Cleric Arrested in $26 Million Plot, Leaving New Blot on Vatican Bank

Abstract: ROME — A Vatican official. A private plane. And 20 million euros in cash. Claiming to have foiled a caper worthy of Hollywood, or at least Cinecittà, the Italian police on Friday arrested a prelate and two others on corruption charges, saying that the priest plotted last summer to help wealthy friends sneak the money, the equivalent of about $26 million, into Italy while evading financial controls. Along with the prelate, a financial broker and a military police agent deployed to the Italian Secret Service were arrested after an investigation that developed out of a broader three-year inquiry into the Vatican Bank. The case is the latest black mark on the bank, which under Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI has been trying to shake its image as a secretive tax and money laundering haven and bring itself into compliance with European norms so it can use the euro. Rome prosecutors say the three men hired a private plane last July with the intention of bringing the cash into Italy from Locarno, Switzerland. The money was to be carried by the Secret Service agent, Giovanni Maria Zito, who would not be required to declare it at the border. But the scheme fell through, the prosecutors said, as the three began bickering and, eventually, lost their nerve. Cellphones used by the three in arranging the money transfer were later burned, prosecutors said. The European Union and the United States have served notice in recent years that they will no longer tolerate the wall of secrecy in tax havens like Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands. As a result, major account holders have been growing increasingly nervous. Nello Rossi, the Rome prosecutor who led the investigation, said that discussions picked up on wiretaps seemed to indicate that the 20 million euros in Switzerland was tied to the D’Amico family, Salerno shipping magnates. Even before his arrest on Friday, the prelate, Msgr. Nunzio Scarano, was known to the authorities. A banker before entering the priesthood, and until recently an accountant in a top Vatican financial office that oversees the Catholic Church’s real estate holdings, Monsignor Scarano was under investigation by magistrates in Salerno on accusations that he illegally moved $730,000 in cash from his account in the Vatican Bank to Italian banks, his lawyer said. Monsignor Scarano’s lawyer, Silverio Sica, said his client would contest the charges. “I am certain he will want to speak to prosecutors to clarify his position,” Mr. Sica said. He added that Monsignor Scarano had had no previous dealings with the police or with judicial investigations. In a statement on Friday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that Monsignor Scarano had been suspended from his position at the Vatican “more than a month ago, ever since his superiors were informed that he was under investigation.” Image Msgr. Nunzio Scarano has twice been accused of financial misdeeds. Credit Francesco Pecoraro/Associated Press He added that the Holy See “has not yet received any requests from the competent Italian authorities, but confirms its willingness for full collaboration,” and that the Vatican’s internal financial watchdog was following the matter and would take, “if necessary, the appropriate measures in its competency.” Only priests, members of religious orders, Catholic institutions, employees of the State of Vatican City and diplomats accredited to the Holy See are allowed to keep accounts at the Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Works of Religion. But rumors have long swirled that accounts were being used as fronts for other interests, including organized crime and Italian politicians. In the Salerno case, prosecutors accuse Monsignor Scarano of having illegally moved 560,000 euros, equivalent to $730,000, from his account in the Vatican Bank. Mr. Sica said that the monsignor had told prosecutors that the money came from a “generous donor” and was intended to finance a hospice for terminally ill patients in Salerno. According to Mr. Sica, the prelate needed the sum to pay off a mortgage on a personal apartment. Because of “controversial reasons of a family nature,” Monsignor Scarano had been advised to ask 56 friends to accept 10,000 euros apiece, in exchange for money transfers in the same amount, Mr. Sica said. All 56 are also being investigated by Salerno prosecutors. The authorities, who have accused Monsignor Scarano of laundering the money, said he had another reason. “He split the money up so it wouldn’t be as noticeable,” said Franco Roberti, the chief prosecutor of Salerno. The investigation came about after Monsignor Scarano reported a break-in at his apartment late last year, during which the thieves made off with precious paintings and silver artifacts. That led to questions about where the art had come from, Mr. Sica said, and then to the discovery of the moving of the 560,000 euros. The arrests Friday were the most dramatic events to emerge from the Rome prosecutors’ investigation into the Vatican Bank since 2010, when prosecutors seized $30 million from two external accounts used by the Vatican Bank and placed its then-president and director general under investigation. The money was later ordered unfrozen after the Vatican created an internal financial watchdog in 2010, but it has not yet been released. The collaboration between the Vatican and investigators in the case was virtually unprecedented, Giacomo Galeazzi, who follows the Vatican for the Turin newspaper La Stampa, said in a telephone interview. In the past, the Vatican had always resisted when asked to assist in judicial matters, he said, citing a famous kidnapping case that involved the daughter of a Vatican employee; the case of Roberto Calvi, a banker with close ties to the Vatican who was found dead in 1982; and the investigation into the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. “This time the collaboration is real, and the Vatican has announced that it would do its own internal investigation,” Mr. Galeazzi said. “That marks a real change of climate.” That change can be attributed in part to Pope Francis, but also to the influence of the American Catholic Church. The American cardinals “were very upfront about the need to clean up the Vatican Bank,” he said. “This pope could not deny the prosecutors any assistance.”

Italy
Vatican Bank
Money laundering
Nunzio Scarano
Giovanni Maria Zito
Catholic Church


Queens Questions Need for 2 Convention Centers

Abstract: The 250 muffler shops, tire installers and other grease-stained businesses that make up the tumbledown quarter of Queens known as Willets Point have long known that they could be wiped out to make way for a gleaming new convention center, New York City’s first outside Manhattan. In December, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg broke ground for sewer mains and storm drains for Willets Point to open the way for the neighborhood’s transformation , the city’s Web site trumpeted a convention center, citing it as helping to create “New York’s next great neighborhood.” But a month ago, the businesses learned to their surprise and bewilderment that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was proposing another, far grander convention center — at more than three million square feet, it would be the nation’s largest — as part of a mammoth gambling hall that would rise at the Aqueduct racetrack, six miles to the south. Does Queens, they wondered, need two convention centers? Jake Bono of Bono Sawdust Supply, which for almost 80 years has sold sawdust to circuses and horse farms, said that if the Aqueduct convention center was built, “that point-blank means there’s not even a need for a convention center at Willets Point.” As Mr. Bono sees it, local politicians have been staging a “charade,” wielding a convention center at Willets Point as a politically palatable enticement to justify the destruction of what is, to some eyes, an unsightly warren of car-repair shops that now greets fans patronizing the nearby Citi Field. The city has always spoken of a convention center as part of a retail, hotel, office and apartment complex that would be close to two highways, an airport, a bay and train and subway connections. But Mr. Bono said he believed the convention center had always been the city’s “main selling point.” Queens officials have also regarded the city’s redevelopment plan as intimately intertwined with a convention center. Helen M. Marshall, the borough president, was reportedly taken aback when she heard of the governor’s Aqueduct proposal. “What happened to Willets Point?” was the way Dan Andrews, her spokesman, described her reaction. “Oh my God, there’s going to be two!” He said Ms. Marshall had since embraced the idea that there could indeed be two convention centers, the one at Aqueduct and a smaller space of fewer than 400,000 square feet at Willets Point for smaller trade shows and for local and regional conferences of, say, the Queens medical and dental societies. Events at such a center may be too big to fit into a hotel ballroom but not big enough for the proposed Aqueduct center. And the Queens Chamber of Commerce emphasizes that “an exhibition hall or conference center” was only a single feature in the overall plan. “Willets Point right now looks like something in a third-world nation, and if we’re going to be able to maximize economic opportunities it’s going to require full redevelopment,” said Jack Friedman, the chamber’s executive director. The city’s Economic Development Corporation , which is spearheading the Willets Point overhaul, did not respond directly to questions about the governor’s Aqueduct proposal. Despite that proposal, Jennifer Friedberg, a spokeswoman for the corporation, said, “our plans have not changed.” City officials do, however, seem to be less wedded to the convention center as part of a reborn Willets Point. For example, officials take pains to point out that any convention center is years away from being built and is not included in the first phase of the project, which covers 20 of the roughly 61 acres. That phase imagines 400 apartments, 35 percent of which will be for people of limited income, a hotel and 680,000 square feet of retail space. The corporation is poring over proposals for the first phase from a half-dozen developers and should select a winner in coming weeks. It is also close to acquiring 90 percent of the needed land and is prepared to condemn the rest through eminent domain. Both Mr. Cuomo’s push for an enormous convention center in southern Queens and the convention center plan for Willets Point come at a time when the centers are losing their appeal. Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio who is writing a book on convention centers, said attendance had been declining for more than a decade, and started to drop even before the current economic downturn. He said the trend was a result of tighter spending by businesses and the Internet’s ability to let clients examine new products and communicate with far-flung peers. Attendance at McCormick Place in Chicago, the nation’s largest center at more than two million square feet, plummeted from three million in 2001 to two million in 2010. The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan recorded 1.92 million attendees in 1990, but 633,000 in 2009, according to official figures. Thus, building two centers in Queens, or even one, “makes no sense whatsoever,” Professor Sanders said. “You’re talking about building more space in a market that’s oversupplied,” he continued. Alfredo Franza, vice president of United Steel Products in Willets Point, which since 1977 has made rolling security doors and other iron works for clients including Yankee Stadium, said he was surprised to learn about the plans for two convention centers. “I started laughing,” he said. “It’s like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” Beyond the convention center, there are a number of other issues roiling the debate. Willets Point United , an association of 22 businesses that oppose the city’s redevelopment plan, says the city, to support its case for condemnation, keeps calling the area blighted when instead it is a vibrant industrial area that employs about 2,000 people. Its neglected appearance, Mr. Bono said, is a result of the city’s failure to put in sewer lines and storm sewers and repave the streets. Mr. Bono said the city had been unfairly picturing the neighborhood as a contaminated brownfield when the association’s testers had found no evidence of dangerous pollution. “Is this area really blighted, or is it an industrial area that had been deprived of essential municipal services?” said Michael Rikon, the lawyer for Willets Point United, who is fighting condemnation in court. Mr. Bono concedes that many business owners are surrendering to eminent domain offers, but only because they see no chance of beating the Bloomberg administration and would rather not be trapped in a limbo that makes it difficult to invest in their businesses. “You want to be a civil rights crusader,” he said, “and spend your life fighting City Hall?”

Willets Point (NYC)
Area Planning and Renewal
Real Estate (Commercial)
Aqueduct Racetrack
Cuomo Andrew M
Queens (NYC)
Conventions Fairs and Trade Shows


Palin Endorses Lonegan in New Jersey Senate Race

Abstract: NEW EGYPT, N.J. — With polls suggesting a tightening race and only a few days remaining in the United States Senate contest in New Jersey, thousands of people gathered at a racetrack here to watch Sarah Palin endorse the Republican candidate, Steve Lonegan. “Something big is happening here; it’s called momentum,” said Ms. Palin, the former Alaska governor who was John McCain’s running mate during the 2008 presidential election. “The country knows it, the media knows it.” Recent polls have shown Mr. Lonegan, a former mayor of Bogota, N.J., and a businessman, gaining ground on his nationally known Democratic rival, Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark. The election is on Wednesday. The surge has surprised many who thought the special election to fill the seat that became vacant upon the death this year of Senator Frank R. Lautenburg , a veteran Democrat, would be a landslide victory for Mr. Booker. While Mr. Booker maintains a 12-point lead in the polls, Mr. Lonegan has gained traction in part by framing the election as a referendum on Mr. Booker’s celebrity. “My opponent, Cory Booker, was anointed by Hollywood; he was anointed by Oprah,” Mr. Lonegan said. “California doesn’t need a third senator.” More than 2,000 supporters of Mr. Lonegan’s crammed beside a dirt racetrack in front of a bus emblazoned with “Tea Party Express.” Many hoisted yellow flags that said “Don’t Tread on Me.” Most raised iPhones to snap photos of Ms. Palin. Denise Williams, a retired teacher from Forked River, said she came to the rally because she believed Mr. Lonegan would help thwart the president’s agenda. “I want him to go into the Senate and I want him to vote against everything that the liberal, socialist White House is for,” Ms. Williams, 64, said. “I want my grandkids to grow up in America.” Image Sarah Palin, right, backed Steve Lonegan, shown with his wife, Lorraine, with their daughters, Katherine, left, and Brooke. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times While the federal government staggered into another week of shutdown, Mr. Lonegan urged his supporters to back Republicans who refuse to compromise on their budget demands. “Tell the Republicans in Washington, D.C., to hold the line,” Mr. Lonegan said before leading the crowd in a chant of “Hold the line! Hold the line!” Ms. Palin also praised the House Republicans, who insist that parts of the Affordable Care Act be delayed before some government programs reopen. “They’re calling it the ‘government shutdown.’ I think it should be called a ‘slimdown,’ ” Ms. Palin said. She then criticized the suspension of federal aid for the families of fallen soldiers, the shuttering of an Amber Alert Web site and the closing of war memorials. “But Michelle Obama’s really groovy ‘Let’s Move’ video is still up and running because you can’t be chubby,” Ms. Palin said. She also rejected the notion that people should accept the Affordable Care Act because it was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. “They said that about Prohibition,” Ms. Palin said. “But I believe now you can get a beer with your famous New Jersey pizza.” The racetrack is in a rural swath of Ocean County lined with fields, a few golf courses and a Smokey Bear sign. Signs advertised for sale pumpkins, produce and pine trees. Mike Betancourt, a retired teacher from Whiting, N.J., said he was motivated to drive to the rally because of Mr. Lonegan’s momentum. “He’s doing better lately,” Mr. Betancourt, 67, said. “It made me want to come out.” Diana McKnight, 55, from Forked River, brought her husband to see Mr. Lonegan. “It started out he didn’t have a chance,” she said. “The gap is getting smaller, I feel wonderful.” Even Mr. Lonegan seemed giddy. He mentioned Mr. Booker’s campaign and Twitter messages to an Oregon stripper, and made a play on words to reference his own momentum. “My opponent would rather tweet about pole dancers,” he said, “than poll numbers.”

Senate races
Cory A Booker
Sarah Palin
Steve Lonegan
New Jersey
Republicans
Political endorsement


Dirty Job, but Someone Has to Do It

Abstract: Go to a nondescript office building on the East side of Manhattan, down the hall to a door already in the clutches of a fake dismembered hand, and you will find the newsroom of The Smoking Gun. The take-no-prisoners Web site at thesmokinggun.com is in the midst of spilling affidavits in a Texas polygamy case and recently pushed The Los Angeles Times to retract a major article about the shooting of Tupac Shakur by pointing out that it was based on fake documents. The site also debunked James Frey’s memoir, revealed Bill O’Reilly’s specific fascination with loofahs, and is about to publish a major investigative article about a “well-known platinum-selling artist,” replete with mug shots and police reports. Open that door — “Don’t mind the hand,” advises one of the guys who works there — and you will find a bigger-than-life poster of the former N.F.L. quarterback Michael Vick. And three guys sitting at computers. Much has been said, here and elsewhere, about how the emerging digital economy has decimated the business model of journalism. But the same digital technology has made each remaining journalist several times more powerful. As working reporters, we are able to get information — through the public and government Web databases and proprietary digital sources — that our ancestors in the business would not have dared dream of. I know because I’m one of the ancestors. The Smoking Gun, a part of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., a Time Warner company, is the happy byproduct of that revolution. To the delight of an average four million unique visitors a month, its staff ferrets out contract riders, embarrassing civil filings, and police reports that read as if the crime fiction writer James Ellroy wrote them. Last month, it had 58 million page views (thanks again, Mr. Spitzer). I briefly thought of asking them to look up my own history — criminal and otherwise — but that seemed too easy. It’s disconcerting to a see a news brand as robust and well-known as The Smoking Gun run by a staff of three people: the editor, William Bastone, a veteran Mafia reporter who used to work at The Village Voice; Andrew Goldberg, managing editor, and Joseph Jesselli, reporter and Web master, who also worked at The Voice. Mr. Bastone said most people writing on the Web are most interested in its characteristics as a megaphone, as opposed to the toolbox it contains for practicing journalism. “Name me a Web site that does original reporting. There aren’t many,” he said. Mr. Bastone is a low-key man who does not seem like the kind of guy who would be breaking big stories about Mafia figures, but he remains surprised that very little digital shoe leather is being expended, given the opportunities. “It is beyond night and day from just 15 years ago in terms of reporting,” he said, shaking his head.” When I think about how many hours — hundreds of days, really — I spent in records offices looking for stuff I can just get on my desktop, it drives me crazy.” While Mr. Bastone and his fellow pirates do some long-running stories, much of what they do involved obtaining the “get” — the lawsuit, the arrest photo, the private memo — and slapping it up on the Web for all to see, never mind months of investigation or meetings with editors. That approach can never replace the kind of reporting that resulted in Pulitzer Prizes last week for The Washington Post’s investigation of mistreatment of veterans at Walter Reed or The New York Times series on toxic products from China. But The Smoking Gun has demonstrated that if you obey the metabolism of the Web, not the journalist, you can land with significant impact in a hurry. “I think one of the keys is that we are three people,” said Mr. Bastone, who founded the site with Daniel Green, another Voice alumnus who has since moved on to truTV at Turner, and Barbara Glauber, Mr. Bastone’s wife and the designer of the site. The kind of guy who can get fired up about a tattered, vintage mug shot of David Bowie, Mr. Bastone did not bring a lot of Web savvy to the enterprise when he started it back in 1997 while he was still working at The Voice. “I didn’t even have an e-mail address,” he said. “I sent out the news about the site on a fax machine. I wonder what the guys at Wired thought when my press release came by fax.” Yet The Smoking Gun has managed to prevail on a road that is littered with carcasses. It is the tiniest news staff in the Time Warner empire, but truTV, formerly Court TV, uses The Smoking Gun name to brand a television show: “The Smoking Gun Presents: World’s Dumbest,” the leading show on the network. Several specials stamped with the logo ran on Adult Swim, part of the Cartoon Network. It ain’t Frontline, but the viewers show up. “Their secret sauce is the ability to source documents that no one else can get,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, which inherited the site when it bought Court TV. “It’s not a big business, but it’s profitable, and one of the things we are diligent about is the care and feeding of brands. Young people respond to this brand on TV and on the Web.” (Despite the corporate synergy, the site shows no favors. Last year, when Chris Albrecht, then head of Time Warner’s HBO, was picked up in Las Vegas and accused of assaulting his girlfriend, he got a ride through the spanking machine, replete with a scary mug shot and a brutally detailed police report.) Working at The Smoking Gun seems a fairly solitary existence, with the staff of three grinding away on computers, but there are breaks in the action. Last Thursday, Thomas Riccio, the ex-con who recorded the O. J. Simpson memorabilia bust, stopped by to chat. The site laid him out in 2007 — “Meet Thomas Riccio: Arsonist, prison escapee, stolen goods dealer” — but there were no hard feelings. He used the mug shot they had unearthed for the cover of the book he is pushing. Mr. Bastone, who sold out to what was then Court TV for an undisclosed sum in 2000, said the idea for the site was his fascination with rummaging around courthouses and city property records and a notion that it might attract an online audience. Nowadays, that obsession finds expression on his desktop. “Sitting here, we can monitor cases and filings as if we were sitting in the courtroom,” he said. So far, the Smoking Gun crew is still doing the most looking. “We figure that people who come to the site sort of get it; we consider them to be sophisticated and in on the joke,” said Mr. Goldberg. “But I would never have thought this far down the road that we would be all alone.”

Computers and the Internet
Newspapers
The Smoking Gun (thesmokinggun.com)
Suits and Litigation
Time Warner Inc


Saying He’s Pro-Russia, McCain Criticizes Putin

Abstract: MOSCOW — In a combative essay published Thursday in the online newspaper Pravda.ru, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, declared himself to be “pro-Russian” but delivered a blistering attack on President Vladimir V. Putin, describing him as presiding over a failed petro-state and as a quasi dictator who rules “by corruption, repression and violence.” Mr. McCain’s article was intended to answer an Op-Ed column by Mr. Putin in The New York Times on Sept. 12 that made the case against President Obama’s threatened military strike on Syria. Mr. Putin’s column, in which he presented Russia’s position as defending international law and respect for state sovereignty, generated fierce debate, including praise and accusations of hypocrisy. While Mr. Putin’s article focused more generally on American foreign policy, Mr. McCain, who has long been a sharp critic of the Kremlin, focused squarely on the Russian president himself. In his introduction, though, Mr. McCain made an effort to dispel the idea that he is anti-Russian, a perception that is widespread here. “I am not anti-Russian,” Mr. McCain wrote. “I am pro-Russian, more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today.” “I make that claim because I respect your dignity and your right to self-determination,” he continued, addressing the Russian people. “You should be governed by a rule of law that is clear, consistently and impartially enforced and just. I make that claim because I believe the Russian people, no less than Americans, are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he added. While Mr. McCain wrote that he did not believe a Russian citizen could publish similar criticism, such complaints appear frequently in the Russian press — especially online, where there is generally no censorship even as the government retains fairly strong control over what is shown on the major television stations, particularly in news reports. Mr. Putin, speaking Thursday at an annual conference of Western academics and policy analysts, ridiculed Mr. McCain for submitting the article to Pravda, which he suggested was proof that the American senator was locked in an outdated cold war mind-set. “I think that he has a certain deficit of information about our country,” Mr. Putin said. “And the fact that he wanted to be published in Pravda, not any other publication, apparently he wants to be published in a most authoritative publication with big circulation,” Mr. Putin added, mockingly. “Of course, Pravda is a respectable publication of the now oppositional Communist Party, but its level of distribution in the country is minimal.” Mr. Putin insisted that there was nothing anti-American in his article in The Times, and he said Mr. McCain had been invited to the conference, called the Valdai Discussion Club after the Russian town where it is held. Image Senator John McCain responded to a column by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press Mr. Putin usually holds a private dinner with the Valdai group, but to note the event’s 10th anniversary, the invitation list was broadened to include several opposition politicians and journalists who were given limited access. Mr. Putin used his remarks and a question-and-answer session to touch on a wide range of subjects, and he portrayed the event itself as proof that there was no suppression of speech in Russia. At one point, Mr. Putin defended a new Russian law banning propaganda on nontraditional sexual relations, which is widely perceived as intended to suppress homosexuality. He said that the law did not discriminate, but also that “Europeans are dying out” in part because of societal acceptance of gay relationships. Even as he suggested that Mr. McCain was stuck in the past, Mr. Putin raised his own complaint with a cold war edge. “Once, we were promised that NATO will not cross the eastern border” of Germany, he said. “We discussed it and Gorbachev was given a promise, though it was not registered anywhere. And now, where is NATO? And where is the border? We were simply duped.” Mr. McCain cited the propaganda law in his article, criticizing Mr. Putin’s government. “They write laws to codify bigotry against people whose sexual orientation they condemn,” he wrote. He did not defend United States policies, but accused Mr. Putin of shielding the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. “How has he strengthened Russia’s international stature?” Mr. McCain asked. “By allying Russia with some of the world’s most offensive and threatening tyrannies.” Mr. McCain was not the first member of Congress to respond to Mr. Putin in the Russian news media. On Monday, Kommersant, one of Russia’s most prominent daily newspapers, printed an open letter to the Russian people by Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In his letter, which he also published on his Web site , Mr. Israel explained in leveled language why he would potentially vote in favor of a military strike on Syria, although he praised Mr. Putin’s efforts to persuade Mr. Assad’s government to surrender its chemical weapons arsenal. “Diplomacy should always be the first preference,” Mr. Israel wrote.

John McCain
Russia
Vladimir Putin
US Foreign Policy
Syria
Arab Spring
Pravda
Bashar al-Assad
US Military
Biological and Chemical Warfare


Kazakhstan Orders Curfew in Town After Labor Unrest

Abstract: MOSCOW — The president of Kazakhstan declared a state of emergency on Saturday in a town in the western oil-producing region of the country, where striking workers and the police fought the day before, leaving at least 11 people dead. The nearly three-week state of emergency allows the authoritarian government to prohibit audio and video recording and establish a curfew in the town, Zhanaozen, and on Saturday human rights activists reported that the road into the town had been blocked by a checkpoint. Journalists trying to go there said their commercial flight had been canceled. With cellphone coverage intermittent and Internet access in the area apparently blocked by the government, confusion swirled over the scale and causes of what could be the worst civil unrest in Kazakhstan, an oil-rich Central Asian nation, since independence was declared 20 years ago. Human rights groups and the government were presenting starkly different narratives of what happened. Nongovernmental groups and independent journalists said protesting workers were venting their rage at a government that had failed to solve a wage dispute involving a state-run employer. The government, in contrast, has tried to cast the protesters as “hooligans,” possibly financed from outside the country. “We will not permit any attempts to disturb the peace and calm in our home, to erase the achievements of our independence,” President Nursultan Nazarbayev said in a statement issued Saturday. The government has not said how the deaths occurred, but Mr. Nazarbayev said Saturday that the police had acted lawfully. Witnesses who spoke to local journalists on Friday, before communications were cut, said that the police had fired at the workers and that the death toll was higher than what the government said. An online video that appeared to have been recorded at the scene before the deaths showed angry men stomping on holiday decorations, swinging sticks to shatter glass orbs and golden bells, and lighting a Christmas tree on fire. The decorations appeared to have been set up for a state-run party for children that might have been called as a way to dislodge the workers from the square after an extended sit-in. Mr. Nazarbayev, who on Friday announced the formation of a commission to investigate the violence, said the panel would “take all the necessary measures to identify and punish those who organized this unrest.” Nurdaulet Suindikov, a spokesman for the Kazakh prosecutor general, said at a news conference on Saturday that “as is well known, the riots began with hooligan behavior on the part of a group of young persons and unemployed oil workers who had fallen under their influence.” The government raised the death toll on Saturday to 11 and said 86 people had been injured. Andrei A. Grishen, the editor of a newsletter published by the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights, said about 200 people attended a solidarity gathering in Almaty, the commercial capital and the center of the small opposition movement, but they were not allowed to march. The police briefly detained about two dozen people, he said. The police detained about 150 people at another protest on Saturday in Aktau, a provincial capital, Mr. Grishen said. The unrest could prove to be an embarrassment for United States foreign policy in Central Asia. American oil companies have courted Mr. Nazarbayev’s government for years with the support of several American administrations, and the State Department has rarely criticized the government publicly. The oil workers in Zhanaozen walked off their jobs last spring over demands for higher wages. But they recently shifted their focus to political demands, including the right to form independent parties. In one online video posted by Stan TV, a Kazakh television channel, a witness described the mayhem, in an account that could not be verified independently. “It started unexpectedly at one moment,” Sholpan Otekeyeva, a resident of Zhanaozen, told journalists. “Three people were killed before my eyes. The riot police were shooting from the side. We thought they were nonlethal weapons, and people ran toward the troops. They shot and shot. At some moment they started to hit people on the arm, on the leg. One guy was hit in the forehead.”

Kazakhstan
Politics and Government
Deaths (Fatalities)
Demonstrations Protests and Riots
Nazarbayev Nursultan A
Police
Almaty (Kazakhstan)
Curfews
Strikes


Lindsey Vonn Fractures Arm, Putting Her World Cup Season in Question

Abstract: For the fourth time in the last five winters, a serious injury will interrupt Lindsey Vonn’s ski racing season. Vonn announced Friday on her Facebook page that she had “severely fractured” the humerus bone of her right arm in a training crash on Thursday. Vonn posted images of her X-rays, which showed that the bone had splintered . Vonn was training at Copper Mountain in Colorado, where three years earlier she crashed and tore her anterior cruciate ligament, an injury that caused her to miss the 2014 Sochi Olympics. “While I am beyond frustrated by this latest setback, at least my knees are ok and I will return to the slopes as soon as possible, as I always do!” Vonn wrote on her Facebook page. “Thank you for the continued love and support, it means so much to me.” Vonn added that she had undergone surgery to repair the broken bone. While she has charged into postsurgery physical therapy in the past, it is unclear when she will be fit to return. In February, Vonn’s 2015-16 season ended abruptly with a fall that resulted in three hairline fractures of her left knee. Vonn was leading the women’s World Cup standings at the time, chasing her fifth overall title. It had already been a comeback season, as she had broken her ankle four months earlier. At the 2013 world championships, Vonn tumbled violently down the course, tearing the anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments in her right knee. She also sustained a tibial plateau fracture in the knee in that crash. Despite a frantic rehabilitation effort, she was unable to return to form in time to race in Sochi in early 2014. Vonn, who turned 32 last month, wants to race until at least the 2018 Winter Olympics. She has been an almost unstoppable force in the super-G and downhill speed races, but staying healthy has increasingly become her biggest challenge. Vonn has won 20 World Cup season titles, two Olympic medals (including the first gold medal for an American in the women’s downhill) and 76 World Cup races. She is within 10 World Cup victories of the career record set by Ingemar Stenmark, a mark once thought to be all but unassailable. But Vonn’s racing style has always been to fearlessly attack each course, a tactic that usually separates her from the field but in the last three years has led to three torn knee ligaments, two substantial knee reconstructions, two fractures of her tibia, a broken ankle and now a shattered arm. Vonn even takes practice runs with an all-out aggressiveness. As Vonn said in an interview last year at her home in Vail, Colo., “I’m the last one standing of my generation of racers.” Now she must rehabilitate another injury. Vonn will almost certainly miss the three speed races early next month at Lake Louise in Canada, where she has won 18 times. In mid-December, there are a variety of other speed races and giant slalom races; Vonn usually participates in most disciplines except slalom. The bulk of the European-based World Cup schedule begins after Christmas.

Sports injury
Lindsey Vonn
Alpine skiing
Skiing


Bitter ‘Brexit’ Campaign Could Turn on Record Number of Voters

Abstract: LONDON — Politicians campaigning for and against British withdrawal from the European Union fanned out on Wednesday in a final, frenetic effort to build support on the eve of a referendum that could reshape the nation’s place in the world and upend the Continent’s dreams of closer integration. With polls showing a statistical dead heat, both sides went all-out to motivate their supporters to vote on Thursday, while financial markets and European leaders braced for the possibility that Britain could be the first nation to leave the 28-member bloc. Reflecting the stakes and the tension about the outcome, the tone of the campaigning remained negative to the end, complete with invocations of economic ruin and an allusion to the Nazis. Voters will be asked a single, simple question in the referendum: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” Image Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and a leading proponent of the Leave campaign, raised a pint of beer on the campaign trail in Piercebridge, northeast England, on Wednesday. Credit Scott Heppell/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A record number of voters — just shy of 46.5 million — have registered to take part. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. The country’s Electoral Commission said it anticipated a result on Friday morning “around breakfast time,” but cautioned that there was “considerable uncertainty” around the timing. The issue of a British exit, or “Brexit,” has deeply divided the governing Conservative Party, split families and neighborhoods, underscored the shortcomings of the Brussels bureaucracy and fueled the hopes of anti-European Union populists across the Continent. Prime Minister David Cameron closed out the campaign for remaining in the European Union with an argument that Britain will be more prosperous if it stays in the single European market of 500 million people — and he warned that there was no going back from a decision to leave. “You can’t jump out the airplane and then clamber back through the cockpit hatch,” he told the BBC. John Major, a former Conservative prime minister who also supports staying in the bloc, said that while the voters’ wishes must be respected, “If they vote to leave on the basis of half-truths and untruths and misunderstandings, then pretty soon the gravediggers of our prosperity will have some very serious questions to answer.” Quiz: The ‘Brexit’ Vote Is Here. How Much Do You Know? Britain is voting on whether to remain in the European Union. How many countries are in the bloc? Can the queen vote? Test your knowledge of these and other important questions. The former London mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative who is the most prominent face of the Leave campaign, crisscrossed the country on Wednesday, starting at London’s Billingsgate fish market. He got a rousing ovation when he declared in a televised debate on Tuesday night that “Thursday can be our country’s independence day.” Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, who has long campaigned against membership in the bloc, denounced the European Union as a project of elites, declaring, “This referendum is the people versus the establishment.” In a last-minute controversy, Michael Gove, the justice secretary and a leader of the campaign to leave the bloc, likened economists who warned of the dire consequences of withdrawal to Nazi-financed researchers who once denounced Einstein. (Mr. Cameron said that Mr. Gove had “lost it,” and Mr. Gove apologized on Wednesday.) Bettors Back Status Quo Some polls showed the Remain side with a slight edge and others showed the Leave side ahead, but in most cases surveys showed the race within the margin of sampling error. A “poll of polls” compiled by The Financial Times found that the campaign was ending close to a dead heat . ‘Brexit’: Explaining Britain’s Vote on European Union Membership Britain will hold a referendum on Thursday on whether to leave the European Union, a decision nicknamed “Brexit.” Financial markets have been more confident that Britain will vote to stay in the bloc, with the pound rising in value against the dollar this week. On Wednesday, the pound held steady, close to its high against the dollar this year. Bettors, too, have been putting their money on the Remain camp’s winning. On Wednesday afternoon, the odds implied an 80 percent chance of Britain voting to stay with Europe. One sign of hope for the Remain campaign: Most polls before the September 2014 referendum on whether Scotland should secede from the United Kingdom showed that contest to be neck-and-neck, but voters broke fairly decisively — 55.3 percent to 44.7 percent — in favor of the status quo. Some analysts say the same tendency of late-deciding voters to break toward the safety of the status quo and away from the risk of change will be at play this time around. Turnout and Voter Fatigue The general assumption is that those voters who want to quit the European Union, including older people, are more motivated than those who prefer to stay in Europe, including younger people, and that the Remain campaign will therefore face the bigger challenge in turning out its supporters. Image Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, continued to push for a British exit in London on Wednesday. Credit Facundo Arrizabalaga/European Pressphoto Agency The Leave campaign’s base of support is expected to be among low-income voters, those without university degrees, and older people. It is expected to run strongest in England. The Remain camp is likely to do well in London and other big cities, and with better-educated and more cosmopolitan voters. It is expected to perform strongly in Northern Ireland and in university towns, where students see advantages in being able to work freely in other European nations. Scotland is also strong territory for the Remain camp, though there is some evidence of political fatigue there. “My worry is turnout in Scotland and U.K.-wide,” said Alyn Smith, a member of the European Parliament with the Scottish National Party, who backs the Remain camp. “It is quite clear that the people who have committed themselves to leave will crawl across glass to get to the polling stations and on the Remain side it’s much more, ‘Why are we doing this?’ ” Matthew Goodwin , a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent, has written that the Remain camp was apparently more strategic in focusing its efforts on areas of strong support, while the Leave campaign had not done enough to lure votes in working-class areas of northern England where its message has resonated. Across the Channel Leaders in Europe have largely tried to avoid intervening in the referendum, though they have nearly universally urged British voters to remain, fearing a domino effect if Britain leaves, and a boost to populist parties that are growing in popularity, from Germany and the Netherlands to Greece and Spain. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy urged British voters on Wednesday to stay with Europe, writing in The Guardian that Britain would be “less great” if it were to leave. But Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France, said in a televised interview on Tuesday that “I would vote for Brexit, even though I believe that France has a thousand more reasons to leave the European Union than Great Britain does.” She cited France’s membership in the passport-free Schengen zone and in the eurozone. (Britain is not part of either.) “What does it mean, whatever the result: that the European Union is decaying, that there are cracks everywhere — what do we do?” she asked. “Do we wait for the flood, do we wait for the explosion? Or do we get around a table and build the Europe of nations, which will replace the totalitarian European Union to which we are subjected today?”

Referendum
EU
Great Britain
David Cameron
Brexit


A Doorman’s View of the Inauguration

Abstract: I HUDDLED under the portico of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, waiting for Aretha Franklin. It was 8:10 a.m. on Inauguration Day with a temperature of 25 degrees and a wind chill that felt like 50 below. I was wearing a charcoal gray doorman’s uniform and matching cap over a sweater, turtleneck and long johns, but my teeth and bones had already stiffened into icicles. A white Rolls-Royce Phantom turned up the driveway. My mentor, Eskander Isayas, a veteran doorman with a trim moustache and sparkling brown eyes, stepped in front of the car and waved it to a stop. That was my cue. I bolted over to the Rolls and yanked open the passenger side doors. Ms. Franklin and an entourage of at least a dozen minions and family members paraded out of the hotel lobby. I stood frozen in awe at the sight of the “Queen of Soul.” At age 66, swaddled in a bulky blue overcoat, her black hair coifed in shoulder-length waves, she exuded an inimitable regal air. Having performed a free concert at the Kennedy Center the night before, she was scheduled to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the presidential swearing-in ceremony on Capitol Hill. As Ms. Franklin approached the Rolls, I offered her my left hand, but she ignored it and slipped into the backseat without assistance. A woman wearing a white mink coat scrambled into the front seat. I ignored her and ogled Ms. Franklin, longing for some kind of keepsake acknowledgment. “Close the door,” Ms. Franklin said at last. I did as commanded and stepped back, blushing in embarrassment. The Rolls-Royce sped away with a police car in the lead and a white stretch limousine and a second police car bringing up the rear. It was a poignant reminder that I would have to strive to earn a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T, never mind a nice tip, during my stint as a rookie doorman. I felt like a mere bait fish in a glittering pond full of rich and famous whales. Along with the legendary singer, the Four Seasons guest list included Oprah Winfrey; Steven Spielberg; the billionaire George Soros; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and his wife, Maria Shriver; the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns; the media maven Arianna Huffington; and the actors Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and Natalie Portman. Even so, I took pride in the opportunity to work for one of the most prestigious brands in the hospitality industry. Based in Toronto, the Four Seasons is a management company that runs (but does not own) 80 luxury hotels worldwide. The Four Seasons at 2800 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Georgetown, is the only hotel in the District of Columbia that boasts a Mobil five-star rating and a AAA five-diamond rating. It has more than 450 employees and 222 rooms, a staff-to-room ratio of better than two to one. During a one-day training session the week before the inauguration, my Four Seasons colleagues had indoctrinated me in the hotel’s service culture standards. A chart posted in the hall near the human resources office literally spelled out the particulars using the seven letters in the word “service.” I managed to memorize less than half the list. “Employees will actively greet guests, SMILE, and speak clearly in a friendly manner,” decreed item No. 1. “Employees will make EYE contact even in passing with an acknowledgment,” item No. 2 declared. “All staff will create a sense of RECOGNITION by using the guest’s name, when known, in a natural and discreet manner,” added item No. 3. I was equally, if not more, daunted upon discovering that the Four Seasons had a so-called “glitch system.” As the hotel’s manager, David Bernand, informed me, when an employee makes a mistake like misplacing a piece of luggage, the error is entered into a computerized database. At a regularly scheduled meeting at 10 a.m. the following day, the hotel’s supervisors review the cause of the error and devise ways to compensate by offering the unintentionally mistreated guest extra attention and services. “We try to make the guest forget that we forgot their bags.” Mr. Bernand said. My role as a doorman demanded special grace and prowess. I would often be the first member of the hotel staff a guest saw upon arriving and the last one a guest saw upon departing. According to the head concierge, Javier Loureiro, who had started as a doorman when the hotel opened in 1979, I needed to have “radar” eyes. “We strive for seamless and intuitive service,” Mr. Loureiro said. “You have to be able to sense that someone is coming up behind you even when you are looking forward.” My doorman trainer, Eskander, noted that Inauguration Day would pose unique challenges in teamwork. The hotel was booked to capacity with more than 400 guests staying for a required five-night minimum at rates ranging from $895 a night for a standard room to $15,000 a night for the presidential suite. In addition to opening doors, I would be expected to assist the bellmen and the valet parkers in tagging luggage, ticketing cars and directing limo traffic. “Whenever someone else is busy, you pitch in,” Eskander said. On Inauguration Day, I arrived at the Four Seasons in the 5:55 a.m. darkness. I fetched my doorman’s cap, coat and trousers at the uniform pickup room in the hotel basement and dressed in the men’s locker room. I tried to practice a gracious smile in front of a wall mirror, but I kept flashing toothy grins and lippy leers that looked insincere and a little scary. I joined Eskander under the portico at 6:30. Shortly before my star-crossed encounter with Aretha Franklin, I greeted Denzel Washington and his wife, Pauletta Pearson, with a smile and a “Good morning.” Ms. Pearson, who was bundled in fur, paused to return my smile. Mr. Washington, who had not donned a winter coat, headed straight for an S.U.V. waiting in the driveway. While I never did see Mr. Soros, Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Spielberg — they evidently slipped out a side entrance on 29th Street — I spent the ensuing four hours opening the front door for hotel guests and visitors like Mr. Burns, Mr. Jackson, Ms. Portman, Ms. Huffington, the former baseball star Dave Winfield and the PBS talk show host Charlie Rose. Alerted that the rookie doorman on duty was actually a reporter, Ms. Huffington, a longtime Four Seasons habitué, offered a critique. “You look handsome in your uniform,” she allowed. “But you are not like the Four Seasons doormen who have been here for years. Don’t quit your day job.” Shortly before noon, I raced down to the flat-screen TV in the basement-level employees’ cafeteria along with more than 50 bellmen, housekeepers, desk clerks, cooks, valets, waiters, bartenders, supervisors and fellow doormen. When Barack Obama finished reciting his oath of office, I joined them in a spontaneous outburst of applause and cheers. By 1 p.m., I was back at my doorman’s post. Because the city’s core was cordoned off, even guests with limos had been forced to walk long distances to and from Capitol Hill. But almost everyone returning from the inauguration ceremony was in an ebullient mood. I got my first and only tip — a crisp dollar bill — from a man who snared one of the few available taxicabs. I got an even greater thrill when I greeted Governor Schwarzenegger by name and he responded. “Hey, good to see you,” he said. When my shift ended at 3 p.m., many of the guests were already getting dressed for the inaugural balls. Exhausted but inspired, I wanted to turn into a pumpkin or at least back into a reporter. I changed out of my doorman’s uniform, and departed the Four Seasons with a line from Mr. Obama’s Inaugural Address still ringing in my ears: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

Inaugurations
Executives and Management
Doormen
Washington (DC)
Four Seasons Hotel


‘Dumping’ of Homeless by Hospitals Stirs Debate

Abstract: LOS ANGELES, Feb. 22 — For a year, reports have surfaced that hospitals here have left homeless patients on downtown streets, including a paraplegic man wearing a hospital gown and colostomy bag who witnesses say pulled himself through the streets with a plastic bag of his belongings held in his teeth. Now, prosecutors are hoping a bill introduced last week in the State Senate will give them stronger legal firepower to charge the hospitals. Of the 55 or so reports of “patient dumping,” principally in the dilapidated quarter known as Skid Row, only a handful are being investigated for criminal activity, said Rocky Delgadillo, the city attorney. Only one hospital has been charged, using a misdemeanor count that has never been tested in court. The problem is that while California state law requires hospitals to have written procedures outlining follow-up care for patients, it does not expressly prohibit leaving them on the street. Advocates for the homeless said it was common in many cities for homeless people still requiring medical treatment to end up on the street or at the doors of shelters ill prepared for their medical needs. “Hospitals don’t know what to do with them, and they think it’s the homeless agencies’ responsibility,” said Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, a Washington advocacy group. Mr. Stoops said local and federal laws were murky, at best, over where homeless patients should be discharged. The proposed California law, written by members of Mr. Delgadillo’s staff and introduced by Senator Gilbert A. Cedillo, a Democrat from Los Angeles, would require hospitals to transport discharged patients to their residence or, if they lack one, to the place they identify as their home, typically a shelter. “There currently is no law making dumping homeless hospital patients on Skid Row a crime,” Mr. Delgadillo said Thursday at a news conference. “What we really need is legal clarity that specifically prohibits it.” The bill calls for a jail term up to two years and a fine of $1,000 for anyone violating the law. Hospitals could be fined $10,000 and placed on probation, opening the way to court orders dictating how they treat discharged patients who are homeless. Mr. Delgadillo said homeless patients often lacked insurance or other means to pay for their care, prompting hospitals to discharge them quickly. Skid Row seems a logical place to take them, with its profusion of shelters and social service agencies, but advocates for the homeless said few places could provide the necessary medical care. “We are set up to get people back on their feet, but we are not set up as a hospital,” said the Rev. Andrew J. Bales, president of the Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row. Prospects for the bill were unclear. A spokesman for Fabian Núñez, a Democrat from Los Angeles who is the Assembly speaker, said he supported it, but a spokeswoman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said it was too early to take a position on it. A similar measure Mr. Cedillo introduced last year was unsuccessful. Among the suspected patient-dumping cases that have drawn attention is one in which Mr. Delgadillo has charged Kaiser Permanente with misdemeanor false imprisonment involving a case last year caught on videotape. The case that has drawn headlines and indignation more recently involved the paraplegic man found crawling in the street on Feb. 8. A dozen people say they saw a woman driving a van from Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center leave the man in the street, with some saying she got back in the van and spruced up her makeup. Mr. Delgadillo said he was still investigating the case. Dan Springer, a spokesman for the hospital, said it had acknowledged that its procedures for releasing the patient had not been followed. Mr. Springer said the hospital was taking steps to ensure it did not happen again. James Lott, an executive with the Hospital Association of Southern California, criticized the proposed legislation, calling it “in a word, stupid,” and an example of Mr. Delgadillo’s “grandstanding.” Mr. Lott said federal laws already required hospitals to treat and stabilize patients before discharge and to provide a plan for follow-up care if needed. In addition, he said, hospitals downtown agreed two months ago to new procedures ensuring that homeless patients were not left on the street. He conceded the protocol had been violated in the case of the man found crawling in the street.


U.S. Sprinter Aiming for Olympics as a Rugby Player

Abstract: LONDON — Carlin Isles once competed against Tyson Gay and Justin Gatlin while trying to become an Olympic track athlete. Now 23, Isles has abandoned that goal. Sort of. He might make it to the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, but not on the track. Thanks largely to a YouTube video that has been viewed millions of times, Isles is something of a phenomenon in world rugby, the seven-a-side version that will make its Olympic debut in Rio. His personal best of 10.13 seconds for the 100 meters would have put him well inside the qualification mark for the semifinals at the London Olympics last summer. Isles believes he would have trimmed his time to 10.00 had he continued his track career. But while studying sprinting techniques on the Internet one night last year, he stumbled upon footage of sevens rugby and was intrigued. After sending an e-mail message to Nigel Melville, the former England captain who now serves as chief executive for USA Rugby, Isles had a rugby ball in his hands for the first time only four days later. “I thought to myself, ‘I could go to the Olympic trials, or I could play rugby,’ ” Isles said. “So I put all my eggs in one basket, because I didn’t want to waste any time. I fully believed that if I worked hard at this, things would pan out how they were meant to. “My best shot of making the Olympic team as a sprinter probably would have been in 2016 — but I’m really not a patient person. I was establishing my name a little bit, and I thought I could really establish myself — but I didn’t want to wait until I was 26 for my talent to shine.” Rugby last appeared in the Olympics in Paris in 1924, when the United States won gold in the 15-a-side form of the game. The sport is played mainly in Europe, Oceania, South Africa and parts of South America. The United States plays in the International Rugby Board’s Sevens World Series and recently secured its core status for next season, which would allow it automatic entry to every event, in turn improving its chances of competing in Rio de Janeiro. Since taking his position in 2006, Melville has tried to harness the physical attributes of those who do not quite make the highest grades in football and sprinting, and then teach them the intricacies of rugby. “The Olympics gives credibility to the sport of rugby here, because if you are a sport that’s not in the Olympics and is not professional, then what are you? You lack appeal,” Melville said. “But people know the Olympics and they know Olympic athletes. If you don’t want to play football or continue with track and field after college, but are looking for a sport, then rugby is now a viable option.” Isles, from a family of 11 siblings from Massillon, Ohio, earned a football and track scholarship to Ashland University. In his new pursuit, raw speed can get him only so far. “If you imagine never having seen a sport, and then trying to learn to play at an elite level straightaway, it isn’t easy,” Melville said. “In many ways, for him to understand it, we as coaches have had to go back to how we would coach a 7-year-old when they start playing.” Isles recently showed promise by scoring in the closing seconds to give the United States its first victory in more than 20 attempts against rugby powerhouse South Africa. This was in front of a record one-day crowd for sevens rugby of 71,898 at Twickenham Stadium in London. “One of my inspirations is to get to Rio — and I know that’s the same for every player in our team,” Isles said.

Rugby
2016 Summer Olympics
Track and field


Britain Is Scrutinizing Madoff Payments to Austrian Banker

Abstract: LONDON — British authorities have started an investigation into millions of dollars of payments from the operations of the convicted money manager Bernard L. Madoff to companies linked to the Austrian banker Sonja Kohn, an Austrian official confirmed on Friday. The Serious Fraud Office had asked Austrian prosecutors in May for help in investigating payments made by Mr. Madoff’s London office for research reports by Bank Medici in Austria, which was majority-owned by Mrs. Kohn, who also served as its chairwoman. “We’re closely cooperating with the S.F.O. and the U.S. Justice Department in that case,” the official, Gerhard Jarosch, a senior public prosecutor in Austria, said Friday. A separate investigation by the Austrian prosecutor into whether Mrs. Kohn and Bank Medici were involved with Mr. Madoff is continuing, he said. Prosecutors are looking into whether Mr. Madoff paid more than $40 million to Mrs. Kohn in exchange for turning three Bank Medici funds into feeder funds for his business, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing affidavits filed by prosecutors in the United States and Britain. The Austrian daily Der Standard reported last week that Mrs. Kohn received about £7 million, or $11.5 million, for research reports for which prosecutors were unable to find receipts. Carolin Treichl, a spokeswoman for the former Bank Medici, said Mrs. Kohn was “shocked” by the accusations that she received personal payments from Mr. Madoff and rejects such assertions “vehemently.” Mrs. Kohn has not been charged with wrongdoing but Bank Medici surrendered its banking license in March. Clemens Trauttenberg, a lawyer for the former Bank Medici, rejected accusations that there were any unaccounted payments to Mrs. Kohn or the bank. He said the British regulator had not yet contacted him or his client but that they were ready to cooperate. “Research reports about certain market segments and other issues were supplied and there is nothing forbidden about it,” said Mr. Trauttenberg after consulting with Mrs. Kohn, who declined to comment personally. “We already presented more than 100,000 pages of documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Several allegations were proven untrue recently.” Bank Medici, of which Mrs. Kohn owned 75 percent and UniCredit’s Bank Austria held the rest, generated most of its fees through Madoff-linked investments in 2007 even though Mr. Madoff’s name did not appear in the bank’s annual report that year. Once the fraud was discovered, Bank Medici appeared among the top entries on Mr. Madoff’s victims list. The bank managed and distributed funds that invested about $3.2 billion with Mr. Madoff. Mr. Madoff was sentenced this week to 150 years in prison, the maximum for his crimes. Mrs. Kohn has repeatedly said that she is a victim of Mr. Madoff. Mrs. Kohn is now trying to rebuild her reputation in the Austrian banking industry. She renamed the bank 20.20 Medici, using the term with which optometrists describe perfect vision. Keeping the Medici name is a sign that Mrs. Kohn is not trying to “rid herself of what happened in the past,” Mr. Trauttenberg said. At her new venture, Mrs. Kohn plans to offer advisory and research services.

Frauds and Swindling
Kohn Sonja
Madoff Bernard L
Bank Medici


Mississippi: 3 Sentenced to Prison in Racially Motivated Killing

Abstract: Three young white men who admitted they were out hunting black people to attack when they beat, ran over and killed a 47-year-old car plant worker in 2011 were sentenced Tuesday to federal prison after a hate crimes investigation. Judge Carlton Reeves of United States District Court sentenced Deryl Paul Dedmon, 22, to 50 years; John Aaron Rice, 21, to 18 and a half years; and Dylan Wade Butler, 23, to seven years on the most serious count against them, commission of a hate crime. All three men are from Brandon. They were charged in the death of James Craig Anderson. Prosecutors said the men had harassed or assaulted black people who they thought were homeless or intoxicated. Victims were chosen because the men thought they would not tell the police, the authorities said. The harassment began in April 2011, culminating in the death of Mr. Anderson. Seven others are awaiting sentencing.

Murders and Homicides
James Craig Anderson
Hate crime
Mississippi
Dylan Wade Butler
Deryl Paul Dedmon
John Aaron Rice


With Late Surge, Islanders Top the Rangers

Abstract: Rarely over the past two decades have the Islanders had a better record than the Rangers at any stage of the season. The Islanders certainly hope that this season — their last in Nassau County before they move to Brooklyn and a short subway ride from Madison Square Garden — will be different. Barely a week into the campaign, the Islanders made a bold statement on Tuesday in the teams’ 250th meeting, breaking open a 2-2 game early the third period on a goal by Kyle Okposo, then adding three more against Henrik Lundqvist for a 6-3 win at the Garden. The outcome left Lundqvist — who led the Rangers to the Stanley Cup finals last spring — somewhat vexed. “We have to talk about this obviously, and address it, and correct it,” Lundqvist said. “We don’t really want to talk about last year; now is a new season. We have some new players, and we just need to be on the same page.” The same can be said for the Islanders, who also feature a decidedly different cast from a year ago, when they finished last in the eight-team Metropolitan Division. They have added a new starting goaltender, Jaroslav Halak, the fleet Russian forwards Mikhail Grabovski and Nikolay Kulemin, and defensemen Johnny Boychuk and Nick Leddy. All played a role in dismantling the Rangers in the first of five meetings this season. Though outshot by 43-27, the Islanders played with the same tenacity they exhibited in back-to-back season-opening wins over the Carolina Hurricanes while taking full advantage of numerous miscues by the Rangers’ defensemen. Boychuk scored on a power play and Halak made save after save, especially in the middle period, when the Rangers fired 21 shots and scored only once. Then the Islanders’ captain, John Tavares, scored the type of momentum-altering goal that elite players often do, taking a pass from Kulemin after a giveaway by defenseman Michael Kostka and snapping the puck past Lundqvist at 15 minutes 3 seconds of the second. Image The Islanders’ Brock Nelson as a shot by his teammate Mikhail Grabovski slipped past the Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist in the third. Credit Bruce Bennett/Getty Images After Okposo’s goal — the 100th of his career — 48 seconds into the third off another giveaway in front by Kostka, the Islanders silenced the crowd with goals 30 seconds apart by Brock Nelson and Grabovski, at 4:50 and 5:20. “We wanted to simplify our game in the third, and we accomplished that,” Tavares said. “We were fortunate to get that early goal, and then everyone pitched in. We had more time and space to make plays, and we did.” The Islanders are 3-0 for the first time since 2001, and the Rangers have lost three straight after a season-opening victory at St. Louis. Lundqvist, who allowed all six goals in a 6-3 loss against Toronto before being pulled on Sunday, has allowed more than five goals in consecutive starts for the first time in his career. Perhaps more astonishing is the way the Rangers tend to fall apart at home, a problem that often plagued them in the first half of last season. “I think we all want to win so badly, especially at home, and sometimes you try to do more as a group and personally,” Lundqvist said. The Rangers have allowed 17 goals in their last three games, perhaps because their defensive pairings have been in flux since Dan Boyle broke his hand blocking a shot in St. Louis. Kostka was making his Rangers debut after Matt Hunwick had played two games in Boyle’s place. Rick Nash continued his offensive surge, opening the scoring at 6:21 of the first and scoring again late in the third. Nash has six goals and is the first Ranger with goals in each of the team’s first four games. But the Rangers have yet to score on a power play through four games, failing three times against the Islanders to go 0 for 11 on the season. “The difference in this game was probably the second period,” Rangers Coach Alain Vigneault said. “We have numerous Grade A opportunities but couldn’t score. Then we made a few mistakes, and they made us pay for it.” After Boychuk’s goal at 10:31 of the first, Derick Brassard put the Rangers ahead by 2-1 early in the second, converting a pass from Chris Kreider. The Rangers had the better of play until Tavares scored.

Ice hockey
Rangers
Islanders
Henrik Lundqvist
Rick Nash
John Tavares
Kyle Okposo
Johnny Boychuk


Bel Kaufman, at 100 Still a Teacher and a Jokester

Abstract: When Bel Kaufman sits you down on her sofa and asks, “Are you comfortable?” the right answer, she reminds you, requires a Yiddish inflection, a shrug and the words, “I make a living.” At 100 years old, Ms. Kaufman is still shpritzing jokes, Jewish and otherwise, which is in her genes. Her grandfather was the great Yiddish storyteller Sholem Aleichem, a writer who was able to squeeze heartbreaking humor out of the most threadbare deprivation and wove the bittersweet Tevye stories that became the source for “ Fiddler on the Roof .” This year, Ms. Kaufman did something more than tell jokes. She became one of the few adjunct professors in her age cohort and taught a course on Jewish humor at Hunter College , her alma mater. One of the jokes the class dissected: “The Frenchman says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have wine.’ The German says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have beer.’ The Jew says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have diabetes .’ ” “We were not just telling jokes,” Ms. Kaufman said in her book-lined Park Avenue study, her eyes glinting mischievously. “We were investigating why so many comedians are Jewish and so many Jewish jokes are so self-accusing.” “It goes back to immigration from the shtetl, from that poverty, and because the Jew was the object of so much opprobrium and hatred,” she said. “The jokes were a defense mechanism: ‘We’re going to talk about ourselves in a more damaging way than you could.’ ” Her first triple-digit birthday party was Tuesday, and Ms. Kaufman was honored by Hunter, with a medley of playfully reconstructed songs from “Fiddler,” and other honors coming from the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene and the Dutch Treat Club . Ms. Kaufman was 5 when her grandfather died, on May 13, 1916, and she believes she is the last person alive who remembers him and his impish humor. “I remember his laugh; I remember his hand when we walked,” she said. “He used to say the tighter I hold on to his hand, the better he will write. He wrote me a letter which I treasure: ‘I’m writing you this letter to ask you to hurry and grow up and learn to write so you can write me a letter. In order to grow up, it is necessary to drink milk and eat soup and vegetables and fewer candies.’ ” Ms. Kaufman graduated from Hunter in 1934, just 11 years after emigrating from the Soviet Union as a 12-year-old and being forced to start in first grade. Born in Berlin , she was raised in Odessa and Kiev, and the Russian Revolution was the background music of her childhood. “Dead bodies were frozen in peculiar positions on the street,” she recalled. “People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour. But a child has no basis for comparison. Doesn’t every child step over dead bodies? I didn’t know any different.” Ms. Kaufman’s hard work and the watchful eye of a demanding father led to a master’s degree in literature from Columbia and teaching jobs at a series of public high schools. Her 20-year odyssey became the springboard out of her grandfather’s shadow. In 1965, she published “Up the Down Staircase,” a novel about a new teacher very much like Ms. Kaufman who struggles to keep up her spirits in a school crowded with more than a few hopeful but ornery students and where memo-happy principals issue rules like not walking “up the down staircase.” It spent 64 weeks on The New York Times ’s best-seller list and led to Ms. Kaufman’s second career as a speaker. Ms. Kaufman, who is recovering from a broken rib, refused to have her photograph taken until she changed into a more elegant turquoise blouse, scarf and earrings. But, “without vanity,” she described herself as having been a “wonderful teacher.” Yet she recalled how difficult it was to get fully certified by a byzantine school bureaucracy. The examiners had her explain a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay , and told her afterward she had given “a poor interpretation.” Having been blocked once before because of a trace of a greenhorn accent, she refused to be stopped a second time. So she did what any true aspirant would have done: she wrote a letter to Ms. Millay and had her evaluate her interpretation. “You gave a much better explanation of it than I myself should have,” the poet wrote back, and the chastened examiners saved face by urging Ms. Kaufman to try for the license again. She now meets former students who are grandparents. Indeed, she cannot believe that she has a son, Jonathan Goldstine, 69, who is a retired professor of computer science, and a daughter, Thea, a psychologist, who is 67. Ms. Kaufman lives with her second husband, Sidney J. Gluck, 94, who runs the Sholem Aleichem Memorial Foundation. “He likes older women,” Ms. Kaufman said with a chuckle. Now that her rib is healing, Ms. Kaufman intends to resume her hobby — dancing mambos and tangos at a local school. Her determination helps explain how she made it to 100, though she does not think it is such a big deal. “It must have happened gradually, while I wasn’t looking,” she said. “I feel no different than I felt at 99, 98 or 97. Just because you live a long time, you get all this attention. Just because you survived? Of course, I survived a lot.”

Bel Kaufman
Judaism
Comedy
Hunter College
Sholem Aleichem


Japan’s Ruling Party Finds Itself in a Tight Spot

Abstract: TOKYO — Mounting troubles threaten the brief administration of Japan ’s unpopular prime minister, Taro Aso . The bigger question is whether time could also be running out for his Liberal Democratic Party and its half-century monopoly on political power in Japan. Mr. Aso’s frequent verbal gaffes have offended just about everyone from doctors to kindergarten mothers. A prominent lawmaker has defected from his party, and a former prime minister publicly rebuked him. Even his plan to bolster economic growth by giving away at least $130 in cash per person has been panned by the public as a cynical vote-winning gesture. If the party loses in elections this year, it could mean a drastic redrawing of Japan’s political lines, as Liberal Democratic lawmakers defect to create new parties or join the opposition, which has historically been weak and divided. It also raises the possibility of a radical rethinking of Japan’s increasingly ineffectual and dysfunctional politics, which have failed to produce the big changes needed to lift a nation that has slipped into slow stagnation. Political analysts and lawmakers say a defeat could even spell the end of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has appeared outdated with no ideology to bind it together beyond a desire to hold onto power. In its place could emerge new, more modern types of political parties bound together by a shared agenda and principles. “The party itself has grown obsolete,” said Tomoaki Iwai, a politics professor at Nihon University in Tokyo. For now, the winner would probably be the largest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, which endorses similar policies to the Liberal Democrats and also lacks an ideological core. The latest blow to the prime minister came Tuesday, when his finance minister resigned after appearing to be in a stupor during a news conference over the weekend at an economic summit meeting in Rome. The minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, who admitted to a glass of wine over lunch, blamed cold medicine for his strange performance, which was widely replayed on YouTube. The embarrassing news conference, and Mr. Aso’s tardiness in seeking Mr. Nakagawa’s resignation, have shaken a five-month-old administration that is already one of the least popular in postwar Japanese history. This week, panicked members of Mr. Aso’s own party began calling on him to step aside so the Liberal Democrats could install a new, more appealing leader before the coming general election for the lower house of Parliament. “The prime minister no longer has the ability, trust or integrity to manage the current political crisis,” Masazumi Gotoda, a Liberal Democratic lawmaker, told reporters on Wednesday. Even before the minister’s resignation, Mr. Aso’s approval ratings had dipped to single digits. An opinion poll published Feb. 10 by a leading newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, showed the Democratic Party of Japan had an approval rating of 28.3 percent, surpassing the Liberal Democrats’ 26.8 percent. A loss in the lower-house election, which must be called by mid-September, would remove the Liberal Democrats from Japan’s helm for only the second time since the party’s founding in 1955. The party lost power for 11 months in 1993. But many lawmakers and political analysts say pushing aside Mr. Aso could also backfire. Mr. Aso would become the third prime minister in less than three years to step down amid dismal approval ratings. That could further damage public confidence in the Liberal Democrats, already reeling from scandals, including the loss of millions of pension records, which outraged this rapidly aging nation. “The party is in a dilemma because it could lose either way,” said Atsuo Ito, an independent political analyst. The Liberal Democratic Party has been one of the longest-ruling political parties in the democratic world, founded to keep Japan firmly in the American camp against the Soviet Union, while focusing on export-led growth and building up the country with infrastructure projects. But in recent years, the party has increasingly looked like an exhausted relic from the cold war, say political analysts and lawmakers. The party appears stuck in its old ways, promising tens of billions in new public works to combat the current financial downturn, despite sinking Japan deeply into debt building roads to nowhere during its stagnant 1990s. Recently announced figures for the fourth quarter showed that Japan’s economy is deteriorating at its worst pace since the oil crisis of the 1970s. “The Liberal Democratic Party was not made for exerting strong leadership,” said Yoshimi Watanabe, a former minister of administrative reform who left the party last month. “But political leadership is exactly what Japan needs now.” Mr. Aso’s backers point out that this is not the first time that people have predicted the Liberal Democrats’ demise, saying that both Mr. Aso and the party can still bounce back. They say voters will warm to the cash handouts and other planned stimulus measures like a lowering of highway tolls. They are also counting on Japan’s cautious electorate to shy away from an untried opposition, though they admit that the Liberal Democrats must also find a new message to woo back voters. “The Liberal Democrats are a very flexible party, so it will adapt,” said Yoshihide Suga, a lawmaker who is deputy chief of the party’s election committee. The last time someone tried to change the Liberal Democrats was a half decade ago, when then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi vowed to save the party by destroying it. He broke the grip of the party’s powerful internal factions and weakened its embrace of rural voters with steep cuts in public works and the privatization of Japan’s huge postal system, a source of jobs. But analysts say Mr. Koizumi ended up crippling the party by failing to create an alternative political base. Since Mr. Koizumi’s departure in 2006, the party has appeared to lose its direction, a sense worsened by what seem to be flip-flops on crucial issues by Mr. Aso. This month, Mr. Aso told a parliamentary committee that he had opposed Mr. Koizumi’s postal privatization plan, despite boasting a few months earlier that he had been the minister in charge of it. Mr. Aso has also turned off voters by seeming to be out of touch. The wealthy scion of a family that owns a concrete conglomerate, Mr. Aso talks of drinking at upscale hotel bars at a time when his constituents face growing layoffs and economic distress. He has also been mocked for his chronic misreading of characters in the written Japanese language. “There’s an unmistakable mood here that it is time to give the Democratic Party a chance,” said Mr. Iwai of Nihon University. “But the Democrats have no experience running a country, so expectations aren’t high there, either.”

Elections
Aso Taro
Liberal Democratic Party
Japan


We’re Google. So Sue Us.

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 19 — Google attracts millions of Web users every day. And, increasingly, it’s attracting the attention of plenty of lawyers, too. As Google has grown into the world’s most popular search engine and, arguably, the most powerful Internet company, it has become entangled in scores of lawsuits touching on a wide range of legal questions, including copyright violation, trademark infringement and its method of ranking Web sites. Any company that is large and successful is going to attract lawsuits, and Google’s deep pockets make it an especially big target. But as it rushes to create innovative new services, Google sometimes operates in a way that almost seems to invite legal scrutiny. A group of authors and publishers is challenging the company’s right to scan books that are still under copyright. A small Web site in California is suing Google because it was removed from the company’s search results. And European news agencies have sued over Google’s use of their headlines and photos in Google News. In these cases and others, potential legal problems seem to give the company little pause before it plunges into new ventures. “I think Google is wanting to push the boundaries,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. “The Internet ethos of the 90’s, the expansionist ethos, was, ‘Just do it, make it cool, make it great and we’ll cut the rough edges off later,’ ” Professor Zittrain said. “They’re really trying to preserve a culture that says, ‘Just do it, and consult with the lawyers as you go so you don’t do anything flagrantly ill-advised.’ ” Now, with its planned $1.65 billion acquisition of the video site YouTube, which contains not just homemade videos but also copyrighted clips that users upload without permission, some observers say Google is exposing itself to a new spate of lawsuits. Along with YouTube’s 34 million viewers, Google will inherit a lawsuit filed last summer against the company. Robert Tur, who owns a video from the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that shows a trucker being beaten by rioters, is suing YouTube, accusing it of copyright infringement. “Clearly, we investigated that whole issue,” said David C. Drummond, Google’s general counsel and senior vice president of corporate development. Mr. Drummond pointed to the “safe harbor” provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A number of courts have held that under this provision, Web sites are not liable for copyrighted content posted by users, as long as they promptly remove it when it is pointed out to them. “We rely on the same safe harbor that YouTube relies on, so we’re fairly familiar with the issues,” Mr. Drummond said. “If you look at it, it’s somewhat illustrative of the kinds of lawsuits we face.” Google has been known to settle, but for the most part it aggressively fights litigation — so far with a good deal of success. Over the last few years, the company has spent millions in legal fees and hired a small army of bright young lawyers, many of them technically proficient and experts in the field of intellectual property. The company’s legal department has grown from one lawyer in 2001 to nearly 100 lawyers now, not just at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but also overseas. The company has also retained counsel at many outside law firms. Many of the lawsuits Google is facing carry little weight. Yet it has a vested interest in fighting all of them, even those of questionable merit, and seeing that they are resolved quickly. In part, this is because any lawsuit that reaches the discovery, the pretrial fact-finding phase, poses the danger of revealing too much about Google’s proprietary technology. Google also has an interest in establishing a solid body of legal interpretation in its favor. Many of the plaintiffs are asking for damages, but money is not always the issue. There are several cases, focusing on questions of intellectual property and trademark protection, that challenge Google’s whole way of doing business. These plaintiffs are suing Google to protect their well-established practices; their interest is not so much in remuneration as it is in getting Google to change its approach. Peter S. Menell, a professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that although Google’s well-established core search functions are not at risk, “there are a number of areas now in which new and exciting business models are being threatened.” Cases addressing trademark protection in Google’s ad system could hurt its bottom line, as the company’s revenue comes mainly from advertising sales, said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law in California. In one of the most important such cases to date, last year a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., dismissed a claim by Geico, the auto insurance company. Geico said that a Google policy of permitting Geico’s competitors to buy advertisements tied to searches for the keywords “Geico” and “Geico Direct” confused Web surfers looking for the company’s site. The two companies settled the case before the judge reached a full decision on the other issues involved. “This is Google’s cash cow,” Professor Goldman said. “If they can’t sell keywords freely, they’re not worth their market valuation.” Michael Kwun, a senior litigation counsel at Google, agreed that “the Geico case was very important.” Mr. Kwun said that establishing a body of precedent was a priority for Google, especially as legal interpretations continued to evolve. “If we don’t at least litigate to the point where we get rulings on the issues that matter to us, we’re left with less clarity in the law,” he said. Yet in the course of a long run of legal triumphs there have been a few bumps, and Google is facing some uncertain outcomes in the coming months. Copyright challenges are at the center of the uncertainty. In one case that could have large ramifications, Perfect 10, a publisher of pornographic magazines and Web sites, sued Google for using thumbnail-sized reproductions of photos in its image search results, among other things. Earlier this year, a Federal District Court judge in California said Google had violated copyright because it had undermined Perfect 10’s ability to license those images for sale to mobile phone users, and he issued a preliminary injunction. Google appealed the decision, and oral arguments before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit are scheduled for next month. Google’s use of snippets of copyrighted works has also raised the ire of news outlets. Last month, a Belgian court ordered Google to stop publishing headlines from Belgian newspapers without permission or payment of fees. And in a case pending in a Federal District Court in Washington, Agence France-Presse is suing Google, accusing it of violating its copyright by using its headlines, photographs and story fragments in Google News. Google is arguing that news headlines and short phrases are not copyrightable. “From our perspective, these are simple issues that were decided a long time ago,” said Alex Macgillivray, 34, whose title at Google is senior product counsel. The company is making the same argument in cases pending against its book search service. Representatives of publishers and authors are challenging the company’s practice of scanning books that are still under copyright. They argue that because Google must copy an entire book to make it searchable, it is violating the copyright of the author or publisher if it does so without permission. Google has offered to let publishers opt out of the book search program but has refused to ask permission to make the copies in advance. Google has been known to settle cases. But in general it mounts a vigorous defense, Mr. Goldman said. “If they get sued, they turn the tables on the plaintiff and file motions to get the upper hand in the case,” he said. Last spring, KinderStart, a small search engine in Southern California that focuses on information for parents of young children, sued Google after it noticed that its site had been removed from Google’s search results — leading to a loss of traffic and revenue for the company. Google said in court filings that an area of the site that permitted visitors to add links had been full of pointers to low-quality or pornographic sites, indicating that it was poorly maintained or was an effort to manipulate Google’s search results. KinderStart said the removal was unfair and unjustified and that Google’s guidelines on ways to avoid such punishment were too vague. A federal judge in San Jose dismissed the first version of the complaint, in essence agreeing with Google that the company is free to shape its search results in any way it chooses. KinderStart has filed a second, amended complaint, which is scheduled to be heard by the same judge on Friday. “We’re not against innovation at all,” said Gregory J. Yu, a lawyer for KinderStart. “But Google should not dictate what we should or should not see and find on the Web. They can knock off these small Web sites and there’s nothing the small Web sites can do.” In the KinderStart case, Google was quick to take the offensive. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed last spring, Google responded with a motion that, if granted, would throw out several of KinderStart’s claims and require KinderStart to cover Google’s legal fees. The judge deferred consideration of the motion. Professor Zittrain of Oxford said Google’s corporate mantra — “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” — gives some insight into its approach. “They actually see that as Promethean,” Mr. Zittrain said. “They think of it as bringing fire to humankind. And it may even cause them to be bolder than other companies.” Google’s legal muscle and shrewdness are not lost on those on the other side of the fights. “We’ve got a formidable legal team, but obviously it’s nowhere near the unlimited resources of Google,” said David A. Milman, the chief executive of Rescuecom, a nationwide computer repair company that sued Google on trademark infringement grounds similar to Geico’s — and quickly lost. The company said that it would appeal the decision. “People say you can’t fight the government,” Mr. Milman said. “Google, in this case, is very similar to the government. They’re the government of the Internet.”

Google Inc
YouTube.com
Computers and the Internet