Baby’s Killing Tests India’s Protection of an Aboriginal Culture

Abstract: OGRABRAJ, India — The police on South Andaman Island know what to do when members of the isolated Jarawa tribe venture into the villages that surround them, hoping to snatch rice and other prized goods, like cookies, bananas or, for some reason, red garments. The policy is to send the Jarawas back into the 300 square miles of forest that has been set aside for the tribe, where they are expected to survive by hunting and gathering, as they have for millenniums. Inspector Rizwan Hassan, whose precinct includes a “buffer zone” beside the tribe’s reserve, is under clear orders: to interfere as little as possible in the traditional life of the tribe, which India prizes as the last remnant of a Paleolithic-era civilization. This did not prepare him for the criminal complaint that was registered at his station in November. A 5-month-old baby was dead, and witnesses came forward willingly, leaving the police, for the first time in history, confronting the prospect of arresting a Jarawa on suspicion of murder. The Jarawas, who number about 400 and whom one geneticist described as “arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet,” are believed to have migrated from Africa around 50,000 years ago. They are very dark-skinned, small in stature and until 1998 lived in complete cultural isolation, shooting outsiders with steel-tipped arrows if they came too near. After the tribe made peace with its neighbors, India took steps to minimize contact between the Jarawas and the world that surrounds them, hoping to avoid the catastrophes that befell aboriginal people in other countries, like the United States and Australia, when settlers passed on germs and alcohol. Nevertheless, contact is occurring. Outreach workers visit the tribe’s camps, and Jarawas receive medical treatment in isolation wards at hospitals. Poachers strike up illicit relationships with members of the tribe, trading food for help in harvesting crabs or fish. It is as a result of such an encounter, the police believe, that a baby boy with a lighter skin color than usual was born to an unmarried Jarawa woman last spring, evidence that alien genes had found their way into an undiluted pool. Concern for a Mixed-Race Baby Among the first to be alerted about the birth of a mixed-race baby was M. Janagi Savuriyammal, a 24-year-old tribal welfare officer whose office sits beside a crocodile-infested creek at the edge of the tribe’s reserve. It is no secret that the tribe has, in the past, carried out ritual killings of infants born to widows or — much rarer — fathered by outsiders. Dr. Ratan Chandra Kar, a government physician who wrote a memoir about his work with the Jarawas, described a tradition in which newborn babies were breast-fed by each of the tribe’s lactating women before being strangled by one of the tribal elders, so as to maintain “the so-called purity and sanctity of the society.” He said he was aware of at least seven such cases in his 12-year tenure. The faces of the children haunted him, he wrote in his book, but he added that he was “never ready to interfere in the customs and rituals of the tribe.” Ms. Savuriyammal took a different view. When she learned that some members of the tribe “did not want the baby to grow up,” as she put it, she and her staff began a campaign of persuasion, presenting arguments against killing the child and, at one point, posting a social worker near the Jarawa camp to watch over him. She was not the only one who felt the child was in danger. Rooby Thomas, who oversees care of Jarawa patients at a hospital near the reserve, saw the baby when his mother brought him in for a checkup and was so alarmed when she saw his skin tone that she set up a screen to hide him. “I isolated that baby from the other Jarawa,” she said. “I heard they usually kill non-Jarawas.” Five months had passed when Ms. Savuriyammal received an alarmed call from a member of her agency’s field staff. She rushed to the camp to find the baby missing and his mother crying silently. Two witnesses, both women, told the police that on the previous night they had seen a Jarawa man, Tatehane, drinking liquor with an outsider who had entered the reserve illegally. Tatehane then slipped into the mother’s hut and took the baby from her side before she awoke, a local newspaper reported, citing the two witnesses. The witnesses later found the baby’s body on the sand, drowned. Ms. Savuriyammal filed a criminal complaint with the police, but they were in unknown territory: In 200 years of fatal clashes between tribesmen and British and Indian settlers, no member of the tribe had ever been named as a suspect in a crime. The authorities arrested the two nontribal men identified in the criminal complaint: a 25-year-old believed to have fathered the child, who was accused of rape, and a man who gave Tatehane liquor and was accused of abetting murder and interfering with aboriginal tribes. But they did not arrest the Jarawa man, Tatehane, even though he was accused of murder in the complaint, instead appealing for guidance from the department of tribal welfare, said Atul Kumar Thakur, the South Andaman police superintendent, who is overseeing the investigation. Inspector Hassan was not authorized to speak about the case. There were other problems. When Inspector Hassan asked a tribal elder to lead him to the child’s body, the man said only that he had carried it deep into the jungle, where tribal tradition dictates bodies should be left for months, until dry bones can be retrieved. When the inspector pressed harder, the elder looked at him in perplexity, saying the baby was no longer in that place, but had joined his ancestors in another place, said Ms. Savuriyammal, who was present for the conversation. When Inspector Hassan had persisted, she said, the elder had just shaken his head. “If I give the body to you, the world will start shaking, and we will all die,” the elder said. At that, Ms. Savuriyammal said, the inspector ended the interrogation. Clashing Views on Outside Contact Even before the police heard of the baby’s killing, the authorities on South Andaman Island were struggling with the question of whether to allow the Jarawas, who are classified as a “particularly vulnerable tribal group,” more access to the world outside their reserve. The top official on the Andaman Islands, Lt. Gov. A. K. Singh, said that upon taking up his post in 2013, he had encountered two schools of thought. One, held by officials and academics on the left, he said, was that “any contact of the primitive tribe with modern civilization has been detrimental.” The other school questioned how the government could deny the tribe the benefits of modern life. “Mankind has progressed by leaps and bounds,” Mr. Singh said. “Are they to remain in that state? Have we given them the choice?” Mr. Singh has introduced programs that gently nudge the Jarawas toward greater social integration: lessons in reading and writing, and the distribution of clothing in exchange for handmade baskets. The pace of change worries specialists like S. A. Awaradi, the director of the Andaman and Nicobar Tribal Research Institute, who describes the tribe as “our human heritage.” “This has been a self-sufficient civilization for thousands of years,” Mr. Awaradi said. “By mishandling, you are creating a blunder of civilization.” “Basically,” he added, “contact is the mother of all ills.” Zubair Ahmed, a journalist, said the policy of minimizing interaction with the Jarawas had run into a problem: Members of the tribe are curious about what surrounds them. “We have seen them coming out, coming out on their own,” Mr. Ahmed said. “You cannot push them back inside the forest. They want to have a phone. They want to ride in a vehicle.” The killing wrenches the issue into painful new territory. Few islanders like the idea of seeing a Jarawa man handcuffed, let alone imprisoned. Nupur Sarkar, a 28-year-old constable in the village of Tirur, grew up hearing the story of how Jarawa men hiding in the treetops shot her uncle through the chest, then surrounded his fishing boat, puncturing his torso again and again with their arrows. Now that friendly contact with the tribe has increased, she is quite sure she knows the man who killed her uncle. But she shook her head sharply at the thought of prosecuting a person who is unaware of Indian laws. “They are in a pre-civilization period,” she said cheerfully. “We deal with them on that basis.” Others go further, saying the state has no business interfering in the tribe’s tradition of killing children of mixed blood. “Such things were usually ignored,” said Samir Acharya, an activist with the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology. “I think they have the right to maintain the purity of their race. If they decide such a child should be wasted, let them do it.” A Case in Legal Limbo For now, the case does not seem headed for a swift resolution. Mr. Thakur, the police superintendent, who is overseeing the case from the islands’ capital, Port Blair, said it was straightforward enough from a constitutional perspective: “Nobody is above the law.” On the other hand, Indian law also accords special rights to vulnerable social groups, like castes and tribes. “They have special status,” he said. “We are duty-bound to protect their interests.” The matter, forwarded to the Tribal Welfare Department, seems poised to enter a kind of legal Sargasso Sea, circulating among bureaucratic eddies and tide pools. This is a peculiarly Indian solution, and that seems to suit nearly every stakeholder. There is no pressure from members of the Jarawa tribe, who are, by and large, sympathetic to the man accused of killing the child, Ms. Savuriyammal said. But Rooby Thomas cannot get the boy’s face out of her mind. As a medical officer in the hospital closest to the Jarawa reserve, she spends long strings of idle hours with their families. As Ms. Thomas spoke, a cluster of naked Jarawa children were making a racket outside the isolation ward, peering out at the lights of the village and calling to passers-by. Ms. Thomas drew her breath when she learned from a reporter that the boy, whom she had treated as a newborn, had been killed. She wondered if she could have saved his life if she had kept him in the clinic. That thought had fluttered through her mind at the time, but after a few days the child’s mother seemed restless and confined within the hospital’s walls, and a male relative who accompanied them was insistent on leaving and broke a window. So Ms. Thomas submitted the necessary paperwork, waited for a government vehicle and sent the child back into the forest.

Murders and Homicides
Indigenous peoples
India
South Andaman Island


When Losers Take Center Stage

Abstract: April seems to be the time of year when the winners and losers come into sharper focus. In hockey, teams are getting knocked out of the playoffs, sometimes in embarrassing upsets. In basketball, the best teams are gearing up for a long spring while losing teams are jockeying for better draft picks. In football, the teams in the news are those with the top picks in the draft — and often the most rebuilding to do. And in baseball, the gauzy honeymoon known as spring training has evaporated and some fans realize that their teams are in for a very long season. That perhaps explains why the sports pages are filled with talk of losing as much as winning. Bill Simmons’ amusing if long-winded column includes details on the battle for the playoffs includes the race for the worst record and top draft pick. Michael Jordan’s putrid Charlotte Bobcats, of course, take center stage. But there’s an ode to the franchise that can’t shoot straight, the Nets . Simmons ends his list of the weirdest moments in the team’s absurd history with the kicker, “It’s a credit to the Clippers and Warriors that we don’t think of the New Jersey Nets as the N.B.A.’s most screwed up franchise. Let’s hope they have better luck in Brooklyn.” Ouch. Using Simmons’ logic, the Nets will continue to pursue Dwight Howard despite his having to undergo season-ending back surgery that would raise red flags for many general managers. (See: Stoudemire, Amar’e) Even before the injury, Howard has been poisonous, having toyed with his team and the fans in Orlando and jawboning with Coach Stan Van Gundy, behavior unbecoming for a man who portrays himself as Clark Kent. Perhaps a change of scenery is in order. Next stop, Brooklyn? At the opposite end of the standings, the Bulls continue to sputter. On Thursday, they lost to the Miami Heat, which is now just 1.5 games behind Chicago in the race for the top spot in the Eastern Conference with a few games left. Still, the Bulls have the playoffs in front of them, unlike the Blackhawks, who are in danger of being knocked out of the chase for the Stanley Cup by the Phoenix Coyotes , who notched their third overtime victory in their best-of-seven series. These are the same Coyotes who are living on life support from the city of Glendale, which can’t figure out whether to wash its hands of the team. It just goes to show that teams in financial hot water can still get hot. Remember how the Texas Rangers made it to the World Series after emerging from bankruptcy? The big story in hockey, though, is not the financial hits teams are taking, but the knockouts players are taking. Brendan Shanahan, the league’s enforcer of player safety, has had to dole out tough love to tough men who have made nasty hits on stars like Daniel Alfredsson and Marian Hossa. The suspensions have failed to deter players, though, and led a growing chorus of commentators to wonder about Shanahan. Speaking of swings and misses, here’s an unlikely shout out to the ageless Bartolo Colon, who, pitching for the A’s Thursday night, threw a remarkable 38 consecutive strikes to the Angels between the fifth and eighth innings. For those keeping score at home, 17 were called strikes, 10 were foul balls, 10 balls were put in play and just one was a swinging strike.

Hockey Ice
Playoff Games
New Jersey Nets
Phoenix Coyotes


Electrical Risks at Iraq Bases Are Worse Than Said

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents. During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007. And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis. Electrical problems were the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq, according to an Army survey issued in February 2007. It noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.” The Army report said KBR, the Houston-based company that is responsible for providing basic services for American troops in Iraq, including housing, did its own study and found a “systemic problem” with electrical work. But the Pentagon did little to address the issue until a Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering. His death, caused by poor electrical grounding, drew the attention of lawmakers and Pentagon leaders after his family pushed for answers. Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general have begun investigations, and this month senior Army officials ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR. “We consider this to be a very serious issue,” Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday in an e-mail message, while declining to comment on the findings in the Army documents. Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, would not comment about a company safety study or the reports of electrical fires or shocks, but she said KBR had found no evidence of a link between its work and the electrocutions. She added, “KBR’s commitment to the safety of all employees and those the company serves remains unwavering.” In public statements, Pentagon officials have not addressed the scope of the hazards, instead mostly focusing on the circumstances surrounding the death of Sergeant Maseth, who lived near Pittsburgh. But the internal documents, including dozens of memos, e-mail messages and reports from the Army, the Defense Contract Management Agency and other agencies, show that electrical problems were widely recognized as a major safety threat among Pentagon contracting experts. It is impossible to determine the exact number of the resulting deaths and injuries because no single document tallies them up. (The records were compiled for Congressional and Pentagon investigators and obtained independently by The Times.) The 2007 safety survey was ordered by the top official in Iraq for the Defense Contract Management Agency, which oversees contractors, after the October 2006 electrical fire that killed two soldiers near Tikrit. Paul Dickinson, a Pentagon safety specialist who wrote the report, confirmed its findings, but did not elaborate. Senior Pentagon officials appear not to have responded to the survey until this May, after Congressional investigators had begun to ask questions. Then they argued that its findings were irrelevant to Sergeant Maseth’s electrocution. In a memo dated May 26, 2008, a top official of the Defense Contract Management Agency stated that “there is no direct or causal connection” between the problems identified in the survey and those at the Baghdad compound where Sergeant Maseth died. But in a sworn statement, apparently prepared for an investigation of Sergeant Maseth’s death by the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, a Pentagon contracting official described how both military and KBR officials were aware of the growing danger from poor electrical work. In the statement, Ingrid Harrison, an official with the Pentagon’s contracting management agency, disclosed that an electrical fire caused by poor wiring in a nearby building two weeks before Sergeant Maseth’s death had endangered two other soldiers. “The soldiers were lucky because the one window that they could reach did not have bars on it, or there could have been two other fatalities,” Ms. Harrison said in the statement. She said that after Sergeant Maseth died, a more senior Pentagon contracting official in Baghdad denied knowing about the fire, but she asserted that “it was thoroughly discussed” during internal meetings. Ms. Harrison added that KBR officials also knew of widespread electrical problems at the Radwaniya Palace Complex, near Baghdad’s airport, where Sergeant Maseth died. “KBR has been at R.P.C. for over four years and was fully aware of the safety hazards, violations and concerns regarding the soldiers’ housing,” she said in the statement. She added that the contractor “chose to ignore the known unsafe conditions.” Ms. Harrison did not respond to a request for comment. In another internal document written after Sergeant Maseth’s death, a senior Army officer in Baghdad warned that soldiers had to be moved immediately from several buildings because of electrical risks. In a memo asking for emergency repairs at three buildings, the official warned of a “clear and present danger,” adding, “Exposed wiring, ungrounded distribution panels and inappropriate lighting fixtures render these facilities uninhabitable and unsafe.” The memo added that “over the course of several months, electrical fires and shorts have compounded these unsafe conditions.” Since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, tens of thousands of American troops have been housed in Iraqi buildings that date from the Saddam Hussein era. KBR and other contractors have been paid millions of dollars to repair and upgrade the buildings, including their electrical systems. KBR officials say they handle the maintenance for 4,000 structures and an additional 35,000 containers used as housing in the war zone. The reports of shoddy electrical work have raised new questions about the Bush administration’s heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq, particularly because they come after other high-profile disputes involving KBR. They include accusations of overbilling, providing unsafe water to soldiers and failing to protect female employees who were sexually assaulted. Officials say the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq that companies like KBR were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the operations. Some of the electrical work, for example, was turned over to subcontractors, some of which hired unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day. Government officials responsible for contract oversight, meanwhile, were also unable to keep up, so that unsafe electrical work was not challenged by government auditors. Several electricians who worked for KBR have said previously in interviews that they repeatedly warned KBR managers and Pentagon and military officials about unsafe electrical work. They said that supervisors had ignored their concerns or, in some cases, lacked the training to understand the problems. The Army documents cite a number of recent safety threats. One report showed that during a four-day period in late February, soldiers at a Baghdad compound reported being shocked while taking showers in different buildings. The circumstances appear similar to those that led to Sergeant Maseth’s death. Another entry from early March stated that an entire house used by American troops was electrically charged, making it unlivable. Since the Pentagon reports were compiled, more episodes linked to electrical problems have occurred. In late June, for example, an electrical fire at a Marine base in Falluja destroyed 10 buildings, forcing marines there to ask for donations from home to replace their personal belongings. On July 5, Sgt. First Class Anthony Lynn Woodham of the Arkansas National Guard died at his base in Tallil, Iraq. Initial reports blamed electrocution, but his death is being investigated because of conflicting information, according to his wife, Crystal Woodham, and a spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard.

Defense Contracts
Military Bases and Installations
Iraq
Accidents and Safety
Electric Light and Power


Forest Fire Scorches 3,000 Acres in Ulster Park

Abstract: A fast-moving forest fire that twice jumped trenches dug to hold it back has scorched 3,000 acres of the Minnewaska State Park Preserve near New Paltz, N.Y., an official said on Sunday. Only minor injuries were reported in the fire, which started on Thursday in the northeast quadrant of the park, about 90 miles north of New York City in Ulster County. But residents of a nearby hamlet have been told to prepare for evacuation, said Yancey Roy, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. About 200 firefighters as well as local and state police officers, park rangers and others were involved in fighting the blaze, which was 80 percent contained by Sunday, officials said. The cause of the fire was under investigation, Mr. Roy said. The fire has been fueled by winds and dry, thick underbrush composed of mountain laurel, huckleberry and pitch pine, and its reach had doubled from 1,000 acres on Friday to 2,000 acres by Saturday. Two fire lines initially held the blaze at bay, until flames raced up trees and released embers that were carried by the wind. By Sunday afternoon, the fire had been contained near Kerhonkson Heights, the hamlet in the Town of Rochester at the edge of the park that was preparing for evacuation, Mr. Roy said. Firefighters were trying to stop the fire’s western front, which was advancing in a remote area accessible only by foot and all-terrain vehicles. Helicopters were dumping 500-gallon tanks of water drawn from a park lake onto the leaping flames. Sunday’s cooler weather, higher humidity and foggier conditions helped slow the blaze’s advance, said Capt. Dan Walsh of the rangers. All roads into the 20,000-acre park were closed, Mr. Roy said. He said it was the largest forest fire there in nearly 60 years.


More Soot Than Sparks From Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD - Review

Abstract: I’m not exactly sure what’s been seeping into the water supply at Amazon ’s Seattle offices, but it’s making the executives a little loopy. They’re hailing Amazon’s new touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, as “the best tablet at any price.” Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the iPad in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks. Now, read my lips: The Kindle Fire HD is not a disappointment. It’s not! Or it won’t be, once Amazon finishes polishing the software. The prices are the lowest ever; $200 for the 7-inch screen, $300 for the 8.9-incher, $500 for the 8.9-incher with cellular Internet ($50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter). The prices go up by $15 if you wish to eliminate the full-screen ads for books and movies that appear on the “sleep” screen. In each case, that’s either much less expensive than similarly equipped rivals, or much better equipped than similarly priced ones. The 7-inch Fire HD, the one I tested, will be available on Sept. 14; the larger models arrive in late November. These Fires shoot off plenty of sparks. The biggest one is the “HD” — the screens are better than the first-generation Fires, very bright and very sharp. Amazon also says that they have a wider viewing angle than before. Great, although who complains about viewing angles on a 7-inch screen that you hold directly in front of you? Incidentally, despite the name “HD,” the screen can’t actually show you movies in hi-def. It may have the requisite number of pixels, but most of them are dedicated to black letterbox bars; the screen is the wrong shape for movies. And you can’t enlarge the playback to fill the screen, as you can on an iPad. These Fires also have mini-HDMI jacks. With the proper cable (not included), you can hook the tablet up to a TV, for excellent picture and sound. It works great. (You can send an iPad’s image to a TV, too — wirelessly, in fact — but only if you buy an Apple TV for $100.) The Fire’s sound rocks. Its stereo speakers (“with Dolby audio”) blast out much better, richer sound than any of its monaural competitors. The battery life is fine — more than eight hours, according to Consumer Reports. Most models come with 16 gigabytes of memory — twice what’s on the rival Google Nexus or Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, although the Nook has a memory-card slot for expansion. Amazon has fixed the problems that plagued the original Kindle Fire’s first-generation software. The home screen — a scrolling “carousel” of icons representing the most recently viewed videos, books, apps and so on — now moves fluidly, with just the right amount of animated momentum. Taps usually register on the first try. And reading magazines, which once felt like an arm-wrestling match with intrusion-happy programmers, is now a graceful, effortless experience. In most magazines, you can zoom in to a layout for more legible type, or double-tap for a vertically scrolling text-only view. (Unfortunately, some magazines, like The New Yorker, use their own navigation systems; you wind up having to learn different reading systems.) The Fires are intended to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem of music, movie, TV and e-book stores — which they do exceedingly smoothly. Movies, books and even certain games remember your place as you move from gadget to gadget. Anything you buy from Amazon is stored online, for redownloading whenever you like. And Amazon’s Prime membership ($79 a year) gets you a free book a month, 5,000 free streaming movies and free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases. Amazon movies don’t offer subtitles or captions. Some of them, however, now offer something called X-ray: you can tap to summon biographies of whatever actors are in the current scene. Cool, occasionally. Those are some of the sparks. There is also, alas, a lot of soot. For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal. Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com , three seconds longer for Cracked.com — and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com . There’s a camera on the front, but no camera app to use with it. Until someone writes software for it, you can’t take a picture or record video. Amazon says that for now, it’s for use only with Skype for video calling. Most urgently of all, Amazon should tackle the apps problem. The Fire still lacks built-in apps for navigation, notes, to-do lists, alarm clock or stopwatch. Amazon says more than 30,000 apps are available for the Fire, but they include only a fraction of my iPad favorites. For example, I couldn’t find Dropbox, Bump, Flixster, Echofon, Voxer, Flight Track Pro, Nest, Jot Not, Google Voice, Google Search or Taxi Magic. Finally, there are the bugs. Once again, Amazon seems to have scrambled for the holidays, with the intention of polishing its software later. Everything lags a bit; some apps take seven or eight seconds to open. The Gmail sign-up wizard has bugs; Draw Something’s screen appears upside-down and won’t rotate upright; and turning a magazine page or zooming in produces blurry, blotchy text. It takes the gasping processor a couple of seconds to catch up with the sharp text you’re expecting. Some things take too many steps. You can’t open your bookmarks list from a Web page — only from the Starter screen of Web thumbnails, which takes four steps to reach. One extremely promising advertised feature is missing entirely: individual accounts for your children, with parent-governed time limits for each activity (movies, games, reading and so on). Next month, says Amazon. Over all, the tablet feels professional and elegant, but it still exhibits a few of the goofy hardware design decisions that have plagued Amazon since Kindle 1.0. For example, the tiny volume and power buttons are black like the case, unlabeled and flush with the edge so you can’t feel them. When you want to change the volume, you have to turn the tablet on edge to study them, preferably with a flashlight and a map. The Fire doesn’t come with a wall charger; that’s $10 extra at purchase time, or $20 later. Without it, you have to charge from a computer’s USB jack — and even then, the Kindle doesn’t charge unless it’s asleep or its brightness is turned down. (Rival tablets charge just fine from the same jacks.) This week, Amazon also introduced new versions of its traditional black-and-white, for-books-only Kindles, each spectacular in its own way. The PaperWhite has built-in illumination, like Barnes & Noble’s GlowLight model but with slightly more even lighting and a lower price ($120, with ads). And the basic, no-frills Kindle costs only $70, the lowest ever. Last year’s Kindle Fire is still available, slightly upgraded, for $160. And, of course, there are other great small tablets from Google, Samsung — and soon Apple, if you believe the rumors. But the Kindle Fire HD models are attractive, confident viewers of movies, TV shows, Web pages and books. They tap into Amazon’s increasingly appealing online world of entertainment and information stores. And above all, they make the Kindle Fire’s industry-leading features-per-dollar ratio even more top-heavy. But “the best tablet at any price?” Hmmm. Somebody should put a call in to the Seattle water inspectors.

Amazon.com Inc
Tablet Computers
E-Books and Readers
Amazon Kindle Fire HD
Amazon Kindle


Justices Agree to Consider F.C.C. Rules on Indecency

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether the Federal Communications Commission ’s policies banning nudity, expletives and other indecent content on broadcast television and radio violated the Constitution. The granting of a hearing in the case, F.C.C. v. Fox Television Stations, No. 10-1293, puts into question whether the court will overturn its landmark 1978 ruling on indecency, F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation. The Pacifica decision, which upheld the commission’s finding that George Carlin’s classic “seven dirty words” radio monologue was indecent, cemented the F.C.C.’s ability to police the public airwaves. But in the subsequent 33 years, the media landscape has markedly changed, causing several justices to question in recent decisions whether those standards were still relevant in a world of unfiltered cable television, Internet, film and radio. The case is an appeal by the F.C.C. of a ruling in 2010 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that said the commission’s policy against “fleeting expletives” and other indecency, which it measures on a case-by-case basis, was “unconstitutionally vague.” The Supreme Court reframed the case slightly, saying it would hear arguments only on whether the F.C.C.’s “indecency enforcement regime” violated the free speech or due process clauses of the Constitution. At issue are two live broadcasts on the Fox network of the Billboard Music Awards. In the first, in 2002, Cher used an obscenity while accepting an award. In 2003, Nicole Richie, while presenting an award, used two vulgarities in explaining how hard it was to remove cow manure from a purse. The Supreme Court will also consider whether the appeals court was warranted in overturning a fine against ABC stations for the 2003 broadcast of an episode of the then-popular ABC series “NYPD Blue” that included a naked woman. The Fox case has previously come before the court. In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the commission had followed proper administrative procedures when it invoked the ban on expletives during certain hours against broadcasters. But several justices, including at least one on each side of the decision, expressed skepticism that the ban on expletives was constitutional. The Obama administration and the F.C.C. asked the Supreme Court to overturn the recent appeals court decision, saying it would keep the agency from effectively policing the airwaves. “We are pleased the Supreme Court will review the lower court rulings that blocked the F.C.C.’s broadcast indecency policy,” a spokesman for the F.C.C. said in a statement. “We are hopeful that the court will affirm the commission’s exercise of its statutory responsibility to protect children and families from indecent broadcast programming.” Fox said in a statement that it was “hopeful that the court will ultimately agree that the F.C.C.’s indecency enforcement practices trample on the First Amendment rights of broadcasters.” ABC also said it believed that the Second Circuit was correct and that the Supreme Court should affirm that decision. The appeals court ruled that the F.C.C.’s policy was inconsistent, in part because the commission ruled that Fox stations violated its policy with the language on the awards shows while it allowed the use of the same language in a broadcast of the film “Saving Private Ryan.” While the Pacifica case gave the F.C.C. the authority to regulate indecent speech like the Carlin monologue, which made deliberate and repetitive use of vulgarities, it left uncertain whether the use of an occasional expletive could be punished. The F.C.C. later said it could, and it has generally ruled that broadcasters could not allow indecent material from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. All of the incidents at issue occurred within those protected hours. The F.C.C. case was one of 11 that the court accepted on Monday for its next term. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was a judge on the Second Circuit before being appointed to the Supreme Court, recused herself from consideration of the F.C.C. case.

Indecency Obscenity and Profanity
Federal Communications Commission
Supreme Court


Chinese Claim That World Accepts Its Organ Transplant System Is Rebutted

Abstract: HONG KONG — Chinese state news media and pro-Beijing newspapers in Hong Kong said on Friday that an international organ transplant conference in Hong Kong demonstrated that China’s transplant system, which for decades used organs from executed prisoners, had global backing. That assertion was disputed on Friday afternoon by the president of the Transplantation Society , a nongovernmental organization based in Montreal that had organized the meeting. At a conference session on Thursday, several leading Chinese medical specialists — including Dr. Huang Jiefu, a former deputy health minister; Dr. Zheng Shusen, a transplant surgeon at Zhejiang University; and Dr. Chen Jingyu, a transplant surgeon at Wuxi People’s Hospital — spoke about “a new era” of organ transplantation in China, according to the program and to several people who attended the event, which was not open to the news media. China says it stopped using the organs of executed prisoners on Jan. 1, 2015, but doubts linger . “Scholars say this special Chinese organ transplant meeting shows that the Chinese organ transplant world has been truly accepted by the Transplantation Society,” said Global Times , a Chinese state-run newspaper. Similar reports were published by the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao. Speaking at a news conference on Friday, the society’s president, Dr. Philip J. O’Connell, denied this. Dr. O’Connell told reporters that he had told Chinese presenters at the Thursday session that their country’s decades-long practice of using the organs of executed prisoners had horrified the rest of the world. Many international medical organizations and human rights groups oppose the use of organs from prisoners on the grounds that they cannot give their consent freely. Hong Kong is a former British colony that returned to Chinese rule in 1997 , but it does not practice capital punishment and has an organ donation system separate from the Chinese mainland’s. “It is important that you understand that the global community is appalled by the practices that the Chinese have adhered to in the past,” Dr. O’Connell said he told them. “As a result of these practices, the Chinese transplant centers have allowed a trenchant political opposition to their government to prosper,” he said. Although Dr. O’Connell did not name any groups, he may have been referring to Falun Gong , a spiritual movement that is outlawed in China and that accuses the Chinese authorities of extracting organs from its members. Many of its practitioners have been jailed since 1999, when a large meditation exercise they staged in front of the party’s Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing caught leaders off guard. Speaking to reporters on Friday, Dr. O’Connell said that “no one could interpret” what he said to the Chinese representatives as meaning that their system was “truly accepted by the Transplantation Society.” “So they may say that, but that’s not what the truth is,” he added. Also at the news conference on Friday, Dr. Jeremy Chapman, a former president of the society, said that a paper delivered at the Thursday meeting may have violated the society’s rules that no organs from executed prisoners be used in research. Dr. Chapman did not name the presenter, but several people who attended identified him as Dr. Zheng, the transplant surgeon at Zhejiang University. Attempts to contact Dr. Zheng on Friday were not successful. Reached on WeChat, a social media app, Dr. Huang, the former deputy health minister who has been overseeing the transition of China’s transplant system away from using prisoners’ organs, said that Dr. Zheng had already returned to Hangzhou, the provincial capital of Zhejiang. Repeating that the society demanded that China completely stop using prisoners’ organs, Dr. Chapman said, “The material presented by one of the presenters in that first session was, in my view, incapable of being fitted within the confines of that.” “I’ve already mentioned that to the Chinese government representatives who were at the meeting. I expect them to investigate,” he said, adding that the Transplantation Society would also investigate. If his suspicions proved true, Dr. Chapman said, “Then they will be named and shamed, and they will be excluded from our meetings forever — and from publication in transplantation journals.”

Transplants
China
Hong Kong
Falun Gong
Huang Jiefu


New Curbs Sought on the Personal Data Industry

Abstract: The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday called on Congress to protect consumers against the unchecked collection and sharing of their digital data — from websites visited to their marital status — by providing people with tools to view, suppress and fix their information. The agency also said the little-known companies, called data brokers, that analyze and sell huge amounts of the consumer information for marketing purposes, needed to be reined in and more transparent to the public. Companies that trade in consumer data, the agency said in a 110-page report about the industry, suffered from “a fundamental lack of transparency.” “You may not know them, but data brokers know you,” Edith Ramirez, chairwoman of the F.T.C., said in a conference call. It is an industry, she said, that “operates largely in the dark,” yet it has remarkably detailed information that includes online and store purchases, political and religious affiliations, personal income, and socioeconomic status. One data broker in the report, for example, had 3,000 data categories for nearly every American consumer. Data brokers analyze information collected about consumers to make automated assumptions about them, the report said. While the conclusions may determine the products and services offered to a person, the report said, the conclusions can be mistaken. Consumers are placed in data-driven social and demographic groups for marketing purposes with labels like “financially challenged,” “diabetes interest” and “smoker in household,” the report said. The report explains how these software-generated groupings could affect a person. It said a person assumed to be a “biker enthusiast” might get special offers from the local motorcycle shop. But that same person might also have to pay higher fees for life insurance because insurers infer that person engages in risky behavior. The practices of data brokers have been described in news articles and in a few previous government reports, including one by the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee last December. But experts say the F.T.C.’s report, the conclusion of an 18-month investigation, is the most detailed and authoritative portrait to date. “For many Americans, this is going to be eye-opening,” said David C. Vladeck, a professor of law at Georgetown University and former senior F.T.C. official. “This is a very strong call to Congress to get something done.” The F.T.C. report adds momentum to the push in Washington to put new curbs on how information collected about people is used by companies. This month, the White House issued its own report that focused largely on how companies gather and use vast stores of data online about individuals, and how those practices could be used to discriminate against certain racial, ethnic or socioeconomic groups. The White House report called for a renewed push to pass a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which President Obama first proposed in 2012. Several of the recommendations in the F.T.C. report are similar to those in the White House privacy proposal. In February, Senator John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, and Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, introduced a bill that would require data brokers to disclose more information about their practices and to give consumers more control over their information collected and sold by the companies. The data broker industry generally opposes legislation, asserting that effective self-regulation is the preferred solution in an industry that is changing quickly and growing rapidly. Peggy Hudson, senior vice president of government affairs for the Direct Marketing Association, which represents data brokers, said that the F.T.C. report, after a lengthy investigation, “still does not show there is consumer harm.” In the conference call with reporters, Ms. Ramirez, the F.T.C. chairwoman, said her agency’s investigation and report “did not identify any unlawful activity.” The dangers cited by the F.T.C. are speculative, Ms. Hudson said, adding that existing laws prohibit the kind of potential discrimination that both the F.T.C. and White House big data reports described. “Self-regulation is working,” she said. The F.T.C. began policing the data broker industry in 2010, out of concern that companies were using large new sources of digital data and clever software to sidestep the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That legislation, passed in 1970, was a response to privacy concerns raised by the surge in data collection and analysis in the mainframe era — the big data of its day. The law permitted the collection of personal financial information by credit bureaus, but sharply limited its use. And the F.T.C. staff worried that the amount of digital data now available because of online browsing and other activities, combined with sophisticated software for spotting correlations and inferences based on the data, make it possible to get around the restrictions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Privacy groups generally praised the F.T.C. report on Tuesday, but said it could have gone further in its recommendations. Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, described the detailed report as “a powerful and disturbing privacy wake-up call.” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the agency’s report placed too much responsibility on individual consumers to monitor the activities of data brokers. The problem, Mr. Rotenberg said, is that data brokers — unlike websites and retailers, for example — do not deal directly with consumers. “The consumer,” he said, “is not the customer, but the product.” Data brokers, Mr. Rotenberg suggested, should be required to contact an individual when his or her information is about to be sold to an insurer, prospective employee or government agency, for example. “There should be much clearer rights and stronger protections for the individual,” he said. “The F.T.C. didn’t go far enough. This was a missed opportunity.” The nine data brokers examined in the F.T.C. report were Acxiom, CoreLogic, Datalogix, eBureau, ID Analytics, Intelius, PeekYou, Rapleaf and Recorded Future. Since the F.T.C. investigation began in December 2012, companies in the industry have taken some steps to disclose more information about their activities and the information they collect. Acxiom, the largest data broker, set up a website, AboutTheData.com, that allows a consumer to see some of the information it has on people, as well as some of the data-generated assumptions it makes about them. In a statement on Tuesday, Acxiom said it generally agreed with the observations in the F.T.C. report and that the industry’s current code of conduct and best practices are largely in step with the F.T.C. recommendations.

FTC
Data Mining,Big Data
Privacy
Acxiom
PeekYou.com
Corelogic
eBureau
Datalogix International
Computers and the Internet
Tech Industry


Afghans Protest Deadly U.S. Raid

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — A night raid by American troops in the eastern province of Nangarhar left at least 10 Afghans dead, and within hours, on Friday morning, protests by their relatives and friends turned violent, killing at least one other person, according to accounts from witnesses and Afghan officials. Afghan officials said the witnesses described the dead as civilians, but a spokesman for the American military, Lt. Col. Joseph T. Breasseale, said they were insurgents, including a Taliban subcommander and several others; he did not have a precise number of fatalities. He said they were killed in a firefight after refusing orders from a joint Afghan and NATO force to come out of a house. Two insurgents were wounded and captured, he said, and “multiple automatic rifles” were found in the house. American Special Operations forces and Afghan special forces carried out the raid in an attempt to arrest an insurgent named Qari Shamshudin, who was among the 10 people killed, according to a spokesman for the Nangarhar governor’s office, Ahmad Zia Abdul Zai. It was the second fatal night raid in two weeks in the Surkh Rod district, about nine miles west of Jalalabad. Afghan officials had confirmed that a man was killed in the previous raid, on April 28. An Afghan member of Parliament, Safia Sidiqi, said that the house raided then was her own and that the victim was related by marriage to her brother. Ms. Sidiqi was among the protesters on Friday, witnesses said. The protesters carried the bodies of four of the latest victims, burned an American flag, and shouted slogans, including “Death to America” and “Long live the Taliban.” They were also critical of the Nangarhar governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. When the crowd of villagers and relatives tried to storm the district police and government building, the police fired to repulse them, Mr. Abdul Zai said, killing one protester and wounding two. Ms. Sidiqi and other local officials said one of the wounded later died, but there was no official confirmation. A spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, Zemarai Bashary, said the ministry was sending an official delegation to investigate the raid. The delegation would be headed by Lt. Gen. Merza Mohammed Yarmand, head of the Afghan national police’s criminal investigation division, who had formerly conducted investigations of civilian killings by NATO forces in Gardez and elsewhere. “The local people in the area are claiming these are innocent civilians who have been killed,” Mr. Bashary said. “We are investigating those claims.” In response to the April 28 case, Mrs. Sidiqi accused the Americans of deliberately seeking out her house, although she was not at home at the time. “My brother called me on the phone at 11:40 p.m. and told me that there were some thieves outside our house, and then I called Nangarhar provincial police headquarters, and they told me they are not thieves, they are Americans doing their search operations,” she said. Her response at the time, she said, was to quote an Afghan saying: “If you’re not a thief, you have nothing to fear from the authorities.” In that raid, Colonel Breasseale said, the victim came out of the house with a shotgun. “He clearly presented hostile intent and they yelled at him to drop the weapon and he refused to do it,” he said. Colonel Breasseale was skeptical of claims that the people inside the house thought they were being attacked by criminals. “That seems to be the running line for anyone who was hit in a night raid these days,” he said. A villager from Surkh Rod district said he lost four cousins and an uncle during the raid. “I hate this stupid Karzai, this stupid governor,” said the villager, Omarudin, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “My uncle and cousins were not Taliban, so why did they kill them?” Ms. Sidiqi, who later visited the survivors in the village of Koshkaky, where she was reached by telephone, said it was clear to her that all of the victims were farmers who had been working late threshing their wheat harvest. One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy and another a 70-year-old man, she said. After talking to survivors, she put the number of dead from the village at 11 rather than 10. “I think this is the enemies of the Americans in Afghanistan, feeding them bad information in order to create friction between the Americans and the people of Afghanistan,” she said. Ms. Sidiqi said NATO troops should work with local officials and elders to arrest people they suspect of insurgent ties; early this year, the NATO commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, issued guidelines limiting night raids and encouraging working through local residents. “Instead they just shot them down as they jumped from their beds,” Ms. Sidiqi said. She confirmed that some weapons were found in the house. “They were two rifles. These are farmers, and everyone has rifles,” she said. “They cannot compete with a hundred Americans with all their modern weapons.”

Afghanistan War (2001- )
Civilian Casualties


In States Once Reliably Red, Palin and Biden Tighten Their Stump Speeches

Abstract: TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The vice-presidential candidates spent the final, frenetic hours of the 2008 campaign on traditionally Republican turf, with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. urging Democrats to get to the polls and Gov. Sarah Palin warning that “the far-left wing of the Democrat” Party is poised to take over Washington. Ms. Palin addressed large crowds in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia on Saturday, and made several appearances in Ohio on Sunday. Mr. Biden spent Saturday and Sunday skittering around Ohio and Florida before heading to Missouri for an early appearance on Monday. It is no coincidence that the candidates are appearing only in states that President Bush won in 2004. The Republican ticket, led by Senator John McCain of Arizona, is playing defense while the Democrats, confident they have locked up the states they won in 2004, are seeking new territory. Ms. Palin’s message, at its heart, is a fear-based argument against electing Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. She warns voters that Mr. Obama will raise taxes, expand government, capitulate to terrorists and promote an extreme liberal agenda with the help of broader Democratic majorities in Congress. “The time for choosing is near, and the choice is going to come down to what we believe in, Ohio,” Ms. Palin, of Alaska, said at a rally Sunday in Canton, Ohio. “We believe in the forward movement of freedom, not the constant expansion of government.” Mr. Biden’s message has evolved in recent days, from harsh attacks on Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin to a broader appeal for an end to what he calls the “politics of division.” He still mocks the Republican ticket, arguing that they are not mavericks but rather mere “sidekicks” to Mr. Bush who would continue his foreign and economic policies. He says that in their desperation, Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin are using smears and lies to impugn Mr. Obama’s character and patriotism. But Mr. Biden, with an unstated sense that victory is within the Democrats’ grasp, has turned to a call for healing a divided nation. He urges his audiences to “choose hope over fear.” “We have to unite this country,” Mr. Biden, of Delaware, said at a rally at Florida State University here on Sunday. “We cannot stay blue and red, really, we cannot stay divided. We can’t strengthen the economy if we are pitted one against the other.” “We cannot move past the politics of division unless we reach out to those people in the parking lot,” he added, referring to about a dozen noisy pro-McCain protesters near the event. In Florida on Saturday, Ms. Palin used the age-old tactic of warning elderly people that her opponents were not committed to Social Security. (Mr. Biden did the same thing in Florida last week.) In Virginia, she affirmed her support for gun owners’ rights, drawing loud cheers. Speaking with a Southern twang, she said she would work on “keeping Virginia red and making y’all prosperous.” Ms. Palin’s crowds have been enormous and enthusiastic, shaking red-and-white pompoms and filling minor league baseball stadiums, airplane hangars and warehouses. The music at campaign events reinforces her image as a plainspoken, hard-working reformer (“9 to 5” and “Straight Talk” by Dolly Parton), while paying tribute to her appearance (“She’s Not Just a Pretty Face” by Shania Twain and “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder). Ms. Palin is almost always accompanied by her husband, Todd, whom she chirpily introduces as “Alaska’s first dude.” (Sometimes she follows up by joking that he “looks like one of those Secret Service guys.”) Mr. Biden has been joined for the last several days by his wife of 31 years, Jill Jacobs Biden, a community college professor. Dr. Biden tells audiences that this is the most important election of their lifetimes and adds a few biographical notes about her husband, including that he lost his first wife and a young daughter in a car accident in 1972. When Mr. Biden takes the stage, unfailingly to “The Rising” by Bruce Springsteen, he thanks Mr. Obama for choosing him as his running mate. “The reason I’m so thankful,” he says, “is I’ve never heard my wife say such nice things about me in public.” Mr. Biden regularly warns against complacency and urges those in the audience who have not voted already to cast their ballots early if possible. Mr. Biden and Ms. Palin have accelerated their schedules, now appearing at as many as five rallies a day in as many cities. A week ago, two or three events a day was the norm for each candidate. They have shortened their stump speeches and are spending less time greeting supporters. Their exhaustion is beginning to show, particularly late at night. Ms. Palin’s voice sometimes grows hoarse and Mr. Biden occasionally stumbles over lines he has repeated dozens of times. The other night he referred to his running mate as “Baracko.” Just as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York did in the primaries, Ms. Palin dismisses Mr. Obama’s oratory as “just words,” even as she whips crowds into a frenzy with her own remarks. “The rousing speeches of our opponent, they can fill a stadium,” Ms. Palin said. “But they cannot keep our country safe. And for a season, a man can inspire with his words, but for a lifetime, John McCain has inspired us with his deeds.” Her speeches have relied on repetition, especially words like “tough” and “guts” when applied to Mr. McCain. Speaking in Virginia on Saturday, she repeated the phrase “Joe the Plumber” six times. Ms. Palin singles out Mr. Biden regularly in her remarks, noting that he once said it would be patriotic for the wealthy to pay more taxes, and recalling that, in a verbal slip, Mr. Biden said that he and Mr. Obama opposed so-called clean coal technology. But Mr. Biden rarely singles out anything Ms. Palin has said or done. He does not question her qualifications or mention any of her verbal blunders. She appears, if at all, as “McCain-Palin,” merely an appendage to the Republican nominee for president. On Monday, Ms. Palin will begin her day in Ohio, and then head to Missouri, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada. Late that night, she will fly to Anchorage, travel to her home in Wasilla, Alaska, to cast her vote on Tuesday, and then fly to Phoenix to join Mr. McCain. Mr. Biden will start Monday with a speech in Lee’s Summit, Mo., then appear in Zanesville and Akron, Ohio, before ending his day with a rally in Philadelphia. He will vote in his hometown, Wilmington, Del., then fly to Chicago to spend election night with Mr. Obama at a large gathering in Grant Park.

Biden Joseph R Jr
Palin Sarah
Speeches and Statements
Presidential Election of 2008


After Setback, Villanova’s Yarou Pushes Hard to Return

Abstract: VILLANOVA, Pa. — Frank Tchuisi, a Villanova graduate assistant, received the phone call around midnight in San Juan, P.R. Coach Jay Wright needed to see him because Mouphtaou Yarou , a French-speaking freshman forward from Benin in Africa, had tested positive for hepatitis B. Wright wanted Tchuisi, a Francophone from Cameroon, to be with Yarou when he learned the news. “I was heartbroken,” said Tchuisi, recounting the mid-November meeting, 14 hours before the Wildcats’ third game of the season. As a player, Tchuisi made recruiting phone calls to the 6-foot-10 Yarou. To ease the transition for Yarou, Wright asked Tchuisi to stay with the program. Tchuisi was the one who flew with Yarou back to Philadelphia, where he went for more tests. “We talked about the game as if nothing was wrong,” said Yarou, whose size was seen as the missing link for Villanova (15-1, 4-0 Big East), which hosts Georgetown on Sunday. Hepatitis B is a contagious liver disease that can range in severity and last a few weeks to a lifetime. It can be spread by bodily fluids from an infected person. Neither the team nor Yarou would discuss his case. A starter for the first two games, Yarou was sidelined indefinitely. But Wright assured him that even if he never played again, Yarou, who earned two A’s during a summer session, would keep his scholarship. “He needed to stay positive and hang in there,” Wright said. The team’s trainer told the staff that Yarou could not practice. He warmed up and stretched on the sideline to avoid collisions. As teammates ran past for layups, they yelled, “Here we go, Mouph!” to pick up his spirits. “It was kind of like a Bubble Boy situation,” the senior forward Antonio Pena said. Yarou, 19, soon burst out of that role. After watching the teaching moments of practice, he retreated to the weight room to run on a self-propelled treadmill. Attached to a harness, he worked on his stamina, in increasingly longer, speedier bursts. “He lit a fire on the belt,” Lon Record, the strength and conditioning coach, said. Two years earlier, when Yarou first entered the United States and played at Massanutten Military Academy in Virginia, he lifted weights for the first time. Yarou was offered an opportunity to play soccer in Nantes, France, when he was 12, but he followed his brother, Khader, into basketball. Weight lifting, much like the red meat in Yarou’s new diet instead of the fruits and vegetables he had been accustomed to, was an acquired taste. Record has stayed on top of Yarou’s lifting, telling him about a scene in “Unbreakable” in which Bruce Willis’s character continues to add plates to his bench press until no more are left. “That’s what I want to happen with Mouph someday,” Record said. Health was not the first hurdle for Yarou to clear in November. The Sporting News also questioned his age, citing a link on the FIBA Web site to a club tournament in Africa two years earlier. One of the team rosters listed Yarou as 23 years old with June 26, 1984, as his date of birth. “My first thought was maybe it’s true,” said Wright, who had flown to Benin with his former associate coach Pat Chambers in September 2008 for a whirlwind visit with Yarou’s family. “Everything had almost gone too smoothly from the beginning.” Arie Johnson, who became a surrogate mother to Yarou last year at Montrose Christian in Rockville, Md., was adamant that the boy who stayed under her roof with other teammates was no older than 19. “Twenty-five years old? Please,” Johnson said in a phone interview Thursday. “If the people behind that report saw this boy dressed in Steve Urkel glasses at senior prom, they would never have even questioned it.” As it turned out, Yarou had his birth certificate. Grades were never an issue. When he enrolled at Villanova, he wanted to take a higher level of calculus than was suggested. Wright was somewhat dumbfounded by the request until Yarou’s first test score came back. He received a 99. “You can relate with him on an intellectual level,” Wright said. “He wants to be taught.” Yarou, who wears two white long-sleeve pads to protect against scratches, was cleared to play on Dec. 30. He is averaging 14 minutes and 3.6 points. Yarou participates in all aspects of practice and stays with Tchuisi to shoot an extra 100 free throws afterward. When he approaches the scorer’s table to check in at home games, the student section chants, “Mooooouph!” Wright said, “He continues to answer the call.”

Villanova University
Basketball
College Athletics
Hepatitis
Yarou Mouphtaou


A Bruising Fight in Rough Water

Abstract: LEWISTON, N.Y. — With boiling currents below and steel skies above, Capt. Frank Campbell steered up the Lower Niagara River in search of king salmon. It was a warm afternoon during the second week of October, normally a prime time to catch king, or chinook, salmon during their annual run up the green river. But a water temperature near 70 degrees meant thousands of fish were waiting in Lake Ontario for the river to cool. Campbell headed in the opposite direction, piloting his 21-foot boat into the Niagara Gorge, beneath the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge carrying traffic to and from Canada. We were in pursuit of those fish that had preceded the main run. The entrance to the gorge is a tempest of white water and white noise, where the cliffs suddenly rise to 350 feet and house enormous concrete hydroelectric plants. A charter boat captain who spends 250 days a year fishing area waters, Campbell brought us to Devil’s Hole, at a spot thick with rocks and rapids four miles below the falls. We were there to catch one of the most prized freshwater fish in North America. A mature Lake Ontario king salmon can easily weigh 30 pounds. To catch such a trophy in the raging waters of the gorge, with the trees showing the first of their fall colors, makes for a rare fishing experience. “The only other opportunity people could have for catching fish like this is going to Alaska,” Campbell said. “There’s no other sport fish to compare to them, size-wise or fight-wise.” Although native to the North Pacific, king salmon were introduced to the Great Lakes during the 1960s to cull baitfish populations. Steve Dolan is an assistant manager and fish culturist at the Salmon River Hatchery in Altmar, outside Syracuse, where Lake Ontario’s king salmon are raised. The hatchery stocks roughly 1.5 million annually in the lake’s tributaries. The fish then spend up to four years feeding in the lake before returning to the rivers to spawn before dying. In the Niagara, king salmon run as far upriver as the falls. And although they do not feed while spawning, they will strike at bait. “They’re not in a good mood,” Dolan said. “They’re looking to spawn. It’s their natural instinct to get something out of the way.” To provoke the fish, Campbell lets his boat drift with the current and uses salmon eggs as bait. He sets hooks on a skein loop near the river bottom, using a 15-pound leader on 17-pound line. The trick, he said, is to make the eggs look natural and ensure the bait remains near the rocky bottom. Campbell, who has 15 years’ experience as a captain on the river, adroitly managed to keep the boat steady in the current while fishing, offering instruction, freeing snags and fending off barbs about failing to catch anything. Bill Hilts, an outdoors liaison with an area tourism agency, had accompanied us for the day, providing a foil for Campbell and a recipe for chicken-wing-flavored king salmon steak. Although the weather had cleared, revealing the river’s emerald water, our prospects dimmed because salmon do not favor light. Still, the fish were there. Campbell had been hooking them for weeks. Fishermen on a platform at the New York power plant were netting them. And the salmon seemed to taunt us by occasionally leaping from the water before disappearing with a splash. But after more than three hours, we had yet to net a fish. Campbell had hooked one early on, but the line snapped. By 6 p.m., another charter boat had reached its limit — three king salmon per person in New York waters — and headed in. It was then, as the sun slipped below the rim of the gorge, that our fortunes improved. Campbell hooked a fish and handed me the rod. The spool whined, and a salmon leaped. I reeled furiously. For 10 strenuous minutes, the fish fought as I alternately raised the rod and reeled. Campbell finally netted the 25-pound thrasher a half-mile downriver amid the turbulence from the power plants. My first king salmon was a muscle-burning thrill. Thirty minutes later, Campbell hooked another 15-pound king. The gorge had grown dark by then, and we were alone on the river. We took one final pass through Devil’s Hole and returned to the docks at Lewiston. In a cleaning station on a bluff above where the river runs wide and slow, Campbell cut flanks from the fish for steaks and removed several pounds of bright orange eggs that would be used as bait. With the meat in a pile to one side, and the eggs in another, the scene was a visual aid for something Campbell would say later. “Salmon eat and spawn,” he said. “Those are the only two things they do.” In Celtic mythology, salmon were thought to be wise, with their smarts correlating to their number of spots. But here on the Lower Niagara, catching king salmon is not so much a cerebral pursuit. When the conditions are right and the fish are running, it is a battle in muscular currents with a feisty fish and the river roaring like the crowd at a prizefight.


Pakistan Says It Makes More Gains on Taliban

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Pakistani Army said Sunday that it had captured the central square of Mingora, the largest city in the contested Swat Valley , as it appeared to be making slow but steady gains against the Taliban there. Ten militants and six Pakistani soldiers were killed in fierce street battles in the city on Sunday, according to a statement by the Pakistani Army. Another six soldiers were wounded. Meanwhile, helicopter gunships pounded what were said to be militant hide-outs in a nearby tribal region, killing at least 18 people, The Associated Press reported. The army’s capture of the central square, known as Green Square, carried symbolic weight. Under the Taliban, it had gained notoriety as “Slaughter Square.” Beheaded bodies — often of people accused of spying or of un-Islamic behavior — were thrown in the square to intimidate residents. Security forces, moving from street to street, also arrested 14 militants on Sunday, the military said, in an offensive that is seen as one of the decisive phases of the military’s push to gain control of Swat from the Taliban. Until now, the battle between the military and the Taliban was confined to the mountainous countryside and villages of Swat. But Mingora, about 100 miles from Islamabad, the capital, could prove to be the toughest challenge. Militants have hidden in urban neighborhoods, where they command the rooftops of houses and other buildings. The military’s claims have not been independently verified because the region has been closed to most journalists. But Mehmood Shah, a defense analyst and a retired brigadier in Peshawar who used to be in charge of security in the tribal regions of the North-West Frontier Province, said most of the captured neighborhoods were suburbs and the troops had not moved into the city in a “major way.” Mr. Shah, who has spoken with city residents, said that the military had surrounded the city, choking the militants, who are holed up inside with little chance of escape. Most of the captured intersections and crossings were of strategic importance. “The troops are moving from street to street, house to house, but they have to keep the tempo slow as civilians are also present in the city,” he said. “Troops cannot use heavy weapons and artillery, so as to avoid collateral damage.” Mr. Shah said the leadership of the militants still seemed to be present in the Swat Valley, while some militant leaders were putting up a fight in Mingora. “It seems that bin Yamin and Muslim Khan are present in Mingora,” Mr. Shah said, referring to a top militant and a Taliban spokesman in Swat, who is known for his frequent appearances in local media and for bombastic claims. A military spokesman said that troops had also entered Piachar village. The remote valley of Piachar is considered to be one of the main strongholds of the Taliban in Swat. Mr. Shah said it would be difficult for the militant leadership to sustain itself in the remote mountains of Piachar. On Sunday morning, helicopter gunships struck multiple targets in the Orakzai tribal region, including a religious school, The A.P. reported, citing a local government official, Mohammad Yasin. At least 6 civilians were among the 18 dead, Mr. Yasin said, adding that the targets were strongholds of Hakimullah Mehsud, a deputy to the Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud. Hundreds fled the area during the fighting, he said. The Pakistani military said a curfew had been relaxed from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Matta and Khawazakhela, two towns that had been cleared of militants.

Swat (Pakistan)
Defense and Military Forces
Taliban


Scores Killed in Attack on Shiite Pilgrims in Iraq

Abstract: BAGHDAD — A woman who veiled her explosives in a black robe struck a column of Shiite pilgrims on the outskirts of Baghdad on Monday in a suicide attack that Iraqi officials had predicted but could not stop. The attack — coming a week after four enormous bombings in Baghdad using vehicles driven by suicide bombers — killed at least 38 people and wounded scores more along a major roadway in an industrial district on the northern edge of Baghdad, according to officials. The bombing occurred despite what officials had pledged would be intensified security for the annual pilgrimage to Shiite Islam’s holiest shrine in Iraq , underscoring the ability of insurgents to outmaneuver the country’s security forces, seemingly at will. Two more attacks — one with a grenade, another with a roadside bomb — later struck still more pilgrims in southern Baghdad, wounding 16. The attacks compounded a sense of insecurity in Baghdad ahead of a parliamentary election in March, which already is inflaming political tensions. The bomber was able to mingle among pilgrims, evidently unsearched, before detonating what officials described as a vest or belt of explosives. The force of the blast and shrapnel cut through a crowd near a tent that had been erected, like thousands of others across the country, to provide shelter, food and water for pilgrims making their way to Karbala to commemorate Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. One man who was wounded, Aqil Jassim, spoke of blood “falling like rain.” Another blamed the “blind hatred” of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a domestic insurgent group, for the bombing, but Mr. Jassim also faulted Iraq’s police and army, which once again raised doubts about their tactics, training and professionalism. One of Iraq’s main weapons against bombs has been a detector of dubious efficacy, whose manufacturer now faces fraud charges in Britain . “The security forces are responsible because they were not searching anyone,” Mr. Jassim said in a hospital in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, where some of the wounded were treated. The Baghdad Operations Command, which oversees security in the capital region, later said that the bomber had detonated her explosives near a place where women were in fact being searched. Among those killed, the command said in a statement, were three women who had volunteered to conduct searches of other women. Even as word spread of yet another attack, the command’s spokesman, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta al-Moussawi, announced that “a large number” of 134 officers and soldiers who were under investigation in the wake of last week’s attacks would face court-martial for negligence and dereliction of duty. He also told Iraqis and officials to be vigilant. In a statement, he said that insurgents had developed “new highly explosive formulas” to avoid detection. Hundreds of thousands of Shiites from Iraq, Iran and beyond make their way to Karbala for the pilgrimage each year. Many do so on foot, a journey that can take days or even weeks. The pilgrimage was banned by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government, resumed with fervor by the country’s Shiite majority after the American invasion in 2003, and was attacked regularly since. The pilgrims, along with the tents, which are festooned with the green and black flags of the faith, clog roads headed to Karbala for days before the pilgrimage’s culmination , known as Arbaeen, which is Friday. Despite road closings and other measures to heighten security, the attacks have continued as relentlessly as the marchers. Samir Mahmoud, a pilgrim making his way to Karbala from a village north of Baquba, was knocked unconscious by the bombing. When he came to, he said, he witnessed a scene of carnage, with stunned survivors staggering among body parts. Before the blast he spoke with a man wearing a white shroud inscribed with words saying it would wrap his body if he died on the road to Karbala. He was among those killed, Mr. Mahmoud said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest violence. The main insurgency group here, the Islamic State of Iraq, claimed responsibility for the previous attacks, which were coordinated and were clearly intended to attack the credibility of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government . The use of suicide bombers, including women, is not new, but it had diminished recently. Diyala, the province from which many of the pilgrims killed on Monday came, has long been a center of recruiting and training of female bombers. A senior military commander in Babel Province, south of Baghdad, was quoted in the newspaper Sabah on Monday announcing the arrest of a man responsible for recruiting suicide bombers to attack the Karbala pilgrims. It was not clear if there was any connection to Monday’s bombing.

Iraq
Pilgrimages
Shiite Muslims
Terrorism
Iraq War (2003- )


Bank of England Stands Pat

Abstract: LONDON — The Bank of England kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged on Thursday amid concern that the British economy fell back into recession at the beginning of the year. The central bank decided to leave its interest rate at the record low of 0.5 percent, where it has been since March 2009. It also held its program of economic stimulus at £375 billion, or about $568 billion. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn A. King, has been pushing this year for more fiscal stimulus to help the economy grow, but has been overruled by other members of the central bank’s interest rate setting committee. Mr. King is to be succeeded in three months by Mark J. Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada. The concern is that more stimulus would weigh on the pound, which in turn would fan inflation that is already running at an annual rate of 2.8 percent, above the central bank’s target of 2 percent. Disappointing manufacturing data, apprehensive consumers and concern about the effects of the crisis in Cyprus mean that many economists still expect the Bank of England to expand its bond-purchasing program this year. “The economy is going nowhere,” said Vicky Redwood, an economist at Capital Economics in London. “There’s essentially no growth.” Data released in three weeks is to show whether Britain fell back into a recession in the first quarter, which would be the third recession for the economy in five years. Consumers have curbed spending as the government’s austerity measures, which include spending cuts and tax increases, raise fears that unemployment will increase. Higher costs for electricity during an unusually long winter have further squeezed households. Many companies are reluctant to spend while bank loans are difficult to come by and while the outlook for demand — especially from the euro zone, Britain’s largest export market — is difficult to predict. George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, warned last month when he updated Parliament on the state of the economy that “another bout of economic storms in the euro zone would hit Britain’s economic fortunes hard again.” In March, the Office for Budget Responsibility halved its forecast for British economic growth to 0.6 percent this year from a previous forecast of 1.2 percent. Growth is expected to rise to 1.8 percent next year, compared with a previous estimate of 2 percent, the office said. Cold weather was partly to blame for a contraction in the construction industry in March, the fifth consecutive month of declining activity, according to Markit Economics. Disposable income fell 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter from the previous three months, the Office for National Statistics said last month.

Bank of England
Interest rate
Euro Crisis


Heavyweight Retains Title in Brooklyn

Abstract: Deontay Wilder retained his World Boxing Council heavyweight championship with a devastating knockout of Artur Szpilka in the ninth round at Barclays Center. Charles Martin won the vacant International Boxing Federation heavyweight championship in an underwhelming bout against the injured Vyacheslav Glazkov in the co-main event.


Crashes and Traffic Jams in Military Test of Robotic Vehicles

Abstract: VICTORVILLE, Calif., Nov. 4 — A Pentagon-sponsored robot race at a former Air Force base here on Saturday revealed that computer-controlled vehicles, at least to date, have failings that are all too human. The contest, called the Grand Challenge and sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, featured both robot collisions and robot traffic jams. Yet the event also demonstrated that the state of the art in robotics has reached the point where the most sophisticated autonomous vehicles can now drive comfortably and safely on a city course while surrounded by traffic and other obstacles. “It was a good day in robotland,” said William L. Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who pioneered the idea of contests to help advance robot technology during the 1980s. The Chevrolet Tahoe from Mr. Whittaker’s Tartan Team, sponsored by General Motors and others, won the top prize this year. Although the car finished just minutes behind a Volkswagen-sponsored Passat designed by a group of Stanford researchers, Darpa officials spent the night reviewing the cars’ performances during three separate missions, including how well they adhered to California’s driving rules. On Sunday morning, they announced that the Carnegie Mellon car named Boss had won first prize ahead of Junior from Stanford and Victor Tango from Virginia Tech . The event was the third in a series of races that have been held since 2004 to help meet a Congressional directive that requires the military to replace a third of its fleet of logistics vehicles with robots by the middle of the next decade. This year’s race offered three prizes of $2 million, $1 million and $500,000 for the vehicles that were best able to navigate a 60-mile course in a simulated city in under six hours. During the last week, the field of 35 invited contestants was narrowed to 11 finalists. They included several Volkswagen Passats, a Subaru, a Chevrolet Tahoe, a Toyota Prius, a Land Rover, a Ford Escape Hybrid, and an oversize Marine Corps transport vehicle made by Oshkosh. “We’ve been looking at the problem of protecting people on the battlefield,” said Norman Whitaker, the Darpa project manager for the event. He told the more than 300 reporters attending the race that the vehicles, once started, would perform tasks as varied as left-hand turns across oncoming traffic and pulling in and out of narrow parking spaces, all without human intervention. “There’s no animal or midget inside controlling it or anything else,” he said. To the casual bystander, the stream of robots left a disquieting impression as each vehicle drove by with both drivers and passengers conspicuously absent as steering wheels twitched back and forth. “It’s amazing how quickly you acclimatize to the idea of robot driving in cities,” said Michael Montemerlo, a Stanford roboticist who headed the programming effort of the Passat that finished the course first. Each vehicle is a complex ensemble of sensors and computers that are programmed to follow roads, avoid oncoming traffic, merge, pass and occasionally even cheat on the rules to get out of difficult situations. In addition to the prize money, the event, which has been held every 18 months, cost $20.5 million to produce this year. However, the organizers described it as an economical way to bring about rapid technological progress in a field that is a military priority. Mr. Whitaker also said that the program was having a Sputnik-like impact in the engineering and computer science departments of many universities, where enrollments have jumped in response. During the contest, which began at 8 a.m. Saturday, it quickly became apparent that there were disparities in the abilities of the vehicles. Early in the race, a Land Rover designed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a near collision and then a real collision with a Passat built by a team of researchers based in Braunschweig, Germany. The German team was later pulled from the race by officials. Separately, the Oshkosh military vehicle was withdrawn after it had to be halted just inches from colliding with a pillar. A short time later, the car entered by a team from the University of Central Florida ended its race by running into an abandoned building.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University


New York State Agrees to Overhaul Solitary Confinement in Prisons

Abstract: New York has agreed to a major overhaul in the way solitary confinement is administered in the state’s prisons, with the goal of significantly reducing the number of inmates held in isolation, cutting the maximum length of stay and improving their living conditions. The five-year, $62 million agreement , announced on Wednesday, is the result of a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union over the treatment of inmates in solitary confinement in the prisons. For 23 hours a day, 4,000 inmates are locked in concrete 6-by-10-foot cells, sometimes for years, with little if any human contact, no access to rehabilitative programs and a diet that can be restricted to a foul-tasting brick of bread and potatoes known at the prisons as “the loaf.” The changes are expected to reduce the number of inmates in solitary confinement by at least a quarter and usher in a range of reforms, including limiting the time served to three months in most cases and providing the prisoners with certain privileges, like monthly phone calls and group recreation. “This is the end hopefully of an era where people are just thrown into the box for an unlimited amount of time on the whim of a corrections officer,” said Taylor Pendergrass, the civil liberties union’s lead counsel on the case. “This will not be the end of the road for solitary confinement reform, but we really think it’s a watershed moment.” The legal settlement caps three years of negotiations between the civil liberties union and the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo , and comes at a time of intense scrutiny of the state prison system. In June, two murderers escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., setting off a nationwide manhunt that cost millions of dollars. But it also exposed serious dysfunction within the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision that has been documented in a series of articles by The New York Times and The Marshall Project , a nonprofit news organization. While states like Washington and Colorado have gone further in curbing the use of solitary confinement, both the civil liberties union and the governor’s office say the New York settlement is historic, given the size of the corrections system — it encompasses 54 prisons that hold nearly 60,000 inmates — and how much there was to do after decades of neglect. “I think this agreement is radical and groundbreaking in ways that we couldn’t anticipate 10 years ago,” Alphonso B. David, the governor’s chief counsel, said. Image The agreement caps three years of negotiations between the New York Civil Liberties Union and the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times Mr. David said Mr. Cuomo saw the lawsuit as an opportunity to make New York prisons a model for the country. Even though both sides say they are dedicated to a sweeping reform effort, there are still significant obstacles. Almost two years ago, the state agreed to an interim settlement that eliminated the use of solitary confinement for pregnant women, most developmentally disabled inmates and any prisoner under age 18 . And yet during that time, the number of inmates in solitary confinement has increased. Officials attributed the rise in part to the escape in June, which prompted a crackdown throughout the prison system. More than 50 people have been in solitary confinement for longer than five years. At the same time, the average length of stay in isolation has gone down, to 190 days as of December from 225 days last year. Another major question is whether the corrections officers’ union, which has great power in the prisons, will go along with the settlement. After the interim settlement was adopted in 2014, the union filed a lawsuit, which is still pending, challenging many of the new policies. Officials with the corrections officers’ union said they had not been included in the negotiations nor had they yet reviewed the details of the settlement. “Our state’s disciplinary confinement policies have evolved over decades of experience, and it is simply wrong to unilaterally take the tools away from law enforcement officers who face dangerous situations on a daily basis,” the union said in a written statement. The settlement agreement, which also involved the law firm Morrison & Foerster and Alex Reinert, a professor from Cardozo Law School, must still be approved by the judge in the case, Shira A. Scheindlin, of Federal District Court in Manhattan. Image A Nutraloaf from a prison cafeteria, similar to the one that the agreement will prohibit for inmates in solitary confinement. Credit Andy Duback/Associated Press The agreement establishes a maximum sentence of three months for most disciplinary violations, except assaults, and 30 days for almost any prisoner who has committed a nonviolent infraction for the first time. Isolation will no longer be imposed for first-time violations for drug use or possession, which in the past accounted for as much as one-fifth of the solitary population. The number of infractions punishable by solitary confinement will be cut in half, and violations that once gave corrections officers wide discretion to impose long sentences, such as “disobeying orders,” will now have a maximum of 30 days. Though conditions will improve under the settlement, privileges for the inmates in isolation will still be highly restricted. For the first time, according to the civil liberties union, inmates will be able to make telephone calls, but only once every 30 days for those in long-term isolation. The corrections department will also begin a pilot program to provide offline tablet computers to inmates, but there are 30 for the entire state system. In the past, inmates in solitary confinement were given one hour of recreation a day, which they spent alone in a chain-linked cage. Under the settlement, they will be allowed to leave their cells and spend their recreation time with others on the solitary block for two hours, three times a week. They will also have greater access to reading materials and be allowed to hang curtains in front of their toilets for privacy. And the settlement prohibits prison guards from using food as a punishment. “I think it’s symbolic, but I think it will have a significant impact throughout the prison system,” Mr. David said. “We will eliminate the loaf.” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the civil liberties union, described it as “notorious,” “indigestible” and “worse than not eating at all.” Section IX, Article D of the agreement says the corrections department has three months to phase out the loaf and replace it with “a nutritious, calorie-sufficient, and palatable alternative meal composed of regular food.” A report by the civil liberties union called “ Boxed In ,” which was published in connection with the lawsuit, cited studies that found half of the inmates in solitary confinement were seriously mentally ill; solitary inmates accounted for 34 percent of all suicides in the state prison population; and those in isolation were disproportionately African-American. Tonja Fenton, a plaintiff in the lawsuit who wrote her original legal complaint in pencil from her cell, spent three years in solitary confinement. “I was locked up in a cage and forgotten,” Ms. Fenton, who has since been released, said during a conference call on Wednesday. “You don’t hear any other voices, you speak out loud just to hear yourself. You forget what it’s like to be human.” According to the report, each year about 2,000 inmates are released directly from solitary confinement into the community without receiving any transitional support. The settlement agreement aims to change that by creating “step-down” programs, which will provide mental health counseling, job training, education and drug treatment at several prisons including Southport Correctional Facility, near New York’s border with Pennsylvania, which houses only inmates in solitary confinement. A monitor chosen by the civil liberties union will be able to inspect the prisons to ensure compliance, and the corrections department will be required to publish quarterly status reports to its website. The civil liberties union praised the Cuomo administration for its “extraordinary effort” to work out an agreement. “No prison system of this size has ever taken on such sweeping and comprehensive reforms to solitary confinement at one time,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “And if it complies with all the terms within the time frame, New York will undergo an unprecedented transformation.”

Solitary Confinement
Prison
New York
NY Corrections Department
Andrew Cuomo