Guarded Optimism as Cease-Fire Holds in East Ukraine

Abstract: BERLIN — Buoyed somewhat by the relative success of a two-week-old cease-fire in eastern Ukraine , the foreign ministers of Germany , France , Russia and Ukraine have urged fighters and mediators to build on that progress and withdraw weapons and remove land mines as well as prepare for local elections later this year. The four nations held what the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, described as one of their less confrontational meetings late Saturday, reviewing as they have on six previous occasions the state of a truce and overall accord that has never fully held or been carried out. While Mr. Steinmeier noted that every advance remained difficult and negotiators still had not agreed on the withdrawal of weapons, or how to hold elections in eastern Ukraine, he expressed guarded optimism that the leaders of the four countries would meet in Paris in early October. The success or failure of what is known as the Minsk accord, finalized in the Belarus capital, “stands and falls with the political will of the conflict parties to stick to the agreement reached in February,” Mr. Steinmeier said. The plan to meet next month proves that will endures, Mr. Steinmeier said. The meeting will be held Oct. 2, according to the office of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Russia’s Endgame in Ukraine How Russia aims to achieve its goal of keeping Ukraine isolated from the West. In another sign of a slight warming in relations with Moscow, both Mr. Steinmeier and the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, held talks on the sidelines Saturday night on the civil war in Syria, statements from their ministries said. The influx of refugees from Syria, Iraq and other conflict zones — and Russia’s reported military deployments in Syria — have lent renewed urgency to efforts by diplomats to end the fighting. At least four million Syrians have fled the conflict to neighboring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Tens of thousands of Syrians have joined a migrant march through the Balkans this summer in search of refuge and asylum in Western Europe. Mr. Steinmeier noted that Saturday’s session on Ukraine was the seventh time the foreign ministers had gathered to discuss the conflict there, which began in March 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine , and pro-Russian forces began battling Ukrainian soldiers in the east of the country. The death toll in the conflict is nearing 8,000 , the United Nations has said. Mr. Steinmeier noted after the talks, which lasted three and a half hours, that humanitarian aid was also sorely needed in the east. “We must already think of the coming winter,” he said. “We do not want a repeat of the humanitarian emergency of last winter.” The foreign ministers also appealed to the parties involved in the conflict to refrain from laying new land mines, and also remove or disable existing ones. For that, and for monitoring weapons withdrawals that were supposed to have occurred months ago, the parties must grant access to monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the four ministers said. The Russian news agency Interfax quoted both the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the Ukrainian foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, as expressing the same guarded optimism as Mr. Steinmeier after the talks on Saturday.

Ukraine
Russia
Germany
France
Military
Frank-Walter Steinmeier


Centrist Party in Israel Introduces Civil Union Measure

Abstract: JERUSALEM — Israel’s centrist Yesh Atid Party introduced civil union legislation on Tuesday that would give same-sex couples access to the rights of marriage and free heterosexual ones from the religious strictures imposed on marriage. Israel has no civil marriages, and some experts estimate that in recent years a quarter of Jewish couples have chosen to either marry abroad or live together without marrying rather than adhere to the chief rabbinate’s requirements for, among other things, proving Jewish ancestry. Hiddush, an Israeli group that promotes religious pluralism, recently placed Israel among the 45 nations in the world with “severe restrictions” on marriage ; most of the other 44 are governed by Islamic law. Arab citizens of Israel are married through either Christian or Islamic authorities, and encounter problems if they wish to marry outside their faith. Supporters of the rabbinate’s control over marriage, divorce and other family matters say it is essential for the unity of the Jewish people. Jewish law prohibits certain unions — for example, descendants of the ancient tribe of priests cannot marry divorced women — so allowing civil marriage could create problems for religious marriage in future generations. American Jewish leaders have strongly urged the adoption of a civil marriage law, fearing that many of their constituents would otherwise be unable to marry in Israel because their family histories do not fulfill the rabbinate’s requirements. The 15-page bill introduced in Parliament on Tuesday was careful not to use the word “marriage,” but would confer on couples in civil unions the same rights and benefits as ones who marry in religious ceremonies. Those eligible for such unions are defined as “two human beings” without regard to gender. It provides a way to dissolve the union, in a parallel to divorce. “We have no argument or clash with the religious establishment, but we do need to provide a civic solution for every person, Jew or non-Jew, gay or straight,” Yair Lapid, Israel’s finance minister and chairman of Yesh Atid, said in a statement. Legislation passed in 2010 provided a similar civil union arrangement, but only for couples who do not adhere to any religion, and it is rarely used. A separate bill passed this week loosened one rule that had required Jewish couples to be married by the Orthodox rabbis of the communities in which they live, but it still restricts which rabbis are sanctioned to perform ceremonies. The new bill faces an uphill battle. It is opposed by the Jewish Home Party, which like Yesh Atid is a member of the governing coalition.

Israel
Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage
Judaism
Marriage
Yesh Atid
Yair Lapid
Benjamin Netanyahu


A Brief History of Dimming the Lights on Broadway

Abstract: Q. Now that all the recent fuss has subsided over Broadway’s dimming (or not dimming) its lights for Joan Rivers , could you tell me who first received that honor? A. The tradition began in the 1950s, and started slowly. According to a 2013 article in The New York Post , house lights in all Broadway theaters were first dimmed in honor of Gertrude Lawrence , who died of viral hepatitis at age 52 in September 1952 while she was starring in the Broadway musical “The King and I.” (She had gone to a hospital right after appearing in a matinee in August, The New York Times reported .) The second honoree, according to Time magazine, was Oscar Hammerstein II in 1960, for whom theater marquees briefly dimmed in a Broadway blackout the likes of which had not been seen since World War II. The third honoree, according to Playbill , was the actor Alfred Lunt in 1977. A committee of the Broadway League, a trade association of Broadway theater owners and producers, decides who should get the honor; the marquees usually dim for one full minute at curtain time on a show night. Today, the tradition is much more common: Ruby Dee , Robin Williams , Philip Seymour Hoffman , Eli Wallach and Marian Seldes were among those honored this year, along with Ms. Rivers. Last month, the Broadway League, which had first decided not to dim the lights of its 40 theater marquees for Ms. Rivers, reversed itself after an outcry from individual theater owners and artists.

Theater
NYC
Gertrude Lawrence
Oscar Hammerstein II
Alfred Lunt
Lighting


Threats Test Obama’s Balancing Act on Surveillance

Abstract: WASHINGTON — President Obama has said he wants eventually to scale back drone strikes and steer the country away from a single-minded focus on counterterrorism. But in response to a vague yet ominous terror warning in recent days, his administration shut down nearly two dozen American embassies and consulates and waged an intense drone campaign in Yemen. American officials speak of the need for vigorous debate about controversial National Security Agency programs revealed by Edward J. Snowden, and Mr. Obama on Friday promised greater accountability to keep the surveillance state in check. Yet his underlying message was clear: the expansive monitoring of telephone and electronic communications would continue because the safety of the country depended on it. America’s war on terrorism may one day end, as Mr. Obama said in a speech in May, but until that happens the president has given every indication that it will be fought in much the same way it has for nearly 12 years. Even Mr. Obama’s promise of more transparency appeared to fail an instant test during his Friday news conference. Asked about the flurry of American drone strikes in Yemen, which have been reported by every news outlet, Mr. Obama demurred. “I will not have a discussion about operational issues,” he said. Mr. Obama, who ran for office in 2008 against what he described as the excesses of counterterrorism under President George W. Bush, has occasionally expressed ambivalence about drone strikes and aggressive surveillance. But with Republicans ever ready to pounce with accusations that he has made the country less safe, he has declined to abandon any of the tools used by his predecessor, with the sole exception of the brutal interrogation methods once used by the C.I.A. The government’s striking response to the reported terror threat in recent days has coincided with a wave of unprecedented skepticism about the N.S.A.’s sweeping surveillance programs since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures. When Mr. Snowden began releasing secret documents two months ago, Mr. Obama said he welcomed a debate on the trade-offs of N.S.A. surveillance and privacy. But the debate has grown far larger than administration officials anticipated, with lawmakers of both parties in Congress and half of Americans in polls calling for curbs on the agency. On Thursday, two small companies providing secure e-mail to customers added their voices. Lavabit and Silent Circle announced that they would shut down their e-mail services rather than give in to what they suggested was government pressure to make customers’ messages available to the N.S.A. In a message on his Web site , Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, said he was forced “to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.” He said he was prohibited by law from explaining what had happened over the last six weeks, but the suggestion was that he was fighting a government demand for access to the e-mail of one or more customers. Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have had a continuing, even escalating impact as journalists have continued to pore over them. On Thursday, for instance, The New York Times wrote that the N.S.A. was examining all e-mail messages in and out of the country and searching them for clues associated with terrorism or foreign intelligence. On Friday, The Guardian , the British newspaper that has published many of Mr. Snowden’s revelations, wrote about a clause in N.S.A. rules that permits the agency to search for Americans’ names and identifying information in data about foreign targets gathered from large Internet companies. In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Obama said he was satisfied that the N.S.A. programs were both necessary and respectful of Americans’ privacy. He acknowledged the “instinctive bias of the intelligence community to keep everything very close.” But he said he had urged America’s spies to err on the side of making more details public. “Let’s just put the whole elephant out there, and examine what’s working,” he said. On Friday evening, the State Department announced that nearly all of the embassies and consulates that had been closed this week would reopen on Sunday — with only the American Embassy in Sana, Yemen, remaining closed. The consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, will also stay closed, the result of what American officials said is a different threat from the one that had forced the closing of the other diplomatic posts. With intelligence agencies trying to piece together information about a terror plot allegedly discussed in recent weeks between senior Qaeda operatives, American drones delivered a flurry of missile strikes throughout Yemen. Eight strikes have been carried out in Yemen in the past two weeks, a ferocious rate of drone attacks rivaled only by the two-week period after a suicide bomber killed seven C.I.A. employees at a base in Afghanistan in December 2009. During his speech at National Defense University in May, President Obama said that targeted killing operations needed to be tightly constrained. The United States only carries out strikes against terrorists who pose a “continuing and imminent threat” to Americans, the president said, and only when it is determined it would be impossible to detain them, rather than kill them. And, Mr. Obama said, “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set.” It is yet unknown who exactly was killed in Yemen during the past two weeks. Therefore, it is hard to judge the recent strikes against those standards the president laid out in May. Specifically, did the dozens of people reportedly killed all pose a “direct and imminent threat”? And, with American officials fearing that an attack could happen at any moment, just how much care was taken before each strike to determine that no civilians were in the missiles’ path? At the very least, this extraordinary period of killing operations in Yemen has revealed just how much the president’s stated inclination to be more judicious about drone strikes is tested in a period of perceived crisis. Striking a balance between liberty and security is a leitmotif in many of President Obama’s speeches, and on Friday he spoke of “rebalancing” the ledger after the demands of more than a decade of war. But the changes he announced on Friday were incremental rather than radical — more of what he referred to as “tightening the bolts” rather than dismantling the machine itself.

Barack Obama
Government Surveillance
Terrorism
NSA
Drones
Lavabit
Silent Circle


Japanese Find Romance and Rituals Far From Home

Abstract: PARIS, Aug. 6 — The first time that Hirosha Watanabe and Naoko Shibuya entered a church was the giddy moment when they marched down the aisle, he in pearl gray tails and she in a frothy wedding dress, to the strains of the Wagner classic “Bridal Chorus.” They were joined at the altar of the American Church in Paris by a minister, an interpreter, a video maker and a photographer — the players in Japanese wedding packages for lavish Western ceremonies with traditional trappings. Most of the brides and grooms are more familiar with Shinto practices than Christian rites. But they are flocking to Paris and other romantic European locations in search of rituals, stained glass and bellowing pipe organs, all chosen from convenient online catalogs. So many Japanese wedding tourists are trading golden rings in the peak summer and autumn seasons that the interdenominational American Church enlisted retired pastors for the marriage ministry dominated by the couples. A towering Adventist church outside Paris and the American Cathedral, which offers Episcopal ceremonies, also perform large numbers of the ceremonies. “We view it as an outreach opportunity to offer a radical cross-cultural welcome from our perspective,” said Zachary Fleetwood, the dean of the cathedral, adding, “We find that couples are deeply moved and touched by the experience, and so are we.” These dream weddings — with prices from about $2,750 to $5,800 — are, in fact, fantasies. Few Japanese couples can establish the 40-day residency requirements for a legal French marriage, and most arrive on a 6:30 a.m. flight from Tokyo hours before their ceremonies. Instead, they marry in civil ceremonies in Japan and then head to the Parisian churches for “blessings,” “celebrations” or thanksgiving ceremonies. Wedding tourism companies are an established tradition in Japan. Hawaii remains the preferred destination, but lately officials there have started to fret about a softening in the romance market. Europe and the mainland United States have shared a small slice of the wedding travel market, but in an annual report on overseas honeymoons and weddings, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare indicated that Europe now holds about 2 percent of all the overseas ceremonies. About 20,000 couples had European ceremonies in the past year. The nuptial catalogs include details of fairy-tale castles in France and Switzerland and stone churches in London and Paris. The packages also include all the wedding basics — from white dresses and makeup and hairstyling to the grooms’ fresh white gloves. Some of the couples go overseas because at home, “They have to ask their friends and relatives to come to the ceremonies,” said Akihiro Hayashi, a Tokyo analyst for Ichiyoshi Research who tracks the dominant player, Watabe, and its competitor, Best Bridal. “They have to make plans for a party with the family that on average costs about $30,000, while they can pay about $10,000 for an entire overseas wedding and travel,” he said. Although American Church officials do not disclose the fees they receive, they said that wedding contributions amounted to about 15 percent of the church’s operating budget and that weddings of Japanese couples made up about 80 percent of the ceremonies. The Rev. Kenneth Stenman, a retired Lutheran pastor from Colorado, arrived this summer to take up duties as a minister to Japanese couples. On a Monday morning in July, he met two couples for the first time as they stepped out of a car with just minutes to establish rapport. “There are a lot of pastors in the States that won’t officiate at a wedding if you aren’t members of the church, but I never felt that way,” Mr. Stenman said. “I feel like it is a ministry, a service that I could provide for people, and in that contact with them, I can communicate a little bit of God’s love.” Mr. Stenman’s basic strategy, as with Mr. Watanabe and Ms. Shibuya on that Monday, is to provide a quick tour of the church and a brief meeting to explain rituals. Every time, he leans close to ask the couple a question that usually does not need Japanese translation. “Do you love her?” he asked, eyeing Mr. Watanabe, who burst out laughing and answered, “Yes!” “Do you love him?” Mr. Stenman turned to Ms. Shibuya, who nodded vigorously, shaking the pale roses pinned to her upswept hair. “Oh, yes!” Occasionally, couples like Kentaro Takanami and Kana Yamauchi know some English. “I used to live here in Europe before,” the new Mrs. Takanami said, brushing tears from her eyes as she left the church sanctuary in a rustling white train and a silver rhinestone crown and veil. “Since I was a kid, I always wanted to be married in Europe. And France is a very beautiful country.” The dominant wedding travel brokers are Japanese, and they are preparing for the future softening of the market with the aging of the Japanese population. Watabe, for instance, is prospecting for Chinese clients in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Some wedding agencies in France have formed their own trade group, Association Oui, with a Web site in English and Japanese that lists quality standards, pledging to provide only genuine ministers, not actors. But the wedding agencies and the association are cautious about discussing business. Perhaps that is because in London the Church of England was criticized a year ago for performing blessing ceremonies. Critics complained that wedding tourism transformed churches into theme parks for tourists. In Neuilly-sur-Seine, an affluent suburb on the edge of Paris, l’Église Adventiste de Neuilly is marrying Japanese couples almost daily. Members of the French Adventist church held a vote on the issue after Watabe approached officials several years ago, with a majority agreeing to allow “celebration ceremonies.” Bernard Cassard, a pastor who handles all of the ceremonies, said church members had decided that the ceremonies were a form of evangelism. He acknowledged, though, that the Seventh-day Adventist religion was stricter for its own members, refusing to perform weddings of Adventists to nonmembers. “It’s an occasion for us to know people who aren’t Christian,” Mr. Cassard said, sitting in the church’s leafy garden after the end of a ceremony. “The principle of the celebration is to give them a little teaching about Christianity.” He looked up at another resplendent Japanese bride and groom striding out the doors of his church. A photographer motioned to him. Wordlessly, Mr. Cassard moved out of sight of the camera lens.

Europe
Japan
Weddings and Engagements
Religion and Churches
Travel and Vacations
Paris (France)


Three Men to Watch at the U.S. Open

Abstract: Mardy Fish Every year or two, Fish , 28, will make a sensational run, then fall back to the tennis equivalent of the peloton. The rap against Fish was that he lacked the work ethic to reach the top. But after knee surgery last September, he embarked on a diet and conditioning program that made him stronger, faster and more agile. Seeded 19th, Fish can play serve and volley, can change pace, has height and spin on his ground strokes, and can defend to extend points. Add in his superb serve, and Fish is a real threat, a fit player with weapons, surging confidence and a crowd-pleasing persona. David Nalbandian Nalbandian returned to the tour after hip surgery and relatively quickly earned the 31st seed. His comeback was accelerated by his surprising title in Washington this month. Ranked outside the top 100 at the time, Nalbandian marched through the draw, defeating another player mounting a comeback, Marcos Baghdatis. At his best, Nalbandian is capable of sublime play, with impressive wins over Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in his career, and a Wimbledon runner-up finish in 2002. At 28, Nalbandian seems to be playing with a renewed sense of urgency. Sam Querrey Querrey, seeded 20th, looks loose, relaxed and ready for the rigors of a grueling Grand Slam. Under the expert guidance of the coach David Nainken (who is also behind Mardy Fish’s resurgence), Querrey has climbed the ATP rankings, to No. 22. His results this year have been solid, with titles won on clay, grass and hardcourts. He beat Andy Murray in the final in Los Angeles last month. Querrey, 22, has built his ranking and tour reputation slowly, and he may be ready to make a statement at this year’s Open.

Tennis
United States Open (Tennis)
Fish Mardy
Nalbandian David
Querrey Sam


Monumental Piece of the Old, Old City of Petra

Abstract: Archaeologists have been combing the ancient city of Petra in southern Jordan for at least two centuries. Now, with drones and satellite imagery, they have discovered new features , including a monumental platform of nearly 30,000 square feet, or roughly half a football field. Pottery shards nearby date from the second century B.C. through the sixth century A.D. “It was large, significant given its location, and significant resources were used to construct it,” said Sarah Parcak , a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “But its exact function? We don’t know.”

Archaeology,Anthropology
Petra
Drones
Satellite
Sarah Parcak


Gnarly Moves and Shrewd Deals

Abstract: It was not the need for speed or the opportunity to impress girls that initially drew Rob Dyrdek to skateboarding. “I idolized my sister’s boyfriend,” Dyrdek said. “He wore four bandanas on each arm and each leg, and a spiked belt across his chest and waist. He was the sickest dude ever, and I was like, ‘If he’s a skater, I gotta be a skater.’ ” Dyrdek, now 37, began skating at 11, turned professional at 16 and quickly established himself as one of the world’s top street skaters. More recently, Dyrdek became a mainstream star with his hybrid sports/comedy/reality shows “Rob and Big” and “Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory” on MTV . His third MTV program, “Ridiculousness,” will make its debut Monday. On his shows, Dyrdek ricochets around his 25,000-square-foot office space filled with oversize toys, like a foam pit and a zip line, almost like Tom Hanks in “Big.” He also has a hand in everything from clothing lines to a cartoon series, and has nearly 1.3 million Twitter followers. Currently taking precedence in Dyrdek’s ever-growing empire is Street League Skateboarding , a national tour of the world’s top street skateboarders. Thus far this season, 16-year-old Nyjah Huston has won all three stops for a total of nearly $500,000 in prize money. The championship event was scheduled for Saturday afternoon at Prudential Center in Newark. Q. You have so much energy on your television shows, I always suspect you must be hopped up on energy drinks. A. I would like to think I’m a caffeine-driven visionary. But for the most part, those are these isolated moments where I know we’re about to do something fun or crazy. Most of the time, I’m so serious with the stuff I do in my normal life. It’s almost like the television stuff is an outlet to be crazy. Q. Do you come up with a lot of the stuff for the shows on the fly? A. What I like to do is create sandboxes, where I know what I’m doing but I don’t know what’s going to happen. So you’re the only one that goes in kind of knowing — everyone’s reacting around you, nobody’s acting around you. It can be grueling, because you take six months to shoot 10 episodes. I’ve got so many businesses and different things I do, so I shoot four days a week, from 11 to 6. It still gives me decent time to take meetings in the evening, meetings in the morning; I handle my creative stuff for the show on Wednesdays. It’s relatively controllable. And then I work a lot on the weekends. Q. On your Web site, you refer to yourself as a serial entrepreneur. A. I’ve learned a lot about developing and creating brands, and as I’ve gotten older, how to find the right partners. You can build something really big because you’ve put all the right people in place. So for me, from the sunglasses I’ve got coming out to this weird little jewelry line to the burrito line ... Q. Wait, burritos? A. Yeah, I’ve got a lot of random companies. The next step is just sitting down with smart V.C.’s and angel investors, true business-thinking entrepreneurs, because I’ve always financed everything myself. Q. What’s the best thing you ever spent your money on? A. What I would consider the best thing was a hyperdimensional resonator — that’s a time machine — which I bought off the Art Bell radio show. I bought it from a gentleman named Steven Gibbs, who I listened to for like three hours talking about his time travel machines. I was like: “O.K., whether it works or not, this guy is dead serious that he sells time machines. I’m buying one.” Cost me $375, and you wear wires around your head and you put a magnet on your chest, and you think about the date you want to go to. I still consider that one of my finest purchases. Incidentally, it never worked. Q. On TV, you always seem to be having fun. A. I get to do insane things. I got attacked by a tiger. I got attacked by a shark. I got to jump a car 100 feet. I got to create a car that was like a skateboard and jump it 40 feet to grind on a rail. I jockeyed a horse in a horse race. It allows me another creative outlet besides my true passion, which is business, and second to that is skateboarding. Q. Have you always had an interest in business? A. When I was like 16, I knew my career would be in business. I started my first company when I was 18. Despite all the fun and chaos of “Rob and Big” and “Fantasy Factory,” there’s always been a giant business hustle behind it, with all these steps sort of in line with what I’ve been doing. I already had Street League mapped out before “Rob and Big” ever hit the air. It was just a matter of building and learning and refining. I used all these brands I had relationships with to sell brand integration. That basically set the model for how I’d do “Fantasy Factory.” Then I used those relationships to sponsor my league when I launched my league. It kind of just helped everything keep going. Q. What exactly is Street League? A. The biggest athletic alternative to organized team sports in the world is skateboarding. If you don’t fall into that team sports mold but you’re athletic, you become a skateboarder. So it’s creating a place for those guys to shine, to cross over to the mainstream in an easily understandable format. Q. Instead of a team sport, it’s almost like the PGA Tour or tennis circuit, where individuals are competing to see who is the best on any given day. A. It’s similar to that. But the business model is more of the U.F.C. model, where you sign with the League and you skate in the League only, where the PGA and the ATP are more organized bodies that have events all over the world. But it’s so great because you have the best in the world all in one place battling it out, and doing the gnarliest streetboarding anyone’s seen. Now it’s a matter of building our stars through shoulder programming and awareness. Building a niche sports property and taking it to the mainstream takes a decent amount of time. Q. What makes Street League different from previous skate competitions? A. One of the problems in the past was you’d turn on skating on TV and you had no idea what’s going on — just a bunch of bailing out you can’t even follow. Now it plays much like a traditional sports game. There’s three periods and you’re accumulating points all the way to the end. And it leads to a single moment, the way team sports lead to a single moment. It’s the last-second field goal, it’s Kobe’s game-winning shot. It comes down to a single moment, which is a true sports story moment. Q. So with Street League, are you the executive producer? The commissioner? A. There isn’t a title for it. I nitpick the script of how the show is going to go, we pick apart every aspect of the Web site, every last thing. Q. How were you able to get the prize money together? A. Because it was a hard-core thing. Doing events is incredibly expensive, and where you can save the most money is in what you pay the athletes. Why should you pay a $500,000 purse when your event costs you $1 million? Why should you pay $500,000 when you could pay $100,000? I built this thing specifically making sure you get paid the most, what you’re worth. And the bigger I make the whole thing, we’ll have the first million-dollar payday. To me, that’s just a matter of growing it and getting it there. And it’s growing. Last year, we averaged 5,000-6,000 people per event; this year, it’s about 8,000-9,000. We’re going straight to the top, and every event, the stakes are so high for these guys. Q. You want to eat? You’ve been talking nonstop. A. I know, I get fired up. I haven’t even had any coffee today.

Skateboarding
Skateboards
MTV Networks
Athletics and Sports
Dyrdek Rob


European Union Signs a Pact on a Pipeline for Gas From the Caspian Sea

Abstract: PRAGUE — The European Union signed an energy agreement on Friday aimed at speeding up the construction of a long-delayed pipeline that would bring gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe and help offset the bloc’s dependence on Russian energy. The agreement, signed by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Egypt at a summit meeting in Prague, centers on the 2,000-mile Nabucco pipeline, which would bring Central Asian gas to Europe without passing through Russian territory. The European Union hopes the pipeline will start pumping gas to Europe by 2014. The pressing need to find an alternative to Russian supply was underlined in January when a pricing dispute between Russia and Ukraine resulted in a shortage of gas supplies in several European countries. Turkey, whose cooperation is essential for the pipeline, has haggled for months over transit rules. It indicated on Friday that it was prepared to sign a transit deal by June. But Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul , also made it clear that his acquiescence would depend on some progress in Turkey’s talks on membership in the European Union, which have stalled in recent months. Diplomats said representatives of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan refused to sign the agreement because of pressure from Russia, which supplies one-fifth of Europe’s gas. The Kremlin views the Nabucco pipeline as a potential geopolitical challenge , and it has sought to frustrate its developers at every turn. But the recent decline in energy prices has weakened its influence with the gas producers, creating more of an opening for the West. Nabucco would supply up to 31 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually — about 5 percent of the European Union’s gas needs.

European Union
Pipelines
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Prague (Czech Republic)
Gul Abdullah


Cargill to Acquire EWOS, Norwegian Fish Feed Supplier, for $1.5 Billion

Abstract: LONDON — Cargill said on Monday that it had agreed to acquire EWOS, a supplier of feed for salmon and trout farms, from its private equity owners for 1.35 billion euros, or about $1.5 billion. The deal would be the American food and agriculture giant’s first entry into the salmon market, making it a leading supplier to salmon farms as it expands its aquaculture business, Cargill said. It is Cargill’s second deal related to operations serving fish farms in recent months. In July, Cargill announced a $30 million joint venture with Naturisa to build a shrimp feed facility in Ecuador. The EWOS transaction “is a strategic investment in our long-term growth and evidence of our commitment to the growing aquaculture industry,” David W. MacLennan, the president and chief executive of Cargill, said in a news release . The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close by the end of the year. EWOS, which is based in Bergen, Norway, produces more than 1.2 million metric tons of fish feed a year and accounts for one-third of the world’s market for salmon and trout feed. Founded in Sweden in 1931, EWOS posted operating revenue of 11.6 billion Norwegian kroner, or about $1.4 billion, in 2014 and employed more than 1,000 people. As part of the transaction, Cargill would acquire seven feed manufacturing facilities in Canada, Chile, Norway, Scotland and Vietnam, as well as two research and development centers. Altor Equity Partners and Bain Capital acquired EWOS from the Norwegian fish farming group Cermaq in 2013 in a deal that valued the business at about 6.5 billion kroner.

Cargill
Mergers and Acquisitions
Fish farming
Salmon
Private equity
Bain Capital
Cermaq
Bergen Norway


Now, a Little Respect for Extinct Monsters of the Deep

Abstract: Here is a quick paleontology quiz. Which group of animals included large, air-breathing predators up to 50 feet long that bore live young, dominated their world for more than 100 million years and were ultimately exterminated by an asteroid 65 million years ago? Easy, right? Did you say dinosaurs? Sorry, wrong answer. But it was a trickier question than it may have appeared. The correct answer is marine reptiles, which at the time of the last great extinction included mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and pliosaurs. The key clue in my question was “bore live young.” Unlike the dinosaurs, which were terrestrial and laid eggs, marine reptiles were fully aquatic and bore live young. This latter combination was no coincidence. Despite their awesome size and abundance in the fossil record — their bones were among the first to be recognized as fossil remains of extinct creatures — marine reptiles have long played second fiddle to their much more famous saurian cousins. But if we humans were aquatic creatures, we would have a whole lot more respect for these other reptiles. They were the top predators of Cretaceous seas. Thanks to their prevalence, scientists have figured out a lot about them, particularly recently. This includes, most remarkably, insights into their genetics — something that is not even preserved in the fossil record — and what it took to transform ordinary lizards into extraordinary sea monsters. The first scientific description of a fossil marine reptile was of a beast discovered in 1764 by workmen in an underground limestone quarry near Maastricht, in the Netherlands. It took a long time for the identity and significance of the bones to be realized. At first mistaken for a crocodile, fish or whale, the creature was pilfered by the French Army when it seized Maastricht in 1795. The fossil was eventually recognized as something entirely different and named Mosasaurus (“Mosa,” Latin for the Meuse River, near Maastricht, and “saurus,” meaning lizard). Mosasaurs and other marine reptiles were center stage in the growth of the fossil record in the early 19th century. Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs like those discovered by young Mary Anning in the Lyme Regis area of Dorset, in southern England, were displayed in museums across Europe. Marine reptile fossils have been found across the globe, from Africa to Australia, and even Antarctica, a distribution that documents their long success. The first report of the creatures in the American West was from the Lewis and Clark expedition, which encountered a large skeleton in 1804 while voyaging up the Missouri River in Sioux country. It, too, was initially misidentified as a fish, even though at a reported 45 feet long, that would have been one heck of a fish. Indeed, the name ichthyosaur means “fish lizard” and describes the streamlined body form that resembled large fish and sea mammals like dolphins. Extinct marine reptiles also exhibited another important similarity to all sea mammals: they bore live young. We know this because among the plethora of fossil skeletons that have been unearthed are specimens of female ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs and other extinct marine reptiles preserved in the act of giving birth, with their young emerging tail-first, just as baby whales, dolphins and manatees do; doing so prevents the air-breathing young from drowning. The bearing of live young distinguishes the marine reptiles from many other reptiles that lay eggs, like lizards and snakes, as well as dinosaurs. Even reptiles that spend most of their time in water, like crocodiles, sea turtles and marine iguanas, must come to land to lay eggs. This is because gas exchange through the eggshell is too slow underwater to allow the young to develop. Interestingly, the only living reptiles that spend their entire lives in water, Hydrophiidae, true sea snakes, all bear live young. So there appears to be a simple requirement for reptiles to be fully aquatic: to bear live young. But that precludes another common reptilian trick, the control of the determination of the sex of their young by the temperature at which eggs are incubated. In crocodiles, the majority of sea turtles and some lizards, the temperature of the environment surrounding their eggs governs whether the hatchling is male or female, as opposed to the presence of distinct sex chromosomes as in many other species. Since live-bearing reptiles are not able to regulate sex through incubation temperature, this fact raises the question of whether there is a link between the evolution of giving birth to live babies, and the control of sex by genetic means. Chris Organ and Daniel Janes of Harvard, and Andrew Meade and Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, in England, recently examined 94 living species of reptiles, birds and mammals and found that, indeed, there was a very strong link . The genetic control of sex appears then to be a crucial prerequisite to evolving live birth. Given that link, the scientists then investigated whether they could infer how sex was controlled in ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs and other lines of extinct marine reptiles, each of which evolved from a different ancestor and at different times. Using sophisticated statistical tests, they concluded that, indeed, genetic control of sex was likely to have operated in each group. The point of the study was not so much the feat of inferring the genetics of long-extinct creatures, but of understanding the steps involved in evolving a fully aquatic lifestyle. Once the genetic control of sex evolved, so could live birth. And with live birth, these animals were freed of the obligation to return to land to nest. That freedom allowed them to evolve large body size, and the fins and fluked tails that made them efficient swimmers. They dominated the open seas.

Reptiles
Paleontology
Fossils
Dinosaurs
Science and Technology


A Queens Shop Where Mozart Sonatas Come With the Fish Specials

Abstract: In Whitestone, Queens, there is a tiny fish store that thinks it is a music store. Its name is Porgy & Bass, and it is owned by a 61-year-old woman named Jane Cho, whose love of Gershwin is obvious. But her main man is Mozart, and one of his violin concertos filled the cramped shop on Wednesday evening as Ms. Cho was closing. Musical witticisms were written on the handwritten sign offering fish specials. Fish dumplings were being sold by the “ensemble”; one could buy a “solo” portion or a “chorus” portion. On the shelves, the Old Bay seasoning shared space with a Mozart biography. Stray display signs — Stuffed Clams $2.39; Sea Scallops $11.99 — lay next to Pavarotti recordings. A small portrait of Beethoven hung next to the Board of Health certification. Ms. Cho, a Korean immigrant, said she opened the place five years ago and named it after the Gershwin opera. “I really want to run a music store, but I don’t have the money to open one,” she said. With the fish store, she has an affordable rent and simply has to drive her car in the early morning to the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. She has two grown daughters. “I don’t have many customers, but they are good customers,” she said. “I make just a living. I don’t expect anything more than that.” Ms. Cho says she has worked seven days a week, with never as much as a day off in five years. The shop is her oasis, she said, a place constantly filled with classical music, sometimes that of her daughters — Yuri, 29, and Yumi, 26 — who are distinguished violinists with successful professional performance careers. Both are Juilliard graduates and now live in California, where they teach master’s students in conservatories. Yuri also plays with the Afiara String Quartet , based in San Francisco. Ms. Cho initially immigrated from Korea to Edmonton, Alberta, in the 1970s, and she had her daughters taking piano and violin lessons by age 3. “I showed them the scales I knew on piano,” she said. “That major is happy and minor is sad.” In 1996, when the girls were teenagers, their father died suddenly of a heart attack. With little money, Ms. Cho moved with the girls to Manhattan and got them auditions to enter Juilliard on scholarship, she said. They studied with the prominent violin teacher Dorothy DeLay. Ms. Cho secured a cheap apartment in Washington Heights and worked various jobs to support them. But the recession has hit Ms. Cho. Last year, she could no longer afford the rent in Washington Heights and moved into a furnished room in the home of a Korean family in Flushing, Queens, closer to her shop, where she displays CDs and other items from her daughters’ careers. Recently, she decided it was too costly to keep her large display cases stocked with ice and fresh fillets, so she consolidated the frozen fish into two freezers. The king crab legs are stuffed next to the boxes of shrimp and fillets. Whitestone is still heavily Italian, and during Christmastime, customers place big orders for shrimp and clams, Ms. Cho said. Despite her daughters’ lofty careers, they return to New York at Christmastime to help her handle the rush, Ms. Cho said proudly. She put on Yumi playing Mozart’s violin sonata in A major with a pianist; then Yuri’s quartet playing a Mendelssohn piece for strings. From a display shelf, she took down her daughters’ childhood violin case and opened it. Inside were the small fiddle and some Mickey Mouse stickers and old doodles of Beethoven’s name — in bubble letters with feet. Ms. Cho said she can always differentiate her daughters’ playing on a recording, having listened to them practicing all these years. In the home she shares in Flushing, she teaches the family’s small children the scales she knows on piano — major feels happy and minor feels sad. “It reminds me of teaching Yuri and Yumi,” she said. “I’m lonely, but I can manage. Music is my friend now.”

Classical Music
Queens (NYC)
Immigration and Emigration
Korean-Americans


U.S. to Resume Training Georgian Troops

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The United States is resuming a combat training mission in the former Soviet republic of Georgia to prepare its army for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, despite the risks of angering Russia , senior Defense Department officials said Thursday. The training effort is intended to prepare Georgian troops to fight at NATO standards alongside American and allied forces in Afghanistan, the Pentagon officials said. Russian officials have been informed, American officials said. The training should not worry the Kremlin, they said, because it would not involve skills that would be useful against a large conventional force like Russia’s. “This training mission is not about internal defenses or any capabilities that the Georgians would use at home,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. “This is about the United States supporting Georgia’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan, which everybody can recognize is needed and valued and appreciated.” At the same time, officials in Washington said, the Georgians should not see the new training mission as a military counterweight to Russian influence along Georgia’s borders and within the separatist regions they fought over. A year ago, the republic’s brief, disastrous war with Russia froze a similar American training operation that prepared Georgian troops for deployments to Iraq. The new training mission is scheduled to begin Sept. 1. The first members of a Marine Corps training and advising team are to arrive in Georgia on Sunday or Monday, and the number of trainers will fluctuate between 10 and 69 over the next six months. Georgia has pledged an army battalion — about 750 troops — to Afghanistan, and it should be ready to deploy next spring, perhaps by March. It is unlikely that Kremlin officials could offer a convincing argument that training a single Georgian Army battalion amounted to a threat to Russian security. But the new training could be seen as a launching pad for increased military relations among Washington, NATO members and a former Soviet republic that aspires to NATO membership. The Kremlin vehemently opposes any extension of NATO’s defensive umbrella over former Soviet republics, in particular Georgia and Ukraine. At the same time, some NATO officials view Georgia’s behavior before the war last year as needlessly provocative, and have said it harmed the country’s chances for alliance membership. Shortly after taking office, President Obama ordered the doubling of American forces in Afghanistan, to about 68,000, and the administration has sought, with little success, to persuade NATO allies to add to their combat forces. In contrast to some NATO allies that impose restrictions on where their forces can go and what they can do in Afghanistan, the Georgian military will send its troops with none of these so-called caveats, a decision viewed by American officials as intended to indicate Georgia’s worthiness for potential alliance membership. Officials said Georgia’s troops would probably be assigned to operations in areas of Afghanistan under Marine command, so the training mission begins that partnership. The United States has so far rebuffed requests from Georgia to rearm its military after its humiliating defeat by Russia. When the war began, Georgia recalled an army brigade serving in Iraq and never sent it back, and the Americans training the Georgians returned home. Georgian troops that join the Afghan mission will bring their own small-caliber weapons, but the United States and other allies will supply vehicles, including armored transports, as well as logistical support and daily supplies, according to senior Defense Department officials. Any weapons provided to the Georgians would stay in Afghanistan, the officials said. Some military ties between the United States and Georgia resumed after the war with Russia, but they focused on officer development, improvement of command-and-control systems, and other such areas, officials said. There have been visits by senior American military officers and government leaders — most recently Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — and NATO has conducted some military exchanges. Administration officials familiar with discussions with Russia said American officials emphasized that Russia had endorsed the international security assistance mission in Afghanistan. For example, Russia allows overflight rights and land access for the coalition supply mission for Afghanistan. A senior Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to describe the diplomatic communications with Russia, acknowledged that “this is delicate for us — because while we want to be supportive of the Georgians, and look forward to their contribution in Afghanistan, we don’t want to be perceived incorrectly as supplying lethal capabilities that would elicit a Russian response.”

United States Defense and Military Forces


Fatal Attacks Strike a Hotel in Somalia

Abstract: MOGADISHU, Somalia — At least six people were killed and many more were wounded after consecutive car bombings and an attack by armed militants at a hotel in Mogadishu on Wednesday evening, officials said. A vehicle loaded with explosives crashed into a police car outside the gate of the Jazeera hotel and exploded. That was followed, the authorities said, by another blast in the middle of the rescue operation. Then, gunmen rushed toward the hotel and a firefight broke out between them and the police, according to Gen. Abdihakin Dahir Saacid, the police chief. He told the state news media that the police had foiled the raid. “The first suicide car bomber hit at the back of a police car at the gate of the Jazeera hotel,” General Saacid said. “Another car loaded with explosives blew up during the rescue operation and the terrorist fighters trying to enter the hotel were killed on the spot.” The scene was sealed off soon after the attack. The authorities said that at least six people had been killed, though police sources said that number was likely to rise. Hospital sources said that at least 10 people had died. No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, despite threatening messages from the Islamist militant group Shabab broadcast on local radio stations in the previous 24 hours. The messages warned of attacks on government installations in Mogadishu on Dec. 31 and told civilians to stay away. The hotel, which is near Mogadishu’s airport, has long been favored by foreign visitors, and government officials frequently gather there. In September 2012, three suicide bombers tried to assassinate Hassan Sheik Mohamud , Somalia’s newly elected president, as he was holding a news conference at the hotel with the visiting Kenyan foreign minister. Mr. Mohamud was not harmed, but an African Union soldier was killed. The bombs on Wednesday night went off as Somalis were still celebrating the New Year and after the prime minister, Abdiweli Sheikh Ahmed, visited the Defense Ministry and a military training camp, vowing that his government would bolster security.

Mogadishu
Fatalities,casualties
Al Shabab
Somalia


Movie Stirs Protest at U.S. Embassy in Cairo

Abstract: CAIRO (AP) — Ultraconservative Islamist protesters climbed the walls of the United States Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday and took down the American flag, replacing it with a black flag with an Islamic inscription to protest a movie attacking Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. Hundreds of protesters marched to the fortresslike embassy in downtown Cairo, gathering outside its walls and chanting slogans against the movie, whose origins are mysterious but which was reportedly produced in the United States. “Say it, don’t fear: Their ambassador must leave,” the crowd chanted. Dozens of protesters then scaled the walls of the embassy building, went into its courtyard and took down the flag from a pole. They brought it back to the crowd outside, which tried to burn it, but failing that, tore it apart. The protesters raised a black flag with a Muslim declaration of faith on it: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.” The flag, similar to Al Qaeda’s banner, is popular with ultraconservatives around the region. Nearly all the embassy staff members had left the compound before the protest, and the ambassador was out of town. The protest was a result of outrage over a movie being promoted by an anti-Muslim Egyptian Christian campaigner in the United States, clips of which are available on YouTube and dubbed in Egyptian Arabic. The video depicts Muhammad as a fraud, and shows him having sex and calling for massacres. Muslims find it offensive to depict Muhammad at all, much less in an insulting way. By evening the protest had grown, with thousands standing outside the embassy, chanting: “Islamic, Islamic. The right of our prophet will not die.” A group of women in robes and veils that left only their eyes exposed chanted, “Worshipers of the cross, leave the Prophet Muhammad alone.” Dozens of riot police officers lined up along the embassy walls. They did not stop protesters who continued to climb up the wall and stand on it, chanting. But by evening it appeared that the protesters were no longer going into the embassy compound. One member of the ultraconservative Salafi movement, Abdel-Hamid Ibrahim, said, “This is a very simple reaction to harming our prophet.” In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said the United States was working with Egyptian authorities to restore order. Embassy security officials sent most staff members home early on Tuesday after learning of the coming protest, said a United States official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. It was not clear who had made the film. Morris Sadek, an Egyptian-born Christian in the United States known for his strongly anti-Islam views, said in an interview from Washington that he was promoting the video on his Web site and on certain television stations, which he did not identify. He said the video “explains the problems of the Copts who suffer from Muslims,” for which he blamed the Koran. For several days, the Egyptian news media have been reporting on the movie, playing excerpts and blaming Mr. Sadek for it, with ultraconservative clerics going on the air to denounce it. Medhat Klada, a representative of Coptic Christian organizations in Europe, said Mr. Sadek’s views did not represent those of expatriate Copts. “He is an extremist,” he said in an interview from Switzerland. “We refuse any attacks on religions because of a moral position.” But he said he was concerned about the reaction from angry Islamists. “They don’t know dialogue and they think that Islam will be offended from a movie,” Mr. Klada said.

Diplomatic Service Embassies and Consulates


Criminal Past of Missing Painting’s Co-Owner Surfaces

Abstract: The lawsuit seemed destined to become a late-night television punch line: man gets drunk, claims he loses million-dollar painting, gets taken to court. The suit was filed on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan by Kristyn Trudgeon, a co-owner of the painting, “Portrait of a Girl” by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, valued at $1.35 million, according to the lawsuit. The other owner was identified as a man named Tom Doyle. As the lawsuit tells it, Mr. Doyle hired his friend and co-worker James Carl Haggerty to take the painting to a potential buyer. The next morning, Mr. Haggerty called Mr. Doyle and told him that he no longer had the painting and could not remember where he had been because he had had too much to drink. Ms. Trudgeon sued Mr. Haggerty, and one of her lawyers said he was suspicious of Mr. Haggerty’s explanation. But the case took a turn on Wednesday when it became known that Tom Doyle was Thomas Doyle, 53, who spent more than two years in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2007 to stealing from an art collector a bronze Degas statue of a nude dancer. The news forced Ms. Trudgeon’s lawyer, Max DiFabio, to abruptly withdraw the lawsuit, along with an offer of a $25,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the painting. Mr. DiFabio said that his client knew nothing of Mr. Doyle’s criminal background and that he would “pursue any and all legal remedies available to my client.” “We are concerned with regard to Mr. Doyle’s behavior,” Mr. DiFabio said. “I can’t say one way or another as to Mr. Haggerty’s involvement with Mr. Doyle.” Efforts to reach Mr. Doyle on Wednesday were unsuccessful. The police said that they had not been contacted about the case and that no investigation had begun. The lawsuit, reported by New York news media on Wednesday, said surveillance footage showed Mr. Haggerty leaving the Mark Hotel, at 77th Street and Madison Avenue, about 12:50 a.m. on July 29 with the painting after showing it to a potential buyer. About 2:30 that morning, security video from Mr. Haggerty’s building at a Trump property on Riverside Drive showed him entering without the painting, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Doyle was paroled from a New York State prison in December after serving his sentence for third-degree grand larceny in the theft of the Degas statue. In that case, he befriended Norman Alexander, a Manhattan art collector, in part by presenting him with a business card that identified him as a descendant of Joseph Duveen, later Lord Duveen of Millbank, a dealer who dominated the international art market during the 1920s and ’30s. Mr. Alexander had entrusted Mr. Doyle with a bronze sculpture of a dancer looking at the sole of her right foot, according to prosecutors. Mr. Doyle said he would buy the statue, worth about $600,000, but never paid Mr. Alexander all the money he was owed, prosecutors said, and sold the statue to an art gallery for $225,000. Before Mr. Doyle arrived in New York in 2001 — violating his federal parole in Kansas, the authorities said — he had been in trouble with the law. In the early 1990s, Mr. Doyle was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after stealing books from an art library at the University of Kansas, according to an article in The Kansas City Star. In 2000, he was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay more than $118,000 in restitution after stealing jewelry from a Tennessee woman, according to the authorities and court documents. Mr. Doyle’s parole in that case was revoked for failure to meet his probation officer and failure to pay restitution, according to court documents.

Suits and Litigation
Art
Collectors and Collections
Doyle Thomas
Trudgeon Kristyn
Haggerty James Carl
Robberies and Thefts


Michel Platini Is Ineligible for FIFA Presidency While Suspended

Abstract: Michel Platini will not be recognized as a candidate for FIFA’s presidency while he is under suspension, its executive committee ruled Tuesday in Zurich, although the ruling left the door open to his candidacy should the ban be lifted. Without mentioning Platini by name, the committee said candidates for the top job who are suspended were not eligible to run. But its statement also said that should a ban expire or be lifted before the election, such candidates could be reinstated by what it called the Ad Hoc Electoral Commission. Platini, the president of European soccer’s governing body, known as UEFA, was once considered the front-runner for the presidency of FIFA, which governs soccer worldwide. But he was suspended for 90 days this month at the same time as FIFA’s longtime president, Sepp Blatter, amid a corruption investigation by the Swiss. Both men have vigorously professed innocence. Domenico Scala, FIFA’s financial compliance chief, told The Associated Press that Blatter’s authorization of a payment to Platini without a written contract was a “classic conflict of interest.” FIFA also confirmed Tuesday that the election for a new president would take place Feb. 26, as scheduled. The executive committee said it welcomed recommendations by a reform committee that included term and age limits for the president. The full FIFA conference will consider the proposals in February. The reforms would also include more transparency for FIFA’s ethics committee. “The tone in the meeting today was good,” Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer, said of the executive committee’s meeting Tuesday. “We took some steps — small steps, maybe, but important steps in the right direction.” FIFA has been beleaguered over ethical matters for years, culminating in the indictments in May of nine top soccer officials by the United States on corruption charges. In June, after 17 years in office, Blatter, 79, said he would step down when a successor was elected. In September, Swiss investigators announced that they had opened criminal proceedings against him.

Soccer
FIFA
Michel Platini
Bribery and Kickbacks
Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance


The American League Wins the All-Star Game — Again

Abstract: Correction Appended ST. LOUIS — The National League must feel like the frustrated brother who cannot beat his brother when it plays the American League in the All-Star Game. The N.L. knows it is talented enough to win and knows it can win. But the A.L., the imposing brother, does not let it happen. Adam Jones hit a sacrifice fly to deliver the go-ahead run in the eighth inning, and a succession of relievers pitched seven shutout innings to power the A.L. to a 4-3 victory at Busch Stadium on Tuesday night. The A.L. increased its unbeaten streak to 13 (12-0-1), which simply added another year to an All-Star record. Most of the fans who flocked here wanted to see Albert Pujols dominate the show, but it was the A.L. that dominated. It was a different year with different players, but it was a familiar result. “They have talent, we have a lot of good talent,” said Mariano Rivera, who earned his record fourth All-Star save. “And I think we have a little bit of an edge. We have all those 12, 13 years. When you see that, it gives you more motivation to continue that streak.” That was not trash talking. It was Rivera’s realistic explanation. He worked a 1-2-3 ninth to finish off a stylish performance by the A.L. Other than a splurge of three runs and four straight hits in the second, the N.L. was mostly silenced. Before that rally, the A.L. retired the first five batters; afterward, the A.L. retired 18 in a row. Curtis Granderson’s hustle in the eighth helped the A.L. tame the N.L. again. After his shot to left-center field took a wicked bounce off the fence, Granderson figured that he could get a triple. He barely made it. But by reaching third with one out, Granderson was able to score the go-ahead run on a flyball to right by Jones. Still, Granderson said that was not his highlight. “The thing I’ll probably take away from this game is meeting Obama,” he said. On a night when President Obama wore a Chicago White Sox jacket to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, the league in which the White Sox reside prevailed. The N.L. has not won since 1996, although the teams tied in 2002. During an interview with Fox, even Obama wondered why the A.L. has been so superior. The victory gave the A.L. team the home-field advantage in the World Series. Derek Jeter, who scored on a double by Joe Mauer in the fifth to help the A.L. tie the score, 3-3, said he did not “even want to try to figure” out why the A.L. has been dominant. Like Granderson, Jeter said the thing he will most remember about the night was meeting Obama. “He said he was a fan,” Jeter said. “It’s kind of hard to believe when you think about presidents.” Jeter said Obama called him “the old guy” on the A.L., but Jeter reminded the president that he was not the oldest player. “He figured the rest out on his own,” said Jeter, who did not provide Obama with a birth certificate for 42-year-old Tim Wakefield. Brad Hawpe looked as if he might help the N.L. end their losing streak when he crushed a shot to left field in the seventh. But Carl Crawford retreated to the warning track, leaped and stretched his glove over the top of the fence to snare the ball. How impressive was Crawford’s catch? It was the reason he was named the most valuable player. Crawford said the A.L. players had a motto. “The one thing we say is don’t be the group that breaks the streak,” he said. In the eighth, the N.L. broke its hitless drought. Adrian Gonzalez walked with two outs, and Orlando Hudson hit a single to move Gonzalez to third. When Ryan Howard, who is from St. Louis, emerged from the dugout as a pinch-hitter, the fans rose and howled. If Pujols could not be the hero, maybe Howard could. Joe Nathan destroyed that chance by striking out Howard with a nasty 2-2 split-finger fastball. Before the game, Tim Lincecum, the N.L.’s starting pitcher, sat by his locker and spoke with reporters for at least a half-hour. Lincecum talked about everything, the surprising Giants, how he grips certain pitches, his shaggy hair. “I’m too busy to cut it right now,” Lincecum said. When a reporter asked Lincecum if he would like the N.L. to score a bunch of runs in the first inning so he could get an at-bat, Lincecum said he only cared about winning. Instead of the N.L. scoring in the first, it was the A.L. that scored off Lincecum. Ichiro Suzuki had a crisp single to right field and then Lincecum drilled Jeter in the hand with a pitch. Mauer cued a ball in front of the plate that Yadier Molina fielded and whipped to third for the first out. It was almost a double play, but David Wright’s throw to first was wide. When Mark Teixeira rapped a ball toward first, Lincecum probably thought he had at least one more out. But Pujols, a Gold Glove first baseman, failed to corral the ball and it rolled into shallow right field. Jeter scored. After Jason Bay singled to load the bases, Josh Hamilton’s fielder’s choice groundout drove in the second run. Before the N.L. had even batted, this All-Star Game was feeling a lot like the previous dozen. The A.L. starter Roy Halladay looked like his league’s best pitcher, but only for the first five batters of the game. Then the N.L. peppered him for four straight hits to score three runs and snatch a one-run lead. Wright blooped a two-out single over second baseman Aaron Hill’s head and advanced to second on Shane Victorino’s single. Molina, who was second to Pujols in receiving the most applause, slapped a single to center. Wright scored easily, so Hamilton tried to nail Victorino at third. The throw deflected off Victorino’s shoulder and into foul territory, which allowed him to scoot in with the second run. Prince Fielder, who won the Home Run Derby on Monday, came in as a pinch-hitter, an early sign that this was definitely an All-Star Game. Fielder flared a ground-rule double into the left-field corner to knock in Molina and give the N.L. a 3-2 edge. It did not last. It never does. The perennially frustrated brother was frustrated again.

Baseball
All Star Games
National League
American League
Pujols Albert
Obama Barack
Crawford Carl


European Leaders Tell a Dazed Britain to Get Going on ‘Brexit’

Abstract: LONDON — With British politics in turmoil, there were already clear indications on Saturday of a tense and bickering divorce from the European Union . Britons woke up to a diminished currency and much confusion about the consequences of their vote on Thursday to quit the European Union , including who would be their next prime minister. The leaders of the campaign to exit the bloc, or “Brexit,” continued to disagree over what kind of relationship they wanted with Europe, and thousands of Britons started signing a petition asking for a second referendum. Meeting in Berlin, European leaders told Britain to hurry up and begin the formal process of exiting the union, while Prime Minister David Cameron said that process could wait until his replacement was chosen in October and leaders of the “Leave” campaign suggested it could come even later, after a new round of talks with Brussels. “I do not understand why the British government needs until October to decide whether to send the divorce letter to Brussels,” Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, told German television. “I would like it immediately,” he said. “It is not an amicable divorce, but it was also not an intimate love affair.” The emergency meeting of foreign ministers from the European Union’s six founding states — Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — revealed impatience and exasperation with Britain. The Europeans want Mr. Cameron to start the legal process of quitting by immediately invoking Article 50 of the bloc’s governing treaty, which sets guidelines for severing ties and provides for a two-year window for talks. But nothing in the treaty requires Britain to invoke the article until it chooses, since it remains a full member, with all privileges and obligations, until it quits. The European Union has other considerable challenges, including the migrant crisis, Greece’s turbulent economy and sanctions on Russia over Ukraine. European leaders, looking at Spanish elections on Sunday and German and French elections next year, want the uncertainty around the British question resolved as soon as possible so they can try to show their own voters that Brussels is capable and on track. But the British have to decide what they want in a future relationship with the European Union, given the disagreement among the Brexit leaders, who are not a government. Mr. Cameron, humiliated and an opponent of leaving, clearly has no desire to bear the burden of those negotiations — both internally, within the divided Conservative Party, and externally, with other European leaders. His counterparts in Europe think he has damaged not only himself and his country, but also them, by energizing European populism and diminishing the bloc. Image Protesters on Downing Street in London on Friday, after Britain voted to leave the European Union. Credit Mary Turner/Getty Images The French are particularly impatient, with Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault saying on Saturday that negotiations on Britain’s departure from the bloc should begin soon. He warned that Mr. Cameron will face “very strong” pressure to accelerate the process when European leaders meet on Tuesday in Brussels, where Mr. Cameron is expected to be asked to leave the room when the others discuss their plans. The Europeans are also expected to cancel Britain’s six-month presidency of the council, which was to begin in July 2017. There is confusion about Britain, too. Mr. Ayrault said Saturday that “they must designate a new prime minister, which would certainly require several days.” In fact, the process will be considerably longer, because Conservative lawmakers must first agree on a leadership contest and decide when it will be. That contest will involve numerous ballots of Conservative legislators to winnow down candidates to two, and then the 150,000 or so registered members of the party (who had joined at least three months ago, to prevent infiltration) will vote by mail. Even so, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said at a news conference in Potsdam that it “shouldn’t take forever” for Britain to deliver formal notification of Article 50, “but I would not fight over a short period of time.” Ms. Merkel, trying to be conciliatory in the face of facts, said that she was seeking an “objective, good” climate in talks on Britain’s exit, and that there was “no need to be particularly nasty in any way in the negotiations; they must be conducted properly.” Already weakened politically by the migrant crisis , Ms. Merkel was expected to meet on Saturday with 20 top officials from her coalition government of center-right and center-left parties. But with elections coming, coalition unity is beginning to falter as the junior partner, the Social Democrats, seek to create their own profile for voters. The Scottish cabinet held an emergency meeting in Edinburgh on Saturday after the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon , said it was “democratically unacceptable” that Scotland should be removed from the European Union against its will. Scotland voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in the bloc, and Ms. Sturgeon, who leads the Scottish National Party that favors independence from Britain, reiterated after the meeting on Saturday that a second independence referendum was “highly likely.” She said Scotland planned to enter discussions with European Union institutions and European governments to protect its place in the bloc. Ms. Sturgeon said she would establish an advisory panel on the legal, financial and diplomatic implications of the vote. As Mr. Cameron’s announced resignation sank in, speculation abounded that Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and the most visible leader of the “Leave” campaign, was the favorite to replace him. But there were reports in British newspapers that Mr. Cameron and his deputy, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, were eager to keep Mr. Johnson from profiting from what they considered to be his betrayal and that they were organizing support for Theresa May, the home secretary. The Labour Party was also in turmoil, with a leadership challenge being organized against Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left legislator who was blamed for a halfhearted effort to keep Britain inside the European Union. In a speech in London on Saturday, Mr. Corbyn largely ignored the no-confidence effort. Instead, he told supporters that Labour would fight to ensure that its agenda was at the heart of discussions as Britain negotiated its exit from the bloc. He mentioned the importance of employment protections and human rights, said the referendum had laid bare divisions in the country over immigration and underlined the despair of those hit by austerity measures. “Today it’s important we learn from what has taken place,” he said. Asked if he would run again if his leadership was challenged, he replied, “Yes, I am here.” As markets plunged over the uncertainty, the credit ratings agency Moody’s lowered its outlook for the United Kingdom, citing the potential for weaker economic growth in the long, messy process of disentangling Britain from the European Union. The sense of shock was particularly acute in London, a cosmopolitan city and an important financial center, which reacted to the vote with anger, disappointment and even tears. “I was crying yesterday,” Camila Diehl, 26, who works for a cancer charity in London, said Saturday. “I just can’t believe this is happening. This is not the country I know.” Ms. Diehl, who has a Colombian mother and a British father, said she was worried about what the vote would mean for funding for scientific research. She is now questioning her future in Britain, she said. Mayor Sadiq Kahn, who supported “Remain,” took to Facebook on Friday, saying he wanted to “send a clear message to every European resident living in London — you are very welcome here.” “There are nearly one million European citizens living in London today, and they bring huge benefits to our city — working hard, paying taxes, working in our public services and contributing to our civic and cultural life,” he wrote. A petition calling for London to vote to join the European Union has drawn more 150,000 signatures, while a separate online petition calling for a new referendum had the support of more than 2.1 million people as of Saturday evening. And in the latest consequence of Britain’s vote to withdraw from Brussels, Britain’s highest-ranking European Union official — Jonathan Hill, the commissioner for financial services — resigned on Saturday.

Great Britain
EU
David Cameron
Brexit
Referendum
Boris Johnson
Angela Merkel


Ethics Panel Subpoenas Reporter in Scandal

Abstract: In an extremely rare move, the State Ethics Commission issued a subpoena this week to a reporter involved in the ethics scandal surrounding Gov. Eliot Spitzer , a signal that a full investigation into actions of the governor’s staff is under way. The subpoena calls for James Odato, a Statehouse reporter for The Times Union of Albany, to appear before the commission next week. A lawyer for the newspaper said it did not plan to cooperate. Mr. Odato wrote the July 1 story that broke news that Joseph L. Bruno , the Senate majority leader, had used state-owned helicopters and police cars for trips to New York City on days he attended fund-raisers. A subsequent investigation by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo’s office cleared Mr. Bruno and found that high-ranking aides to Mr. Spitzer had acted inappropriately by asking the State Police to gather information about the senator’s travels and providing it to Mr. Odato. The aides said they were only responding to a Freedom of Information Law request filed by the reporter. The subpoena also asks for any documents in the reporter’s possession related to Mr. Bruno’s state-financed travel, including communications between Mr. Odato and members of Mr. Spitzer’s staff. E-mail messages, telephone logs, story notes, written minutes, calendars and diaries are all included in the request, according to Mary Fran Gleason, managing editor of The Times Union. “The legal arguments are strong on our side,” said Eve Burton, general counsel for the Hearst Corporation, which owns The Times Union. Ms. Burton said that if necessary, the newspaper would fight the subpoena in court. Referring to Mr. Odato, she said, “We’ve told him that he’s not going to appear,” adding, “He made promises of confidentiality to a number of people, and he plans to keep those promises.” Many observers would be eager to hear testimony from Mr. Odato, who could likely shed light on some enduring questions surrounding the case. His interactions with Darren Dopp, Mr. Spitzer’s communications director, came under scrutiny in Mr. Cuomo’s report, which said Mr. Dopp devised the plan to tarnish Mr. Bruno. Mr. Dopp has been suspended without pay. Mr. Odato, reached yesterday on his cellphone, referred questions to Ms. Gleason. The publisher of The Times Union, Mark E. Aldam, said yesterday that he could not comment beyond Ms. Burton’s remarks. The subpoena of a reporter appears to be unprecedented in the two-decade history of the Ethics Commission. A spokesman for the ethics panel, Walter Ayres, said he could not recall a subpoena of a reporter by the commission in nearly 18 years. Karl J. Sleight, who stepped down in March as executive director of the commission after six years as its head, said he did not remember a similar incident during his tenure. “I don’t even recall a case where you would even have to consider the issue,” Mr. Sleight said. Several First Amendment groups said yesterday that a state-level commission issuing a subpoena to a reporter was basically unheard of. “What? It’s a state ethics commission?” asked Christine Tatum, national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, when told yesterday of the subpoena. “I’m sitting here going, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ ” Ms. Tatum said that subpoenas are normally issued by courts, and that ethics panels rarely resort to the device. “This is putting this journalist in a very difficult position, and one that the journalist absolutely should not be in,” Ms. Tatum said. “Most people have the sense to not subpoena a reporter,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “There’s almost always easier ways to get your information.” Mr. Ayres, the spokesman for the Ethics Commission, confirmed that the subpoena had been issued, but declined to comment further. “We pursue cases where they take us,” he said. Ms. Gleason of The Times Union said that some members of her paper’s staff might still have been unaware that the subpoena had been issued. “We didn’t make any big announcement,” she said.

Spitzer Eliot L
Ethics
Newspapers
Freedom of the Press
Ethics Commission
Times Union
Bruno Joseph L


Europe Tempers Hopes for Summit Meeting

Abstract: BRUSSELS — Hoping to force President-elect Barack Obama to act quickly, European governments on Friday called for development within the next 100 days of a plan to overhaul the global financial system. European Union leaders want an international summit meeting scheduled for next week in Washington to establish a swift timetable for strengthening the International Monetary Fund, reshaping financial governance and imposing greater regulation on the sector. While seeking to pressure Mr. Obama to address the issue early in his term, the 27 European nations whose leaders met here in Brussels nonetheless watered down several French proposals that would have pressed the United States and other members of the G-20 rich and emerging economies to agree to a series of changes when they meet Nov. 15. European expectations of the Washington meeting had been high. Several leaders have compared it to Bretton Woods , the international conference that created the post-World War II financial structures. But with the United States to be represented by President Bush, and only limited discussion with leaders of emerging economies, Europeans now accept that agreement on a range of principles — and a timetable — is the most that can be achieved next week. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, which holds the European Union’s rotating presidency, said he had spoken with Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama and added that the world “could not wait” until the inauguration of the next president on Jan. 20 before taking action. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain highlighted the need for governments to bolster the real economy and try to prevent a deep recession from taking hold. “Coordinated action on interest rates should be complemented by action on fiscal policy,” Mr. Brown said. The Washington meeting, Mr. Brown added, will come at a “decisive moment for the world economy,” adding that “the decisions we take in the next few months will reshape our world for a decade or more.” European nations have conducted intense diplomacy in the last week, both about who should go to Washington next week and how detailed a plan Europeans should push. Mr. Sarkozy presented the summit meeting as an opportunity for Europeans to mold the debate because the era of the dollar as the only global currency had “come to an end.” The agreement Friday, however, was significantly less specific than an earlier draft paper considered by European finance ministers. An overhaul of the International Monetary Fund has, however, emerged as a central preoccupation among European leaders. Mr. Sarkozy said there was not yet consensus among Europeans about how far the remodeling of the monetary fund should go, however. Some nations see the monetary fund as the central bank of the central banks, others as the repository of a large stabilization fund and others as an agency that would warn nations if their approach was threatening international stability, Mr. Sarkozy said. The 27 nations agreed, however, that the monetary fund should become the “pivot of a renewed international system” and should coordinate more closely with the Financial Stability Forum, which aims to promote international financial stability through information exchange and cooperation in supervision and surveillance. Some diplomats were skeptical that the United States would agree to commit itself to specific measures during a time of political transition. The principles put forward by the Europeans on Friday include regulation, “or at least oversight,” of all financial institutions, accountability and transparency, new approaches to risk assessment and a central role for the monetary fund. A reference to “international economic governance” disappeared from the draft text after a spat between France and Germany. The government in Berlin took the view that this might imply too great a role for the European Union in economic affairs at the expense of national governments and an independent European Central Bank. Britain made sure that a call to harmonize capital adequacy requirements was deleted. It opposes some of the details of a proposal to legislate in this area.

Summit Conferences
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Europe
International Trade and World Market
United States


A Broken Laptop in Indonesia, and No Repair Shop in Sight

Abstract: WHEN I was practicing medicine, I used to give lectures all over the world. Now, most of my travel is focused on developing medical education programs and attending scientific congresses, as well as researching books that I write. I’m kind of a control freak. That’s not good, especially when traveling for business, when everything that can go wrong often really does. I was in Bali, Indonesia, and my trip was going very well until about the third day, when my laptop computer broke down. I needed it for work, and like everyone who has experienced a broken computer, I felt out of control and out of touch. That’s not a good feeling for me. My first instincts were to just dump the computer, ship it home to Oregon for repair or buy a new computer somewhere in Indonesia. Each of those ideas had its own drawbacks, so I finally decided to try to get the thing fixed in Bali. At the time, Bali had a good electronic infrastructure for commerce, but not everyone was as plugged in as we are in the United States. I still figured there must be a few computer repair technicians available somewhere in Bali who could help me out. Image Gideon Bosker, president of CMEducation Resources, in Paris. Sometimes, he says, you have to trust unlikely people on a trip. Credit Tanya Supina The hotel front desk directed my driver to a computer dealer. We drove out of the hotel district, and cruised through neighborhoods crammed with shops for baskets, teak furniture and kites. When we passed some beautifully manicured rice fields, I really thought I had made a poor decision, since we were in rural Indonesia. We finally got to the computer store, and a woman there directed us to the computer repair part of the establishment, which was in a shed packed with pool tables. It looked to me like the most out-of-control high-tech service center anywhere in the world. It was like a computer graveyard, with parts strewn all over the place. To say I was a little concerned is an understatement. No one seemed to speak English, but an older man finally pointed to a teenage boy who apparently could help me. The young man quickly said my computer wasn’t booting up, which didn’t give me much confidence, since I already knew that. But I asked him if he thought he could fix it. He smiled and took my laptop. Instead of using that magic electronic tester that I saw computer repair people use at my shop back home, this young man began tapping on my computer’s plastic shell with his fingers. It reminded me of how I used to check the backs of my older patients for pneumonia. He then put his ear down on the computer’s surface, which made my blood pressure rise even more. I could not figure out what this young man was doing since he was doing absolutely nothing high tech. It was really more like he was performing a deep Balinese massage on my computer. I nearly lost my mind when he started to take it apart. Screws were all over the place, and he was jiggling wires and jamming connections together. I thought everything on my computer was lost. But then he put the cover back, flipped the switch, and everything was fixed. Best of all, nothing was lost. I would have paid him anything, but he only asked for 20,000 rupiah, which was at the time about $3.18 in American dollars. I gave him much more. The computer worked like a charm for years after his repair. But even more important is that I learned that sometimes you simply can’t control everything. Sometimes you have to trust the most unlikely of people. It’s a good lesson to learn, especially when you are on the road.

Business travel
Bali
Airlines,airplanes
CMEducation Resources
Gideon Bosker


Gaza, Vexed by Floods, Gets Fuel and Power

Abstract: GAZA — Gaza’s lone power plant sputtered back to life on Sunday for the first time in seven weeks, bringing relief to the Palestinian coastal enclave where a lack of cheap fuel has contributed to the overflow of raw sewage, 21-hour blackouts and flooding after a ferocious winter storm. Palestinian officials said that a $10 million grant from Qatar was covering the cost of two weeks’ worth of industrial diesel that started entering Gaza by truckload from Israel. The Qatari grant ended a bitter round of finger-pointing between Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, and its rival, the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank. The Authority, which unlike Hamas has dealings with Israel, can always ship fuel to Gaza via Israel, but Hamas has accused the Authority of imposing high taxes on the fuel and has refused to buy it. Gaza’s supply of subsidized fuel from Egypt has also dried up since the Egyptian Army clamped down last summer on the smuggling tunnels running beneath the Gaza-Egypt border. Ihab al-Ghussein, a spokesman for the Hamas government, said Qatar was also preparing to send a ship with diesel through an Israeli port, enough to keep the plant running for three months. Ahmed Abu al-Amreen of the Gaza Power Authority said that the plant would provide Gaza’s 1.7 million residents with two eight-hour shifts of electricity every 24 hours. Since the power plant shut down on Nov. 1, Gaza has depended on electricity purchased from Israel and Egypt, but that met only about 30 percent of the demand in the coastal territory. When the storm descended on Gaza late last week and temperatures plummeted, Hamas appealed to Qatar for help. Qatar urged the Palestinian Authority to send in the fuel and pledged to cover the cost. An official in the office of the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process said staff members had been working closely with American officials to encourage the Qataris to reach an agreement with the Palestinian Authority. The skies cleared in Gaza on Sunday after days of flooding and cold. Mustafa Sawaf of the Hamas Ministry of Social Affairs said he expected that most of the 900 families who had been evacuated to shelters would be back in their homes by evening. In Israel, there was mounting public criticism of the authorities as the winter storm waned. The Jerusalem area experienced its heaviest snowfall in about 50 years, and tens of thousands of Israelis were left without electricity, some for up to three days. Many Palestinian households in the West Bank also lost power. The main highways in and out of Jerusalem were closed from Thursday to Sunday morning because of the treacherous conditions and abandoned cars, leaving many motorists stranded. The Israeli government and representatives of the state-owned electricity company rejected the criticism, saying the high cost of laying electricity cables underground and investing in snow-clearing equipment had to be weighed carefully, given the rarity of such fierce storms in the area. In a separate development, a Lebanese Army soldier shot and killed an Israeli soldier who was driving along the Israeli-Lebanese border near Rosh Hanikra, according to the Israeli military. The Lebanese Army did not immediately comment and the details of the episode remained unclear, but Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported that Lebanese Army forces had fired at Israeli forces along the border near the Naqoura crossing. Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli army spokesman, said the military had protested to UNIFIL, the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, about what he called an “outrageous breach of Israel’s sovereignty.” Israeli forces went on alert along the border, which has remained tense but relatively calm in recent years.

Gaza Strip
Electric power
Blackouts
Palestinians
Hamas
Palestinian Authority
Qatar
Israel


New York Rent Regulation Laws Expire Amid Last-Minute Talks

Abstract: ALBANY — Rent regulations limiting how much landlords can charge for about one million apartments in New York City and its suburbs expired on Monday night after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on how to extend them. With only two days left in this year’s legislative session, the rent laws were one of several big-ticket issues that remained unresolved as last-minute negotiations continued. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and lawmakers have thus far also failed to reach an agreement on a number of issues central to the governor’s agenda, including a tax credit meant to expand access to private schools and a policy that would change sexual consent standards on college campuses. Also unresolved were negotiations over the future of a program that gives developers generous tax breaks in exchange for creating affordable housing. In a statement late Monday night, Mr. Cuomo said “there will be no short-term emergency” caused by the expiration. “While the Legislature needs to act immediately,” he said, “New York tenants should know that this state government will have zero tolerance for landlords that seek to exploit those who live in rent regulated units.” The atmosphere in the Capitol has been tense in recent days, as politicians blamed each other for the lack of action. On Monday, lawmakers and aides shuttled between meetings hoping to reach deals on some of the more substantial subjects. While no one emerged from these discussions with a deal, the parties seemed to be moving toward agreement on some issues late Monday, according to one person involved in the talks who was unwilling to speak on the record because of the sensitive nature of the discussions. Adding to the political consternation was that Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has sought to link the passage of rent legislation with the approval of the education tax credit. But the Assembly, controlled by Democrats, has steadfastly opposed the tax credit, and has insisted that rent regulations be considered separately. A prime example of Albany’s intransigence was the maneuvering around rent regulations. The Assembly passed an extension bill that would give lawmakers two more days to reach an agreement. Democrats in the Assembly have been pushing to extend and strengthen the regulations in an effort to slow the speed at which apartments categorized as rent-stabilized are converted to market rates. An apartment could become deregulated when the rent reaches $2,500 and it becomes vacant, under a provision known as “vacancy decontrol.”Assembly Democrats have proposed getting rid of vacancy decontrol and the governor has suggested either eliminating it or raising the threshold to $2,700. The Senate, controlled by Republicans, opted not to pass a short-term extension. In a narrowly divided vote around 10 p.m., it passed its own proposal that provided an eight-year extension but left vacancy decontrol intact. Despite their differences on Monday, lawmakers were still expected to reach some kind of agreement on extending rent regulations before they ultimately left the capital. In the short term, the expiration of rent laws will have little effect on tenants. Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday said he would not tolerate any incidents of landlord harassment and encouraged tenants to report such cases. The governor on Sunday issued a similar warning, in writing, to landlords. “If anyone is concerned that they may be put in jeopardy because of the inaction in Albany, that their lease may be canceled or that they may be harassed, call 311 and we will get you the help you need,” Mr. de Blasio said. The Senate majority leader, John J. Flanagan, a Long Island Republican, downplayed the significance of the short-term lapse in the rent laws. “Do I think anything tumultuous or crazy is going to happen overnight?” he asked. “Absolutely not.”

New York
Real Estate
Housing
Rent Control
State legislature
Andrew Cuomo
Bill de Blasio
NYC