Internet Providers Testing Metered Plans for Broadband

Abstract: SAN ANTONIO — The broadband era began with the expectation that Internet connections were like buffets — all you can eat, 24 hours a day. But users are now being prodded to think about how much they’re consuming. Here in South Texas, Time Warner Cable customers have been given the online equivalent of a scale in the bathroom, a “usage tracker” that adds up all the household’s Facebooking and YouTubing. Customers who sign up for a light plan of 5 gigabytes of broadband — that’s the equivalent of two high-definition movie downloads — are rewarded with a $5 discount each month if they don’t go over. If they do, they pay $1 for every additional gigabyte. “We’re moving away from one-size-fits-all,” said Jon Gary Herrera, a Texas spokesman for the cable company, which now tends to call itself a broadband company instead. Some of Time Warner Cable’s competitors are moving the same way, slowly but surely, toward tiers of pricing for higher speeds and bigger amounts of broadband at home, mimicking the wireless industry’s much-maligned pricing plans. The strategy, called usage-based billing, is advantageous for the companies that control the digital pipelines. But it may be detrimental for customers who are watching more and more video on the Web every month, as well as companies like Netflix that distribute it. Some fear that as customers become more aware of how much broadband they’re using each month, they’ll start to use less of it, and in that way, protect traditional forms of entertainment distribution and discourage new Internet services. Executives at cable and broadband providers dispute that by saying it is in their interest to make broadband a must-have product. “The exploding growth of online video usage undercuts any argument that cable is standing in the way of this business,” said Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the industry’s trade group. But some government officials aren’t so sure. The Justice Department’s antitrust lawyers are conducting an investigation into the cable industry’s treatment of online video companies with an eye toward deterring anticompetitive behavior. Some analysts say the investigation could, perhaps counterintuitively, accelerate the move to usage-based billing. As online video use soars, customers just want faster and better broadband service, and they complain (online, naturally) when Web pages or videos take too long to load. Kate Miller, a Time Warner Cable customer in Utica, N.Y., said her 2-year-old daughter Jane has already learned the word “buffering.” “Elmo,” Ms. Miller said, “was never meant to buffer.” There’s a clash between what users expect from broadband service and what is actually delivered to them, said Chris Balfe, the president of Glenn Beck ’s media company, which created an online TV channel nearly a year ago. He has noticed sluggishness at home when trying to view YouTube videos. “As a broadband video provider it’s frustrating, but as a user it’s absolutely infuriating,” he said. Usage-based billing is seen by some as a fairer alternative to broadband caps, a term most closely associated with Comcast , which had been enforcing a limit of 250 gigabytes per Internet customer per month. Although only a small minority of customers ever exceeded the cap, it became a lightning rod for competitors like Netflix, which accused Comcast of unfairly favoring its own services. Comcast said this spring that it would start to test usage-based billing. “Our network is not an infinite resource, and it is expensive to expand it,” David L. Cohen, a Comcast executive, said at the time. Along with news and entertainment, the futures of entire industries — commerce, health care and transportation — are being built atop a broadband foundation. Companies big and small are coming up with ways to get faster broadband to more people; many people believe that broadband speeds will inevitably improve as time goes on, just as computer chip speeds have. But others say that the marketplace lacks sufficient competition, which keeps the price of broadband — a high-margin product — higher than it otherwise would be. They wonder whether strategies like usage-based billing will worsen what is already an economic barrier for some Americans. “It’s like locking the doors to the library,” said Nicholas Longo, the director of Geekdom, a new collaborative work space for small companies in San Antonio. Geekdom will pay almost any price for reliable broadband — that’s a critical piece of what it sells to start-ups that pay for work space. But some of the start-ups fear that changes to broadband pricing will tamp down consumer demand for the new products they’re conceiving and testing. “If we had an unlimited pipe, there’s so much more we could do,” said Yuri Zapuchlak, a co-founder of Vidmaker, a video editing tool that exists “in the cloud,” meaning that the videos are uploaded and downloaded from the Internet in real time. For now, the Vidmaker software works around the limits of wireless and wired Internet access by breaking off the chunks of video that are going to be edited and uploading only those chunks. Time Warner Cable started testing usage-based billing in San Antonio four months ago by offering the $5 discount to lighter users. Customer service representatives at a suburban call center are now trained to ask new customers about how they use the Web; once uses (listed on a work sheet) like “Internet gaming,” “watching TV/movie clips” or “video chat” are mentioned, callers are steered toward a pricing plan with unlimited bandwidth. For now, unlike the 5-gigabyte plan, the unlimited plans have no overage charges. But the provider, and others like it, could change the pricing plans if many people begin to drop cable TV— essentially making up for losses on the television side by making broadband more expensive. Such changes to pricing, if they occur, would happen gradually and carefully, executives say privately. But they are already working to change consumer expectations. Suddenlink, a home broadband provider in 18 states, sells usage-based plans tied to speeds, so customers who choose faster, pricier broadband speeds also have more bandwidth to use. The company calls them “allowance plans.” One of Comcast’s tests will be structured that way. In another test, customers will get a monthly allotment of 300 gigabytes a month (enough for roughly 100 movies) and will pay more for additional “blocks.” The Netflixes of the world are wary of these moves, though there may be little they can do. Concerns about both caps and usage-based billing have already caused one would-be online video competitor, Sony , to rethink its plan to sell a bundle of cable channels over the Internet. Dish Network and other companies have been preparing plans for similar bundles, which could help cause the so-called unbundling of television that consumer advocates have dreamed about for decades. But “these guys have the pipe and the bandwidth,” said a Sony Network Entertainment executive, Michael Aragon, referring to cable and broadband providers, while speaking at a meeting sponsored by Variety in April. Still, Mr. Aragon added, “We do believe there’s a business model out there.”

Computers and the Internet
Price
Time Warner Cable
Comcast
San Antonio


Palestinians Set Up Camp in Israeli-Occupied West Bank Territory

Abstract: JERUSALEM — Adopting a tactic more commonly employed by Jewish settlers who establish wildcat outposts in the West Bank , scores of Palestinian activists erected tents on Friday in a hotly contested piece of Israeli-occupied West Bank territory known as E1, and they said they intended to stay put. The Palestinians claim E1, just east of Jerusalem, as part of a future state. The protest comes six weeks after Israel announced that it was moving forward with plans for thousands of settlement homes in E1, stirring international outrage . The Israeli military authorities arrived Friday and handed the protesters notices warning them that they were illegally trespassing and that they had to leave, according to a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld. Mr. Rosenfeld said he expected movement “at some point,” with the protesters either leaving voluntarily or by force. But the protesters said that they had anticipated such action by Israeli security forces and that their lawyers had already gone to the Israeli Supreme Court to argue for a delay in any evacuation until the state details the grounds for such a move. Protest leaders said the court had given the state six days to respond. About 200 activists began pitching tents on a hill in the barren, stony territory on Friday morning, and issued a statement announcing the establishment of a village named Bab al-Shams (Arabic for “Gate of the Sun”), after the title of a novel by a Lebanese writer , Elias Khoury, that portrays Palestinian yearnings through a metaphorical story of love for the land. Israeli plans to build in E1 have been vehemently opposed for years by international players, including the United States, who say construction there would partially separate the northern and southern West Bank, harming the prospects of a viable contiguous Palestinian state in that territory. Israel announced its intention as a countermeasure after the United Nations General Assembly voted in November to upgrade the Palestinians’ status to that of a nonmember observer state. Israel wants to create contiguity between East Jerusalem, which it has annexed, and the large urban settlement of Maale Adumim that lies beyond E1, and says that the future of the West Bank has to be settled in negotiations. In the meantime, critics say, Israel continues to establish facts on the ground. “We are here as a response to the settlers and to the Israeli policy of settlement expansion,” said Muhammad Khatib, a veteran member of the grass-roots Palestinian Popular Struggle Coordination Committee and a resident of Bilin. That West Bank village became a symbol of Palestinian defiance after it held weekly protests and won a ruling in the Israeli Supreme Court in 2007 forcing Israel to reroute its West Bank barrier so as to take in less of the village’s agricultural land. “Now I am one of the people of Bab al-Shams,” said Mr. Khatib, speaking by telephone from the protest site. “We want to stay here forever.” Mr. Khatib said that the police were stopping people and supplies from entering the site, but that the campers had come prepared. He added that if the Israeli security forces came to evict the protesters, “we will resist in our nonviolent way.” Israel says that most of the E1 area is Israeli land. Protest leaders said they had set up their encampment on a parcel of land owned by a Palestinian family from A-Tur, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem. They added that the landowners had given their full permission for the encampment and had joined the activists at the site. About 25 tents were set up Friday, including one serving as a clinic and one for the “village administration,” according to Abir Kopty, a spokeswoman for the coordination committee, who also spoke by phone from the encampment. “We call this a village, not an outpost,” Ms. Kopty said, “because there is a huge difference between Palestinians living on their own land and settlers building illegally on our occupied land.” Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, said in a statement: “This initiative is a highly creative and legitimate nonviolent tool to protect our land from Israeli colonial plans. We have the right to live anywhere in our state, and we call upon the international community to support such initiatives.”

Israel
East Jerusalem
West Bank
Palestinians
Israeli settlement
PLO


A Police Shot to a Boy’s Back in Queens, Echoing Since 1973

Abstract: It was 1973, long before anyone could imagine hashtag declarations of solidarity and protest, the kind of message to the world that today might read, #IamCliffordGloverInTheFourthGrade. No one could pull out a phone to make a video of Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old running from a plainclothes police officer with a gun who had just jumped out of a white Buick Skylark in Jamaica, Queens, on a spring morning in 1973. “I am sure a camera would have helped, but the ballistics were clear,” Albert Gaudelli, a former Queens prosecutor, said this week. “The bullet entered his lower back and came out at the top of his chest. He was shot T-square in the back, with his body leaning forward. He was running away.” That bullet killed Clifford Glover . Its trajectory — through a family, a neighborhood, a generation — can be traced to this day, in injuries that never healed, in a story with no final word. When a black man named Walter Scott was shot by a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., on April 4, a cellphone video made by a passer-by showed that Mr. Scott was also running away when he was killed and that he was not, as the officer claimed, carrying a police Taser. “With all this killing and stuff,” said Pauline Armstead, a sister of the dead boy, “they need to go back to Cliffie Glover.” Clifford, a black boy, had been shot by Officer Thomas Shea, a white man, who said he had tried to question him and his stepfather because they fit the descriptions of cab robbers. They ran. The officer said he fired when Clifford, in flight, pointed a gun at him, which the mortally injured boy had then managed to toss or hand to his stepfather. In the hours and days that followed the shooting, armies of investigators scoured the streets and sewers, pored over court records and arrived, without warrants, to search the homes of Clifford’s family and relatives. “Guys were trying to help Shea, and coming up with all kinds of stuff,” said Mr. Gaudelli, who was the chief homicide prosecutor in Queens at the time. “Someone showed up with a starter’s pistol, but as soon as you pressed them on it, they folded. There was no gun.” Image Clifford Glover People in Jamaica rose in protest; the streets were blocked with heavy construction equipment owned by a black contractor. Mr. Shea became the first police officer in nearly 50 years to be charged with committing murder while on duty. “Shea says that the kid turned and appeared to have a gun,” Mr. Gaudelli said. “That’s what got him indicted: The ballistics made Shea a liar.” But not, apparently, a murderer, at least in the eyes of the jury of 11 white men and one black woman who found him not guilty . Afterward, many of the jurors joined Mr. Shea and his lawyers at a Queens Boulevard restaurant to celebrate. They told reporters it was possible Mr. Shea had been telling the truth about seeing a gun. That same day, word of the verdict reached a baseball field on the grounds of the South Jamaica Houses, known locally as the 40 Projects. Eric Adams, who was then a 13-year-old from the neighborhood, was waiting to bat. “We were playing a Long Island team that happened to be all white,” said Mr. Adams, who became a police officer and is now the Brooklyn borough president. “When the news came out, about 200 people emerged on the field. They just took the baseball bats and started beating the white players, chanting, ‘Shea got away.’ ” Later, Mr. Shea would be fired despite a rally by police officers and the pleas of his lawyer, Jacob Evseroff, who said his client was needed on the force “to protect us from the animals who roam the streets of New York.” The Long Island baseball team had come to Queens as part of “an interracial, inter-neighborhood thing,” Mr. Adams said. “It was their first visit.” The Jamaica team tried to stop the assault but could not. “That was all the outrage,” he said, adding that “because of what happened, a lot of our guys quit the team, never played baseball again.” For his generation of black boys and girls, Mr. Adams said, the verdict “brought a lot of despair.” The year after Clifford Glover died, the number of shots fired by officers declined by nearly half. ( In 2013, the number of shots fired was 248, the fewest since the Police Department began keeping detailed records in 1971; at the peak, in 1972, officers fired 2,510 bullets.) Image Clifford’s stepfather, Add Armstead; mother, Eloise Glover; and a sister, Patricia Glover, the day after Clifford was fatally shot in 1973. Credit Gary Azon Because Mr. Shea had spoken freely with his superiors, the largest police union began a campaign urging its members not to talk after a shooting until a union lawyer had arrived. For Clifford’s family, his death changed everything. “They wrote that we were poor,” Darlene Armstead, a younger sister, said this week. As she and three other siblings, Kenneth, Pauline and Patricia Armstead, described the household this week, the family may not have had much money, but before Clifford’s killing, it was sound. Darlene’s father, Add Armstead, who was Clifford’s stepfather, went to work every morning at a junkyard. The family had dinner each night at the same time, around one table, Ms. Armstead said, then watched cowboy shows on television. On summer weekends, neighborhood children feasted in the backyard on watermelon laid out on a door, covered by a sheet, that rested on two clean garbage cans. Add Armstead and his brothers enjoyed cigars and burgers. “My father taught us structure,” Darlene Armstead said. She had to make beds. One brother had to clean the yard and bring out the garbage. Clifford, a fourth grader at Public School 40, went with his stepfather on weekends to the junkyard, carrying his own little wrench. On the morning of April 28, 1973, a Saturday, Add Armstead woke Clifford before dawn so they could be at the yard to move cranes into place for a delivery. They walked a few blocks along New York Boulevard — known today as Guy R. Brewer Boulevard — when an unmarked car pulled alongside them. Mr. Armstead, carrying wages that he had been paid the day before, said he and Clifford ran, afraid that they were going to be robbed. Hearing shots, he flagged down a patrol car, not realizing that Clifford had been felled. Mr. Shea testified that he did not realize that Clifford, who stood just five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds, was a child. After the shooting, prosecutors said, Mr. Shea’s partner, Walter Scott, was recorded on a radio transmission saying, “Die, you little,” adding an expletive. Mr. Scott — who by coincidence has the same name as the man killed in North Charleston — denied it was his voice. Clifford’s death sent his mother, Eloise Glover, into a tailspin. “My mother turned on my father — ‘Did you have a gun, they said you had a gun,’ ” Darlene Armstead said. “It caused them to break up. My mother lost her mind.” Image Officer Thomas J. Shea, center, celebrated his acquittal with his lawyers at a local restaurant. Credit Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times The family received a settlement from New York City that, in the memory of the children, came to about $50,000, most of which the mother lent to local churches but never got back. “My mother didn’t want no one to know when she going outside,” Ms. Armstead said. “She always used the back door.” Ms. Armstead recalled sleeping nights on chairs in hospital emergency rooms while her mother was being treated, and living off restaurant handouts. “She was going to pay this guy to board up the house and she would pay him to bring the food to us,” she said. The children went to foster care and group homes. One brother was in a psychiatric institution for about 10 years. Her mother, who had diabetes, died in 1990 at age 54. Add Armstead died in 2005, at 83. “They put guns on him; they said he had guns at work, at home,” Kenneth Armstead said. “To demonize him would help Shea’s story.” Mr. Shea, who moved out of the state after his marriage broke up, could not be reached. “I’ve lost it all,” he told the author Thomas Hauser, whose 1980 book, “The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea,” is a comprehensive account of the episode. The defense lawyer, Mr. Evseroff, said a video would have changed nothing. “The case was resolved as a result of a trial,” he said. For Mr. Adams, the quick termination of the South Carolina police officer in the shooting this month of Walter Scott was a positive step. “That mayor said: ‘You know what? It has just gone too far,’ ” Mr. Adams said. “The pathway of Shea’s bullet physically stopped when it hit Clifford Glover, but the emotional pathway probably still continues to this day.”

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


Tyco Has Loss on Legal Case, but Results Beat Forecast

Abstract: WEST WINDSOR, N.J., Aug. 7 (AP) — Tyco International said Tuesday that it fell to a fiscal third-quarter loss because of hefty charges primarily related to a legal settlement, but its adjusted results exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. The company agreed to set up a $3 billion cash fund in May to satisfy shareholder claims arising from actions by its former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski , and other top officers convicted of looting the company and overstating its value. Tyco completed spinoffs of its health care and electronics units on June 29. The company, now focused on fire, security and energy products, reported a loss of $3.55 billion, or $7.18 a share, in contrast to a profit of $868 million, or $1.68 a share, in the period a year earlier. The loss from continuing operations was $3.04 billion, or $6.13 a share, versus income from continuing operations of $170 million, or 33 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Excluding $3.3 billion related to a legal settlement, charges and other items, Tyco posted income from continuing operations of $277 million, or 55 cents a share, compared with $252 million, or 49 cents a share. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected earnings of 48 cents a share. Shares fell 56 cents, to $47.44, on the New York Stock Exchange. Quarterly revenue for the period that ended June 29 climbed 8 percent, to $5.09 billion, from $4.72 billion a year ago. Consensus estimates put sales at $5.01 billion. Tyco said it expected fourth-quarter revenue growth of 6 to 7 percent, excluding infrastructure services. The Covidien health care business and Tyco Electronics, the Tyco spinoffs, are scheduled to report their earnings on Wednesday and Thursday. The company has its headquarters in Bermuda, but the executive offices are in West Windsor.

Company Reports
Tyco International Ltd
Stocks and Bonds
Health Insurance and Managed Care
Kozlowski L Dennis
Crime and Criminals


A Review of BiVio, in Huntington

Abstract: IN Italian, the word “bivio” means crossroads. So BiVio, an Italian restaurant that opened in Huntington in February, is aptly named, located as it is a few yards from the convergence of Jericho Turnpike and Deer Park Road East. Although the building most recently housed another Italian restaurant, it is best remembered as the former Fred’s, a longtime diner noted for its German specialties. The first thing diners see when they walk into BiVio is the bar, situated where the counter of Fred’s used to be. Mirror-backed with a shiny granite top, it makes a good first impression. A right turn takes you into a carpeted, L-shaped dining room decorated in earth tones, with white-clothed tables and votive candles. Farther into the restaurant is a bigger room, brightly illuminated by skylights, where large groups, especially those with children, are seated. BiVio is owned by Omar Ortega, who was for 15 years the owner of Mario’s in East Meadow, and more recently the manager of the well-regarded Luigi Q in Hicksville; he has a silent partner in the new restaurant. BiVio’s chef, Pastor Alfaro, worked for six years at Luigi Q and was at La Veranda in Glen Cove, since closed, before that. Mr. Ortega, who acts as host, headwaiter and enthusiastic cheerleader, sets the mood. (We knew who he was because the waiters addressed him as Omar.) Although he is never intrusive, before the evening is over, diners may learn that he is from Argentina, is a grandfather and loves soccer. The jolly waiters keep the mood going, and the busboys are extremely efficient. One night, a young girl at our table saw a placard listing pink lemonade among the beverages. Not realizing it was an alcoholic cocktail, she asked for one. Mr. Ortega paused for only a moment before saying, “We can make her a pink lemonade.” Another night, a guest nibbling the biscotti brought to the table at the end of the meal mentioned that they would be good dipped in sweet wine. In a flash, Mr. Ortega arrived with a glass of wine “from my own private bottle.” At the next table, two women were told they had to taste the house-made cannoli cake, gratis for them. BiVio is that kind of place. There are no surprises on the menu. Diners will find traditional Italian food, ably prepared and generously portioned. Salads — the traditional Caesar and the house salad in balsamic vinaigrette are both worth ordering — arrive on dinner plates, and entrees on platters. One evening, when a diner who had ordered an entree that came with a choice of salad or the soup of the day mentioned that he didn’t care for the soup offered, Mr. Ortega said, “How about a bowl of stracciatella?” The Italian egg-drop soup laced with spinach, made to order, was a hit with its flavorful broth. Other good appetizer choices were the tender baked clams, with a light coating of bread crumbs, and the baked eggplant, a layered tower featuring four cheeses in a chunky tomato sauce. The two pastas we tried, both house-made, were satisfying: pappardelle in a meaty, almost creamy Bolognese sauce, and gnocchi in a tomato sauce bolstered with onions. The penne alla Caprese featured fresh diced tomatoes in a garlic-olive oil sauce, but the cubed mozzarella in the dish had melted into a stringy, rather than creamy, mass. We had no complaints about the huge portion of tender chicken Parmesan served with the pasta of one’s choice, or with the two veal scaloppine dishes we sampled: a tangy piccata with artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes and capers, and a soothing Marsala with wild mushrooms. The dessert menu notes which ones are house-made. We stuck to those and liked all that we tried: a creamy tiramisù; a moist Italian cheesecake sparked by lemon; a rich chocolate mousse cake; a mixed-berry crepe, glazed with sugar and served à la mode; and the cannoli cake, a layering of yellow cake and sweet cannoli filling. BiVio does not impress with trendy fare, but it satisfies with well-prepared favorites, served in large portions at moderate prices. BiVio 1801 East Jericho Turnpike Huntington (631) 499-9133 biviorestaurant.com WORTH IT THE SPACE Upscale, comfortable restaurant in a free-standing building with two dining rooms: one cozy and L-shaped; the other larger, with skylights. There are no steps, but the restrooms are not wheelchair accessible. THE CROWD Many couples and small groups, including families with children. Servers are amiable and attentive. THE BAR Mirror-backed, with a polished granite top and about a dozen stools. There are 50 bottles on the wine list ($28 to $120, with a $250 Champagne), and 12 wines by the glass ($8 to $10). THE BILL Lunch entrees, served from noon to 3 p.m. on weekdays, $9.95 to $17.95. Dinner entrees range from $15.95 (chicken Marsala) to $38.95 (veal chop). The prices are reasonable, considering the large portions. American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Discover are accepted. WHAT WE LIKED Baked clams, baked eggplant, house salad, Caesar salad, gnocchi, pappardelle Bolognese, veal Marsala, veal piccata, chicken Parmesan, all house-made desserts. IF YOU GO Open Tuesday through Thursday, noon to 10 p.m.; Friday, noon to 11 p.m.; Saturday, 4 to 11 p.m.; and Sunday, 3 to 9 p.m. Closed Monday. Reservations are recommended. RATINGS Don’t Miss, Worth it, O.K., Don’t Bother.

Restaurants
Huntington (NY)
Ortega Omar
BiVio (Huntington NY Restaurant)
BiVio (Huntington NY)


Four Players Suspended Before Lady Vols’ Opener

Abstract: Fourth-ranked Tennessee has suspended four players for academic reasons. Coach Holly Warlick said two players would miss one game and two would miss two games. Warlick said Wednesday that guards Ariel Massengale and Andraya Carter would miss one game and forward Cierra Burdick and guard Jannah Tucker would miss two because they did “not live up to our academic standards.” Tucker’s punishment will not take effect until she has fully recovered from a knee injury. Massengale, Carter and Burdick will sit out the fourth-ranked Lady Vols’ Nov. 14 opener against Penn. Burdick also will sit out the Nov. 17 home game with Oral Roberts. None of them will play Sunday in an exhibition game with Carson-Newman. “We don’t have a lot of rules,” Warlick said. “You can’t miss a class. You miss a class, you miss a game. You’ve got to sit in the first three rows. You can’t be late. It’s pretty black and white and simple. (Those are) our rules. If those types of rules, you don’t abide by them, the consequence is right there.” Burdick averaged 8.7 points and 7.3 rebounds while making 25 starts last season. Carter made 21 starts and averaged 6.9 points and 2.3 assists. Massengale averaged 12.5 points and 5.8 assists in 19 starts last season before missing the Lady Vols’ final 16 games with a head injury. Tucker redshirted last season.

Basketball
Holly Warlick
University of Tennessee


Christie Proposes Ending Tenure for Poor Teachers

Abstract: PRINCETON, N.J. — One month after Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey used his annual state address to call for an end to tenure for teachers, his administration unveiled a plan on Wednesday that would take away tenure from ineffective teachers but stopped short of eliminating it. The acting state education commissioner, Christopher D. Cerf, in an address at Princeton University, said Mr. Christie would propose that tenure continue to be awarded to teachers who are rated highly effective or effective for three consecutive years. Those who are rated ineffective for one year, or partially effective for two consecutive years, would lose their tenure protections, though not necessarily their jobs, he said. Mr. Cerf said these ratings of teachers would be based on a new evaluation system that would assess the performance of teachers based at least partly on their students’ test scores but also on other measures, like classroom observations and teacher practices. He said Mr. Christie wanted to make the evaluation system mandatory in all districts, and to prohibit it from being altered in union negotiations. The proposal would need the approval of the State Legislature. Mr. Cerf said Mr. Christie, a Republican, had not changed his position that the tenure system needed to be radically reconsidered. In the past decade, Mr. Cerf said, 17 teachers, out of about 100,000 tenured teachers statewide, have lost their jobs because of charges of incompetence. “The governor’s plan is consistent with his longstanding position that the tenure system is broken,” he said. Mr. Cerf said the governor would also propose that decisions about layoffs be based primarily on teacher evaluations, though seniority could be a lesser factor. Joseph Ricca, superintendent of the East Hanover Township district, said he supported the governor’s ideas for tenure changes. “It will certainly allow administrators to make decisions based on student achievement, and that — really, ultimately — has to be the driving force,” he said. But the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, continued to oppose Mr. Christie’s plan. “In fact, if the governor’s goal is to cultivate anxiety in the heart of every parent and every teacher in New Jersey, he has done that today,” Barbara Keshishian, the union’s president, said in a statement. “He just doesn’t understand teaching, the tenure process or what constitutes a sound evaluation process.” Mr. Christie, who was scheduled to speak in Washington on Wednesday, has attracted national attention with his tough approach to schools. During his State of the State address in January, he said “the time to eliminate teacher tenure is now.”

Tenure
Teachers and School Employees
Christie Christopher J
New Jersey
Education (K-12)


Craigslist Agrees to Curb Prostitution Ads

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — The online classifieds company Craigslist said Thursday that it had reached an agreement with 40 state attorneys general and agreed to tame its notoriously unruly “erotic services” listings. Prostitutes and sex-oriented businesses have long used that section of Craigslist to advertise their services. Early this year, the attorney general of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, representing 40 states, sent a letter to Craigslist demanding that it purge the site of such material and better enforce its own rules against illegal activity, including prostitution. The two sides began a series of conversations about what Craigslist could do to prevent such ads. “They identified ads that were crossing the line,” said Jim Buckmaster, chief executive of Craigslist. “We looked at those ads, we saw their point, and we resolved to see what we could do to get that stuff off the site.” In March, Craigslist began asking its erotic services advertisers to provide a phone number, which an automated system calls. The system reads a series of digits, which the advertiser types into a Web page as verification before the ad will appear on the site. Craigslist said that ended most of the illicit material. Under the broader agreement announced Thursday, Craigslist is going further, asking that advertisers provide valid identification. It said that it will charge erotic services vendors a small fee for each ad — $5 to $10, Mr. Buckmaster said — and require that they use a credit card for the payment. This, theoretically, will let the company confirm users’ identities. It will donate the money to charities, including those that combat child exploitation and human trafficking. On Wednesday, Craigslist also sued a variety of companies offering services designed to circumvent its protections. Mr. Blumenthal said the new measures would discourage many sex operators from using Craigslist. “The mere act of authentication will be a very significant deterrent,” he said. “There are very few prostitutes who want to be called by Craigslist and asked to give additional identifying information.”

Craigslist
Prostitution
Online Advertising
Computers and the Internet


Iceland’s Leader Vetoes Bank Compensation Deal

Abstract: The president of Iceland blocked a $5 billion compensation deal with the British and Dutch governments on Tuesday, upending the precarious finances and politics of the island nation and further jeopardizing already frayed ties with Europe and international lenders. In a televised speech, the president, Olafur R. Grimsson, detailed his opposition to the $5 billion compensation deal. His decision means that the measure will be submitted to a referendum, even though recent polls show that 70 percent of the population opposes the bill. Some 60,000 people in Iceland — one-fifth of the population — had signed a petition against the bill, which was presented to the president last week. Its rejection would force Iceland’s increasingly shaky left-wing coalition to reopen negotiations with the British and Dutch governments — both of which have taken a hard negotiating stance. Icelandic banks were aggressive investors in Northern Europe, luring depositors with high rates. But short-term financing for the highly leveraged institutions dried up when the credit crisis hit. Iceland reached an agreement with Britain and the Netherlands last June to reimburse those governments for loans they used to repay the first 20,887 euros (about $30,000) lost in each bank account — the minimum they say Iceland is required by treaty to pay. The outlines of that deal appear to remain in force. But the presidential rebuke is being described as a momentous decision for Iceland. It also highlights a widening rift between European governments — pressed by bond investors, ratings agencies and the International Monetary Fund to cut budgets and shrink deficits — and their recession-battered citizenry. Late last month, the constitutional court in Latvia vetoed a move by the government there to cut pensions in line with an I.M.F.-sponsored austerity package. That development threatens the I.M.F. agreement and the country’s ties with foreign creditors. Governments in Ireland, Greece and even Britain are also finding it difficult to satisfy both bond investors and voters. In a country that was driven to default by the speculative overseas excesses of its banks, there is doubt and suspicion over the motivations of outsiders, but also a grudging recognition that Iceland is obliged to repay Britain and the Netherlands for bailing out depositors. The two countries stepped in to help Icesave, the Internet unit of Landsbanki, which collapsed in late 2008 along with the rest of Iceland’s banking sector. The savings of Icelandic citizens were protected by an unlimited domestic deposit guarantee. In a statement, the British treasury said that the “government expects Iceland to live up to its obligations.” British government officials cast doubt on what will happen next. Iceland has never held a referendum and there is scant language in its constitution explaining how one should be carried out. Iceland’s prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, told reporters in Reykjavik that Iceland would have its referendum and that “Iceland honors its international obligations.” Any backroom dealings between Iceland and its lenders is likely to be received with even more anger by Icelanders. Emotions remain raw over Britain’s invoking of antiterror laws in its initial response to the failure of Icelandic banks. There is also a strong feeling in Iceland that the bargain to repay the depositors of Icesave is nothing but large nations ganging up on a small one. “The U.K. and the Dutch have been pushing too hard and they have been using the I.M.F. to pressure Iceland,” said Ogmundur Jonasson, once a health minister in the current government who resigned recently over the Icesave bill. “I am hoping now that they will respect democracy and understand that one has to listen to what the people say.” Amendments added to the bill as it made its way through Parliament — including one that said repayments would not be made if Iceland’s gross domestic product fell below a certain level —angered officials in London and Amsterdam. The bill passed by the Icelandic Parliament on Dec. 30 removed some of those conditions, but the president said the matter was not for politicians to decide, as “the nation is the highest judge for the validity of law.” The government in October 2008 nationalized the country’s three biggest banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki. Those banks failed owing more than $60 billion to creditors overseas. The friction has complicated the country’s efforts to regain access to international lending to rebuild its economy, which shrank at an annual 7.2 percent rate in the third quarter. And with further I.M.F. aid dependent on a final resolution to the Icesave matter, fears are growing that the country might tilt toward insolvency. “By pushing so hard, the British and the Dutch might push Iceland into bankruptcy and get no money back at all,” said Jon Danielsson, an expert on the Icelandic economy at the London School of Economics. “Without the deal, the government is facing a debt burden of 140 percent of G.D.P. With the deal, it goes to 200 percent, giving Iceland one of the highest debt burdens in the world.”

Iceland
Banks and Banking
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Great Britain
Netherlands
Economic Conditions and Trends
European Union


White House Chides Schumer for Protest of Counterterrorism Cuts

Abstract: A White House spokesman criticized Senator Chuck Schumer of New York sharply on Wednesday, questioning his credibility on national security issues after Mr. Schumer and New York City officials challenged the Obama administration’s decision to reduce financing for a grant program that supports local counterterrorism efforts. Mr. Schumer, a Democrat set to become the party’s Senate leader, drew the administration’s ire after complaining this week about a plan to cut annual funding for the Urban Area Security Initiative to $330 million from $600 million. Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, and the city’s police and fire commissioners joined Mr. Schumer in denouncing the move on Wednesday. A short time later, the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, took aim at Mr. Schumer. “At some point, Senator Schumer’s credibility in talking about national security issues, particularly when the facts are as they are when it relates to homeland security, have to be affected by the position that he’s taken on other issues,” Mr. Earnest said. “Senator Schumer is somebody that came out and opposed the international agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He was wrong about that position,” Mr. Earnest added, “and when people look at the facts here when it comes to funding for homeland security, they’ll recognize that he’s wrong this time, too.” Financing for the program was being reduced, Mr. Earnest said, because New York had not spent the money it had already received. Of $760 million given to the city and state in homeland security grants over the past few years, $620 million remained unspent, the Homeland Security Department said. Still, the Obama administration proposed increasing the funding available to the state by an additional $255 million in the 2017 fiscal year, Mr. Earnest said. Mr. Schumer, while acknowledging that New York had not spent the money it had gotten, said the financing remained vital. “Some bureaucrat came up with this idea, and it rose to a top level without it being stopped,” he said of the planned cut. “I think this administration does a very good job on terrorism. I think they’re very cognizant of the need and of given resources. But, here they made a big mistake, and the mistake shouldn’t stand.” Police Commissioner William J. Bratton called the planned cuts “unconscionable.” Stephen P. Davis, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, issued a statement defending the New York officials’ position. “We stand fully behind the police commissioner, mayor, and senator’s earlier statement,” Mr. Davis said. “The administration’s current budget reduces our federal terrorism funding by half, with real impact to New Yorkers who live in the country’s top terrorist target.”

Chuck Schumer
NYC
Federal Aid
Terrorism
Bill de Blasio
William J Bratton


For Nets Players, Play in Brooklyn, Practice in New Jersey, Live In ...

Abstract: From towering billboards and slick subway posters, Deron Williams strikes a neighborly pose. “Hello Brooklyn ,” the Nets ’ star says in the team’s ubiquitous advertising campaign. “Goodbye, Brooklyn,” Williams might say each night, as he drives back to his Manhattan apartment. The Nets will call Brooklyn home this fall, but you won’t find them bagging organic tomatoes at the Park Slope Food Co-op , antique hunting at the Brooklyn Flea or enjoying a pleasant fall evening on the nearest brownstone stoop. For reasons both practical and personal, the Brooklyn Nets will not be living in Brooklyn, at least for their inaugural season. It is not a matter of preference, but logistics: Although the Nets will play at the new Barclays Center near Downtown Brooklyn, they will still practice at their longtime training center in East Rutherford, N.J. The lease runs two more years. The Nets have 44 home games, including the preseason. They could have 75 days of practice. The housing choice comes down to simple math and, considering commuting issues, sanity preservation. So when the final buzzer sounds each night, Brooklyn’s basketball ambassadors will retreat to TriBeCa and Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, and to Edgewater, Hoboken and Clifton in North Jersey. You might see them in Fort Lee, but not in Fort Greene. “I like Brooklyn a lot,” Williams said, before adding: “We practice in Jersey. In Manhattan, I’m in between both.” Williams is renting in SoHo while shopping for a permanent home, preferably one with easy tunnel access. He will have company. Joe Johnson, the Nets’ newly acquired All-Star guard, forward Kris Humphries and guard Jerry Stackhouse will all be living in Manhattan as well. Seven Nets will reside in New Jersey , including the rookie Tyshawn Taylor, who got an apartment in Hoboken, his hometown. (Two others, Mirza Teletovic and Tornike Shengelia, are playing overseas and have not yet shopped for homes, but they are likely to end up in New Jersey, too.) There is a certain chicken-and-egg logic at work: The old training center is drawing players toward New Jersey. A Brooklyn practice site, if it opened tomorrow, would surely draw them toward the borough. “I would have definitely lived in Brooklyn if we were practicing there,” Stackhouse said. Of course, rooting for strangers who presumably represent one’s city, or borough, is one of the willful delusions of sports fandom. As Jerry Seinfeld noted years ago, “You’re actually rooting for the clothes.” Fans care about the name on the front of a player’s jersey but pay little mind to where he sleeps at night. There are no Yankees living in the Bronx , and just a handful of Mets in Queens . There were six Knicks living in Manhattan last season — including Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire — but that was an unusually high number. They mostly cluster in Westchester County, near the team’s training center, some 25 miles from Madison Square Garden. The Rangers also train in Westchester , but a majority typically live in Manhattan, making them perhaps the most New York-centric of New York’s teams. The Jets and the Giants not only play in New Jersey, but most of them live there as well. In the search for domestic bliss, sports stars weigh the same factors as everyone else: space, price, location and, for those with children, school quality. Players with families usually choose the suburbs. The bachelors are more likely to land in Manhattan. Proximity to actual arenas and stadiums tends to be an afterthought. “I wish the guys would love to live in Brooklyn, because the deals there are amazing, and it’s a great place,” said Jaclyn Rosenberg, a Manhattan-based Realtor, whose firm, the Rosemark Group, works with the Nets. “But I think the guys are still not 100 percent on living there.” For Williams, family concerns were paramount. He and his wife Amy have four children: ages 9, 6, 3 and 18 months. They want a four-bedroom apartment — a virtual black swan in the New York housing market. “Brooklyn has some great places,” Williams said. “But four bedrooms, they don’t have it.” But it is the commute that is ultimately the most powerful concern for N.B.A. players, and a team’s practice site is their most important destination. It is where they train, watch film, receive treatment, eat and socialize. It is where they go to massage a broken jump shot at midnight, or to retreat from other concerns. It is a hub for all team activity. The Nets’ PNY Center, which opened in 1998, has a cafeteria, a staff chef, a lap pool and a player lounge. It is where the Nets will spend a majority of their time. “I actually wanted to live in Brooklyn,” said the Nets’ C. J. Watson, who has friends in the borough. But he chose Edgewater, a 12-mile drive from East Rutherford, because “I just had to stay close to the practice gym.” A player commuting from Brooklyn to the PNY Center might exhaust his patience and his brake pads by the end of the first month. To get to practice, he would have to cross two rivers and the expanse of Manhattan and navigate potential bottlenecks at various bridges and tunnels. The distance would be around 15 miles, but the trip might last more than an hour. For now, the Nets will also continue to fly out of Newark Liberty International Airport , where they already have a slot for their private charter. That, too, is pushing players toward New Jersey. At the moment, the Nets are actually splitting time between three home bases. The basketball operations staff is working from the PNY Center. The marketing and business staff has offices in MetroTech, in Downtown Brooklyn. Then there is the arena. The team is making plans to ease the commuting strain. The Nets will provide hotel rooms in Brooklyn on game days, allowing them to hold a morning shootaround at the arena’s practice court without forcing players to crisscross Manhattan multiple times before tipoff. Unfortunately, that court cannot be used as an everyday practice site because the arena will be busy with concerts and other events. The Nets do plan to build a new training center within the next two years, possibly in Brooklyn, although the team is scouting locations throughout the city. Last week, they inspected a waterfront site in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn , according to Crain’s New York Business. Nets officials chose not to build a new facility right away, because they wanted to gauge players’ preferences and routines during this inaugural season, said Billy King, the general manager. “Because once you build it, there could be obstacles for players,” King said. This way, the players will “get a feel for where they may want to live, whether it’s schools for kids or to get a better feel traffic-wise, getting in and out of Brooklyn and getting a feel of knowing Brooklyn better.” Even the convenience of a Brooklyn practice site might not turn every Net into a Brooklynite. Some players will be drawn to the borough’s electricity. Others not so much. “I’m afraid of the city,” forward Gerald Wallace flatly admitted in July. He grew up in tiny Childersburg, Ala. (population: 5,100) and found a home in Clifton, N.J., a solid 22 miles from the Nets’ new arena. “Hopefully,” Wallace said, “I can find a driver to take me back and forth.” Brooklyn seems ready to adopt the Nets. It may be a while before the Nets adopt Brooklyn.

Basketball
Brooklyn
Commuting
Barclays Center NYC
East Rutherford NJ
NYC


Modern Explorers Seek a Place in a GPS World

Abstract: Eric Larsen seemed ill at ease in his tuxedo. He is more inclined to trudge across an ice shelf than mingle at a fancy party in Manhattan. Yet here he was, in black tie, nibbling on canapés at the American Museum of Natural History. Mr. Larsen came to this event because of how he makes a living. It’s printed on his business card: Explorer. He had trekked to New York City from his home in Boulder, Colo., for his profession’s version of the Oscars: the Explorers Club Annual Dinner and awards. More than a thousand people joined him this month for the four-hour soiree beneath the museum’s fiberglass blue whale. Among them were astronauts like Buzz Aldrin, astronomers like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a panoply of others who make a point of seeking thrills and seeking knowledge, in varying proportions. Founded in 1904, the Explorers Club is an international society dedicated to promoting field research and “preserving the instinct to explore.” Among its early members were the first humans to visit the North Pole, the South Pole, the summit of Mount Everest and the surface of the moon. Image Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, left, was the first American woman to walk in space. Because of technological advances, "Everyone is an explorer to a certain extent now," she said. But "the value of that dose of exploration to the individual shouldn't be discounted." Greg Olsen, right, became the third private citizen to visit the International Space Station in 2005. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times Theodore Roosevelt joined the club in 1915; at this year’s dinner, there was a look-alike in safari gear, hired by the hosts. But as this ghost of expeditions past bushwhacked through guests in evening wear, a less intrepid spirit came to mind — not exploration, but nostalgia. For all the triumphs of the past, today’s explorers face a daunting prospect: Our maps are fully drawn, and there is not much left for them to do. We may still search the ocean floors and rappel into uncharted caves, but it is hard to shake the feeling that these expeditions are not fundamental. It’s like we are dabbing with a napkin at the few blank spots in the atlas. The “instinct to explore” may still persist, but it’s lost its whiff of derring-do — more pickled than preserved. Do we really need explorers now, in the age of Google Maps? The Explorer Club’s departing president, Alan H. Nichols, believes we do. “This is the golden age of exploration,” he said in a meeting at the club’s headquarters on the Upper East Side. Members come here to drink whiskey and host lectures amid the mounted tusks, sleds and axes. Some of Roosevelt’s trophies decorate the rooms. Image Reflecting on how modern exploration is changing, C. William Steele, left, a spelunker, said, "There are more women involved than there used to be and a wider age range, five decades of scientists all working together, while it used to be just people in their twenties." At right, Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, who said her family has opted to keep exploring even as it has grown. She and her son, Ronan, wear hats acquired on a trip to Southeast Asia. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times In addition to his administrative duties, Mr. Nichols, 85, has been working on a project to find the tomb of Ghengis Khan. “They’ve been looking for the tomb for 750 years, and they haven’t found him,” Mr. Nichols said. “But we’ll find him. Why? Because we’ve got underground-penetrating X-rays, we’ve got drones, we’ve got magnetometry. We’ve got all this stuff that explorers haven’t had before!” But the growth of new technology poses problems for one of the club’s most cherished precepts — that exploration means adventure in the field, carried out by visionary risk-takers. These days, many of our most thrilling expeditions are made remotely, using robot arms and sensors, and in place of legendary ship-captains and mountaineers — think of Ernest Shackleton and Sir Edmund Hillary — we have expansive teams of scientists and engineers. When NASA sends up rovers to study the Martian surface, they are controlled by committee in Pasadena, Calif. It’s hard to say if these men and women are explorers in the classic sense. “Their psychological experience is of being there,” said Bill Clancey, a cognitive scientist who embedded with the Mars Exploration Rover mission in February 2004. He remembers sitting in a dark room, with heavy shades drawn across the windows so the researchers could match their schedules to the days and nights of a planet 140 million miles away. As the team sent commands up to the rovers, he said, the scientists built up a mental map of where they were. “They know what’s around the bend and what’s behind them. These are real experiences, the experiences of real explorers.” Image For those whose sense of adventure extended to their palates, fried tarantula appetizers were offered at the Explorers Club Dinner. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times It is easy to mistake the robots for explorers, Dr. Clancey said, even though they’re just elaborate tools. Yet even in Pasadena, there was uncertainty about who or what, exactly, was behind the work. In one of the NASA team’s first published science papers , the action was described in different ways: “We drove Spirit,” the authors wrote, and then later, “Spirit drove away.” The Explorers Club has grappled with these confusing, modern expeditions by honoring the scientists in charge. Not everyone agrees with their inclusion, though. Mr. Nichols caught some flack, he said, for offering Elon Musk a special honor at last year’s annual dinner. “Explorers were coming to me and saying, ‘It’s ridiculous to call him an explorer.’” Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, has helped to foster journeys into space, but he has not gone on trips himself. Image John Foote was hired to play the role of Theodore Roosevelt at the party. Modern exploration means reflecting on what will be lost because of climate change, said Janne Lillehagan, seated. She and Catarina Frostad, standing, are members of the Norwegian chapter of the Explorers Club. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times There are some places on Earth where exploration in the classic mode still seems viable, and where the issues are not quite so vexed. This year, the club honored a caver named C. William Steele, who was about to set off to spelunk in Huautla, Mexico, the site of the deepest cave system in the Western Hemisphere. Mr. Steele takes biologists along on his expeditions, à la Darwin on the Beagle, and his teams have found cave-adapted species of tarantulas . There is no way to do this work with robots, he told the dinner guests. “It’s the purest form of exploration: You don’t know until you go.” For most other projects, though, the definitions are less clear. Even in the realm of deep-sea exploration — among the last frontiers of unmapped Earth — work has been distributed, and now scientists on shore can dial in to missions in the field. The whole idea of exploration “will get redefined over and over again, and it will continue to trouble people,” said Rosalind Williams, a historian of science at M.I.T. and the author of “The Triumph of Human Empire.” Even in the 19th century, she said, people understood that “the end was in sight.” They felt a new age coming, one in which humans dominate the planet, for better and for worse. For some self-described explorers, this has meant turning inward. “It’s about the story that I’m telling,” Mr. Larsen, the Colorado explorer, said at the dinner. He makes a living finding sponsors for his polar expeditions, but he does not promise travel to new places. Instead, he finds a way to fill the old ones with a novel set of meanings. A few years ago, he tried to reach the South Pole … on a bicycle. “At this point, it’s not so much about ‘I did this,’” Mr. Larsen said. “It’s how I did it.”

Explorers Club
Exploration
Clubs
Map
American Museum of Natural History
Alan H. Nichols


After 11 Years in Prison, Skakel Goes Free on Bail

Abstract: STAMFORD, Conn. — After spending more than a decade behind bars for the murder of a teenage girl in Greenwich, Conn., Michael C. Skakel, a cousin of the Kennedys, was ordered free from prison on Thursday to await a possible retrial. Judge Gary White of Connecticut Superior Court in Stamford set bail at $1.2 million, ordering Mr. Skakel not to leave the state without permission and to wear a tracking device. The bail hearing came after another judge ruled last month that Mr. Skakel did not receive a fair trial because his first lawyer, Mickey Sherman, had not represented him effectively , depriving him of his constitutionally guaranteed right to counsel. As Judge White made his announcement, friends and relatives of Mr. Skakel burst out in applause. Mr. Skakel, dressed in a suit and blue tie, tapped his chest as he walked out of the courtroom. Shortly after 2 p.m., he emerged from the basement of the courthouse and embraced supporters in enthusiastic bear hugs. He stood silently while his lawyer spoke to the throng of reporters outside before being whisked away in a waiting car. Hubert J. Santos, Mr. Skakel’s current lawyer, declined to publicly reveal where Mr. Skakel would go once he was released. His brother John Skakel, who lives in Portland, Ore., provided bank checks to cover the bail. It was the latest twist in a case that has fascinated the public and confounded investigators since 1975, when the battered body of Martha Moxley, 15, was found beneath a tree in her family’s backyard, pieces of a broken 6-iron golf club by her side. Mr. Skakel, 53, was also 15 at the time of the murder, and the two were neighbors in a town that has long been a bastion of wealth. At different times, both Mr. Skakel and his brother Thomas were suspected of killing Ms. Moxley. But it was more than a quarter of a century before Mr. Skakel was tried and convicted . In 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. Image Dorthy Moxley and John Moxley, Martha’s mother and brother, speaking at a news conference outside the courthouse. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times The judge who ruled last month, Thomas A. Bishop of Superior Court in Rockville, wrote in a scathing 136-page decision that Mr. Sherman failed to show an attention to detail, lacked a coherent strategy and “was in a myriad of ways ineffective.” Those failures, he wrote, led to a “conviction that lacks reliability.” After the ruling, Mr. Santos filed a motion for his client to be released on bail. In a later hearing, Judge Bishop decided that the question of whether to grant bail belonged with the criminal court in Stamford, where Mr. Skakel will be retried if the state decides to go forward with another prosecution. From the outset, the case has attracted national news media attention, offering a potent mix of power, money and sex. It inspired a made-for-television movie, and became a staple for tabloids and an unending source of interest for true-crime writers, particularly Dominick Dunne. Mr. Skakel is the nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, and the link to one of America’s most famous families fueled additional interest in the case. His trial in 2002 lasted three weeks and revealed tawdry details about his life as a young man, including his drinking and his drug use. In his defense, Mr. Skakel acknowledged that on the night of the murder, he had climbed a tree and masturbated while trying to look into Ms. Moxley’s bedroom. During the trial, the prosecution painted Mr. Skakel as an emotionally disturbed man who was consumed with guilt after the killing, prompting confessions and suicide attempts. In one particularly vivid example cited in court documents, a man employed by the family as a gardener described how Mr. Skakel once tried to jump off the Triborough Bridge after saying that “he had done something very bad, and that he needed to get out of the country, and that he had to kill himself.” Mr. Skakel has always publicly maintained his innocence. Throughout the trials and appeals, Mr. Skakel’s family has fought fiercely on his behalf, spending millions of dollars in various bids to win his freedom. Image Mr. Skakel walked out of the courthouse on Thursday after being ordered free on bail. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times On Thursday, the prosecutors did not object to the setting of bail, just the amount. Mr. Santos suggested $500,000; John Smirga, the lawyer for the state, recommended a number closer to $2 million. Among the factors he wanted the judge to consider were the brutality of the murder, and Mr. Skakel’s resources, character and mental condition. Mr. Santos dismissed the notion that his client could flee if he wanted to, given the notoriety of the case. “His is the most recognized face in America,” he said. “So he’s not going anywhere.” At a news conference outside the courthouse on Thursday, Ms. Moxley’s mother, Dorthy , and brother, John, expressed disappointment at the decision but confidence that Judge Bishop’s decision to overturn the conviction would be reversed by the state’s appeal. “We knew this day would come, so I wasn’t completely destroyed,” Mrs. Moxley said, adding “There’s a lesson to parents: If your child does something wrong, face up to it.” Mr. Santos used the bail hearing to once again criticize the original prosecution of Mr. Skakel. He said the case had been weak and was based on hearsay. “If the prosecution found a homeless guy at a train station” who claimed that Mr. Skakel confessed to the murder, Mr. Santos said, “he would be on the stand in a New York minute.” Mr. Smirga defended the handling of the case but also noted the difficulties of prosecuting a crime so long after it took place. Video Nearly 40 years after the murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley of Greenwich, Conn., people are still fascinated about the details of the case. “Each time the facts of this case are presented, they mutate,” he said. There was no single piece of evidence — like DNA, an eyewitness or a photograph — that could be used against the defendant, he said. He compared the case to “a giant jigsaw puzzle,” but one without a picture to show what it is supposed to look like when all the pieces are put together. Mr. Smirga said he was confident the state solved the puzzle and vowed to continue in its appeal of Judge Bishop’s decision to vacate the conviction. “His lawyer was found ineffective,” Mr. Smirga said. “But he hasn’t been found innocent in any forum.” Mr. Santos said Judge Bishop’s ruling revealed flaws in the state’s case against Mr. Skakel. Mr. Santos and the Skakel family said they would continue to fight until Mr. Skakel was fully vindicated. “This is the first step in correcting a terrible wrong,” the Skakel family said in a statement. “We look forward to Michael being vindicated and justice finally being served.” Mr. Skakel was ordered to have no contact with the Moxley family. He has a 14-year-old son, but, after more than a decade in prison, no home to return to. His lawyer declined to publicly reveal where Mr. Skakel would go once he was released. While the joy of the Skakel family was evident in the courtroom, Mr. Moxley said he could not see how anyone could be happy about all that has happened. He said that even if Judge Bishop’s ruling cast doubt on Mr. Skakel’s guilt, it left a cloud of suspicion over his brother Thomas, who was 17 when Ms. Moxley was killed. He was the last person known to have seen her alive. “It is difficult to fathom how there could be any victory in this,” he said.

Michael Skakel
Decisions and Verdicts
Gary J White
Murders
Martha Moxley
Connecticut
Greenwich Connecticut
Thomas A Bishop


‘Line Standers’ Raise Fairness Issue at Supreme Court

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Dale Carpenter wanted to see last month’s pair of same-sex marriage arguments at the Supreme Court. He bought a plane ticket from Minneapolis, where he teaches law, and he turned up at the court a little after 3 o’clock on the morning of the first argument. Professor Carpenter’s first surprise on that cold night was that most of the people in front of him in line were not waiting to get in. They were “line standers” who had been paid to hold places for others. “Many of them seemed to be homeless or very poor,” Professor Carpenter said. “It seemed very shady to me.” The going rate, he learned, was about $50 an hour, some of which went to a company that had made the arrangements. Such place holding is common at Congressional hearings and is on the rise at the Supreme Court , where seats for last month’s arguments went for as much as $6,000 . Michael J. Sandel , a political philosopher at Harvard, said the phenomenon was disturbing. “Allowing line-standing companies and scalpers to sell seats in the Supreme Court is yet another instance of letting money dominate democracy,” he said. “It’s at odds with equal access and undermines the dignity of the court.” There are two lines for Supreme Court arguments, one for the public and one for members of the court’s bar. Professor Carpenter was a member of the bar, and so he chose the shorter line. Membership in the Supreme Court bar sounds like a high distinction, but it is not. All it takes is a check for $200, three years of law practice and the endorsements of two current members of the bar. More than 200,000 lawyers have satisfied those requirements. Vanishingly few of them will ever argue before the justices. In effect, Professor Carpenter had joined a fan club little different from the ones that let you get good seats at a rock concert. At the Supreme Court, too, the best seats are set aside for members of its bar. “I paid the $200 just to get into the line,” Professor Carpenter said. The scene outside the court troubled Suzanne B. Goldberg , a law professor at Columbia and member of the Supreme Court bar. “I had never heard of paid line standers before, and I had been to all of the major gay rights arguments in the past two decades,” she said, adding that she had reluctantly used a line-standing service to see the second of the two same-sex marriage arguments last month. “Particularly for the public line,” she said, “allowing line standers privileges people who can pay or law firms and businesses that can. I wish the court would find better ways to handle the situation.” Professor Carpenter made it into the courtroom for the first same-sex marriage argument, on March 26, but it was close. He got to court earlier for the second one the next day, arriving at 2:15 a.m. That time, though, he encountered a new phenomenon: Washington’s toniest lawyers were cutting the line. They would arrive in groups of two or three and take the place of a single line stander, Professor Carpenter said. “We had no authority to appeal to,” he said. “It was a state of nature.” For that second argument, Professor Carpenter made it only as far as a lounge reserved for lawyers, though it did have an audio feed. (There is no similar overflow room for the public.) There are about 400 seats in the courtroom, but many of them are set aside for guests of the justices and for the news media. For the first argument, there were 105 seats available for members of the bar and about 70 for the public, said Kathleen Arberg, the court’s public information officer. On the next day, there were 78 seats for members of the bar and about 70 for the public. Another 30 seats each day were set aside for people who rotated through for a three- to five-minute glimpse of an argument. The demand for seats, in other words, far exceeded the supply, and the court basically let the marketplace allocate this scarce and valuable public commodity. What else might it have done? One obvious partial solution would have been to allow live broadcasts of the arguments. That would have dampened but not eliminated the demand for seats. People still want to go to televised baseball games. The second thing the court could have done is police the lines. “Just having a uniformed person walk around would help,” Professor Carpenter said. “I don’t think it would take a lot. Even just minimal monitoring would have an effect.” Line cutting aside, many economists say the current system works just fine and allocates the available seats efficiently. In his book “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” Professor Sandel wrote that line-standing arrangements might well be acceptable on libertarian and utilitarian grounds. But he added that the arrangements also corrupt, in the broader sense of the word. “To corrupt a good or social practice is to degrade it, to treat it according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it,” he wrote. Put another way: A Supreme Court argument over the meaning of equality is a grave and weighty moment in the history of the nation. It is not a Van Halen concert. There are, of course, many steps the court could take to manage the lines. Lotteries, wristbands and nontransferable tickets linked to government-issued identification come to mind. However it is accomplished, Professor Carpenter said, only people who actually stand in line should be allowed to sit in the courtroom. I asked him if he would ever pay for a seat if the rules do not change. “Depends on the price,” he said.


In Economic Review, Italy and Spain Get Warnings on Debt and Deficit

Abstract: BRUSSELS — The top European economics official warned Italy and Spain on Friday that they risked missing important debt and deficit targets in the first such review of national budget plans for 13 countries in the euro zone. The announcement, by Olli Rehn, the European Union’s commissioner for economic and monetary policy, is part of an effort to stave off the kind of fiscal problems that fed a crisis that nearly destroyed the euro. The reviews, conducted before budgets are approved by national parliaments, represent a change in the way the euro area is governed. The action is a new attempt by the European Union to enforce rules on deficits that were flouted during the last decade by major countries, including Germany. The lapses were widely seen as setting a bad example to others like Greece that had far more vulnerable economies. “Member states have given the commission the responsibility to issue these opinions, and I trust that they will thus be taken on board by national decision-makers,” Mr. Rehn said at a news conference here. The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, did not invoke its powers to require Italy, Spain or any other country to revise their budget plans. Mr. Rehn characterized the report cards given on Friday as “much more about partnership than penalties.” Separately, finance ministers from the European Union’s 28 member states meeting here Friday reached an agreement on how to help banks that may be found short of capital as a result of a review to begin soon by the European Central Bank. That review, involving about 130 of the euro zone’s largest lenders, is meant to determine if banks have lurking problems and might need to be recapitalized or even shut down. Under the accord reached Friday, the ministers made clear that creditors of failing banks would have to suffer in any bank bailouts and that national funds would need to be used first before a country would be able to apply for European funds as a last resort to prop up troubled banks. The finance ministers hit an impasse, however, on how to create an agency that would determine when failing banks would need to be restructured or even shut down. Deadlocked, the ministers canceled a planned dinner on Friday, delaying further formal discussions until next month. Mr. Rehn’s judgments, though, involved not banks but national governments. And the ramifications were most serious for Italy. The commission said that the draft budget for Italy, which has the third-largest economy in the euro area, demonstrated only “limited progress” in meeting earlier recommendations, and Mr. Rehn warned that the country might not hit its benchmark for reducing debt next year. European Union rules require all member states to bring their deficits down to 3 percent and their debt down to 60 percent of gross domestic product. According to a forecast by the commission, Italy’s debt is projected to rise to 134 percent of G.D.P. next year from 133 percent this year — even though its deficit is projected to fall to 2.7 percent next year from 3 percent this year. Mr. Rehn refused to grant Italy an exemption that would have enabled it to spend additional billions of euros already included in its budget for next year. That represented a setback for the government of Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who won a confidence motion early last month but whose grip on power remains fragile. The move could strengthen the hand of lawmakers allied with the former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, but Mr. Rehn played down concerns that his action could jeopardize stability in Italy. “Every day this year, at least, has been a politically sensitive moment for Italy, like often in the previous years,” Mr. Rehn said. “So we just have to do our job and we have presented our views as regards whether Italy is practicing what it preaches and ensuring that its public finances are on a sustainable path.” The verdict drew a sharp reaction from the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, which said the commission did “not take into account important measures.” The country’s finance minister, Fabrizio Saccomanni, insisted that it was “not necessary to change the budget.” In the case of Spain, the commission said the draft budget for 2014 was “at risk of noncompliance.” The commission projects a Spanish deficit of 5.9 percent next year, rising to 6.6 percent in 2015.

Italy
Euro Crisis
Spain
Budget
EU
Olli Rehn


Short on Labor, Farmers in U.S. Shift to Mexico

Abstract: CELAYA, Mexico — Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems. Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in the fields of California, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexican and many probably in the United States illegally. But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation. “I’m as American red-blood as it gets,” Mr. Scaroni said, “but I’m tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue.” A sense of crisis prevails among American farmers who rely on immigrant laborers, more so since immigration legislation in the United States Senate failed in June and the authorities announced a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants. An increasing number of farmers have been testing the alternative of raising crops across the border where there is a stable labor supply, growers and lawmakers in the United States and Mexico said. Western Growers, an association representing farmers in California and Arizona, conducted an informal telephone survey of its members in the spring. Twelve large agribusinesses that acknowledged having operations in Mexico reported a total of 11,000 workers here. “It seems there is a bigger rush to Mexico and elsewhere,” said Tom Nassif, the Western Growers president, who said Americans were also farming in countries in Central America. Precise statistics are not readily available on American farming in Mexico, because growers seek to maintain a low profile for their operations abroad. But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, displayed a map on the Senate floor in July locating more than 46,000 acres that American growers were cultivating in just two Mexican states, Guanajuato and Baja California. “Farmers are renting land in Mexico,” Ms. Feinstein said. “They don’t want us to know that.” She predicted that more American farmers would move to Mexico for the ready work force and lower wages. Ms. Feinstein favored a measure in the failed immigration bill that would have created a new guest worker program for agriculture and a special legal status for illegal immigrant farm workers. In the past, some Americans have planted south of the border to escape spiraling land prices and to ensure year-round deliveries of crops they can produce only seasonally in the United States. But in the last three years, Mr. Nassif and other growers said, labor force uncertainties have become a major reason farmers have shifted to Mexico. While there are benefits for Mexico, as American farmers bring the latest technology and techniques to its crop-producing regions, American farm state economists say thousands of middle-class jobs supporting agriculture are being lost in the United States. Some lawmakers in the United States also point to security risks when food for Americans is increasingly produced in foreign countries. Tramping through one of his first lettuce crops near Celaya, an agribusiness hub in Guanajuato, Mr. Scaroni is more candid than many farmers about his move here. He had made six trips to Washington, he said, to plead with Congress to provide more legal immigrants for agriculture. “I have a customer base that demands we produce and deliver product every day,” he said. “They don’t want to hear the excuses.” He acknowledges that wages are much lower in Mexico; he pays $11 a day here as opposed to about $9 an hour in California. But without legal workers in California, he said, “I have no choice but to offshore my operation.” The Department of Labor has reported that 53 percent of the 2.5 million farm workers in the United States are illegal immigrants; growers and labor unions say as much as 70 percent of younger field hands are illegal. As the American authorities tightened the border in recent years, seasonal migration from Mexico has been interrupted, demographers say. Many illegal farm laborers, reluctant to leave the United States, have abandoned the arduous migrant work of agriculture for year-round construction and service jobs. Labor shortages during harvests have become common. Some academics say warnings of a farm labor debacle are exaggerated. “By and large the most dire predictions don’t come true,” said Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. “There is no doubt that some people can’t count on workers showing up as much as they used to,” Professor Martin said. “But most of the places that are crying the loudest are exceptional cases.” But some recent studies suggest that strains on the farm-labor supply are real. Stephen Levy, an economist at the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, in Palo Alto, compared unemployed Americans with illegal immigrant workers in the labor market. “The bottom line,” Mr. Levy said, “is that most unemployed workers are not available to replace fired, unauthorized immigrant workers,” in part because very few of the unemployed are in farm work. Mr. Scaroni said he started growing in Mexico reluctantly, after seeing risks to his American operations. At peak season his California company, Valley Harvesting and Packing, employs more than 1,000 immigrants, and all have filled out the required federal form, known as an I-9, with Social Security numbers and other identity information. “From my perspective everyone that works for me is legal,” he said. But based on farm labor statistics, he surmises that many of his workers presented false documents. An impatient man in perpetual motion, Mr. Scaroni marches through his fields shouting orders to Mexican crew leaders in rough Spanish while he negotiates to buy new trucks in Mexico on a walkie-talkie in one hand and to sell produce in the United States on a cellphone in the other. Frustrated with experts who say that farmers with labor problems should mechanize, he plunges his hands into side-by-side lettuce plants, pulling out one crisp green head and one that is soggy and brown. After his company invested $1 million in research, he said, “We haven’t come up with a way to tell a machine what’s a good head and what’s a bad head.” He also dismisses arguments that he could attract workers by raising wages, saying Americans do not take the sweaty, seasonal field jobs. “I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I did that I would raise my costs and I would not have a legal work force,” Mr. Scaroni said. Still, transferring to Mexico has been costly, he said. Since the greens he cuts here go to bagged salads in supermarkets in the United States, he follows the same food-safety practices as he does in California. Renting fallow Mexican land, he enclosed his fields in fences and installed drip-irrigation systems for the filtered water he uses. He trained his Mexican field crews to wear hair nets, arm sheaths and sanitized gloves, and held drills on the correct use of portable toilets. In the clean-scrubbed cooling house, women in white caps scrutinize produce for every stray hair and dirt spot. By now about one-fifth of Mr. Scaroni’s operation is on five farms approaching 2,000 acres in Guanajuato. A few of his Mexican employees came from California, like Antonio Martínez Aguilar, a field manager who worked there for 15 years but could never get immigration documents. “I tried everything, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do to make me legal,” Mr. Martínez said. Negotiated among growers and unions over seven years, the agricultural measure in the failed immigration bill, known as AgJobs, had wider bipartisan support than the bill as a whole, lawmakers said. Its supporters have said they hope to bring it before Congress this fall, perhaps attached to the farm bill. [It was hurt by last week’s resignation of Senator Larry E. Craig, the Idaho Republican who was one of its chief sponsors.] Mr. Scaroni expects to recover his start-up costs because of the lower wages he pays here, although he says Mexican workers are less productive in their own country. “It’s not a cake walk down here,” he said. “At least I know the one thing I don’t have to worry about is losing my labor force because of an immigration raid.”

Labor
Agriculture
Mexico
Relocation of Business


Media Earnings Results Are Awaited, a Bit Warily

Abstract: It looked as if the world was coming to an end across the media business three months ago. Major media stocks crashed suddenly as panic spread that the number of people canceling or paring their cable and satellite subscriptions was accelerating. Eroding television ratings and dismal advertising sales prompted apocalyptic forecasts about the role of traditional television in the digital future. This week, as media giants including Disney, 21st Century Fox and Time Warner are scheduled to report quarterly earnings, the short-term outlook for the industry appears brighter. Fears of a rapid acceleration of cord-cutting, consumers canceling subscriptions to traditional pay television services, were overblown based on the recent results from cable and satellite providers, analysts said. And while ratings remain challenged, the advertising market appears to have been somewhat stronger in the third quarter. But while the sky has not fallen yet, questions about the long-term future of the industry remain pressing. Investors are looking for media executives to show how they are adapting for survival. That includes providing innovative offerings in the traditional cable and satellite bundles and exploiting new digital distribution outlets, like streaming and mobile. “Nobody standing still will be O.K.,” said Brian Wieser, a media analyst with Pivotal Research Group. “But I don’t think they are standing still.” All eyes will be on Disney, the world’s largest entertainment group, which is scheduled to report its fiscal full-year and fourth-quarter results after markets close Thursday. The company ignited concern across the industry when it reported results in August and issued reduced growth expectations for its large cable network division. The group contributes about half of Disney’s operating income and is anchored by the sports network ESPN, long considered one of the industry’s strongest performers. In part because of subscriber losses attributable to cord-cutting and more tailored programming bundles, the company said then that its Disney Media Networks group would achieve “midsingle digit” operating income growth between 2013 and 2016, instead of the previously expected “high single-digit” growth The comments scared investors, who worried that the rest of the industry was in peril if even ESPN, with its valuable sports programming, was not immune to the threat of cord-cutting. On Aug. 5, eight major media stocks crashed, wiping out a combined $37 billion in market value. Since then, shares in the Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox and Time Warner have all been down. “ESPN has the most subscription fees, so has the furthest to fall with cord-cutting,” said Anthony DiClemente, a media industry analyst with Nomura. “At the same time, for a lot of households, ESPN is one of the most important networks.” ESPN has made several moves in recent months to shift its business to the new way people watch its programming. They include an announcement in October that the network was laying off about 300 employees , or nearly 4 percent of its work force. ESPN’s subscriber base has fallen to 91.8 million, from 98.9 million in October 2013, according to Nielsen. The second quarter of 2015 was the industry’s worst for pay television subscription losses. That downturn is bad news for the media companies that sell programming to cable and satellite distributors. However, initial third-quarter results from cable and satellite companies, including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Charter, indicate modest subscriber declines, analysts said. The satellite provider Dish Networks will report earnings next week, which will make the cord-cutting snapshot more clear. “The United States is a slowly melting ice cube,” Mr. DiClemente said. “It is just a question of how quickly the ice cube melts.” One big question media executives are likely to face this week is whether people are signing up for the slimmer bundles of channels that cable and satellite companies are introducing. The television companies could come under pressure if they are not included in those bundles. “The bigger issue here is not just whether people cut the cord, but who has the bigger negotiation leverage: the distributors or the media companies,” said Kannan Venkateshwar, a media analyst with Barclays. He noted that Comcast recently reduced its forecast for the amount of money it would have to spend on programming for the second year in a row. “Whatever is the upside for cable is the downside for media,” Mr. Venkateshwar said. “Some of the negotiating leverage seems to be moving to the distributors.” This week, media executives are likely to highlight their ventures in streaming as potential new revenue sources; those efforts include creating stand-alone streaming services and selling their programming to streaming services and mobile providers. Time Warner’s HBO, and CBS Corporation’s CBS and Showtime, for instance, have introduced stand-alone services outside the traditional cable subscriptions. Verizon’s Go90 free ad-supported mobile streaming service offers popular shows from ESPN and Viacom’s Comedy Central. Another important topic is whether Netflix is a friend or an enemy. The service, which now counts 70.4 million paid global subscribers, has come under fire in recent months by some media executives who question whether they should license their shows to Netflix, and potentially send viewers somewhere else to see the content. The fear is that even though the license fees help prop up revenue, the deals with Netflix cannibalize traditional ratings and advertising revenue. James Murdoch, the chief executive of 21st Century Fox, said in an investor conference this fall that business rules were changing. He added that while the company had had a long relationship with Netflix, it was also working more with Hulu, the streaming service that Fox owns with Comcast and Disney. “Should media companies trade near-term pain for long-term gain?” Mr. DiClemente asked. “Some companies are continuing to sell to Netflix, but some are taking a more militant position.”

Walt Disney
Time Warner
21st Century Fox
News media,journalism
Earnings Reports


Reimagining a Boardwalk, This Time in Concrete

Abstract: One of the enduring symbols of Hurricane Sandy’s fury — and there were many — was the havoc wreaked on the five-mile Boardwalk at Rockaway Beach in Queens, which was variously banged up, destroyed or swept away. For months after the storm, the parks department raced to ready the beach for the summer season, repairing concession areas and creating safe entry points. Now, 11 months after the hurricane, New York is finally turning its attention to the Boardwalk itself. Replacing it will be hugely expensive, with a tentative price tag of $200 million. It will involve 4.7 miles of new decking and about 50,000 linear feet of railing. And though work could start by the end of the year, the Boardwalk will take years to rebuild; just how many is unclear. What is certain, however, is that it will not be made of wood. Soon after the hurricane, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that the storm had laid to rest the debate over wood versus concrete as the preferred material for boardwalks. He pointed to the few concrete sections that had come through in relatively good shape. “We think in terms of making a big investment for the long term, concrete is a much better choice,” said Liam Kavanagh, the parks department’s first deputy commissioner. “It’s stronger than wood and lasts twice as long. For the most part, we didn’t see the wholesale destruction of the concrete that we saw with the wood.” But the surface will not necessarily resemble the bland gray tones of the city’s sidewalks. The parks department has solicited a range of ideas for the future Boardwalk in a series of community meetings. Image Rockaways residents examined samples of concrete at a meeting on Wednesday. Credit Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times On Wednesday night, residents, like shoppers considering tile for a new kitchen, turned out to study a dozen samples of so-called concrete aggregate; some samples featured colorful bits of glass, while others were embedded with seashells. Residents in one corner devised a wish list for amenities, both on and off the Boardwalk, like bike lanes, spray showers and dog runs, while in another corner, residents considered storm defenses, whether a sea wall, offshore breakwaters or rock jetties. One resident, Pamela O’Grady, 68, favored the last solution. “This historic storm proved that the places with rock jetties had 50 percent less damage to the beaches,” Ms. O’Grady said. “We know the jetties work.” The Army Corps of Engineers, which pumped nearly 600,000 cubic yards of sand onto the beach this summer, will eventually build whatever storm protections are chosen, but that will not happen for years, given the Corps’ lengthy technical and economic reviews. The Corps plans to share draft alternatives for the Rockaways with the public early next year, said Chris Gardner, a spokesman for the agency. In the meantime, parks officials and engineers reassured the residents that the Boardwalk would be rebuilt to withstand future monster storms. Not only will it be raised along its entire length, but the decking will be securely fastened to concrete pilings. The old Boardwalk had simply rested on the pilings, making it vulnerable to the storm surge. “Yes, we are going to attach the decks to the foundations so the decks won’t be floating into your living rooms,” said Jonathan Goldstick, vice president of the engineering firm CH2M Hill , which the city has hired to oversee the project. Both the city and the Army Corps are working to build up the beaches. Throughout the spring and summer, the city created an artificial bulwark on the beach by laying so-called trap bags, giant bags of sand, from Beach 55th to Beach 149th Street. Starting this winter, the Army Corps will begin the second phase of work to widen and raise the beach, adding 2.9 million more cubic yards of sand. Image One of a series of public meetings on Rockaway Beach reconstruction was held on Wednesday at Public School 114 in Queens. Credit Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times “The idea is to build a beach berm roughly 100 to 200 feet wide, and the berm will be at least 10 feet above sea level,” Mr. Gardner said. The city would like to make that berm even higher, Mr. Kavanagh said, and is in talks with the Army Corps to cover additional costs. As a result of the higher beach elevation, the new Boardwalk may appear to be more flush with the beach than the old one did. There was talk at the meeting on Wednesday night, which was held in a public school on Beach 135th Street, about how to “memorialize” the Boardwalk. Some suggested using the salvaged wood to create shade structures and benches on the new Boardwalk. But the liveliest discussion centered on what type of concrete to use. Participants were asked to put stickers on their favorite samples. The clear favorite was one flecked with blue and green glass, which sparkled under the fluorescent light. Still, there were those who could not let go of wood ; someone even slipped a black-and-white photograph of the old Boardwalk into the mix of concrete samples. “Wood is less stressful on the human body,” lamented Nick Scorcia, 56, a road paver who lives in Rockaway Park. “I don’t like any of the concrete alternatives. You can’t even call it a boardwalk. Now I have to call it a concrete walkway.”

Rockaway Beach Queens
Hurricane Sandy
Concrete
NYC Parks and Recreation
Mike Bloomberg
Beach