Russian Bill Worries Adoptees and Families in U.S.

Abstract: As word spread last week that a house of the Russian Parliament had voted to prohibit adoptions of Russian children by American parents, Russian adoptees in the United States made appeals to President Vladimir V. Putin , asking Russia not to hold needy children hostage to international politics. With the proposed ban apparently rolling through Russia’s legislature, a loose network of hundreds of adoptees and their American parents started writing letters to the Russian leader, and they are planning a joint appeal to the country’s ambassador in Washington after Christmas. One leader of the effort is Tatyana McFadden , who was adopted at age 6 with spina bifida, paralyzed from the waist down, by Deborah McFadden of Clarksville, Md. “I probably wouldn’t have survived in that orphanage,” said Ms. McFadden, who is now 23 and a multiple medal winner at the London Paralympics , among other top racing honors. “Closing down adoptions would ruin thousands of lives.” The bill to end American adoptions has passed one house of the Parliament and could pass the other next week. Mr. Putin has refused to say whether he will sign or seek to alter it. It arose in response to a new American law imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of violating human rights, a law Mr. Putin has called an arrogant insult. As the adoptees, many of them young adults or teenagers now, make their own appeals to Russia, several American groups involved with adoptions and child welfare have asked their members to write legislators and President Obama to call for strong diplomatic measures. “Right now, the main thing is to ask Mr. Putin not to sign it,” said Randi Thompson, the executive director of Kidsave , a child-advocacy group based in Los Angeles and one of the organizations urging clients to contact Washington. While her group works in Russia to promote domestic adoptions, Ms. Thompson said, international adoptions remain the only alternative for thousands of children, many of them older or with disabilities that make them hard to place. In Moscow on Friday, in the strongest public statement on the issue yet from the United States, Ambassador Michael A. McFaul sharply criticized the bill, saying in a statement and in Twitter messages , “The welfare of children is simply too important to be linked to other issues in our bilateral relationship.” It is not clear whether the ban, if signed into law, would affect adoptions already in progress, but the threat has put adoption agencies and hopeful parents on edge, leading many to look to other countries. Even without the proposed ban, sending children to the United States had become more contentious within Russia in recent years, and some regions have slowed or virtually halted such adoptions. Katherine Horton, 49, a research professor in Alexandria, Va., and mother of one girl she adopted from Russia in 2008, traveled there last February and spent a week getting to know Polina, a girl now 19 months old whom she was also working to adopt. Ms. Horton has spent thousands of dollars on repeated medical tests and screening procedures and had expected to return in May to make final arrangements. But the months have dragged on without action or explanation from local Russian officials, and on Monday she made an excruciating decision. She notified the orphanage that she would give up her application for Polina. “As heartbreaking as it is for me, it is the right thing for Polina,” she said. “This could drag on for years, and the longer she stays in an institution the worse off she’ll be.” “It kills me,” she added. “I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about her, wondering how she is, if she is warm.” Some 45,000 Russian children have been adopted by Americans since 1999, according to State Department records, but after reaching a peak of 5,862 in 2004, the numbers have declined steeply, to 962 in 2011. Experts say the decline has resulted in part from a welcome push for domestic adoptions and foster care in Russia. But it also reflects increasingly stringent screening, paperwork and expenses for prospective foreign parents and a nationalistic reaction that has led some local officials, like those Ms. Horton faced, to hamper American adoptions. That reaction and increased screening that some adoptive parents call unnecessarily repetitive and costly were stoked by wide news coverage in Russia of episodes in which adopted Russian children in the United States were abused and died — tragedies, all agree, but rare events that led to criminal punishments. While adoption agencies applaud Russia’s efforts to nurture domestic adoption, which is not a strong tradition, they note that tens of thousands of children still languish in orphanages and that parents from other countries are unlikely to meet the need. “If the ban is adopted, some number of children will end up living in orphanages until they are old enough to hit the streets,” said Adam Pertman, the executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute , a research group in New York. Erin and Keith Thompson of Huntsville, Tex., have visited Russian orphanages annually as part of a Christian mission. After having a son, they adopted Sasha, now 14, at age 12, and Losha, now 17, when he was 16. “We have seen the hopelessness in those orphanages,” Ms. Thompson said. When they met Sasha, she recalled, an orphanage official told them that every year at Christmas, the boy would ask Santa Claus for a family. “There are so many children just waiting,” she said.

Adoptions
Russia
Orphans and Orphanages
Putin Vladimir V
Children and Childhood
United States International Relations


2 More Secret Service Employees Resigning

Abstract: WASHINGTON — After the Secret Service scandal erupted nearly two weeks ago, the accusations of egregious behavior by the men entrusted with protecting President Obama seemed clear-cut. Members of Congress and tabloids depicted a dozen agency employees meeting prostitutes in their hotel rooms and drunken revels at brothels or strip clubs involving up to 20 women. But now, as the Secret Service pursues an inquiry involving interviews with hotel maids, the women involved and the roughly 200 agents and officers assigned to Mr. Obama’s trip to Colombia, the investigators have pieced together a more nuanced story, complicating how the senior agency managers addressed the fates of their employees, according to two officials briefed on the findings. One official said that the misconduct in Cartagena, Colombia, ranges from personnel, including at least one veteran supervisor, who knowingly took prostitutes to their hotel rooms to at least two employees who had encounters with women who investigators now believe were not prostitutes. One officer, who is single, met a woman who investigators concluded was not a prostitute in a chance encounter at a bar before taking her to his room, according to the official. Another, who was cleared of serious misconduct but will face disciplinary action, had taken a woman to his hotel unaware that she was a prostitute until she demanded money, the official said. The man refused to pay and told her to leave, the official said. On Tuesday, the Secret Service announced that two employees under scrutiny would remain with the agency, two had resigned and proceedings to dismiss another had begun. Of the dozen originally implicated, a total of three will remain; six have resigned; two have been dismissed; and one has retired. While calling the scandal “the worst moment” in Secret Service history, Representative Peter T. King, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said Tuesday that the agency had moved “very quickly and aggressively,” and would continue the inquiry to make sure that national security was not compromised. The agency’s investigation, which also included polygraph tests of the employees, has been conducted amid intense attention from the news media and Capitol Hill. The Secret Service is also looking into whether there has been a pattern of misconduct on presidential trips to foreign countries. Some former officials questioned the rigor of the investigation into the activities of those on the Colombia trip, who included men from dog-handling, sniper and counterassault units. Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general for the Department of Justice from 2000 to 2011 and now a defense lawyer in Washington, said the fact that the investigation was conducted by the Secret Service — and not an inspector general — raised questions about the credibility of the findings. “An inspector general’s office, unlike the Secret Service, doesn’t have an interest in the outcome,” Mr. Fine said. “The Secret Service wanted to move quickly on this to show that they were taking care of it.” The investigation was complicated by the Secret Service’s rules of conduct that do not appear to clearly address the issue of whether their employees — most of them are male — can spend the night with a woman in a foreign country. One of the government officials said the misconduct standards were “kind of vague” for disciplining unmarried Secret Service personnel, as are many of those in question, who pick up a woman in a foreign country while on assignment. On Tuesday, a spokesman for the agency declined to comment when asked about the regulations. A government official who had been briefed in recent days by Secret Service officials said that agency officials could not answer the question of whether that conduct violated agency rules. “They said, ‘We teach all our agents that if they go to Amsterdam, they cannot smoke marijuana ,’ ” the official said. “But they couldn’t tell us whether there was anything explicit in their rules and regulations that said anything about whether one of their personnel could spend the night with a woman in a foreign country. They said they would have to get back to us on that, and they haven’t.” In forcing out some of the personnel, the agency fell back on the argument that some of the employees had jeopardized their national security clearance by their interactions with the women, according to the official. Without clearances, they could not perform their jobs. In North Carolina on Tuesday, President Obama called the Secret Service agents caught in a prostitution scandal “a couple of knuckleheads” who did not reflect the overall professionalism of the agency. “The Secret Service, these guys are incredible,” Mr. Obama said at a taping of Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show on NBC on the campus of the University of North Carolina . “They protect me, they protect our girls. A couple of knuckleheads shouldn’t detract from what they do. What they were thinking, I don’t know. That’s why they’re not there anymore.” The Secret Service has found no evidence that the women who spent the night with the personnel were foreign agents or that the women were exposed to classified information, according to government officials. Nonetheless, members of Congress continued to raise the issue on Tuesday. In a radio interview, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said that countries might be using prostitutes to obtain information about the United States and that the Russians were famous for using such tactics. The United States military has said that 11 enlisted personnel on the Colombia trip are also under investigation, and that at least half of them had violated curfew. But there are no accusations of involvement with prostitutes. In an echo of the Colombia situation, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Tuesday that three Marines acting as security guards and one embassy staff member at the American Embassy in Brazil had been disciplined and sent home late last year after they became embroiled in a dispute with a prostitute at a Brasília night club. According to a Defense Department official who asked for anonymity because he was discussing secret information, the Marines got into a car with the woman and then disagreed over her payment. In the process the Marines pushed the woman out of the car, breaking her collarbone, the official said. After a Navy investigation, all the Marines were disciplined, with two receiving demotions in rank. The case has been well covered in the Brazilian news media, and Mr. Panetta, who was in Brazil on a weeklong visit to the region, was asked about it by a reporter at the news conference. “This incident was fully investigated, and those that were involved have been punished and held accountable,” Mr. Panetta responded. “They are no longer in this country, they were reduced in rank and they were severely punished for that behavior. I have no tolerance for that kind of conduct.”

Secret Service
Prostitution
Cartagena (Colombia)


Move Over, Anna Nicole, Here's Barry

Abstract: SAN DIEGO - THE former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith is known for her helium-filled assets, wacky mood swings and indecipherable rants -- and so is Barry Bonds. "It's very expensive to be me," she once complained. "I tell my kids, 'You know what, just don't be famous,' " he once complained. So for the money, the high-maintenance Smith parlayed her bizarre persona into a campy, if absurd, television reality series a few years ago. So for the fame, the contradictory Bonds is parlaying ESPN's deficit of integrity into a vehicle for his image rehab, wielding editorial control over his own reality series. It is called "Bonds on Bonds," but will anyone watch reality TV if it's about a phony? If last night is an indicator, then yes, because there is a wide audience with morbid curiosity. There was a touch of the twisted last night. For most of the evening, the laid-back tofu crowd of Padres fans at Petco Park provided Bonds with exactly what he craves: attention. Through eight innings, there were hearty boos when his name was announced and signs with Magic Marker asterisks colored on them. Fans also faintly chanted "Game of Shadows," in reference to a book written by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters who divulged court records as proof of Bonds's methodical use of steroids. Bonds always seems amused by reactions -- and often is even motivated by hostility -- but he was not sure what to make of a large plastic syringe thrown in his direction as he trotted to left field before the ninth inning. Reporters standing near the field said he plucked the syringe with his glove. "I just put it off the field so no one would get hurt," he said after going 1 for 4 with a ground-rule double in the Giants' 6-1 loss to the Padres. He didn't seem upset, just bewildered. He also chose to offer no opinions on the jeers, boos or signs But he did offer this strange reply, "I can't read, so I don't understand what they're saying." Another day of Barry being Barry. Does such nonsense attract viewers? Bonds and ESPN are betting on it. There is a niche in insipid broadcasting, as Anna Nicole Smith discovered. But there is a critical difference between Smith and Bonds: She is an opportunist marked by a vacuous shtick; he is a narcissist marked by a conscience vacuum. Bonds's interests are always first. He could easily call his amazing career a day before making a mockery of baseball's hallowed home run record, before replacing the dignified Hank Aaron with his tainted presence. Bonds could make like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa: shrink and vanish. But Bonds is bigger than ever. He walked to the plate on opening day with his outsized body and 10-gallon hat size and the swing of a helicopter blade. "You get big because of two kinds of drugs, anabolic steroids and human growth hormone," said Dr. Gary Wadler, a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency. Baseball does not test for HGH because players will not give blood, the only valid testing method available. Players may allow needles during physicals, but they will give up only a Dixie Cup for the doping police. "There is no way to know if a player is clean in respect to growth hormone," Wadler said. "I don't know why they've drawn that line in the sand, but baseball has done it." Few stars create more moral ambivalence than Bonds. Cheat or not, surly or sweet, his behavior is often excused through loopholes in integrity. ESPN is willing to compromise its trust with viewers for him. Giants fans are willing to defend him no matter what lurks in his urine samples. And Giants Manager Felipe Alou is willing to blame Bonds's ex-mistress for ratting out her erratic ex-sugar daddy. "If everyone's house is clean -- and I'm talking about adultery, too -- throw the first rock," Alou said before the game last night. Bonds's pursuit of Aaron's record has left baseball confused about what's right and wrong, too. If "Game of Shadows" prompted an internal investigation by baseball, hasn't it also triggered the reasonable cause paragraph in the drug-testing policy? Shouldn't Bonds, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield -- all outlined as steroid users in the book -- be tested more than twice a year? "In general, if there is information in a book or a newspaper, it would depend on how it was sourced," said Rob Manfred, baseball's executive vice president for labor relations. "If sourced material is credible, that could be enough." What else can "Game of Shadows" provide: photos of an injection? It probably wouldn't matter. Bonds won't acknowledge any evidence. Whenever confronted, he makes the same move he did with the plastic syringe: tosses it to the side. Bonds simply pushes ahead in his own strange reality, ready to make a show out of it. But not to be confused with Anna Nicole Smith, he is a narcissist more than an opportunist. They may share the same fate, though. Smith's reality series opened to big numbers but quickly spiraled into cancellation. Weird and sensational celebrity does have an expiration date. Sports of The Times E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS
BONDS BARRY
SMITH ANNA NICOLE
BASEBALL
STEROIDS
SPORTS OF THE TIMES (TIMES COLUMN)


Jordan Spieth Is Chasing a FedEx Cup First: A Repeat Title

Abstract: NORTON, Mass. — Jordan Spieth checked in with his second straight 68 on Saturday to stand five shots off the lead at the Deutsche Bank Championship. He is vying for his third win of the season while also positioning himself to do what no one has done in the nine-year history of the FedEx Cup: Repeat as the Cup champion. In just giving himself that opportunity — he is guaranteed a position in the final two tournaments — Spieth is a FedEx Cup outlier. He is just the second defending FedEx Cup champion to qualify for the season-ending Tour Championship, joining Brandt Snedeker, the 2012 winner. Tiger Woods is the only two-time FedEx Cup champion, winning the inaugural event in 2007 and again in 2009. Woods was injured for the 2008 FedEx Cup playoffs and did not qualify for the 2010 Tour Championship. A look at the plight of FedEx Cup champions the year after reveals an understandable slippage. The $10 million bonus certainly helps. But does it also make players subconsciously complacent or less hungry? “I don’t think any of the winners say, ‘I just won the FedEx Cup; I don’t care anymore,’” said Bill Haas, the 2011 FedEx Cup champion. “If anything, it fires them up and drives them to succeed.” But, he added, “at the end of the day, when we tee it up, no one cares how many times you finished 12th in your career.” Haas said: “What people care about and what you’re measured by are wins. And it’s hard to win out here, even for FedEx Cup champions.” Of the eight FedEx Cup winners, half went winless the year after their championship season. Vijay Singh still has not won a tournament since the Deutsche Bank Championship in 2008, the year he won the FedEx Cup. Billy Horschel, the 2014 champion, has not won since taking the 2014 Tour Championship. Jim Furyk, the 2010 FedEx Cup champion, went five years before his next victory. Henrik Stenson, the 2013 champion, did not win again on the PGA Tour until this year’s British Open. Spieth, however, wasted no time establishing his 2016 bona fides, winning the Hyundai Tournament of Champions in Hawaii in January, his third start of the season. He also won the Dean and DeLuca Invitational in Texas in May and was ranked fifth in FedEx Cup points heading into this weekend, the second leg of the four-tournament FedEx Cup playoffs. “I didn’t feel that it impacted the way I started the year whatsoever,” Spieth said. “It doesn’t affect the next year. You want to try and improve and I think everyone thinks the same way.” He added: “For some reason or another, that hasn’t been the case. I don’t think it’s a trend that is common.” Haas was something of a surprise as the winner of the FedEx Cup in 2011. He won the Tour Championship, his only victory that season. He was ranked 25th in the FedEx standings before the Tour Championship. He has three wins since, including one the next season at the Northern Trust Open. “Those three wins I’ve had since the Cup have meant more to me than the three I had before, because you’re saying it wasn’t a fluke,” Haas said. “I can play out here. I can compete out here. Winning the Cup should fire you up and validate that you are worthy of all that.” Haas came close to returning to the Tour Championship in 2012, ending up 31st on the FedEx points list. He still agonizes over that, four years later. “You want to make that final 30, and I knew Brandt was the first one to make it back to the Tour Championship after winning it all the year before,” Haas said. “It was one of my goals that year, was to make it back. So missing it was a big deal. One year, I was No. 1. The next year, I was No. 31. It’s hard to stay on top.” Spieth (six under par) and Haas (four under) are some distance back from the second-round leader, Kevin Chappell, who is at 11 under after shooting a seven-under 64 on Saturday at T.P.C. Boston. Chappell had six birdies and an eagle. He is winless this year but has three second-place finishes and entered the tournament No. 13 in the FedEx Cup standings. Neither Horschel nor Singh made the cut. Also missing out on the weekend were Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson. The world No. 1, Jason Day, survived a quadruple-bogey eight on No. 5 and finished with an even-par 71 to make the cut at one under.


Whiplash Can Follow a Car Crash or a Wedding Announcement

Abstract: Teaneck, N.J. Teaneck’s tale of love, money, sexual orientation and Torah began innocently enough. A young couple, who grew up in Conservative Jewish congregations, who met at a Jewish day camp and whose lives have been dominated by Jewish interests, sent a wedding announcement to The New Jersey Jewish Standard . It said that Avichai Smolen, 23, and Justin Rosen, 24, planned to be married this month by Rabbi Joshua Gruenberg at North Shore Synagogue in Syosset, N.Y. After much deliberation, the newspaper ran the announcement — the first in its 79-year history for a same-sex marriage — in its Sept. 24 issue. Then, in its next issue, citing complaints from Orthodox rabbis and a “firestorm” that resulted, it issued an apology for the “pain and consternation” the announcement had caused members of the Orthodox community. It promised not to run similar announcements again. Then, after firestorms from other corners, the newspaper released a statement on Tuesday reconsidering its reconsideration. It said the paper may have acted too quickly and listened to only one segment of its readership, which includes Bergen County and beyond, Orthodox and non-Orthodox. What it says about Teaneck, a community with a history of diversity, a contentious civic culture, a Muslim mayor and an increasingly dominant Orthodox Jewish community, is worth an entire rabbinical commentary in itself. But coming at the same time as the suicide of Tyler Clementi , a Rutgers University student, it played out like a Talmudic variation on contemporary themes. Jews may have a reputation for tolerance, but they are splintered on gay issues. Reform and Reconstructionist communities tend to be supportive, Conservative ones conflicted but generally not hostile, and Orthodox leaders, if not all congregants, usually staunchly opposed. So there was some sympathy for The Standard’s plight. “This is one where they almost couldn’t win,” said Andrew Silow-Carroll, editor in chief of The New Jersey Jewish News, which serves a much less Orthodox readership. Mr. Silow-Carroll said his publication ran its first same-sex wedding announcement in January and received no response. “The Orthodox community has huge economic clout,” he said. “If they put out the word that their members shouldn’t be reading or advertising, it could be crippling for a newspaper that size.” Many others were surprised that the paper didn’t figure out the politics in advance and show more resolve. “The news that your paper will no longer publish gay marriage announcements reflects craven cowardice,” one reader wrote on the paper’s Facebook page. “Some letters from Orthodox rabbis changed your mind? What did you expect Orthodox rabbis to say?” “You didn’t realize you’d have to have a little backbone when you made the decision to publish the announcements in the first place?” the reader added. Neither the Orthodox rabbis contacted nor the newspaper responded to phone calls. And on the streets of Teaneck, businesspeople preferred to speak anonymously, rather than risk offending. Still, there was widespread speculation that the economic clout of the Orthodox gave them outsize influence. “This decision didn’t reflect the whole Jewish community,” said Rabbi Steven Sirbu, of Temple Emeth, a Reform congregation in Teaneck, where nearly all the other Jewish congregations are now Orthodox. “It looks like the newspaper was held hostage in some way by a small group of Orthodox leaders.” Another rabbi, David Kirshner, of Temple Emanu-El, a Conservative congregation in Closter, said that while critics of the same-sex announcement couch their argument in terms of Scripture, the newspaper contains numerous elements that can be seen as impious — like ads for nonkosher restaurants. “Make no mistake about it,” Rabbi Kirshner wrote in a public letter. “This is homophobia masquerading as religious piety. Pure and simple.” Mr. Smolen and Mr. Rosen have felt more than a bit of whiplash , but they figure that, in a distinctly Jewish way, maybe controversy could lead to greater understanding, particularly of the way being marginalized or excluded can have tragic consequences. They will sign papers for a civil marriage in Greenwich, Conn., on Thursday and have a traditional wedding ceremony Oct. 17. “We’re very happy about the conversation this has engendered,” Mr. Rosen said “and think it’s incredibly important both inside the Jewish community and without.”

Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage
Judaism
Teaneck NJ
Homosexuality


Nine to Five, and Then Some

Abstract: Q. Your boss expects you to work long hours, and your personal life is suffering. What can you do to keep both your job and your sanity intact? A. As soon as your professional life overshadows your personal one, speak up. Cali Williams Yost, president of Work+Life Fit, a strategic consulting company in Madison, N.J., said that even if employees were not upset about how much they were working, dwindling personal time would breed disillusionment down the road. "If you don't put a stop to it early on, you become so burned out, unproductive and overwhelmed that eventually you leave without even trying to salvage the situation," said Ms. Yost, author of "Work+Life: Finding the Fit That's Right For You"(Riverhead, 2004). Q. Whatever happened to the eight-hour workday? A. It may seem that the average workday has lengthened considerably since the 1980 film "Nine to Five." Many industries are downsizing and workplace tasks have become more complicated, placing a greater burden on fewer employees. Jim Murphy, founder and chief executive at Afterburner, a management consulting firm in Atlanta, calls this phenomenon "task saturation," and he notes that in areas like consulting, financial services and law, it's not uncommon for junior staff members to work 12- or 14-hour days. But the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average American employee is still working close to an eight-hour day. Last year, companies employing a total of 48 million workers reported that more than 72 percent of them worked about 8.25 hours a day. In a 2002 report, the Families and Work Institute in New York reported that 67 percent of roughly 3,500 salaried employees said they worked 35 to 50 hours a week. Q. Is it legal for companies to expect employees to work long days? A. It depends on the workplace and the job. Federal law mandates overtime pay after 40 hours a week for most workers, but there are important exemptions for executives, administrative personnel and outside sales employees, among others. And mandatory overtime may be routine for some workers -- certain hospital employees, for example. Companies do not typically advertise that they expect employees to work 12-hour days; instead, they nurture a corporate culture of overachieving and leave employees to make scheduling choices on their own. Julie Jansen, author of "You Want Me to Work With Who?" (Penguin, 2006), experienced this firsthand as a business consultant. Her bosses encouraged her to work harder, she said, even though she was already putting in 70- and 80-hour weeks. "I remember pleading with them at one point for an assistant or someone to help," said Ms. Jansen, who lives in Stamford, Conn. The situation was never resolved, she said, and it finally drove her to quit. Q. How do you request a lighter schedule without looking like a slacker? A. The best way to get a reprieve is to demonstrate that you deserve one. First, chart your hours over a two-week period, and try to quantify the projects you have handled over that time. Then, meet with the boss and cite the list as proof of your contributions to the firm. Armed with these facts, you should be able to make your case without being viewed as an underachiever. Nevertheless, be tactful. The boss is probably overworked as well. Christine M. Riordan, professor of management and associate dean of the M. J. Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, says it is important to avoid sounding like a complainer. "You need to put yourself in your boss's shoes," Ms. Riordan said. "What are the market conditions? What demands and pressures might he be facing?" Q. What practical moves might reduce the number of hours you spend at work? A. Improve your time management. Offer to take work home or to telecommute. Look into alternate work schedules -- some companies give employees every other Friday off if they work nine 10-hour days in between. There's also flextime -- a customized schedule that lets an employee incorporate personal needs like child care into a workday. Several studies show that these approaches to scheduling can be effective. In a 2005 study titled "Making Flexibility Work: What Managers Have Learned About Implementing Reduced-Load Work," professors at Michigan State University in East Lansing found that productivity and team effectiveness soared at companies that responded creatively to the demand for flexible schedules. "Just because an employee works long hours doesn't necessarily mean that he or she is productive," said Ellen Ernst Kossek, a professor of labor and industrial relations at the university and one of the authors of the study. "Sometimes a flexible work schedule or slightly fewer hours can do wonders for an employee's effectiveness and desire to get involved." Q. What should you do if the boss is unwilling to compromise? A. If you ask for a lighter workload, be prepared for all possible outcomes, including rejection, said Ken Siegel, president of the Impact Group, an organizational consulting firm in Beverly Hills, Calif. "Ultimately, everybody, including your boss, has a job to do," Mr. Siegel said. "If the boss promises you that the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train bringing you more work," maybe you should keep going. "Otherwise," he added, "it might be time to start looking for a less demanding job." OFFICE SPACE: CAREER COUCH Workplace or career topics may be sent to ccouch@nytimes.com.


Some Urge U.S. to Focus on Selling Its Skills Overseas

Abstract: In the drive to double America’s exports, Washington has been focusing on manufacturers. But that may be the wrong target. With an educated work force, a culture of innovation and strong capital markets, the United States has a larger comparative advantage in high-skilled services like engineering, law and finance than in lower-skilled manufacturing jobs that rely on cheap labor. For these reasons, economists see tremendous potential for growth — if, that is, Washington helps clear the way. “There is for some reason this manufacturing fetish in America that is not consistent with U.S.’s fundamental economic interests.” said Aaditya Mattoo, the research manager at the World Bank. “Meanwhile, there are these barriers which American services companies face in establishing abroad, and no one talks about them.” Under current policy, manufacturing companies enjoy special tax cuts and other subsidies, and can count on the government to protest when American goods face unfair tariffs. For example, when India passed tariffs on alcohol imports that tripled the price of Jack Daniels whisky, the United States fought back. But to this day India requires New York Life Insurance to give three-quarters of its Indian profits to a local partner, Washington does not intervene. As the developed world has gotten wealthier, global demand for skills and services — especially the higher-end ones — has risen. In the United States, services increasingly dominate the economy. Employment in this sector has risen steadily since the 1960s, with 70 percent of Americans now working in service industries. And America already exports more services than any other country in the world, even more than the next two competitors combined. In 2011, that amounted to $612 billion exported in services, up 10.1 percent from 2009, and up 136 percent since 1991. Still, there is great untapped potential for more, since all of these exports are being sold from a tiny share of all the American companies that could participate in the global marketplace. “There is this huge infrastructure boom where these big, fast-growing economies are going to need to build out their roads, sewers, telecommunications networks, factories, airports, harbors, you name it,” said J. Bradford Jensen, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and author of a recent book on global services trade. “All those projects require armies of architects, engineers, project managers, financial insurers. These are all the kinds of tradable services that we have an advantage in providing.” Given these opportunities, Mr. Jensen estimates that the United States has the potential to more than double its annual exports of services annually, creating an additional $800 billion in tradable business services like engineering and law alone. (“Tradable” refers to services that can easily be done across borders, as opposed to work like cutting hair or drawing blood.) Meeting this potential in business services would support or create about three million jobs, by his estimate. These jobs pay significantly higher wages than manufacturing jobs, even when controlling for how educated workers are and other demographics, he added. To some extent American companies are staying at home because of cultural or language barriers, worries about intellectual property protection and corruption, and sometimes lack of interest. Often, though, countries ban or place quotas on services from abroad that make these imports prohibitively expensive. One 2010 study estimated discrimination against services imports in some of the major emerging markets like China, India and Indonesia was effectively equivalent to a tariff on these imports of more than 60 percent. In Malaysia, for example, 80 percent of television programming must originate from local production companies owned by ethnic Malays. Brazil has similar quotas for movie screenings. In other cases, foreign laws make it extremely expensive or complicated for American entrants. In India, foreigners are not allowed to own more than 26 percent equity in an insurance company, regardless of how much the local partners provide. “Taking a minority shareholding and doing 100 percent work doesn’t hold up for us,” Ajit Jain, who heads Berkshire Hathaway’s reinsurance business, told an Indian newspaper last year. The company opted to sell another company’s insurance products through a Web site rather than to expand its own underwriting business in India. Mr. Jain did not return calls from The Times. China has many similar partnership requirements, along with other limits on foreign businesses. For example, the government tightly restricts the routes of planes operated by foreign delivery services. “There’s a very narrow band of space we can fly in,” said Daniel J. Brutto, the president of U.P.S. International. “If there’s bad weather in China, our planes are not going anywhere. That means our deliveries will take longer.” Other American companies have been comparably restricted, if they can get into the country at all. Cigna has been selling health insurance in China since 2003 (with a Chinese partner), but has been allowed to expand into only one new province a year, according to Tyrrell Schmidt, Cigna International’s chief marketing officer. A director at a major international bank — who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the Chinese government, as did managers at other companies interviewed about expanding abroad — said the organization had scores of employees in China, and about 90 percent of them were there solely to deal with the country’s regulatory issues and licensing requirements for foreigners. Most of America’s public efforts to increase exports to China, however, involve whether the country’s currency policies are making its goods artificially cheap. “What we really care about is market access,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a trade economist at Cornell University who focuses on China. “And that’s where we’re having trouble getting politicians to take notice.” Part of the reason that the United States doesn’t aggressively protest when other countries hinder services is that it doesn’t have the authority. Multilateral trade agreements have led to relatively freer trade in goods, but not in services. The United States can file a dispute with the World Trade Organization over a tariff, but generally cannot do the same for licensing fees, partnership requirements and other obstacles that countries can impose on services. The United States has negotiated freer market access with a few countries, including South Korea and Chile . Though a broader services agreement has been talked about for decades, it has repeatedly been put off for various reasons. Developing countries have declared they must liberalize trade in agriculture before even considering services, and Congress is reluctant to dismantle its generous agricultural subsidies. Another obstacle is that the states, and not the federal government, control market access for many services through licenses. For example, the federal government doesn’t control whether a worker can practice law in Arizona; Arizona does. That makes it difficult for America’s federal trade negotiator to work with other countries over licensing issues. Some business leaders also want to fight protectionism with protectionism rather than invest more efforts in trade negotiations. Because some foreign governments allow only their own engineering firms to bid on state-financed projects, there are questions about whether American projects should remain open to international competitors. “It’s not a level playing field,” said Gregs G. Thomopulos, the chief executive of Stanley Consultants in Muscatine, Iowa, and a past president of the International Federation of Consulting Engineers . He said the American government should retaliate by blocking foreign bids on American aid projects. “We’re using American money and we need to showcase American experience,” he said. “What better way to help the job process than by employing American firms and American staff who pay taxes here?” Perhaps the most basic constraint is not abroad but here in the United States, which has relatively tight immigration controls. Services often require workers to travel freely across borders. Asking India to allow American consultants to enter and leave Delhi at will is difficult if the United States cannot — or, more accurately, will not — reciprocate. Economists acknowledge concerns about freer trade displacing some American workers. But they say the United States would nonetheless have a net gain in jobs if borders everywhere were more open. “We need to have a visa policy that allows businesses to operate efficiently at home and abroad, and that allows all professionals to be able to move back and forth between corporate offices,” said Jeffrey J. Schott, a former trade negotiator and now senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. “If we don’t, why would anyone else?”

International Trade and World Market
Labor and Jobs
United States Economy
Factories and Manufacturing
Economic Conditions and Trends
India
China
Service Industries


Unseeded Wozniacki Wins Women’s Final of Pilot Pen

Abstract: NEW HAVEN (AP) — Marin Cilic won his first ATP Tour event Saturday, beating the American Mardy Fish, 6-4, 4-6, 6-2, at the Pilot Pen in New Haven, a tuneup for the United States Open. Despite having the crowd against him, the 19-year-old Cilic broke the hard-serving Fish five times, three times in the final set, securing the victory in his first finals appearance. After hitting a 123-mile-per-hour ace for match point, he threw his hands in the air, then paused, unsure of what to do next. Eventually, he dropped to his knees. “My mind was rolling so much,” he said. “But it’s fine. Probably I’ll get to know next time how to celebrate.” His best decision of the night might have come at the coin toss, when the 6-foot-6 Cilic elected to receive. He broke Fish, 26, in the first game and made that hold up in the first set. “I was feeling that it’s better that I get one game before I start to serve to get a little bit in the match, to hit few balls, just to feel how I’m going to do in the first game, not to be too nervous,” Cilic said. After dropping the second set, he broke Fish again to open the third. Fish came back with a break of his own, but Cilic responded in the next game and broke him again in the sixth game. Cilic held Fish to only 5 aces and had 11 of his own. Fish, who lost to James Blake in the men’s final a year ago, was trying for his third career victory, and first since 2006. “I would have liked to have played better,” Fish said. “This is my 11th final, and I’ve only won twice. It’s starting to really sting, you know, nine times losing. I’ve got a lot of runner-up trophies in my office in my house.” WOZNIACKI WINS WOMEN’S TITLE Unseeded Caroline Wozniacki won her second title this month, beating top-seeded Anna Chakvetadze, 3-6, 6-4, 6-1, in the women’s final. The 18-year-old Wozniacki had not been in a WTA final before August. She earned her first WTA Tour victory in Stockholm, then reached the third round at the Beijing Games, where she lost to the eventual gold medalist, Elena Dementieva. Her run included victories over eighth-seeded Dominika Cibulkova, third-seeded Marion Bartoli and seventh-seeded Alize Cornet.

Chakvetadze Anna
Tennis
United States Open (Tennis)
Women's Tennis Assn


In SungEun Grace Lee Case, Right to Die Is Weighed Against a Family’s Wishes

Abstract: In a video uploaded to YouTube on Thursday, a man in a black baseball-type cap tenderly strokes SungEun Grace Lee’s forehead as she sits propped in her hospital bed. Then he asks if Ms. Lee, a 28-year-old financial manager who is on life support with terminal brain cancer, would be willing to let her father, who does not want to let her die, make her medical decisions for her. “So, are you willing to sign over your medical proxy to your father?” Ms. Lee, paralyzed from the neck down and unable to speak, clearly mouths the word “Yes,” and then again, “Yes.” “So when do you want to leave to the nursing home?” the man asks. “Now,” she says. Ms. Lee is at the center of a tug of war that pits a patient’s right to die against her family’s desire to keep her alive and their religious belief that taking her off life support would be tantamount to suicide. But unlike Karen Ann Quinlan and Terri Schiavo , the country’s two most famous right-to-die patients, Ms. Lee, who is known as Grace, is fully conscious and, according to a psychiatrist who examined her, mentally competent to make her own decisions. But doctors at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., where she is being treated, have gone to court to testify that she has said in no uncertain terms that she cannot bear to go on living as she is, and wants to be removed from life support. Her family disagrees, and the video, which lasts just 24 seconds and appears to have been excerpted from a longer conversation, shows her as a compliant daughter, willing to put her fate in the hands of her father. The man in the video, titled “Grace Telling Us She Wants to Leave the Hospital,” was a cousin, according to one of Ms. Lee’s brothers, Paul, who shot the video. Terry Lynam, a spokesman for the hospital, declined to comment on the video, but said, “We just want to comply with her wishes, whatever they might be.” The fight over whether to let Ms. Lee die was reported Thursday in The Daily News . On Thursday, lawyers said an appellate court panel had indicated it would rule that the hospital could not remove Ms. Lee from life support until there had been a decision in her father’s petition to become her legal guardian, which could give him more power over her health care decisions. A hearing in that matter is scheduled for Tuesday. In a news conference Thursday, Ms. Lee’s father, the Rev. Man Ho Lee, senior pastor of Antioch Missionary Church in Flushing, Queens, said that his daughter was being manipulated by her doctors, and was not making decisions on her own. “I believe there was influence,” her father said, speaking Korean through an interpreter. He accused the doctors of altering his daughter’s judgment through medication. “They have no rights to take anyone’s life,” he said, as his wife, Jin Ah Lee, began weeping and continued to sob for 45 minutes, sometimes drowning out his voice and those of other speakers. “I believe my daughter is under depression and heavily medicated. I also believe she can win the battle and overcome this.” Ms. Lee, a University of North Carolina graduate, was a financial manager at Bank of America and training for the New York City Marathon when she fell ill with a brainstem tumor in October 2011, according to a letter that her father wrote to church members. She moved in with her parents in Douglaston, Queens, and endured chemotherapy and radiation. But in early September, she had a seizure and was admitted to North Shore, where she agreed to have a tracheotomy and to be put on a feeding tube, her court-appointed lawyer, David A. Smith, said. Toward the end of September, fearing that Ms. Lee would be taken off life support, her father went to court in Nassau County to try to become her guardian so he could make her medical decisions. A judge temporarily restrained the hospital from removing Ms. Lee from life support. The restraining order was lifted last Friday, by Justice Thomas P. Phelan of State Supreme Court in Nassau County. In a hearing before Justice Phelan, Ms. Lee’s physician, a psychiatrist and a social worker all testified that she had clearly said that she wanted to be removed from life support. “She keeps repeating that she doesn’t care and she just wants the tube out. Why won’t I take it out, why, why, why?” Dr. Dana Lustbader, her physician and the chief of palliative care, told the court. Dr. Lustbader said that most people on life support with a brain tumor like Ms. Lee’s have only weeks or months to live before dying of pneumonia or bedsores or infection. She said that on Sept. 18, doctors had tried to see whether Ms. Lee could survive without the breathing tube, but it appeared that she could not. But a lawyer for the family, Mary P. Giordano, told the judge, “Your honor, the family’s belief is that people who commit suicide go to hell.” Paul Lee told the court that not only was suicide against the religious principles of his family and church, but it was also against his sister’s personal beliefs. He remembered that when he had had personal troubles and thought of killing himself, “It was Grace that told me not to give up.” A consulting psychiatrist, Dr. Brian Keefe, testified that Ms. Lee did not think of removing her life support as suicide, but that “she didn’t want to live in the way she was currently forced to live.” Responding to the family’s lawyer, the judge said, “This is not suicide.” In his letter to the church, Ms. Lee’s father said that because his first two children were boys, he had wanted a girl, to lift his family’s long curse. All of its girls, he wrote, had died at birth. In court, he said that “in our family, there’s a lot of males, but there’s only one daughter.” When he thought of losing her, he said, “everything goes black.”

Life-Sustaining Support Systems Withdrawal Of


Romney Renews Focus on Empathy Gap With Obama

Abstract: BOSTON — Mitt Romney ’s biggest challenge at the moment is not President Obama . It’s himself. A bruising summertime campaign by Democrats to tarnish and define Mr. Romney before he could fully introduce himself has contributed to a significant empathy gap with Mr. Obama. It is a rising concern among Romney campaign advisers, who are feverishly working to find ways to persuade voters that even though Mr. Romney is not like them, he can still relate to their lives. The next three weeks provide a critical opportunity for Mr. Romney to strengthen his connection with voters. The selection of a running mate, which aides said he would announce Saturday, along with a Republican convention highlighting his family and a new wave of television ads are designed to urge voters to take a fresh look at Mr. Romney, who is still routinely seen as less likable than the president. Of all the statistics that Mr. Romney’s aides pore over at the campaign headquarters here, one consistently worrisome finding is Mr. Obama’s deeper personal appeal to voters. The deficit for Mr. Romney is not sugarcoated by his strategists, who bluntly acknowledge on Page 8 of their August political update to donors and supporters: “Voters believe Obama is more relatable.” Three months before Election Day, Mr. Romney is routinely matching — or outshining — the president when voters are asked who is more likely to help improve the nation’s economy. He also holds a wide advantage on which candidate would best confront the budget deficit. Yet the personal dimension of the race has been a stubborn hurdle for Mr. Romney, aides said, a point of frustration accentuated by relentless questions raised by the Obama campaign about Mr. Romney’s tax returns, wealth and overall character traits. It is complicated by the often awkward campaign style of Mr. Romney, whose own supporters acknowledge that he is hardly a natural politician. The contest between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney will test the axiom of whether the candidate who is seen as the most likable will win. The Romney campaign is not focused so much on trying to get all voters to relate to Mr. Romney, but rather to show that Mr. Romney can relate to voters. “Likability plays less of a role in an election like this where you have a single issue that dominates the national agenda,” said Neil Newhouse, Mr. Romney’s pollster. “Likability doesn’t solve the economy or put more middle-class Americans back to work.” As Mr. Romney opens a four-state bus tour on Saturday in Virginia, a chief goal is trying to strengthen his relationship with voters. It will be his most extensive burst of retail politicking in more than a month, which comes as leading conservative voices worry that Mr. Romney has squandered an opportunity this summer against Mr. Obama. The conservative radio host Laura Ingraham aired her frustration on Friday, saying, “Mitt Romney cannot at this point be convincing himself that he’s winning.” She argued on her show that Mr. Romney has spent more time raising money than pushing back against Democratic attacks about his background. The headline of an essay by the conservative columnist Matthew Continetti in The Washington Free Beacon declared : “The Killing: The battle to define Mitt Romney is over — and Romney lost.” For his part, Mr. Romney ignored the criticism on Friday as he flew to Norfolk, Va., saying, “A lot of campaign work is raising money, which has its own rewards obviously, but campaigning is the most fun, the most enjoyable and rewarding.” With a strong majority of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track, and a national unemployment rate of 8.3 percent, strategists in both campaigns believe the presidential race is nearly deadlocked in most battleground states. But several Republican officials say there is time for Mr. Romney to take control of the race and provide more details about his plans to turn the economy around and create jobs. “He needs to have face time with voters and a more intimate setting so people can get the measure of the man,” said Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who will campaign on Saturday with Mr. Romney. “It certainly is a plus if people like you. Then they’ll trust you on the issues.” Several national polls released this week suggest that Mr. Obama is emerging from the summer in better shape than Mr. Romney. But a financial advantage that the president’s campaign enjoyed in television advertising spending for most of the summer will end this month when Mr. Romney is able to start spending his general election money. Trying to narrow the empathy gap, which is even more pronounced among female voters, is a central goal of Mr. Romney’s strategy for the Republican convention, which opens Aug. 27 in Tampa, Fla. A series of swing state polls from Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News found that Mr. Romney fell short when voters were asked which candidate cared more about their needs and problems. “Romney gives the impression that he is totally disconnected from normal people,” said Harry Kroll, 68, a software consultant and independent voter from Rhinelander, Wis., who spoke in a follow-up interview from the poll. “Just the way he talks, the phrases he uses, are not what normal people use.” The take-away among Mr. Romney’s advisers is that a majority of voters believe Mr. Romney will do a better job rebuilding the economy, but they are unsure whether he will fix it for them or only for wealthier Americans. In short: If many voters are ready to fire Mr. Obama, they are not yet sold on whether Mr. Romney deserves to be hired. Alex Castellanos , the Republican advertising strategist who worked on Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign in 2008, said questions of likability may be overstated in an election dominated by economic concerns. “When your house is on fire, you don’t really care if your fireman is that likable or not. You do care if he is useful or not,” Mr. Castellanos said. “You are more likable if you show that you can solve the problem. Mitt Romney hasn’t yet done that.”

Romney Mitt
Presidential Election of 2012
Obama Barack


A Pink-Slip Thanks for a Major Decision

Abstract: When John Gaherin, the chief labor negotiator for Major League Baseball, arrived for a meeting with the chief of the players union and baseball’s arbitrator, he carried an envelope in the pocket of his suit jacket. It was two days before Christmas 1975, not a time to be conducting serious business, but Gaherin and Marvin Miller, the executive director of the union, knew why Peter Seitz, the arbitrator, had summoned them. They knew that the subject of the meeting would be as serious a bit of business as baseball had ever experienced, and Gaherin went to the meeting prepared. Seitz had informally telegraphed his decision in a grievance case, and now he would formally hand his written opinion to the two men. As soon as he did, Gaherin handed Seitz the envelope. “You’re fired,” it said in effect. Such is the perilous life of impartial arbitrators in baseball and other professional sports. Either side — the league or the union — has the right to fire them. Like managers, they are hired to be fired. “He told me he had expected as much,” Michael Seitz, Peter’s son, said in a recent telephone interview. “His feeling was there was no other way to decide the case, because the baseball owners had been stupid in assuming that when they didn’t have a player under contract, they still had a contractual hold on him.” Fredric R. Horowitz, a 64-year-old lawyer from Santa Monica, Calif., is the latest to take a turn. He will arbitrate Alex Rodriguez’s appeal of his 211-game suspension. While arbitrators pay for their decisions, which anger either the owners or the players, they don’t always receive credit for the significance of their decisions. Seitz, for example, was responsible for creating free agency in baseball with his decision in the 1975 Andy Messersmith-Dave McNally grievance, but I believe, as Miller used to complain, that some reports in the news media, including in The New York Times, mistakenly credited other cases: Curt Flood’s 1970 lawsuit against baseball and Catfish Hunter’s 1974 grievance against Charlie Finley. Flood’s suit challenged the game’s reserve clause, the rule that bound a player to his team until he was traded, sold or released. Hunter’s grievance contended that Finley, the Oakland Athletics’ owner, had breached his contract. The Hunter case was exactly what the union argued, a breach-of-contract case. Finley had not paid the premium on Hunter’s annuity, as stipulated in his contract, Richard Moss, the union lawyer, said, and the pitcher should be a free agent as a result. Image The arbitrator Peter Seitz in 1975 after granting free-agent status to Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally. Credit Associated Press Seitz, in his first year as baseball’s arbitrator, agreed with Moss’s argument and declared Hunter a free agent. A year later, when Seitz ruled in the Messersmith-McNally grievance, he did not cite the Hunter decision as a basis for this decision. As a breach-of-contract case, it affected no player but Hunter. No other player could gain free agency based on Seitz’s decision on Hunter. “It didn’t change the mind of a single owner,” Miller said of the Hunter decision in one of the many conversations we had on the subject. “The owners’ position on free agency was the same after the Hunter case as it was before.” Nor, Miller added, did the Flood case affect the owners’ thinking on the reserve clause and free agency. The reserve clause had forever been the tie that bound players to their teams, whether they liked it or not. Flood did not like it, and when the St. Louis Cardinals traded him to Philadelphia, he opted to sue the commissioner rather than go to the Phillies, contending that he should have the right to play where he wanted. The suit went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where Flood lost. The owners always argued that elimination of the reserve clause would ruin baseball, Miller said, and Flood’s loss in the lawsuit emboldened them to maintain their position. As heroic as Flood was in pursuing his lawsuit, it fell well short of having an impact. Its failure was one of the reasons the owners were so confident of winning the Messersmith-McNally grievance in court when they appealed Seitz’s decision, which said players could be free agents if they played the renewal year in their contract without signing a new contract. What the owners failed to understand, in their inexperience in labor matters, was that judges rarely overruled an arbitrator’s decision, doing so only if the arbitrator had exceeded his authority. The clubs and the commissioner have not done particularly well before arbitrators in instances where players have been suspended for conduct off the field. That history continued last year when Shyam Das overturned Ryan Braun’s 50-game suspension. Das was fired after his Braun ruling. Baseball would have preferred settling all of the doping cases stemming from the investigation into Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic that is believed to have distributed banned substances to baseball players. The union also seemed eager to settle. But Rodriguez has appealed his 211-game suspension. Given the volatility of the Rodriguez case, it would not be surprising if Horowitz’s first major case were his last.

Baseball
Arbitration
Major League Baseball Players Assn
MLB
Alex Rodriguez
Frederic R Horowitz
Peter Seitz


A Review of ‘Strut: The Peacock and Beauty in Art,’ in Yonkers

Abstract: Eagles were made to soar, canaries to sing and peacocks, obviously, to dazzle the eye. But in “Strut: The Peacock and Beauty in Art,” the gorgeous creature with the magnificent plumage is dissected and found to have hidden depths and multiple personalities. Through some 150 objects created in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, this fascinating exhibition from the Hudson River Museum recounts the many ways artists, designers and the rest of us have made use of this astonishing bird. Maybe you have a vase of peacock feathers at home. Maybe you watched a befeathered Katy Perry singing “Peacock” on the Letterman show. Or maybe, like the sculptor Rikki Morley Saunders, whose bronzes greet visitors entering the museum, you keep peacocks as pets. Most of us, however, encounter this relative of the pheasant, grouse and turkey on fancy lawns, fancy attire and certain television programs . A native of the jungles of India, it was exported in time to turn up in the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology. But its importance is more visual than literary, as befits its strong colors (the vivid blue body, shot through with emerald iridescence, the green, turquoise-spotted tail) and dramatic form (the slender neck and head crowned with a delicate crest, the gently swelling body and those unbelievable feathers, sometimes trailing in a drooping train, sometimes spreading in a stiff, filigreed fan). Image Louis Rhead’s “La Femme au Paon (Woman With Peacocks)” (circa 1897). Credit Private Collection Needless to say, “Strut” blazes with blues and greens, rendered in paint, ink and ceramic glazes — Christopher Dresser’s 1890s vase is designed to hold, surprise, peacock feathers. And painted peacocks decorate the white goose feathers of a fashionable Victorian lady’s fan. But there are also pure white peacocks, and they easily share the show’s spotlight with their colored brethren. Jessie Arms Botke’s “Albino Peacock and Two Cockatoo,” painted around 1930, is a bravura display of skill, its diaphanous white cloud of feathers veiling the foliage and flowers of the birds’ perch. And Federico Uribe’s witty sculpture “Diner,” made for this show, turns ordinary clear-plastic tableware into a translucent peacock, its comb a fan of tiny salt spoons, its head a wine goblet with a broken-off stem for a beak, its tail a cascade of teaspoons, knives and forks. If some works in “Strut” deny the peacock its color, still others ignore its elegance. Those who know its malevolent screech , so completely at odds with its superb form, will not be shocked to learn that peacocks are fierce fighters, battling for mates and territory. “Strut” includes several really angry birds, among them those in Dillon Lundeen Goldschlag’s grand, colorful sculpture of yarn, tree trunks and copper wire, “Untitled Peacocks (Fighting Males).” In another contemporary piece, Peter Paone, whose name is related to the Italian word for peacock, gives his bird a tail of flowers, each representing a specific experience in the painter’s life. More traditional approaches include Louis Rhead’s 1890s lithograph “La Femme au Paon” (“Woman With Peacocks”), in which the birds are mirrored in the woman herself. Her coiffure, an elongated bun, suggests a crest; her gauzy, burgundy-colored dress is studded with circles that imitate peacock-feather eyes. And she walks with her birds through a peacock-colored landscape along a looping vermilion path. Image Galileo Chini’s “Peacock- Pattern Vase” (circa 1900). Credit Collection of Jason Jacques That hue shows up again in Robert Winthrop Chanler’s painted screen from 1927, “Four Peacocks.” The artist seems more interested in the rich red-orange background than in the flattened blue of the birds. On one side, they are little more than sinuous vertical shapes aslant the screen’s three panels; on the reverse, they crowd at the left while their open, interlacing tails cover the two right-hand panels. Even when they are not the center of an artist’s attention, peacocks appear again and again as abstracted decorative motifs. “Strut” displays examples of pottery, wallpaper, book bindings, purses and fabrics adorned with fronds and circles that mimic the birds’ distinctive feathers. In his turn-of-the-century vase, Galileo Chini transforms the feathers’ eyes into a rhythmic geometry. Beyond its graphic appeal , the peacock’s association with glamour, novelty and pride makes it irresistible to marketers. In the eye-catching Art Nouveau poster by Camille Bouchet, a resplendent peacock dwarfs the bottle of cognac being advertised. Peacocks have also sold cigarettes, Jell-O, hosiery, floor tiles and, of course, color television sets. On a video monitor, several whimsical, animated incarnations of the NBC peacock strut across the screen. One of them ends up on a platter, just like the peacock in an 1881 illustration by Percy Macquoid, “The Christmas Dinner: Bringing In the Peacock.” Held aloft by a woman in a yellow gown, ogled hungrily by her pet hounds, and trailing clouds of aromatic steam as well as the usual sweep of feathers, this bird is food, not eye candy. “Strut” ends in the parlor of Glenview, the manor house across the courtyard from the galleries. There, the curators have installed Kymara Lonergan’s wonderful 2008 “Madame Laurent,” a standing figure of a woman arrayed in a gown of ostrich and peacock feathers topped with a Victorian mourning cape. But a more fitting conclusion is back in the museum’s downstairs gallery, where photographs by Landon Nordeman chronicle the events of Aug. 2, 2011. That’s when a peacock abandoned its home at the Central Park Zoo and landed on a Fifth Avenue windowsill, stopping vehicular and pedestrian traffic below. There’s something strangely satisfying — and also funny — about gawking at pictures of people gawking at a peacock while you’re spending your afternoon gawking at pictures of peacocks. The one in Manhattan eventually flew away ; the ones in “Strut” are guaranteed to stay put.

Art
Hudson River Museum
Robert Winthrop Chanler


Roosevelt Island Maintains Its Mix

Abstract: Gus Christensen was, until six months ago, a managing director at Evercore Partners, the boutique investment bank, a position preceded by stints at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and an education at Wharton. Some years ago, befitting that profile, he was a Republican; but eventually the religion of the free market lost its hold on him, so much so that his politics migrated aggressively to the left. Last week he posted on Twitter a link to a tabloid piece about a billionaire who was buying a $70 million pied-à-terre for his children at 740 Park Avenue, with the hashtag #Signoftheapocalypse. Mr. Christensen is running for the State Assembly in the 76th District, which runs east of Third Avenue on the Upper East Side and includes Roosevelt Island, a community that might be seen as a template for the kind of equitable and more economically integrated city that he and other progressives, fearing the eclipse of all but the wealthiest faction of the plutocratic class, want to see achieved. Roosevelt Island, which is considered part of Manhattan and not Queens, was famously conceived as a utopia for working- and middle-class New Yorkers in 1969, and the architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed its master plan. Most of the apartments on the island were subsidized through state and federal programs, and various buildings were developed to house tenants of different income levels, so that someone receiving a Section 8 grant, for instance, might live next to a teacher in a rent-regulated unit. A decade ago when several luxury rental and condominium buildings were planned and began to appear — especially on the previously undeveloped south end of the island — an inevitable panic about the evaporation of the area’s unusual alchemy followed. “We are in the midst of vast change, and real estate is the prime consideration,” Matthew Katz, a former president of the Roosevelt Island Residents Association, told The New York Times nine years ago . “The island is being set up for gentrification, which means that middle-class housing will disappear.” That has not happened, in part because of the regulatory policies in place, and because development, most of it the result of a partnership between the Hudson and Related Companies, has progressed with sufficient attention paid to the island’s character. Before it is completed, Riverwalk, the complex of buildings toward the south end (which includes staff housing for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), will total 2,000 units, 800 of them affordable to families making roughly $68,000 to $125,000 a year, David Kramer, a principal at Hudson, told me. You are likely to meet doctors on Roosevelt Island, but you are far less likely to meet arbitrageurs. None of the three restaurants in the newly developed quadrant of the island is rarefied. One is a pizza place run by a former police officer. Another is a Japanese restaurant run by a family who had been operating an old-school Chinese takeout place on the north end of the island. The third, the Riverwalk Bar & Grill is, as Jeff Escobar, the current president of the residents association, said, “tremendously popular with everybody.” An ice cream shop on Main Street, the island’s retail corridor, caters to the tastes of children, rather than the palates of adults who demand rose-hip sorbets, and is run by a longtime resident known as Coach Scot. “The fear,” Mr. Escobar said, was that Roosevelt Island “would become the waterfront in Long Island City,” which is to say a haven of single financial types and internationalists. But it attracted families instead. “If anything,” he said, “the old-timers now wish the newcomers were more integrated into life in the middle of the island.” In some sense, Roosevelt Island suffers from the inverse of the problem afflicting most gentrifying areas; even long-term residents believe that Main Street could benefit from higher-end retail services, which they feel would bring the micro-communities together more fluidly. “When the organic grocer opened, people initially complained about the pricing, but that backed down,” Mr. Escobar said. Many residents of Roosevelt Island are working to preserve those apartments developed through the Mitchell-Lama program that are at risk of aging out of affordability and commanding market rates. In an effort to preserve the social balance, two buildings are pushing plans to allow residents to buy their apartments at low cost but keep them from reaching market rates for another generation or so. The impression left after walking around Roosevelt Island is not of a place rife with the “Yuppies Die” class warfare that seems palpable in many parts of Brooklyn. What residents worry about isn’t so much the prospect of more luxury housing, but more housing of any kind, this particularly in light of the coming applied science campus from Cornell University and Technion of Israel. The population of the island has grown by 20 percent over the past 10 years, and the demands on infrastructure are intense. One real problem for Roosevelt Island, as Mr. Christensen put it, is that “there are just too many people on the F train in the morning.”

Gus Christensen
Roosevelt Island Manhattan
State Legislature elections
Real Estate
Housing
Urban Planning


A Cube With a Twist: At 40, It Puzzles Anew

Abstract: JERSEY CITY — A Rubik’s cube can be twisted and twiddled in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways, and 43,252,003,274,489,855,999 of them are wrong. Those truths — especially the second, maddeningly frustrating one — have been known since soon after the modish, Mondrianish plastic object was invented in 1974. The cube went on to become the must-have toy of 1980 and 1981. Its popularity faded fast. By 1982, the cube was so last year, doomed to Hula-Hoop faddishness. In 1986, The New York Times said the cube had been “retired to the attic, the garbage heap and, with a bow to its elegance and ingeniousness, to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.” Lately it has undergone a resurrection in a world in which engineers and computers can generate helpful algorithms that would-be cube solvers can share with each other. But some things have not changed. The typical Rubik’s cube still has nine squares on six sides, and the same eye-popping colors. And those unfathomable huge numbers in the first paragraph are still quintillions. “Four-point-three times 10 to the 19th,” explained Paul Hoffman, the president and chief executive of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. Rubik’s cubes have trailed Mr. Hoffman for his entire career. On his first job after college, as an editor at Scientific American, he shepherded a March 1981 cover story about Rubik’s “magic cubology” into print. It was written by Douglas R. Hofstadter, the professor known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” who said it had taken him “50 hours of work, distributed over several months,” to solve the “unscrambling problem.” He mentioned group theory, which has to do with algebraic structures, and something he called “cubitis magikia,” a “highly contagious” condition “accompanied by the itching of the fingertips that can be relieved only by prolonged contact” with a certain multicolored object. Image Erno Rubik, the inventor of the Rubik's cube, with Anthony Brooks, 20, a speed cuber who attended the exhibition. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Now Mr. Hoffman is capitalizing on the cube again, with a $5 million exhibition that opens to the public on Saturday. It features an 18-karat gold Rubik’s cube said to be worth $2.5 million that pivots and swivels like an ordinary plastic one, and a cube-solving robot that is no match for speed cubers, as competitors who try to beat the clock are known. It took the machine a minute to unscramble a jumbled cube. In that time, Anthony Brooks, a speed cuber with several records to his name, did it three times, once using only one hand. Speed cubers can memorize algorithms they have developed on their laptops and shared on websites or by email to unscramble a jumbled cube in less time than it takes to read a sentence like this one aloud. But Mr. Brooks said speed cubing also involved muscle memory and tricks, like breaking in a cube the way baseball players break in a glove with neatsfoot oil. “You can buy lubricants — cube lubes,” Mr. Brooks said. “Or regular silicon spray you can find in any hardware.” In the 40 years since it was invented, the cube has made some intriguing cameo appearances. Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked intelligence secrets, told two journalists he had arranged to meet that they would recognize him outside a restaurant in Hong Kong because he would have a Rubik’s cube in his hand. Mr. Hoffman said that sounded like an homage to the 2009 film “Duplicity,” in which spies played by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen realize who they are because they are both carrying Rubik’s cube key chains. That could not have happened to the cube’s inventor, Erno Rubik, 69. He said he did not travel with a cube. “I don’t need to,” Mr. Rubik said as he previewed the exhibition this week. For the record, he calls it “my cube.” “From my mouth, it sounds strange to call it ‘Rubik’s cube,’ ” Mr. Rubik said. “If I have a child, I call it ‘my child,’ not ‘Rubik’s boy’ or ‘Rubik’s girl.’ Naturally, after 40 years, I have a strong relationship with my cube.” He passed a display case containing his original pride and joy, a wooden cube. It sat in front of the Hungarian patent he was issued for his “magic cube” in 1975. He invented the cube as the solution to the kind of structural problem that could bedevil an architecture professor, which is what he was at the time. The structural problem was how to keep a mechanism with many moving parts from tumbling to the floor. Image Mr. Brooks wore a blindfold while competing against a cube-solving robot, which was still outmatched by the speed cuber. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Do not expect him to face off against a speed cuber like Rowe Hessler, a bowling-alley manager from Riverhead, N.Y. Mr. Hessler, 23, is a former United States speed cubing champion, whose fastest time unscrambling a standard three-by-three-by-three cube was 6.94 seconds. At the science center, Mr. Hessler did it in a seemingly effortless 9.69 seconds of twisting and pivoting. The only noise was the cube, clicking like bad dentures in a cartoon. Mr. Rubik said he had not imagined when the ink on the patent was fresh that the cube would become so universal. “I had a feeling about the intellectual value of the cube” early on, he said, adding that items with intellectual value can be a hard sell in a material world. Mr. Rubik said he had thought that toy manufacturers would pigeonhole it as a puzzle. “Traditionally, the puzzle section in the toy business is very narrow,” he said, “and they don’t believe it’s possible to make a business. They’re not selling mass production.” He said the cube had changed that thinking. Mr. Hoffman said one billion to 2.5 billion cubes had been manufactured, assuming there were five counterfeits for every legitimate one sold. “They’ve seized whole 747s full of illegal knockoffs,” he said. Experts have calculated that a cube could be solved in as few as 20 moves, no matter how it is scrambled. But speed cubers do not have time to think about the elegance of economy implied by minimizing moves. Mr. Hessler said speed cubers averaged about 50; his lowest was 31. For his part, Mr. Rubik declined an invitation to go up against Mr. Hessler, but he said he understood the appeal of speed cubing, even if it was not the sport for him. “The main group who is buying the cube is teenagers,” Mr. Rubik said, “and they are competitive and they have the time. When you are working, you don’t have the time.”

Rubik's Cube
Puzzle
Erno Rubik
Liberty Science Center
Paul Hoffman
Games
Robot


Ground Squirrels Chew Snakeskins to Mask Their Scent

Abstract: Here’s an odd animal behavior for you: the California ground squirrel chews on the molted skins of one of its main predators, the rattlesnake, and applies the scent to its body by licking itself all over. This eau de snake has a purpose, says Barbara Clucas, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis. It acts as camouflage, covering up the squirrel’s own scent so a meal-seeking rattlesnake will leave it alone. Camouflage is nothing new in nature — it’s used by animals big and microscopic, and by plants, too. But among vertebrate animals at least, most of the deception is visual. The California ground squirrel’s behavior is a rare documented case of olfactory camouflage among vertebrates, Ms. Clucas said. The squirrels are not the only rodents to chew snake skins, nor the only animals to apply the scent to their bodies. Ms. Clucas said that with the ground squirrels it seemed likely that the behavior was an antipredator one, because adult males, which are resistant to snake venom, don’t do it. Squirrel pups, which are not resistant, do the chewing, as do their mothers, which are resistant but look after the pups in the burrows. Ms. Clucas and two colleagues, Donald H. Owings and Matthew P. Rowe, tested the reactions of hungry rattlesnakes to pieces of filter paper with rattlesnake scent alone, squirrel scent alone and a combination of the two. The snakes flicked their tongues over the squirrel-only scent, but not over the combined scent or the snake-only scent. The finding , reported in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggests that if a rattlesnake is hovering over a squirrel burrow, it can be tricked into thinking that there are no squirrels there. Ms. Clucas noted that people tend to think of camouflage more in visual terms. “But there are a lot of animal predators where the main sense they use is olfaction,” she said. “So this kind of behavior could be more widespread.”


A Son of Immigrants Rises in a Southern State

Abstract: NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 21 — The first words from Bobby Jindal to his supporters after he won the Louisiana governor’s race on Saturday night were not about his victory, but L.S.U.’s triumph over Auburn the same day. The message could not have been clearer: I’m one of you, a normal, red-blooded football-loving Louisiana guy. It is a theme that seems to have informed the youthful Republican congressman’s every step, from his decision at age 4 to jettison his given name of Piyush for that of a character in the television series “The Brady Bunch” to the attentive faith-infused courting of conservatives that led to his victory on Saturday with 54 percent of the vote. Mr. Jindal’s efforts only highlight, though, what is glaringly obvious to anyone who sees and hears the slight 36-year-old son of immigrants from India. He is a highly unusual politician, having become the nation’s first Indian-American governor in a Southern state where race is inseparable from politics. Still, Mr. Jindal offered something few others could to a state that is on its knees. Louisiana is more desperate than ever, a place where the glaring needs of its citizens evidently trumped considerations of race and ethnicity. He has taken an already lengthy public policy résumé, mostly in health care, along with sterling educational credits (Brown University and Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar) and come back home instead of using his credentials as a ticket to escape, as many other accomplished Louisianans do. Louisiana — largely impoverished, undereducated and unhealthy — has been left behind by whatever national prosperity has accrued in recent decades. Hurricane Katrina only knocked it back further. Mr. Jindal, outside the Louisiana mainstream but within the well-to-do 21st-century American one, seemed to offer a ticket to the latter. Mr. Jindal is a technocrat and a Roman Catholic convert, a policy aficionado well-versed in free-market solutions to the crisis in health insurance and a proponent of “intelligent design” as an alternative theory to evolution, suggesting it may be appropriate in school science classes. His ascent has delighted many Indian-Americans, who have never seen one of their own elected to such a high political position. Sanjay Puri, chairman of the U.S.-India Political Action Committee, predicted that Mr. Jindal would surprise doubters with the depth of his understanding on policy issues. Others, however, are cautious, saying that Mr. Jindal is out of the mainstream on issues that matter to Indian-Americans. “The fact that he’s of Indian ancestry is a subject of jubilation,” said Vijay Prashad, professor of South Asian history at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking of the way Mr. Jindal has been portrayed in the Indian-American press. “But there’s a very shallow appreciation of who he really is. Once you scratch the surface, it’s really unpleasant.” Mr. Jindal’s platform, though conscientiously detailed, was hardly revolutionary, and the campaign itself was a study in caution. Louisiana’s rickety fiscal structure went mostly ignored. And Mr. Jindal, intent on not jeopardizing a big lead in the polls, shunned reporters. Though he was criticized during the campaign for talking relatively little about hurricane recovery in still-suffering New Orleans, he said Sunday he hoped to secure more federal assistance for homeowners and planned to meet with President Bush to discuss the region’s needs. Piyush Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge to Hindu parents who had come to the United States six months before so his mother could pursue a graduate degree in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. His father was an engineer from the Punjab region of India, the only one of nine siblings to attend high school. The younger Jindal, growing up in Baton Rouge, was not expected to come home from school with anything less than 100 on tests. Public high school in Baton Rouge was followed by Brown, where Mr. Jindal was Phi Beta Kappa, and a conversion to Roman Catholicism that Mr. Jindal has described in transformative terms. “I draw my definition of integrity from my Christian faith,” Mr. Jindal said during the campaign. “In my faith, you give 100 percent of yourself to God.” “But we live in a pluralistic state,” he was careful to add. After Oxford, a well-paid stint at the Washington consultants McKinsey and Company was followed by an interview for the job of secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals with the newly elected Republican governor of Louisiana, Mike Foster, in 1995. Mr. Jindal was 24; it was the biggest department in state government, and it was in serious financial trouble. He got the job despite Mr. Foster’s initial skepticism, made cuts and restored the department to financial stability; Louisiana still has one of the highest percentages of uninsured, however. More high-level jobs followed in quick succession: chairman of a bipartisan Medicare reform commission in Washington, head of the statewide University of Louisiana system, assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services under Mr. Bush. He and his wife, Supriya, returned to Louisiana to so he could run for governor in 2003. The Jindals have three young children, Celia, Shaan and Slade. During that campaign, Mr. Jindal attacked liberals in radio advertisements and talked up his connections to Mr. Bush. The so-called bubba vote was nonetheless against him that year and he lost to the current governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who has chosen not to run again. Mr. Jindal was elected to Congress from the New Orleans suburbs in 2004, and it was common knowledge that he was biding his time for another run at the governor’s mansion. His short time in Washington was unobtrusive, and he continued to campaign at home while others in the state’s Congressional delegation established a more forceful presence as hurricane recovery efforts unfolded. Mr. Jindal’s biggest test comes now. He said he arrived in Baton Rouge intent on “cleaning up the corruption” and determined to “show the voters and the entire country that we are serious about changing our reputation.” Legislators in Huey Long’s state Capitol are sensitive to such suggestions, however. Mr. Jindal’s honeymoon could be short.

Jindal Bobby
Louisiana
Governors (US)
Race


House Approves Bill to End Tax-Free Real Estate Spinoffs

Abstract: Wall Street may have to come up with a new strategy to replace a type of deal that has been popular among activist investors and companies. On Thursday, the House of Representatives approved legislation including provisions that would remove the tax advantages of spinning off corporate real estate into a separate, publicly traded real estate investment trust. The end of such tax-free spinoffs will generate $1.9 billion in additional tax revenue in the coming years, the Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated. Hilton Worldwide may end up being the last big company to reap the benefits of this type of deal. The company, which the Blackstone Group took public about two years ago, is working on a plan to spin off its hotels into a REIT, according to a person briefed on the matter. The hotel operator has requested that the Internal Revenue Service deem the transaction tax-free. These spinoffs have been a popular tactic of activist investors who have pushed companies to unlock cash by separating themselves from their real estate holdings. Publicly traded REITs own property or mortgages and are not taxed so long as they pass most of their income on to shareholders. Companies that own a lot of real estate — mall operators, restaurant chains and even casinos — have looked at a spinoff to a real estate investment trust as a way of getting a higher value for those properties and using the cash to pay off debt. There have been 15 tax-free REIT spinoffs since 2010, including five last year and three this year, for a total of $21.6 billion, according to FactSet. This summer, Darden Restaurants completed the $747 million spinoff of Four Corners Property Trust. Even before Thursday’s vote, regulators and lawmakers signaled their intention to shut off the spigot. The I.R.S. said in September that it would not give any more private approvals on these kinds of spinoffs while it studied the matter more closely. And some companies have been unconvinced of the transaction’s benefits. Macy’s, Ethan Allen and McDonald’s have all resisted the calls for REIT spinoffs from activist investors. “For some companies, it’s a shame that they won’t be able to get that done,” one prominent activist investor said of REIT spinoffs, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Many companies have known about this as an option for years and didn’t move.” With the move by Congress, companies “are going to have to figure out another way to unlock the value of their real estate without a spinoff,” said Robert Willens, a tax consultant in New York. “No one is going to do a taxable spinoff.” Hedge fund activists have already prodded some of their targets to pursue other kinds of transactions that would not require the blessing of the I.R.S. Starboard Value, for example, has called on Macy’s to consider forming a joint venture with a real estate specialist for its properties, a move similar to what Hudson’s Bay Company, the parent of Saks Fifth Avenue, has done for about 40 of its stores. Hilton’s chief executive, Christopher J. Nassetta, earlier had talked about a REIT spinoff as an option that the company was exploring. He recently told investors and analysts that Hilton expected to have detailed plans to discuss by early next year. “They’re massively complex sort of options that we’re thinking through,” he said in October. Companies may look to sale-leaseback arrangements as an alternative to REIT spinoffs. In September, Bob Evans Farms announced plans to sell about $200 million of property and lease it back, including its headquarters in New Albany, Ohio. The restaurant group has been pursued by the activist investor Tom Sandell. This summer, Time Life Fitness, based in Chanhassen, Minn., sold 10 high-end fitness centers to Gramercy Property Trust in a $300 million sale-leaseback arrangement. Another way to reap the value of real estate is to sell property. Hilton sold the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan in February for $1.95 billion to a Chinese insurance company. In July, Pinnacle Entertainment said it would sell its casinos to Gaming & Leisure Properties. The vote on the legislation with the REIT provision was 318 to 109. It was a bipartisan effort led by Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah; Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon; and Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The tax legislation now goes to the Senate, where it is expected to pass. It contains much more than the REIT provisions, including permanent tax incentives for individuals and companies. The move by Congress to end one kind of tax-focused deal follows recent public outcry about another: inversions, or the acquisition of a foreign company that allows a United States company to move its legal headquarters to a country with a lower tax rate. The I.R.S. and the Treasury have also proposed ways to curtail these kinds of transactions, which by estimates have cut into tax revenue by some $34 billion, and called on Congress to help. But lawmakers appeared to choose clamping down on a kind of deal-making that has an easier solution over one that may create unintended consequences. The REIT issue “is easier to fix with a piece of legislation,” said Edward Glazer, a lawyer at Goodwin Procter. “It’s harder to draw the line on inversions and how to limit them without putting U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage.” Wall Street and the REIT industry may see more opportunity in other changes that were part of the tax bill. Elsewhere in the bill are provisions that make foreign investment in real estate investment trusts and commercial real estate in the United States more attractive. First, it exempts shareholders of publicly traded REITs from tax on the sale of the holdings if they own 10 percent or less of the stock (up from 5 percent), and second, it creates new exceptions to taxes for foreign pension plans. The relaxed rules for foreign investment are expected to generate another $20 billion to $30 billion in investment in United States commercial real estate next year, says Kenneth Rosen, the chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. This year commercial real estate attracted some $500 billion in investment across the board, he said, citing statistics from Real Capital Analytics. Supporters of the change from within the real estate industry say it removes the disadvantages of investing in commercial real estate compared with other types of investments and helps the American real estate market compete with foreign real estate markets. The curtailment of tax-free REIT spinoffs was intended to partly fill the gap in lost revenue as a result of the foreign investor tax changes, lawyers said. The bill “contains much more good news than bad news for REITs and the real estate industry,” Mr. Glazer said.

Corporate tax
Commercial Real Estate
House of Representatives
Congress
IRS
Legislation


In Richmond, Va., Herons and Shad Signal a James River Revival

Abstract: RICHMOND, Va. — Every urban river is a political canvas. What was, in hard industrial eras past, melds to what is and what might yet be. Ten years ago, bathers in the James River, which wends through this old Southern city, wore ear and nose plugs to stave off infections from sewage runoff. Now, the river is stalked by blue herons and shad — symbols as potent as the belching riverbank ironworks and factories of the unfiltered, blue-collar past. After huge cleanup efforts, unprecedented numbers of tubers, kayakers and fishermen converge here, steps below downtown skyscrapers. On a sunny weekday morning, preparing for his gallery exhibit opening, Aaron Pavelis, 29, was trying to capture the river — his river, an artist’s vision, present tense — with paint and palette: a shimmering contrast of old railroad bridges and trees deep in shadow. Inspired by the Dutch masters, Mr. Pavelis spread hand-mixed paint “with no modern additives” and delighted in the splashing of the shad. But he was a realist about the river, too. He said he would eat the shad, which have come in from the Atlantic for their spring spawning mission. But what of the catfish that inhabit it year-round? “I still have my doubts,” he said, watching as a freight train thundered overhead. Residents remain cautious, too. To protest water pollution in February, a University of Richmond student floated the “James River UFO,” a disc made of feathers, downriver. And in April, the public utilities’ Twitter account warned: “Green water in the James tomorrow is a V.C.U. art student project. Don’t panic. Don’t call. Don’t worry.” Bathers needed reassurance as well when shad were seen floating on the surface of the river, looking like so many textured brushstrokes of paint. As it turned out, biologists from Virginia Commonwealth University and state agencies were sending electric currents into the water, momentarily stunning but not harming the fish so they could measure the shad’s resurgence. After almost 20 years of restocking and a fishing moratorium, the fish are a food source for the herons, now some 200 strong, with a rookery on an island in the river. Observant visitors — a record one million are expected this year — can spot the rookery by parking under the elevated train tracks and walking along a narrow gangway built atop a city water pipeline. Ralph White, the manager of the James River Park System for more than three decades, has watched the river’s transformation from a dammed and divided symbol of Richmond’s Confederate past to a point of modern union. Because of mercury, the biggest catfish — some run to 50 pounds — are still not yet fit to eat, he concedes. But “a five-pounder,” he adds reassuringly, “is quite excellent.”

James River (Va)
Water Pollution
Richmond (Va)