Sponsorships Available. Inside Stadium, That Is.

Abstract: The Yankees are never known for missing opportunities to make money. Yet when they decided to build a new stadium, they declined the potential riches that could come from selling the rights to the name. “The dollars we passed were incomparable,” said Lonn Trost, the Yankees’ chief operating officer. “Having said that, you wouldn’t rename the White House, you wouldn’t rename Grant’s Tomb and you wouldn’t rename the Grand Canyon. This is Yankee Stadium, and this will always be Yankee Stadium.” But as they look ahead to the new Yankee Stadium, which will open in 2009, the Yankees have found an alternate way to collect some of the money they might have made from naming rights. They will announce today that they have hired the Creative Artists Agency to market partnerships to corporate sponsors. “It’s an opportunity for a company to partner with the Yankees and say, ‘We support the Yankees’ decision to keep the stadium as Yankee Stadium,’ ” said Mike Levine, the co-head of CAA Sports. Of the ballparks that have opened since 1998 — in Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco, Houston, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Detroit — all but Busch Stadium in St. Louis have changed to a new corporate name; and Busch, of course, is synonymous with Anheuser-Busch brewing. The Mets’ new ballpark, which will also open in 2009, will be called Citi Field, a 20-year deal that will pay the team at least $20 million a year. Trost acknowledged that because of the history of the name Yankee Stadium, a rights deal might have backfired for the company that put its name atop the marquee of the new ballpark. “If we were foolish enough to have sold it, any company that would have taken the name would have been injured by it,” Trost said. Knowing that, he said, the partnership with CAA will help the Yankees benefit financially by offering expanded sponsorship deals to companies in the new ballpark. Trost and Levine said specific plans were still in development, but there would be no advertising on uniforms, which is against Major League Baseball rules, and Trost stressed the ballpark would not be cluttered with corporate logos. “We don’t want to make it look like a carnival or a rodeo,” Trost said. “This will be done intelligently and will not ruin the image of Yankee Stadium.”

New York Yankees
Stadiums and Arenas
Baseball
Athletics and Sports


A Review of Bistro Latino, in Westchester

Abstract: ONE wonders where Rafael Palomino finds the time. This noted chef, a Bedford resident, has produced several cookbooks, runs a catering business and oversees a clutch of restaurants (each with a discrete menu) scattered from New Haven to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Sonora in Port Chester has long been a stop for diners who enjoy Mr. Palomino’s Nuevo Latino touch, and Bistro Latino in Tuckahoe, his newest venture in Westchester, is very much in the informal café tradition — serviceable without frills, with bare heavy table tops, tight seating and quick, knowledgeable service. More than 20 small plates dominate the menu, divided between “charcuteria and quesos,” the meats and cheeses for which Spain is famous, and tapas, mostly fish or vegetable combinations, with one lamb selection and two featuring Hudson Valley duck or foie gras. The bandeja mixta — a choice of three from the meat and cheese list — was prettily presented on a board garnished with sliced apple and breads and a dark ruby compote of red grapes. Our threesome comprised Serrano ham, which came in transparent, silky slices; chorizo imperial, a lusty, moist sausage made from black-footed free-range pigs that feed mostly on acorns, as the menu explains; and a hard Rocal sheeps-milk cheese (the creamier textured Tetilla might have been a better textural choice). Though tempted by cocas — flatbreads covered with a mélange of ingredients, here starring mushrooms or shrimp — we found the tapas irresistible. The very best of them were almost too good to share, like four miniature salmon sandwiches filled with fresh salmon tartare captured between wafers of latticed potato chips, with capers and dots of mustard aioli edging the plate. Brilliant, too, were slices of seared Hudson Valley duck breast atop a sweet potato and cinnamon purée, and cuts of lobster with earthy foie gras. From under a snowfall of fried potato threads peeped juicy hunks of grilled octopus on garlicky hummus; and the sweetness of sea scallops profited from a lacing of tart cider sauce. In this creative company, only the familiarity of a fine beet and goat cheese salad and an order of three crab croquettes caused us to rank them as also-rans. It was a pity to skip other favorites, though, like the cocas, the tortilla Espanola and the mejillones con chorizo, a Spanish version of moules frites, with chorizo. Although tapas are the big draw, Bistro Latino offers a few main dishes that hold their own. But for an occasional kitchen misstep or two — like some oversalting, and in one of the dishes overcooking lobster, which was chewy — the entrees we sampled were admirable. Fresh seafood paella Palomino brought a generosity of lobster, scallops, shrimp and other shellfish pressed into a bed of well-seasoned rice; and a tender chicken half arrived topped (as a few other dishes were) with a melting gossamer pane of Manchego. Braising is done beautifully here: short ribs and lamb shanks were bathed in their rich dark gravy. And fillets of branzino and striped bass were fresh and moist, their garnishes of buttery spinach and gnocchi coated with beet juice, delightfully appropriate. Like other great chefs, Mr. Palomino knows how to combine flavors. Potatoes are mashed with green apples, the slight tartness of the apples well-suited to the braised lamb shank; or with saffron, to add more zing to roasted chicken. Lively notes of chocolate balsamic vinaigrette or pomegranate sauce might be drizzled here and there. The dishes here offered such variety of flavors that we felt little desire for a sweet ending. We did try a few desserts, though, including chocolate cake, warm and slightly bitter; flan, a tad weighty; churros, somewhat pale and oily. The best was a lovely tart pomegranate bread pudding special, and there’s good espresso, too. Bistro Latino 64 Main Street Tuckahoe (914) 961-2233 bistrolatinorestaurant.com DON’T MISS THE SPACE A compact, informal dining room includes a handsome bar seating 11 and closely spaced tables seating 44. Banquettes, mirrors and wine bottles line warm ecru walls. Two steps lead to a narrow entrance. THE CROWD Adults in neat casual attire. Helpful, accommodating and snappy service. Live music on Saturdays, 10 p.m. to midnight. THE BAR Wines, mostly from Spain, $35 to $80; $9 by the glass. Beers by the bottle, $5. Cocktails and various sangrias, $8 and $9. THE BILL Lunch: starters, tapas and entrees, $6.50 to $18. Dinner: tapas, $7 to $18; entrees, $20 to $29. WHAT WE LIKED Serrano ham, chorizo imperial, Rocal sheeps-milk cheese, mini salmon tartare sandwiches, seared Hudson Valley duck breast, cuts of lobster with foie gras, grilled octopus with hummus, sea scallops with cider sauce, beet and goat cheese salad, and crab croquettes; seafood paella Palomino herbed roasted chicken, braised lamb shank (special), braised short ribs, branzino, stripped bass with beet gnocchi (special); pomegranate bread pudding (special). IF YOU GO Lunch: Tuesday to Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Brunch: Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dinner: Tuesday to Thursday, and Sunday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m. Reservations accepted and necessary on weekends. Street parking. RATINGS Don’t Miss, Worth It, O.K., Don’t Bother.

Restaurants
Westchester County (NY)
Palomino Rafael
Bistro Latino (Tuckahoe NY Restaurant)
Tuckahoe (NY)
Bistro Latino (Tuckahoe NY)


Fans Brawl at Exhibition Between West Ham and Columbus Crew

Abstract: COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A brawl among more than 100 fans at halftime marred an exhibition match Sunday between West Ham United of the English Premier League and the Columbus Crew of Major League Soccer. The fights overshadowed West Ham United’s 3-1 victory. They began when a handful of West Ham supporters, some wearing the team’s claret and blue colors, entered the northeast corner of the stadium, where the Crew’s most boisterous supporters typically gather. Crew supporters began directing chants toward the rival fans, and fights quickly broke out between more than 100 Crew fans and at least 30 West Ham fans. Columbus police officers and members of the Crew Stadium security staff eventually separated the groups. Highway Patrol officers arrested one fan outside the stadium for disorderly conduct, a Patrol spokeswoman, Anne Ralston, said. A dispatcher did not say whether the Columbus police had made any arrests inside the stadium. The incident was the second involving Crew fans this season. When New England celebrated its winning goal at Columbus on May 24, a fan shouted a racial slur at Revolution forward Kheli Dube, who is black. The incident prompted a league investigation, with M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber saying that the fan would be barred from league games for life if officials were able to identify him.

English Premier League
Columbus Crew
Major League Soccer
Soccer


El Chapo’s Arrest Prompts Mixed Feelings Among Mexicans in New York

Abstract: “People come in saying, ‘How sad! They got him!,’” said Gloria Calixto on Sunday, from behind the counter of Guadalupita II, a corner store in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, that was bursting with piñatas and sugar-dusted pastries, chilies and Virgin Mary figurines. She was referring to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, who was recaptured in Mexico on Friday after escaping from prison last year, and who may now face extradition to the United States on drug charges . The news of the arrest, and the odd trail that may have led up to it — involving a film crew, a Mexican actress, the actor Sean Penn and Rolling Stone magazine — drew a sigh in New York City’s Mexican enclaves, but for a number of different reasons. Some, like Carlos Gerardo Izzo Rivera, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in New York, sighed with relief. In a statement, he described Mr. Guzmán’s arrest as “an action against impunity,” and said it was proof that Mexico and its institutions had “the capacity to confront and overpower those that threatened the peace of Mexican families.” Image Elizbeth Meneses, left, and Cecilia Martínez are waitresses at Rinconcito Familiar in Sunset Park. “They’ve become legends, stories for us,” Ms. Martínez said of the cartel leaders. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times On the streets, outside churches, in restaurants and on Facebook, though, Mexicans in New York were less celebratory. There are more than 182,000 foreign-born Mexicans in New York, and about double that number in the region, according to the latest United States Census Bureau figures. Some of them lamented that the game of cat and mouse between the Mexican authorities and the head of the powerful Sinaloa cartel was over, again. Mr. Guzmán escaped from prison through a tunnel last year; in 2001, he rode out of prison in a laundry cart, by one account. In the process, the crafty drug lord went from being a Robin Hood for the people of his home state, Sinaloa, to a folk hero — or antihero — for a broad swath of Mexicans. Image Miguel Palacios said he had lost faith in the government in Mexico when he arrived in the United States. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times Last summer, after his escape, narcocorridos, or drug ballads, dedicated to Mr. Guzmán appeared almost immediately on the Internet . And, after his capture on Friday, many felt deflated that he was no longer on the lam. Ms. Calixto, the shopkeeper, said Mr. Guzmán had fallen into the trap of his own celebrity “because he’s so powerful, he feels like God.” Mexican popular culture has tended to glorify the drug trade and kingpins like Mr. Guzmán. From afar, some said, these figures can seem particularly unreal. “They’ve become legends, stories for us,” said Cecilia Martínez, a waitress at Rinconcito Familiar, a Sunset Park taqueria, where the speakers pumped brass-heavy music with drug-related themes and shout-outs like “Viva Sinaloa!” At one of the tables, Armando Mendoza, a construction worker eating lunch with a friend, said of the arrest, “I don’t like it, but what are you going to do?” Image Valdente De Jesus, right, with an unidentified woman, dismissed the drug lord’s arrest. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times Others sighed because they said they considered the arrest of Mr. Guzmán to be mere theater, a show to reassure the public — and the United States government — that Mexico was cracking down on drug traffickers, but one that did not convince them that Mexican officials were not corrupted by drug money and complicit with Mr. Guzmán and his kind. “Pablo Escobar fought with the government, but not El Chapo,” said Miguel Palacios, as he pulled apart Christmas wreaths at Palacio’s Flowers in Sunset Park. “El Chapo and the Mexican government, they’re practically holding hands.” Mr. Palacios said he had lost faith in the government in Mexico when he arrived in the United States. “People see what the Mexican government is like when they come here,” he said. He mentioned the case of 43 young students who disappeared in 2014 after clashing with the Mexican police. “People say the cartels are bloodthirsty,” he added. “The state is bloodthirsty.” Image Like many members of his generation, Melvin Tlaczani, 13, said he did not know who Mr. Guzmán was. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times In front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a Roman Catholic church in Sunset Park, Valdente De Jesus, a restaurant worker, also dismissed the drug lord’s arrest. “If it really is El Chapo,” he said, “they should extradite him because evidently the prisons are not secure for a person like him.” “If it is El Chapo,” he repeated. Like Mr. De Jesus, some Mexicans in New York said they suspected the man arrested on Friday could be a double. Among the younger generation of Mexican immigrants, some had only the dimmest understanding of Mr. Guzmán’s notoriety. “I’m sorry, I don’t really know who he is,” said Melvin Tlaczani, 13, who wore a sweatshirt bearing the phrase “Straight Outta Brooklyn” as he carried a box of avocados from his family’s Sunset Park taqueria, Ricos Tacos. Image Martina Pérez said Mr. Guzmán would probably escape from prison again. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times People who knew of the arrest shrugged it off, too. “Nothing will change,” said Shirley García, a cocktail waitress at Guadalajara de Noche in Jackson Heights, Queens, expressing a common sentiment. “There are many more, in Guerrero, Tijuana, Veracruz,” said Ms. García, referring to cartel leaders in other Mexican states. “And people are going to keep buying drugs,” she added. Atilán Ramírez, a barber at Puebla, said consumers of drugs, not the producers, should be punished. “He is just a businessman,” Mr. Ramírez said as he cleaned up the edges of a boy’s haircut with clippers. Even those few who applauded the arrest harbored doubts about what would happen next. “It’s good, because he is a criminal like any other, and he kills and is very vengeful,” whispered Martina Pérez, a mother of three who was helping a friend buy supplies for her wedding at the bridal shop Pink House, in Jackson Heights. “But we ask ourselves, ‘How long will he be there?,’” she said, peeking out from amid taffeta and silk. “On Facebook, most people say he is going to escape again or feign his own death, because there is no other way.” Would he have the help of the authorities? “Yes,” she said. “That’s obvious.”

Joaquin Guzman Loera,El Chapo
Mexican American
Drug cartel
Prison escape
Sunset Park Brooklyn
Drug Abuse


An Ugly Turn in the Race to Oppose Mrs. Clinton

Abstract: The pitched battle to be the Republican challenger to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has turned nastier, with the campaign manager for Kathleen Troia McFarland, who is struggling to get on the primary ballot, accusing her opponent, John Spencer, of bigamy. In an NY1 News interview on Tuesday, Edward J. Rollins, a top aide to Ms. McFarland, spoke of Mr. Spencer's personal history and his record as the mayor of Yonkers, dredging up marital infidelity and accusing him of nepotism. Mr. Spencer has never denied that while he was mayor, he had a long affair with his chief of staff while he was married, and had two children with her before they were married. "He runs around saying, 'I'm a good Catholic, I'm this, I'm that," Mr. Rollins said, adding that to "a lot of Catholics in this state, that's bigamy." Mr. Spencer was not married to both women at the same time. Mr. Rollins added that the affair was "just the tip of the iceberg" and showed that Mr. Spencer "thinks he can lead a double life." The comments come as Ms. McFarland, a Pentagon spokeswoman during the Reagan administration, has been trying to get enough support to get on the ballot in the Republican primary and challenge Mrs. Clinton in the election this fall. Mr. Spencer's campaign manager, Kevin Collins, shot back, calling the remarks "sleazy" and a "desperate act by a desperate campaign." Mr. Spencer and Ms. McFarland have battled over who would be the more formidable challenger to Mrs. Clinton in the general election. Ms. McFarland did not enter the race until early March, when some powerful Republicans were already committed to supporting Mr. Spencer and unwilling to switch. Mr. Spencer has also been endorsed by the executive committee of the Conservative Party. William O'Reilly, a spokesman for the McFarland campaign, said that she has about 16 percent of the votes among delegates attending the Republican convention next month. Under state rules, candidates must receive 25 percent of the delegate votes to be on the primary ballot, or collect 15,000 signatures from registered voters. For her part, Ms. McFarland distanced herself from Mr. Rollins's remarks. "I have made it clear from the start that I don't like mudslinging and attack politics," she said through a spokesman. "Mr. Spencer's personal life is of zero interest to me, and I don't expect it to come up again. Questions about his mayoralty are relevant, but not his personal life."

Clinton Hillary Rodham
Republican Party
McFarland Kathleen Troia


Chinese Mine Disaster Ends With 74 Dead

Abstract: BEIJING — Dozens of miners who had been trapped in a Chinese coal mine after a deadly explosion on Sunday have been rescued, authorities said Monday, according to The Associated Press. Seventy-four workers have died in the incident, making it the deadliest coal-mining accident in the country in more than a year. The miners were working in the Tunlan Coal Mine in Shanxi Province, the coal mining heartland of China , when the blast occurred at 2:17 a.m. Sunday morning, state-run news agency Xinhua reported. The mine is in city of Gujiao and is run by the Shanxi Coking Coal Group, one of China’s largest producers of coking coal, which is used in steel production. At the time of the explosion, 436 people were working underground. On Monday, 114 miners remained hospitalized due to carbon monoxide poisoning, with five listed in critical condition, a Shanxi government spokesman told Xinhua on condition of anonymity, citing policy. Additional rescue efforts led to more than 300 miners being pulled from the mine, and rescue operations were stopped Monday with all the workers accounted for, The Associated Press reported. The Shanxi Coking Coal Group, which is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, produces about five million tons a year of coking coal, Xinhua reported. The mine has a reputation for safety, Xinhua said, and no accident had occurred there for five years. Three top mining officials were removed from their posts in the wake of the fatal blast, the China Daily newspaper reported. The death toll on Sunday was the highest in a coal mine accident since December 2007, when an explosion in the city of Linfen in Shanxi Province — often called the most polluted city in China because of the relentless haze from coal production — killed 105 miners, The Associated Press reported, citing the State Administration of Work Safety. That explosion was set off by an accumulation of gas in an unventilated tunnel. The mining industry in China has a poor safety record. The government, which has been trying to improve safety standards by closing illegal mines, reported last month that about 3,200 people died in mining accidents last year, a 15 percent decrease from the previous year. But the death rate still indicates that China’s mines are the most dangerous in the world. In January, Zhao Tiechui, a senior official in charge of coal mine supervision, told Xinhua about problems regulating the industry. The government has said that 80 percent of the 16,000 mines operating in China are illegal. “Coal mines often experience the most serious accidents because so many of them are operating illegally,” he said. “The industry also sees the most frequent covering-up of accidents.” But mining is lucrative for those at the top. The owners of large mining companies are among China’s wealthiest people. Provincial mining authorities promised Monday to compensate the families of the 74 workers who died in the Sunday explosion, Xinhua reported. Some $4 million will be set aside for compensation; each family was to receive at least $29,000, and children of miners killed would receive additional funds until they turned 18, the news agency said.

China
Accidents and Safety
Mines and Mining
Rescues


Blue Bell Ice Cream Is Back on Sale After Listeria Stoppage

Abstract: Blue Bell Creameries has resumed ice cream shipments four months after listeria contamination halted sales and production. The company, based in Brenham, Tex., used Twitter and Facebook on Tuesday to announce its trucks were “on the road again” and filled with ice cream. The messages did not say when and where Blue Bell products would be sold. Blue Bell in April voluntarily recalled all products after its treats were linked to 10 listeria illnesses in four states, including three deaths in Kansas.

Blue Bell Ice Cream
Food Safety
Listeria monocytogenes
Ice cream


Money, Arena and India Play Into Potential Sale of Kings

Abstract: As N.B.A. owners debate the merits of the two groups vying to buy the Sacramento Kings, including at their two-day meeting in New York on Thursday and Friday, they will scrutinize the size of each group’s bid and each’s ability to build a new arena. The group led by Christopher R. Hansen, a hedge fund manager, and Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, had been thought to have the upper hand. It has a tentative agreement to buy 65 percent of the team from the Maloof family and approval to build a new arena from Seattle, where the group hopes to move the team if it wins. The rival group, which includes the founder of 24-Hour Fitness, Mark S. Mastrov, and Paul E. Jacobs, the chief executive of Qualcomm, has an offer worth about as much and approval to build a new arena in Sacramento. The group has another attraction: Vivek Ranadive. Ranadive, a software businessman from Silicon Valley who is vice chairman of the Golden State Warriors, will become the face of the Kings if his group is chosen. With deep pockets and extensive contacts, he plans to promote the N.B.A. heavily in his native India and to Indians living in the United States. Cricket is the most popular sport in India, but several sports, including basketball, vie for the second spot. “I believe basketball will be the global sport of the 21st century because it can be played by young and old, boys and girls, indoors or outdoors, rich or poor,” Ranadive said this week in a phone interview. “Independent of whether the Kings bid succeeds or not, I’m very committed to making it the No. 2 sport in India.” The two sets of bidders could learn their fate in the coming days or weeks. On Wednesday, the N.B.A.’s advisory finance and relocation committees met to discuss the offers. They may recommend a bid to the league’s owners this week, although Commissioner David Stern told reporters Wednesday that it would probably take several more weeks before the owners vote on the sale of the team. Either way, the recommendations of the committees are expected to hold sway. If the group trying to keep the team in Sacramento wins, Ranadive will have to sell his minority stake in the Warriors so he can become the general partner of the Kings. He would then be the first majority owner of Indian descent in the N.B.A. and become an instant celebrity among the Indian diaspora and in India. His star power in India should help supplement the N.B.A.’s fledgling efforts there. The league opened an office in Mumbai in 2011 and now has six employees looking for ways to market the league. Three N.B.A. games are shown each week on the channel that broadcasts the country’s largest cricket league, and the N.B.A. has started a Web site in India. Several N.B.A. players have traveled to India to hold clinics and promote the sport. Parallels with the N.B.A.’s efforts in China are often made. Stern, who this month traveled to India for the first time, said the comparisons were unfair because the Chinese have been playing the game far longer, have their own leagues and have produced N.B.A. stars. But the potential for growth in India is enormous, Stern said. India has more than 1.2 billion people and an emerging middle class, many of whom speak English. “The demographics favor us,” he said. “This is not about finding the next great Indian player, though over time we know it’s inevitable. It’s about working with schools, creating programs. But we’re not unmindful of television, merchandising or events. This is a long-term proposition.” Ranadive’s drive to raise the profile of the sport in India, while welcomed, will not be a deciding factor in which group gets the Kings. Money may be secondary to which group offers more reassurance about its ability to build an arena, which generates revenue and stabilizes a team’s position in its home city. “Although the purchase price is important, it’s only one factor,” said Irwin Raij of Foley & Lardner, who advises teams on stadium deals and is a former member of the Sacramento First Task Force, which helped the city evaluate options for a new sports complex several years ago. “If you’re the league, you want to make sure the arena deal is real.” If Ranadive’s group wins, expect him to take some of his marketing and promotional ideas to Sacramento. With the Warriors, he has held Bollywood nights and sold a record number of season-ticket plans partly because so many Indians now follow the team. Ranadive, who attends nearly every home game, created a smartphone application that lets fans follow the team. He has recruited other Indian executives to help promote the sport. Becoming the face of the Kings, Ranadive said, “could be that catalyst” that catapults the sport in India. “We would have a full-court press on this.”

Sacramento Kings
Steven A Ballmer
Christopher R Hansen
Vivek Ranadive
Mark S Mastrov
NBA
Basketball
Relocation


Restoring the Tradition of Quail Hunting

Abstract: PIGGOTT, Ark. — During his periodic stays in this small town in the Arkansas delta, Ernest Hemingway was looked upon by the locals as something of a proto-hippy with his shabby clothes, unshaven face and artistic disposition. He was once mistaken for a hobo. Children taunted him and pelted him with rocks. Obliged to visit his in-laws’ home in Piggott, Hemingway made the most of it and became a bird-hunting bum. Pauline Pfeiffer became Hemingway’s second wife in 1927 and her brother Karl became his quail hunting partner. “Of course he came because Pauline would come back to see her parents, but the one thing he liked was the quail hunting here,” said Don Roeder, who grew up going to church with the Pfeiffer family and is a trustee of the Matilda and Karl Pfeiffer Foundation. “One of the stories that Mr. Pfeiffer would tell me was if he killed more quail than Ernest had, they had to stay out there until Ernest had killed as many as Karl had.” Then, spreading his arms wide, Roeder said, “Hemingway had an ego like this.” Roeder said that during the time when Hemingway visited, quail were just about everywhere, but that began to change. “When I first came back here out of the service, I could go out here hunting with friends and we could shoot quail, but they were going away then, and now you rarely hear a quail,” he said. The mating call of the bobwhite quail provides the bird its name, a ringing three-count whistle: bob-bob-white. It is a sound many baby boomers have heard while growing up and one their children might have heard. But it is one their grandchildren may never hear. In many parts of their range — from New England to the Dakotas to Texas — bobwhites have disappeared and the sport of quail hunting has fallen on hard times. Quail hunting has been both aristocratic and egalitarian. It is a sport of Southern plantation gentry who ride walking horses with bespoke double guns in their scabbards and have pedigreed pointing dogs racing across the fields before them. It is also the sport of the farm kid armed with a dad’s old shotgun and a rangy mutt for a hunting companion. Both types of hunters have equally satisfying hunts, but these days social standing does not matter. Everyone is quail-poor. Bobwhite quail are one of the most studied wildlife species in the United States, yet conservationists have yet to halt the declining populations. Biologists agree that overhunting is not the issue. Quail are prolific breeders but have a short lifespan. Hunting seasons could be eliminated and still approximately 90 percent of the quail would be dead within the year. Other predators, like raptors, coyotes or raccoons, are also not the reason for their decline, although many hunters point the finger at them. Don McKenzie is in charge of the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative, a team of 25 state fish and wildlife agencies and conservation groups. The goal of the group, formed in 2002, is to get wild quail populations to what they were in 1980. It is one of the most difficult large-scale wildlife restoration projects. Canada geese, whitetail deer and wild turkeys — all at one time low in numbers — have become so populous that they spill into the suburbs, but bringing back bobwhite populations is a struggling enterprise. “One of the difficult parts of quail restoration is we have to restore suitable habitat at a landscape scale,” McKenzie said. “When you compare that with deer and turkey restoration, the habitat was already suitable. It was a matter of catching remaining wild animals in places where they were and moving them to places where they weren’t and protecting them until they took care of themselves. It’s still a challenge, but nothing compared to what we face now with bobwhites.” The reason restoring bobwhite quail is so difficult is because it involves changing the nation’s manipulated rural landscape. According to McKenzie, exotic fescue, Bahia grass and Bermuda grass took hold across the United States in the 1940s. These carpetlike grasses were planted to promote better cattle grazing and edged out the native warm-season grasses that are conducive to good quail habitat. The native grasses grow in clumps, which allow the quail to hide, move and forage and are essential to their survival. With pastures covered with invasive exotic grasses, the quail found cover along brushy fencerows and field edges, but by the 1970s modern agricultural practices that maximized every inch of soil devoured these small sanctuaries and left quail with few hideouts. Wildlife biologists have known about this connection between warm-season grasses and quail habitat, and many landowners have tried to create an oasis for quail on their property by planting a paradise of native plants. Yet the quail population never reached the old numbers. “Resident game bird conservation professionals have been telling landowners this for 50 years: all you need to do is some small-scale stuff on your place and you’ll have birds and everything will be fine,” McKenzie said. “Well, after 50 years of doing that, it certainly doesn’t work.” The problem is that the islands of prime quail habitat — restored or naturally occurring — are not connected to one another to create larger plots of good habitat where quail have greater odds of survival. “We have to come up with bigger pieces of landscape that are managed in common, and have connections with other pieces of well-managed landscape where there are sustainable populations of birds,” McKenzie said. “We must make it happen by the millions of acres instead of by the tens of acres.” Jeff Parrish, executive director of Freedom to Roam, a coalition of organizations working to conserve wildlife corridors, said, “Bobwhite quail are like a crucible for what the future of wildlife is going to look like in North America. “There’s a new coal mine we’re living in and it’s one that is really fragmented,” he said. “The quail are telling us a story that we never thought we’d hear, which is the world’s gotten chopped up and the only way we can protect those species is to connect them more.” Dan Petit begins all of his bobwhite quail discussions with the same story: he grew up in northern Ohio and last heard a quail call there as a teenager in 1978. He is the director of bird conservation for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which supports the quail restoration initiative. “It’s easy to look into your crystal ball in 2011 and see exactly where the quail are headed,” Petit said. “Look at lesser prairie chickens. In your grandpa’s day, there were a million of them out there. Now there are 40,000. They just need that connectivity. “We think that converting pastures of cool-season grasses into warm-season grasses is economically very palatable to those individuals that make a living off of those grasses. This does not require a stimulus bill or anything like that.” McKenzie bemoaned that a generation of Southerners is growing up without quail hunting. “In my family,” he said, “the culture of quail hunting is as much part of our lives as barbecue, fried catfish and SEC football. It’s a part of life, a part of growing up and it’s part of what being from the South is all about.” Although Hemingway worked on different stories while visiting his in-laws, only one story, “A Day’s Wait,” can be traced to a true experience that happened in Piggott, and it includes a quail hunting scene. He writes of the quail “coming out while you were poised unsteadily on the icy, springy brush they made difficult shooting and I killed two, missed five, and started back pleased to have found a covey close to the house and happy there were so many left to find on another day.” Maybe that was why he chose to stay in Piggott and chase bobwhites when the film adaptation of his novel “A Farewell to Arms” made its premiere on Broadway in 1932. Unlike the hunters of Hemingway’s generation and the generation after, the hunters of today are lucky to see a covey of quail, and they are uncertain there will be many left.

Hunting and Trapping
Birds
Environment
Endangered and Extinct Species


Shift by Hartmarx Reopens Bidding

Abstract: CHICAGO (AP) — A federal bankruptcy judge in Chicago on Monday approved a bidding process for the Hartmarx Corporation after the company revised a takeover bid to provide more cash for its largest creditor, the Wells Fargo bank. Emerisque Brands and SKNL North America submitted an $85.5 million offer last week for the company’s assets, which Wells Fargo rejected, saying it was too low. Hartmarx renegotiated the bid’s structure, allowing Wells Fargo to get more cash. Another hearing to approve final details was scheduled for Tuesday.

Hartmarx
Wells Fargo & Co
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures


Regulators Warn 5 Top Banks They Are Still Too Big to Fail

Abstract: The nation’s top bank regulators have added an unexpected voice to the growing chorus of critics worried that the biggest American banks, nearly eight years after the financial crisis, are still too big to fail. The Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said on Wednesday that five of the nation’s eight largest banks — including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — did not have “credible” plans for how they would wind themselves down in a crisis without sowing panic. That suggests that if there were another crisis today, the government would need to prop up the largest banks if it wanted to avoid financial chaos. The announcement coincides with a presidential campaign that at times has been dominated by a debate over what danger the big banks still pose to the nation’s economic security. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has called for the biggest banks to be broken up, a stand that his opponent, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, has criticized. But Mr. Sanders’ position has drawn sympathy from some on the other side of the political spectrum, including the new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari, who was a Treasury official during the financial crisis. In long letters sent to the banks this week, the two regulatory agencies pointed to the dangers created by the global reach and complexity of the largest banks, which are bigger now than they were before the 2008 crisis. The current arrangement could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States,” the regulators said in their letter to JPMorgan. The regulators this week did not come close to calling for a breakup, yet they did in effect provide backing for Mr. Sanders’s premise that not enough has been done to safeguard the financial system. “The goal to end too big to fail and protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts remains just that: only a goal,” Thomas M. Hoenig, the vice chairman of the F.D.I.C., said in a statement. The regulators were responding to the so-called living wills that banks must submit to regulators on a regular basis to explain how the banks plan to enter bankruptcy in an orderly fashion in case of a crisis. The living wills are a requirement of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, intended to help make large financial institutions less of a threat to the wider economy. The Fed and the F.D.I.C., which jointly oversee the largest banks, agreed that the plans put forward by five of the big banks, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon, were “not credible or would not facilitate an orderly resolution under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.” Only one of the biggest banks, Citigroup, was given a passing grade by both agencies, though it too was told that its plans needed improvements. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley received passing grades from only one of the two agencies. Barney Frank, the former Massachusetts congressman who was one of the architects of the Dodd-Frank law, said on Wednesday that the rejection of the living wills indicated that the regulators believed they still have more to do to tackle the too-big-to-fail issue. But he added that the regulators were showing resolve. “It sends a message,” Mr. Frank said in an interview. “It signals that they are serious.” In recent weeks, Mr. Frank has criticized the financial overhaul proposals by Mr. Sanders. Mr. Frank contends that some of the plans to break up the banks are simplistic because they take a one-size-fits-all approach. In contrast, he said, measures like the living wills allow regulators to press for banks to shrink, based on specific conditions at those firms. The five banks that received rejections have until Oct. 1 to fix their plans. After those adjustments, if the Fed and the F.D.I.C. are still dissatisfied with the living wills, they may impose restrictions on the banks’ activities or require the banks to raise their capital levels, which in practice means using less borrowed money to finance their business. And if, after two years, the regulators still find the plans deficient, they may require the banks to sell assets and businesses, with the aim of making them less complex and simpler to unwind in a bankruptcy. Also on Wednesday, JPMorgan announced a decline in both profit and revenue for the first quarter. Other large banks will report quarterly results this week. “Obviously we were disappointed,” Marianne Lake, chief financial officer of JPMorgan, said on Wednesday morning. The results are a particular blow for JPMorgan because it often boasts about the strength of its operations and its ability to weather any crisis. Just last week, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, bragged in his annual letter that the bank “had enough loss-absorbing resources to bear all the losses,” under the Fed’s annual stress-test situations, of the 31 largest banks in the country. But the Fed and F.D.I.C. said on Wednesday that JPMorgan appeared to be unprepared for a crisis in a number of areas. The regulators said, for instance, that the bank did not have adequate plans to move money from its operations overseas if something went wrong in the markets. The letter also said that JPMorgan did not have a good plan to wind down its outstanding derivative contracts if other banks stopped trading with it. Wall Street Earnings: A Grim Quarter for Big Banks It is shaping up to be another grim year for the nation’s biggest banks. They were hit hard by a bad environment for trading and deal-making. Ms. Lake said “there’s going to be significant work to meet the expectations of regulators.” But she also expressed confidence that the bank could do so without significantly changing how it does business. Investors appeared to agree that the verdicts from regulators did not endanger the banks’ current business models. Shares of all of the big banks rose on Wednesday. Wells Fargo, which is generally considered the safest of the large banks, was the target of unexpected criticism from the Fed and F.D.I.C. The agencies criticized Wells Fargo’s governance and legal structure, and faulted it for “material errors,” which, the regulators said, raised questions about whether the bank has a “robust process to ensure quality control and accuracy.” In a statement, Wells Fargo said it was disappointed and added, “We understand the importance of these findings, and we will address them as we update our plan.” The banking industry has complained that the process of submitting living wills is complex and hard to complete and it has suggested changes. “A useful process reform might be to do living wills every two or three years, instead of annually,” said Tony Fratto, a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public relations firm that works with the banks. “The time required for banks to produce them and regulators to react to them is clearly too tight.” But Martin J. Gruenberg, the chairman of the F.D.I.C., said on Wednesday that regulators were “committed to carrying out the statutory mandate that systemically important financial institutions demonstrate a clear path to an orderly failure under bankruptcy at no cost to taxpayers.” “Today’s action is a significant step toward achieving that goal,” he added.

Banking and Finance
FDIC
Federal Reserve
2016 Presidential Election
Dodd Frank
JPMorgan Chase
Bank of America
Wells Fargo &
Bank of New York Mellon
State Street Corporation


B.C.S. Commissioners Reach Consensus on 4-Team Playoff

Abstract: The expected became a reality Wednesday as college football’s leaders announced that they will move forward with a four-team seeded playoff to decide the sport’s champion starting in 2014. The decision effectively ends the controversial and polarizing Bowl Championship Series system, which began in 1998 as a way to match the sport’s top two teams in a title game. The decision has been expected for months as conference commissioners conceded as early as January that the relentless controversy would prompt a change to a playoff-style format. The only step remaining, which appears to be a formality, is the presentation of their plan to the B.C.S. oversight committee in Washington on Tuesday. But much like the B.C.S. was constantly steeped in controversy, the selection of a four-team playoff still appears destined to inflame the sport’s passionate fans. While the B.C.S. commissioners did not announce the details of how they would pick the teams for the four-team playoff, a source with direct knowledge of the decision said the plan is for a selection committee to “more than likely” pick the four best teams. There will be a preference given to conference champions in the selection, but how much is yet to be determined. Strength of schedule will also be strongly considered. There have yet to be any discussions about how the finances will be split among the teams. The selection committee will subject a sport steeped in regional biases to a different type of controversy, although one that will likely die down a bit now that there will be semifinal and final games. The two semifinal games are expected to be played within the bowl system and the national championship will be bid on like the Super Bowl . In a joint statement, the 11 conference commissioners and the Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said that they had reached a “consensus behind a four-team, seeded playoff, while recognizing that the presidents will certainly present their views, including a discussion of a Plus-One.” The meeting in Washington next week is viewed more as a coronation than a discussion, however.

Bowl Championship Series
Football (College)
Bowl Games
College Athletics


U.N. Suspends Its Mission in Syria, Citing Violence

Abstract: CAIRO — The United Nations said Saturday that it was suspending its observer mission in Syria because of the escalating violence, the most severe blow yet to months of international efforts to negotiate a peace plan and prevent Syria’s descent into civil war. The United Nations said the monitors would not be withdrawn from Syria, but were being locked down in Syria’s most contested cities, unable to conduct patrols. While the decision to suspend their work was made chiefly to protect the unarmed monitors, the unstated purpose appeared to be to force Russia to intervene to assure that the observers are not the targets of Syrian forces or their sympathizers. Russia has opposed Western intervention and, by some accounts, continues to arm the forces of President Bashar al-Assad . For President Obama , the suspension of the observers’ activities — unless it is reversed quickly — could signal the failure of the latest effort by the West to reach a diplomatic solution and ease Mr. Assad from power. But Mr. Obama’s choices are no better than they were when the uprising in Syria began nearly a year and a half ago. A bombing campaign like the one conducted last year by NATO in Libya with strong American and Arab League support is not feasible in Syria: the battle is being waged in crowded cities, with little chance to attack the Syrian Army without the risk of high civilian casualties. Mr. Obama, NATO nations and the Arab League have never wanted to send in a ground force, which would probably face heavy casualties in what many fear is emerging as a civil war. The White House issued a statement on Saturday once again calling on Syria to uphold commitments it has made in recent months, “including the full implementation of a cease-fire.” The statement added, “We are consulting with our international partners regarding next steps toward a Syrian-led political transition” called for in two United Nations Security Council resolutions, and “the sooner this transition takes place, the greater the chance of averting a lengthy and bloody civil war.” Syria’s uprising has become one of the most intractable and deadliest conflicts of the Arab Spring, with reports of at least four massacres in recent weeks, including accounts of killings of as many as 78 civilians, many of them women and children. On Saturday, dozens of Syrians were killed in government attacks across the country, especially in villages around Damascus, the capital, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain with contacts in Syria. The group and other activists said security forces were carrying out sweeping arrests, particularly of young men, in towns around the capital. The Obama administration is resisting calls to arm rebel groups, for fear that they are not an organized force and could eventually turn on one another. “The problem is that if we do nothing and Syria explodes, we have a broader conflict in the Middle East ,” a senior American diplomat said last week, before the United Nations announcement, adding, “But our options aren’t any better than they were a year ago.” The observers had been the foundation of a six-point peace plan that Kofi Annan , the former United Nations secretary general and the special envoy to Syria, had sought to hammer out with the consent of Mr. Assad and his foreign sponsors, including Russia and Iran . Both of those countries have huge stakes in the outcome: Russia has a military base in Syria and has long used Mr. Assad as an instrument to project influence in the region, and the Syrian government is Iran’s only real ally in the region. But Russia has frozen strong action, complaining that the West went beyond its humanitarian mandate when it aided the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya last year. The leader of the observer mission in Syria, Gen. Robert Mood, said in a statement that he had little choice but to suspend the mission. Escalating violence across Syria over the past 10 days had prevented the teams from carrying out their mandate to verify events on the ground. They have repeatedly been attacked by pro-government supporters, driving them back in recent days from the village of Al Heffa, which had been under assault all week until all its residents fled. “The lack of willingness by the parties to seek a peaceful transition, and the push toward advancing military positions is increasing the losses on both sides: innocent civilians, men, women and children are being killed every day,” General Mood said. “It is also posing significant risks to our observers.” But he emphasized that he was only suspending the mission, not ending it, and would evaluate daily the chances for resuming its activities. Ahmad Fawzi, Mr. Annan’s spokesman, said General Mood was responding in part to pressure from countries that contributed the observers. “Troop-contributing countries are saying our men and women are at risk, we are having second thoughts about this operation,” Mr. Fawzi said. “They are in danger and they want the danger to go away.” “There is nothing final,” he said. “It is a suspension, not termination.” But patrols would resume only “when we return to a situation where both sides show us that they are serious and earnest about stopping the killing of each other.” General Mood is expected to fly to New York to brief the Security Council on Monday. Responding to the observers’ decision, Syria’s government said Saturday that it respected both the peace plan and the safety of the United Nations observers. But it blamed the opposition for the escalation of violence in Syria. In a statement, the Foreign Ministry also assailed “Arab and international powers” for arming the rebels and supporting their “defiance of the U.N. plan.” By mid-July the original 90-day mandate for the observers will expire. But the suspension, if prolonged, will focus new pressure on those governments allied with Syria, particularly Russia and Iran, which have backed the plan as the only way to stop the violence. The inclusion of Iran in an international group proposed by Mr. Annan to discuss ways to save the peace plan — a “contact group” in the United Nations’ parlance — was rejected by the United States , while Russia insisted on it. That raised serious questions about whether the contact group would ever meet. At a minimum it is supposed to include the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus important neighboring states. “Everybody realizes this meeting has to take place,” Mr. Fawzi said. “They need to come up with a draft action plan.” That plan is supposed to include a cease-fire and a political transition, presumably with Mr. Assad leaving the country. But Russia and Iran have continued to back Mr. Assad and have refused to endorse plans for his exit. The United States, along with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, has embraced the rebels. The inability of the United Nations to bridge the gap only increases the likelihood that the Syrian conflict will become a regional proxy fight. “There is just a political hurricane gathering in the Eastern Mediterranean,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Both sides agree that it is a hurricane, but they don’t agree on its nature. “And in any case,” he continued, “I am not sure how you could contain this. Even if you started now, it would take a long time to get something in place that would tamp this down.” Inside Syria, opposition activists called the observer mission a sham that had only served to deflect attention from the failure of the world powers to stop Mr. Assad’s forces from killing civilians. “Their presence is just like their absence,” Mohammed el-Muetassem bi’Allah, 18, an activist from Homs, said of the observers. “They are incapable of stopping the violence. They were there and the shelling was intensifying on Homs and Khaldiya.”


The Knicks and J. R. Smith Are Closing In on a Deal

Abstract: J. R. Smith may be close to signing with the Knicks , although some unspecified hurdles remain, according to people involved in the decision. Smith can sign with an N.B.A. team after playing the last several months in China. He has been weighing offers and reportedly has narrowed his choices to the Knicks and the Los Angeles Clippers . Although there were reports Thursday that Smith had chosen the Knicks, he had not yet informed other teams of a decision. Smith is a solid 3-point shooter who would provide depth at guard and small forward. But he is also known as a ball-stopper and a volatile personality who could erode the Knicks’ newfound chemistry. There is disagreement among team officials on whether he is worth the risk. The Knicks would sign Smith using a $2.5 million salary-cap exception, prorated for the rest of the season. They would have to waive a player to make room. Bill Walker, who has been filling the role of backup swingman, seems the most likely candidate. HOPE ON CABLE TV DEAL There is a sliver of hope that the impasse between Time Warner Cable and MSG Network might end soon — allowing those deprived of watching Jeremy Lin to finally grasp the worldwide Linsanity. James L. Dolan, the executive chairman of Madison Square Garden, and Glenn A. Britt, the chairman of Time Warner Cable, met Monday for less than an hour, said two people briefed on the situation but not authorized to speak publicly. It is the only encouraging news to emerge during the 47-day blackout. The Dolan-Britt meeting is likely to lead to their assigning their dealmakers to resume long-dormant talks in the coming days. That, in turn, could lead to an exchange of offers. How soon that happens is anyone’s guess. A chasm divides them. So, it seems, does a lack of trust. Much of what is known about past negotiations comes from Time Warner Cable: that it agreed on an MSG proposal to raise rates by 6.5 percent only to see MSG renege and demand a 53 percent hike. “All the numbers I’ve heard aren’t true,” Mike Bair, the president of MSG Media, said Wednesday in an interview with Mike Francesa on WFAN Radio. Bair has never publicly divulged any figures and has insisted that MSG only wants Time Warner Cable to pay a subscriber fee comparable to its competitors. At their level, they were not exchanging proposals to end the dispute that began on Jan. 1 and forced Time Warner Cable customers to find alternatives to see each new chapter in the Lin phenomenon. Not to be forgotten is the hunger that blackout-affected Rangers fans have to see their first-place team. Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, said he had helped bring the sides together. In a statement, Schneiderman’s spokesman, Danny Kanner, said, “In the past two weeks, we have facilitated constructive conversations with Time Warner Cable and MSG Networks and look forward to continuing to work with the parties toward a resolution of their dispute.” Schneiderman has no statutory authority in the blackout. He can only encourage talks. The last dispute between MSG and Time Warner lasted 63 days in 2005. Eliot Spitzer, then the state attorney general, at first monitored the impasse and then gradually got involved. On the last day, the sides met in his office and made a deal. RICHARD SANDOMIR LIN PUMPS UP RATINGS Wednesday night’s win over the Sacramento Kings produced a 5.78 rating (or 427,015 local TV households) for MSG Network, the highest in the brief Jeremy Lin era. At its highest point, between 9:30 and 9:45 p.m., the rating spiked to a 7.48, which is the equivalent of 552,608 households. The six games started by Lin have averaged a 3.79 rating (279,998 households) — 109 percent better than the 20 previous games televised by MSG. Over all, MSG’s Knicks ratings are up 69 percent this season. RICHARD SANDOMIR

Basketball
Smith J R
New York Knicks
Time Warner Cable Inc
MSG Network
Los Angeles Clippers


In California, Hybrid Owners Look to Extend Carpool Privilege

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Virtue may be its own reward, but incentives don’t hurt. In California in 2004, when the country’s first measure restricting vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions became law, 75,000 owners of the gas-stingiest hybrid cars were assured access to carpool lanes. Now the $8 yellow decal that served as a get-out-of-traffic-free card is about to become meaningless: the privilege, originally set to expire in 2008, was legislatively extended twice, and now ends July 1. But the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic drivers who got the coveted decals — 10,000 more were added a couple of years later — are finding it hard to accept the idea that they are not as special as they once were. “It’s so California,” said Fran Pavley, a state senator who sponsored the original measure as an assemblywoman seven years ago, as she tried to describe the aggrieved response to the change. “It’s not quite like taking away your firstborn,” she added. “But it’s right up there for anyone who spends time on the freeway.” Her district includes Santa Monica and Malibu, where 3 percent of all cars are hybrids — the greatest concentration in the state. Los Angeles County, whose freeways of molasses have contributed to pop song lyrics and hospital asthma admissions, is home to 27,227 of the yellow-stickered hybrids, almost one-third of the state total. The lobbying for an extension of the carpool lane privileges is unlikely to bear fruit, said Ms. Pavley, a Democrat who drives a Prius but has no sticker. John Burton, a former leader of the State Senate, called Ms. Pavley to push for the extension, because vehicles that qualify for a new (green) sticker program do not go on sale until next year. Mr. Burton, now chairman of the state Democratic Party, has a yellow-stickered car, qualifying him to shave many minutes off the 90-minute drive between his home in San Francisco and the Capitol in Sacramento. But the time he saved, he said, is “honest to God not that big a deal.” Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied hybrid owners, said they were “a mixture of people wanting to signal their virtuousness and people wanting to get to work quickly.” In the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, where all hybrids are given carpool lane privileges, the number of hybrids is nearly double that in the Maryland suburbs, where they have no special status. Within the Virginia suburbs, Prince William County, which is farther from the area’s work hubs, has the highest proportion of hybrids, said Nicholas Ramfos, a transportation specialist with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. In Sacramento, Ms. Pavley’s staff is considering changing her phone number as of July 1, when the yellow-stickered cars must rejoin the noncarpool plebeians. “Maybe we need to get people counseling,” she said.

Roads and Traffic
Hybrid Vehicles
Automobiles
California
State Legislatures
Car Pools


U.S. Is Hosting Mexico Again? Road Trip to Columbus!

Abstract: COLUMBUS, Ohio — Sixteen years ago, a man named Jim Smith sketched out the first plan. It was November 2000. On a blank piece of paper he found at home, Smith — then the general manager of the Columbus Crew of M.L.S. — began to play around with a concept. The schedule for the final round of 2002 World Cup qualifying had just been released. As a bit of a thought exercise, Smith scribbled and scratched, did some adding and multiplying, and ultimately determined that, if sales were conducted just so — 5,625 tickets to Crew season-ticket holders, 6,800 tickets to in-state youth associations, 4,200 to U.S. Soccer and its supporters’ club, and so on — the club might be able to sell out Crew Stadium for a match between the United States and Mexico in the dead of winter. Then Smith called the Crew’s owner, Lamar Hunt. “I remember that I told him, ‘We need to host this U.S.-Mexico game in February,’” Smith said recently, “and he sort of paused and then said, ‘Are you crazy?’” Smith laughed. “I said: ‘It’s perfect. We can sell it out, and I’ll tell you how.’ And then he listened and supported it 100 percent. And then we went out and did it.” That match, which was ultimately played in February 2001, may be remembered for many things — the result, certainly, as well as the atmosphere and the frigid weather and the fact the Mexican team stayed inside its heated dressing room instead of warming up before kickoff. But more than anything, the match will be seen as a beginning. On Friday night, Columbus will host its fifth consecutive home World Cup qualifier between the United States and Mexico, a run that began with that game 15 years ago and includes four straight wins for the Americans, all by the score of 2-0 (or, as you may have heard in countless advertising slogans, “Dos a Cero”). That record of success, along with a mix of unmatched ambience, undying support and — not surprisingly — a little bit of superstition, has turned this college-football-mad town in the Midwest into the de facto caretaker of what is the United States’ biggest soccer match on home soil. Image A recreation of the work sheet drawn up by Jim Smith, then the general manager of the Columbus Crew M.L.S. franchise, proposing that the United States national team host a 2002 World Cup qualifier against Mexico in Columbus in February 2001. Smith formulated a plan to sell out the Crew’s stadium for the midwinter game, but others were skeptical. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again,” said Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer. “Until we lose, there may be someone who moves the Mexico game away from Columbus, but it’s not going to be me.” As usual, this week’s game will be a major happening here, with fan parties, a live event featuring former national team players talking about that 2001 game and a scavenger hunt in which fans can enter a contest to win prizes by seeking out — and taking selfies with — seven life-size cutouts of current American players scattered throughout downtown. The primary United States national team fan group, American Outlaws, will hold several events, including block parties and an oversize tailgate, which is expected to attract as many as 15,000 fans, according to Brock Hemphill, the president of the organization’s local chapter. “I locked down a babysitter months ago,” Hemphill said, adding that, because of the expected “intensity” of the activities, “I’ve got her booked for three days.” It was not always like this. For the first game in 2001, Smith said, “If you weren’t at the game in Columbus, you probably didn’t know it was even taking place in the city.” The whole premise was new. While other teams in Concacaf, the governing body overseeing soccer in North and Central America and the Caribbean, often created hostile conditions for visiting teams — bags of urine have been thrown at players in Mexico City, and hotels in Central America are routinely surrounded by loud fans on the eve of matches — the United States back then was frequently a guest in its own house. Ticket sales and in-stadium revenue were often the driving forces in site selection then, leading to situations that were less than ideal. Bruce Arena, the former national team coach, explained to the news media before that first game in Columbus that they were there, in part, because “a lot of places were blocked out” as potential hosts, “even by the X.F.L., of all things.” Columbus, then, was a natural alternative because the city boasted M.L.S.’s first soccer-only stadium, built to host the Crew. Although significantly smaller than, say, Foxboro Stadium — which had hosted the previous game against Mexico, in 1997 — Crew Stadium, now known as Mapfre Stadium, offered an energetic fan base and the opportunity for U.S. Soccer to fill the venue while still largely controlling the number of visiting fans who could get in. “We could certainly make more money in tickets going to bigger places,” Gulati said. “But this isn’t a friendly. The equation is much more than that.” As soccer’s popularity has risen exponentially in the United States, so, too, has the scale of its international showpiece game. The city estimates that between $4 million and $5 million in spending is generated by hosting the match, and it pegs the value of the news media exposure of the game, which will be televised in about 100 countries, as multiples of that. This week’s game does have some unusual circumstances surrounding it. While only a few hundred fans of Mexico are expected to be in the stadium — they are generally allocated a place in the corner of the upper deck — the atmosphere could be especially charged because the game will be played just three days after an Election Day in which Mexico, and Mexican-Americans, have been thrust into a prominent place by the Republican Party nominee, Donald J. Trump. These matches already have a complex security operation around them, according to Lt. Marc Dopp, who works in the special events division of the Columbus Police Department, and because of Ohio’s perennial status as a battleground state, the police are very familiar with how to handle potential political discord. “To be honest,” said Hemphill, the supporters’ group president, “I’m really hoping that Florida decides the election this time.” Regardless of any political fallout (or the result of the game itself), there is no official mandate that the game return to Columbus during the 2022 World Cup qualifying cycle. Club and city officials do a fresh bid each time a game comes on the calendar, and other cities with newer, larger soccer-only stadiums could offer similar weather and crowd advantages. Kansas City, Kan., for example, opened its stadium in 2011 and hosted World Cup qualifiers in the last cycle. It often has been mentioned as a potential host if U.S. Soccer ever moved the game away from Columbus. But the magic around Columbus has grown so strong that, for the moment at least, it is difficult to imagine the match anywhere else. “It’s a real turnkey situation there,” said Tom King, the managing director of administration for U.S. Soccer. “So when the Mexico fixture gets put up on the board and we know the dates, one of our first calls is to Columbus.”

Soccer
Mexico
US Men's Soccer Team
Columbus Crew Soccer Team
Columbus Ohio
2018 FIFA World Cup


Joplin, Mo., Ponders Future of a Love Letter in Ruins

Abstract: JOPLIN, Mo. — As this rebuilding city races to finish clearing the rubble from the deadly tornado last spring , one irreparably broken structure has been allowed, for now at least, to remain. The building, a modest red brick house, has no roof. All but one of its exterior walls are missing, splintered and scattered by the storm, leaving an impression of a giant dollhouse. A Christmas tree, dressed in ornaments, has been placed in a tidy living room arrangement of two couches and a coffee table. The reason this house has so far survived the wrecking ball can be found scribbled on its walls, on its floorboards, in its closets and along virtually every other remaining surface. They are personal messages, thousands of them, handwritten by the volunteers who flooded the community to help sift through and cart out the debris. Every day visitors and locals alike stop to add a note to the collection. Every disaster has its memorials, from the organic to the carefully orchestrated. Several monuments have emerged here as the city labors to clear the remaining rubble of the tornado that cut through the heart of the community on May 22, killing 161 people. But as that effort nears completion, the community is questioning what to do with a memorial that is itself rubble. City leaders have been discussing whether to move the whole structure or perhaps simply take parts of the building for public display. “We think there is some value to preserving it,” said Mark Rohr, the city manager. “But we can’t let it sit there forever.” In the meantime, the walls of the building, known here as the volunteer house, are peeling under the assault of sun and rain and wind. Like a love letter slowly torn to pieces, the peeling paint is littering the floorboards with snippets of messages, often just a few letters, a name or a word, like “home,” “rebuild” and “alone.” In the newly barren patches, more messages are being scrawled. The serendipity of the monument stands in sharp contrast with the deliberate stone and steel structures put up in nearby Cunningham Park. The first structure is a three-tiered fountain with 5, 22 and 11 streams of water on the different levels to symbolize the date of the storm. The second is an enormous metal replica of the rubber wristbands handed out to volunteers, emblazoned with the message “The Miracle of the Human Spirit.” A third one honoring relief workers is planned. These are the official memorials, the ones visited this month by a collection of men in suits who had gathered for the announcement that a company had donated $25,000 to the park. At the end of that ceremony, a man dressed as Santa emerged to present the assembled politicians, including the governor, with a giant check and to pose for photos. “Ho, ho, ho, merry Christmas, everyone,” he said, “And thank you, Coca-Cola.” Throughout Joplin, it is hard to miss the signs and sounds of progress. New houses and businesses have emerged on the flattened landscape . Plans to replace the destroyed high school and hospital are moving forward. And though many are still struggling, the feared exodus has not begun. That progress, city leaders have said repeatedly, could not have happened without the assistance of volunteers. Nearly 115,000 volunteers, from every state, have registered with the city since the storm, and perhaps as many simply showed up and started helping. This was what Tim Bartow, the owner of the house, was responding to when he wrote a message of thanks to the volunteers who lent their hands and backs to the hard, messy work of clearing the rubble. Mr. Bartow, who rode out the storm with his family in the basement, spray painted it in large letters on the side of the home: “You are our heroes.” Then he cleared space in the house for the storm-damaged furniture, which had been strewn over several blocks, so that volunteers would have a place to rest. After a while, the volunteers started writing messages of their own, offering love from Georgia and prayers from Texas. Now many make a point of stopping here before they leave the community. Some just signed their names, but the more expansive recited Scripture or offered words of support. The sentiments expressed are hardly unusual, reminding that in moments of tragedy, people seek comfort in the worn truths underlying clichés. “The human heart, even after this,” reads one message written on the kitchen floor, each letter on a different tile, “remains stronger than this very ground.” The foundation of the house, in truth, is crumbling, Mr. Bartow said. But he has decided to leave the house up until city leaders decide on the question of preservation. Patrick Tuttle, director of the Joplin Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the decision would be made soon because cleanup deadlines were looming. “Whether we take part of it or all of it is the question,” he said. Then, whatever remains will be torn down so the property can be sold as an empty lot. For now, though, the house stands, oddly resilient to the deconstructive power of the storm and the constructive power of the rebuilding city, speaking to a moment in between that will be harder to explain when it is gone.

Tornadoes
Joplin (Mo)
Monuments and Memorials
Volunteers and Community Service


Chinese Journalist Detained in Beijing, One Day After Human Rights Talk With U.S.

Abstract: BEIJING — A Chinese journalist who had pressed for the release of a prominent human rights activist was detained Friday, one day after the United States completed annual discussions with China on human rights. The journalist, Chen Min, 51, widely known by his pen name, Xiao Shu, was called to a meeting with security officials in Beijing at around noon Friday. As he was questioned, he kept a friend informed by text message. In his last message at 1:50 p.m., Mr. Chen said the officers wanted him to leave Beijing and were threatening him, the friend, Wang Gongquan, said. After that, frantic calls and messages to Mr. Chen went unanswered, Mr. Wang said. Mr. Chen had helped organize a petition calling for the release of Xu Zhiyong, a legal scholar who inspired a grass-roots anticorruption campaign calling for public officials to declare their assets. Mr. Xu, already under house arrest for more than three months, was detained on July 16 for seeking to “gather people and disrupt social order in a public space.” The detention of Mr. Chen came as an Obama administration official spoke at the American Embassy here Friday about the results of three days of meetings at the annual U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue, which is now in its 18th round. Uzra Zeya, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, said at a news conference that she had “specifically called into question the pattern of arrests and extralegal detentions of public interest lawyers, Internet activists, journalists, religious leaders and others who challenge official policies and actions in China.” The case of Mr. Xu, 40, was among those Ms. Zeya named as having been raised with the Chinese. Mr. Xu has worked as a law lecturer, and was previously a member of a local legislative body, the People’s Congress, in Beijing’s Haidian district. In recent years, the college where he is employed, the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, has barred him from teaching. Mr. Xu’s recent call for party officials to declare their assets seemed to be in line with the campaign by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to eliminate corruption. His main offense appears not to have been the cause he pursued, but rather his effort to mobilize a “New Citizens Movement,” which by some estimates had attracted several thousand people. Human Rights Watch estimates 16 people associated with the movement have been detained. Two other activists who are serving prison terms whose cases were raised with the Chinese were Gao Zhisheng, who defended practitioners of Falun Gong, a religious group banned in China, and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ms. Zeya said. The Americans raised the cases of more detained human rights activists, she indicated, than the eight identified by name at the news conference. The United States government was deeply concerned, Ms. Zeya said, that the Chinese authorities had tried to silence activists by targeting their family members and associates. In that category, she mentioned the families of Liu Xiaobo and Chen Guangcheng, a legal activist who is now in the United States. The detention of Mr. Chen, the journalist, came after he sent an e-mail Friday saying that he was prepared to endure arrest for the sake of Mr. Xu, the detained rights advocate. “I have no other choice,” Mr. Chen wrote in the e-mail, which he forwarded to a reporter. “First, in the name of brotherhood, I must act for Xu Zhiyong, my friend of many years. Second, my bottom line is the advancement of civil society. If the authorities violate this bottom line and I go along, that would amount to the bankruptcy of the ethical framework that I have stood by for many years.” Mr. Chen had worked as an editor and commentator at Southern Weekend, a weekly newspaper with a reputation for combative journalism that offended some officials. He was forced aside in 2011. He has attracted a wide following among educated Chinese readers with impassioned and sometimes acidic criticisms of censorship and other political restrictions. Mr. Xi has indicated that proposed economic reforms would not be accompanied by any significant political relaxation. He has instead repeatedly stressed his loyalty to party traditions and political orthodoxy. On Thursday, Chinese state-run news media featured a commentary from the official Xinhua news agency that warned that if China embraced democratic ideas promoted by liberal intellectuals, it would succumb to turmoil worse than that in the Soviet Union after the collapse of Communism. These unnamed liberal intellectuals were “creating apocalyptic visions of China’s imminent collapse and vilifying the present socialist system,” the commentary said, accusing the liberals of “blatantly inciting the public to serve as cannon fodder for triggering social turmoil in China.”

Chen Min
Human Rights
China
News media,journalism
Political prisoner


Climate Change - Bali Climate Talks - Kevin Conrad - Papua New Guinea

Abstract: For 15 years, United Nations talks aimed at fixing a faltering 1992 climate treaty have provided little drama. But at the latest session last month on the Indonesian island of Bali, Kevin Conrad, a young man representing one of the world’s least influential nations, Papua New Guinea, gained a worldwide spotlight as he faced down the sole superpower, the United States. It was during the final formal plenary, which was crammed with observers, journalists and officials from more than 180 countries. The American negotiators had objected to language inserted in a document at the last minute by developing countries led by China and India. A swell of boos and jeers built. After a long sequence of polite criticisms from developing countries over the sudden diplomatic logjam at the very end of two draining weeks, it was Mr. Conrad’s turn. “I would ask the United States, we ask for your leadership,” he said. “But if for some reason you’re not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.” The room erupted in applause, and within minutes the lead American representative, Paula J. Dobriansky, dropped the objection and said, “We will go forward and join consensus today.” Nearly every news report — many are now on YouTube — focused on Mr. Conrad’s bold comment as a nudge that got the sleeping giant in the global greenhouse to move a little. But what happened was not that simple, Mr. Conrad said recently, in his first in-depth interview since the close of the talks. The American delegation, in a way, was “set up” by other countries to take the blame, he said, adding that his prime goal was not to embarrass the United States but to keep the negotiations from getting derailed. Divisions and confusion within the negotiating bloc of developing countries, which has long gone by the name the Group of 77 and China, were as much the cause of the diplomatic logjam as anything else, he said. Interviews with several other negotiators and observers supported his view. “There was a certain feeling that maybe the U.S. could be the fall guy for this whole thing, that if G-77 couldn’t resolve its own issues, if it just held the line on a position they already knew the U.S. rejected, that the U.S. would be the one that stepped up and had to take the flak for collapsing the whole thing,” he said. “From Papua New Guinea’s standpoint, we couldn’t accept that.” Mr. Conrad said the potential breakdown in the session’s final hours was particularly vexing to him because New Guinea and other forested tropical countries were finally getting attention for a proposal of payments by rich countries for preserving tropical forests. Deforestation currently contributes about a fifth of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. The boos for the United States, and cheers for Mr. Conrad, appeared to reflect widespread feelings, built over seven years, that the Bush administration had stalled progress in curbing greenhouse gases even as it claimed to be leading the effort. In fact, Mr. Conrad’s statement was an intentional ironic echo of one made by another American official, James L. Connaughton, the chairman of the White House council on environmental quality, who had been quoted by Reuters earlier in the week as saying: “We will lead, we will continue to lead. But leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.” Mr. Conrad, 39, was born in the United States to Papuan parents but grew up in Wewak on New Guinea’s northern coast. He studied finance at top American universities, worked in investment banking and lives with his family in the New York City area. Besides representing New Guinea in climate talks, he runs the Rainforest Coalition , a group formed by tropical countries seeking compensation for the benefits of not cutting their forests. In the interview, which can be seen on video (and commented on) at nytimes.com/dotearth , Mr. Conrad stressed the need for continued focus on cutting emissions wherever they come from, rather than on countries tussling for advantage, as was largely the case in Bali. “I think collectively we as humanity have become more mature in this climate battle, and we understand collectively that we’ve got to turn off all the emissions sources in order to win,” he said. “The climate doesn’t know whether it came from a factory or from Papua New Guinea’s deforestation. We’ve really got to get all hands on deck and tackle all of the issues.” He added: “If we can deliver sustainable revenues to communities living in rural areas of tropical countries that are deforesting simply to exist, then we have sort of a win-win-win proposition.” He said the rich-poor divide in the talks, which crystallized in the final clash in Bali, is a distraction from the reality that all countries have agreed, by the end of 2009, to do something new: define a threshold for greenhouse gases beyond which the world will not go. “We were all there for a collective good, and I was playing a role for the collective good,” he said. “We have an opportunity here, and that’s why I hope we don’t fumble it.”

Global Warming
Treaties
Third World and Developing Countries
International Trade and World Market
International Relations
United Nations


Recession Drains Social Security and Medicare

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Even as Congress hunted for ways to finance a major expansion of health insurance coverage, the Obama administration reported Tuesday that the financial condition of the two largest federal benefit programs, Medicare and Social Security , had deteriorated, in part because of the recession. As a result, the administration said, the Medicare fund that pays hospital bills for older Americans is expected to run out of money in 2017, two years sooner than projected last year. The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than predicted, it said. Spending on Social Security and Medicare totaled more than $1 trillion last year, accounting for more than one-third of the federal budget . The fragility of the two programs is a concern not just for current beneficiaries, but also for future retirees, taxpayers and politicians. Lawmakers say they would never allow Medicare’s trust fund to run out of money. But beneficiaries could be required to pay higher premiums, co-payments and deductibles to help cover the costs. The projected date of insolvency, a widely used measure of the benefit programs’ financial health, shows the immense difficulties Mr. Obama and Congress will face in trying to shore them up while also extending health coverage to millions of Americans. The labor secretary, Hilda L. Solis , noted that 5.7 million jobs had been lost since the recession began in December 2007. With fewer people working, the government collects less in payroll taxes , a major source of financing for Medicare and Social Security. A resumption of economic growth is not expected to close the financing gap. The trustees’ bleak projections already assume that the economy will begin to recover late this year. The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner , said the only way to keep Medicare solvent was to “control runaway growth in both public and private health care expenditures.” And he said Mr. Obama intended to do that as part of his plan to guarantee access to health insurance for all Americans. But if cost controls do not produce the expected savings, Congress is likely to find it difficult to preserve benefits without increasing taxes. Just hours before the trustees of Medicare and Social Security issued their annual report, suggesting that the nation could not afford the programs it had, the Senate Finance Committee finished a hearing on how to pay for the expansion of health insurance coverage that Mr. Obama seeks. Mr. Obama has said he does not want to finance expanded health coverage with more deficit spending. Rather, he says, Congress must find ways to offset the costs, so they do not add to the deficit over the next decade. Federal deficits and debt are soaring because of the recession and federal efforts to shore up banks and other industries while trying to revive the economy with a huge infusion of federal spending. “The financial outlook for the hospital insurance trust fund is significantly less favorable than projected in last year’s annual report,” the Medicare trustees said. “Actual payroll tax income in 2008 and projected future amounts are significantly lower than previously projected, due to lower levels of average wages and fewer covered workers.” In coming years, the trustees said, Medicare spending will increase faster than either workers’ earnings or the economy over all. The trustees predicted that, for the first time in more than three decades, Social Security recipients would not receive any increase in their benefits next year or in 2011. In 2012, they predicted, the cost-of-living adjustment will be 1.4 percent. The updates are calculated under a statutory formula and reflect changes in the Consumer Price Index , which was unusually high last year because of energy prices. If there is no cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security, about three-fourths of Medicare beneficiaries will not see any change in their basic premiums for Part B, which covers doctors’ services. The monthly premium, now $96.40, is usually deducted from Social Security checks, the main source of income for more than half of older Americans. The trustees said that one-fourth of Medicare beneficiaries would face sharply higher premiums: about $104 next year and $120 in 2011. This group includes new Medicare beneficiaries and those with higher incomes (over about $85,000 a year for individuals and $170,000 for couples). Seventy-five percent of beneficiaries will not pay any increase, so the remaining 25 percent have to pay more to keep the trust fund at the same level, Medicare officials said. The aging of baby boomers will strain both Medicare and Social Security, but Medicare’s financial problems are more urgent. The trustees predict a 30 percent increase in the number of Medicare beneficiaries in the coming decade, to 58.8 million in 2018, from 45.2 million last year. But the projected increase in health costs and the use of medical care is a more significant factor in the growth of Medicare. The trustees predict that average Medicare spending per beneficiary will increase more than 50 percent, to $17,000 in 2018, from $11,000 last year. Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said the Medicare report “underscores the urgent need for health reform.”

US Economy
Medicare
Social Security
Finance
Barack Obama
Health Insurance
Recession and Depression


Uproar as Komen Foundation Cuts Money to Planned Parenthood

Abstract: Pink ribbons have for decades been a symbol of resolve and compassion in the face of the deadly disease of breast cancer . Now, that nearly ubiquitous icon has many women seeing red. When the nation’s largest breast cancer advocacy organization considered in October cutting off most of its financial support to the nation’s largest abortion provider, the breast cancer group was hoping for a quiet end to an increasingly controversial partnership. Instead, the organization, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, is now engulfed in a controversy that threatens to undermine one of the most successful advocacy campaigns. The foundation’s decision to eliminate most of its grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening caused a cascade of criticism from prominent women’s groups, politicians and public health advocates and a similarly strong outpouring of support from conservative women and religious groups that oppose abortion. Now, leaders of both the Komen foundation and Planned Parenthood are accusing each other of bad faith and actions that undermine women. And two organizations dedicated to detecting and curing breast cancer have found themselves on opposite sides of the nation’s divisive debate over abortion. John D. Raffaelli, a Komen board member and Washington lobbyist, said Wednesday that the decision to cut off money to 17 of the 19 Planned Parenthood affiliates it had supported was made because of the fear that an investigation of Planned Parenthood by Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, would damage Komen’s credibility with donors. The organization’s longtime support of Planned Parenthood had already cost it some support from anti-abortion forces, Mr. Raffaelli said. But the board feared that charges that Komen supported organizations under federal investigation for financial improprieties could take a further and unacceptable toll on donations, he said. “People don’t understand that a Congressional investigation doesn’t necessarily mean a problem of substance,” Mr. Raffaelli said. “When people read about it in places like Texarkana, Tex., where I’m from, it sounds really bad.” So the Komen board voted that all of its vendors and grantees must certify that they are not under investigation by federal, state or local authorities. But for Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, being the target of partisan investigations is part of doing business. So Komen’s new rule effectively ended their long partnership and seemed to the health services provider an unacceptable betrayal of their common mission to save women’s lives. Dawn Laguens, an executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said that Komen’s money had over the years underwritten breast cancer screenings for 170,000 women, some of whose lives were saved as a result. She said she had no sympathy for Komen’s attempt to mollify donors by ending its relationship with a controversial provider of women’s health services. Only a small percentage of Planned Parenthood’s expenditures go toward abortion services. “I’m going to reserve my empathy for the women left on the side of the road by somebody who has given into bullying,” Ms. Laguens said. “I think it’s particularly curious that they wanted to quietly put this decision out there.” News of Komen’s decision galvanized many of Planned Parenthood’s supporters. The organization had collected $400,000 in donations by mid-afternoon on Wednesday and hoped the flow would continue long enough to replace Komen’s entire annual grants of $700,000, Ms. Laguens said. Komen supporters accuse Planned Parenthood of milking Komen’s decision to generate a fund-raising bonanza. “Why are they going nuts?” Mr. Raffaelli asked rhetorically. “And the answer is that they want to raise money, and they’re doing it at the expense of a humanitarian organization that shares their goals and has given them millions of dollars over the years.” Komen told Planned Parenthood of its decision just days before Christmas. When Komen’s board voted on the policy, several members asked who would be affected by the new policy. Elizabeth Thompson, Komen’s president, said, according to Mr. Raffaelli: “Planned Parenthood is the only one we know of. If we find others, those would be impacted, too.” For the board, the calculation was simple: “You should as a general rule always pick vendors and grantees that will broaden your base of support and not narrow it,” Mr. Raffaelli said. Mr. Raffaelli disputed assertions that were widely circulated on the Web on Wednesday that the decision was made or influenced by Karen Handel, Komen’s new senior vice president for public policy, a Republican who ran for governor of Georgia in 2010. During that campaign, Ms. Handel wrote, “Since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.” Ms. Handel was hired to urge state governments to spend money on breast cancer screening, and having a Republican deliver that message could help in many states, Mr. Raffaelli said. One of the two Planned Parenthood affiliates that will receive money from Komen for 2012 is Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties in California. Stephanie Kight, senior vice president of that affiliate, said that in mid-December, her local Komen affiliate called and asked for the 2012 grant application to be submitted that day. Ms. Kight complied and believes that the reason for the rush was to get the grant financed before the new rules went into effect. The Komen affiliate in Connecticut posted a message on its Web site on Wednesday saying, “We understand, and share, in the frustration around this situation.” Ann Hogan, board president of the Connecticut Komen affiliate, said she was surprised by the decision to cut most of Planned Parenthood’s financing and had called officials at Komen’s headquarters. “I’m frustrated by the entire situation,” Ms. Hogan said. Foes of abortion and Web sites critical of it have criticized the Komen foundation’s financing of Planned Parenthood for years. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis and several bishops in Ohio issued statements last year raising concerns about donating to the Komen foundation. In December, LifeWay Christian Resources, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, said it was recalling a pink Bible it was selling because a dollar per copy was going to the Komen foundation. “We are very grateful Susan G. Komen for the Cure will no longer fund Planned Parenthood affiliates,” said Thom S. Rainer, president of LifeWay. Pleas to boycott or defend Susan G. Komen for the Cure over its decision to pull money from Planned Parenthood poured onto Web sites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr on Wednesday, as activists both amateur and professional urged action. “Susan Komen would not give in to bullies or to fear,” Judy Blume, the children’s book author, said in a Twitter post. “Too bad the foundation bearing her name did.”