Primary in Florida Echoes Republican Battles

Abstract: WASHINGTON — An increasingly nasty Republican primary in central Florida between Representative Sandy Adams and Representative John L. Mica in many ways encapsulates the central conflict that has divided House Republicans in the 112th Congress. Mr. Mica, chairman of the powerful House Transportation Committee, has spent nearly two decades in Congress bringing home the proverbial bacon for his district, cured and ready for constituent enjoyment. Ms. Adams, a freshman blessed by the Tea Party , passed her first term railing against just that sort of spending — which used to help get people elected — even voting against a highway bill that Mr. Mica had championed. She is trying to frame Mr. Mica as an old-school big spender out of step with the party and the nation, a battle cry that has led to the policy and strategy conflicts that have defined House Republicans this year. Mr. Mica, who was upset with Ms. Adams’s choice to run in that district, has tried to draw attention to his more conservative votes, and has criticized her campaign, going so far as to contact the House Ethics Committee over one advertisement that shows Mr. Mica with President Obama, arguing that it violates the House’s rules by showing footage from floor proceedings. One of a handful of contests pitting incumbent vs. incumbent this year, the Florida race, which will culminate on Tuesday, can be told in part through the contributions of those members who have taken the unusual step of endorsing one colleague over another in the primary: Ms. Adams has received several donations from fellow freshmen, and Mr. Mica from some more entrenched members like himself. “We’re all part of the same class, a historic class,” said Representative Austin Scott of Georgia, the freshman class president who gave Ms. Adams $2,000 for her primary fight. “Sandy’s a wonderful person and has been a great member of Congress, and quite honestly as someone who is 43 years old, I’m looking for people with fresh ideas, and Sandy fits that bill.” On the flip side are Mr. Mica’s supporters, who tend to sympathize with seniority and all that implies. “Chairman Mica is a leading advocate for transportation and infrastructure and is fully committed to making wise decisions as we manage our serious debt and deficit problems,” said Senator John Boozman, Republican of Arkansas, who gave $2,500 to his bid. “I was pleased to serve with him in the House of Representatives and appreciated his leadership during my time on the transportation committee.” A similar primary battle in Southern California has divided Congressional Democrats, although in a far more lopsided fashion. Representative Howard L. Berman has received donations from a dozen of his House and Senate colleagues, while his primary opponent, Representative Brad Sherman, has collected far less. As in zero. “I think the vast majority of Democrats are giving to red-to-blue candidates,” Mr. Sherman surmised, referring to races in which Democrats seek to remove Republican incumbents. Mr. Berman had a different view: “What I think it means is they think I am a more effective congressman.” Two-incumbent primaries almost always turn onetime friends and colleagues into bitter foes and split member loyalty. But the contest between Ms. Adams, a businesslike former deputy sheriff who often speaks about the domestic abuse she suffered in her first marriage, and Mr. Mica, the affable if occasionally loopy Hill denizen, began with a bang of bitterness. Florida’s Congressional boundaries, like the rest of the nation’s, were scrambled in redistricting, leaving the residences of both Mr. Mica and Ms. Adams in the new Seventh District, which encompassed most of Seminole County and over half of her current constituents, and about 40 percent of his. Mr. Mica made the decision to run against her during the same week that he was trying to push a controversial — and ultimately failed — highway bill, which annoyed several Republican House leaders. It was a slightly curious choice as more of Mr. Mica’s constituents will be in an adjoining district. From the start they have tussled over their spending records. Ms. Adams has mocked Mr. Mica for securing more than $300 million in federal money for construction costs of a $1.2 billion Florida rail line and for a component of the highway bill he helped write that added new toll lanes to Interstate highways. In the ad that Mr. Mica has called into question, Mr. Mica is depicted with Mr. Obama at the bill signing, with a voice-over that calls him the president’s “best cheerleader.” Mr. Mica has countered with ads criticizing Ms. Adams’s votes for spending bills while she was in the Florida Legislature, suggesting that her record did not match her antispending talk. He has also criticized some of her foreign trips as boondoggles. The two no longer speak, in large part, Ms. Adams said, because when she went to shake Mr. Mica’s hand at a recent event, he pulled her close and said, “You will regret this for the rest of your life. I’ll destroy you.” Mr. Mica remembers the conversation differently. “I told her that she would regret personally attacking my family for the rest of her life. I think that’s something that stoops to a whole new level.” (Ms. Adams once said in a statement that Mr. Mica had “recklessly requested $4 billion in earmarks and even secured a $13 million earmark for a family member’s client.”) Ms. Adams says she lets the criticism roll off. “I feel very good about the race,” she said. “I think a healthy discussion is a good thing. My opponent said he has taken creative discretion about my record, which is another way of saying he is lying about my record.” Mr. Mica, who has taken in $1.6 million for a roughly two-to-one fund-raising edge, would appear to have the advantage in the race, but he said he was working as if behind. “I think I have a groundswell of local support,” he said. “I don’t like to see members in the middle of this contest and it’s unfortunate when you have two incumbents, but that happens. The race is in the hands of the voters of the Seventh District and the Good Lord, and whatever they determine, I’ll be fine.”

Mica John L
Republican Party
Primaries and Caucuses
Florida
United States Politics and Government
Adams Sandy
Tea Party Movement


After a Gold Medal at the Rio Olympics, Disney World? Maybe Not. Perhaps Parades. Definitely Fries.

Abstract: It’s become a sports cliché that when an athlete or a team wins a championship, the default response to “What’s next?” is “I’m going to Disney World!” But that’s old news for Olympic medalists. Michael Phelps did that way back when he had only eight gold medals, after Beijing in 2008. For the 2016 Olympic medalists, finding out what’s next takes many forms. Some athletes are thrust into the spotlight as newly minted celebrities, making the rounds of talk shows and other public appearances, walking red carpets and appearing in commercials or on cereal boxes or, in the gymnast Aly Raisman’s case, on a Smuckers jelly jar. Rounding the Bend in Rio 12 Photos View Slide Show › Image James Hill for The New York Times Simone Biles, 19, who won four gold medals at the Rio games, had one less thing on her post-Olympics bucket list after the “Today” show flew in the actor Zac Efron, a vocal gymnastics fan on social media, to meet her and the rest of the gymnastics team Wednesday. “Just call me Mrs. Efron already,” Biles wrote on Twitter of her star-struck encounter. For Brianne Thiesen-Eaton of Canada, who won the bronze medal in the heptathlon, it was not a Hollywood star but one in her own sport, Usain Bolt, who provided her big moment. “Get Olympic medal. Hop fence. Get a selfie with Bolt,” she wrote on Twitter the next day. Raisman and her teammate Biles shared one common post-medal goal: French fries. Raisman posted to Twitter on Wednesday a photo of the two gymnasts outside a McDonald’s in Rio de Janeiro eating, as she wrote in all-caps, fries and chocolate ice cream. But on Thursday, she posted a photo of herself on a treadmill to Twitter. “Already back in the gym #motivated,” she said. Some medalists said they would take their time re-acclimating to the real world, or at least the continuation of training. Image Kayla Harrison, 26, who won her second gold medal in judo in Rio and is the only American to win gold in the sport, said she was looking forward to attending parades. Credit James Hill for The New York Times Kayla Harrison, 26, who won her second gold medal in judo in Rio and is the only American to win gold in the sport, comes from Ohio but trains in Massachusetts. “I am looking forward to returning to what I understand are several parades, including one in my hometown of Middleton, Ohio, and a couple in the Boston area,” Harrison said. Some athletes will return to school. Ginny Thrasher, 19, who won the first American gold medal of the Rio Games in women’s 10-meter air rifle, returned to West Virginia University to begin her sophomore year — accompanied by a crew from ESPNW , who chronicled her first day back on campus. For at least one Olympian, celebrity must temporarily trump the real world. Maya DiRado, a swimmer who won gold medals in the 200-meter backstroke and the 4x200 freestyle relay as well as a silver in the 400-meter individual medley and a bronze in the 200-meter individual medley, had announced her intention to make Rio her one and only Olympics. She planned to retire from the sport to begin a job as a business analyst with McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, in Atlanta this fall. But her plans have changed slightly to accommodate her newfound fame; she will defer her job for four months, she said, to explore “endorsements, appearances and speaking engagements.” Of her long-term plans, Ms. DiRado said, she will “move to Atlanta, go to work for McKinsey while always keeping a foot in the Olympic space as a retired swimmer and an advocate for the Olympic movement."


Deal Would Bring Inspections of Overseas Drug Suppliers

Abstract: More than 80 percent of the active ingredients for drugs sold in the United States are made abroad, mostly in a shadowy network of facilities in China and India that are rarely visited by government inspectors, who sometimes cannot even find the plants. But after decades of failed attempts, the federal government and the generic drug industry have reached an agreement that is almost certain to pass Congress and that will lead to routine inspections of these overseas plants, potentially transforming the enormous global medicine trade. Under the landmark agreement, expected to be completed within weeks, generic drug companies — which make 75 percent of the prescription medicines sold in the United States — would pay $299 million in annual fees to underwrite inspections of foreign manufacturing plants every two years, the same frequency required of domestic plants. Self-interest helped drive the agreement because the industry will not only get speedier approvals of new products as part of the deal but also may avoid scandals involving tainted medicines, which tend to hurt confidence in the entire industry. At its present pace, the Food and Drug Administration would need more than 13 years to inspect every foreign drug plant exporting to the United States. Some plants have never been inspected, which saves them huge sums in cleanup and other compliance costs — an important reason that drug manufacturing is disappearing from the United States and that tainted-drug scandals occur. In one infamous case, Chinese manufacturers deliberately substituted a cheap fake for the dried pig intestines used to make the blood-thinning drug heparin. The tainted drug was linked to 81 deaths and exposed tens of thousands of people to danger. The F.D.A. never inspected the plants making the crucial ingredients, a larger problem that only now, more than three years later, may be fixed. “This agreement is epoch-making,” said Guy Villax, chief executive of Hovione, a generic drug maker with plants in New Jersey, Europe and China. Supply chains for many generic drugs often contain dozens of middlemen and “are highly susceptible to being infiltrated by falsified” drugs, Mr. Villax said. Dr. Margaret Hamburg , commissioner of the F.D.A., said she was pleased with the generic drug fee proposals. “If a program along the lines of what the parties are working on is enacted by Congress, it would represent a real breakthrough,” Dr. Hamburg said. “F.D.A.’s entire generic drug program would be placed on a much more stable footing.” The agreement will not affect the making of over-the-counter medicines or vitamins , whose global supply chains are even more vulnerable to tampering since government inspectors almost never visit their makers. Aspirin and vitamin C supplements, among others, are now made almost entirely in uninspected plants in China. Nor will the agreement change the F.D.A.’s oversight of name-brand prescription medicines. Although branded drugs usually have more secure supply chains than those of generics, major pharmaceutical companies have moved aggressively into China in recent years and often rely on rarely inspected suppliers. Federal officials for years have expressed concerns about the nation’s growing reliance on sometimes mysterious foreign drug suppliers, but they had largely despaired of fixing the problem. Congress has never given the F.D.A. the money needed to inspect these plants, and for nearly two decades the generic drug industry resisted proposals to pay inspection fees. The industry changed its stance for several reasons. First, the heparin scandal scared everyone. The fake ingredient was good enough to pass a sophisticated test, so the conspirators probably knew that deaths would result, reflecting a callous level of greed. And the Chinese government refused to allow the F.D.A. to investigate, suggesting that the perpetrators were not only smart but politically well connected. Second, the generic drug industry is no longer a motley collection of struggling mom-and-pop companies. Years of consolidation have created giants like Israel-based Teva Pharmaceuticals that understand that their businesses depend on winning the confidence of patients and regulators alike, and they can afford to pay the fees needed to achieve that confidence. Third, the industry finally gave up hope that Congress would appropriate enough money for the F.D.A. to perform the job. The agency’s oversight of generics has floundered so badly that new applications to sell generics take a median of 31 months to be approved, and there are now 2,458 applications awaiting approval, up from 2,361 at the end of last year. The new fees are expected to underwrite the hiring of enough reviewers to bring approval times down to 10 months and sharply cut the application backlog — providing cheaper and better drugs to patients. The fourth reason is Heather Bresch. Ms. Bresch, 42, is the president of Mylan Inc., a generics giant, and the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia. For years, Mylan’s sole drug plant was in Morgantown, W.Va., and the facility is so huge — it produces 22 billion tablets and capsules a year — that the F.D.A. stationed an employee there almost full time. But in 2007, Mylan bought two foreign companies with plants on nearly every continent. When Ms. Bresch visited these and other foreign plants, she was shocked to learn that many had not been visited by an inspector in almost a decade. “As a mother of four children, I want to know the drugs I’m giving them are safe,” Ms. Bresch said. “And as an American businesswoman, I want to keep jobs here, and that means making sure foreign drug plants have to meet the same standards as domestic ones.” Last year, she wrote an ambitious proposal to tax the industry $300 million annually so the F.D.A. could do a better job. Agency officials initially reacted skeptically since the industry had repeatedly rejected earlier, far more modest fee proposals. But Ms. Bresch lobbied aggressively, according to several participants, and her proposal was soon largely adopted, although a few small details remain to be negotiated. Generic drug fees will be included in a package of industry fees — including those for branded drugs and medical devices — in legislation the Obama administration is expected to send Congress in January. Such fees were first approved in 1992 and have become a vital source of F.D.A. financing, although some consumer groups say they have led the agency to become too cozy with those it regulates. Legislation must pass before October 2012, or numerous F.D.A. functions will halt, imperiling patients and creating chaos in the drug and medical device industries. Since such an outcome is unthinkable to government officials and industry executives alike, most predict that the legislation will pass early and easily. But defaulting on the nation’s debts was once seen as unthinkable and nearly happened this summer, so worries abound.

Drugs (Pharmaceuticals)
Generic Brands and Products
Law and Legislation
Factories and Manufacturing
International Trade and World Market
Food and Drug Administration
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Bresch Heather
Mylan Inc
Accidents and Safety


A.I.G.’s Stock Rises, and Many Wonder Why

Abstract: It may have been written off as a hopeless case less than a year ago, but the stock of the American International Group shot up to $50 on Thursday, capping a fourfold gain in the last two months. For all the optimism taking hold in the markets these days, it is hard to find a tangible explanation. “Who would want to buy a stock that’s still 80 percent owned by the government?” wondered William T. Fitzpatrick, an equity analyst at Optique Capital. Shares ended the day at $47.84, a gain of 27 percent from the previous close of $37.69. Yes, the company has named a new chief executive, who comes from a solid background at MetLife, and yes, he has said that A.I.G. will pay back the government for its bailout sooner rather than later. The giant insurer has been moving to change the names of key business units and working to disentangle its bewildering structure. It even reported a profit in its latest quarter. But none of that really explains the recent gains. Speculation swirls daily that some deal may be in the works, that short sellers are being squeezed out of their positions, or that the company’s former chief executive, Maurice R. Greenberg , may be poised to make a comeback in the role of consultant. The new chief executive, Robert Benmosche, has been fueling some of the interest, as he talks about seeking advice from Mr. Greenberg and slowing the breakup of A.I.G. so it is not a fire sale. Mr. Fitzpatrick said he thought the likelier explanation for the increased share price was that speculators looking to profit from a distressed stock had pounced on A.I.G. “The risk appetite has returned to the marketplace,” he said. “People don’t want to get 5 percent back. They want to get the money back that they lost over the last year.” They look at a cratered stock like A.I.G. and think, “This is the place to do it,” he said. Taxpayers may take some comfort from the rise in A.I.G.’s stock, which means better returns on their involuntary investment. Even though the government owns most of A.I.G., however, the soaring value of its shares does not come close to matching the vast amount of credit it extended through the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. Roughly $180 billion was marshaled to keep A.I.G. afloat last fall and winter. The entire market value of A.I.G.’s stock is just $6.4 billion, even at the current price. Also, the stock is concentrated in a few hands, meaning that a small number of investors can cause a big move in the stock price. The number of shares was reduced by a 20-for-1 reverse split in June. The government has the biggest stake in A.I.G., and the biggest common shareholder is Mr. Greenberg and a group of entities he controls. Mr. Benmosche’s total pay, about $10 million a year with bonus, includes a substantial portion in A.I.G. stock, which has gained 53 percent since his selection. His contract granted him $4 million in restricted shares, which cannot be sold for five years, as of Aug. 10. Even though A.I.G. is back in the black, there are still signs of trouble under the surface. Its insurance companies hold big blocks of complex asset-backed securities, and the company’s departing chief executive, Edward M. Liddy, said that an accounting break helped produce its recent modest profit. Mr. Liddy has also warned investors to “expect continued volatility” in the coming months, saying that even good news could be bad for the bottom line: if A.I.G. succeeded in repaying its debt to the Federal Reserve soon, he said, the accounting treatment could produce a $5 billion pretax hit to earnings. Nor is it clear that A.I.G. will succeed in raising enough money to pay back the Fed. MetLife has been looking carefully at A.I.G.’s big international life insurance business for several months, but has not yet made an acceptable offer. Hopes that Mr. Benmosche would be able to jawbone his old company into raising its price were dampened earlier this month, when A.I.G. said in a regulatory filing that it had taken steps “to ensure that Mr. Benmosche is not inappropriately involved in any transaction between A.I.G. and MetLife.” The new chief executive may have given the stock a lift on Wednesday, when he gave an interview to Reuters on the terrace of his vacation home on the Adriatic. He said he had turned to Mr. Greenberg for support and advice on a regular basis and continued to do so. “The world may choose to vilify him,” Mr. Benmosche was quoted as saying of Mr. Greenberg, who was forced out in an accounting scandal in 2005. “I think of him as having had some problems, but he can help us with the solutions.” Mr. Greenberg ran A.I.G. for more than three decades, presiding over a period of giant gains for shareholders. Some see him as a hero; some see him as a scoundrel who tricked regulators, stalled claimants and set the stage for the company’s near collapse. Mr. Greenberg has denied that, saying he was incapable of sinking the company three years after he left it. He has sparred with A.I.G. since his ouster, and has criticized of Mr. Liddy, saying his efforts to dismantle the company quickly to pay back the Fed were misguided.

American International Group
Stocks and Bonds
Greenberg Maurice R


Olympic Cyclists’ Thigh-Popping Success Starts in Quads

Abstract: LONDON — The picture of the Olympics so far, an image that swept across the Internet and introduced the sports world to the term “quad-off,” might be one featuring two cyclists in their underwear with shorts around their ankles, their thunderous thighs prominently displayed. The size of those thighs invited comparisons to large, cylindrical objects like barrels, telephone poles and ham hocks. Each thigh, on its own, seemed bigger than a female Olympic gymnast. The image, a try-this-on-for-thighs comparison between one German cyclist nicknamed Gorilla (Andre Greipel) and another nicknamed Mr. Thigh (Robert Förstemann), underscored a more serious notion. Namely that cyclists, particularly track sprinters, rely on quadriceps, in all their massive, veined glory, to power them to success. Förstemann’s thighs, each comparable to a watermelon, measured 34 inches — wider than his waist. “The picture is definitely real,” said Benjamin Sharp, the high-performance endurance director for USA Cycling. “Cyclists have strange shapes: big quads, small waists and big butts. It’s hard to find pants.” He paused, then added, “It’s funny we’re talking about this.” Inside the velodrome, everything, including the design of the arena, the track inside and the athletes’ helmets, seemingly emphasizes the sleek and the slim. Everything, that is, except the thick, bulky and somewhat frightening quadriceps of the competitors. To cycling teams and their support staffs, this is less an Olympic oddity than a necessity specific to their sport. The British track cyclist Chris Hoy , who collected his fifth career gold medal in the men’s team sprint Thursday, noted recently that his thighs measured 27 inches, or size 8 for a woman’s waist. Of course, Hoy can also cover a kilometer on his bicycle in less than a minute. Hoy’s former teammate Jamie Staff could fit his wife’s skirt snug around one thigh when he won a gold medal at the Beijing Games. “Insane,” said Staff, now a USA Cycling coach. “Basically, going quick on a bike as a sprinter is about leg speed and leg strength. Naturally, quads help.” Beth Newell, a United States national champion from California , is considered something of an international quad expert in cycling circles. She first measured the muscle when a skinny friend suggested that Newell’s quads were bigger than the friend’s head. In a 2007 blog post Newell outlined the steps for proper quadriceps measurement. One: wrap string around the thickest part of the leg. Two: align string with tape measure. Three: pull string taut. From then on, Newell became, in her own words, “a crusader to glorify the big quad,” updating her Web site with her latest measurements and those of her competitors. Improper measurement drove Newell bonkers. Unlike their track counterparts, road cyclists, as endurance riders, often balk at their thigh size, she said, when they should celebrate it instead. Her advice: go for girth. “It isn’t like measuring waistlines for skinny minnies,” Newell wrote in an e-mail. “This is about bragging about massive (sometimes) muscular quads! The people making those comments obviously didn’t get the point. Go big or go home!” Athletes tabbed the baseline measurement for an acceptable sprint cyclist’s thigh at 60 centimeters, or 23.6 inches. Newell cited the American cyclist Jennie Reed as someone she envied in that regard. Hoy noted in recent interviews that some of his competitors’ thighs made his look skinny. Perhaps there was a bit of thigh envy involved. Regardless, no one disputes that the biggest thighs in cycling belong to Förstemann, whom Newell referred to as Quadzilla. “Those German track sprinters are pretty much legendary,” she wrote. “I don’t think any of them have names, even. They just get referred to by their quad size. “Herr Achtzig to the line,” Newell wrote, using the German for Mr. Eighty. To be fair, participants did note that quad size did not necessarily correlate with speed. Imagine a sumo wrestler, for instance, on a race bike. Victoria Pendleton of Britain , a winner of nine world titles and one gold medal so far in these Games, is but one example of the regular-size-thigh cycling set. Lack of quad size, though, can doom even the most promising young riders, the equivalent of a weight lifter with small biceps. Big thighs, the participants said, serve as an intimidation factor before races, a way to send a message to competitors without speaking, with no more than a quick flex. Newell said some riders rubbed warming oil on their quadriceps because the shine accentuates the size of the muscles, giving them that bodybuilder cut. She argued against team uniforms that included thinning stripes, a “serious no-no” in the quad game. “I mean, we pedal hours and hours every week — it’s a full-time job — so often, our bodies are seen as a measurement of our ability,” she wrote. Much of a cyclist’s thigh growth, Sharp said, is natural, the byproduct even of particular positions on the bike. Sprinters who sit hunched over, more compact, tend to use their quadriceps more. Because they spend thousands of hours in the same position, the body conforms accordingly. Staff said much of his thigh expansion came from workouts. He loved that part of cycling, in particular the squats. His exploits in that lift still live in videos on YouTube . At his peak, Staff said, he could squat about 529 pounds. Even now, when he is retired and coaching, his thighs compare favorably with those of the athletes on his team. He could still win a quad-off, which is cycling’s version of the male model walk-off in the movie “Zoolander.” Food helps, too: huge quantities of protein, enough calories to feed a large village. Newell recommended living with noncyclists so as to finish what they do not eat. She also advocated drinking microbrews and having dessert with breakfast. She said an Australian coach gave his sprinters chocolate cake to enhance quadriceps growth. This often leads, of course, to what cyclists call the pants problem. For years, Newell pestered one company executive with her campaign for “keirin cut” jeans: roomier in the quad, less so in the waist. Keirin is a type of cycling race. Hoy told the British newspaper The Guardian that women often approached him and said they did not want to cycle because their thighs would look like his. Those thighs, he tells them, give him the power to accelerate. But Hoy must also buy pants two sizes too big to accommodate them. Sharp said a Brazilian jeans store in Philadelphia , now defunct, used to cater to cyclists, who would descend on it from all over the world. Newell insisted that if all else fails, her brethren embrace quad size, in the one place where the term “thunder thighs” is actually a compliment. “Your friends love to hear about your muscles,” she wrote. “Pull down your pants to show them your strong quads and muscle definition. Make them grab your legs in public. “We can all be winners here.”

Track Cycling
2012 Summer Olympics
Muscle
USA Cycling
Chris Hoy


Lawyer Charged With Huge Fraud Is Denied Bail

Abstract: A prominent New York lawyer arrested this week on fraud charges ranks as “a Houdini of impersonation and false documents” who used guile, a box of cellphones and a series of phony Web sites and e-mail addresses to steal more than $380 million, a federal prosecutor said on Thursday. The prosecutor, Jonathan R. Streeter, made the allegations in United States District Court in Manhattan, where he successfully argued that the lawyer, Marc S. Dreier, 58, should be held without bail on wire and securities fraud charges. Mr. Dreier is accused of cheating hedge funds and investors through the brazen use of bogus identities and documents. Since his arrest, all of Mr. Dreier’s known assets in the United States, and those of the law firm that bear his name, have been put under the control of a receiver, Mr. Streeter, an assistant United States attorney, said. But, he said, investigators believed Mr. Dreier might have hidden assets overseas. “He has absolutely no incentive to stay in the United States; his life has completely unraveled,” Mr. Streeter told United States Magistrate Judge Douglas F. Eaton. “He has gone from being an extremely rich man that flies around in private jets and meets with rich and famous people, to a person who has absolutely nothing and is facing potentially the rest of his life in jail.” Judge Eaton concluded that the high-living Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyer posed “an extraordinary risk of flight” and rejected for now a proposal by Mr. Dreier’s defense lawyer that his client be held under house arrest at his home in Quogue, N.Y., or his triplex apartment in Manhattan. The defense lawyer, Gerald L. Shargel, had asked the judge to release him on a $10 million bond, guaranteed by his 19-year-old son and 85-year-old mother, whom he said Mr. Dreier would be loath to saddle with such a debt. Mr. Shargel suggested placing his client under the supervision of armed guards to ensure he complied with a series of conditions, including no use of a computer or a BlackBerry. But Mr. Streeter described the evidence in the case as overwhelming, characterized Mr. Dreier as “a person of exceptional ingenuity and exceptional resourcefulness,” and said he “is in a desperate situation and the only way out of that desperate situation is for him to flee.” Mr. Dreier, the owner and founder of Dreier L.L.P., which employs 250 lawyers, was charged in a complaint unsealed on Monday with stealing about $113 million from hedge funds since October. But the government on Thursday told Judge Eaton that the losses were climbing. “He faces almost certain conviction, given the mountains of evidence against him that are growing every day,” Mr. Streeter said. “As of this morning, and the information keeps coming into us, the actual loss in this case is over $380 million dollars.” In arguing for home detention, Mr. Shargel said Mr. Dreier — who was arrested in Canada on a related matter five days before his arrest in New York — had returned to face likely charges even though he could have stayed and fought extradition, a process that could have taken up to two years. “Mr. Dreier rejected that option,” he said. Clad in a blue prison smock and orange slip-on sneakers, his salt-and-pepper hair matted and unruly, Mr. Dreier appeared concerned during the hourlong proceeding as he sat beside Mr. Shargel, sometimes leaning his chin into his hand, with his index finger across his lips. Mr. Shargel said his client had been held in solitary confinement since his arrest, had been allowed to shower only once, and had no reading material, no phone calls and no visitors. Mr. Shargel said prison officials had explained the treatment by saying that they did not have a bed in the general population section and needed to make sure Mr. Dreier was not a gang member. Mr. Dreier was initially arrested in Canada on Dec. 2 after an elaborate ruse to sell $45 million of the phony promissory notes there collapsed, according to a Toronto police department document. After meeting with a lawyer for a teachers’ pension plan on another matter and obtaining that man’s business card, Mr. Dreier asked to use a phone and was ushered into a conference room by a secretary, according to the document. A short time later, he used the room to meet with the representative of a hedge fund whom he had previously invited to the offices, and impersonated the lawyer whose card he had just been handed. But the scheme quickly unraveled, authorities said, when the hedge fund representative and the secretary felt something was amiss, and Mr. Dreier was arrested soon after. He was held in a Toronto jail until his arraignment last Friday and he returned Sunday night to New York, where he was arrested by federal authorities. While jailed in Toronto, Mr. Dreier called the Dreier L.L.P. controller several times and asked him to move millions of dollars from the firm’s escrow accounts into Mr. Dreier’s personal account, but the man refused, Mr. Streeter said. Mr. Streeter, and court records, say Mr. Dreier was able to persuade the controller to transfer his call to the firm’s banker, who transferred $10 million from an escrow account into Mr. Dreier’s personal account. It remains unclear whether the $10 million was frozen as a result of Mr. Dreier’s arrest, or whether he moved it again to a financial institution outside the United States. But Mr. Streeter emphasized that a review of Mr. Dreier’s assets — artworks, homes, and law firm assets — “do not come up to $380 million, meaning that there is a large amount of money that is completely unaccounted for.”

Dreier Marc s
Frauds and Swindling
Bail
Securities and Commodities Violations


Police Take On Family Violence to Avert Deaths

Abstract: As the number of homicides in New York has reached historically low levels, the Police Department has intensified its efforts to combat a particularly stubborn and daunting source of murders: domestic violence. Over the past several years, the department has bolstered the size of the staff at its domestic violence unit by about 40 percent, with 450 police officers now focused on families with histories of violence. The police are now making more domestic violence arrests, while murders linked to domestic violence appear to have declined slightly. As part of their work, the officers assigned to the domestic violence unit make a total of 70,000 precautionary visits a year to the households with past episodes. Each precinct station house also maintains a “high propensity” list of a dozen or so households that get special attention because they are believed to be most at risk of further violence. In their visits, the police devise safety plans with the victims and check for evidence of further abuse and, when a past abuser is barred from the home, signs of his return. “You look to see if she has any bruises; you’re looking around the house to see if the furniture is broken,” said Detective Dale Edwards, describing what she does during a home visit. “You inquire. You try to be tactical about it.” The murder rate in New York has dropped significantly over the last dozen years, to an average of fewer than one a day in the first six months of 2013 from nearly two a day in 2000. The trend has been attributed in part to the Police Department’s focusing its resources on getting guns off the street and on neighborhood gangs. Now, with the efforts to reduce domestic violence homicides, the department believes it is seeing success in an area once thought to be intractable. In 2011, there were 47 homicides involving “intimate partners” — a category that includes spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends, current or otherwise. There were 39 such murders last year, and as of Wednesday, 21 this year. (Historically, about 80 percent of the victims of intimate-partner homicides in the city are women.) “I think this proactive approach has played a significant role in the reduction of murders,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in an interview. The push in New York mirrors similar efforts around the nation. In Massachusetts, for example, a program in Newburyport won accolades from the White House for its outreach program that tries to identify cases where domestic abusers seem most likely to escalate to murder, and prevent them from doing so. In 2011, the Police Department grew alarmed at a sudden increase in domestic violence murders, prompting an internal review and, ultimately, many changes. Among them, under Mr. Kelly, domestic violence unit assignments became detective-track positions, a significant draw for young and ambitious officers and a signal that the department was making the work a priority. More emphasis has also been placed on evidence collection. After a choking assault, for example, domestic violence officers are required to return to see a victim a day or two later to photograph bruises that may not have been visible when officers first responded. Image Chief Kathleen M. O’Reilly heads the Police Department’s domestic violence unit. Its staff has grown recently to 450 officers. Credit Jabin Botsford/The New York Times In Sunnyside, Queens, Viridiana Victorio’s address was added to the local precinct house’s watch list after her boyfriend grabbed her neck and slapped her in 2011, one of thousands of misdemeanor domestic assault cases in that borough alone. But something about Ms. Victorio’s case raised a red flag for the police. Officers began visiting her apartment to offer support and to confirm that the boyfriend, Angel Pérez-Rios, was staying away, as a restraining order required. Their 20th visit was a month ago, on June 25. Something minor — either the presence of a beer bottle or two glasses, according to the police — prompted the officers to ask whether Mr. Pérez-Rios had returned. Ms. Victorio and her children said no. But Mr. Pérez-Rios had moved back in. The police say he stabbed her to death a week later. He is now charged with murder. “The police commissioner wanted to know, had we done everything humanly possible to help this individual?” Chief Kathleen M. O’Reilly, who heads the department’s domestic violence unit, said. “I said that we categorically had done everything, barring moving in to her residence with her.” The case underscores the challenge that confronts the police even after they have identified a domestic violence situation they think is likely to escalate to murder. In 2012, the police responded on 263,207 occasions to reports of domestic violence. The chief of the special victims bureau in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Audrey Moore, said that as cases came in, there was often a question at the back of prosecutors’ minds: “Is this going to be the case, the case where he goes on to kill her?” The police use a computer program to scan police complaint reports for worrisome words like “kill,” “suicide” and “alcohol” and to help officers prioritize the more combustible cases. The Police Department has also begun to make greater use of the millions of domestic incident reports that it has filed away over the years. Now each time a domestic violence case is opened, all previous reports associated with that victim are automatically sent to the assigned officer. But the department also depends on officers’ gut instincts and the fear levels of the victim in deciding whom to place on the high-propensity lists. The next victim may not even be on the radar of the officers currently devoted to domestic violence work. Less than a quarter of the victims and perpetrators of domestic homicides had contact with the police in the year before the murder, according to city statistics. A significant number of the killings seem to occur as the victim is preparing to leave a boyfriend or husband, investigators and prosecutors said. Image Prosecutor Scott E. Kessler leads the domestic violence unit for the Queens district attorney. Credit Demetrius Freeman/The New York Times Taking on the responsibility of preventing such homicides poses relatively new challenges for police departments nationwide. Until the 1980s and the early 1990s, officers tended to view the bulk of domestic violence cases as beyond the scope of their jobs. “When I was a police officer and after that, there was this sort of notion that family matters would be left alone,” said Commissioner Kelly, who became a trainee in 1960. “It was something that was seen as unwieldy, complex, and I think officers years ago shied away from it.” Those attitudes started to change in the late 1970s, partly as a result of lawsuits by women’s groups. Since the mid-1990s, the New York department has had specially trained domestic violence officers assigned to precincts. When Mr. Kelly became police commissioner in 2002, there were 150 officers assigned exclusively to domestic violence casework. Now there are about 450, he said, with much of the increase happening since 2010. Over the past decade, prosecutors across the city have changed their approach to domestic assault cases, relying more on physical evidence that allows them to pursue cases even when the victim has reconciled with her abuser and stopped cooperating. Prosecutors have had success using recorded phone calls from Rikers Island, where incarcerated husbands and boyfriends often call their victims to persuade them to lie about the abuse. In Queens, prosecutors have begun to subpoena the phone records of both victims and defendants to demonstrate contact between the two, providing an explanation to a jury for a victim’s changed story. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office recently started to use an ultraviolet light to find evidence of neck injuries that might not have resulted in visible bruising in choking or strangulation cases. “We’re always looking if there was something that we missed, if there was something that would trigger a better response,” said Chief O’Reilly, who has run the domestic violence unit since 2011. The home visits are “the cornerstone of our response to domestic violence,” she continued. They can continue for years, long after the conclusion of any criminal cases involving the couple. Scott E. Kessler, the prosecutor who leads the domestic violence unit for the Queens district attorney, estimated that three-quarters of domestic violence defendants violate an order of protection within 72 hours, through phone calls or text messages or by returning to the residence. Home visits by the police can make the abuser wary about moving back in, Mr. Kessler said. “The victim is telling the defendant, ‘The officers keep coming by to ask if you’re here, checking on you,’ ” he said. “That’s got to be a deterrent.”

NYPD
Murders
Domestic violence
NYC
Police


Product information on the Palm Treo 755p

Abstract: Like Hollywood starlets, smartphones are becoming thinner and thinner. If the original Palm Treo was like the curvaceous Jayne Mansfield, the 755p, with service from Sprint, is more Kirsten Dunst. The five-ounce 755p is less than an inch thick and has a 320-pixel-square color touch screen and a 1.3-megapixel camera. The device is compatible with Sprint’s EV-DO network, which means it can download data at near-broadband speeds. While most of the software is fairly standard — contacts, calendar and calculators — it also includes Outlook e-mail support, an instant messaging program and Google Maps. The phone will work with Sprint’s TV service and Sprint on Demand, a live weather and traffic service. The 755p has 60 megabytes of internal memory and can handle miniSD memory cards of up to four gigabytes. The price is $280 after a rebate with a two-year contract. Calling plans start at $40 a month; optional EV-DO service requires a Sprint data plan starting at $15. The 755p lasts for about five hours of talk time on one charge, not unlike a starlet on a can of Red Bull. JOHN BIGGS


Proceeds of Bulger Items Will Compensate Victims

Abstract: BOSTON — When the authorities searched the apartment of the Boston gangster James (Whitey) Bulger, they found $822,000 in cash and a large collection of guns hidden in holes cut into the walls. Other than the cash, there were few valuables. Books, hats, sweatshirts and household items bought at discount stores filled the rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica, Calif., which Mr. Bulger shared with his longtime girlfriend while he was on the run. But the authorities are hoping to attract buyers for Mr. Bulger’s belongings so they can compensate his victims. His possessions will be sold during a criminal forfeiture auction expected to be held in the next few months. “We want to certainly be able to obtain funds to go back to the victims who were harmed by Bulger,” said Mary B. Murrane, an assistant United States attorney, “but we don’t want to do that in a way that glorifies Bulger or potentially causes some offense to the victims or others who have been impacted by Bulger.” Mr. Bulger, 84, was convicted in August of orchestrating or participating in 11 killings during his reign as leader of the Winter Hill Gang. He was sentenced to two life terms, plus five years, in prison. The cash found in his apartment and the proceeds from the auction will be split among the estates of murder victims whose families choose to participate, and several extortion victims. A few items are likely to bring in substantial amounts of money, including a gold and diamond claddagh ring with an estimated appraised value of $48,000 and a replica of a 1986 Stanley Cup championship ring. But most of the things found in the apartment have no intrinsic value. The authorities are hoping they will appeal to crime memorabilia collectors or other buyers. There is a rat-shaped cup used to hold pens and scissors, a collection of books about the mob and Mr. Bulger’s gang, and an assortment of cat figurines and Soldier of Fortune magazines. There are also Valentine’s Day and Christmas cards from Mr. Bulger’s girlfriend, Catherine Greig. The authorities have not yet decided whether to auction personal items, Ms. Murrane said. “It’s looking at those items that on their own don’t have value and which of those would be appropriate to auction, knowing that they would sell only because of who owned them,” she said. “It’s definitely a question of balance.” The families of victims in the case expressed mixed feelings about the auction. Steve Davis, whose sister Debra was killed in 1981, said he did not like the idea. The jury that convicted Mr. Bulger in numerous murders was unable to reach a decision on whether he was responsible for Ms. Davis’s death. “I wish they would burn everything right in front of all of us,” Mr. Davis said. “They should just destroy everything. That would kill the memories we have of him.” Auctions in other high-profile cases have brought in millions of dollars. The federal Marshals Service, which is responsible for selling seized and forfeited properties, raised $232,000 in 2011 through an online auction of items belonging to the “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski, including 20 personal journals and the hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses depicted in his famous F.B.I. sketch. In the case of Bernard L. Madoff, a two-day auction in Miami brought in $3.2 million to compensate victims of his $65 billion Ponzi scheme. The sales included fine jewelry, coins and 14 pairs of Mr. Madoff’s underwear.

Murders
Whitey Bulger
FBI
Auction
Boston


NATO Resumes Sending Detainees to Afghan Prisons

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — A moratorium by NATO on transferring detainees to some of the Afghan government’s detention facilities has been lifted and transfers have resumed, NATO officials said Wednesday. Last fall, the transfers were suspended in the wake of a devastating report from the United Nations that found evidence of routine human rights abuses and torture at 16 detention centers, including eight operated by the National Directorate of Security and eight operated by the police. The United Nations report, which covered 47 detention facilities in 22 provinces, found that in some of them detainees were beaten with rubber hoses and hung from hooks, and that their genitals were twisted to extract confessions. The NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, immediately halted detainee transfers to all Afghan facilities where the United Nations found abuses and put in place a remediation program. Over the past four months NATO officials have assessed each of the jails named in the report and instituted a retraining program for the Afghan leadership at them, as well as the interrogators and guards. The Ministry of Interior and the National Directorate of Security, which run Afghan detainee operations, have cooperated, NATO officials said. NATO said that it had resumed transferring detainees to 12 of the 16 detention centers, but that for four of them it was conditional, meaning that NATO could reverse that decision after further checks. Four places, including three where detainees reported routine abuse and in some cases torture, have not yet been certified for transfers. The United Nations Convention Against Torture prohibits the transfer of a detained person to the custody of a state where there are substantial grounds for believing that the detainee is at risk of torture. There is also a United States law that prohibits assistance or training to the security forces of a foreign country if there is evidence of torture. Financing and assistance can continue, however, if serious remedial action is taken. Typically when NATO troops arrest Afghans in the field, they hold them briefly for questioning and let them go if they are deemed to have no connection to suspicious activities. If they do appear to have insurgent connections, NATO troops either turn them over to the Afghan detention system or, in rarer cases, send them to the detention facility operated by the United States in Parwan. The moratorium on transfers has meant that more detainees have either been transferred to Parwan or been ferried to Afghan centers where there have not been accusations of abuse. Those Afghan facilities are often further afield, which means NATO soldiers are holding more Afghans for longer periods than before and more soldiers are involved in detention operations than in the past, said Maj. Carl Dick, who is heading up the assessment and retraining effort. Although NATO has little capacity to monitor all the detention facilities that it sends detainees to, if it hears of abuses from the United Nations or from the International Committee of the Red Cross it will halt transfers immediately until the facility has been investigated and if necessary, the problems have been resolved. “As soon as there is reasonable doubt that there is inhumane treatment, we stop transfers,” Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, the NATO spokesman, said. The process raises tough questions for the future. Since there are fewer NATO troops in the field, it will be harder for them to retain oversight of detention operations. But as long as there are any NATO troops there will still be the need to transfer detainees to the Afghans, General Jacobson said. There will be even more reliance in the future on reports by the United Nations and the Red Cross, he said.

Human Rights and Human Rights Violations


In Midwest, Rising Waters and Fears of Worse

Abstract: CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — All around the Midwest, the water just kept rising. Even as this city was nearly shuttered on Friday, its sandbagged downtown submerged in the biggest flood ever recorded here, people in Des Moines began evacuating and other Iowa towns thought about it. In Wisconsin, stretches of major roads were closed and tornadoes struck. Some in Michigan had no power. Elsewhere, there was no train service, no drinking water, no end in sight. The economic costs of the devastating floods were also beginning to seep in: tourism officials, who depend on the short summers, were bracing for washed-out seasons; farmers in many states stared out at ponds that had once been their fields of beans and corn; and officials were preparing to shut down 315 miles of the Mississippi River, a crucial route for millions of tons of coal, grains and steel. By now, one prospect — a notion no one wants to ponder but is impossible to avoid — has begun to emerge in Iowa, as well as in Indiana, Minnesota and Illinois: the possibility that this summer might prove to be something like 1993, when the torment of flooding resulted in widespread personal misery and loss, as well as economic cost of $20 billion. “Right now, we can’t see anything as devastating as 1993 along the Mississippi, but we’re gearing up,” said Ron Fournier, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers’ district in the central Midwest, which just ordered three million more sandbags, 25 large pumps and a vast array of extra supplies. “The hard part is as simple as not knowing how much rain we’ll get,” Mr. Fournier said. “Beyond what we saw 24 hours ago, and what we predict in the next 24 hours, we just don’t know what’s coming. We want the rain to stop.” In this eastern Iowa city of more than 120,000, the rain had stopped by early Friday morning. In fact, the sun was out. But as the Cedar River crested at more than 31 feet — far higher than it had been in 1993, when it reached more than 19 feet — residents, rain-weary after several drenching weeks, seemed skeptical of the authorities’ suggestion that the worst might be over. “If there’s one more drop of rain, I’ll be looking to pack up some stuff,” said Fernando Albino, 36, who sat outside his second-floor apartment, staring at the lapping waters just down the block. Lia Mikesell took her three children on a walk to the water near their apartment building, and reflected back on 1993. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” she said. Remarkably, officials have reported no flood-related deaths in this city, and only one injury — a twisted ankle. But the effects have been felt all around. Many businesses were closed. A hospital sent its 176 patients, including babies and the elderly, to other facilities. More than 15,000 people had no power. And Cedar Rapids’ water shortage remained severe, prompting officials from the chamber of commerce to issue a plea on Friday that businesses suspend heavy water use, lest the city impose mandatory restrictions. Hotels were asked to stop refilling their pools. Restaurants were asked to use paper plates. Beauty salons were asked to cut back on shampoo. While the water was expected to recede here, it may take days, perhaps weeks, and that is if it does not rain. “There are going to be some trying times coming up in the near future,” said Brian Fagan, the mayor pro tem of Cedar Rapids, who described in stark terms a boat tour he took of the most heavily flooded areas: churches inundated above their stained glass windows, restaurants with water to the roof. The flooding has caused more than $700 million in damage here. Elsewhere, other rivers were still rising, and officials say the worst may be yet to come, perhaps next week. In some parts of the Midwest, more rain was forecast for the weekend, followed by, forecasters say, a period of dryness. Most of Iowa’s counties were considered disaster areas, and new troubles were mounting in other states, as shelters opened, government buildings were soaked and sandbags seemed to be everywhere. The aptness of comparisons to the flooding of 1993 seems to depend on where one lives. In a few towns along some tributaries of the Mississippi River, the recent flooding has already done more damage; elsewhere, along the Mississippi itself, nearly every community from the Iowa-Minnesota border into parts of Missouri is above flood stage, Mr. Fournier said, but not approaching the levels of 15 years ago, when about 50,000 homes in nine states were damaged or destroyed. So far, weather experts said, the rain had come faster and more intensely in the weeks since late May, but not for as sustained a stretch as it did in June and July 1993. “What would make this like 1993 is if it lasts a little longer,” said Michael Palecki, a regional climatologist with the Midwestern Regional Climate Center. Along the Mississippi on Friday, the Army Corps of Engineers was closing locks that had become inoperable because of high waters, and removing electrical equipment that could be damaged. By Monday, 14 such locks will be closed, Mr. Fournier said, effectively blocking all barge traffic for more than 300 miles between Bellevue, Iowa, and Winfield, Mo. “The cost of this is easily going to be in the millions here, and that doesn’t even begin to count all the ripple effects of not being able to move things,” said Lynn Muench of the American Waterways Operators, a trade group of tugboat, towboat and barge operators and owners. Some barges already carrying loads may now get stuck en route, she said. Others may choose alternative shipping means or simply wait, she said, losing costly time. “They are all concerned that 1993 is where we’re heading,” she said of her trade group members. “It was devastating. It basically shut down the river for the whole year. It was a total loss.” In other areas, the economic fallout was stark. Some cornfields sat under water and wheat fields were smashed by tornadoes and high winds. The delays and troubles have pushed up commodity prices, already high. “Is there a good time for a flood? No,” said Ernest Goss, an economist at Creighton University in Omaha. “Is there a worse time? Yes, and this is it. This is really going to add to the pinch on the consumer nationwide and to some degree internationally.” In the Wisconsin Dells, a popular summer tourist region for Chicagoans and others, the Tommy Bartlett Show, a water ski show, reopened on Friday afternoon with jugglers, acrobats and daredevils — but no skiers and no water. Earlier this week, some of the flooding had actually caused the waters in Lake Delton, where the skiers had performed for decades, to cut a new path and vanish, leaving a muddy lake bed. But even the scaled back show faced new problems as flooding elsewhere had caused major roads to be closed. In Cedar Rapids — where tourism officials had, long before these events, deemed 2008 “the year of the river” in honor of the Cedar River — dazed-looking families were still trickling into two shelters the Red Cross set up in public schools on Friday evening. At the Prairie High School shelter, two neighbors — Richard Wells, 62, and Richard Branscom, 81 — drank Cokes on a cafeteria bench. Both men had only their bags of medicine. “We couldn’t get nothing out, just ourselves,” said Mr. Branscom, a retired hotel worker, who was evacuated in a boat after the waters rose to his neck.


Judge Temporarily Blocks Georgia Sex-Offender Provision

Abstract: A federal judge has temporarily prevented the State of Georgia from forcing eight sex offenders from their homes Saturday — the day a law that prohibits sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of school bus stops goes into effect. According to a brief filed by the plaintiffs' lawyers, the provision would make nearly 9,000 sex offenders and their families homeless because there are virtually no housing arrangements that meet the law's requirements.


2011 World Swimming Championships: Phelps Wins 200-Meter Butterfly

Abstract: SHANGHAI — Michael Phelps pulled away in the final lap of the 200-meter butterfly final Wednesday night to capture his first gold medal at the swimming world championships and send a message that his prowess remains. After finishing third in the 400 freestyle relay and second in the 200 freestyle, Phelps delivered in his signature event, putting away Takeshi Matsuda of Japan in the last 50 meters to win with a time of 1 minute 53.34 seconds, about seven-tenths of a second ahead of Matsuda. Phelps, who had his streak in championship races for the butterfly broken at 34 earlier in the year by Wu Peng, extended his unbeaten streak in international finals to nine. And in what is the last major international competition before next summer’s London Olympics, it may be a sign that the world’s most accomplished swimmer has returned to form. “I’m super happy with going faster than I did last year,” Phelps said after the race. “But this is just a small step for my next year.” The last time Phelps competed in China was in the 2008 Olympics, when he won a record eight gold medals. At the 2009 world championships, in Rome, he grabbed another five golds, and one silver, at an event that was overshadowed by a debate over swimsuit technology. In Rome, 43 world records were set. So far at these world championships, where rules requiring traditional textile suits are in place, no records have been broken. Phelps, 26, shot to an early lead in the first 50 meters Wednesday, but Matsuda — for years a strong challenger — pulled even near the halfway mark and going into the final lap, with China’s Wu trailing in third place. After the race, Phelps said he had anticipated a close finish. “I knew it was going to be a grueling last 50,” he said, referring to Matsuda. “The race was going to come down to the last 50. And heading into tonight I had kind of decided he was going to be the toughest one.” Phelps’s gold medal comes after a slow start. He was part of the United States relay team that failed to defend its title Sunday in the 400 freestyle. The United States finished third behind Australia and France. The United States team had not lost a relay of any type since 2007. Phelps also narrowly lost the 200-meter freestyle final to his longtime friend and teammate Ryan Lochte on Tuesday. Lochte pulled ahead in the final lap to win in a time of 1:44.44. Phelps took the silver at 1:44.79 and the world-record holder Paul Biedermann of Germany won the bronze. Asked why there was no big celebration when he captured his first gold Wednesday, Phelps said he needs to stay focused and learn to conserve his strength for the races. “I have to curtail my emotional energy,” he said. “Controlling emotional energy is really big.” These world championships are perhaps the strongest sign yet that Phelps and Lochte are now the world’s two best swimmers; so far, the 26-year Lochte may even have an edge. In the semifinal of the 200-meter individual medley Wednesday night, Lochte and Phelps pulled away from the field, with Lochte winning in 1:56.74. Lochte is the world-record holder in the event, and Thursday’s final is expected to be a tough duel. The United States swimming team has had a subpar performance so far at these world championships, winning 5 gold medals and 19 medals over all. China, the host country, has been impressive. The Chinese swept the diving gold medals, winning all 10, and have 29 medals in the competition. One of the bright spots for China came shortly after Phelps won Wednesday when 19-year-old Sun Yang crushed the field to win his first world title and a gold medal in the men’s final of the 800-meter freestyle. On Monday, 15-year-old Ye Shiwen won China’s first swimming gold medal in the women’s 200-meter individual medley.


South Africa: Mandela Responds to Treatment for Respiratory Infection

Abstract: Military doctors treating former president Nelson Mandela , 92, for an acute respiratory infection said Monday that he continued to respond to medication and had a peaceful night, according to a statement from President Jacob Zuma’s office. Mr. Mandela went home Friday after spending two nights in the hospital.


London Stock Exchange Group in Talks to Sell French Clearing Arm

Abstract: LONDON — The London Stock Exchange Group said on Tuesday that it was in “exclusive” talks to sell the French arm of its majority-owned clearing business to Euronext, part of the British-based company’s efforts to win regulatory approval for a merger with Deutsche Börse. The Deutsche Börse merger with the London Stock Exchange Group would create Europe’s largest stock market operator by far, combining exchanges in Britain, Germany and Italy. But European Union antitrust regulators opened an “in-depth” investigation into the deal in September over its potential impact on competition in financial markets. The clearing of trades is one of several areas being explored in the inquiry, which is expected to conclude next year. On Tuesday, the London Stock Exchange Group said in a news release that it was exploring the sale of LCH S.A., the French operating arm of the LCH.Clearnet Group, to “address proactively antitrust concerns raised by the European Commission.” “There can be no certainty that this will lead to any transaction or as to the terms upon which any transaction might proceed,” the London Stock Exchange Group added. Euronext confirmed the discussions. Any potential sale of LCH S.A. would be subject to approval by European regulators and would depend on the successful closing of the Deutsche Börse transaction, the London Stock Exchange Group said. Euronext accounts for about half of LCH S.A.’s business. The London Stock Exchange Group and Deutsche Börse agreed in March to an all-stock merger , and shareholders from both exchanges approved the deal in July. It was the companies’ third attempt to combine since 2000. Before the shareholder votes this summer, both exchanges spent much of their time trying to reassure investors about the merger in light of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. They have said that Britain’s exit would not change the deal but could “well affect the volume or nature” of business carried out by the combined company.

Mergers and Acquisitions
Competition law
London Stock Exchange
Euronext Stock Exchange
Deutsche Borse
LCH.Clearnet


Croatia Forgiving Debt of Some of Its Poorest Citizens

Abstract: ZADAR, Croatia — While Greece and Germany tussle over what debt forgiveness might mean, Croatia, the European Union’s newest member, is adopting its own approach, offering what it calls a “new beginning” to 60,000 of its poorest citizens. Starting Monday, the government of Croatia, which joined the European Union in July 2013 , offered a debt write-off to Croats who have blocked bank accounts, owe less than the equivalent of about $5,000 and currently receive some sort of welfare benefits. They also should have no property or savings beyond a primary residence. By Wednesday, about 20,000 citizens had applied for the assistance, announced last month by Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic, who touted it as a unique scheme to help the poor as strapped European nations look for imaginative ways to clean up their finances but prevent further impoverishment. “This is the first time that someone decided to solve this problem in this way,” Mr. Milanovic told Parliament. “Not by punishment or legal force, but through an agreement.” Croatia, a country of 4.2 million, has spent the past five years trying to climb out of a prolonged recession. Membership in the European Union did not provide the expected economic boost, subjecting the country instead to the bloc’s fiscal constraints. Unemployment hovers near 20 percent, and the nation’s credit rating has fallen below investment grade. The government predicts meager growth of less than 1 percent this year. Reception of the proffered debt relief has been mixed. While the country’s Financial Agency said it expected that about 60,000 Croats could benefit from the scheme, economists and debt-stricken citizens who do not qualify have been critical. Vlado Simunovic, a 50-year-old father of five, thought he would be bound to get help. Instead, the Financial Agency turned him down, saying he owed $59,000, 10 times the suggested limit. “I didn’t even know I owed that much money,” Mr. Simunovic said by telephone from his home in the small town of Vinicno, 40 miles northeast of Zagreb. “I thought they’d be able to help me at least with something.” He had already joined the Association of the Blocked, an advocacy group that aims to help the 322,000 people with blocked accounts and is pressing for a change in debt laws. Currently, creditors can block individuals and business owners from accessing bank accounts and earnings, taking funds until debts are repaid. Miriam Kervatin, president of the association, said this leaves welfare recipients and the unemployed in a spiral of debt that is nearly impossible to escape. Zdeslav Santic, chief economist for Croatia’s Splitska Banka, had other reasons to be skeptical of the new beginning. The actual economic benefit will be difficult to quantify in both the short and long term, he said. “After six years of successive G.D.P. decline, this is one measure that can help those poorest citizens,” he said, adding quickly, “We must remember that this is an election year.” Mr. Milanovic, a Social Democrat, announced the arrangement just days after his party’s candidate lost an extremely tight presidential election to the conservative Croatian Democratic Union, whose nominee, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic , is a former ambassador to the United States. It was the third electoral setback in a row for the ruling coalition, after the Croatian Democratic Union took most seats in last May’s European parliamentary elections and also triumphed in local elections last year. A new national election must take place before the end of this year. The most recent opinion poll by Ipsos Puls in December said the Croatian Democratic Union had support from 26 percent of the voters polled, compared with 18 percent for the Social Democrats. Mr. Santic said that the new scheme offered a short-term boost for the poorest of debtors. “But without the creation of new jobs,” he said, “their situation will not improve.” Mr. Milanovic has emphasized that the new beginning is a one-off deal that will not be repeated. “It took a lot of patience, some amount of time and that is — if it must be said — proof that we are a humane government,” he said. Mr. Simunovic, a former welder who has not worked since he experienced a series of health-related setbacks in 2007, is not so sure about government compassion. After creditors take a percentage, he said, he has just 1,170 kunas, or $172, left from his monthly disability pension. ”Every time we get the electricity bill, we have to reconsider whether we buy bread,” he said.


Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggersin P.R. Campaign

Abstract: Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance. "All across the country, newspaper editorial boards -- no great friends of business -- are ripping the bills," he wrote. It was the kind of pro-Wal-Mart comment the giant retailer might write itself. And, in fact, it did. Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell's Jan. 20 posting -- and others from different days -- are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart's public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers. Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters. But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, has been forthright with bloggers about the origins of its communications, and the company and its public relations firm, Edelman, say they do not compensate the bloggers. But some bloggers have posted information from Wal-Mart, at times word for word, without revealing where it came from. Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit.com, one of the oldest blogs on the Web, said that even in the blogosphere, which is renowned for its lack of rules, a basic tenet applies: "If I reprint something, I say where it came from. A blog is about your voice, it seems to me, not somebody else's." Companies of all stripes are using blogs to help shape public opinion. Before General Electric announced a major investment in energy-efficient technology last year, company executives first met with major environmental bloggers to build support. Others have reached out to bloggers to promote a product or service, as Microsoft did with its Xbox game system and Cingular Wireless has done in the introduction of a new phone. What is different about Wal-Mart's approach to blogging is that rather than promoting a product -- something it does quite well, given its $300 billion in annual sales -- it is trying to improve its battered image. Wal-Mart, long criticized for low wages and its health benefits, began working with bloggers in late 2005 "as part of our overall effort to tell our story," said Mona Williams, a company spokeswoman. "As more and more Americans go to the Internet to get information from varied, credible, trusted sources, Wal-Mart is committed to participating in that online conversation," she said. Copies of e-mail messages that a Wal-Mart representative sent to bloggers were made available to The New York Times by Bob Beller, who runs a blog called Crazy Politico's Rantings. Mr. Beller, a regular Wal-Mart shopper who frequently defends the retailer on his blog, said the company never asked that the messages be kept private. In the messages, Wal-Mart promotes positive news about itself, like the high number of job applications it received at a new store in Illinois, and criticizes opponents, noting for example that a rival, Target, raised "zero" money for the Salvation Army in 2005, because it banned red-kettle collectors from stores. The author of the e-mail messages is a blogger named Marshall Manson, a senior account supervisor at Edelman who writes for conservative Web sites like Human Events Online, which advocates limited government, and Confirm Them, which has pushed for the confirmation of President Bush's judicial nominees. In interviews, bloggers said Mr. Manson contacted them after they wrote postings that either endorsed the retailer or challenged its critics. Mr. Beller, who runs Crazy Politico's Rantings, for example, said he received an e-mail message from Mr. Manson soon after criticizing the passage of a law in Maryland that requires Wal-Mart to spend 8 percent of its payroll on health care. Mr. Manson, identifying himself as a "blogger myself" who does "online public affairs for Wal-Mart," began with a bit of flattery: "Just wanted you to know that your post criticizing Maryland's Wal-Mart health care bill was noticed here and at the corporate headquarters in Bentonville," he wrote, referring to the city in Arkansas. "If you're interested," he continued, "I'd like to drop you the occasional update with some newsworthy info about the company and an occasional nugget that you won't hear about in the M.S.M." -- or mainstream media. Bloggers who agreed to receive the e-mail messages said they were eager to hear Wal-Mart's side of the story, which they said they felt had been drowned out by critics, and were tantalized by the promise of exclusive news that might attract more visitors to their Web sites. "I am always interested in tips to stories," said one recipient of Mr. Manson's e-mail messages, Bill Nienhuis, who operates a Web site called PunditGuy.com. But some bloggers are also defensive about their contacts with Wal-Mart. When they learned that The New York Times was looking at how they were using information from the retailer, several bloggers posted items challenging The Times's article before it had appeared. One blog, Iowa Voice, run by Mr. Pickrell, pleads for advertisers to buy space on the blog in anticipation of more traffic because of the article. The e-mail messages Mr. Manson has sent to bloggers are structured like typical blog postings, with a pungent sentence or two introducing a link to a news article or release. John McAdams, a political science professor at Marquette University who runs the Marquette Warrior blog, recently posted three links about union activity in the same order as he received them from Mr. Manson. Mr. McAdams acknowledged that he worked from Wal-Mart's links and that he did not disclose his contact with Mr. Manson. "I usually do not reveal where I get a tip or a lead on a story," he said, adding that journalists often do not disclose where they get ideas for stories either. Wal-Mart has warned bloggers against lifting text from the e-mail it sends them. After apparently noticing the practice, Mr. Manson asked them to "resist the urge," because "I'd be sick if someone ripped you because they noticed a couple of bloggers with nearly identical posts." But Mr. Manson has not encouraged bloggers to reveal that they communicate with Wal-Mart or to attribute information to either the retailer or Edelman, Ms. Williams of Wal-Mart said. To be sure, some bloggers who post material from Mr. Manson's e-mail do disclose its origins, mentioning Mr. Manson and Wal-Mart by name. But others refer to Mr. Manson as "one reader," say they received a "heads up" about news from Wal-Mart or disclose nothing at all. Mr. Pickrell, the 37-year-old who runs the Iowa Voice blog, said he began receiving updates from Wal-Mart in January. Like Mr. Beller, of Crazy Politico, Mr. Pickrell had criticized the Maryland legislature over its health care law before Wal-Mart contacted him. Since then, he has written at least three postings that contain language identical to sentences in e-mail from Mr. Manson. In one, which Mr. Pickrell attributed to a "reader," he reported that Wal-Mart was about to announce that a store in Illinois received 25,000 applications for 325 jobs. "That's a 1.3 percent acceptance rate," the message read. "Consider this: Harvard University (undergraduate) accepts 11 percent of applicants. The Navy Seals accept 5 percent of applicants." Asked in a telephone interview about the resemblance of his postings to Mr. Manson's, Mr. Pickrell said: "I probably cut and paste a little bit and I should not have," adding that "I try to write my posting in my own words." In an e-mail message sent after the interview, Mr. Pickrell said he received e-mail from many groups, including those opposed to Wal-Mart, which he uses as a starting point to "do my own research on a topic." "I draw my own conclusions when I form my opinions," he said. Mr. Pickrell, explaining his support for Wal-Mart, said he shops there regularly and is impressed with how his mother-in-law, a Wal-Mart employee, is treated. "They go real out of their way for their people," he said. Wal-Mart's blogging initiative is part of a ballooning public relations campaign developed in consultation with Edelman to help Wal-Mart as two groups, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, aggressively prod it to change. The groups operate blogs that receive posts from current and former Wal-Mart employees, elected leaders and consumers. Edelman also helped Wal-Mart develop a political-style war room, staffed by former political operatives, which monitors and responds to the retailer's critics, and helped create Working Families for Wal-Mart, a new group that is trying to build support for the company in cities across the country. At Edelman, Mr. Manson, who sends many of the e-mail messages to bloggers, works closely on the Wal-Mart account with Mike Krempasky, a co-founder of RedState.org, a conservative blog. Both are regular bloggers, which in Mr. Manson's case means he has written critically of individuals and groups Wal-Mart may eventually call on for support. Before he was hired by Edelman in November, Mr. Manson wrote on the Human Events Online blog that members of the San Francisco city council were "dolts" and "twits" for rejecting a proposed World War II memorial and that every day "the United Nations slides further and further into irrelevance." After he was hired, Mr. Manson wrote that the career of Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was marked by "pointless indecision." Wal-Mart declined to make Mr. Manson available for comment. Ms. Williams said, "It is not Wal-Mart's role to monitor the opinions of our consultants or how they express them on their own time." In a sign of how eager Wal-Mart is to develop ties to bloggers, the company has invited them to a media conference to be held at its headquarters in April. In e-mail messages, Wal-Mart has polled several bloggers about whether they would make the trip, which the bloggers would have to pay for themselves. Mr. Reynolds of Instapundit.com said he recently was invited to Wal-Mart's offices but declined. "Bentonville, Arkansas," he said, "is not my idea of a fun destination."

WAL-MART STORES INC
BLOGS AND BLOGGING (INTERNET)
COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET


A Waiting Game on the Louisiana Water

Abstract: PORT SULPHUR, La. — These waters have been closed longer this time than anyone here can remember. At the Myrtle Grove Marina, , Capt. Dave Marino had been expecting six bookings on Sunday at $575 a pop. But instead of fishermen, his shrunken customer base now includes journalists and experts, like a marine biologist from Auburn University , who want a firsthand look at the devastation that many of the boat operators view as far worse than a hurricane. Although lives were lost in Hurricane Katrina , Captain Dave, 41, believes that his livelihood may be gone forever. “I’d rather have another hurricane than this,” he said as he motored past the oyster beds — now all closed — places he has known since childhood. He stopped by an inland marsh to examine the grass at the edge of the water, which has turned a murky brown. “With a hurricane, you know when it hits and what the damage is and what you’ve got to fix,” he said. “With this spill, the only answer is to wait.” There is plenty of time to ponder haunting questions. How many gallons of oil have already leaked into the canals leading out to the gulf? To the naked eye, the effects of the spill are still seen only sporadically, when the oil washes up in big patches despite the miles of boom that have been placed offshore. How many more months will the oyster beds remain closed? After Hurricane Katrina, fishing resumed within a few days. Will there be any shrimp or oysters left? The Cajun Star, a shrimp trawler, cruised by with its green nets hoisted on deck. Captain Dave tore a single blade of sea grass and his fingers were coated with the sticky, rust-colored oil. “The best minds in the world are supposedly working on this,” he said, “but no one has seen anything like this before.” The seafood industry is Louisiana ’s largest private employer and pumps $2.4 billion into the state’s economy. BP recently gave the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board $2 million for public service announcements about the safety of the state’s fish and shellfish. But if fishing remains closed, there will soon be none from this area to eat. In the Bus Canal, a fishing camp named for a gray school bus whose engine died during a 1954 visit, Tony Mitchell had planned a crab boil for his grandchildren. Instead, he’s sitting on a cooler, drinking a Bud with two friends at a shack called Camp Blood Sweat and Beers. It is the ultimate man cave. Inside, CNN is broadcasting an update on the spill. Mr. Mitchell calls himself “the mayor of the Bus Canal.” “My margin of victory last time was 100 percent,” he told a visitor. He choked up when asked about the spill’s effect on the lives of his neighbors. “It’s unspeakable,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I’ve been through five hurricanes and now this.” As Captain Dave’s boat headed back to the marina, his 7-year-old son, Brandon, ran to greet him. The captain had expected to bring up his family on these same coastal waters. “Dad,” Brandon shouted, “you got oil on the front of your boat.”

Oil and Gasoline
Louisiana
Commercial fishing
Offshore drilling
Gulf of Mexico
Accidents and Safety
BP


Talks Continue at AT&T as 5 Contracts Expire

Abstract: AT&T said on Sunday that the company was continuing negotiations with a labor union after five contracts covering more than 80,000 of its workers expired on Saturday. The employees in the company’s wireline telephone business are still working under the terms of the expired contract, according to AT&T and the Communications Workers of America union. The union has authorized a strike but not yet called on workers to walk out. A contract covering an additional 32,000 employees in the Southeast regions had been part of the talks. But the company said that talks for that contract, which expires on Aug. 8, have now been postponed until July. Health care costs have been a major point of contention. AT&T says that its workers pay only 8 percent of their health care costs, similar to auto workers, but far less than the 34 percent it says average American workers pay. AT&T said that its goal was to achieve a “more market-based health care plan that continues to provide good health care coverage.” The union said in a statement that because the company was profitable even in the tough economy, it was “difficult to understand why AT&T is demanding workers to take on even more health care costs.” The union said that several of its districts had filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board accusing AT&T of refusing to provide “information necessary to resolve many outstanding issues.” “There has been little progress in the areas of health care, retirement security and employment security,” the union said.

AT&T Corp
Communications Workers of America
Organized Labor


Amid State Inquiry, Cigna Agrees to Revise Doctor Ranking Program

Abstract: Cigna Corporation has agreed to improve its rankings of physicians in response to an investigation of health insurers suspected of directing patients to cheaper doctors, according to the office of Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo . Cigna, a Philadelphia-based insurer, will report to the attorney general every six months and will use an outside monitor, Mr. Cuomo’s office said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. Programs to rank physicians on quality of care and fees have become more popular as health care costs have risen. Cigna offers its ranking service for doctors to policyholders in 28 states, Mr. Cuomo’s office said. The agreement is the first of its kind between a major insurer and a state attorney general, according to the statement. “Accurately measuring physician performance is an evolving and complex practice,” Mr. Cuomo said in the statement. “Today’s agreement creates greater transparency and accountability, and an oversight mechanism to ensure these principles are enforced.” Insurers have a profit motive to recommend doctors who charge less, not necessarily those who are most qualified, Mr. Cuomo has said. Patients who choose not to go to preferred doctors may have to pay more, he said. “Patients should always be able to trust that the information they receive on physicians is valid and reliable, but the integrity of this information can be undermined by a health insurer’s corporate profit motive,” Nancy H. Nielsen, president-elect of the American Medical Association, said yesterday in a statement. Cigna agreed to standards that include disclosing how doctors are ranked and providing a process for consumers to register complaints about the system. The new program also includes a way for doctors to appeal incorrect ratings, according to the statement. In addition, Cigna agreed to contribute as much as $100,000 to an independent organization to develop ways to make it easier for consumers to understand the ranking system, said Jeffrey L. Kang, the chief medical officer of Cigna, in the statement. “Our program is focused on providing actionable and meaningful information and is founded on clinical integrity to ensure comparisons are fair,” Dr. Kang said yesterday at a news conference. Mr. Cuomo’s inquiry began six months ago, and the investigation is continuing, Linda Lacewell, the head of Mr. Cuomo’s task force on the health care industry, said at the news conference. The attorney general’s office sent letters to Cigna and other major health insurers saying that their physician ranking programs were likely to confuse consumers. Mr. Cuomo’s office asked the insurers to explain how the plans comply with New York public health law and the methodology used, and to provide copies of any complaints from consumers.

Doctors
Ratings and Rating Systems
Health Insurance and Managed Care
Cigna Corp
Cuomo Andrew M


Minaya Looks Back to Assess What the Mets Need to Do Next

Abstract: On the day after, Omar Minaya looked back on everything that went wrong, and his gaze went right past Game No. 162 to a four-day stretch earlier this month when he said his “stomach dropped” because of injuries to two players. First, there was Damion Easley straining his right quadriceps while trying to beat a double-play relay. A few days later, in Washington, it was Fernando Tatis sustaining a season-ending separated shoulder on a seemingly routine dive in the outfield. For Minaya, the Mets ’ general manager, those two events were worth recounting as he talked to reporters at Shea Stadium and acknowledged the challenges inherent in strengthening a team that failed miserably in the final weeks for the second consecutive year. Beyond the predictable issues like overhauling a bullpen that was one of the worst in baseball, finding more starting pitching and deciding whether to re-sign free agents like Oliver Pérez (possibly) and Pedro Martínez (unlikely) or to exercise their option on Carlos Delgado (almost certainly), the Mets, Minaya suggested, will pursue a potent right-handed hitter to balance an unbalanced lineup that leans heavily to the left side. It was an imbalance that Easley and Tatis helped alleviate when they were healthy. But ideally, at this point in their careers, they would be bench players, not starters, as they often were for the Mets this season. Neither would qualify as the everyday right-handed hitter Minaya seems to want and of whom he now has only one in the lineup, in David Wright. “We have to ask ourselves, O.K., what is it? What is it that we’re missing?” Minaya said. “What is it that is lacking from us getting across that barrier to getting into the postseason?” While Minaya talked about his team, he had little information to shed on the status of Jerry Manuel, the interim manager who is widely expected to receive a contract extension, perhaps by the end of the week. “I don’t consider going through the process indecision,” said Minaya, referring to the consultations he is now having with the team’s ownership. “I think we owe it to ourselves to go through the process.” Manuel did receive an endorsement on Monday from Delgado, who showed up at Shea to clean out his locker. “He’s a great communicator, he’s upbeat and he keeps things simple,” Delgado told reporters, while also expressing his frustration about again falling short of the postseason. The best thing that Minaya can do for Manuel, of course, is to make the Mets better. They had an opening-day payroll of $138 million this season, and do not figure to have a lot of room to take on big salaries this winter, despite the $31 million that will come off the books with the expiring contracts of Moises Alou, Orlando Hernández, Pérez and Martínez. For one thing, the Mets will probably have to assume much of Luis Castillo’s four-year $25 million deal if, as they hope, they can trade him this off-season. If they can move Castillo, one potential replacement at second base is the rookie Daniel Murphy, a left-handed hitter whose .313 average and plate discipline has convinced team officials he is ready to play every day. Murphy played left field this season but will play second in the Arizona Fall League. If Murphy can make the position switch, Minaya could then seek a veteran right-handed hitter to play left. What that would mean for Fernando Martínez, the highly regarded outfield prospect, is unclear. He, too, is a left-handed hitter and, with two other young outfielders — Carlos Gómez and Lastings Milledge — having been traded last winter, it is possible Martínez could be traded, too. “Bottom line, we’re not playing this week,” Minaya said. “We have the talent to play this week, but we’re not playing this week. So we have to ask, why? And it’s not only this year, it’s last year.” With Wagner gone, the Mets, of course, also need a closer, but they still seem inclined to bypass the Francisco Rodríguez sweepstakes. Minaya will probably ship out Aaron Heilman and Scott Schoeneweis, both of whom had a lot of tough moments in the bullpen this year and probably need to go elsewhere. Of the starting pitchers, only Johan Santana, the currently injured John Maine and Mike Pelfrey are under contract, and it is possible that Pérez may price himself out of the Mets’ range by asking for $13 to $15 million a year. If Pérez leaves, Minaya may have the financial flexibility to pursue a durable starter like Derek Lowe, who is now with the Los Angeles Dodgers. And then there is that right-handed hitter he seems to want. “I think you have to start off by saying to yourself, Be open to everything, be open to everything,” Minaya said. “Don’t lock yourself in and say, We’re not going to consider that. I think we have to consider anything.”


Taking a Break From Outrage

Abstract: Five days a week, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union , spends his time considering the more gruesome aspects of the global war on terror. But even the most zealous government critic will tend to crave a quiet Sunday. Mr. Romero, 44, lives in Jersey City but often spends his weekends in the Hamptons, where he treats Sundays like “a religious holiday — in a civil libertarian sort of way.” EQUINE THERAPY I’ve got a little place on an old horse farm out there that’s divided into a property association and about 30 or so cottages. The fields are rented out to a polo player who has 15 horses, and in between coffee and brunch in the morning, I’ll feed the horses if they’re out. They’re in this field with beautiful wooden fences, and I’ll just rip up some grass and go to the fence. My favorite horse is Noche, a beautiful black horse from Argentina. Then there’s Casino and Pandora. I’m actually in the middle of trying to negotiate them a larger field. CHECK, PLEASE I always end up having brunch out because there’s no such thing as a good brunch at home. When I’m in the Hamptons, there’s a place around the corner I like, the first restaurant closest to my house, called Nichol’s. I’ll sometimes go to Cittanuova in town, which is more of a happening place, with a bigger group of people. KEEPING IT SELFISH Sundays are sacred to me, and I largely try to keep them as my own. I don’t do work meetings, I don’t meet donors and I only do media interviews if it’s “Face the Nation.” I’ll spend at least two hours with the Sunday Times. OTHER READING I just finished a history of Hadrian by Anthony Everitt. I’m a big ancient history buff. It was the time when the world was coming together. It was all about globalization before we had the Internet and international airline travel. But my favorite historical figure is Alexander the Great. He was just this complicated, fascinating, brilliant narcissist. WAFFLE AND A SHVITZ If I’m in the city on a Sunday, it’s pretty much the same routine except I go to a brunch place with great waffles or sometimes to Bouley Upstairs , where they have fantastic hamburgers. In the late afternoon, I’ll usually end up at the Russian-Turkish baths , on the Lower East Side, on East 10th Street. It’s where I get a platza, which is when the Russian guys beat you with oak leaves. Whenever someone wants to talk about civil liberties, I go into the cold plunge and they never follow me. SPARE THAT TREE Out in the Hamptons, I have a beautiful Russian sage, but my rhododendrons didn’t grow this year. My hydrangeas are gorgeous, but the deer love them too much. I’m trying to resuscitate a big fir tree. The landscaper told me to rip it up, but I said, “Come on, we’ll throw fertilizer on it, it’ll grow a new top.” Between the horses and the plants, it’s the furthest thing from worrying about Guantánamo, torture or indefinite detention. It really wipes the slate clean.

American Civil Liberties Union
Anthony D. Romero Anthony D.
Civil Rights and Liberties
Hamptons (NY)