Uehara’s Save Streak Ends, but Boston Wins

Abstract: David Ortiz hit a leadoff home run in the 10th inning and visiting Boston beat Oakland, 7-6, on Sunday to avoid a four-game series sweep. The A’s scored three runs in the eighth, and then homered twice in the ninth against Koji Uehara, who had converted 31 straight save opportunities dating to 2013. REDS 4, BLUE JAYS 3 Host Cincinnati beat Toronto after the Blue Jays’ Brett Lawrie and Jose Bautista exited early because of injuries. Lawrie sustained a broken right index finger when he was hit by a pitch in the second. Bautista left because of tightness in his left leg. PIRATES 2, CUBS 1 Brandon Cumpton pitched seven scoreless innings, Travis Snider hit a solo home run and Pittsburgh beat host Chicago. Cumpton won his third straight decision, retiring 13 of the first 14 batters he faced. TWINS 6, WHITE SOX 5 Joe Mauer had two hits and two runs batted in, and Minnesota beat visiting Chicago to complete its first four-game sweep against the White Sox in 20 years. After Chicago scored five times in the third for a 5-3 lead, Brian Dozier and Mauer had R.B.I. singles, and Josh Willingham added a sacrifice fly in the fourth. MARINERS 2, ROYALS 1 The rookie Roenis Elias pitched into the seventh inning, Mike Zunino homered and visiting Seattle defeated Kansas City for a three-game sweep. Elias struck out five, walked two and improved to 4-1 in June. Zunino hit his ninth home run, tops among American League catchers. Kansas City has lost four straight. CARDINALS 5, PHILLIES 3 Mark Ellis drove in two runs, including the go-ahead score with a bunt, and host St. Louis got a scoreless effort from its bullpen to beat Philadelphia. Philadelphia has lost two straight after a season-high five-game winning streak. RAYS 5, ASTROS 2 Yunel Escobar drove in two runs during a three-run sixth inning and Tampa Bay beat visiting Houston. The Rays are 8-18 over their past 26 games, including five wins in seven games against the Astros. TIGERS 10, INDIANS 4 Max Scherzer pitched six strong innings, Miguel Cabrera homered and drove in three runs, and Detroit beat host Cleveland for a three-game sweep. NATIONALS 4, BRAVES 1 Tanner Roark won his fourth straight start, Denard Span had an R.B.I. double and host Washington beat Atlanta for a split of the four-game series. DODGERS 2, PADRES 1 Hyun-Jin Ryu pitched six solid innings and Los Angeles beat host San Diego soon after San Diego’s General Manager Josh Byrnes was fired. Ryu won for the sixth time in seven starts since missing more than three weeks with shoulder inflammation. GIANTS 4, DIAMONDBACKS 1 Madison Bumgarner gave up just two infield singles while pitching into the ninth inning and visiting San Francisco beat Arizona to take two straight from the Diamondbacks after a six-game losing streak. BREWERS 6, ROCKIES 5 Aramis Ramirez homered and drove in two runs, and Milwaukee continued their road dominance with a win over Colorado. The Brewers swept the Rockies to finish 6-1 on a trip that started in Arizona. ANGELS 5, RANGERS 2 The rookie Matt Shoemaker won his fifth straight decision in a starting role, and Los Angeles completed a three-game sweep of visiting Texas. C. J. Cron homered for the third straight game, helping the Angels pull to five games behind first-place Oakland in the A.L. West.

Baseball
Reds
Blue Jays
Jose Bautista
Red Sox
Oakland Athletics
Brett Lawrie


Ukraine’s Leader Schedules Vote After Disbanding Parliament

Abstract: MOSCOW — President Viktor A. Yushchenko of Ukraine signed an order on Thursday to dissolve Parliament and hold snap elections, raising new uncertainties about Ukraine’s tilt toward the West at a moment when the country has become a focal point of rising tensions with Russia . The move resulted from a worsening rift between Ukraine’s two top leaders, Mr. Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko , one-time allies who have become bitter rivals with differing visions of how Ukraine should handle relations with Russia and West. The vote, scheduled for Dec. 7, will test Mr. Yushchenko’s drive to solidify ties with the United States and Europe and steer Ukraine, part of the former Soviet Union, toward membership in NATO, a step that would be likely to antagonize Russia. Ms. Tymoshenko, who joined Mr. Yushchenko in leading the so-called Orange Revolution against the country’s pro-Moscow government in 2004, now represents a political faction that favors warmer ties with Russia. The split reflects a deep divide in Ukraine, which has a large ethnic Russian minority and influential business interests that favor closer relations with Moscow, but also a fervent nationalist movement that brought Mr. Yushchenko to power and sees Ukraine’s future as tied to the West. Strong gains for Ms. Tymoshenko in the parliamentary elections could jeopardize Mr. Yushchenko’s efforts to join NATO, a step that has grown less popular in Ukraine, but is strongly supported by Washington. The short war in August between Russia and Georgia has prompted urgent calls, particularly from Washington, for Ukraine and Georgia to be offered a NATO membership plan. The elections will be the third parliamentary elections since Mr. Yushchenko came to power in 2004. At the time, he promised to wrest Ukraine from its corrupt, authoritarian past, though today it remains mired in political stagnation. Mr. Yushchenko’s decision followed weeks of raucous political infighting with Ms. Tymoshenko, whom he has accused of orchestrating a power grab at the expense of Ukraine’s national interests. The two are likely to face off in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2010. “I am convinced, deeply convinced, that the democratic coalition was destroyed by one thing — the ambition of one person,” Mr. Yushchenko said Wednesday in a television address during which he announced the dissolution of Parliament. “The Yulia Tymoshenko bloc has become the hostage of its leaders, who are willing to sacrifice everything: our language, security and our European prospects.” Ms. Tymoshenko recently sided with Ukraine’s opposition to pass measures limiting the president’s powers, leading to the collapse of a fragile parliamentary alliance with Mr. Yushchenko’s party last month. The prime minister is considering whether to contest Mr. Yushchenko’s decision to dissolve Parliament and hold new elections before Ukraine’s Constitutional Court, her spokeswoman said. Ms. Tymoshenko’s supporters have called for mass protests. Speaking in Macedonia on Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates reaffirmed Washington’s support for Ukraine’s NATO ambitions despite the government’s instability and said the United States would work with any new coalition that emerged. Russia has responded angrily to any indication of more NATO expansion, and it recently bolstered its military. In Russia, calls have increased for Moscow to take ownership of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, a mostly ethnic-Russian region where Russia bases its Black Sea Fleet. Ms. Tymoshenko recently began presenting herself as a centrist politician able to bridge the divide between pro-Western forces and those who want to maintain close ties to Russia. She refused to back Mr. Yushchenko in his support for Georgia in the war with Russia, adopting a more neutral stance. Ms. Tymoshenko recently went to Moscow for talks with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on energy cooperation, a meeting that was almost thwarted when Mr. Yushchenko requisitioned her plane after his own plane was said to have had a technical malfunction. Ms. Tymoshenko’s overtures to Russia have prompted criticism from Mr. Yushchenko’s supporters that she has been co-opted by the Kremlin, though Mikhail B. Pogrebinsky, director of the Kiev Center for Political and Conflict Studies, said she would rely heavily on her pro-Western supporters in the parliamentary elections, which he said her bloc would probably win. Recent opinion polls give Ms. Tymoshenko’s bloc a slight edge in popularity over the Party of Regions, the main opposition party, which is led by Viktor F. Yanukovich. Mr. Yushchenko’s parliamentary bloc trails both. Mr. Yanukovich, even more than Ms. Tymoshenko, has pushed for better ties with Russia. If his party wins the elections or becomes a partner in a coalition government, the chances of Ukraine pushing for an additional steps to join NATO would be sharply reduced. NATO countries are to meet in December to discuss granting Ukraine and Georgia membership action plans.

Ukraine
Yushchenko Viktor
Tymoshenko Yulia V
Elections
Politics and Government
International Relations
Russia


Mets Are Optimistic About Signing Santana

Abstract: A second round of talks with the representatives for Johan Santana left the Mets feeling optimistic about their chances of signing him to a lucrative extension before their 72-hour negotiating window expires at 5 p.m. on Friday. Although a club official said he would not feel totally confident until the contract was signed, he acknowledged that the Mets had not waited this long or invested this much energy into acquiring Santana, the ace left-hander who is likely to head their rotation for several years, to fail to bring the trade to fruition. Besides, Santana wished to be traded before spring training, and if the deal were to collapse, he would be right back where he started — in Minnesota. The sticking point continues to be the length of the contract. Pitchers, even those who have won two Cy Young awards, are more susceptible to injury than other players. The club official, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly because of the sensitive nature of the discussions, indicated that a six-year contract extension, which would defy the organizational philosophy of limiting the length of pitchers’ contracts to five years, is a reasonable possibility. Excluding the $13.25 million Santana is owed in 2008 but including a signing bonus that should push this season’s salary beyond $20 million, the final price tag figures to be about $150 million, making him the highest-paid pitcher in baseball. If a deal is not reached by 5 p.m. on Friday, the Mets can ask the Twins for up to 72 additional hours to negotiate the contract. The Twins have the right not to grant the Mets additional time, voiding the trade. The Mets can also continue to ask for additional time as long as the commissioner’s office allows it. But an official familiar with the protocol, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said it was unlikely that the commissioner’s office would permit the process to advance past a second window. Once the Santana deal is completed, the Mets may add more starting pitchers. They have not ruled out the possibility of signing the free-agent right-hander Kyle Lohse, who went 9-12 in 32 starts for Cincinnati and Philadelphia last season. That move could push Orlando Hernández to the bullpen, bolstering an aspect of the team that crumbled toward the end of last season. Hernández’s versatility would make him a valuable long reliever or, because of his success against right-handed hitters (they batted .167 off him last season), a late-inning specialist who could defuse a pressure-packed situation. The Mets have acquired several right-handed relievers this off-season, but none are sure bets to improve a relief corps that posted a 5.40 earned run average during the final 17 games of the season, when they lost a seven-game lead in the National League East. Reports have been positive on Duaner Sánchez, a setup man who missed all of last season, but the Mets do not know what to expect from him.

Santana Johan
New York Mets
Baseball
Wages and Salaries
Free Agents (Sports)
Athletics and Sports


Tom Werner Is Trying to Block Rob Manfred’s Bid to Replace Bud Selig

Abstract: Some commissioner elections are landslides, with one favorite candidate and no opposition. Others are like old-style political conventions, filled with intrigue, rivalries and multiple ballots. There is no certainty what will happen Thursday when Major League Baseball’s team owners convene in Baltimore to vote on a commissioner to replace Bud Selig, who will retire in January after more than 22 years in the position. But with two candidates — Rob Manfred, baseball’s chief operating officer, and Tom Werner, an owner of the Boston Red Sox — linked to different factions, neither man might receive the 23 of 30 votes required for election. That could lead owners to turn to a third candidate, Tim Brosnan, baseball’s executive vice president for business, whose work has produced increasingly lucrative television and sponsorship deals. They could also reconsider the owners Mark Attanasio of the Milwaukee Brewers or Stuart Sternberg of the Tampa Bay Rays, both of whom met with the search committee that nominated Manfred, Werner and Brosnan. If the owners unite around Manfred, baseball’s No. 2 executive and the perceived favorite to succeed Selig, they will be emulating the smooth transition that occurred earlier this year in the N.B.A. when, after a long and highly public apprenticeship, Adam Silver took over for David Stern after his 30-year run as commissioner. Silver had been the heir apparent for so long that no visible competition arose. Image Tom Werner, center, with John Henry, right, principal owner of Boston Red Sox, and Larry Lucchino, the team's president. Werner, a television producer and part owner of the Red Sox, has emerged recently as an opponent to Rob Manfred to replace Bud Selig. Credit Michael Dwyer/Associated Press Manfred has handled labor relations and baseball’s drug-testing program for Selig, two areas of critical importance to the sport. But an easy victory lap for Manfred seems unlikely because of opposition from Werner, a television producer whose time as a Red Sox owner has included three World Series championships, and Brosnan. Werner has the support of Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the Chicago White Sox, and Arte Moreno, the Los Angeles Angels’ owner, who believe that Manfred has given too many concessions to the players union and want the next commissioner to be more confrontational. John Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox, feels that Werner’s background in entertainment qualifies him more than Manfred to broaden baseball’s fan base, according to owners and senior baseball officials. Like Selig, Werner would be an owner-turned-commissioner. Selig and his partners owned the Brewers, which gave him a power base that he used to help oust Fay Vincent as commissioner in 1992. Selig replaced Vincent but was not formally elected commissioner until 1998, when he put his ownership of the team into a trust. If Werner can get eight votes, he can block Manfred and make the process chaotic. Brosnan would have to rely on bringing more revenue to baseball — like the $12.4 billion television rights deals with ESPN, Fox and Turner Sports — to make his case that the sport needs a commissioner with his particular business background. He is also known for innovations in marketing, like the MLB Fan Cave. Image Tim Brosnan, second from right, at a 2013 All-Star Game news conference that included, from left, Edgardo Alfonzo, Mookie Wilson, John Franco, David Wright and Michael R. Bloomberg. Credit Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press The history of several other commissioner elections shows that a deadlock among the known candidates can produce the unexpected — and can damage the chances of favorites. In late 1968, there was no clear consensus among owners to replace William D. Eckert as baseball commissioner. At first, it was a battle along once-rigid hierarchical league lines between Michael Burke, the president of the Yankees, and Charles Feeney, a vice president of the San Francisco Giants. Burke could not drum up National League support; Feeney got some American League backing but not enough to win. Other names were proposed, including those of Lee MacPhail, the Yankees’ general manager, and John McHale, the president of the Montreal Expos, who had not yet played their first game. After 19 ballots taken over 13 hours at a Chicago airport hotel, the owners took a breather until early February. Eckert, whom the owners had dismissed, stayed on. The owners reconvened in Bal Harbour, Fla., but knew that neither Burke nor Feeney could get the 75 percent of the votes needed in each league to win. They needed someone new — and an insider with a distinctive name, Bowie Kuhn, was suggested. Kuhn was then a lawyer for the National League. The 24 owners elected him unanimously, initially for a one-year term. He would serve a tumultuous 15-year tenure that was characterized by his resistance to free agency, his battles with the union chief Marvin Miller and his suspension of the Yankees’ owner, George Steinbrenner, for illegal campaign contributions. The last three N.F.L. commissioners were not elected quickly. In 1960, owners could not name a commissioner after more than 20 ballots. Marshall Leahy, a San Francisco lawyer; Austin Gunsel, a former F.B.I agent who became the acting commissioner after the death of Bert Bell; and Don Kellett, the general manager of the Baltimore Colts, could not get enough votes. The Pittsburgh Steelers’ owner, Art Rooney, suggested seven other candidates, including Happy Chandler, the former baseball commissioner, and Don Miller, one of Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen. But nowhere on Rooney’s list was the man finally elected: Pete Rozelle, the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. Image Bowie Kuhn, front, with Happy Chandler to his right, during the 1979 World Series. Kuhn served a tumultuous 15-year tenure as baseball's commissioner from 1969 to 1984. Credit Associated Press In 1989, Jim Finks, the president of the New Orleans Saints, was the only person recommended by a search committee to replace Rozelle. But opposition by some of the newer and younger owners led to a further search that brought in Paul Tagliabue, a longtime lawyer for the league who was elected on the 12th ballot. Seventeen years later, Roger Goodell needed five ballots to be elected, despite being closely allied with Tagliabue. During his time as baseball commissioner, Selig has often worked tirelessly to produce consensus on major decisions and mask internal divisions. But the absence of unanimity around a single candidate could turn Thursday’s commissioner vote into a donnybrook like the N.F.L.’s. Owners, Selig and the candidates are scheduled to arrive in Baltimore on Tuesday; the candidates will make oral presentations to the owners Wednesday. The executive council will meet that day to determine the details of the voting, a process that the owners must approve. On Thursday, if chaos does not intrude, the identity of Selig’s successor should be known.

Baseball
Appointments and Executive Changes
MLB
Bud Selig
Tom Werner
Rob Manfred
Stuart Sternberg
Mark Attanasio
Tim Brosnan


Papua New Guinea Is Little Prepared for Gas Wealth

Abstract: TARI, Papua New Guinea — A founding myth in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea is said to have foretold the arrival of ExxonMobil , the American oil giant that is preparing to extract natural gas here and ship it overseas. According to the myth, called Gigira Laitebo, an underground fire is kept alive by inhabitants poking sticks into the earth. Eventually, the fire “will light up the world,” said Peter O’Neill, the national government’s finance minister. “By development of the project and delivering to international markets, it’s one way of fulfilling the myth.” But like all myths, this one is open to wide interpretation, as a group of men and women at a Roman Catholic parish here suggested before Sunday Mass recently. “If foreigners come to our land, you give them food and water, but don’t give them the fire,” said John Hamule, 38, as the others nodded. “If you do, it will destroy this place.” In 2014, ExxonMobil is scheduled to start shipping natural gas through a 450-mile pipeline, then on to Japan, China and other markets in East Asia. But the flood of revenue, which is expected to bring Papua New Guinea $30 billion over three decades and to more than double its gross domestic product, will force a country already beset by state corruption and bedeviled by a complex land tenure system to grapple with the kind of windfall that has paradoxically entrenched other poor, resource-rich nations in deeper poverty. While the West’s richest companies are used to seeking natural resources in the world’s poorest corners, few places on earth seem as ill prepared as the Southern Highlands to rub shoulders with ExxonMobil. The most impoverished region in one of the world’s poorest countries, it went unexplored by Westerners until the 1930s. Believing that this rugged, mountainous region was uninhabited, the explorers were stunned to find at least one million people living here in one of the world’s most diverse areas, largely in small, distinct communities separated by different cultures, languages and nearly impassable terrain. Constant tribal wars over land, women and pigs — the last being prized measures of wealth, used to pay for dowries and settle disputes — have grown deadlier in the past decade with the easy availability of high-powered rifles smuggled in from Indonesia, just to the west, which are exchanged for the marijuana grown here. Mr. O’Neill says the Southern Highlands are too diverse, too fragmented, to develop the kind of widespread insurrection that exists in the Niger Delta of Nigeria . But local leaders worry about the continuing inflow of guns into an area with almost no government presence, and no paved roads, electricity, running water, banks or post offices. They worry that the benefits of the gas project will fall short of expectations, begetting a generation of young men who will train their anger on ExxonMobil. Already, in fact, angry landowners have forced ExxonMobil’s contractors to suspend work temporarily at several construction sites, and local businessmen bid for contracts with unconcealed threats. “Any outside waste management company that is given the contract will not be allowed into Komo by force or whatever means,” said Robin Tuna, 34, whose company was bidding for just such a contract in Komo, an area south of here where ExxonMobil is building a large airfield. And ExxonMobil faces the daunting prospect of dealing with Papua New Guinea’s distinctive form of land tenure, which grants control over 97 percent of the land to customary landowners , primarily indigenous people whose ownership rights to small plots are inherited. More than 60,000 people own land where gas will be either extracted or transported. To get their agreement, the government invited 3,000 to a meeting last year to hammer out benefit-sharing agreements. The government intentionally held the conference on an island to ward off gate-crashers, though 2,000 uninvited landowners eventually flew over, said Anderson Agiru, the governor of Southern Highlands Province. The meeting, scheduled for seven days, lasted six weeks. And still thousands, who remain unsatisfied, have streamed to the nation’s capital, Port Moresby, to try to get their cut. “They tell us they are busy or to come back the next day,” said Jim Tatape, one of hundreds of angry landowners milling around recently in front of the Department of Commerce and Industry, waiting to see anybody inside. “We don’t want to deal with government anymore,” added Mr. Tatape, who was seeking money to start a small, though vaguely defined, business. “ExxonMobil is the developer. We are the landowners. We should deal together.” Officials at ExxonMobil declined to be interviewed for this article. In an e-mail, the company said it “seeks to create long-term economic and social benefits from its projects and presence.” Citing its ethics policy , the company wrote that it strived to “help developing nations to improve their systems as well as help support local business to develop proper governance systems.” The picture here in the Southern Highlands is not completely bleak. With the start of several ExxonMobil-related construction projects in recent months, for instance, the police have returned after a long absence. “It was a lawless place until last year,” said Joe Wija, 43, the town administrator at Komo, where police barracks and a new provincial government building are being constructed after the end of a long tribal war. “The government is coming back now. When ExxonMobil came here, it was the light at the end of the tunnel.” Here in Tari — the largest town closest to the gas fields but really just a series of squat buildings surrounding a recently fenced-off airstrip — a separate tribal war has given way to new businesses. “No one from the outside dared to come to Tari two years ago,” said Peter Muli, 37, whose chicken restaurant, House-Kai, is now thriving. One recent afternoon, Tari was swarming with villagers, most of them barefoot, who had descended from the surrounding hills, where they live in hamlets dotted with thatched huts. Here, they sold fruits, vegetables and coffee beans. Some men strutted around in traditional garb, wearing elaborate wigs and body paint, even as others, dressed in T-shirts and other hand-me-downs from Australia, competed fiercely at darts to win a can of Coke. With gas exports a few years off, only a little money has begun flowing into the hands of the people here. But it has begun to worry the priests at the Catholic parish. “You want to be optimistic but you have to be realistic,” said the Rev. Sam Driscoll, 78, a Capuchin Franciscan friar from West Virginia who has lived in Papua New Guinea for 50 years. The money, the friars said, risked deepening existing problems like alcoholism, marijuana use and polygamy. “The people here are not ready for that kind of money,” said the Rev. Paul Patlo, a Papua New Guinean. While conceding the danger of social disruptions, Papua New Guinea officials are adamant that the windfall will be used for development and not siphoned off by the well connected. Mr. O’Neill, the finance minister, said the government planned to channel the revenue into three sovereign wealth funds that would be overseen by a board of advisers, including foreigners, adding that the government would also be held accountable by the World Bank and other creditors. But Michael McWalter, a former director of the petroleum division at the Department of Petroleum and Energy and a current adviser, said that corruption permeated the country’s political establishment and bureaucracy. “Whether they will put the money into a revenue fund and steal it all in one go, I don’t know,” said Mr. McWalter, who is also a director of Transparency International here. Father Patlo, 39, told his congregation at Hulia Parish here the biblical parable of the unjust steward, who misused money entrusted to him. “The government and the company sit together and eat in the same place, so they must develop the country together,” he went on, but he also assigned responsibility to his listeners, exhorting them to spend their money on their children’s school fees and save any left over. Earlier, he had held up a warning: a local village chief who had squandered a $120,000 windfall. A short drive away, Hamon Matipe, the septuagenarian chief of Kili, confirmed that he had received that sum four months earlier. In details corroborated by the local authorities, Mr. Matipe explained that the provincial government had paid him for village land alongside the Southern Highlands’ one major road, where the government planned to build a police barracks. His face adorned with red and white paint, a pair of industrial safety glasses perched incongruously on a head ornament from which large leaves stuck out, Mr. Matipe said he had given most of the money to his 10 wives. But he had used about $20,000 to buy 48 pigs, which he used as a dowry to obtain a 15-year-old bride from a faraway village, paying well above the going rate of 30 pigs. He and some 30 village men then celebrated by buying 15 cases of beer, costing about $800. “All the money is now gone,” Mr. Matipe said. “But I’m very happy about the company, ExxonMobil. Before, I had nothing. But because of the money, I was able to buy pigs and get married again.”

Papua New Guinea
Third World and Developing Countries
Natural Gas
Exxon Mobil Corp


Google Adds Searching by Voice to iPhone Software

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone . Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine. The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location. The ability to recognize just about any phrase from any person has long been the supreme goal of artificial intelligence researchers looking for ways to make man-machine interactions more natural. Systems that can do this have recently started making their way into commercial products. Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering. The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard. The service can be used to get restaurant recommendations and driving directions, look up contacts in the iPhone’s address book or just settle arguments in bars. The query “What is the best pizza restaurant in Noe Valley?” returns a list of three restaurants in that San Francisco neighborhood, each with starred reviews from Google users and links to click for phone numbers and directions. Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who has done pioneering work in voice recognition, said Google’s advantage in this field was the ability to store and analyze vast amounts of data. “Whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months,” he said. “It’s important to understand that machine recognition will never be perfect,” Mr. Reddy added. “The question is, How close can they come to human performance?” For Google the technology is critical to its next assault on the world of advertising. Google executives said location-based queries would make it possible to charge higher rates for advertisements from nearby businesses, for example, although it is not selling such ads now. As with other Google products the service is freely available to consumers, and the company plans to eventually make it available for phones other than the iPhone. “We are dramatically increasing value to the advertiser through location and voice,” said Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses. Google is by no means the only company working toward more advanced speech recognition capabilities. So-called voice response technology is now routinely used in telephone answering systems and in other consumer services and products. These systems, however, often have trouble with the complexities of free-form language and usually offer only a limited range of responses to queries. Several weeks ago Adobe added voice recognition technology developed by Autonomy, a British firm, to its Creative Suite software, allowing it to generate transcripts of video and audio recordings with a high degree of accuracy. Mr. Gundotra said Google had been tackling the twin problems of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices. “Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” he said. The new iPhone search capability is not the first speech offering from Google. In March, it announced that GOOG-411, an experimental directory information service, had turned into a real product. The service allows users to ask for business phone and address information. The company said it had built on its experience and the data it collected through GOOG-411 in developing the iPhone service. The new service is an example of the way Google tries to blend basic computer science research with product engineering. The company has hired many of the best speech recognition researchers in the world and now has teams working on different aspects of the problem in New York, London and its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. An intriguing part of the overall design of the service was contributed by a Google researcher in London, who found a way to use the iPhone accelerometer — the device that senses how the phone is held — to set the software to “listen” mode when the phone is raised to the user’s ear. Google researchers said that another of its advantages over competitors was the billions of queries its users have made over the years. “One thing that has changed is the amount of computation and the amount of data that is available,” said Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance Communications before coming to Google. Past queries can be used to build a statistical model of the way words are frequently strung together, Mr. Cohen said. This is just one of the components of the speech recognition system, which also includes a sound analysis model and a mechanism for linking the basic components of language to actual words. Google recently published a technical paper on building large models for machine translation of language. The researchers wrote that they had trained the system on two trillion “tokens,” or words.

Google Inc
iPhone
Voice Recognition Systems
Search Engines
Computers and the Internet


Fearing Wildfires, Utility Plans Power Shutdowns

Abstract: JULIAN, Calif. — There probably is not a person in this little mountain town who has mentally deleted the images of 2007, when angry orange flames, followed by giant plumes of smoke, licked at the trees and roared across the freeway near here, killing neighbors in communities close by and engulfing hundreds of homes. Eager to avoid a repeat of that horrific year, and the ensuing lawsuits, officials of San Diego County’s chief power utility have hatched a disputed plan to deal with one potential fire source: downed power lines. If electrical wires can cause fires when winds and temperatures are high, the officials say, then electricity itself will have to go. The utility, San Diego Gas & Electric, says that if the state approves the idea, it will shut off power to thousands of residents here in the rural “backcountry” of northeastern San Diego County under specific fire-friendly weather conditions: low moisture, high temperatures and sustained winds of at least 35 miles an hour. Power would remain off until those conditions passed. The utility envisions shutdowns as short as 12 hours or perhaps as long as 72. This is the first time such a proposal has been made by a power company in California, where the threat of wildfires has grown exponentially over the last decade, in large part because of a protracted drought. Eight large wildfires devastated parts of the state in the fall of 2007, and three of them — including the second-largest fire in the state’s recorded history, which burned in this area — were caused by downed electrical wires. Since then, 126 families have sued the company for damages. The shut-off plan, covering roughly 130,000 residents of small towns across 1,600 square miles, has infuriated local water authorities, who count on electricity to feed water wells. It has also caused an uproar among many homeowners, who fear that a lack of power could in some cases worsen a fire rather than prevent one. With power off, “that means that when the other 97 percent of causes that start a fire occur, there is no water in our system to fight them,” said Gary Arant, general manager of the water district in the town of Valley Center. The battle has pitted many in this remote area, where it is not uncommon for some homeowners to see more coyotes than people for days at a time, against what they call “the city,” or San Diego, where officials hold sway over any number of matters affecting the county’s largely unincorporated rural sections. The towns here, abutting large swaths of Indian reservations, are the topographical opposite of the nearby desert and beaches. They are tucked into wooded hills surrounding the Cleveland National Forest that are reachable by roads that those who suffer from motion sickness ought to consider warily when visiting. Residents generally do not care for former city dwellers who arrive looking to add bright streetlights, or what they see as the imposition of the will of government or utility companies on their rural ways. “This is an old mining town,” said Michael Hart, publisher of The Julian News. “Once or twice a year we get people who want to citify the backcountry. We had someone show up here once who wanted to make us like Santa Barbara. We ran them out on a rail.” Officials of San Diego Gas & Electric, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy, say the power shut-off plan (formerly “proactive de-energization,” a name that was changed because no one could pronounce it) is needed in an area with heavy forests and a hot and dry climate where Santa Ana winds are a threat to down lines. They point out that the company has taken other preventive measures, like replacing wooden utility poles with steel ones, and note that the likelihood of imposed power shutdowns would be relatively low, given all the requisite criteria. Stephanie Donovan, a spokeswoman for the company, said it was very unlikely that the entire area would experience all those weather conditions at once. “We are projecting that we could have the conditions ripe for an emergency shut-off once or twice a year,” Ms. Donovan said, “covering about 18,000 to 22,000 people at a time.” The plan requires the approval of the California Public Utilities Commission, which held public hearings on it last week. The commission’s decision is expected this summer, just in time for the height of the fire season. The plan has some limited support among residents and business owners. “This is a practical solution until another solution comes about,” said Gary Knight, president of the San Diego North Economic Development Council. As an alternative, Mr. Knight suggested, backcountry residents could agree to waivers freeing the power company from any liability in the event of a fire ignited by a downed wire. In exchange, the shut-off plan could be scrapped. “It’s a beautiful lifestyle back there,” Mr. Knight said, “but there are risks.”

Forest and Brush Fires
San Diego (Calif)
Blackouts and Brownouts (Electrical)
San Diego Gas & Electric Company
Fires and Firefighters
Weather
Electric Light and Power
Rural Areas
Sempra Energy
Drought


Knicks, Often Looking Up, Feel Empty Inside

Abstract: PORTLAND, Ore. — Deep teams, quality ones built to win championships, have strong frontcourts or at least one overpowering force. They pose problems for a player the caliber of Amar’e Stoudemire, a natural power forward. The Knicks ’ lack of size exposes their weakness. In four games against the Miami Heat, the Orlando Magic and the Los Angeles Lakers, the Knicks were outrebounded, 207-150. “We have a lot more parts than I thought entering the season that would be the core of the team going forward, but we need other parts,” the Knicks’ president, Donnie Walsh, said Monday in a telephone interview. “If something comes along to make the team better, I will. If not, I know we still have free agency, I know we still have trading in the future and I’m happy to let this team continue to compete. I never thought this thing would get built overnight and we’re in really the first year of putting the team together again, and I’m very pleased with where we are.” It is unlikely that Walsh will overhaul a roster that has exceeded expectations at 21-15, and the chances of the Knicks acquiring Carmelo Anthony seem slimmer with each passing day, a notion Anthony acknowledged Monday. “I don’t think they’re looking at me,” Anthony told AOL FanHouse. “They wouldn’t want me to come in there and mess what they have up. That’s what I’ve read, so.” It was unclear if Anthony was being sarcastic or skeptical. Still, there are other pressing needs for the Knicks. They will visit one potential center candidate on Tuesday here against the Trail Blazers, the former Knick Marcus Camby. Coach Mike D’Antoni has often heard, dating to his Phoenix days, that his teams need to match up better against opponents. “The way we beat them is by better ball movement, hitting shots, Amar’e having a better game and to me, those are under our control and we can do that,” D’Antoni said. “I know the easy response is, ‘O.K. let’s go ahead and match up with them.’ Well, I don’t think we’ll get the other stuff.” The part-time starter Ronny Turiaf, who is 6 feet 10 inches, will start against Portland, D’Antoni said. Turiaf played only six minutes in the Knicks’ 109-87 loss to the Lakers on Sunday as D’Antoni attempted to stretch the floor with Shawne Williams. Earlier this season, Turiaf played only six minutes against Orlando and Dwight Howard. It is based on D’Antoni’s preference, what he calls a gut feeling. He trusts Turiaf, but if the Knicks win against quality teams, D’Antoni thinks they will succeed through crisp ball movement and hitting shots, not by engaging in a big-man match with the Lakers or the Magic. “I love Ronny, but I don’t think he’s going to stop Dwight Howard, so how do we win?” D’Antoni said. “Do we close up our offense to try and stop something we can’t? Or do we try and be quick and fast and hit 3s and run and play well enough to beat them another way?” Walsh understands and agrees with D’Antoni’s strategy. “I firmly believe you have to have both of it,” he said. It all brings them back to their most vexing problem. D’Antoni said he was working to reinsert Timofey Mozgov into the rotation. The 7-1 Mozgov has played sparingly for the last month after beginning the season as the starting center. D’Antoni elaborated on why he placed Stoudemire back in Friday’s blowout win over Phoenix by saying he wanted Mozgov to become comfortable playing alongside Stoudemire. “It’s really nice to say we need a starting center,” D’Antoni said. “O.K., go get one. Nobody’s giving them up. He’s a guy I think we need to target to help us the second half of the season.” For his part, Stoudemire said, “With the team that we have right now, I think we’re pretty good.” He then compared the Knicks to his Suns squad last season that exceeded expectations and made the Western Conference finals. “I feel the same type of energy here in New York, where anything is possible,” he said. REBOUNDS Danilo Gallinari is with the team on the trip as he recovers after spraining his left knee on Jan. 2. Gallinari said the injury was improving, although he still felt occasional discomfort. He spent Monday’s practice shooting and working with the training staff. ... Amar’e Stoudemire suggested that the N.B.A. look into Ron Artest’s play for further disciplining. Artest received a technical for grabbing Shawne Williams and a flagrant foul for clotheslining Stoudemire.

Basketball
New York Knicks
Stoudemire Amare


The Cradle of Modern Grand Prix Racing

Abstract: Other races in the Formula One series may feel more steeped in Grand Prix racing history — the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, for example, or the Monaco Grand Prix , or even the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring old and new — but no other race on the calendar is as symbolic of the story of the modern incarnation of Grand Prix racing as the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. “It’s quite simply the home of motorsport,” said Michael Schumacher , the multiple-world-champion driver at the Mercedes team. Indeed, Silverstone was the site of the first Formula One Grand Prix championship race in May 1950, won by Giuseppe Farina in an Alfa Romeo, and it has held all but 17 of the British Grand Prix races since then. Aintree and Brands Hatch occasionally held the race until 1987, but Silverstone has since been the permanent home of the British Grand Prix. More than that, though, the race is the home race for the largest number of Formula One teams, as most of the industry of the series — the team factories and home bases — is in England, within an hour or so drive of Silverstone. “We always try to put our best foot forward at Silverstone,” said Vijay Mallya, owner of the Force India team. “It’s where our factory is based and it’s our second home race of the season. It’s also one of the most atmospheric events on the calendar thanks to the passion of the British fans, who always show tremendous support. For our team, it’s definitely a highlight of the season.” Although Formula One has expanded around the world, with more races run outside Europe than ever before, it remains primarily a British industry. The British Grand Prix at Silverstone has survived through many battles in recent years, pitting the owners of the circuit — the British Racing Drivers’ Club — against Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One promoter. The battle usually has to do with fees charged for staging the race, although for many years it also had to do with Ecclestone’s request that the circuit invest in its facilities so that they would match the level of elegance and practicality of the lavish new circuits that have been constructed around the world, in countries that often have no auto-racing culture or tradition. Major efforts have been made, and since last year Silverstone has had a new pit building and paddock on a par with — or better than — many of the new sites. The Silverstone circuit was built on a plateau that had been the site of a World War II Royal Air Force bomber station. Despite several developments over the years, it still has much of its original high-speed layout. At the track in 1985, Keke Rosberg set Formula One’s first 160-miles-per-hour, or 256-kilometers-per-hour, qualifying lap, in a Williams. Despite changes to the layout made in 2010, the middle section of the track remains one of the fastest in the world. “Even after the track was amended, it didn’t lose its magic; for me as a driver, it is one of the best and interesting tracks of all,” said Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel, the defending world champion driver. “The track is demanding for a driver and provides everything a driver likes, including the unpredictable weather that is possible in July in Silverstone.” The British Grand Prix has indeed produced some of Formula One’s most historic and memorable races. Home drivers have often figured in the most exciting races. In 1977, James Hunt, who was the reigning world champion and driving for McLaren, started on pole, but dropped to fourth. He then passed two drivers, retook the lead after another car dropped out and won the race. In 1985, the race was the scene of one of the early battles between two of the biggest rivals in racing history, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. Senna was racing in a Lotus and Prost was in a McLaren. Prost passed Senna for the lead and the victory, seven laps from the end of the race. In 1988, Senna was third and Prost fourth at the start. In strong rain, Senna took the victory, again proving his prowess on a wet track. David Coulthard, a Scottish driver at McLaren, won the race in 1999 and also in 2000, when he did so after an exceptional passing move on Rubens Barrichello in a Ferrari. But one of the most popular victories in recent years was that of Lewis Hamilton, in 2008, the year when the bright young British star went on to win the world championship. “By far the best victory I’ve ever had,” Hamilton called it, after he started the wet race in fourth position, before passing his teammate at McLaren, Heikki Kovalainen, for the lead on Lap 5. The track has never been good to Hamilton’s current teammate and compatriot at McLaren, Jenson Button. The world champion in 2009 at the Brawn team, Button has never finished higher than fourth at Silverstone, in 12 years running at the race. But he nonetheless maintains his love of his home event. “It’s part of the fabric of F1, and still one of the world’s greatest motor-racing circuits,” Button said. “This has been an incredibly unpredictable season, but at least it’s a little easier to predict that Silverstone will once again be packed and that all the British drivers are going to get a lift from the energy the fans bring. “I always enjoy racing at home because the atmosphere is unbeatable,” he added.

Formula One
Automobile Racing
Great Britain
Schumacher Michael


Irwin Dambrot, 81, Dies; Caught in Gambling Scandal

Abstract: Irwin Dambrot, who helped lead City College to the 1950 N.I.T. and N.C.A.A. basketball championships, only to be engulfed in a national point-shaving scandal that tarnished an unprecedented feat and rocked the college game, died on Thursday. He was 81 and lived in Mendham, N.J. His death, at a hospital in Summit, N.J., was caused by complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Katrin Dambrot, his ex-wife and primary caretaker. With a starting lineup of Dambrot, a senior co-captain, at forward and four sophomores, all five from New York City high schools, City College stunned the basketball world in March 1950. Though City did not make the top 20 national rankings in the 1949-50 regular season, it became the only team to win both major national basketball championships in the same year. The Beavers defeated Bradley University of Peoria, Ill., the No. 1-ranked team, in the finals of the N.I.T. and N.C.A.A. tournaments, and they did it each time at Madison Square, the national showpiece of college basketball. Dambrot scored a game-high 23 points in City College’s 69-61 victory over Bradley in the championship game of the then-prestigious National Invitation Tournament. The players were hailed by New York’s mayor, William O’Dwyer, at a City Hall rally and by fellow students at a campus celebration. The school’s battle cry, “Allagaroo!,” echoed through Manhattan, and the venerable City College coach, Nat Holman, basked in the plaudits with his players. Ten days after winning the N.I.T., City College captured the N.C.A.A. championship with Dambrot hitting a basket, blocking a shot and then throwing a long pass leading to another basket in the final minute of a 71-68 triumph over Bradley. Dambrot, 6 feet 4 inches tall, scored a team-high 15 points in that game and was named the tournament’s most valuable player. In “The Game They Played,” his 1977 book on the college basketball scandal, Stanley Cohen quoted Holman as calling Dambrot “the greatest player I ever coached.” “The team went crazy, the school went crazy and New York City went crazy,” Dambrot told USA Today in March 1996 in recalling the double championship. “It was an unbelievable experience.” But in the winter of 1951, it all came crashing down. Dambrot and six teammates — his fellow starting players Ed Warner, Ed Roman, Floyd Layne and Al Roth, and the substitutes Norman Mager and Herb Cohen — were arrested in a point-shaving scandal. Players from Bradley, Kentucky, New York University, Manhattan and Long Island University were also implicated for agreeing to take bribes from gamblers to keep final scores within the established point spreads in order to create betting coups. The seven accused City College players pleaded guilty to misdemeanor conspiracy charges and all received suspended sentences in November 1951 except Warner, who was sentenced to six months in jail. Dambrot was accused of agreeing to bribe offers in two 1949-50 regular-season games and receiving $1,000, according to prosecutors. There was no evidence of any point shaving in the 1950 N.I.T. or N.C.A.A. tournament games. Dambrot was born in the Bronx on May 23, 1928, attended Taft High School and was the Knicks’ first-round selection in the April 1950 N.B.A. draft . But he had passed up pro basketball and was attending Columbia University’s dental school when the scandal broke. He went on to practice dentistry in the Forest Hills section of Queens and Manhattan, and, as he put it after retiring, “a lot of us just wanted to do things for people, to help.” Layne coached the City College basketball team in the 1970s and ’80s, Roman received a doctorate in adolescent psychology and counseled emotionally disturbed students, and Warner refereed high school games and worked in youth recreational programs. Dambrot spoke on occasion of City College’s feat and the unselfish team play that bested heralded opponents. “Constant ball movement, screens, backdoors, pick-and-rolls,” he told Sports Illustrated on the 50th anniversary of the double championship. “We got a lot of easy shots.” But even with the passing of decades, he declined to speak about the bad times: the scandal, the shame and the memories that lingered. As his nephew Keith Dambrot, the coach of the University of Akron men’s basketball team, told The Seattle Times in 2009, “He never really recovered from that totally.” Dambrot was married and divorced twice. He is survived by his sons, Stuart and Jonathan; his daughter, Donna; his brother, Sidney, who played for the Duquesne team that went to the 1954 N.I.T. final; and three grandchildren. In December 2009, Dambrot, who was recovering from a broken hip in addition to suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was on hand in a wheelchair at Madison Square Garden with Layne and Ron Nadell, a substitute on the 1950 City College team, when the Garden cited the double championship as the No. 1 college basketball moment in the game’s 75-year history there. Katrin Dambrot, who escorted her former husband to the ceremony, said that when she told him they were going back to the Garden, he said, “Make sure you bring my uniform.” Layne fought back tears as he held Dambrot’s hand. “It’s my brother,” he said. “We were always close. We were always the same. We bonded then, we bond now. We will always bond.”

Colleges and Universities
Basketball
Deaths (Obituaries)
Dambrot Irwin


With Trademark Bombast, Paladino Returns on a Smaller Stage

Abstract: BUFFALO — Three years after an unsuccessful, and strangely entertaining, run for the governor’s office, Carl P. Paladino has found his way back into the spotlight, albeit one lighted by a 40-watt bulb. In May, Mr. Paladino, the millionaire Buffalo real estate developer, was elected to the city’s school board . He sought the position with the same take-no-prisoners style and bombastic brio that characterized his failed 2010 bid for governor, filing a lawsuit against the board, lobbing demands and accusations, and rallying against the powerful teachers’ union. His new role is driven by a deep desire to help Buffalo’s struggling schools, he said, and has nothing to do with eyeing higher office. “I looked and looked and I kept looking the other way, and looking the other way,” Mr. Paladino, a Republican, said during a recent interview at an airport hotel he owns. “And finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.” Mr. Paladino, 66, said he had no intention of running for governor again in 2014, when Andrew M. Cuomo will seek a second term. At the same time, however, he seemed to revel in both keeping people guessing and keeping his options open. “I’m a very spontaneous person,” he said. “If someone aggravates me, I’m going to go after them. I wake up every morning and I say, ‘What bad guys should I go after today?’” Indeed, Mr. Paladino’s Web site features “Carl’s Bucket List,” a nonpartisan list of peeves (“Thruway Toll”) and Albany-based opponents like Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the Democrat-dominated Assembly, and the Republican Senate leader, Dean G. Skelos, someone whom he called “two-faced.” He labeled Mr. Cuomo “a total phony,” and said he wanted to “take out” Brian M. Kolb, the Assembly minority leader. “I’m going to blow him up,” Mr. Paladino said. Mr. Kolb called those remarks childish, but they should not come as a shock; during the 2010 campaign, after all, Mr. Paladino promised to “clean out Albany with a baseball bat.” And as for other ambitious Republicans, Mr. Paladino said they might want to give him a call. “I’ll be leading the upstate conservative Republican movement,” he said of his political future. “And whoever’s going to run for governor is going to have to answer to me.” His entry into the school board race was a surprise; neither his children nor his grandchildren had attended Buffalo’s public schools. “I wouldn’t even think of putting my child into that public school system,” Mr. Paladino said. Instead, he said he was driven by his concern for Buffalo, one of the poorest big cities in the nation, and the city’s students and educators. “There’s violence,” he said. “Teachers are frustrated; they can’t teach.” But Mr. Paladino seemed to have the potential to be a divisive figure, even before formally joining the board on July 1. Like the school district itself, which serves about 34,000 students, the nine-member board is often segregated along racial lines, consisting of five black women and four white men, including Mr. Paladino. At times, Mr. Paladino has referred to a group of several African-American women on the board as the “Black Sisterhood,” something he denied was racially insensitive. “That’s what they call themselves,” Mr. Paladino said. “So I call them that and they say you can’t call us that.” Mr. Paladino added that the black members of the board “think all black children should only be taught by black women, or black teachers, and that the district has to be led by a black person.” None of which, he said, is meant to be racially charged, but rather simply unburdened by political correctness. Image Carl P. Paladino at Buffalo City Hall after being sworn in. Credit Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times “I’ve got 500 employees in this community and many, many of them are black,” he said. “So don’t go telling me how I’m a racist.” Mr. Paladino has called for the resignation or firing of the board’s superintendent, Pamela C. Brown, who is black and whom he has called incompetent. “She can’t chew gum and walk at the same time,” he said. Dr. Brown has been more diplomatic about Mr. Paladino. “I haven’t got the chance to get to know him personally,” she said. Black members of the board, meanwhile, have been guarded about whether Mr. Paladino’s remarks — or his often brusque demeanor — are offensive. Barbara Seals Nevergold, the school board president, who is black, said she believed she could work with Mr. Paladino, though “it will be a distraction, I think, if the conversation and the agenda is focused on Mr. Paladino.” But setting that agenda seems to be exactly Mr. Paladino’s plan. At his first meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Paladino introduced motions covering nearly three dozen issues, including the hiring of an auditor to look at transportation costs and a plan to extend the school year and school day. He also asked permission to bring his dog Duke to board meetings. The board declined. “It was very insulting to him,” Mr. Paladino said afterward. His aggressive approach has thrilled supporters like Larry Cannan, a retired law enforcement officer, who came to cheer Mr. Paladino at his swearing-in at Buffalo City Hall. “He’s been very good to the people of Buffalo,” Mr. Cannan said. “And he’s going to show them what they’ve been missing.” However, some education advocates said his approach seemed wrong for complex problems facing Buffalo’s schools, which include high dropout and expulsion rates. “Carl Paladino is all critique and has no solutions,” said Brian Trzeciak, a lead organizer with Citizen Action of New York and the Alliance for Quality Education. Mr. Paladino conceded that some of his bluster was carefully calculated to draw attention to problems — and possible solutions. “I had to be outrageous to get there,” he said, adding, “I have to light people up.” Such bomb-throwing tactics were on display during Mr. Paladino’s unlikely run for governor, when he became a Tea Party favorite after defeating a more mainstream candidate , Rick A. Lazio, in the Republican primary. After becoming the nominee, Mr. Paladino ran an often-furious campaign — literally, with signs reading “I’m Mad as Hell Too, Carl!” posted around the state. His campaign was dotted with memorable foibles, including a debate performance suddenly interrupted by a bathroom break and a near fistfight with Fredric U. Dicker, the longtime New York Post columnist. Today, Mr. Paladino still says those thwarted fisticuffs were justified by what he considered intrusive reporting about his daughter, Sarah, who was conceived outside of his 43-year marriage. Her mother was an employee of Mr. Paladino’s development company, which was revealed during the 2010 campaign. Since his defeat, Mr. Paladino has spent much of his time with his family, which was shaken by the loss of his son, Patrick, in a car accident in 2009. “You can’t hurt me,” he said. “I’ve already been hurt worse than anything else in life.” His son’s death still rattles Mr. Paladino — and apparently drives him. “It’s in his name that I do a lot of what I do,” he said. Mr. Paladino undoubtedly enjoys the role of rabble-rouser, something on display at his swearing-in, during which he made a couple of failed nominations for board president and vice president, and jousted with reporters afterward. And while he will be only one of nine members, Mr. Paladino seemed confident that he could make a difference, or burn out trying. “I don’t have an endgame,” he said. “My game is to take on any bad guys I see out there. And do the best I can until they put me under the carpet.”

Carl P Paladino
Buffalo NY
K-12 Education


Decision on Voting Law Could Limit Oversight

Abstract: WASHINGTON — If the Supreme Court strikes down or otherwise guts a centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act, there will be far less scrutiny of thousands of decisions each year about redrawing district lines, moving or closing polling places, changing voting hours or imposing voter identification requirements in areas that have a history of disenfranchising minority voters, voting law experts say. A close look at the law demonstrates how a series of seemingly technical details amount to what is essentially a safeguard against violations in those states and regions covered by the law — most of which are in the South. It also shows how that very bulwark comes at the cost of sharply tilting the playing field against those areas in ways that several conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices expressed alarm about during arguments on Wednesday. The legal issue turns on two main parts of the act: Section Five, which covers jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, and Section Two, which covers the entire country. Both sections outlaw rules that intentionally discriminate against or otherwise disproportionately harm minority voters. Section Two would remain in effect even if the court strikes down Section Five. But reliance only on Section Two would mean a crucial difference in how hard it may be to block a change in voting rules in an area that is currently covered by Section Five. Those jurisdictions, because of their history of discrimination, must prove that any proposed change would not make minority voters worse off. By contrast, under Section Two, the burden of proof is on a plaintiff to demonstrate in court that a change would prevent minorities from having a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. “Getting rid of Section Five is not getting rid of voting rights; it would just make voting rights litigation look like normal lawsuits,” said Ilya Shapiro , a legal scholar at the Cato Institute, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to strike down Section Five. “It would mean that if the federal government claims people have been harmed, it would have to prove it.” But J. Gerald Hebert , who formerly handled voting rights litigation for the Justice Department and is now in private practice, said that losing Section Five would be “devastating to protecting voting rights” because the costs of a lawsuit are so steep. Jon Greenbaum , the legal director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law , said it would mean that the bulk of changes that now receive automatic scrutiny by the federal government could take effect without any review, eliminating a deterrent against mischief. “Section Five makes all the voting changes public and transparent, because when they are submitted for preclearance, the Justice Department will call local folks in the community and get their take on it,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “If you have no Section Five, a lot of stuff will just go under the radar.” One reason for the difference is that in places covered under Section Five, changes are automatically blocked until the proposal is reviewed and approved by the Justice Department or a panel of judges. In the interim, the old rules still apply. By contrast, a plaintiff in a Section Two lawsuit must persuade a court to issue a preliminary injunction to stop a change from taking effect. Moreover, it is a “huge” difference, Mr. Hebert said, that under Section Five, the starting premise is that the covered state or locality’s change may be discriminatory, and the state or locality bears the burden of proving otherwise. Under Section Two, a plaintiff must prove wrongdoing. Since states or other places covered under Section Five must prove that their proposed changes are acceptable, they have a strong incentive to provide the data — voter rolls, driver’s license databases and other demographic data — that is often necessary to analyze the impact of a change, but can be costly and cumbersome to produce. In a Section Two case, the challenger must fight in court to obtain such data. The decision-maker, too, is different. Places covered under Section Five must persuade people who live in or near Washington — either officials in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, or federal judges whose chambers are in the District of Columbia. Lawsuits under Section Two are heard by local Federal District Court judges, like any other federal lawsuit. Finally, there is a subtle but important difference in what counts as a discriminatory effect. Under Section Five, the baseline for analyzing the consequence of a proposed change is whether the jurisdiction can prove the change will not make minorities worse off than they were under the current rules. Under Section Two, by contrast, the analysis starts fresh without any reference to the previous situation. This difference can be significant in redistricting cases, where the Section Five standard makes it far simpler to argue that any map that reduces the number of districts where minority voters constitute a majority should be rejected. Roger Clegg , the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a nonprofit group that opposes affirmative action and joined another friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to overturn Section Five, argued that eliminating the Section Five standard in considering legislative district lines could be a good thing. He argued that its effect now is to coerce “racial gerrymandering” in drawing districts, which he said promoted polarization and was “inconsistent with the ideals of the civil rights movement.” Richard Hasen , an election law specialist at the University of California, Irvine, law school, said he hoped the court upheld Section Five but believed that it would be struck down. Its mere existence, he said, has had a deterrent effect and “gives minority voters in covered jurisdictions a seat at the bargaining table” when election rules changes are proposed. “If that seat is gone, the only thing minority voters will have to hang over elected officials’ heads is Section Two liability and constitutional liability, which are much tougher standards to win under,” he said. “But the most egregious things can still be challenged.”

Civil Rights
Redistricting and Reapportionment
gerrymandering
Voter registration
Supreme Court
Voting Rights Act
US
Election
Minorities


Karzai Says Afghan Army Will Need Help Until 2024

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday that Afghanistan would not be able to pay for its own security until at least 2024, underscoring his government’s long-term financial dependence on the United States and NATO even as President Obama has pledged to begin withdrawing American troops in 2011. Mr. Karzai spoke at a news conference here with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who did not put a timetable on the American and allied financial commitment but acknowledged that there was a “realism on our part that it will be some time before Afghanistan is able to sustain its security forces entirely on its own.” The news conference came just hours after as many as a dozen people were killed during an allied raid in Laghman Province, Afghan officials said, prompting hundreds of villagers to march in protest. The early morning operation outside the provincial capital, Mehtar Lam, east of Kabul, happened “without any coordination with the Afghan forces or Afghan officials,” said Sayed Ahmed Safi, a spokesman for the governor of Laghman. He said one woman was among the dead, which included civilians as well as insurgents, all killed by small-arms fire. He said the troops also detained four men. After Afghan security forces blocked marchers from entering Mehtar Lam, gunfire broke out, killing one protester and wounding two others, he said. NATO confirmed the raid and said that seven militants were killed but that there were no “reports to substantiate those claims of harming civilians, including women and children.” The target of the raid was a Taliban bomb maker. A military spokesman said he did not know whether the troops involved were American or from another NATO country. The Afghan Interior Ministry said a delegation had been sent to investigate, and urged residents not to resort to violence. If the civilian dead are confirmed, the raid would be one of the worst recent episodes resulting in civilian casualties, which have engendered antipathy toward American and NATO forces among Afghan citizens and officials. The American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, tightened rules on airstrikes last summer in an effort to reduce civilian casualties. But while civilian casualties continue to anger Afghan officials, Mr. Karzai’s comments on Tuesday highlighted just how much the government could be forced to rely on the United States and other NATO countries for decades to come. “For another 15 to 20 years, Afghanistan will not be able to sustain a force of that nature and capability with its own resources,” Mr. Karzai said, referring to the force required to secure the entire country. The subject was one of the main reasons that Mr. Gates arrived here Tuesday on an unannounced visit. He said a major topic of discussion with Mr. Karzai would be how fast the Afghans could recruit, train and retain their own security forces, the key to the planned American withdrawal that is supposed to begin in July 2011. The price of building up Afghan forces to take over significant security duties could be enormous. Some estimates say it will take up to $50 billion over five years to increase army and police rolls to 400,000, the level sought by General McChrystal. At the news conference, Mr. Gates held out the possibility that a future improvement in Afghanistan’s finances would defray some of the costs. “Whether that is 15 or 20 years, we’ll hope for accelerated economic development in Afghanistan,” he said, adding that “as the Afghan economy expands, then the proportion of the costs of supporting the Afghan security forces will diminish.” He also said there was a possibility that the size of Afghan security forces could shrink, “as is often the case after the end of a conflict.” Mr. Gates, the first member of Mr. Obama’s national security team to travel to Afghanistan since Mr. Obama announced last week that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to the country, told reporters en route to Kabul that he had already signed orders for the deployment of 17,000 additional personnel, and that most would be in place in southern Afghanistan by the spring. Included in the group are 1,500 Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., who will deploy later this month; an additional 6,200 Marines from Camp Lejeune, who will deploy in early spring; and a brigade combat team of about 3,400 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., who will also deploy next spring to train Afghan security forces. Mr. Gates said that one “eye opener” for the Americans was learning that the Taliban often paid their militia fighters more than the Afghan government paid its soldiers and police officers, and that a pay increase for the Afghan security forces was crucial to building them up. Another problem, Mr. Gates said, was that the Afghan security forces were spread far too thin. “Attrition is higher in the areas where the combat is heavier,” he said. “The reason is there aren’t enough of them. And they basically fight until they die, or they go AWOL.” Rotating in more Afghan soldiers, he said, “would be an important part of the retention piece as well.” Asked if it was not “late in the game” in an eight-year-old war to begin learning these facts about Afghan security forces, Mr. Gates replied that “there’s a lot of this that’s late in the game, frankly.”

Afghanistan
Karzai Hamid
Afghanistan War (2001- )


Buying IndyMac at a Bargain Price

Abstract: The private equity firms buying IndyMac, the failed California-based bank, will get loans and securities with a face value of $23 billion, and a couple of mortgage businesses for an outlay of just $1.6 billion in cash. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation also handed them several other benefits. But the F.D.I.C. may have been too soft on the buyers. First, J.C. Flowers, Paulson and others are paying what looks to be a low headline price of $13.9 billion, including assumed liabilities, for IndyMac’s $16 billion loan portfolio, $6.9 billion of securities and two mortgage servicing platforms. That suggests a discount from face value of a minimum of 40 percent on the loans and securities. But the discount on those assets is probably even greater. Last March, the investor Wilbur Ross bought Option One, which has a mortgage servicing business about a third the size of IndyMac’s, for $1.1 billion. Extrapolate that to IndyMac’s servicing business as a rough comparison, and it implies a value of roughly $3 billion. That would mean the private equity buyers are paying about $11 billion for IndyMac’s loans and securities, or about a 55 percent discount from face value. Depending on the details of the assets, even in a dire market that could be a bargain. The deal echoes some that were struck during the last American banking crisis, in the early 1990s, but the F.D.I.C. now appears to be giving more away. Last time around, the F.D.I.C. or other government agencies retained significant upside, as well as sharing losses. By contrast, IndyMac’s buyers will bear the first 20 percent of any future write-downs on about $13 billion of the loans. Beyond that, though, the lion’s share of losses will be borne by the F.D.I.C. But the agency will share only in the profits associated with a $2 billion collection of loans. The F.D.I.C. is also leaving in place a $6 billion loan to IndyMac that could be hard to refinance. Throw in IndyMac’s deposit liabilities of more than $6 billion, and that leaves only $1.6 billion of the $13.9 billion of assets for the buyers to fund with new cash. On top of that, the buying group has applied for a federal holding company charter for its acquisition vehicle. That could eventually bring the buyers tax benefits too. The F.D.I.C. says the deal allows it to rid itself of hard-to-sell assets, including IndyMac’s portfolio of troublesome Alt-A mortgages. The agency had already sunk about $9 billion from its insurance fund into IndyMac, so while it did shop the bank to a range of possible buyers, it may have understandably been in a hurry to return it to private hands. Perhaps that justifies some of F.D.I.C.’s concessions. But assuming no one steps in with a better offer this time, the agency should aim to strike a harder bargain next time. Paper Pushers It used to be that if you wanted a job done properly, you did it yourself. That no longer holds for the administration of hedge funds. The practice of doing administrative work in-house was already on the wane. But Bernard L. Madoff’s apparent fraud appears to be accelerating the march toward outsourcing. Exhibit A this week is Millennium Management, the old-school hedge fund firm run by Izzy Englander. All its funds are now going to be administered by GlobeOp Financial Services. That means tasks like reconciling cash positions will now be handled outside. Millennium’s move does not suggest anything is amiss. But it does reflect a hardening investor mood expressed most decisively, if belatedly, by Union Bancaire Privée, the Swiss bank. After big losses on investments managed by Mr. Madoff, UBP said it would no longer invest in funds that didn’t outsource administration. The idea is that an independent administrator, earning only service fees and not reliant on any one fund, has no incentive to let anything slip by. Funds that outsource trading and custody-related functions should give investors even more comfort, because that gives administrators different sources of data to cross-reference. By contrast, Mr. Madoff’s investment outfit was buried within his market-making firm, so he appears to have acted as his own administrator, prime broker and custodian. That may have allowed him to fabricate consistent-looking documentation to fool his investors. With investors and regulators demanding more transparency, hedge fund managers may find it a blessing to hand paper-pushing tasks to someone else. Then they’ll have more time to do what they are supposed to do best: investing. LAUREN SILVA LAUGHLIN and RICHARD BEALES

IndyMac Bancorp
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Banks and Banking
Bankruptcies
Flowers J C Co
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp


UConn Nears Perfection, but Has Room to Improve

Abstract: TRENTON — The Connecticut women’s basketball team received a light round of applause from fans scattered in the stands at Sovereign Bank Arena when it took the floor for a brief practice Saturday. The Huskies’ coach, Geno Auriemma , quietly sauntered in a minute later. The Huskies are now four victories from an undefeated season and a sixth national championship, so it may seem that Auriemma would want to push the tempo, to do everything he could to ensure that a marvelous season has a thunderous end. Not so. “This is the time of year where if players need coaches to help them in certain areas, you don’t have the right players, anyway,” he said. Auriemma is letting his players motivate themselves. Renee Montgomery, his steady senior guard, said Auriemma told them that preparing for the postseason was like studying for a test. If they pace themselves during the season, learning as they go, they do not need to cram. Auriemma said Connecticut has rolled to a 35-0 record because they continued to want to improve. It is not as if they refuse to study film or break down tendencies at this stage, but the season has been a steady work in progress. And now, Auriemma has backed off. “When it comes tournament time, he’s ready,” Montgomery said. “He doesn’t need to rant and rave and worry if everything’s right.” As impressive as the Huskies’ season has been — they have won their games by an average of 31.6 points — Auriemma would prefer his players detect their imperfections and work on them. The Huskies believe they have room for improvement. Top-seeded Connecticut plays a regional semifinal Sunday against California (27-6), the No. 4 seed. The Golden Bears lost three of five games going into the N.C.A.A. tournament and made the Round of 16 for the first time, but Connecticut regards the game as a challenge. “Connecticut’s motto is, if we worry about our team and what we’re doing, we shouldn’t have to worry about what the other team is doing, as long as we play our A game,” said Maya Moore, a sophomore forward who is the Huskies’ leading scorer. The Huskies made the Round of 16 for the 16th consecutive year by beating Vermont and Florida with such ease that Auriemma was able to clear his bench. Cal, driven by the senior Ashley Walker, appears to be a more formidable opponent, with impressive tournament victories over Fresno State and Virginia. But the Golden Bears seem to understand they will be facing a team perceived to be unbeatable. “You don’t have to play a perfect game, but you have to play a really smart game,” Cal Coach Joanne Boyle said. “For us, we do best when we are in a routine, and we just kind of stick to a routine and minimize the bigger picture and just look at things in small segments.” With the exception of a season-ending knee injury to the freshman guard Caroline Doty, the Huskies have been healthy. Only one Connecticut player, the reserve forward Meghan Gardler, has fouled out of a game this season. Not one of the starting five averages two fouls a game. “They’re pretty smart,” Auriemma said. “They’ve figured out when they can do certain things and when they can’t.” The team has played with such efficiency that Auriemma said Saturday that he had begun repeating himself: there are no bad teams left, the only guarantee for the team is one more game, and the Huskies are looking forward to Sunday’s game, not past that. “I just think we constantly see things we have to work on,” Montgomery said. Moore said, “We come out of every game feeling we gave it our all-out best, and when we’re done we feel like we’ve battled and gotten better.”

University of Connecticut
NCAA Basketball Tournament (Women)
College Athletics
Auriemma Geno
Montgomery Renee


New Poll of Democrats Suggests a Three-Way Tie

Abstract: That didn’t last long. A day after a poll showed Anthony D. Weiner to be the front-runner in the Democratic primary for mayor, a new poll released on Wednesday suggests that the race is a three-way tie among Christine C. Quinn, Mr. Weiner and William C. Thompson Jr. The poll, by Quinnipiac University, was conducted from June 19 to 25; it offered a reminder of the extent to which the primary remains unsettled at a time when many voters have not begun to pay attention. But the poll suggests a few developments: Ms. Quinn, who had long led the Democratic field, has lost ground and can no longer be considered the front-runner; Mr. Weiner, who is saddled by scandal and who jumped into the race quite late, has emerged as a serious contender; and Mr. Thompson, who has long lagged despite being the Democratic nominee in 2009, is gaining support. The poll found Ms. Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, has the support of 19 percent of registered Democrats; Mr. Weiner, a former member of Congress, has 17 percent, and Mr. Thompson, a former city comptroller, has 16 percent. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, meaning that the difference between the contenders is not statistically significant. Bill de Blasio, the public advocate and a candidate for mayor, had the support of 10 percent of registered Democrats; John C. Liu, another mayoral hopeful who is now the city comptroller, had the support of 7 percent. The Quinnipiac poll comes the day after a Marist College poll, conducted with The Wall Street Journal and NBC New York, found Mr. Weiner ahead of Ms. Quinn by five percentage points. The Marist poll jolted the race because it was the first recent survey in which Ms. Quinn was not in first place, and because it suggested that many voters were willing to overlook or forgive the scandal of lewd online behavior that prompted Mr. Weiner’s resignation from Congress. The Democratic and Republican primaries are on Sept. 10, and if a runoff is necessary, that will probably take place on Oct. 1; the general election is Nov. 5. The Quinnipiac poll, conducted by telephone, included 830 registered Democrats.

Polls
Mayoral races
William C Thompson Jr
Anthony Weiner
Christine C Quinn
NYC
Quinnipiac University


Connecticut Senate Candidates Focus on Town of Independents

Abstract: NEW HAVEN — The people in nearby East Haven are accustomed to seeing sandpipers, seagulls and ducks touching down in their town on Long Island Sound. This year they have come to recognize a new breed of visitor: candidates for United States Senate . Richard Blumenthal , the Democrat seeking to win the open seat being vacated by the retiring Senator Christopher J. Dodd, held his statewide general election campaign kickoff in East Haven, at the Village of Mariner’s Point condos overlooking the Sound, rather than in next-door New Haven, which has four times the population and is overrun with Democrats. Three weeks earlier, he had held another campaign event in town, at the East Haven Senior Center. (Unfortunately for the campaign, many of the center’s regulars were in Rhode Island that day at a lobster bake.) His Republican opponent, Linda E. McMahon , opened her south-central Connecticut campaign headquarters opposite the East Haven Town Green on Hemingway Avenue — even though registered Democrats in East Haven (unlike, say, nearby Madison) outnumber registered Republicans by more than 2 to 1. All of this political attention can be explained in one word: independents. East Haven is swimming in them (the kind who are called small-i independents because they registered to vote without affiliating with any party, not the kind who have joined the newly formed state Independent Party ). And just like other candidates across the country, those in Connecticut’s United States Senate race are wooing unaffiliated voters, in the hope that they can capture their support and ride it into Washington in January. “The way the independents go is the way the election’s going to go,” said Ed Patru, Ms. McMahon’s spokesman. Independents make up a substantial plurality in blue-collar East Haven: 47.6 percent of the town’s registered voters are unaffiliated, compared with 36.7 percent who are Democrats and 15.4 percent who are Republicans. The town alternates between electing Democratic and Republican mayors. In that way, East Haven is much like Connecticut. At last count, the state had 914,893 unaffiliated voters, 792,934 Democrats and only 433, 057 Republicans. While Connecticut these days is blue on national pundits’ maps, it has actually been turning steadily purple, a trend Joseph I. Lieberman recognized long before he won re-election to the Senate as an independent in 2006. East Haven is largely a bedroom community, with a small New England town center, village green, 1774 stone church and farms to the north. It was a magnet for Italian-American families who, after World War II, left New Haven to buy, and in many cases build, their first homes. (The town has one of the highest concentrations of Italian-Americans in the country.) A recent influx of Hispanic newcomers has led to some racial tensions . Like Connecticut at large, the town voted for the Republicans John G. Rowland and M. Jodi Rell for governor in 2002 and 2006; Senator Lieberman, who ran as an Independent in 2006; and Barack Obama, a Democrat, for president in 2008. Its population is just 29,000. But, said the former state Republican Party chairman, Chris DePino, who lives on the East Haven waterfront, whoever wins East Haven “usually wins the state.” Nationally, independents determined the outcomes of the elections in 2006 and 2008, when they threw their weight behind Democrats. This year the edge seems to be going to Republicans, said Gary Jacobson, a political science professor at University of California-San Diego who writes books on Congressional elections. That trend presumably stems from voter “anger” over the economy, and unhappiness with President Obama and Congress. Candidates are positioning themselves to tap into those emotions. Ms. McMahon has emphasized her status as an “outsider” — a businesswoman who never ran for public office before. While seeking the support of Connecticut’s Tea Party and appealing to conservatives on economic issues (like preserving all the Bush tax cuts ), she has also come out for abortion rights, gay rights and embryonic stem cell research . That would fit with the depiction of voters in independent redoubts like East Haven, whom Mayor April Capone Almon describes as fiscally conservative and socially moderate. After the surprise victory in January by the Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election for United States Senate, Mr. Blumenthal, a lifelong moderate-to-liberal Democrat, started talking about how angry he is about the ways of Washington. He also joined the Republican chorus opposing a civilian trial for a person accused of being a 9/11 plotter. He said that President Obama might not want to visit Connecticut to help his campaign because the two had so many policy disagreements. (Now that Ms. McMahon has risen in the polls, Mr. Blumenthal welcomed Mr. Obama’s plan to headline an in-state fund-raiser for him on Sept. 16.) Mr. Blumenthal may be misreading the Massachusetts vote, Mr. Jacobson said. “Scott Brown’s victory partly depended on the fact that he had a weak opponent,” he said. Usually the region leans other ways. “The New England independents tend to be moderate to liberal. That’s why there are few Republican congressmen or senators in that part of the world.” Still, Mr. Jacobson said, “This is not a good year to be a Democrat.” From Mr. DePino’s perch by East Haven’s waterfront, the candidates look a lot like the ducks, he said: “They show up one at a time. They look for fish to eat, or in this case voters to sway. You don’t see them again for a while. Then they show up in a different part of the beach.” Darleen Hood, who has lived in East Haven for 34 years and runs the town library’s circulation desk, said the parade of candidates has surprised her: “We’re not a big city.” But, she added: “Just because they make themselves visible doesn’t mean they’ll do their jobs well. Just because they make time for you before an election — afterwards, just try to get in touch with them!” Parse this: What does Mr. Blumenthal think about the community center and mosque planned for Lower Manhattan? His opinion was clear and strong about the decision to try Khalid Shaikh Muhammed in federal court in New York City. But the statement his campaign released about the mosque controversy left some confusion about where he stands: “This issue is highly sensitive and deeply personal for many people in Connecticut, New York and around the country. While Dick believes this issue should be decided at the local level, he hopes that local leaders will make the decision after reviewing all factors, and that they will give serious consideration to the wishes of those who were directly affected by the 9/11 tragedy.” Ms. McMahon came out against the proposal. Paging Doonesbury: East Haven voters — voters, period - may not see much of one candidate this fall: Charles Pillsbury, the newly anointed Green Party challenger to Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, a Democrat and a 10-term incumbent. Mr. Pillsbury, a peace advocate and a model for his Yale roommate Garry Trudeau’s comic strip hero, captured 5 percent of the vote when he last ran against Ms. DeLauro in 2002. That took too much work, he said. He is running again because no one else in the party would, but this time, he said, he plans to limit his campaign appearances. His goal is modest: 1 percent to hold a ballot line for the party. “Mine’s a symbolic race,” he told a reporter for The New Haven Independent, Thomas MacMillan. Ms. DeLauro does have an energetic Republican challenger, Jerry Labriola Jr. He held a " Rosa retirement“ fund-raiser last week — on the beach in East Haven. Paul Bass edits The New Haven Independent ( www.newhavenindependent.org ).

Connecticut
Senate
Elections
East Haven (Conn)
Blumenthal Richard
United States Politics and Government
Third-Party Moves (US)
Green Party
McMahon Linda E