The Universal Remote Dormant in Your Smartphone

Abstract: WHILE the universal remote has served humanity with distinction, its days are numbered, and your smartphone is to blame. In the beginning, a universal remote had to control two or three things (typically a television, a cable box and a VCR or DVD player). And for a handful of devices, a remote with all the buttons in one place worked just fine. Over time, the universal remote expanded its jurisdiction, as there were new devices to control: audio receivers, streaming-video boxes, digital video recorders and other home entertainment components. The universal remote did only what it could: It grew more buttons. But that was a stopgap at best. With so many devices to manage — and with so many buttons to use — universal remotes started to become ridiculously complex. There was a solution, of course: touch screens. Devices using these interactive displays can change their layouts depending on the remote being mimicked. Several manufacturers put touch screens into their high-end remotes. But touch screen remotes were — and are— expensive. A traditional universal remote costs $20 or so. Touch-screen models often cost in the hundreds. Some engineers got to thinking: There is a growing number of touch screens in the world, in the form of smartphones. And since more and more entertainment devices are Internet-enabled, and since smartphones are as well, they don’t even need an infrared transmitter; they can control equipment using Wi-Fi. And so now we have a bounty of applications and accessories that let us use the technology we already have to control the technology we already have. This is not only frugal, but upgradeable and flexible. Whether you want to control your music, your television or your PowerPoint presentation, there’s probably a solution using your phone. Music and Video Plenty of people use iTunes. And many of them use their computers to play music over their home stereo speakers. Knowing this, Apple makes a slim remote to work with most of its PCs. But this remote has no screen and can perform only a few basic functions. But a free iPhone application, called Remote, uses Wi-Fi to control the computer as if you were sitting in front of an iTunes window. Users can browse and sort through entire music and video libraries, select playlists and adjust volume. IPhone users who are also fans of Sonos , the multiroom audio system that works with all kinds of music files — not just Apple-approved — can download a free application called Sonos Controller for iPhone . It works over Wi-Fi and mimics the hardware-based controllers Sonos makes. A similar free program, VersaZones Mobile ( versagroup.net ), lets users control Sonos devices on a Windows Mobile handset. There are other options, too. Melloware’s Intelliphone remote ( melloware.com ) works with an iPhone to control Windows Media Center PCs. Users can move the cursor on the PC’s display by using the iPhone’s touch screen, and a Qwerty keyboard obviates the need for a separate wireless keyboard. Intelliphone is one part of a two-application suite. The other component, Intelliremote, is loaded onto the Media Center PC and costs $24. After that, Intelliphone is free. Users of all but the earliest BlackBerry models can also stream music from their phone to any sound system connected to the company’s Remote Stereo Gateway, which sells for $90. The matchbook-size device plugs into a stereo and receives streaming audio, via Bluetooth, from a paired BlackBerry. This isn’t really a remote control, because the music is being streamed from the BlackBerry’s memory card. But the overall effect is the same, and BlackBerry remote programs for music are thin (for now). Television Controlling your television is a bit harder than controlling your digital music library. Most TVs aren’t part of a home’s wireless network, and therefore they rely on infrared signals. The Unify4Life AVShadow ( unify4life.com ) is a $99 kit that works with BlackBerrys to mimic infrared remote controls on most TVs and set-top boxes. The Shadow is both phone software and a piece of hardware that converts a BlackBerry’s Bluetooth transmission into an infrared signal your TV can understand. The company also makes the GarageShadow, a device that operates garage doors via a BlackBerry. IPhone-toting TiVo lovers can control their Series 3 or HD DVRs with Derek Stutsman’s DVR Remote ( www.stutsmansoft.com ), a $3 application that mimics the well-known TiVo remote, complete with thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. It works over Wi-Fi. For the more adventurous, a group of engineering students at the University of Toronto have created an infrared transmitter for iPhones and iPod Touches. UiRemote ( uiremote.wordpress.com ) has created a working prototype and will release a commercial version this year. Presentations PowerPoint presentations and the like are a bit easier to control remotely because, presumably, they are being viewed through a laptop. But the benefit is considerable. No longer tethered to your laptop, you can move around the room while still holding in your hand an image of what’s on the screen behind you. No more of that weird over-the-shoulder karaoke move when checking to see where you are in the presentation. Senstic ( www.senstic.com ) makes a $9.99 PowerPoint remote application for the iPhone called i-Clickr. The application connects to PowerPoint on a PC and displays the current slide and the control buttons on the iPhone’s screen. For users of Apple’s KeyNote software, there is the 99-cent Keynote Remote. The software shows a large, easy-to-read representation of your current slide along with any notes added in the presentation file running on a Mac. A hardware solution for Windows Mobile and BlackBerrys is the Impatica Showmate ( www.impatica.com/showmate ). This small device connects to any VGA-compatible projector and receives PowerPoint slides over Bluetooth. Users can then control the playback of the slide deck from the handset. It costs $250 for the hardware and software bundle. This is probably the beginning of the end for the stand-alone universal remote. Since Apple opened its App Store, all the other big players in mobile technology have either begun or announced application stores. And opening software development to the public only means that more of these types of applications are likely to be created.

Computers and the Internet
Wireless Communications
iPhone
iPod
Remote Control Systems


In N.F.L. Playoffs, 4 Elite Quarterbacks Are Left Standing

Abstract: Brady. Rodgers. Roethlisberger. Ryan. As in most years, the N.F.L. conference championships include four strong teams. But this year they also include four elite quarterbacks. Matt Ryan of the Falcons, Tom Brady of the Patriots and Aaron Rodgers of the Packers were first, second and fourth in the key statistic of adjusted yards per passing attempt. The four remaining quarterbacks, including Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers, were first, second, sixth and seventh in passing touchdowns, despite Brady missing four games for his deflation suspension and Roethlisberger missing two because of injury. The starters occupy four of the six Pro Bowl slots for quarterbacks, joined by Derek Carr of the Raiders and Dak Prescott of the Cowboys. They also are all paid more than $20 million a year. (Prescott makes a rookie salary of $680,000.) It is not always the case that the final four includes only top quarterbacks. Last season, the Super Bowl was won by a team, the Broncos, carried almost entirely by its defense. Its quarterback, the faded superstar Peyton Manning, ranked 48th in adjusted yards per pass and 45th in touchdown percentage among quarterbacks who started a game. This year’s quartet starts with Brady and Rodgers, who along with Manning are considered the best quarterbacks of their era. Which one has been better? You can go back and forth with dueling statistics as long as you like. Brady ranks second among active passers in touchdowns to Drew Brees, with Rodgers sixth. But Rodgers, who has played fewer seasons, has more touchdowns per game. Rodgers also ranks first in adjusted yards per pass, with Brady fourth. Rodgers has one Super Bowl win, while Brady is going for a record fifth this season. Of the four quarterbacks, Roethlisberger had the least impressive numbers this year, although they were far from bad. While few would put him at the level of Brady and Rodgers, his career numbers are not too far behind. He is fifth in career touchdown passes and fourth in yards among active players. He has two Super Bowl titles. Despite initial reports that he would miss four to six weeks with a torn meniscus in October, he ended up sitting out just two games. The breakthrough season this year came from Ryan. At age 31 and in his ninth year as a starter, he put up career highs in touchdowns and yards and a career low in interceptions. After establishing a fairly consistent adjusted yards-per-pass figure of about 7 every year, he jumped up to 10.1 this year. He is also considered the front-runner to be the N.F.L.’s most valuable player, just ahead of Rodgers and Brady. If the lines are to be believed, the Super Bowl will pit the veteran Brady (a 6-point favorite over Roethlisberger and the Steelers) and the upstart Ryan (4 points over Rodgers and the Packers). Team success always reflects glory on a quarterback. Terry Bradshaw, Ken Stabler and Joe Namath all made the Hall of Fame based on their teams’ playoff heroics, though their raw numbers were not always sensational. No matter what combination makes the final game this year, the final four signal callers are all backing up their team success with individual achievement.

Playoffs
Football
Atlanta Falcons
Patriots
Packers
Steelers
Tom Brady
Aaron Rodgers
Ben Roethlisberger
Matt Ryan


Hong Kong Bookseller Confesses on TV to Evading Rules on Shipping to Mainland

Abstract: HONG KONG — A co-owner of a Hong Kong publishing house who disappeared from his home in Thailand only to emerge in police custody in China has given a televised confession, saying that his company circumvented customs regulations to ship politically sensitive books from Hong Kong to the mainland. The disappearance of the businessman, Gui Minhai, a naturalized Swedish citizen, and four other people connected with the publishing house, Mighty Current Media, and its bookshop in the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong has set off protests and widespread concern about the rule of law in this semiautonomous Chinese city. Mr. Gui and his colleagues churned out gossip-filled books on elite politics in China that were aimed at mainland tourists unable to find such material at home. Mr. Gui was shown on Phoenix Television , a broadcaster based in Hong Kong, on Sunday night saying that he had circumvented China’s strict rules on importing books, in part by placing shipments in bags that could not be X-rayed. He also said that he had forged documents from Sweden to apply for his Chinese driver’s license. The Phoenix report included interviews with another co-owner, Lu Bo, and two employees, Lin Rongji and Zhang Zhiping, who said they had helped Mr. Gui with the banned book sales. The three men were detained in Guangdong Province in October. A fifth man connected with Mighty Current Media, Lee Bo, an editor, was last seen in Hong Kong in late December . He later called his wife to say he had gone to Shenzhen, a neighboring city on the mainland, to aid an investigation. Hong Kong police and immigration officers met with Mr. Lee on Monday in a guesthouse on the mainland, the police said in a statement. He told the officers that he had gone to mainland China voluntarily and was not abducted, but he declined to give further details, the police said. He said he was “assisting in an investigation of a case relating to a person surnamed Gui” and would return to Hong Kong when the matter was settled. Mr. Lee also asked that the police not reveal his location, according to the statement, and he said he required no further help from the Hong Kong authorities. In an interview broadcast by Phoenix on Monday evening, Mr. Lee gave a similar explanation for his disappearance. “After the problems with Mighty Current Media emerged, I wanted to secretly go to the mainland and clear up the problems as quickly as possible,” he said. He told the network that he had been worried that he would have to testify against people who could cause problems for him or his family, so he traveled secretly with the help of friends so as not to leave a record of crossing the internal boundary between Hong Kong and mainland China. Mr. Lee added that he planned to give up his British “right of abode” because it had “made the situation even more complex.” Mr. Lee has British citizenship, and Britain’s top diplomat has complained that the handling of Mr. Lee’s case was in violation of a treaty on the status of Hong Kong, a former colony, that gives residents protection under a separate legal system. The Paper, a state news outlet based in Shanghai, reported on Sunday that the police officials handling the case had said that because Mr. Lin, Mr. Lu and Mr. Zhang had “a relatively good attitude in admitting their crimes,” there was a possibility that they could soon be released to return to Hong Kong. But Mr. Gui was not named as a candidate for release, and his admission to the book shipments indicated that he might be charged with new crimes. Since October 2014, the publishing house has shipped about 4,000 books to 380 people in 28 Chinese provinces and regions, The Paper reported, citing investigators. Mr. Gui, 51, appeared in a previous televised confession in January on CCTV, China’s national broadcaster, saying that he had violated probation by leaving China after he was convicted of killing a woman in a drunken-driving accident in the eastern city of Ningbo in 2003. Such televised confessions have become increasingly common in prominent, politically delicate cases in China. The circumstances make it difficult to determine what level of freedom, if any, the subjects have in making their confessions and the potential risks they face for not cooperating. The Paper report said that Mr. Gui had decided to come to China after his father died in June, and that he wanted to see his mother, who is in her 80s. “I always thought about giving myself up,” he said. “I thought that if I took care of that traffic accident mess, I could see my mother once more while she was still alive.”

Hong Kong
Freedom of speech
Gui Minhai
Mighty Current Media
China
Phoenix Television
Publishing
Ships and Shipping


Trial of Ex-Officers Opens With 2 Views of Fatal Albuquerque Shooting

Abstract: ALBUQUERQUE — Lawyers in the trial of two former police officers charged in the fatal 2014 shooting of a homeless man on Monday painted starkly different views of how the encounter unfolded. A special prosecutor said the officers could have backed away from a confrontation. Defense lawyers said the officers were simply doing their jobs. In her opening statement, the prosecutor, Randi McGinn, said the officers “could have stopped at any point and established distance” between themselves and the man, James Boyd, a paranoid schizophrenic who had been illegally camping on a craggy mountainside on this city’s east end in March 2014. But they did not. As Mr. Boyd turned his back on the officers, as if ready to surrender, the officers set off a flash-bang grenade, followed by six shots. Keith Sandy, who has retired since the shooting, and Dominique Perez, who was fired after his indictment, face second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the shooting of Mr. Boyd. Mr. Perez’s lawyer, Luis Robles, characterized the case as “a clash between the duty of the Albuquerque Police Department to provide safety to our community, and the dangers Mr. Boyd posed to that community.” During the four-hour standoff, Mr. Boyd, who had spent much of his adult life in and out of jail and psychiatric hospitals, repeatedly told the officers that he worked for the Department of Defense and could have them all killed with one phone call. Mr. Sandy and Mr. Perez are the first officers to stand trial for their roles in a fatal shooting in Albuquerque, whose police force has had a rate of shootings higher than the national average for years. The case also spotlights the challenges faced by police officers nationwide in dealing with people with mental illness. Ms. McGinn, a seasoned trial and civil rights lawyer who was named special prosecutor in the case, told jurors that through a series of poor decisions, Mr. Sandy and Mr. Perez created a volatile situation that led to the death of Mr. Boyd. Angry and incoherent through much of the confrontation, Mr. Boyd refused to surrender and drop the knives he held in each hand. “Mr. Boyd, for three hours, said, ‘I’m afraid of you. I think you’re going to murder me,’” Ms. McGinn told the jury. “On this day, he was right.” Mr. Boyd was shot in the arms and back; he died hours later. The lawyers made their opening statements in a courtroom full of friends and relatives of the former officers, along with Mr. Boyd’s brother, Andrew Jones. Mr. Jones winced as defense lawyers played a video clip of the shooting recorded by Mr. Perez’s helmet camera, which, when released in 2014, touched off the largest street protests here in a generation. Mr. Boyd was shot weeks before the Justice Department criticized the Albuquerque police force for excessive use of force and ordered several changes. One change was the disbanding of a special tactical unit known as the Repeat Offender Project, to which Mr. Sandy was assigned. In court on Monday, Ms. McGinn signaled that Mr. Sandy would be portrayed differently from Mr. Perez, a decorated veteran of the Iraq war. It was Mr. Sandy and his team who sent crisis intervention officers who had been negotiating with Mr. Boyd away from the scene, she said, and it was he who told a state trooper before he even saw Mr. Boyd that he planned to shoot him with a stun gun. Ms. McGinn also said that Mr. Sandy did not switch on his body camera during the hourslong encounter. Mr. Sandy shifted in his chair and scribbled notes as Ms. McGinn laid out her case against him. Sam Bregman, Mr. Sandy’s lawyer, said in his opening statement that his client had followed training. Police shootings, he said, are not to be judged in hindsight. The trial is expected to last two weeks. If convicted of second-degree murder, the former officers could serve up to 15 years in prison. They both plan to testify in their own defense.

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


Annoying a Politician and Ending Up in Cuffs

Abstract: One evening last August, as Edward Kerry Sullivan stood outside his apartment building on Staten Island, a car pulled up and a man got out. By Mr. Sullivan’s recollection, the conversation went like this: “Are you Edward Sullivan?” the man asked. “That’s me,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Do you have anything on you that I should be worried about?” the man asked. “Who are you?” Mr. Sullivan replied. “Police,” the man said. “You’re under arrest.” A second police officer, in plain clothes like the first, stood by. They handcuffed him and then folded him into their unmarked car. The officers told him, Mr. Sullivan said, that they had been watching him for several days. The crime? He had written “The Jerk,” about three inches high, on a campaign poster for James P. Molinaro, the Staten Island borough president. The undercover officers had taken a picture of the poster. There was no question that Mr. Sullivan had written it; moreover, there was no doubt that for weeks before that, he had launched far more pungent strikes against Mr. Molinaro in letters to a newspaper and public officials, criticizing the borough president’s plans to develop part of the Staten Island waterfront. Somehow the police had begun an investigation of Mr. Sullivan, 52, a former merchant marine who is now an advocate for environmental protection. He was brought to the 120th Precinct and charged with criminal mischief, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Once the case came to court, the Staten Island district attorney declined to prosecute him. Who gave the orders for the police to investigate him? Why would a nearly broke city squander resources on this? And by the way, what about freedom of speech? Representatives of the Bloomberg administration, the New York Police Department and Mr. Molinaro’s office did not respond to these and other questions. So far, no one has explained why the government used its power of arrest against Mr. Sullivan. Since early 2003, the Police Department has been given more power to investigate political activities that, in its view, might pose a threat to public order. Getting such powers for the police was a major policy initiative of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; and the corporation counsel, Michael A. Cardozo. Yet the Sullivan case could be rooted in a long custom of police and political entanglements on Staten Island. In January 2001, a city employee named Terence Hunter wrote to the borough president at the time, Guy V. Molinari, to complain about the closing of a community center in a predominantly black neighborhood. He compared it to a “high-tech lynching” and accused Mr. Molinari of being the type of person who would approve of a lynching — including a picture of the low-tech kind in the letter. The day after Mr. Hunter’s letter arrived at the borough president’s office, five officers from the Intelligence Division came to his home. He was arrested , photographed, fingerprinted and interrogated. He said he was ordered to write an explanation of the letter. After spending the night in a cell, he was released from the courthouse the next day without charge. He sued. Had the case gone through the normal process for city lawsuits, he and his lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union would have had a chance to question officials under oath about how he had come to be arrested. Instead, city lawyers offered him $200,000 for his night in jail. He took it. “The city clearly was in a rush to settle Hunter so as to keep us from delving into the relationship between the N.Y.P.D. on Staten Island and the borough president’s office,” said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Now Mr. Sullivan, too, has sued . Once again, the use of police resources in a political debate will be a central issue. The posters themselves appear to have been put up illegally. Given that, it is unlikely that writing on one of them, as Mr. Sullivan did, would violate any law. Last summer, in letters to The Staten Island Advance and to elected officials, Mr. Sullivan criticized Mr. Molinaro (who succeeded the nearly identically named Mr. Molinari in 2002) over the private development of 36 shorefront acres, saying it was a betrayal of the public trust. Mr. Sullivan — who is fighting cancer and hoping for a liver transplant from someone with type O-positive blood — said the arrest had worn him down. The circumstances of his arrest are too important to be explored only in a civil case, which often winds up being simply a matter of dollars and cents. The City Council is supposed to watch over the executive branch of government, including the police. A lawsuit does not freeze the rest of democracy. Nor is it a substitute.

Police
Civil Rights and Liberties
Suits and Litigation
Staten Island (NYC)


Fastow Testifies Lay Knew of Enron's Problems

Abstract: HOUSTON, March 8 - Andrew S. Fastow, the onetime chief financial officer of Enron, provided some of the strongest evidence yet linking Kenneth L. Lay, the company's founder and former chief executive, to a conspiracy to defraud investors. But Mr. Fastow's statements, coming in the sixth week of the trial of Mr. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, another former chief executive, were almost lost under a searing cross-examination by Daniel Petrocelli, Mr. Skilling's lead lawyer. Days after he retook the reins as Enron's chief executive in 2001, Mr. Lay was told that Enron was in such a precarious state that a "massive restructuring" or a sale of the company would be required to save it from ruin, Mr. Fastow said at the criminal trial of his former bosses. In the most devastating testimony to date that Mr. Lay was not in the dark about Enron's snowballing problems, Mr. Fastow said that he told Mr. Lay in August 2001, just after Mr. Skilling had resigned as chief executive, that Enron had $5 billion to $7 billion of "embedded problems" and had all but run out of options to right the listing ship. "We needed some sort of dramatic solution and we needed a bank to help us sort it out," Mr. Fastow said in his second day on the witness stand. But Mr. Petrocelli stole the spotlight on Wednesday as he aggressively questioned Mr. Fastow, 44, for more than four hours about his criminal activity in a series of off-the-books partnerships that netted Mr. Fastow millions of dollars while entangling his family in his criminal schemes. Mr. Petrocelli portrayed Mr. Fastow as a selfish thief who put his own greed before the good of Enron, and as a man who, rather than plead guilty to his own crimes, let his wife, Lea W. Fastow, go to jail for a year. Mr. Petrocelli drew gasps from the courtroom audience when he displayed what he called a "booty list" totaling $120 million, the sum of all the proceeds Mr. Fastow and Michael J. Kopper expected to earn through their schemes. But Mr. Fastow seemed determined to weather what is expected to be a lengthy and cutting cross-examination by defense lawyers. Contrite and polite, Mr. Fastow openly admitted to being greedy and conceded that Mr. Skilling earned not a penny from Mr. Fastow's self-dealing partnership schemes. Mr. Fastow, who has already agreed to serve at least 10 years in prison and is cooperating with prosecutors, portrayed himself as a man who had come to terms with his wrongdoing. "What I did was reprehensible," he said at one point, starting into a speech after a question by Mr. Petrocelli. "It is not easy to look at yourself and to recognize that about yourself. And it took me a long time to do that. And some days it is still hard to do that. I have destroyed my life. All I can do is ask for forgiveness and be the best person I can be." But in the morning, Mr. Fastow, under questioning by prosecutor John Hueston, said he personally discussed Enron's "serious problems" with Mr. Lay in the summer and fall of 2001. At a meeting on Aug. 15 in Mr. Lay's office, Mr. Fastow said he outlined Enron's problems for Mr. Lay. At the meeting, he testified he presented Mr. Lay with a list of problem areas, including the energy services and broadband units, as well as an Indian power plant project. "Even if we are smart and don't make a mistake for five years," Mr. Fastow said he told Mr. Lay that day, "it will take us that long to work ourselves out of our problems." Mr. Fastow suggested to Mr. Lay that "we have to open up the kimono, show them the skeletons in the closet, what our assets are really worth." The finance chief said he told Mr. Lay that he wanted to pursue a "strategic alternative" with an investment bank, including selling off Enron's pipelines or the entire company. Mr. Lay asked what bank he recommended, and Mr. Fastow said Goldman Sachs because that was one bank that did not have credit lines with Enron and thus would not attract any attention in the market. Days later, on Aug. 20, Mr. Lay told a BusinessWeek reporter in an interview that Enron was "probably in the strongest and best shape that it has ever been in." He added: "There is no other shoe to fall." Mr. Fastow said Mr. Lay was lying. "We had some other shoes that fell in the third quarter," he said Wednesday, including a $1.2 billion accounting error. That same day in August, Mr. Lay was told at a meeting of senior officers, including Mr. Fastow, that Enron was facing an earnings shortfall of several hundred million dollars for the quarter, Mr. Fastow said. Days later, at a road show for investors in New York attended by Mr. Lay and Mr. Fastow, Greg Whalley, who was days away from being named company president, abruptly decided to head back to Houston instead of traveling to Boston with the other Enron executives. Mr. Fastow asked him why, he testified Wednesday. "If I met with investors, if I came to Boston, I would have to lie too much," Mr. Fastow recalled Mr. Whalley telling him. Throughout September 2001, Enron's top executives, including Mr. Lay, struggled to find a way to plug an earnings shortfall. By Sept. 13, two weeks before the end of the third quarter, Enron still needed to fill an $826 million gap to meet its promised earnings target, Mr. Fastow said. Much of the hole was ultimately filled by tapping into reserves, he said, which would mask problems in some of its units. Two weeks later, on Sept. 26, Mr. Lay told Enron employees on an Internet chat that "the third quarter is looking strong. We will hit our numbers." But Mr. Fastow said that Enron was hitting its numbers "because we were pulling hundreds of millions of dollars out of reserves." The first day of Mr. Fastow's cross-examination drew an overflow crowd to the courthouse. On the scene was Richard M. Scrushy, the former HealthSouth chief executive who was acquitted of securities fraud charges last year. "Were you a hero to Enron when you stole?" Mr. Petrocelli asked, pacing the courtroom with his reading glasses in one hand. "Within the culture of corruption that Enron had, that valued financial reporting rather than economic value, I believed I was being a hero," Mr. Fastow replied. The defense lawyer also outlined the difficult choices Mr. Fastow made in avoiding admitting his guilt to prosecutors building their Enron case. Mr. Fastow refused to plead guilty and cooperate initially, which led the government to prosecute his wife, who had received kickback checks for some of his schemes, for filing a false tax return. Mr. Fastow pleaded guilty to two crimes but could be prosecuted for 96 additional crimes if prosecutors decide he did not cooperate fully, Mr. Fastow confirmed. And his wife could also be prosecuted again, he said. "You have a lot riding on this testimony?" Mr. Petrocelli asked. "That is why I need to be truthful," Mr. Fastow responded. Mr. Petrocelli led Mr. Fastow through painstaking details about his crimes, including plots hatched in the Cayman Islands and secret spreadsheets detailing illicit profits. Mr. Petrocelli later detailed all the profits earned from the illicit deals Mr. Fastow participated in, which he had kept track of on his laptop computer. Mr. Fastow and Mr. Kopper had already pocketed about $46 million. "How much of the $120 million from the booty sheet went to Mr. Skilling?" Mr. Petrocelli asked. "Zero," Mr. Fastow replied. Mr. Petrocelli fought to control Mr. Fastow, whom he accused at one point of offering scripted answers. Mr. Fastow retorted that Mr. Petrocelli's questions seemed rehearsed as well. Mr. Petrocelli also repeatedly tried to push Mr. Fastow to admit that he was bent on helping to convict Mr. Skilling so that the "history books" of the Enron saga would not place all the blame on Mr. Fastow's slight shoulders. "A significant number of senior management participated in this activity to misrepresent our company," Mr. Fastow said. "And we all benefited financially from this at the expense of others. And I have come to grips with this. That, in my mind, was stealing."

ENRON CORP
FASTOW ANDREW S
LAY KENNETH L
SUITS AND LITIGATION


Sotheby’s Sales Weaken Amid Thinning Market

Abstract: A year is a long time in the art market. And Monday’s marquee auction of Impressionist and modern works at Sotheby’s demonstrated how much the art world has changed since last May. The tally for 62 works on offer (of which 21 lots failed to sell) was $144.5 million with fees, far below the low estimate of $164.8 million. It was also far below the $368.3 million raised last May in an equivalent sale of 64 works. “Imps and mods,” the powerhouse market of the 1980s, have become far less fashionable than contemporary art. Last spring, in more bullish times, and with wealthy Asian bidders active at New York sales, Christie’s and Sotheby’s supported the prices of selected pre-1950s artists with some expansive guarantees, or pledged minimum prices. A year later, many guarantees have disappeared — and so have many of the Asian bidders who last year pursued three out of the five lots that sold for more than $20 million, including a van Gogh for $66.3 million. “Now we’re concentrating far more on lots priced in the $1 million to $20 million range. And that’s where we can make a profit,” Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s worldwide co-head of Impressionist and modern art, said, referring to the slim margins that auction houses often make from guaranteed works. He characterized Monday night’s patchy bidding as “a more sophisticated market” in the post-sale news conference. “Given the fireworks we’ve seen in the market, and the subsequent waning, the lurching around of the global economy and key collector groups,” said Mary Hoeveler, an art adviser based in New York, “it’s not the moment to sell if your expectations are high.” Are You Smarter Than a Billionaire? Art auctions can be unpredictable. See how you match up in this interactive quiz. Here are some of the highlights. BEST OF THE B TEAM With no trophies by Monet or van Gogh — which last year spurred prices in excess of $50 million — it was left to the “Imps and mods” B team of artworks to create Monday evening’s memorable moments. Maurice de Vlaminck’s vibrant 1905 landscape, “Sous-bois,” thought to have been painted near Chatou in France during the height of the Fauvist movement, had been in the collection of the Blaffer family of Texas for many years and had never been offered at auction. That is an increasing rarity in this heavily traded market. Included in a number of major exhibitions, it sold to Nancy Whyte, a New York-based adviser who was bidding on behalf of a client, for $16.4 million, against a low estimate of $12 million. SURPRISE FAILURE André Derain’s 1906 canvas, “Les Voiles Rouges” (“The Red Sails”), was another former Blaffer picture, but it failed to sell against an estimate of $15 million — to the surprise of Sotheby’s and dealers in the room. “It was like a misfiring Ferrari,” Roger McIlroy, the Australian dealer, said of the auction. “It did well at parts of the race, but fell off the track occasionally.” STAR SELLER Sotheby’s was pleased to put one over on its archrival Christie’s with an entry from the Loeb family of collectors. Paul Signac’s shimmering 1892 Pointillist painting, “Maisons du Port, Saint-Tropez” was entered by the diplomat John Langeloth Loeb Jr., a former American ambassador to Denmark. It had been inherited from his parents , John Langeloth Loeb Sr. and Frances Lehman Loeb, who sold their celebrated collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art at Christie’s in 1997 for $92.7 million. The Signac sold for $10.7 million against a low estimate of $8 million to a telephone bidder. SURPRISE SUCCESS Auguste Rodin is a trophy name, but buyers have tended to prefer his editioned bronzes to his marbles. The 1901-03 sculpture “L’Eternel Printemps,” depicting a passionate kiss between two naked lovers, was believed to be one of 10 known marble versions of the subject. It inspired a lengthy duel between Ben Frija, the Oslo dealer, and a telephone bidder who prevailed at $20.4 million, an auction high for Rodin — and the top price of the sale. “I don’t understand paying $20 million for a Rodin that he never touched,” said Richard Nagy, the London dealer, who regarded the work as carved by assistants from a maquette. GUARANTEES In its May 2015 evening “Imps and mods” sale, Sotheby’s and third parties pledged minimum prices to the sellers of 14 lots. On Monday night, a more risk-averse Sotheby’s included just one guaranteed work — a 1926 Magritte, estimated at $2 million. It sold for $2.3 million with fees to a bidder who appeared to be the guarantor. THE LAST WORD Last year, 78 percent of the lots sold; this May, the selling rate dropped to just 66 percent. “This wasn’t a sale of trophies,” said Heinrich zu Hohenlohe, director of Dickinson in Berlin, specialists in high-end artworks. “There weren’t the standout lots that get people excited.” “It was a relatively difficult sale in difficult times,” he said.

Art
Auction
Sotheby's
Rodin
John L. Loeb Jr.


U.S. Memo Details Views on Killing Citizens in Al Qaeda

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Obama administration lawyers have asserted that it would be lawful to kill a United States citizen if “an informed, high-level official” of the government decided that the target was a ranking figure in Al Qaeda who posed “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States” and if his capture was not feasible, according to a 16-page document made public on Monday. The unsigned and undated Justice Department “white paper,” obtained by NBC News, is the most detailed analysis yet to come into public view regarding the Obama legal team’s views about the lawfulness of killing, without a trial, an American citizen who executive branch officials decide is an operational leader of Al Qaeda or one of its allies. The paper is not the classified memorandum in which the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel signed off on the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico and who died in an American drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. But its legal analysis — citing a national right to self-defense as well as the laws of war — closely tracks the rationale in that document, as described to The New York Times in October 2011 by people who had read it. The memo appears to be a briefing paper that was derived from the real legal memorandum in late 2011 and provided to some members of Congress. It does not discuss any specific target and emphasizes that it does not go into the specific thresholds of evidence that are deemed sufficient. It adopts an elastic definition of an “imminent” threat, saying it is not necessary for a specific attack to be in process when a target is found if the target is generally engaged in terrorist activities aimed at the United States. And it asserts that courts should not play a role in reviewing or restraining such decisions. The white paper states that “judicial enforcement of such orders would require the court to supervise inherently predictive judgments by the president and his national security advisers as to when and how to use force against a member of an enemy force against which Congress has authorized the use of force.” It also fills in many blanks in a series of speeches by members of the Obama legal team about the use of force in targeted killings, including remarks by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. at Northwestern’s law school in March. He asserted that the Constitution’s guarantee of “due process” before the government takes a life does not necessarily mean “judicial process” in national security situations, but offered little specific legal analysis. Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, called the paper “a profoundly disturbing document,” and said: “It’s hard to believe that it was produced in a democracy built on a system of checks and balances. It summarizes in cold legal terms a stunning overreach of executive authority — the claimed power to declare Americans a threat and kill them far from a recognized battlefield and without any judicial involvement.” The release of the white paper comes as President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser and nominee as C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, awaits a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Pressure has been growing on the administration to make the secret legal documents public, or at least to provide the Intelligence Committees with more of them. On Tuesday, eight Democratic and three Republican senators, including some Intelligence Committee members, wrote to Mr. Obama asking for the legal opinions authorizing the killing of Americans. The letter followed one sent by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, a member of the Intelligence Committee who has long sought access to the legal opinions. The senators wrote that they needed the legal opinions to judge “whether the president’s power to deliberately kill American citizens is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards.”

Targeted Killings
Justice Department
Office of Legal Counsel
Barack Obama
Al Qaeda
Drones


Minerals Service Had a Mandate to Produce Results

Abstract: NEW ORLEANS — On March 5, 1997, an obscure federal official with a puckish grin entered a hotel ballroom here and greeted 1,000 jittery oilmen on what would prove a landmark day. For years, fading interest in the Gulf of Mexico had punished the local economy and left Louisiana to mourn its “ Dead Sea .” Now, rising oil prices and new technology were setting off the deep-water version of a gold rush. Interest in drilling ran so high that the official, Chris Oynes, was heading into the annual lease auction with a record number of sealed bids. In giddier times before the bust, his predecessor presided over the auction in a jaunty red blazer, but Mr. Oynes was far too conservative for that. Or so everyone thought — until he opened his briefcase and brought down the house with a size 46 scarlet jacket, an omen of the coming deep-water boom. “They knew symbolically what this meant,” Mr. Oynes said in a recent interview. “In Louisiana terms: ‘Let the good times roll.’” Now the gulf is reeling from the worst oil spill in United States history, after five million barrels of sludge escaped from a defiant mile-deep hole that BP finally cemented last week. Deep-water drilling has been temporarily banned. And the Minerals Management Service , the agency that led the way into the deep-water age, has been abolished, ridiculed as a pawn of the oil industry it was meant to oversee. The gulf office that Mr. Oynes ran for many years has drawn particular scorn. The causes of the spill remain unclear, but a number of the agency’s actions have drawn fire: it shortened safety and environmental reviews; overlooked flaws in the spill response plan; and ignored warnings that crucial pieces of emergency equipment, blowout preventers, were prone to fail. The story has gained a bacchanal gloss because agency employees in Louisiana and Colorado took meals, gifts and sporting trips paid for by the industry, and several Colorado officials had sex and used drugs with industry employees. But the agency’s culture was shaped by forces much bigger than small-time corruption. For decades, Washington and Louisiana were joined in the quest for red-jacket days, and the minerals agency was expected to provide them. Washington got oil and royalty fees; Louisiana got jobs; and the agency got frequent reminders of the need to keep both happy. Seldom do regulators work in a place so dependent on the industry they oversee. From the top of Louisiana’s tallest building (One Shell Square) to the bottom of its largest aquarium (with a sunken rig), oil saturated the state’s culture long before it covered its marshes. It is prized as a source of jobs and as a source of tax revenue. While Floridians stage protests to prevent drilling, Louisianians stage a Shrimp and Petroleum Festival to “prove that oil and water really do mix.” When Mr. Oynes’s wife, Rena, won a teaching award, it was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute . Across South Louisiana, regulators have grown up hunting and fishing — and working on oil rigs — with the people they oversee. Few people have mattered more in that world than Mr. Oynes, 63, who held top jobs in the gulf office for 21 years and outlasted 11 agency directors before resigning abruptly in May. Many branches of government have parallel figures, little-known civil servants whose knowledge and staying power lend them great sway. Cobbled together three decades ago from rival corners of the Interior Department , the minerals service had a three-part charge: issuing leases, collecting royalties, and overseeing the dangerous work at sea. His superiors in Washington set broad policy, but Mr. Oynes, a heavyset conduit of high energy, dominated the gulf with 12-hour days and a zeal for detail. His decisions guided which drilling plans would be approved, what safety checks would be required and how the platforms would be inspected. Raised in conservative Orange County, Calif., he shared nothing of the Mardi Gras spirit for which Louisiana was known — only its belief in the importance of oil and its respect for the people who mined it. For years, he told associates that modern engineering made spills all but impossible and harmless if they did occur. Since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, Mr. Oynes has made no public comments. But angry at what he called lampooning depictions of the agency, he recently broke his silence, offering his account of what happened on his watch. He aired many problems, but few regrets. “I thought we had done a pretty good job of addressing the challenges that come with deep water,” he said in an interview. “My opinion has not changed.” Mr. Oynes acknowledged that he had known nothing about a group of studies, some nearly a decade old, that cast doubt on the reliability of blowout preventers — the fail-safe equipment that failed in the BP spill. He could not explain why the studies, commissioned in Washington, had not reached him. But he bridled at what has become the dominant story line: that a heedless group of derelict bureaucrats abetted catastrophe. In Mr. Oynes’s counternarrative, a dedicated staff did all it could to safely coax oil from watery depths, mindful that it creates jobs, bolsters national defense and helps keep the lights on. “That is a very noble mission,” he said, while emphasizing that the gulf is a special prize. “When people came down, new directors, whatever, I would try not to insult their intelligence,” he added. “But I tried to make sure they understood we had a national asset they were managing.” “I can’t tell you how many times we had that conversation inside M.M.S.: doesn’t the public understand energy doesn’t come from a light switch?” he said. “It has to come from somewhere before it gets to the light switch.” A Special Bond If modern Louisiana history could be squeezed on a bumper sticker, this is what it would say: Louisiana ♥ Petroleum. Or that was the message conveyed last year when Mr. Oynes joined other Interior Department officials at a hearing in New Orleans on offshore drilling . At hearings elsewhere, industry critics largely set the tone. But in New Orleans, a grandmother waited for hours to say, “Drill, and drill vigorously.” A school principal said the majority of his students’ parents worked for the oil industry. A drilling engineer lauded the industry’s safety record. “The incident rate for a real estate agent is higher than someone working on the rigs,” he said. As things go in Louisiana, the engineer happened to be Mr. Oynes’s best friend. Five states border the Gulf of Mexico, but Louisiana’s bond with subsea petroleum is unique. Marshes blur distinctions between drilling on land and at sea. The continental shelf slopes gently. There are no white sand beaches to protect, only river mud. In some states, drilling has been seen as a threat to native cultures. In Cajun country, it opened a door to the middle class — even as a typical offshore schedule (two weeks on, two weeks off) let workers still fish, hunt and farm. “The industry didn’t destroy the old culture — it saved it,” said Diane Austin, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona . What it did largely destroy, through cash and cunning, was significant political opposition. Local groups have typically been weak and small — no match for an industry that Mr. Oynes calls the “900-pound gorilla.” “We would issue standard notices to environmental groups, and they would never even come to a meeting,” he said. “Arguing against oil and gas isn’t going to get them anywhere.” As Congress debated the landmark 1978 law that governs offshore activity, Louisiana officials argued for a light federal touch. “We have 20,000 oil wells off the coast of Louisiana, and we have been drilling out there for a quarter of a century,” Senator J. Bennett Johnston, a Democrat, said on the Senate floor. “The so-called danger from oil spills has simply not been proved. Not only has it not been proved, it has been disproved, and we need to get on with that drilling.” Elsewhere in the country, the law requires companies to submit detailed proposals for offshore activities, called Drilling and Production Plans. In the gulf, it specifically forbids them. Though the minerals agency invented an alternative (a Development Operations Coordination Document), it provides for lesser levels of review. Born of competing national concerns, the law outlines competing goals. One passage calls for the “expeditious and orderly development” of offshore gas and oil. The next adds a codicil: “subject to environmental safeguards.” While Mr. Oynes said he gave the mandates equal weight, many subordinates thought that he — like his adoptive state — favored one word. “Expedite,” he would say. Technology Outpaces Rules When Mr. Oynes arrived in New Orleans in 1986, Louisiana was in crisis. Oil prices had fallen by more than 60 percent in a single year, and discoveries in the gulf were dwindling. With unemployment in some parishes above 25 percent, sardonic bumper stickers entered state lore: “Last one out, turn off the lights.” The crash lives on in communal memory like a bout with a life-threatening disease — a reminder of how many organs fail when the offshore heart stops pumping. After 11 years in the Interior Department’s leasing program, Mr. Oynes knew the importance of offshore oil but was still surprised at how deeply it had seeped into Louisiana society. “It’s subtle, but it’s everywhere,” he said. His main interests outside work were church and his sons’ swim meets, and both brought friendships with people in the industry. “Maybe 20 percent of the guys in the church worked in the oil patch,” he said. Among the other swim team parents was his friend the drilling engineer. Economic rejuvenation came slowly but accelerated in 1994 with the launching of Shell’s Auger platform, a $1.2 billion marvel capable of mining oil through 2,800 feet of water and 19,000 feet of subsea sand and rock. It came amid a series of head-turning technological advances that, along with rising oil prices and lowered federal royalty fees, suddenly made deep-water drilling lucrative. The gold rush was on. In 1997, Mr. Oynes’s red-jacket auction brought the federal government $824 million and leased a record 1,032 tracts — numbers he can still recite as readily as his phone number. In 1998 he won a presidential award for distinguished government service. Mr. Oynes was a lawyer, not an engineer, but he understood that the regulations lagged the technology. When Congress started its debate in the 1970s, the deepest well was less than 700 feet beneath the gulf’s surface. By 2003, rigs were drilling nearly two miles down. The achievements inspired awe — even allusions to space exploration — but posed new safety and environmental risks that the agency had to address. One internal problem it faced was a feeling among many staff members that swift action was impossible. One regulation had famously taken nine years to get through Washington. “It created a tone of ‘Why should we try to have an aggressive program of regs?’ ” Mr. Oynes said. “I had to become a cheerleader: ‘Now guys, don’t give up.’ ” Rather than issue formal regulations, the office often relied on weaker “Notices to Lessees and Operators,” which were supposed to explain existing rules, not announce new ones. Mr. Oynes said the office got “very inventive” in stretching the reach of the notices but knew the industry “could file a lawsuit and we were vulnerable.” That frustration was compounded by a feeling that the agency’s Washington bosses cared more about leasing — where to do it and how much money it would bring? — than they did about the challenges of getting the oil from the sea. That was true, Mr. Oynes said, under Republican and Democratic administrations. “It’s almost a given with a director that they don’t know anything about drilling,” Mr. Oynes said. “We would turn to each other and say, ‘Headquarters isn’t paying attention.’ ” Despite the impediments — tight budgets were another — Mr. Oynes won what felt to him like significant victories. He got money to create a fifth field office, in Lake Charles, La. He hired a dozen or more new inspectors. (After the BP spill, the Obama administration is now talking of adding hundreds.) He won small amounts of money for new training and created retention bonuses to keep staff members in the 550-person office from decamping to the oil industry, where they could sometimes double their salaries. Many accounts of the agency’s culture have cited the “revolving door,” suggesting that regulators pulled their punches in the hopes of landing industry jobs. A number of Mr. Oynes’s senior lieutenants went to work for the industry, including his deputy, his chief of staff and heads of two of the four divisions. Two former agency directors went on to lead the industry’s Washington lobbying group. Mr. Oynes calls the criticism “totally off base,” saying the role-swapping was limited and played no role in the agency’s culture. But he added: “I find it pretty hard to imagine I would ever go to work for an oil company. I’m just not comfortable with that.” He considered himself a tough cop. When he learned that Shell was burning huge volumes of natural gas it considered too costly to bring to shore — cheating the government of royalties and wasting energy — Mr. Oynes called federal prosecutors, who won $49 million in royalties and fines. Chevron howled in 2003 after the agency rejected a hefty bid for a deep-water tract. But Mr. Oynes backed the staff geologists, and the tract fetched more than five times as much the following year. “We stuck to our guns,” he said. One agency practice now called into question is the use of a process called categorical exclusion to excuse individual drilling plans from intensive environmental reviews. Critics say the exclusions are meant for activities with no potential for environmental harm, not drilling in the ocean floor. BP got two categorical exclusions for its ill-fated well, one for exploration and one for drilling. “What’s missing when you do a categorical exclusion is the chance to consider alternative techniques,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, which is one of several groups suing the agency over the practice. “You say there is only one option — the preferred option of the oil industry.” Agency officials say the sheer volume of gulf activity left them little choice: they issued up to 1,000 drilling permits each year, and environmental impact statements can take up to two years. Instead, they examined the safety and environmental issue posed by the drilling in wholesale fashion, before conducting the annual lease sales. Decades had passed since the last big spill. Mr. Oynes saw no reason to change. Tension Between Factions As the gulf office adapted to the deep-water age, it was riven by a tribal split: engineers versus environmental scientists. The engineers were action-oriented and confident; they trusted machines. The scientists were deliberative and academic; they worried about what they might not know. Engineers typically had local roots. Scientists often came from out of state. The engineers called their rivals the “free thinkers down on the third floor.” “We had huge conflicts,” said Hammond Eve, who ran the environmental division for eight years before retiring in 2004. Both sides knew which division held the power. The law gave the head of field operations — the lead engineer — the authority to approve exploration and drilling plans. To win changes, the environmental scientists had to work through him. When tensions arose between the factions, Mr. Oynes cast himself as the neutral broker, but subordinates sensed where his instincts lay. “From my perspective, we can’t sit here and talk about it forever,” he said. “We have to get on with things.” The result was a culture that favored trust over doubt, saying yes over saying no. One day in a staff meeting Mr. Eve raised a question: with wells being sunk at ever-greater depths, what are the chances of a blowout, a catastrophic eruption? Mr. Oynes said the answer would come from the head of field operations. “And later on the answer came back that it was impossible,” Mr. Eve said. “They said the blowout preventer will take care of it.” (That head of field operations, Donald C. Howard, was fired in 2007 for accepting gifts from a drilling company, and pleaded guilty to lying on his ethics form.) Mr. Oynes expressed a similarly confident view in a 2003 interview with Tyler Priest, an oral historian at the University of Houston . Referring to a giant spill in Santa Barbara , Calif., in 1969, Mr. Oynes said, “You could almost say it is impossible for that to happen again.” Given modern cleanup technology, he added, “Even if you had a spill, how much harm is it going to do?” Mr. Eve calls the comment “absurd.” “Chris shaped the program around that premise,” he said. “The premise was wrong, and therefore the program was wrong.” He said Mr. Oynes, seeking to increase production, had fostered an office culture that was “pro-industry to the point of being blind.” Others saw his doggedness in a fight over seismic testing. The industry uses the tests to locate oil, but the high-decibel blasts can harm marine mammals. To authorize them, the minerals agency needed permission from the National Marine Fisheries Service . When the fisheries agency declined to give it, the minerals group proceeded anyway — temporarily, minerals officials said, while the agencies continued negotiations. The fisheries service wanted the gulf office to require independent spotters aboard the seismic testing boats, with the authority to shut them down. Mr. Oynes grew livid, calling the idea costly and impractical and saying the boat crews could be trained as scouts instead. “He was screaming at the top of his lungs,” said a former agency scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears government reprisals. “He said, “N.M.F.S. is trying to shut down oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico!’ ” The standoff with the fisheries service has now lasted eight years. Four environmental groups filed a suit against the minerals service in June, saying the seismic testing violates the law. The clash between the agency’s environmentalists and engineers dominated a project meant to guide the agency into the deep-water age, a two-year study of new risks called an environmental assessment. Published in 2000, it framed the agency’s approach for the next decade. It reads like a document at war with itself. It counted 151 well blowouts in the previous 25 years, about one every two months. It said a quarter had led to spills. It questioned the effectiveness of chemical dispersants and cited the difficulties of drilling relief wells. In noting that a deep-water blowout could take up to four months to control, it all but forecast the BP disaster: “Of particular concern is the ability to stop a blowout once it has begun.” Then it quickly silenced its own alarm bells, casting spills as a “very low probability event” and noting that companies had “speculated” that deep-water blowouts might cap themselves (because of loose sediment on the ocean floor). It saw no need for new safeguards or an environmental impact statement, a more rigorous review that would have included public debate. Why not do one, just to be safe? “I’m sure industry would have been very nervous,” Mr. Oynes said, explaining that it took “some hand-holding” just to do the assessment. “If you start talking about an E.I.S., their alarm bells start going off a bit stronger: ‘Oh my God, what is going on here?’ ” Still, he said, had the study been necessary, the agency would have done it. A Bureaucratic Bungle For most of his career, Mr. Oynes, like his agency, flew beneath the public radar. But in 2006 he was dragged before Congress for his role in a costly mistake. For him, and for the minerals service, it forecast troubles to come. To encourage production, Congress had passed a law in 1995 suspending royalties on deep-water tracts unless oil prices exceeded a certain threshold. But the minerals agency somehow dropped the threshold provision from two years of contracts. When prices unexpectedly rose, the companies pocketed billions of dollars. The inspector general called the episode a “jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling.” While he placed much of the fault on the Washington staff, two industry representatives recalled telling Mr. Oynes about the omission. Mr. Oynes testified that he did not recall the exchange. The incident has trailed Mr. Oynes ever since, but most accounts omit the coda. Congress drafted the law so poorly that the federal courts invalidated the thresholds for the entire five-year program, at a cost of up to $60 billion. Congress had derided Mr. Oynes while committing the greater mistake. For Mr. Oynes and members of his inner circle, the episode only fed a notion they had of themselves as stoic sentinels on the petroleum frontier — forced to take flak unfairly, but there to get things done. A year after his Congressional thrashing, Mr. Oynes was promoted in 2007 to a top Washington job. He felt like he was capping a storybook career. The Dead Sea had come to life, technology had made quantum leaps and there had not been a single major spill. “It felt very good,” he said. Last year the Offshore Energy Center, a nonprofit group in Galveston supported by the oil and gas industry, inducted the minerals agency into its Hall of Fame for raising safety and environmental standards “in cooperation with the petroleum industry.” The minerals service gave out safety awards, too. Last year one went to BP. On the morning of April 21, Mr. Oynes got an e-mail saying that 11 people were dead. The news got worse from there. Nothing would stop the toxic geyser about a mile below the sea. The blowout preventer had failed. Soon, news accounts focused on a trail of studies, a decade long, that had questioned the reliability of the devices. One, commissioned by the Washington office of the minerals agency, reported a “grim snapshot” that “illustrates the lack of preparedness.” Mr. Oynes is still trying to understand why he knew nothing about them. Time magazine placed him on its “dirty dozen” list of people most responsible for the spill. In New Orleans, The Times-Picayune reprised his role in the blown royalties affair. A congressman hailed his planned departure as a “an opportunity to begin anew.” Soon the inspector general’s office released a report, long in the making, about the agency’s Lake Charles office. It depicted an ethics-free zone, where inspectors routinely took industry gifts and did favors for industry friends. They went hunting and fishing on the companies’ tab, accepted company meals, went skeet shooting at the companies’ expense, and in one case flew on a private plane to watch Louisiana State University in the Peach Bowl. (One employee said he knew it was wrong, but did it because he was a “big L.S.U. fan.”) One inspector negotiated a job with a company while inspecting its platforms. “Obviously we’re all oil industry,” said Larry Williamson, the district manager. “We’re all from the same part of the country. Almost all our inspectors have worked for oil companies out on these same platforms. They grew up in the same towns.” On May 12, the administration announced that the minerals service was being abolished. It would be split into three agencies: one to issue leases, one to collect royalties and one to supervise offshore operations. After decades of quiescence, Louisianians are suddenly appearing at oil and gas protests. But what they object to is the federal government’s six-month ban on deep-water drilling. About 10,000 people gathered last month in the Cajundome in Lafayette as Gov. Bobby Jindal , a Republican, urged them to “defend our way of life.” Two federal courts in Louisiana invalidated the ban (though the administration created a new one). While the accident “is an unprecedented, sad, ugly and inhuman disaster,” wrote Judge Martin Feldman of Federal District Court, “oil and gas production is quite simply elemental to gulf communities.” He said halting would have “immeasurable effects” on the economy. At the Aquarium of the Americas, a beckoning riverfront attraction beside the French Quarter , curious crowds file through the Gulf of Mexico exhibit. The first thing they see is a sunken oil platform, with fish swarming about its barnacled legs. Dreamy music completes the message: symbiosis and serenity. The Audubon Institute, which runs the aquarium, is the city’s most prominent nature group, but the exhibit talks about oil as much as it talks about fish. It cites the taxes the industry pays, the number of jobs it creates and the utility of “a special fluid called drilling mud.” No one could accuse the group of distancing itself from its sponsors. A large sign credits six major oil companies for sponsoring the exhibit, led by BP.

Minerals Management Service
Offshore drilling
Gulf of Mexico
Oil and Gasoline
Conflict of interest
BP
Accidents and Safety


At Least 5 Are Killed and 12 Are Missing as Storms Ravage Texas and Oklahoma

Abstract: AUSTIN, Tex. — Louie Bond called it a tsunami, a surge of water that began late Saturday night with torrential rains in Texas’ Hill Country and raced down the bluff-lined valley carved out by the Blanco River. By the time it reached the vacation getaways and retiree cabins overlooking the river at Wimberley, some 30 miles southwest of here, the surge was 40 feet high, sweeping away bridges and homes and ancient stands of cypresses as if they were bath toys. One of the homes held 36-year-old Jonathan McComb, his wife and two children and two other families from their Corpus Christi hometown — nine in all, including at least three children. On Monday, Mr. McComb was in a San Antonio hospital with a collapsed lung and broken bones. The other eight were missing, along with four others from the area, apparently lost in the torrent that capped weeks of rain and violent weather across Texas and Oklahoma. The weekend’s weather left at least five people dead in the two states, and more heavy rain and tornadoes pummeled Texas on Monday. Image At least 13 people were reported killed in Ciudad Acuña, a Mexican border town west of San Antonio, after a tornado struck. Credit Ramiro Gomez/Reuters “It had been raining here for weeks, a lovely wet spring after years of drought. The ground was saturated,” said Ms. Bond, a magazine editor and former editor of Wimberley’s newspaper. “The cypress trees along the river are stripped down to bare toothpicks.” Wimberley and nearby San Marcos, a pair of Blanco River towns off the Interstate 35 corridor linking Austin and San Antonio, appear to have been the hardest-hit towns in the United States. But in Ciudad Acuña, a Mexican city of about 140,000 on the border due west of San Antonio, a tornado that leveled blocks of buildings at sunrise Monday killed at least 13 people. In Oklahoma, weekend storms killed two people: a firefighter in Claremore, near Tulsa, who was swept into a storm drain Sunday, and a Tulsa woman who died Saturday after her automobile hydroplaned on a highway. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott added 24 counties on Monday to at least a dozen that were declared disaster areas earlier this month because of weather. Forecasters predicted more rain and severe weather across the state the rest of this week. Image Debi Welsh cleaned up the remains of her family home in Wimberley, Tex., on Monday. Credit Jerry Lara/The San Antonio Express-News, via Associated Press On one level, this spring’s rains have been a blessing, all but obliterating an acute drought that had gripped part of the state for five years. But the weather has also been punishing. Officials recommended on Monday that outside Houston, families leave about 400 homes below Louis Creek Dam, which was said to have been weakened by steady rain and at risk of failing. Mr. Abbott, who flew across the Blanco River valley on Monday, said at a news conference that the damage there was “absolutely devastating.” In Hays County, which includes San Marcos and Wimberley, an overnight curfew imposed Sunday was renewed Monday as residents and workers began assessing the damage to at least 1,200 homes, including at least 350 in Wimberley that were destroyed. San Marcos authorities said one unidentified man had been killed Sunday. “I’ve been here for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Will Conley, a Hays County commissioner. “Bridges that have never seen water flow over them had 20 feet of water over them.” Image A flooded section of East Jefferson Street on Sunday in Grand Prairie, Tex. Credit Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press “We’ve had worse flooding in the general area,” he said, “but we have not seen a surge of the river to this degree in recorded history.” In the picturesque country around Wimberley, the Blanco River’s banks are sprinkled with bed-and-breakfasts and rental cottages. Last weekend, Mr. McComb, his 33-year-old wife, Laura, and their sons, Leighton, 4, and Andrew, 6, were staying in one home with two other Corpus Christi families, Ralph and Sue Carey and Randy and Michelle Charba. To their west, a cloudburst in the Blanco River’s upper reaches dumped at least 10 inches of rain late Saturday, unleashing a flash flood. Not long ago, said Ms. Bond, the magazine editor, local officials initiated a so-called reverse-911 system, intended to make mass telephone calls to local residents in the event of an emergency. “Everyone’s phone went crazy,” Ms. Bond said. “It was a massive effort to call people, to wake people up and get people out.” Whether Mr. McComb and the other guests got a call is not known. Bert Cobb, a Hays County judge, told The Associated Press that floodwaters peaked about 4 a.m. Sunday at more than 40 feet. He said witnesses saw the McComb house slip from its foundation into the river, then smash into a bridge. Mr. McComb’s father, Joe McComb, told The Corpus Christi Caller-Times that his son managed to reach the river’s banks despite being hit in the head by debris. Mr. Cobb, the county judge, said that only pieces of the house had been recovered.


If It’s N.B.A. Players vs. Owners, What About the Fans?

Abstract: The N.B.A. got younger this week; what remains to been seen is whether the league got any wiser. On Thursday, dozens of N.B.A. players met in New York with Billy Hunter , the executive director of their union, then addressed reporters in a calculated show of strength. A few hours later in Newark, incoming N.B.A. rookies celebrated the happiest day of their lives as they walked across a stage to shake hands with smiling, affable David Stern , the N.B.A. commissioner. As the veterans spoke somberly on a rain-swept afternoon in Manhattan and young players gushed in Newark, Ron Artest, the Lakers’ unpredictable forward, announced in Los Angeles that he was planning a name change — to Metta World Peace. And players wonder why the public is hard pressed to take their so-called plight seriously. Earlier this month, the N.B.A. was bathed in light and good will. The league had completed one of its most successful seasons and celebrated one of its most compelling finals as Dallas defeated Miami in six games. Two weeks later, well-compensated players and billionaire owners are locked in a dispute primarily over money at a time when much of the nation is suffocating with debt and unemployment. Hope, for many, is in short supply, and two primary outlets for diversion — the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. — are either shut down or about to be. The N.F.L. players have been locked out for more than 100 days, and N.B.A. players may not be far behind. On Friday, dozens of them attended the latest bargaining session in Manhattan while wearing identical gray T-shirts that proclaimed “Stand.” It looked impressive, but there was no apparent progress during the talks between the two sides with just a week to go before the current labor deal expires. Professional athletes are often puzzled by the general public’s attitude toward them when they become embroiled in labor disputes with team owners. That attitude seems to range from apathy to contempt; few seem to identify with the players at all. Hunter tried to make the case this week that union workers are union workers, and that they face the same assault from management whether they are well-paid athletes or not. “It’s part of the overall climate that one sees around the country,” Hunter said. “True, our players may earn a few more dollars than the average person, but they’re still confronted by the same issues.” Hunter has a point, although we’re talking more than a few dollars here. The average N.B.A. salary dwarfs an average worker’s. But the disparity in compensation may not be the only reason fans don’t identify with players when labor disputes arise. Fans thrive on passion and hard-fought competition. Labor negotiations, while certainly heated, are, at their essence, a day at the office. Players can have all the shows of unity they want. T-shirts and otherwise. Removed from stadiums and arenas, the magic wears off, and their battle over a labor contract is far less compelling. Sports leagues manufacture fantasy and escape, unscripted interactive drama. Labor negotiations offer none of that for a fan looking to take a timeout from the rest of his life. On Wednesday, Hunter was asked if he trusted Stern. He used a boxing analogy to make the point that the bargaining was not personal. “The atmosphere within the room, there’s not a lot of acrimony,” he said. “We’re polite, we laugh, and we shake hands and pat each other on the back. “That’s how it is,” he added. “It’s not about whether we like, dislike, trust, don’t trust.” But therein lies a fundamental disconnect. For fans, everything is personal, and not necessarily rational. You don’t mess with people’s joy, and that’s what postponing a season would do. From the wealthiest to the poorest, fans lose themselves in stadiums and arenas. When the games are over, players step out of their in-game character, but fans continue to rejoice or smolder as they take these wins and losses to heart. This is the phenomenon that LeBron James clumsily, but perceptively, touched on in his remarks after Game 6 of the N.B.A. finals, when he said that no matter how much fans hated him, they’d have to go back to living their lives when the games were over, when the day was done. Professional sports are a gift for those who can play and a refuge for many of those who cannot. From the draft to the regular season to the playoff finals, the promise of a dream is what keeps fans coming back for more. The public squabbling between players and owners over money pushes fans away. On Thursday, the N.B.A. received its annual infusion of youth; what players and owners need now is an infusion of wisdom. In addition to exchanging intricate formulas for sharing revenue, the two sides had better find a way to prevent the good will they’ve re-established from being destroyed, perhaps for good.

Labor and Jobs
National Basketball Assn
Basketball
Hunter Billy
Stern David
Lockouts
Organized Labor


Cyprus Peace Talks End With Each Side Blaming the Other

Abstract: Negotiations to end the decades-old division of Cyprus broke down on Tuesday, with the two sides still far apart and no date set for a new round of talks. It was the second round of meetings this month between Nicos Anastasiades, the Greek Cypriot leader, and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart, Mustafa Akinci. The talks in Switzerland were supposed to produce a map of the internal boundaries of a future federation on Cyprus and pave the way for broader talks early next year. But the two-day session broke up without progress, and each side blamed the other. The internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government held Turkey responsible and said it was “not a good night for our country.” “We are not at all happy and sincerely regret that as a result of the Turkish attitude, it was not possible to complete a promising process,” said Nikos Christodoulides, a government spokesman. Mr. Akinci, the Turkish Cypriot leader, accused the Greek Cypriot side of insisting on “maximalist positions” on territory and other issues. The United Nations has sponsored 18 months of negotiations between the two leaders in what was seen as the best hope of a settlement in years. Despite the failure on Tuesday, Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, “remains hopeful that a deal can be reached this year and will personally support those efforts,” said his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric. The Turkish Foreign Ministry said of the end of the negotiations, “A very important opportunity has been missed,” according to Huseyin Muftuoglu, a spokesman. Greek leaders said they were “open” to talks with Turkey on the status of the Mediterranean island. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece, in a phone call last week with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “expressed desire for a bilateral meeting,” but no date was set, according to Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, a spokesman for the Greek government. Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded the northern third of the island in response to an Athens-inspired coup seeking a union with Greece. It has been widely agreed that some of the territory currently controlled by the Turkish Cypriots would be ceded to Greek Cypriots in any peace deal. But just how much, and what land Turkey should give up, has bedeviled four decades of talks. The two leaders had been thought to be close on the percentage of territory that would remain under Turkish Cypriot control, with Mr. Akinci suggesting 29.2 percent and the Greek Cypriots proposing 28 percent. But they remained far apart on how many Greek Cypriots should be allowed to return to homes they fled in 1974. Greek Cypriot news reports said that Mr. Anastasiades had reduced his target to 90,000 from 100,000, but that Mr. Akinci was insisting on fewer than 70,000.

Cyprus
UN
Mustafa Akinci
Nicos Anastasiades
International relations
Greece
Turkey


Rivals for Prime Minister Claim Victory in Ukraine

Abstract: KIEV, Ukraine , Oct. 1 — Leaders of the two main political parties in Ukraine both claimed victory on Monday in crucial parliamentary elections, but the vote appeared so tight that it could be many days before a new prime minister takes office. Supporters of Yulia V. Tymoshenko , the former prime minister who was a stalwart of the Orange Revolution of 2004, insisted that the final tally would show that she was the victor. But her chief rival, Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich , dismissed those statements as premature. With no convincing winner in Sunday’s contests, the situation remained relatively unstable, especially given Ukraine’s recent history. Close elections in the past three years have produced political stalemates, large-scale demonstrations, extended legal battles, back room maneuvering and accusations of voter fraud — all of which have left this nation ballot-weary. Officials said late Monday night that with 93 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Yanukovich’s party had 34 percent and Ms. Tymoshenko’s had 31 percent. But those numbers could fluctuate as polling places finish reporting. Ms. Tymoshenko’s party said she would become prime minister again by reaching a deal with President Viktor A. Yushchenko ’s party, which received 14 percent, rekindling an alliance that was triumphant in the Orange Revolution, but collapsed in acrimony later on. But many of the areas that had not yet reported were strongholds for Mr. Yanukovich, indicating that his percentage might grow. Two or three minor parties appeared to have a chance of qualifying for Parliament, which could allow them to influence the choice of prime minister as the two main parties woo them as partners. Associates of Ms. Tymoshenko complained Monday about the slow pace of the count in the areas loyal to Mr. Yanukovich, and they hinted of possible fraud. President Yushchenko announced that he was ordering an investigation. Despite the complaints about the count, the elections on Sunday appeared to have been conducted fairly, competitively and without major problems, according to foreign observers, making it unusual for a republic of the former Soviet Union. It also contrasted with the presidential election that led to the Orange Revolution, which was annulled after observers reported widespread malfeasance. The showing of Ms. Tymoshenko was a surprise, in that opinion polls before the election had her party trailing Mr. Yanukovich’s by as many as 10 percentage points. On Sunday night she declared, “The victory of the democratic forces is final.” On Monday, Mr. Yanukovich criticized Ms. Tymoshenko for presuming that she would be prime minister, saying that she was demonstrating her “political immaturity.” “Any statement regarding a victory solely on the basis of exit poll predictions is irresponsible, unpersuasive and extremely cavalier,” he said. The third-place showing of Mr. Yushchenko’s party reflected how far his popularity had slipped since the days of the Orange Revolution, when he won the presidency over Mr. Yanukovich. Ukraine has stumbled through political turmoil since, and the public tends to hold Mr. Yushchenko responsible. Mr. Yanukovich, whose political career was thought to be over after he lost the presidency in 2004, mounted an unexpected comeback last year with the help of an American political consultant, Paul J. Manafort. Once considered a hard-liner who favored close ties with Russia, Mr. Yanukovich has been campaigning as a reformer who wants to build relations with Europe. Voter preferences in Ukraine have been largely based on regional divisions, with Mr. Yanukovich winning support in the Russian-speaking east and south of the country. Ms. Tymoshenko and Mr. Yushchenko are popular in the Ukrainian-speaking west.

Ukraine
Politics and Government
Elections
Tymoshenko Yulia V
Yanukovich Viktor F
Yushchenko Viktor


Stimulus and Exports Help Ease Japan’s Recession

Abstract: TOKYO — Japan ’s economy grew at a robust annual rate of 4.8 percent in the third quarter as stimulus spending and a rebound in exports appeared to bring the country firmly out of its worst recession in the postwar era. Gross domestic product grew 1.2 percent in the July-to-September period from the previous three months, or at an annual pace of 4.8 percent, the government said on Monday. It was the second consecutive quarter of growth for Japan and offered more evidence of a widespread recovery from the global economic crisis. Last week, the 16-country euro zone said its economy grew 0.4 percent in the three months to September, the first uptick in six quarters. The G.D.P. in the United States expanded at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the quarter that ended in September, also partly propelled by stimulus programs. The reading for Japan, an initial estimate that could yet be revised, beat a 2.9 percent median forecast of 20 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Still, the outlook for Japan’s economy remains unclear, with a new government indicating it will slow down stimulus spending just as the recovery starts to gain steam. “We’re finally seeing a rebound in domestic demand, and a high rate of growth over all. It’s clear that the economy has bottomed out,” Koichi Haji, chief economist at the NLI Research Institute in Tokyo, said. “But much of the recovery has been thanks to government spending, so we’ll most likely see growth slow going forward,” Mr. Haji said. “It’s too soon to say we’re out of the woods.” Strong investment by companies helped drive the recovery. Capital spending rose a better-than-expected 1.6 percent in the quarter, the first gain in a year and a half. Exports grew 6.4 percent, helped by stimulus spending by governments around the world, which has led to a recovery in global trade. Consumer spending, which makes up two-thirds of the economy, climbed 0.7 percent, propped up by more than 20 trillion yen in stimulus spending by Japan. In particular, government incentives on purchases of energy-efficient appliances and cars have bolstered sales at companies like Toyota Motor and Sony. Citing increases in demand, manufacturers like Toyota and Nissan recently upgraded their earnings forecasts for the fiscal year. Still, Japan’s exporters remain under pressure from the strong yen, which makes their products less competitive overseas and erodes profits in the home currency. The recent expansion goes only so far to make up for ground lost in the global downturn. Though Japan’s banks were not at the epicenter of the financial crisis, the country suffered as demand for its exports collapsed, wiping out a full five years of economic growth. Industrial production still remains a fifth off last year’s levels, and unemployment, at 5.3 percent, is close to a record high. Deflation is back in full force, eroding profits and wages. And despite the frailty of Japan’s recovery, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has been fiercely critical of further spending on public works. His Democratic Party of Japan, which swept to a landslide victory in August, has blocked 2.9 trillion yen ($32.4 billion) in stimulus measures introduced by the departing government and could hold on to the funds until next year. Instead, Mr. Hatoyama says he plans to divert the money toward social welfare spending, like subsidizing child care and lowering tuition fees at schools. His deputy, Naoto Kan, said on Monday that the government could outline an extra budget for this year that focuses on support for workers and the environment. But while better safety nets could ease the blow of high unemployment and help raise the birthrate, economists say those measures would take time to carry out and to take effect — and such a delay could hurt economic recovery in the short term. “As the Democrats move from investment in concrete to investment in people, a smooth transition will be key,” said Mr. Haji of NLI. “Any public works money not spent now is a direct loss to the economy. We could see a slight slump before the Democrats’ measures kick in.” Critics also warn that Mr. Hatoyama’s programs could be detrimental to Japan’s rising debt, which is approaching twice the size of its $5 trillion economy. Last week, the Fitch Ratings agency warned that it would review its rating on Japan’s public debt if the government failed to rein in spending. Uncertainty over Japan’s economic recovery has weighed on Tokyo’s Nikkei index, which has fallen 1.8 percent since the start of July, despite a rebound in corporate profits.

Gross Domestic Product
Japan
Economic Conditions and Trends
Recession and Depression
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Gross National Product (GNP)


John M. Stephens, Patriots Running Back, Dies at 43

Abstract: SHREVEPORT, La. (AP) — John M. Stephens , a New England Patriots running back who was the 1988 offensive rookie of the year, died Tuesday after his pickup truck ran off a highway near here and struck trees. He was 43. Stephens apparently lost control of his truck on a rural stretch of Louisiana Highway 169, the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s office said. He was not wearing a seatbelt and was thrown after the truck hit the trees, Cindy Chadwick, a spokeswoman for the sheriff, said in a statement. No one else was injured in the crash. Stephens was selected 17th in the 1988 National Football League draft. He played six seasons in the league, reaching the Pro Bowl as a rookie, when he ran for 1,168 yards. He played for the Patriots until 1992, then spent short stretches with Green Bay, Atlanta and Kansas City before retiring with 3,440 career yards and 18 touchdowns. At Northwestern State, Stephens broke the team’s career rushing record set by Joe Delaney, topping it by 10 yards with 3,057. Both were offensive rookies of the year in the N.F.L. Stephens won the N.F.L.’s first Gale Sayers Humanitarian Citation for his work on behalf of the Roxbury (Mass.) Comprehensive Community Health Center.

Stephens John M
Football
New England Patriots
Deaths (Obituaries)