BBC and News Corp. Sharpen Attacks

Abstract: PARIS — If relations between the BBC and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. deteriorate any further, executives might soon resort to slashing each other’s tires. Usually the BBC and News Corp., which controls the Sky pay-television service and some of the biggest newspapers in Britain, clash over matters like broadcasting regulations. Now they are battling over a racecar driver, one who recently decided to take a turn as a writer. The man in question is, or was, a minor actor on the BBC television show “Top Gear,” in which he plays the mystery driver known as The Stig. The BBC has zealously guarded the identity of The Stig, who never raises his darkened visor or utters a word during the show. “The whole point of The Stig is the mystique — the bizarre characteristics he has, the wonderment created about what he might think, feel, do or look like,” wrote Andy Wilman, producer of the show, in a blog entry on the show’s Web site. That explains the BBC’s anger when it learned that The Stig had written a book, “The Man in the White Suit,” in which he revealed all. The broadcaster sued, seeking an injunction to stop publication, but was rebuffed by a British court. Now the publisher, HarperCollins, can go ahead with its release of the book this week. What does Mr. Murdoch have to do with any of this? HarperCollins is owned by News Corp., as is The Sunday Times, which last month unmasked The Stig in advance of the publication of his autobiography, identifying him as Ben Collins, a former member of the British Army’s Special Air Service. On Friday, another News Corp. daily, The Sun, published an interview with Mr. Collins in which he accused the BBC of trying to bully him into silence. Mr. Collins said he had been treated like a second-class citizen, working under short-term contracts and arranging his own pension and health insurance, as the three stars of the show, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, lorded it over him. Even the nickname The Stig was taken from the derogatory label for new boys at the private school that Mr. Clarkson and Mr. Wilman attended as teenagers. Excerpts from Mr. Collins’s book appeared in The Sunday Times over the weekend. Sky News has provided rolling coverage. The synergies among the various News Corp. units have not gone unnoticed at the BBC, which accused the company of mounting a coordinated attack. The interview in The Sun “appears in a newspaper that is owned by the same company that is publishing Ben’s book,” the BBC said. “It seems to have been designed simply to attempt to generate further sales.” The BBC said it was considering additional legal action, possibly claiming damages for breach of contract or breach of confidence. Touchy, touchy. Is the BBC, in its obsession with Mr. Murdoch, forgetting that the popularity of “Top Gear” stems from the fact that the show does not take itself too seriously? The humor is of a decidedly British brand. There are stunts, crashes and races, as well as segments in which celebrities drive low-budget cars around a test track. All of this is livened up by schoolboy yuks about American automobiles, women drivers, German engineers and bicycling environmentalists. “Top Gear” is extremely popular; Britons named it their favorite television series of the past decade in a poll by another broadcaster, Channel 4. The show travels, too. It is available in more than 100 countries, including the United States, on the BBC America channel. Adaptations of the format have been created for Australia and Russia, and a U.S. version is set to make its debut by the end of the year. As for the British original, it will have to figure out how to live without Mr. Collins, who wants to start his own show — presumably not on the BBC. Bookmakers are taking bets on who the next Stig might be, if the character is retained. There is speculation it could be a woman. News Corp. employees probably need not apply.

News Corporation
British Broadcasting Corp
News and News Media
Television


Washington: Oil Rig Arrives Amid Opposition

Abstract: A 400-foot-long Arctic oil drilling rig pulled by tugs arrived in Seattle waters Thursday despite environmentalists’ protests and the city’s opposition to letting it dock there. The Polar Pioneer is one of two rigs that Royal Dutch Shell plans to park in Seattle until drilling season in the Arctic begins in the summer. Shell’s plans created a showdown not just with environmentalists but also with the city of Seattle. Mayor Ed Murray says a new permit is needed for the rigs to dock at Terminal 5, but Shell says current permits are sufficient. Protesters paddled out in kayaks to meet the rig.

Royal Dutch Shell
Seattle
Offshore drilling
Oil and Gasoline


Transportation Quietly Moves to New Highs

Abstract: TRANSPORTATION is a segment of the stock market that could use a good publicity agent. As investors cheer the recovery of more widely followed indexes, the Dow Jones transportation average excels in obscurity, up 11 percent this year and near a record high. The performance, which puts the index more than 21 percent above its peak of the previous bull market, is all the more remarkable against a backdrop of record energy prices, a big expense for companies that move things and people. Investment advisers say shares are soaring as a result of forces that remain largely unseen. Transportation may seem like yesterday's industry, but many businesses are using the latest technology and management methods to remake themselves and accelerate growth. That is so among railroad and trucking companies, and theirs are the more stellar performances. As for air carriers, it depends on what they carry; cargo haulers are doing better than airlines. Trucking went through a rough patch in the last recession. Times are no longer hard, even with oil at $70-plus a barrel, because the industry has greatly enhanced productivity and kept prices firm. Routes are managed in a way that limits turnaround time at destinations and maximizes the amount of cargo hauled. The best companies, said Barbara S. Walchli, manager of the Aquila Rocky Mountain Equity Fund, are able to insinuate themselves into their customers' manufacturing schedules, improving those companies' productivity as well. One concern in particular, Knight Transportation, based in Phoenix, exemplifies "this whole move by companies in supply-chain management, moving goods around as efficiently as possible," Ms. Walchli said. "They have added a layer of value to their trucking business by providing logistics." Tom Wadewitz, a transportation analyst for J. P. Morgan, says he thinks that added layer may be thinner than Ms. Walchli does. Logistics "may add a little more money and margin," Mr. Wadewitz said, "but the companies that do best are the ones that do best at their core business." He described Knight as "a high-quality company with good growth prospects over time" and "one of the best-run truckers," but he rates it only neutral because of doubts he has about the industry's prospects. "Capacity is coming in," he said, meaning that new operators are entering the market. "It's less clear that the pricing story and supply-demand dynamics will persist." A better investment, he said, is Swift Transportation, also of Phoenix, which has been thriving under new management. Mr. Wadewitz prefers railroads, a group for which everything has been moving, pardon the expression, on the right track since deregulation 25 years ago. The number of rail operators is actually shrinking, thanks to mergers, and so is the size of the crew needed to run a train. At the same time, trains are able to carry more and bigger cars because of the stronger construction materials. These developments reduce expenses, Mr. Wadewitz said, and on the other side of the ledger, railroads have been able to push up prices. They even benefit from higher oil and gas prices, which increase demand for, and shipments of, coal. Norfolk Southern, based in Norfolk, Va., benefits especially from the surge in coal use, he said, and from the rapid growth in global trade, which requires ever more goods to be shipped through seaports. He recommends its stock and that of CSX, a once wayward business that has righted itself. CSX "is enjoying strong pricing and cost control and utilizing equipment and labor more efficiently," he said. As much as he likes those two, he cautioned that some railroad stocks have moved too far, too fast. He is neutral on Burlington Northern Santa Fe largely because its share price has quadrupled in about three years. That caveat aside, Mr. Wadewitz says he expects the sector to continue to treat investors well, possibly into next year. "It's a long-term story for the rails," he said. "They have become very focused on productivity improvement and rationalizing some of the capacity out. It's a story that's more sustainable than for the truckers and air cargo companies."

KNIGHT TRANSPORTATION
NORFOLK SOUTHERN CORP
CSX CORP
SWIFT TRANSPORTATION CO INC
TRUCKS AND TRUCKING
RAILROADS
STOCKS AND BONDS


Hostesses as Recruiters? How Far Is Too Far?

Abstract: College football never fails me with its grubbiness. Just when I was getting all soppy about some student-athletes I encountered last week, I read about a recruiting scandal at the University of Tennessee . Maybe you saw the photograph at SI.com , with the two poised young women, with their rigid beauty-queen smiles, posing with a couple of high school prospects a couple of states away. I thought there was a law against this kind of thing, across state borders or something. And maybe there is. The National Collegiate Athletic Association is investigating whether the university or the football “program” encouraged these two young “hostesses” to be so far from campus. According to one dictionary , a hostess is: “a woman who receives or entertains guests in a social or official capacity.” Like the traditionally dressed women who smile and bow when you enter a department store in Seoul or Tokyo. Very formal. Very dignified. But sending out “hostesses” as college football recruiters? Tacky. I’m not suggesting anything untoward happened on the little trip from Knoxville, Tenn., to Duncan, S.C . I’m sure the two young women were there just to wish the lads well and say, “If you’re ever in the neighborhood, y’all come see us, y’heah?” According to eyewitnesses, the hostesses were members of Orange Pride, a club identified with the football machine at U.T. They were holding a sign that said, “Miller and Willis Have Our Hearts.” Somehow this does not seem like a field trip for Sociology 121 or Archaeology 23. It sounds like a major state university encouraging two undergraduates to send an unmistakable message: “These are the kind of honeys we have in Knoxville.” Athletes want to know this before they matriculate. (What, you thought Tiger Woods was the only athlete who likes variety?) The N.C.A.A. seems to find this a trifle irregular. Whether Coach Lane Kiffin actually handed the hostesses a road map and chits for gasoline fill-ups is not the point. It happened on his watch, the way Watergate happened on the watch of Richard M. Nixon. By the way, I am no Tennessee-basher. I’m an old Appalachian hand. Been to Kingsport and Monteagle and Oak Ridge . Once wrote a story about Decoration Day in hillside cemeteries of east Tennessee, people coming home on Interstate 75 to plant flowers on their family graves. Visited a spiffy farm with no electricity or running water in the back of Anderson County only a few decades ago. So this is not some form of Yankee prejudice. I just have a problem with any university that befouls the concept of education by sending out “hostesses” to a couple of blue-chip prospects. I looked it up. I love looking at maps of my old stomping grounds. Makes me want to get in a car and take a drive. The Web tells me that Interstate 40 is cut off by a rock slide west of Asheville, N.C. (I am not making this up), so if I had time and the weather were benign, I would take Route 441 out of Knoxville through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge , put on a Dolly Parton tape in homage, and think about taking a hike in the Smokies , haven’t done that in years, and then meander around Asheville on local roads, bowing toward Thomas Wolfe's gravesite (damn, I am getting nostalgic just writing about this) before picking up Interstate 26 toward Spartanburg, S.C., and adjacent Duncan. Two hundred and three miles. That’s what it adds up to on my AAA map. Each way. Actually don’t know how the hostesses got to the high school football game. Maybe they were flown on a private jet donated by some fat-cat Tennessee Vols booster. The N.C.A.A. could start its investigation with the comments in The New York Times from Keith Easterwood , a basketball coach who accompanied his son on a football recruiting trip to Knoxville. He said recruits were reduced to “blubbering idiots” by Orange Pride hostesses brushing into them. “My observation is that this is a very organized operation,” Easterwood said. “These girls have obviously been groomed. There’s a lot of eye contact and touching.” These details reminded me of my first visit to Hofstra College back in the day. As a prospective English major, I did not encounter any hostesses leaning into me, which surely would have been turned me into a blubbering idiot, too. But somebody did point me in the direction of the admissions office. People were nice, so I enrolled there.  Unfortunately, Hofstra never did catch up with Tennessee on the fine art of recruiting, which is probably why my alma mater gave up football a few weeks ago, thereby craftily touching off a major tsunami of anger from the most loyal alumni the school has, or rather, had — the old players. Apparently, current Hofstra students would not venture out to free games on Saturday. They were probably up in their dorm rooms watching Tennessee on television. Top 25 football. Cheerleaders and other honeys with rigid beauty-queen smiles. It’s a different culture. Could the N.C.A.A. mandate an autumn without the sound of “Rocky Top” echoing off the hills? Could happen. Maybe should happen. And if it does, I recommend a hike in the Smokies on Saturday afternoon. No hostesses up there, however.

College Athletics
Draft and Recruitment (Sports)
University of Tennessee
Hostesses
Football


With Job in Peril, Yankees’ Nuno Wobbles Through a Start

Abstract: Vidal Nuno had only a tenuous hold on his spot in the Yankees’ pitching rotation when he took the mound Saturday against the Baltimore Orioles. He hardly strengthened his position in the Yankees’ 6-1 loss , allowing five runs, four of them earned, in six and a third innings while giving up three home runs. While Manager Joe Girardi did not officially put Nuno on alert after he gave up eight runs in three innings last week against the Oakland Athletics, there had been hints that his time in the rotation could be limited. General Manager Brian Cashman said during the week that the team could stretch out reliever Adam Warren in the event that there was an opening in the rotation — presumably Nuno’s spot. But Girardi seemed to play down that possibility Thursday, suggesting that Warren had become too valuable in the bullpen to become a starter. Cashman also said the team had no alternatives in the minors, although he vowed that he would make every effort to make a trade to help the club. Image Adam Jones hit a solo shot off Vidal in the first. Credit Brad Penner/USA Today Sports, via Reuters For the moment, while they sift through their options, the Yankees need Nuno to pitch better. After Saturday’s game, Girardi said his rotation would not change for the moment. It appears that Nuno will have at least another opportunity to save his job, although the Yankees have two days off in the next couple of weeks that would allow them to skip Nuno’s turn. The Yankees do not necessarily need a fifth starter until early July. “This is what we have,” Girardi said. “As I’ve said, it’s not like there’s starting pitchers lying around out there. We’ve talked about that. Our guys have done a pretty good job. They have. He’ll continue to go out there and compete.” Nuno (1-4) has struggled so much recently that Saturday’s performance actually caused his earned run average to dip, to 5.88 from 5.90. But Nuno found some solace in that he had a better feel for his cutter than he had had in several starts. His biggest problem has been locating his fastball. His numbers at Yankee Stadium (31 earned runs in 391/3 innings, with 13 home runs) are especially troubling. “At times, I’m trusting all my stuff, and I’m positive,” Nuno said. “But sometimes, hitters are sitting on fastballs, and they’re looking for one pitch, and they got it.” Image Nelson Cruz hit a two-run homer in the fourth. Credit Brad Penner/USA Today Sports, via Reuters Nuno said he would use the next five days to review video and try to figure out what he could do mechanically to improve his command. Although he said he did not feel pressured by the uncertainty of his role, he acknowledged that he was essentially pitching for his job “every time, every outing, every inning.” “The production has to be there,” Nuno said. “Yeah, the production is there, at times, but it’s falling back to my 2010 year. I’m on a roller coaster right now. I need to have a steady peak.” So will the Yankees be willing to keep Nuno in the rotation and wait until C. C. Sabathia or Michael Pineda returns from the disabled list? Both are still several weeks from pitching in the majors. Sabathia, who has been on the disabled list with a knee injury since May 11, threw a 36-pitch bullpen session Saturday and said he experienced no pain. He is scheduled to fly to Tampa, Fla., in the next few days and will throw a live batting practice session on Tuesday. If all goes well, he could throw in a minor league rehabilitation game Saturday. To help his recovery, Sabathia is using a knee brace that he will very likely try to use when he pitches in games. Image Steve Pearce hit a two-run blast in the fifth inning. Credit Mike Stobe/Getty Images “I haven’t experienced any of the things I felt early in the year,” Sabathia said. “I’m excited about the way I feel. My arm feels good. My knee feels good. The brace that I have on is helping a lot. I’m ready to go.” Cashman said last week that he thought Sabathia would return in August. The Yankees received somewhat discouraging news Saturday when a magnetic resonance imaging examination of Pineda’s surgically repaired right shoulder revealed inflammation. Pineda had hoped to start throwing sometime in the next few days. Instead, he will not throw until Saturday at the earliest. The Yankees’ offense could not do much to help Nuno. For the second consecutive day, the Yankees were thwarted by the Orioles’ starting pitching. On Friday, Ubaldo Jimenez allowed just one run in five and two-thirds innings despite tying a career high with six walks. On Saturday, the Yankees could not solve Bud Norris, who limited them to one run — a Mark Teixeira homer — in five innings. Norris left the game after feeling tightness in a groin muscle while warming up. But the Yankees could not do much against three Orioles relievers, either. Ultimately, if Nuno continues to struggle, the offense will need to be better.


China Central Bank Appears to Inject $81 Billion Into Top Lenders

Abstract: HONG KONG — With industrial production growing at the slowest pace since the worst of the global financial crisis and foreign direct investment in a tailspin, China appears to have taken the unusual step of using monetary stimulus in an attempt to forestall further economic weakness. China’s central bank has lent 100 billion renminbi, or $16.2 billion, to each of the country’s five main, state-controlled banks, bankers and economists said Wednesday, although the central bank and the five banks involved stayed silent. The seemingly stealthy decision to inject a total of $81 billion into the banking system this week came as the Chinese economy, like many economies in Europe, has slowed over the summer, although still expanding at a pace that would be the envy of most countries around the world. The move by the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, to transfer the money directly to state-controlled banks drew immediate criticism from economists at international banks. The central bank had been seeking in recent months to reduce the role of bureaucratic guidance in China’s financial sector, relying instead on pushing interest rates up and down and then letting market forces allocate money among borrowers and lenders. The loans this week represented a much more targeted approach, with the money going entirely to five heavily regulated big banks. Those five, which account for at least three-fifths of the market by various measures, are the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and Bank of Communications. The banks are likely to lend the money to politically connected industries and individuals, notably those in favored sectors like advanced electronics or the construction of mass-market housing. The central bank does occasionally make loans to the country’s biggest banks under a program known as the standing loan facility, which has been used again this week. The standing loan facility is intended to provide extra cash before holidays, like the weeklong national holiday at the start of next month to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China by Mao in 1949. But the standing loan facility is usually used to inject much smaller sums of money into the banking system, nothing like the scale of what was introduced this week, which amounts to monetary stimulus. Even before the Lunar New Year, which gives a much bigger jolt to the banking system than the coming holiday week because of extensive gift-giving, the central bank this year injected only 190 billion renminbi, or $31 billion, at the end of January. Many economists had expected the central bank this month to allow commercial banks to hold a smaller share of their assets as reserves, which would free up more money for lending. Some economists had expected the central bank to engage in money market transactions to increase the availability of funds for banks to lend. But few had expected the central bank to lend the money directly to big banks, an older tactic that the Chinese government had seemed to be steering away from. “We believe the tool, which is akin to printing money, is a misuse” of the central bank’s position as the lender of last resort, Shen Jianguang, the Hong Kong-based chief Asia economist at Mizuho Securities Asia, wrote in a research note. Louis Kuijs, a China economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, was similarly skeptical. “It seems to run counter to the reform orientation, in the sense that this is another measure that is intended to channel liquidity to specific institutions,” he said. “Monetary policy reform is supposed to go in the direction of more indirect, market-oriented policy.” Adding to the unusual nature of the loans was the secrecy that surrounded them. The People’s Bank of China declined to comment about the loans, and the five major banks also remained silent, leaving financial markets to guess about the interest rate the banks were being charged and other details. The loans were first reported in the wee hours of Wednesday morning by Sina, a Chinese website. The report cited two bank analysts as sources. The Chinese action comes as the European Central Bank begins its own targeted lending program on Thursday. The E.C.B. will provide banks with extremely low-rate loans, provided that the banks promptly relend the money in the private sector. The European plan also prohibits banks from lending the money to households for home purchases. The People’s Bank of China is providing three-month loans to the major banks, Sina reported. Because the central bank gets to decide in December whether to roll over the loans or call them in, the measure is more limited than reducing the percentage of assets that banks must keep as reserves. The $81 billion injection of money to the banking system has roughly the same initial effect as a reduction by a half percent in the required reserve ratio, economists at J.P. Morgan calculated. Industrial production grew 6.9 percent in China last month compared with a year ago. Only two months in the past decade have been weaker: November 2008, when industrial production grew 5.4, and December of 2008, when it grew 5.7 percent. Foreign direct investment dropped 14 percent in August from a year earlier, after declining 17 percent in July. Shen Danyang, the Commerce Ministry spokesman, said on Tuesday that the decline should not be attributed to his country’s antimonopoly raids on the Chinese offices of numerous multinationals in recent months; he pointed out instead that costs in China were rising, especially for labor-intensive manufacturing.


Senate Declines to Clarify Rights of American Qaeda Suspects Arrested in U.S.

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday decided to leave unanswered a momentous question about constitutional rights in the war against Al Qaeda : whether government officials have the power to arrest people inside the United States and hold them in military custody indefinitely and without a trial. After a passionate debate over a detainee-related provision in a major defense bill, the lawmakers decided not to make clearer the current law about the rights of Americans suspected of being terrorists. Instead, they voted 99 to 1 to say the bill does not affect “existing law” about people arrested inside the United States. “We make clear that whatever the law is, it is unaffected by this language in our bill,” said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who helped shape the detainee-related sections of the bill with Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The disputed provision would bolster the authorization enacted by Congress a decade ago to use military force against the perpetrators of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It says the government may imprison suspected members of Al Qaeda or its allies in indefinite military custody. Because the section includes no exception for suspects arrested domestically, the provision prompted a debate about whether it would change the law by empowering the government, for the first time, to lawfully arrest people inside the United States and hold them indefinitely in military custody, or whether it would change nothing because the government has that power already. The debate brought new attention to the ambiguous aftermath of one of the most sweeping claims of executive power made by the Bush administration after Sept. 11: that the government can hold citizens without a trial by accusing them of being terrorists. One of the proponents of making no exceptions for Americans, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said it would be “crazy” to exempt Qaeda suspects who are Americans and are arrested inside the country from battlefield-style detention. He argued that, to stop other attacks, they must be interrogated without the protections of the civilian criminal justice system. Citizens who are suspected of joining Al Qaeda are opening themselves up “to imprisonment and death,” Mr. Graham said, adding, “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them: ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer. You are an enemy combatant, and we are going to talk to you about why you joined Al Qaeda.’ ” But Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, said citizen terrorism suspects should retain their “fundamental civil liberties” in order to protect the founding principles of the United States. “I think at a bare minimum, that means we will not allow U.S. military personnel to arrest and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens, regardless of what label we happen to apply to them,” he said. Before voting to leave current law unchanged, the Senate rejected, 55 to 45, a proposal by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, to instead say that Americans are exempt from detention under the 2001 authorization to use military force. The uncertainty over the current law added confusion. Some, like Mr. Graham and Mr. Levin, insisted that the Supreme Court had already approved holding Americans as enemy combatants, even people arrested inside the United States. Others, like Senators Feinstein and Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, insisted that it had not done so. Each side pointed to different passages of the Supreme Court’s ruling in a landmark 2004 case. The decision said the Bush administration could hold as an enemy combatant a citizen who had been captured in Afghanistan and was accused of fighting with the Taliban. Mr. Levin noted Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that “there is no bar to this nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant.” But others noted that Justice O’Connor had also stressed that the ruling was limited to “a United States citizen captured in a foreign combat zone” while active combat there was in progress, a different context from a domestic arrest. (She also wrote, “Certainly, we agree that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized.”) There were two Bush-era cases of people held as enemy combatants arrested inside the United States, one of them a citizen. Lower courts reached contradictory opinions about whether holding them in indefinite military custody was lawful, and they were transferred to the civilian system before the Supreme Court weighed in. Still, in 1942, several German saboteurs were captured inside the United States and prosecuted before a military commission. One was a naturalized American citizen. In an opinion written after the men were executed, the Supreme Court held that the process had been legitimate.

United States Defense and Military Forces


A Chance to Excel on the Court, and Off

Abstract: One Sunday afternoon, the living room of a small unit in the Park Hill Apartments, a federally subsidized housing complex on Staten Island, was filling up with the sounds of a basketball video game, NBA Street: Homecourt. Over the grunts and sneaker squeaks, 9-year-old Rhasan Porter recounted his older sister’s recent real-life game. “They were losing in the first half,” he said between bursts of high-speed thumb work. “They were losing in the second half. They started winning in the third half. And they won in the fourth half!” “Quarter,” said his amused sister, Courtney Turner, 18, whose broad shoulders were supporting the weight of another brother, Rhashad, 5. “Whatever,” Rhasan said, eyes fixed on the TV screen. “You won.” Ms. Turner was home for the weekend from Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., where she is on track to become the first member of her immediate family to graduate from college. While she is one of her team’s most promising players, often playing point guard though she is only a freshman, Ms. Turner was admitted to the school before its coach knew of her talent. She also earned a $38,000 scholarship based on academic, not athletic, merit. “She’s a phenomenal player ,” said Candice Brown, Ms. Turner’s coach. “But she could quit the team tomorrow and the scholarship would still be there.” Ms. Turner’s attention was not always so evenly divided between basketball and school. Growing up, she preferred to spend most afternoons shooting baskets at the hoop outside her apartment building. “She never played with dolls,” said Ms. Turner’s mother, Shanee Rawley. “She always wanted the basketball.” Ms. Turner’s single-mindedness began to pay off in junior high, when she joined a traveling team. By the time she was in high school, her mother, who works for the city’s parks department, had begun to stress with increasing urgency the importance of getting decent grades: “Do good in school so you don’t end up here,” Ms. Rawley said. Asked to elaborate on why her mother encouraged her to leave Park Hill, Ms. Turner responded: “The same old cycle. Street life, drugs, blah, blah, blah.” In part because her father, who has been in and out of prison for much of Ms. Turner’s life, had been caught in that cycle, Ms. Turner took her mother’s words to heart. Her junior year, she made both team M.V.P. and the National Honor Society. The scholarship Manhattanville awarded her did not cover the roughly $44,000 in annual tuition and other fees. So the New York City Mission Society , a member of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies , one of seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund , drew $2,000 from the fund to help Ms. Turner make up the difference. It then tapped one of its own programs and supplied her with an additional $1,200. Ms. Turner took out about $3,000 in loans to cover the rest. In liberal arts classes at Manhattanville, Ms. Turner has recently developed an interest in writing. And when she is not in class or working at the student center on campus, she is playing a great deal of basketball. She recently scored her career high of 12 points in a game. Still, she won’t say what her strengths on the court are — in fact, she will not even admit that she has any. This she leaves to her teammate Carey Hickey, 19, who had accompanied Ms. Turner to Staten Island and was at that moment fighting a losing battle of Street with Rhasan. “She has confidence issues off the court,” said Ms. Hickey, who also plays point guard. “But in the moment she’s really good at breaking away and driving to the basket.” For his part, Rhasan has not yet determined whether he will follow his sister’s lead and seriously pursue a sport. But there is one objective on which he is firmly decided: “I’m going to go to the same college as her.” How to Help Checks payable to The NewYork Times Neediest CasesFund may be sent to: 4 ChaseMetrotech Center, 7th FloorEast, Lockbox 5193, Brooklyn,N.Y. 11245. All gifts are acknowledged;special lettersare not possible. Checks intendedfor a particular Neediestagency should be writtento and mailed to the agency,noting that it is a Neediest gift. 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New York Times Neediest Cases Fund
Education and Schools
Manhattanville College
Basketball


Super Bowl 50 Commercials Are Expected to Have a Lighter Tone

Abstract: For this year’s Super Bowl , marketers want to have fun again. On the heels of last year’s somber string of ads — particularly a Nationwide Insurance commercial that featured a child who turned out to be dead and elicited almost immediate mockery and criticism online — some advertisers have already said they plan to rely on humor and heartwarming stories during the game on Feb. 7. On its “Crash the Super Bowl” website , Doritos is asking people to pick their favorite consumer-generated ad from among three spots. The one with the most votes will air during CBS’s telecast of Super Bowl 50. One ad shows the actress Doris Roberts, best known for her Emmy-winning role on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” using a Tinder-like dating app. David Rudy, who created the ad, said his friends agreed that Ms. Roberts would be a good choice. “I knew it would be very difficult to get her,” he said, “but if I didn’t at least try then it would definitely not happen. So I cold-called Doris’s manager, Sandy, pitched the idea, and she liked it.” A second ad shows a couple’s ultrasound test going haywire. The third relies on that familiar advertising fallback: cute dogs. Toyota will air a humorous 60-second spot for the Prius hybrid car during the second quarter of the game, said Jack Hollis, the group vice president for marketing. The spot will kick off a “comedy of errors” campaign for the new Prius and will, Mr. Hollis said, mix humor and drama, and run through the summer. Mr. Hollis did not provide details on the new Super Bowl commercial but said it would take viewers on a “joy ride,” while simultaneously showing off various features of the Prius. There will not be any celebrity endorsers. “It will have some tongue-in-cheek humor,” Mr. Hollis said. “It will have a little bit of over-the-top humor.” All of the “highly dynamic” driving shown in the spot will be real, he added. In recent years, commercials for Toyota featuring Kaley Cuoco of “The Big Bang Theory” and the Muppets have been created by the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, Los Angeles. The feel-good commercials by Toyota, which often takes a comedic approach to Super Bowl ads, and Doritos may come as a relief to viewers after last year’s game. Nationwide said it wanted to start a conversation by airing a spot from the perspective of a dead child. “I couldn’t grow up, because I died from an accident,” the child said, while a dirgelike version of the Nationwide jingle played in the background. Mocking memes sprang up on social media deriding the commercial as the worst ad ever. “Nationwide, Your Kids Will Die,” read one. Coca-Cola and the National Football League aired serious ads about cyberbullying and domestic violence. Nissan added to the viewer ennui with a spot about a racecar driver separated from his son. The father survives a car crash while his family looks on, and Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In the Cradle” plays in the background. Not all of the commercials landed flat, however. Budweiser and the agency Anomaly had viewers reaching for their tissues with their “Lost Dog” spot about an adorable pup rescued from a snarling predator by the Clydesdales. “Lost Dog,” the sequel to Budweiser’s 2014 spot “Puppy Love,” connected with audiences and has been viewed more than 30 million times on YouTube. Snickers and the agency BBDO Worldwide scored with their spoof of “The Brady Bunch,” starring the actors Danny Trejo and Steve Buscemi. The spot is still airing nearly a year later. “Some years, funny things resonate; other years, emotional things,” said David Lubars, chief creative officer of BBDO. “There’s no way to predict which tone will click with the audience. The thing to do is be different and pure and ignore formulas entirely.” Advertisers often reflect the prevailing atmosphere during the Super Bowl, which is also their industry’s top showcase. Last year, some brands tried to make a statement about society’s ills. This year, with topics like terrorism, the economy and the presidential campaign prevailing, there is already enough serious news to go around, says Bradley Kay, president of SS&K ad agency. So he does not expect marketers to repeat Nationwide’s serious strategy. Instead, they will most likely try to offer a brief escape. “People are looking to be entertained at that moment in time,” Mr. Kay said. “I don’t think they want to be depressed.” “Most people I know had to turn away from the Nationwide spot, it was so upsetting,” he added. That does not mean serious, or issue-oriented, ads are necessarily always a bad strategy. They can act as counterprogramming in a saccharine sea of cute dogs and talking babies, said Steven Miller of Rutgers University’s department of journalism and media studies. Although it was “extremely serious,” Apple’s dystopian “1984” ad is still the “granddaddy” of all Super Bowl commercials more than three decades after it aired, he said. Besides, being funny is not easy. “There’s an old saying: Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” Mr. Miller said. “There’s more of a chance of failing with your product by going for the laugh.” The ad scene around the Super Bowl has become such a circus that some marketers have forgotten basic lessons, says Ernest Lupinacci, a marketing consultant. For example, just because consumers like your Super Bowl ad in a popularity poll does not mean they will like, much less buy, your product. Sales are the ultimate proof of effectiveness. Budweiser’s puppy spot was a viewer favorite, but sales for the beverage company dropped in the first half of 2015. Likewise, a serious ad does not have to mean it is depressing. There were no laughs during Ram Trucks’ stirring “So God Made a Farmer” spot by the Richards Group during Super Bowl XLVII. But people still talk about the ad and how it moved them. “Remember the mood of your audience,” Mr. Lupinacci said. “I don’t want a lecture. But you can still do something serious and profound — and move people.”

Super Bowl
advertising,marketing
Football
Comedy
Online advertising


One Night After an Outburst, the Yankees Are Shut Out

Abstract: CHICAGO — Miguel Gonzalez pitched five-hit ball over seven innings and the White Sox beat the Yankees, 5-0, on Wednesday night. One night after getting blanked for the fifth time, the White Sox returned the favor and handed the Yankees their fifth shutout. Gonzalez (2-4) matched his longest outing of the season and shut down the Yankees after they pounded out a season-high 20 hits in Tuesday’s 9-0 romp. Tim Anderson capped a four-run second with a two-run double off Michael Pineda (3-8), and the White Sox won for the sixth time in eight games. They took two of three from the Yankees to capture their fifth straight series, another twist for a team that got off to a 23-10 start and then went into a tailspin. Gonzalez, who went seven innings in a loss at Houston last week, struck out three and walked one. He was 0-3 with a 7.25 E.R.A. in his previous four starts. Zach Duke worked one and a third innings and the former Yankee David Robertson got the final two outs, striking out Chase Headley with runners on second and third to end the game. Jacoby Ellsbury and Didi Gregorius each had three hits for the Yankees, who missed a chance to reach the .500 mark and dropped to 2-4 on a 10-game trip that takes them to the All-Star break. “We can’t get over the hump,” Manager Joe Girardi said. “We can’t play consistent enough to get over the hump and get to five games over, get to 10 games over, and it’s a number of different things. It’s pitching at times. It’s swinging the bats at times. You look at the two games here and we didn’t hit with runners on and that was the difference.” Pineda, who had a 2.75 E.R.A. in six June starts, gave up five runs and five hits in six innings. The White Sox did most of their scoring in the second, pounding out four runs after Pineda retired the first two batters. Brett Lawrie singled to ignite the rally and scored from second on a base hit by Avisail Garcia, who came in on a 6-for-46 slump. J.B. Shuck added an R.B.I. ground-rule double to left, putting runners on second and third, and Anderson followed with a double to left that made the score 4-0. INSIDE PITCH Carlos Beltran was back at designated hitter after playing the outfield Tuesday for the first time in a week. He has been bothered by a tight right hamstring. “The issue is not gone, so he’s probably going to D.H. more than the outfield for a little bit,” Joe Girardi said. Girardi also said he thinks Beltran will be able to play in the All-Star Game after being selected for the ninth time.

Baseball
White Sox
Yankees
Miguel Angel Gonzalez


U.S. Open — Simpson Outlasts Challengers to Win First Major

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — After three days of sunshine, the United States Open was blanketed Sunday in a crystallizing two-layer fog. The winner, Webb Simpson, wore a long-sleeved shirt underneath a long-sleeved buttoned sweater and played a game stripped to its bare essence: fairways, greens, pars. Simpson, who began the day four strokes behind the leaders, Jim Furyk and Graeme McDowell, cut through the haziness of a densely packed leader board with a four-birdie binge beginning at No. 6, a par 4 that ranked as the most difficult hole of the week with 15 birdies in four rounds. He then parred out for his second straight two-under-par 68, which included a beautiful up and down from the craggy rough at No. 18. In the clubhouse with a 72-hole total of one-over 281, Simpson waited while the last three twosomes finished. In the final group, Furyk, the 2003 United States Open champion who was ahead with six holes to play, fell out of contention with bogeys at 16 and 18. His playing partner, McDowell, the 2010 Open champion, birdied the 17th and had a 24-foot birdie putt at 18 to force an 18-hole playoff on Monday. “I did not want to play again tomorrow for a lot of reasons,” Simpson said. “I was just as nervous watching the telecast as I was playing.” When McDowell’s putt rolled long, Simpson and his wife, Dowd, who is pregnant with their second child, looked at each other in disbelief and exchanged a kiss and hug. As Father’s Days go, this is one Simpson, 26, is not likely to forget. On the way to his third tour victory and first major title, Simpson outlasted a group of contenders that included McDowell, Furyk, David Toms, Padraig Harrington and Ernie Els, who have a combined nine major championships. McDowell closed with a 73 and finished at two over, tied for second with Michael Thompson, who produced the day’s low round, 67. “I would rather have tried and failed than have never tried at all,” McDowell said, adding, “But no, yeah, I’m disappointed right now.” Two strokes back, in a tie for fourth, were Furyk (74), Toms (68), Harrington (68), John Peterson (70) and Jason Dufner (70). With a 72, Els finished alone in ninth at four over. On tour, Simpson is viewed as a Clydesdale among Arabians, a plodder who has maximized his talents. Not that there is anything wrong with that. From Jack Fleck in 1955 to Scott Simpson in 1987 to Lee Janzen in 1998, the United States Open has a history of glorifying the workhorse on its Olympic Club track. Of the five winners crowned here, only Billy Casper, in 1966, was considered a thoroughbred. “I never really wrapped my mind around winning,” Simpson said. “This place is so demanding, and so all I was really concerned about was keeping the ball in front of me and making pars.” He added: “One of my thoughts on the back nine was I don’t know how Tiger has won 14 of these things because the pressure, I couldn’t feel my legs most of the back nine.” Tiger Woods, a three-time Open champion who began the tournament as the heavy favorite, posted his second over-par round after moving into a tie for the 36-hole lead. He closed with a 73 and finished tied for 21st at seven over. It was only the second time in 10 majors that Woods failed to win after holding at least a share of the halfway lead. Woods started bogey, bogey, double bogey and was six over after six holes. The par-3 third, which was playing 224 yards, capsulized his day: Woods’s six-iron off the tee landed short and right of the green; he hit his second shot over the green, chipped back to 30 feet of the pin and two-putted. “Unfortunately, just got off to such an awful start,” Woods said, adding, “The first six I just didn’t play well at all.” Woods was not the only one to stagger through the first six holes, which the analyst Johnny Miller, the 1973 United States Open champion, described as “awesomely tough.” Beau Hossler, the 17-year-old amateur from Southern California, bogeyed the third, fourth and fifth holes on his way to a 76, his highest score of the week, and a 72-hole total of plus-nine. In the final 10 twosomes, not a single golfer negotiated the six-hole stretch in under par Sunday, and they were a combined plus-46. Phil Mickelson played the entire week as if in a fog. He produced three three-putts and zero birdies in his closing 78, his worst score at a United States Open since he carded a 79 in the final round in 1994. Mickelson, a five-time runner-up, finished at 16 over after hitting 40 of 72 greens in the four rounds. “If you played anything less than perfect golf, it was extremely penalizing,” Mickelson said. “And I played far from perfect.” With its tight fairways and small greens, the Lake Course set up well for Lee Westwood, one of the game’s best ball strikers. When he pulled to three strokes off the lead after 54 holes, Westwood was hopeful that his first major title in 57 tries was nigh. A gloom descended on Westwood’s championship aspirations on No. 5, after his drive was swallowed by one of the trees lining the right side of the fairway. The shot conjured memories of Janzen’s tee shot in 1998, which landed in a tree in the same area but dropped into play after a brief delay. Janzen made par on the hole and went on to win. Westwood returned to the tee, split the fairway with his drive and made a double bogey on his way to a 73. He finished at five over, good for his sixth top-10 finish in his past nine majors. But it was Simpson who broke his major maiden, on his fifth try. “If I was honest with you, I believed in myself that I could win a major,” Simpson said, “but maybe not so soon.”

Simpson Webb
United States Open (Golf)
McDowell Graeme
Furyk Jim
Olympic Club (San Francisco Calif)
Golf


Armstrong Returns Olympic Bronze Medal

Abstract: Lance Armstrong has returned the bronze medal he won at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, the latest fallout from his admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs. The International Olympic Committee in January vacated the medal, which Armstrong won in the road time trial. Armstrong said on Twitter on Thursday that he had given it back, and a United States Olympic Committee spokesman confirmed that. ■ Vincenzo Nibali’s lead over the American Christopher Horner, 41, in the Vuelta a España was cut to three seconds with three days to go. The 18th stage was won by Vasil Kiryienka of Belarus, who covered the 116-mile route from Burgos to Peña Cabarga in nearly five hours. Horner used a burst to gain 25 seconds on Nibali.

Lance Armstrong
Doping
Olympics
International Olympic Committee
Biking


New York Today: The Mother of Exiles, in 2017

Abstract: Updated, 8:07 a.m. Good morning on this snow-speckled Monday. The Statue of Liberty has another name: the Mother of Exiles. The nickname — symbolizing the United States as a nation of immigrants — was imagined by the poet Emma Lazarus , who in 1883 wrote the sonnet “ The New Colossus ” to raise money to create the statue’s pedestal. These excerpts were inscribed on a plaque and mounted inside the monument — in 1903: Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome … “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” “There are tears running down the cheeks of the Statue of Liberty tonight,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York wrote in a Twitter post over the weekend, shortly after President Trump signed an executive order barring all refugees from entering the United States for 120 days and Syrian refugees indefinitely. The order also blocked entry for 90 days for citizens — refugees or not — of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. “These policies do not reflect the values of the United States or of New York City,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement . “In this great city of immigrants we will remain true to our values and always welcome all who yearn to breathe free.” Image Protesters gathered at Kennedy Airport to object to the detention of travelers and refugees. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times Hundreds of protesters responded to the order by swarming Kennedy International Airport on Saturday, where 40 or more travelers were detained over the course of the weekend . Disorder also swept airports across the nation and lawyers mobilized . City taxi drivers called for an hourlong work stoppage. A federal judge in Brooklyn issued a ruling to partly block the president’s order , helping 100 to 200 people who had been held at airports around the country. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo set up a hotline — 1-888-769-7243 — to support those missing or detained in transit. “To be clear,” Mr. Trump said in a written statement on Sunday, “this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting. This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe.” As he defended his order, thousands gathered at a rally in Battery Park, and ferries continued shuttling visitors from Lower Manhattan to Liberty Island to spend some time with the Mother of Exiles. Here’s what else is happening: Weather The fluffy stuff is back. Light snow should dust our sidewalks, and cars, and planters, and garbage piles. Which means it’s chilly, and with the wind, it will feel like it's 20 to 30 . (Bundle up!) If you think we haven’t had much snow this season, you’re right. But only by a smidgen. We’ve had 10.1 inches; the average is 11.6. With less than half an inch expected today, we probably won’t hit the average. Perhaps tomorrow, when more snow is on tap. In the News • Here are some of the stories of those affected by Donald J. Trump’s executive order. [ New York Times ] • Leaders in Brooklyn’s Yemeni-American community fear the future as their relatives are detained at Kennedy Airport. [ New York Times ] • Christian leaders in New York have strongly criticized President Trump’s executive orders, and a former New York district attorney has called the policy a “disgrace.” [ New York Times ] • Closing arguments are set to begin in the Etan Patz murder retrial. [ New York Times ] • A killer is paroled after four decades, but on the condition that he be deported to England. [ New York Times ] • Subway trains running on the 7 line derailed at the same station in Queens twice over the weekend. [ CBS ] • A dredging project began in Flushing Bay near La Guardia Airport to alleviate a stinky smell. [ NY1 ] • Read how the city charges homeowners for front stoops. [ Crain’s New York ] • The author Brad Meltzer sees his children’s books as antidotes for a society that has mistaken fame for heroism. [ New York Times ] • After a separation of 17 years, Miguel Ramos arrived in Yonkers in October to live with his mother, Mirna Ramos. Then she learned she had cancer. [ New York Times ] • Today’s Metropolitan Diary: “ Famous People Encountered on the Street ” • Scoreboard: Hawks scrape by Knicks , 142-139 (in quadruple overtime). • For a global look at what’s happening, see Your Monday Briefing . Coming Up Today • Visit Hidemi Takagi’s photography exhibition on barbershop culture in Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, at the borough’s Central Library . 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. [Free] • Indulge in some Monday Night Magic (and comedy ) at the Players Theater in Greenwich Village. 8 p.m. [ $42.50 ] • Push your limits at a flying trapeze or ballet barre class at Circus Warehouse in Long Island City, Queens. Times vary. [ $65 ] • Looking ahead: Join writers from “Late Night With Seth Meyers” for an improv comedy show on Thursday at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea. • Nets at Heat, 7:30 p.m. (YES). • For more events, see The New York Times’s Arts & Entertainment guide . Commute • Subway and PATH • Railroads : L.I.R.R. , Metro-North , N.J. Transit , Amtrak • Roads : Check traffic map or radio report on the 1s or the 8s . • Alternate-side parking : in effect until Feb. 13. • Ferries : Staten Island Ferry , New York Waterway , East River Ferry • Airports : La Guardia , J.F.K. , Newark And Finally... Image They need your help. Credit Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times For all you golf fans out there, a dispatch from the mini-golf front: The much-adored miniature golf course on Governors Island is in danger of not reopening. The course, which was designed by local artists, is uniquely New York: Where else can you tap your golf ball over a little George Washington Bridge? But as the costs of maintaining the course rise, its future has grown murky. Figment Project , the group that created the course, recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money to reopen the attraction this summer. Some things to look forward to, if that comes to fruition: the Governors Island Miniature Golf Masters Tournament, and new holes on the theme “NYC Has the Beat,” with designs reflecting our city’s lively music scene. New York Today is a weekday roundup that stays live from 6 a.m. till late morning. You can receive it via email . For updates throughout the day, like us on Facebook . What would you like to see here to start your day? Post a comment, email us at nytoday@nytimes.com , or reach us via Twitter using #NYToday . Follow the New York Today columnists, Alexandra Levine and Jonathan Wolfe , on Twitter. You can find the latest New York Today at nytoday.com .

NYC
Executive Orders
Statue of Liberty
Immigration
Refugees,Internally Displaced People
Donald Trump
Emma Lazarus


The World Remembers Muhammad Ali

Abstract: President Obama said he “ shook up the world, and the world’s better for it .” George Foreman called him royalty, but added that the “ common man was his pal .” Paul McCartney remembered his sense of humor and how he “would often pull a pack of cards out of his pocket, no matter how posh the occasion, and do a card trick for you.” In the full sentences of official statements and the terse, quickly typed prose of Twitter and Instagram, the world mourned the loss of the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali , who died on Friday at 74. Athletes, celebrities, lawmakers and artists paid tribute to a superstar famous for audacious self-confidence as he faced opponents in the ring and unanticipated bravery as he faced illness. Ali’s funeral is scheduled for Friday in Louisville, Ky., his hometown. The eulogies will be given by former President Bill Clinton, Billy Crystal and Bryant Gumbel. Many echoed Ali’s own description of himself as “the greatest” — “If you asked him, he’d just tell you,” the president and his wife, Michelle, said in a statement — but not only in the ring. “A giant, an inspiration, a man of peace, a warrior for the cure,” said the actor Michael J. Fox , who was 30 when he learned he had Parkinson’s disease. Ali was given the diagnosis when he was 42. “His may be the greatest of 20th-century American stories,” said the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson , the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And as reporters remembered enduringly quotable encounters with Ali — like the time in 1964 when he promised to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” — Sports Illustrated said it planned to use a photograph of Ali on the cover of its June 13 issue. It will be the 40th time he has occupied that spot. Some, like the boxer Floyd Mayweather , mentioned “your charisma, your charm and above all, your class.” Some recognized Ali as a man willing to defy authority, and pay a price, as he did when he refused to be drafted as the Vietnam War was escalating. He lost his boxing title as a result and did not step into the ring for three years while lawyers appealed in court. The White House issued a 564-word statement from the Obamas in which the president said he kept a pair of Ali’s gloves in his private study off the Oval Office. The president said they were on display beneath “that iconic photograph of him” at age 22, “roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston.” The president added: “I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was — still Cassius Clay, already an Olympic gold medal winner, yet to set out on a spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the peak of his power and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.” The president also said that Ali “stood with King and Mandela, stood up when it was hard, spoke out when others wouldn’t.” He also praised Ali’s refusal to be drafted and his court fight, which ended in victory in the Supreme Court. The justices, reversing a lower court, gave him the conscientious-objector status he had sought after a draft board reclassified him available for military service. “Ali stood his ground,” the president said. “And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today.” Muhammad Ali’s Words Stung Like a Bee, Too Outside the boxing ring, Ali fought his battles with his mouth. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, noted that Ali had grown up in Louisville and that Louisville was the site of the Muhammad Ali Center, a museum that opened 11 years ago. “Inside the ring,” McConnell said, “he was graceful on his feet and packed a powerful punch. Outside the ring, he thrilled us with his exuberance for life.” The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, recalled meeting Ali one morning in June 1972 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Reid was 32, and Ali was about two years younger. “That morning I was just a star-struck kid from Searchlight,” Reid said, referring to the town about 60 miles from Las Vegas where he was born. He added that he watched “in awe as he trained.” “Muhammad Ali was everything the world had come to know and love — funny, charming and one hell of an athlete,” Reid said. On social media, there were reactions from boxers who followed him in the ring — “God came for his champion. So long great one,” Mike Tyson posted on Twitter — and from people who remembered the conscientious-objector case. The filmmaker Michael Moore noted that Ali was “convicted as a felon simply because he refused to go to Vietnam.” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the former basketball star, recalled meeting Ali in 1967, soon after Ali’s conviction for draft evasion. Abdul-Jabbar, then Lew Alcindor, said on ESPN that he was the youngest of the well-known black athletes who met with Ali and, after questioning him about his stand on the draft, appeared at a news conference together, expressing support for him. Image Mourners created a memorial at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Ky. Credit Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images Abdul-Jabbar said on Saturday that he and Ali became friends. He said that they had “a difference in style with regard to how he presented his issues and his passion for them.” But he added, “What it’s all about was freedom and justice and equality for all Americans, equal opportunity for all Americans.” “One of his legacies, his outreach across the lines of religion, to remove all the obstacles and build bridges, you know, that’s what he was about,” Abdul-Jabbar said on ESPN. “He did that until he drew his last breath.” The boxing promoter Don King, whose career was jump-started by the Rumble in the Jungle bout between Ali and Foreman in what was then Zaire in 1974, told The Associated Press, “It’s a sad day for life, man.” “Like Martin Luther King, his spirit will live on,” King said. “He stood for the world.” Foreman sent several tweets . In one, he said, “Until Ali no one said ‘I’m beautiful.’” Adding that the “common man was his pal,” Foreman said: “That is beauty. Greatest kind.” He also said Ali did not beat him in the Rumble in the Jungle with the famous “rope-a-dope” tactic. “No,” Foreman wrote on Twitter, it was “his beauty that beat me.” Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the Broadway musical “Hamilton” and stars in it, posted a page from an interview with Ali that was published in Playboy magazine in 1975 in which he said he would like to be remembered “as a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right.” Ali also mentioned helping “as many of his people as he could — financially and also in their fight for freedom, justice and equality” and trying “to unite his people through the faith of Islam.” At the end he added, “And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.” In his tweet, Miranda said: “Maestro, you called it exactly right. Thank you.”


Ex-Leader Embodies a German Divide on Russia

Abstract: BERLIN — It was an image that provoked consternation abroad and in an instant captured Germany’s long-conflicted place between East and West: former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder embracing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as he arrived last month at a party in St. Petersburg for the German’s 70th birthday. Closer to home, the Russian bear hug produced strong doses of criticism alongside calls for understanding. It quickly became part of the wrenching debate over where precisely German loyalties lie, and a reflection of the sudden and acute identity crisis Germany has experienced since Mr. Putin changed the borders of Europe by fiat in annexing a part of Ukraine. That German identity has been shaped by centuries of trade with Russia, Germany’s culpability in the midcentury war between Fascism and Communism, and in more recent decades the firm alliance with Western Europe that made Germany a linchpin of the European Union. Today, every party in Parliament except for the far-left Linke, which includes Communists from the former East Germany, is standing firm against Russia. But opinion polls draw a very different picture: a 50-50 split between Germans who wholly support the West’s actions against Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea, and those who urge greater tolerance for Moscow’s actions. Perhaps no one embodies those competing tugs and the ways in which they have influenced German political and business leaders in the decades since the collapse of the old Soviet empire more than Mr. Schröder. His relationship with the Russian president is revealing of the difficulties Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced in coaxing Germany’s business elite into supporting a firm line against Mr. Putin. Both Mr. Schröder and Mr. Putin grew up poor. Each lost a close male relative in World War II. They ascended to power around the same time, and have become such friends that they and their spouses have celebrated New Year’s together. Ludmila Putina, now divorced from the Russian leader, is said to have helped Mr. Schröder and his wife, Doris, select the two children they adopted from St. Petersburg orphanages. Not least, since leaving office in 2005, Mr. Schröder has grown rich as an executive for Gazprom, the Russian energy giant that functions as an arm of Kremlin power, at once supplying a dependent Europe with oil and natural gas, even as it opportunistically ratchets up the price or threatens to cut the flow to countries like Ukraine, which the company says is billions of dollars in arrears. The St. Petersburg party where the men embraced was hosted by Nord Stream, the company that oversaw construction of a pipeline that was built from Russia under the Baltic Sea to the German coast, bypassing Ukraine and Poland. Mr. Schröder has been chairman of the board of Nord Stream, a Swiss-registered company majority owned by Gazprom, since December 2005, taking his position just weeks after leaving the chancellorship. As such, he is one of many Germans profiting from business ties with Russia, where some 6,000 German companies have invested an estimated 20 billion euros, or about $27 billion. At the time he joined Nord Stream, Mr. Schröder was harshly criticized by conservatives in Ms. Merkel’s camp who have since become entwined in their own scandals centered on the closeness of business and political elites in Germany. Ronald Pofalla, then general secretary of Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said at the time that “Schröder doesn’t care about gas, for him it’s just a matter of money.” This past winter, Mr. Pofalla was the target of similar criticism for reportedly seeking to join the board of Deutsche Bahn, the partly state-run rail operator in Germany, for a salary in the 1 million euro range just two weeks after quitting the cabinet. Similarly, a young legislator from Ms. Merkel’s party, Philipp Missfelder, who weeks earlier had stepped down as special spokesman on relations with the United States, was revealed to have attended the party in St. Petersburg for Mr. Schröder, to party criticism and general puzzlement. For his part, Mr. Schröder was subjected to a fresh round of criticism across the political spectrum for his embrace of Mr. Putin. Katrin Göring-Eckardt, a leader of the Greens, called it a “dangerous” way to undermine efforts by the German government to contain the crisis in Ukraine. “Completely irresponsible,” said Andreas Schockenhoff, a legislator from Ms. Merkel’s bloc with deep knowledge of Russia. The hawkish foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, had a clipped response when asked about his fellow Social Democrat, Mr. Schröder. The ex-chancellor no longer held a government post, he noted, and was thus “free to decide when and where he celebrates his birthday or to attend receptions held in this name.” The criticism of Mr. Schröder prompted him to offer a defense of his actions in a lengthy interview with Stefan Aust, a journalist he knows well, that was published in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. In the interview, Mr. Schröder was characteristically defiant. “I have nothing to hide and I won’t bow to any pressure,” he said, lauding the “reliability” of the Russian president. Mr. Schröder, who through his office declined a subsequent interview with The New York Times, suggested that he had used the meeting to discuss the plight of four German military observers who were being held hostage by pro-Russian militants in Ukraine at the time. (They were freed five days later.) Yet most striking about the interview was Mr. Schröder’s insistence that neither his friendship with Mr. Putin nor his adoption of two Russian children constitute what the ex-chancellor called “the core of my relationship to Russia.” Rather, he said, it is history. “In World War II, we Germans were responsible for the deaths of 25 million people,” Mr. Schröder said. “For me, the reconciliation with Russia borders on a miracle.” He did not mention Ukraine’s suffering in World War II, however, arguing that German guilt for Nazi crimes suffuses the country’s dealings with Russia. Mr. Schröder recalled visiting with Mr. Putin the mass graves of hundreds of thousands who perished in the 872-day siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. Among them was Mr. Putin’s brother, Viktor, an infant during the siege. When reminded in the interview that he himself lost his father, who was killed in the war in Romania in 1944, Mr. Schröder replied: “Yes, that too. Putin’s brother died in an inhumane hunger blockade of Leningrad ordered by Hitler. And now Putin must hear that he is a disguised Nazi. That just isn’t right!”

Gerhard Schroder
Vladimir Putin
Germany
Russia


Despite Rocky Start, Rutgers in the Big Ten Is Still Seen as a Big Win

Abstract: In the three years since Rutgers announced that it would join the Big Ten, its sports teams have repeatedly made headlines, but mostly for the wrong reasons. There was the player-abuse scandal that cost the men’s basketball coach and the athletic director their jobs, and the embarrassing revelation that the coach’s replacement, a beloved former player, had not in fact graduated from the university, as he and Rutgers had claimed. Last month, there was the dismissal of six football players before the team’s second game for their suspected involvement in criminal activities and their coach’s three-game suspension for contacting a teacher and asking her to give a player extra-credit homework to keep him eligible. Yet a little more than a year after Rutgers, New Jersey’s flagship state university, joined the oldest and perhaps the wealthiest conference in college sports, it is difficult to find someone who thinks that it or the conference did not make the right decision. “It might be a fun read that the Big Ten has remorse, but it’s somewhat irrelevant,” Jim Delany, a New Jersey native who has been the Big Ten commissioner for 26 years, told The Chicago Tribune last month. (A spokesman said Delany was not available to comment this week.) “We hope the situation improves,” he added, “but we are glad that Rutgers is in the Big Ten.” The reasoning has a lot to do with geography. Ohio State Coach Urban Meyer, who will lead his top-ranked Buckeyes into Piscataway on Saturday night for a nationally televised game, said that New Jersey had “as good high school football as anywhere in the country, and obviously a ridiculous amount of TV sets.” Those TV sets may help the Big Ten negotiate a blockbuster new television deal in the next year, and they have already helped the Big Ten Network , according to its president, Mark Silverman. The network, which is now in more than 60 million homes nationally, added eight million subscribers in the New York metropolitan area in the past year, a period that coincided with Rutgers’s first year as an associate member of the Big Ten. It also experienced a 20 percent year-over-year rise in advertising revenue — more than twice what would have been expected without conference growth. Rutgers also has further raised the conference’s profile in the country’s media capital. Without Rutgers, it would be difficult to imagine the Big Ten staging its basketball championship tournament at Madison Square Garden, as it will in 2018. And while the change has been a money loser so far for Rutgers, which at $36.3 million last year had the largest subsidy to its athletic department of virtually any public college in Division I, as calculated by USA Today, sports may soon be able to pay their own way: In just a few years, Rutgers will begin receiving a full member’s cut of the Big Ten’s exploding media revenue. In this context, even the staunchest critics of big-time athletics at Rutgers have acknowledged the Big Ten’s sheer financial pull. “I thank God we joined the Big Ten,” said Mark Killingsworth, an economics professor who is chairman of the New Brunswick Faculty Council and a longtime critic of the university’s enmeshment in major athletics. “The situation, as terrible as it is, would be even worse if we were still in the A.A.C.” — the American Athletic Conference, where Rutgers spent one season — “or whatever is left of the Big East,” a conference that no longer sponsors football. For decades, Rutgers had an ambivalent attitude about raising its athletic profile. A 1970s president could pledge only to move sports into the “bigger time, not the big time.” The Janus-faced outlook was perhaps best exemplified by a stretch of the 1980 football schedule in which a game against top-ranked Alabama was sandwiched between ones against Cornell and William & Mary. As late as the 2000s, numerous campus voices bemoaned athletic department deficits and urged the university to back away from big-time sports. “There was a longtime feeling there that they wanted to be Princeton during the week and Penn State on the weekend,” said Robert Mulcahy, the Rutgers athletic director from 1998 to 2008, when he was fired amid accusations of financial misdeeds related to the athletic department’s pursuit of a top-flight football program. Image Jim Delany, left, commissioner of the Big Ten, at a Rutgers game last year. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times But the die has since been cast. A physical master plan for the university has called for more than a dozen new athletic buildings or renovations. On Saturday morning, Rutgers will break ground on its first new athletics construction in years, a $3.3 million indoor baseball and softball facility. And on Saturday evening, Rutgers (3-3) will host No. 1 Ohio State (7-0) at a sold-out High Point Solutions Stadium in ABC’s prime-time game. “For as long as I’ve been here,” said Robert L. Barchi, who took the office of university president in 2012, “moving into the Big Ten was a major objective.” The road has not been without bumps. Athletic department budget shortfalls in the two academic years leading up to 2014 totaled more than $83 million combined. The dismissals of the six football players after their arrests was an embarrassment, and Coach Kyle Flood’s actions in contacting a teacher about a player’s grade might have violated N.C.A.A. rules. “Any time we ratchet up the level of competition and we have to scramble in a year to make a transition that might take most places 10 years, I am concerned about that sort of thing happening,” Barchi said. A university financial plan has predicted that Rutgers will continue to run substantial deficits for several years, in part because — as with the other recent Big Ten additions Nebraska and Maryland — for its first six years of membership it will receive smaller conference payouts than longstanding members. That figure is about $9 million to $10 million a year, said Janine Purcaro, the athletic department’s chief financial officer. The other Big Ten universities received $25 million to $26 million, she said. (Leaving the A.A.C. also required Rutgers to pay an $11.5 million exit fee.) Both Killingsworth and a committee of the Rutgers University Senate have questioned whether even those projections underestimate rising expenses. But Rutgers will fully vest as a Big Ten member in 2022, and will then start receiving a conference and N.C.A.A. payout estimated at $35.5 million a year. But that figure, too, is conservative: The Big Ten is set to sign a new deal for national broadcast rights next year, which, combined with continued growth at the Big Ten Network, is expected to establish annual payouts exceeding $40 million for each program. Barchi, echoing a criticism he himself has made, said, “Right now, at Rutgers, athletics is siphoning dollars away from the academic mission.” He added: “That is why we have a plan to eradicate that imbalance. I am fully convinced that if we stay the course, that is what’s going to happen.” He also pointed to other, nonfinancial benefits, including a higher national profile and a place in a research consortium restricted to the Big Ten and the University of Chicago. “We constructed a group of universities that we felt were our peers or aspirational peers, and virtually every one of the Big Ten schools falls into one or another of those groups,” Barchi said, adding, “not just athletics, but academics.” A report published this year by the Rutgers University Senate’s budget and finance committee was skeptical. The notion that investing in athletics benefits academics, it said, “amounts to a suggestion that one can take funds away from academics, use those funds to increase spending on athletics, and then expect this to create substantial net benefits for academics.” Rudy Bell, a history professor who has been at Rutgers nearly 50 years, sounded a more optimistic note. “If we can use this to hoist up our academic strength, that would be valuable,” he said of Big Ten membership, suggesting that the university spend “the kind of money on the academic side that is now being spent on the athletic side.” But Bell, who has a football season ticket and planned to attend Saturday night’s game, added, “I cannot imagine anyone deciding the history department can run a $20 million deficit.”

College football
Big Ten Conference
College Sports
College basketball
Sports
Big Ten Network
Rutgers


Investor Eases Money Pressure on American Apparel

Abstract: American Apparel took another step away from a financial precipice this week when an investment firm bought a $10 million loan that had threatened to set off a string of defaults. The loan, made by the British private equity firm Lion Capital, included a provision that said the loan would be in default if American Apparel’s founder, Dov Charney, was no longer its chief executive. That loan was then tied to another, larger line of credit with Capital One, meaning that if the Lion loan was in default, the Capitol One loan could soon be as well. Mr. Charney was forced out as chief executive by American Apparel’s board in June. Since then, American Apparel and Lion Capital have been involved in an unusually public battle over the future of the loan, which carries an interest rate of 20 percent. The retailer has said that because Mr. Charney was never formally terminated — he was first suspended for a 30-day period, as his employment agreement required — the loan was not actually in default. Standard General, the investment firm that bought the loan, maintains the same, according to a regulatory filing made on Friday evening. Lion Capital insisted that the loan was in default and formally called it in this month. Shortly after he was forced out as the company’s leader, Mr. Charney partnered with Standard General to increase his stake in the company to 43 percent. In the process, he essentially signed away all his voting rights in favor of the investment firm, which was left in control of 44 percent of the company, including another small parcel of shares it bought independent of Mr. Charney. On July 9, Standard General, Mr. Charney and American Apparel entered into a $25 million agreement to remake the board and try to shore up the company’s finances while keeping manufacturing in the United States, for which the company is known. Though the agreement may buy the company some measure of stability, it poses a serious risk for Mr. Charney because it does not guarantee him any role at the company. His future, the agreement says, will rest on the outcome of a continuing investigation initiated by the board into Mr. Charney’s personal and professional conduct. Based on those results, members of the new board will make the final call on Mr. Charney’s role with American Apparel.


Merck Says Niacin Drug Combination Failed in Trial

Abstract: The drug maker Merck announced on Thursday that a combination of niacin and another medicine failed to protect against heart attacks and strokes in a large clinical trial, and that the company would no longer pursue approval of the combination drug in the United States. The trial, which followed more than 25,000 patients over four years, also found a statistically significant increase in the number of patients who suffered serious harm, although the company said those adverse events were not fatal. The patients studied were all taking statins, a class of drugs commonly used to lower bad cholesterol. The results are likely to further tarnish the reputation of niacin, a drug that is often prescribed to raise the levels of good cholesterol in patients at risk for heart disease but that was found not to prevent heart attacks in a government study last year. Merck’s drug, called Tredaptive, combined an extended-release version of niacin with laropiprant, a medicine intended to reduce facial flushing in patients, one of niacin’s more inconvenient side effects. Tredaptive is sold in about 40 countries, including in Europe, but it failed to win approval in 2008 in the United States. In a statement, Merck said it was recommending that doctors not start new patients on the drug. The company said it would work closely with regulatory agencies “to understand the results and determine next steps.” Although the study did not determine that the negative results were because of niacin, the conclusions will probably further call into question whether patients should continue to be prescribed long-acting niacin, which is most commonly sold in the United States as Niaspan, made by Abbott. Niacin is a type of B vitamin that is considered a drug when it is taken in higher doses. Last year, a study of more than 3,000 patients by the National Institutes of Health found that Niaspan offered no benefit over the use of statins alone. “The failure strongly suggests that niacin simply does not improve outcomes for patients,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, who was not involved in the Merck study. He said he would continue prescribing niacin to patients who were already on it and faring well, but would probably not prescribe it to new patients until he could see more details about Merck’s trial. Another cardiologist, Dr. James A. de Lemos, said he would now recommend to patients using niacin that they stop taking it. He said that the study poked another hole in the once-promising theory that raising HDL, or “good” cholesterol, would lower a patient’s risk of heart disease. “This is the death knell for niacin, for sure, but it really raises questions about the whole HDL hypothesis,” said Dr. de Lemos, a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who was also not involved in the study. Two experimental drugs that raised good cholesterol levels failed to prevent heart disease in earlier studies. Merck and Lilly are testing two other medicines that raise HDL more sharply than niacin, which works differently in the body. Pam Eisele, a spokeswoman for Merck, said the results from the Tredaptive study have no impact on the outlook of anacetrapib, Merck’s experimental drug. “We continue to believe that anacetrapib has the potential to be a significant innovation in lipid management,” she said. Dr. Nissen, who heads the trial for Lilly’s drug, also cautioned against drawing overly broad conclusions. Each of the HDL-raising drugs works differently, he said. “HDL is exceedingly complex,” he added. Sales of Niaspan were $634 million in the first three quarters of 2012, a 12 percent decrease over the same period in 2011, according to Abbott’s quarterly report. A spokeswoman for Abbott said the company was not familiar with the details of Merck’s study but that it would evaluate results as they became available. “Physicians are best placed to determine the appropriate use for the product as they know the needs of their individual patients,” said the spokeswoman, Tracy L. Sorrentino. Merck, whose shares fell more than 3.4 percent in Thursday trading, said sales of Tredaptive were about $13 million over the first three quarters of this year.

Niacin
Clinical Trials
Drugs (Pharmaceuticals)
Merck & Company Inc
Heart
Stroke


A New Look, and Label, for American Eagle Outfitters

Abstract: The teenage-fashion retailer American Eagle Outfitters is set to acquire the high-end men’s wear label Todd Snyder for $11 million in cash and stock, shifting away from the “fast fashion” wars that have upended the teenage apparel market, and aiming to gain a foothold with an older age group. The acquisition, to be announced on Tuesday, includes Todd Snyder’s Tailgate brand, a vintage collegiate sportswear line. American Eagle hopes to open as many as 200 Tailgate stores at universities nationwide, starting with Southeastern Conference and Big Ten colleges, and sell American Eagle jeans alongside Tailgate’s retro tees. “It’s really our type of look, the American styling,” said Jay Schottenstein, American Eagle’s chairman and interim chief executive. The retailer has been searching for a permanent chief since January 2014, when it abruptly fired Robert Hanson. It is a much-needed departure for American Eagle, which began as a leisure and outdoors brand in 1977 but has since catered to teenagers and college-age shoppers alongside rivals like Abercrombie & Fitch and American Apparel. For much of last year, American Eagle and the entire teenage apparel space appeared to be in free fall. To compete with the fast-fashion assault from retailers like H&M and Forever 21, American Eagle’s windows blared the largest bargains, its T-shirts for barely $10. American Eagle’s sales slumped 10 percent in the year’s first three months. A clash over strategy with Mr. Schottenstein was blamed for Mr. Hanson’s dismissal, adding to turmoil at the brand. Some rivals like Wet Seal and American Apparel were driven into bankruptcy. “We’d been trying to compete by screaming with the loudest promotions from the windows, having among the lowest price points on fleece and T-shirts,” said Chad Kessler, a former Abercrombie & Fitch executive who was named the brand’s global president in March. He added, “It wasn’t working.” Mr. Kessler, who joined American Eagle in February 2014, was determined to distance the brand from the disposable styles and rock-bottom pricing that had hurt the company’s bottom line. The brand closed unprofitable stores and overhauled its women’s T-shirts, developing a new spandex jersey fabric it calls “Soft and Sexy” and doubling some prices to almost $20 a shirt. It also started high-performance stretch denim lines for men and women, also raising prices to about $49 a pair. And it pared back its wide-ranging discounts, paying more attention to curating a coherent collection for each season. The Todd Snyder acquisition is another step away from a reliance on low prices and heavy discounting. Started by Mr. Snynder in 2011, the Savile Row-inspired men’s wear collection Todd Snyder New York, sold at the likes of Bergdorf Goodman, Ron Herman, Neiman Marcus and Barneys, is a world away from fast fashion. American Eagle will look to expand Mr. Snyder’s eponymous line, starting with a flagship store in New York — the label’s first independent store, Mr. Kessler said. (A Todd Snyder coat can cost $1,000.) Still, it is Todd Snyder’s Tailgate collegiate line that American Eagle sees as the centerpiece of its acquisition. Begun by Mr. Snyder from his father’s Huxley, Iowa, basement in 1997, Tailgate has garnered a cult following with its hip take on college fashion. On top of licensed college sport shirts, the brand’s sole brick-and-mortar store at the University of Iowa sells T-shirts featuring local college sports legends and logos of favorite local bars and restaurants. Mr. Kessler thinks that a keen local focus is scalable, and that young shoppers everywhere will warm to Tailgate’s local flavors. He envisions designers eventually doing careful research on as many as 200 college towns, identifying iconic heroes and hangouts in each. After eight quarters in negative territory, American Eagle is into its third consecutive quarter of sales growth. In the most recent quarter, sales at stores open at least a year surged 11 percent, driven by a 16 percent jump in women’s apparel. Profits and margins have rebounded. But American Eagle faces an even tougher retail landscape. H&M, Zara and Uniqlo are opening stores at a rapid pace, and a new entrant, the Irish brand Primark, is threatening to undercut even fast-fashion retailers with fire sale prices. Mr. Snyder will become a “sounding board” for American Eagle designs and marketing, widening the brand’s appeal beyond teenagers, Mr. Kessler said. His first call to action? Some old-school reinvention, he said. “It’s true that at the end of the day, people are buying jeans or buying T-shirts. But it’s like bottled water: How do you repackage water to make customers say, ‘Wow, I’m going to go buy that brand’s water?’ ” he said. “It’s the same thing in design, more so in apparel,” Mr. Kessler added. “You need to make it exciting and new so a customer’s going to want to buy your jeans as opposed to someone else’s. You can’t just be the same old, same old.”

American Eagle Outfitters
Todd Snyder
Fashion
Mergers and Acquisitions


Olympics Begin Under Cloud of Tragedy

Abstract: WHISTLER, BRITISH COLUMBIA — It is too early to start singing Woe Canada in earnest. Two weeks of competition remain in these far-from-wintry Olympics, ample time for the karma and weather patterns to shift. But it has been a soggy, deeply dispiriting start: one of postponed races, rain even in the mountains and, above all, death on the luge track. The Winter Games have had regular flurries of adversity and controversy through the years — from voter rejections to doping and corruption scandals — but genuine tragedy has been exceedingly rare. Then came Friday afternoon and the crash of the Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili during an official training run just hours before an opening ceremony that no longer seemed like quite as good a reason to clap one’s red mittens and whoop with national pride. But the Canadians still managed to party at the first indoor ceremony in Olympic history. The 82 delegations marched in just the same, with the loudest applause reserved for the Canadian and Georgian teams and for Wayne Gretzky, the ice hockey icon who predictably was selected as the final torch bearer and then less predictably was required to leave the arena and make an extended journey in a pickup truck in the drizzle to light the outdoor cauldron near the waterfront. It was not exactly enough to make anyone forget Li Ning’s spectacular roof run, torch in hand, at Beijing’s opening ceremony in 2008. But back under the roof before Gretzky’s strange odyssey, there were appropriate expressions of sympathy for Kumaritashvili from Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, and John Furlong, the chief executive officer of the Vancouver Organizing Committee. Other reactions seemed much less appropriate, above all the decision by the International Luge Federation to release a statement later that evening that essentially attributed Kumaritashvili’s deadly crash to pilot error and indicated that it was not due to “deficiencies in the track.” The federation then reopened that track for the men’s competition Saturday and proceeded to lower the start (and the speed), raise the walls near the area where Kumaritashvili was killed and pad the posts where his inert body eventually came to a halt after he had flown off the track when he lost control of his sled in the final curve. For a track with no deficiencies, it certainly warranted quite a few modifications, even if luge officials explained that the moves were actually intended to help sliders cope psychologically with the challenge of racing so soon after the death of a colleague. It did seem terribly, disrespectfully soon, and whatever conclusions emerge from official inquiries and any legal proceedings to come, it seems clear that an Olympian who makes a mistake in competition should never be presumed to be in a position to pay with his life. “It’s precisely up to the inquiry to determine what has happened, but I heard this on television, that this was because of human error,” said President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia. “And I believe that any human error should not lead to the death of an athlete.” In a sophisticated era of computer simulation in track design, worst-case scenarios should be accounted and planned and padded for. Yann Fricheteau, a French luge coach, summed up the feelings of many when he told French reporters, “You never should be able to fly off the track.” There were no serious incidents Saturday when the lugers did resume competing from the lower start and, Olympic stakes being high and competitors being normally self-absorbed, there was even some grumbling from the better men that the course, the fastest in the world, had now been made too accessible. Others were concerned with the bigger picture. “This is my last Olympics,” announced Rubén González of Argentina. “A few weeks ago I wouldn’t have said that. I wanted to keep going. Yesterday, it gave me perspective. There are other things to do in life. “People think that sliders are daredevils and risk takers. People shouldn’t think of us that way. We are analysts. We are like engineers and test pilots.” On Saturday, they were mourners, too, wearing black armbands and black bands on their helmets or, in the case of Levan Gureshidze of Georgia, skipping the competition altogether. But the mood, despite the low-hanging cloud cover that has wrapped the first phase of these Games in a shroud, was brighter elsewhere. The first gold medal went to Simon Ammann of Switzerland late on Saturday afternoon at the ski jump. When he had landed and set a new hill record, he screamed with primal delight. In all, the gold medals on the opening day of competition went to five different nations, none of which was the host nation. Canada does not own the podium yet, not even on Cypress Mountain, the slope on Vancouver’s North Shore where it has spent so many dollars and man hours schlepping in the snow and then trying to preserve it in recent weeks. Though there was plenty of mud and exposed grass elsewhere Saturday night, the mogul run was ready — or at least ready enough — for the women’s final. With a chill wind blowing wisps of fog across the top of the course and the ground cover looking more like the granular stuff you put in a snow cone than the stuff you race on for medals, Jennifer Heil of Canada took the lead on the final run, which was no great surprise considering that she was the defending Olympic champion and winner of her last four World Cup events. But there was still one competitor to go, Hannah Kearney of the United States, and Kearney churned through the mushy course, nailed both her jumps and giddily deprived Canada of the latest chance to end to its streak of never winning an event in a home Olympics. Those who held tickets for the men’s downhill Saturday in Whistler were forced to make other plans when the signature race of the Games was moved to Monday (if they’re lucky) and the rest of the early Alpine schedule reshuffled. The good news for Vancouverites is that their Olympics can only get better and sunnier from here.

Vancouver (British Columbia)
Olympic Games
Olympic Games (2010)