, ’04 and ’03.” As part of its efforts to eradicate E. coli, the meat industry is experimenting with vaccines, antibiotics and feed additives that may reduce the level of E. coli 0157:H7 in cattle intestines. But so far, those are not commercially available. To date, nearly all of the efforts to curb E. coli have focused on interventions at slaughterhouses and at grinding plants that produce ground beef. Hamburger meat poses an elevated risk of illness because grinding can mix live E. coli bacteria throughout the meat, and consumers often undercook their hamburgers. Steaks pose less of a risk because any E. coli on the surface are likely to be killed during cooking. Mohammad Koohmaraie, director of the Agriculture Department’s U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska, said his research had determined that most E. coli contamination came from the hides of cattle, which became matted with mud and manure in feed lots. As a result, his research has focused on ways to reduce the likelihood that manure from the hides comes in contact with a carcass during slaughter and subsequent handling. “If you don’t do a good job of removing the hide, a whole bunch of it gets on the carcass,” Mr. Koohmaraie said. “If you do a good job, just a little bit to none gets on the carcass.” His research, for instance, found that spraying the hides of cattle with a chemical wash immediately after they are killed drastically reduces the incidence of E. coli 0157:H7. JBS Swift & Company and Cargill are now using hide-washing procedures, which can cost several million dollars to install. Dean A. Danilson, Tyson’s vice president for food safety and quality assurance, said that his company might install hide-washing equipment as it built new plants or retrofitted old ones. In the meantime, in the rear of the Lexington plant, a former combine factory converted to a slaughterhouse, an employee in rain gear hoses down cattle in a pen before they are slaughtered to rinse away manure and limit the amount of dust when the hide is removed. “Keeping the dust down, knocking some of the caked-on mud and things off, any little bit helps,” Mr. Danilson said. It is the first of many steps that Tyson employs to reduce the chances that pathogens like E. coli survive processing. Once the animal is killed, the hide is removed, first by knives and then by machines, in a manner intended to keep it away from the exposed carcass, starting near the anus and hind legs. After each cut is made to remove the hide, a worker follows behind with a steam vacuum to kill and suck away microbes. The carcass, pulled along on an overhead rail, is then sent into a cabinet with pivoting nozzles that soak it with water at about 185 degrees. After the head is removed and before the animal is gutted, the carcass is sprayed with a mild acid wash, again to reduce the level of microbes. Besides removing the hide, one of the most critical steps to prevent E. coli 0157:H7 comes when the animal is eviscerated and its internal organs are removed. The workers who remove the organs are careful not to cut the bowel, which could spread manure, and a worker looks over the internal organs to make sure the intestines are intact. The carcasses are then sawed in half, and the cut line is steam vacuumed. In one of the most important interventions, the split carcasses are sent into a 30-foot-long, hissing stainless-steel cabinet, where rows of nozzles spray them with steam for at least 13 seconds before they enter a second chamber that douses them with a disinfectant for at least 15 seconds. The last step comes after the carcasses have been cut into steaks and roasts and leftover scraps, with the latter tossed into 2,000-pound bins for grinding into hamburger meat. Workers are assigned to cut at least 60 four-inch by one-half-inch strips from each lot of trimmings; a lot is five 2,000-pound bins. Those samples are then ferried to a laboratory, where they are mixed with solution that encourages E. coli 0157:H7 to grow. After incubating for eight hours, the samples are tested, and if positive for the germ, that lot is diverted from being used as ground beef. Instead, it is used in cooked products or otherwise processed to kill the microbes. “I wish I had a silver bullet. We have done a lot, and it’s a continuing ongoing process to look for more,” Mr. Danilson said. But he acknowledged that it was impossible to create a perfect system for stopping E. coli 0157:H7. “Taking a dirty animal and turning it into food — from the time of the cave man, that has not been an easy process.”

Meat
E Coli (Bacteria)
Food Contamination and Poisoning
Bacteria


No Safety for Christians in the Mideast

Abstract: LONDON — It has been that time of year when Christians, in the West at least, gather to count their blessings. Churches more used to the murmured orisons of shrinking congregations suddenly fill with worshipers singing carols, punctuating less-spiritual rites of frenetic spending that mimic the feast days of the faithful — Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Only this week, on the 12th day, did the moment come for many to strip the decorative lights from Christmas trees and pack the baubles and tinsel away until next December, making room, perhaps, for darker thoughts. Rarely, if ever, it seems, has this Western blend of belief and materialism been so remote from the experience of hundreds of thousands of Christians elsewhere struggling to cope with an unwanted and bloody collision with the Islamic exclusivism of jihadists, primarily in Iraq, Syria and Nigeria. And rarely have Western worshipers seemed so reluctant to acknowledge that their faith could be entering the final stage of its long decline in the lands where it was born and first propagated. For decades, Christian communities in the Holy Land have dwindled, squeezed between the competing claims of Israelis and Palestinians and threatened by Islamic militancy. In Lebanon, 15 years of civil war starting in 1975 brought Muslims and Maronites into bloody conflict. In 2003, the American-led invasion of Iraq replaced the relative tolerance of Christians under Saddam Hussein with sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that drove Christians away. Since 2011, the so-called Arab Spring has narrowed the space, forcing Christians such as Egypt’s Copts to take sides between secular and Islamic forces. The Middle East’s demography, in other words, is being fundamentally rewritten, particularly in recent months when militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have expelled, murdered or persecuted Christians and other minorities in the Iraqi city of Mosul. For the first time in centuries, scholars of Middle Eastern religion say, Iraq is becoming an exclusively Islamic state after hosting one of the region’s biggest Christian minorities. “There is a feeling of ‘fin de race’ among Christians all over the Middle East,” the prominent Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi was widely quoted as saying before his death in 2011. “Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place, and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world.” Indeed, Pope Francis told Middle Eastern Christians: “Your very presence is precious for the Middle East. You are a small flock, but one with a great responsibility in the land where Christianity was born and first spread. You are like leaven in the dough.” Yet the plight of those communities seems to leave Christian leaders facing an insuperable dilemma. If they urge Western societies to give sanctuary to fellow Christians from the patchwork of denominations that have flourished in the Middle East, they risk accelerating the region’s de-Christianization and fanning xenophobia in European lands. If they do nothing, they stand accused of abandoning those who share their faith. “These are not Johnny-come-latelies,” the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, said in Britain. “They have got more history of being there than we have, most of us, of being in this country.” “There are things that can be done,” he said, “and it is better than simply draining the entire region of Christians who have been there since the time of St. Paul.” The archbishop, the leader of the Church of England and spiritual head of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, has spoken in favor of creating “safe havens” for Middle Eastern Christians, maintaining their presence in the region while shielding them from persecution. But with tensions again mounting across the region, and the collision between radical Islam and the West spilling onto the streets of Paris with Wednesday’s lethal attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the very notion of safety seems elusive, irrespective of faith.


Dan Gilbert’s Quest to Remake Downtown Detroit

Abstract: THE best way to experience all that is strange and a little otherworldly about downtown Detroit is to walk the streets around 5 p.m. on a weekday. At that hour, you’ll notice not just the peculiarity of what is around you — notably, the gorgeous, Art Deco skyscrapers alongside empty, decrepit buildings — but also what is missing. There is no traffic here. As the workday ends, cars trickle out of underground parking lots and speed off to nearby highways, but in a volume that doesn’t cause delays. It is just one small sign of how far Detroit’s fortunes have fallen: the birthplace of the mass-produced automobile, the city that gave us the infuriating, bumper-to-bumper commute, is now so sparsely populated that it doesn’t have a rush hour. Dan Gilbert would like to change that. No, he’s not interested in a honking pileup of S.U.V.’s. Mr. Gilbert, 51, a Detroit native and the fantastically wealthy founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, wants to revive two square miles that were once the thrumming heart of this city. To do so, he has already spent roughly $1 billion acquiring nearly three million square feet of real estate, and is ready to close another deal, for the Greektown Casino-Hotel and nearby parking lots, that will add one million more square feet to his holdings. His real estate company, Bedrock Real Estate Services , is renovating properties, building apartments and wooing corporate tenants. A seven-mile light rail system is in the planning stages, underwritten by a number of businesses and business leaders, including Mr. Gilbert, as well as foundations and a federal grant. Along with his employees, civic groups and public-spaces gurus, he is devising strategies to “activate” streets with outdoor seating and ground-level retail stores. Taxpayers will kick in a yet-to-be-determined sum for parts of this rehabilitation program, but it will be a fraction of what Mr. Gilbert contributes. His plans, according to academics like Brent D. Ryan, author of “ Design After Decline : How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities,” amount to one of the most ambitious privately financed urban reclamation projects in American history. Opportunity Detroit, as Mr. Gilbert has branded it, is both a rescue mission and a business venture that, if successful, will yield him a fortune. When he started buying in 2011, the city was having what he has described as a “skyscraper sale.” Among the bargains was the Dime Building , a 23-story neo-Classical gem of glazed brick and terra cotta trim, designed by Daniel Burnham — of Flatiron Building fame — and completed in 1912. In August 2011, Bedrock bought all 330,000 square feet of it, reportedly for $15 million. There are high-end apartments in Manhattan that cost more. If this area turns around, no one will profit quite like Mr. Gilbert, but the risk looks as great as the potential reward. Even with its auto industry in relatively robust, post-bailout health, Detroit has been on a long, distressing slide. A quarter of its population left in the last decade, and it has $14 billion in long-term debt. The financial situation is so dire that Michigan’s governor recently appointed an emergency manager. Detroit remains a national symbol of municipal decline, a victim of macroeconomic trends, poor planning and political corruption. Mr. Gilbert is undaunted. Part-owner of a handful of casinos, he is familiar with big bets and steep odds, and, as they say in poker, he is all in. In 2010, he started moving his employees from a nearby suburb, and 7,600 people on his payroll now work downtown. “Not a single one of them has told me, ‘I don’t want to be here,’ ” he said in a recent interview in his office next to downtown’s Campus Martius Park, formerly among the city’s busiest gathering points and a focus of his campaign. “Kids coming out of college want that urban core excitement, more and more.” DRESSED in a red-checked button-down shirt and a blue blazer, Mr. Gilbert is 5 feet 5 inches of restless energy. He has slicked-back dark hair, a Hollywood smile and dolorous eyes that give him the look of a man in need of sleep. Growing up in Southfield, a nearby suburb, he spent little time in the city. One of his earliest memories is of his father, who owned a nightclub-restaurant in the city, explaining the Detroit riots as the violence unfolded over five days in 1967, leaving more than 40 people dead and 2,500 stores burned or looted. It was a searing moment in the city’s history, one that highlighted racial disparities that still haunt Detroit. “People my age, we would hear from our parents and grandparents who were raised in Detroit about how great this city was, from 1900 to the 60s,” Mr. Gilbert said. “But none of us had any memory of that. And it wasn’t until my late 20s and early 30s, when I started traveling for business, to places like New York City and Los Angeles, that I realized how much we were missing. As I started visiting these great American cities, it hit me — man, how did we blow this so badly?” He seems to consider it his duty to rebuild what a previous generation allowed to fall apart. He aims to turn downtown into a high-tech hub, where young entrepreneurs both live and work. (He and a handful of companies are offering rent and mortgage subsidies to people willing to live downtown.) These pioneers will have easy access to high culture: the city’s leading museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Opera House are nearby, as are stadiums for the city’s professional baseball and football teams. About 80 small companies have already settled into buildings owned by Bedrock, many of them start-ups funded by Detroit Venture Partners , a venture capital firm co-owned by Mr. Gilbert. A Twitter office is here, too, as is a branch of Uber , the online taxi-calling service. National brands, like Nike, are being courted. A master salesman, Mr. Gilbert describes a reinvigorated downtown as though it is inevitable, but there are more than a few skeptics. They include Mr. Ryan, who teaches in the department of urban studies and planning at M.I.T. “Urban renewal always happens as a symphony of events, and part of the symphony is innovative, optimistic developers with the ability and willingness to transform historic properties,” he said in a recent interview. “But another part is a strong regional economy. You can’t fight the fact that Detroit is a de-industrializing market and it isn’t facing dramatic, positive transformation.” Mr. Gilbert, though, is not just any innovative, optimistic developer. This is a guy who at age 12 organized a pizza delivery service, with children on bikes rushing store-bought pies to neighbors. (Local restaurants eventually shut down the operation with a complaint to the health department.) He remains just as driven, but now his self-made fortune stands at $3.5 billion, according to Forbes. He has learned from mistakes of previous efforts to reimagine downtown, and he and his staff will apparently have a largely free hand. Government officials have promised to expedite permits for renovations, signs and so on. “My job,” said Dave Bing, the Detroit mayor and former National Basketball Association star, “is to knock down as many barriers as possible and get out of the way.” THE week I went to Detroit to interview Mr. Gilbert, in mid-March, the city was undergoing its latest in a long series of this-must-be-rock-bottom moments. It started on Monday, March 11, when a former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was found guilty of racketeering, extortion and other crimes. Three days later, Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan introduced Kevyn Orr, a Washington bankruptcy lawyer, as Detroit’s emergency manager. The appointment was greeted with some vocal resistance, like that of a few dozen protesters who poured into the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center on March 28 for 90 minutes of chants and protest songs. A federal lawsuit contending that the appointment is unconstitutional was filed by a number of unions, local activists, clergy members and others. But many locals seemed to decide that usurping local politicians’ power was a fine idea. Even Mayor Bing immediately pledged support. He and others — Mr. Gilbert included — seem to regard the city as an addict and Mr. Orr as a hard-nosed counselor leading an intervention. The day before Mr. Orr’s appointment was announced, Mr. Gilbert met in a conference room for his twice-a-month Detroit real estate meeting, with about a dozen people who work for him, plus a lawyer and leasing agent. If Detroit 2.0, as this group often calls the effort, has a planning committee, this is it. The conversation started with a long discussion about the terms of a lease with a specialty grocer, then segued into a look at a handful of buildings, some for sale, others already under contract. “There was a massage parlor in that one,” said Matt Cullen, president of Rock Ventures, one of Mr. Gilbert’s companies, as the group looked at a photograph of one less-than-spiffy building. “How would you know that?” Mr. Gilbert needled. Mr. Gilbert speaks with an accent that is Bill Murray-esque, and his default expression is, too: deadpan, which somehow makes him look perpetually on the verge of saying something wry. An inveterate prankster, he recently had a few dozen farm animals, including goats, chicken and geese, hauled into the office of a neat-freak colleague who was turning 50. “You could smell that they were in the building,” says Bill Emerson , the C.E.O. of Quicken Loans, who was not the target of the prank. “Some days, I think Dan is just a big kid at heart.” If so, he is a big kid who really likes to win. Mr. Gilbert is majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers of the N.B.A., and gained brief national fame when the team’s star, LeBron James, announced in 2010 that he was decamping for the Miami Heat. Mr. Gilbert issued a statement to fans personally guaranteeing that the Cavs would win an N.B.A. championship “before the self-titled former ‘king’ wins one.” He added: “You can take it to the bank.” Fortunately for Mr. Gilbert, there is no bank for errant predictions. The Heat won the N.B.A. championship last year. Thirty minutes into the Detroit real estate meeting, talk turned to Moosejaw , a Michigan seller of outdoor apparel that is the first large retailer to open in downtown in the Gilbert Age. A representative of the chain had been quoted a few weeks earlier in a local newspaper, talking in upbeat but not quite superlative terms about the site, in a building on Woodward Avenue, one of the city’s grandest streets and a primary focus of Detroit 2.0. Image Downtown Detroit once buzzed with activity, but the city has lost about a quarter of its population over the last decade. Credit Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times The comments weren’t rosy enough for Mr. Gilbert. He turned to a woman newly hired as a liaison with retailers and urged her to reach out to Moosejaw’s management. “Tell them we’ll do promotions, we’ll do whatever they want,” he said. “If the one store that moved in were to move out? Forget about it. We’re dead.” In late March, Mr. Gilbert would announce that Moosejaw had signed a long-term lease. But the chicken-and-egg problem of his vision is that retailers won’t come unless there are people on the streets, and people won’t walk the streets unless they are lined with retailers. (There is pre-Gilbert retail on ground floors, including a CVS store, but lots of empty spaces, too.) The solution is what Mr. Gilbert calls the big bang: bring in as many stores and people, at the same time, as quickly as possible. Of course, both retailers and people need to feel secure, and Detroit’s dicey reputation is no secret; its murder rate was among the highest in the country last year, and among the city’s highest in nearly two decades. So there’s a command center in Chase Tower, a Bedrock-owned building where a bank of monitors are watched by security guards, with live feeds from video cameras downtown. It was the one part of Mr. Gilbert’s operations deemed off-limits during my tour. THESE guards keep an eye on what is actually one of the safest parts of the city. Few people live downtown, which means that the area is largely empty at night, and during the day it is filled with white-collar workers. There are rough patches, and a block-wide hole where the Hudson’s department store once stood. But the place feels more sterile than threatening. It’s the rest of Detroit that could use 24-hour surveillance. One of the looming and unanswered questions posed by Mr. Gilbert’s campaign is what, if anything, they will mean for the 137 square miles of the city that are not in his blueprints. To get a sense, I sat in the passenger seat of the Prius owned by George Galster , a professor in the department of urban studies and planning at Wayne State University and author of “Driving Detroit.” Professor Galster is steeped in the arcana that shape neighborhoods, like zoning laws and topography, and as he explained early in this three-hour drive, he is the fifth consecutive George Galster to live in Detroit. “My great-great grandfather came here from Germany in 1851,” he said, easing to the side of Mount Elliott Street, not far from downtown. He put his car in park and pointed to the moribund remains of a large, once-grand building of bricks and wood boards. “This was the church my great-grandfather built,” he said. “This is the church where my parents met. It’s where I was baptized.” Today, it is a hovel that looks too dangerous to enter. “This is what is horrible about Detroit,” he says, putting his car back into drive. “It takes away your memories.” The surprise about this city is that most of it doesn’t look like a city. It looks like a suburb that has gone bankrupt. It’s filled with single-family homes — some inhabited, many not — that sit on streets where other houses have been razed, excavated and plowed over. Once, two million people lived here. Now, it’s down to about 700,000, spread around an area large enough to accommodate every acre of land in San Francisco, Boston and the Bronx, combined. There are a handful of strikingly lovely neighborhoods, like Sherwood Forest and Indian Village, which is studded with gorgeous Tudor Revival homes. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are stops in what has become a perversely popular tour of ruins, like Michigan Central Station, designed by the same architects behind Grand Central Terminal and now so hollowed out that you can actually see through it. Most of the city, though, is flat and featureless. It lacks what urban planners call “good bones,” large structures in dense neighborhoods. Parts of it appear to be in the midst of an evacuation. “We’re looking at a lot of torched buildings,” Professor Galster said. Burned homes are among the 5,000 to 8,000 dwellings that are abandoned in Detroit every year, according to Professor Galster. And this highlights one of the city’s chronic maladies: a continuing exodus of population and tax base. There are many causes — the decline of the auto industry and white flight among them — but the one that Professor Galster returns to time and again is development in the suburbs. “The villains are the rules of the game,” he said. “Developers find it far more profitable to build in farmland in the suburbs than in vacant land in the core. It’s easier to acquire big sites without worrying about hidden basements, or gas stations, or a reputation for violence, or corruption or inefficiency or the potential racism of your customers.” It makes financial sense for developers, but it is disemboweling the city, he said. Which is why he believes that without reform to housing and development laws, neither Mr. Gilbert nor the emergency manager, nor any combination of earthly forces, can salvage Detroit. What if downtown is resuscitated and no improvements are made to any other part of the city? It’s a possibility that concerns the Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “What we don’t want to see is two Detroits, one for those who are downtown and one for those in the neighborhoods,” Reverend Anthony said. “I don’t think that is what Mr. Gilbert wants, either. But I know that unless we have viable and strong neighborhoods, downtown will be merely a city near a river. It has to spread, it must spread to the neighborhoods.” The uncomfortable reality is that Mr. Gilbert is a white guy trying to change the choicest parts of a city that is 83 percent African-American. A white guy who lives in an affluent village about 20 miles from downtown. But as he explains, his project is just a beginning. “This is not the only solution,” he said. “The education system needs to be addressed. But what we’re doing is a big part of the solution. I can’t think of a great American city that doesn’t have a great downtown.” WHEN Dan Gilbert was in the fourth grade, he bought candy at wholesale from the father of a friend and sold it at retail prices to classmates. It was the start of a nearly obsessive quest to create enterprises and earn profits. He estimates that he’s either invested in or started 70 companies in his career. One early and ill-fated venture was running a short-lived bookmaking operation with some friends while a freshman at Michigan State University. It ended when he was arrested by an undercover agent. He served probation, the charges were dropped and there was no conviction. “We were college teenagers,” he said. Subsequent ventures were more mundane, and far more successful. He later earned a real estate agent’s license and, while at Wayne State University Law School, worked part time at a Century 21 office. At some point, he realized that the serious money was in selling mortgages, not homes. So he and two partners, including his younger brother, Gary, went into the mortgage-origination business together. Mr. Gilbert and his partners took out ads in those once-ubiquitous free magazines that listed houses for sale, something that none of his competitors did. “From the very beginning we could make the phones ring,” Mr. Gilbert said, “even if we didn’t know what to do once they rang.” The company, called Rock Financial because it sounded sturdy, would eventually become Internet-based, selling mortgages in all 50 states. It was acquired by Intuit for $532 million in 1999, says Mr. Gilbert, and renamed Quicken Loans. Three years later, after the dot-com bubble burst, the company was sold to a group of investors led by Mr. Gilbert for a sum he put at roughly $55 million. This year, Quicken Loans will do $100 billion worth of mortgage business, says Mr. Gilbert, making it the third-largest home lender in the country, behind Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, according to Mortgage Daily. Quicken Loans now employs nearly 2,500 mortgage bankers. One morning last month, 300 of them were working on the third floor of the Chase Tower, and a swing through the office was like a visit to a frat party at a telemarketing firm. There were many men and some women with headsets, talking to customers and staring at computer screens — nothing novel there. But a karaoke machine sat in an aisle. Guys threw footballs to one another; one employee shot at colleagues with a Nerf gun. Basketball pennants were draped from the ceiling, as part of a March Madness theme. “You should have been here last week,” said one broker, Nerf gun in hand. “The theme was spring break. I was wearing shorts, a hat, sunglasses.” Mr. Gilbert espouses a philosophy of instilling fun in the workplace, one piece of an elaborate corporate culture that he has fine-tuned over the years, and describes, every few months, in a surprisingly entertaining, seven-hour monologue to new employees. One of more than a dozen core principles described in “Isms in Action,” as the lecture is titled, is summed up as “Obsessed with finding a better way.” That could work as a pretty good motto for Opportunity Detroit. It is being designed and unveiled with the city’s past missteps in mind. One of the most infamous is the Renaissance Center, a huge, mirrored complex of towers built in 1977 and currently the headquarters of General Motors. “One critic said it was the pre-eminent example of terrible urban planning,” said Mr. Cullen of Rock Ventures, who formerly worked for G.M. and helped champion the idea of buying the RenCen, as everyone here calls it, and moving the company in. “The building basically sucked the remaining people out of downtown and stuck them in a fortress.” Mr. Gilbert wants to return the area to the pedestrian haven that it was decades ago. If he succeeds — he expects significant results within four or five years — the place will again resemble the scene captured in a photograph that is plastered on a wall not far from his office. It is a huge, sepia-toned shot of Campus Martius , snapped in 1917. Looking at the picture, you realize that it includes the neighborhood where you are standing, though at a time when it bustled with men and women in hats, strolling amid billboards, retailers and a lineup of trolley cars. This urban idyll was a few years from extinction by the time Dan Gilbert was born. If his quest to bring it back to life proves anything, it’s that you can feel nostalgia for a place you’ve never actually been.

Dan Gilbert
Bedrock Real Estate Services
Detroit
Urban Planning
Quicken


Congolese Militia Leader Convicted in Attack on Village

Abstract: PARIS — The International Criminal Court on Friday convicted a militia leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo in an attack on a Congolese village in 2003 in which more than 200 people were shot and hacked to death, and women were raped and abducted to serve as sex slaves. The militia leader, Germain Katanga, was found guilty by two of the three judges at the court in The Hague of complicity in organizing the attack on the village of Bogoro and providing guns to speed the killing. He was acquitted of charges of rape and the use of child soldiers. Mr. Katanga’s conviction is only the second in the decade since the court’s work began. The other guilty verdict , in March 2012, involved Thomas Lubanga, a militia leader who was among Mr. Katanga’s enemies in the Ituri region of Congo, where years of fighting have been fueled by ethnic strife and rivalries for power and mineral riches. A third militia leader, Mathieu Ngudjolo, who had stood trial with Mr. Katanga and led an allied fighting group, was acquitted in December 2012. All three cases have been marked by uncertain witness testimony and what critics say is a lack of prosecutorial evidence. Lawyers following the proceedings say the cases have illustrated the hurdles faced by the court in passing judgment on crimes that happen in shifting bush wars, in distant, almost inaccessible regions where combatants are often mercenaries or children. In their ruling, the judges noted that militia members, wielding machetes and firing indiscriminately, had attacked the village “while its inhabitants were still asleep.” Image Germain Katanga, the Congolese warlord, is seen on the television screens in the press room of the International Criminal Court during his trial in The Hague, Netherlands on Friday. Credit Pool photo by Phil Nijhuis Mr. Katanga had initially been charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes. But toward the end of the trial, two of the judges, citing incomplete evidence, downgraded the charges against him and defined his role as an accomplice to war crimes rather than as a principal perpetrator. The dissenting judge on Friday, Christine van den Wyngaert of Belgium, said that Mr. Katanga should have been acquitted because his trial had lasted too long — Mr. Katanga arrived in The Hague in 2007 — and because the shift in charges had violated his rights as a defendant. His acquittal on the rape charges drew mixed reactions from women’s groups who have long denounced the widespread rape and abduction of women as sex slaves for fighters in the Congolese conflict. Brigid Inder of the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice, one of the rights groups following the trial, said the judgment was inconsistent. “We are extremely disappointed that the judges appeared to expect a different level of proof” for sexual crimes than for pillaging, murder or destruction of property, she said. The attack on Bogoro, although a “modest” case, she said, was representative of the types of attacks and the types of violence specifically directed against women. Karen Naimer of Physicians for Human Rights said that despite the mixed verdict, progress was made because the International Criminal Court had included charges of sexual violence for the first time. Ms. Naimer said it demonstrated a greater focus on such crimes, “and reminds us just how critical it is to collect, document and preserve forensic medical evidence in order for these cases to succeed.” Mr. Katanga will be sentenced in a separate hearing.

War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity