An Everyman on the Trail, With Perks at Home

Abstract: For the millions of voters getting to know him, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. , the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, portrays himself at times as an average guy who takes the train to work, frets about money and basically has led a middle-class life. “Ladies and gentlemen, your kitchen table is like mine,” Mr. Biden said when Senator Barack Obama introduced him as his running mate. “You sit there at night after you put the kids to bed and you talk, you talk about what you need. You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills.” Mr. Biden certainly can trace his roots to the working-class neighborhoods of Scranton, Pa., and Claymont, Del., where he was raised. But these days, his kitchen table can be found in a 6,800-square-foot custom-built colonial-style house on four lakefront acres, a property worth close to $3 million. Although he is among the least wealthy members of the millionaires club that is the United States Senate — he and his wife, Jill, a college professor, earn about $250,000 a year — Mr. Biden maintains a lifestyle that is more comfortable than the impression he may have given on the campaign trail. A review of his finances found that when it comes to some of his largest expenses, like the purchase and upkeep of his home and his use of Amtrak trains to get around, he has benefited from resources and relationships not available to average Americans. As a secure incumbent who has rarely faced serious competition during 35 years in the Senate, Mr. Biden has been able to dip into his campaign treasury to spend thousands of dollars on home landscaping and some of his Amtrak travel between Wilmington , Del., where he lives, and Washington . And the acquisition of his waterfront property a decade ago involved wealthy businessmen and campaign supporters, some of them bankers with an interest in legislation before the Senate, who bought his old house for top dollar, sold him four acres at cost and lent him $500,000 to build his new home. There is nothing to suggest Mr. Biden bent any rules in the sale, purchase and financing of his homes. Rather, he appears to have benefited at times from the simple fact of who he is: a United States senator, not just “Amtrak Joe,” the train-riding everyman that the Obama-Biden campaign has deployed to rally middle-class voters. “He was a V.I.P., so he was treated accordingly by the bank,” said Ronald Tennant, a former loan officer who handled the mortgages Mr. Biden used to build his house. The bank did not give him a below-market interest rate, a perk that has caused embarrassment for some other members of Congress. But, Mr. Tennant said, “We paid particularly close attention to make sure everything came out right.” Mr. Biden’s campaign said that he neither received special treatment nor offered any to the people he has dealt with in real estate and banking, and that he had not left a misleading impression of his wealth with voters. The senator, said David Wade, his spokesman, “has never forgotten where he came from, or how he grew up, and those middle-class values motivate his work for the middle class.” “He appreciates,” Mr. Wade continued, “that with his income as a senator he has been blessed to live comfortably, provide for his family, send his kids to college, and have the home his family dreamed of.” As for the payments by Mr. Biden’s campaign committee, Citizens for Biden, his aides insisted they were not used to cover the senator’s living expenses, which would be illegal. Election lawyers said that the law does not spell out all the ways an officeholder could benefit personally from the use of campaign money, and that regulators are generally reluctant to challenge the justifications campaign committees use. Mr. Biden’s campaign said the payments to tree trimmers and lawn services, typically totaling a few thousand dollars a year, were permissible because they were tied to political events at his home. Jim Whittaker, co-owner of Grass Roots Inc., which was paid $4,345 in 2000, said the payment probably represented several visits to the senator’s property, adding that Mr. Biden was “late paying the bill one time.” “We cut the grass and put sod down for him, did spring cleanups, mulching and knocked down vegetation,” Mr. Whittaker said. “One time we did a mulching job and he was having an event, but I don’t know if it was political or just for friends.” Beyond landscaping costs, one of the Biden campaign’s largest regular expenditures is for Amtrak tickets for the senator and his aides or consultants. Going back to 2001, those expenses typically ranged from $9,000 to $15,000 a year — far exceeding that of his colleagues in Delaware ’s Congressional delegation, whose campaigns spent between $500 and $3,000, federal election records show. Like Mr. Biden, Delaware’s other senator, Thomas R. Carper , and Representative Michael N. Castle commute daily to Washington, their offices said. Commuting on the train to and from Washington is an expensive proposition, $84 round trip from Wilmington or $1,062 for a monthly pass, although Amtrak offers a little-known discount for federal employees traveling on business. Senators cannot use their office travel allowance for commuting, according to a spokesman for the Senate Rules Committee. But Mr. Biden’s aides acknowledged he sometimes uses campaign money to pay for trips if they “involved a meeting or event related to his campaign.” They could not explain why his campaign’s Amtrak expenditures are relatively high, other than to point out that they would include travel by his staff and consultants, as do those of other politicians. The Biden campaign’s Amtrak expenses have remained high even in years without elections, when he was not actively campaigning and his committee retained a handful of part-time staff members and almost no consultants. In 2003, for instance — after he had just easily won re-election to another six-year term — his committee spent $10,874 on Amtrak tickets; that same year, the campaigns of Senator Carper and Representative Castle spent $1,257 and $589, respectively. Mr. Biden’s Amtrak travel is the stuff of Washington lore. He started making the 90-minute trips each day to be with his young sons after his first wife died in 1972, and he has continued ever since. On the stump, Mr. Biden cites his commute as a way to connect with voters; last month he brought reporters along to chronicle a ride. At least by Senate standards, Mr. Biden does not have to try too hard to underscore his relative lack of wealth. He has long shouldered a heavy debt load; he obtained or refinanced mortgages 29 times since he was elected in 1972, and currently owes $730,000 on two mortgages on his home. In addition, he has had several personal loans, including one for up to $50,000 secured by the cash value of six life insurance policies. Mr. Biden supplements his $165,000 Senate salary with a stipend from teaching a college course. His biggest boost came a few years ago, when he collected $225,000 in advances for his best-selling memoir. The Bidens have several checking accounts with less than $15,000 each, and Jill Biden’s retirement fund with between $15,000 to $50,000, according to their tax returns and Mr. Biden’s Senate financial disclosure reports. The couple reported virtually no investment income last year, and their largest asset by far was their home. Mr. Biden previously lived for 21 years in a 10,000-square-foot former DuPont mansion in Greenville, which he bought in 1975 for $185,000 after learning it was slated for demolition. After extensive renovations, he sold it in February 1996, through word of mouth, to John R. Cochran III, the vice chairman of MBNA, one of the nation’s largest credit card companies. He agreed to pay Mr. Biden’s full asking price, $1.2 million. MBNA reimbursed Mr. Cochran for a loss he took on the sale of his old home, according to a 1997 securities filing, which said the company requested that he move to Delaware from Maryland . Mr. Cochran, who still lives at the house, could not be reached for comment. The real estate deal was just one facet of a close relationship between Mr. Biden and MBNA, which donated more than $200,000 to his campaigns. The Delaware-based company gave a job to Mr. Biden’s son Hunter; flew Senator Biden and his wife to the Maine coast, where Mr. Biden spoke at a company retreat; and its former chief executive, Charles M. Cawley, donated at least $22,500 to a nonprofit breast cancer fund started by Jill Biden. MBNA also was an aggressive advocate of bankruptcy reform legislation before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Mr. Biden was a senior member and its former chairman. The legislation would make it harder for consumers to escape credit card debts. Mr. Wade said there was nothing improper in Mr. Biden’s dealings with Mr. Cochran. He said the sale price was supported by an appraisal for the same amount, and that Mr. Biden never did MBNA any favors in the Senate. In acquiring a site for his new house, Mr. Biden bought the lakeside parcel in Wilmington in March 1996 from Keith D. Stoltz, a real estate executive who once lived adjacent to the property and sold it to the senator for $350,000, the same price he paid for it five years earlier. In an e-mail message, Mr. Stoltz said the price was reasonable because the real estate market was soft and he had paid a premium for the lot so he could keep it undeveloped. “Joe initially offered me $300,000 for the lot and I declined his offer,” he said. Mr. Stoltz and several of his relatives have since given a total of about $33,000 in campaign donations to Mr. Biden over the years. He said the senator has never done anything “either formally or informally” to help his company. To build his house, Mr. Biden turned to Beneficial National Bank. Its executives were active in state politics in Delaware, major campaign contributors to both parties nationally and advocates of changes to bankruptcy policy. Not long before Mr. Biden obtained his construction loan from Beneficial in July 1997, he had offered to nominate the bank’s chairman, James H. Gilliam Jr., for a federal judge’s post in Delaware, according to news accounts of Mr. Gilliam’s death in 2003. Mr. Gilliam, a lawyer who also headed a state judiciary nomination panel and donated to Mr. Biden’s campaigns, declined the offer and recommended someone else, whom Mr. Biden nominated in June 1997. Mr. Biden’s campaign said that his dealings with Mr. Gilliam had nothing to do with the $634,000 in loans he received from Beneficial, adding that Mr. Biden had other reasons to consider Mr. Gilliam, who would have been Delaware’s first African-American federal judge. Mr. Biden, who said in his book that he designed his house “from the ground up,” saw it finished it time to move in for Christmas 1998, although the work of maintaining it never seemed complete. Recounting how he was once interrupted by a presidential phone call while he was outside watering newly planted cypress trees, he lamented that “even after a few years on the property, there was still landscaping to be done.”

Joe Biden
Finance
Amtrak
Senate
2008 Presidential Election
Campaign finance
MBNA
Delaware


Smith Ends Up in Right Place to Be M.V.P.

Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The ball found Seattle Seahawks linebacker Malcolm Smith in a big way during the postseason. Two weeks ago, he caught a ball tipped by cornerback Richard Sherman to seal a victory over the San Francisco 49ers and send Seattle to the Super Bowl. On Sunday, with the Denver Broncos behind by 15 points in the second quarter, quarterback Peyton Manning was hit as he threw a pass to Knowshon Moreno. Smith picked it off and ran 69 yards for a touchdown. “It was up there for a while, and I was kind of thinking, Again? No way,” said Smith, who was voted the game’s most valuable player. He added, “It didn’t feel real until I got to the sideline and realized, wow, that was a big play.” Smith was not done. In the third quarter, Manning threw a pass to Demaryius Thomas, who ran for 23 yards to the Seattle 21-yard line. But cornerback Byron Maxwell poked the ball free, and Smith, a third-year player out of Southern California, picked it up. The Seahawks then marched 58 yards for another backbreaking score. It was the eighth time a defensive player was voted most valuable player of the Super Bowl. (In Super Bowl XII, two Cowboys defenders shared the award).The Seahawks’ defensive coordinator, Dan Quinn, complimented Smith’s versatility and speed, noting that he had started the year at outside linebacker and had then moved to inside linebacker. That, it appeared, put him in the right place at the right time not once or twice, but three times. “I always imagined myself making great plays,” Smith said. “You never think about being the M.V.P.” Smith was also involved in perhaps the most bizarre security breach at the game. Early in his news conference, a man who appeared to be in his 30s leapt onto the platform and grabbed the microphone from behind the lectern. “Investigate 9/11,” he said. “Nine-eleven was perpetrated by people in our own government.” Smith looked to the side for help, and Harvey Greene, the spokesman for the Miami Dolphins, who was running the news conference, jumped forward. But the man, dressed in a red and black flannel shirt, had already run off. The incident lasted about four seconds. Smith remained calm. “Is everyone all right?” he asked to the handful of reporters nearby. “Let’s check his press pass,” he added with a smile. As of 11:45 p.m., the N.F.L. was still looking into the matter. TAILGATING BETWEEN THE LINES The tailgate must go on, even at the Super Bowl. So Karin Kerr flew from Seattle to Philadelphia with a friend, Phillip Leonard. They rented a car, put a cooler in the trunk and piled soda and two kinds of beer on a bed of ice. Then they drove to MetLife Stadium, pulled into Lot P and wondered where everyone was. “I expected this lot to be full,” Kerr said Sunday afternoon. Tailgaters talk about the spectacle of what they do before a game — before a regular game, anyway. They talk about the rows of cars. They talk about the sophisticated grills. They talk about the sense of community. There was not much of that in Lot P because there was not much of a crowd as fans had been encouraged to use mass transit to get to the game. By midafternoon, only a dozen hard-core tailgaters had pulled in and set up as best they could. Some were cramped: Under the rules for the Super Bowl, each vehicle had to stay within one parking space, no spilling over into a second spot with tents or tables; grills were prohibited. Farrah Rubani and her fiancé, Richard Tricario of Staten Island, were in the parking space diagonally in front of Kerr and Leonard’s, and Rubani said it was expensive ground. She said they had paid $170 for the parking space. (She said they had spent $8,000 for two game tickets — face value $1,500 apiece.) On Sunday, Rubani and Tricario, who is a Dallas Cowboys fan, had set up two folding chairs behind their car, careful not to go out of bounds. They were not sitting in the chairs. They turned one chair into a makeshift serving table for shrimp and olives. Tricario said there were sandwiches in a cooler. He shrugged. “You can’t grill,” he said. “We’re following the rules.” JAMES BARRON OPERATIC ANTHEM Renée Fleming became the first opera singer to perform the national anthem at the Super Bowl, but the word “opera” went unmentioned in her introduction. The announcer called Fleming a “Grammy winner and superstar soprano.” Her rendition was eminently operatic: confident, sensible and performed with ease, and without the strain — sometimes exciting, sometimes not — that pop-diva belting entails. Though the anthem ended up lasting just a few seconds more than two minutes, she began at a daringly slow pace, with creamy, light strings underneath. The choral backup was drawn from the armed forces. When it was announced that the anthem would be delivered by an opera star, one of the main questions was just how high her high notes would be. Video evidence, a pitch pipe and an online keyboard suggest that Fleming reached A-natural — two of them. ZACHARY WOOLFE

Football
Super Bowl
Renee Fleming
MetLife Stadium NJ
Broncos
Seahawks
Malcolm Smith


Arkansas Coach Says It’s Time to Retire

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — John McDonnell was doing fine in New York in the mid-1960s. McDonnell, an Irish immigrant, came to the United States at 26 and became a cameraman at WOR-TV, earning $220 a week. He was also a fast miler, and Southwestern Louisiana University (now Louisiana-Lafayette) offered him an athletic scholarship. So he gave up his job, got an education and became a track coach. In June, after the N.C.A.A. championships, he will retire, only weeks short of his 70th birthday. He has been cross-country coach at Arkansas since 1972 and also the men’s track coach there since 1977. Since 1984, his athletes have won N.C.A.A. team titles 19 times in indoor track, 12 times in outdoor track and 11 times in cross-country. In the Penn Relays here at Franklin Field, his Arkansas men, starting in 1987, have won the 4xmile relay or its metric equivalent 19 times and the distance medley 15 times. He has coached such renowned athletes as Tyson Gay, Mike Conley, Joe Falcon, Alistair Cragg and Wallace Spearmon Sr. and Jr. Alberto Salazar, the marathon champion and now a coach, has called McDonnell “the best coach in the United States” since the 1980’s. Conley said, “We came to Arkansas because we believed in him and what he thought he could do.” Cragg said simply, “I am his creation.” A former Arkansas law professor named Bill Clinton marveled at “his ability to train and inspire young people.” So why retire? “It’s just time,” McDonnell said. “My intensity is fine and my health is good. But you don’t know what’s in store for you, so you want to spend time with your wife. Ellen has been a track widow for 36 years. She raised the kids, and every time something happened, I was out of town. “I wish I could have spent more time with the kids when they were growing up. There was always a meet. Heather, my daughter, played tennis and won two state championships and I never saw her do it. Sean, my son, was racing motorcycles and doing well and I didn’t see him doing it enough. “I haven’t lost that fire to coach, but it’s time for me to get away from the pressure. It’s the pressure I put on myself. It’s been a terrific ride. I’ve been very fortunate.” On Friday, his team finished far back in the distance medley (Texas won in 9 minutes 32.89 seconds) and the sprint medley (Louisiana State won in 3:16.68). On Saturday, Arkansas will run in the 4x800-meter and 4xmile relays. Of all his achievements, McDonnell says he has a favorite. “When you coach guys who win world championships,” he said, “that’s a great thing. But the big thing for me was winning the N.C.A.A. indoor title in Syracuse in 1984. “It was our first N.C.A.A. title. When you kick down the door, something else might happen, and it happened for us.” Now retirement is coming, and he said he would spend more time on his 2,500-acre ranch in Pryor, Okla., where he has more than 650 cattle. Next year at this time, the Penn Relays will beckon. “I might come to watch it, just sit in the stands and not coach,” he said. “I’ve never done that before. It sounds good, doesn’t it?” NOTES An unofficial world record was set Friday in the Penn Relays’ open 480-yard shuttle hurdles relay when a United States team of David Oliver, Aubrey Herring, Joel Brown and Aries Merritt won in 53.31 seconds. Merritt and three other Americans ran the previous best of 53.36 last year. The event is not recognized by the I.A.A.F., the sport’s world governing body. ... Louisiana State won three women’s relays: the 4x100-meter (42.59 seconds, a meet record), the shuttle hurdles (52.77, a meet record) and the sprint medley (3:46.65). ... Jamaican teams won two relay finals for high school girls: Edwin Allen in the 4x100 (44.79 seconds) and Holmwood Tech in the 4x800 (8:41.92). Natalie Baird of Park View of Sterling, Va., won the high school girls discus (154 feet 8 inches) for the third straight year. ... In the finals for high school boys, Germantown (Pa.) Friends won the distance medley (10:11.54) and Cory Leslie of Perkins, Ohio, the mile run (4:12.76).

McDonnell John
Track and Field
College Athletics


In North Dakota, a Great Divide Over Oil Riches

Abstract: STANLEY, N.D. — Just like everybody else around here, Fred Evans spent his life coaxing a good enough living out of the earth. He grew wheat, ran cattle and, during a couple of short-lived bursts of activity, worked on the drill rigs searching for oil across the northern prairie. But unlike his neighbors, Mr. Evans was convinced that the area would someday be home to an epic oil boom. For years he would approach others in the area offering to buy or lease the rights to drill on their land, often delivering his pitch at a time of need. More than a few, to their enduring regret, agreed. So it was with pure jubilation that Mr. Evans, who hides a businessman’s sensibility under a broad-brimmed cowboy hat and a stable of folksy aphorisms, watched one of the rumbling pump jacks on his property pulling up the oil that has made him a rich man. “It’s like music,” he said, raising his voice over the noise. “Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.” Sure enough, money is flowing by the barrelful into Mountrail County, transforming a tiny community once proudly situated in the middle of nowhere into an unexpected oasis of prosperity at the heart of the nation’s biggest oil play. No other county in the state has had a bigger jump in the number of households earning more than $100,000, which spiked to 21 percent from 6 percent during the last decade, according to an analysis of census data. But much like the crude below, the benefits have spread unevenly, often as a result of decisions made long ago. As some residents find themselves cashing oil royalty checks worth tens of thousands of dollars a month or more, many of their neighbors are resigned to receiving almost nothing from the wells that pepper the landscape and even their own land — aside from the headaches that go with living in a boomtown. Marlene Gunderson, who works alongside her husband and daughter at the county courthouse researching the ownership history of every acre of property for oil companies, stumbles across the names of neighbors who are receiving huge checks for mineral interests, though she has none herself. “That’s just the way life goes,” she mused. “Some people get. Some don’t.” As with any major boom — from real estate to tech stocks to natural resources — the sudden split between the winners and the witnesses has been painful. But this is happening in a small town, where proximity and familiarity make a sudden reordering all the more difficult. “It’s not all good,” said Leslie Anderson, who is among the lucky locals who sometimes make more from a single month of oil payments than he used to earn in a year of farming. “There are lots of families fighting that got along before.” After more than five years of oil-driven growth, Mountrail County, which a decade ago had shrunk to less than half its peak size before the Great Depression , registered an official population of 7,673 in the 2010 census, though local leaders believe there are thousands more. With the unemployment rate at only 1.3 percent, local sons and daughters are no longer leaving to find work. And as the rest of the nation watched incomes drop or stagnate, in Mountrail County median income rose more than 50 percent in the last decade, the fifth-highest gain in the nation. Residents earned on average an additional $20,000, adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis of census data by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College in New York. At one of the local banks in Stanley, the county seat, deposits have increased to $135 million from $43 million before the boom. But the new wealth is not always easy to spot. Residents say a culture of modest living means they don’t know for sure which of their neighbors are making money off oil, though they have suspicions. “I’m seeing people that have never owned a new vehicle in their life driving a new car,” said Wade Enget, a local lawyer, who estimated that about half the residents are receiving oil money. “People who never took a day off are going on vacation.” The main driver is the payments that residents receive for leasing mineral rights. In 2009, the most recent year statistics are available, the signing bonuses and the royalties paid for the oil extracted from private land totaled about $1 billion statewide, according to an industry-financed study by North Dakota State University. Though many of those checks go out of state — to the far-flung descendants of homesteaders or to companies that bought mineral rights — more than half stay in North Dakota, helping double the number of state residents earning more than $1 million a year. And the checks are likely to continue, said Lynn D. Helms, director of the state’s Department of Mineral Resources, citing estimates that the average well will pay about $10 million in royalties over three decades. Living in a simple trailer home, Lenin Dibble reveals few signs that he has suddenly become a wealthy man. A retired farmer and rancher, Mr. Dibble receives royalty checks of as much as $80,000 a month for his small share of mineral rights. To explain his frugal lifestyle, he pulled out a letter from his father, yellowed from the passage of half a century. “When you get a few dollars in your pocket never advertise it,” he read. “And hold a conference before spending any of it.” And as he finished, Mr. Dibble insisted he does not need any of the oil money, which he has been saving for his adult children, because Social Security and payments for leasing out his farmland were enough. What he and others in town notice more than the newfound money are the problems: locking the door to his house, taking the keys out of his car and seeing a quiet community where everyone knew everyone overrun by the bustle of strangers. “I wish it had never happened,” he said. Because land and the rights to whatever lies beneath it can be sold separately in North Dakota, only about one in five royalty checks goes to the owner of the land where the oil is being extracted. Though some residents never acquired mineral rights when they bought property, the payday has been most distressing for those living on longtime family estates where the mineral rights were sold off, often for a tiny fraction of their current value. “There are only two reasons people sold,” said Roger Cymbaluk, a prominent real estate broker in nearby Williston. “One, they didn’t know what they were worth; two, they were desperate.” Some used mineral rights in lieu of cash to settle debts during hard times — trading some acres to banks to satisfy a mortgage. Others sold them to savvier industry veterans after oil was first discovered six decades ago, which is why an outsize portion of the royalty checks for North Dakota oil head each month to Texas. Stanley Wright, who used to sell farm equipment in Stanley, described how he took a substantial loss — and suffered the wrath of his wife — when he allowed two farmers to pay him with mineral acres. Now that the gamble has paid off decades later, he wrestles with guilt over his windfall. His eyes well up and his hands start to shake as he insists he never took advantage of anyone. “Minerals in those days weren’t worth anything,” he said. In recent decades, people have been more reluctant to sell, though offers keep coming. For those landowners who do not own the mineral rights, the usual compensation has been a few thousand dollars for the disruption of hosting an oil rig. Even with the dust, noise and traffic, the most frustrating part is watching the wells on his property earning money for other people, said Mark Ellis, a farmer and rancher. “It’s more interesting when you’re getting a piece of it,” he said. Living just down the road from where the skeleton of a one-room schoolhouse still stands, Mr. Evans, 73, is unapologetic, if vague, about his success, which he said resulted from decades of groundwork. Now he is described variously by neighbors as the richest man and the biggest crook in Mountrail County. Some of them recounted visits during which Mr. Evans tried to offer them deals they believed were designed to take advantage of their ignorance or misfortune. Several noted that even his sisters took him to court in a dispute over family mineral rights. Mr. Evans, who calls himself “a Podunk from farm country,” brushes it all aside. “I’m definitely not a fortune teller,” he said. “But I just knew this thing would take off. I’ve been wrong other times, but I felt it.”

Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Agriculture and Farming
Drilling and Boring
North Dakota
Land Use Policies
Mountrail County (ND)


Britain: Flu Cases Surge, Straining Some Hospitals

Abstract: Britain is having an unusual surge of flu cases this winter, according to the World Health Organization , and British news media reports said severe cases were straining intensive care units, particularly those for children, at some hospitals. Most cases are of last year’s H1N1 swine flu pandemic strain, which has now become a seasonal flu. Relatively few Britons got flu shots this year, officials said, ascribing that to skepticism after the swine flu pandemic proved less lethal than feared.

Swine Influenza
Epidemics
Hospitals
World Health Organization
Great Britain


Surveying How Their Gardens Grow

Abstract: Deborah Marton spends her workdays toiling over places where others spend their days of rest. Ms. Marton, 52, is the executive director of the New York Restoration Project , a nonprofit group that Bette Midler started in 1995 to reclaim decaying green spaces in the city’s low-income neighborhoods. This means that Ms. Marton sometimes spends her weekends hearing from Ms. Midler. “Right now she’s in L.A., preparing for a tour,” Ms. Marton said. “But she does think about work on the weekends.” After the past winter, and with Earth Day approaching on April 22, the staff, which tends to two parks and 52 community gardens, has had a lot of planting and spiffing up to do. When not overseeing the spiffing, Ms. Marton decamps to her loft in the Flatiron district, which she shares on alternating weeks with her son, Henry, 16, and full time with Lex, a small rescue mutt. Image Playing with her dog, Lex, at home. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times DOG ALARM I typically wake up around 8. I don’t usually set the alarm. We have a little dog, and when my son’s with me, I like to give him a little break, because he gets up early during the week. Both of us are up at 6 when he’s around, because the dog has to go out before he goes to school. So I’ll get up and walk the dog, then come home and make breakfast for the two of us. We have a nice, relaxed breakfast. À LA FRANÇAISE We have a lot of bakeries in my neighborhood all of a sudden, so if they let me pick up the dog and come in, I’ll buy some croissants or something like that, and that’s what we’ll have. He’s really little, so if I hold him, they’ll let me do that. It’s a French bakery, so in deference to the looser restrictions in that regard in France, they go out of their way. RIVER RUN I usually go for a run on Saturdays and Sundays. I run along the Hudson. I’ll run to the river and then down a ways and then head back. My turnaround is Battery Park City. It’s about five miles all together. CULTIVATING THE GARDEN In the afternoon, I might check out what’s going on in one of our gardens or in Sherman Creek Park or Highbridge Park . Or if my son is with me, he goes to LaGuardia, he’s a visual arts major, so we go look at a lot of art. So the other Sunday we went to the Kehinde Wiley exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. It was powerful. Image Checking visuals for a work project at home on East 19th Street. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times Maybe we’ll do that, or I might do some work in the afternoon. I’m on email on and off all day. Sometimes I might go into the office. I check email every half-hour. CALLING OHIO Something my son and I try to do every weekend, at least one of the days, is FaceTime my daughter at Oberlin. INSPIRED BY COMPETITION I’m always looking at what other groups are doing with their parks. I really like what Leslie Koch is doing on Governors Island — like, do whatever you want within our parameters. The idea of letting people decide what they want to do and to try to give them the tools to do it is very much consistent with what we try to do in our spaces. I’m always looking for ways that spaces can communicate to the people who use them that they matter. Image Ms. Marton with her mother, Agnes Marton, and her son, Henry, looking for a lunch spot. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times DINING OUT If we’re out looking at art in Brooklyn, we’ll find a place in Prospect Heights and have dinner there. Or we’ll go to a restaurant in the neighborhood. The Flatiron neighborhood tends to have some super-high-end expensive places, and we have identified the less super-expensive places. There’s a Korean place called Barn Joo that we go to sometimes. There’s a brick oven pizza place called La Pizza Fresca . Burger & Lobster opened on 19th Street recently. It’s a London chain and they only have three things on the menu. You can get a burger, you can get a lobster or you can get a lobster roll. They all cost $20, and they all come with fries and a salad, and that’s all you can get. Once in a while we’ll go to the Coffee Shop . And then if we want to spring for something special we might go to Boqueria . My son’s a very adventurous eater. HOMEWORK, HOUSEWORK After dinner I’ll either read or finish some housework, like laundry. Henry’s usually watching something on his laptop. We’ll go over his homework for the week. We might make his lunch for the next day. He’ll feed the dog and walk the dog. And if we cook we’ll clean up together. We don’t watch much TV. PAGES Usually I’ll get into bed somewhere around 10 and read for an hour or so. I like science fiction, but I read widely. I just finished “ Someone ,” by Alice McDermott. I go to sleep around 11.

New York Restoration Project
Deborah Marton
Gardens and Gardening
NYC
Urban Planning


Tigers Blank Twins as David Price Gets All but the Last Out

Abstract: David Price left no doubt about his worthiness as Detroit’s opening-day starter, coming within one out of a complete game in the Tigers’ 4-0 win over the visiting Minnesota Twins on Monday. Price retired the first 13 Minnesota batters and allowed five hits before being pulled with two on and two outs in the ninth. Joe Nathan struck out Torii Hunter for the save, although Hunter protested to the plate umpire, Joe West, saying he had checked his swing. The Tigers acquired Price at last year’s trade deadline. The Twins lost in their first game under Paul Molitor, their new manager. J. D. Martinez and Alex Avila homered off Phil Hughes, and Yoenis Cespedes tripled and scored in his debut for Detroit. RED SOX 8, PHILLIES 0 The Boston newcomer Hanley Ramirez and Dustin Pedroia each hit two home runs, Clay Buchholz threw three-hit ball over seven innings, and the visiting Red Sox trounced Philadelphia in an interleague opener. Buchholz showed Boston it does not need to trade for an ace — namely the Phillies’ Cole Hamels. Buchholz struck out nine and pitched the way he did when he went 12-1 in 2013. Hamels gave up five hits in five innings, striking out six. He allowed four homers for the second time in his career. DODGERS 6, PADRES 3 Los Angeles’s new addition Jimmy Rollins hit a tiebreaking three-run homer in the eighth, rallying the host Dodgers past retooled San Diego. Rollins and Howie Kendrick joined the team in the off-season to improve Los Angeles’s infield defense, but their offensive prowess delivered the victory. Kendrick’s double with two outs in the seventh tied it at 3. ORIOLES 6, RAYS 2 Chris Tillman pitched into the seventh inning, and visiting Baltimore hit three homers while spoiling Tampa Bay’s debut under its rookie manager, Kevin Cash. Tillman allowed one run and four hits, struck out four and walked three in six and two-thirds innings. Alejandro De Aza, Steve Pearce and Ryan Flaherty connected for the Orioles, and Travis Snider had three hits in his Baltimore debut. MARINERS 4, ANGELS 1 Felix Hernandez struck out 10 and allowed only two hits over seven innings, Seth Smith had three extra-base hits and two R.B.I. in his Seattle debut, and the Mariners topped Los Angeles. Mike Trout hit a homer in the first inning and Erick Aybar singled leading off the fifth for the Angels. ASTROS 2, INDIANS 0 Dallas Keuchel and two relievers combined on a three-hitter, and host Houston beat Cleveland after being held hitless by the American League Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber for nearly six innings. George Springer and Jake Marisnick each drove in a run for the Astros. Making his first opening-day start, Keuchel allowed three hits and struck out four in seven innings. BRAVES 2, MARLINS 1 Two Atlanta relievers combined to escape a bases-loaded jam with no outs in the seventh, and the new closer Jason Grilli pitched a perfect ninth to help the visiting Braves edge Miami. The sellout crowd’s mood turned sour in the second inning when the game was halted for 16 minutes because of rain — a first at the 3-year-old Marlins Park, which has a retractable roof. The showers were unexpected, and fans booed when play was halted while the roof was closed. REDS 5, PIRATES 2 Todd Frazier hit a three-run homer in the eighth inning, overcoming another stumble by the bullpen, and host Cincinnati beat Pittsburgh. Billy Hamilton and Joey Votto singled before Frazier connected against Pittsburgh’s Tony Watson, breaking a 2-2 tie. Johnny Cueto struck out 10 in seven innings before turning a 2-0 lead over to a bullpen that was a big problem last season. Andrew McCutchen of the Pirates tied it with a two-run shot off the newcomer Kevin Gregg. ROCKIES 10, BREWERS 0 Kyle Kendrick pitched seven sharp innings and got two hits, as visiting Colorado routed Milwaukee. Corey Dickerson and Nolan Arenado each homered and drove in four runs. Troy Tulowitzki doubled twice, singled and scored three times. Kendrick, who left Philadelphia after last season, gave up seven singles, walked none and struck out six. ROYALS 10, WHITE SOX 1 Yordano Ventura pitched six solid innings before leaving with a thumb cramp, and Alex Rios had a three-run homer among his three hits as host Kansas City thumped Chicago. Rios, who was making his Kansas City debut, homered in a five-run seventh.

Baseball
David Price
Detroit Tigers
Minnesota Twins


Chile Takes Steps to Rehabilitate Its Lucrative Salmon Industry

Abstract: SANTIAGO, Chile — When a devastating virus swept through Chile’s farmed salmon stocks last year, some of the industry’s biggest players laid off thousands of workers, packed up operations and moved to unspoiled waters farther south along the Chilean coast. But the virus went with them. Last month, the Chilean government began hashing out tougher measures to improve the sanitary and environmental conditions of the troubled industry. But producers expect still deeper losses this year, as the virus continues to kill millions of fish slated for export to the United States and other countries. Government and industry officials say they have already taken important steps to improve the ways salmon are farmed. But the persistent problems, critics say, reveal that neither the industry nor the government has fully grasped the need for the far-reaching changes required to protect not only consumers and the environment, but also one of Chile’s most important industries from itself. They are not the only ones concerned. In the midst of the virus crisis, Chile has continued to raise salmon for export with chemicals and medications not approved for use in the United States and Europe, according to documents from regulators. While the United States Food and Drug Administration says Chile made some progress in tackling its problems, it will keep Chilean imports of farmed fish under special scrutiny for the time being. Chilean government officials and industry officials say the troubles are part of the growing pains of a $2 billion industry that in less than two decades built itself into the world’s second largest exporter and the biggest supplier of salmon to the United States. The virus afflicting the fish, infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, is not harmful to humans, they note. But after The New York Times reported on Chile’s dying farmed fish last year, some buyers, like the supermarket giant Safeway, restricted imports from Chile. The troubles spurred the Chilean government to step up its controls. Last year Sernapesca, Chile’s national fishing service, tripled its inspections of farmed fish, said Felix Inostroza, the agency’s director. Among other things, the measures now being weighed by the Chilean Congress, which are expected to be passed before April, would thin the density of salmon pens, where overcrowding has contributed to the virus’s spread, and reduce the use of antibiotics. The authorities also plan to organize aquaculture permits into “neighborhoods,” where salmon companies will be required build in rest periods between production cycles, to give the marine environment time to recover, said Rodrigo Infante, general manager of SalmonChile, the industry association. But environmental groups say they will continue to lobby for tougher changes. “It is not enough for the industry to voluntarily police itself,” said Andrea Kavanagh, manager of the Salmon Aquaculture Reform Campaign for the Pew Environment Group in Washington. “For too long, the government has ceded to industry convenience,” she added, “permitting chemicals known to harm its environment as well as consumers.” Her group obtained F.D.A. inspection reports last year in an open records request showing that Chilean producers had used three chemicals that are effectively banned in the United States. Industry and Chilean government officials say the chemicals are not harmful to consumers when used the right way. “Just because a substance is not allowed for use does not necessarily mean it poses a risk to human health,” said Alicia Gallardo, the head of the Aquaculture unit of Sernapesca. But Chilean companies have struggled to comply with the regulations of other countries, particularly as they cope with a parasitic bacteria, rickettsia, carried by sea lice, which causes infection-prone lesions. The industry is using antiparasitic treatments like emamectin benzoate, a pesticide fed to the fish, to treat the lice infestations, and antibiotics to control the resulting infections. F.D.A. officials said that emamectin could be used in limited cases in the United States, but that it was one of the three prohibited chemicals that were highlighted in F.D.A. inspection documents last April. The others were oxolinic acid and the antibiotic flumequine, according to the F.D.A. inspection reports recovered by the Pew Environmental Group. Copies of the documents were shared with The New York Times and their authenticity verified by F.D.A. officials, including Donald Kraemer, the F.D.A.’s deputy director in the office for food safety . In response to the findings last year, he said, the F.D.A. put three firms — Cultivadores de Salmones Linao Ltda., Empresas Aquachile and Alimentos Cuisine Solutions — on an “import alert,” which required that they prove shipments were drug-free. The F.D.A. lifted the alert after the companies put in added controls, Mr. Kraemer said. From May to July, the F.D.A. also increased the number of fish samples it tested from Chile, he said. None of the F.D.A. tests came up positive for any banned drugs. But, Mr. Kraemer said, the F.D.A. does not have a reliable way to test for emamectin. Empresas Aquachile declined to comment on the F.D.A. inspections. Alex Miquel, the chief executive of Alimentos Cuisine Solutions, said that since being notified of its violations in October the company began testing each batch of salmon that it purchased from other companies. In e-mailed responses, Álvaro Jiménez, managing director of Chile operations for Marine Harvest, which controls Cultivadores, noted that the F.D.A. alert was not based on detection of drug residues in the fish, but rather on documents detailing the company’s drug control procedures at the plant. “We are now in line with the requirements,” he said. The Chilean firms did not stop using the drugs, said Mr. Kraemer of the F.D.A. Rather, they increased the “withdrawal period” for the fish — the length of time they hold the fish after they are treated with the drugs, he said. Still not fully satisfied, the F.D.A. has scheduled a “system review” for this March in Chile, where it will work with its counterpart in Chile, Sernapesca, to address how the country will deal with its fish diseases. “We need to be able to know if they can control it on their side of the ocean, so we don’t have to do it on our side,” Mr. Kraemer said. Chilean government officials, concerned about job losses in the south, say they are determined to reform the industry. “But this has to be done with incentives,” said Hugo Lavados, Chile’s economy minister. In November, the government announced that it would provide $120 million in loan guarantees to help producers meet the new regulations quickly. But this year, producers still expect salmon output to drop by about 30 percent, said César Barros, president of SalmonChile.

Fish Farming
Chile
Salmon
Food and Drug Administration
International Trade and World Market
Recalls and Bans of Products
Fish and Other Marine Life
Viruses
Environment


U.S. Files More Charges in Benghazi Attack

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Tuesday filed 17 additional charges against the Libyan man suspected of being the ringleader in the 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including a United States ambassador. Some of the charges make the man, Ahmed Abu Khattala, eligible for the death penalty. Shortly after Mr. Khattala was apprehended in June by American commandos in Benghazi, he was charged in Washington on one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists that resulted in a death. He pleaded not guilty to that charge, but a federal judge ordered that he remain in custody because he posed a threat. The indictment made public Tuesday had a few new details about what occurred when militants attacked the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. It said that after Mr. Khattala had “actively participated in the attack” on the mission that killed the ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and another American, he turned away emergency responders. Mr. Khattala then entered the mission and “supervised the plunder of material from the mission’s office, including documents, maps and computers containing sensitive information about the location” of a C.I.A. annex. That annex was attacked about a half-hour later, resulting in the deaths of two Americans. The indictment said that Mr. Khattala had launched the attack because he believed the diplomatic mission was really being used to collect intelligence. “He viewed U.S. intelligence action in Benghazi as illegal, and that he was therefore going to do something about the facility,” according to the indictment. Mr. Khattala is scheduled to appear in court on Monday.

Ahmed Abu Khattala
Benghazi Attack 2012
Benghazi
Libya
Justice Department
Diplomats Embassies and Consulates
J Christopher Stevens
Terrorism


This Campaign Is Wet (and Wild)

Abstract: The feats of Casanova were formidable, especially when you consider that he was bereft of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest of the social media by which to pursue his conquests. Now, a campaign for a line of personal products seeks to make up for that. The campaign, scheduled to get under way on Monday, is for the Wet brand of lubricants sold by Wet International, part of Trigg Laboratories. The campaign, timed to coincide with the coming of Valentine’s Day , is centered on a social application that lets computer users declare a friend, family member, paramour or special someone the “world’s greatest lover.” The campaign, with a budget estimated at $100,000, is indicative of a more prominent presence in the mainstream for sex products like lubricants and condoms, which were once hidden behind the counters by druggists who required customers to ask for them in furtive whispers. Ads for intimate products now appear in mass magazines like Cosmopolitan and People. Retailers promote them in circulars, like one this week for the Duane Reade drugstore chain in metropolitan New York that declares, “Enhance the pleasure of intimacy with our selection of personal products,” among them K-Y lubricants and Trojan condoms. Personal products are even turning up in that most prosaic of media, the coupon inserts in Sunday newspapers. K-Y offered $7 worth of coupons in recent ads in inserts, which carried the headline “Happy Valentine’s Night.” And Trojan, sold by Church & Dwight, offered coupons in ads in inserts on Sunday. “Save $5 on Valentine’s Day treats to satisfy every taste,” the headline read. An accompanying photograph showed a heart-shaped box of chocolates with condoms in place of candy. The “World’s Greatest Lover” application is designed for Wet by Oddcast, a company in New York that specializes in what it calls user-personalized viral marketing — that is, ads that consumers are invited to share among themselves. Such ads are deemed to be more involving than traditional pitches that are delivered in top-down fashion. For instance, for McDonald’s in Europe, Oddcast introduced a promotion for the movie “Avatar” in which a computer user was invited to “Avatarize yourself” and become a version of the Na’vi characters from the film. And to help the E*Trade Financial Group promote the commercial the company ran during Super Bowl XLIV on Sunday, Oddcast brought out an application named BabyMail, which enables visitors to a Web site to send e-mail messages using voices that simulate baby talk. Oddcast’s greatest hits include customized e-mail messages sponsored by CareerBuilder.com in early 2006, which were known as Monk-e-mail (pronounced “monkey mail”). Although the campaign that inspired the application is long over, Monk-e-mail lives on in a demonstration of the staying power of ads that consumers pass along voluntarily. “We’re in the beginning stages of social media,” says Jennifer Martsolf, vice president for marketing at Trigg in Valencia, Calif. “We know it’s important to engage with our consumers.” One reason is that “a lot of our demographic goes online,” she adds, for tasks that include “research about this product,” reading about it on Web sites and “learning about it from bloggers.” The Wet brand started in the social media about a year and a half ago, Ms. Martsolf recalls, with a MySpace page that included large banner ads. “People responded to it very well,” she says, so the company is “playing with Facebook and starting with Twitter.” The goal is to encourage “a call to action,” Ms. Martsolf says, in the form of visits to the Wet brand’s Web site where consumers can learn more about the line; print coupons; request samples; sign up for e-mail newsletters, which are tailored to six sexual orientations or “prefer not to answer”; and order Wet products like lubricants, massage and bath oils, gels and shaving cream. “We’re trying to reach a consumer who might not necessarily go into an adult bookstore,” Ms. Martsolf says, where Wet products were originally available for purchase. In addition to being sold on Web sites, at nightclub events and at so-called adult home parties, she adds, Wet products are also stocked by retailers like CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens — “and we just got into Target.” Education is part of the Wet mission, Ms. Martsolf says, especially telling consumers “sex is more fun if you use it.” “We have a fun brand,” she adds, and its customers “skew a bit younger” than those for the principal rivals of Wet, which are K-Y, sold by a unit of Johnson & Johnson, and Astroglide, made by Biofilm. (Astroglide is on Facebook and Twitter, too, and K-Y is on Facebook.) To play up the fun persona, Ms. Martsolf says, she began searching for “a company that would do a viral campaign” for Wet and all the examples she found on Google “were produced by Oddcast.” Oddcast presented three ideas, she recalls, including one that evoked something she had been thinking about for years, based on the concept of how “you’d go to Spencer Gifts and get a ‘World’s Greatest Lover’ trophy.” The application will be available on a microsite, or special Web site . A photograph can be uploaded from a computer or through the Facebook Connect feature on facebook.com . The Oddcast software creates a make-believe newscast in which a person is feted for his or her love-making prowess in a video clip and in text on a mock home page. The home page is for the imaginary WETWN news network, and under “important breaking news” is the headline that the person chosen for the honor, identified by his or her given name, was “declared ‘World’s Greatest Lover.’” A three-paragraph fake article follows in which the given name is included in four places. At one point, a panel of judges declares the person has “raised the art of love-making to new, unforeseen heights” and concludes, “We can’t think of a more worthy recipient of this honor.” On the other side of the page is a report about a White House state dinner honoring the person at which President Obama commended “the World’s Greatest Lover’s tremendous dedication, hard work and ingenuity as an inspiration for all aspiring romantics.” The video clips runs at the center of the home page. “And now for our top story,” a news anchor says. “The World’s Greatest Lover was announced today.” She introduces a clip of a man, identified as the head of the search committee, describing how the winner was chosen from “hundreds of nominees.” Back comes the anchor, who says, “Our sources inform us that the winner, pictured here” — and at this point, the photograph supplied by the computer user pops up — “is celebrating behind closed doors at an undisclosed location.” The anchor then introduces a judge, who appears on screen “live from Stockholm.” She recounts how the winner “scored an average 10 out of 10 on multiple events,” among them some ribald, even naughty achievements, and finishes with a deft raise of her eyebrows. The anchor returns again with a final news item: “The World’s Greatest Lover has signed a sponsorship deal with Wet personal lubricants and will be traveling the world to demonstrate winning techniques and the benefits of a great personal lubricant.” The application can be sent directly to its intended recipient or be posted to more than 50 social networking venues like Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and Wordpress. Oddcast wants to offer advertisers an alternative to a company that promises to “put your banner in front of 10 million people,” says Sandy Smallens, executive vice president at Oddcast. And “Wet isn’t exactly able to take out commercials during reruns of ‘Full House,’ ” he adds. The Oddcast staff members went “back and forth on the tone” of the application, Mr. Smallens says. “We were more conservative at first,” he adds, and eventually ended up with “a PG-13 presentation, at worst.” Oddcast and Wet have set a goal of 250,000 “engagements” for the application, Mr. Smallens says, defined as instances of people interacting with it in various ways. “Frankly, I think we’re going to over-deliver on that number,” he adds. The application marks the debut of Oddcast’s own distribution of a campaign through measures that will include using Facebook and Twitter, reaching out to bloggers, promoting the application in the company’s newsletters and talking it up in chat forums. A public relations agency in San Francisco, Larkin/Volpatt Communications, is teaming up with Oddcast to handle the public relations aspects of the distribution. For example, Larkin/Volpatt will promote the application with editors at men’s and women’s magazines and with blogs about parenting written by the so-called mommy bloggers and daddy bloggers. Wet will also publicize the application on the home page of stayswetlonger.com , Ms. Martsolf says, in its newsletters and with the distributors of its products.  If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that runs Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com .

Computers and the Internet
Social Networking (Internet)
Online Advertising
Advertising and Marketing


After Serving as Somalia’s Prime Minister, Back to Work in Buffalo

Abstract: BUFFALO — At his cubicle at the State Transportation Department building here, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed recounted what he did during a recent leave of absence. He trimmed the size of the federal government. He instituted regular paychecks for the military. He campaigned against corruption. And he avoided being shot. “Every morning when I was brushing my teeth I heard bullets hitting the metal over my window,” Mr. Mohamed said. “It was like, pop pop pop pop. The first day I was shocked. But after that I knew the bullets would not get through, so I continued brushing.” Mr. Mohamed, 49, smiled genially over the neutral-toned cubicle dividers and file cabinets of the state office building. For eight months, starting last November, he was the prime minister of his native country, Somalia , one of the most chaotic nations on earth. And then, as suddenly as he had left, he was back in his cubicle at the Transportation Department, where he makes sure the department’s contracts and contractors comply with nondiscrimination and affirmative action requirements. “This is my life,” he said. Mr. Mohamed, who has lived in the United States since 1985, said he had no plan to join the Somali government when friends helped him arrange a meeting with the country’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed , in September 2010 during a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Mr. Mohamed said he talked to the president about how factions in government might cooperate, drawing on his own experience working with difficult contractors in Erie County. At the time, the president had just dismissed his previous prime minister. As soon as Mr. Mohamed returned to Buffalo, he said, his friends called to say the president liked his ideas — and would he consider submitting his résumé to be prime minister? “My wife was not supportive of the idea,” he said. “But I told her, if I don’t do it, who will? I said, violence comes from conflicts, and I’ve learned how to resolve conflicts. That’s exactly what I do here.” Richard Downie, deputy director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington , said that because so many Somali professionals had left the country, émigrés working in other countries were sometimes tapped for high government positions. One chief of staff in the Somali military had been working as an assistant manager in a McDonald’s in Germany , Mr. Downie said. On Oct. 14, 2010, after a meeting with Somalia’s president in Mogadishu, Mr. Mohamed was appointed prime minister , and by November he was on the job , governing a country ravaged by terrorism and on the brink of dire famine. “I called my wife every other night so she would know I’m still here,” he said. His interior minister was killed by a suicide bomb carried by the minister’s niece. “It was a risk,” he said. “But if you want to do good things, a position like that comes with a level of personal risk.” His salary was the same as what he earns at the Transportation Department, from which he took a one-year leave of absence. Mr. Mohamed grew up in the capital city, Mogadishu, the son of a government airline administrator. He joined the Somali ministry of foreign affairs in 1982, and was transferred to Washington in 1985. After he criticized the Somali government in 1988, he applied for asylum in the United States, fearing for his safety if he returned to Somalia. “I knew if I went home anything could happen,” he said. Because he had relatives in Toronto , he moved to Buffalo, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in political science at the State University of New York at Buffalo and became part of a local expatriate community of about 1,000 Somalis, he said. The culture shock was profound. “Take appointments,” he said. “Here you have to be on time. Back home that was not a huge issue. Maybe you could be one and a half hours late. That’s why the diaspora can make a big difference in Somalia, because we can take back what we learned in the first world.” As prime minister, Mr. Mohamed assembled a cabinet of technocrats to run the country, reducing the cabinet’s size to 18 from 39, most from outside the country. He campaigned against corruption and set up a regular payroll for the military. “He came in talking tough on corruption,” Mr. Downie said. “And there was quite a lot of public demonstration of support for him. But there’s little evidence of any improvement made. The ultimate verdict is that his heart was in the right place; he went in and was immediately fed to the sharks.” The sharks in this case were the president and the speaker of Parliament , Sharif Hassan Sheik Adan, who in June settled a long and bitter fight for power by sacrificing Mr. Mohamed , who was allied with the president. “That was the downfall of Mohamed,” Mr. Mohamed said. “Temporary, I hope.” Government soldiers and civilians rioted in protest, saying Mr. Mohamed was the government’s only honest leader. He was replaced by his former deputy, Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, who was an economics professor at Niagara University, near Buffalo. By June, Mr. Mohamed was back in Buffalo. “My job here was always something to fall back on if Somalia didn’t work out,” he said. Mr. Mohamed said he was enjoying not having to look over his shoulder for assassins and to be living at home with his wife and four children. Some critics have questioned Mr. Mohamed’s public stance against corruption, and an audit of the transitional government recommended forensic investigations of his office as well as of those of the president, speaker and other officials. A United Nations report in July called “endemic corruption of the leadership” in Somalia the “greatest impediment” to a working government. “If the argument is that he fought corruption, it’s either a smoke screen or he’s absurdly incompetent,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “Corruption grew during his tenure as prime minister.” Mr. Mohamed said he tried to combat corruption from inside the government. “That’s why we won the hearts and minds of people,” he said. Some of the challenges in Somalia were the same as they are at the Transportation Department, he said. “When I’m here, I’m helping minorities,” he said. “And over there, it’s a different capacity and responsibility, but the purpose is the same.” But he said he hoped to return to Somalia, perhaps even to run for president. “It’s a mixed feeling to be here,” he said. “I believe I have some duty to go back one day and play some role. I don’t know what that role will be.” Janine Shepherd, who works in the next cubicle, said she was glad to have him back. “We were all surprised,” she said, “when he became prime minister: ‘What? Our Mohamed?’ ” When he came back, she said, they made him a cake. “We weren’t sure he’d return to D.O.T.,” she said, “because once you do something grand like that, to come back to this humble work is something else.”

Politics
NY Transportation Department
Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed
Somalia
Buffalo NY


More Blumenthal Claims of Vietnam Service

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Broader newspaper archival searches have continued to turn up claims by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut that he was a Vietnam War veteran, even though he did not serve in the war. The most recent claim unearthed was in a report published in The Milford Mirror, a weekly, describing an appearance he made at a May 2007 Memorial Day parade in Milford, Conn., attended by local officials, military people and the relatives of a local man killed while serving in Iraq. As people gathered around a bandstand to give praise to fallen veterans, the article said, Mr. Blumenthal recalled his days during the Vietnam War. “In Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said, according to the article, “we had to endure taunts and insults, and no one said, ‘Welcome home.’ I say welcome home.” The disclosure of the Milford episode came days after The New York Times reported that Mr. Blumenthal, who is running for the United States Senate, had falsely claimed that he had served in Vietnam, and had failed to correct reports in the news media that perpetuated the claim. In one instance, according to the report in The Times, Mr. Blumenthal told a Norwalk audience in 2008, “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam.” The article also described his attendance at a rally in Bridgeport, where about 100 military families gathered to express support for American troops overseas. “When we returned, we saw nothing like this,” he said. “Let us do better by this generation of men and women.” The Times also reported that Mr. Blumenthal received five deferments that allowed him to avoid the war and, among other things, travel abroad to study and to work in the White House. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve, considered a haven from the war, in early 1970, when deferments had come under review by the Nixon administration. Mr. Blumenthal has acknowledged that on occasion he has misspoken about his military service. But he has said that he never intentionally misled the public about his military record. He spoke about the controversy at the state’s Democratic Party Convention on Friday night, where delegates chose him as the party’s nominee for the seat being vacated by Senator Christopher J. Dodd. The report in The Times was followed by a report in The Advocate of Stamford that described Mr. Blumenthal’s speaking about his military service at the Stamford Veterans Day parade on Nov. 9, 2008. “I wore the uniform in Vietnam,” he said, “and many came back to all kinds of disrespect. Whatever we think of war, we owe the men and women of the armed forces our unconditional support.”

Blumenthal Richard
Vietnam War
Veterans
Senate
Connecticut
United States Politics and Government
Attorneys General


Stocks Mixed on Weak Earnings

Abstract: Stocks struggled to a mixed finish on Thursday after weak earnings news from 3M and other companies weighed on the market. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 12 points, but broader indexes posted slight gains. The market rose steadily in the opening moments of trading after a surprise drop in first-time claims for unemployment benefits, pushing the Dow up as much as 53 points. 3M set a negative tone with a downbeat view on the economy and a lower forecast for full-year earnings. 3M’s dim assessment of the economies in the United States and Europe was a reminder that growth in many developed nations remained weak. 3M, which makes everything from Post-it notes to Scotch tape, called growth in those regions “uninspiring.” Its shares fell 6.4 percent. Apple fell about 1 percent after warning in a regulatory filing that profit margins might narrow next year. Colgate-Palmolive also said it expected sales growth to slow next year. Not all the corporate news was bad. Eastman Kodak rose 15.4 percent after saying more customers turned to home and office printers, and Motorola said its phone division was profitable for the first time in three years. Avon Products sank 5.6 percent after reporting surprisingly poor results from emerging markets. The beauty products seller said weakness in Brazil and Russia hurt quarterly profits. The pharmaceutical companies Bayer and Sanofi-Aventis, as well as the automaker Hyundai Motor, began earnings reports worldwide with upbeat results, sending stocks higher overseas before markets opened in the United States. A surprise drop in claims for unemployment insurance provided the most encouragement about the economy. Claims fell to their lowest level in three months, bolstering hopes that companies might increase hiring soon. The Dow fell 12.33 points, or 0.1 percent, to close at 11,113.95. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 1.33 points to 1,183.78, while the Nasdaq composite rose 4.11 points, or 0.2 percent, to 2,507.37. The dollar was broadly lower against other currencies, while commodities prices mostly rose. Gold rose $19.90 to $1,342.50 an ounce. Bond prices rose. The Treasury’s benchmark 10-year note rose 16/32, to 99 22/32, and the yield fell to 2.66 percent from 2.72 percent late Wednesday.

Stocks and Bonds
Economic Conditions and Trends
Company Reports


Strasburg Still Wrestles With Principle That Protected Him

Abstract: VIERA, Fla. Early on a sleepy weekend morning, the Washington Nationals’ spring training clubhouse just beginning to stir, baseball’s most celebrated and hotly discussed right arm lifted a bottle from a dressing stall shelf, holding it up for a visitor. The colorful label read, “BodyArmor Super Drink.” Stephen Strasburg, the owner of that special and most carefully protected appendage, shrugged and said he had grown up on Gatorade and this new nutritional product was “just something different to drink around the house.” Strasburg has that bleached and rawboned look — 6 feet 4 inches, a well-distributed 220 pounds, light hair closely cropped, scruffy goatee — that presents the appearance of natural body armor. Except we all know better, given the elbow surgery that limited him to a total of 86 major league innings in 2010 and 2011, along with the consensus belief that pitchers are the most delicate of all prize athletes. At 24, Strasburg has a new season and, body willing, roughly 200 innings ahead of him for the first time. The Bubble Wrap that General Manager Mike Rizzo protected him with last season — frustrating Strasburg and flummoxing Nationals fans as they lost without their ace in the first round of their inaugural postseason — has been removed. But freedom from the bubble comes with understandable fear. “It’s going to be a really good challenge for me this year, something I’ve never done in my life, really, and hopefully everything goes according to plan,” Strasburg said. “Then you can do the same thing, work on the maintenance part of your training, so you have an idea of what it takes physically and mentally to be prepared to throw 200 innings every year.” By shutting Strasburg down after 1591/3innings (he was 15-6 with a 3.16 earned run average), Rizzo ignited a debate that pit developmental applications of caution against cultural codes of competition. Critics disparaged Rizzo for depriving Strasburg, his teammates and long-suffering Washington fans of the best chance of advancement for the nonguaranteed promise of future October cheer. Rizzo argued that this was his core philosophy on pitcher development and he would not deviate from it, or make an excuse for the 2012 postseason outcome. “We did it several times before Stephen, and we’re going to do it several times after Stephen,” he said Saturday, citing Jordan Zimmermann and Ross Detwiler as pre-Strasburg examples, while passing on the tempting correlation to another Washington star, Robert Griffin III. Around the nation, not just its capital, who could resist the stunning ah-ha moment of RGIII’s catastrophic knee injury while playing hurt for the Redskins in their playoff defeat to Seattle? The ensuing firestorm of second-guessing engulfed Mike Shanahan, the Redskins’ veteran coach, for failing to protect his rookie quarterback from his live-for-today propensities and seemed — at least in making the surface comparison — to validate Rizzo’s position. Strasburg, speaking from the heart and with a mound warrior’s mind-set, wasn’t necessarily buying what he considered an apples-to-oranges argument. Image The Nationals’ decision to shut Strasburg down last year contrasted with the Redskins’ allowing Robert Griffin III to play hurt, leading to a serious knee injury. Credit Nick Wass/Associated Press “Yeah, I heard a little bit about it and stuff, but there’s so many differences in what happened,” he said. “I was, you know, 100 percent healthy, and he was kind of banged up and pushed through something that was lingering. I mean, if I was to get shut down and had a lingering injury like he had, I’d be, ‘O.K., probably the smart thing to do.’ But the fact was I felt 100 percent, ready to go, ready to pitch in the playoffs for the first time.” He shook his head, the insurgent part of his psyche still seemingly stewing, and added, “Hard to feel good about that, tougher to deal with.” How did it look to his teammates, Strasburg wondered, that he had to be airlifted off the mountain with the young Nationals making their initial push for the peak? Idealistic as it may sound, and as long a road as RGIII will probably have to work his way back, he will never have to prove himself to teammates again, or ask that they fall in behind him. “I think the comparisons were made because we’re in the same city and we came up at a time when people were thinking that we’re going to turn everything around for the organizations,” Strasburg said. “But the thing I love about RGIII is that he’s a proven leader, and he’s the type, much like the guy I want to be, who leads by example. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s going to come back even better.” Given proper rehabilitation, that would be a reasonable expectation. Then again, professional football finds itself in a terrible fix these days for its negligence on not being more vigilant on the issue of masking injury in pursuit of immediate gratification and need. The cultural divide of their respective sports notwithstanding, whose values would the emerging superstar rather have governing his career, Shanahan’s or Rizzo’s? While it’s at least conceivable that Rizzo may have chosen not to shut down Strasburg had he been dealing with an older team on a last-gasp run, he understood that the Nationals were on the rise with several foundation stars like Strasburg, Bryce Harper and Ryan Zimmerman. Conversely, baseball’s latest performance-enhancement episode has ensnared Gio Gonzalez, a 21-game winner last year; the 70-year-old Nationals manager, Davey Johnson, has declared this his farewell season; and, well, human beings are always vulnerable to mental lapses along with the physical breakdowns. “This year, there’s a target on our back,” Strasburg said. “The games are a little different when you’re playing against teams that have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder. I think that’s what you’ve got to prepare for, not to be impatient with everything.” In effect, however unconsciously, this sounded like an endorsement of the Rizzo plan. The best armor for the body does tend to be the brain.

Stephen Strasburg
Washington Nationals
Baseball
Robert Griffin III
Mike Rizzo


Hugo Lindgren Is Named to Lead New York Times Magazine

Abstract: The New York Times has named the executive editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, Hugo Lindgren, as the next editor of The New York Times Magazine. Mr. Lindgren, 42, oversaw the recent redesign and overhaul of Businessweek under its new ownership and has worked in senior editing positions at New York magazine and George. He will begin his new role on Oct. 25. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the decision came after an exhaustive process that included external and internal candidates. “We talked to a lot of great candidates, inside and outside of The Times, but Hugo stood out for his creativity, his charisma and his experience helping to refresh two major magazines,” Mr. Keller said in a memo to the staff on Thursday. Mr. Lindgren replaces Gerry Marzorati, who led the magazine for seven years and now oversees special projects and business initiatives for the Times newsroom, acting as a representative for the paper’s top editors as those ventures are developed. This is the second high-level editorial change at the Times magazine properties recently. In June, Sally Singer , a longtime writer and editor at Vogue Magazine, was hired to run T: The Times Style Magazine.


Across New York Region, Alarming Wave of Young and Suburban Heroin Addicts

Abstract: THE kids weren’t all right. They lived in the same comfortable Long Island town and were barely in their teens when they took their first hit of marijuana or sip of alcohol, propelling them on dark journeys they couldn’t seem to escape. Within a couple of years, they were in heroin’s grip. “My parents had no idea,” said one of them, a 17-year-old girl who, like other formerly addicted youths interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of her past drug use. “My mom thought I was smoking a lot of weed and taking diet pills, because who would’ve thought that such a bad drug could be so easily accessible to me?” The girl grew up in western Suffolk County, in a town where, she said, “everything is perfect,” with white picket fences and two cars in each driveway; for her birthday last October, she received a black Jeep, and she went to a wealthy, high-performing public school. “Growing up, everything is pushed on you,” she said. “You’re trying to be the smartest, trying to compete with everyone.” Heroin, she said, was an escape. The girl said that she had not used drugs since entering rehabilitation in January, but that many of her former friends were still hooked on heroin, and at least two had fatally overdosed. They are part of a new wave of heroin abuse that officials across the New York region are grappling to understand. During the first six months of 2009, 25 people in Nassau County died of heroin overdoses — more than from homicide and drunken driving combined; in 2008, 46 people fatally overdosed on heroin, up from 27 in 2007, according to Nassau officials. In New York City, recent drug raids of so-called heroin mills have yielded hundreds of thousands of bags at a time, up from several hundred bags a year ago, according to Bridget G. Brennan, the city’s special narcotics prosecutor . What is especially worrisome to law enforcement officials and treatment experts is the fact that many of heroin’s newest addicts are in their teens or early 20s; many also come from middle- or upper-middle-class suburban families. At Blue Hills Substance Abuse Services, a treatment center at Cedarcrest Regional Hospital in Hartford, about 10 percent of young adults had cited heroin addiction during admission in recent years; this year, it’s closer to 30 percent. At the Mendham site of Daytop New Jersey, an adolescent substance abuse center, the portion of teenagers entering treatment for heroin addiction has doubled to 40 percent in the past year. “The problem is the kids are using younger and younger,” said Howard Riesel, coordinator of the adolescent-services unit at Glen Cove Hospital on Long Island. “It’s cheap. It’s accessible.” Experts trace the spike in heroin use to its widespread availability and low cost. A bag of heroin can sell for $5 to $25 and induce a six- to eight-hour high, according to officials and former users. Cocaine, by comparison, can cost $40 to $60 for a 30-minute high, while prescription painkillers like Vicodin or OxyContin sell for upward of $40 a pill on the street. “It’s becoming cooler,” said Dr. Carlos Hernandez-Avila, a medical director at Blue Hills. Long Island residents were brutally awakened to the heroin problem in June 2008, when Natalie Ciappa, 18, an honors student from Massapequa, fatally overdosed. Suffolk and Nassau Counties passed laws in her name to build Web sites tracking heroin arrests . The Nassau County executive, Thomas R. Suozzi, put together heroin summits to raise awareness, and last week police in Suffolk county began making anti-heroin presentations to eighth graders, an initiative that will soon extend to other grades. Still, in the past eight years, the number of young people entering the county’s detoxification centers and withdrawal programs has mushroomed. In 2000, 59 people ages 19 to 25 entered Nassau’s detoxification and rehabilitation centers for heroin abuse, according to Arlene Sanchez, the county’s commissioner of mental health , chemical dependency and developmental disabilities services. In 2008, 458 did. Jonathan, 19, a former addict who attended Mr. Riesel’s program on Long Island, said he took his first puff of marijuana at 13, and it made him feel gloriously liberated from the awkward, chunky boy he had been. Within two months, he was popping Vicodin pills, dextromethorphan (a cough medicine that can have psychedelic effects) and, eventually, Xanax and OxyContin. He made much older friends, began selling drugs and prided himself on his high drug intake. “People almost gave me praise for it,” Jonathan said. He said he tried heroin shortly after he turned 15, while high on Ecstasy and cocaine. It blew him away. “It hits you so hard, but it’s so smooth and enticing at the same time,” he said. “It hits you like a train of false love.” The heroin available in the Northeast these days is purer than the kind that ravaged New York City in the 1970s, experts say, and almost certainly as lethal, if not more. Dealers often mark the bags with words like “Red Bull,” “Lexus,” “Kiss of Death” and “R.I.P.,” or a skull and crossbones. “It’s part of the attraction of the drug, to get so close to dying but come back,” Ms. Brennan said. “The results can be tragic.” One of Jonathan’s friends, a 21-year-old former addict from Long Island named Brian, said heroin was cheaper, and often more available, than marijuana or ecstasy. “Believe it or not, as a high school teenager, it was easier for us to get than alcohol,” he said. “It’s cheaper than anything out there.” The 17-year-old girl from western Suffolk said she moved to heroin after she could no longer support her two-pill-a-day OxyContin habit, which she had financed by stealing from her parents. Her first drive in her new black Jeep was to a heroin dealer. She grew thin and listless, stopped showering and began sleeping at all hours, but said that her parents did not suspect the worst. “Parents are working hard out here and giving their kids all this stuff, and still kids are getting hooked,” she said. “I think parents put a blinder over their faces.” Another friend of Jonathan’s, a high-achieving student named Alex, passed under the radar until he was arrested for possession at 16. “I had a 98 percent average,” he said. “I was in honor societies. I was a peer mediator.” Now 20 and in college, Alex said he had been drug- and alcohol-free for two and a half years. For all four former addicts, it took being arrested, often several times and nearly always for drug-related offenses like stealing or possession, before their addictions came to light. All four said they also witnessed friends overdosing, sometimes fatally, or had overdosed themselves. Brian knew young people who gave unconscious friends CPR until the ambulance arrived. Last October, Jonathan overdosed and was shocked back to life by defibrillator paddles in a hospital emergency room. The first thing he did after waking up, he said, was reach into his pants’ pocket to locate his drugs. He eventually got clean, earlier this year, after spending time at St. Christopher’s Inn , a friary, rehabilitation center and homeless shelter in Garrison, N.Y. He is healthy now and stands tall in his 6-foot-1 frame. When local officials began focusing on heroin last year, Jonathan said his friends all had the same thought. “This has been a problem for a while,” he said. “We all wondered, ‘Where have you been?’ ”

Teenagers and Adolescence
Heroin
Drug Abuse and Traffic
Suburbs
Medicine and Health
New York City
Westchester County (NY)
Long Island (NY)
Connecticut
New Jersey


Rosendale, N.Y., Draws Arts-Conscious Brooklynites

Abstract: ROSENDALE, N.Y. — Until about a year ago, Fredrick Arnold was living the life of a Williamsburg hipster. An aspiring filmmaker with mutton-chop sideburns, he spent his working hours waiting tables at Dumont Burger, and his off hours on projects like an animated music video for one of his favorite bands, Casper & the Cookies . But after being laid off — “Suddenly I wasn’t just competing with other people in their 20s, but with out-of-work stock brokers, people with Ph.D.’s, and even experienced chefs for a shrinking number of waiting jobs,” he said — Mr. Arnold, 25, moved about 90 miles north to this Hudson Valley town. He found a one-bedroom apartment just off Main Street for $700 a month (he previously paid $650 for a tiny room in a three-bedroom) and a job at Market Market , a cafe and nightclub on the edge of town with an eclectic menu and a distinctly Brooklyn feel. The cafe, opened three years ago by Jenifer Constantine and Trippy Thompson, a couple of other Williamsburg expatriates, is a place where one might stumble upon a copy of The Brooklyn Rail , the Greenpoint-based publication covering the local arts scene. Maggie Gyllenhaal of Park Slope was recently spotted there having lunch. “It feels to me like a neighborhood bar in Brooklyn, filled with people who have sensibilities similar to mine,” said John Cox, who moved to Rosendale from Carroll Gardens in 2003, when he and his wife were ready to start a family. “We realized that if we stayed in Brooklyn, we’d need a bigger, more expensive apartment, and we’d be working crazy hours just to be able to pay for day care, never to really spend time with our kid.” Rosendale, in Ulster County, is hardly the first place to consider itself Brooklyn North or the sixth borough. But like New Paltz and Beacon before it, this depressed former cement manufacturing town of 6,400 has lately had a steady influx of creative freelancers with 917, 718 and 646 area-code cellphones. Some hop on the bus for the hour-and-forty-five-minute ride to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, others telecommute, and many have traded in their office jobs for less psychically demanding ones in landscaping or food service while they pursue their music or art on the side. “It was a trade-off,” said Heige Kim, a painter who opened a gallery, Roos Arts , on Main Street last year, and whose husband, Fred Lee, commutes to his job as a database manager for a Midtown law firm. “When we moved up here, we got more space, and as an artist, especially, you’re always negotiating for more space,” she said. “But now Fred has to ride the Trailways bus every day.” With the feel of a rough-and-tumble new frontier — not unlike Williamsburg or Red Hook a decade ago — Rosendale offers a break from Brooklyn’s bubble real estate prices: the mean price for a house in 2008, the last year available from city-data.com , was $201,797. The town has a much shabbier look than manicured weekender havens like Stone Ridge or Woodstock, but it is closer to the city than other low-cost towns like Catskill and Hudson. The town lacks a supermarket but has a surprising number of restaurants — four on Main Street alone, including the Rosendale Cafe , a stalwart vegetarian and folk-music institution. “We make jokes about how many people we keep meeting up here who are from Williamsburg,” said David Soman , a children’s book illustrator who was ahead of the curve when he and his wife moved here in 2001. “There’s a growing contingent. We keep meeting more of them at Market Market.” Market Market replaced the Springtown Green Grocer, a beloved standby where locals used to shop for organic produce and pick up mostly vegetarian lunches from a salad bar and steam table. “In the beginning people seemed resentful toward us for coming in and trying to do something different,” Ms. Constantine said. “It’s funny, sometimes people will still walk in looking all confused and say, ‘Wait, where are the vegetables?’ ” But it has become a magnet for the Brooklyn exiles. Situated directly across the street from the Trailways station (you can get your bus tickets there), the cafe has a sleek bar surrounded by reproduction vintage Fornasetti wallpaper. The menu features tacos filled with house-made chorizo, Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches, and specials like pork schnitzel with brussels sprout and bacon hash. “Trippy and I thought it would be good to offer foods that we missed when we moved up here,” Ms. Constantine explained. Several nights a week, there is entertainment: live music, including a series called Tributon featuring musicians covering the songs of a particular artist; D.J.’s; karaoke; comedy; and videos. Earlier this month, when the band Mercury Rev played music over a silent film, the cafe was packed with people in their 20s and 30s, many in vintage clothes and skinny jeans. On a recent Wednesday evening, when local musicians Skip Piper , Ross Rice and Jude Roberts took turns playing, Market Market was crowded with urban-expat regulars, including Eric Stern, the bling-bedecked stylist for “ The Real Housewives of New York City ”; the graphic design artist Woody Pirtle ; and D. B. Leonard, a musician and writer who moved from Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan to Woodstock in 2008, but is now hunting for an apartment in Rosendale. There were a couple of new faces, too. “We moved up April 1,” said Turu Illgen, an architect who just spent three years building a house in Williamsburg with his wife, Angela Voulgarelis , a painter. “After all that hard work, we can’t really afford to live there,” Mr. Illgen said, half-laughing. “The taxes alone would kill us. So we rented it out and moved up here.”

Rosendale (NY)
Rosendale
Housing and Real Estate
Brooklyn (NYC)


Mars Lander Is Poised to Begin Digging for Ice

Abstract: After a couple of days of playing in the dirt, the Phoenix Mars lander is to begin its scientific work in earnest on Tuesday or Wednesday, looking for ice and hints of past liquid water in the planet’s far north. The scoop on the Phoenix’s 7.7-foot-long robotic arm will dig three trenches side by side and carry the dirt samples to instruments on the lander. The first analysis will be done by an instrument called the thermal and evolved gas analyzer, or TEGA, which heats and vaporizes the soil and then identifies the vapors. “Five years ago when we started this mission, I was somewhat worried that we didn’t have wheels,” Peter H. Smith, the NASA mission’s principal investigator, said at a news conference on Monday at the University of Arizona, which is handling the spacecraft’s science operations. But now, Dr. Smith said, “we’re in a really great place for doing the science we plan to do.” Mission scientists said they had overcome a short circuit in the TEGA instrument, the only significant glitch so far. The short circuit occurred in a high-voltage filament that adds an electrical charge to the vapor molecules. Switching to a backup filament solved the problem. The primary mission of the Phoenix is to dig into an ice layer believed to exist a few inches below the surface. Temperatures at the site are frigid, between minus-112 and minus-22 degrees Fahrenheit. But, in the past, the Martian climate might have been warm enough at times for the ice to melt and transform the region into a habitable environment. Already, photographs show several bright, smooth patches beneath the Phoenix, where the lander’s thrusters might have blown off the surface soil. The patches look “for all the world like ice,” Dr. Smith said. The scientists said they named the icelike patches Holy Cow, because that is what they said when they saw them. On Saturday, the lander tested its robotic arm and, pressing the scoop against the soil, produced a footlike impression that the scientists named Yeti. On Sunday, it scooped up some soil and dumped it out. Photographs of the test scoop showed white specks in the soil, which could be salt or ice.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration


New Bloomberg Job Rumor Is Followed by a Denial

Abstract: The political future of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been the subject of relentless speculation for months. First he was said to have been flirting with a presidential bid. Then his name was floated as a possible running mate of Senator Barack Obama. Now, Mr. Bloomberg is rumored to be eyeing a third mayoral term. And just as with the earlier rumors, City Hall aides have issued firm denials about this one. “It’s untrue,” Stu Loeser, the mayor’s press secretary, said in an interview on Sunday. The idea of the mayor’s considering running for a third term in next year’s election was reported by The New York Post on Sunday. For Mr. Bloomberg to remain as mayor for another four years, he would first have to win the repeal of a law that limits citywide elected officials to two consecutive terms in office. The law could be altered or eliminated in two ways: through a City Council bill or through a voter referendum, which is how it came to be. Mr. Loeser, however, said that the mayor “believes in term limits and he is not going to seek a third term.” The discussion adds to the buzz about what is next for the mayor after his second four-year term in office. So far, Mr. Bloomberg has been somewhat vague about his post-mayoralty plans. He has said that he will run a foundation to focus on his charitable works. George Arzt, a political consultant who was press secretary to Mayor Edward I. Koch, said that regardless of its truth, floating a rumor about Mr. Bloomberg’s interest in running for a third term “is not bad political strategy.” “He’s no longer a lame duck if he’s out there fighting for a third term, or at least giving the impression that he would fight for the third term,” Mr. Arzt said. The prospect of a third term would give Mr. Bloomberg more control over his legacy, Mr. Arzt said. It could allow him to recover from recent setbacks like the defeat of the congestion pricing plan in Albany and delays in projects like the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn because of the economic downturn. Mr. Bloomberg has been a firm and consistent opponent of extending term limits for local elected officials, including himself. He used his veto power six years ago on a measure to revise term limits for some City Council members and give them an extra two years in office — though the Council overrode the veto, on a 47-to-2 vote. The Council continued to hold internal discussions about term limits for some time, weighing whether to push changes that would extend term limits for lawmakers to three full terms from the current limit of two full terms. The limits were imposed after a 1993 referendum and were reaffirmed by voters in 1996. In 2006, the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, commissioned a poll to gauge the public’s receptiveness to changing or eliminating term limits. Shortly after the poll was conducted, Ms. Quinn declined to discuss its findings, saying only that the results were “mixed.” But in December, Ms. Quinn — who has been described as a likely mayoral candidate — announced that she would not support any efforts to change the law, saying it would be “anti-democratic and anti-reform” to overrule the will of New Yorkers. On Sunday, Ms. Quinn said through a spokesman that she had no comment on the any third-term aspirations by the mayor. She is among 36 council members whose tenure is set to end with Mr. Bloomberg’s on Dec. 31, 2009. In January, Mr. Bloomberg said that he would appoint a Charter Revision Commission to evaluate the structure and operation of city agencies and find ways to eliminate redundancies and antiquated regulations. The commission’s work would extend into next year, however, and Mr. Loeser said that even if it should recommend doing away with the limits, any modifications would come too late to benefit the mayor or current council members.

Politics and Government
Bloomberg Michael R
Presidential Election of 2008
Elections
City Hall
New York City