Mike Trout’s Numbers Add Up to Greatness at a Tender Age

Abstract: It is not that Mike Trout hit his 30th and 31st home runs Sunday. It is not that the second shot was a grand slam. It is not that the homers helped the Los Angeles Angels to a 13-7 victory over the Texas Rangers and kept them a game ahead of the Houston Astros in the American League West. It is that a fan in right field was holding a net labeled “Trout net,” and Trout’s slam landed directly in it. Image Trout acknowledged the fans after his grand slam against the Rangers on Sunday. Credit Kelvin Kuo/Associated Press After the game, Trout said he noticed the net, though he stopped short of saying he dropped the ball in it intentionally. Few would have doubted him if he had. Trout has again been little short of superhuman this season. His 31 homers and 75 runs in 97 games led the majors entering Monday, and he led the American League in slugging percentage at .632 and on-base plus slugging percentage at 1.038. He also leads the game in just about every advanced stat that accounts for everything a player does, such as wins above replacement. Trout’s 31 homers, 75 runs and 10 steals would be impressive numbers through September, let alone through July. Last year only Trout and Giancarlo Stanton of the Miami Marlins reached those totals for the entire season. And Trout’s Angels have 64 games to go for him to rack up bigger numbers. His season also includes a leadoff home run in the All-Star Game off Zack Greinke, and his second consecutive All-Star Most Valuable Player Award . Trout, 23, already has a league M.V.P. Award and two runner-up finishes. He ranks sixth in home runs before the age of 24 , with 129, behind the Hall of Famers Eddie Mathews, Mel Ott and Frank Robinson, plus Ken Griffey Jr., who is very likely to join the Hall next year, and Alex Rodriguez, who would be a Hall shoo-in if not for his steroid use. Trout also ranks in the top 10 before age 24 in on-base percentage, slugging percentage and walks, as well as sacrifice flies and hit by pitch. He turns 24 on Aug. 7, so there are still a few days for him to move up the charts. Trout and Albert Pujols (29 homers) are the big names on the Angels, who have the fifth-best record in baseball. But the team may actually be better on the other side of the ball, having given up the second-fewest runs (362) in the league, after the Kansas City Royals. Hector Santiago is 7-4 with a 2.43 E.R.A., and Andrew Heaney, 24, who was acquired in the off-season, is 5-0 with a 1.79 E.R.A. in six starts. Trout’s impressive résumé includes only one playoff appearance. Last season, his team was swept by the Royals, and Trout was 1 for 12. Trout and Angels fans will expect more this year.

Baseball
Mike Trout
Hector Santiago
Giancarlo Stanton
Andrew Heaney
Ken Griffey Jr
Mel Ott
Los Angeles Angels


Foul Ball Leaves Wright Limping; Hobbled Youkilis Is Out

Abstract: MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — David Wright fouled a ball off his left foot in the first inning Wednesday night, hopped around the batter’s box and looked to be in a lot of pain. The looks were not deceiving as Wright later explained that driving the ball into his big toe caused significant discomfort. When Wright grounded out to end the inning, he jogged to first base. When Wright moved across the diamond to play third base, he limped. Before the second inning started, Wright put his hands on his knees and lowered his head. Wright’s body language seemingly begged for someone to examine him or remove him from the game. The Unites States, which is losing players to injuries about as often as it plays games, did not send a trainer on to the field to check on Wright. Maybe Manager Davey Johnson was concerned that Wright would be painfully honest about how much pain he felt in his aching toe. Because the Americans had only one reserve player in catcher Brian McCann, Wright knew that he had to deal with the pain. He did, barely. Wright played all nine innings with a cracked toenail as Venezuela tamed the United States , 10-6, in the World Baseball Classic at Dolphin Stadium. “There is a difference between being hurt and being banged up,” Wright said. “This is banged up.” Less than five minutes after the Americans lost, Wright, who was still wearing his uniform, walked about 150 feet from the clubhouse to an X-Ray room. The X-Rays were negative. Wright had a bruised toe and a cracked nail, but he stressed that he would not miss any games. The United States plays Sunday, and Venezuela plays Saturday. Their opponents are not yet determined. Before getting the X-Ray results, Wright acknowledged that he wondered if he had broken his toe. If Wright had done the same thing in spring training, he said that he probably would have left the game. But, if Wright had done it during the regular season, he said that he would have continued playing. The Mets surely would have been more assertive in examining Wright after he fouled the ball off his foot. Johnson first asked Wright how he was feeling when Wright returned to the dugout in the second. Then Wright said Johnson asked him every inning after that. “I felt good enough to stay out there,” Wright said. If the United States ’ bench was not so thin, Johnson said that he would have replaced Wright. “Well, under normal circumstances, I’d have taken him out,” Johnson said. “I asked him how he is doing. I asked him. We’re not going to play somebody out of position. He basically tore off the toenail on his left foot, so he’s not a happy camper right now.” On a day where Kevin Youkilis (ankle injury) became the fourth player to leave the American team in the second round because of an injury, Wright almost made the foursome a quintet. Wright joked that the United States players had “to stop getting hurt.” But, of course, the Mets would not think it were funny if Wright continued playing with a damaged toe so he did not put Johnson in a compromising position. No manager wants to use his only backup catcher, but Johnson had lineup options if he wanted to protect Wright. Johnson could have moved Chris Iannetta to third and used McCann at catcher. Wright never made Johnson feel that was necessary. “I thought the best thing would be to go out there and suck it up,” Wright said. The scene of an injured Wright moving gingerly around the field contrasted with the scene from Tuesday. The first American players to reach a giddy Wright and maul him, in a celebratory way, were Derek Jeter and Youkilis. Shane Victorino was a step behind them. It was a frantic scene after Wright’s two-run single catapulted the United States to a 6-5 win over Puerto Rico . So, one of the best players on the Mets was engulfed by the most popular player on the Yankees, the most versatile player on the Boston Red Sox and the grittiest player on the Philadelphia Phillies. The enemies were teammates on a memorable night, rolling around in the infield dirt. The Americans have been hurt by injuries and by disinterest, some from fans and some from players, during the Classic. But tournament officials should use the picture of Wright buried in the red, white and blue uniforms of players who are normally his adversaries as a recruiting tool. “If you can’t get excited about last night’s game and what we were able to accomplish,” Wright said, “you don’t enjoy the game of baseball.” Wright is a dream player for the executives who market the Classic because he is a respected player who has been extremely vocal about how much he wants to compete in the event. When Wright was asked what he would tell players about the Classic, he quickly said, “You got to do it.” If the 30 general managers were privately asked if their players should play in the Classic, all 30 would undoubtedly say they would rather have them abstain. The general managers need healthy players to have their strongest teams and to maintain their job security. No triumphant picture featuring Wright with some of his rivals is going to eliminate the possibility of injuries. Still, Wright said that the players on the American team were the players who “really, really want to be here.” Wright has said he wanted to return for the Classic in 2013. “If we had a sign up sheet right now, you’d have 28 guys in there who are banged up, injured or not, that would sign up again,” Wright said. “And I would be the first one on that list.” While Wright had a routinely solid season with the Mets by hitting 33 homers, driving in 124 runs and batting .302, he was also criticized for not producing in critical situations. Wright, who hit .243 with men in scoring position, said Tuesday’s at-bat will contribute to his remaining relaxed in important at-bats this season. “We’re talking about being up with the game on the line,” Wright said. “When you wear those three letters across the front your chest, you have quite a bit of pressure and weight on your shoulders. I think that can only help.” Before Wright helped the United States defeat Puerto Rico in dramatic fashion, Wright received a text message from Alex Rodriguez. Wright said that Rodriguez, who is rehabilitating from hip surgery in Colorado, wished Wright, another New York third baseman, luck. After the game, Wright received an avalanche of e-mails and text messages from almost everyone except Rodriguez. The one that meant the most came from Daniel, Wright’s 17-year-old brother. “My brother sent me a text that said, ‘This is, by far, the coolest thing you’ve ever done,’” Wright said. One night later, Wright probably impressed his little brother again. He helped a depleted team by playing nine innings with a broken toenail. The cool older brother played with a lot of pain.


A Field of Houses in Georgia Doesn’t Fulfill Dreams of Going Home

Abstract: SHAVSHVEBI, Georgia — Lyuba Valiyeva, 74, wrapped a wool scarf around her head and ventured across the highway to examine more closely the extraordinary things happening on the plain near the South Ossetian border. Houses, hundreds of them, were rising from the cropland. Utility poles were being tipped into holes and strung with black cable. The hammering continued late into the night, and every morning, the rows of identical red-roofed houses extended a little farther. There was, she concluded, not even a small difference between one house and the next; the only thing she could compare it to was a poultry incubator. And the incubator was already twice the size of Shavshvebi. “What are they going to call it? Lower Shavshvebi?” she asked, and, with genuine curiosity, added, “Will they be able to find enough refugees?” Two months after the war in South Ossetia , Georgian leaders are adamant that the separatist enclave must be returned to Georgia. But they are also well on the way to building 7,000 winterized houses, at a speed that has shocked international humanitarian aid workers, for refugees who will not be able to return home. Some 31,000 people are in that category, and President Mikheil Saakashvili has promised that each of them will have a new home by Dec. 15. It is an impressive effort, especially for a country that has never grappled with the 220,000 refugees who fled Abkhazia after a war in the early 1990s. A large population of displaced people, living in constant hope of returning home, poses thorny problems for a society. But it can also be used as a bargaining chip, demonstrating the urgency of return. The swift building project “is an acknowledgment of reality,” said Margaret Vikki, the Georgia country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council. For 15 years after the Abkhaz war, she said, “they never stopped talking about return. There was always rhetoric about ‘Next spring in Abkhazia.’ This has completely stopped.” It was a question that troubled the workers — many of them refugees themselves — as they troweled cement onto the cinderblock walls of the houses. Each had a different answer for how long refugees would live in the houses they were building, but they counted it in months, not years. “We will return when the Russians leave. That will happen when we join NATO,” said Makhmoud Akatouri, 40, who lost 11 head of cattle and 15 bee colonies when Russians moved into South Ossetia. The stall he built for the cattle, he grumbled, was the size of one of the new houses. On a nearby worksite, Zakro Kvitsinadze was thinking the same thing. “We like to have big houses. Now we will have to live in a small house,” he said. But he brightened when he realized he was talking to an American. “Are you going to help us get rid of the Russians?” he asked. When compared with state housing programs used in other emergencies — Hurricane Katrina comes to mind — the Georgian building program is swift and bureaucracy-free. Teams of local builders said they would receive 3,500 lari, or about $2,500, for each house completed to government specifications. They are rushing to finish as many as possible, and some said they were working through the night. Peter Nikolaus, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative in Georgia, called it “a very, very swift and a very decisive move.” His sole criticism, he said, was that the Georgian authorities did not let him and other humanitarian officials know about the effort. “I felt puzzled,” he said. “I realized that the building had already started and almost been completed, and nobody informed us.” The handling of this refugee population offers a stark contrast with what happened 15 years ago, when hundreds of thousands of people fled fighting in the separatist enclave Abkhazia. The government in Tbilisi in those days, led by Eduard Shevardnadze, never publicly acknowledged that the refugees would have to build new lives elsewhere. Today, 45 percent of that initial group still lives in hotels and dormitories, said Julia Kharashvili of the IDP Women Association, an advocacy group for the internally displaced. At a news conference in Brussels on Wednesday, Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze said that Georgia would spend about $700 million to improve conditions for both the old and new waves of refugees. He said the money would come from the approximately $4.5 billion in pledged international aid for that purpose. At the Shavshvebi work site, a group of deeply tanned workers who had been pushed out of Abkhazia showed little interest in government aid programs. Vakhtang Sukhadze, 63, dreamily described his house in Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, which he last saw 16 years ago, and derided the new structures as “boxes.” He has a six-room apartment in Gori, near the South Ossetian border, he said, but he could be packed in a matter of hours if he heard that he could go back to Sukhumi. “The swallow,” he said, “makes his nest where he flies.” Taking a break by the slate-gray foundation, Mirabi Atskhanorahsvili squinted across the flatland at the ridge of hills that rose about two miles in the distance, separating the valley from Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. The real danger, he said, emanated from the hills, where the Ossetians were “uncivilized,” not from the Ossetians from the valley like the ones in Shavshvebi. But as he and his crew put the finishing touches on one house and started on the next, identical one, their minds wandered: What if the radicalism spreads into the valley? What if Russian troops move up to the road and seize the new settlement as soon as it is built? Will they just start over with new rows of houses in another place? “There are open fields over there,” he said, pointing, “in case it happens.”

South Ossetia (Georgian Republic)
Immigration and Refugees
Housing


Sexuality as Defense Puzzles Judge

Abstract: A judge cast doubts yesterday on a defense raised by one of the young men accused of chasing a gay man to his death in traffic on the Belt Parkway last year. The defendant, Anthony Fortunato, 21, is charged with murder as a hate crime, but he has claimed that he, too, is gay. Mr. Fortunato and a co-defendant are on trial in the killing of Michael J. Sandy, 29, a gay man who was lured from his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a lot in Sheepshead Bay on Oct. 8, 2006. Mr. Sandy was called to the rendezvous through online chats at a Web site for gay men. When he arrived at the secluded lot, the authorities say, he was beaten and chased onto the Belt Parkway, where he was struck by a car. He died five days later. On the second day of the trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court yesterday, Judge Jill Konviser-Levine questioned that defense. “I’m still curious as to the relevance of your client’s sexuality,” the judge said to Mr. Fortunato’s lawyer. Still, she did not forbid him from presenting evidence of his client’s sexuality. In response, the defense lawyer, Gerald J. Di Chiara, elaborated on his theory that the attack was part of a confused effort to experiment with homosexuality. Mr. Di Chiara had revealed his client’s sexual orientation in his opening statement on Monday. “If he happens to be gay,” Mr. Di Chiara told the judge yesterday, “I think it’s more likely that he’s not targeting gay people.” Mr. Di Chiara sought to introduce online screen names used on his client’s computer and a suicide attempt by Mr. Fortunato before the attack as evidence of his state of mind. Judge Konviser-Levine precluded the evidence of a suicide attempt, telling Mr. Di Chiara it was not relevant. She allowed Mr. Di Chiara to seek to introduce evidence of the screen names. Mr. Di Chiara said he was not seeking sympathy for his client, but planned to use evidence of his state of mind to prove that he was capable of strange behavior.

Sandy Michael J
Hate Crimes
Homosexuality


Leftist Parties in New York Have New Appeal

Abstract: You can still be a card-carrying Communist in New York, but these days committed Communists usually register online. “We actually have a card, but we don’t make a big deal of it,” said Sam Webb, the national chairman of the Communist Party U.S.A. The Socialist Party U.S.A. does distribute red cards to members willing to “subscribe to the principles” of the party, but another leftist group, the Democratic Socialists of America, prefers online registration, with members using a virtual shopping cart to pay yearly dues of about $60 by credit card — Marx be damned. In some ways, the Left remains locked in place. Its three major national parties are still confined to cramped Manhattan offices that are plastered with gaudy posters and honeycombed with pamphlets for distribution and envelopes for stuffing. But in other ways the landscape has changed significantly. All three parties are finding the Internet to be a fruitful recruiting tool and believe their message has been given a fresh, beguiling appeal by the failures of capitalist symbols like Lehman Brothers and by debacles like the billions of dollars in securities tied to subprime mortgages. “The economic crisis of 2008 gave us new life,” said Billy Wharton, a co-chairman of the Socialist Party, who grew enamored of socialism while battling tuition increases as a student at the College of Staten Island. “We have ideas for resolving the economic crisis, and people began to listen to them.” Rather than trumpeting membership numbers, the parties, embracing the norms of the digital era, prefer to discuss the number of hits on their Web sites and Facebook pages. And philosophically, they take a kind of I-told-you-so schadenfreude in statistics that indicate a growing gap between the rich and the poor, with top chief executives now making 275 times as much as the average proletarian. Still, it is hard to imagine that the parties have inherited a revolutionary tradition once so popular that in the 1932 presidential election, Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate, garnered 884,000 votes and William Z. Foster, the Communist candidate, had over 100,000. But then again, after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of socialist republics in Eastern Europe, some people may be surprised to learn that these parties are still around. All three have greatly shrunk from their heydays. The Socialist Party has about 1,000 members nationally. The Communists claim 2,000. The Democratic Socialists, which for many years included luminaries like Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, have about 6,000. “It’s not easy to make political progress outside the two-party structure because people don’t want to waste their votes,” said Frank Llewellyn, 62, the national director of the Democratic Socialists, who became a socialist as a result of the civil rights and antiwar movements. Rather than battling for power through elections, all three parties try to sway the national conversation through coalitions with labor unions and other mainstream organizations. Both socialist groups turned out at City Hall this month to protest budget cuts, at a rally that was largely organized by the unions. But on matters of principle, the leftist parties diverge. All three oppose President Obama’s health care program, seeing it as a giveaway to insurance companies and preferring either a single-payer government plan or a socialized system like that of Britain, where doctors work for the government. The Socialists sometimes do have candidates who run in states where the rules for getting on the ballot are not too onerous; Greg Pason, the national secretary, ran for governor of New Jersey in 2009. But the Democratic Socialists see that effort as futile and prefer endorsements; they supported David N. Dinkins and Ruth W. Messinger in their mayoral bids in New York City. The parties’ enduring character is obvious in visits to their offices. The Socialist Party is housed in a tumbledown building on Lafayette Street known informally as the “Peace Pentagon” or the A. J. Muste building, not because the name approximates its mildewed atmosphere but because Mr. Muste was a benefactor of the peace groups that the building houses. The Democratic Socialists even have a foothold on Wall Street, with cluttered offices in a building on Maiden Lane. It is not because Wall Street has suddenly adopted a philosophy of “to each according to his own needs.” “It’s cheap,” Mr. Llewellyn explained. “This is an area of the city where you get the best deals.” The Communists even own the means of production — they lease out their eight-story building on West 23rd Street to other left-wing organizations. The party has the most decorous space, having redesigned its office with glass walls and tall windows. “We’re not up to some nefarious business we have to hide from the American government,” said Libero Della Piana, 38, the party’s communications director. Physical space matters less these days than virtual space. All three groups have lively Web sites that flaunt their philosophies and histories. Mr. Della Piana, the child of an Italian anarchist, boasts that the Communists’ news site has 25,000 unique visitors a week; before it stopped publishing in the late 1960s, its newspaper, The Daily Worker, was read by just 5,000 subscribers. In 2010, he said, 700 prospective members applied through the Web site. Recent disclosures of capitalist excesses have given the parties a second wind after the collapse of the Soviet Union suggested the bankruptcy of collectivist philosophy. Mr. Llewellyn said that since 2007 his party’s membership had increased by 50 percent, to 6,000. “People see the consequences of unregulated markets, greed, a lack of checks on the power of the private flow of capital to drive the economy and undermine jobs,” Mr. Llewellyn said. Mr. Webb, who joined the Communists in the 1970s, likes to emphasize the party’s rich history, including the fight against McCarthyism and the volunteers who helped the Spanish Republicans battle the Fascists, rather than more unpleasant episodes like the case of the American Communist Julius Rosenberg, who spied for the Soviet Union. Mr. Della Piana says the Soviet Union’s dissolution freed the party to be more ideological because “no one could ever say again we were puppets.” “We have a whole generation of young people attracted to the idea of communism without the baggage of the cold war,” he said. After declining to 250 members in 1980, the Socialist Party’s membership has quadrupled, Mr. Wharton said. He was even asked to appear on a Fox affiliate when conservatives raised suspicions that Mr. Obama was a socialist. “They thought I’d go on and on and actually support the policies of President Obama,” said Mr. Wharton, 42, a General Educational Development, or G.E.D., teacher in Brooklyn. “The question was ‘Is he a socialist?’ and my answer was ‘I’m not sure he’s even a liberal.’ I called him a hedge-fund Democrat.” None of the parties view their existence as futile — immersing themselves in everyday local battles, they believe, will spread their influence. “Socialism won’t come to this country until tens of millions decide capitalism doesn’t work for them,” Mr. Webb said. “If you’re a revolutionary, if you’re a socialist, you have to have patience.”

New York State
Politics and Government
Communist Party U.S.A.
Socialist Party U.S.A.
Democratic Socialists of America
Socialism (Theory and Philosophy)
Communism (Theory and Philosophy)


Iran Sees Rise of Islamic Hard-Liners in Arab Lands

Abstract: TEHRAN — Hopeful that the protests sweeping Arab lands may create an opening for hard-line Islamic forces, conservatives in Iran are taking deep satisfaction in the events in Tunisia , Egypt and Yemen, where secular leaders have faced large-scale uprisings. While the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confronted its own popular uprising two years ago — and successfully suppressed it — conservatives in Iran said they saw little similarity between those events and the Arab revolts, and instead likened the recent upheavals to Iran’s own 1979 Islamic revolution. “In my opinion, the Islamic Republic of Iran should see these events without exception in a positive light,” said Mohammad-Javad Larijani, secretary general of the Iranian High Council for Human Rights and one of the most outspoken figures among Iran’s traditional conservatives. He made it clear that he hoped that the “anti-Islamic” government of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted in Tunisia, would be replaced by a “people’s government,” meaning one in which conservative Islamic forces would gain the upper hand, as they did when Iranian people overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, establishing a quasi-theocracy. On the other side are the United States and France, he said, who are “doing everything they can to ride the wave and prevent the people from establishing the regime that they desire.” “I am more optimistic about Egypt,” Mr. Larijani said in comments published Friday on the Web site Khabar Online , which is closely linked to his brother, Ali Larijani, the Parliament speaker. “There, Muslims are more active in political agitation and, God willing, they will establish the regime that they want,” Mohammad-Javad Larijani said. Some here have even echoed the pan-Islamic rhetoric of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “Today, as a result of the gifts of the Islamic revolution in Iran, freedom-loving Islamic peoples such as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and nearby Arab countries are standing up to their oppressive governments,” said a leading hard-line cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is believed to have influence with President Ahmadinejad. In comments published Friday on the Web site of the semiofficial news agency ISNA, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, who favors a political system in which elections merely endorse “divinely chosen” clerical leaders, congratulated the people of Tunisia and Egypt, stating that they had acted “based on the principles” of Iran’s Islamic revolution. Meanwhile, the leaders of Iran’s “green” opposition movement, which led large street protests here two years ago after a disputed election, have so far issued no statement on the events in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. While foreign commentators have tried to draw comparisons and assess differences between the overthrow of Mr. Ben Ali’s government in Tunisia, many here have found such comparisons strained and unconvincing. “No one can compare Arab and Iranian society with each other,” said a former reformist journalist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid drawing the attention of the security services.

Iran
Larijani Mohammad-Javad
Egypt
Tunisia


Oracle Growth Plans Worry Rivals and Customers

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Each year, Oracle ’s presence looms over this city for a week, during the company’s Open World customer conference. About 41,000 people arrived this week to discuss business software in fine detail and talk over beers. Stretches of downtown streets closed and gave way to makeshift tents housing coffee stands, bars, Lego play areas and candy buffets. But Oracle’s annual takeover of San Francisco pales against its larger ambitions — to supply just about all the technology, software and hardware, that businesses might need. This sweeping agenda has rattled the nerves of customers, who fear that Oracle has its own best interests, not theirs, at heart. The worry is that instead of saving money, customers will end up paying more over the long term, and that Oracle, already known for its aggressive tactics, will use its strong position in software to gain even more leverage over a larger array of products. Companies have long used Oracle’s software to keep track of their most prized information. For Oracle, this resulted in sales of $26.8 billion last year and hints of an annual revenue goal of $100 billion. Over the last five years, Oracle has acquired a staggering 66 companies, most of which were software makers that provided expertise in niche areas. This year, it bought Sun Microsystems, a hardware maker, signaling its intention to dominate the data centers of businesses by controlling more of their technology purchases. It is a prospect that its traditional partners and, more important, its customers, find unnerving. “It’s freaking terrifying for some people,” said Jason Carey, a database software developer for a credit services company. Maureen Miller, who oversees technology infrastructure work for the National Science Foundation, put it this way: “We are becoming an all-Oracle shop, but not by choice. They bought every company we deal with. And we don’t tend to want to put all of our eggs in one basket.” Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, argued that the company’s new strategy would benefit customers. “If you want to go faster and you want a system that is more reliable, you have to be willing to spend less,” he said in his opening pitch at this week’s event, while extolling the virtues of linking hardware and software. But customers are skeptical, and pushing back. Oracle built its business by dominating the database market, providing the central repositories of crucial information that businesses must maintain and use to complete transactions. This has given it an unrivaled position of power when dealing with customers. Capitalizing on such an edge, Oracle’s sales representatives have earned a fearsome reputation as hard-line negotiators determined to squeeze customers. But through its acquisition spree, Oracle moved well beyond the database and into business software, buying up the important products that companies use to keep track of their technology infrastructure, employees, sales, inventory and customers. With Sun, Oracle has found a way to sell customers hardware bundled with all that software in a fashion similar to that of its main database rival, I.B.M. Oracle executives say they can build better, faster, cheaper products this way by engineering complete systems rather than requiring customers to cobble together the parts. It is akin to the Apple model of limiting choice and controlling the crucial pieces in a computer, as opposed to the PC model, where the Windows software from Microsoft can run on hundreds of different machines. Later this year, Oracle also plans to give select customers access to a product suite called Fusion. This arrives after five years of work and will unite many of the products Oracle has acquired into a single software platform — one that will combine functions found in rival products from companies like SAP, I.B.M., Microsoft and Salesforce.com . But customers are objecting to Oracle’s moves. For example, some of Sun’s largest former customers consist of the large Wall Street players, and they pushed back this year when Oracle moved to limit their choices around the Sun technology. Oracle ultimately gave in to their pleas, reaffirming deals that would let Hewlett-Packard and Dell offer prized Sun software on their hardware. “Customers will always gripe about giving too much control to any one company,” said Israel Hernandez, director of software research at Barclays Capital. Like it or not, many of the largest technology companies — H.P., I.B.M., Cisco Systems and Oracle — have made their data center conquest plans clear. Oracle now competes directly with its partners H.P. and Dell, as does Cisco, the networking specialist, through its move into computer servers. Meanwhile, H.P., once one of Cisco’s closest allies, has begun a major assault in the networking arena. “We will see more concentration because that’s where the marketing is going,” Mr. Hernandez said. At least Oracle has the courtesy to assuage customer’s nerves for one week through its Open World largess. The downtown tents covering parts of Howard and Mason Streets house alcohol-soaked evenings sponsored by Fujitsu, fully stocked candy bars and Lego playpens where people win prizes from Google for interesting constructions. People also dine inside the tents on 59,000 lunches said to have an eco-friendly touch with 60 percent of the food coming from within 100 miles of the city. Just outside the tents, show attendees can pick up a Services Serum smoothie at the Dell-sponsored juice bar and then relax on white leather lounges. Or people can look past the white-gloved guards to sneak a peek at the America’s Cup trophy that Mr. Ellison won this year. But the main party will take place on Wednesday night, when Oracle will bus people to a series of concerts held on Treasure Island, which sits between San Francisco and Oakland. The headlining acts include the Black Eyed Peas, Don Henley and the Steve Miller Band. Six acts will perform on two stages surrounded by amusement rides, four laser systems, 150,000 cocktail napkins, mounds of food and 12 searchlights beaming into the sky. Typically, a few brave female souls will dance near the music stages, while hundreds of male database gurus sip free drinks and ogle. “I don’t know if any of the customers or the nerds that show up care that much about the fancy production,” said Christine Stamper, who paid $1,800 to attend the conference and runs her own software consulting business in Portland, Ore. “It’s a little goofy.” Ms. Stamper said she hoped to learn the latest and greatest about Oracle’s products. “That they have stayed healthy and grown has meant that I could make an entire career out of this,” she said. This month, Oracle hired Mark V. Hurd, the former chief executive of H.P., as a co-president. Analysts viewed the hiring as a positive for Oracle as it looks to expand. At H.P., Mr. Hurd oversaw the largest computer server business around and ran the world’s largest technology company. “As Oracle continues to grow, we need people experienced in operating a $100 billion business,” noted Safra A. Catz, Oracle’s other co-president, at the time of Mr. Hurd’s hiring. The $100 billion total would put Oracle in the same class as H.P. and I.B.M. “I read that statement as a signal that Oracle intends to get aggressive and pursue growth,” Mr. Hernandez said. “It implies a step up in mergers and acquisitions.” Such talk only makes already weary Oracle customers more anxious. And San Francisco officials must wonder if the city could survive the demands of an Oracle four times its current size.

Oracle Corp
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Computers and the Internet
Enterprise Computing


Torre Says Yankees’ Offer Showed Lack of Trust

Abstract: RYE BROOK, N.Y., Oct. 19 — His duties now include cleaning the garage, shopping for groceries and cooking dinner. With no job lined up for next summer, Joe Torre said he may see the major horse races or show up at Wimbledon. His charitable work will continue. But Torre’s itinerary, in his new life as the former manager of the Yankees , does not include a trip to Yankee Stadium. His personal assistant will pack up his photos and books and cigars. “I walked out of there, and I’m not going back,” Torre said Friday. “I just leave the memories.” Torre rejected the Yankees’ contract offer on Thursday, but in a news conference Friday at the Hilton Rye Town, he said he felt rejected by them. The wound is fresh, and Torre could not even say if he would throw out a ceremonial first pitch sometime after the Yankees open their new ballpark in 2009. “If somebody wants you to do a job, and it takes them two weeks to figure out, yeah, ‘I guess we should do this,’ you’re a little suspicious,” Torre said, adding later, “If somebody wanted me to manage here, I’d be managing here.” Torre acknowledged that the $5 million the Yankees offered him was generous. But he said he felt insulted by the framework of the deal, which was heavily tied to incentives and not open to negotiation. In a meeting Thursday in Tampa, Fla., the Yankees offered one year and Torre intimated that he wanted two. A team that spends lavishly for players was unwilling to give a second year to Torre, who reached the postseason in each of his 12 seasons but had not won a World Series in either of his last two contracts. The structure of the Yankees’ proposal rewarded Torre with a $1 million bonus for each postseason round the team would achieve in 2008. But if he did not reach the World Series, he would not have exceeded this season’s $7.5 million salary. “The fact that somebody is reducing your salary is telling me they’re not satisfied with what you’re doing,” Torre said. “I think it was just the way it was offered, more so than the numbers involved. Two years would have opened the door to have more discussions, and it never happened.” Torre said he would leave it to reporters to interpret whether the Yankees made him an offer they knew he would turn down. In a meeting that included the team’s principal owner, George Steinbrenner ; his sons, Hank and Hal; his son-in-law, Felix Lopez; Randy Levine, the team president; General Manager Brian Cashman; and Lonn Trost, the chief operating officer, Torre said he sensed that only one or two people wanted him back. One supporter, Torre said, was Cashman, who talked Steinbrenner out of firing him after the Yankees’ 2006 playoff loss. Cashman was less vocal in his support this time, but he said he was not the only person who hoped Torre would accept. “Everybody in that room wanted him back; I have to disagree with him there,” Cashman said Friday night. “Joe knows I’m an ally because there’s a bond there. But I’ve got to speak for everybody else in the room, and they did want him back, too.” As Steinbrenner cedes control to his sons, he is more intent on seeking consensus for major moves. Levine said all of the executives wanted Torre back. “Every single one of us made that offer with the hope that he would return,” Levine said. “We were all disappointed that he did not accept it. Reasonable people can differ.” Asked why the Yankees would not negotiate, Cashman said there were pressure points for both sides that made the deal unworkable. “It’s just complicated, given the dollars,” Cashman said. This was not the first time the Yankees had talked about a new contract for Torre. Early in spring training, Torre indicated he would be willing to accept a one-year contract extension. Steve Swindal, who was then Steinbrenner’s son-in-law, said a pay cut would be mandatory, but in any case, the Yankees wanted to wait until the season was over. After a third consecutive first-round knockout, they would not give Torre the kind of deal he got last time, after winning six pennants in eight seasons. The new offer would have kept Torre as the majors’ highest-paid manager, and while Torre bristled at the idea of incentives, ownership saw them as a way for him to exceed his 2007 salary. Cashman said the incentive package would probably not be part of a new manager’s contract. Torre said Cashman told him about the offer on Wednesday night and warned that the Yankees were unlikely to adjust it. But Torre said he wanted to fly to Tampa anyway. Cashman flew home on Wednesday and flew back with Torre on Thursday. On the flight, Torre said, Cashman asked him, “Are you going down to make a deal or to say goodbye?” Torre said he did not know. The meeting was brief — 20 minutes, Torre said — and although Steinbrenner was there, it was his younger son, Hal, who presented the offer and the rationale. Torre had incentives built into the contract he signed after the 2001 World Series, but he disputed the idea that he needed financial motivation to win in the postseason. “I’ve been there for 12 years and I didn’t think motivation was needed,” Torre said. “I just didn’t think it was the right thing for me, and I didn’t think it was the right thing for my players. Any pressure that was caused by thinking the manager’s going to lose his job, I didn’t think we needed.” In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Levine said the Yankees believed it was “important to motivate people, as most people in everyday life have to be, based on performance.” Levine is responsible for negotiating the Yankees’ major contracts, and Torre had little to say about their relationship. Torre said that, besides Cashman, he had little backing among the Yankees’ hierarchy. “If something goes wrong, I understand a lot of questions are going to be asked,” Torre said. “But I’d like to believe the support should come from the organization that, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’ It’s not the money that is going to be the determining factor. It’s just going to be the commitment and trust — because you can’t have one without the other — to manage the ball club.” Then Torre thanked Steinbrenner for trusting him to manage his team for 12 years. It is Steinbrenner’s team, after all, and in winning more games for it than any manager besides Joe McCarthy, Torre is now an important part of its past. Torre had played for each of the three teams he managed before Steinbrenner hired him, but he never played for the Yankees. “I still feel very much like a visitor to this whole organization,” he said. Now Torre is a visitor again, officially, a proud and wounded one with no plans to stop by anytime soon.

Baseball
New York Yankees
Torre Joe
Steinbrenner George M 3d


Concerns Up and Down the Food Chain

Abstract: BRETON ISLAND, La. — As the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon spreads across the Gulf of Mexico, environmentalists and government officials have been working frantically to protect shoreline habitat like this island in the Breton National Wildlife Refuge , eight miles off the coast of Louisiana. Breton Island, with its hundreds of nesting birds, has been protected by orange booms, as have many other areas of delicate estuaries and wetlands. But biologists are increasingly alarmed for wildlife offshore, where the damage from a spill can be invisible but still deadly. And they caution that because of the fluidity between onshore and offshore marine communities, the harm taking place deep at sea will come back to haunt the shallows, whether or not they are directly hit by the slick. The gulf’s deeper water harbors 10 species of threatened sharks, 6 species of endangered turtles, manatees, whales and innumerable fish. It is also a temporary home for the eggs of dozens of species of fish and shellfish, whose offspring spend their earliest days floating along currents at the surface of the water — the very layer where most of the oil settles. There, the effects can be devastating, studies from previous spills show, like whales so drugged and disoriented by noxious petroleum fumes that they can drown, and tiny translucent organisms whose bodies are literally burned from the inside out as the sun heats the fuel they have ingested. “Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of experience in how oil affects marine life, ecosystems, coastal communities, and fisheries,” said Christopher Mann , with the marine program of the nonprofit Pew Environment Group. “The iconic images of oiled seabirds are just the tip of the iceberg, because oil spills affect life up and down the food chain.” Take the blue crab, which, along with shrimp, is among the largest fishing crops out of Louisiana. When molting, the crabs are known as soft shells and are immensely popular in restaurants up and down the East Coast. They also serve as food for other sea creatures like redfish and certain species of turtles. Although thought of as a coastal animal, the crabs breed at sea. As the water warms, females leave the protection of the coast for perhaps the only time in their lives and go out to shoals in the gulf to disperse fertilized eggs. The eggs hatch and billions of tiny crabs invisible to the naked eye drift for 40 days along the currents in the deep sea before ending up back in the marshes. Many of the shoals favored by the crabs are already covered in oil, said Caz Taylor , a professor of ecology and evolution at Tulane University, who is studying their migration patterns. “It can’t be good,” she said. Spring is mating and spawning season for almost everything in the gulf: Fill a jar with plankton from the local waters in the spring and it will typically contain the larvae of 80 species. All the eggs and hatchlings are surface dwellers, with almost no ability to swim away from the slick. “Eggs and larvae that dwell near the sea surface are especially vulnerable,” said Jeffrey Short, Pacific research director for Oceana , a nonprofit organization that works for marine preservation. The components of crude oil, he added, can produce developmental deformities at low concentrations, and “any such deformities are ultimately lethal to organisms in the wild.” So far, there have been few documented animal casualties of the Deepwater Horizon spill, though rumors of dead manatees and whales abound. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that its planes had spotted numerous species of dolphins and turtles in areas now covered by the slick. Since Sunday, 30 turtles have washed up dead on beaches in Gulfport, Miss., an unusually high number even for this time of year when they are migrating. But Moby Solangi, executive director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, said that in a preliminary examination, the oil did not appear to be the cause of death. Full necropsies on the animals are being completed. Still, Michele Kelley, turtle and marine mammal stranding coordinator for Louisiana, said she is worried. “Sea turtles are more prone to ingest the stuff,” Ms. Kelley said, especially as the slick clumps. Whales and dolphins that must come up through the oil to get air are likely to suffer skin and eye irritation. In some cases, they may breathe in the toxic fumes of evaporation. In areas where oil is viscous, the marine mammals can risk having their skin and eyes irritated. More rarely, they risk breathing toxic fumes from the evaporating oil, and becoming drugged and sleepy. The fumes are particularly dangerous when the crude is fresh, because some strong toxins evaporate early. With a onetime spill, the slick gets less dangerous over time, but in the gulf, where the well has not been capped, there is a constant supply of new vapors. Dr. Solangi said he was worried for dolphins. “They have to be awake to breathe,” he said. “If they become anesthetized, they will die. If they become intoxicated by fumes, they won’t survive.” Even normal feeding might expose sea creatures to harm from the spill: sea grass and other vegetation covered in oil are ingested by fish that are then eaten by bigger fish and finally by manatees or other marine species. It is this food-chain effect that worries Larry Schweiger of the National Wildlife Federation . “It is not a question of whether all these species will be affected now. It is when,” he said.

Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Environment
Animals
Offshore Drilling and Exploration
BP Plc
Explosions
Gulf of Mexico
Accidents and Safety
Transocean Inc


Push for Gender Balance on Boards Gains Steam

Abstract: BRUSSELS — The proportion of women taking positions on corporate boards in the European Union is rising at the fastest pace in a decade as a push for laws on gender balance gains momentum, the bloc’s top justice official said Thursday. “The proof is in the pudding: regulatory pressure works,” Viviane Reding, the E.U. justice commissioner, said in a statement to the International Herald Tribune on the eve of her participation in a panel on the role of women in economic decision-making at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Ms. Reding is leading a campaign for legally binding measures to promote gender equality in the top ranks of the European business world. But she has run into vigorous opposition from some E.U. governments, including Britain’s, that prefer that such measures be voluntary. Ms. Reding had to abandon a proposal in November for legislation that called for punishing companies whose supervisory boards had fewer than 40 percent women. Ms. Reding then proposed that sanctions apply only in cases where companies do not have 40 percent of women on their supervisory boards and fail to enact selection procedures giving priority to a qualified female candidate. Her appearance at Davos should give her another opportunity to make the case that her amended proposal, which must be approved by the European Parliament and by E.U. governments, should be adopted across Europe. Belgium, France and Italy, among others, recently adopted legislation encouraging the naming of women to corporate boards and “are starting to show progress,” she told the I.H.T. The evidence “clearly demonstrates that time-limited regulatory intervention can make all the difference,” she said. Image Viviane Reding, the European Union justice commisioner, said regulatory pressure was working. Credit Andrew Testa for The International Herald Tribune In Italy, which adopted a law in 2011 requiring listed and state-owned companies to have women in a third of management and supervisory-board positions by 2015, there was an increase of 4.9 percentage points between January and October last year in the number of women on the boards of listed companies. Even so, Italy remains below the European average, with only 11 percent of those seats occupied by women. Ms. Reding lauded France for becoming the first E.U. member state last year to have more than one woman on the top-level board of all of its largest listed companies, including major banks like Crédit Agricole and BNP Paribas. She said women now represented a quarter of the membership of nonexecutive boards on the CAC 40, an index of leading French stocks. France introduced its law last year requiring executive and nonexecutive boards to have 20 percent women by 2014 and 40 percent women by 2017. Boards that do not include enough women would have their votes annulled. Women still lagged far behind men and occupied only 15.8 percent of seats on the executive and nonexecutive boards of publicly listed companies across the Union as of October 2012, according to figures to be released on Friday by the European Commission. But that represented a gain of 2.2 percentage points from a year earlier. The gain was also the highest yearly rise since 2003, when the European Commission began monitoring gender balance on corporate boards, according to Ms. Reding. “Companies are finally starting to understand that if they want to remain competitive in an aging society they cannot afford to ignore female talent,” said Ms. Reding, who added that 60 percent of graduates from universities in the Union’s 27 member states last year were women. Nearly all E.U. countries recorded an increase in women’s membership on the executive and nonexecutive boards of publicly listed companies between January and October last year, the commission said. The exceptions were Poland and Ireland, where the numbers held steady at 12 percent and 9 percent, and Bulgaria, where the figure dropped four percentage points to 12 percent, according to the commission.

Gender
EU
European Commission
Davos World Economic Forum
Davos
Women and Girls
Board of directors
Legislation
Viviane Reding
Europe


Bidders’ Plans for Brooklyn Hospital Include Medical and Housing Needs

Abstract: All four remaining bidders for the troubled Long Island College Hospital said on Friday that they did not believe the hospital was viable in its present form, and proposed to turn the hospital property, in a fashionable brownstone neighborhood of Brooklyn, into some combination for housing and medical care. At the same time, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was arrested during the mayoral campaign in a demonstration to save the hospital, and who has often denounced the specter of hospitals being turned into “luxury condominiums,” has signaled in the last few days that he sees some compromise as an acceptable outcome to the long fight to save the hospital in Cobble Hill. Anthony E. Shorris, the first deputy mayor, said Friday that if Mr. de Blasio’s attitude had softened it was because the hospital’s owner, the State University of New York, had become more conciliatory toward the community and more transparent in its bidding process. “We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress from where this was six months ago,” Mr. Shorris said. “The hospital was about to be closed and leaving no health care at all in the community. Now all we’re talking about is how much health care.” He said the administration would continue to try to maximize the amount of health care in any redevelopment, but that it also valued affordable housing. But community groups in the Cobble Hill area that have successfully sued to keep the hospital open were not mollified. On Friday, Jim Walden, a lawyer for the groups, repeated their call for the State University of New York to reopen the bidding, “under terms that promote more hospital operators to come forward to compete for this venerable institution.” “SUNY’s failure to do so,” he added, “will only prolong and expand the litigation, preventing any responder from securing an enforceable contract award.” The four bidders made fiercely competitive presentations Friday before the SUNY trustees, who offered little discussion but are expected to choose one of the proposals as early as next week. Only one proposal, by the Chinese Community Accountable Care Organization, working with a group of physicians, promised to keep it a full-service hospital, but at a “much reduced” size, about 100 beds, at least in the beginning. It would also include housing and retail, but few details were provided. Other proposals would provide a mix of affordable and market-rate housing. One developer, Fortis Property Group, proposed 25 percent affordable housing, while another, the Peebles Corporation, offered 35 percent. R. Donahue Peebles, chairman of Peebles, claimed it was the largest African-American-owned real estate development company in the country. Rents would range from roughly $1,300 a month for the affordable apartments to $3,000 for the market-rate ones, he said. The fourth developer, Related Companies, also proposed to reserve 25 percent of about 750 apartments for affordable housing. Related has developed the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle and is developing Hudson Yards. Related would work with Brooklyn Hospital Center, which is less than a mile from Long Island College Hospital. Fortis’s chairman, Louis Kestenbaum, told the trustees that he was “a Brooklyn boy with deep roots in the community.” He said his father, a rabbi, created a community health care organization in Williamsburg, and his family had used Long Island College Hospital. “My late mother, blessed memory, was treated there many times,” he said. Fortis would join with partners including NYU Langone Medical Center, which would expand its presence in Brooklyn, particularly as a cancer-care provider, said its associate chief clinical officer, Dr. Gary Kalkut. Dr. Kalkut said only the sickest 1 or 2 percent would go to NYU Langone’s Manhattan center. Several of the speakers appealed to the hospital unions, which have sued to keep the hospital open. They assured them they would create some medical jobs, around 200, and some said that they would have union shops. Brooklyn Hospital and NYU Langone would run what they called free-standing emergency rooms, which would receive ambulances, on the current hospital site. Peebles would not. Instead it would partner with Dr. Neil Calman, a founder of the Institute for Family Health, which runs 30 clinics across the state. Dr. Calman bluntly told the trustees that the concept of free-standing emergency rooms made sense in rural areas, where medical care was hard to find, but not in Brooklyn. Dr. Calman said it was not fair to patients to go to a free-standing emergency room only to find that they needed “to be put back in the ambulance again” to go to a full hospital. The financial partners for the Chinese organization would be John A. Catsimatidis, the Gristedes grocery store magnate who was a Republican primary candidate for mayor in the last election, and Rudy Washington, a deputy mayor of community development in the Giuliani administration. Mr. Catsimatidis, who said he was planning to develop other property in Brooklyn, provided some of the few light notes during the presentation. He said his children were interested in real estate, and though they had graduated from New York University, they could graduate from SUNY if that would help his proposal. He promised to write a big check, saying, “I don’t have sex appeal, but I do have checks appeal.” H. Carl McCall, chairman of the SUNY board of trustees, responded: “Are you writing a check on the way out?”

Long Island College Hospital
Real Estate
Housing
Hospital
Bill de Blasio
Cobble Hill Brooklyn
College
SUNY


Fond Memories of Nets in West Hempstead

Abstract: To the Sports Editor: Re “All Too Often, a Sorry State of Affairs,” April 23: Although the Nets did not provide many wonderful moments for their fans, they actually provided us with a lifetime of memories. During those early years of the Nets organization, our hometown, West Hempstead, N.Y., housed the Nets in a quaint arena called the Island Garden. (It certainly didn’t have a corporate sponsor name or luxury suites.) Yet as small as it was, it enabled the huge dreams of any young sports fan to become a reality. We will never forget walking to the parking lot, escorting players like the future Hall of Famer Rick Barry to their cars while getting autographs. So thank you, Nets, for giving two brothers something we still cherish talking about 40 years later. Ira Zimilover Merrick, N.Y. Reuben Zimilover Queens A Call for Educators to Act To the Sports Editor: Re “Changes to Postseason Inevitable, but Format Is Far From Certain,” April 25: This article did not mention the word education; university presidents were mentioned only in passing. Obviously, universities participating in Division I football are now being run by television commitments and the Bowl Championship Series. At a time when all we hear is the importance of education, the highly paid university presidents who have the ultimate responsibility for maintaining the integrity of their institutions have all but disappeared from the scene. Time for these educators to prevent college football from resembling the N.F.L. even more. L. Donald Jaffin Jupiter, Fla. Outlets for a Retiree To the Sports Editor: Re “In Comfortable Retirement, and Getting Tired of It,” April 22: Trevor Pryce is certainly a lucky man to be retired and healthy at such a young age. But if he’s looking for meaningful ways to fill his time, there are numerous community centers, sports leagues and youth programs that could put his talent, knowledge and experience to very good use.Gary Axelbank Bronx A Resource to Draw Upon To the Sports Editor: Re “Dying Art, Lost Occupation,” April 25: Perhaps one reason so many newspapers seem to be gasping for air is their penchant for minimizing that part of the paper that sparkles with the human touch: illustrations and cartoons. One only has to recall the delight Al Hirschfeld provided so often and for so long to readers of the arts pages of The Times. Newspapers might also note that The New Yorker still has cartoons. So I am convinced that there might be a lesson in there for newspapers. A few more cartoons, not fewer, might help them get off life support and maybe bring a smile or two to the readers in the process. Bottom line: we readers need more of the stuff Mike Ricigliano can do, not less.Mike Dater Portsmouth, N.H. A Witness to Woefulness To the Sports Editor: “Bobcats Are Fighting a Losing Battle” (April 22) referred to the 1947-48 Providence Steam Rollers, who won six games in the Basketball Association of America, a precursor to the N.B.A. I was in attendance when Carl Braun set a league scoring record for a game with 47 points. Unfortunately, he scored them for the opposing team, the Knicks.George Monteiro Windham, Conn.


Pleased With the City’s Progress, but Wary of the Price

Abstract: “This is a working-class neighborhood,” Robert Mecea said, with more than a dollop of sarcasm. “But the houses sell for a million and a half, so I don’t know how working class that is.” Outfitted in cycling spandex, Mr. Mecea, a photographer, was relaxing on a bench outside Connecticut Muffin, a neighborhood coffee-break oasis in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, gazing at the melding of pastoral and bustling in the westernmost corner of Prospect Park. He was gearing up for a 70-mile ride to Rockland County and back, but first, he paused to reflect on the state of the city as it prepares to elect a new mayor. Like other residents of Windsor Terrace, Mr. Mecea said he was pleased that the city was safer and more attractive than it was when Michael R. Bloomberg was inaugurated nearly 12 years ago. But many demurred that improvements have come at the expense of those who scrape by, with everything from a sandwich to a subway ride costing more, and no commensurate uptick in wages. “So let’s say you make the minimum wage or even $20 an hour — that’s $800 a week, $3,200 a month,” Mr. Mecea, a 46-year-old native of Romania, said. “The apartments right here on my street rent for $3,300. I’m making it, but I’m barely making it.” Windsor Terrace was, for most of the 20th century, a blue-collar and middle-class Irish enclave — the writers Pete Hamill and Frank McCourt have lived there. But in recent decades its gracefully curving row houses and Arts and Crafts houses have been discovered by families and singles priced out of adjoining Park Slope. At Connecticut Muffin, where local residents pause before hitting the subway, residents said the city’s ambience has been enhanced by the continued tamping down of crime, the promotion of biking and the construction of projects like the High Line. “A public project on that scale hasn’t happened since Central Park and Prospect Park were created,” said Bojana Ilievski, 37, an architect. But Rachel Kaufman, 43, a musician, worried that a development juggernaut had replaced colorful mom-and-pop shops with sleek chain stores. Yael Sverdlik, 34, an acupuncturist, was chewing on a scone — something she admitted was a naughty treat by her standards — while sipping green tea. “There’s more consciousness of being healthy,” she said. “We’re using cars less. People are getting more exercise. Citi Bikes is great and the city is getting cleaner.” But she, too, had misgivings over the widening gap between rich and poor that she believes is pushing low-income New Yorkers out of the city. “It’s almost impossible to live by yourself if you start out in New York,” said Ms. Sverdlik, who shares a one-bedroom apartment for $1,850 a month. “The city has improved but it’s become elite.” Schools were another worry. Karen Schmauk, 49, who had just stocked up on peaches and artichokes at the park’s farmers’ market, said she teaches English to foreign-born students at New York City College of Technology and sees that high schools are “graduating kids who are not prepared to write at a college level — or read.” Her 1-year-old son, Luca, biting happily into a peach slice, has several years to go before starting school, but she was concerned about his educational future. Many also faulted top city and police officials for what they suggested was their cluelessness about the emotional impact of stop-and-frisk policies on innocent young men who suffer the humiliation of searches. Quincy Vance, 43, a gym teacher at St. Ann’s School and its basketball coach, said he had been stopped four times. “People feel violated,” he said. “Some officers don’t give an explanation. They pick a bunch of black and Latino teenagers. They don’t stop Wall Street guys and frisk their briefcases.” Ms. Ilievski, though, said she has had a different experience. “For a 6-foot-tall white girl, it’s a story of stop-and-flirt.” The muffin shop sits near the sealed-off bicycle lane on Prospect Park West, which has been the subject of vigorous local debate. So there was a wealth of opinions about the hundreds of bicycle-lane miles Mr. Bloomberg’s administration has carved out. Ms. Ilievski said cycling had become safer. “I noticed people who never rode bikes before riding them,” she said. But Mr. Mecea, a bicyclist and driver, dissented. “They’re making it almost impossible for drivers to get through,” he said. “They say it’s traffic calming but by the time you get here you’re so enraged because you have only two lanes left and some guy double parked. It’s not calming.” There was no great enthusiasm for the candidates seeking to replace Mr. Bloomberg. As Ms. Ilievski put it: “Two candidates are riddled with scandal and a third I don’t see that she has particular public projects in mind.” “It’s hard to imagine filling the shoes of someone who’s had a strong presence like Bloomberg,” Ms. Schmauk said. But Mr. Vance said he liked Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, who lives nearby in Park Slope. “He’s married to a black woman and it seems like he can relate to New Yorkers because it’s a multicultural place,” Mr. Vance said. The ban on smoking in restaurants and bars was cited as a signature improvement that upgraded life for Bob Bozic, a burly 63-year-old former prize fighter who once went six rounds with Larry Holmes, before he was heavyweight champion. “I work in a bar and I used to worry about dying of secondhand smoke,” Mr. Bozic said. Almost everyone was optimistic about the city’s future, though Mr. Mecea’s comments bore a tinge of world weariness. “New York is a slow, churning monolith,” he said. “It’s like putting your shoulders on Mount Rushmore and trying to move it. I don’t think any person can have that much effect on our lives.”

Windsor Terrace Brooklyn
Mayoral races
Mike Bloomberg
NYC


Congressional Republicans Project Unity While Democrats Scramble

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans, donning “Make America Great Again” hats on Tuesday, celebrated their impending control of government, sidestepping questions about disarray in President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition efforts while Democrats struggled to unify behind their leadership after a brutal election defeat. “Welcome to the dawn of a new unified Republican government,” Speaker Paul D. Ryan said at a news conference Tuesday after a meeting with House Republicans. “This will be a government focused on turning President-elect Trump’s victory into real progress for the American people.” Mr. Ryan, whose renomination was unanimous, deflected questions about Mr. Trump’s selection of Stephen K. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News with ties to hard-right nationalists , as his chief strategist, and questions about the role of Mr. Trump’s children in the new administration. Mr. Trump “is so successful because he’s surrounded himself with good people,” Mr. Ryan said. As for Mr. Bannon, who has relentlessly attacked Mr. Ryan, he said, smiling stiffly, “I’m not looking backward.” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who has led House Democrats since 2003, found herself facing unexpected pushback in her own re-election efforts. She postponed a vote that had been scheduled for Thursday until Nov. 30, yielding to the demands of members who asked for more time to reassess. The delay is likely to favor Ms. Pelosi, who will have time to remind members of the money she has raised for them over the years and consolidate her support, which runs deep, especially among the women in her caucus. But the building unease with the status quo in their ranks was clear on Tuesday, members said. Before a tense meeting with members, some had urged Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, 43, to challenge Ms. Pelosi, 76. He has not yet decided whether to run against her. Representative Marcy Kaptur,an Ohio Democrat who once challenged Ms. Pelosi, said she had previously signed a letter expressing support for her but noted that she would be willing to take a second look at someone from the Rust Belt, where Hillary Clinton lost in what had been Democratic strongholds in presidential elections. “I ran against her for this very reason, that our region needed more voice,” Ms. Kaptur said. Ms. Pelosi called a meeting with other party leaders Tuesday afternoon, and several senior Democrats said there was a jittery feeling in her camp. “We just got a shellacking last Tuesday,” said Representative G.K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina and the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “We got an unexpected defeat, and we’ve got to recalibrate and decide how we go forward.” Democrats were especially stung by Mrs. Clinton’s loss among working-class voters. “We’re the party of Franklin Roosevelt,” said Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania. “We should not be struggling as a party the way we are with working-class voters. And the fact that we are signals that we need to talk.” The battle reflects a larger debate within the Democratic Party — being played out in its choice for the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee — pitting those who want to rebuild the base of President Obama’s support among newer and more diverse voters and those who want to court anew the party’s white working-class voters, especially in the Midwest. Among Republicans, there was ambiguity of a different sort as they struggled to determine who was in charge of Mr. Trump’s policy agenda. For now, it appears that Vice President-elect Mike Pence is making the calls to Capitol Hill. “Nobody really knows,” former Speaker John Boehner said of Mr. Trump’s agenda in an interview with CNBC. He added, “He is barely a Republican. He could barely be a Democrat as well. Nobody really knows where he is going.” Other Republicans were generally positive about the prospects of a government in their full control, in spite of the early signs of a bumpy transition. Most Republicans said they knew nothing about Mr. Bannon and had little knowledge of his background. “I really have only met him once,” said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “People I’ve spoken to in the campaign have a high regard for him. That’s really all I know.” There were also clear signs that not all of Mr. Trump’s appointments and legislative notions would get unanimous support from his party. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, spoke out against the possibilities of either Rudolph W. Giuliani or John Bolton as nominees for secretary of state. “Bolton is a longtime member of the failed Washington elite that Trump vowed to oppose, hellbent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in the last 15 years,” Mr. Paul wrote in an editorial . Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he supported much of Mr. Trump’s agenda, but was also critical of his views on Russia and many of his previous policy proposals on immigration. “I will not vote for a bill that treats a grandmother and a drug dealer the same,” Mr. Graham said.

US
US Politics
House of Representatives
Congress
Republicans
Paul D Ryan Jr
Nancy Pelosi
Democrats
US Foreign Policy


Magnus Norman Wants to Give Back to Tennis as a Coach

Abstract: PARIS — Roland Garros Stadium is sweet-and-sour territory for Magnus Norman. It is the bustling place where he reached his only Grand Slam final, which he lost to Gustavo Kuerten despite saving 10 match points. It is where Norman’s prize pupil, Robin Soderling, became the only man to beat Rafael Nadal at the French Open and later reached two finals of his own, only to lose them both and eventually his health. But then tennis has been bittersweet for Norman as a general rule. It gives and then it takes; it rewards and then demands tribute. He once swore off the whole complex, apparently cursed activity for nearly a year. “I didn’t watch any tennis, didn’t pick up a racket,” Norman said. That was in 2004 and 2005. He had finally been compelled to retire young at age 28 after a series of major hip and knee problems, chronic injuries that slowly sapped his morale and destroyed his career after that excellent 2000 season when he spiked at No.2 in the world rankings, came within one victory of No. 1 at the French Open and won five titles, including Rome. “You always want to end on your own terms, and I didn’t get that chance,” Norman said. So he returned to school in Sweden, studying at a private marketing institute. He then took a job as a marketing director at the financial services company Catella, which had once sponsored the tournament in Bastad, Sweden. “I thought it was really, really good for me to be away from tennis and to have other friends and sort of develop outside the tennis world,” Norman said. “But I’m more like the sports guy. I want to hang out in locker rooms. I’ve grown up with sports, so that’s who I am. And after a couple of years it sort of caught up with me that this was not really me. I missed the tennis.” He used vacation time in 2008 to coach Thomas Johansson, his good friend and former Swedish Davis Cup teammate, and then left Catella altogether to coach the volatile, underachieving Soderling the following year. After helping Soderling rise above his foibles, Norman has now helped the Swiss player Stanislas Wawrinka make the daunting climb from perennial resident of the second tier to Grand Slam champion, with his Australian Open title in January. In Madrid last year, when he and Wawrinka had been working together for less than a month, Wawrinka reached the final and in his post-match remarks in the stadium, turned to Norman and said with a grin: “I still don’t know if you are really lucky or really good. We will find out.” Norman chuckled at the memory even if the answer now seems self-evident. Making meaningful headway in the age of Nadal, Roger Federer and the rest of the Big Four has been much too much for nearly everyone to ask. “He did a great job with Robin Soderling and is doing an amazing job with me,” Wawrinka said. “He’s a positive guy, always trying to find the solution and the new thing to improve. At the end, at this level, it’s the small changes that can make the bigger change.” At age 37, Norman is now one of the most widely admired coaches in the game. “I really think that I still have something to prove inside myself,” he said. “I think I have something to give back to tennis. Maybe if I would have continued playing until age 33 or 34, maybe I wouldn’t have this hunger to give something back, but I still feel like I left something on the table on the tour.” Norman believes if he were playing now he could likely have avoided his hip problem, which was similar to the one that put an early end to Kuerten’s career. “You see guys now working and traveling with physios and working completely differently than we did,” he said. “We were doing sit-ups and push-ups, and we were running and working out hard but nothing like they do right now. You also see the guys now and how flexible they are. I was not nearly as flexible as Novak Djokovic. When you see these guys move around the court these days, it’s incredible.” Norman nearly chose another sport as a youngster. His father played professional bandy in Sweden. Bandy is a Swedish game played on ice, with 11 players to a side who use sticks to strike a ball. Magnus was good enough to be part of the national junior team. When he was 16, he received two invitations in the mail on the same day. “The Swedish bandy federation invited me to go with them to Russia and the Swedish tennis federation invited me to go to Florida,” Norman once explained. “It was wintertime. Which do you think I chose?” As a tennis player, Norman was a powerful presence with an unusually big backswing on his forehand, a reliable two-handed backhand and a hard-running baseline style. He was also someone who embraced a heavy workload. Johansson, who has known him since he was 10, remembers a particularly unpleasant workout session in their teens with the Swedish players Mikael Tillstrom and Marten Renstrom. “We were running on a track and first I was throwing up and then Marten and then Mikael,” Johansson said. “And then when we were all lying on the ground throwing up left and right, Magnus Norman, who was the youngest of us four, took out his rope and started skipping rope just on the side of us.” Image Under his coach Magnus Norman, Stanislas Wawrinka won his first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in January, and has improved his world ranking to No.3. Credit Ray Giubilo/Freshfocus Norman also had a temper that was slow to ignite but could burn quite hot. “It was like a car going from 0 to 100 with nothing in between,” said the former Swedish star Jonas Bjorkman. “All or nothing, and I think that had a lot to do with him being a perfectionist on court.” But Norman was and remains an understated presence outside of competion. “My father is a really quiet guy and I think I got that from him,” Norman said. The other members of Wawrinka’s support team like to call Norman the tennis whisperer. “Because I don’t say too much, but when I say something I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” Norman said. “And I think maybe that’s something I share with Stan. Even if he’s more talkative than I am, I think we both are on the shy side a little bit. I’m not the guy you will see screaming the loudest on the court at my player, but when I say something I really mean what I say.” Norman said he had made some technical changes to the 29-year-old Wawrinka’s game, altering the footwork on his forehand to improve his ability to make late adjustments. He also has emphasized that Wawrinka needs to focus on “bigger targets” and add spin and avoid too many huge risks under pressure, particularly with his forehand. He also has urged Wawrinka to avoid some of the scheduling mistakes he made during his own rise. “You have to play a very smart schedule, and that’s what I think Stan is doing really well this year, even if he has been a little bit up and down with the results,” Norman said. “He hasn’t panicked when he’s losing. He isn’t overplaying when he’s confident and doing well. You’ve got to be really careful to not overplay because you can get injured and sick.” “When I was at the top, I saw all this money coming in and all the points, and I got a little bit overexcited and I started maybe to play a little too much instead of thinking I was only 25 or 26 and I had a lot more years to come,” he added. “So that’s something that also plays a little bit in my favor as a coach. I’ve been there. I’ve done that and probably would have done it a little bit different if I had the chance again.” But much of Norman’s work continues to be focused on attitude. “I think maybe the main thing I changed about both Robin and Stan is the mental aspect,” Norman said. “Robin was a guy who was wasting a lot of energy on things that were not about his tennis. It could be spectators or his opponent, could be the sun or the wind. And I think I did a good job with that. I think the same with Stan, who always has been a little bit nervous and a little bit soft when it came to tough matches.” There were big hints of a shift before Norman arrived, above all the marathon fourth-round loss to Djokovic at the 2013 Australian Open that made every short list of matches of the year. “We’ve seen glimpses of it,” said the veteran coach Paul Annacone of Wawrinka’s potential. “I always believe at that level the mental and emotional beats the physical, so a lot of it is repetition until the player believes and proving points to the player about why they are great. And I think Magnus had a pretty good plate of ingredients in front of him to deal with, and what he’s probably reinforced is how formidable Stan can be doing what he does well, which is basically punishing people from the back of the court.” Wawrinka and his agent, Lawrence Frankopan, chased Norman in 2012 and early 2013 after he decided to split with Soderling and focus on his young family and new Good to Great tennis academy in the Stockholm suburbs. There were at least two other leading players interested in securing Norman’s services, but Norman finally agreed to work with Wawrinka in March 2013 after he and his wife decided that their twin daughters, who will turn 3 in July, were old enough to cope with the occasional separations. He liked Wawrinka personally and felt that, because Wawrinka had a young daughter of his own, he was better placed to empathize with Norman’s own constraints. “He knows how it is with with kids and that sometimes you cannot go for a week and have to stay home,” Norman said. Swedish mentors are now ever more in demand, and the new arrivals include Stefan Edberg, now helping Federer, and Thomas Engqvist, now helping the Spaniard Fernando Verdasco. But Norman hopes that all of them will eventually be able to help Swedish players become champions again. That is all the more pressing with no Swede in the top 300 in men’s singles and Soderling all but retired because of health problems linked to mononucleosis. “I think all of us will end up working with Swedish tennis again,” he said. “I think we’ll all come together, and I think that will be amazing if we can manage to put Sweden back on the tennis map.” Edberg is involved in an academy in Vaxjo. Norman started the Good to Great academy with Tillstrom and the former Swedish player Nicklas Kulti in 2011. For now, Norman said 40 players are enrolled, 30 of them Swedes, and he plans to one day devote all his energy to the project. “Maybe in 10 or 15 years when i don’t want to travel that much anymore,” he said. But for now his full focus is on Wawrinka and Roland Garros. Does he think the tournament owes him anything? “No, not really,” Norman said. “I don’t think it owes anyone anything. It’s all about winning, and I was not handling the pressure good enough. I don’t think Robin was either, to be really honest.” Asked if Wawrinka can handle it, Norman answered, “Absolutely, he showed me in Australia.” But if there is one tennis truth that Norman has learned, it is that it is best for a player to strike when he has the chance, before the game demands tribute. “What happened to Robin is a tragic story, first of all for Robin, second for all of Swedish tennis,” Norman said. “But these things can happen. It happened to me at my peak, and to Robin at his peak. You can never take anything for granted.”

Tennis
French Open
Roland Garros Stadium
Magnus Norman
Stan Wawrinka
Paris France


G.O.P. Plan Would Allow Spying Without Warrants

Abstract: WASHINGTON, March 8 - The plan by Senate Republicans to step up oversight of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program would also give legislative sanction for the first time to long-term eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant, legal experts said on Wednesday. Civil liberties advocates called the proposed oversight inadequate and the licensing of eavesdropping without warrants unnecessary and unwise. But the Republican senators who drafted the proposal said it represented a hard-wrung compromise with the White House, which strongly opposed any Congressional interference in the eavesdropping program. The Republican proposal appeared likely to win approval from the full Senate, despite Democratic opposition and some remaining questions from Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, emphasized in an interview on Wednesday the White House's resistance to any limits on what President Bush considers his inherent power to order surveillance of potential terrorists on American soil. "There was a lot of pushback," Mr. Roberts said. "So we kept saying, I am sorry, that is not acceptable, and the reality is such that you will either do this or you will face bigger obstacles and we will get into confrontation." The negotiations that produced a deal on the eavesdropping program left Senate Democrats fuming on the sidelines, adding to the partisan squabbling on the Intelligence Committee that longtime observers of Congress say is unprecedented. But on Wednesday, the Democratic vice chairman of the committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, issued a conciliatory statement, saying that while he favored a full investigation, a committee decision on Tuesday to appoint a seven-member subcommittee to oversee the N.S.A. eavesdropping was "a step in the right direction." Mr. Rockefeller said he and Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Dianne Feinstein of California, both fellow Democrats, would serve on the subcommittee, joining Mr. Roberts and three other Republicans, Senators Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Christopher S. Bond of Missouri. On Tuesday, Mr. Rockefeller said he believed that the committee's Republicans were "under the control" of the White House. Mr. Roberts said on Wednesday that he resented being portrayed as what he called a "lap dog of the administration." "He doesn't know how hard we worked," Mr. Roberts said of Mr. Rockefeller. The Republican proposal would give Congressional approval to the eavesdropping program much as it was secretly authorized by Mr. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks, with limited notification to a handful of Congressional leaders. The N.S.A. would be permitted to intercept the international phone calls and e-mail messages of people in the United States if there was "probable cause to believe that one party to the communication is a member, affiliate, or working in support of a terrorist group or organization," according to a written summary of the proposal issued by its Republican sponsors. The finding of probable cause would not be reviewed by any court. But after 45 days, the attorney general would be required to drop the eavesdropping on that target, seek a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or explain under oath to two new Congressional oversight subcommittees why he could not seek a warrant. The administration would be required to provide "full access" to information about the eavesdropping, including "operational details," to the new Senate and House subcommittees, the summary said. Each subcommittee would consist of four Republicans and three Democrats from the Intelligence Committees. Mr. DeWine, a principal author of the proposal, said it would give "very specific pinpoint oversight." "We will be seeing specific cases coming back and seeing why they are not going into the FISA court," he said. In an emergency, the existing FISA statute permits the government to eavesdrop for 72 hours before getting a warrant, and for 15 days after a declaration of war. The Republican proposal would permit eavesdropping with no warrant for 45-day periods, with no limit on how many times they could be renewed. "Aside from the civil liberties dimension, there's an invitation here to the president to go on indefinitely with warrantless surveillance," said William C. Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University. Caroline Fredrickson, head of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office, said it was "profoundly disappointing to see lawmakers willing to lower the bar to allow the president vast powers to spy on Americans." Republicans offered varying views on whether the agreement with the White House ruled out a Congressional investigation of how the N.S.A. program was begun, how it was conducted and what dissent existed inside the administration. Mr. DeWine said he did not expect the subcommittee to investigate the last four years of the program's operations, saying the panel needed to be "moving forward." But Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine and another sponsor of the proposal, said it did not preclude an investigation by the committee if the subcommittee found that one was called for. The Republicans were miffed that Mr. Rockefeller, the committee's ranking Democrat, had portrayed them as caving in to White House pressure. On Tuesday, Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska and another author of the proposal, called that notion "laughable." Mr. Hagel said he and Senators DeWine and Snowe were "three of the most independent Republicans" in the Senate and added, "I have never been accused of buckling to White House pressure."

WIRETAPPING AND OTHER EAVESDROPPING DEVICES AND METHODS


Lawyers Call for Drastic Change in Educating New Lawyers

Abstract: DALLAS — Faced with profound and seemingly irreversible shifts, the legal profession is contemplating radical changes to its educational system, including cutting the curriculum, requiring far more on-the-ground training and licensing technicians who are not full lawyers. The proposals are a result of numerous factors, including a sharp drop in law school applications , the outsourcing of research over the Internet, a glut of underemployed and indebted law school graduates and a high percentage of the legal needs of Americans going unmet. “There is almost universal agreement that the current system is broken,” said Thomas W. Lyons III, a Rhode Island lawyer and a member of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education , which gathered here over the weekend for a public hearing at the association’s midyear meeting. While a few schools are freezing tuition and others are increasing hands-on learning, critics are increasingly saying that the legal academy cannot solve its own problems, partly because of the vested interests of tenured professors tied to an antiquated system. Effective solutions, they insist, will have to be imposed from the outside. Since law schools are regulated by state courts, that means convincing top state judges of the necessity of major change. At the task force’s hearing, where lawyers and students gave testimony, most said the time was ripe for that change. Many recommended reducing the core of law school to two years from three to cut costs. Others suggested that college juniors should be encouraged to go directly to law school, the bar exam should be simplified, accreditation standards should be relaxed to allow for more experiential learning, and states should establish training for the legal equivalent of nurse practitioners. The task force was set up last summer and was given 24 months to issue its recommendations. But its chairman, Randall T. Shepard, a former chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court, said a sense of crisis was driving the group to do so this fall. Over the years, bar associations and foundations have called for similar changes, with limited impact. But leaders in the legal profession say that this time is different. “We are going to look at everything from scratch,” Laurel G. Bellows , a Chicago lawyer and the president of the American Bar Association, said in an interview. “We have to keep everything on the table.” Image Randall T. Shepard, a former Indiana Supreme Court chief justice, leads a task force on overhauling legal education. Credit Rex C. Curry for The New York Times Paula Littlewood, a task force member and the executive director of the Washington State Bar Association , put it this way to her colleagues: “There’s a time for incremental change and a time for bold change. This is the time for bold change.” Hers is one state that is not waiting. It has established a board to create a program for limited-license legal technicians , the first in the country. Within a year, the board is expected to lay out the educational and professional framework for the technicians. They will have more training and responsibility than paralegals but will not appear in court or negotiate on their clients’ behalf. “The consuming public cannot afford lawyers, and the profession needs to figure that out and own it,” Ms. Littlewood said. “Our hope is to provide more access. The second point is that you have these folks out there doing unauthorized practice, which is harming the public. The hope is to bring them under the tent.” Elsewhere in the country, law schools are trying to deal with declining popularity in a range of ways. The University of Akron Law School in Ohio has frozen its tuition and virtually ended its out-of-state surcharge . At the University of Oregon, Michael Moffitt , the law school’s dean, has started clinics on nonprofit groups, environmental policy and probate mediation. He has also set up law courses for students in other parts of the university, which brings revenue to the law school. “The problem is that we have been selling only one product,” Mr. Moffitt said. “But if you are getting a business degree, you need to know about contract law. City planners need to know about land-use law. So we at Oregon are educating not just J.D. students. “Demand is through the roof,” he added. “I feel like I am living a business school case study.” Nicholas W. Allard , who became the dean of Brooklyn Law School in New York last summer after a career in government and private practice, said that in the past, graduates of elite schools arrived at major law firms with little knowledge of the actual practice of law. As a result, corporations hiring those firms felt that their large hourly bills were in effect going to train those graduates, who were assigned some of their work. Mr. Allard said those corporations are no longer willing to do that. As a result, he said, law schools need to have far more practical training and closer ties to the legal profession. That has led a number of schools to choose deans from within the profession, like Mr. Allard, rather than from academia. He also said legal practice had a growing global component that needed to be addressed. “Some international exposure is being looked at for the first year in many places,” Mr. Allard said. “Whether you have a shingle up in Park Slope or in Maine, you are going to have some need for an appreciation of international legal issues.” One group that came under frequent attack at the meeting here was tenured law school professors, who were criticized as having high pay, low productivity and a remote relationship with the practice of law. Robert L. Weinberg , a retired founding partner of the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly and a lecturer at George Washington University Law School, said that instead of restricting the number of adjunct lecturers like himself, law schools ought to greatly increase them because they bring real-world examples to students. Jim Chen , a professor of law at the University of Louisville and a former dean of its law school, said that to reduce law school from three years to two would mean that, in turn, tenured professors, whom he called the biggest expense for law schools, would have to take a one-third cut in pay. But, Mr. Chen said, they would never accept that, and the impetus for change would have to come from State Supreme Courts. Derek M. Tokaz, the research director of Law School Transparency , a legal education policy group that seeks to guide some of the changes, told the gathering that drastic changes were needed in student loans and accreditation. Rather than start with the number of required classroom minutes or student-teacher ratio, Mr. Tokaz said, what students need to know upon graduation should be agreed upon first. As the meeting ended, one task force member, Michael P. Downey of St. Louis, summed it up. “The house is on fire,” he said. “We don’t want a report that sits on a shelf.”

Lawyers
Law school
American Bar Association
Michael Moffitt


Arrest in Killing of Queens Bodega Clerk

Abstract: A 29-year-old man was arrested early Sunday and charged with killing a clerk at a bodega in Queens during a robbery on Oct. 23, law enforcement officials said. The man, Shawn Forde of Queens, was arrested about 4 a.m. and charged with murder, robbery and criminal possession of a weapon, the police said. Juan Arcadio Torres , 54, was working as the night clerk at the Lucky Grocery and Deli in Laurelton a little over a week ago when he was shot and killed, according to the Queens district attorney’s office. “The victim’s life was cut short the moment that the defendant decided to pull the trigger — a decision that has had a devastating impact on the victim’s family and could lead to the defendant spending the rest of his life in prison,” said Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney. “This case is yet another example of the mindless gun-related violence that too often takes innocent lives and recklessly endangers public safety.” The district attorney’s office said Mr. Forde walked into the bodega at 220-26 Merrick Boulevard shortly before 10 p.m. He grabbed Mr. Torres’s brother, the shop’s owner, at gunpoint and demanded cash. When Mr. Torres tried to help his brother, the gunman shot him in the face, the police said. The killing has rattled bodega owners across the city and has led some of them to start a campaign urging bodega owners to apply for gun licenses. It also struck Mr. Torres’s family especially hard. A close family friend was killed at the same bodega in 2002, and a few years before that, the family said, one of Mr. Torres’s brothers was killed at a deli in Brooklyn.

Murders and Attempted Murders
Convenience Stores
Torres Juan Arcadio
Queens (NYC)