Car Search Yields No Clues in Fatal Chase

Abstract: The police found no weapon or evidence of a motive while searching the car of a Connecticut woman who was fatally shot by officers after trying to ram her vehicle through a White House barrier, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday. Search warrant results show that a lockbox inside the car of the woman, Miriam Carey, had a passport, foreign currency, a driver’s license and Social Security cards for her and her daughter. Other items included keys, hospital discharge documents, a lease agreement for a New York City apartment and an uncashed check for about $1,800. But the documents do not reveal the significance of any of the belongings or shed light on why she showed up at the White House with her 1-year-old daughter in the car. A search warrant application shows the police thought the lockbox could contain maps, drugs, documents pertaining to the White House, weapons or “fruits of other crimes.” Ms. Carey, 34, of Stamford, was shot after a police chase on Thursday.

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


To Spur Traffic at News Sites, Just Travoltify

Abstract: Which of the following interactive features drove record traffic to its respective news sites in recent months: a) How Much Time Have You Wasted on Facebook? for Time; b) The interactive dialect quiz for The New York Times; c) The Adele Dazeem Generator: Travoltify Your Name, which appeared on Slate; or d) all of the above? Congratulations if you answered d) all of the above. News organizations are changing their formats in the digital age to connect with more readers, with quizzes and games having become popular offerings that audiences find hard to resist. The Facebook quiz helped lead Time to its highest Internet traffic day ever, 3.8 million unique visitors in January. The dialect quiz , which appeared in December, was the most viewed and most emailed article last year for The New York Times. And the Adele Dazeem name generator , which Slate put up Monday after John Travolta mangled the introduction of the singer Idina Menzel at the Oscars ceremony, calling her Adele Dazeem, was the most viewed article ever in Slate’s 18-year history. The feature, which allows readers to enter their name and find out how John Travolta might mispronounce it (this reporter came out as Laurence Keezy), had been viewed by 9.5 million unique users by Wednesday afternoon and was adding roughly 100,000 people an hour. At first Slate’s editor, David Plotz, was not sure this development was an entirely good thing: “Definition of ambivalent: The John Travolta name generator is the most popular story in Slate history,” he posted on Twitter. Later in a phone interview, he said “bemused” was a better description of his feelings. “Readers will go high or low with us,” he said. “It was off the news and it was fun and shareable. All publications are aspiring to that direct connection to their audience.” And whether they like it or not, in these tough times news organizations are prepared to take advantage of a strategy that allows them to charge more for advertising — rates are based on monthly visitors to the site — and to potentially attract new readers who might become loyal followers. “It is the gamification of content,” said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “Take the same dynamics that lead games and social sharing to be addictive and use them in a way to connect to content.” Games have been part of the newspaper business for a long time. The New York Times has featured its crossword puzzle since 1942, while other newspapers have carried comics, word puzzles and acrostics. But the digital age has allowed for interactivity, which makes for an especially alluring form of game-playing. If users can put their own name and information into a template and come out with an amusing answer, it often prompts them to share it with others through social media, contributing to the holy grail of virality. While quizzes are also not new — Slate, for instance, previously offered the Carlos Danger name generator, a reference to the supposed pseudonym used by Anthony Weiner — the trend toward interactivity is only accelerating. Time magazine hired its first digital interactive graphics editor last August. BuzzFeed, the up-and-coming digital news site, installed a quiz template in its system in 2012. The Wire, part of Atlantic Media, has introduced a custom-made bracket competition to coincide with March Madness, the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, where users vote to narrow the field in categories like the best college, the best city, the best seat in a movie theater. The problem for media organizations is where, if anywhere, to draw the line between amusing content and the mission of reporting the news. Many digital publications have relied on addictively shared content of dubious news value — like quizzes to determine which character of the Downton Abbey television series the user most resembles. Still, there are plenty of sophisticated ways to use interactive games, says Ian Bogost, the co-author of “Newsgames: Journalism At Play.” “The really interesting thing about games is they can depict how things work and systemic issues that underlay stories, that we can look at in another way,” he said. Stephen Engelberg, editor in chief of ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news site, said he steered his publication toward interactive features with a public service bent, and had still found them to be powerful drivers of traffic. ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs app allows users to find out if their doctor has taken money from pharmaceutical companies. It has generated seven million views since it was first posted in 2010. "The point of these interactives is not really to drive traffic," said Steve Duenes, The Times’s associate managing editor of visualization, whose department produced the dialect quiz. "We use the same news judgment we apply to our articles and our videos: Is it newsworthy, is it interesting? It is not always extremely serious, but it is always smart." Time’s managing editor, Nancy Gibbs, who has been remaking her publication from a newsweekly into a 24/7 digital news operation, said that one of her most important hires was the interactive graphics editor. But she says there is a clear line between what they do and the quizzes that are blatant grabs for views. “What’s so important about what we do is that it is based on actual research,” she said. The graphics “are very anchored in empirical data. It isn’t just random quizzes and things that people are making up.” They are also extremely popular. The Facebook quiz generated 1.1 million visitors to help produce the busiest day ever for Time in January. Another interactive quiz, “America’s Mood Map: An Interactive Guide to the United States of Attitude,” helped drive Time’s second-busiest day last October. Mr. Plotz of Slate says that as long as his magazine runs serious journalism alongside the name generators and other interactive tools, he sees no reason to worry. He pointed out that before Travoltify Your Name was posted, an 18,000-word article about the woman Ronald Reagan made famous by calling her the welfare queen had been getting the most attention. “We will do anything that is interesting, journalistically worthy,” Mr. Plotz said. “Travolta is explosive, but we published 50 other articles that day, including one on the Crimean Tatars. If we had a great idea we’d do another interactive today and tomorrow.” The Wall Street Journal apparently felt the same way. On Wednesday, when it was announced that SAT tests would revert to a 1,600-point scale, The Journal quickly published a quiz allowing readers to compare their SAT scores to those of their peers.

News media,journalism
Social Media
Games
Facebook
Slate Magazine
Time Inc
The New York Times


Terror Quiets Libyan Capital as Rebels Battle in the East

Abstract: TRIPOLI, Libya — A state of terror has seized two working-class neighborhoods here that just a week ago exploded in revolt, with residents reporting constant surveillance, searches of cars and even cellphones by militiamen with Kalashnikovs at block-by-block checkpoints and a rash of disappearances of those involved in last week’s protest. As rebel fighters in the country’s east celebrated their defeat of a raid on Wednesday by hundreds of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi ’s loyalists in the strategic oil town of Brega, many people in Tripoli said they had lost hope that peaceful protests might push the Libyan leader from power the way street demonstrations had toppled the strongmen in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia . The climate of fear suggests just how effectively the government’s ruthless application of force in Tripoli has locked down the city and suppressed simmering rage, even as the rebels have held control of the eastern half of the country and a string of smaller western cities surrounding the capital. “I think the people know that if they make any protest now they will be killed, so all the people in Tripoli are waiting for someone to help them,” one resident said. “It is easy to kill anybody here. I have seen it with my own eyes.” Several people in the two neighborhoods, Feshloom and Tajura, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of Colonel Qaddafi’s secret police, said militias loyal to the colonel were using photos taken at last week’s protest to track down the men involved. “They know that there are people who have energy and who are willing to die, so they pick them up,” another resident said. Residents of Feshloom showed reporters cellphone photographs taken at Tripoli Central Hospital of a large wound in the chest of a neighbor, Nagi Ali el-Nafishi, 56, and they pointed out a bloodstain on the concrete where he had been shot after leaving a mosque last Friday. A doctor who examined him told reporters that the bullet had exploded his heart and lungs, causing him to die of blood loss within minutes. Several residents said at least four people from their neighborhood had been killed that day, including Hisham el-Trabelsi, 19, who they said was shot in the head, and Abdel Basit Ismail, 25, who they said was hit by random gunfire while she was calling to a relative involved in the protest. They also reported the discovery of the body of at least one man, Salem Bashir al-Osta, a 37-year-old teacher who disappeared at a protest last Sunday. It was found near the Abu Slim prison, showing signs of a severe beating but no bullet holes. And in both neighborhoods, both hotbeds of resistance, residents say disappearances have continued all week as the security forces appear to be rounding up suspected protesters in anticipation of Friday Prayer services, the customary gathering time for street protests across the Arab world. On Wednesday night, a resident Tajura called a journalist to report that five people had been arrested leaving a mosque on Saturday, including Mohammed Safi, the director of mechanical engineering at a university here. “Every day they take people away,” the resident said. “We would like to know where they are, what happened to them?” Another resident reached by telephone on Thursday said the police had broken down a door to arrest a relative the night before. “They tried to frighten his mother and sister,” the resident said. “We don’t know where they have taken him.” As Colonel Qaddafi tightened his grip on Tripoli, there were indications that the conflict was settling into a stalemate. Flush with their victory in Brega, rebel fighters pushed 25 miles to the west and established a makeshift checkpoint. A dozen lightly armed men stood guard, greeting trucks filled with Egyptian migrant workers fleeing eastward toward home. At rebel checkpoints in the east and at the Tunisian border, many of the refugees have said that Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers had robbed them, taking their phones and money. Yet witnesses reported that Libyan Air Force planes had conducted bombing raids near the front, and in a British television interview one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, Seif al-Islam , appeared to confirm reports of bombing near Brega, saying that the bombs were meant “to frighten them to go away, not to kill them.” President Obama on Thursday issued his strongest call yet for Colonel Qaddafi to step down, saying he had lost all his legitimacy as a leader and that “the entire world continues to be outraged by the appalling violence against the Libyan people.” Responding to the mounting international pressure, a panel of Libyan government officials told foreign journalists that their security forces had acted with admirable restraint in the face of an insurrection that, they said, was violent from the start. They provided a long list of police headquarters and other government buildings that had been burned by protesters last week. And they presented the government’s first official death toll since the uprising began last month: 374, far below most estimates by foreign governments or human rights groups. The officials faulted the United Nations Security Council for failing to investigate more directly before referring Libyan leaders to the International Criminal Court and freezing the Qaddafi family’s assets. And they announced with great fanfare that they had seized what they said was an illegal shipment of painkillers, evidence, they said, that supported Colonel Qaddafi’s contention that Al Qaeda had drugged Libyans to incite them to revolt. In Feshloom and Tajura, residents derided such theories, just as they scorned the government’s assertions that its officers had never fired on protesters or violated human rights. On Thursday and on other occasions this week, residents pointed to buildings where they said Qaddafi militias had set up operating bases. They said that at night their streets were filled with heavily armed checkpoints where the police inspected cars, documents and cellphones for any signs of participation in the unrest. Family members of a protester who was killed last week said they were afraid to host mourners after the funeral for fear of attracting scrutiny from the militias. And after many around the city spoke freely of revolt as recently as last Saturday, everyone in Feshloom critical of Colonel Qaddafi on Thursday said he or she was afraid to be seen near a foreign journalist. Men in a Feshloom barbershop pointed quietly to two figures in plain clothes across the street, who they feared were secret police. “His spies are everywhere!” said a man on a store stoop in Feshloom, echoing a sentiment heard from more than half a dozen others. “There is somebody watching you right now!” “Many people have been killed here,” he continued, “and if I speak to you, they will come for me.” A few residents said they still hoped that their neighborhoods would turn out to demonstrate against Colonel Qaddafi again on Friday, despite the threat of deadly violence or abduction. But many said they feared the killings and disappearances had scared many away. A young rebel organizer in Tajura who just days ago had boldly vowed to reporters that his neighborhood would turn out in force, admitted Thursday night that he had lowered his expectations, noting the recent disappearance of a member of his family. At around 1 a.m. Friday, bursts of gunfire were already ringing out over the capital. “If there were weapons, we have good young men who can fight, who can do anything,” one father said with resignation. “But there are no weapons.” Colonel Qaddafi’s firm grip on Tripoli augurs a prolonged standoff with the rebels. Their main front line remains several hundred miles from here, and the rebels in the western cities say that while they control their towns they remain deeply worried about the heavy concentration of tanks and other military forces ringing their perimeters. “Tripoli is surrounded,” one man said. “It is impossible for any power to reach Tripoli.” The Libyan leader’s deadly tactics also suggest just how difficult the animosities stirred up by the revolt may be to bury when it is resolved. In a country bound by intertwined tribal ties, where large extended families make everyone’s business widely known, rebels say that they fear for their lives if their revolt is crushed, and that they know members of Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces must feel the same. One Feshloom resident who lost a family member in the protests said the man’s mother had told him: “ ‘I would like to see the Qaddafis killed one by one, and the sons killed first so that he could feel the pain I have felt.’ ” Others described a growing sense of fatalism. One young man in an upscale cafe said he pinned his hopes on a palace coup. “The people around Qaddafi — that is our only hope,” he said.

Arab Spring
Libya
Military
Muammar Kaddafi
International relations


Queens Company Insures Immigrants for Colombian Burial

Abstract: When he recalls the blur of events that followed the death of his 14-year-old son in Queens from an accidental shooting six years ago, Ivan Echeverry can still feel the smothering shame of having to go cap in hand to raise money for the cremation and funeral. Mr. Echeverry was an immigrant from Medellín, Colombia , working as a construction laborer — and broke. With the help of a civic leader in the Colombian community of Jackson Heights, Queens, he was able to raise $1,200 at a Lions Club meeting in one evening. Friends kicked in a little more. “This pained me,” said Mr. Echeverry, 47, who now sells DVDs and CDs at a small store in the neighborhood. “I am not a beggar.” The bind he faced is common among New York’s immigrant poor. In Jackson Heights, business owners say that at least once a week, someone drops by asking for donations to pay for a funeral here, like that of Mr. Echeverry’s son, or a flight to carry the body back home — expenses that can amount to several thousand dollars. But a company created by four prominent funeral businesses in Colombia has come up with an alternative that appears to be unusual among immigrant groups in New York: burial insurance for all those costs. The insurance, with rates starting at $4.12 per person per month, is available to both legal and illegal immigrants from Colombia and covers many post-mortem expenses, including picking up the body, transporting it — or the cremated ashes — by plane to Colombia, and helping to arrange a funeral service and burial in that country or in the United States. It also provides paperwork for American officials, including a death certificate and an embalming report. “Normally, Colombians in the United States aren’t prepared for death here,” said Mauricio Palacios, 29, the director of the company, Previsión Exequial Colombia , which operates out of a shopping mall on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights. “We’re preoccupied with achieving the American dream.” “But,” he added, “it’s very expensive to die in the United States.” Burial insurance is nothing new. With rates as low as $8 per month, the industry is robust, particularly in some low-income black communities, though it has been dogged for years by fraud and racially discriminatory pricing. But Previsión Exequial Colombia stands out for several reasons: it offers its services exclusively to a particular immigrant population; it guarantees a funeral service and burial abroad, and the funeral businesses that founded it do much of the work themselves. The company is part of a new niche in the American funeral industry in the past few years, catering to Mexicans, Ecuadoreans and Filipinos, said officials at the National Funeral Directors Association, a trade group in Wisconsin. Mr. Palacios, in turn, has been contacted by Mexican, Ecuadorean, Peruvian, Dominican and Sikh entrepreneurs interested in starting similar ventures in New York. “It’s a solution to a very big problem: Nobody thinks they’re going to die and nobody ever saves for a burial,” said Orlando Tobón, a civic leader of Jackson Heights’ Colombians. He has lent his name and face to advertisements for the company, and let it work out of his two-room travel agency. For years, Mr. Tobón has been the first stop for many people trying to raise money for funeral costs. “I take them to the bars, the discothèques to ask for help,” he said. Since the company was founded in 2005, more than 14,000 Colombians have signed up, most from the New York region, Mr. Palacios said. Though the insurance is aimed at Colombians in the United States, it can also cover relatives in Colombia, and Mr. Palacios estimates that most family policies include at least one member in the home country. The business offers a choice of two packages: $21.99 per month for four family members, and $32.99 for eight. The insurance becomes effective one month after the first payment. So far, Previsión Exequial has handled post-mortem procedures for more than 330 participants, Mr. Palacios said. Maria Bertha Pérez, 68, who works as a baby sitter in Manhattan and rents a small room in Elmhurst, Queens, took out a policy two years ago and added several relatives. On July 23, a brother died at age 80 in Cali, Colombia. A funeral home affiliated with the insurance program immediately took over, and ran things smoothly. But the morning after her brother’s death, a sister — 94 and also in Cali — died. By the time Ms. Pérez got the news, a funeral home in Cali had been hired. Ms. Pérez now finds herself having to pay the full cost for her sister’s burial, draining her meager savings. She sighed heavily. “Look how life can be sometimes,” she said.

Funerals
Insurance
Immigration and Emigration
Queens (NYC)
Death and Dying
Colombia
Jackson Heights (NYC)


Portugal’s President Calls for Early Elections

Abstract: MADRID — The president of Portugal reignited political turmoil in the country on Thursday by calling for a new coalition government and early elections, rather than maintaining the administration of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, which has been strained by differences over its austerity policies. The unexpected step by President Aníbal Cavaco Silva, made in a national television address on Wednesday evening, came after Mr. Passos Coelho presented him with a deal meant to salvage the governing center-right coalition, which nearly collapsed last week after two cabinet ministers resigned. Presidential endorsement is required for such agreements and is typically granted as a matter of routine. It was unusual for Mr. Cavaco Silva to instead present a plan of his own. That he did so suggested a lack of confidence in the durability of Mr. Passos Coelho’s coalition, and underlined how divided European leaders have become over the issue of austerity policies. In his address, the president urged Portugal’s two largest parties — Mr. Passos Coelho’s Social Democrats and the opposition Socialists — to share power until next June and to hold a general election then, rather than leave in place the increasingly unhappy partnership between the Social Democrats and the smaller conservative Popular Party, led by Paulo Portas. At the beginning of July, Vítor Gaspar, the finance minister who put together Portugal’s current austerity program at the request of international creditors, resigned. Mr. Portas, who had clashed with Mr. Gaspar, resigned as foreign minister the next day, but Mr. Passos Coelho eventually persuaded him to stay by promoting him to deputy prime minister. Portuguese presidents have the power to dissolve Parliament, though they rarely use it. Mr. Cavaco Silva held meetings with party leaders on Thursday to discuss the situation, and was scheduled to meet with the prime minister in the evening. Mr. Passos Coelho did not comment on the president’s proposal before that meeting. Analysts were unsure why Mr. Cavaco Silva had decided not to endorse the ruling coalition’s agreement. “He probably wants to make an impact on his legacy by presenting himself as a guarantor of political stability,” Antonio Barroso, a political analyst at Teneo Intelligence, a New York-based consulting company, said in a note to its investor clients. But he said the president’s proposal ‘'creates even more uncertainty than under a reshuffled coalition agreement.” He added that any talks between the Social Democrats and Socialists over sharing power “will be extremely complicated.'’ Socialist leaders have said recently that they would consider forming a coalition with the Social Democrats, but only after Mr. Passos Coelho agreed to call an early election. The Socialists were themselves forced to call an early election in June 2011 after a parliamentary standoff over Portugal’s budget problems. Despite an international bailout and a plan to make the economy more competitive, Portugal has been stuck in a recession. The tax increases and spending cuts imposed under the terms of the bailout program have prompted street protests and strikes.

Portugal
Euro Crisis
Election
Pedro Passos Coelho


Jets’ Dreams Crash Into Harsh Reality in Loss to Ravens

Abstract: BALTIMORE — Justin Tucker, the Ravens’ kicker, lined up for a 26-yard field goal Sunday. The snap was solid. The hold was, too. And when he booted the ball through the uprights, the scoreboard at M&T Bank Stadium might as well have flashed: “Ravens Win! Ravens Win!” Because that field goal buried the Jets. Really and truly buried them. It came less than five minutes into the second quarter. It gave Baltimore a 3-point lead. From then on, the Jets’ 19-3 loss contained a few scintillas of suspense. Among them: ■ Would they get burned on yet another deep touchdown pass? Yes. ■ How many interceptions would Geno Smith throw? Two. ■ Would a snap actually thwack Greg Salas while he was in motion, with Baltimore recovering the loose ball? Uh-huh. Those all qualified. But never in doubt was how many points they would finish with. “I guess over all, just about everything,” center Nick Mangold said when asked what ailed the Jets’ offense. He was not being flippant. He was being honest. Coach Rex Ryan said the Jets were girding for a low-scoring game, but this is not what he meant. The Jets did not score — never threatened to — after a Nick Folk field goal put them ahead midway through the first quarter. It is difficult to sustain drives when a team converts 1 of 12 third-down chances, or when its offensive line struggles in pass protection, or when its quarterback completes 9 of 22 passes. All of these are recurring problems for the Jets, who have lost their last two games by a combined 39 points. Week after week, Smith vows not to turn the ball over; Ryan vows that the secondary will better defend deep passes; and various players proclaim that everything will be fixed, because it has to, it just does. Image Running back Chris Ivory being tackled by Baltimore’s Haloti Ngata. Ivory had 35 yards on nine carries and injured an ankle. Credit Gail Burton/Associated Press There are five games left in the Jets’ season. They dream of playing more. But their fans, at this point, may wish there were fewer. Ryan, straying from his normal postgame protocol, answered questions about individual performances by saying that he preferred to watch the game film first. “This is on us collectively and how we can improve moving forward,” Ryan said. And so, he did not address the job security of Smith, who in the last six games has completed 49.1 percent of his passes with a touchdown and 10 interceptions, struggles that at least invited the distant possibility of a quarterback change for next week’s game against Miami. Ryan did not much discuss a flailing offense that has scored four touchdowns in its last 52 possessions. And aside from acknowledging that Ed Reed ranked third in the hierarchy of culpability, Ryan did not explain how a defensive call intended to thwart the vertical passing game — quarters coverage — failed to prevent Joe Flacco’s 66-yard touchdown to Jacoby Jones. Not that those extra 7 points mattered much, anyway. “We’ve got to fix our mistakes,” defensive end Muhammad Wilkerson said. “We can’t let the same mistakes beat us.” Wilkerson could have said as much after losses in Tennessee or Cincinnati. The Jets, after rebounding from those defeats to win their next game, were hailed for their resilience and competitive spirit. They could just as easily be known for folding when faced with a potential winning streak. A second straight loss may only make clearer which label truly fits them. The playoffs, to the Jets now, represent two four-letter words stacked atop each other. At 5-6, they remain in contention, and not only that, but in a six-way tie for the A.F.C.’s final wild-card spot. Their problem is that three of those teams — Tennessee, Pittsburgh and, now, Baltimore — hold the head-to-head tiebreaker advantage. Image Geno Smith, facing pressure, was 9 of 22 passing for 127 yards with 2 interceptions. Credit Gail Burton/Associated Press “We’re out of lifelines right now,” guard Willie Colon said. And if one were thrown, could they catch it? Ryan attributed some of the Jets’ inefficiency to their dropped passes. There were a few, indeed. But enough to account for 60 minutes of woefulness? Unlikely. Smith went around to members of his receiving corps afterward and reinforced his confidence in them. Many prominent members of the offense — Colon, Mangold, Santonio Holmes — responded in kind, but ultimately Ryan and his staff, with General Manager John Idzik, will decide whether a switch is necessary. Starting Smith’s backup, Matt Simms, would serve as an indictment both of Smith and of Idzik’s call to draft him. “I’m not going to sit here and say that my job is 100 percent secure, because every single guy in this locker room has to prove themselves daily,” Smith said. Smith has proved himself capable every day but Sunday for the last seven weeks. The offensive coordinator, Marty Mornhinweg, evaluating Smith’s recent performance, said last week, “I’m not so sure he’s in a funk.” If not a funk, then what? A tailspin? A whirl? Mornhinweg would not say, but his play-calling on Sunday answered the question. The Jets integrated Wildcat calls and running plays and anything that would inhibit Smith from throwing the ball. Smith caught a pass, from Josh Cribbs, before he threw one. At halftime, he was 2 for 7 for 21 yards. On six of their first seven possessions, the Jets failed to record a first down. After Smith’s second interception, with about four minutes remaining, a good chunk of the crowd filed for the exits. Even the Ravens’ fans could not watch anymore. The Jets’ 220 yards of total offense was a season low. The Ravens were not cowed by their own struggling offensive line or by Flacco’s season-long stretch of imprecision. If anything, they were emboldened, aware of the Jets’ miserable pass defense. Flacco’s touchdown to Jones split Dee Milliner and Reed, who did not look back for the ball, he said, because he could not find it. That came after a 60-yard toss to Torrey Smith, which was the fifth of at least 53 yards allowed this season by Antonio Cromartie. Smith’s reception set up the afternoon’s most pivotal moment. Seven plays later, Tucker made that 26-yarder. The Ravens led, 6-3, with 10 minutes 15 seconds remaining in the first half. The game was over. And if the Jets do not resolve their issues quickly, their season soon will be, too.

Ravens
Jets
Geno Smith
Ed Reed
Dee Milliner
Antonio Cromartie
Rex Ryan
Torrey Smith
Football
Jacoby Jones


NATIONAL BRIEFING | SOUTH | Florida: Sheriff’s Deputy Is Fatally Shot

Abstract: A Broward County sheriff’s deputy was killed in the second shooting of a Broward deputy in the line of duty this week, the authorities said. The deputy, identified as Sgt. Chris Reyka, 51, was on routine patrol when he became suspicious of two cars in a parking lot behind a drugstore in Pompano Beach. As Sergeant Reyka got out of his car to investigate, someone jumped out of one of the cars and shot him several times before fleeing, according to a statement issued by the sheriff’s office. The shooting of Sergeant Reyka, an 18-year veteran of the force, comes four days after Maury Hernandez, an undercover Broward County sheriff’s deputy, was critically injured when he was shot in the head by a motorcyclist he had pulled over for running several red lights.


Smith & Wesson Is Fighting Its Way Back

Abstract: SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - It is hard to imagine a company sinking as low as Smith & Wesson, the legendary arms maker that equipped soldiers from the Civil War to Vietnam and 98 percent of American police forces. Just two years ago, the company's chairman was found to be a convicted felon: he had failed to disclose spending 15 years in jail for armed robbery. Federal investigators were looking into accounting irregularities, and the company's stock was stuck at $1.50 a share. Adding to the company's woes, American soldiers for the last decade have carried Italian-made Berettas, while most police forces long ago switched to handguns from Glock, an Austrian company. But now, with new owners and a new chief executive, Michael P. Golden, who once sold power tools for Black & Decker and bathroom fixtures for Kohler, Smith & Wesson is coming back to life -- thanks to an expanding Pentagon budget and growing spending by the Homeland Security Department. With consumer sales of rifles, shotguns and handguns remaining flat for the last decade, Smith & Wesson is casting its lot with Washington, where it is making headway with a new "Buy America" pitch in Congress and at the Pentagon. The company recently won contracts to supply pistols to the fledgling Afghan security forces, its first Pentagon award in 15 years. Next, it wants to put a Smith & Wesson back into every American soldier's hand -- a major contract worth up to $600 million. Smith & Wesson was not the only American gun maker whose fortunes fell in recent years. Just last month, in nearby New Haven, the Winchester firearms factory -- where the "gun that won the West" was made for 150 years -- closed its doors. Another neighbor, Colt's Manufacturing, is a shadow of its former self and is now known mainly for a single product, M-16's, that it sells to the Pentagon. But Smith & Wesson fell more drastically than the others, mainly because of its agreement in 2000 to adopt gun safety measures to settle lawsuits brought by state and federal agencies. That Clinton-era accord resulted in a boycott by the National Rifle Association and made Smith & Wesson an industry outcast. The mood in Washington has changed since then, and to the company's advantage. A gun-friendly administration as well as a new law signed last fall by President Bush -- the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms act -- that shields gun makers from lawsuits has undercut the opponents of guns. Lawsuits against gun makers have largely been tossed out of court, and the end of a 10-year ban on assault weapons is encouraging the gun industry to make new, more powerful weapons, with higher price tags. "This is a 154-year-old legacy brand that everyone knows and likes," said Mr. Golden, 51, in an interview in his office here decorated with memorabilia of sharpshooters and historic firearms. "But we had no sales to the federal government. Zero. None. We had no representatives in Washington. No lobbying firms. "We are a gun company," Mr. Golden added. "The country is at war. We had no one in Washington looking out for our legislative issues or trying to get procurements. It blew my mind. Smith & Wesson means a lot. It stands for Americana." For help in Washington, the company hired the lobbying firm of Greenberg Traurig, where the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff once worked, and paid it $120,000 in the second half of 2005, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, an independent campaign finance Web site. And Mr. Golden and Smith & Wesson executives began calling on lawmakers themselves, pressing the case for buying American firearms. "I'm amazed how easy it is to get audiences with key members of the House and Senate and the agencies," Mr. Golden said. "They always say, 'Where have you guys been? We haven't seen you in years.' " For the last decade, some three million to four million guns of all types -- rifles, shotguns and handguns -- have been sold annually in the United States, with sales estimated at about $1.4 billion a year. This lack of growth reflects a diminished appetite for sport hunting. In addition, the durable nature of guns means that although gun owners may want the latest model, they do not necessarily need to buy one. In the meantime, the federal budget for small arms continues to grow, not only for American soldiers and other government agents, but also for Iraqi and Afghan government forces. "The government is the only business that is expanding," said Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, based in Washington. "The civilian market is not, while the government is putting tens of billions of dollars into homeland security." It remains to be seen whether Smith & Wesson's improving fortunes are a one-time blip or the beginning of a longer trend. The $20 million contract to arm Afghan police officers, soldiers and border guards was awarded to Smith & Wesson in four pieces, starting last year. It calls for Afghan forces to receive more than 22,500 pistols, the model SW9VE, a 9-millimeter double-action semiautomatic. Next year, the Pentagon will be deciding on a new 10-year contract to provide 645,000 sidearms for the military to replace its Beretta models. With up to $600 million at stake, Smith & Wesson wants to be in the running -- perhaps, suggests Mr. Golden, even working with the Pentagon to develop a next-generation pistol. "The big push by Smith & Wesson is that contracts should go to a U.S. manufacturer," said Eric Wold, an industry analyst with Merriman Curhan Ford, a San Francisco brokerage firm. "And you can't get more American than Smith & Wesson." Smith & Wesson is also one of four companies -- the other three are foreign gun makers -- on the Pentagon's approved list for small-arms sales to Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, Smith & Wesson has not gotten any Iraqi contracts. Instead, the Pentagon made a contract with Glock to provide 100,000 guns to Iraqi forces. "Glock is an Austrian company, and Austria has no soldiers in Iraq and has nothing to do with the war effort," said Mr. Golden. "But they got the contract to sell 100,000 pistols." On the police front, Smith & Wesson lost out to Glock when the company introduced a lightweight polymer gun in the early 1980's that American manufacturers initially mocked, saying that no police officer would buy a "plastic" gun, especially a foreign one. Last September, Smith & Wesson finally introduced its own polymer pistol, the M&P (military and police) 40 series of handguns, and is now beginning to inch back up from its current market share of 10 percent. On top of that, a shrewd marketing campaign has put the Smith & Wesson name on everything from Nascar racers to a shooting-and-hunting cable show on the Men's Channel. And it now adorns a new men's cologne -- introduced in an event at the Miami Beach estate once owned by Gianni Versace (the company made clear it was not a Smith & Wesson gun that was used to kill Mr. Versace). "No company in modern history has come back from the dead like Smith & Wesson," said Russ Thurman, editor of Shooting Magazine, a leading trade publication. "In the dark days for Smith & Wesson, you'd go to a trade show and there would be an invisible cone of silence around the Smith & Wesson booth. Now you have to get into a fistfight to get close to their displays." Smith & Wesson was founded in 1852 when Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson introduced a pistol to replace the muzzle-loaded rifle. In 1987 it was purchased by Tomkins of London for $112.5 million; the new owner later invested $60 million to upgrade the factory here. When Tomkins sold the company in May 2001, it received only $15 million. The buyer was an American investor group that took the company public and now holds 25 percent. While the company is best known for its manufacturing heritage, Mr. Golden has stressed marketing in his hiring of a new management team from Coca-Cola, Frito Lay, Ingersoll-Rand and Harley-Davidson as well as from its rival Glock. During the last two years, the company's stock has risen to $6.25 a share, from $1.50. Revenue rose to $124 million in the 2005 fiscal year, which ended last April 30, from $118 million in 2004. Meanwhile, profit climbed to $5.2 million, from $800,000 a year earlier. The shifting political climate allowed for the lapse of a 10-year ban on assault weapons and has encouraged the industry to come up with new assault-style weapons that are attracting a lot of attention. One of Smith & Wesson's most successful new products is the X-treme Velocity Revolver .460, which is not an assault weapon but is billed as "three times more powerful" than the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum used by Clint Eastwood in the "Dirty Harry" movies. Its bullets can travel at 2,300 feet a second, or twice the speed of sound. "Repealing the assault weapon bans opened a new market for military-style and exotic weapons for consumers," said Robert A. Ricker, executive director of the American Hunters and Shooters Association, a membership group. "A lot of guys delight in having the biggest and most nasty-looking guns. That's one of the industry trends." The company has also come up with a single-shot rifle that is the law enforcement version of a military assault-style weapon. The rifle, the M&P15, is popular with police departments as an alternative to pump shotguns. For Mr. Golden, selling guns is a big change. "It's a little more action than when I was working at Kohler," he said during a recent analysts' conference call, "when we were selling toilets."

SMITH & WESSON
FIREARMS
UNITED STATES ARMAMENT AND DEFENSE


Detainees Plotted Bombing in Spain, Judge Says

Abstract: MADRID — Ten men arrested in Barcelona on Saturday on suspicion of planning a suicide attack on the city’s public transportation system had intended to carry out the bombing last weekend, a Spanish judge said Wednesday in court documents ordering the men to remain in jail. The detainees, most of them Pakistanis, were part of an “organized group” that was planning to attack Jan. 18 through Jan. 20, Judge Ismael Moreno of Spain’s National Court wrote. The detainees include three potential suicide bombers, at least two of them Pakistanis who came to Spain in the past few months, the judge wrote. He questioned the 10 suspects on Wednesday in the Madrid court, then charged all with belonging to a terrorist organization and some with possession of explosives. Four others arrested Saturday were released without charge. Judge Moreno said several suspects were arrested Saturday during a meeting at an unofficial mosque in Barcelona, where the police found materials that could be used in explosives, including nitrocellulose and timers. However, the materials confiscated in raids Saturday were small quantities that were not “guaranteed to cause damage,” Judge Moreno said. They could have been used to teach plotters how to build a bomb, he said. On Tuesday, prominent Pakistanis called for the release of the 14 detainees, saying most of them were known in the community and had no history of violence. But Judge Moreno said the suspects’ interrogation and testimony from a protected witness revealed a picture of a structured group of spiritual leaders, explosives experts and the potential suicide bombers. The group had acquired the “necessary human capacity to operate and was close to acquiring the technical capacity in terms of explosive devices,” he wrote in the court order. Its members were followers of the Muslim revivalist movement Tabligh Jamaat, the judge said. The movement professes to espouse a benign, apolitical strain of Islam, but Western intelligence agencies suspect it of recruiting jihadists. According to court documents, the Barcelona group was led by Maroof Ahmed Mirza, 38, and Mohammad Ayud Elahi Bibi, 36, both Pakistanis and the members most well versed in Islam. Hafeez Ahmed, 39, a Pakistani who spent five months in Pakistan last year, was alleged to be in charge of making and handling explosives. The court accused Mohammad Shoaib, 25, and Mehmood Khalid, 27, both Pakistanis, and Imram Cheema, whose age and nationality were not given, of being the potential suicide bombers. It said they came in recent months from Germany, Sweden and Portugal.


After the Deluge, the Reality of Deprivation

Abstract: MALINAGAR, India — Losing everything he owns has become a routine disaster for Shankar, a landless laborer in the northeastern state of Bihar who saw his home and belongings destroyed in some of the worst floods to hit the north of India in decades. “This is the third time I’ve lost my house in the rains,” he said, standing in the water and peering into the shell of his home, hopeful of salvaging something from the ruins. “This year the rains were worse, and the waters are deeper. But in the end it’s the same. I have nothing left.” Only the thatch roof of his house was visible above the muddy waters that turned his village of Malinagar into a lagoon in August. Beneath the rippling surface, the straw walls had caved in and his stock of grain for the winter, clothes, furniture and possessions were slowly rotting. The monsoon rains in India are a democratic force. When the skies open, the water pours on the homes of rich and poor alike. But after the deluge, the poor always suffer most. On Aug. 16, Unicef officials said that about 2,800 people in India, Bangladesh , Nepal and Pakistan had died since the monsoon season began, from drowning, waterborne illnesses, snakebites or hunger. But for survivors, the real endurance test is just beginning. With crops destroyed and fields bloated with water, there will be no agricultural work for millions of landless laborers here for months, leaving them to rely on the sporadic support of aid agencies and government relief organizations. Unicef said it was concerned about the prospect of worsening child malnutrition. Bihar is the least developed state in India, barely touched by the booming growth and new economic confidence of the major cities. Yet there are gradations within this poverty, and subclasses of richer and poorer. The wealthier residents of Malinagar still have their homes, made from sturdy brick and concrete. Some managed to find shelter on their flat roofs when the flooding began here at the beginning of August. The poorer, living in shacks without electricity at the exposed edges of the village, had to flee to roughly made shelters on higher ground. The floodwaters began receding in mid-August, replaced by a stinking, stagnant sludge, but villages remained cut off, and many of those houses that have re-emerged are uninhabitable. Hundreds of thousands of people are sheltered beneath bed sheets along raised highways, just inches away from the traffic, which grinds past, splattering them with mud. Life cannot yet begin again for most of the 14 million people that the United Nations estimates have been affected by the crisis in Bihar. In certain lights, in the lull between storms, Malinagar becomes a mirage of watery beauty. Beyond the shells of flooded houses, the waters from the burst Bagmati River stretch as far as the eye can see. In July, the lake was a parched wheat field. Now village girls sit like mermaids, combing their hair, half-submerged in the calm waters; children shriek with excitement as they splash along the shore. But Shankar, who goes by only one name, finds nothing to rejoice about. The 25-year-old is familiar with the deprivation that follows the flood. His wife and two daughters, 1 and 6 years old, live on the wages he earns as a laborer in the fields. “There is no work, so there is no money,” he said. “I’m worried about how the children will eat. Even now we are eating dry bread with salt. It’s very sad for the children to live like that.” The village leader, Vijay Sharma, said those with the least to lose had lost the most. “The richer villagers have ways of working things out,” he said. “The poorest will not get any work for months more. I don’t know how they are going to survive.” At a national level, the plight of these flood victims arouses little compassion. In early August, when the United Nations declared the floods the worst in living memory, the miserable condition of the 31 million people affected in India was covered internationally but was neither front-page news in New Delhi newspapers nor featured on national news channels. Instead, bulletins were dominated by the sentencing of a Bollywood star to jail. Such apathy is not unusual. Newspapers in India often neglect the suffering of the rural poor, more preoccupied with the triumphs of the emerging India than with the familiar stories of extreme hardship experienced by hundreds of millions of Indians living on the land. Even within the government, attempts to implement a national flood prevention policy have been halfhearted. Saifuddin Soz, the Indian water resources minister, said he hoped that more resources might be granted as a result of the severe flooding this year. “Once the crisis is over I will be calling on the cabinet to create a national commission for flood management,” he said. Among the homeless, waiting for the waters to dry up, there was little optimism. Manohar Paswan, 45, stared across the water at the rubble that used to be his house, his head shaven out of respect for the youngest of his seven children, a 6-month-old boy, Nitish, who died in the second week of August, bitten by one of the poisonous snakes that thrive in the floodwaters. Marooned, there was no way of getting help. Now, Mr. Paswan is concerned about how his family will eat. “Government help is nowhere to be seen,” he said.

India
Floods
Economic Conditions and Trends
Bangladesh
United Nations Children's Fund
International Relations


Hoping to Set Sail on Sunlight

Abstract: To sail on winds of sunlight has long been a dream of rocket scientists. The Planetary Society , a nonprofit that promotes space exploration, announced Monday that it would send the first of two small craft testing the technology of solar sails into orbit this May, tagging along with other small satellites on an Atlas 5 rocket. “We strongly believe this could be a big part of the future of interplanetary missions,” said William Sanford Nye — better known as Bill Nye the Science Guy — the chief executive of the organization. “It will ultimately eventually take a lot of missions a long, long way.” When photons — particles of light — bounce off a shiny surface, they impart a tiny bit of momentum, an effect that comes directly from the equations of electromagnetism published by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s. In his 1865 novel, “ From the Earth to the Moon ,” Jules Verne appears to have been the first to realize that this force could be harnessed for space travel. The bombardment of sunlight over a large area can gradually but continuously accelerate a spacecraft. On launching, the Planetary Society’s craft, LightSail , is about the size of a loaf of bread — 4 inches by 4 inches by 1 foot. In orbit, the spacecraft will undergo a month of testing before it extends four 13-foot-long booms and unfurls four triangular pieces of Mylar, less than 1/5,000th of an inch thick, to form a square sail that spans almost 345 square feet. The May flight is to check that the sail deployment and other systems work as designed. But at the altitude that LightSail will be flying — the Planetary Society cannot say how high, because the Atlas 5’s main payload is a military satellite — the drag of air on the sail will be greater than the pressure of light, and the craft will drop out of orbit and burn up in a few days. Next year, a second LightSail is to be lofted to an altitude of 450 miles by a Falcon Heavy rocket from Space Exploration Technologies Corp. , or SpaceX. That flight is to be the first to demonstrate controlled solar sailing while in orbit around Earth. “The idea ultimately is to be able to tack like a sailboat on each orbit,” said Mr. Nye. Both LightSails were built for less than $4 million, Mr. Nye said. NASA considered solar sails in the 1970s for a mission to meet up with Halley’s comet in 1986. The initial design called for a square sail roughly half a mile on a side — an area of almost 7 million square feet. That was swapped for a design the engineers had more confidence in — a dozen rectangular sails, each 25 feet wide and more than four miles long, arrayed like helicopter blades. Ultimately, the immense sails were regarded as too risky a technological jump. “It was very audacious for its time,” said Louis D. Friedman, who was the engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leading the project. Image LightSail, a solar sail spacecraft, is to be launched into orbit in May. Its Mylar sail will be about the size of a loaf of bread when it is launched, but will be unfurled to a span of almost 345 square feet after a month of testing. Credit Justin Foley/Cal Poly NASA scrapped the comet mission, and sails fell out of favor at the space agency. A decade ago, the Planetary Society collaborated with Russian scientists on a solar sail spacecraft called Cosmos 1, raising $4 million from members. “I said, now we have a chance to realistically do something,” said Dr. Friedman, who left NASA in 1980 and helped found the Planetary Society, serving as its executive director. Cosmos 1 launched in June 2005 from a Russian nuclear submarine. But the rocket failed, and Cosmos 1 was lost before the sail could be tested. Next, the society turned to something smaller — LightSail — taking advantage of a new generation of smaller, cheaper satellites known as CubeSats. “This is a more accessible, easier-to-build gizmo,” Mr. Nye said. “You don’t need a whole space agency.” Interest in solar sails also revived at NASA, which tested its own CubeSat, NanoSail-D , in 2011, demonstrating how a sail could be used to nudge decommissioned satellites back into the atmosphere. Two other NASA CubeSats with solar sails could go up with the first launching of NASA’s new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, expected in 2018. One, Lunar Flashlight , will use a solar sail not only for propulsion but also to reflect light into shadowed craters near the moon’s poles, for a look at ice deposits there. The other, NEA Scout , is to visit an asteroid. The probes will cost about $15 million each, far less than most NASA space missions. Japan has already sent a solar sail on an interplanetary voyage. Its Ikaros spacecraft launched in May 2010 and passed by Venus later that year. Robert L. Staehle is among those at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory brainstorming concepts like sun-watching CubeSats that could give early warning of a solar storms that could knock out power grids. Solar sails save the weight and expense of lugging fuel, keeping the price tag of the sun-watching mission below $100 million, Mr. Staehle said, less than a fifth of the cost of a conventional approach using thrusters. Another possibility is a small, solar sail-driven spacecraft looping between Earth and Mars, a precursor to cargo ships lugging supplies to astronauts living on Mars. Ultimately, sails could take us to the stars. Sunlight would be too weak for that trip, but a giant laser aimed at a gigantic sail could provide the necessary acceleration. Neither lasers or sails large enough exist today, but in Dr. Friedman’s opinion, “it is the only technology that leads to interstellar.”

Sun
Space
Planetary Society
SpaceX
Solar energy
Rocket
Sunlight
Moon
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Mars


China Lets Media Report on Air Pollution Crisis

Abstract: BEIJING — The Chinese state news media on Monday published aggressive reports on what they described as the sickening and dangerous air pollution in Beijing and other parts of northern China, indicating that popular anger over air quality had reached a level where Communist Party propaganda officials felt that they had to allow the officially sanctioned press to address the growing concerns of ordinary citizens. The across-the-board coverage of Beijing’s brown, soupy air, which has been consistently rated “hazardous” or even worse by foreign and local monitors since last week, was the most open in recent memory. Since 2008, when Beijing made efforts to clean up the city before the Summer Olympics, the air has appeared to degrade in the view of many residents, though the official news media have often avoided addressing the problem. The wide coverage on Monday appears to be in part a reaction to the conversation that has been unfolding on Chinese microblogs, where residents of northern China have been discussing the pollution nonstop in recent days. The problem is so serious — the worst air quality since the United States Embassy began recording levels in 2008 — that hospitals reported on Monday a surge in patient admissions for respiratory problems. Beijing officials ordered government cars off the road to try to curb the pollution, which some people say has been exacerbated by a weather phenomenon, called an inversion, that is trapping dirty particles. “I’ve never seen such broad Chinese media coverage of air pollution,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, a business consultant in Beijing who tracks the Chinese news media. “From People’s Daily to China Central Television, the story is being covered thoroughly, without trying to put a positive spin on it.” People’s Daily, the official party mouthpiece, published a front-page signed editorial on Monday under the headline “Beautiful China Starts With Healthy Breathing.” “The seemingly never-ending haze and fog may blur our vision,” it said, “but makes us see extra clearly the urgency of pollution control and the urgency of the theory of building a socialist ecological civilization, revealed at the 18th Party Congress.” The 18th Party Congress, a meeting of party elites held in Beijing last November, was part of a once-a-decade leadership transition. In a political report delivered on the first day, Hu Jintao, the president and departing party chief, said China must address environmental problems worsened by rapid development. The inclusion of sections in the report on the need for “ecological progress” could be opening the door for greater dialogue on such issues under the watch of Xi Jinping, the new party chief, and his colleagues on the Politburo Standing Committee. Image People in an industrial district of the eastern city of Qingdao, China, wore masks in the hazy morning on Monday. Credit Wu Hong/European Pressphoto Agency Even before the congress, the official news media had some latitude to publish critiques of environmental policy and investigate environmental degradation, in contrast to strict limits on what they can say on “core interest” issues like Tibet and Taiwan. Nevertheless, the coverage unfolding now represents a new level of depth in addressing air pollution. Bill Bishop, the editor of Sinocism, a daily online newsletter about news media coverage of China, wrote on Monday that “Chinese media is all over the story in a remarkably transparent contrast to today’s haze in Beijing.” Mr. Bishop, who is also a columnist for the DealBook blog of The New York Times, wrote: “Clearly it is impossible to pretend that the air is not polluted or that the health risks are not significant, so are the propaganda authorities just recognizing reality in allowing coverage? Or is there something more going on here, as perhaps the new government wants to both demonstrate a commitment to transparency and accountability as well as use this crisis to further the difficult reforms toward a more sustainable development model?” China Youth Daily, a state-run newspaper, published a scathing signed commentary on Monday under the headline “Lack of Responsive Actions More Choking Than the Haze and Fog.” The commentary questioned basic economic policies and the China growth model: “This choking, dirty and poisonous air forces the Chinese to rethink the widespread, messy development model.” Global Times, a newspaper that often defends the party, said in an editorial that the government in the past had erred by releasing pollution information in a “low-key way.” It said: “In the future, the government should publish truthful environmental data to the public. Let society participate in the process of solving the problem.” On Saturday, when a Twitter feed from the United States Embassy rated the air in central Beijing an astounding 755 on an air quality scale of 0 to 500, China Central Television, the main state network, devoted a large part of its 7 p.m. newscast to the pollution. That night, the Beijing government reported alarming levels of a potentially deadly particulate matter called PM 2.5; in some districts, it exceeded 900 micrograms per cubic meter, on par with some days of the killer smog in London in the mid-20th century. Under pressure from the existence of the embassy monitor and growing anger among prominent Chinese Internet users, Chinese officials have been releasing more data on PM 2.5 levels, in a sign of creeping transparency. Beijing began reporting PM 2.5 levels in January 2012. Xinhua, the state-run news agency, announced late last year that the Ministry of Environmental Protection had required 74 cities to start releasing PM 2.5 data. For years, Chinese officials had been trying to limit public information to data on PM 10 or other pollutants that are generally considered less deadly than PM 2.5, which is invisible and can lodge deep in the lungs. “Last year, Chinese media began to report with regularity on air pollution, especially in Beijing and concerning PM 2.5 in particular,” Mr. Goldkorn said. “But the apocalyptic skies above the capital this last weekend seemed to have encouraged an even greater enthusiasm for reporting this story.”

Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China


Republican Says Iran Deal Should Halt Uranium Enrichment

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Laying down a marker, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Tuesday that a follow-on nuclear accord with Iran should require that Tehran stop enriching uranium. “The key issue is whether a final agreement would allow Iran to manufacture nuclear fuel,” the chairman, Ed Royce of California, said during a hearing that included testimony by Secretary of State John Kerry. “It simply can’t be trusted with enrichment technology, because verification efforts can never be foolproof.” Comments by Mr. Royce and other panel members effectively shifted the terms of the debate from the interim accord that the United States and five other world powers negotiated last month, which involved freezing much of Iran’s nuclear program, to the more comprehensive one that international negotiators now plan to pursue. The interim agreement is for six months, but it can be renewed for an additional six months by mutual consent. The goal is to buy time so that a more sweeping agreement can be negotiated. The interim agreement also outlines some of the provisions of such a follow-on agreement, saying that Iran could continue to enrich uranium “under mutually agreed parameters” and under “enhanced monitoring.” Mr. Kerry said to the panel that he did not know if a comprehensive agreement could be achieved, but that the United States had an obligation to try. And, seeking to defuse the congressional push for additional sanctions, he said that imposing new penalties at this point would poison the atmosphere for such talks. “We have an obligation to give these negotiations an opportunity to succeed,” Mr. Kerry said. Trying to reassure the lawmakers, Mr. Kerry said that the scope of any future Iranian enrichment activity under a comprehensive agreement would need to be “mutually agreed” and would be linked to legitimate civilian needs. But the six-month interim agreement, Mr. Kerry asserted, was also in the best interest of the United States because it halted important elements of Iran’s program. “The national security of the United States is stronger under this first-step agreement than it was before,” said Mr. Kerry, who asserted that Israel and Persian Gulf Arab states were also more secure. Mr. Kerry promised that the Obama administration would go to Congress for tougher sanctions if the effort to negotiate a comprehensive nuclear accord with Iran faltered. “We are committed to asking you for additional sanctions if we fail,” Mr. Kerry said. “We will need them.”


Hawaii: Work on Giant Telescope Is Paused

Abstract: Gov. David Ige of Hawaii said Tuesday that construction on the Thirty Meter Telescope at Mauna Kea was stopping for a week. He said the group building the telescope, one of the world’s largest, had agreed to pause construction to allow interested parties to have more discussions about the project. The peak of Mauna Kea is held sacred by some Native Hawaiians, and hundreds of people have recently protested the construction. More than a dozen people were arrested last week for blocking the road that leads to the top of Mauna Kea.

Hawaii
Telescopes Observatories
David Ige
Space


Bronx Rabbi Who Took Boys Naked to Sauna Will Keep His Job

Abstract: A prominent Orthodox rabbi in the Bronx who was the focus of scrutiny for having taken boys naked to a sauna will keep his job, after his synagogue’s board changed course and decided not to seek his removal. The rabbi, Jonathan Rosenblatt of the Riverdale Jewish Center, had fought efforts to remove him and apologized for lapses in judgment, and seemed to have the support of most of the 700-member congregation. “After carefully considering various scenarios over the last several weeks, we firmly believe that the approach laid out by Rabbi Rosenblatt is an effective and appropriate way forward,” the board’s president and chairman wrote in an email to members last Thursday. The rabbi, the board said, had “shared his vision” about strengthening bonds among members and maintaining the synagogue’s financial stability. The email was reported on Monday by The Jewish Telegraphic Agency. At least two board trustees resigned over the decision to keep Rabbi Rosenblatt, and dozens of congregation members unhappy with the process have begun holding services at each other’s homes instead of at the synagogue. In May, an article in The New York Times described how shortly after taking the helm of the synagogue in 1985, Rabbi Rosenblatt began taking boys from his congregation, as young as 12, to a gym to play squash or racquetball, then to the sauna, where he would talk with them about their faith. The rabbi and the boys were often naked during the chats. Some of those congregants from the late 1980s and early ’90s said he gawked at them in ways that they found disturbing. Another said that in clothed chat sessions the rabbi often touched him in a manipulative and seductive way. The rabbi was never accused of sexual misconduct. He eventually agreed to stop taking congregants to the sauna. In the wake of the article, at least 45 members signed a petition urging Rabbi Rosenblatt to step down. But more than 200 members signed another one urging him to stay. In early June, the board voted to try to buy out Rabbi Rosenblatt’s contract, and he initially agreed to negotiate . Two weeks later, though, in an emotional and contrite speech to the congregation, the rabbi said, “I still believe I have contributions to make and surely, with God’s grace, I am ready to serve you.” The congregation applauded the speech. A lawyer for Rabbi Rosenblatt, Benjamin Brafman, said on Tuesday, “We are obviously pleased with the board’s decision, and it was clearly the right decision as there were never any grounds for his removal.” But one board member, who did not want his name published because of the inflammatory nature of the issue, said that the about-face was forced on the board by the president and chairman. In June, the board voted by a wide margin — 34 to 8, reportedly — to seek the rabbi’s removal. At a board meeting last Wednesday, though, the member said, the chairman and president presented the decision to keep the rabbi as a done deal and would not allow a vote. The board member said he resigned after the meeting. Another member, who also did not want her name published, said she did the same. Both board members said that at least three others had resigned. The president, Samson Fine, and the chairman, Donald Liss, did not return voice mail messages on Tuesday. Some rank-and-file members, too, have decided that if Rabbi Rosenblatt stays, they will leave. A group has been holding services at each other’s homes for the last six weeks or so; two people who have been attending said the services typically attract 50 to 80 people. One of them, Steven Bayme, a program official at the American Jewish Committee, worshiped at Riverdale Jewish Center for 38 years and had given lectures at Rabbi Rosenblatt’s invitation. “He’s caused a schism in the congregation that he aspires to lead,” Mr. Bayme said. He called his decision to leave the congregation “extremely painful.”

Jonathan Rosenblatt
Riverdale Jewish Center
Bronx
Rabbi


Rivera’s 601st Save Will Have to Wait as Yankees Fall

Abstract: TORONTO — With Trevor Hoffman’s record of 601 saves just one rung ahead of him on the career list, Mariano Rivera brought his family to Canada in the hope that they could share in the celebration when he tied, and then broke the record. But for the second straight game since he reached the 600-save plateau on Tuesday, Rivera was left idle as the Yankees lost, 5-4 , to the Toronto Blue Jays , who won the game on pinch-hitter Jose Molina’s game-ending single off Cory Wade in the ninth inning. But the loss was also due, in part, to the fact that another pitcher chasing a milestone was unable to hold a lead. C. C. Sabathia, the Yankees No. 1 starter and their main hope in any potential playoff series, gave away a 3-1 lead in the fifth inning on a bases-clearing double by Adam Lind and failed in his second attempt to win 20 games. Sabathia lasted only five and two-thirds innings and gave up 4 runs and 10 hits. He walked four and struck out eight. It was the fifth time in his last nine starts that Sabathia has given up exactly 10 hits after doing it only once in his first 23, and the fact that he needed 120 pitches underscored the problems he was having with his fastball command. Sabathia has only two starts left in the regular season to find that command, but Manager Joe Girardi said he was not concerned. “I still really believe in him,” Girardi said. “I think he’s going to be great for us and he’ll continue to be great for us. Tonight he struggled for us a little bit, but he gave us a chance to win the game. We weren’t able to score after we tied it up.” Sabathia had been dominant in opening the season with a 16-5 record and 2.55 earned run average. Since then he is 3-3 with a 4.34 E.R.A., and hitters are batting. 314 against him in that stretch. That downturn has coincided with the Yankees switch to a six-man rotation. Sabathia has always said he prefers to pitch every fifth day, but he has done that only once over his last seven starts. “I’m not here to make excuses,” Sabathia said. “It’s totally my fault that I wasn’t able to go deep in the game. I know how tough it’s been grinding out the last couple weeks for us, and it’s my job as a starting pitcher to go deep into the games and get these guys a rest. I haven’t been able to do that.” The Yankees tied the score, 4-4, in the sixth when Robinson Can scored on a single by Nick Swisher. The score remained that way until the bottom of the ninth. Lind started the winning rally by blistering a ball off the right-field wall for a double off Boone Logan before being replaced by pinch-runner Adam Loewen. Logan intentionally walked Brett Lawrie and then threw out Loewen at third on Colby Rasmus’s failed sacrifice bunt attempt. Girardi then brought in Cory Wade to replace Logan, and he was greeted by Molina’s pinch-hit single to the gap in left center that scored Lawrie. The defeat, coupled with the Boston Red Sox’ victory over the Tampa Bay Rays, cut the Yankees’ lead in the American League East to three and a half games with 13 to play. The Yankees’ offense staked Sabathia to a 3-1 lead after four innings, but Sabathia gave it back an inning later. After walking consecutive batters, Sabathia surrendered a bases-clearing double to Lind as the Blue Jays took a 4-3 lead. The Yankees had been hoping that Alex Rodriguez would be able to play Friday after missing the previous five games because of the lingering effects of a sore thumb. But Rodriguez was not in the starting lineup because he wanted to try an experimental tape job on his bat first. During batting practice, Rodriguez had a quarter-inch rim of tape, about a centimeter thick, wound around the handle of the bat, roughly four inches up from the handle. The ridge of tape is intended to keep his hands separated so his upper right hand does not press down on his sore left thumb. After taking about eight rounds of batting practice before the game, Rodriguez said it was the best he had felt in a month. So after Friday’s loss, the Yankees’ sixth in nine games, Girardi said he was hoping to pencil Rodriguez into the lineup Saturday. Then he slightly amended that, but only regarding the implement he would use. “I’d actually like to use a pen,” he said.

Baseball
New York Yankees
Toronto Blue Jays
Rivera Mariano


A Very Dirty Movie

Abstract: Documentarians don’t get much burlier than Chris Bell. The 35-year-old was a competitive powerlifter before genetics—he stands 5-foot-6 on a good day—forced a career change and sent him off to the University of Southern California’s film school. Bell’s two brothers, Mad Dog and Smelly, weren’t so quick to give up their athletic dreams and turned to steroids to further their pursuits of glory. Bell’s debut film, “Bigger Stronger Faster,” uses his family as a starting point to probe the sport’s world obsession with sports-enhancing drugs. It had its premiere at Sundance in January and went into limited release in New York and Los Angeles on May 30. Wider release will follow. He spoke to Play about juicing, family style You used steroids once, for about two months. Did you notice a huge difference? Absolutely. Steroids work. I’m not going to lie about it. I would walk into the gym and people would say, “What are you on?” For me, it was much more of an issue of ethics. I felt like I was kind of cheating society or something. It’s really a bizarre feeling. Senator Joe Biden once called steroids “un-American,” but you contend that they’re intensely American. When Biden said that so indignantly in 2004, it sparked an idea in my mind: is it really un-American to use steroids, or are steroids a side effect of being American? Is it just something you do in a win-at-all-costs culture? We’re constantly told we’re the biggest, best, strongest, fastest country in the world. When you’re pitched that perfection is crucial to your well-being, you’re really taking a look at a society that’s in trouble. You trace this back to the 1980s. I remember everything being larger than life. I remember Ronald Reagan quoting Rambo. We [the United States] went to the Olympic Games in 1984 and dominated them. Lyle Alzado was the top football player. Hulk Hogan was in the ring ripping off his shirt. All these things were running through my head. Then when Arnold Schwarzenegger really blew up, it was kind of the icing on the cake. I had to see every Arnold movie on the first day it came out. It was kind of like a religious cult between me and my friends. In the film you sit down and confess your steroid use to your mom. What was that like? It was pretty nerve-racking. My brothers and I went home to visit the parents. It was Eastertime. I said I was going to tell mom and shoot it for the movie. My brothers said, “Sure, we’ll talk about it, too.” My younger brother, Smelly, then says, “I’ll tell mom if she specifically asks me.” She never asked the specific question, so he kind of left me hanging there. He says, “What do I have to gain from telling people?” I think that’s what a lot of athletes think. Mad Dog has gone on and off steroids for several years. Did you notice any ill effects? He has had side effects when he has come off of them. He has been kind of sad. He’s not sure whether he’s sad due to the fact he’s not as strong or if he’s just sad. Part of the problem is that the athletes who talk honestly about steroids are either tragic figures like Lyle Alzado or buffoons like Jose Canseco. Canseco’s a guy who says he’s a warrior for the truth. But when I asked him to talk to me for my film, he told me that I didn’t know anything and if I wanted him to talk to me, I would have to help him raise money for his movie, “Juiced.” Ironically, when my movie came out at Sundance, my manager gets a call that he wants me to direct “Juiced.” You refused an offer to direct Canseco’s life story? Yeah. What’s your max bench press? It’s 525 pounds. Is that a U.S.C. film-school record? Yeah, definitely, by a few hundred pounds.

Steroids
Motion Pictures
Bell Chris (1972- )
Documentary Films and Programs


Russia: Biden Says U.S. Will Push For Russia to Be in Trade Organization

Abstract: Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. , left, in meetings with Russia ’s president on Wednesday, called the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization “the most important item on our agenda,” and promised that the White House would push for the repeal of cold-war-era trade restrictions. But he warned that international investors were watching closely to see whether Russia made progress on corruption and rule of law. “Investors are looking for assurances that the legal system treats them fairly and acts on their concerns swiftly,” Mr. Biden said during a visit to the Skolkovo business school. Mr. Biden, who two years ago originated the idea of a “reset” between Russia and the United States, is tasked with maintaining the momentum in the still-jittery relationship. Russia is looking for the United States to help promote its economic modernization, a central goal of Dmitri A. Medvedev’s presidency.

Biden Joseph R Jr
World Trade Organization
Russia
United States
International Trade and World Market
Politics and Government


Jets Put Last Puzzle Piece in Place, Just in Time

Abstract: FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — On his first official day of his second season as a Jet, Ryan Fitzpatrick threw two interceptions in team drills. He also tossed what Brandon Marshall called the best deep ball Fitzpatrick had ever thrown him, and it just might have been: a 50-yard parabola that caught Marshall in stride down the sideline. Marshall had been waiting five months for this precise moment, ever since free agency dawned in March with Fitzpatrick and the Jets at a contractual impasse. Marshall flooded him with phone calls and text messages and social media videos imploring him to return. He needed his quarterback. “It’s a good feeling to be whole right now,” Marshall said. One day into training camp, that is an apt characterization of the Jets. They are whole. They are not a complete team — they are unproven in many areas, deficient in others — but they are whole. The front office certified as much with two deals spurred by deadlines, Muhammad Wilkerson’s five-year extension that proved homegrown players get rewarded, and Fitzpatrick’s one-year pact that proved just how much the organization valued him. “From a mental psyche, from a team standpoint, it was good to have him back,” Coach Todd Bowles said. Fitzpatrick, 33, earned universal respect in the locker room for his leadership as much as his performance last season, in which he threw for a franchise-record 31 touchdowns and led the Jets to a 10-6 record. He and the organization disagreed on his value for most of the last five months, but throughout the stalemate Fitzpatrick expected he would return. Image Jets receiver Brandon Marshall running a drill at the start of training camp. Credit Julio Cortez/Associated Press “Just because it made too much sense for me to be here,” Fitzpatrick said, “and it made too much sense for them to have me here.” Fitzpatrick gives the Jets the best chance to overtake New England in the rugged A.F.C. East. Better than Geno Smith, who has now lost his job twice to Fitzpatrick: last August, when Ikemefuna Enemkpali slugged Smith, and on Wednesday night, when the contract standoff ended. If the Jets’ coaching staff and front office felt differently about Smith, they would not have ultimately budged off their initial three-year offer, giving Fitzpatrick the one-year, $12 million deal he came to covet. “I’m not disappointed,” Smith said, although he acknowledged his frustration before adding, “We all want to be out there.” Only one of them can start on Sept. 11 against Cincinnati, and barring any unexpected developments, it will be Fitzpatrick. As his agent finished the deal with the Jets, Fitzpatrick drove around this wooded pocket of Morris County, awaiting clearance to join his teammates. When Fitzpatrick stopped his truck outside the booth guarding the facility here, the men inside were surprised to see him but waved him through anyway. He parked but was barred from entering the building: The Jets had erased his security code. So he texted Marshall for his. Fitzpatrick walked into the team meeting, he said, a few seconds after the clock struck 7. “Sorry I’m late, Coach,” Fitzpatrick said. “That’s a $12 million fine,” Bowles replied. Marshall referred to that sum when he explained the team’s reaction when Fitzpatrick entered: “Want all this money? You better throw some touchdowns.” The longer Fitzpatrick stayed away, the more pressure he put on himself to play well this season. Fitzpatrick blanched at the Jets’ initial offer of $24 million over three years because of its structure: His salary dropped to $6 million in the second and third years. That rate might be commensurate with the league’s backups, and if the second-round pick Christian Hackenberg had progressed enough to earn the 2017 starting job, that is precisely what Fitzpatrick would be. But that is not how Fitzpatrick perceives himself — not now, not ever, and certainly not after throwing 31 touchdowns last season. “I probably see myself differently than you all see me,” Fitzpatrick said, adding: “When that offer came in, all I thought to myself was, ‘It’s going to be a one-year deal, we’ve got to do it as a one-year deal.’ If that’s how they want to play it and that’s how they see it, then I’d much rather bet on myself.” By agreeing to a one-year deal, Fitzpatrick is effectively welcoming another set of negotiations next off-season. If he plays well and leads the Jets to their first playoff berth since 2010, he stands to make more money. If he does not, proving that last season was an aberration, Fitzpatrick will most likely find somewhere else to play in 2017. “There’s definitely risk involved, but I mean, I would almost not want them to sign a guy” who agreed to that first offer, Fitzpatrick said. “How could I look myself in the mirror and say, ‘I’ll try to play good this year’ and then, next year, ‘I’ll just collect some checks and teach the young guys.’ It’s not who I am. It’s not in my nature.” Fitzpatrick stayed in shape, he said half-jokingly, by regularly walking 18 holes on New Jersey’s hilly golf courses and by chasing around his five children. In this turbulent off-season, they had gotten used to their father being around. But on Thursday, Fitzpatrick was back on the field, surrounded by teammates who adore him, back where he was wanted, back where he was needed.

Football
Jets
Ryan Fitzpatrick
Brandon Marshall


Berlusconi Faces Inquiry in Prostitution Case

Abstract: ROME — Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi faces investigation in a prostitution case involving an under-age nightclub dancer, prosecutors announced Friday, a day after Italy ’s highest court weakened a law that had shielded him from prosecution while in office. The office of the Milan prosecutor, Edmondo Bruti Liberati, asserted in a statement that Mr. Berlusconi had illegally compensated the minor for sexual relations during encounters at the prime minister’s private villa outside Milan. Mr. Berlusconi’s lawyers dismissed the accusations as “absurd and unfounded,” though they were certain to compound a particularly difficult time for the prime minister, whose coalition has been worn down by months of infighting that has left him with a bare majority in Parliament. The ruling by the Constitutional Court that revoked automatic immunity for the prime minister further weakened him. Even so, earlier accusations of impropriety have not disenchanted voters who have kept Mr. Berlusconi in politics for almost 17 consecutive years, and there was no sense that this most recent scandal would cause his downfall. “Italians have become used to this kind of news, so this will have no impact on the public that supports Berlusconi; it will only increase tensions between him and the judiciary,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political science professor at Luiss University in Rome. “We’ve seen so many of these things, the public opinion thinks this is just one more.” The prostitution case involves a girl named Karima el-Mahroug, who is better known in Italy by her nightclub stage name, Ruby Rubacuori (Ruby Heart-stealer), who was detained last May on allegation of theft. The episode became public in November, when it emerged that she had been released from police custody after a telephone call from the prime minister. She was 17 years old at the time. Prosecutors are also investigating whether Mr. Berlusconi abused his power when he intervened to have her released. Mr. Berlusconi has been summoned to appear before prosecutors in Milan this month. “I can’t wait to defend myself in court from such absurd accusations,” Mr. Berlusconi said in a live audio message posted Friday evening on the Web site of his supporters, Promotori della Liberta. The investigation, he said, was “based on nothing” and he accused politicized prosecutors of persecuting him and trying to “subvert the fundamental rules of democracy.” His lawyers, Niccolo Ghedini and Piero Longo, played down what they said was an intentionally headline-grabbing investigation that would probably be dismissed because the accusations had “already been fully denied” by all the people involved. Pledging to reform the judicial system so that citizens’ right to privacy would be respected, Mr. Berlusconi said the investigation was an “interference in my private life that has no precedence in the history of this country.” Indeed, Mr. Berlusconi’s private life has been a mother lode for prosecutors. His business dealings have led to dozens of investigations — from which he has emerged practically unscathed — though he is currently on trial in separate cases in Milan on charges of corruption, tax fraud and embezzlement. Mr. Berlusconi, a billionaire, said in the audio statement that the only people who were happy as a result of his legal travails were his lawyers. “They’re sure that with me they’ll never be out of a job,” he said. His personal life has also become tabloid fodder, especially since he split from his wife, Veronica Lario, who filed for divorce in May 2009 after 19 years of marriage. Since then, the Italian media have had a heyday reporting that he has had dalliances with prostitutes, that aspiring models call him Daddy, and that flocks of young women, including minors, attend lively parties at Mr. Berlusconi’s private residences in Rome, Sardinia and Arcore, outside of Milan. In interviews, Ms. Mahroug has said that she lied about being under age and denied having sex with the prime minister. She turned 18 in November. In a statement on Friday, Mr. Berlusconi’s lawyers said it was untrue that Mr. Berlusconi had been intimate with Ms. Mahroug. Yet in the statement from the prosecutor’s office she is named as the injured party. In Italy, the age of consent is 14, but favoring or exploiting prostitution of minors under 18 is a crime. A member of Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party is also under investigation, as are a well-known talent agent and the news director of one of Mr. Berlusconi’s television channels, the ANSA news agency reported. Mr. Berlusconi’s supporters rallied around the prime minister on Friday, accusing the Milanese prosecutors of pursuing a political agenda bent on ruining Mr. Berlusconi that could have more widespread ramifications. Are Milanese prosecutors “fully aware of the incalculable damage that this episode wreaks not on the prime minister, but on the image of Italy and Italians around the world in such a delicate moment for the economic and financial stability of the country?” asked Daniela Santanché, a junior cabinet member. Analysts said, however, that for the moment Italy’s fractured center-left opposition posed few real threats to the prime minister. “He’s still in a relatively strong position, and were elections to be called tomorrow he’d still win, Ruby or no Ruby,” Professor D’Alimonte said.

Italy
Berlusconi Silvio
Prostitution
Politics and Government
Lario Veronica


Taiwan Chip Industry Powers the Tech World, but Struggles for Status

Abstract: TAIPEI, Taiwan — Tien Wu, chief operating officer of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, has a problem: the brightest young people in Taiwan do not want to work in the island’s signature business, chip making. “All the college freshmen are asking, ‘Why should I join the industry? I’d rather work for Facebook, Apple or Google,’ ” Mr. Wu said in an interview. Taiwan, an island of 23 million people, is the world’s biggest chip maker. The industry generated about $63 billion in sales here last year — more than one-fifth of the global total, according to the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association. Made-in-Taiwan chips are major components in many of the world’s PCs, smartphones, cameras and other gadgets. Why, then, has chip making lost its allure? Many semiconductor companies in Taiwan struggle with low profit margins or even lose money. At the same time, Silicon Valley giants like Google and Apple, whose wizardry would be impossible without the continuing innovations of the semiconductor industry, are sitting on so much cash they do not know what to do with it. “We’re the guys in the hot room, forging the iron and taking the heat, and someone else is reaping the benefit,” Mr. Wu said. His lament was echoed by executives of other companies during a semiconductor trade show in Taiwan last week. So even as engineers toil at the latest technological breakthroughs in chip design and manufacturing, industry leaders are also wrestling with a bigger question: how can the semiconductor business grab a bigger portion of the profits it enables? The issue is gaining urgency because one of the axioms of semiconductors may be about to break down, putting new financial pressure on the industry. According to Moore’s Law, named after Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. But transistors are now packed so densely on chips that it may be technically impossible to go further without corrupting data, specialists say. “Everybody is coming up against this,” said Pascal Viaud, chief strategy officer of Yole Développement, a consulting firm in Lyon, France. “The industry is going to need to find new ways of creating value.” One approach is to stack transistors, creating so-called three-dimensional chips, rather than line them up side by side. Samsung Electronics of South Korea announced this summer what it described as the first mass-produced 3-D chips for flash memory, a major component in smartphones. Although 3-D technology and other advances promise to lower the cost and increase the performance of consumer electronics, they make chip design and manufacturing more complicated and expensive. This has prompted semiconductor companies to rethink how the industry is structured. Several business models are competing for primacy. The giants of the industry, including Samsung and Intel, offer one-stop shopping — designing, manufacturing and packaging chips into integrated circuits that are sold to the companies that design and assemble finished phones, cameras and other products. Advocates of this approach, featuring chip-making behemoths known as integrated device manufacturers, or I.D.M.’s, say it provides the financial scale and technological expertise to deal with the industry’s challenges. Image Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is adding capabilities, like chip packaging. Credit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, via Reuters Another approach is more specialized, with separate companies handling different stages in the creation of an integrated circuit. Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, for example, packages and tests chips that have been made by so-called chip foundries and designed by others. Supporters of this approach say clients of electronics companies prefer to deal with more focused semiconductor contractors. “Today, I can say with certainty that the I.D.M. model is dead,” said Ajit Manocha, chief executive of Global Foundries, a chip maker in Milpitas, Calif., that was created from the manufacturing arm of Advanced Micro Devices four years ago. Although semiconductor companies everywhere are wrestling with how they should be structured, it is particularly pertinent in Taiwan because of the industry’s size and its relative fragmentation. Taiwan has been less affected by the rounds of consolidation that have concentrated the industry in a handful of big players elsewhere. To try to cope with the new challenges, the biggest chip maker on the island, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or T.S.M.C., long considered purely a foundry, has recently moved to add capabilities, like chip packaging. United Microelectronics Corporation, the second-largest foundry by revenue in Taiwan, has announced an alliance with International Business Machines to develop new technology, as well as investments in other chip companies. Despite all the maneuvering, 2013 is shaping up as a pretty good year for chip makers in Taiwan, with total revenue expected to rise to 1.87 trillion Taiwan dollars, or about $63 billion, up 14 percent from 2012, according to the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association. But the industry is volatile; two years ago, sales plunged 12 percent. Some analysts see signs of a turnaround in memory chips, one of the weakest parts of the industry. Prices have been weak for years because chip makers expanded capacity just as sales of personal computers, a big user of memory chips, began to slump. But consolidation has helped put capacity back in line with sales. The vulnerability of the market to changes in supply and demand was demonstrated in early September when a fire at a plant in China that is owned by SK Hynix of South Korea, the second-biggest producer of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chips after Samsung, caused prices in the spot market to surge as much as 20 percent. The market for other chips, including those that serve as the brains of computers and mobile devices, has been steadier, helped by the global boom in sales of smartphones and other mobile devices. Some executives say concerns about the structure of the industry are overblown. Instead of coveting the lavish profits of the Internet companies and mobile phone makers like Apple and Samsung, they say, chip makers ought to work on developing new markets for their products in industries like automobiles and health care. “It’s about innovation,” said Jack Sun, chief technology officer of T.S.M.C. “We need to collaborate to create innovation together. Otherwise we won’t be able to retire.” “So leave the software guys and the O.E.M.’s alone for now,” he said, referring to the companies that assemble electronics devices, known as original equipment manufacturers.

Computer Chip
Taiwan
Advanced Semiconductor Engineering
Electronics


Farewells, and Some More Questions, for Press Secretary

Abstract: WASHINGTON — At the top of his last briefing as White House press secretary on Wednesday, Jay Carney acknowledged to his adversaries in the news media “how hard it can get in here, how hot it can sometimes be.” It was a fitting metaphor for the temperature in the briefing room as Washington baked in near-100-degree heat outside. And it was a recognition of the often tense exchanges during his three-and-a-half years as President Obama’s chief spokesman. But as he prepares to depart the White House at the end of the week, Mr. Carney praised reporters, saying that it was “always a pleasure” and that he had always sought to help the news media do their job even as he served Mr. Obama. “That is what I’ve tried to do,” Mr. Carney told a packed briefing room. “You’ll be the judge of my success, at least in part.” Mr. Carney said he loved “my years as a reporter,” but when a journalist later asked whether a seat should be saved for him on the other side of the podium, he laughed and said it was — finally — a question he could answer definitively. (The clear implication: He is not returning to reporting.) Reporters in the room, including several who regularly expressed frustration with Mr. Carney’s refusal to directly answer their questions, offered him good wishes and thanked him for his service. But the goodbyes were followed quickly by the kinds of questions that had created the frustrations in the first place: Does the administration want Nuri Kamal al-Maliki out as prime minister of Iraq? When will the president decide about airstrikes? Has the president decided to block the Keystone XL pipeline? Mr. Carney answered none of them directly, returning repeatedly to his White House talking points. But he also got in a couple of off-the-cuff quips, as well. When a reporter quoted former Vice President Dick Cheney as saying that “rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” Mr. Carney jumped in. “Which president was he talking about?” Mr. Carney asked, without cracking a smile. Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, came in at the end of Mr. Carney’s briefing to thank him for his “unrelenting” service to the White House and in working with “our partners” in the news media. “We are going to miss you dearly,” Mr. McDonough said.