A New Wave of Migrants Flees Iraq, Yearning for Europe

Abstract: BAGHDAD — Having sold his car for $4,600, and then some of his wife’s jewelry, and having loaded his smartphone with photographs of his five children, all that was left for Haider Abdella to do was say goodbye. “From yesterday to today, we are crying,” he said. His mother sat next to him on the couch, sobbing. “He’s never left me before, from when he was a child until now,” she said. “How can I bear him leaving?” Mr. Abdella, 42, a police officer, had never left Iraq — never even seen the sea. But last week, he was on a plane to Istanbul, and from there traveled to the coastal resort city of Izmir, Turkey. A day later, he was on a smuggler’s boat to Greece, crying and praying over the phone with his family left behind in Baghdad. By the weekend, he told them, he was well on his way to Germany. Emboldened by the recent wave of news coverage showing their countrymen and fellow Arabs fleeing the war in Syria and reaching Europe, many Iraqis see a new opportunity to get out. Their reasons for leaving vary. Some, like Mr. Abdella, who said he was threatened by militias, fear for their lives. Others are displaced from areas controlled by Islamic State militants. Still others are lifelong residents of Baghdad escaping harsh economic circumstances brought on by falling oil prices. Image Iraqis on Tuesday in Passau, Germany. The White House is considering sheltering more Syrians in the United States. Credit Michael Dalder/Reuters After years of violence and unmet promises for democracy by a corrupt political elite, Iraqis who resisted leaving during previous crises are now embarking on the country’s next great wave of emigration, an exodus that leaders warn is further tearing at the country at a time when its unity, more than ever, is threatened by the militants of the Islamic State. “I’ve spent all of my life in Iraq in sadness,” said Khalil Hussein, a Baghdad resident whose relatives have set off for Europe. He said he would join them soon, and to raise money, he has sold his wife’s sewing machine, kitchen utensils and an air cooler. “There is no hope,” he said. “I just want to get rid of Iraq.” The migrant flight is a small piece of the humanitarian disaster unfolding across Iraq, where nearly 3.1 million people are internally displaced . The International Organization for Migration has recorded about 6,000 Iraqis arriving this year on boats to either Greece or Italy, a fivefold increase over last year. But that is just a small fraction of the number of Iraqis actually taking the journey, because most avoid being registered officially when they arrive in Greece. And since mid-August, at least 250 Iraqis a day have been landing on Greek islands, Konstantinos Vardakis, the top European Union diplomat in Baghdad, said in an interview. To accommodate increased demand, Iraqi Airways recently added two new daily flights to Istanbul from Baghdad. In recent weeks, the phenomenon has snowballed, as Iraqis track migrants on messaging apps like Viber and WhatsApp and hear back from friends who have reached places like Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel has welcomed migrants and has become a hero to many Iraqis. The stories Iraqis hear from relatives in Europe are often euphoric, and full of possibility. “When you go to Europe, they treat you well, they give you a house, they pay you money, they take care of your health,” said Ali Hattam Jassim, 37, whose brother recently arrived in Belgium. “We have so many friends there, and they tell us how great the life is.” That the exodus includes so many young people has alarmed officials, who have issued statements urging them to stay by appealing to patriotism and duty at a time of war. Image An Iraqi woman waiting for a bus after disembarking at the port in Piraeus, Greece. Credit Win Mcnamee/Getty Images At a recent Friday sermon in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a representative for Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shiite cleric, said: “We call on our youth who are disappointed with the current situation to reconsider their options and to think about their country and their people and be more patient. They should look to the men of the armed forces and volunteers and the tribal fighters who are sacrificing their lives and fighting the terrorists on different fronts, and dying for the sake of defending the country and its beliefs.” For almost four decades, Wadie al-Waily has owned a travel agency, the Iraq & Egypt Travel & Tourism Company, on Saddoun Street in central Baghdad. Mr. Waily, who these days is selling a lot of one-way tickets to Turkey, has seen up close the traumas of Iraq’s modern history through the travel patterns of its people. In the 1970s, a period often held up here as a brief golden age, he said, “The young people were not thinking of leaving Iraq because when they graduated from school, they immediately found a job, a house. They could have a future.” The 1980s brought the long war with Iran, and many young men left to escape military service. In the 1990s, crippling economic sanctions imposed by the United States devastated society. “In the 1990s, life was destroyed,” Mr. Waily said. “Most of the people started thinking about leaving Iraq.” The invasion by the United States in 2003 brought many exiles back. They came hoping to nurture a new Iraq, only to leave again when the country slipped into sectarian civil war. Now, many who chose to stay through all of it have finally made a decision to leave. And some who came back only in recent years — many were pushed back to Iraq from Syria, where they had sought refuge before that country was thrown into chaos — are taking flight again. Seeking a Fair Distribution of Migrants in Europe German and European Union leaders have called for European countries to share the burden of absorbing the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have poured into the continent this summer. Adnan al-Azzawi, 45, was in Damascus, Syria, from 2004 to 2011, and then returned to Baghdad. He recently sent his family on the migrant journey, and they wound up in Belgium. He hopes to join them soon. For now, he has been using the Viber app to communicate with his family in Belgium, where they are living in a migration camp. With the journey behind them, his family is adjusting to life in exile, and to the little differences between life there and life here. Meal timing has been one jarring change for his family in Belgium, Mr. Azzawi said. There, breakfast is served at 7 a.m. “That is too early for us,” he said. Dinner is at 6 p.m. “We like to eat at 10,” he said. The food itself is sometimes strange. His family sends photographs of their meals. One showed what looked to be a pile of lasagna with a dollop of mayonnaise. “They didn’t eat it,” he said. “They don’t know what it is.” He sends them back photographs of their favorite Iraqi dishes, “to make them jealous.” On a recent afternoon, three friends who were all in their 20s were purchasing tickets to Turkey at a bus station in the upper-class neighborhood of Mansour. One of them, Hattam Jabbar, 28, pulled from his shoulder bag an identification card issued in 2008 by the United States Army that said he was a fighter for the “Sons of Iraq,” the United States-backed program that brought Sunni fighters into the government fold to fight what was then Al Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to the Islamic State. “There is nothing to make me sad about leaving,” he said. “There is no humanity here.” Mr. Hattam said he hoped his journey would end not in Europe but in the United States, where, he said, “even the dogs live well.” He explained what he meant by telling a story an Iraqi friend living in the United States had recently told him. The friend, he said, had gone to the supermarket and left his dog in his car with the windows up on a hot day. A police officer, seeing this, scolded him, and told him he was putting the dog at risk. “That means they even respect the dogs,” he said. “Even the dogs have rights in America.” The migration story has become something of a national preoccupation here, overshadowing not just the war against the Islamic State but also, for now, continuing street demonstrations demanding political overhauls and better services. On Friday, Baghdad’s day of protest, demonstrators waved placards bearing the face of the German chancellor, thanking her for welcoming so many asylum seekers. “God Bless You,” one sign read, while another praised Ms. Merkel and called Arab rulers “filthy.” Some of the protesters in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square seemed to be there only to hedge their bets. While demonstrating to change their country, many would just prefer to leave. At a recent protest, Tahir Abdulhamid, 45, stood surrounded by demonstrators chanting against corrupt politicians. “There’s no mercy in Iraq,” he said. “We feel like we are living in a jungle, where the strong eat the weak.” He added: “If I had the ability to leave already, and enough money, I would have left.”

Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis


Knicks Re-Sign Martin to a One-Year Deal

Abstract: The Knicks re-signed Kenyon Martin to a one-year deal. Martin, a tough, reliable forward throughout his 13-year career, will make about $1.4 million next year on a veteran’s minimum contract, which was all the over-the-salary-cap Knicks could offer him. The move gives the Knicks more frontcourt depth behind Tyson Chandler and Andrea Bargnani. Martin, 35, joined the team in February last season on a 10-day contract before becoming a valuable role player. He averaged 7.2 points and 5.3 rebounds in 18 games during the regular season. He averaged 5.3 points and 4.5 rebounds in 12 playoffs games.


Governing Coalition in Austria Collapses; Early Election Expected

Abstract: BERLIN — The Austrian government collapsed on Monday after months of acrimonious dispute between the nation’s two largest parties. New elections, most likely in September, seemed all but certain — pending parliamentary approval — after the People’s Party withdrew from the governing coalition. The leftist Social Democratic Party and the conservative People’s Party had been locked in an uneasy governing coalition since January 2007. Austria , an Alpine nation of 8.2 million, enjoys strong economic growth and low unemployment. Yet fears about rising consumer prices have aggravated longstanding tensions over immigration . Public sentiment toward the European Union has also soured drastically, and analysts said that in the election anticipated this year these trends could benefit far-right parties. The discontent reflects growing restlessness across Europe on these issues. Truck drivers packed the roads around Vienna on Monday, slowing traffic as part of a demonstration against high fuel prices. Austrian doctors have been closing their offices in strikes to protest proposed health care reform. It was in this atmosphere that at a news conference Monday, the vice chancellor, Wilhelm Molterer of the People’s Party, said his party was quitting the government and called for early elections. The Social Democrats are “directionless, leaderless and no longer capable of finding common solutions,” the Austrian news agency APA quoted Mr. Molterer as saying. Shortly afterward, Alfred Gusenbauer, the chancellor, a Social Democrat who is unpopular, announced that he would not seek re-election. The inconclusive results of the election in October 2006, in which the Social Democrats won 35 percent of the vote and the People’s Party 34 percent, meant that neither could form a government with a smaller party, and the major parties were forced to join together. Analysts said the snap elections favored the conservatives. “Today, the People’s Party projects more of an image of stability, and the Social Democrats one of instability,” said Wolfgang Bachmayer, head of the OGM Institute, a political consulting firm. Chancellor Gusenbauer had already stepped down last month as head of the Social Democratic Party. At a news conference on Monday, he said he would be replaced as its candidate for chancellor by Werner Faymann, the transport minister and new party leader. One of the parties expected to have the largest gains after the failure of the coalition of mainstream rivals is the far-right Freedom Party. It was founded by the extreme right-wing nationalist Jörg Haider , who left to form a new party, the Alliance for Austria’s Future, which barely made it over the 4 percent threshold for representation in the last election. “The Freedom Party may well be the winner” in terms of gaining voters, if not overall vote total, said Peter Filzmaier, a political science professor at the Danube University in Krems. Mr. Filzmaier said party members would in all likelihood add at least five percentage points to their 2006 tally of 11 percent, or “in the best case they could even double their showing.”

Austria
Politics and Government
Gusenbauer Alfred
Haider Jorg


Race Is on to Develop Green, Clean Technology

Abstract: DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — It is shaping up to be the Great Game of the 21st century. To top officials and business executives here at the World Economic Forum, Topic A this year was the race to develop greener, cleaner technology, which is emerging as one of the critical factors in reshaping the world economy as emerging powers snap at the heels of battered Western economies. With the United States and China sizing each other up across the Pacific and Europe seeking to maintain its economic stature, it is a battle for potentially millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in export revenues. The outcome — which pits a venture capital-driven market approach relying on government subsides against a top-down system of state capitalism — has the potential to influence how economic and political systems evolve. Concern that China may be edging ahead in potentially lucrative growth sectors like renewable energy was palpable here, where senior officials from the United States and Europe warned that the West could not afford to be complacent. “Six months ago my biggest worry was that an emissions deal would make American business less competitive compared to China,” said Senator Lindsay Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who has been deeply involved in climate change issues in Congress. “Now my concern is that every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy.” He added: “China has made a long-term strategic decision and they are going gang-busters.” Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, agreed. “It’s a race and whoever wins that race will dominate economic development,” she said. “The emerging markets are well-placed.” The global economic downturn, which hit the aging developed world far harder than fast-growing emerging markets, has focused attention on the job-creating potential of green technology, seen by many here as the next industrial revolution. In the energy sector alone, the deployment of new technologies, like wind and solar power, has the potential to support 20 million jobs by 2030 and trillions of dollars in revenue, analysts estimate. Ms. Lagarde estimated that as many as 240,000 jobs could be added in France over the next few years, helping offset the 400,000 lost last year in the slump. While new energy sources will initially be more expensive than fossil fuels, politicians in the West, mindful of a stagnant or shrinking manufacturing base, are hopeful that clean technology offers a way of rebuilding older industrial areas by creating a comprehensive green supply chain. The quest for a new comparative advantage, economists say, is all the more urgent as the crisis has left the financial-services sector reeling — a sector that was long considered one of the last bastions of Western sophistication. From China’s perspective, experts here said, climate change offers the opportunity to leapfrog Western competitors. “The low-carbon economy is the future,” said David Li Daokui, a professor at the Center for China in the World Economy in Beijing. But others cautioned against framing the development of alternative energy as a pure competition. If the United States and China “work together we can deal with almost all the major global crises,” said Robert Hormats, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs. He stressed that success in clean technologies was not a “zero-sum game.” But he agreed with those who see green technologies as important job generators. “Don’t leave the jobs on the table — the Chinese get it,” he said. Moreover, the quest for sustainable energy and industrial processes is playing out against the backdrop of vastly different economic and political systems. In China, the government poured an estimated $440 billion into clean energy last year. It is investing heavily in renewable energy and nuclear power. It also is pursuing efforts to make extraction of its vast coal reserves cleaner. Already home to one-third of the globe’s solar-energy manufacturing capacity and 400 solar-energy companies, China is expected to surpass Spain this year as the No. 3 country in terms of wind power installations, behind Germany and the United States. William Rhodes, senior vice chairman of Citigroup and board vice chairman of the National Committee on U.S.-China relations, predicted that Beijing’s research into storing carbon emissions underground could soon lead to a major breakthrough. In the United States, meanwhile, President Barack Obama faces an uphill battle in Congress to pass politically-sensitive legislation aimed at capping carbon emissions. “China has the type of centralized industrial policy that we can’t match and don’t want in the United States or the European Union,” said Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, a U.S. advocacy group. “What we have to compete with China is the power of our marketplace. A clear and declining cap on carbon emissions will send the essential market signal to industry, and that will engage our market directly in this competition.” Mr. Krupp said it was Washington must make the next move since the Copenhagen climate talks last month failed to produce a binding global deal, because China may be in no rush to unleash America’s renowned capability for innovation. That could prove disastrous not only to the environment, analysts said, but also to the economic prospects of today’s advanced industrial nations. Said John Chipman, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London: “Climate change has become a theater of geopolitical competition.”

Global Warming
Science and Technology
Davos (Switzerland)
United States
United States Economy
China
European Union


N.B.A. to Experiment With Shorter Game in Nets Exhibition

Abstract: The N.B.A. will experiment with a 44-minute game Sunday when the Nets play the Boston Celtics in a preseason game at Barclays Center. The league’s competition committee is seeking preliminary data to analyze how a shorter contest would compare with the current 48-minute format, said Rod Thorn, the N.B.A.’s president for operations. Professional sports leagues, particularly Major League Baseball, have been looking at ways to quicken their games and keep fans engaged. Though the N.B.A. has not drawn as much criticism for the length of its games, it has prided itself on being a league willing to experiment with its product. Increasingly in recent years, possible tweaks to streamline contests have been bounced around. The idea to test a shorter game during the preseason came up at a recent coaches’ meeting, the N.B.A. said. “I’m looking forward to gauging its impact on the flow of the game,” Nets Coach Lionel Hollins said in a statement. “Since there is a shorter clock, it affects playing time, so it’ll be interesting to see how it plays into substitution patterns.” Quarters in the 44-minute game will be shortened from 12 minutes to 11. The number of mandatory timeouts in the second and fourth quarters will be reduced to two from three. The length of games has become an urgent consumer issue, particularly as leagues in recent years have introduced new technologies that bring more accuracy to officiating at the cost of precious minutes and seconds. Baseball appears to have the most egregious problem: The average nine-inning regular-season M.L.B. game this year took 3 hours 2 minutes, according to Elias Sports Bureau, a record for baseball, and playoff games this month have routinely been stretching past four hours. The average nonovertime N.F.L. regular-season game last year took 3 hours 9 minutes. The average nonovertime N.H.L. game in the 2013-2014 regular season took 2 hours 28 minutes. The N.B.A., during its 2013-2014 regular season, had an average nonovertime game length of 2 hours 15 minutes. But basketball has not been exempt from reproach. For one thing, the stop-and-start nature of late-game situations — when the flow of play can devolve into a tedious string of fouls, free throws and timeouts — has long been under the microscope. Some popular proposed fixes would simply make N.B.A. games more closely resemble international basketball games, which are 40 minutes long and do not allow live-ball timeouts. A more far-fetched idea emerged last year and generated some interest: It would limit every trip to the foul line to one shot that would be worth however many points the corresponding field goal was worth. A more realistic solution, the 44-minute game, will play out in public on Sunday. “I appreciate the N.B.A.’s long history of forward thinking and willingness to try new ideas,” Celtics Coach Brad Stevens said of the game.

Basketball
Brooklyn Nets
Celtics
Rod Thorn


Flacco Guides Ravens’ Offense to Beat Bengals

Abstract: Joe Flacco deftly directed Baltimore’s new no-huddle offense, and the Ravens ’ defense administered an old-fashioned whipping to the Cincinnati Bengals . Flacco threw for 299 yards and 2 touchdowns, Ed Reed took an interception 34 yards for a score, and the Ravens rolled to a 44-13 victory Monday night to extend their home winning streak to 11 games. Using the no-huddle offense almost flawlessly, the Ravens amassed 430 yards and got two short touchdown runs from Ray Rice. After letting an early 14-point lead dwindle to 4, at 17-13, the Ravens pulled away by scoring 24 straight points in just more than six minutes. Flacco watched the final eight minutes on the sideline after going 21 for 29 in Baltimore’s ninth consecutive victory in the A.F.C. North. The Ravens were the only team in the division to win in Week 1. And while the offense certainly was impressive, Baltimore’s defense also excelled in its first game under the coordinator Dean Pees. Playing without the injured N.F.L. Defensive Player of the Year Terrell Suggs, who had 14 sacks last year, the Ravens dropped Andy Dalton four times. Not only that, but Baltimore turned two turnovers into touchdowns in a two-minute span. After Reed’s touchdown return, the 37-year-old linebacker Ray Lewis forced a fumble that was recovered by Lardarius Webb, setting up a 1-yard touchdown run by Rice to make it 41-13 with 13 minutes 41 seconds left. Reed’s jaunt with a pass tipped by Cincinnati receiver Brandon Tate put him in the N.F.L. record book. Reed has 1,497 yards in interception returns, eclipsing the previous record of 1,483 yards by Rod Woodson. It was Reed’s seventh career score on a pickoff return. Dalton went 22 for 37 for 221 yards, and BenJarvus Green-Ellis rushed for 91 yards and a score in his Cincinnati debut. But the Bengals, who failed to beat a team that reached the postseason last season, once again came up short against a high-caliber opponent. SKELTON NURSING ANKLE SPRAIN For at least a few magic moments, these were Kevin Kolb’s Arizona Cardinals once again. Booed by a share of the home crowd as he took the field after an ankle injury to John Skelton, Kolb heard nothing but cheers after he engineered the winning touchdown drive against Seattle on Sunday. Just how long he will be Arizona’s No. 1 quarterback is an open question. Skelton’s injury was not as serious as first thought. Coach Ken Whisenhunt said it was a low ankle sprain and called it “good news.” Asked if he was ruling out Skelton for next week’s game at New England, Whisenhunt said, “Not yet.” BILLS LOSE RECEIVER As if a deflating season-opening loss was not bad enough in putting a dent in Buffalo’s high expectations, the Bills have injuries to two key offensive players to contend with. Receiver David Nelson will miss the rest of the season after tearing a ligament in his right knee. The news is at least a little more encouraging for running back Fred Jackson, who will miss at least three weeks after he also hurt his right knee. “It’s a setback,” Coach Chan Gailey said. “You lose experience and you lose versatility. But I think our guys can adjust.” BROWNS’ HADEN SUSPENDED Cleveland Browns cornerback Joe Haden was suspended without pay for four games for violating the N.F.L.’s policy on performance-enhancing substances. He will be eligible to return to the Browns’ active roster Oct. 8. Haden played in Sunday’s game against Philadelphia. He had an interception and six tackles in Cleveland’s 17-16 loss. Haden recently had his appeal heard on the suspension. He reportedly failed a drug test during the off-season for taking Adderall. Haden will not be allowed at the team’s headquarters during his suspension. He will lose $1.356 million in salary while out.

Football
Chicago Bears
Marshall Brandon
Cutler Jay
Revis Darrelle
Spiller C J
Cincinnati Bengals
Baltimore Ravens


Filipino Suspect Says He Killed American

Abstract: MANILA, April 27 (AP) — A woodcarver suspected of beating a Peace Corps volunteer to death surrendered Friday and confessed on television, saying he had erupted in rage when she bumped into him as he was fuming over a feud with a neighbor. “I admit it, yes. I killed her, but I did not do whatever other people are thinking I did,” the man, Juan Duntugan, told ABS-CBN television, apparently referring to speculation that the volunteer, Julia Campbell, 40, of Fairfax, Va., was killed in an attempted rape or robbery. He said he dropped a bundle of clothes when Ms. Campbell, who was embarking on a hike on April 8 in Ifugao Province, bumped him, and he then hit her on the head with a rock. Jose de Venecia, the speaker of the House of Representatives, said Ms. Campbell would receive the Philippine Congressional Medal of Achievement, the highest decoration by the legislature, as a “martyred volunteer.”

Peace Corps
Philippines
Murders and Attempted Murders


Comcast Deal and Amazon Speculation Stir Talk on Online Streaming

Abstract: The increasing importance of Internet rights for television channels and shows has been vividly demonstrated twice in the last few days. Comcast and Time Warner announced an unusually comprehensive pact on Tuesday that covers the online streaming of channels like TNT, TBS, CNN and the Cartoon Network. Meanwhile, media analysts were aflutter about the possibility of Amazon ’s starting an online video subscription service that could rival Netflix. Amazon has declined to comment. The blog Engadget published an Amazon.com screen capture on Saturday that suggested that Amazon was preparing an all-you-can-eat video streaming service, which like Netflix could give customers access to a variety of TV shows and films. Barclays analysts said in a note to investors on Monday that they anticipated a service “similar to Netflix’s current platform.” “While its content portfolio would initially likely be less robust than Netflix’s licensed content, we believe Amazon has the scale to become a viable over-the-top distributor over time,” the note stated, before reiterating that such services were largely supplemental to entrenched cable and satellite distributors. Deals like the one between Comcast and Time Warner are devised in part to blunt online upstarts. The companies said the contract was a step forward for their vision of “TV Everywhere,” a concept that holds that people who pay for a cable television subscription once should be able to watch television on any screen, be it a big-screen TV or an iPad . But that concept requires complicated new contracts between programmers like Time Warner and distributors like Comcast. “TV Everywhere” has been slow to materialize, so the announcement on Tuesday was a breakthrough of sorts. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, said the agreement “really solidifies our partnership in this effort and really pushes forward the concept of giving consumers more access to quality on-demand content on any device they choose.” The rights for online streaming were part of a larger agreement between the companies. Details were not disclosed, but the agreement also renews Comcast’s traditional carriage of some of Time Warner’s channels. Brian L. Roberts, the Comcast chief executive, said the contract was for multiple years. On the on-demand side, the agreement covers many of Turner’s TV shows and movies in a variety of places, including Comcast’s streaming Web site, Comcast’s on-demand system on television sets, Turner’s own Web sites, and on tablets and mobile phone screens. Significantly, the contract will cover out-of-home streaming of Turner channels and TV shows by Comcast customers in the future. Comcast already has similar pacts for streaming content with HBO, another part of Time Warner. A Comcast app that allows customers to stream certain TV shows was already visible in the iPad app store on Tuesday night. What remained unknown on Tuesday was whether Comcast was paying a substantial amount for the streaming rights. “They haven’t wanted to pay substantially more for television video-on-demand rights in the past,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst for BTIG. He said of Comcast, “Have they had a change of perspective on paying for additional on-demand rights? Or is this deal about Time Warner just wanting to seed the market because it’s been 18 months and ‘TV Everywhere’ has moved more slowly than investors had hoped?”

Computers and the Internet
Comcast Corp
Time Warner Inc
Amazon.com Inc


Tears and Tissues as Editor Testifies in Phone Hacking Case

Abstract: LONDON — The tabloids Rebekah Brooks once edited might have paid six figures or more for details like those she has been divulging about her personal life during her trial on phone hacking charges: the celebrity husband, the adultery, the infertility, the daughter by a surrogate mother. As she rose to the top of Britain’s prurient press and Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire here, Ms. Brooks received advice from Mr. Murdoch, her father-figure boss and mentor. And what he said about keeping one’s head down and not courting publicity she turned into a personal code. Friends described her as fiercely private. “It was almost like she had no past,” one former colleague said. Yet spilling her guts, tabloid style, appears to be part of the legal strategy for Ms. Brooks, the most prominent defendant in one of the biggest criminal prosecutions of recent years. She counts Prime Minister David Cameron and two of his predecessors among her friends, but if convicted, she could go to prison. She has denied all the charges. For over a week now, Ms. Brooks has been in the witness box answering personal questions from her lawyer, Jonathan Laidlaw, as her second husband and her onetime lover have looked on. The husband, Charlie Brooks, a racehorse trainer whom she married in 2009, and the lover, Andy Coulson, her former deputy and successor at The News of the World, the now-defunct Sunday tabloid at the heart of the scandal, are among the seven co-defendants in the case. Did she have a six-year affair with Mr. Coulson? (It was not an affair, she said, just intermittent “physical intimacy.”) What of the dramatic end to her first marriage, to Ross Kemp, an actor in the long-running soap opera “EastEnders,” to whom she gave a black eye and a fat lip, earning her the nickname “the slapper” in the press? (This was the only time she was arrested for assault, the court was assured.) How badly did she want a child? (After many failed hormone treatments, her cousin offered to be a surrogate.) There were tears and tissues and, at least once, a break for composure in Courtroom 12 of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court. Every so often, there was a gentle apology from Mr. Laidlaw for the questions he was asking. “My personal life was a bit of a car crash,” Ms. Brooks said. She told how she met Mr. Kemp in 1995, split up with him, then married him and tried to have a baby, before it all fell apart for good in 2006. She described the on-and-off intimacy with Mr. Coulson during that time as “quite dysfunctional.” “It’s probably very easy to blame work, but the hours were very long and hard and you got thrown together in an industry like that,” she said, recalling in particular moving into a hotel close to the office during the time of the Iraq invasion in 2003. “It was wrong, and it shouldn’t have happened but things did.” At one point, Mr. Laidlaw brought up an unfinished love letter to Mr. Coulson that the police found on Ms. Brooks’s computer. The letter had been read out by the prosecution earlier in the trial as evidence that if Ms. Brooks or Mr. Coulson had known anything about shadowy journalistic practices at The News of the World, they would almost certainly have shared it with the other. “I tell you everything, I confide in you, I seek your advice, I love you, care about you, worry about you,” Ms. Brooks had written. “In fact without our relationship in my life, I am really not sure how I will cope.” The letter, she said, was written at a time of “emotional anguish” and after a few drinks. “I do not know if anyone has been in this situation; in a time of hurt, at night after a few glasses of wine, you probably shouldn’t get on your computer,” she said. “But that is obviously what I did. I wrote my feelings down in the moment. These are my thoughts really to myself, but I wrote it in a letter form, probably with the intention of finishing it and sending it, but I probably thought better about it the next day.” At times, her defense echoed the kind of embarrassing detail and moral failings she and Mr. Coulson once happily splashed across the front pages — some of such articles, prosecutors say, based on hacked voice mail messages. Ms. Brooks has denied knowledge of the practice or of the name of the private investigator who has admitted to carrying out the hacking while on the payroll of The News of the World. She learned only in 2011, she says, when the newspaper The Guardian broke the news, that the tabloid, under her editorship in 2002, had gained access to the voice mail of an abducted teenager. It was this case above all, of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered, that caused the storm of public outrage that prompted Mr. Murdoch to close down The News of the World and Ms. Brooks to resign in July 2011. Her testimony has made her look fallible, like people once exposed by her paper, but also vulnerable. Some say it could help humanize a woman best known so far for her ruthless journalism and power. The verdict is still far off, but already, the trial is reshaping journalistic codes in Britain’s raucous press. That is one reason the trial has been so closely watched. Another, says Roy Greenslade, a journalism professor at City University London, is that it has been unfolding rather like a juicy tabloid exclusive. “She knows what newspapers will print,” he said, “and happens to be feeding just the sort of headlines that she would have printed herself in the past.”

Rebekah Brooks
Newspaper
Wiretapping Eavesdropping
News of the World
Andy Coulson
London
Great Britain


On Tinder, Taking a Swipe at Love, or Sex, or Something, in New York

Abstract: On a recent night, with Valentine’s Day looming, I went out for drinks with a woman I know and a few of her friends. It was a Thursday, and the bar they chose, Bondurants , on the Upper East Side, was packed with people just like them: good-looking, semi-affluent millennials, downing craft beer and milling about in hungry-looking, monosexual clusters. My acquaintance, Dana, who is 25 and works in public relations, is an enthusiastic, some might say obsessive, user of the dating app Tinder . She, like her friends, will often spend hours blithely swiping through its gallery of digitized faces — at work, at home, even in busy pickup bars. But that’s New York’s technologized dating scene. Except for ordering their drinks, none of the people I was with that night spoke to any other actual human beings. Their erotic energy was focused on the touchscreens of their smartphones. Each of them had six or seven Tinder chats going simultaneously. Chris Livoti, a 27-year-old marketing executive, was expertly toggling between Tinder and its gay-friendly forerunner, Grindr . Dana’s co-worker Krishna Antoine, 26, was chatting, in between sips of prosecco, with a guy named Andrew (Tinder uses only first names). When she sent Andrew a suggestive eye emoji and he failed to respond, she dropped him in frustration, clicking over to the profile of Mark, a man with a mustache, who, she soon determined, was actually a better match for Dana. “I don’t like him,” Ms. Antoine said. “I’m passing him on to you.” It has been three years since Tinder, which had been launched in California, landed in New York, bringing its addictive right swipes and rabid style of flirting to the city’s inherently frenetic dating culture. While the app has been blamed for devaluing romance and turning the search for love (or at least a nearby body) into a Ritalin-paced video game, it is probably more accurate to say that it has not fundamentally changed the local dating scene so much as quickened and coarsened its already abrupt, aggressive nature. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Tinder is a matchmaking service that enables people to connect with one another through no more than a brief swipe on their smartphones. While traditional dating sites, like OKCupid or Match.com , use algorithms to sort through personal profiles and to link up strangers with complementary interests, Tinder makes the daters do the choosing, stripping down and speeding up the process. You look at a photo, tagged only with a name, an age and, with a tap, perhaps a short introduction, and then you vote yes by swiping to the right, or no by swiping left. Imitators have added their own twists: Down lets you identify Facebook friends you think are attractive; Zoosk learns your preferences and shows profiles similar to ones you’ve previously liked; Happn zeros in on people you’ve crossed paths with in the past. But Tinder is the biggest. According to the company, there are now about one million Tinder users in New York, the largest market in the country (Los Angeles is second). The app’s popularity is based on two chief aspects of its software. The first, which plays off our desire for instant gratification, is a location function that lets those seeking companionship search for people in their area. The other, which avoids the embarrassment of rejection, is what the company calls the “double opt-in”: a match between two users will occur only if they each signal that they like the other’s profile. The matched pair can then chat through Tinder’s messaging service and, perhaps, meet. In recent months, Tinder seems to have entered its baroque phase. Early users have proclaimed it passé , gossip sites regularly report on celebrity Tinder hookups and the “Best of Tinder” section on Reddit , where people self-consciously post their funniest exchanges, is steadily growing. Spending time on the app, especially in New York, where the population density creates an almost bottomless set of options, leaves one with the slightly bug-eyed feeling of having run full speed through a dozen cheesy singles’ bars in 15 minutes flat. Because you can Tinder while heating up dinner or using the bathroom (people do), the experience is rife with cognitive dissonance. A French farce of characters on the make — horny frat boys, wisecracking media girls, emo artists, the occasional lying troll — leap out of your phone and crowd into your kitchen as you sit there in your sweatpants eating Indian food. On my recent foray into the universe of Tinder, I encountered plenty of sexed-up New Yorkers eager after only a few texts to engage in almost any sort of copulative activity. But I also talked with people who used the app for less licentious reasons: to form platonic friendships, or to find companions while traveling abroad. There was the foodie Tinder user, for instance, who likes to place herself in upscale Manhattan neighborhoods, wanting nothing more than to be taken out for expensive dinners by her matches. There was the business user who leverages the app as a client-development tool. There was the bearded Brooklyn user who rarely goes on dates yet chats with his matches, chastely, often for weeks on end. There was the Wall Street user who slavishly served a match by folding her laundry and picking up her groceries. Then there was the self-affirming user who while committed to her boyfriend, nonetheless visits the site in strategic sallies to achieve her goal of obtaining 1,000 ego-boosting matches. “What you get out of Tinder totally depends on what you want it for,” Dana told me a few nights before we went out. She had just related a particularly seamy Tinder story (Day of the Dead, quickie sex, cocaine) and asked that her last name not be mentioned, saying she had recently had a stalker and also feared that her father, or employer, might read about her feats. Sitting in her handsome Brooklyn duplex, Dana shared a classic New York Tinder tale. A couple of months ago, she met a man on the app and slept with him a few times just before she went on vacation. The man, who is a model, had been kicked out of his sublet, and because he was homeless, more or less, Dana suggested that he rent her room while she was away. When she came back from her trip, Dana discovered that her full-time roommate had slept with another man Dana had been sleeping with. So Dana threw the roommate out, and the male model took her place. Now the two of them live together: cooking meals, doing laundry, watching Netflix, occasionally sharing the same bed. The situation, Dana said, gets thorny only when one of them returns to the apartment with a date — as happened a couple of weeks ago, when the model came home with a Tinder girl who vanished after 15 minutes. “I was, like, ‘So where’s your friend?’ ” Dana told me, recalling this mystery. “And he went, ‘Oh, she left.’ ” When Dana asked why she had left, she said her roommate answered, “‘Because I asked if you could join us and it kind of freaked her out.’ ” As she finished this account, Dana got a text. It was from a couple in Chinatown she had recently met on the app, writing to say that the threesome they had planned that night would have to be postponed. Vaguely disappointed, Dana perked up minutes later when another Tinder message came in — from Max, a Brooklyn musician. I watched her thumb Max a quick invitation on her iPhone. It turned out she was free that night. Did he want to hang out? I took that as my cue to leave. By the time I headed off, Max was headed over. Tinder is the perfect social lubricant for the tech-savvy, upwardly mobile cohort of 20-somethings in New York. The city’s online dating pool is difficult to quantify, but according to experts who study dating trends, it is mostly composed of busy, fairly wealthy transplants who have left their friends and families, and thus are looking, assertively, to make connections in the most efficient way they can. Image Bondurants, a bar on the Upper East Side, was busy on a recent night with customers engaging in multiple conversations on Tinder simultaneously. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times “When you have a population of young, relatively affluent transients, schooled in technology, uprooted from their networks and hoping to find each other, the chances are they’ll look for a solution on their phones,” said Benjamin Karney, a professor of social psychology at U.C.L.A. Tinder and its competitors — apps like Loveflutter , which bills itself as an “anti-Tinder” for the quirky, and Hinge , which seeks to connect people who are friends, and friends of friends, on Facebook — don’t collect a lot of personal information on their users; detailed profiles aren’t the point. But from the data that they do collect, it is possible to say that most New Yorkers who date on mobile apps are well-educated, slightly more are male than female, are mainly from Brooklyn and Manhattan, and are overwhelmingly between 18 and 34. Several intriguing trends are embedded in the data about who connects with whom, and where and when people tend to use the apps. Data from Loveflutter says members in Brooklyn corresponded the longest with each other before suggesting real-world dates, while those on Staten Island were keenest to meet in person. Engineers at Hinge said women in the West Village and men in Chelsea got the most right swipes, while women on Staten Island and men in the Bronx were the most outgoing, initiating the greatest number of chats. Beyond these findings, social scientists say apps like Tinder are incredibly effective at identifying a local population of potential mates and at helping people contact one another (through instant-message systems), particularly in large, anonymous places like New York, where traditional modes of introduction — family connections or religious institutions — might not be available. But the apps are not so good, experts say, at predicting or inspiring chemistry; indeed, there is evidence, at least in theory, that New York’s bountiful supply of romantic possibilities can actually erode one’s dedication to any single partner. “There’s tons of research that suggests if people know they have lots of options, they feel less dependent on and committed to their current option,” Professor Karney said. “But options aren’t the only or the main predictor of commitment. What’s most important is that you actually like your partner. What mobile technology does is make it easier to find someone, if you’re looking.” He added, invoking the old Paul Simon song: “If you want to leave your lover, there aren’t just 50 ways these days, there are 150,000 ways.” It made me think of what I’d seen while observing Tinder users: that the adult consequence of living with one’s decisions doesn’t really exist when the next best thing is only a swipe away. I heard stories of people on real-world Tinder dates catching their counterparts using the app and chatting with other potentials. In some sense, the city’s vast and constantly replenished pool of daters mirrors the capitalist principles of mass production and planned obsolescence. Why be satisfied with the iPhone 6 when something new is on the way? “New York is the perfect place for Tinder and the worst place at the same time,” said Kirra Cheers, a Brooklyn photographer who documented her Tinder dates for a photo project she called Tinderella . “In a city where things move fast and time is valuable, it’s quick, it gets right to the point. But after a while people tend to become dispensable. It lessens the value of each person you go out with.” Over two months last year, Ms. Cheers, 27, went out on 34 dates with 17 men — among them, a 24-year-old neuroscientist who took her to a pool hall in the Bronx, and an actor, her age, who took her to Toys “R” Us, where they browsed for gifts for imaginary children. She said she enjoyed the process of meeting new people, listening to their stories and entering their lives. “Sharing a moment with a stranger is fascinating stuff,” she said. But when the project ended in August, she was ready for a change. “After dating so aggressively,” Ms. Cheers said, “I kind of wanted to settle down with just one guy.” The problem, she discovered, was that Tinder is not always conducive to finding that guy. The app creates “a social A.D.D.,” Ms. Cheers explained, that can often cause its users to end up collecting, instead of connecting with, others. “The best way to use Tinder is to see it as an opportunity to meet new people, to make new friends, to have nights out and be introduced to things you might never have done before,” she said. “But if you’re looking for a long-term relationship, if that’s your primary interest, you’re going to have a disappointing experience.” Officials at Tinder get a little touchy if you happen to suggest that their product, designed to facilitate connection, frequently results in people standing with their foreheads angled down while they stare into the maws of their phones. “Tinder actually makes you more social — it replicates the real world,” Rosette Pambakian, a company spokeswoman, told me during one of our conversations. “When you walk into a coffee shop, you don’t have a sign on your head that says, ‘I’m looking for a nonsmoking, vegetarian Jewish man for a serious relationship.’ You don’t let a profile do the work. It’s the same with the app. You meet someone online and then find out through conversation if you’re compatible.” While my group was en route to Bondurants on that Thursday, Alex Paramithiotti, a digital advertising salesman, was deeply engaged in the online meeting process, chatting on his phone with a shortlist of potential liaisons. There was a longhaired brunette; a C.E.O. who had gone to Yale; a fashionista transplanted from Miami. When he asked the fashionista if she was free, right then, to join him at the bar, the woman texted back: “You’re so last minute.” “Yeah, but that’s New York,” Mr. Paramithiotti, 28, said. Arriving at the bar, all of them pulled their phones out. A few hours later, when the drinks were finally working, Mr. Livoti grabbed Dana’s phone and began responding to her texts like a Tinder version of Cyrano. This got creepy rather fast. Chatting with a guy named Roy, Mr. Livoti expressed interest in necrophilia and Rohypnol, the sedative commonly known as a date-rape drug. “Wanna meet up?” Roy wrote. As the night went on, no one crossed the bridge from Tinder to the real world, not even the bartender, Johnny Walker White, who was using the app as he worked. He had posed the perfect question of Tinder ontology to one of his matches, a woman named Alexandra: “What do you feel is the meaning of life? In a sentence or two.” Perhaps a bit too earnestly, Alexandra wrote back, “Living, listening, learning, loving ...” In the end, only Mr. Paramithiotti wound up going home with someone — though not someone he met on Tinder. He took the old-fashioned route, calling a girlfriend who lived around the corner.

Tinder Mobile App
NYC
Social Trends
Dating
Mobile Apps
Single People
Online Dating


Meatpacking Plants Accused of Harassing Muslims

Abstract: DENVER (AP) — Federal officials say Somali Muslim workers were denied prayer time and faced harassment and firings at meatpacking plants owned by JBS Swift & Company in Colorado and Nebraska. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed lawsuits on Monday in Federal District Court in Denver and Omaha, saying that Muslim workers were called names and that meat and bones were thrown at them by co-workers and managers. The commission also accused the company of firing workers when they asked for accommodations during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Swift officials did not return requests for comment.


Desperately Searching for Track 16

Abstract: Dear Diary: It’s Thursday night before the July 4 weekend. I text my sister about where to meet at Penn Station to take the train out to see our parents. “Have you been before?” she asks. “No,” I say. “First time.” “O.K., the station is complicated.” “I’ll be fine.” On Friday, I arrive 15 minutes early for a 4:06 train. Plenty of time. I get a text: “Track 16 by the wine store.” Piece of cake. I enter the Long Island Rail Road terminal. The place is swamped, a fog of pink shorts. After a minute, I find Track 16. I look around. No sister. No wine store. I squeeze through the crowd to the information desk. “Wine store’s two hallways down,” a man says, not pointing in any direction. “Which way?” He points behind me. Two hallways down there’s another entrance to Track 16. I glance in every direction. No sister. No wine store. It’s 4 p.m., six minutes to go. I run to a pretzel stand and ask again. “Two hallways down,” a woman says. “Which way?” I sprint and spot a third entrance to Track 16. Then an announcement: “The 4:06 will now be leaving the station.” I try to send a text. No service. I bump into a guy and ricochet off a wall. I look up and there it is: the wine store. I wait outside the doors. A sweaty man goes inside, muttering unprintable words to himself. He can’t find his brother. In the distance, by a fourth entrance to Track 16, I finally see a familiar face. “Where were you?” she asks. “Track 16.” “Which entrance?” “Great question.” She shakes her head. “I told you this place was complicated.”


How Mike Pence Became a Conservative Hero: Unwavering Opposition to Abortion

Abstract: One by one, Republican women of the Indiana state legislature rose to describe, in anguished terms, why they could not support an anti-abortion measure hurtling toward passage. They hated abortion, they said, but this bill went too far. It would have prohibited a woman from aborting a fetus because it had a disability, such as Down syndrome. Representative Holli Sullivan called it a “dangerous” plan that could compel women to lie to their doctors. Her colleague Wendy McNamara warned of a return to “back-room abortions.” Another, Cindy Ziemke, said it was a case of government overreach. “It’s a sad day for me to have to vote no on a pro-life bill,” Ms. Ziemke said in emotional remarks in March. “I have never had to do that before. I never thought I would ever have to.” Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, waved off the objections of his fellow Republicans: He signed the legislation into law a few weeks later, enacting what advocates and foes agree was a sweeping and unusual set of restrictions on abortion that went further than any other state in the country and openly clashed with legal precedent. Image Protesters at a rally for women’s rights in April in front of the Capitol in Indianapolis. Credit Mykal Mceldowney/The Indianapolis Star, via Associated Press Mr. Pence’s reputation as a longstanding, implacable and dogged opponent of abortion has made him a hero to the country’s cultural conservatives. Now that he is Donald J. Trump’s running mate, it puts him at odds with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and could complicate the party’s outreach to a decisive bloc of voters in the general election: women. Mr. Pence may be best known for embracing a different conservative cause — his support for a controversial 2015 law that could have made it easier for religious people to refuse service to gay couples. But to a powerful network of grass-roots activists, Mr. Pence’s most enduring legacy is his unbending battle against abortion and his repeated willingness to test the boundaries of the law in seeking to limit it. “He has never wavered on this at all,” said Micah Clark, the executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana , a conservative group allied with Mr. Pence. The same cannot be said for Mr. Trump. In 1999, he described himself as “very pro-choice” on abortion, and for years, he has donated to numerous candidates who were ardent supporters of abortion rights. It was not until 2011, when he flirted with running for president, that he switched positions. He now declares himself opposed to it, “with caveats.” Pence Ranks Low in Approval, but Not as Low as Trump and Clinton Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, who Donald J. Trump announced as his running mate on Friday,<strong> </strong>has a relatively low approval rating among governors. Mr. Pence, an evangelical Christian who is fond of quoting Scripture, is a lifelong abortion foe, and put the issue at the center of his career in Congress, where he represented southern Indiana for 12 years. He sponsored one of the first bills to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood in 2007 and pressed for similar efforts year after year, summoning words of outrage but having little effect. “It is my ambition, from time to time to time, to come onto this blue-and-gold carpet of this Capitol and speak to my colleagues, and anyone else who may be listening, on the moral and intellectual and historical arguments for the sanctity of human life,” he said in a 2003 speech on the floor of the House. He radiated anger over the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States, Roe v. Wade, calling it in 2009 “the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott,” which found in 1857 that black slaves were property and not citizens. And he repeatedly evoked what he said was the evil of the procedure itself — “nascent human life that is ended abruptly and in darkness.” Since his election as governor, in 2012, he has signed anti-abortion measures every year he has been in office. Most copied the language of conservative state laws around the country, which made it harder for abortion clinics to operate and put new demands on women seeking the procedures, according to abortion rights advocates. Donald Trump and Mike Pence: Highlights Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence appeared for the first time in public together since Mr. Pence was named as Mr. Trump’s running mate. Here’s how we analyzed it. But the law that he helped usher in this year was different. Under the bill, Indiana would have been the first state to broadly ban abortions based solely on a fetus’s race, on its sex or on its suspected disabilities — and impose penalties on doctors who violate the rules. Other states, like North Dakota, have banned abortions for some of those reasons, but Indiana’s was more expansive. It touched on the information a doctor must give, the counseling a woman must receive and the handling of fetal tissue. It required that abortion providers bury or cremate fetuses. Traditionally, they disposed of them as medical waste. “It went broader than any of us thought a law like this could possibly go,” said Elizabeth Nash, who monitors state laws for the Guttmacher Institute , a research group that supports abortion rights. She called the Indiana measure “the most restrictive of these types of abortion laws.” The law was a surprise even to many of the lawmakers who passed it. A less far-reaching bill had made it through the Indiana House before more extensive provisions, agreed to in the Senate, were tacked on for final approval. Some lawmakers, including the Republican women, said they were stunned by what they saw as a rushed process. But State Senator Travis Holdman, a Republican who said he introduced the provision banning abortions because of genetic abnormalities after conferring with local Right to Life officials, said the legislative process was not out of the ordinary. Mr. Holdman said he did not confer with Mr. Pence over the bill, but he knew the governor’s history when it came to abortion. “I was assuming he would be supportive,” he said. “To say you’re not worth anything to society so we’re going to basically kill you so we don’t have to deal with the expense that you’re going to bring when you’re born — I find that abhorrent,” Mr. Holdman said. Video Donald J. Trump, then the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, announcing Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his vice-presidential running mate. Credit Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times The number of women who abort fetuses after receiving a diagnosis of Down syndrome has been a concern for people in the anti-abortion movement. Though estimates vary on the precise number, a broad review of research published in the journal Prenatal Diagnosis in 2012 showed that an overwhelming majority of women chose to terminate such pregnancies. The outcry from opponents of the Indiana law, which Mr. Pence signed in March, was immediate and furious. Angry protesters, many of them women, marched on the Capitol, bearing sarcastic signs that mocked the governor as a repressive, fatherlike figure from a bygone era. “Set your clocks back 43 years,” read one. “We will not go quietly back into the 1950s,” declared another. In a campaign of phone calls and online postings, called “Periods for Pence,” women who felt the latest law infringed on deeply personal decisions mockingly gave the governor’s office jarringly personal updates on their menstrual cycle. If state law ventured this far into their lives, organizers asked, who knew what Indiana officials would demand to know next? “Started my cycle today,” one woman told Mr. Pence in a Twitter post. Another wrote: “Perimenopausal bleeding happening now in South Bend. Some heavy flow, I tell you, Pence. Thanks so much for your concern!” The constitutionality of the measure was in question, given longstanding Supreme Court rulings on abortion, a fact that even its supporters readily conceded. And in late June, a day before the law was to take effect, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against it. “How can it be described as anything but a prohibition on the right to an abortion?” asked Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of Federal District Court for Southern Indiana. On the Trail: The Week of July 15 10 Photos View Slide Show › Image Damon Winter/The New York Times The State of Indiana is considering whether to appeal the ruling, and anti-abortion groups are lobbying the governor’s office to do so. The legal setback seemed of little worry to Mr. Pence. For the governor, who was facing a tight re-election fight before he was selected as Mr. Trump’s running mate, the episode was a well-timed political boon. He had stood up for religious conservatives, who had carried him into office, at a moment when many of them seemed to doubt the depth of his allegiance to them. Mr. Pence’s embrace of the 2015 law that could allow religious conservatives to decline services to gay couples had set off a national firestorm, and no group seemed angrier with his response to the fallout than social conservatives. To them, the governor’s decision to revise the law to satisfy Indiana’s politically moderate business leaders felt like an unexpected betrayal from a man who promised never to compromise his values. “It was a mistake,” said Curt Smith, the president of the Indiana Family Institute , a conservative group, who had worked behind the scenes to keep the law’s original language. “I was very disappointed.” The abortion law was a chance for Mr. Pence to repair those strained bonds. And the governor seemed to tailor his message to those supporters when the bill reached his desk, showcasing his Christian values and abiding faith. “I sign this legislation,” he announced after the bill signing, “with a prayer that God would continue to bless these precious children, mothers and families.” It seemed to work. Conservative groups rushed to his defense and have showered him with praise. A local chapter of Indiana Right to Life, a group opposed to abortion, plans to give Mr. Pence its annual “Courage Award” for his work on the law. “Pro-lifers are very proud of the work he has done on this,” said Jeanette Burdell, the executive director St. Joseph County Right to Life. Even his foes on the issue grudgingly acknowledge his single-mindedness, which they say outstrips his passion for issues like the religious exceptions law, which has defined his time as governor. “That was one thing, but this — abortion — has been his mission in life,” said Representative Linda Lawson, a Democrat.

Mike Pence
Abortion
Donald Trump
2016 Presidential Election
Indiana
Conservatism in the United States
Republicans


Japan Wins Team Title

Abstract: Kohei Uchimura led Japan to its first world gymnastics title in nearly 40 years. Japan held off Britain and China in a tense final in Glasgow on Wednesday, with Uchimura clinching the gold medal despite a fall on high bar in the final routine of the night. Japan finished with a team total of 270.818 points to edge Britain by 0.473 of a point.


Zoning Regulations Slow Willets Point Redevelopment Plans

Abstract: The Bloomberg administration has spent more than $130 million in recent years trying to speed up the redevelopment of a pockmarked, 13-block stretch of auto repair shops near Citi Field in Queens. But even as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg plans to announce a deal with a developer for the site this month, the project at the area known as Willets Point suffered another setback, which will delay construction for as much as two years. The proposal for a mix of retail space and housing on 12.75 acres, the first phase of the project, does not conform to existing zoning regulations and will require a new environmental review, public hearings and a journey through New York City’s often treacherous review process. “This slows them down a lot,” said Michael B. Gerrard , a lawyer who is representing landowners opposed to the redevelopment plan. The administration tried to put the best face on what could be a lengthy delay. “We’re very close to having a deal in place that will transform Willets Point into New York City’s next great neighborhood and continue the historic process we’ve already made there,” said Julie Wood, a Bloomberg spokeswoman. According to real estate executives and officials briefed on the plans, the city will award the first phase to a joint venture of Related Companies and Sterling Equities, a real estate company owned by Fred Wilpon and Saul B. Katz, the owners of Citi Field and the Mets. The problems came to light on Wednesday morning, when city officials notified the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court that a hearing next week on the project was no longer necessary. Local landowners who are opposing the city’s use of eminent domain to gain control of the site have appealed a lower court decision in favor of the Bloomberg administration. The city said it was withdrawing the bulk of the legal findings on which it based its case for eminent domain. It plans to submit a new set of findings, after the environmental review and the public review. Those, in turn, will almost certainly generate a new lawsuit opposing the project. Ms. Wood declined to identify the developer or describe how the project would differ from the original plans, but said, “Today’s action ensures that our plan will comply with the site’s myriad technical and legal requirements.” The administration first approved the redevelopment of the 62-acre Willets Point neighborhood in 2008. It solicited proposals from developers for the first phase in September. The first phase was to include 680,000 square feet of retail space, a hotel and up to 400 apartments, a substantial number of them intended for low- and moderate-income families. But as city officials pared the number of bidders, it became apparent that the developers could not devise a viable plan that met all the city’s requirements, in part because of the potentially high costs of cleansing the land of toxic substances.

Area Planning and Renewal
Bloomberg Michael R
Willets Point (NYC)
Zoning
Real Estate and Housing (Residential)
Real Estate (Commercial)
New York City


Paying Low Rent, but at an Inflated Risk

Abstract: MOUNT VERNON WHEN Kimberley Howlett moved into a rent-regulated, one-bedroom apartment on East Sydney Street here with her two young children earlier this year, after cobbling together enough money for the security deposit and moving expenses, she thought she didn’t have to worry about housing anymore. Not so, she learned three months after settling in. The owner of the building, Jeffrey B. Rednick, ordered her and the other tenants to vacate as soon as possible. A crack had been found in the pre-war brick, Tudor-style apartment house, and major repairs costing about $1.5 million were needed, Mr. Rednick said. Eighteen of the tenants have already left; the other five, including Ms. Howlett, are still there. “I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face,” said Ms. Howlett, a single mother who works as an optician’s assistant at a LensCrafters store nearby. “The landlord took my money, and then barely three months later, he tells me to leave. Where am I going to get the money to move again?” And where will she find another apartment in a county that is among the most expensive to live in? As Dennis Hanratty, executive director of the Mount Vernon United Tenants Association, an advocacy group, said, “It’s an increasingly hostile rental market out there for low- and moderate-income earners.” In 2007, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Westchester was $1,600, up from $1,089 in 1996, a 47 percent increase, according to the Westchester Residential Opportunities, a nonprofit housing counseling agency in White Plains. The increase reflects the “skyrocketing cost of real estate” during that period, said Geoffrey Anderson, executive director of the agency. Renter incomes have not kept pace, and “those with low incomes are far more vulnerable, because their housing options are so limited,” Mr. Hanratty said. As the economy deteriorates, increasing numbers of landlords are encountering financial difficulties, and tenants are bearing the brunt, said Lyndon D. Williams, a county legislator from Mount Vernon. That has a big impact in some areas; 59.5 percent of residents in Mount Vernon pay rent and 50 percent do so in Yonkers, according to 2006 census data . At the 497-unit Levister Towers in Mount Vernon, where more than half of renters receive federal Section 8 housing subsidies, the owner defaulted on an installment agreement with the city for back taxes and failed to file state and federal income taxes last year, said Helen M. Blackwood, of the city’s Law Department. Meanwhile, tenants at the complex are at the mercy of vendors who have not been paid by the Sheldrake Organization, which took over the run-down and drug-infested 59-year-old complex of five buildings in 2001 and began to make improvements. Con Edison temporarily shut off gas service this fall, and although that problem was rectified, residents continue to wrestle with myriad other problems, said Sylvia Tyree, the Levister Towers tenants’ association president. Elevators in the 10-story buildings are often out of service, for example. “We’re angry and frustrated, because we had hoped for a better situation with the new owner,” Ms. Tyree said. As Mr. Williams, who helped the Levister tenants form their association, observed, “Unlike the wealthy, low-income tenants don’t always have the resources to fight back and hire lawyers.” At the American Red Cross of Westchester headquarters in White Plains, John Ravitz, the chief executive, reported that his organization is responding to more requests for aid from fire victims, who often live in overcrowded, poorly maintained buildings where tenants have doubled and tripled up to make ends meet. And at Westchester Residential Opportunities, Mr. Anderson, the chief executive, said older residents constitute another at-risk group of tenants, often unable to cope with changes in their housing. “We certainly would hope landlords would give some extra thought to that group, especially going into the holidays,” Mr. Anderson said. Sarah Lawrence College, which owns an 87-unit apartment complex in Yonkers, is reclaiming 20 rent-regulated units that are leased or rented to non-college residents, some of whom are older tenants receiving housing subsidies. In an attempt to find alternative housing for those residents, many of whom are paying between $700 and $1,500 a month rent, the college consulted with the Housing Action Council in Tarrytown, said Rosemarie Noonan, the council’s executive director. It has decided to allow tenants to remain and to reassign the apartments for student housing when a tenant leaves. Over all, though, the outlook is bleak for low-income tenants who need alternatives, said Debbie Perkins, a social worker with Community Housing Innovations, an advocacy organization in White Plains and Patchogue on Long Island that is working to prevent homelessness. “If you have a fairly low rent and a low income and you lose that rent, there are very few choices out there,” she said. “If you’re earning a higher income and paying $1,500 a month for rent, you can probably find another apartment, but if you can only afford $1,200 a month, that may not be possible. “Especially when people are working hard and doing everything they can to make ends meet, they get angry.” Some tenants resist, like Walton Punter, who lives at 6 East Sydney Street, where Ms. Howlett also rents an apartment. “Why should I leave?” asked Mr. Punter, who is single and works as a housekeeper at a nursing home in the Bronx. “Most people got up and ran when the landlord told them to move, but I won’t. Let him take me to court.” Sometimes, though, overwhelmed tenants despair and end up homeless, Ms. Perkins said. In what bodes ill for this winter, homeless shelters in Westchester have already begun to fill up. Occupancy did not dip during the summer as it usually does, and shelter providers report that they are already at 90 percent capacity. And food pantries are running low. “We’re worried about what the coming months will bring,” Ms. Perkins said. “When it gets very cold, we’ll really be in trouble.”

Housing
Renting and Leasing
Westchester County (NY)


James Gorman of Morgan Stanley, Going Against Type

Abstract: It was a stickup, Wall Street style. With bonus season fast approaching, Jack DiMaio, the top bond trader at Morgan Stanley, wanted more money for his guys. Tens of millions more. So, as traders had always done, he marched into the boss’s office and asked for it. But it was 2010 and times had changed, and this chief executive, James P. Gorman, was adamant: Morgan Stanley was done giving in to demands for big bonuses when earnings were thin, and he didn’t bother to soften the rejection with the kind of pep talk managers usually offer when cash can’t be found. Mr. DiMaio soon left the firm — but not that many other traders followed, because on post-crisis Wall Street, there weren’t as many places to go. And Mr. Gorman’s message that he was more concerned about making the numbers work than simply keeping the troops happy quickly filtered down to the trading floor. Now, nearly four years after this showdown, the numbers are working very well for Mr. Gorman and Morgan Stanley. But this white-shoe investment bank, which nearly went under in 2008, is now a very different place. Instead of perennially playing Avis to Goldman Sachs’ Hertz in the lucrative but dangerous business of bond trading, Mr. Gorman has focused on safer ways of making money. Morgan Stanley’s far-flung stockbrokers, who manage money for individual clients and prefer to be called financial advisers, now contribute almost as much to the bottom line as the bankers and traders who long counted themselves as Wall Street’s blue-blooded elite. This 78-year-old firm has also recovered from its clumsy management of Facebook’s initial public offering in 2012 to become the most sought-after underwriter of tech I.P.O.s. It is among the select group of underwriters managing what is expected to be a huge offering this summer by the Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce giant, and the bank tops the rankings for tech underwriting in 2014. “The firm is on a positive trajectory after a lot of hard knocks,” Mr. Gorman said in an interview this month. “If that means making some hard decisions along the way to get there because I have more information at the top of the house than any individual is going to have by definition, that’s fine. I am perfectly comfortable doing that.” In the process, he and Morgan Stanley are becoming the face of what may be Wall Street’s future: highly profitable, to be sure, but with fewer of the grand ambitions or larger-than-life personalities that have always characterized the place. “I’m pretty invisible, and that’s just fine,” he acknowledged. Unlike his charismatic predecessor, John J. Mack, Mr. Gorman is not a pillar of the upper-crust New York social scene. “I’m not that interested in just being around powerful people for the sake of it,” said Mr. Gorman, who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his wife of more than 20 years, Penny, and their two college-age children. “If you want to spend weekends with your family, something’s got to give.” Investors don’t seem to have any problem with his low profile. Morgan Stanley’s share price has doubled in the last two years, mollifying angry investment bankers and traders who received stock in the lean years when cash bonuses shrank. So while Mr. Gorman, 55, may not command the loyalty or adulation for which his predecessor was famous, or have the outsized profile of rival Wall Street chieftains like Jamie Dimon or Lloyd C. Blankfein, he can live with it. “James has never focused on being liked,” said Brian C. Pfeifler, one of Morgan Stanley’s top financial advisers. “He just makes sure people respect him. I’m not buddy-buddy with him, but I respect him.” Told of that assessment, Mr. Gorman offers only the mildest of protests. “I think anybody who says they don’t care about being liked is lying,” he said. “I care if my dog waves its tail when I come home. But you’re not going to make everybody happy.” Neither Banker Nor Trader On Wall Street, chief executives typically come in two flavors. There are bankers like Henry M. Paulson Jr., who earned his stripes advising Fortune 500 clients on mergers and stock offerings at Goldman Sachs before serving as Treasury secretary. And there are traders, including smart (or lucky) ones like Mr. Blankfein, as well as less fortunate ones like Richard S. Fuld Jr. of Lehman and Jon S. Corzine of MF Global, who led their firms down the road to perdition. Mr. Gorman is neither. Raised in a family of 10 siblings in Melbourne, Australia, he studied law and practiced briefly in Australia before coming to New York to attend Columbia Business School. He joined McKinsey, known for churning out brainy number crunchers but not necessarily charismatic or bold corporate leaders. Tall, well-tailored and fit — he gave up boxing for rowing not long ago — Mr. Gorman still bristles at being described as a consultant and is quick to note that he has spent more time on Wall Street than he did at McKinsey. In 1999, after more than a decade in consulting, he went to Merrill Lynch, a McKinsey client, as chief marketing officer. Within two years, he was overseeing Merrill’s huge brokerage force, the famed “thundering herd,” as head of wealth management. Serving all manner of retail customers was what made Merrill a household name, but Mr. Gorman shifted the focus to more upscale clients, with accounts of less than $100,000 going to call centers. He also took an ax to what had long been affectionately called “Mother Merrill,” a place where brokers spent lavishly. With the rise of Charles Schwab and E*Trade, the fat years at Merrill were ending, and Mr. Gorman responded by culling the thundering herd and doing away with the nearly unlimited expense accounts. Profit margins rose, but the changes did not make Mr. Gorman many friends. “It was a cultural shift, and James is one of the people who put the stake in the heart of Mother Merrill,” said Guy Moszkowski, who worked at McKinsey and Merrill with Mr. Gorman and is now a managing partner at Autonomous Research, an independent firm in New York. And while Mr. Gorman may be Australian by birth, he is hardly Crocodile Dundee, and definitely not the type to go in for the jocular atmosphere of steakhouse dinners and junkets favored by stockbrokers. As Mr. Moszkowski put it, “It would never occur to me to call him anything but James.” Serious with colleagues, even a bit remote, Mr. Gorman can be a very demanding boss. “People looking for a John Mack-style slap on the back are not going to get it with James,” said one longtime Wall Streeter. “If you’re looking for regular affirmation, it’s going to be a lonely existence.” No one doubts that Mr. Gorman has the smarts for his current job. But sometimes, it’s important to be lucky as well, as Thomas R. Nides, a Morgan Stanley vice chairman and longtime firm consigliere, puts it. And Mr. Gorman has been able to make the most of some very good fortune. Image Paul Taubman left the firm after Mr. Gorman selected a rival to run its institutional side. Credit Tina Fineberg for The New York Times One of his biggest breaks was being lured to Morgan Stanley in 2006. He left Merrill Lynch well before the firm was crushed by tens of billions in losses in the housing bust, ultimately forcing it into the hands of Bank of America in 2008. Mr. Mack said he was struck by Mr. Gorman’s lack of pretension when he interviewed him in 2005. Although formal personally, Mr. Gorman doesn’t go in for the imperial trappings of some of his peers. “He said, ‘I want to join the organization,’ ” Mr. Mack recalled “He never said, ‘I want to report to the C.E.O.’ In a business of big egos, I don’t come across many people like that.” Mr. Gorman’s boss at first was not Mr. Mack, but Zoe Cruz, a Morgan Stanley co-president viewed as Mr. Mack’s potential successor. Though not for long. Less than two years after he joined, Morgan Stanley’s traders racked up $9.4 billion in losses on a disastrous subprime wager, which not only put Mr. Gorman’s more predictable wealth management group in a better light, but also prompted Ms. Cruz’s abrupt exit. Mr. Gorman was elevated to co-president, giving him a broader ambit and a direct reporting line to Mr. Mack. Mr. Gorman used that access to deliver a blunt message: In the wealth management business, Morgan Stanley had to go big or go home. “He said, ‘We can’t be an in-betweener,’ ” Mr. Nides said. Although the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 nearly sank Morgan Stanley, it also made possible its metamorphosis into a wealth-management powerhouse. After the existential threat to the firm eased — thanks to Washington’s controversial Wall Street bailout, as well as a $9 billion lifeline from Japan’s largest bank — Mr. Mack and Mr. Gorman dusted off the blueprint to expand wealth management. Before the crisis, Morgan Stanley had looked at buying Smith Barney, the brokerage arm of Citigroup and the jewel in the Citi crown, but could not afford it. But now Citigroup was in dire condition, requiring two bailouts by Washington in the fall of 2008 totaling $45 billion, and Mr. Gorman and Mr. Mack knew that the bank’s chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, was desperate to raise capital. Morgan Stanley could still not afford to swallow all of Smith Barney in one bite, and Citigroup didn’t want to immediately give up all the much-needed earnings power the unit possessed. So Mr. Mack and Mr. Gorman proposed a deal that would ultimately prove quite beneficial for the firm: With an initial upfront payment of $2.75 billion, Morgan Stanley acquired 51 percent of Smith Barney, with the right to buy the rest down the road at a price to be determined later. Initially, the new joint venture suffered from high expenses and required huge investments in technology, all of which pressured profit margins. But those costs were split with Citi, lessening the burden on Morgan Stanley. While a Citigroup spokesman disputes the characterization, executives familiar with the negotiations say that Michael L. Corbat, then a top Citigroup official and now its chief executive, could have raised objections to the big spending going on at the time but was largely silent. By 2012, with Mr. Gorman now in charge, Morgan Stanley was ready to buy the remaining 49 percent of Smith Barney. But he and Mr. Pandit could not agree on how much it was worth, with Citi asking $22.5 billion and Morgan Stanley offering $9.5 billion. That is a lot of daylight, and Perella Weinberg Partners , the boutique advisory firm, was brought in to arbitrate and make an independent appraisal. Morgan Stanley would provide financial estimates only for one year, however, forcing Perella Weinberg to rely on past performance, including those initially depressed profit margins in 2010 and 2011. When Perella Weinberg came up with a valuation a bit below $13 billion, jaws dropped at Citi. The two sides settled on a final price of $13.5 billion, so far below Citigroup’s estimate that it was forced to take a $4.7 billion pretax write-down after the deal. Image In 2009, Mr. Gorman and Mr. Mack closed a deal with Vikram S. Pandit, then of Citigroup, to buy 51 percent of Smith Barney. After Mr. Gorman became chief, he bought the rest in a transaction regarded as a Morgan Stanley victory. Credit Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters “It was James Gorman one, Vikram Pandit zero,” said Mike Mayo, a widely followed bank analyst at CLSA in New York. In 2012, when the sale was negotiated, Morgan Stanley’s wealth management unit delivered $1.6 billion in pretax net income, with a profit margin of 12 percent. By 2013, after Morgan Stanley had absorbed all of Smith Barney, the division earned $2.6 billion and margins had soared to 18 percent. “You create your own luck in this world,” said Glenn Schorr, a longtime Wall Street analyst at ISI International Strategy & Investment. “They split the costs, and Morgan Stanley reaped 100 percent of the rewards.” What does Mr. Gorman have to say about his negotiating strategies and Morgan Stanley’s refusal to provide long-term projections to Perella Weinberg? “They had all the information they needed,” he said dryly. “What drove the margins down actually was the market environment.” Wealth management now delivers higher profits even as new government regulations like the Volcker Rule crimp trading, and it does so without the kind of risk that alarms regulators and investors. It has also prompted a re-evaluation of Mr. Gorman’s retail strategy among Morgan Stanley’s old white-shoe types, who traditionally regarded retail brokerage as beneath them, at least when compared with the rarefied world of advising corporate clients on going public or on mergers and acquisitions. “There are plenty of people taking credit around here and high-fiving themselves now,” Mr. Nides said. “But at the time, the same people said he was wrong and was doubling-down on a bad business. Some of the senior investment bankers were naysayers, and he powered through.” Calming the Waters Wall Streeters are famously unpredictable when it comes to the way they regard their leaders. Philip J. Purcell, Mr. Mack’s predecessor as chief executive, stepped down under pressure in 2005, when he angered the firm’s old guard by pushing retail while restraining traders from taking on too much risk. That view seems prescient now, but Mr. Purcell remains the only Morgan Stanley chief executive not to have a portrait hanging in the firm’s wood-paneled boardroom. Nor did he attend the firm’s 75th anniversary gala, held in 2010 at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mr. Mack quickly increased the size of the firm’s trading positions after Mr. Purcell’s departure, only to preside over billions in losses in 2007 and 2008. Even after the recent run-up, Morgan Stanley’s stock is still down more than 50 percent from where it was before the crash, but Mr. Mack remains a beloved figure at the firm. Mr. Gorman does not inspire the devotion that Mr. Mack did, but neither has he spawned the enmity that brought down Mr. Purcell. And he has managed to placate the warring tribes in trading, investment banking and wealth management. While Morgan Stanley has become more of a gatherer of client assets and less of a flashy trader, it still does a fair bit of trading, especially in equities. At nearly $11 billion this year, total trading revenue at Morgan Stanley is expected to be smaller than Goldman’s $13.2 billion. But in the first quarter, it was better-than-expected results in fixed-income trading that enabled overall firm profits to beat analyst expectations. Image John J. Mack, Mr. Gorman’s predecessor at Morgan Stanley, had a much higher profile and remains beloved at the firm. Credit Stephen Yang/Bloomberg News, via Getty Images Mr. Gorman has also continued to push traditional investment banking. Amid intense criticism of Morgan Stanley’s bumpy handling of the Facebook initial public offering two years ago, he earned applause and loyalty from bankers and traders by going down to the trading floor and mounting a full-throated defense of their performance. “It wouldn’t have been his idea to go, but he was happy he did it,” one colleague said. “It went a long way.” Facebook’s shares initially plunged after the offering, which was also accompanied by technical problems. Massachusetts regulators fined Morgan Stanley $5 million, saying it had not shared information about Facebook’s outlook equally among big and small investors. But just as the run-up in Morgan Stanley’s own shares has silenced critics of Mr. Gorman, so has the recent surge in Facebook shares tamped down the embarrassment over whatever missteps took place when the stock made its debut. Over all, Morgan Stanley is almost the same size as its archrival Goldman Sachs, with just under $33 billion in revenue expected in 2014. Goldman Sachs is much more profitable, however, with analysts expecting it to make $6.8 billion this year, versus Morgan Stanley’s $4.5 billion. With Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers now gone, Morgan Stanley and Goldman are the last two big independent investment banks left on Wall Street, and they face pressures from up-and-coming boutique firms and from giants like JPMorgan Chase. But they are thriving in the niches they dominate, and Morgan Stanley has been edging out Goldman in recent years to rank as No. 1 in global tech I.P.O.s on Wall Street. To get to this point, Mr. Gorman had to make some difficult calls. In 2012, when he had to decide between the feuding executives Colm Kelleher and Paul Taubman over who would run the institutional side of the business, Mr. Gorman chose Mr. Kelleher as the better manager. He let Mr. Taubman walk out the door, despite Mr. Taubman’s status as a legendary rainmaker. Since he left the firm, in fact, he has advised on $210 billion in deals — on his own. “I’m not privy to the ins and outs, but I know it was a tough decision,” said Lewis W. Bernard, a top Morgan Stanley executive for decades and former board member who helped force out Mr. Purcell. “James makes the hard decisions, knowing full well there are consequences and he’s prepared to live with them.” When Mr. Gorman is uncomfortable or has bad news to deliver, he often clears his throat, and as a result, throat-clearing has entered the firm’s lexicon as code for trouble, as in: “How was the meeting with James?” “There was a lot of throat-clearing.” “Sorry to hear that.” Still, Mr. Gorman has his less-uptight moments. When the head of equity trading, Ted Pick, was late for meetings several times recently, Mr. Gorman put his chair in the corner, prompting a laugh from the group when Mr. Pick eventually arrived. But niceties and bonhomie are overrated anyway, said Mr. Pfeifler, the Morgan Stanley financial adviser, who joined the firm about 25 years ago and has had a front-row seat for all of its ups and downs. Years ago, after a long weekend spent crunching numbers on deals, Mr. Mack invited Mr. Pfeifler and his fellow analysts to come to his weekend house and enjoy a keg. “James would never do that,” Mr. Pfeifler said. “He doesn’t care about that kind of stuff.” More important now, he explained, is that after the volatility of the Mack era, including the epic trading losses, and the turf wars between the institutional business and wealth management that forced out Mr. Purcell, something resembling stability reigns at Morgan Stanley. “A great C.E.O. has four or five important decisions to make,” Mr. Pfeifler said. “And James has gotten the big ones right.”

Morgan Stanley
James P Gorman
Banking and Finance
Stockbroker
Goldman Sachs Group
Stocks,Bonds


Vonn Wins in Downhill

Abstract: Lindsey Vonn won the season-opening World Cup downhill Friday for her 16th victory at Lake Louise, Alberta, and her 34th career World Cup downhill victory. She finished in 1 minute 50.5 seconds. Cornelia Hütter was second in 1:51.08. ■ Aksel Lund Svindal won his third straight World Cup race, holding off Kjetil Jansrud in a demanding downhill in Beaver Creek, Colo. Svindal finished in 1 minute 42.34 seconds to beat Jansrud by 0.30 of a second. ■ Sara Takanashi won the season-opening event on the women’s ski jump World Cup in Lillehammer, Norway, overcoming a tremendous first jump by Maja Vtic. Takanashi had jumps of 95.5 and 97.5 meters for a total score of 251.7 points, beating Vtic by 11.5 points. Vtic jumped 101.5 meters in the first round but had lower style points than Takanashi, then managed just 93 meters in her second jump.


Indonesia: Payment Spares Maid in Saudi Arabia

Abstract: Indonesia has agreed to pay $1.8 million to prevent one of its citizens from being executed in Saudi Arabia, just days before she was to be beheaded for killing her employer. Migrants’ rights activists welcomed the decision on Friday. The Indonesian woman, Satinah Binti Jumadi Ahmad, a 41-year-old domestic worker, was convicted of killing her Saudi employer in 2007, but she said that she had acted in self-defense after her boss had physically abused her. The government, which announced its decision on Thursday, had been widely criticized after it initially said it could not raise the money in time. Celebrities and activists started a fund-raising campaign. As allowed by Saudi law, the victim’s family had initially demanded $4 million in “blood money” to spare the maid’s life but agreed to lower the amount after years of negotiations with the Indonesian government. Migrant workers contribute millions of dollars to the Indonesian economy annually in remittances.

Domestic worker
Murders
Indonesia
Saudi Arabia
Capital punishment
Satinah Binti Jumadi Ahmad
Foreign Workers


ESPN Replaces USA as Early-Round Home of the Masters

Abstract: The Masters will no longer be carried by the USA Network, its home on cable for the tournament’s early rounds since 1982, but will shift to ESPN starting in April, according to a deal announced yesterday. The weekend rounds will continue on CBS. As usual, any television deal with the Augusta National Golf Club is shrouded in mystery. No financial terms were announced. The length of the contract was not divulged, but if the club’s negotiating tradition holds, the deal will be for one year. TNT was also seeking the rights that ESPN won. “With the worldwide reach of ESPN, and their demonstrated leadership in new media, we think ESPN is uniquely positioned to showcase the Masters and golf to new audiences,” Billy Payne, the chairman of Augusta, said in a statement. USA’s average audience for the Thursday and Friday rounds reached 2.5 million in 2004, dipped to 2.2 million the next year, but returned to 2.5 million this year. USA, which is owned by NBC Universal, declined in late summer to make a deal, unwilling to pay a new rights fee sought by Augusta. The club reimburses the networks for their production costs. But in an arrangement unique to big-time sports, the networks receive no revenue from the four minutes each hour of advertising sold to IBM, AT&T and ExxonMobil and cannot promote their programming. ESPN will carry CBS’s feed of the tournament and augment the coverage with Mike Tirico as the host from the Butler Cabin studio, the same role played by Bill Macatee for USA. Otherwise, it will be CBS’s Jim Nantz and Nick Faldo in the 18th tower on ESPN’s telecast, along with the rest of CBS’s crew, including David Feherty and Peter Oosterhuis, but not Gary McCord, who was judged to be too irreverent by the club in 1994 and has not called the tournament since. USA is getting out of sports, relying on its more successful programming, including professional wrestling, “Monk,” “Psych,” “Burn Notice” and new episodes of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” Its full slate of early-round PGA Tour events ended with the start this year of the Golf Channel’s full-season contract. And it is expected to shed its money-losing coverage of United States Open tennis as soon as its deal ends. USA would rather carry its dramatic programming — whether first-run or repeats — in prime time than evening replays of the Masters or tennis sessions. ESPN and its corporate sibling, ABC Sports, no longer carry full schedules of golf, as they had until last year. But ESPN still shows early-round coverage of the United States Open, and ABC continues to carry the final rounds of the British Open. ESPN was well known to Augusta for its international Masters broadcasts since 1993. In addition to the ESPN deal, Payne also announced that Mercedes-Benz and Rolex would be the first two global sponsors to support the Masters telecasts and golf development programs outside the United States.