Top Maryland Democrats Ponder Post-Mikulski Options

Abstract: CHEVY CHASE, Md. — The unexpected retirement of Senator Barbara Mikulski, the tough-talking Maryland Democrat and longest-serving woman in the history of the Senate, has set off a political frenzy among ambitious Democrats positioning themselves for promotions in this traditionally blue state. On Tuesday, Representative Donna Edwards became the second Democrat — after Representative Chris Van Hollen, whose district includes this wealthy suburb of Washington — to jump in the race to succeed Ms. Mikulski, setting up what is expected to become a competitive primary in a state where an open Senate seat is a rarity. Ms. Edwards, who is spotlighting her biography as a single mother and community activist, is casting herself as the progressive. Mr. Van Hollen, the House Budget Committee chairman, has the backing of Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader. But they may soon have company. The list of those thinking of running is long — and growing longer. “It’s easier to say who is definitely not running than who is,” said former Gov. Parris Glendening, a Democrat who described the state of play in Maryland as “a major chess game, where everyone is moving around and thinking, ‘I’ll go here, and you’ll go there.’ ” Maryland is a relatively small state, of about six million people; registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by 2 to 1. Although a Republican, Larry Hogan, won the governorship in a major upset last year, Democrats will have a strong advantage in the 2016 Senate race, in part because Maryland typically votes Democratic in presidential election years. Both of the state’s senators are Democrats, as are seven of its eight House members. When Ms. Mikulski steps down in January 2017, she will have served in the Senate for 30 years. “An open Senate seat in Maryland is a once-in-a-career opportunity,” said Todd Eberly, a political scientist at St. Mary’s College. “You have a whole lot of folks within the Democratic Party who would love a promotion, and because of the nature of Maryland, whoever gets the nomination is the odds-on favorite to become the senator. So I would expect more people to get into this race.” Beyond Mr. Van Hollen and Ms. Edwards, four of the remaining five Democrats in Maryland’s congressional delegation have said they are contemplating Senate bids. The exception is Representative Steny Hoyer, who has served since 1981 and is disinclined to give up his position as the No. 2 Democrat in the House. Benjamin T. Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P., has also said he might run, as has Baltimore’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. Two former lieutenant governors — Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Anthony Brown, both of whom lost bids for governor — are also potential candidates. And backers of Heather Mizeur, a former state lawmaker who ran a long-shot primary challenge to Mr. Brown last year, hope to draft her into the race. Image Representative Chris Van Hollen also says he is running, setting up what is expected to become a competitive primary in a state where an open Senate seat is a rarity. Credit Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press The maneuvering is playing out in a party that does not have clear leadership and is still reeling from Mr. Hogan’s surprise victory last year over Mr. Brown. And it is producing jockeying farther down the ballot, as other Democrats eye Mr. Van Hollen’s and Ms. Edward’s House seats. “There are no bosses, and there are no real machines left,” said State Senator Jamie Raskin, the Democratic whip and one of at least three potential candidates for the Van Hollen seat. “It’s a complete free-for-all environment.” Republicans say a bruising Democratic primary can help them. “When there’s an incumbent Democrat, it’s very hard for us to win because of the makeup of the state,” said Joe Cluster, the executive director of the Maryland Republican Party. “But we do very well in open seats.” No Republican has announced his or her intention to run. Mr. Cluster said party leaders were waiting to see whether the state’s lone Republican congressman, Representative Andy Harris, will enter the race. If Mr. Harris does not, Mr. Cluster said, potential candidates could include Bob Ehrlich, a former governor, and Michael Steele, a former lieutenant governor who also ran the Republican National Committee. Ms. Mikulski’s announcement, less than two weeks ago, that she would vacate the seat she held for decades came as a shock. In the last Congress, when Democrats ran the Senate, she headed the powerful Appropriations Committee, and with a 2016 Senate electoral map that looks favorable to Democrats, many thought she would stay and try to win back her chairmanship. Mr. Van Hollen, who has held positions in House leadership and has national connections from his days as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has nearly $1.7 million in the bank. In addition, Mr. Reid’s endorsement will give him a lift outside Maryland. “I think that’s going to help a lot with national money,” said Oscar Ramirez, a former vice chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party who backs Mr. Van Hollen. “It didn’t impact Edwards, but there may be some other candidates who were going to jump into the race who are now not going to.” But Mr. Ramirez added that Ms. Edwards would be formidable. She represents Prince George’s County, the wealthiest majority-black county in the nation, and has a strong base among African-Americans. National progressive groups, including the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is urging presidential candidates to adopt the populist positions of Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, are rallying behind her, as are women’s groups. In announcing her candidacy in a video to supporters Tuesday, Ms. Edwards emphasized her humble beginnings. “I was a single mom, putting my son through school, working full time, paying back student loans and struggling to make ends meet,” she said in the video, filmed at National Harbor in Prince George’s County. “The last thing I had time for was a political fight.” Mr. Van Hollen’s backers insist that he, too, has a strong progressive record. But if more business-minded Democrats — like Representative John Delaney, a moderate who represents the outer suburbs of Washington and the western portion of the state — step in, the Maryland primary is likely to expose divisions that are playing out at the national level between progressives and moderates. “There’s an old saying: ‘I don’t belong to an organized party. I’m a Democrat,’ ” Mr. Glendening said. “We can clearly say that in terms of Maryland politics.”

Maryland
Barbara A Mikulski
Christopher Van Hollen Jr
Donna Edwards
Democrats
US
Senate
Congress
Senate races
US Politics


Reaction to Smells May Help Diagnose Autism, Study Suggests

Abstract: It may be possible to diagnose autism by giving children a sniff test, a new study suggests. Most people instinctively take a big whiff when they encounter a pleasant smell and limit their breathing when they encounter a foul smell. Children with autism spectrum disorder do not make this natural adjustment, said Liron Rozenkrantz, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and one of the researchers involved with the study. She and her colleagues reported their findings in the journal Current Biology. They presented 18 children who had an autism diagnosis and 18 typically developing children with pleasant and unpleasant odors and measured their sniff responses. The pleasant smells were rose and soap; the unpleasant smells were sour milk and rotten fish. Typically developing children adjusted their sniffing almost immediately — within about 305 milliseconds. Children with autism did not respond as rapidly. As they were exposed to the smells, the children were watching a cartoon or playing a video game. “It’s a semi-automated response,” Ms. Rozenkrantz said. “It does not require the subject’s attention.” Using the sniff test alone, the researchers, who had not been told which children had autism, were able to correctly identify those with autism 81 percent of the time. They also found that the further removed an autistic child’s sniff response was from the average for typically developing children, the more severe the child’s social impairments were. “We hope that it can be used as a diagnostic marker to diagnose autism at a very young age,” Ms. Rozenkrantz said. “This is a nonverbal measure, and it only requires breathing.” First, though, Ms. Rozenkrantz said more long-term follow-up studies need to be done with young children.

Autism
Odor
Children
Current Biology Journal
Nose


Chambliss Announces Retirement From Senate

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Senator Saxby Chambliss , the Georgia Republican who helped lead efforts to find a bipartisan deficit reduction compromise, announced on Friday that he would retire at the end of 2014, a decision likely to set off a battle on the Republican Party’s right flank for a successor. Already, organizations backed by the Tea Party were stirring interest in a primary challenge for Mr. Chambliss over his embrace of new revenues as a part of any comprehensive deficit package. Representatives Tom Price and Paul Broun, two Republican doctors and ardent conservatives from Georgia, had expressed interest in a possible challenge. But without Mr. Chambliss in the picture, the Senate contest in Georgia could shape up to be a battle royale on the right. Other possible candidates could include Herman Cain, a failed presidential candidate, and Karen Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state who ran for governor in 2010 with the backing of Sarah Palin. Ms. Handel lost that contest but went on to a senior position at the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer foundation, where she championed a controversial move to withhold financing for Planned Parenthood cancer screenings. Image Senator Saxby Chambliss lifted his public stature in 2011 as one of three Republican senators in the “Gang of Six” hashing out a deficit reduction plan that the group hoped would capture broad appeal. Credit Cliff Owen/Associated Press In a statement, Mr. Chambliss took pains to say he did not fear losing a primary challenge. “Lest anyone think this decision is about a primary challenge, I have no doubt that had I decided to be a candidate, I would have won re-election,” he said. “In these difficult political times, I am fortunate to have actually broadened my support around the state and the nation due to the stances I have taken. Instead, this is about frustration, both at a lack of leadership from the White House and at the dearth of meaningful action from Congress.” Mr. Chambliss lifted his public stature in 2011 as one of three Republican senators in the “Gang of Six” hashing out a deficit reduction plan that the group hoped would capture broad appeal. Along with Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Mike Crapo of Idaho, both Republcians, Mr. Chambliss cemented strong bonds with Democratic deficit negotiators and ultimately embraced a framework that would include increases in revenues and cuts to entitlement programs to get the deficit in check. But despite dozens of closed-door tutorials, secret retreats and symposiums, the Gang of Six failed to bring on board enough senators in both parties to force Democratic and Republican leaders to adopt its principles. It did elicit a strong backlash on the Republican right. Democrats insisted they would make a run at his seat. “Georgia will now offer Democrats one of our best pick-up opportunities of the cycle. There are already several reports of the potential for a divisive primary that will push Republicans to the extreme right. Regardless, there’s no question that the demographics of the state have changed and Democrats are gaining strength. This will be a top priority,” said Guy Cecil, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But in a mid-presidential term election, Georgia will present a steep climb for the Democratic Party.

Saxby Chambliss
Senate
Congress
Republicans
US Politics


Indonesia: Dutch Apologize for 1947 Massacre of 430 Villagers

Abstract: Six decades after a massacre during Indonesia ’s struggle for independence, the Dutch government apologized for the killing on Friday. The Dutch ambassador, Tjeerd de Zwaan, made the apology before hundreds of villagers in Rawagede, the scene of the killing of up to 430 boys and young men by Dutch troops on Dec. 9, 1947. Dutch troops arrived in the village looking for a resistance leader. When the villagers said they did not know where he was, the soldiers rounded up nearly all the men and took them to a field where, squatting in rows with both hands placed on the backs of their heads, they were shot one by one. The apology followed a landmark ruling by a Dutch court in September that said the state was responsible for the massacre.

War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity


Trump Campaigned Against Lobbyists, but Now They’re on His Transition Team

Abstract: WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists. Jeffrey Eisenach, a consultant who has worked for years on behalf of Verizon and other telecommunications clients, is the head of the team that is helping to pick staff members at the Federal Communications Commission. Michael Catanzaro , a lobbyist whose clients include Devon Energy and Encana Oil and Gas, holds the “energy independence” portfolio. Michael Torrey , a lobbyist who runs a firm that has earned millions of dollars helping food industry players such as the American Beverage Association and the dairy giant Dean Foods, is helping set up the new team at the Department of Agriculture. Mr. Trump was swept to power in large part by white working-class voters who responded to his vow to restore the voices of forgotten people, ones drowned out by big business and Wall Street. But in his transition to power, some of the most prominent voices will be those of advisers who come from the same industries for which they are being asked to help set the regulatory groundwork. The president-elect’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined a request for comment, as did nearly a dozen corporate executives, consultants and lobbyists serving on his transition team, which was outlined in a list distributed widely in Washington on Thursday . A number of the people on that list are well-established experts with no clear interest in helping private-sector clients. But to critics of Mr. Trump — both Democrats and Republicans — the inclusion of advisers with industry ties is a first sign that he may not follow through on all of his promises. “This whole idea that he was an outsider and going to destroy the political establishment and drain the swamp were the lines of a con man, and guess what — he is being exposed as just that,” said Peter Wehner , who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush before becoming a speechwriter for George W. Bush. “He is failing the first test, and he should be held accountable for it.” Transition teams help new presidents pick the new cabinet, as well as up to 4,000 political appointees who will take over top posts in agencies across the government. President Obama, after he was first elected, instituted rules that prohibited individuals who had served as registered lobbyists in the prior year from serving as transition advisers in the areas in which they represented private clients. They were also prohibited, after the administration took power, from lobbying in the parts of the government they helped set up. “They wanted to make sure that people were not putting their thumb on the scale, or even the perception of that,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, the director of a nonprofit group called the White House Transition Project , which has studied two decades of presidential transitions. Among the advisers assisting Mr. Trump who have no clear private-sector ties are Brian Johnson , a top lawyer for the House Financial Services Committee, who is helping to pick top staff members for the federal government’s many financial services agencies. Edwin Meese III , who served as attorney general under Mr. Reagan and is now associated with the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, is helping oversee management and budget issues, along with Kay Coles James , a Bush administration official who now runs an institute that trains future African-American leaders. Former Representative Mike Rogers , Republican of Michigan, who served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and was once a special agent in the F.B.I., is overseeing issues related to national security, including the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security. But in other areas, most notably the energy sector, the transition team advisers are far from independent. Mr. Catanzaro’s client list is a who’s who of major corporate players — such as the Hess Corporation and Devon Energy — that have tried to challenge the Obama administration’s environmental and energy policies on issues such as how much methane gas can be released at oil and gas drilling sites, lobbying disclosure reports show. He also worked with oil industry players to help push through major legislation goals, such as allowing the export of crude oil . He will now help pick Mr. Trump’s energy team. Michael McKenna , another lobbyist helping to pick key administration officials who will oversee energy policy, has a client list that this year has included the Southern Company, one of the most vocal critics of efforts to prevent climate change by putting limits on emissions from coal-burning power plants. Advisers with ties to other industries include Martin Whitmer , who is overseeing “transportation and infrastructure” for the Trump transition. He is the chairman of a Washington law firm whose lobbying clients include the Association of American Railroads and the National Asphalt Pavement Association. David Malpass , the former chief economist at Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank that collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis, is overseeing the “economic issues” portfolio of the transition, as well as operations at the Treasury Department. Mr. Malpass now runs a firm called Encima Global , which sells economic research to institutional investors and corporate clients. Mr. Eisenach , as a telecom industry consultant, has worked to help major cellular companies fight back against regulations proposed by the F.C.C. that would mandate so-called net neutrality — requiring providers to give equal access to their networks to outside companies. He is now helping to oversee the rebuilding of the staff at the F.C.C. Dan DiMicco , a former chief executive of the steelmaking company Nucor, who now serves on the board of directors of Duke Energy , is heading the transition team for the Office of the United States Trade Representative. Mr. DiMicco has long argued that China is unfairly subsidizing its manufacturing sector at the expense of American jobs. In his campaign, Mr. Trump promised to take steps to close the so-called revolving door, through which government officials leave their posts and then personally profit by helping private companies reap rewards from policies or programs they had recently managed. In October, declaring that “it’s time to drain the swamp in Washington,” he promised to institute a five-year ban in which all executive branch officials would be prevented from lobbying the government after they left. He has also promised to expand the definition of a lobbyist, so it includes corporate consultants who do not register as lobbyists but still often act like one. Bruce F. Freed, the president of a nonprofit group called the Center for Political Accountability , which is pressing major corporations to be more transparent about their political spending, said Mr. Trump’s transition team had sent an unfortunate signal to his followers. “This is one of the reasons you had such anger among voters — people rigging the system, gaming the system,” Mr. Freed said. “This represents more of the same.”

2016 Presidential Election
Lobbying
Donald Trump
Regulation and Deregulation


Paladino, on Cuomo, City Traffic and More

Abstract: BUFFALO — Carl P. Paladino , the Republican nominee for governor, spoke on Wednesday about a range of issues as he points toward the election against Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo , the Democratic nominee. Following are excerpts from the interview. On Mr. Cuomo: Insular I think is a very good word for him. Just carrying around this air about him. This entitlement. And I noticed it first when I was watching him on the newsreels, and whenever he was getting out of a car, he would sit there until somebody opened the door. And then he would walk to the building and he would stop, it’s like he wouldn’t dirty himself and touch the handle. He waited until somebody came and opened the door to the building for him. And I said, there’s something wrong with this guy. On why, campaigning in New York for the primary, he preferred Queens and Staten Island, over heavily Democratic Manhattan and Brooklyn: Staten Island and Queens are much the same as like Buffalo. You don’t have traffic jams every red light, all right? Look at the time you have to spend to get around Manhattan. I mean, try to get someplace. On his view of Sheldon Silver , the Democratic speaker of the Assembly: We have a government out of control. We have a leader in government that’s, wait a minute, is he a dictator? He’s one man; one man runs our entire government. I’m being blunt about that. Is that incorrect? On how he would cut state spending by scrutinizing the performance of agencies: Who are the political hacks hanging around the office that are there for patronage and causing a morale problem? How do they handle take-home vehicles? Does everybody have a take-home vehicle? Because we heard that’s a monster of a problem with state government. On an encounter between Mr. Cuomo and a Paladino campaign worker named Amber, who dresses up like a duck to mock candidates who will not debate Mr. Paladino. Amber is one of those very unassuming types, but once you put that duck outfit on her, she quacks like they’ve never quacked before. So a few weeks ago we sent her out to Wyoming County. And she’s doing her quack quack thing. So finally Andrew gets really frustrated with them and asks one of his characters to go over and get rid of her. So the guy goes over to Amber, and he doesn’t know it’s a woman in the suit, and he says, “Listen buster, you’d better get out of here and take your two girlfriends” — he’s referring to the two guys — “take your two girlfriends with you, or I’m going to shove that sign down your throat.” Well you know what Amber does? Quack quack quack quack quack quack quack. She went back in his face. Amber’s a third-degree black belt.

Paladino Carl P
Republican Party
Cuomo Andrew M
Silver Sheldon
New York State
Politics and Government
Elections


At Hedge Funds and Private Equity, Lucrative Paydays

Abstract: OUR annual list of highly compensated executives includes some astonishing salaries. But they are not necessarily the richest compensation packages out there. We rely on filings required by the Securities and Exchange Commission for public companies. That means we are missing entire categories of businesses: privately held corporations, most hedge funds and many private equity firms. Some sleuthing shows that payouts given to private equity titans and hedge fund managers were often significantly higher than that of the mere mortals on our list. Four of the largest private equity firms — the Carlyle Group , Apollo Global Management, the Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company — went public in recent years, a move that required them to begin disclosing executive pay. Their executives don’t show up on our main list because we look only at companies with total revenue of more than $5 billion. Unlike executive pay at most corporations, much wealth here is derived from their ownership stakes in these firms, and, each year, they get payouts based on their stakes. Distributions at private equity firms are analogous to dividends corporations pay shareholders, said Victor Fleischer, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School and a columnist for DealBook . Private equity executives may also hold direct ownership stakes in the funds managed by the firm, so distributions from those funds wouldn’t necessarily show up in the public data, he noted. If all of the distribution payouts were factored in, some of these executives’ pay packages would dwarf those on our list. Consider Leon Black, C.E.O. of Apollo Global Management , among the largest private equity firms with $2.86 billion in 2012 revenue. He took in more than $125 million last year. A tiny piece — $287,000 — was from salary and other base compensation. The bulk was from distributions based on the 92.7 million shares he owns in the firm, according to Equilar calculations. Steve Schwarzman, founder and chief executive of the Blackstone Group , took in $8.4 million in compensation last year, and his distributions earned him an additional $204 million. “Mr. Schwarzman has a salary and does not take a bonus,” said Peter Rose, a Blackstone spokesman, in response to Equilar’s research. “He gets dividends on his Blackstone stock, just like the public, and he gets his share of the gains in the funds he invests in. His interests perfectly match up with our fund investors and our public shareholders.” The wealth of executives at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts was harder to determine, because it disclosed only distribution payouts on common units and not on the convertible ownership units held by top executives. But even excluding those payouts, the two co-chiefs at K.K.R., Henry R. Kravis and George R. Roberts, made more than $35 million each in compensation. These large payments would not be obvious to the casual reader of proxy statements. Only the salary, bonuses and certain other pay like stock grants are listed plainly on the annual compensation tables in S.E.C. filings. To determine the big dividend payouts, Equilar pieced together information in other parts of the company’s annual report. A spokesman at Apollo Global declined to comment on its compensation, and representatives for Carlyle and K.K.R. did not reply to requests for comment. HEDGE fund managers typically prize secrecy. Only a handful of hedge funds — including Och-Ziff, Fortress Investment and Oaktree Capital Management — are publicly traded and thus required to disclose their executive pay packages. Each year, AR magazine estimates hedge fund managers’ pay based on the fees they charge clients as well as the change in value of their personal stakes. In 2011, Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, had an estimated payday of $3.9 billion (yes, billion with a “b”), according to AR magazine. The activist investor Carl C. Icahn was estimated to have earned $2.5 billion in 2011. The 2012 list will be published in the coming weeks. By comparison, the publicly traded hedge funds paid their C.E.O.’s relatively meager amounts. Oaktree Capital’s president, Bruce Karsh, made about $12.2 million in base compensation and about $64 million in distributions in 2012. ( Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.65 billion.) To be fair, many hedge fund managers have most of their wealth tied up in the funds themselves. For instance, Steven A. Cohen, one of the consistently top-paid hedge fund managers, owns more than half of the estimated $15 billion in assets managed by his firm, SAC Capital.

Executive Compensation
Private equity
Hedge fund
Apollo Global Management
Blackstone Group
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts,KKR
Carlyle Group


Safety Agency Is Questioned on Collapse at Utah Mine

Abstract: WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 — Senators on Wednesday questioned whether the head of the mine safety agency had done enough to prevent the Crandall Canyon Mine disaster in Huntington, Utah , or provided adequate leadership in the rescue effort. Just 18 months after a hearing into the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia, where 12 miners died, senators at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing expressed frustration that the Mine Safety and Health Administration had not spearheaded stronger enforcement of safety standards. “It is infuriating to watch MSHA, even after the tragedy at Sago, continue a tepid, disjointed and minimizing approach to mine safety,” said Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. The collapse last month in Utah trapped six miners, who are presumed dead. Three rescuers, including an employee of the mine agency, were killed in another collapse 10 days later. The mine safety director, Richard E. Stickler, defended his agency’s approval of “retreat” mining at Crandall Canyon. In that technique, pillars of coal that hold up tunnel ceilings are extracted. Mr. Stickler said the cause of the accident was a large “bump” that occurs when mine supports are overstressed, causing cave-ins that redistribute the weight of the mountain. “Inside the mine, the force of the bump was so intense that it blew out the ventilation walls more than a half-mile from the bump area,” he said. “In my nearly 40 years of working in the mine industry, I have never seen a catastrophic mountain bump of this magnitude.” The committee will hold a session to hear from Robert E. Murray, a co-owner of the mine, who told the panel that he was sick and unable to attend.

Mine Safety and Health Administration
Accidents and Safety
Mines and Mining
Utah


Chelsea Survives a Scare With Drogba to Top Norwich City

Abstract: LONDON — Two brave men go for a ball in the air. They have eyes only for the ball, and fear does not enter their heads. They collide, and one of them appears to be knocked out even before he crashes to the turf. A fearful hush descends on the audience. Almost 42,000 in the stadium hold their breath as players on both sides rush to the fallen man. One player alertly reaches into his mouth to make sure that the concussed player’s tongue is not blocking his breathing. Medical aid is expert and immediate. But still it is seven minutes before Didier Drogba, the Chelsea striker, is strapped onto a stretcher, his face covered in an oxygen mask as he is carried to a waiting ambulance. This is English soccer in the raw. The incident, during Chelsea’s home match against Norwich City on Saturday, has a hopeful and positive outcome because Drogba was released from the hospital after extensive tests and will be monitored by the club’s full-time medical staff before he is cleared to play again. The collision was without blame. Drogba, who stands 1.89 meters, or 6-foot-3, and weighs 84 kilograms, or 185 pounds, met in midair the Norwich goalkeeper, John Ruddy, a man even taller and heavier. Drogba’s timing was a fraction of a second better than Ruddy’s, which might be expected of a world-renowned goal scorer competing against a much younger goalie who had made 11 short-term career moves before reaching Premier League status this month. Look closely, and you see that at the moment of impact both men’s eyes are closed. Drogba’s skull lightly deflects the flight of the ball, while Ruddy’s fists catch the striker in the head. Anyone who has played soccer to any standard knows that this is a collision waiting to happen. The goal area is for the bravest of the brave, and not only will accidents happen but this, as much as all the millions of pounds spent importing skilled players to the Premier League, is still the utmost physical drama that makes English soccer so compelling around the world. Chelsea, by the way, won the match, 3-1. The turning point of the contest was a penalty kick, conceded by Ruddy. The goalie, rightly not punished in any way for his coming together with Drogba, was penalized with a penalty kick and a red card for a later rash dive at the feet of the onrushing midfielder Ramires. By that time, Drogba was under hospital surveillance, and Chelsea was on its way to victory. The final goal, as deft a touch as all that before it had been helter-skelter, came in the 11th minute of injury added time, from Chelsea’s latest multimillion-dollar recruit, the Spaniard Juan Mata. Barring unforeseen repercussions from his concussion, Drogba will be back. But he is 33, his value to the team is based on fearless aggression and vision and ability. And at Chelsea’s level, somebody will someday, perhaps soon, make a decision that his prime and his time is up. Indeed, that process is under way. After Drogba was carried away Saturday, a substitute, Romelu Lukaku, appeared. The son of a former Zaire international, Lukaku, 18, is built like Drogba, plays like him, and just has to play 307 games and score 144 goals in Chelsea blue as Drogba has done since 2004. Even this early in the season, some transitions may be paying off. A club that has known better times, Liverpool, is showing signs of becoming competitive again at the top of the league. It is, remarkably, 21 years since Liverpool was England’s champion. Twenty-one years, and two American boardroom buyouts, since Kenny Dalglish both played and managed the team that outplayed all others in the league. The new American owners, the Boston Red Sox proprietors Fenway Sports Group, reinstalled Dalglish as team manager and, since January have sold Fernando Torres to Chelsea, but recruited seven new players at a combined cost of £115 million, around $188 million, in transfer fees. The owners have plans to build on Liverpool’s name abroad. They see a huge potential income stream from the merchandising of the Liverpool brand abroad, especially in Asia. And they appear to realize that the value of the brand is utterly and totally tied up with the soccer played on the field. On Saturday, in a 3-1 victory over Bolton, Liverpool at times gave glimpses of the passing and movement and power of the 1990s, when King Kenny Dalglish was in his heyday. With a capacity 44,000 crowd behind him, Dalglish clearly lives every ball, plays every move in his head from the sideline. He professes to know no secrets, other than soccer at its finest is teamwork between eleven men who have ability and belief in doing the simple things well. The secret, of course, is picking the right men in the right positions. The catalyst to Liverpool’s early season rise is Luiz Suárez, the ebullient, spiky, crafty Uruguayan. He moves like a latter-day Dalglish, hunting goals but also intuitively finding space for others around him to score goals. José Enrique, a Spanish defender purchased from Newcastle only two weeks ago, slots straight into the Liverpool way as if born to play there. The others, English or Scottish, reflect Liverpool’s old philosophy that to win the English league you need a solid backbone of British talents, and British willingness to run the extra mile to win a soccer game. In his “idle” years when he was an ex-manager, Dalglish spent his time obsessively watching and learning global soccer by satellite. Seldom a talker, more of a doer, he bided his time until the crowd demanded that the Americans turn back Liverpool’s clock by rehiring him. While Torres struggles to find the form and force for Chelsea that he initially was for Liverpool, the collective new signings for Liverpool appear to have all hit the ground running. Why wouldn’t they? Dalglish asks; Liverpool is a comfortable place to play, if you can play. It is as much a statement as anyone is likely to extract from the team-builder. Right now, with the season just three games in, Dalglish knows that being on top of the standings means next to nothing. “It’s early days,” he answers reporters trying to get him to be more expansive. “But better than being bottom.” And he smiles, the way Liverpool’s cagey former manager, Bob Paisley, smiled when he signed Dalglish as a player.

Chelsea Football Club
English Premier League
Liverpool FC


Japan Announces Emergency Budget for Rebuilding

Abstract: TOKYO — The Japanese government earmarked almost $50 billion in emergency spending on Friday for the first step in the country’s largest reconstruction effort since World War II. The $48.5 billion budget is likely to be followed by more spending as Japan takes on the gargantuan task of rebuilding the section of its Pacific coastline ravaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Parliament is expected to pass the budget next week. At least 14,133 people have been found dead, an additional 13,346 remain missing and more than 130,000 are living in evacuation centers. Government estimates put the total damage from the quake and tsunami at $300 billion. The nuclear crisis set off by the tsunami has added to the human and economic toll. On Friday, the government banned residents from a 12-mile evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, where several reactors have suffered explosions and radiation leaks. A previous order urged but did not require evacuation from that zone; the government still recommends that residents leave if they are within 19 miles of the plant. “We all share the hope that reconstruction does not mean a return to where we were, but the building of a brighter future,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan said at a news conference. “I feel it was my fate to be prime minister at a time of great adversity,” said Mr. Kan, whose handling of the crises has been criticized sharply in Parliament and in the country at large. Japan has rebounded from other catastrophes: The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake killed as many as 140,000 people and caused widespread destruction in Tokyo. It also is thought to have wiped out almost 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. In comparison, the death toll from the March 11 quake and tsunami is far lower, and the economic damage is likely to add up to just a few percent of G.D.P. Still, Japan faces different challenges now, which could weigh heavily as it rebuilds: a rapidly aging population, a long-stagnant economy and public debt that is already at twice the size of its economy, thanks to profligate public works projects of the 1990s. That debt burden adds serious obstacles to financing the great reconstruction. Raising taxes, for which there appears to be a measure of public support, will dampen already tepid personal consumption levels. Issuing more government bonds will add to the ballooning deficit. Mr. Kan’s grip on leadership also appears to be weakening under the withering criticism, including charges that he bungled the initial response to the nuclear crisis, causing it to worsen. The president of Fukushima Daiichi’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, visited an evacuation center on Friday. “I have no words to express my regret,” the president, Masataka Shimizu, told the evacuees after making his way through cardboard beds and blankets. Television cameras in tow, he knelt and bowed deeply — the ultimate posture of apology in Japan. Some refugees bowed back, but others heckled him. “We all just want to go home,” one told him quietly.

Japan
Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011)
Infrastructure (Public Works)


Landis Joins Race’s Crowd, but Riders Ignore Him

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — Floyd Landis , the cyclist who recently admitted to doping after four years of vehemently denying it, showed up at the Tour of California on Saturday, looking like an important man. Flanked by private security guards wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns and nightsticks, he was escorted into the hospitality area for the sponsor of his current team, OUCH-Bahati Foundation Pro Cycling, a domestic-level squad that was not invited to this eight-day race. Landis then sat with his back to the road, ignoring the hubbub behind him. Some of the riders he had accused of systematic doping were zipping by on a 20.9-mile time-trial course. First came George Hincapie, the United States road racing champion. “The American legend is charging!” the race announcer shouted. Then came the three-time defending Tour of California champion, Levi Leipheimer, called “Mr. California” over the loudspeakers. The five-time national time trial champion David Zabriskie, once a close friend of Landis’s, was next. Landis, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, eventually turned to watch the top riders in their final lap of the route through downtown. But as his former teammates and friends flew by him, he showed no reaction. He simply chomped on his lunch — coleslaw and a tiny hamburger — and stared blankly at the road. Landis, who was stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title for doping, did not talk to reporters Saturday. His security guards and a beefy bodyguard made sure of that. But some of the people he has accused of doping were not silent. “He’s here, really?” Zabriskie said sarcastically after he finished third in the time trial, 27 seconds back. “Tell him I said hi. How’s he doing?” Another person Landis has accused of being involved in doping — Jim Ochowicz, the Team BMC Racing president — had heard that Landis might be at Stage 7 on Saturday. “Everybody’s free to do whatever they want; it’s a free country,” Ochowicz, a former top USA Cycling official, said of Landis’s attendance. “I haven’t had contact with Floyd in a long time. I feel sorry for him.” Ochowicz said that none of Landis’s allegations were true and that he did not know why Landis would make them. He added that he “couldn’t say” if he had been contacted by antidoping officials or federal agents involved in an investigation of doping in cycling — an investigation Landis is cooperating with. But Ochowicz called those investigations unsettling. “Anybody would be nervous about something like that,” he said. Team HTC-Columbia’s Tony Martin, a 25-year-old German, won the time trial on a route with bumps, rough surfaces and shifting wind. His teammate Michael Rogers was second, 22 seconds back. Rogers, of Australia, remained in the leader’s yellow jersey, nine seconds ahead of Zabriskie, with one stage to go. Leipheimer is third over all, 25 seconds out of first. After years of dominating this race, he was dejected after finishing fourth in the time trial. That effort could have put his fourth consecutive Tour of California victory out of reach. “Of course, if I come to the Tour of California, if I don’t win, I lose,” said Leipheimer, who added that he had “nothing to say” about Landis being at the race. “Dave and Mick were just a fraction better than me all week.” Rogers, one of the few top riders here not implicated by Landis, said he was hopeful of keeping his lead on the final day, an 83-mile circuit race north of this city. “We’re really excited and we think we can do it,” Rogers said of his potential victory on Sunday, which would be the biggest win of his career. At one time, winning the Tour of California was a huge victory for Landis, too. In 2006, a year after Armstrong went into a three-and-a-half-year retirement, Landis was labeled the next great American rider. Back then, he had a lot of friends in the sport. “At one point or another, all of us implicated have cared about Floyd,” Armstrong said before Thursday’s stage, during which he crashed and abandoned the event. “We might have been on different teams or from different backgrounds in our lives, but at some point or another, we shared the bond that we all gave Floyd a ladder. When he dug himself in a hole, we gave him a ladder to dig out of. Now people aren’t throwing ladders at him anymore.” Landis’s personal doctor, Brent Kay of OUCH Sports Medical Center, is still willing to do that. He was by Landis’s side the day Landis tested positive for synthetic testosterone at the Tour de France. And he remained at Landis’s side, although a series of e-mail messages posted on the RadioShack Web site last week left him feeling embarrassed. In those messages, some of which were from Kay to Armstrong and a Tour of California race official, Kay wrote that he still believed that Landis had never doped. He was asking for Landis and the team to be included in this race. But halfway through the Tour of California, Landis admitted to doping, shocking those who had long believed in him. For Kay, it was just a hiccup in their relationship. He invited Landis to attend Saturday’s stage as a guest of a fund-raising event he was hosting, and he shooed some reporters away from Landis. Before that event, Kay spoke briefly to reporters standing just outside metal barricades hastily erected around the area. “I’m not going away; I’m supporting him as a physician,” Kay said of Landis, adding that he believed that Landis told the truth when he said that others in the sport had doped. But he could not explain why he was supporting Landis. He said, “I just do.”

Landis Floyd
Doping (Sports)
Tour of California (Bicycle Race)
Bicycles and Bicycling
USA Cycling
Leipheimer Levi
Martin Tony
Rogers Michael
Armstrong Lance
Hincapie George


How to Cut the Deficit While Adding Jobs

Abstract: WASHINGTON When Joe Biden convened debt ceiling negotiations with Congressional leaders on May 5, the experts were saying that the economy was on an upswing. They’re not saying that anymore. Consumer spending has weakened. Hiring has slowed. Stocks have slid. As tends to be the case in the long aftermath of a financial crisis, the economy once again needs help . And the debt talks have become the best opportunity for Washington to provide that help. Doing so will require some political maturity, because the negotiators will have to hold on to two thoughts simultaneously. They will need to increase the deficit in some modest, targeted ways that could increase hiring, like tax cuts for businesses and spending on scientific research. At the same time, negotiators will have to find enough medium-term spending cuts and tax increases to bring down the deficit soon. Economically, this mix is not all that complicated. Ben Bernanke , the Federal Reserve chairman, has called for a version of it, in his own cautious way. Coming up with a plan to reduce the deficit was urgent, he said, but making cuts now “could be self-defeating if it were to undercut the still-fragile recovery.” Politically, the mix is clearly trickier. Yet both parties have reason to compromise. Democrats are worried — or at least they should be, deeply — that the weak economy will cost them the White House and Senate next year. Republicans are worried that their plan to replace Medicare with a system of private insurance will let Democrats win even if the economy remains weak. A deal that commits both parties to further cuts in Medicare’s growth while also helping the economy seems to have a chance of passing. For the economy’s sake, the best such deal would include two kinds of help. The first would be immediate: further tax cuts for households and businesses, as well as an extension of jobless benefits. On Tuesday, the White House signaled that it was open to new cuts in the payroll tax. These moves could help lift spending and re-establish the confidence that the economy would indeed recover, as it always has before. The second kind of help might be even more important: policies that would eventually shift the country away from its debt-fueled reliance on consumption and toward more investment , production and high-end service industries. I understand that some of these steps, especially in the first category, smack of stimulus. Many people are understandably skeptical of stimulus, given that the economy remains in bad shape despite everything the government has tried over the last four years. But the earlier stimulus made a big difference , even if it couldn’t erase the impact of the worst financial crisis in decades. The tax rebates signed by President George W. Bush and President Obama both lifted spending. So did the cash-for-clunkers vehicle rebate program. The billions of dollars of state aid prevented layoffs of teachers, police officers and sanitation workers. It is no coincidence that this downturn has been far less severe than the Great Depression , even though the initial deterioration this time was worse . It’s no coincidence that the only quarter of economic growth in 2008 was the quarter when the Bush rebate checks went out. It’s no coincidence that the economy’s most rapid improvement and fastest growth under Mr. Obama came as his stimulus plan and the Fed’s actions were peaking . A new plan — sure to be called a jobs plan, not a stimulus — would start by extending the payroll tax cut for households through the end of next year. Late last year, Congress and the White House extended the Bush income tax cuts through the end of 2012 but cut the payroll tax only through 2011. This makes little sense, substantively. The payroll tax (which finances Social Security and Medicare) has become the main tax that most middle- and lower-income households pay, according to the Tax Policy Center. So cutting the payroll tax delivers more economic bang than the Bush tax cuts , at a far lower cost to the deficit. Absent an extension, almost everybody’s taxes will rise on Jan. 1. “When the economy is not doing well,” says Ike Brannon of the conservative American Action Forum, “you hate to see any tax increase.” Employers also pay a portion of the payroll tax, and several people — including Lawrence Summers and the members of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s debt panel — have called for the employer portion to be cut, too. That would certainly help. But I think the strongest argument is for a targeted cut. Any business that increased its net employment could be exempted from payroll taxes on new workers for a few years, creating a big incentive to hire instead of, say, buying new machines . The exemption could be retroactive to June 1, so that companies would not wait to hire until after the bill passed. Corporate lobbyists defeated this idea last time — because executives wanted federal money even if they were not hiring — but that’s just self-interest. And what about policies to begin restructuring the economy? Economists can give you a long list. High-skill immigrants, often the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, could be encouraged to stay here, rather than shown the door. The permit process for businesses could become simpler, as executives urged Mr. Obama in North Carolina on Monday. Perhaps most important, Washington could make more high-return investments in science and education. Only the federal government can afford the large-scale basic science that has often led to breakthrough innovations , like the semiconductor, the Internet and many new drugs. Yet federal spending on basic research , as a share of the economy, has fallen 5 percent in the last five years. Talk about a self-defeating cut. All told, a growth agenda like this one would cost a few hundred billion dollars over the next couple of years. It’s small change relative to any number of ways to reduce the deficit: squeezing wasteful Medicare and military spending, reforming the Social Security disability program, forcing social programs to become more accountable for results, closing corporate tax loopholes, returning tax rates on the rich to Clinton-era levels. Obviously, any package that survives the debt ceiling talks will not be the ideal one. But there is a whole lot of room between neutral and ideal. Washington really can put people back to work while cutting the deficit. And, of course, moving people back into paying jobs will ultimately help reduce the deficit, too.

US Economy
Economy
US Politics
Layoffs
Federal Budget
Federal Taxes
Payroll tax


Musharraf Leaves White House in Lurch

Abstract: WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 — For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world. On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly. Now the White House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward. General Musharraf’s move to seize emergency powers and abandon the Constitution left Bush administration officials close to their nightmare: an American-backed military dictator who is risking civil instability in a country with nuclear weapons and an increasingly alienated public. Mr. Bush entered a delicate dance with Pakistan immediately after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when General Musharraf pledged his cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda, whose top leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are believed to be hiding out in the mountainous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The United States has given Pakistan more than $10 billion in aid, mostly to the military, since 2001. Now, if the state of emergency drags on, the administration will be faced with the difficult decision of whether to cut off that aid and risk undermining Pakistan’s efforts to pursue terrorists — a move the White House believes could endanger the security of the United States. Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American military commander in the Middle East, told General Musharraf and his top generals in Islamabad on Friday that he would put that aid at risk if he seized emergency powers. But after the declaration on Saturday, there was no immediate action by the administration to accompany the tough talk, as officials monitored developments in Pakistan. Inside the White House the hope is that the state of emergency will be short-lived and that General Musharraf will fulfill his promise to abandon his post as Army chief of staff and hold elections by Jan. 15. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, traveling in the Middle East, called Mr. Musharraf’s move “highly regrettable,” while her spokesman, Sean D. McCormack, said the United States was “deeply disturbed.” Teresita Schaffer, an expert on Pakistan at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called General Musharraf’s action “a big embarrassment” for the administration. But she said there was not much the United States could do. “There’s going to be a lot of visible wringing of hands, and urging Musharraf to declare his intentions,” she said. “But I don’t really see any alternative to continuing to work with him. They can’t just decide they’re going to blow off the whole country of Pakistan, because it sits right next to Afghanistan, where there are some 26,000 U.S. and NATO troops.” The hand-wringing began even before General Musharraf imposed military rule. Ms. Rice said she has had several conversations with General Musharraf in the past few weeks — the last one two days ago — in which she appealed to him not to declare emergency powers. The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, had also been exhorting General Musharraf and his top deputies against making that step, Ms. Rice said. “We were clear that we did not support it,” Ms. Rice said, speaking to reporters aboard a flight from Istanbul to Israel, where she is traveling for regional talks. “We were clear that we didn’t support it because it would take Pakistan away from the path of democratic rule.” But even as she criticized General Musharraf’s power grab, Ms. Rice stopped short of outright condemnation of General Musharraf himself, even going so far as to credit him for doing “a lot” — in the past — toward preparing Pakistan for what she called a “path to democratic rule.” That seeming contradiction highlights the quandary in which the Bush administration now finds itself. There has long been a deep fear within the administration, particularly among intelligence officials, that an imperfect General Musharraf is better for American interests than an unknown in a volatile country that is central to the administration’s fight against terrorism. In recent months the White House had been hoping that a power-sharing alliance between General Musharraf and Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, would help the general cling to power while putting a democratic face on his regime. Now, experts predict that the United States will be watching Pakistan closely in the coming days to see how hard General Musharraf cracks down on his opponents — and whether opposition political leaders, journalists and scholars are imprisoned. Much of the attention will be on Ms. Bhutto, who strongly condemned the emergency declaration and quickly cut short a visit to Dubai to return to Pakistan during the crisis. Officials will be watching to see whether Pakistan’s fractured opposition, including Ms. Bhutto and her political party can unite and pose a serious challenge to General Musharraf. They will also be watching the reaction of the military, which has been demoralized by a spate of suicide bombings against military targets. Whatever happens, experts say that General Musharraf’s decision was not good news for the Bush administration. Even if Pakistan does get back on the path to democracy, Saturday’s action will likely tarnish the Pakistani leader, as well as the legitimacy of any election organized by his government. Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the current situation could easily plunge Pakistan into chaos, leading to an increase in violence by Islamic fundamentalists or provoking demonstrations by opposition political parties. “You could have chaos in the street, or a situation where it would be suicidal for Bhutto to try to participate in the process,” he said, adding, “Either of those scenarios puts the U.S. in a very difficult position.”

Musharraf Pervez
Bush George W
Pakistan
United States
United States International Relations


Russian Track Team Competes, but It’s a Long Way From Rio

Abstract: MOSCOW — Instead of the Olympic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, members of the Russian track and field team, which has been barred from the Games over a doping scandal, competed among themselves Thursday evening at what looked like a high school stadium. While many called the track meet Russia’s “alternative Olympics,” the organizers said it simply was an effort to support individual athletes who had trained hard for the Games. Track’s global governing body barred the team last month after revelations of state-sponsored doping, which has led other sports federations to bar Russian athletes. The track meet, organized in just a week, was dubbed the Stars 2016 Tournament. “We organized this event in order to let our athletes demonstrate the results of their work ahead of the Olympics and also to support them financially,” said Dmitri A. Shlyakhtin, the head of the Russian track and field federation. Image Anna Schagina running in a 1,000-meter race on Thursday. Credit Maxim Shemetov/Reuters Winners were awarded 100,000 rubles each, or $1,500. Winning a gold medal at the Games can earn a government bonus of some four million rubles, around $60,000. The 137 athletes competing at the tiny Zamansky Brothers stadium in northeast Moscow — considered too obscure to have ever hosted as much as a national championship — included many of the 68 barred track athletes, among them stars like Sergei V. Shubenkov, the current world champion hurdler, and Ivan S. Ukhov, the 2012 Olympic high jump champion. A total of 272 Russians have been allowed to compete in Rio so far. Russia had planned to send 387 athletes. An investigation, commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and directed by a Canadian lawyer, Richard McLaren, listed abnormal levels of table salt in urine, scratches on the inside of the bottle caps and mismatching DNA as evidence of tampering with doping samples. Various computer data and emails suggested that high-ranking Russian sports officials were involved in the scheme. The International Olympic Committee, in a highly criticized decision, declined to bar all Russian athletes but said the 28 individual sports federations overseeing Olympic sports should decide which athletes are clean and cleared to compete. At the meet here, only a few hundred people, mostly relatives and friends, came to cheer the athletes. The event, which was not highly publicized, was streamed online but not televised. Putin has dismissed the accusations against the Russian antidoping system as politically motivated, saying, “There is not the slightest concrete evidence” to prove them. The athletes agreed. “I don’t think sports had anything to do with this; they are just trying to pressure us on all fronts,” said Vasily A. Kopeikin, the winner of the long jump event, wearing a number bib that said, “I jump clean.” Other athletes had bibs saying, “I run clean” or “I throw clean.” Image The Russian sports minister, Vitaly L. Mutko, center, cheered the athletes. A WADA report said he had extensive knowledge of doping. Credit Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press Kopeikin denied he had ever encountered a state-run doping system in Russia. “All they want to do is push us back, so that Russia would sit silently and obey,” he said. The Russian sports minister, Vitaly L. Mutko, who the WADA report said had extensive knowledge of doping, awarded prizes to the winners. After the ceremony, the athletes encircled Mutko in the middle of the green field for almost an hour, expressing their grievances and worries. “The house of cards has collapsed, so what do we do now?” asked Dmitri S. Tarabin, a javelin thrower and one of the meet’s winners. “Just tell me whom to fire; I will do everything,” said Mutko, a longtime ally of Putin. Mutko has said he would not fire himself.

2016 Summer Olympics
Russian Track and Field Federation
Doping
Russia


Eagles’ Kelly Shows the N.F.L. How to Run

Abstract: The Philadelphia Eagles’ heavily hyped offense did not disappoint in Chip Kelly’s N.F.L. coaching debut Monday night. The Eagles ran 30 plays in the first quarter and 53 in the first half, operating at a dizzying pace against an overmatched Washington Redskins defense in a 33-27 victory. The Eagles had 21 first downs in the first half, using an even faster tempo than the lightning-quick, hurry-up offense the team showed in the preseason. Kelly took his foot off the gas pedal in the second half, but he won over a lot of Eagles fans, and skeptics, in just 30 minutes. The Eagles shredded the Redskins on the ground, rushing 49 times for 263 yards. In the 14 years under Andy Reid , the most carries Philadelphia had in a game was 46, in a Week 1 blowout against Dallas in 2000. On Monday, LeSean McCoy rushed 31 times for 184 yards and a touchdown, and looked every bit as good as those numbers. But Philadelphia’s success on the ground was particularly notable in light of how the rest of the league fared in Week 1. The passing game has dominated headlines for the past few years; teams have been throwing more effectively and more frequently than ever. But there was an underreported side story: in each of the last two seasons, the average N.F.L. carry was for 4.3 yards, the only two times the league average had been so high. So as passing records were being set each week, rushing efficiency was also peaking. But in Week 1, before Monday night, N.F.L. offenses were overmatched in the running game. Miami, San Francisco and Seattle all won, but the Dolphins’ Lamar Miller rushed 10 times for 3 yards; the 49ers’ Frank Gore had 21 carries for 44 yards; and the Seahawks’ Marshawn Lynch gained just 43 yards on 17 rush attempts. Perhaps it is not surprising that the plodding BenJarvus Green-Ellis had 14 carries for 25 yards for the Cincinnati Bengals against the Chicago Bears, but the explosive C. J. Spiller had just 41 yards on 17 carries for the Buffalo Bills against the New England Patriots. In Pittsburgh, neither the Steelers nor the Tennessee Titans could run the ball: combined, their five running backs rushed for 137 yards on 51 carries, producing an average gain of 2.7 yards. At MetLife Stadium, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Doug Martin and the Jets’ Bilal Powell and Chris Ivory combined for 46 carries and averaged 2.4 yards a carry. Image In Chip Kelly’s N.F.L. coaching debut Monday night, the Eagles ran 30 plays in the first quarter and 53 in the first half. Credit Rob Carr/Getty Images On Sunday, only two players cracked the 100-yard mark: the second-string Patriots running back Shane Vereen (101) and Oakland Raiders quarterback Terrelle Pryor (112). This was the first time in 20 years that fewer than four running backs cracked the century barrier in Week 1. More surprising, the league average before Monday night was an abysmal 3.4 yards a carry. Apparently, the N.F.L needed a college coach to put the running game in vogue again. The Belichick Test On Sunday, the Patriots defeated Buffalo and the rookie quarterback E J Manuel, 23-21. On Thursday night, the rookie Geno Smith and the Jets travel to New England with the hope of pulling off an upset. Rookie quarterbacks are now 4-11 in games against Bill Belichick’s Patriots, with one of those wins coming from the last Jets rookie to start against New England: Mark Sanchez. The Jets are a 13-point underdog in Week 2. With the exception of a meaningless Week 17 New England game against Vince Young and the Tennessee Titans in 2006, no team with a rookie quarterback has been favored to beat Belichick’s Patriots. At 13 points, the Jets are the largest underdog of any of the rookie-led teams. For his career, Belichick is 18-9 as a coach or defensive coordinator against rookie quarterbacks. Boldin Connection A decade ago, Anquan Boldin gained a stunning 200 receiving yards in his first game with the Arizona Cardinals. On Sunday, Boldin topped that feat, with 208 yards, in his first game for the 49ers: he is now responsible for half of the four 200-yard receiving games in Week 1 of an N.F.L. season since 1970. The 49ers traded a sixth-round pick to Baltimore to acquire Boldin in March, as the Ravens were planning to cut him to clear $6 million in salary-cap space. It was only one game, but Boldin was as valuable as any nonquarterback in the first week of the season. Boldin helped his new quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, have the first 400-passing-yard game of his young career in a 34-28 win over Green Bay. Kaepernick did not hit the 300-yard mark until Super Bowl XLVII in February, but he had his best passing game against a Packers secondary that was missing safety Morgan Burnett and cornerback Casey Hayward. Kaepernick posted a 129.4 passer rating on 39 passes, the highest rating on so many passes since Peyton Manning — three days earlier. From 2008 to 2012, only four quarterbacks hit those thresholds in a game. Predictive Power of Week 1 Everything is magnified in Week 1, including losses, especially in Tom Coughlin’s world. Since 1990, just 25 percent of all teams that lost in Week 1 made the playoffs. But that is a bit deceiving. Among all playoff teams since 1990, 68 percent of them won in the opener. That is the same winning percentage those teams had in the rest of the regular season. In other words, good teams lose games from time to time, but there is nothing special about losing in Week 1. For trivia buffs: the week that playoff teams are least likely to lose is Week 3; playoff teams have had a 73.3 winning percentage in those weeks.

Football
Philadelphia Eagles
Chip Kelly
Colin Kaepernick
Bill Belichick
Anquan Boldin


Aretha Franklin Thwarts Screening of Documentary Featuring Concert Footage

Abstract: TELLURIDE, Colo. — Aretha Franklin prevailed on Friday in an 11th-hour legal bid to stop the Telluride Film Festival from screening Sydney Pollack’s posthumous documentary “Amazing Grace,” which shows the making of Ms. Franklin’s album of the same name more than four decades ago. In a strongly worded emergency order, Judge John L. Kane of the United States District Court for Colorado said Ms. Franklin had “a high likelihood of success on the merits” of her case. “A film that essentially recreates the entire concert experience is not fair use of this footage,” he added. The injunction specifically barred screenings in Telluride, including what would have been the film’s premiere on Friday night at the 500-seat Chuck Jones Cinema, and did not mention other film festivals. The judge’s order, which will expire in 14 days, also blocked screenings scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. The injunction clouds the future of what had been one of the festival season’s most highly anticipated documentaries. The movie was set to show on Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival, where distribution rights were to be sold at an accompanying film market. Ms. Franklin had long opposed the release of the movie, which she said violated her contractual and other rights. While those issues remain to be settled, Friday’s injunction throws into disarray the plans for a splashy debut and high-profile sale. In a statement, a spokeswoman for the festival told attendees of the ruling late Friday afternoon and said another documentary, “Sherpa,” would be substituted at the planned screening. “Amazing Grace” was shot in early 1972, as Ms. Franklin recorded her album at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church near Los Angeles. Mr. Pollack experienced difficulties in matching sound with his film, and eventually shelved the project. But it was later revived by the producer Alan Elliott, who acquired the rights from Warner Bros. and apparently solved the technical problems. Mr. Elliott did not respond to queries on Friday. A spokesman for William Morris Endeavor, which was to oversee the sale of film rights, had no immediate comment. In a statement issued before Judge Kane ruled, Thom Powers, a documentary programmer with the Toronto festival, said: “We’re proceeding with plans to screen ‘Amazing Grace’ at TIFF. We haven’t heard of any legal procedures regarding the film in Toronto.” Whether the ruling would change that position remained unclear. It is extremely rare for a festival to remove a film from its lineup after it has been announced. Courtney Love successfully stopped the unflattering documentary “Kurt & Courtney” — about her and her late husband, Kurt Cobain — from playing at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, but she had a rather direct legal claim: The documentarian, Nick Broomfield, had not cleared the necessary music rights. At this year’s Sundance festival, lawyers were on call to defend against any attempt by the Church of Scientology to block a screening of “Going Clear,” Alex Gibney’s documentary about the church. But the church, despite a public relations campaign against the film, which was released by HBO, did not go to court. In 2011, Ms. Franklin sued Mr. Elliott, aiming to block his revival of the “Amazing Grace” film. But the case was resolved when she understood Mr. Elliott to have said that he had no intention of releasing it publicly, according to a recap in the complaint filed Friday. That complaint maintains that Mr. Elliott’s deal with Warner Bros. requires him to get Ms. Franklin’s permission before using Mr. Pollack’s footage. “The film is the functional equivalent of replaying an entire Aretha Franklin concert without her consent,” the complaint said. It cited rights of publicity, the right to the use of her name and likeness, invasion of privacy and antipiracy concerns as matters to be considered in blocking the film. Even before Judge Kane’s ruling, Ms. Franklin had become persona non grata at Telluride. “I’m sorry, I thought maybe Aretha had sent you,” a festival volunteer said after being startled by the sudden approach of an attendee. “She’s suing the festival, you know. What gall.”

Aretha Franklin
Movies
Telluride Film Festival
Sydney Pollack
Amazing Grace
Documentaries
Lawsuits
John L Kane Jr
Toronto International Film Festival


California: BART Trainee Was Running Train in Fatal Crash

Abstract: The operator of a Bay Area Rapid Transit train involved in a fatal accident on Saturday was a trainee who was not yet certified to drive the train, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board said on Monday. The train, which killed two workers who were inspecting a section of track, was on a run “for training and maintenance purposes” during a strike by railroad workers, said the investigator, Jim Southworth. BART had said it would train managers to operate trains in order to provide a limited shuttle service during the walkout. Unions for the striking workers had warned that it would be dangerous to allow inexperienced operators to drive the trains.

Bay Area Rapid Transit
Train wreck
Fatalities,casualties
Strikes Labor
NTSB
California
San Francisco Bay Area


Hamilton on Pole in China

Abstract: Lewis Hamilton maintained Mercedes’s perfect record in qualifying this season, holding off two Red Bull drivers to capture his third pole of the campaign at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai. It was the 34th pole of Hamilton’s career, a record for most poles by a British driver in Formula One. The Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo was about 0.6 of a second back in second, and teammate Sebastian Vettel was third.

Car Racing
Mercedes GP Petronas Formula One Team
Lewis Hamilton


Judge Ties Italy Secret Service to Cleric’s Abduction

Abstract: ROME — The Italian secret service was most likely aware of, “and perhaps complicit in,” the abduction of an Egyptian cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003, a judge in Milan said Monday. But, he added, state secrecy prevented the court from proving this. The statement by the judge, Oscar Magi, was part of a 200-page document explaining his reasoning behind the landmark November ruling that convicted 23 Americans, most of them Central Intelligence Agency operatives, of kidnapping the cleric. It was the first case to yield convictions in the practice of “ extraordinary rendition ,” in which terrorism suspects are captured in one country and taken to another, where they may be subjected to coercive interrogation techniques . Judge Magi convicted a former C.I.A. base chief and 22 other Americans of kidnapping in the abduction of an Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr , also known as Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors said the cleric was taken from Milan in broad daylight and flown from an American air base in Italy to a base in Germany and then on to Egypt, where Mr. Nasr asserts he was tortured. Judge Magi wrote that the fact that the C.I.A. had conducted the operation on Italian soil with such impunity “leads to the presumption that such activity was carried out at least with the knowledge (or maybe with the complicity)” of the Italian secret service. But he added that it was “not possible” to prove those ties because of a decision last March by Italy’s Constitutional Court, which ruled that any evidence of contact between the Italian secret service and the C.I.A. was covered by state secrecy and therefore inadmissible in the trial. In his reasoning, Judge Magi said this had created a kind of “black curtain” over crucial parts of the trial. He criticized the Constitutional Court ruling as having created “a logical and juridical paradox.” Judge Magi acquitted three Americans, citing diplomatic immunity, and two Italians, citing state secrecy. Tried in absentia, the other 23 Americans are considered fugitives and are sought under a European Union arrest warrant. Through their lawyers, they pleaded not guilty. The Italian government is not expected to request extradition of the Americans, who are not expected to serve jail time. Still, the case marked the first time a judge in an allied country had placed C.I.A. agents on trial. The trial shed some light on the darker recesses of American counterintelligence operations. At the time of his abduction Mr. Nasr was under surveillance by the Italian authorities, who suspected him of recruiting militants from his Milan mosque. He was missing for a year, until he resurfaced in Egypt and called his wife in Italy to say he had been tortured. The call activated Italian prosecutors, who are required to investigate if there is the possibility of a crime. Prosecutors reconstructed Mr. Nasr’s disappearance using cellphone records traced to the American agents. In what was widely seen as a bungled and sloppy operation, the operatives used false names but left a paper trail of unencrypted phone records and credit card bills at luxury hotels in Milan. That the trial reached a ruling even after the Constitutional Court verdict radically narrowed its scope was a testament to the persistence of the judge and the veteran counterterrorism prosecutor Armando Spataro, who brought the case. Judge Magi wrote that in 30 years as a penal judge, he had “very rarely” heard testimony “so precise, attentive and correct regarding such difficult and serious investigations,” adding that he had never seen a penal trial in which events had been reconstructed with such “certainty” and “such a degree of authority.” Both sides have 45 days from Monday to decide whether to appeal. Mr. Spataro said it was “very probable” that he would appeal. Arianna Barbazza, a court-appointed lawyer for 13 of the convicted Americans, who has never met her clients, said she would “absolutely” appeal the ruling.

Italy
Extraordinary Rendition
Nasr Hassan Mustafa Osama
Kidnapping


The Raw Face of Capitalism, Kremlin Style

Abstract: NEW YORK — For anyone who ever hoped Russia could become a liberal, free-market democracy, the grim trial last month of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky , the former oil tycoon who was once his country’s richest man, offered a slender solace: it was widely and loudly condemned. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, compared the prosecution to that of the poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. Joe Nocera, writing about the business and economic consequences in The New York Times (whose global edition is the International Herald Tribune), described the Kremlin’s tactics as “boneheaded.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned that the case would “have a negative impact on Russia’s reputation,” and particularly on its “investment climate.” What was notable about this chorus of foreign criticism was the implication that, even judged by the Kremlin’s own standards of realpolitik, the treatment of Mr. Khodorkovsky was a mistake. Moscow’s leaders want to restore Russia’s wealth and greatness: Western assertions that the Khodorkovsky trial had hurt Russia’s reputation and would discourage foreign investment suggested that the Kremlin was harming its own cause. But some investors, economists and political analysts are drawing a different, and much starker, conclusion: The Khodorkovsky verdict was an inevitable and logical act of self-preservation by a regime that is fully and lucratively in control of Russia. In this reading, there is nothing accidental about Mr. Khodorkovsky’s continued imprisonment. It is, instead, the clearest possible statement of the rules of Kremlin capitalism, and of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin ’s confidence that, at least as long as Siberia has oil, there is plenty of private capital willing to play. “Within Russia, everyone who matters understands exactly what the Kremlin is trying to say: that there is no one above the rule of the Kremlin,” said Roland Nash, co-founder of Verno Capital, who is a 16-year veteran of doing business in Moscow. The message, according to Sergei Guriev, one of Russia’s leading economists and rector of the New Economic School, is this: “It is to show that Putin is fully in control. It is not a question of Khodorkovsky getting out of jail, it is a question of other businessmen not following in Khodorkovsky’s footsteps.” Ian Bremmer, author of a recent book on state capitalism and president of the Eurasia Group, a global political risk and consulting firm, said the verdict was “rational” and “predictable.” “If you are in a sector the state cares about in Russia,” he said, “you either play ball with the Kremlin, or you leave.” Mr. Nash did remark that the Khodorkovsky case had exacted a real, quantifiable economic cost. “The Russian equity market would be worth several hundred billion dollars more if it weren’t for the critical Western perception of Russia, and the Khodorkovsky case is the principal example of that perception,” he said. Critics of Putinism, especially Western ones, like to point to this lost value as proof that the treatment of Mr. Khodorkovsky and the authoritarian politics that his case represents are a mistake. But that analysis, according to Mr. Guriev, a liberal who laments the path Russia has taken, leaves out the essential political calculus of Putinism. “Economic growth per se is not important to a ruler, if he is not there to enjoy it,” Mr. Guriev said. “Better to stay in control of a stagnant, but large and rich, country than to be kicked out of a growing one. Everyone wants a bigger cake, but better a small cake than none at all.” And while the Russia cake is surely not as big as it could be, it’s big enough, and growing steadily: Gross domestic product increased 3.7 percent last year, worse than China’s red hot 10.5 percent, but better than the United States’ 2.6 percent. The Russian stock market rose 22 percent in 2010. One reason the cake is still big enough for Mr. Putin and his allies is that many foreign investors are still willing to tolerate an economy run according to Kremlin rules. “I haven’t talked to one corporation that used the Khodorkovsky trial, as opposed to corruption more generally, as a factor in their investment decision,” Mr. Bremmer said. Companies in extractive industries, still the dominant sector in the Russian economy, are accustomed to dealing with all kinds of governments. Playing by the authoritarian logic of state capitalism, in Russia and elsewhere, is familiar, even reassuring, he suggested. Emerging-market investors have similar experiences. As the flows of capital among emerging markets — rather than between emerging markets and the West — become more important, so does tolerance for Russian, or Chinese, or Middle Eastern state capitalism. “There is a much better understanding of the nuances and the differences in the rules of the game in the emerging world than there is in the developed countries,” said Mr. Nash, whose biggest investor is from Abu Dhabi. “There are now sources of capital that don’t care so much about issues like the Khodorkovsky trial.” But while the Kremlin is clearly unmoved by foreign criticism of Russia’s human rights record and even of its investment climate, it is increasingly worried about one thing: innovation. Mr. Putin’s Russia is complacent about its ability to attract capital, but it is panicked about its capacity to come up with cutting-edge technologies. Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-born professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in the relationship between political systems and economic growth, believes that in the long run, this will be the big test for today’s swaggering, authoritarian regimes: “Can China and Russia create their own Silicon Valleys? That is the hard constraint these systems face.” Even as Mr. Khodorkovsky goes back to jail, another oligarch, Alisher B. Usmanov, and his partner Yuri Milner are raising, via Digital Sky Technologies, their stake in Facebook. And another billionaire, Viktor Vekselberg, has been charged with constructing Skolkovo, which the Kremlin dreams will be its version of Silicon Valley. To judge the longevity of Kremlin capitalism, watch his efforts. Chrystia Freeland is global editor at large at Reuters.

Russia
Putin Vladimir V
Khodorkovsky Mikhail B
Economic Conditions and Trends


Joni Ernst’s Playbook, for Women to Win Men’s Vote

Abstract: HAMLIN, Iowa — Joni Ernst, the Republican Senate nominee in Iowa, motors along the state’s back roads in a tour bus festooned with giant images of herself, an American flag, a cornfield and the tag line: “Mother. Soldier. Independent Leader.” She drops into county courthouses and small-town cafes, and introduces herself as “a southwest Iowa farm girl.” Her ads remind voters that, having commanded National Guard troops in Iraq, she could become “the first female combat veteran in the Senate.” She brought her 15-year-old daughter to Hamlin — living proof of the “mother” line in her résumé. But in a state that is one of two that have never sent a woman to Washington or elected one governor (the other is Mississippi), there is one thing Ms. Ernst never does. She never appeals to Iowans to help her break the glass ceiling. “I’m not running on my gender,” she insists. By running to make history without saying so, Ms. Ernst, 44, is helping to write a new playbook for Republican female candidates. In a year that is proving challenging for women running for the Senate from both parties, Ms. Ernst has broken through with a powerful political message that has helped her build a surprisingly enthusiastic base of support — among men. While Democrats rely on women — a key component of their base — to get elected, Republicans need the male vote to win. This holds true for candidates of both sexes from both parties. Of the 15 female Senate candidates from the two major parties running this year, just two seem assured of victory: Susan Collins, the incumbent in Maine, and Representative Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, both of them Republican. Image Joni Ernst, in Des Moines. Credit Daniel Acker for The New York Times The other 13 are either trailing badly or, like Ms. Ernst, in tight races. Among incumbents, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, all Democrats, are fighting to hang on to their seats. Two other bright Democratic prospects — Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky and Michelle Nunn in Georgia — are in tough races in red states. Ms. Ernst, who beat four men in the primary, stands out as the lone Republican woman in a cliffhanger campaign. If she beats her Democratic opponent, Representative Bruce Braley, in the race to succeed Tom Harkin, she will deprive Democrats of a seat they have held for nearly 30 years — and perhaps help Republicans take over the Senate. “She’s a model for the Republican success story,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “They have run right-wing women before, but they haven’t had a right-wing woman before who was able to give so many gender-based cues while still maintaining their base.” Analysts liken Ms. Ernst’s approach on gender to that of President Obama on race. “You would be hard-pressed to find a clip of Senator Obama running in 2008 to be the first African-American president,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster. She advises Republicans like Ms. Ernst against running “overtly as a woman.” But Ms. Ernst is hardly ignoring her gender. Her ads offer a playful take on masculine endeavors. There she is firing a gun. There she is riding a Harley-Davidson. There she is boasting about “castrating hogs on an Iowa farm.” But interspersed among those images are other, softer cues: In one new ad, she is seated at a kitchen table talking about “the Iowa we leave our children”; in another, she says she learned the “key to a great biscuit” while working at a fast-food restaurant. Around the country, Democratic women are running more explicit appeals to women. In Kentucky, an ad for Ms. Grimes features Democratic women in the Senate. “Shatter the glass. Break the ceiling. It’s time for Alison,” they declare . In Georgia, Ms. Nunn’s advertisement asks, of her Republican opponent, “Can the women of Georgia trust David Perdue?” And in Iowa, Staci Appel, a Democratic House candidate, pitches herself as running “a race to elect the first woman to Congress from the state of Iowa” — even though the same could be said of Ms. Ernst. If Ms. Ernst winds up in Washington, it will be largely because Iowa’s men sent her there. Ms. Ernst has a 12-point advantage among men deemed most likely to vote, while she and Mr. Braley are closely divided among such women, according to an NBC News/Marist College poll released this week. But in previous polls, Mr. Braley was doing much better among women — a hint that in the campaign’s waning days, Ms. Ernst may be narrowing the gender gap, as she makes inroads among older women. In an election season in which Republicans have gained traction by talking about the threat of Islamic extremism, Ms. Ernst emphasizes her national security credentials — a strong sell with Republicans, and especially men. Last week, she traveled the state with Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and an Air Force reservist. Here in Hamlin, population 252 as of the latest census, Mr. Graham talked up Ms. Ernst’s military credentials to the dinner crowd at Darrell’s Place, a roadside restaurant where the pork tenderloin sandwiches sell for $5.25 and the beer signs flash in neon. “It would be nice to have somebody in the Senate,” Mr. Graham said, “who doesn’t talk about boots on the ground, but has had her boots on the ground.” Mr. Graham says Republicans are hungry for more candidates like Ms. Ernst. “We’re a party of short white guys,” he said self-deprecatingly, “and we need to reflect America.” Nationally, Democrats have long outpaced Republicans in nominating women for high elective office, and 2014 has followed that trend. A recent analysis by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University found that there are twice as many as female Democrats running in Senate, House and governors’ races this year than there are Republican women. Debbie Walsh, the center’s director, said Democrats had “more infrastructure” to support female candidates, through political action committees like Emily’s List. And Republican women tend to be more moderate and have difficulty surviving conservative primaries. Ms. Ernst is an exception. Her breakout moment was the hog castrating ad, in which she vowed to rein in Washington’s “big spenders,” declaring: “Let’s make ’em squeal.” The ad delighted Republican men but made some Republican women queasy. “When I saw that ad, I said, ‘Ew, I don’t know if I like that,’ ” said Christine Hensley, a member of the Des Moines City Council. Then, Ms. Hensley said, she mentioned it to Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, “and he said, ‘Isn’t that ad great?’ ” If Mr. Braley has a hope of winning, said Ms. Lake, the Democratic strategist, it is by tying Ms. Ernst to the so-called Republican war on women. Recently, Mr. Braley campaigned with Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, the reproductive rights organization, which has attacked Ms. Ernst for her anti-abortion stance and support of “personhood” rights for fetuses, using the slogan, “Women are watching.” At the University of Iowa last week, Ms. Ernst was just four minutes into her stump speech promoting her “Iowa values,” when several young women began shouting her down. The scene grew so raucous that the candidate cut her talk short, ducking inside a classroom building to slip out a backdoor. “Women are watching! Women are watching!” the protesters chanted as she left. Stacia Scott, a 22-year-old social worker who helped lead the protest, echoed Democrats’ talking points about Ms. Ernst. “Joni Ernst,” she said, “is not a woman for women.” In the end, analysts say, the race may come down to the women’s vote. The question, said Dianne Bystrom, the director of the Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University, is this: “Are women going to turn out to defeat a history-making female candidate?”

Joni Ernst
Iowa
Women and Girls
Republicans
2014 Midterm Elections
Senate races


Salesforce to Use Amazon’s Cloud to Expand in Canada and Australia

Abstract: Amazon Web Services, the biggest of the cloud-computing providers, has a new line of work: Taking other cloud-computing giants into other countries. On Wednesday, Salesforce.com announced it would use A.W.S. to expand in Canada and Australia, in a deal valued at about $400 million. If successful, the value of the transaction will most likely get much bigger. “For sure, we’re talking of billions of dollars in services over the next several years,” said Marc Benioff, the co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce. Salesforce already uses A.W.S. for some of its businesses, but this is the first time its key applications will be on someone else’s computers. Mr. Benioff said Salesforce had evaluated similar deals with Microsoft and Google, the other two giants in selling cloud-computing to corporations. So far, A.W.S. is still ahead on its range of offerings and low prices, he said. Salesforce will review the contract in one year, he added. Cloud computing uses a massive density of computer servers and sophisticated software to rent data storage, computing and applications to companies. Besides those capabilities, the deal with A.W.S. enables Salesforce to get into new markets faster, since Salesforce doesn’t have to find facilities and recruit talent. Amazon has also established itself in countries like China that have strict requirements about what data can be sent offshore. Meeting those regulations is difficult and time-consuming, and companies like Salesforce put a premium on getting into markets quickly. While the deal could be a sign of larger trends in corporate computing, as businesses evaluate whether to keep their own computers or work with the big public clouds, for now it also has limits. That spending will probably be limited to new countries where Salesforce expands, Mr. Benioff said. That may change, he added, as the three giants bring down prices and increase the services they offer. “We have our own infrastructure in the U.S., Japan, the U.K., France and Germany,” Mr. Benioff said. “If you have critical mass, your own infrastructure is still cheaper.” Mr. Benioff said that, down the line, A.W.S. may also become competitive purely on price, as their scale and engineering enables them to run big computing systems at a lower cost. “If Amazon, Microsoft and Google are smart, the price difference will change,” he said. Adam Selipsky, vice president of marketing and sales for A.W.S., said the company was intent on getting its prices down enough to replace existing servers in established markets. “Our prices relative to what they can build themselves – we’re already at a stage where it’s competitive,” he said. “We’re just at the starting point of enterprise adoption.”

Cloud computing
Salesforcecom
Amazon
Marc Benioff
Price


Year After Heartbreak, Happiness in the Stable and the Cradle

Abstract: OCEANPORT, N.J. — It was late May, and a little more than a week stood between American Pharoah and his date with destiny in the Belmont Stakes. The morning media crush had dissipated at Bob Baffert’s barn at Churchill Downs in Kentucky, where the colt, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes champion, was free from the crowd already assembling at Belmont Park in New York. Dana Barnes , an exercise rider and the wife of Baffert’s top assistant, led the way past American Pharoah to show off the horse who had carried the barn’s Derby hopes only a year earlier. That colt, Hoppertunity, stood stoically in his stall and stared back at his smiling visitors, one of whom — me — shares part of his name. Three days before the 2014 Derby, at this very same barn, smiles were hard to come by. Hoppertunity, the second choice in the morning line at 6-1, had been scratched because of a foot injury. The news was especially hard to stomach for the real sources of his name, Chad and Kathleen Hopper of Pasadena, Calif., who are friends with Baffert and his wife, Jill. The Bafferts had named the horse after the couple’s favorite saying , “Another day, another hoppertunity,” which became a soothing mantra after Kathleen’s 10th, and final, failed in vitro fertilization attempt. “This is a brutal business,” Jill Baffert said in an email after Hoppertunity was scratched. “Now we have the pain we feel for the owners and for bringing more disappointment to Kathleen and Chad.” She continued: “We get so invested emotionally in these horses. When I see how much they mean to other people and the attachment they feel toward them, it makes me emotional. The good thing is, our boy Hoppertunity is fine, and there are many good things — hoppertunities — in the future.” At the time, Jill Baffert had no idea how foretelling her words would be. One year later, as we stood outside Barn 33, Baffert was on the cusp of Triple Crown history, Hoppertunity was in the midst of a successful comeback, and the Hoppers were expecting their first child — naturally. Kathleen Hopper, who runs a cookie business from her home, had just returned from teaching a bakery in Italy how to make her cookies when she found out, on the first anniversary of her father’s death, that she was pregnant. On June 6 — Kathleen Hopper’s birthday — American Pharoah became the 12th Triple Crown champion , and the first in 37 years, when he won the Belmont by five and a half lengths. A week later, he received a hero’s welcome at Churchill Downs ahead of the Stephen Foster Handicap, in which Hoppertunity finished third. In seven races since his return from injury, Hoppertunity has finished in the money six times. Then, at 5:45 p.m. on July 20, Ella Grace Hopper arrived, weighing 6 pounds 4 ounces. In anticipation of Ella’s birth, Jill Baffert and a few other friends held a shower for Kathleen on May 30 at Santa Anita Park. The third race was named “This Filly Is a Hopper” in her honor. “We text each other and say, ‘Look at what a year does,’ ” Kathleen Hopper said of the Bafferts. Bob Baffert said he was pointing Hoppertunity toward the $1 million Pacific Classic on Aug. 22 at Del Mar in Southern California. As for where American Pharoah will end up next after easily winning the Haskell Invitational by two and a quarter lengths on Sunday at Monmouth Park, well, that is anybody’s guess. “I won’t run him unless he’s 100 percent, and I’ll always do right by the horse,” Baffert said after the race. Image Chad and Kathleen Hopper, after whom the horse was named, with their daughter, Ella, in a family photo. There are no regrets about last year; Baffert learned long ago that racing luck comes and goes, and a heart attack in 2012 only mellowed him further. “There’s no doubt he was our best chance last year,” he said Saturday, referring to Hoppertunity. “The Derby can be cruel, so I’ve been on both ends.” Now, as American Pharoah is embarking on his post-Triple Crown career, Kathleen Hopper is embracing her new role as a mother. She has taken a break from her cookie business and has kept up with American Pharoah’s success only loosely — horse racing is more of Chad’s thing anyway. Still, both watched from California on Sunday as the colt ran his winning streak to eight. Baffert, who acknowledged that he was more nervous about the Haskell than the Belmont, said he had watched as a fan, too. “I’m looking at this horse like, ‘Where did he come from?’ ” he said. “This horse has brought us all to another level. He’s a gift from God. As a trainer, we wait a lifetime to get one like this.” Although American Pharoah is the star of Baffert’s barn, the Hoppers are planning to soon take Ella to visit his stablemate Hoppertunity — who does not boast Triple Crown credentials but who has taught all involved the importance of the saying “Another day, another hoppertunity.”

Horse racing
Bob Baffert
Kathleen Hopper
Chad Hopper
Triple Crown Horse Racing
Haskell Invitational