Video Feature: For Musicians, Apps for Tuning, Keeping Time and Organizing Charts

Abstract: SMARTPHONES and tablets are powerful music devices. You can listen to music, you can create music and, with the right app, you can get an assist when playing an instrument. One of the most useful apps for guitarists — and yet one of the simplest — is a tuner app. It makes sense: There is no need to carry another device when a smartphone is already in your pocket. For simple guitar-tuning powers, one of my favorite apps is TuneWave, $1 on iOS . I like it because the design is modern and the app has few distracting bells and whistles. The app’s screen is simple, with three main parts: A needle dial like an old voltage meter, a large display of the musical note being played and a wavelike display. To use TuneWave you simply place it near your guitar, pluck a string, adjust the tuning and watch the displays to see when you’ve tuned the string to perfection. The less wavy the display, the closer you are to the chosen note. The app has a few simple controls and is minimalist and speedy. It is also useful for tuning other stringed instruments like violins. On Android, I like Tuner -gStrings Free, a free app that also has a modern design and relatively minimalist look. It works in almost exactly the same way as TuneWave, but it has a few extras, like the ability to set up your phone’s microphone sensitivity for the best results. It is ad-supported and the ads could get annoying. For a more full-featured guitar tuning app check out Guitar Tuna, a free iOS and Android app. Tuning your guitar involves watching a graph on the screen as you pluck a string — when the graph’s trace is at the center, your tuning is accurate. The app even shows useful messages like “too low” if the string is tuned too flat. Guitar Tuna also includes a guitar chord section. This shows you how to place your fingers on the strings to play a chord, and it can sound out the chord you’ve selected. It also has a simple metronome section that can sound out beats to keep your playing exactly on time. Lastly, Guitar Tuna has a “Games” section with different activities to learn guitar chord fingering, or, for example, to train yourself to identify chords by ear. Some of these games are free, but you have to pay in-app to unlock more at around $3 each. Or you can unlock everything for $13. If you’re looking for a straightforward metronome app, then Pro Metronome, free on iOS , is a great choice. The app does precisely what you’d expect: It displays a visual cue and a simultaneous sound at the beats-per-minute rate you select. Its menu system is simple and over all, the app feels very professional. If you upgrade to the Pro version for $3, you get some extras like being able to keep two rhythms at once, which may be useful for some musical performances. You can also choose the audio cues that accompany the metronome’s “ticks” — including a counting voice. On Android, a great equivalent app is Metronome Beats. This free app has many similar features, including the ability to choose custom sounds to keep you on the beat. It’s slightly more modern-looking, although its interface can appear cluttered and confusing. But it’s certainly a very capable metronome app. Lugging around sheet music is much easier now, too: No more carrying paper, and some apps even do clever tricks like turning the pages. On Android my favorite app of this type is Orpheus Sheet Music Reader. This app, which costs $4.57 , is very capable: It not only stores PDF sheet music, but also syncs with Dropbox so you can easily add music to your library, and it connects to external peripherals like the AirTurn pedal so you can flip the pages hands-free. On iPads or iPhones, the DeepDish GigBook app, which costs $10 , takes this idea one step further. As well as displaying sheet music for you to play, it also lets you scribble on the screen to annotate the score with information like fingerings. The app also has a set list creator, so you can collect all the music you need for a gig, and it’s also compatible with page-turning peripherals. Don’t forget SoundCloud — an audio-focused social network where musicians can upload and share their music with people around the world, who can even embed it in their websites if you give permission. SoundCloud, free on iOS and Android , is easy to use, and I find it a great place to discover new music and even share audio recordings of my own. Quick Call Google has given its Translate app a serious overhaul. The most impressive new trick is based on an older app called WordLens, which Google bought. WordLens lets you see translated words live on your phone’s screen when you hold your phone’s camera up to street signs, menus and other printed text. Translate is free on iOS and Android .

Mobile Apps
Musical instrument
Google
Translation
Music
Guitar
SoundCloud
Android


Prosecution Deferred Offers Options

Abstract: Jose Lopez walked out of a Cook County courtroom Wednesday with a huge weight lifted from his shoulders. Mr. Lopez, 36, who had been charged with felony retail theft, had his case dismissed after completing a new deferred-prosecution program run by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. He was one of 32 people who had already finished the program, which gives certain nonviolent first-time felony offenders the chance to have their charges dismissed. Deferred-prosecution programs are flourishing nationwide, experts say, in part because budget crunches are forcing governments to reconsider the costs associated with incarceration. Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board president, has supported efforts that she believes would reform the criminal justice system by, for example, reducing the county jail population and the juvenile detention center to rehabilitate offenders better and to save money. Mark Kammerer, the coordinator of alternative-prosecution and deferred -sentencing programs for the state’s attorney’s office, estimated the new deferred prosecution program, which began in March, had already saved the county at least $415,000 in court costs. More important, he said, the program offers participants the opportunity to address mistakes and move on with their lives. The Cook County state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, said her office did not grant deferred prosecution to those charged with violent offenses. Admission to the program also requires the permission of any victims. Participants must not incur new felony charges and may be required get a job or perform at least 96 hours of community service, attend school or work toward a high school equivalency degree, pay restitution and undergo treatment for drug or alcohol abuse. Those who complete the program, usually in 9 to 12 months, have their charges dismissed and may apply to have them expunged from their records. Among the eligible offenses are theft, retail theft, forgery, possession of a stolen vehicle, possession of marijuana and burglary. Those who violate the terms of the program face trial on the charges. As of the end of last month, 320 participants were enrolled in the program, Mr. Kammerer said. Mr. Lopez said he had learned a lesson from his experience and regretted the anguish he had put his family through. “It’s embarrassing,” he said. “It’s hard to look in the mirror, but looking at your family’s reaction hurts just as much.” Experts note that felony convictions can have lasting ramifications. They make getting a job extremely difficult, even for those who are highly educated, said Tony Lowery, director of policy and advocacy for the Safer Foundation, which provides education, training and placement services for people in Illinois with criminal records. Erin Antonietti, one of the two assistant state’s attorneys who handle deferred prosecution cases, acknowledged that the program was not without risk. “We’re taking a chance on everyone. Who knows what kind of choices they’ll make when they leave the courtroom?” he said. “We keep our fingers crossed and hope to God that they stay on the right path, because they’re going to make us look bad and put themselves in trouble.”

Crime and Criminals
Labor and Jobs
Restoration and Renovation
Cook County (Ill)
Chicago (Ill)


Governing Party Expects Gains in South Korean Vote

Abstract: BUCHEON, South Korea — The sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan , apparently by a North Korean torpedo, has provoked an international crisis that has embroiled big powers like the United States and China. But here in South Korea , it has had another effect: buoying the country’s once embattled conservative, pro-American president, Lee Myung-bak . Soon after taking office two years ago, Mr. Lee appeared at risk of losing public support, as he faced mass demonstrations on the streets of Seoul against the import of United States beef. Now, political experts are talking about the “Cheonan effect,” as polls show that more than half of expected voters approve of the president and his tougher line toward the North. Nowhere is the current upwelling of popular support more apparent than in polling for the local elections to be held across South Korea on Wednesday. Mr. Lee’s Grand National Party, whose candidates once faced tight races in some districts, now appears poised to sweep the most important races, including hotly contested mayoral elections in Seoul and the nearby port of Incheon. Kim Moon-soo, the conservative governor of a province outside Seoul, just two weeks ago was in an uphill battle for re-election against a liberal opponent. Now, polls show him with a comfortable 15 percentage point lead. “The only way to secure national security is to vote Grand National Party!” Mr. Kim recently told a crowd of flag-waving supporters, many of whom wore the sky blue of the governing party. Such colorful displays are typical of the feisty and contentious election campaigns in South Korea, one of Asia’s most robust democracies. But the emotions unleashed in March by the sinking of the Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors, made what would have been local elections fought over public works and school lunches into an important national referendum on South Korea’s stance toward the North. Politicians and political analysts agree that voters decisively turned to the Grand National Party after the announcement on May 20 of the results of an international inquiry into the sinking that found North Korea responsible. Political analysts said the results were enough to persuade many undecided voters to swing to the conservatives, who are seen as stronger on defense. “The Cheonan is having a huge effect by pushing voters to rally around the flag,” said Kim Ki-shik, a political analyst at the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, a policy research group. A telephone poll of 800 likely voters conducted Saturday by the East Asia Institute, a political research group, found that 52 percent of respondents approved of Mr. Lee in May, up from 46 percent a month earlier. It also found that 54 percent of respondents would “take the Cheonan into consideration” when casting ballots on Wednesday. Political analysts said the sinking also soured many of these swing voters against the liberal opposition, which favors resuming engagement with North Korea, and which had been openly skeptical about whether the North was behind the attack. Some on the left have accused the president of manipulating the inquiry’s results to enhance his party’s chances in the elections. But commentators warn that this wave of anger over the sinking does not signal unconditional support for Mr. Lee. In particular, they say that a majority of voters are against an openly confrontational stance toward the North, much less military retaliation. In fact, after years of rising living standards and lowered tensions with the North under Mr. Lee’s two liberal predecessors, most South Koreans do not have the stomach for an actual standoff, political analysts say. This means Mr. Lee must tread carefully, even as he stands with his nation’s closest allies, the United States and Japan, in calling for a firm response to the sinking. If he is seen as provoking North Korea, or pushing it too far, public sentiment could easily swing against him, analysts say. “Voters are furious at North Korea now,” said Yoon Hee-woong, director of research at the Korea Society Opinion Institute, a polling company, “but the consensus here is clearly against confrontation.” Mr. Lee’s current stance is that South Korea is willing to resume dialogue with the North, but only after it apologizes for the sinking and brings those responsible to justice. At a speech in Bucheon, a suburb about an hour from Seoul, Mr. Kim, the candidate for governor, criticized the North for the attack. He did not call for revenge, but instead said that South Korea needed to bolster its own defenses and give moral support to the president in a time of crisis. “Is this election about judging Lee Myung-bak?” he asked about 500 supporters outside a train station. “Or do we need to judge North Korea and Kim Jong-il?” he added, referring to the North Korean leader. The supporters of his opponent, Rhyu Si-min of the People’s Participation Party, grouse that the sinking of the Cheonan had hijacked the elections. “The Cheonan has crowded out all the other important issues,” said Mr. Rhyu’s chairwoman for campaign strategy, Kim Hyun-mee. In Ilsan, a nearby city, Mr. Rhyu repeated in a hoarse voice his support for “peaceful coexistence” with the North. Among his supporters at the rally, most of them in their 20s and 30s, suspicions run deep against the president and the United States, South Korea’s longtime protector. “I don’t think North Korea did it,” said Lee Soo-hong, 39, who said he was between jobs. “I think the United States is using this incident to control South Korea.” Mr. Kim, the conservative candidate, said that his party’s tradition of closer ties to Washington was helped him with voters. “When people feel insecure, they feel the necessity of the United States,” said Mr. Kim, who paused before adding, “and the Grand National Party.”

South Korea
Cheonan (Ship)
Torpedoes
Lee Myung-bak
Elections
North Korea


Chris Froome Runs Into Trouble as Tour Enters France

Abstract: LILLE, France — The return of the Tour de France to its homeland Tuesday brought a noticeable reduction in the enormous crowds that characterized its first three days in England. It may also have brought unwanted trouble for the defending champion, Chris Froome of Britain. As is often the case in the nervous first week of the Tour, two riders crossed or touched wheels, setting off a chain reaction early in the 163.5-kilometer (101.6-mile) stage from Le Touquet to Lille . Froome, who was riding immediately behind them, seemed to fare the worst. Froome rarely appears confident or comfortable when in the middle of the seething mass of 194 riders. And unless he is shepherded by his Sky teammates, he can wind up too far back in the pack for safety. After Froome resumed riding, a bleeding wound was visible through a tear on the left thigh of his shorts. Given that Wednesday’s stage features a bone-shaking ride over several sections of rough cobblestones, it was more worrying that the race doctor put what appeared to be a splint on Froome’s left wrist and a bandage on his right hand. The medical information released about Froome’s condition was vague, which is normal after a leading rider has a spill. Florence Pommerie, the head physician for the Tour, told French television networks that she had “to find out more in details what’s up with him after the stage.” She added, “But we’ll keep an eye on him during it.” In brief comments, officials from the Sky team played down the severity of Froome’s injuries. “We were very scared, as was everyone,” Nicolas Portal, a team director, told reporters, adding that the splint was a precaution. “He must have fallen hard, I imagine, but it’s O.K.” Dave Brailsford, the manager of the Sky team, said Froome would have X-rays “just to check his wrist.” Late Tuesday evening, Froome said in a statement that doctors had cleared him to race. Last month, Froome was leading the Critérium du Dauphiné , a mountainous race that is something of a Tour preview, when he crashed, also injuring his left side. He finished 12th over all. Perhaps to mark the return of the Tour to France, Thomas Voeckler, a French rider with a fondness for hopeless causes that nevertheless attract publicity, took off within the first 10 kilometers of the stage start and was joined by Luis Ángel Maté Mardones of Spain. Despite Voeckler’s frequent grimacing and riding with an intensity that suggested he wanted to wrench his bike apart, the break never acquired an insurmountable time gap. That allowed Marcel Kittel, a German, to win his third stage of this year’s Tour in a closely fought sprint. Vincenzo Nibali retained the overall lead and the yellow jersey that comes with it. Kittel said afterward that Wednesday’s cobbled stage had long been one of his priorities this year, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, “It’s going to be a very, very difficult stage.”

Biking
Tour de France
Marcel Kittel
Mark Cavendish
Christopher Froome
Alexander Kristoff
Vincenzo Nibali
Peter Sagan
Andy Schleck


Honeybee Killer Found by Army and Entomologists

Abstract: DENVER — It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees ? Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food. Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two. A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One . Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised. Liaisons between the military and academia are nothing new, of course. World War II, perhaps the most profound example, ended in an atomic strike on Japan in 1945 largely on the shoulders of scientist-soldiers in the Manhattan Project. And a group of scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula has researched bee-related applications for the military in the past — developing, for example, a way to use honeybees in detecting land mines . But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the first time that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security Department and academia have teamed up to address a problem that both sides say they might never have solved on their own. “Together we could look at things nobody else was looking at,” said Colin Henderson, an associate professor at the University of Montana’s College of Technology and a member of Dr. Bromenshenk’s “Bee Alert” team. Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines. A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal. Even learning how to mash dead bees for analysis — a skill not taught at West Point — became a factor. One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die — they fly off in every direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed. That makes large numbers of bee autopsies — and yes, entomologists actually do those — problematic. Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal. “It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.” Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. And several RNA-based viruses had been detected as well. But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae. “Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army’s analytic software tool could do. “We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,” he said. The Army software system — an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics — is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for. But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees. Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom. The first steps were awkward, partly because the Army lab was not used to testing bees, or more specifically, to extracting bee proteins. “I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.” The process eventually was refined. A mortar and pestle worked better than the desktop, and a coffee grinder worked best of all for making good bee paste. Scientists in the project emphasize that their conclusions are not the final word. The pattern, they say, seems clear, but more research is needed to determine, for example, how further outbreaks might be prevented, and how much environmental factors like heat, cold or drought might play a role. They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus — controllable with antifungal agents — especially when the virus is detected. Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity. In any event, the university’s bee operation itself proved vulnerable just last year, when nearly every bee disappeared over the course of the winter.

Bees
Fungi
Viruses
United States Army
University of Montana


Officers Facing Assault Charges Surrender to Brooklyn D.A.

Abstract: Officer Richard Kern surrendered at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office early Tuesday morning to face charges for assaulting a man during a police stop on a busy subway platform in October. At dawn, he walked in with his attorney, after his two fellow officers, Alex Cruz and Andrew Morales, also surrendered. They are scheduled to face lesser charges of obstruction. Neither Mr. Kern nor his lawyer, John D. Patten, had any comment. Mr. Cruz, who was accompanied by his lawyer, Stuart London, did not comment either, nor did Mr. Morales. The charges are still pending. “The officers are under arrest now and will be arraigned after an 11 a.m. press conference,” Jonah Bruno, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said. Jerry Schmetterer, the lead spokesman for the district attorney, said that the officers’ fingerprints will need to go to Albany electronically, following procedure. “It’s up to the arresting detectives whether or not they will be handcuffed to the wall during the booking,” Mr. Schmetterer said. In a statement last month, Officer Kern, 25, said: “I did absolutely nothing wrong.” Lawyers for the other officers have also said their clients did nothing wrong. But a grand jury in Brooklyn last week found enough evidence to charge them in the case of Michael Mineo , a 24-year-old body piercer. Mr. Mineo, whom the police suspected of smoking marijuana, told investigators he was sodomized with an object while the officers grappled with him. A transit officer who took part in the arrest testified that Officer Kern touched Mr. Mineo’s buttocks with his baton. But the transit officer waited several days before reporting what he saw, and police officials have said that civilian witnesses initially questioned by the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau said they did not see an assault. The lawyer for a fourth officer involved in the arrest, Noel Jugraj, said on Monday that his client had also spoken to investigators and did not expect to be charged. “My client has been forthcoming from the get-go,” said the lawyer, Edward J. Mandery. “He did not participate in a crime.” Mr. Mandery would not discuss Officer Jugraj’s account to the grand jury. “My client is a decorated officer,” he said. “He is not hurting anyone and he is not protecting anyone. He is going to tell the truth as to what he observed.” The Police Department left the officers on active duty for nearly three weeks after the encounter, but has since refused to discuss many of the core facts about their careers, including the number of arrests they have made and whether they have been the subject of any disciplinary actions. Going forward, much of the focus of the case will fall on Officer Kern because of the allegation that it was his baton that was reported to have come in contact with Mr. Mineo’s rectum. In recent days, the officer’s colleagues stepped forward to say that those accounts are at odds with the conscientious, responsible man they knew. “He just wanted to be a good cop,” recalled Kevin Clark, a retired officer who worked with Officer Kern for about a year in the 71st Precinct. Twice previously, Officer Kern was accused of using excessive force. but his lawyer said he was cleared in both cases by the Civilian Complaint Review Board . One of the incidents, in 2007, prompted two lawsuits that the city agreed to settle for a total of $50,000. But the city said the settlements did not reflect any admission of wrongdoing, and Mr. Kern has called the allegations of excessive force “a complete lie.” The review board declined to discuss the cases. In the lawsuits, Officer Kern was accused of making unlawful arrests and manhandling people washing their coats in the laundry room of a Brooklyn housing project. The police were responding to a 911 call, and a resident later signed an affidavit saying the group in the laundry room had no authority to be there. On Monday, the lawyer who brought the cases, Richard J. Cardinale, said he had filed a third lawsuit last week stemming from the same case, this time on behalf of Edgar Acuna. Like the two earlier lawsuits, it alleges that Officer Kern struck Mr. Acuna with his gun, unnecessarily sprayed him with Mace and choked him. Several officers mentioned in interviews that Officer Kern, who is slight at 135 pounds, was not someone who typically used his size to overpower suspects. “He’s real skinny,” said Edwin Boone, a retired sergeant who gave Officer Kern the best evaluation in his 15-person squad. Friends said Officer Kern grew up in the Woodside section of Queens to a family of modest means. At Holy Cross High School, he ran track, graduated in 2001 and attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice, leaving a few credits shy of his degree. He worked briefly in the sports department of The Associated Press, but soon quit to enroll in the Police Academy. Friends say he lives with his parents in Queens while he and his wife save for a house. His lawyer said Officer Kern has made 90 arrests, a number that represents the work of a fairly active officer, and had been assigned to an anticrime unit in hopes of qualifying to become a detective.

Mineo Michael
Assaults
Suits and Litigation
Kern Richard
Police Brutality and Misconduct
Police Department (NYC)
Civilian Complaint Review Board


Washington Insurance Official Is Ousted

Abstract: The insurance commissioner for the District of Columbia was dismissed from his job just a day after he publicly questioned a decision by President Obama to reverse a provision of the Affordable Care Act, a person with knowledge of the events said on Sunday. This person said that the commissioner, William P. White, had requested but never received permission from the office of Mayor Vincent C. Gray to publish a critique of Mr. Obama’s surprise announcement on Thursday that he would allow thousands of Americans to renew policies that might not provide the minimum coverage required by the health law. Instead of waiting to hear from Mr. Gray’s office, the person said, Mr. White’s office posted the statement on the city government’s website less than 15 minutes after sending an email seeking approval. Later, when confronted by the mayor, Mr. White said he had received permission from the mayor’s staff even though he had not, the person said. In an interview, Mr. White said that Victor L. Hoskins, Washington’s deputy mayor, told him that the mayor had “decided to go in a different direction” and that Mr. White’s services would no longer be needed. Mr. White, who had been commissioner for roughly three years, said his statement on the Affordable Care Act was not mentioned during his conversation with Mr. Hoskins. Mr. White said that although he commonly sent releases to the mayor’s office, it was not his normal practice to wait for the mayor or the mayor’s office to sign off. He added that he did not misrepresent to the mayor that he had permission to send out the release. “When I issue statements, I am speaking on behalf of the department about insurance, and I don’t speak on behalf of the mayor,” Mr. White said. “In this instance, however, the issue was clearly more political than usual.” Michael M. Flagg, a spokesman for Mr. White, referred questions to the mayor’s office, saying he could not discuss personnel matters. Mr. White’s statement took direct issue with Mr. Obama’s decision, saying the president’s policy reversal to allow the continuation of canceled policies “undercuts the purpose of the exchanges, including the District’s DC Health Link, by creating exceptions that make it more difficult for them to operate.” Mr. Obama had been criticized heavily over the canceled policies because he had said many times that people who liked their insurance would be able to keep it under the new law. Mr. Obama’s reversal, which allows states to continue policies that had been canceled but does not require that they do so, threw the issue into the laps of insurance companies and insurance commissioners like Mr. White, who typically regulate insurance policies. In a meeting with Mr. Obama at the White House on Friday, executives for the major insurance companies expressed mixed feelings about whether the continuation of canceled policies could work in every state. At the same time, several insurance commissioners voiced their opinions on the move. “I do not believe his proposal is a good deal for the State of Washington,” Mike Kreidler, the insurance commissioner there, said Thursday. The commissioner in Florida, by contrast, supported the proposal. The person with knowledge of the situation said that Mayor Gray was unhappy with the tone of Mr. White’s statement, if not the substance of its arguments.

William P White
Washington DC
Health Insurance
Vincent C Gray
Obamacare,Affordable Care Act
Barack Obama


How Much Graduates Earn Drives More College Rankings

Abstract: PayScale introduced its first college salary report in 2008, and the College Scorecard from the federal government followed last year, ushering an elephant into the hallowed halls of college admissions: What do the schools’ graduates actually earn? Despite the hand-wringing of many in academia, who saw the immeasurable richness of a college education crassly reduced to a dollar sign, the data has wrought a sea change in the way students and families evaluate prospective colleges. Earnings data are finding their way into a proliferating number of mainstream college rankings, shifting the competitive landscape of American higher education in often surprising ways. This fall, The Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education (a unit of TES Global, and no relation to The New York Times) introduced their first college rankings . Forty percent of their result is measures of “outcomes” — earnings, graduation rate and loan repayment rate. The other 60 percent rates the school’s resources; student engagement, as measured by student responses to a questionnaire; and “learning environment,” or diversity. Last year The Economist released its first college rankings , and it relies even more heavily on earnings data. It took the College Scorecard earnings data and performed a multiple regression analysis to assess how much a school’s graduates earn compared with how much they might have made had they attended another school. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce has issued another set of rankings , adjusting the College Scorecard salary rankings first for choice of major (since disproportionate numbers of students studying high-paying fields like engineering and business skew the results), and yet another ranking that assesses students’ expected earnings, given their characteristics when they entered college, to the actual outcome. PayScale itself has refined its rankings in response to criticism, by including along with salary data the percentage of students who major in subjects other than high-paying science, technology, engineering and math, as well as the percentage of respondents who found “high meaning” in their work. Both Forbes and Money magazines, in their rankings, incorporate PayScale data on earnings. To be sure, the dowager of college rankings, U.S. News & World Report, steadfastly disdains the use of earnings or other outcomes in its rankings . While it continues to tweak its criteria, it relies primarily on measures of reputation and selectivity. There are now so many rankings that “We’ll soon be ranking the rankings,” said Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University and author of “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.” Image Juggle the ratings in the right way, factoring in a graduate’s future salaries and job satisfaction, and Claremont McKenna College in California comes out on top. Credit J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times Rankings “drive presidents and trustees into frenzies of delight or alarm,” he said. “Meanwhile, most institutions that serve most students — underfunded public colleges, especially community colleges — aren’t even on the screen.” One thing is clear: None of the rankings agree on which is the “best” college. The only school that shows up among the top 10 on the Wall Street Journal, Economist, Georgetown, PayScale and U.S. News lists is Harvard. But it ranks No. 1 on only one of Georgetown’s lists (earnings adjusted for choice of major). The number of rankings is a good thing. Students and their parents certainly shouldn’t rely on only one source. “We’ve been very clear that this is a guide for figuring how much you should spend on your education,” said Katie Bardaro, vice president for data analytics at PayScale. “In choosing college, you need to make a smart financial decision. What’s the likely return on your investment? “Is it the only factor?” she added. “Absolutely not. But it’s an important factor.” Stanford University is No. 1 on the recent Wall Street Journal list. It fares well on PayScale and U.S. News, too. But it falls to a distant No. 256 on The Economist’s list (which, it should be said, produced the results most at odds with other rankings). Results diverged even more widely for smaller schools. This year’s winner on PayScale is the SUNY Maritime College, whose graduates earn a median $147,000. The school at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx enrolls fewer than 2,000 students and it offers bachelor’s degrees in engineering and science. But it only ties for 80th in U.S. News’s “regional universities north” category and isn’t even ranked by The Wall Street Journal. Or consider a venerable liberal arts college like Washington and Lee in Virginia. It’s No. 1 on The Economist’s list. Its graduates earn a whopping $22,375 more than would have been expected based on the characteristics of entering students, the magazine calculated. But it ranks only 109th on the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education list, with an especially low score for diversity. Women’s colleges are especially vulnerable when earnings data are incorporated. U.S. News ranks Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, No. 3 among national liberal arts colleges. It falls to No. 30 on The Wall Street Journal’s rankings, and to No. 201 on PayScale. Yale illustrates an even starker divergence. It is No. 1 for outcomes in The Journal’s ranking; in The Economist’s, it’s near the bottom, at 1,270. The magazine estimates that a student attending Yale would earn about $10,000 a year less on average than if the student had attended another college. To show how sensitive the results are to the criteria used in the rankings, I asked PayScale to rank schools based on earnings but also with relatively few majors in the high-paying science fields and whose graduates reported a high level of meaning in their work. Image A commencement ceremony at Harvard, a university that is highly ranked on most lists but No. 1 on only one. Credit Rick Friedman for The New York Times That resulted in an entirely different list: The top five (in order) were Claremont McKenna in California, Georgetown, Wesleyan, Holy Cross and Oberlin. Liberal arts colleges — whose leaders have been some of the most vocal critics of rankings — generally fared much better using criteria that included job satisfaction. (I’m a graduate and trustee of DePauw University, a liberal arts college.) But does the proliferation of data — and rankings — actually help students and parents make wiser choices? “What’s clear is that rankings sell,” said Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges. “It’s not at all clear that leads to a better-informed public. There’s so much information it’s hard for any high school student to sort it out.” Jeff Strohl, director of research at the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, said, “When I was 17, I wouldn’t have known what to make of” all the data. But Georgetown’s goal is to help students interpret it. “We need to move the needle from just presenting the earnings numbers to helping them make a decision based on that. We need to think about this using a public service model,” he said. If nothing else, earnings are objective and, as the database grows into the millions, reliable. And they’ve helped focus attention on little-known schools that would never crack the high status barrier of the U.S. News rankings, especially the community colleges that educate the vast majority of America’s students. In addition to SUNY Maritime, I found myself looking up some schools I’d never heard of that fared well on the earnings-based rankings: Bentley University (Massachusetts), which made both The Economist’s and Georgetown’s top 10 lists; Otis College of Art and Design (California) and Alderson Broaddus University (West Virginia), both in The Economist’s top 10; and University of the Pacific (California) and Molloy College (New York), both in Georgetown’s top 10. In the end, of course, deciding which college to attend is intensely personal. No ranking can assess a student’s unique personality, goals, strengths and weaknesses and match those to the “right” college. So how would I rank the rankings? Other than its ability to confer bragging rights, which seems a dubious distinction among already status-crazed students and parents, U.S. News seems in danger of becoming an anachronism as long as it ignores outcomes. It should go without saying that the value of an education should never be reduced to purely monetary terms. But college is a major investment; students and parents should consult PayScale and the College Scorecard in order to understand the financial implications of their decisions. No ranking is perfect, but I found that The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education survey did a creditable job blending a wide variety of factors, including outcomes and student engagement. As Phil Baty, rankings editor at Times Higher Education, told me this week, “The success of a college graduate should not be measured purely in terms of the salaries they earn. There’s more to life than a high salary. This is why we’ve also put an emphasis on how much the student is intellectually engaged, stimulated and stretched by their college education.”

College
PayScale
Income
Wages and salaries
The Economist
Wall Street Journal


Bubba Watson Gets First PGA Tour Victory

Abstract: Bubba Watson rallied from six strokes back and beat Scott Verplank on the second playoff hole with a par putt for his first PGA Tour victory Sunday at the Travelers Championship in Cromwell, Conn. Watson, Verplank and the Ryder Cup captain Corey Pavin went to extra holes after they all finished 14 under par. After dropping a 3-footer for par on the par-3 16th to win it, Watson hugged his wife, Angie, and began crying. Verplank left his tee shot short of the green on the second playoff hole and missed an 8-foot par putt. Watson, who had a 48-footer for birdie, steadied his nerves enough to get it close. Pavin was eliminated on the first playoff hole after hitting his tee shot just 219 yards and putting his approach into a bunker short of the 18th green. Justin Rose, coming off his first PGA Tour win this month at the Memorial, had a three-stroke lead after three rounds but was one over par on the front nine and collapsed on the back, shooting a five-over 75. AN ENGLISH DUEL David Horsey of England birdied the 18th hole to win the BMW International Open in Munich by one stroke over his countryman Ross Fisher, shooting a five-under 67 that earned him the biggest victory of his career. Horsey, a 25-year-old former Walker Cup player, earned $410,000. He finished at 18 under after starting the day tied for fifth. Fisher had an eagle on the 18th to place second. ROBERTS HOLDS OFF FUNK Loren Roberts birdied the final hole for a seven-under 65 and a one-stroke victory over Fred Funk in the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open, a Champions Tour event in Endicott, N.Y. It was the 12th tour victory for the 54-year-old Roberts, who was five shots back with eight holes to play.

Golf
PGA Tour Inc
Watson Bubba
Verplank Scott
Pavin Corey
Rose Justin
Fisher Ross
Roberts Loren
Funk Fred


Extremists Make Inroads in Pakistan’s Diverse South

Abstract: MIRPURKHAS, Pakistan — In a country roiled by violent strife, the southern province of Sindh, celebrated as the “land of Sufis,” has long prized its reputation as a Pakistani bastion of tolerance and diversity. Glittering Sufi shrines dot the banks of the river Indus as it wends through the province. The faithful sing and dance at exuberant religious festivals. Hindu traders, members of a sizable minority, thrive in the major towns. But as Islamist groups have expanded across Pakistan in tandem with the growing strength of the Taliban insurgency, so, too, are they making deep inroads into Sindh. Although banned by the state, such groups are systematically exploiting weaknesses in Pakistan’s education system and legal code as part of a campaign to persecute minorities and spread their radical brand of Sunni Islam. The growth of the fundamentalist groups, many with links to armed factions, has been alarmingly rapid in Sindh and has brought violence in its wake, according to police officials, politicians and activists. In recent months, Hindu temples have been defaced, Shiite Muslims have been assaulted and Christians have been charged with blasphemy. A central factor in the expansion of such groups is a network of religious seminaries, often with funding from opaque sources, that provides them with a toehold in poor communities. “If there were three seminaries in a city before, now there are tens of seminaries in just one neighborhood,” said Asad Chandio, news editor of the Sindhi-language newspaper Awami Awaz. In May, a threatening crowd in Mirpurkhas, a small city in central Sindh, surrounded four members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had set up a stall near the railway station. The mob accused the four of blasphemy because they were selling books that contained images of God and Moses. The crowd’s leader was a member of Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, a sectarian group that is ostensibly banned by the government, but that is now openly operating, and growing, across Sindh. Fearing crowd violence, police officers led the four to a nearby police station where they were charged with blasphemy — potentially a capital offense. They were taken away in an armored vehicle, and are now in hiding as they await trial. Image A family praying last week in Karachi at the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, a Sufi saint. Credit Max Becherer for The New York Times Locals said they were struggling to understand how, or why, the incident had taken place. “There are so many communities here, and we have all lived peacefully,” said Francis Khokhar, the lawyer for the four accused. The Sunni supremacist ideology propagated by Pakistani sectarian groups is similar to the one that is proving so potent in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is flourishing. In Pakistan, such groups do not pose a direct threat to the state yet. But their growth in Sindh is a sobering reminder that a future threat to Pakistani stability could stem from the provincial towns as much as the distant tribal belt, where the Pakistani military is trying to disrupt havens for the Taliban and other militants. The provincial government in Sindh, concerned about what one government official called the “mushroom growth” of extremist seminaries, is trying to decide what to do. “Our seminaries have become a source of trouble,” Niaz Abbasi, the home secretary of Sindh, said in an interview. Despite its open-minded image, Sindhi society has always had a fringe of Islamist extremists, particularly within Karachi, the provincial capital, which has seen an increase in violent attacks in recent years. What has alarmed experts, however, is the spread of fundamentalist groups deep inside the province. Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, the group behind the blasphemy charges in Mirpurkhas, sprang from a small town in Punjab Province about 30 years ago, capitalizing on local sectarian and political divides. Once known as Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, it has grown into Pakistan’s dominant vehicle for Sunni sectarianism, trafficking in hatred against Shiites to win popular and political support. It has been banned several times — first, in its incarnation as Sipah-e-Sahaba, and in 2012 in its present guise. Still, that did not stop its leader, Maulana Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi, from running for Parliament last year. This year, an election tribunal disqualified the winner and gave the seat to Mr. Ludhianvi . The case is in litigation now. Pakistan’s Hot Spots at a Glance Main theaters of conflict in northwestern Pakistan. The group also has longstanding ties to the ruthless militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, whose militants have killed hundreds of Shiites in Baluchistan and Karachi in the past two years. Malik Ishaq, the leader of Lashkar, is also a vice president of Ahle Sunnat. Now Ahle Sunnat is on a recruitment drive in Sindh. While it was traditionally centered in Karachi and Khairpur district, about 200 miles to the north, it now has signed up 50,000 members across Sindh, about half of them outside Karachi, said a spokesman, Umar Muavia. A key to its success is an expanding network of 4,000 religious seminaries that offer free classes and food to students from impoverished families. “We give them a religious education,” said Hammad Muavia, a spokesman for the group in the Khairpur district. “We feed and house them, and provide them a bursary that goes to their families. We even pay for their medical expenses. We take better care of the students than even their own parents.” In part, Ahle Sunnat is exploiting the chronic weakness of Pakistan’s education system: Over 3,000 state-run schools in Sindh are not functioning, and those in operation frequently offer a dismal quality of schooling. Less clear are its sources of income. The group says it raises funds from local businessmen and the community, but critics say it is principally funded by Saudi Arabia. “Yes, sometimes if there are clerics from Saudi Arabia visiting Pakistan, they contribute to us,” said Mr. Muavia, the Khairpur spokesman. “But there is no relationship with the Saudi government.” The link between madrasas and militancy is often debated by experts; some point out that Pakistan’s most famous jihadi commanders have been educated not at madrasas but at state-run schools. What is clear, though, is that the madrasas offer groups like Ahle Sunnat a toehold from which to project themselves into the community and expose more Pakistanis to sermons that sometimes veer explicitly into incitement of violence against Shiites and other minorities. The group is also using the contentious blasphemy law to cow its enemies. Mr. Chandio, the newspaper editor, said his newspaper received threats from Ahle Sunnat after he published photos of the group’s activists attacking a police van during a blasphemy case. Image Community leaders gathered last week in the Essa Nagri neighborhood, Karachi’s largest Christian community, where a fence was recently built on the border of a mixed Pashtun neighborhood after two members of the Christian community were murdered. Credit Max Becherer for The New York Times Mr. Muavia, the Ahle Sunnat spokesman in Khairpur, said he had filed several blasphemy cases, but, to his disappointment, the police had rejected them. “The Pakistani government is outraged when blasphemous acts against Prophet Muhammad take place abroad, but does nothing when they happen at home,” he complained. Other Sunni groups are also expanding in Sindh. Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a charity that the United States recently designated as a front for the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, has a network of seminaries and carries out relief work during natural disasters. Its leader, Hafiz Saeed, regularly tours Karachi and other major cities in Sindh, evidently unbothered by a $10 million American bounty for his arrest. Also expanding is Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a conservative politician from northwestern Pakistan. The group held two of the largest political rallies in the province in recent years. Since March, the police have recorded 12 attacks on Hindu and Sikh temples across the province, said Iqbal Mehmood, who until recently served as the provincial police chief. Separately, Hindu leaders have accused Muslim groups of trying to forcibly convert Hindu girls to Islam. Across Pakistan, Shiites have been subjected to “an alarming and unprecedented escalation in sectarian violence,” Human Rights Watch recently noted in a report on attacks on ethnic Hazara Shiites in western Baluchistan Province, which adjoins Sindh. Some officials say the groups have flourished in part thanks to the turning of a blind eye by provincial politicians — mostly from the Pakistan Peoples Party that has dominated Sindh’s politics for decades — and the tacit support of the military and its powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. During the 1990s, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi “enjoyed a close relationship” with the military and ISI because it was assisting with the fight in Indian-controlled Kashmir, said the recent Human Rights Watch report. For its part, the military denies that it is supporting militant groups. “These groups don’t come up naturally; they are provided backing by the state,” said Mr. Chandio, the newspaper editor. “They can protest anywhere, and close down a city if they want. But when they hold rallies in support of the army and the ISI, they’ve proven who supports them.”

Pakistan
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat Pakistan
Islam
Sufism
Sunnis
Hinduism
Religion and Belief


Rebekah Brooks, Former British Tabloid Executive, Exploring Work in U.S.

Abstract: Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid newspapers who became an executive before resigning and standing trial in the phone hacking scandal, is in New York and has been meeting people at News Corporation to explore her next professional moves, the company and people familiar with the matter said on Thursday. Ms. Brooks was acquitted on phone hacking and three other charges in June after a trial that included details of an affair she had with a colleague, Andy Coulson, another former editor of The News of the World, the tabloid that was at the heart of the scandal. Mr. Coulson was convicted on a charge of conspiring to intercept phone messages and sentenced to 18 months in prison. “She and her family are here in the United States for a visit, reconnecting with friends and meeting with businesses as she explores and considers her professional future,” a News Corporation spokesman said in a statement on Thursday evening. News of Ms. Brooks’s meetings with News Corporation were earlier reported by Capital New York. Ms. Brooks, known in Britain for her rise from secretary to tabloid kingmaker and confidante of the political elite, including Prime Minister David Cameron, has long been known as a favorite of Mr. Murdoch’s. Since her trial ended, there has been speculation that she might rejoin his company, perhaps in the United States, away from the scandal that seemed to have ended her career. A person close to Ms. Brooks, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that she might also use her powerful connections to start her own enterprise.

News media,journalism
News Corp
News of the World
Rebekah Brooks
Rupert Murdoch
Andy Coulson


Rich Williamson, White House Aide, Dies at 64

Abstract: CHICAGO — Rich Williamson, a former aide to three Republican presidents who lost a widely watched race for the United States Senate in 1992 to Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman in the Senate, died here on Sunday. He was 64. Illinois Republican Party officials announced his death. The cause was complications from a cerebral hemorrhage, a family spokesman said. Mr. Williamson, a lawyer and a foreign policy scholar and author, was appointed to foreign policy and diplomatic roles under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush. He was a senior adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. He became widely known after reluctantly agreeing to seek the Republican senatorial nomination in 1992, believing he would be challenging the incumbent Democrat, Alan Dixon. But Ms. Braun defeated Mr. Dixon in a three-way primary contest. Ms. Braun, a Democrat, defeated Mr. Williamson in the general election with 55 percent of the vote. Mr. Williamson was a former ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and in 2008 was appointed by President Bush to serve as special envoy to Sudan to work on ending genocide there. He continued to work on the issue after Mr. Bush left office. In July, he and the former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright issued a report on genocide prevention. “As we know from our experience in government service, once the body counts begin to mount, our options for responding immediately become far less palatable politically,” they wrote. He was chairman of the Illinios Republican Party from 1999 to 2001 and since 2010 had been the state’s Republican National Committeeman. Richard Salisbury Williamson was born on May 9, 1949, in Evanston, Ill. He graduated from Princeton and the University of Virginia School of Law and was a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington. Information about his survivors was not available.

Richard Salisbury Williamson
US Politics
Republicans
Obituary


Vote Recount Push Advances, but Reversing Trump’s Win Is Unlikely

Abstract: President-elect Donald J. Trump is well into filling out his cabinet and picking key advisers. But a move to challenge the vote tallies in three swing states — an extreme long shot to reverse his Electoral College majority — is advancing in the background, creating a noisy distraction on Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed and raising last-ditch hopes of some Hillary Clinton supporters. In Wisconsin, elections officials said on Monday that a recount of the state’s nearly three million votes would most likely begin on Thursday. In Pennsylvania, Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, who initiated the recounts, filed a legal challenge of the results in state court. And the Stein campaign said it planned to request a recount in Michigan on Wednesday. Neither Ms. Stein nor the Clinton campaign has found evidence of election tampering in any of the three states, where Mr. Trump beat Mrs. Clinton by a combined margin of only about 100,000 votes. But once Ms. Stein seized on the issue last week, the Clinton campaign said it, too, would join in the efforts to seek recounts. Mrs. Clinton has been urged by her supporters to challenge the results, but she has done so only in a passive way. A campaign lawyer said that her team would “participate” in a manner that ensured fairness, but that it had “not uncovered any actionable evidence” of hacking or other interference. The Clinton campaign will pay to have its own lawyers present at recount sites, but it is not contributing money to the effort, campaign officials have said. Ms. Stein said she had invited every candidate, including Mr. Trump, to join her calls for recounts, but she is not seeking money or legal input from the remnants of the Clinton campaign. Image Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, has called for recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times “We would not want to be collaborating with the Clinton campaign on this,” Ms. Stein said. Mr. Trump’s spokesman, Jason Miller, said in an email that the “mere talk of a recount by someone who got less than 1%” — Ms. Stein — “is a joke.” The recount push irked Mr. Trump, who said on Twitter that Democrats were joining what he called a “scam” by the Green Party to “fill up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts.” The president-elect also returned to the issue of voter fraud over the weekend, advancing the baseless charge that “millions” of people voted illegally. He singled out California, Virginia and New Hampshire for “serious voter fraud” — prompting a rebuff from Alex Padilla, the California secretary of state, who said on Twitter that Mr. Trump’s “reckless tweets are inappropriate and unbecoming of a president-elect.” In a span of less than an hour on Monday night, Mr. Trump wrote five Twitter posts in which he asserted without providing evidence that there had been voter fraud, criticized journalists for not doing their jobs and said the fraud had benefited Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Stein, who finished a distant fourth in the popular vote on Nov. 8, had raised about $6.3 million of a $7 million goal as of Monday to cover the costs of three recounts. To begin the recount in Wisconsin, the state must receive payment of $3.5 million by Tuesday afternoon to cover the estimated costs, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said on Monday. The commission approved a schedule, which includes county clerks and canvass members being briefed on procedures on Wednesday morning, with the recount beginning Thursday and being completed by Dec. 12 and certified on Dec. 13. The Electoral College votes on Dec. 19. Ms. Stein asked that the recount of ballots be done entirely by hand, but the elections commission rejected that request. It instead allowed counties to determine whether the ballots should be counted manually or with tabulating equipment. Ms. Stein said on Monday that she would sue to demand the hand count. In all three states, the Stein campaign is seeking to answer the question of whether the vote was hacked by introducing malicious software into voting machines. The possibility was raised by J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan. Although no evidence of hacking exists, Ms. Stein wants to compare paper records of votes with electronic tallies of voting machines, and to subject touch-screen machines (which do not leave a paper trail) to forensic analysis. In Pennsylvania, the hurdles are higher in terms of the number of votes necessary to reverse Mr. Trump’s victory, as well as the procedures for initiating a recount. The state, where Mr. Trump holds a lead of 70,638 votes, or 1.1 percent, allows any three voters to petition to recount their local precinct. But despite a call on Sunday from Ms. Stein on Facebook for thousands of Pennsylvanians to file the paperwork, in many cases the deadlines have come and gone, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State. There are more than 9,000 voting precincts in Pennsylvania. Wanda Murren, a spokeswoman for the State Department, said she was aware of petitions in only a handful of the state’s 67 counties. The Stein campaign said that as of Monday, voters had filed recount petitions in 120 precincts, including more than 70 in Philadelphia, where the county has not yet certified the vote and petitions can still be accepted, according to Ilann Maazel, a lawyer for the campaign. In Michigan, a candidate can request a recount by citing fraud or errors, said Fred Woodhams, a spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state. But other candidates, like Mr. Trump, could potentially object to such a request by appealing to the Board of State Canvassers. At a meeting on Monday, where the canvassers certified the election results , a representative for Ms. Stein said her campaign planned to request a complete hand recount by a deadline on Wednesday. The campaign would need to pay estimated costs of $800,000, and a recount could start as early as Friday. “People will be working well after 5 p.m. and on the weekends,” Mr. Woodhams said. “It will certainly be very challenging, and potentially it could be expensive. The $800,000 will cover a lot of the work, but potentially not everything.”

2016 Presidential Election
Jill Stein
Hillary Clinton
Donald Trump
Green Party of the United States
Wisconsin
Pennsylvania
Michigan


Iraqi Trade Officials Ousted in Corruption Sweep

Abstract: BAGHDAD — With frustration running high about the lack of basic services and a widespread sense that corruption is one of the chief causes, the Iraqi cabinet announced Tuesday that it had forced out three high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Trade as part an anticorruption plan. Three lower-ranking ministry officials were also dismissed. The Trade Ministry controls some of the most visible commodities in Iraq , operates the $5.3 billion program to provide monthly ration baskets for all Iraqis and supervises the importing of new cars. It also oversees the importing of grain, seeds and construction materials. The directors general of the state company for cars and machinery, the legal department and the private sector directorate were all forced into early retirement, while lower-ranking officials were pushed out of the grain importation department and the division in charge of importing construction materials. But at least one of the departing ministry officials and some members of Parliament said the actions were just window dressing intended to shield higher-ups from scrutiny. “I don’t know any of the specific details about the so-called suspicions of corruption,” said the ministry official, Bassem Saddam, the assistant director general of the grain directorate. “I was surprised by this order. Is this a way to repay someone who was an honest employee of the ministry?” Ministry officials also complained that their department had been unfairly singled out in a government notorious for corruption. Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the United States special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, estimated in late 2006 that as much as $4 billion annually, roughly 10 percent of Iraq’s national income, was being lost to corruption. Few believe the pace has slackened since. “I wonder why there is much focus on corruption in the Trade Ministry, when there are so many other places which suffer from corruption,” said a ministry spokesman, Mohammed Hannon. He noted that the forced retirements had been based only on “suspicions of corruption,” adding, “There was no lawsuit filed against those six officials either by the cabinet or the court.” While some in the Trade Ministry complained that the government was overreaching, others said it did not go far enough. The Parliament’s integrity committee has gathered extensive evidence of the ministry’s malfeasance, its chairman said, and its members were perturbed that the cabinet had not forced the trade minister, Falah al-Sudani, to resign or at least call him to account. In recent weeks, Parliament members have collected the 107 signatures they said they needed to discuss a no-confidence motion against the trade minister, said Sabah al-Saadi, the chairman of Parliament’s integrity committee. But committee members were upset to find on Tuesday that the cabinet had punished lower-level people in the ministry and that discussing the no-confidence measure was not on the agenda. Mr. Sudani, a native of Basra, is from a wing of the Dawa Party, although not the wing most closely associated with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki . “To polish their image, they submitted scapegoats instead of starting with the head: the minister of trade,” Mr. Saadi said. “All the contracts that are handled by the Ministry of Trade are under the minister’s control, and he knew about all the spoiled and corrupt material that Iraq has imported.” Mr. Saadi dismissed the idea that the Trade Ministry was being treated unfairly. “The reason to concentrate on the Ministry of Trade is because it gives direct services to the citizens,” he said. “People cannot live without food. It’s not like electricity where they can buy power from private generators. It’s related to poverty and hunger.” Mr. Saddam, the ministry official, said he had had very little authority on his job recently. “I think I was targeted because as a politically independent individual,” he said. “I don’t have much party support.” Problems with the ration basket have drawn widespread complaints from Iraqis, for whom the program was one of the few visible connections to the government. The food basket was a constant under Saddam Hussein, and even his critics pointed to it as one thing they could rely on. The basket consisted of flour, rice, tea, sugar, salt, dried milk for adults and for children, cooking oil, lentils, chickpeas, soap for washing and laundry, and occasional extras, such as tomato paste or cake flour. During the past three years, both the selection of products and their quality have diminished, many Iraqis say. Milk has been missing for much of the past three years, although it recently made a reappearance, and there have been cases of rice with bugs in it and stale tea. The extras that families received under Mr. Hussein are a thing of the past. In violence in Iraq on Tuesday, American soldiers accidentally killed a Sunni Arab neighborhood patrol leader in a small town near the oil-refining city of Baiji, the military said. The man, a member of the American-supported Awakening movement , was shot during an operation to clear a house of insurgents. An American soldier was killed Tuesday in a gunfight near Salman Pak, a town southeast of Baghdad, according to an American military statement.

Iraq
Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations
Politics and Government
Ethics
Maliki Nuri Kamal al-
Iraq War (2003- )


Rangers Hold Off Capitals in Game 3

Abstract: Everything could have gone wrong for the Rangers on Monday. But everything went right. Marc Staal returned from a serious eye injury and gave his teammates and the Madison Square Garden crowd a huge emotional boost. The power play awoke from its slumber. Derek Stepan and Rick Nash, the Rangers’ top scorers during the regular season but blanked in the playoffs, combined for the winning goal with time running down and a 3-0 series deficit looming. Stepan’s goal with 6 minutes 25 seconds left in regulation gave the Rangers a 4-3 victory over Washington. Game 4 set for Wednesday at the Garden. “That’s what we talked about yesterday — it’s far away from being over,” said center Derick Brassard, who had a goal and two assists. “Tonight, it was pretty much do or die for us. The guys competed very hard for 60 minutes, stuck up for each other, and that’s what we need to do.” The Rangers held leads of 2-1 and 3-2, but the Capitals surged back to tie each time. Stepan started the play that led to the decisive goal when he won a battle along the sideboards in the Washington end and passed the puck back to defenseman Ryan McDonagh. McDonagh danced around two Capitals at the blue line, keeping the puck in the zone before sending it to Mats Zuccarello in the left corner. Zuccarello wound it behind the net to Nash standing in the right corner. Nash whipped the puck in front to Stepan, streaking down the slot, and he poked it past Washington goalie Braden Holtby. The Garden erupted. “I had a little struggle the first two periods — I just seemed maybe a step behind or something,” said Stepan, who led the Rangers with 44 points in the regular season but had none in the first two games. “It was a good goal for me. But nothing would have happened without a pass from Rick Nash like that, and a play by Mac on the blue line.” Coach John Tortorella said that even though Stepan “scores the big one tonight, and even though he hasn’t put numbers up, you look how much I rely on him.” Game 3: Rangers vs. Capitals 10 Photos View Slide Show › Image Barton Silverman/The New York Times Tortorella added, “He’s a 22-year-old guy that’s being relied on in all situations.” There was more tension for the Rangers after Stepan’s goal. Brad Richards was sent off for slashing Alex Ovechkin with 1:54 left, and the Capitals pulled Holtby (26 saves) to make it a six-on-four skating advantage. But the Rangers’ penalty killers held firm in front of Henrik Lundqvist (28 saves), who looked like a target at a county fair shooting gallery. “Was it a three-minute power play?” Stepan said jokingly. “It was just desperation.” The Capitals opened the scoring at 4:06 of the first period, but Brian Boyle tied the game at 12:50 of the first, just as the second of six Rangers power plays expired. The Rangers’ power-play unit, which Tortorella described as “stagnant and paralyzed” after it went 0 for 7 in the first two games, scored at 1:23 of the second period, when Brassard roofed a wrist shot from the slot that gave the Rangers their first lead. After Mike Green tied it later in the period, Arron Asham scored at 2:53 of the third. But Jay Beagle knotted the game again at 7:19, setting the stage for Stepan. Staal started the game on defense after missing 29 games from being struck in the right eye by a puck on March 5. Staal received a standing ovation when he took his place on the blue line for the national anthem. “I thought I’d be more nervous than I was,” said Staal, who played 17:17 as part of the second defense pairing with Anton Stralman. “I felt pretty good coming in.” Tortorella said Staal gave the Rangers a lift. “He’s so well respected in the room,” Tortorella said of Staal, who also recovered from a concussion that forced him to miss the first half of last season. “This is two major injuries he’s come back from.” Staal said his first game back was definitely different. “You play your whole life with 20-20 vision, and you step out there, and things definitely are changed,” he said. “But for the most part, it went pretty well.” SLAP SHOTS The Rangers’ fourth-line forward Darroll Powe sustained a possible concussion on his second shift of the game Monday after being accidentally elbowed in the head by Joel Ward. Powe sustained a concussion in a Feb. 17 game against Washington. He missed the three games that followed. ... Ryane Clowe did not suit up after taking the morning skate. He has not played since sustaining an unspecified injury — believed to be a concussion — that forced him out of a game April 25.

Ice hockey
Rangers
Washington Capitals
Derek Stepan
Rick Nash
Arron Asham


Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook , where his friends were sure to see and comment on his editing skills. “I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.” Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter , they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation. The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year , blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier. Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family. Blogging started its rapid ascension about 10 years ago as services like Blogger and LiveJournal became popular. So many people began blogging — to share dieting stories, rant about politics and celebrate their love of cats — that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” the word of the year in 2004. Defining a blog is difficult, but most people think it is a Web site on which people publish periodic entries in reverse chronological order and allow readers to leave comments. Yet for many Internet users, blogging is defined more by a personal and opinionated writing style. A number of news and commentary sites started as blogs before growing into mini-media empires, like The Huffington Post or Silicon Alley Insider, that are virtually indistinguishable from more traditional news sources. Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. Twitter, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters, also contributed to the upheaval. No longer did Internet users need a blog to connect with the world. They could instead post quick updates to complain about the weather, link to articles that infuriated them, comment on news events, share photos or promote some cause — all the things a blog was intended to do. Indeed, small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer , a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said. “If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.” Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services. “The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.” The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr . Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue. Kim Hou , a high school senior in San Francisco, said she quit blogging months ago, but acknowledged that she continued to post fashion photos on Tumblr. “It’s different from blogging because it’s easier to use,” she said. “With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that’s it.” The effect is seen on the companies providing the blogging platforms. Blogger , owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million — although globally, Blogger’s unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million. LiveJournal , another blogging service, has decided to emphasize communities. Connecting people who share an interest in celebrity gossip, for instance, provides the social interaction that “classic” blogging lacks, said Sue Rosenstock, a spokeswoman for LiveJournal, which is owned by SUP, a Russian online media company. “Blogging can be a very lonely occupation; you write out into the abyss,” she said. But some blogging services like Tumblr and WordPress seem to have avoided any decline. Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking. In any case, he said bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary. “There is a lot of fragmentation,” Mr. Schneider said. “But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.” While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent. Russ Steele, 72, a retired Air Force officer and aerospace worker from Nevada City, Calif., says he spends up to three hours a day seeking interesting topics and writing about them for his blog, NC Media Watch , which covers local issues in Nevada County, northeast of Sacramento. All he wants is to have a voice in the community for his conservative views. Although he signed up for Facebook this month, Mr. Steele said he did not foresee using it much and said that he remained committed to blogging. “I’d rather spend my time writing up a blog analysis than a whole bunch of short paragraphs and then send them to people,” he said. “I don’t need to tell people I’m going to the grocery store.”

Blogs and Blogging (Internet)
Social Networking (Internet)
Twitter
Facebook.com
Tumblr


Investors Ignore Risks in Pursuit of Growth in China

Abstract: SHANGHAI — When the Chinese social networking site Renren goes public in the United States this week, investors will most likely ignore the big risks the company faces and be lured by a combination of the words “China” and “social networking.” Shares for popular Chinese technology companies like Baidu, the Internet search engine, and Youku, the online video site, have risen triple-digit percentages since their initial public offerings, whetting investors’ appetites for such offerings. In perhaps the most extreme example of how in fashion the sector is, Facebook, the biggest social network company in the world, has a market value of about $70 billion, based on a share sale currently being contemplated, making it worth more than companies like Boeing. The demand for Renren shares was clear Friday when the company raised the expected price range of its I.P.O. 30 percent to $12 to $14 per share. “Appetite to invest in China right now is so strong that some investors are willing to ignore factors that they wouldn’t in other markets,” said Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting, a company based in Beijing that advises investors on the Internet and telecommunications sectors in China. Renren’s I.P.O. filings do raise a handful of very serious questions. For one thing, Renren does not really seem sure how many users it has. According to its April 27 revised I.P.O. filing, Renren’s monthly unique log-ins grew by only five million, or 19 percent, in the first quarter of 2011 — not the seven million, or 29 percent, it had reported in its first filing only 12 days earlier. Some investors and analysts brush off such red flags — after all, China is the biggest Internet market in the world and it is growing rapidly. They justify their cavalier attitude by saying that figures reported by Chinese companies should be used for directional information and not as perfect quantitative measurements. Others say the opaque information is a big problem. “If you can’t validate the numbers or the company proves it doesn’t have a good handle on the numbers, then you’ve got to be concerned,” said Gary Rieschel, founder of Qiming Venture Partners, which is an investor in Kaixin001, a Renren rival. Another possible risk for investors is the broad government oversight that Renren and other companies operating in China face. The Chinese authorities keep extremely close tabs on Internet companies, arguing that is necessary to maintain social harmony. The monitoring led to a falling out between Google and the Chinese government last year that ended with Google’s curtailing its operations in the country. Renren says in the risk factors section of its I.P.O. prospectus that this oversight means a prohibition against posting content that, among other things, “impairs the national dignity of China” or is “superstitious.” The prospectus does not mention the recent uprisings in the Arab world, which led to a crackdown on the use of certain words on the Internet in China, but it does say that Renren may not post content that is considered “socially destabilizing.” If Renren fails to comply, the company says, its Web sites could be shut down. Clearly that could put it out of business. Whether a posting on a social network page is objectionable is determined by the Chinese authorities. Renren is also required to monitor advertisements on its Web sites, some of which are subject to special government review before they are posted. Renren must even guard against providing services that may lead to its users’ finding themselves in “emotionally charged situations.” Still, it is not difficult to find people who will give the company the benefit of the doubt. “Given the investors it has who have board seats and who work closely with it, you would expect any major issues to have turned up by now,” said Nick Einhorn, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, an I.P.O. research and investment firm based in Connecticut. Renren’s investors include General Atlantic, the private equity firm, and DCM, the venture capital firm. Clare Baldwin reported from New York.

China
Social Networking (Internet)
Initial Public Offerings


Bayern Tops Manchester City in Champions League Opener

Abstract: Jérôme Boateng scored in the 90th minute to give Bayern Munich a 1-0 victory over Manchester City in their Champions League opener in Group E. Gerard Piqué scored the only goal in Barcelona’s 1-0 victory over Apoel, heading in Lionel Messi’s free kick in the 28th minute. Chelsea was held to a 1-1 home tie against Schalke. In other games, Roma routed CSKA Moscow, 5-1; Porto beat BATE Borisov, 6-0; Ajax tied Paris St.-Germain, 1-1; Maribor drew with Sporting Lisbon, 1-1; and Athletic Bilbao and Shakhtar Donetsk tied, 0-0.

Soccer
UEFA Champions League
Bayern Munich Soccer Team
Manchester City Soccer Team


Cuban Centers to Offer a Costly Glimpse of the Web

Abstract: HAVANA — Cuban authorities said Tuesday that they would begin offering public Internet access at more than 100 cybersalons across the island, where residential access is greatly restricted. Starting next Tuesday, people can sign up with the state telecom company Etecsa for temporary or permanent accounts to use at one of the 118 centers, according to a measure enacted with its publication in the government’s Official Gazette. An official newspaper, Juventud Rebelde, said new areas for Internet navigation would gradually be incorporated. Until now, the Internet has been limited to places like tourist hotels, which charge $8 an hour for Wi-Fi; foreign-run companies; and some sectors of Cuban business and government. Home dial-up accounts are rare and restricted. According to government statistics, only 2.9 percent of Cubans said they had access to the Web — though significant underreporting appears likely. About 16 percent were able to go partway online via a domestic intranet and e-mail, often through workplace or school hookups or places like computer clubs and post offices. “Great! I knew this was coming,” said Camila Delgado, a 44-year-old shop worker in Havana, though she added: “There’s still a ways to go to be like everywhere else on the planet. We don’t have access at home, and the prices are prohibitive.” Indeed, some scoffed at the new computer centers’ price tag of $4.50 an hour. That is a stiff fee when state salaries average about $20 per month, although there are an array of subsidized goods and services. “It’s a real bargain,” said a user on the state news Web site Cuba Si who gave the name Osvaldo Ulloa. “I mean, I work for a week and then I can get online for hour — fabulous.” Even for those who are already able to access the wider Internet, some sites are censored for pornographic or politically objectionable content. It was not clear whether the new service would block such sites, and neither the Gazette nor Juventud Rebelde mentioned the issue. Officials say that the limitations are due mostly to technical reasons, and that Cuba has the obligation to prioritize its limited capacity for things that benefit the public good, like research and work centers or universities. Earlier this year, Cuba began sending and receiving data traffic through a fiber-optic cable strung from Venezuela in 2011 that provided the island’s first hard-wired Internet connection to the outside world. Expanding connectivity options for Cubans “is consistent with Cuba’s stated strategy of continuing to facilitate more and more access to new technologies, depending on the availability of resources and with a focus that favors social use,” Juventud Rebelde said. The paper added that the new service was possible thanks to the Venezuela cable.

Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba SA Etecsa


In Nederland, Colo., Marijuana’s a Point of Pride

Abstract: NEDERLAND, Colo. — Millions of Americans expressed their feelings about marijuana last week. In Colorado, 24 communities voted to ban or restrict shops selling legal medical marijuana. In California, voters wrestled with the question of legalization for recreational use — with issues of health, crime and taxes all coming into play — then voted no. But here in Nederland, it was just another beautiful day high in the mountains. Marijuana has been mainstream in this outpost of the counterculture, 8,000 feet in the Rockies and an hour northwest of Denver, since the days of Bob Marley’s cigar-size “spliffs” and the jokes of Cheech and Chong. And to judge by the numbers, things have not changed all that much. An explosion of medical marijuana sales over the last year in Colorado as well as the District of Columbia and the 13 other states where medical use is allowed has certainly brought a new element into the mix. Dispensaries like Grateful Meds, one of seven medical marijuana providers in Nederland, population 1,400, now have legal compliance lawyers on retainer and sales tax receipts in the cash drawer. But marijuana is still marijuana, and Nederland’s perch overlooking what John Denver immortalized as “the Colorado Rocky Mountain high” has not budged. State records show that by some coincidence, the concentration of medical marijuana patients and dispensaries selling medicinal cannabis is higher here in Colorado’s old hippie heartland than in any other corner of the state. In Gilpin County, for example, which begins at Nederland’s doorstep, almost one in 20 residents qualify for cannabis treatment — the highest level in Colorado and more than three times the statewide average. State law, passed by voter referendum in 2000, allows marijuana treatment for a list of maladies, from cancer to chronic pain, if a doctor verifies the need. And doctors have obliged. The sick-enough-for-marijuana pattern extends in a broad band from Nederland west through an archipelago of communities that were equally tinctured by tie-dye a generation ago and are now cornerstones of the state’s resort and tourism industry. Summit and Pitkin Counties, home to ski towns like Breckenridge, Keystone and Aspen, pride themselves on a healthy outdoor youth culture, but they also have a disproportionate amount of debilitating pain diagnosed in men in their 20s, state records show. “Who would think there would be such severe pain among young men in Colorado?” said Ron Hyman, the state registrar of vital statistics and director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s medical marijuana program. Nederland residents like Hal Mobley, 56, who was on his way to get a haircut on a recent morning, asked pretty much the same thing. Marijuana is part of the life here, he said — no more available, no less, and no different in its use, he thinks, than it has been for decades. “It’s for pain?” he said, squinting into the bright sun. Well, it is also good medicine for the Nederland town budget. Tax revenues are way up, in ways that would make many a more buttoned-down town treasurer envious — partly from more tourists spending money in the restaurants and shops, but even more so from marijuana sales. In June alone, while many communities around the nation were still sputtering through economic doldrums, sales taxes collected in Nederland came in a robust 54 percent above those of June 2009. Without the tax collected on marijuana, the increase would have been 22 percent. “It’s been here, probably in an illegal capacity, for a long time, but now there’s an opportunity for industry,” said Nederland’s mayor, Sumaya Abu-Haidar. “There’s an opportunity for free enterprise, an opportunity for people to make a living in a way that wasn’t available before.” Philip Dyer, 45, a local musician, put it another way. The government, he said, “has finally gotten smart enough to regulate it and get their piece.” Supporters of medical marijuana say the pattern — medical use most predominant in places of historically high recreational use — is simply a reflection of better knowledge about the drug and its properties. People in communities where marijuana has been accepted, they say, know more about its medical benefits than those in other parts of the state where medical marijuana patients are rare. Still, residents here say that despite a kind of marijuana status quo on paper, things are changing. A demographic shift in recent years, with more families, professionals, tech workers and telecommuters moving here, has created tensions, town officials say, over questions of growth, development, tourism — and marijuana, with many of the newcomers less enthusiastic than the old guard about Nederland’s ganja-tinged reputation. Earlier this year, Nederland became the third community in Colorado to decriminalize recreational marijuana use. But the vote, mostly symbolic because recreational use is still illegal under state and federal law, deeply divided the community. Legalization passed, but by only 41 of the 477 votes cast. A proposal to hold a cannabis festival in town hit a bigger wall of opposition and was voted down. “When people think of Nederland as this stoner town, if you will, that is not accurate,” Mayor Abu-Haidar said. But the town still has a reputation for having good marijuana, a point of pride that the legal compliance lawyer for Grateful Meds, Susan Eisman, was happy to talk about during a tour of the shop. Whereas many dispensaries have perhaps five strains of marijuana to choose from, Grateful Meds has 30, and serves about 300 patients. “We have patients coming from all over Colorado,” Ms. Eisman said. “And a lot of it is the quality and quantity and the selection and the reputation. “A patient just the other day came all the way from Longmont, an hour away, because he liked a particular strain and he can’t get it anywhere else.”

Marijuana
Medicine and Health
Law and Legislation
Taxation
Colorado


Abu Dhabi Energy Company Aims for Solar-Powered Travel

Abstract: DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, is hosting the first attempt at a round-the-world flight by a solar-powered aircraft, due to start from the emirate in March. The Solar Impulse experimental flight program is one of a slew of international projects in which Masdar has invested, reinforcing its status as a pioneer in solar energy innovation. “We wanted to demonstrate the viability of this revolutionary clean technology,” said Ahmad Belhoul, who took over as chief executive of Masdar, a unit of Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi government’s investment arm, in March. “There have been successful internal flights, but the idea is to have global travel that is exclusively powered by solar energy.” The plan is to span the globe, crossing the world’s major oceans in flights lasting up to five days at a time. The total trip is expected to take about four months. “We have chosen Abu Dhabi as being the best and most suitable departure and return point for the round-the-world tour due to its climate, infrastructure, and commitment to clean technologies,” André Borschberg, one of the pilots and a co-founder of the Solar Impulse project, said in an emailed statement. Solar power, abundant in the Persian Gulf region, still involves capital-intensive and experimental technologies. As the technology develops, however, the costs are falling fast, making large-scale energy-generating projects increasingly viable. Solar energy is not Masdar’s only iron in the fire, however, and the company has had a busy year. It has invested in renewable energy projects around the world, most recently joining Norway’s Statoil and Statkraft to develop an offshore wind farm, Dudgeon, off eastern England. In September, Masdar acquired a 35 percent stake in the 402 megawatt project from Statoil, valued at 3.25 billion dirhams, or $885 million. When completed in 2017, Dudgeon will provide clean energy to more than 400,000 British households. Dudgeon is Masdar’s second major investment in British offshore wind energy. It also has a 20 percent stake in the 630 megawatt London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm. “In Europe, the volume of investment required over the next decade for security, climate change and technology is huge — roughly 1 trillion” euros, or $1.27 trillion, Antony Froggatt, senior research fellow at the think tank Chatham House in London, said in a telephone interview. The scale of investment required “is in part why people are very welcoming to foreign investments,” Mr. Froggatt said: “Aside from developing new technologies, it also speaks to greater opportunities for political cooperation.” This summer, Masdar also delivered a 550 kilowatt project in Samoa, a project that addresses the skyrocketing cost of diesel imports in Pacific countries as well as reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Closer to home, Masdar has invested in the Middle East’s first utility-scale wind farm. The $290 million, 117 megawatt Tafila Wind Farm in Jordan will expand that country’s total power capacity by 3 percent when it goes fully operational, expected to be next year. Masdar is also building the new headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi. When completed, the 32,000-square-foot complex, designed as a test bed for sustainable living, will house Masdar itself and the international agency. “We have a healthy pipeline for the year ahead and are looking at a number of new projects, particularly in North Africa,” Mr. Belhoul, the chief executive, said. “We are in the fortunate position to cherry pick.” The company continues to work on the development of Masdar City, a concept green community that was initially planned as an elevated city with a personal rapid transit system that would serves as its sole transport network. That vision was brought back to earth, literally, by the recession, and the project is now going forward as an urban development on a more modest and relatively conventional scale. “Whatever setbacks Masdar has had, it is still lighting the path for governments on how to commit their resources to 21st century infrastructural developments,” said Tim Woodcock, a director at Plant, a New York solar energy company. “And one message is clear: Think big.”

Airlines,airplanes
Solar energy
Renewable energy
Abu Dhabi