City of Immigrants Fills Jail Cells With Its Own

Abstract: CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility , the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored. Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse. After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world. In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration . Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest. If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion. Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work. Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention , which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions. But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck. In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested. Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools. Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.” Yet in a community whose 1.3 square miles are said to be too small for secrets — “If you sneeze on Washington Street, someone on Pine Street says, ‘Gesundheit,’ ” Mr. Benson said — city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.” The mystery is in some ways understandable. Though immigration detainees made up one-third of the daily population and a majority of the 4,200 men and women who moved through Wyatt’s 722 beds in a year, most were from other states, and those from Rhode Island did not remain long: Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically transferred them within a week. Some were legal immigrants who had served time for serious crimes. But increasingly they were the kind of people who in the past would not have been arrested — people without papers, similar to some of the people who play, cheer and live in Wyatt’s shadow. Sometimes the same people. Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., one of Wyatt’s developers and now the jail’s chief executive, said that who the inmates were made no difference to the jail, which was run like a business, under strict standards . “I’m not interested in getting involved in the politics of immigration,” he said. “All we do is detain people that our clients tell us to detain.” Swallowed by the System Over 10 years, Maynor Canté, 26, hardly glanced at the jail he passed as he hurried between home, two jobs and St. Matthew’s Church , where he led a prayer group. He was 15 when he left Guatemala in 1997, sneaking across the Mexican border to join seven older siblings, legal residents who had spent years scraping new lives out of the industrial ruins of Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley. Caught in Texas, the teenager was quickly let go pending a hearing, like so many arrested under the “catch and release” policy that prevailed while the nation’s boom times demanded cheap immigrant labor. When he failed to show up in court, a deportation order was issued. A decade later, Mr. Canté spoke near-fluent English, and had spent thousands of dollars trying to legalize his status. Mornings, he cleaned a factory for $8 an hour. Evenings, he worked at his nephew’s new clothing shop on Dexter Street, one of several Latino businesses that had revived a bleak stretch of vacant storefronts. Then, early one morning in October 2007 when he headed out the door for his cleaning job, five immigration agents hustled him into a van. That night, as frightened relatives tried to find him, he was delivered to Wyatt in chains. Inside, a plaque declares that the detention center’s mission is “to protect the public from people who pose a threat to society.” One corridor, waxed to an immaculate shine, leads to a darkened control room where correction officers watch a dozen video monitors fed by 200 cameras. A guard can scan an entire unit housing 72 detainees in two- to four-man cells; zooming in on a card game, he can see that one player is holding hearts. The jail was built for inmates awaiting trial on federal charges — drug possession, child pornography , political corruption. But to help pay off $106 million borrowed for its recent expansion and refinancing, Wyatt was now counting on prisoners like Mr. Canté: administrative detainees not charged with a crime, but held while the government tries to deport them. Now he found himself slated for deportation without a hearing — or even any way to make a phone call. “I was scared,” he said, recalling how he prayed the rosary and stared out the tiny window of his cell to watch a freight train pass at 6 a.m. Outside, his sister Emma, 33, was distraught. Since their mother’s death in 2006, she had felt more responsible for protecting Mr. Canté, a big-shouldered man who was still her little brother. “Three days passed and we didn’t know where he was,” she said. On the fourth day, after calls to many jails, a high school friend located Mr. Canté, and members of his prayer circle flocked to Wyatt. His priest, the Rev. Otoniel J. Gomez, had never visited the jail in the eight years since he was sent to Central Falls from Colombia. He spoke to his weeping parishioner through a thick plexiglass barrier. “I thought, ‘This is like a horror movie, talking with a criminal,’ ” he said. Yet the priest soon realized that Mr. Canté was lucky. “Most of these people didn’t have any relatives or friends near them,” Father Gomez said, “not even a lawyer.” The official list of free legal help was largely a dead end. Wyatt’s expensive inmate telephone service was often useless, because it took days to set up an account, and it could not be used to call cellphones. Desperate, other detainees passed Mr. Canté phone numbers on scraps of paper, begging him to ask his visitors to call and tell where they were. Out of Sight, Out of Reach Plucked from communities from Maine to New York, some had already been transferred through several jails; many would soon be moved again, as the federal immigration agency improvised to make space for detainees from new roundups. “It’s like having a room with five bathtubs and water coming in and out of each one to maintain an equilibrium,” explained Todd Thurlow, acting deputy director of the Boston field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which contracts for about 1,000 beds in dozens of jails across New England. Wyatt had a reputation as one of the most professionally run. But for newcomers without help, it could be rough. One complaint, echoed by former jail employees, was that detainees in pain from illness or injury often went without adequate treatment. Other detainees spoke of going hungry, like Edgar Bocce, 25, a Guatemalan cleaner who said two muscular inmates took away his first dinner tray — rice, beans and spaghetti — while guards did nothing. Spartan meals could be supplemented with food from the jail’s commissary, but only if relatives sent money, or detainees stayed long enough to earn some; on the cleaning crew that kept the jail so spotless, starting pay was 40 cents a day. Though officials said detainees were housed according to their history of violence, only one unit was dedicated to immigration detainees, and the rest were mixed in with criminal suspects and convicts. Perhaps the greatest frustration, inmates said, was their inability to make sense of what was happening to them. “Why am I here in jail?” asked one, a Central Falls mechanic who had been seized at immigration headquarters in Providence when he went to check why his green card application was taking so long. Wyatt guards had no answers. “They tell me, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re not Immigration.’ ” Mr. Canté’s sisters borrowed money and hired him a lawyer. But a day after the lawyer’s first visit, their brother was gone — transferred to a Boston jail. That week, he was shackled and bused with 60 other men to detention in York, Pa., then put on a government plane with 300 chained immigrants. He ended up one of 2,000 detainees packed into a windowless tent city that had sprung up only a year earlier in Raymondville, Tex. — the nation’s largest immigration prison camp , run for profit and still growing. For weeks after his lawyer reopened his case for a hearing in Boston, she could not locate him. He was on the verge of deportation by the time she managed to persuade the government to fly him back from Texas, two days before last Christmas. Mr. Canté finally appeared before an immigration judge on Jan. 2, after three months in the detention maze. Because his case fell under the more lenient laws in force before 1997, he not only was released on bond, but allowed to work until his immigration hearing in December 2009. He is now trying to pay back thousands of dollars in loans and legal fees. A Market for Inmates Mr. Canté, whose time in detention cost federal taxpayers about $10,000, was part of what many call an “ immigrant gold rush ” that turned the private prison industry from bust to boom. Across the country, starting in Texas in the 1980s, prison companies built jail cells on speculation as they rushed to cash in on the war on drugs. They overbuilt; abuse scandals and escapes soured many states on private prisons, and by the late 1990s, as competition for inmates increased, the companies’ stock was suffering. Yet given the lure of easy financing and big fees for constructing deals, developers of prison space did not hold back on growth. Instead, big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and the Cornell Companies added more beds and lobbied harder at the source of the most lucrative inmates, the federal government. The payoff came after 9/11 in an accelerating stream of new detainees: foreigners swept up by the nation’s rising furor over illegal immigration. Central Falls was similar, in its poverty, to more remote communities that had hitched their hopes to jails. Set in the river valley where America’s industrial revolution was born, its textile mills had hired large immigrant families — French Canadians and Poles, followed by Syrians and Portuguese — and squeezed them into triple-decker tenements. Even after the work moved away, the mills’ cheap housing continued to draw immigrants, mostly from Latin America. The city was nearly bankrupt in 1990 when developers made a proposition: Build a profit-making jail for two or three hundred nonviolent federal detainees, and guarantee a steady stream of money and jobs for Central Falls. But the deal that emerged, like many elsewhere, proved better at paying private investors than generating public revenue. The municipal corporation borrowed $30 million through a state bond issue to build Wyatt, and hired the Cornell company to run it. Six years later, the municipal body borrowed $38 million to refinance, buying back most of the bonds at a premium that gave the original bondholders a lump-sum return of 28.5 percent on their investment in addition to 9 percent annual interest. And from its opening party in November 1993, Wyatt ran into the same problem as its competitors: finding enough inmates. For a time it imported murderers and rapists by the busload from North Carolina’s crowded prisons. When city residents objected, they learned that Central Falls had no control over who was housed at Wyatt and would get no money unless it was full. At best, Wyatt paid Central Falls $2 to $3 a day for each detainee — less than $400,000 in the good years — to offset its use of city services. At times when the flow of inmates faltered, payments slowed to a trickle. Yet, following the strange logic of prison growth, Cornell and Wyatt officials were soon pushing to refinance yet again and expand. Thomas Lazieh, the mayor who had championed the deal that built Wyatt, defended it as the best the city could get. His successor, Lee Matthews, took a darker view and sued to stop the expansion. “The city was sold a bill of goods,” he said. Wyatt doubled in size anyway, with the backing of the current mayor, Charles D. Moreau. Convinced that it could wrest more revenue from the jail as immigration enforcement boomed, the municipal corporation took full control in August 2007. The budget it approved late that year included $6,000 a month for a Washington lobbyist to seek more detainees at higher rates. A Recession, and Raids By then, as in many parts of the country, people in Rhode Island were looking at Latino immigrants as prime suspects in a dismal economy. A polarizing immigration debate had converged with a huge state budget deficit and high unemployment. As this year began, resentment flared. The catalyst was an ordinary New Year’s feature in The Providence Journal about the first baby born in Rhode Island in 2008. Mother and newborn were still in the hospital when federal agents, spurred by the publicity, raided their apartment in Providence and took away the father on immigration violations. Afterward, the police said, the mother discovered that a roommate from Guatemala had hanged himself behind his locked bedroom door, apparently during the raid. The baby’s father, initially held in secret at Wyatt, was eventually deported. A Guatemalan landscaper with two misdemeanor convictions, he had been ordered to leave the country in August 2007, but stayed, his lawyer said, because his fiancée, a United States citizen, was pregnant with their second child. To some, the case illustrated how illegal immigrants, who make up less than 4 percent of Rhode Island’s population, drained public services. “Rhode Island taxpayers are the real victims!” declared Alice Losasso of West Warwick, in a letter to The Journal. “I’m tired of paying for interpreters so that immigrants can take their driver’s test in whatever language they speak. I’m tired of finding that their girlfriends and children are on welfare.” Her words echoed a major theme of the governor, Donald L. Carcieri, a Republican. In March, he issued an executive order directing the State Police to help federal authorities round up illegal immigrants, saying that they depressed wages and strained services. Public approval for that order reached 75 percent in one poll after an illegal immigrant from Guatemala was charged with carjacking and raping a woman outside a mall. He had been arrested twice before by the Providence police, and already had an outstanding order of deportation. The governor appeared on the Bill O’Reilly program to accuse the Providence mayor of sheltering criminals. In Central Falls, the crackdown sowed panic. At the public charter school two blocks from Wyatt, parents, already afraid to be photographed at school events, were now reluctant to drive to meetings, said Sarah Friedman, a founder of the school. An 8-year-old girl, one of the school’s high-scoring students, stopped speaking in class when her father disappeared into detention, the girl’s mother said. Without his income, mother and daughter, United States citizens, were almost evicted from their apartment. At Central Falls High School, some students stopped coming to class because their families had gone into hiding, said Margie Cruz, a school-home liaison: “The child was born here, the child is legal. But the family has to hide because the father will be deported. “I’ve seen students stopped for a traffic violation and the whole family got deported,” she added. “Children that were here for years. I watched them grow up.” One longtime Little League mother said she used to worry that child molesters could be watching from the jail windows. Now, she said, she worried that her sister’s children would end up inside — the niece who had just graduated from high school with no path to legal status; the nephew who had been taught that local Quakers hid fugitive slaves, and asked his aunt to hide him if his parents were detained. They were part of a generation of Central Falls teenagers born abroad who were coming of age as outlaws in their own town. Some had already lost relatives, like the 14-year-old whose older brother had made a left turn on red and ended up in a detention odyssey that led to deportation. “My mother’s afraid the same thing that happened to my brother could happen to me, because I play soccer, I’m out there,” he said. A few blocks from Wyatt, Police Chief Joseph P. Moran III praised the jail as “a great neighbor — it keeps things under control.” But he went on to tell about the difficulty of investigating the killing of a Dominican cabdriver, because witnesses had not come forward for fear of deportation. He talked of the blurring line between police work and immigration enforcement. One domestic violence call by a husband illustrated the new reality. After a routine computer check, both he and his wife were taken into police custody, and her 8-month-old baby was handed to a friend. The man had an outstanding bench warrant; his wife had a deportation warrant issued by immigration authorities — something not included in the police database a few years ago. “We work hand in hand with ICE,” Chief Moran said. At the same time, he added: “I have friends from Honduras, Ecuador. My kids went to school here. It makes it very, very difficult.” Profit and Loss For defenders of the jail, the bottom line has always been the bottom line: Wyatt’s growth meant more federal money for the city. “They’re going to detain them somewhere,” said the manager of Mr. Williams True Styles Barbershop, on the struggling Dexter Street commercial strip. “It’s a billion-dollar business. Unless we’re going to free them, what difference does it make?” But at least in Central Falls, the incarceration economy was not delivering on its promise. In late June, Mayor Moreau, a big man with a florid face and a police siren in his car, offered up a budget that laid off firefighters — and told angry city employees to get used to it. “We’re at the end of the financial rope for Central Falls,” he told the City Council, citing more than 200 boarded-up homes, foreclosures at the rate of 25 a week, and cuts in state and federal aid that required a 4 percent property tax increase and an 8 percent spending cut in the new $17.4 million budget. Outside, past the defunct factory where Hasbro once made G. I. Joe, beyond the rusty hulk of the downsized Sylvania plant, the summer twilight gleamed on Wyatt’s new facade. What had happened to the windfall of money and jobs it had offered? The jail’s annual revenue had almost doubled in a year, to $21 million, mainly from increasing immigration detention. But the city budget projected revenue of only $525,000 from Wyatt, which is exempt from taxes. That was not even enough to cover its share of city services, according to an estimate by the city’s finance department. It was certainly nothing like the $2 million a year that Mr. Benson, the City Council president, had mentioned to a reporter in April. The mayor, he said, predicted the city would get that much in profits formerly reaped by the Cornell Companies, now that the local board had taken over. Neither the mayor nor the board members, unpaid mayoral appointees, would talk about Wyatt. As for jobs, only 10 of about 200 Wyatt employees lived in Central Falls. The jail’s board was even declining to make the $1,500 donations to local groups it once supported, like a scholarship fund and youth football. Mr. Ventetuolo, the Wyatt chief executive, would not say how much had been saved by dispensing with Cornell’s for-profit services, maintaining that it had all gone toward keeping prices low for the federal government. Wyatt was still in transition, he said, striving to fill new beds to meet soaring payments to bondholders, now up to $8.4 million yearly from $2.7 million under the terms of the latest refinancing. Yet Mr. Ventetuolo’s consulting company had won a raise, to $230,000 from $156,000. And as the number of detainees increased, so did revenue from surcharges on their collect calls to relatives, under a contract with Global Tel Link that gave Wyatt a cut of about $564,000 a year. That arrangement had survived a state ban on phone surcharges at prisons, thanks to lobbying that gave Wyatt a loophole. Other large fees went to lawyers and financiers, as Mr. Matthews, the former mayor, pointed out. “There just happens to be a lot of money made by folks other than the people of the City of Central Falls,” he said. Out in the Open City officials in Central Falls — mostly descendants of earlier immigrants — were mindful that they presided over a community at least 60 percent Latino, where fear of the immigration crackdown was widespread. At the same time, the city had built its hopes for economic stability on a jail that was helping to make that crackdown possible. The combination created a local immigration politics that sometimes verged on denial. But last summer, Wyatt itself was suddenly caught in the glare of the state’s crackdown. On the evening of July 15, a dozen State Police officers and 50 immigration agents swept into six courthouses across the state. They arrested 31 cleaners on suspicion of immigration violations, people paid $7.40 an hour to vacuum floors and scrub toilets in Rhode Island’s halls of justice. All worked for two large state contractors, one owned by the brother of a state legislator allied with Governor Carcieri. In the uproar that followed, experiences that had been private in cases like Mr. Canté’s were put on public display: the difficulty of locating those in custody; the distress of relatives, many of them legal residents or citizens; the absence of basic legal protections familiar to anyone who watches “Law & Order.” Advocates eventually located most of the cleaners. Four were at Wyatt, including a 29-year-old single mother detained in its new women’s unit. Two days after the raids, as city officials raised the Colombian flag over City Hall to honor that nation’s Independence Day, Mayor Moreau criticized the roundup, and chided Governor Carcieri for spending law enforcement resources on it. “We have better things to do,” he said, “than chasing the lady that cleans the attorney general’s office.” A reporter asked how he squared that criticism with Wyatt’s role in holding illegal immigrants, including the cleaning woman locked up there. “One has nothing to do with the other,” he retorted. “It has nothing to do with the City of Central Falls.” Soon, a case that drew national attention made that distinction harder to maintain. On Aug. 6, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a Chinese computer engineer from New York who had overstayed a visa, died in Wyatt’s custody after a year in various detention centers and months in pain. The Times reported a week later that despite his repeated pleas for help, his fractured spine and extensive cancer had gone undiagnosed until shortly before his death. Officials at Wyatt, where he spent his last month, said he had received plenty of medical attention, and immigration authorities started an internal investigation. But local pastors and Latino advocacy groups gathered outside Wyatt on Aug. 15 to demand an independent inquiry. A guard who watched the demonstration, who asked that his name not be published for fear of losing his job, voiced the ambivalence toward Wyatt that seems to shape the attitudes of many in Central Falls. He spoke with sympathy of “good, hard-working people” detained there, and with distaste of the rookie guards — a result of low pay and high turnover — “who talk to people with no respect, like they’re dogs.” But he added: “Immigration and all that, that has nothing to do with us. We’re just the prison.” Even in the Latino population, the new awareness of Wyatt stirred little resistance. “If the Spanish were all registered to vote they could take the city in one election,” observed Councilman Benson. “A lot of them don’t vote because they don’t trust the government, and a lot of them are illegal, so they can’t.” In contrast, Mr. Canté, who finally had proper papers, said he felt like part of Central Falls for the first time. “In all these years I’ve been here illegally, everywhere I went, everything I used to do, I used to feel like a reject,” he said. “Now I feel like I’ve been accepted for the community. I don’t feel afraid anymore. I feel, like, free.” Just how closely Central Falls was entwined in the business of locking up people like Mr. Canté became more obvious this month, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, citing their continuing investigation into Mr. Ng’s death, abruptly removed all immigration detainees from Wyatt, scattering them to other jails in New England, Texas and Louisiana. With Wyatt’s solvency, if not its survival, uncertain, the mayor lobbied the state’s Congressional delegation to get back a share of the growing market in immigration detainees. Meanwhile, jail officials hunted for deals like the one they narrowly lost last spring, to house 80 Vermont inmates judged criminally insane for crimes like murder and rape. Mr. Lazieh, the former mayor who first championed Wyatt, called the government’s immigration policies immoral, arguing that “the system has gone overboard — we’ve turned to criminalizing all immigrants.” But he had no regrets about his city’s part. “If it’s not in Central Falls,” he said, “then this facility would be someplace else.”

Immigration Detention
Rhode Island
Illegal Immigrants
Prisons and Prisoners
Immigration and Refugees
Economic Conditions and Trends


Buccaneers’ Williams Ready to Roll After Second Knee Injury in Two Years

Abstract: TAMPA, Fla. — Training camp was just a few minutes old, a trickle of fans still making their way to the shaded metal bleachers, when Carnell Williams went looking for trouble. His deeply scarred knees were covered by only pants and socks, the braces that protect football’s tender tendons set aside as Williams began his season as an unintentional sports medicine test case. As the rest of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers eased into a new season, Williams lunged toward it, finding a pileup and sticking his left leg in. “I was looking for contact,” Williams said. “I felt great. I was talking to my mom, and I said I’m probably one of the only guys to look forward to training camp. When you’ve been through what I’ve been through, you’re ready to play some football. Enough rehab. I’m ecstatic.” Four years ago , Cadillac Williams was the N.F.L.’s offensive rookie of the year, a powerful, swift runner from Auburn who, with a boyish smile and a nifty nickname, ripped off 100-yard games in his first three starts and quickly became the cornerstone of the Tampa Bay offense. But in 2007 and again in 2008, Williams tore a patellar tendon in his knee. The one in his right knee went first, and 15 months and 63 carries later, the left one tore. In the last two seasons, he has played just 10 games, and the long scars on his knees — the right one is about nine inches long — trace a tortuous path from budding star to afterthought. The more fragile anterior cruciate ligament and medial collateral ligament are such common football casualties that even casual followers refer to them by their familiar initials. But Williams’s future is being watched closely. If he holds onto his job in the crowded Buccaneers backfield, he will be what is thought to be the first N.F.L. player to successfully return from torn patellar tendons in both knees. (The Broncos’ Correll Buckhalter tore the patellar tendon in his right knee two years in a row.) Only one other player, the former Browns cornerback Gary Baxter, got as close as Williams to playing in a game with both patellar tendons rebuilt. Baxter tore them on the same play while breaking up a pass in 2006. He was on injured reserve in 2007, but last season he was able to practice in the preseason. Around that time, Baxter met the former Bears receiver Wendell Davis , who is thought to be the only other N.F.L. player to tear both patellar tendons on the same play. Davis never played again, and neither did Baxter. He needed more surgery, and the Browns released him. Fearing a future of operations and pain, Baxter decided to retire. Williams knows only the broad outlines of Baxter’s and Buckhalter’s stories and of his own potential for medical history, largely because the whispers that he was finished provide the soundtrack for his recovery. “I don’t even sweat it,” Williams said. “My first one, when I ruptured my patellar, there was no way I could come back. I came back and did really good. When I did this one, I heard the same thing.” The patellar tendon connects the shin bone with the quadriceps, the large muscle at the front of the thigh, through the kneecap. It controls the amount of bend in the knee. It is thick and fibrous and it is far less often a football casualty than the anterior cruciate ligament and medial collateral ligament, which are often repaired using grafts from the patellar. But when it ruptures, surgery requires a large incision, and the leg must be locked straight to heal, which causes the quadriceps to atrophy. Healing fully takes at least six months, and it is three months before strengthening exercises can begin. Williams’s rehabilitations were grueling: he ran up escalators and in swimming pools. He pushed blocking sleds and golf carts, and he did weight lifting. Along the way, he grew annoyed because almost everyone believed it was for naught. After his first injury, sustained in October 2007, Williams feared his career might be over. He still struggles to describe the terrible pain he was in. But he was finally activated off the physically unable to perform list for the final six games last season. It was enough time for him to rush for four touchdowns, tying for the team lead . But then the left patellar tendon tore. Williams did not feel fear the second time, but fury. In the locker room after the Buccaneers lost the game and a shot at the playoffs — presaging a tumultuous off-season that included the firings of Coach Jon Gruden and General Manager Bruce Allen and the release of the team icon Derrick Brooks — Williams was balancing on crutches but smiling, shocking his teammates. He knew already the second knee injury was not as bad as the first. Still, with his future no longer assured, Williams says he feels a bit robbed by the detours in his career arc. “I’m human now, we have our doubts,” Williams said. “At the end of the day, when those thoughts come up, you have to push it to the side and step out there on faith. That’s kind of the feeling you get — How do you do two? What’s going on? Whatever it was, it made me a stronger person and made me appreciate the game.” Still, at 27 Williams is far removed from the first-round prodigy he was in 2005, particularly at a position where most players begin to decline by 30. Tampa Bay signed Derrick Ward from the Giants in the off-season, and Earnest Graham is penciled in as the starter. Williams is also working as a returner, although the Bucs have a Pro Bowl returner in Clifton Smith, hoping to secure a roster spot. Williams does not think his movements are limited, and coaches have praised how well he has practiced. Williams is being held out of game action until the third exhibition, Aug. 27 against Miami. “That’s just me being soft,” the new coach Raheem Morris said. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. He’s been fine. He’s been great. He’s been moving around. I just don’t think Cadillac needs to get used to getting hit.” Williams’s ability to return after the first injury means he is more likely to be able to return from the second, said Dr. Jonathan Glashow , an orthopedic and sports medicine surgeon and the co-director of sports medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. Williams is using his anger — at what he has lost, at his doubters — as fuel for his comeback. With each pile-up he emerges from, with every cut he makes, with each practice he finishes, Williams takes another step away from Baxter’s fate and back to the player he once was, toward a sports medicine marvel. “It’s tough, for you to put energy and effort to being able to come back, it’s mentally devastating,” said Baxter, who owns Burger King franchises in East Texas. “It’s going to take a strong person to do it. If he’s already done one, I know he can do another one. It used to be when a guy had an A.C.L., they were done. Someone had to be the first guy to come back.”

Football
Williams Carnell
Knees
Sports Medicine
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Buckhalter Correll
Baxter Gary
Mount Sinai Medical Center


Gorbachev Calls for New Vote in Disputed Russian Elections

Abstract: MOSCOW — Mikhail S. Gorbachev , the last leader of the Soviet Union, added his voice to a nascent anti-Kremlin protest movement on Wednesday, calling for the results of increasingly disputed parliamentary elections last weekend to be scrapped. “With every passing day, more and more Russians are ceasing to believe that the results of the elections were honest,” Mr. Gorbachev said in an interview with the Interfax news agency. “In my view, ignoring public opinion will discredit the authorities and destabilize the situation. That is why I think the government should make but one decision: annul the results of the elections and hold new ones.” Mr. Gorbachev’s remarks come after days of demonstrations against the authorities that have drawn street protests of a size unseen in Russia in years . Hundreds have been arrested and several opposition leaders given 15-day prison sentences. The Russian blogosphere was abuzz on Wednesday with calls for a large demonstration in Moscow this weekend to be held at Revolution Square outside the Kremlin. Yet Mr. Gorbachev is in many ways a curious addition to an amorphous and still largely undefined movement of Russians tenuously united in frustration with the government of Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Gorbachev’s own refusal to crack down heavily on dissent as leader of the Soviet Union helped hasten its demise. Yet, he is widely disliked by Russians of all political stripes who blame him for having allowed the country to fall into chaos. At any rate, it was considered unlikely that the authorities would pay much heed to Mr. Gorbachev’s appeal. Russia’s leaders have insisted that any violations in the elections on Sunday were insignificant. In an interview published on Wednesday, Vladimir V. Churov, the head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, dismissed dozens of amateur online videos that appeared to show ballot stuffing and other fraud. He suggested that they had been faked in home studios. “There is a lot of rubbish on the Internet about violations,” Mr. Churov, said in an interview with Itogi, a current affairs magazine. “Even before the elections, I heard about several fake polling places in apartments, where these movies were shot.” The videos, many of them jittery, amateur-looking productions shot on smartphones, have been touted as a new tactic in the fight against electoral malfeasance in Russia. They have resonated widely in the wake of the elections on Sunday, ricocheting through Russia’s rambunctious blogosphere and contributing to the increasingly evident displeasure with the country’s leaders. In some videos, it is indeed not apparent what violation the camera operator is purporting to document. But most were clearly not shot in apartments. Most of the complaints about falsification have been against Mr. Putin’s governing party, United Russia, which, despite the allegations of widespread fraud, suffered heavy losses. The party lost its constitutional majority in the recent elections, gaining 50 percent of the vote. Critics say that even that was too high to realistically reflect support for the party. The dispute has led to heightened tensions, particularly in Moscow, where thousands of riot police remain on alert in large trucks that line the main thoroughfares. There were sporadic attempts to hold protests in the capital on Wednesday, though the police quickly intervened. Several arrests were reported. The Russian police response to protests since the election drew criticism abroad. “All countries have the duty to respect the dissenting opinion of its own citizens,” said Matteo Mecacci, who heads the human rights committee at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “Restricting these basic civil and political rights is not the way for any democracy to function and is a dangerous path for the authorities to follow.” He called on Russia to allow free assembly, release detained protestors and refrain from unnecessary use of force. Many observers are now looking to the demonstration this weekend to either make or break the protest mood here. On a Facebook page set up for the event, more than 20,000 people had said they would attend as of Wednesday evening. On Triumfalnaya, a popular protest site here, a certain euphoria noticeable earlier in the week was clearly absent among the few dissenters who showed up. Caught amid throngs of helmeted police, some pointed gloomily up at a huge poster recently hung across from the square. It was advertising the latest installment of the movie, “Mission Impossible.”

Russia
Elections
Frauds and Swindling
Gorbachev Mikhail S
Churov Vladimir Y
Politics and Government
Demonstrations Protests and Riots


In Chinatown, a Church Speaks in Several Languages, but With One Strong Voice

Abstract: At the church, pots of red and white poinsettias were carefully arranged for midnight Mass. With the funeral service for an 82-year-old Irish-American parishioner completed in the morning, the Italian-American priest spent part of his afternoon on Monday reviewing his homily, to be delivered in Cantonese and English. A sign announcing a Christmas Eve vigil for Fujianese immigrants was taped to the window. The preparations to celebrate Christmas at the two-century-old Church of the Transfiguration in Chinatown, like the history of the church itself, were multilayered, reflecting the nimble adaptation of a church once dominated by Irish and Italian immigrants that now claims the largest Chinese Roman Catholic congregation in the United States. The English-language Mass, scheduled in part for the Italian-Americans, was said early, at 6 p.m., because those parishioners are now old enough that their children have long since grown up and moved away to Long Island or Staten Island. They do not like to stay out too late. The Mass in Cantonese, which still prevails on the stretch of Mott Street where the church stands, was said at 8 p.m. And at 9:30 p.m., immigrants from the southern Chinese province of Fujian, holding Catholic prayer books printed secretly in China away from the watchful eyes of the government, gathered for their vigil to await the midnight Mass, to be said in Mandarin and English. The vigil reflects the tradition of their worship back in China, where they would often gather, furtively and without priests, in parishioners’ homes. Catholicism in Communist China has historically been split between the state-sanctioned organization and the Vatican-based church. With practices passed down from the Dominican order of Catholic missionaries, who achieved significant influence in Fujian in the 17th century, the Fujianese style of worship is more isolated from the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. Even as many Catholic churches and schools in other parts of the city have been shuttered in recent years because of dwindling membership, Transfiguration Church has continued to evolve and flourish. The church baptizes more than three dozen adults, almost all Chinese, each Easter. It celebrates Masses in three languages, drawing 800 to 900 people each Sunday. Its school’s kindergarten class has a waiting list 150 names long. “We’re bursting at the seams here,” said the Rev. Raymond Nobiletti, a Brooklyn-born Italian-American who worked in Hong Kong for 15 years and speaks fluent Cantonese. When he first joined Transfiguration in 1991, at the request of Cardinal John J. O’Connor, Cantonese was enough to accommodate the Chinese parishioners. Since then, he has been joined by the Rev. Joseph Lin, a priest originally from Fujian Province, who can take confession in four languages. For the midnight Mass, Father Lin recruited two extra priests to hear the confessions of long lines of Fujianese Catholics, whose worship includes making the sacrament regularly. “Now we like to teach them not to do it so often, because it is a burden for us,” Father Lin said. Located just down the street from the once-infamous Five Points, now reduced by development to only three and a half points, Transfiguration Church was built in 1801 with the same stone that was used to build St. Paul’s Church on Broadway. It was used by Dutch Lutherans; as Manhattan became less Dutch and more English, it evolved to serve an Episcopal congregation. The Roman Catholic Church bought the building in 1853 to serve a parish created by a Cuban exile, the Rev. Félix Varela, who directed his services to poor Irish immigrants. As the Irish assimilated, the pews came to be filled by Italians instead. “The real steppingstone came when the Chinese came, because the church could have died,” said Father Nobiletti. The Irish and Italian immigrants came from a Catholic heritage; many of the Chinese did not. “We had to move and get out and get them.” So the church worked on services for immigrants, including English language classes, and expanded offerings for families with young children. Like many other religious institutions, the church has continued to serve as a bridge between government and immigrants. When the Golden Venture ran aground in Queens in 1993, bringing nearly 300 desperate Chinese immigrants to the shore, the Police Department asked the church if it had any Fujianese speakers. And the earlier generations of Chinese immigrants, mostly Cantonese, have themselves begun to assimilate, moving out of Chinatown into the suburbs. Wing Fong, 54, was married at Transfiguration and his three children were baptized there. Though he now lives in Cream Ridge, N.J., he brought his family back to the church on Monday for the 6 p.m. Mass. “You have a constant flow of incoming and leaving,” said Mr. Fong, observing the changes in the church. At the 6 p.m. Mass, Father Nobiletti recited the names of Jesus’ ancestors, including Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and David. Looking out onto the congregation, he said, “We are all part of this genealogy.”

Church of the Transfiguration
Religion and Churches
Christians and Christianity
Immigration and Refugees
Chinatown (NYC)
Christmas


As Service Gaps Remain, City Says Verizon Broke Promise on FiOS

Abstract: When New York City was preparing to let Verizon offer its high-speed FiOS Internet service in 2008, a city councilwoman, Gale A. Brewer, warned that “New Yorkers need to know whether they are going to wait three years or six years.” For many frustrated residents, like Stephanie Brooks, it has already been seven years and there is still no FiOS in sight. Ms. Brooks, who owns a brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, says she doubts that she and her neighbors will ever have the kind of speedy Internet options available in other parts of the city. “Why aren’t we getting the opportunity to get service and have a choice?” said Ms. Brooks, who pointed to more affluent neighborhoods that Verizon wired years ago. “They built around us.” Ms. Brooks’s complaint goes to the core of an increasingly bitter dispute between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Verizon, one of the nation’s biggest and most profitable telecommunications companies, that may end up in a courtroom. Mr. de Blasio has made universal access to affordable broadband a top priority for his administration to help bridge the so-called digital divide between those who can get online easily and inexpensively and those who cannot, as well as to make the city a competitive technology hub. Verizon had agreed to have fiber-optic cable for FiOS pass all three million homes in the city by the end of last year. Lawyers for each side, however, are arguing about the definition of “pass.” The company says it has met the deadline. The city’s response: not even close. FiOS remains unavailable in large swaths of the city, including the vast Co-op City complex in the Bronx, which comprises more than 15,000 apartments. “We’ve had some rather impassioned meetings with some of our residents who say, ‘We want Verizon,’ ” said Jeffrey Buss, general counsel for Riverbay Corporation, which manages Co-op City. The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications released a scathing audit report in June concluding that Verizon “systematically refused to accept orders for residential service.” By the company’s admission, nearly one-fourth of the blocks in the city have no buildings wired for FiOS, the report said. “We want them to make it available to everyone in every ZIP code and on every block so that everyone can get online, to do research, to do their homework,” said Maya Wiley, the chief lawyer for Mr. de Blasio. “We need our residents to get online.” Image Barbara Cooke-Johnson, 75, said she had been waiting for two years for Verizon to bring FiOS to her block of Putnam Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Ms. Wiley said that her staff was negotiating with Verizon and that the city would prefer not to sue the company for failing to fulfill its obligation. But, she added, “if that’s what we have to do, then that’s what we’ll do.” Customers are still being told by Verizon that FiOS is “not available” to them, even after the company claimed to have wired the entire city. Ms. Brooks said that the last time she heard from Verizon was a letter in January telling her that the company was trying to figure out how to connect to her home. One of Ms. Brooks’s neighbors, Barbara Cooke-Johnson, said that two years ago she escorted a Verizon representative door to door on her block, seeking permission to run fiber through the properties. Ms. Cooke-Johnson, 75, a retired lieutenant for the city’s Emergency Medical Service, said she got about 10 neighbors to agree and thought that she would have upgraded from her poky DSL service by now. But she said that she never heard from Verizon again and remained stuck with an Internet connection so slow that it takes nearly 15 minutes to download her email. Her 30-year-old grandson, Laquan, was particularly annoyed, she said, because “he’s on the Internet all the time.” Some neighbors complain that it is impossible for them to work from home without a fast, reliable connection to the Internet, Ms. Cooke-Johnson said. Like most New Yorkers, they have been bombarded with ads for the FiOS service on television and, when they can get online, the Internet. Many of them have been persuaded, through those ads or personal experience, that FiOS is superior to competing services offered by the cable companies that had monopolies in different parts of the city before Verizon was granted a franchise to compete with them. That franchise, granted in 2008 by the administration of Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, was intended to promote competition that would improve service and hold down prices. One of Mr. Bloomberg’s deputies at the time, Robert C. Lieber, called it a “seminal moment in the cable industry in New York City that was long overdue.” He said that it would bring all of the city’s households “not only a true choice of providers and competitive prices, but also a host of benefits.” But Common Cause, a public interest group, has criticized the contract as being too favorable to Verizon. “The problem is that there really weren’t significant penalties,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York. That omission has left the city with two options, she said: Either “pressure Verizon to live up to its promises or sue.” Today, many New Yorkers say what they most want is an answer from Verizon about when the fiber-optic cable will actually reach them. After not hearing from Verizon since the letter in January, Ms. Brooks said she feared that the company had decided against upgrading her neighborhood. Image Mayor Bill de Blasio has made universal access to affordable broadband a top priority for his administration. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times For its part, Verizon says it has made no such choices. The company said in a rebuttal to the city’s audit that it had met the requirement of having fiber in place throughout the city so that it could provide FiOS within a year to any resident who requested it. In virtually every case of a customer’s having waited more than a year, Verizon ran into an obstacle, such as an uncooperative landlord, the company said. “I hope we’re not headed to litigation” with the city, said Kevin Service, senior vice president for network operations for Verizon. “We’ve invested an enormous amount of money” in building out the FiOS network, he said. “It’s absolutely in our interest to get it to as many subscribers as possible.” Mr. Service said the company had completed the first phase of the project, laying the main lines, and was still “laying a lot of fiber” as part of the second phase, which involves getting wires through backyards and into rowhouses and high-rises. As an example, Mr. Service cited the work necessary on a single block in Manhattan — 118th Street in East Harlem. “To get to the 10th floor in the middle of the block,” he said, “we’ve got to talk to not only that building, but the three buildings on one side and the four buildings on the other side.” Mr. Service said he did not “see an end in sight” to that work, adding that it would probably not be completed during the term of the franchise, which runs until 2020. He said he expected Verizon would still be hooking up new customers “at least until then.” He said the company had “the pedal to the metal” with “no intention of slowing down.” But several Verizon employees disputed the company’s assertions, saying that after wiring all of Staten Island, Verizon significantly slowed the expansion to the rest of the city. The company, they said, had been reducing the work force on the wire-line side of its business and had shifted resources to the fast-growing wireless phone business. The union workers, members of the Communications Workers of America, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are working without a contract amid contentious negotiations with Verizon. The union represents about 39,000 Verizon workers, down from about 45,000 when the workers went on strike in 2012 to protest the company’s contract demands. Bob Master, an official of the union, said that the experiences related by the workers seemed to add up to “a pattern and a plan not to finish” the expansion. City officials tend to agree. Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, said he believed that Verizon was “in violation of the intent of this agreement.” “We as a city have to hold Verizon to the contract that they agreed on,” Mr. Stringer said. “This is the equivalent of making sure that every apartment had electricity in a bygone era. Access to the Internet is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity of life.”

Verizon Communications
NYC
Computers and the Internet
Tech Industry
Bill de Blasio


Italy: Senator’s Slur Criticized

Abstract: Calls mounted Monday for the resignation of the Senate’s vice president, Roberto Calderoli, after he compared Italy’s first black cabinet minister to an orangutan. Prime Minister Enrico Letta lamented that the country had been “shamed” by such insults and demanded that they stop immediately. Mr. Calderoli, a leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League, has insisted that he was only joking when he made the comment about the cabinet minister, Cecile Kyenge, at a weekend rally. Ms. Kyenge, an Italian citizen born in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been insulted with racist slurs from the Northern League ever since she was named integration minister in April.

Discrimination
Northern League
Italy
Cecile Kyenge
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Roberto Calderoli


Hovnanian Profit Unexpectedly Leaps, Bolstering Recovery Signs

Abstract: Hovnanian Enterprises , the largest homebuilder in New Jersey, reported an unexpected profit on Thursday for its fiscal third quarter as orders jumped and it recorded a tax benefit. The company reported net income of $34.7 million, or 25 cents a share, for the three months ended July 31, in contrast to a net loss of $50.9 million, or 47 cents, a year earlier. Wall Street had been expecting a loss of 14 cents a share, according to the average estimate of 10 analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Hovnanian has been purchasing land at distressed prices in an attempt to increase profit margins. The “strategy of opening new, better-located communities is driving sales and generating greater operating leverage,” David Goldberg, an analyst with UBS, said in a note to clients. Homebuilders are increasing prices in markets where shortages of existing properties for sale are driving buyers to new construction. New-home purchases rose 3.6 percent in July to a 372,000 annual pace, matching a two-year high, figures from the Commerce Department showed last month. Hovnanian’s net contracts for the quarter increased 19 percent from a year earlier to 1,541 homes, the company said. Revenue jumped 36 percent to $387 million. Its contract backlog, an indication of future sales, rose 41 percent from a year earlier to 2,452. “We believe the housing market’s recent overall strength and our significantly improved sales pace this year indicates that the market for new homes has bounced off the bottom and is already in a period of gradual recovery,” the company’s chief executive, Ara K. Hovnanian, said in the statement. Hovnanian’s shares declined 13 cents, or 4 percent, to close at $3.08 on Thursday. Still, the company’s stock has more than doubled this year, compared with a 74 percent gain in the Bloomberg homebuilder index.

Company Reports
Real Estate and Housing (Residential)
Hovnanian Enterprises Inc


A United Baggage Handler Took an Unexpected Flight in a Cargo Hold

Abstract: Reginald Gaskin normally just loads the suitcases or packages onto aircrafts at the North Carolina airport where he works as a baggage handler. But on Sunday, he ended up being taken for a ride after a regional flight took off with him still inside the cargo hold. He emerged — unharmed — over an hour later in another state. On Tuesday, aviation authorities said they are investigating how Mr. Gaskin, 45, made the journey in the hold of United Express Flight 6060. The flight left Charlotte-Douglas International Airport at 3 p.m. on Sunday and landed at Dulles International Airport in Washington at 4:16 p.m., flight records show. “It certainly does not happen often,” Kathleen Bergen, a regional communications manager for the Federal Aviation Administration, said in a telephone interview. She added that the department was “looking into the event.” Another of the administration’s communications managers, Ian Gregor, said in an emailed statement that the department would determine whether the baggage contractor, G2 Secure Staff, has proper procedures to ensure personnel are out of the cargo hold before the doors are closed, and whether the procedures were followed. Rob Yingling, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, said operations officials, the police and fire personnel were sent to the gate where the aircraft landed. The authority conducted a brief investigation to ensure there was no security breach, he said, adding that the man was not hurt and no criminal charges were filed. It was not immediately clear how Mr. Gaskin ended up undetected in the aircraft, an Embraer 170 operated by Mesa Airlines that reached up to 27,000 feet during the flight. United Airlines, which said the cargo hold was temperature controlled and pressurized, said in an emailed statement on Tuesday it was continuing to look into what had happened. Mr. Gaskin could not be reached by telephone on Tuesday, but he was quoted by The Washington Post on Monday as saying: “I thank God. He was with me.” He also said a lawyer had advised him not to discuss the matter anymore. As the flight arrived in Dulles, emergency dispatchers, who had been alerted by airport workers in Charlotte that Mr. Gaskin might be aboard, questioned whether the hold had been pressurized or whether the person inside was truly an airport employee, NBC reported, citing dispatcher recordings. G2 Secure Staff did not return voicemail messages on Tuesday seeking comment about Mr. Gaskin’s employment and training, or the procedures that were followed. Mesa Airlines did not return voicemail messages. Federal authorities were scheduled to speak with Mr. Gaskin on Tuesday, Mr. Gregor said. Cargo workers have unwittingly been taken for rides before. In 2015, Alaska Airlines said a flight to Los Angeles returned to Seattle after the pilot heard banging in the bottom of the aircraft. It was coming from a ramp agent who told officials he had fallen asleep before takeoff and had awoken when the plane was in the air, the airline reported. Stories of stowaways generally involve a person intentionally and secretly boarding a plane to evade authorities, risking their lives in the wheel well or other areas of an aircraft. In 2016, the bloodied body of a stowaway was discovered in a compound near the nose landing gear of a cargo jet in Zimbabwe during a refueling stop. In 2014, a 16-year-old boy who spent five hours in the wheel well of a Hawaiian Airlines flight from California to Hawaii survived, enduring altitudes of 38,000 feet and subzero temperatures, Time reported.

Dulles International Airport Washington DC

Embraer - Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica


Virginia Tech Prevails in a Lackluster Show

Abstract: MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — In their first taste of the rarefied air of a Bowl Championship Series game, the Cincinnati Bearcats found that life in the penthouse is not ideal. The Bearcats sent about 60 players from the team hotel on New Year’s Eve to avoid the distractions inherent to the rapper Diddy’s throwing a New Year party there. And while Coach Brian Kelly hoped to get his team well rested, the Bearcats stumbled miserably in their debut on college football’s big stage. No. 21 Virginia Tech outlasted the No. 12 Bearcats, 20-7, on Thursday night in a forgettable Orange Bowl. The victory gave the Hokies their fifth consecutive season of 10 or more victories, joining only Texas and Southern California as teams with that distinction. In a battle of conference champions — irrelevant conferences for a majority of this season — Tech salvaged some credibility for the Atlantic Coast Conference. The victory ended an eight-game B.C.S. losing streak for the A.C.C. and boosted its B.C.S record to 2-9. The Hokies (10-4) also ended a four-game losing streak in B.C.S. games. “I know that the A.C.C. takes a beating at times,” said Bud Foster, the Hokies’ defensive coordinator. “But I think it’s really top to bottom the most competitive league in the country.” In a game lacking star power, Virginia Tech tailback Darren Evans led the Hokies with 153 yards and a touchdown. Cincinnati quarterback Tony Pike had been one of the revelations of the Big East, emerging from the bottom of the depth chart to become one of the conference’s biggest stars. But after leading Cincinnati (11-3) on a touchdown on the game’s opening drive, he threw four interceptions and finished 16 of 33 for 239 yards. Pike’s final chance to keep Cincinnati in the game summed up his night. He was stuffed short of the end zone on a fourth-and-goal play with 7 minutes 25 seconds remaining that ended any chance of a Cincinnati comeback. Pike appeared to have a lane to the end zone, but Tech’s Barquell Rivers delivered a crushing hit that sent Pike and the Bearcats’ hopes to the turf. “We left a lot of points out there,” Cincinnati Coach Brian Kelly said. “It was one of those games where we got close but couldn’t put it in the end zone.” The Orange Bowl lived up to its billing as the least attractive of the five B.C.S. games. And while the score remained close for most of the game, the matchup lacked sizzle. They played a sloppy game filled with turnovers (five), punts (nine) and few marquee players. The actual attendance was 57,851, well below the paid attendance of 73,602. The discrepancy came because the Orange Bowl forced local fans wanting to attend next week’s national title game here to buy Orange Bowl tickets along with their title game tickets. That left waves of open seats at Dolphin Stadium, including numerous sections covered by tarps. That scene summed up the main theme for this game — apathy. A flush secondary ticket market left seats going for as low as 99 cents. Virginia Tech sold only 4,000 of its allotment of 17,500 seats. Tech fans, however, should have plenty to be excited about for next season. The team is littered with young talent, as both Taylor and Evans are underclassmen and the Hokies will return eight starters from a defense that ranked No. 7 in the country. “We’ve got a lot of good young players in the program,” Hokies Coach Frank Beamer said. The game offered a test for Kelly, who will enter 2009 as the hottest coach in college football. Kelly’s résumé includes two Division II national titles, a Mid-American Conference title at Central Michigan and now a Big East title in only his second year at Cincinnati. Kelly has earned a reputation as an offensive mastermind, as his wide-open spread offense has thrived at all his stops. Cincinnati marched down the field on its opening drive for a touchdown in the game’s first two minutes. Pike hit Mardy Gilyard on a 15-yard touchdown pass that a diving Gilyard hauled in while barely scraping his feet inbounds. Gilyard, who finished with 158 receiving yards, also made the drive’s biggest play when he caught a 39-yard pass to set up the score. But from that point, the Cincinnati offense went into an elongated funk. Kelly said that the Hokies adjusted by getting more pressure on Pike. He did not respond well. Pike threw an interception in the end zone to foil a second-quarter scoring chance when he flipped a ball to a seemingly wide open Dominick Goodman in the back of the end zone. Virginia Tech’s Stephan Virgil raced over to catch the lob, the first of Cincinnati’s two critical red- zone blunders. And as the Bearcats returned to the team hotel Thursday night, there was no need to plan around another party. In their big-stage debut, the sloppy Bearcats looked as if they could have used another good night’s rest. “I’m not going to jump off the Fontainebleau tonight,” Kelly said of the team’s high-rise hotel. And Cincinnati’s sluggish showing revealed that it is a bumpy road to the top. “We’re on a journey,” Kelly said. “We’re not there yet.”

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University


On a Gritty Shore, California Dreaming

Abstract: Like a lot of boys growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, Leonard Armato spent many a summer day taking in the sun and sand at Coney Island. When Mr. Armato was 11, his father moved the family to Los Angeles to take a job at the University of Southern California. The rest was beach volleyball history. Mr. Armato, now 53, helped found the Association of Volleyball Professionals in 1983. His sports entertainment company took over the organization, the world's leading beach volleyball league, in 2001. Now Mr. Armato, a former sports agent who once represented Shaquille O'Neal and is married to a beach volleyball player, is chief executive officer and commissioner of the league. In August he will preside over its first tournament in New York, in his old stomping ground, Coney Island. Mr. Armato cast the Coney Island tournament, announced in January, as an opportunity to bring some gloss to the old entertainment district, which is already undergoing a city-sponsored makeover. Besides the competition and athleticism of the sport, Mr. Armato said, "it also has this lifestyle component that's very infectious, the whole beach lifestyle with the beautiful people and everything like that." The tour has staged events nearby on the Jersey Shore, but Mr. Armato, who has a picture hanging in his home office that shows him, at age 3, standing on the beach at Coney Island, described the location as special for sentimental as well as business reasons. "We want to make that place the hot spot that it used to be," he said. The tournament, to be televised live on NBC, is scheduled for Aug. 17 to 20, and the league plans to build a 4,000-seat stadium and 12 outer courts next to the Boardwalk. Its promotional partner is Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment, a company controlled by the developer Bruce Ratner, who is a development partner in the Midtown office tower being built by The New York Times Company. Whether a sport practiced by tanned and toned players in bathing suits and visors will succeed on the gritty shores of Brooklyn is a question, but Mr. Armato exuded confidence, and local officials, looking forward toward summer from the overcast days of winter in the Northeast, had open arms. "We love that it's associated with the West Coast and we're bringing it to Coney Island," said Kenneth Podziba, the city's sports commissioner. "It's even more gratifying." He said that beach volleyball had been played in New York before, on a temporary court at Wollman Rink in Central Park as part of the 1998 Goodwill Games. That event was a success, Mr. Podziba said, but he added, "Actually, it's much, much better on a beach." JAKE MOONEY


Louisiana: 2 Officers Killed in Shootout

Abstract: A shootout at a hotel in the main square of Bastrop in northeastern Louisiana left two police officers and one suspect dead, and the authorities were searching for another suspect, officials said. Two paramedics were also hit by gunfire when they arrived at the scene, said Trooper Mark Dennis, a spokesman for the Louisiana State Police. One was in stable condition, and the other was not seriously hurt, Trooper Dennis said. It was not immediately clear what sparked the shooting, or whether the suspect was killed in the initial shootout or by officers who arrived later, Trooper Dennis said. Bastrop is about 100 miles east of Shreveport.


An Index for the Talmud, After 1,500 Years

Abstract: The Talmud is a formidable body of work: 63 volumes of rabbinical discourse and disputation that form Judaism’s central scripture after the Torah. It has been around for 1,500 years and is studied every day by tens of thousands of Jews. But trying to navigate through its coiling labyrinth can be enormously difficult because the one thing this monumental work lacks is a widely accepted and accessible index. But now that breach has been filled, or so claims the publisher of HaMafteach , or the Key, a guide to the Talmud, available in English and Hebrew. It was compiled not by a white-bearded sage, but by a courtly, clean-shaven, tennis-playing immigration lawyer from the Bronx . The index’s publisher, Feldheim Publishers , predicts it will be snatched up by yeshivas and libraries, but more important, it will be a tool for inveterate Talmud students — and there are plenty of those. Feldheim’s president, Yitzchak Feldheim, said the first printing of 2,000 books — a market test — sold out in a few days here and in Israel . More printings have been ordered. The index has 6,600 topical entries and 27,000 subtopical entries that point students to the treatises and pages of text they are seeking. In these passages, sages analyze matters like whether one can remarry a former wife after she has been betrothed to another, or how one should handle a lost object found in a garbage heap. The index guides the student to significant laws about Sabbath and daily observance, as well as maxims, parables, commentaries and Talmudic personalities. The English version costs $29.99, and the Hebrew, $24.99. The index represents seven years of work, but do not ask Daniel Retter why he undertook it, unless you have a spare hour. His answers are as meandering as the Talmud itself, with pathways leading to byways leading to offshoots that sometimes end in cul-de-sacs. Along the way, his voice sometimes rises and falls in Talmudic singsong, and his eyes glitter with delight at the saga’s oddities. “My father was a man of letters,” he begins, then describes how his father, Marcus, had been dedicated to Talmud study during an epic life in which, as a child, he escaped the Nazis on the Kindertransports that rescued Jewish children from Germany and took them to British havens. He brought his family, including Daniel, to New York from London in 1949. (With his dry wit, Mr. Retter noted that his father had literally been a man of letters, since a dozen of his had been printed in The New York Times .) Daniel Retter, 66, attended a yeshiva, enrolled at City College at night while studying Talmud in the daytime, then studied at Brooklyn Law School during the day while digesting Talmud at night. He married another lawyer, Margie, an advocate for abused women seeking Jewish divorces; they raised four children and ended up in Riverdale, where he continued his Talmudic explorations. “I can’t waste a minute,” he said in an interview at the Manhattan offices of his law firm, Herrick, Feinstein. “If I’m on the immigration line waiting for a client to be called, I study the Talmud.” But a puzzle nagged at him. He and other students sometimes needed help tracking down a specific passage, law or topic, or the thoughts of sages like Hillel and Shamai. Most of the time the student consults a loftier scholar. “For the life of me,” Mr. Retter said, “I could not understand why the Talmud did not have an index.” One 50-year-old translation of the Talmud, by Soncino Press, has an index, but its pages do not match those of the standard Aramaic text used by most students hunched over their dog-eared volumes. More recent English translations are either not indexed or have not been completed. For three decades, Talmud students have been able to use a Nexis-like CD search engine, the Responsa Project, created by Bar Ilan University in Israel, that locates words by frequency and proximity. But like Google , it often produces irrelevant hits. Bar Ilan officials acknowledged that the CD had one major disadvantage: students cannot get access to it on the Sabbath, when much learning takes place. It also costs $790. Mr. Retter said he believed that the Talmud, whose compilation was completed in the year 540, “was designed to be mysterious, designed to be locked — I call it the ‘book of mystery.’ ” “The Talmud was written in exile, and it was the thread that kept Jews together,” he said. “It had no punctuation, no paragraphs; it was a book that was to be transmitted orally from father to son.” Until 1445, the concept of an index was meaningless, since books were not being printed. But in the 16th century, the first complete editions of the Talmud were printed by a publisher from Antwerp , Belgium ; the Vilna edition, printed in Lithuania in the 19th century, standardized pagination. One effort to help students navigate the Talmud, Mesoras HaShas, provided cross-references alongside the Aramaic text toward similar ideas elsewhere in the Talmud. But, Mr. Retter wrote in his introduction, “it was not an index as that word is commonly understood, because one had to know the location of the initial reference to find the others.” Rabbi Benjamin Blech, professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University , said the rabbis believed that study should not be made too easy. “We want people to struggle with the text because by figuring it out you will have a deeper comprehension,” he said. “They wanted a living index, not a printed index.” Nothing satisfied Mr. Retter’s needs. As he said: “I’m a lawyer, and if I want to know the law, I look it up in an index.” Before he went — Talmudists should pardon the expression — whole hog, he took his wife’s advice and sought the approval of great sages so the work would be credible. HaMafteach includes letters of endorsement from a dozen, including Yisrael Meir Lau, the former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel. Mr. Retter also recruited Rabbi Elchanan Kohn, a recognized Israeli Talmud scholar, as his editor. The index’s potential market is sure to include the thousands of Jews who participate in Daf Yomi, the page-a-day cycle in which everyone studies the same daf — two actual pages — every day for seven and a half years, until all 5,422 pages are completed, when they begin all over again. Some 90,000 people are expected at the Daf Yomi graduation of sorts that will be held in August at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey . If readers find any errors, the index provides a very contemporary way of making suggestions for corrections that the ancient sages never foresaw and so could not have quibbled with: an e-mail address, errorsandcomments@hamafteach.org .

Indexers
Judaism
Daniel Retter
Books
Rabbi
Talmud
NYC


Behind Inflammatory Email, Aide With a Low Profile

Abstract: Bridget Anne Kelly, the embattled aide to Gov. Chris Christie whose email appears to have instigated the controversial lane closings at the George Washington Bridge in September, is a seasoned operative in New Jersey politics. Until the disclosures on Wednesday, she appears to have maintained a decidedly low public profile. Ms. Kelly has been a member of the Christie administration since 2010, the year the governor took office. She was hired as the director of legislative relations. In that capacity, she oversaw the administration’s interactions with the State Legislature. She then moved up to director of intergovernmental and legislative affairs, presiding over daily operations of the administration’s outreach efforts to government officials and community organizations. Last April, she was promoted to her current position as deputy chief of staff for legislative and intergovernmental affairs, at a salary of $114,000. Image Bridget Anne Kelly, 41, is a deputy chief of staff. Credit Monique Lisa Lionetti/Northjersey.com Ms. Kelly, 41, received a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md., and appears to have spent all or most of her working life in New Jersey politics. She entered the field as a legislative aide to Assemblyman David C. Russo, a Republican representing Bergen, Essex, Morris and Passaic Counties. In 2002, she became his chief of staff. She has a history with local and county Republican organizations, and has served on various municipal boards. She was president of the Ramsey Republican Club from 2005 through 2011. Ms. Kelly was born in New Jersey and currently lives in Ramsey. She has four children. On Wednesday, in the wake of the news about her involvement in the bridge scandal, she appears to have quickly scrubbed what she could of her public identity, including any Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. On her Twitter feed, which was also disabled, there had been a picture of her celebrating her 40th birthday with Mr. Christie and members of his staff at a restaurant in 2012.

Bridget Anne Kelly
Chris Christie
New Jersey
George Washington Bridge


Bobblehead Giveaway to Precede Jeter’s Return to Yankees

Abstract: Yankees catcher Chris Stewart has a collection of baseball memorabilia in a special room in his house, replete with autographed jerseys, caps, bats and other items, including bobblehead dolls. Lots of bobblehead dolls. It is a collection that Stewart has cultivated for years, and one he cherishes. But it has been relatively incomplete so far, wanting for that one signature figurine to make it whole. “Got to get that Derek Jeter bobblehead,” Stewart said about Monday night’s giveaway for the first 18,000 fans. Stewart, like his teammates, has been waiting for the day when a healthy Jeter returns to the clubhouse, his broken ankle healed. But for now, the spring-loaded ceramic version of Jeter will have to do because it will be at least a few days before Jeter is ready to play at the major league level. For the first time in 10 years, the Yankees are handing out bobblehead dolls , and they are starting with one of the most beloved Yankees. Many of Jeter’s teammates, like Vernon Wells and the relievers Shawn Kelley and Adam Warren, say they plan to be in line for the bobblehead, one of several Jeter likenesses the Yankees have handed out over his career. For Stewart, it will be a souvenir he will keep. Other players have been ordered by family members to secure them. “I’ve been told to get that one,” Wells said. Kelley said: “I always try to get them when teams give them out. I put them in the basement, and my son tears their heads off. But maybe not with the Jeter bobblehead.” Later this month, the Yankees will distribute a Hideki Matsui bobblehead, followed by a Yogi Berra doll in August and a Mariano Rivera version in September. The last time the Yankees handed out bobbleheads was in 2003, when fans were able to take home likenesses of Matsui, Jason Giambi and Paul O’Neill. There is no bobblehead giveaway planned for Alex Rodriguez, who, like Jeter, has not played in a major league game this year because of injury. Both players are in the midst of minor league rehabilitation assignments. Rodriguez, who is recovering from hip surgery, started playing in games before Jeter, but Jeter appears to be closer to returning because he went straight to Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, the highest level of the minor leagues, instead of starting off at Class A like Rodriguez. Jeter played his first game Saturday and went 0 for 2 as the RailRiders shortstop. On Sunday, he was 1 for 2 as the designated hitter and scored on a home run. Manager Joe Girardi said Jeter looked good on the tape he watched of his at-bats, but Girardi warned that Jeter still needed at least a few more games to build up his stamina before he could return to the Yankees. “You have to see how he’s moving around, how he’s responding physically to playing every day,” Girardi said. “You have to build him up, and he has to be able to play more than five innings every three days.” Rodriguez was scheduled to play for the Class A Tampa Yankees in the Florida State League on Sunday night. He collected his first hit Saturday, but his progress has not been noteworthy. Girardi said it was not productive to start evaluating Rodriguez’s results at the plate until he had played in seven or eight games, similar to spring training. “You try to watch his at-bats, and how hard he is hitting the ball to contact is probably the most important thing,” Girardi said. There is no exact timetable for either’s return, although their rehabilitation assignments run out after 20 days, at which point the Yankees must call them up or put them back on the disabled list. The Yankees have consistently said both will be back after the All-Star break, which ends July 18. For now, the Yankees, their families and their fans will have to make do with a miniature version of Jeter. Warren, for instance, said his 22-year-old sister, Alex, has a modest bobblehead collection. So he, too, plans to ask the clubhouse attendants to get one on her behalf. “She has some good ones,” he said, “but this will probably be the best one. I mean, it’s Derek Jeter.”

Baseball
Yankees
Derek Jeter
Alex Rodriguez
Souvenir


Time Warner Tops Forecast on Rebound in Ad Sales

Abstract: Time Warner , the media company, on Wednesday reported a 6 percent gain in first-quarter revenue, to $6.7 billion, driven by gains at cable channels like TNT and HBO. Like other media companies, Time Warner has benefited from a rebound in advertising sales. In a conference call with investors Wednesday morning, the chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, said that revenue for the company’s channels increased 18 percent, reaffirming the strength of its cable content. The company’s results were mostly in line with expectations. Net income declined 10 percent, to $651 million, or 59 cents a share, in the quarter, from $725 million, or 62 cents a share, from in the period a year ago. Adjusted earnings, at 58 cents a share, were slightly above expectations. Analysts said the decline was mostly because of higher costs associated with the rights to the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, which Time Warner’s cable channels shared with CBS for the first time this year. Total programming costs for the network division — which includes TNT, TBS, CNN, and HBO — jumped 37 percent from the quarter a year ago. Partly offsetting the costs, combined advertising revenue for the channels climbed 48 percent, helping the company achieve the overall 18 percent gain in revenue for the division. “Investment in must-see sports is really paying off,” Mr. Bewkes said, crediting the NCAA basketball telecasts on the TBS, TNT and truTV channels. Revenue declined 3.3 percent at the company’s motion picture arm, Warner Brothers, where net income declined almost 50 percent because its film slate was healthier in the same period last year. Michael Nathanson, an analyst for Nomura Securities, said the decline was a result of fewer home video releases in the quarter “and the lack of any major box-office hits with releases.” On Wednesday, Time Warner said it had acquired Flixster , an online community for film buffs that recommends films and has a strong presence on mobile phones. The acquisition also includes Rotten Tomatoes, a Web site that compiles film reviews. Time Warner said that Rotten Tomatoes would remain independent. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Time Warner is expected to leverage Flixster and its fan base as it introduces “Digital Everywhere,” a pay-once, play-anywhere approach to digital movie delivery. Time Warner’s publishing arm, Time Inc., which remains much smaller than the television or film divisions, reported revenue that was effectively flat. Asked on the conference call if he intended to sell Time Inc. — a persistent question — Mr. Bewkes said no and reiterated the opportunity that he saw for magazines on tablet computers. Time Inc. confirmed early this week that it had struck a deal with Apple to make the iPad versions of Time, Sports Illustrated and Fortune available free to existing subscribers of the magazines. Previously, only People magazine was available that way for authenticated subscribers. In an outlook statement on Wednesday, Time Warner affirmed that it expected earnings growth in 2011 to be in “the low teens” in percentage growth.


The Case of a Sign Painter and Theft: On Page 1, a Paper Leads to a Suspect

Abstract: Subscribers to The Lewiston Tribune, the daily that serves a town of 31,000 in Idaho , did not need to be the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree to notice something odd on the front page Dec. 13. On the top half of the front page was a photograph of a sign painter, Michael Millhouse, a big man wearing a blue-checked coat as he painted “Merry Christmas” on a store window. Directly below was a photograph from a convenience store’s surveillance camera of someone who took a wallet with $600 cash that a woman had left on the counter. The “unknown man,” as the caption described him, was a big guy wearing, yes, a blue-checked coat. The next morning, the paper was flooded with calls from readers pointing out the similarity between Mr. Millhouse and the unidentified wallet pilferer. According to Paul Emerson, managing editor of The Lewiston Tribune, employees noticed the matching photos near press time, but it was too late to reach Mr. Millhouse to seek an explanation. A pressman dropped the paper off at the police station on his way home at about 3 a.m., and the police later arrested Mr. Millhouse, who said he had intended to turn the wallet in but had been delayed (painting holiday greetings, for example). Mr. Millhouse is scheduled to answer charges of second-degree theft this week and, in an interview, said he would plead not guilty. Mr. Emerson is more inclined to stress that his publication helped solve a crime than the amusing juxtaposition on his front page. Just two days later, though, The Lewiston Tribune published something that Mr. Emerson, who has worked at the paper for 36 years, really does regret: an article about a local woman whose home was supposedly getting a makeover by “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” It became clear the next day that the story was a fabrication. “We ran a correction, and I had to call The Associated Press, which had picked up the story, to tell them we ran an incorrect story,” Mr. Emerson said. “That was egg on my face.” ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN


Walmart to Buy 13 Former Target Stores in Canada

Abstract: Walmart, which has 395 stores in Canada, says it will buy 13 former Target stores and one distribution center in the country and hire 3,400 new employees. Walmart said it would spend $290 million to buy and renovate the stores, creating 1,500 construction jobs. Target closed the last of its 133 Canadian stores in April, laying off more than 17,000 people. A number of retailers have struggled in Canada because of regulatory pressures and competition from Walmart and others. Big Lots and Best Buy have both closed stores in Canada, and Sears sold most of its stake in its Canadian unit.


4-Wheel Dreams for Millions of Drivers in India

Abstract: NEW DELHI — Six years after the idea was hatched, India ’s much-hyped Tata Nano was introduced on Monday. The supercheap compact car with a base model selling for about $2,230 is aimed at the developing world’s millions of motorcycle owners with four-wheel dreams. It arrives as Tata Motors struggles with production problems and a huge debt load. But as the global economy withers and automakers bleed cash and cut employees, global warming continues and oil prices creep back up, even rivals say that tiny, wallet-friendly, fuel-efficient cars like the Nano might be where demand grows worldwide. “We’re quite confident there is going to be huge market for that segment,” said Ashish Sinharoy, a vice president at Renault India. Renault and Nissan have partnered with Bajaj Auto, an Indian scooter maker, to introduce a small, cheap car of their own, due out in 2011. Automakers and car enthusiasts will be following the Nano closely, looking for flaws and gauging consumer reaction. Projects like the Renault-Bajaj alliance, and plans from manufacturers including Honda and Hyundai might be scrapped if the Nano fails. J. D. Power & Associates predicts that Tata will sell 35,000 Nanos this year, because of production constraints. Tata will begin accepting orders next month, charging a fee of $6 to anyone who applies to buy the car. Delivery is expected in July. Questions linger about Tata’s ability to keep costs down and get production up and about the safety and reliability of the Nano. Several auto analysts say that Tata, which had its first quarterly loss in seven years at the end of January, has been forced to delay payments to its vendors because of a cash squeeze. Indian auto suppliers are not in straits as dire as their peers in America and Europe, but any supplier disruption could be devastating to the Nano, because its parts are custom-made. In an e-mailed response to questions about payment delays, Tata Motors said it was “conducting its business properly, adequately and in full partnership with all its vendors.” The company said most of its vendor relationships are covered by a “bill marketing” system, where Tata’s bank makes payments to the vendors, and Tata Motors pays the bank. “As sales begin to climb, vendor purchases will also improve, and a positive cycle will once again get created,” Tata said. If the Nano is successful, it will open the market for others, Mr. Sinharoy predicts. He said a car from Renault-Bajaj would be priced at about 150,000 rupees ($3,000) and be even more fuel-efficient than the Nano. The four-seater Nano can travel 100 kilometers on 4.2 liters of fuel, getting 55.5 miles per gallon. It has lower emissions than most two-wheelers in India, Tata says. With its 11.8-inch dinner-plate-size wheels, an engine the size of a small outboard motor generating 33 horsepower, and a single windshield wiper, the Nano has already drawn some unflattering comparisons to kitchen appliances and garden tools. When the design was unveiled last year, Jalopnik.com , a car lovers’ Web site, asked, “Yes, but will it blend?” A few people have driven the car, and were only recently given permission by Tata to talk about the experience. “It feels like a real car,” said Hormazd Sorabjee, editor of Autocar India magazine, who was one of the early drivers. “It does not feel like a golf cart.” But, he added, it felt like a car that would be used only for city driving. “You’re not going to take this on an intercity highway,” he said. The Nano’s fans far outweigh its critics so far. It already has a dedicated Facebook group. More important, it seems to have a number of eager would-be buyers. Despite a vicious land-rights battle that forced Tata to relocate the Nano factory from its West Bengal site, the car is viewed with great pride in India. It is “absolutely critical” that the Nano goes well, Mr. Sorabjee, said. “The success of this will change the rules of carmaking in the world,” he predicted. Pawan Goyal, a 35-year-old accountant who lives in Noida, a growing town east of Delhi, said he had been planning to buy the Nano since it introduced a prototype at the Delhi auto show in January 2008. “By spending 50,000 rupees extra, I will move on to a four-wheeler,” Mr. Goyal, who drives a motorcycle, said. The Nano will allow him to take along his whole family, including two children, ages 10 and 12, and it will be “more comfortable and safe” than the motorbike. The Nano may attract more than the “starter” market because of the economic slowdown. “In times of crisis, there is a lot of trading down that happens,” said Arindam K. Bhattacharya, a partner in the New Delhi office of the Boston Consulting Group. The Nano is built to safety specifications in India but would not serve all markets. Any additional safety features will mean a increase in costs, and it’s unclear whether Tata’s plans to sell the Nano in the rest of South Asia and Europe will pan out. But consumers in Europe and the United States may demand a Nano of their own. “Consumer behavior can be stimulated simply by the economic issues we’re facing today,” said Dan Oxyer, a partner with the consulting company A. T. Kearney. Some car experts are skeptical about whether the Nano will succeed. “It goes without saying a good car at a low price will sell well in global markets,” said John Bonnell, head of Asia forecasting at J. D. Power & Associates. The fact that the Nano is here at all, though, proves the Big Three American automakers wrong, Mr. Bhattacharya said. When he made presentations on the Nano to Western car manufacturers a few years ago, “they would all laugh and say that it couldn’t be done,” he recalled.

Small Cars (Compact Subcompact and Microcars)