U.N. Women’s Agency Publishes Sobering Report on Lack of Gender Equality

Abstract: PARIS — Most countries still do not explicitly criminalize rape within marriage, according to a sweeping United Nations report of global women’s rights published Wednesday. The report also found that more than half of working women lack basic legal protections on the job. Gender equality is increasingly enshrined in laws, but many millions of women still have no access to justice, said Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile who was appointed as executive director of U.N. Women , the global body’s first agency for gender equality and female empowerment, which published the report. “We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go,” she said. “And even where the laws exist, the implementation and enforcement of those laws can be poor — even in the most progressive countries.” The rate at which rape and sexual violence cases are reported remains low, she said. In 57 countries, the report showed, one in 10 women say they have been victims of sexual aggression, but only 11 percent of those women go to the police. “Women are three times more likely to report a robbery than sexual assault,” said Laura Turquet, chief author of the report. “In many countries the victim still feels more stigmatized than the perpetrator.” Rape as a weapon of war — in some cases with the aim not just to terrorize and displace whole populations but to spread disease — has become part of modern conflict, she said. Among countries that have still not formally outlawed domestic violence are two members of the European Union — Hungary and Lithuania — and among those still not explicitly criminalizing marital rape are a dozen more, including pioneers of gender equality like Norway and Britain. “This is always very surprising for all of us who work on women’s rights issues,” Ms. Turquet said. “Many of the problems women face, for example with violence, are the same in rich and poor countries.” The report offered several recommendations, including enactment of legislation to provide equal-pay rights and paid maternity leave, and making legal complaints filed by victims of violence and discrimination easier and more affordable. In Cambodia, for example, bringing a rape charge involves a medical test that costs the equivalent of two weeks’ wages. In Kenya, inheritance claims cost as much as $800 and involve navigating 17 administrative steps.

Human Rights and Human Rights Violations


Plane Crash Into Alaska Building Is Said to Be Suicide

Abstract: ANCHORAGE — The death of a man whose plane clipped one building before smashing into another in the heart of Anchorage was a suicide, a spokeswoman for his family said. There is no reason to think that the pilot, Doug Demarest, was trying to harm anyone but himself, the spokeswoman, Jahna Lindemuth, said on Friday . Ms. Lindemuth is a managing partner at Dorsey & Whitney, the law firm where Mr. Demarest’s wife, Katherine, works. Ms. Lindemuth declined to say how the family knew it was a suicide and asked that the family’s privacy be respected. Clint Johnson, the Alaska region chief for the National Transportation Safety Board , did not return a call on Friday. Mr. Demarest, 42, was flying a plane owned by the Civil Air Patrol on Tuesday when he clipped the building that houses the offices of Dorsey & Whitney, and crashed into an unoccupied commercial building. He died at the scene. No one else was hurt. The crash occurred in the morning, before most businesses had opened for the day, in a part of the city that contains offices, hotels and restaurants. The authorities have said Mr. Demarest, who joined the Civil Air Patrol five years ago, was not authorized to fly the aircraft, but they have released few other details. The F.B.I. released a statement on Wednesday noting that agency policy prevented it from commenting on an active investigation, including “confirming or denying reports surrounding this case other than to reiterate there is no indication this was a terrorist act.”

Doug Demarest
Plane Crash
Anchorage
Suicide


Hulk Hogan Awarded $115 Million in Privacy Suit Against Gawker

Abstract: The retired wrestler Hulk Hogan was awarded $115 million in damages on Friday by a Florida jury in an invasion of privacy case against Gawker.com over its publication of a sex tape — an astounding figure that tops the $100 million he had asked for, that will probably grow before the trial concludes, and that could send a cautionary signal to online publishers despite the likelihood of an appeal by Gawker. The wrestler, known in court by his legal name, Terry G. Bollea, sobbed as the verdict was announced in late afternoon, according to people in the courtroom. The jury had considered the case for about six hours. Mr. Bollea’s team said the verdict represented “a statement as to the public’s disgust with the invasion of privacy disguised as journalism,” adding: “The verdict says, ‘No more.’ ” The damages awarded to Mr. Bollea on Friday were compensatory: $55 million for economic harm and $60 million for emotional distress. Punitive damages will be established separately, which raises the prospect that Gawker will have to submit to a detailed examination of its finances in court so the jury can assess the scale of the damages. Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton, said in his own statement that the jury did not hear all the facts. “We feel very positive about the appeal that we have already begun preparing, as we expect to win this case ultimately,” he said. The meaning of the verdict will not be clear for some time. But the perception that a Manhattan media company, noted for its wry tone and its insistence that nearly any topic is fair game, was brought low by a celebrity fighting for privacy is most likely to resonate widely across the industry. At issue in the case, in Pinellas County Circuit Court, was a grainy black-and-white tape made in the mid-2000s, which showed Mr. Bollea having sex with the wife of a friend of his at the time, Todd Clem, a radio shock jock who had legally changed his name to Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Gawker posted a brief excerpt in a 2012 post by Albert J. Daulerio, the site’s former editor in chief, that mused on the appeal of celebrity sex tapes. The case represented a peculiar clash of worlds, and it was a surreal spectacle. Mr. Bollea explained his relationship with Mr. Clem, and the ways in which Mr. Clem had encouraged him to sleep with his wife. He also drew a distinction between himself and Hulk Hogan, who he suggested were separate personas . Mr. Daulerio, who was named in the suit along with Mr. Denton, decided to joke about child pornography in his deposition, which shocked the court. And the jurors had to try and make sense of it all. Mr. Bollea’s lawyers said that the publication of the video was a gratuitous invasion of privacy, and had no news value. One of them, Kenneth G. Turkel, took particular aim at the contention that Gawker’s posting of the video was an act of journalism and was therefore protected under the First Amendment. He described the publication as “morbid and sensational prying.” He maintained that had the site’s editors been operating under the rules of professional journalism, they would have contacted Mr. Bollea to ask his permission to publish the video, or at least to warn him that they were going to do so. In any case, Mr. Turkel said, it served only as fodder for readers’ clicks and a source for advertising revenue, Mr. Turkel said. Gawker had argued that its posting of a brief excerpt of the tape was protected by the Constitution, and that Mr. Bollea had given up his right to privacy by talking often in public about his sex life. “He has chosen to seek the spotlight,” a lawyer for Gawker, Michael Sullivan, said. “He has consistently chosen to put his private life out there.” In his closing statement for the defense, Mr. Sullivan insisted that uncovering the sometimes less-than-laudatory activities of public figures “is what journalists do, and at the end of the day it’s what we want journalists to do.” After accounts of the video and images from it surfaced online — but several months before Mr. Daulerio’s 2012 post — Mr. Bollea addressed it in an appearance on a television show run by the website TMZ and in other interviews. “The public discussion was already going on,” Mr. Sullivan said. Image Hulk Hogan with Seema Ghatnekar, a lawyer. He claimed he was emotionally damaged by Gawker’s publication of the video. The verdict is a blow for Gawker, which has rebranded itself as a politics site since it published the tape and has sought to clean up its image in the wake of a series of scandals. The company is technically required to post a bond, which is capped at $50 million, before appealing. But it will almost certainly appeal that bond. The potential effect on the business, which employs about 250 people across seven websites, was not immediately clear. The company recently took significant outside investment for the first time, specifically to prepare for the case, and has been confident it can meet any financial demands the case places on it. In the statement on Friday, Gawker said its team was “disappointed the jury was unable to see key evidence and hear testimony from the most important witness.” That was an apparent reference to Mr. Clem. According to documents unsealed on Friday, the radio host initially told federal investigators that Mr. Bollea was aware that his tryst with Mrs. Clem was being recorded. But he later changed that account after Mr. Bollea sued him, saying the former wrestler did not know a camera was present. Apparently fearing that if he testified in the trial he could be subject to prosecution for giving differing accounts of the events, Mr. Clem invoked his right to not incriminate himself and was not called as a witness. The plaintiff’s legal team issued its own statement, saying that during the three and a half years since the lawsuit was filed, Mr. Clem had testified only once under oath and had “confirmed that Terry Bollea had no knowledge of being filmed or anything to do with it.” Samantha Barbas, a law professor at the University at Buffalo whose research focuses on the intersection of the First Amendment, media and privacy, said the verdict “could have a profound impact on privacy rights and also free press rights” in the United States. “For a jury to say that a celebrity has a right to privacy that outweighs the public’s ‘right to know,’ and that a celebrity sex tape is not newsworthy, represents a real shift in American free press law,” Professor Barbas said.

Hulk Hogan
Gawker.com
Privacy
Nick Denton
Lawsuits
Gawker


Rezoning Plan to Remake 3 Upper West Side Schools Will Proceed, City Says

Abstract: New York City’s Education Department said on Wednesday that it would proceed with a fiercely contested plan to redraw elementary school zones on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in an effort to reduce overcrowding while increasing racial and economic integration at three schools. The plan, which the department was to present on Wednesday night to the elected parent body that votes on such zone changes, is similar to earlier versions of the proposal, which have drawn strident opposition and have prompted some parents to threaten legal action. In recent weeks, the department had stalled, stirring speculation that it might back down in the face of political pressure, as it did last year . Instead, the department said on Wednesday that it was forging ahead. In all, 11 school zones will be redrawn. The three schools that would be significantly affected by the move are at the southern end of Community School District 3, which encompasses the Upper West Side and part of Harlem. While the district is racially and economically diverse as a whole, many of its elementary schools are not. Two of the three schools, Public School 199, on West 70th Street, and Public School 452, on West 77th Street, serve students who are mostly white and well off. The zone for the third school, Public School 191, on West 61st Street, includes a public housing project as well as expensive apartments, though for decades white families have avoided it , leaving it with a population that is poor and mostly black and Hispanic. It also operates below capacity, while P.S. 199 is overcrowded. Rezoning Plan for 11 Manhattan Schools The New York City Education Department released its plan to redraw school zones in Community School District 3 in Manhattan, which encompasses the Upper West Side and part of Harlem. The department’s proposal would redistribute students and move two of the schools into different buildings. In an elaborate dance, P.S. 191 would shift to a newly constructed building just over a block away from its current home, which the department hopes will give the school a fresh start. P.S. 452, which presently shares a building with two other schools, would move into P.S. 191’s current building, where it could serve twice as many students as it now does. Some families currently zoned for P.S. 199 would instead be put into the P.S. 191 zone. And P.S. 452 would add some of the present zones for P.S. 191 and P.S. 199. Overall, the effect would be to put many more white, well-off students in the P.S. 191 zone, while putting more poor, minority students into the zones for P.S. 199 and P.S. 452. The changes would only affect future students; no current students would have to change schools, and children with older siblings already attending one of the affected schools would get priority at those schools. The plan is similar to one offered last month by the District 3 Community Education Council, the group that will vote on changing the lines. The department said the council would vote by the end of the month, when parents can start registering their children for kindergarten. The controversy over the zones is likely to continue beyond the council’s vote. Current P.S. 452 parents who oppose the school being moved have said they would sue to halt the plan. Residents of two buildings that would be rezoned from P.S. 199 to P.S. 191 — 165 and 185 West End Avenue — have hired a lawyer, though their plans are unclear. Assuming the rezoning survives any possible legal challenges, a major hurdle for the Education Department will be persuading wealthy parents to enroll their children at P.S. 191, which has low standardized test scores and was once labeled “persistently dangerous” by New York State. The department has said it would start a gifted and talented program for third graders at the school next year and would provide financing, starting this year, for an instructional coach to work with teachers on math and literacy. The department also said on Wednesday that it was moving to consolidate two schools in Harlem, essentially closing Public School 241, which last year had only 112 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. To do that, the department is asking the council to approve redrawing the zone lines of five other schools. Students and staff now at P.S. 241 would be moved to Public School 76, eight blocks north.

K-12 Education
Zoning
NYC Department of Education
PS 191
PS199
PS 452
Upper West Side Manhattan
Harlem
NYC


L.S.U. Gets Top Ranking in Coaches’ Preseason Poll

Abstract: Louisiana State, which absorbed a lopsided loss against Alabama in the Bowl Championship Series national title game last January, was ranked No. 1 in the USA Today top 25 coaches’ poll, with Alabama second and Southern California third. L.S.U. received 18 first-place votes, slightly fewer that the 20 first-place votes for the Crimson Tide and 19 first-place votes for the Trojans. Oklahoma and Oregon round out the top five. ¶ The N.C.A.A.’s board of directors endorsed a proposal that could bar rule-breaking teams from postseason play for up to four years, as the sanctions imposed on Penn State’s football program do. The proposal would also negate all revenue that teams that violated the rules brought in during the years in which the violations occurred. If the plan is approved, coaches could also be held accountable individually. A vote is not expected before the board’s October meeting.

Coaches and Managers
College Athletics
Louisiana State University
Football (College)
Polls and Public Opinion


Mayor Plans an $80 Million Campaign

Abstract: Even as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his advisers await a City Council vote on a measure that would allow him to seek a third term, they are mapping out an aggressive re-election strategy that involves spending $80 million or more, according to people involved in the discussions. At least $20 million of that money would be used to pound away at the man the advisers believe will be his most likely opponent, Representative Anthony D. Weiner , a Democrat who represents Brooklyn and Queens, the people involved in the talks said. The discussions come as resistance builds to the mayor’s efforts to overturn the city’s 1993 term limits law, which, if left unchanged, would force him from office in December 2009. Already, there are calls for Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire who has financed his own previous campaigns, to abide by the strict spending restrictions in the city’s public finance system. Mr. Bloomberg is not bound by such restriction as long as he spends his own money. But his advisers, in interviews this week, said the mayor had no intention of limiting his spending. Indeed, they said he would spend whatever was necessary to proclaim his credentials and experience — especially in a time of financial unrest — and undo any damage his reputation suffered as a result of undoing the term limits restrictions. One person involved in the discussions said: “There is no cap. There is no price tag.” Another person said that the mayor — who is expected to run not as a Republican, as he did in 2001 and 2005, but as an independent — would spend as much as $100 million. That would be $16 million more than he spent in 2005, when he won by a record margin over Fernando Ferrer. Most of the mayor’s expenditures were dedicated to television and radio advertising, consulting fees and mailings. The people involved in the talks spoke anonymously because they did not want to be seen sharing details of internal strategy. A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, Jason Post, when asked about the mayor’s 2009 election strategy, said, “The mayor is focused on leading the city, not politics.” Until Mr. Bloomberg’s announcement last week that he would abandon his earlier opposition to revising the term limits law and would seek another term, speculation about the 2009 mayoral race was focused on three Democrats: Mr. Weiner; the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn; and the city comptroller, William G. Thompson Jr. And although all three are experienced politicians, none are well known, according to recent polls. Some business leaders, in fact, were so unimpressed with the field that they began pushing Mr. Bloomberg, whose approval ratings have hovered in the 70 percent range, to go for a third act. And even though Mr. Bloomberg’s top aides opposed the idea, he announced last Thursday that he felt compelled by the global financial crisis to change the law and run again. If term limits are altered, the field of contenders promises to look very different. Ms. Quinn, a close ally of Mr. Bloomberg, has already declared that if the mayor seeks a third term, she will instead seek re-election to her seat. Mr. Thompson has been more circumspect, saying that he still intends to run. But most political consultants believe that Mr. Thompson, who has a reputation of being a cautious architect of consensus, will ultimately run for re-election instead. Mr. Weiner, by contrast, has declared unequivocally that he will run for mayor regardless of Mr. Bloomberg’s plans. And since he has already declared that his candidacy will focus on the struggles of the middle class, political consultants say he could use Mr. Bloomberg’s maneuver to rewrite term limits without a public vote as an issue in his campaign. Mr. Bloomberg’s advisers say that they have turned their attention increasingly in recent weeks to Mr. Weiner as a likely opponent. And they are clearly relishing the prospect of a matchup against someone Mr. Bloomberg is said to dislike, and who Bloomberg supporters say has no executive experience. Mr. Weiner was observing Yom Kippur on Thursday (as was Mr. Bloomberg), and was unavailable for comment. But his spokesman, John Collins, said: “Anthony believes that the only way this can legitimately be changed is through a public vote. Right now Anthony is focused on ensuring that all New Yorkers, who twice have voted on the matter, keep their right to vote and do not have it taken away by a backroom deal.” It is not exactly a certainty that the City Council will pass the bill. Several legal complaints are already in the pipeline, because of good-government groups that believe the legislation presents all kinds of conflict-of-interest problems. Meanwhile, Ms. Quinn has delayed making a decision until at least Monday, some council members have said. If Mr. Bloomberg is allowed to run, he is expected to rely on many of the same consultants who helped achieve his 2001 and 2005 victories. These are likely to include three deputy mayors who are his closest aides, Kevin Sheekey, Patricia Harris and Edward Skyler, and two veteran Democratic consultants, William Knapp and Josh Isay. Mr. Bloomberg spent $74 million in 2001 to upset Mark Green, breaking all records for spending in a citywide election until he did so again in 2005.

New York City
Bloomberg Michael R
Weiner Anthony D
Term Limits (Political Office)
Elections


Bank of England Warns of ‘Slow and Protracted’ Recovery

Abstract: LONDON — Britain’s recovery will probably be “slow and protracted,” the Bank of England warned Wednesday, tempering positive sentiment from recent economic reports suggesting that the end of the recession might be in sight. “Growth has just as much chance of being positive over the next 12 months as it has of being negative,” the governor of the central bank, Mervyn King, said. Mr. King added that credit markets remained constricted and that banks were still reluctant to lend, a situation that needed to improve before a real recovery could occur. “Great uncertainty about the outlook” persists, he said in the bank’s quarterly report. “The economy will eventually heal, but the process may be slow.” The central bank predicted that inflation would slow to as low as 0.4 percent this year and then accelerate to 1.5 percent by the end of 2010, revising upward an earlier forecast. But inflation is still unlikely to hit 2 percent by 2012, the central bank said. The pound fell against the dollar on Wednesday, and Britain’s FTSE 100 benchmark share index dropped after the report. A stock market rally last month, rising consumer confidence and a slower decline of house prices in Britain had prompted some investors to anticipate an end of the recession. But Mr. King stressed that banks were still reluctant to supply credit and that companies’ balance sheets remain stretched and laden with debt. The Bank of England reduced benchmark lending rates to a record low of 0.5 percent this year and accelerated its quantitative easing program, buying government bonds and other assets for £125 billion, or $190 billion, to ease credit markets and avoid deflation . The stimulus package, with rising stock markets and a weaker pound, will help Britain’s recovery, Mr. King said, but first banks must reduce leverage and raise more capital. “Although the measures taken by the governments to stabilize their banking systems have been truly extraordinary in scale and scope, it is likely that the supply of credit will continue to be restricted for some while,” he said. HSBC Holdings, the large European bank, predicted Monday that bad loans would increase and that this year would be “tough.” Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland, which are controlled by the government, and Barclays also forecast an increase in bad loans as unemployment continues to rise. The central bank forecast that the economy would contract this year before growing again next year. Mr. King indicated that the central bank would probably keep interest rates low for a while to help the recovery. Inflation, which accelerated above the central bank’s 2 percent target to 2.9 percent in March because of higher energy and food prices , is likely to drop below the target, he said. The bank’s growth forecasts are gloomier than the government’s, which has predicted that the British economy would return to growth at the end of this year and record a contraction of 3.5 percent for the year.

Economic Conditions and Trends
Great Britain
Bank of England


SoftBank’s ARM Deal May Signal Life After ‘Brexit.’ Or Not.

Abstract: When Britain voted last month to leave the European Union, many deal makers predicted that future acquisitions there were all but dead. Then, on Monday, with the announcement of SoftBank ’s monstrous $32 billion acquisition of ARM Holdings , based in Cambridge, England, fears about the so-called Brexit’s potential to quash deals suddenly seemed like a distant memory. “Just three weeks after the referendum decision, it shows that Britain has lost none of its allure to international investors,” the British finance minister, Philip Hammond, said in a statement. But after digesting the politics, the question becomes: Does the acquisition of the semiconductor company ARM by the Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank pave the way for more British deals? Or is ARM an anomaly among British takeover targets? By and large, ARM is a special case for several reasons: ■ Even if Brexit causes an economic slowdown in Britain, ARM would be relatively immune. ARM, which licenses chip designs to semiconductor companies all over the world, generates a mere 1 percent of its revenue from Britain, with only 9 percent from the rest of Europe. ARM derives a majority of its revenue from Asia, followed by North America. ■ After Britain’s vote to withdraw from the E.U., the pound plummeted relative to most currencies around the world, making imports into Britain more expensive. However, ARM does not require much in the way of raw materials to do business. Rather than manufacture the chips itself, ARM’s engineers design the chips or parts of the chips and then sell that intellectual property to semiconductor companies. Much of ARM’s cost basis comes in the form of engineers’ salaries (its employees are spread out across Britain, Europe, North America and Asia). ■ ARM’s stock price gained as a result of Brexit because investors saw it as a safe haven in the region, given the company’s global exposure. Because ARM was trading at its highest level this year before the deal was announced, its executives were more apt to sell, especially at the 43 percent premium SoftBank was offering. ■ From a regulatory standpoint, the deal should not raise too many eyebrows. From an antitrust perspective, there is very little overlap between ARM and the businesses SoftBank owns. Additionally, Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, spoke with Mr. Hammond and Teresa May, Britain’s new prime minister, about the deal on Sunday before it was officially announced. ■ The deal includes no visible cost-cutting, and SoftBank even pledged to increase the number of jobs in Britain. “The independence aspect of the deal is very important,” said Simon Segars, ARM’s chief executive. That said, deal activity may ultimately bubble to the surface in Britain as the current foreign exchange rate favors inbound takeovers, and a desire to diversify outside the region could encourage outbound acquisitions. A recent Brexit report by Citigroup showed that transactions signed during periods of uncertainty tend to outperform lower-volatility periods, suggesting that only the best deals get done during that time. SoftBank certainly hopes that is true with ARM.

ARM Holdings
SoftBank
Mergers and Acquisitions
Brexit
Japan


Afghan Women Most Imperiled, Report Finds

Abstract: PARIS — Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan are the three most dangerous countries in the world for women, according to a panel of gender experts assembled by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Women live perilously in many developing countries today, but on top of the list is Afghanistan, the experts said, with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, minimal access to basic health care and education and scarcely any economic rights for women and girls. Eighty-seven percent of Afghan women are illiterate and one in 11 dies in childbirth, Unicef estimates. As many as 8 in 10 face forced marriages. In Congo, vastly different threats prevail for women. According to Keshat Bachan of Plan International, a private organization specializing in child poverty, the levels of sexual violence and rape there “are simply the highest in the world.” On an average day, 1,152 Congolese women are raped, according to estimates published in The American Journal of Public Health. A married woman is powerless to sign any legal documents without her husband’s authorization. The experts ranked Pakistan third, based on religious traditions that are harmful to women. More than 1,000 women a year are victims of so-called honor killings and many more are victims of acid attacks, child marriage and abusive punishments, including stoning, human rights activists report. Thomson Reuters asked more than 200 aid professionals, academics, health workers, policy makers, journalists and development specialists from five continents to rank countries on their overall perception of danger for women as well as by six risk categories, from health to violence to religious and other factors.


Union Leaders Attacked at Bangladesh Garment Factories, Investigations Show

Abstract: The garment factory’s closed-circuit camera captured some unusual activity: Out front a female union leader was swarmed by people, pushed to the ground and assaulted while a male union activist was chased away and punched. Another female union leader entered the factory door and seconds later was pushed outside, then shoved out of camera range. Two investigations of the episodes depicted in the video, one led by a Washington-based workers’ rights group and another by a prominent American apparel company, determined that the camera footage showed that factory managers directed those attacks at the Global Garments factory in Bangladesh on Nov. 10. The attacks occurred three months after a female union president was beaten in the head with an iron rod just outside another factory owned by the same company, the Azim Group, requiring her to get more than 20 stitches, workers’ rights groups say. They maintain that company-directed thugs carried out that assault, while the Azim Group said the assault resulted from a feud involving a former husband that, the company’s law firm said, “occurred outside working hours, outside the factory grounds, outside any industrial dispute.” The Azim Group, which says it has 24 factories and employs 27,000 workers, said it was not involved in either altercation. Mishcon de Reya, a law firm representing Azim, said the November dispute “arose between the workers and union leaders.” These attacks occurred as the United States and Europe, with workers’ advocacy groups, have been pressuring Bangladesh and its garment industry to improve factory safety and to guarantee that workers are free to unionize if the country wants some trade preferences restored. The Obama administration suspended Bangladesh’s trade privileges last year, after the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,100 apparel workers. In response to the recent attacks against union leaders, two major apparel companies have announced that they are terminating or suspending orders with the Azim Group, the company that owns the two factories in Chittagong where the attacks occurred. After commissioning an investigation, the VF Corporation , which produces the North Face, Nautica, Wrangler and Timberland brands, informed Azim on Dec. 13 that it was terminating their business relationship unless Azim took strong, demonstrable steps by Dec. 31 to guarantee workers’ rights and assure no further violence against union leaders. Scott Deitz, the vice president for corporate relations at VF, called the attacks “deplorable,” and said that while “we do not produce at the factories where these terrible incidents occurred,” VF has “an obligation to ensure that Azim is complying with our global compliance principles.” He said that VF accounts for about 10 percent of the production at Azim’s factories. In addition, Li & Fung, a global supply chain company that helps arrange apparel production for Kohl’s in Bangladesh, said it had conducted its own assessment. “We concluded that a number of union representatives were mistreated and intimidated by factory supervisors,” Li & Fung, which is based in Hong Kong, wrote by email. “This is a serious violation of our code of conduct and that of our customer. As a result, we have suspended all future orders with any factories owned and operated by the Azim Group of companies.” VF and Li & Fung said their penalties would remain in place until they were certain that Azim was respectful of workers’ rights at all its factories and union leaders were free from harassment. Through its law firm, the Azim Group said that the episodes on Nov. 10 were “nonviolent” and that “the workers of the factory were exercising their legal rights to raise concerns about the union leaders.” The company’s law firm added that “any suggestion that the disagreement was ‘organized or directed’ by the management of Azim Group is false.” With regard to the beating on Aug. 26 of Mira Boashak, the acting union president at Azim’s Global Trousers factory, Farhan Azim, director of the Azim Group, said the company had done “whatever we can to assist through paying all medical bills and full remuneration for our worker during her long absence from work.” In an email responding to questions from The New York Times, Mr. Azim said the company routinely engaged in collective bargaining and that it had welcomed and encouraged trade union activity for years. Mr. Azim said that VF had indicated it was willing to discuss how to move forward, and “stated that they strongly hope we can come to an understanding of how to do this.” He added, “The publication of any story by you based on unsubstantiated allegations would be counterproductive at this point and would compel us to take legal recourse.” His father, Mohammad Fazlul Azim, the company’s founder, was until recently a member of the Bangladeshi Parliament. Dan Mozena, who stepped down as the United States ambassador to Bangladesh this week, said in a telephone interview, “We are following the incidents,” adding, “it’s a concern to us.” “The owner alleges that he had nothing to do with it, and the victims allege he had everything to do with it,” Mr. Mozena said. “We have raised these matters with Azim on a number of occasions,” he added. “A criminal act is a criminal act. Whoever perpetrated these beatings, those people need to be held accountable in the criminal process.” The Worker Rights Consortium, a monitoring group sponsored by more than 180 American universities, investigated the attacks outside the two factories and brought those attacks to the attention of VF and other apparel companies. A report that the consortium sent to Azim’s customers on Dec. 18 concluded, “Overwhelming testimonial and videographic evidence proves that Azim Group carried out a coordinated series of attacks on leaders of the GGL (Global Garments Ltd.) union on November 10, involving numerous intentional acts of violence and public humiliation.” Representatives of the consortium interviewed the union leaders who had been beaten and many other workers from the two Azim factories in Chittagong. “What happened is part of a rising wave of violence against workers who are trying to organize and defend their rights and their safety,” said Scott Nova, the consortium’s executive director. “If this violence is successful in suppressing the nascent growth of the labor movement, then the prospect for real change in Bangladesh will be severely dimmed.” Mr. Nova said the compensation the Azim Group provided did not cover all Ms. Boashak’s medical bills and was inadequate. Photographs of her wounds show a long, open, bright red gash in her skull after the Aug. 26 attack. Mr. Nova said it would be a first for Bangladesh if the Azim Group reached a comprehensive agreement to remedy the violence and ensure constructive relations with its unions. Dana M. Perlman, a spokeswoman for PVH, which is based in New York and produces Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein apparel, said it was also investigating the episodes at the two factories. “Pending the results, and the Azim Group’s response, we are not placing any further orders with those two facilities,” she said. VF has made clear that whatever production it stops doing at Azim will be transferred to other factories in Bangladesh so as not to penalize the country. Labor advocates are urging other companies to do likewise. VF hired what it said was a respected human rights expert based in Hong Kong to investigate the beatings. It declined to make its report or the name of the investigator public. Jeff Hermanson, director of global strategy for Workers United, the main union for United States garment workers, was invited by VF to help with the investigation in Bangladesh. He said he worked closely with the leader of the investigation and they found from interviews and the closed-circuit video that some managers and anti-union workers had arrived early and were strategically placed when buses stopped outside the factory. The plant was reopened on Nov. 10 after being closed for three months. “The supervisors were all in front of the gate,” Mr. Hermanson said, “and when the union people arrived, they were dragged and pushed off camera where we were told they were assaulted severely.” “It became clear to us,” he added, “that there was violence against trade unionists, that it was planned by management.” Laura Wilkinson, a Gap spokeswoman, said that while Gap was not a customer of the two factories where the attacks occurred, it uses other Azim Group factories. “Our sourcing and social responsibility teams jointly met with factory ownership to express our serious concerns and expectations,” she said. “We put the Azim Group on notice that if we do not see a swift resolution of this matter, that all parties can support, there will be a significant and direct business impact.”

Bangladesh
Azim Group
VF
Fashion
Manufacturing
Labor Unions


Pettersen Opens 5-Stroke Lead in South Korea

Abstract: Suzann Pettersen shot a four-under 68 to extend her lead to five strokes after the second round of the L.P.G.A. KEB HanaBank Championship in Incheon, South Korea. South Korea’s Ryu So-yeon had a 70 and is alone in second place, a stroke ahead of her compatriot Se Ri Pak, who had the day’s best round with a 67. Michelle Wie, playing on a sponsor exemption, is two over after two rounds and tied for 40th place with No. 2-ranked Stacy Lewis. ¶ Bo Van Pelt shot a five-under 67 to take a one-shot lead over his fellow American Jason Dufner after the third round of the Perth International in Australia. Van Pelt started the day four shots behind the overnight leader Emiliano Grillo and grabbed the lead when Grillo bogeyed two of his last three holes.


Social Networks Offer a Way To Narrow the Field of Friends

Abstract: There are times when you just have to tell your friends about something — but not necessarily your Facebook friends. Just ask Becca Akroyd. When Ms. Akroyd, a 29-year-old lawyer in Sacramento, Calif., wanted to share a picture of her new vegetable garden, she didn’t turn to Facebook. Instead she posted it on Path, a service that lets people share pictures, videos and messages with a small group. “The people I have on my Path are the people who are going to care about the day-to-day random events in my life, or if my dog does something funny,” Ms. Akroyd said. “On Facebook, I have colleagues or family members who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in those things — and also that I wouldn’t necessarily want to have view those things.” Path, which limits friend groups to 50, is among a new crop of Web services that allow people to connect with a handful of friends in a private group. Users get the benefits of sharing without the strangeness that can result when social worlds collide on Facebook. Other start-ups in this anti-oversharing crowd include GroupMe, Frenzy, Rally Up, Shizzlr, Huddl and Bubbla. Even Facebook recognizes that people don’t want to share everything with every “friend.” It has privacy settings that control who can see what, but many people find these challenging to set up. So last fall, Facebook introduced Groups, for sharing with subsets of Facebook friends. And in March, it acquired Beluga, a start-up that allows sharing photos and messages with small groups privately. Last month, Facebook said its users had created 50 million groups with a median of just eight members. It also introduced the Send button, which Web sites can use to let people share things with Facebook groups. “We realized there wasn’t a way to share with these groups of people that were already established in your real life — family, book club members, a sports team,” said Peter Deng, director of product for Facebook Groups. “It’s one of the fastest-growing products within Facebook. Usage has been pretty phenomenal.” Google is also working on tools for sharing with limited groups of people, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans who was not authorized to speak publicly. Slide, a maker of social networking apps that was bought by Google, recently released an iPhone app called Disco, for texting with small groups. Google may discuss its plans in this area at a conference for developers this week. A spokeswoman, Katie Watson, declined to comment. No one expects the start-ups in this field — most of which are new and have relatively few users — to replace Facebook or Twitter. Instead, their creators say that they do a better job of mimicking offline social relationships, and that they represent a new wave of social networking that revolves around specific tasks, like sharing photos or coordinating plans for the evening. Shizzlr, for example, was created by two graduate business students at the University of Connecticut after they realized it was impossible to organize plans on Facebook. “You put out a status about weekend plans and, all of a sudden, you get your uncle commenting that he wants to go hiking with you and your friends,” said Nick Jaensch, who created Shizzlr with Keith Bessette. After users invite a few friends into a group on Shizzlr, the service grabs a list of coming events from Yelp, Google and Facebook and lets members discuss their options. The groups reach capacity at 20 people. In the last three months, about 3,600 people have downloaded the application — a tiny number compared with Facebook’s 600 million members. But Mr. Jaensch says he is not interested in competing with Facebook. “The people that you’ve called in the past two to three weeks are the people you actually do stuff with,” he said. Shizzlr is just getting off the ground, but some of the other services in this field have attracted the attention of prominent investors. Path has raised $11 million from venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. GroupMe, which says it is handling 100 million messages a month, raised $10.6 million from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and First Sound, and others. AOL acquired Rally Up late last summer. Dave Morin, Path’s founder, was an early Facebook employee, but thought the social network had grown too large and impersonal for sharing certain things. Hundreds of thousands of users have agreed and signed up for Path, sharing more than five million photos and videos so far, Mr. Morin said. Most of their groups include far fewer than the 50 friends they are allowed, he said. “People pull out their phone and show their photos and start telling a story about their life — ‘Last week I was on vacation,’ or ‘here’s my cat,’ or ‘here’s what I ate for dinner last night’ — but when we ask if they put those photos anywhere, people would say, ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s way too personal,’ ” Mr. Morin said. Those photos might also be too boring for the full lineup of one’s Facebook friends. And, of course there are other photos that your cubicle neighbors and former flames might find to be ... too interesting. “The larger social networks have certainly become more loose-tie networks of acquaintances,” said Mo Koyfman, an investor at Spark Capital who follows social media trends. “But the way we communicate with acquaintances is very different from how we communicate with friends.” Spark recently invested in Kik, a mobile group messaging app. Mr. Koyfman said most of these start-up applications centered on cellphones because they were inherently more personal than Web sites used at a computer. Mr. Deng at Facebook said that his company was working on more tools for small-group sharing. But some Internet users and entrepreneurs maintain that the big social networks will always be too big for people to share comfortably. John Winter, a developer in New Zealand, cobbled together Frenzy, an application that lets friends share links, photos, songs and other items in an invitation-only folder on the Web storage service Dropbox, effectively turning it into a private social feed. “Twitter is public and Facebook is basically public,” he said. “What else are you going to use?”


Race for New York City Comptroller Has Raised Record Amounts

Abstract: They are four little-known candidates, but television viewers are likely to become quite familiar with them in the coming days. Melinda R. Katz , David Yassky , John C. Liu and David I. Weprin , the four Democratic candidates for city comptroller, have raised a record total of $10 million for their campaigns and have the bulk of it on hand to bombard the airwaves with ads in an effort to break from the pack before the Sept. 15 primary. The last time there was a competitive race for the office, in 2001, William C. Thompson Jr. and his opponent, Herbert E. Berman , raised less than half of that amount. Money, always a key tool, is particularly important in this contest because three of the four candidates, all of whom are members of the City Council, are locked in a dead heat, a poll indicates. If no candidate receives more than 40 percent of the primary vote, the top two will face a runoff election. “The money is crucial to them,” said Micheline Blum, the director of survey research at Baruch College. “None of them is that well known, and they need the money to get the message out and get the people out.” A Quinnipiac University poll on Aug. 26 found 45 percent of voters were still undecided. Three candidates, Mr. Liu, Mr. Yassky and Ms. Katz, were clustered around 16 percent with Mr. Weprin lagging behind at 5 percent. The campaigns are scheduled to release their latest finance filings on Friday, but they have all said that they expect to have significant funds in the cupboard. Mr. Liu, who has collected the most in private contributions so far, $3.2 million, had $2.5 million on hand as of his last filing, on Aug. 14. Mr. Yassky, who has raised the least privately, $2.1 million, has received the most public matching funds and still had $2.2 million on hand at that time. Mr. Weprin and Ms. Katz each had about $1.6 million left to spend at a time when 30-second television spots are costing between $5,000 and $7,000. Each candidate has had success raising money from distinct groups, most notably Mr. Liu, who, if he were to win, would be the first Asian-American elected to citywide office. He has raised more than $2 million from Asian-Americans. More than two-thirds of his money has come from donors who live outside the city. Such contributions are not eligible for the city’s matching funds program, under which each dollar in a private contribution of up to $175 is matched by $6 in public money. As a result, though Mr. Liu has raised the most in private contributions, the $1 million he has collected in matching funds is second to the $1.3 million in matching funds collected by Mr. Yassky. Mr. Yassky, a lawyer and law professor, did particularly well in raising money from other lawyers, who accounted for nearly $400,000 of his total. Real estate developers, among the most reliable sources of campaign money for city candidates, supported all four, but none as much as Ms. Katz, who, as a chairwoman of the Council’s Committee on Land Use, holds sway over the fate of real estate developments that require a zoning change. She collected more than $700,000 of her nearly $2.5 million total in private contributions from real estate development interests. A spokesman for her campaign said that Ms. Katz had won the respect of many real estate developers, even as she fought with them over affordable housing and limiting projects in overdeveloped neighborhoods. One point that distinguishes this election from previous races for comptroller is the relative lack of cash from firms that manage money for the city’s $80 billion employee pension system, which is overseen by the comptroller. Mr. Thompson had collected considerable campaign contributions over the years from money managers associated with the pension system. But under recent reforms, contributions from executives of firms that do business with the city, including those that manage money for the pensions, are now capped at $400 , compared with $4,950 for others. Though Mr. Weprin lagged behind in the Quinnipiac poll, the $1.6 million he has on hand makes him still viable, given that the race is widely expected to wind up in a runoff. The Republican candidate, Joseph A. Mendola, who does not face a primary, has raised $14,600 so far. Get-out-the-vote efforts are also expected to be crucial, since the Democratic primary for the mayor’s race, between Mr. Thompson and City Councilman Tony Avella , is not expected to produce a large turnout. Will enough Asian-American voters turn out to put Mr. Liu over the top? Can Ms. Katz gain an advantage as the only woman in the race? “Honestly, if you’re not a political junkie, do you even know what’s going on in this race?” asked Ms. Blum, the director of survey research at Baruch. “This office never gets that much attention, and it’s even more difficult when you have so many candidates.”

New York City
Elections
Campaign Finance
Katz Melinda R
Yassky David
Liu John C
Weprin David I
Thompson William C Jr
Berman Herbert E
Avella Tony


Conservative Party Endorses Lhota for Mayor

Abstract: The Conservative Party of New York State endorsed Joseph J. Lhota, a Republican, for mayor on Monday, all but ensuring that Mr. Lhota and his chief rival for the Republican nomination, John A. Catsimatidis, will both carry their campaigns into the November general election. Mr. Catsimatidis was endorsed last month by the Liberal Party. In an announcement in front of City Hall, the chairman of the Conservative Party, Michael R. Long, said that Mr. Lhota, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a deputy mayor in the administration of Rudolph W. Giuliani, was the only candidate who shared the party’s positions on keeping taxes low and making the city safe. Mr. Lhota said he was proud to run on the Conservative Party’s line, saying he was focused on “making sure that we maintain all of the advances that we’ve made over the last 20 years, with an enhanced quality of life, sound fiscal policy, reduced crime.” Mr. Lhota has described himself as a libertarian, and some of his views — he supports same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana — clash with those of the Conservative Party. “Joe and I have talked at great length on all the issues, and it’s very clear that there are differences between the two of us, but this is not a race about social issues,” Mr. Long said when asked about these different views. “This is about the future of the city of New York,” he added. Asked if he would run on the Conservative Party line in November even if he lost the Republican primary, Mr. Lhota answered that he would, but added that he considered it a hypothetical question. “I will win the Republican nomination,” he said. “There’s no question in my mind about that.”

Conservative Party of New York State
Joseph J Lhota
Mayoral races
NYC
Political endorsement
John A Catsimatidis


Oakland’s Chris Young on Disabled List

Abstract: The Oakland Athletics put Chris Young on the 15-day disabled list with a strained left quadriceps and recalled outfielder Michael Taylor from Class AAA Sacramento. Young was batting .172 with 4 homers and 15 runs batted in. Taylor, 27, was hitting .329 with 5 homers and 16 R.B.I.

Baseball
Oakland Athletics
Michael Taylor
Chris B Young
Michael Taylor


Trudeau Condemns Killing of Canadian Hostage in Philippines

Abstract: OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the “heinous” killing in the Philippines on Monday of a Canadian who had been held captive by Islamic militants for seven months. Mr. Trudeau confirmed that John Ridsdel, 68, a mining executive, had been killed by the Abu Sayyaf group after a ransom deadline expired. “This was an act of coldblooded murder, and responsibility rests squarely with the terrorist group who took him hostage,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters. On Sept. 21, members of Abu Sayyaf kidnapped Mr. Ridsdel along with Robert Hall, another Canadian, Kjartan Sekkingstad of Norway, and Marites Flor, a woman from the Philippines, from a marina and resort on Samal Island. Several news reports indicated that the group was seeking about $6.4 million in ransom for each of the hostages. Mr. Ridsdel appeared last month in a video posted on a Facebook page associated with Abu Sayyaf, in which he pleaded with Mr. Trudeau to meet the kidnappers’ demands. He appeared with two other hostages; all were handcuffed and appeared gaunt. Global Affairs Canada, the country’s foreign ministry, said that the government would not pay ransom. “Kidnap for ransom is a significant source of terrorist funding, fueling violence and instability,” it said in a statement on Monday. Video This video appears to show the Canadian hostage John Ridsdel in the Philippines begging the Canadian government to intervene before he was beheaded. The ministry declined to comment on what military efforts, if any, had been underway to rescue the hostages when the kidnappers’ deadline approached. Bob Rae, who was interim leader of the Liberal Party in Canada before Mr. Trudeau took over, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he had been working with Mr. Ridsdel’s family in efforts to free the hostages. “It’s hard, it’s just very hard,” Mr. Rae, a friend of Mr. Ridsdel’s since the 1960s, told the broadcaster. “Whether things could have been done differently, it’s too soon for that to be said. Certainly the family did everything they could to try to reach a solution.” Reuters, quoting a spokesman for the Philippines military, reported that a man on a motorcycle on Monday dropped a plastic bag with a head in it in the center of town on Jolo Island, the remote region where Abu Sayyaf is largely based. The military added that tests were underway to confirm the identity of the victim. While the United States military has said that Abu Sayyaf has links with Al Qaeda and has received support from it, many analysts characterize the group mainly as a ruthless criminal organization, focused on profiting from kidnappings rather than ideology. The Philippines armed forces have said the group is holding a number of other hostages. In November, the group decapitated a Malaysian hostage when that country’s prime minister arrived in the Philippines for an international summit meeting. The Calgary Herald reported that Mr. Ridsdel had worked at the newspaper as a reporter during the 1970s and 1980s before becoming a spokesman and manager for Petro-Canada, a large oil company based in that city. Mr. Ridsdel later managed a mine in the Philippines, and worked part time as a mining consultant in recent years. The Philippine military and police, in a joint statement on Tuesday, expressed condolences to Mr. Ridsdel’s family, and vowed to press their efforts “to neutralize these lawless elements and thwart further threats to peace and security.”

Abu Sayyaf
John Ridsdel
Kidnapping and Hostages
Canada
Philippines
Justin Trudeau


United States Can Spy on Britons Despite Pact, N.S.A. Memo Says

Abstract: The National Security Agency is authorized to spy on the citizens of America’s closest allies, including Britain, even though those English-speaking countries have long had an official non-spying pact, according to a newly disclosed memorandum. The classified N.S.A. document, which appears to be a draft and is dated January 2005, states that under specific circumstances, the American intelligence agency may spy on citizens of Britain without that country’s consent or knowledge. The memo, provided by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, is labeled secret and “NOFORN,” indicating that it may not be shared with any foreign country. In recent months, the N.S.A.’s activities have stoked anger across the world after leaked documents have exposed American spying on political and economic partners like Germany and France, as well as various foreign leaders. But until now, there has been almost nothing disclosed about spying among the “Five Eyes” countries — the United States and its close intelligence partners Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The N.S.A. declined to respond to questions on whether the draft became official policy and whether spying on Britain without its consent had ever taken place. But portions of the document appear to indicate that, whether by formal agreement or simply longstanding practice, both Britain and the United States believed that in extraordinary circumstances, one country might feel compelled to spy on citizens of the other. In a reference to an intelligence-sharing compact struck in March 1946, the memo said the two nations had agreed “that both governments will not target each other’s citizens/persons.” That agreement, however, came with a caveat that “when it is in the best interest of each nation,” unilateral spying by one nation on the other could take place, the memo says. It goes on to expand that mandate to allow spying by the United States on any of the Five Eyes countries. The memo was provided by Mr. Snowden to The Guardian , which shared it with The New York Times. The N.S.A. also declined to say whether the memorandum merely codified longstanding American practice or was breaking new ground. “NSA works with a number of partners and allies in meeting its foreign-intelligence mission goals, and in every case those operations comply with U.S. law and with the applicable laws under which those partners and allies operate,” the agency said in a written reply to questions. One former senior intelligence official said he had been unaware there were any exceptions to the policy of the five nations sharing intelligence information with each other, but said he would be surprised if the United States chose to spy on its closest allies very frequently. “They would do this unilaterally so rarely and in such extraordinary circumstances because they would be so concerned about hurting the relationship,” said the former official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. “My bet is that they wouldn’t go to that well very often.” The memo contains several protocols on who should be alerted, and under what circumstances, when spying must take place on other Five Eyes countries — also referred to as “Second Party” countries. One paragraph, marked secret, appears to suggest that the preferred option is to gain permission from the country whose citizens are to be spied upon. But the very next paragraph, marked secret and NOFORN, indicates that the N.S.A. can go it alone if permission is not forthcoming — or if United States chooses not to ask. “When sharing the planned targeting information with a Second Party would be contrary to U.S. interests, or when the Second Party declines a collaboration proposal, the proposed targeting must be presented to the Signals Intelligence Director for approval with justification for the criticality of the proposed collection,” the passage explains. It goes on to say that if that spying is approved, the information it gleans “must be maintained in NOFORN channels” — i.e., never shared with the spied-upon country. A footnote goes further, suggesting that if a Five Eyes citizen is outside of his or her own country, the limits are lifted. In that case, the memo says, “there may be no restrictions associated with that collection” outside of basic N.S.A. rules on avoiding spying on innocent Americans and similar guidelines. The memo does not detail how much, if at all, these orders differ from existing practice among the spying partners. Even the memo’s purpose is classified secret and NOFORN: “This management directive establishes United States Signals Intelligence System (USSS) policy and procedures related to the targeting of Second Party Persons.” From the start, the document raises the intriguing question of whether American and British spy agencies have been loosening the rules established in the nonspying compact of 1946. After referring to the compact, the memo contains a passage stating that “this agreement has evolved” to include the understanding that Britain and the United States would not spy on each other. But in the next two sentences, the memo asserts that the countries “reserved the right” to spy on each other “when it is in the best interest of each nation.”

NSA
Spying and Intelligence Agencies
Great Britain
Edward Snowden
US
Australia
New Zealand
Canada
Guardian British Newspaper


Amazon Shares Drop as Revenues Fall Short

Abstract: Amazon.com ’s plans for world domination hit a slight bump on Tuesday. For years, the retailer has been telling Wall Street to ignore how little money it was making and focus instead on the fact that it was bringing in more and more customers and keeping them so happy they never went anywhere else for anything. In Amazon’s fourth-quarter results, however, investors finally glimpsed off in the distance that growth beginning to flatten. Its revenue rose to $17.43 billion, up 35 percent. Most retailers would die happy with such a jump. But for the e-commerce leader, sales were nearly a billion dollars short of what analysts had been expecting. Even as investors are panting for Facebook’s public stock offering, established Internet stars are disappointing. Amazon’s poor showing came on the heels of a similar miss from Google. Among the reasons for Amazon’s missed expectations: Video games were lackluster. There were supply issues from flooding in Thailand. And maybe there was a bit of backlash. In December, Amazon.com created an uproar by encouraging customers to use a price-checking app on Main Street and in the malls, and then return to Amazon for a better deal. Booksellers, who have long felt themselves in the retailer’s cross hairs, were particularly offended. A tentative “buy local” movement sprang up. In its earnings release , Amazon also warned that it could lose money in the current quarter, offering a range between $100 million in operating income and a $200 million loss. Shares of Amazon, which rose $2.29 to $194.44 on Tuesday, immediately slumped in after-hours trading by $18. “With the valuation Amazon is carrying, you got to perform,” said Colin Gillis, senior technology analyst for BGC Financial. “You’ve got to be like Apple — smash through the numbers people are afraid even to whisper. Instead, they’re only making slightly over a penny on every dollar in revenue. That’s pathetic in any industry.” Other analysts were more optimistic. “The long-term story is very much intact,” said Scott Devitt of Morgan Stanley, although he noted that investors might not be buying the stock for the next six months or so. The biggest question on the mind of analysts going into this earnings report was, How well did the Kindle Fire do? But they knew what the answer was, which was that Amazon was not going to tell them. “We were very pleased with the great growth we had,” said Tom Szkutak, Amazon’s chief financial officer, in a conference call. The only data Amazon would share about Kindles is that their sales were up 177 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010. “That seems like a healthy business,” Mr. Devitt said. If sales were weaker than expected, profits were higher than forecast. Net income decreased 58 percent to $177 million in the fourth quarter, or 38 cents a share, compared with $416 million, or 91 cents a share, in the year-earlier period. Analysts expected sales of $18.3 billion and earnings per share of 17 cents, according to FactSet Research. The company said earlier that it might lose money during the quarter, traditionally the best part of the year for any retailer. Amazon has been in the enviable position of growing much faster than the industry itself. But all that meteoric growth, stoked by selling goods as cheaply as possible and then shipping them either for a pittance or free, does not leave much room for profit. Its margins declined for four quarters before rebounding in the fourth quarter. Yet even as margins have suffered, the stock has been strong. Ever since its founding in 1994, Amazon has built for the future. “We’d rather have a very large customer base and low margins than a smaller customer base and higher margins,” Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, explained in a recent interview with Wired magazine. For a company often thought of as virtual, with its e-books and vibrant cloud computing service, Amazon is increasingly rooted in the real world. Delivering sneakers and diapers and Kindles to the masses requires a lot of warehouses and a lot of warehouse workers. Nomura Securities estimated this week that Amazon would add the rough equivalent of 450 Costco stores from 2011 to 2016. Costco, by comparison, has 592 stores worldwide. “E-commerce is a long secular growth story,” Brian Nowak, a Nomura analyst, said in the report. “We’re still at only 5 percent penetration. So there’s a lot of runway left.” The Fire was unveiled with the sort of splash not seen since Apple introduced the iPad two years ago. But where the acclaim for the iPad only grew once users had it in hand, the Kindle Fire has been subject to some grumbling by some early customers, which has in turn produced crankiness from the device’s fans. Despite the dispute, which shows signs of resembling a high-tech Hatfield and McCoys-style feud, the $199 Fire and the $499 iPad are not necessarily competitors. Analysts have been estimating that Amazon sold as many as six million Fires plus millions more traditional Kindles. Apple said last week that it sold more than 15 million iPads during its fourth quarter, drawing customers who might otherwise have bought Macs or Windows-based PCs. The introduction of the Fire, said Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, did not have “an obvious effect” on the iPad. About 27 percent of the Fire reviews on Amazon’s own site have mixed to negative feelings about the device, down from a third immediately after its debut.

Amazon.com Inc
Company Reports
E-Commerce
Shopping and Retail


Monkeys Control a Mechanical Arm With Their Thoughts

Abstract: Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday. The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives. The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach. In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill. The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one. Experts not involved with the study said the findings were likely to accelerate interest in human testing, especially given the need to treat head and spinal injuries in veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan . “This study really pulls together all the pieces from earlier work and provides a clear demonstration of what’s possible,” said Dr. William Heetderks , director of the extramural science program at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Dr. John P. Donoghue, director of the Institute of Brain Science at Brown University , said the new report was “important because it’s the most comprehensive study showing how an animal interacts with complex objects, using only brain activity.” The researchers, from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University , used monkeys partly because of their anatomical similarities to humans and partly because they are quick learners. In the experiment, two macaques first used a joystick to gain a feel for the arm, which had shoulder joints, an elbow and a grasping claw with two mechanical fingers. Then, just beneath the monkeys’ skulls, the scientists implanted a grid about the size of a large freckle. It sat on the motor cortex, over a patch of cells known to signal arm and hand movements. The grid held 100 tiny electrodes, each connecting to a single neuron, its wires running out of the brain and to a computer. The computer was programmed to analyze the collective firing of these 100 motor neurons, translate that sum into an electronic command and send it instantaneously to the arm, which was mounted flush with the left shoulder. The scientists used the computer to help the monkeys move the arm at first, essentially teaching them with biofeedback. After several days, the monkeys needed no help. They sat stationary in a chair, repeatedly manipulating the arm with their brain to reach out and grab grapes, marshmallows and other nuggets dangled in front of them. The snacks reached the mouths about two-thirds of the time — an impressive rate, compared with earlier work. The monkeys learned to hold the grip open on approaching the food, close it just enough to hold the food and gradually loosen the grip when feeding. On several occasions, a monkey kept its claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel. The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote. “In the real world, things don’t work as expected,” said the senior author of the paper, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The marshmallow sticks to your hand or the food slips, and you can’t program a computer to anticipate all of that. “But the monkeys’ brains adjusted. They were licking the marshmallow off the prosthetic gripper, pushing food into their mouth, as if it were their own hand.” The co-authors were Meel Velliste, Sagi Perel, M. Chance Spalding and Andrew Whitford. Scientists have to clear several hurdles before this technology becomes practical, experts said. Implantable electrode grids do not generally last more than a period of months, for reasons that remain unclear. The equipment to read and transmit the signal can be cumbersome and in need of continual monitoring and recalibrating. And no one has yet demonstrated a workable wireless system that would eliminate the need for connections through the scalp. Yet Dr. Schwartz’s team, Dr. Donoghue’s group and others are working on all of the problems, and the two macaques’ rapid learning curve in taking ownership of a foreign limb gives scientists confidence that the main obstacles are technical and, thus, negotiable. In an editorial accompanying the Nature study, Dr. John F. Kalaska, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, argued that after such bugs had been worked out, scientists might even discover areas of the cortex that allow more intimate, subtle control of prosthetic devices. Such systems, Dr. Kalaska wrote, “would allow patients with severe motor deficits to interact and communicate with the world not only by the moment-to-moment control of the motion of robotic devices, but also in a more natural and intuitive manner that reflects their overall goals, needs and preferences.”

Monkeys and Apes
Brain
Computers and the Internet
Paralysis
Science and Technology


That ‘Made in U.S.A.’ Premium

Abstract: The designer Nanette Lepore is a cheerleader for New York City’s garment district. Most of her contemporary women’s clothing line, which sells at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s, is made locally. Her company occupies six floors in a building on West 35th Street and uses, among other businesses, six nearby sewing factories, a cutting room and even a maker of fabric flowers in the neighborhood. She organizes “Save the Garment Center” rallies, writes about the danger of losing local production and lobbies lawmakers in Washington to support the American fashion industry. “If my only option as a young designer was to make my clothing overseas, I could not have started my business,” she said. Yet Ms. Lepore says that when she signed a deal with J. C. Penney for a low-cost clothing line for teenagers — clothing that sells for about one-tenth the price of her higher-end lines — Penney could not afford production in New York. Of the 150 or so items she now has featured on Penney’s website, none are made in this country. “That price point can’t be done here,” Ms. Lepore said of lower-end garments. As textile and apparel companies begin shifting more production to the United States, taking advantage of automation and other cost savings, a hard economic truth is emerging: Production of cheaper goods, for which consumers are looking for low prices, is by and large staying overseas, where manufacturers can find less expensive manufacturing. Even when consumers are confronted with the human costs of cheap production, like the factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000 garment workers, garment makers say, they show little inclination to pay more for clothes. Essentially, to buy American is to pay a premium — a reality that is acting as a drag on the nascent manufacturing resurgence in textiles and apparel, while also forcing United States companies to focus their American-made efforts on higher-quality goods that fetch higher prices. Image The Fessler USA factory in Pennsylvania was unable to keep running. Credit Matt Rourke/Associated Press Last year, Dillard’s, the midtier department store, wanted to promote American-made clothing, according to Fessler USA, an apparel maker in eastern Pennsylvania. It turned to Fessler to produce tops. Theirs was a brief relationship. “Almost overnight, they called and said, ‘Made in America just doesn’t sell better than made in Asia, and you can’t beat the price,’ ” said Walter Meck, Fessler’s chief executive and principal owner. The pattern repeats across retailers. Brooks Brothers’ American-made cashmere sport coats sell for $1,395; comparable imported ones go for $1,098. At Lands’ End, American-made sweatshirts cost $59, while the ones made in Vietnam cost $25. The label on an Abercrombie & Fitch American-made sweater, which sells for $150, screams about its American origins. But most of the sweaters for sale at Abercrombie are the cheaper ones priced at $68 and up, and made abroad. Eric Schiffer, known as Ricky, and his business partner, Leonard Keff, last year opened Keff NYC , a knitting operation in New York’s garment district. Business has been good, with contracts from higher-price retailers like Abercrombie, Anthropologie and Ralph Lauren. One afternoon earlier this year, Mr. Schiffer watched as a table full of women knotted loose threads on Ralph Lauren gloves destined for the American team in the Winter Olympics next year in Sochi, Russia. (Ralph Lauren chose American manufacturing only under pressure from consumers and government officials up in arms after it supplied Olympics uniforms made in China for the 2012 Summer Games.) Though labor costs about 40 percent more than in China, and retail prices end up 20 percent higher, Mr. Schiffer says Keff’s clients — and, more important, their customers — can afford it. “We can’t work with the Targets and the J. C. Penneys of the world,” he said. “It’s not for everyone. It’s really just for the higher-end companies.” Paying for Quality, or Not Americans spend more than $340 billion a year on clothes and shoes, more than double what they spend on new cars, according to the American Apparel and Footwear Association. And they say they want to buy American, even if it hits them harder in the pocketbook. Two-thirds of Americans say they check labels when shopping to see if they are buying American goods, according to a New York Times poll taken early this year. Given the example of a $50 garment made overseas, almost half of respondents — 46 percent — said they would be willing to pay from $5 to $20 more for a similar garment made in the United States. Image In the economic downturn, said Walter Meck, Fessler’s C.E.O., “all of a sudden we had competition from China and everyone else.” Credit Matt Rourke/Associated Press It is a sentiment that advertisers have picked up on. In the first half of 2013, according to the most recent data available from the research firm Kantar Media, spending on advertising by companies like the Toyota Dealer Association, Chevron and New Balance that emphasized products’ American-made status nearly tripled when compared with the first half of 2012. The flurry of new promotions also has the Federal Trade Commission policing made-in-America claims. According to its rules , “all or virtually all” of a product has to be both assembled and sourced in the United States in order to qualify. But shoppers’ statements that they are interested in American-made goods don’t always square with how they actually spend their money, especially when they are on a budget. “A while back, we thought we’d stick little American flags on the products made in America,” said Frank Blake , chairman and chief executive of Home Depot. He said he had figured, based on the prevailing marketing wisdom, that customers would flock to the items. “But whatever segment really cares about it doesn’t make much difference from a retail perspective.” So retailers are focusing on the quality when trying to justify the higher cost of American goods. The exception to Mr. Blake’s rule comes when buyers are willing to pay more for perceived quality. A majority of consumers, rich and poor, say they believe that American-made products have higher quality than imports, according to the Times survey. Fifty-six percent of those making more than $100,000 said so, as did 67 percent of those making less than $50,000. Lands’ End promotes its American manufacturers as “the highest-quality companies, working with vendors and artisans.” New Balance says its American products are made by “highly skilled craftsmen.” At L. L. Bean, bags are “still made by us here in Maine from practically indestructible cotton canvas.” “With higher-end fashion goods, where it’s made is an identifying source of quality,” said Anthony Dukes , an associate professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. “But at the lower end, I don’t get a sense that people pay too much attention to where it’s made.” Image Fessler USA was liquidated after 112 years. Credit Matt Rourke/Associated Press He said, however, that attention to where items were manufactured “could catch on and is certainly catching on in food, so things can go in the other direction.” Giving Up the Factory It ended last year with a four-inch stack of paperwork from the bank. Fessler USA, an apparel maker in the Blue Mountain foothills of Pennsylvania, was being liquidated after 112 years. By March this year, all except four of the 300 sewing machines had been sold off. The few administrative employees still left on the job had written their names on chairs so they wouldn’t be sold just yet. And Fessler had made its final order, for Michael Stars T-shirts, five months earlier. “It’s eerie,” said Mr. Meck, its chief executive, whose grandfather started the company, then known as Meck & Company, in 1900. “The lights started to go out throughout the factory: that department’s done, that department’s done.” After Mr. Meck and his four siblings bought back the company in 1994 — his father sold it while Mr. Meck was a child — Fessler met time after time with retailers interested in selling American-made goods and produced batches of American-made fashion T-shirts and knits. Business looked so good that just before the recession, it borrowed $4 million to buy a long, low brick factory with the idea of expanding. Clients were already shifting work overseas in the 1990s, so Fessler’s strategy was to focus on smaller companies that couldn’t order the large volumes that most Chinese factories required. While Fessler’s cost was double China’s for finished goods, it had quicker turnaround. But as everyone scurried for customers of any size during the downturn, Chinese factories offered airfreight, making their turnaround almost as fast, at about half the cost. “All of a sudden we had competition from China and everyone else,” Mr. Meck said. Fessler watched one customer after another jump ship. Lucky Brand, which made up 20 percent of its business, discontinued the products it was making at Fessler. Urban Outfitters, its second-biggest customer, told the factory that it was moving work overseas. And as Michael Stars’s business declined with the recession, so did its orders. Image An employee at Keff NYC in Manhattan worked on gloves to be worn by the United States Olympic team in Sochi, Russia. Credit Margaret Cheatham Williams/The New York Times There seemed to be lifelines at times. J. C. Penney, under new management with Ron Johnson as chief executive, placed a priority on American-made clothing and talked with Fessler about producing there. But as Penney’s revenue fell, its executives stopped returning Fessler’s calls. Cost ruled. Eventually, Mr. Johnson himself was out . “We got a little bit of business — not enough to recover — and not many people were willing to pay what it costs to make it in the U.S.A.,” Mr. Meck said. “We have had people who have walked away from us for a nickel.” As the recession hit in 2008, Fessler’s revenue dropped in half from the previous year. By 2011, the banks started circling. Fessler laid off about half of its staff, stopped its 401(k) match and kept only three days of thread on hand rather than three weeks. Mr. Meck went from bank to bank and investor to investor looking for additional capital, while Fessler tried a bunch of one-off projects that didn’t go anywhere, like fireproof clothing and a Pampers washable cloth diaper with a paper lining. Mr. Meck still maintains a small office in the factory in Deer Lake, Pa.; much of the plant is being leased by a bottled-water distributor and a fitness training center. In the front of the building, there is a collection of dusty equipment and supplies that haven’t sold: lights, scales, office chairs, wooden hangers, bins of flawed T-shirts. In the former factory, between stacks of bottled water, there’s a dark line on the floor that signaled the end of the knitting room, gray lines where walls once were, yellow safety lines that encircled the sewing area, scratches and bolt holes in the floor where the cutting machines moved back and forth. The old entrance is lined with logos, a who-was-who of clients like Pendleton and Nordstrom. Up on the roof is another sign of Fessler’s once-grand ambitions: a spread of solar panels that Mr. Meck installed to try to modernize the factory. Now the hallways are dark and silent. The lights are on because of a motion sensor, but there isn’t much motion these days. “This is what’s left of our company,” Mr. Meck said from his office. “We have one room.” An Uncertain Bet Image Seamstresses at work for Nanette Lepore, who has managed to keep much of the production for her high-end clothes in New York. Credit Margaret Cheatham Williams/The New York Times There are some hopeful signs for retailers, even at the lower end. Walmart, which centers its business on inexpensive items, started a program this year to increase its purchasing of American-made goods by $50 billion over the next 10 years. The company says that more than 150 projects are under way, with products ranging from socks to flat-screen TVs. Walmart has an advantage that few other retailers can match: Because of its scale, it can push suppliers on cost. For example, it got the price on an American-made towel down to $9.47, or 50 cents less than a foreign-made towel previously for sale. (That $9.47 towel is a premium product at Walmart, where some towels sell for as little as $1.97.) “We do have research that says, yes, it is an attractive proposition, customers will buy more because of the ‘Made in the U.S.,’ ” said Michelle Gloeckler, a Walmart executive who oversees the program. “We even have some research that says customers will pay more for made in the U.S., but we don’t believe that they should have to.” Walmart’s efforts go only so far. Asked if it would push suppliers to provide more apparel made domestically, executives said probably not, because of the labor costs associated with cutting and sewing. “The wages in other countries are still lower than the absolute wages here, so products that lend themselves to more U.S. production are generally more highly automated,” Ms. Gloeckler said. That has drawn criticism from some suppliers. Price targets “barely cover the cost of the fabric required to make the garments, never mind the salaries and expenses of American workers,” wrote Christopher Dal Piaz, president of the sportswear company SML Sport in New York, in a letter to the Walmart merchandising chief after a frustrating buying meeting. The machine-made products on which Walmart is focusing “do not build a new middle class,” he wrote. (Walmart says the effort has drawn pledges from manufacturers to create more than 1,600 American jobs.) The average price of a garment sold in the United States is $13.49, according to the NPD Group, an industry researcher. That low price is largely a result of sales at extremely low prices by huge retailers like Walmart, Target and H&M — sales that are made possible by efficient supply chains and purchases of products from low-cost countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD. But keeping costs low, which consumers now expect, can often mean lower quality. “In many cases the product that we buy today does not have the same, higher level of standards that we saw in earlier years,” Mr. Cohen said. “Are you buying a T-shirt that’s lighter than it used to be? In many cases, absolutely, yes. They had to take things out to keep the price the same.” As some consumers look for higher quality, the door to American-made goods seems to be opening wider. But even at the higher end, companies like Keff NYC say the market is too new and uncertain to bet on the future. Mr. Schiffer, the company’s chief executive, said a lot of companies were still just testing the appetite for American-made goods. After all, it is the shoppers who will make this movement succeed or fail. “We’re not under any illusions,” he said. “We take orders as we get them. If people come back to us with reorders, great.”

Fashion
Manufacturing
Price
US Economy
Textile
US
Retail


Red Sox to Cubs, Kevin Millar Embraces Another Challenge

Abstract: MESA, Ariz. — The Chicago Cubs ’ clubhouse opened to reporters at 8 a.m. on Tuesday at HoHoKam Park, but Kevin Millar was not available. He was gathering his teammates for a version of “ American Idol ,” with Millar as a judge. “Show’s about to start, boys!” he bellowed from his locker, then tapped out the number of a tardy teammate on his cellphone. “Let’s go, Simon! Eight o’clock audition!” A lot of Millar’s statements end in exclamation points — like “Cowboy up!” his slogan for the 2003 Boston Red Sox , who fell one game short of the World Series. The next season, with Millar as the ringleader, the Red Sox ended 86 years of futility with a championship. Now, at 38, he is facing the most daunting challenge of all, trying to help the Cubs break a 102-year title drought . But first Millar has to make the team. He is here on a nonroster contract. “We like Kevin,” Manager Lou Piniella said. “He’s a versatile player that’s played on winning teams. He’s a loosey-goosey guy that could help with our chemistry and our makeup. We’ll see what he’s got left here this spring, but so far, we’ve been pleased.” Millar did not show much last season, batting .223 with seven home runs in a part-time role for the Toronto Blue Jays. He said the Cubs were his first choice for this year. Millar was teammates in Florida with Cubs pitcher Ryan Dempster and first baseman Derrek Lee. He wanted to play in the National League, where pinch-hitting is more common, and he wanted to train in Arizona, where he has a home. He is 2 for 5 in four games during spring training, and was hit by a pitch in a 5-3 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers on Tuesday. “It’s a dogfight now,” Millar said. “It doesn’t make sense on paper. People are going: ‘Where does he fit in? They’re all right-handed.’ Well, yeah, they’re right. It doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t have to make sense. You fight as long as you can and maybe you get the nod.” Millar has been a first baseman and outfielder, but he spent the winter taking grounders at third base, where he played briefly last season for the first time since 2002. His main competition on the roster may be Chad Tracy , 29, a left-handed hitter with much more recent experience at third. The other day, when Dempster needed hitters for a simulated game, he asked Millar to participate. Millar agreed, and suggested Tracy go with him. “Here’s a guy competing for the same spot on the roster, and he’s trying to bring out the best in everybody,” Dempster said. “That’s something very few people can do, and he does that.” Millar credits that all-for-one spirit for the Red Sox’ curse-busting in 2004, when they rallied from three games down to steal a pennant from the Yankees. They swept St. Louis in the World Series, but vanquishing the Yankees might have been more cathartic. “People said it was the best rivalry in baseball,” Millar said. “No, it’s not — not if you don’t let us win once, right? They beat us every year. That was the group that said: ‘Let’s do it, so what? They’re hotter, they’re bigger, they’re stronger, they’re better-looking, they’re richer.’ But we had that mentality of, you know what? Let’s roll. We shaved our heads, we did what we had to do to win and be a team.” Of course, better pitching also had a lot to do with it. But there was something to be said for the toughness of a team that recovered from the playoff heartbreak of 2003 against the backdrop of such tortured history. The Cubs were less successful. They were also one game from the World Series in 2003, but fumbled away the National League Championship Series and have not won a playoff game since. Futility still stalks them. “I just worry about this season,” Dempster said. “Let the 2010 Cubs be the 2010 Cubs, not 1945 or 1969. That’s irrelevant. It’s not even the 2009 Cubs. This is 2010, and that’s all we can worry about, just go out there and have fun.” Millar will help in that effort, as long as he makes the roster. He has not played for a winning team since the Red Sox let him go as a free agent after 2005, laboring for three years in Baltimore before his cameo with the Blue Jays. The Cubs won the N.L. Central in 2007 and 2008 but were swept from the playoffs each time. They slipped to 83 victories last season and have lost several relievers, including Kevin Gregg (free agency), Aaron Heilman (trade) and Angel Guzman (injury). Marlon Byrd has replaced Milton Bradley in the outfield, and with Ted Lilly recovering from shoulder surgery, Piniella is considering four starters for two spots: the left-handers Tom Gorzelanny and Sean Marshall and the right-handers Jeff Samardzija and Carlos Silva. Millar, naturally, is enthusiastic about his new team, pointing to Lee as a candidate for most valuable player and to Carlos Zambrano as a possible 20-game winner. And although it is early in camp and Millar has no guarantees, he can visualize the best case: a Cubs championship ring to go with his prize from Boston. “Can you imagine if it happened?” Millar said. “I mean, seriously, how cool would that be to have a ring from those two cities?”

Millar Kevin
Baseball
Chicago Cubs
Boston Red Sox


U.S. Trade Deficit Rose in October to $43.9. Billion

Abstract: The United States trade deficit widened 3.4 percent in October, the Commerce Department said on Friday, as exports of American goods fell to the lowest level in more than four years, a reflection of the impact of a weak global economy and stronger dollar. The trade deficit, the difference between exports and imports, widened 3.4 percent in October to $43.9 billion, compared with a revised $42.5 billion deficit in September. Exports of goods and services fell 1.4 percent to $184.1 billion. Exports of just goods dropped an even bigger 2.4 percent to $123.8 billion, the lowest level since June 2011.

International trade
US Economy
Commerce Department


Senators Say C.I.A. Misled Filmmakers

Abstract: Lawmakers are accusing the C.I.A. of misleading the makers of the movie about the raid on Osama bin Laden, “Zero Dark Thirty,” by telling them that waterboarding and similar techniques helped track down the terrorist. A three-year Senate investigation showed that such methods produced no useful intelligence. The C.I.A.’s acting director, Michael Morell, recently contradicted that, saying harsh techniques did produce some tips that led to Bin Laden. In a letter to the C.I.A. this week, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California; John McCain, Republican of Arizona; and others asked Mr. Morell to back up his claim and to share documents showing what the filmmakers were told. The C.I.A. says it will cooperate.

Zero Dark Thirty
CIA
Terrorism
Torture
Movies
Osama bin Laden
US Politics


Ding Dong Lounge and Le Bingo! at Le Poisson Rouge

Abstract: Along with innumerable other starry-eyed provincials, the Miser moved to New York more or less because of “downtown.” The allure of figures like Laurie Anderson and Spalding Gray, Cindy Sherman and Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Zorn and Jim Jarmusch was difficult to resist for us yuppie-oppressed, MTV-addled Generation Xers desperate for deliverance. The culture we’ve come to call “downtown” coalesced in the 1970s and ’80s in a handful of strenuously funky places like CBGB, the Mudd Club and the Knitting Factory. Misfit visionaries filled these shrines with sights and sounds — and smells — that weren’t on offer anywhere except below 14th Street, above Canal and between the rivers. Anyone who knows the recent history of New York knows how the story ended. CBGB isn’t much more than a T-shirt logo, and its old space at Bleecker and Bowery now houses a high-end fashion boutique surrounded by luxury condominiums. The old downtown aesthetic has for the most part migrated across the East River to Brooklyn and Queens. So the Miser couldn’t have been more surprised and pleased to discover hiding far uptown in plain view of Central Park and Columbia University an uncannily preserved little slice of downtown called the Ding Dong Lounge . And to judge by the irreverent history on its Web site, its proprietors are well aware of and rather defiantly reveling in the effect that manic gentrification has had on the sort of culture that once thrived more than 100 blocks downtown. On Saturday night the club will host the brilliantly blistering bands Pink Reason and Sightings , both worthy heirs of punk pioneers like the Dead Boys and Suicide. The cover charge is a mere $8, and drink prices are also retrofitted for the punk era. During happy hour (4 to 8 p.m.) beer in a can costs just $2. For high rollers a can of beer and a shot is $6, all night long. (Saturday at 8 p.m.; 929 Columbus Avenue, between 105th and 106th Streets; (212) 663-2600; dingdonglounge.com .) BINGO, GOWN OPTIONAL It would be hard to find a cultural activity more opposed to the vanguard art that defined downtown Manhattan in its 1980s heyday than that classic V.F.W.-hall-packing, grandparent-approved heartland pastime: bingo. But go tell that to devotees of Le Bingo! , a Saturday night staple at Le Poisson Rouge , the bleeding-edge Greenwich Village club, where the game is hosted by the veteran drag queen Linda Simpson . Winners are promised an array of eccentric prizes and a shot at a cash jackpot. Admission is free, and bingo cards cost $2. Get there a little early to take advantage of happy hour, which runs from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Even if Le Bingo! isn’t likely to remind your Great-Aunt Maude of her Tuesday night charity game at the parish hall, it’s nice to know that downtown still has a few surprises up its sleeve. (Saturday at 7 p.m.; 158 Bleecker Street, near Thompson Street, Greenwich Village; (212) 505-3474; lprnyc.com .)

Ding Dong Lounge
Rock Music
Le Poisson Rouge
Bingo