Kerry Brushes Aside Israeli Official’s Reported Criticisms of Peace Effort

Abstract: KUWAIT — Secretary of State John Kerry brushed aside reports Wednesday that Israel’s defense minister has dismissed his Middle East peace push as naïve and messianic, stressing that he was determined to continue his efforts to secure a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. “We can’t let one set of comments undermine that effort, and I don’t intend to,” Mr. Kerry told reporters after attending a conference here on humanitarian aid to Syria. Mr. Kerry asserted that he and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, were “both very committed to moving the process forward” and that he always knew the talks would be difficult. But Mr. Kerry added that he was keeping his focus and was prepared to work with those “willing participants who are committed to peace and to this process.” The controversy erupted when Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s defense minister, was quoted as making dismissive comments about Mr. Kerry’s efforts and those of John R. Allen, the former American commander in Afghanistan, who has been developing a security plan for the West Bank. On Tuesday, the State Department spokeswoman expressed outrage. “The remarks of the defense minister, if accurate, are offensive and inappropriate, especially given all that the United States is doing to support Israel’s security needs,” the spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said in a statement. “Secretary Kerry and his team including General Allen have been working day and night to try to promote a secure peace for Israel because of the secretary’s deep concern for Israel’s future,” she added. “To question his motives and distort his proposals is not something we would expect from the defense minister of a close ally,” she said. The Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot said in a lengthy article published Tuesday that Mr. Yaalon had “voiced deep skepticism” and “spared no harsh words” about Mr. Kerry and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in “private conversations” with Americans and Israelis. Mr. Yaalon, a senior member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party who has long taken a hard-line stance on the Palestinian issue, was not quoted directly in the article; his comments were described by unnamed sources. “The American plan for security arrangements that was shown to us isn’t worth the paper it was written on,” Mr. Yaalon, a former chief of Israel’s military, was quoted as saying. “It provides neither security nor peace.” The article said Mr. Yaalon had said Mr. Kerry “operates from an incomprehensible obsession and sense of messianism” and “can’t teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians.” “The only thing that might save us is if John Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us be,” Mr. Yaalon was quoted as saying. “We’ve given enough and have received nothing. In a free translation from English, we will tell our American friends, enough is enough.” If the report is accurate, it will be the most public and personal rift between a high-ranking Israeli official and the United States over the peace process since the American-brokered talks started in the summer. The relationship has also been under strain because of deep disagreements regarding the diplomatic deal in the works on Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Kerry is trying to persuade Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu to agree to a framework that would set out the core principles of a peace deal and provide guidelines for continuing to discuss the details. Senior Israeli and Palestinian officials have in recent days splashed cold water on the effort, suggesting that the two sides may have irreconcilable differences on borders, refugees, security, the status of Jerusalem and the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Later Tuesday, the Israeli news website Ynet , the online sister of Yediot, said Mr. Yaalon had offered an apology in a statement released by his office. “Israel and the United States share a common goal to advance the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians led by Secretary Kerry,” the statement said. “We appreciate Secretary Kerry’s many efforts toward that end. “The defense minister had no intention to cause any offense to the secretary, and he apologizes if the secretary was offended by words attributed to the minister.” Other Israeli politicians rushed to repair the damage. Though Mr. Netanyahu did not address the Yaalon comments directly, he said during a speech in Parliament on Tuesday that the United State was “our greatest ally” and that Israel was “working in cooperation” with the American president, vice president and secretary of state. “We maintain our interests, while cultivating this important tie between the two nations,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “We strive to reach a true peace accord.” President Shimon Peres also expressed his support for what he called Mr. Kerry’s “extraordinary commitment.” In a Parliament speech, he said, “Our deep friendship with the U.S.A. is a central component of Israel’s security and a force for the advancement of peace in the region.” A State Department official, who asked not to be identified under the agency’s diplomatic protocol, said that Ms. Psaki’s statement had been coordinated with the White House. Mr. Kerry, who often speaks to Mr. Netanyahu, did not talk to him on Tuesday. But Dan Shapiro, the American ambassador to Israel, has been in touch with both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Yaalon, the official said. The focus of Mr. Yaalon’s complaint, according to the Yediot article, concerns the security arrangements for the Jordan Valley. Israel has insisted on a long-term presence of its soldiers on what would be the future border with the Palestinian state, something the Palestinians say would compromise their sovereignty. The American position on how many Israeli soldiers should stay and for how long is unclear, but part of the plan is to use high-tech systems to ensure security, something Mr. Yaalon derided, according to the article. On Facebook, Tzipi Livni, Israel’s justice minister and one of its two lead negotiators, criticized the tone of Mr. Yaalon’s reported comments, saying, “We can oppose negotiations in a responsible and measured way, without compromising relations with our best friend,” meaning the United States. Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s strategic affairs minister and another senior Likud leader, said on Israel Radio Tuesday morning that he agreed with the content of Mr. Yaalon’s critique, but not the character. “With all the disagreements that we sometimes have,” Mr. Steinitz said, “we have to keep one ironclad rule: without personal insults.” And Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, told Jewish leaders in Geneva that “it isn’t right and is not helpful to Israel to have a loud and public argument,” according to the Israeli daily Haaretz . Mr. Kerry, who spent four days in Jerusalem and the West Bank in serial meetings with Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu early this month, had been considering a return this week depending on progress in the talks, but decided instead to go to Rome to meet with Archbishop Pietro Parolin, Pope Francis’ secretary of state. Pope Francis is planning to visit Israel and Jordan in May. Mr. Kerry then proceeded to Kuwait.

Israel
John Kerry
Palestinians
Moshe Yaalon
US Foreign Policy
Yediot Aharonot
Likud Party Israel
Benjamin Netanyahu
Mahmoud Abbas


Romney’s Tone on Gay Rights Is Seen as Shift

Abstract: Mitt Romney seemed comfortable as a group of gay Republicans quizzed him over breakfast one morning in 2002. Running for governor of Massachusetts, he was at a gay bar in Boston to court members of Log Cabin Republicans. Mr. Romney explained to the group that his perspective on gay rights had been largely shaped by his experience in the private sector, where, he said, discrimination was frowned upon. When the discussion turned to a court case on same-sex marriage that was then wending its way through the state’s judicial system, he said he believed that marriage should be limited to the union of a man and a woman. But, according to several people present, he promised to obey the courts’ ultimate ruling and not champion a fight on either side of the issue. “I’ll keep my head low,” he said, making a bobbing motion with his head like a boxer, one participant recalled. A year after his election, Massachusetts’ highest court legalized same-sex marriage, and Mr. Romney began backing adoption of a state constitutional amendment to ban it. The proposal ultimately failed, but Mr. Romney has carried the fight to the presidential campaign trail, an ever more visible crusader against such unions as he works to position himself among conservatives. Indeed, the issue has become a bedrock of his message. He has fought same-sex marriage “every way I have known how to,” he said recently in Iowa, “and the fight isn’t over.” He has called for the federal Constitution to be amended, and he was the first presidential candidate to condemn last week’s ruling by a judge in Iowa that overturned that state’s ban on such marriages. Mr. Romney bristles when he is accused of shifting on the issue, as he has on abortion, pointing out that he has been consistent in personally opposing both marriage and civil unions between people of the same sex. On the stump, he usually makes a point of saying that he opposes discrimination against gays. But he refrains from details when pressed as to how he might fight it. Jonathan Spampinato, a Republican activist who is openly gay and worked as Mr. Romney’s deputy political director during the run for governor, says he always felt that Mr. Romney was comfortable with gays. When it came to gay rights beyond the issue of marriage, Mr. Spampinato recalls, Mr. Romney asserted during that campaign that there was only the smallest difference between himself, a supporter of domestic partnership rights like survivorship and hospital visitation, and his Democratic opponent, Shannon O’Brien, who backed civil unions. “He explained his position to Log Cabin club members early on,” Mr. Spampinato remembered, “by saying, ‘Regardless of what you call it, if you look at the benefits I support and the benefits Shannon supports, there’s probably a hair of difference.’ ” Calling Mr. Romney a flip-flopper on gay rights would be overly simplistic, Mr. Spampinato said. But he conceded that his old boss had promised the Log Cabin members that he would not champion a fight against same-sex marriage. “It’s definitely a shift in political priorities and strategy,” he said. Recollections by gay Republicans whom Mr. Romney courted and worked with during his campaign for governor, and in his unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1994, produce a portrait of a man they genuinely saw as their partner in their fight for broader acceptance. After the breakfast meeting in 2002, where the Log Cabin board unanimously decided to endorse him, he said in an interview with Bay Windows, a gay newspaper, that he would use his bully pulpit as governor to lobby legislators for domestic partnership benefits. “Those kinds of things I think I can generate a great deal of public support for,” he said, “and therefore create pressure for legislators that otherwise might not think in those terms.” And, in the aftermath of the Massachusetts court decision, Mr. Romney, though aligning himself with the supporters of a constitutional amendment, did order town clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Some members of Log Cabin Republicans say that in doing so, he ultimately fulfilled his promise to them despite his own moral objections. But far more express a sense of outrage at what they deem a betrayal in his current positioning. “I didn’t see him necessarily carrying the flag with missionary zeal” for gay rights back in 2002, said Richard Babson, a Log Cabin member who was at the breakfast meeting. “But I also didn’t see him carrying the flag with missionary zeal for the other side.” Mr. Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, 37, says that back in the early 1990s, he told his father privately that he was thinking about becoming a Democrat. His father sat him down to dissuade him, taking him through the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Tagg Romney says he does not remember his father’s talking about abortion, another issue that has troubled his candidacy, but he does remember being warned that Democrats would lead the country toward same-sex marriage. “He thought it was very wrong to discriminate,” Tagg Romney said. “But where Democrats are going, they’ll eventually want to extend marriage to gays. I said, ‘No way.’ ” Even as early as 1994, when Mr. Romney challenged Edward M. Kennedy for a Senate seat, there were some Log Cabin members who harbored reservations about him. The Boston Globe published an article quoting several people who said Mr. Romney had delivered an address at a Mormon gathering that year in which he called homosexuality “perverse.” For all of that, some activists were optimistic about him. Log Cabin members had been very supportive of William F. Weld, the Republican incumbent as governor, who was fiscally conservative but moderate on social issues. Many members of the club believed Mr. Romney would be similar, especially after meeting with him. “He couldn’t have been more kind and interested in understanding gay rights,” said Rich Tafel, who was executive director of Log Cabin’s national organization at the time. “He struck me as a business person who just wanted to understand this issue, and he wanted to communicate that he wasn’t antigay at all.” Leaders of the group worked with Mr. Romney’s Senate campaign to draft a letter, which he eventually released, about his commitment to gay rights. He declared that he would go beyond Mr. Kennedy’s considerable record on the issue. He pledged his support for federal legislation that barred discrimination against gay men and lesbians in employment, and praised President Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for the military as a first step toward “gays and lesbians being able to serve openly and honestly.” “If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern,” he wrote. “My opponent cannot do this. I can, and will.”

Presidential Election of 2008
Romney Mitt
Homosexuality
Marriages


Astor Juror’s Fear Could Provide Appeal Grounds, Experts Say

Abstract: The revelation that a juror in the trial of Brooke Astor’s son wanted to be dismissed because she felt “personally threatened” by another juror’s comments did not result in a mistrial, as the defense had wanted. But experts said on Tuesday that the jury’s strain may have provided the defense with an avenue for an appeal if there is a conviction. The twist in the case came on Monday, when the jury sent out a note that read, “Due to heated argument, a juror feels personally threatened by comments made by another juror.” “With regards to her personal safety,” the note continued, “she wishes to be dismissed anonymously.” The defense immediately asked for a mistrial, but Justice A. Kirke Bartley Jr., who is presiding over the case in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, denied the motion. He also denied the defense request that he ask the juror what happened. Instead, Justice Bartley gave the entire panel an extensive instruction, asking, among other things, that the jury continue deliberating with “respect and civility.” According to legal experts, the jury’s note, which Justice Bartley made public on Tuesday, has given the defense grounds for an appeal. “For a juror who feels threatened, it raises the question of whether that juror’s vote, regardless of what the vote is, could be a legitimate vote,” said Robert Culp, a Manhattan defense lawyer who regularly handles federal appeals. If Justice Bartley were to dismiss the juror, he would be forced to call a mistrial, rendering more than 19 weeks of testimony and arguments pointless. By 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, the jurors were back at work, and they finished their 10th day of deliberations with no obvious sign of stress. Jurors asked several questions relating to a charge they seem to have been stuck on for days — Count 15 of the 18-count indictment, which charges Mrs. Astor’s son, Anthony D. Marshall , with first-degree grand larceny for awarding himself a retroactive raise of about $1 million. Mr. Marshall and the other defendant, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., a lawyer who worked on Mrs. Astor’s estate, also face various charges that they took advantage of Mrs. Astor’s mental deterioration from Alzheimer’s disease to improperly tap her multimillion-dollar estate. In a letter sent to Justice Bartley on Tuesday, the defense restated its reasons for requesting a mistrial and for the threatened juror to be questioned. “If a conscientious member of a jury is so intimidated by the conduct of her peers in the jury room that she fears for her own physical safety, it is asking too much for that juror to remain true to her oath to decide the case based on her honestly held views,” John R. Cuti , one of Mr. Marshall’s lawyers, wrote. The letter also took exception to part of Justice Bartley’s instructions to the jury, saying that he gave the jurors the impression that they had to reach a verdict. Justice Bartley clarified his remarks for the jurors on Tuesday, telling them to vote their consciences. “You may not simply change your position because you feel isolated or pressured,” he said. Although the juror who felt threatened was not named, Juror No. 8, a legal analyst with Bloomberg L.P., was teary-eyed and red-faced on Monday while the judge spoke with the jurors in the courtroom. On Tuesday, she appeared tense, but showed no other emotion. The jury let out a sigh when Justice Bartley sent them home for the day. Some defense lawyers said their appeal in this case almost certainly would include the judge’s decision not to speak with the juror who felt threatened. “If a juror was threatened with physical abuse, that’s intolerable, and, frankly, that’s a mistrial,” said Brian D. Linder , a partner at the Manhattan law firm Clayman & Rosenberg who specializes in appeals. But Mr. Linder said that if the jury continued to deliberate a long time, that would suggest that the person who felt threatened did not succumb to pressure from fellow jurors, and would make an appeal more difficult to win. The judge’s concern may have been that “conducting an inquiry would feed into the atmosphere of pressure on the juror,” Mr. Linder said. Another avenue for an appeal would be a request to vacate the conviction using facts that were not placed on the record in court — in this case, the reason the juror felt threatened, said Arnold J. Levine, a defense lawyer.

Suits and Litigation
Marshall Anthony D
Astor Brooke


Strongmen Still Cast a Long Shadow in China

Abstract: BEIJING — The 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was “a very big event” even by the standards of the world’s biggest political party and second-largest economy, many senior party members and government researchers say. Big not just in the obvious sense that the congress was tasked with choosing the new party leaders, who will also become the leaders of the government, something that usually happens only once every 10 years. But big also for a significant, potentially perilous, quality that distinguished this congress from its predecessors (including the first, at the party’s founding, in Shanghai in 1921): China has moved beyond the era of the strongman, a man whose words count above all others’. Instead, several thousand members of prominent political and military families and their allies battled for influence over promotions at the top, making the road to the congress “extremely chaotic,” said a senior party researcher, who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Although the last true strongman, Deng Xiaoping , died in 1997, others with influence lingered, including one of the political elders known as the “Eight Immortals”: Bo Yibo, who died in 2007. Even Deng’s long shadow has taken time to fade, but by now, the researcher said, China is deep into a new, less certain era of “palace politics,” the sort of highly personalized power plays that characterized many imperial dynasties. “China’s current problem is that it has no strongman, and no democratic decision-making system,” either of which could confer legitimacy, said the researcher, whose specialty is Communist Party history. “We’ve lost our rules,” he said. “Decision by strongman is one set of rules. And democracy is, too. But today we have neither.” That makes it sound like China is somewhat rudderless, which is not correct, either. It has what many people here and some abroad consider a good choice for party leader and state president — Xi Jinping , the son of a revolutionary leader, Xi Zhongxun. Yet it was perhaps a hand from the grave that pointed the way ahead. In a sign of how long-term planning can be here, in politics as well as economics, Mr. Xi, 59, was tapped early on as a leader, as long as 20 years ago, by his father, but also by none other than Mr. Deng. “Deng played a very long game, like in chess,” said the researcher. In between, the road was carefully chosen, too. Mr. Deng was influential in picking Hu Jintao , 69, the current president, “as a way to cut off Jiang Zemin ,” Mr. Hu’s 86-year-old predecessor, whose high-profile presence at this congress irritated some party insiders who wish he would withdraw from the scene. But China honors such elders, complicating the issue. “Deng didn’t trust Jiang, and Hu’s main advantage was that he was young,” so could outlive Mr. Jiang, the researcher said, “even though Mr. Hu wasn’t considered all that capable.” The strongman runs deep in the psyche of the Communist Party. “From the first congress until the era of Deng Xiaoping, at every congress there was a powerful core, either an individual like Mao Zedong,” the researcher said, “or the Moscow Comintern,” which helped organize the Chinese Communist Party and choose leaders into the 1930s. When the Communist forces regrouped in the northern province of Shaanxi, from where they would take over the country in 1949, “Mao began to choose,” he said. “After Mao died, most personnel decisions were made by Deng, though even he could not decide alone.” In 1989, in the crisis set off by the Tiananmen Square protests, Li Xiannian and Chen Yun, two other “immortals,” had a say in selecting top leaders, too. “That was a very complicated time,” he added. “Now all those political strongmen are gone.” Jiang Zemin was the transitional figure. “And today, no one person can choose,” he said. “We are at a stage of groping for a system to select the power holders.” All that makes the selection of the next, or sixth, generation of Chinese Communist leaders an issue to attend to early, with kingmakers eager to identify candidates and strengthen their authority to smooth the next power transfer, set for 2022. Whatever the future leaders lack in legitimacy must be made up in personal clout. Already some names are being widely bandied, such as Zhou Qiang, 52, the party secretary of Hunan Province, and Hu Chunhua, 49, the party secretary of Inner Mongolia. Whether these men will rise to the very top is unclear, but at a recent meeting of the party delegation from Hunan Province, Mr. Zhou showed the kind of diplomacy and authority that may work well for him. As the octogenarian Xiong Qingquan, a former Hunan party secretary, spoke ramblingly to delegates and reporters, the delegates began to smile in embarrassment. Their smiles deepened as Mr. Xiong whipped out a large sample of his calligraphy to show everyone. Mr. Zhou stepped in. “Secretary Xiong is an old delegate. His ideas are good; his calligraphy is good, too,” he said, moving the action back to proceedings while preserving Mr. Xiong’s face.

Communist Party of China
Deng Xiaoping
Hu Jintao
Jiang Zemin
Xi Jinping


For Putin, Out With the Old Favorites

Abstract: MOSCOW — When he returned home from work last week, the economist Mikhail E. Dmitriyev found two strangers waiting for him in the entryway. They showed no interest in his wallet but seized a bag that contained his laptop computer, and then beat him so badly he was left with a concussion. Mr. Dmitriyev is a meticulous analyst, not inclined to hyperbole or speculation. He spent many years inside the system that President Vladimir V. Putin built, part of a team of economic modernizers that included the Sberbank chief German O. Gref and Aleksei L. Kudrin, the former finance minister. That is why people paid attention in 2011, when Mr. Dmitriyev’s research center reported a surging demand for political change from the urban middle class, describing its swift growth during the Putin era as “a political detonator which cannot be unscrewed.” Much has occurred between now and then. Protests materialized, as Mr. Dmitriyev predicted, and were quelled. In January, Mr. Dmitriyev was removed as the president of his organization, the Center for Strategic Research, telling an interviewer that he may have angered officials by criticizing the government’s new pension policy. This week, he is trying to reason his way through the mysterious attack. “The police suggested that my business competitors might have stood behind it, trying to get commercially valuable data, but there was no such information in my computer which could have justified violent robbery, and my company is a research center with a rather limited budget,” he said. “So, one can guess at non-economic reasons behind this crime. We cannot rule out that this may reflect a growing intolerance to independent thinking in Russia.” Moscow these days is a nervous city. Mr. Putin has rebuilt his popularity by pivoting away from urban elites to an audience of less privileged, conservative voters, starting an anti-Western information campaign that has reached its apex with the standoff over Crimea. Image Demonstrators held flags with the image of President Vladimir V. Putin and the words "We are together!" during a rally in Moscow last week after Mr. Putin reclaimed Crimea as part of Russia. Credit James Hill for The New York Times Mr. Putin’s move to reclaim Crimea is popular among Russians, even liberal ones. This is a function of history; Nikita S. Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for reasons that are debated to this day , not anticipating that the Soviet collapse would sever it from Russia. But Mr. Putin is also announcing a change within his society: a turn inward, away from the West. Russia’s “Western influences,” of course, are people — economic, political and intellectual elites whose work has long since woven them into Western Europe and the United States. In a solemn speech last week, Mr. Putin set the stage for a purge of dissenters. “Some Western politicians already threaten us not only with sanctions, but also with the potential for domestic problems,” he said. “I would like to know what they are implying — the actions of a certain fifth column, of various national traitors?” Time will tell whether this rhetoric will truly translate into a “change of the elite” — a phrase that pro-Kremlin analysts use with a straight face these days. Nikolay V. Petrov, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, sees the change this way: Leading economic technocrats, who once served as a counterpoint to the conservative “shareholders” around Mr. Putin, will find themselves increasingly limited to technical roles, or replaced by people perceived as more loyal. The technocrats were important to Mr. Putin at one time, when he believed liberal economic reforms could make Russia into a first-rung world power, Professor Petrov said, but now he has given up on that idea, and is looking instead to Russia’s geostrategic position as a way to assert its might on the global stage. With that shift has come something new: focused pressure on critical voices from the liberal economic bloc. Sergei M. Guriev, an economic adviser to former President Dmitri A. Medvedev, moved to France last year, fearing that he would be targeted in a political prosecution. Sergei V. Aleksashenko, a former deputy head of Russia’s central bank who participated in antigovernment protests, took a job in Washington last year after his bids to be re-elected to the boards of three state-controlled corporations were blocked. Mr. Dmitriyev, for his part, is still in the hospital, but when he gets out he plans to continue his work in Russia. He predicts that the Crimean crisis will trigger a “new wave of uncertainty and change” that could imprint Russians’ political views for years to come. His center plans to carry out polling to capture this change as it takes shape. First, though, he will have to get a new laptop.

Russia
Moscow
Vladimir Putin
Crimea
Cold War


Artists Mine Scientific Clues to Paint Intricate Portraits of the Past

Abstract: Somewhere in England, about 600 years ago, an artist sat down and tried to paint an elephant. There was just one problem: he had never seen one. The artist was illustrating a book known today as the “Bestiary of Anne Walshe,” a guide to animals. To paint an elephant, he could not jet to Kenya to scrutinize one in person. He could not visit the London zoo. He could not watch a David Attenborough DVD or click through a Web gallery of nature photographs. The only clues the artist could have found were in the mix of facts and myths preserved in old books. There he might read how elephants cannot bend at the knees, or that they have no interest in sex. There were illustrations of elephants in those old books, too, but they were painted by artists who had also never seen one. In the end, the illustrator of the “Bestiary of Anne Walshe” produced a charming mishmash of guesses. His elephant looks like a bull terrier with camel hooves for feet and a vacuum cleaner for a nose. Artists are still painting things they cannot see in real life. Rather than being separated from their subjects by thousands of miles, though, today’s artists are separated by thousands of years — even millions of them. Fortunately, they have a lot more scientific information on which to base their images. But they cannot eliminate the gap between reality and image. Last month, for example, the portrait of a 4,000-year-old man appeared on the cover of Nature . The picture commemorated the sequencing of the complete genome of an ancient resident of Greenland. In a technical tour de force, a team of scientists extracted DNA from tufts of hairs that had been collected in Greenland in 1986 and stored in a Danish museum since. The scientists discovered that the owner of the Greenland genome — nicknamed Inuk — was not all that closely related to Native Americans. Instead, his DNA links him to the Chukchi people of Siberia. The new research suggests that Greenland was peopled in a separate wave of migration from Asia. The scientists then looked at markers for individual genes that previous studies had linked to particular traits. For example, they discovered that Inuk’s blood was A positive. Other gene variants in Inuk’s DNA have been associated with physical appearance. Some are linked with a high body mass index. Others are linked to brown eyes and dark, thick hair. Inuk had a gene variant associated with a slightly shovel-like shape to the upper front teeth. He even had a gene associated with baldness . The artist Nuka Godtfredsen used these clues to paint Inuk’s portrait. He studied photographs of Chukchi people to give Inuk a face. He also took note of the fact that, despite Inuk’s genetic propensity for baldness, the tufts of his hair were up to eight inches long. As a compromise, he gave Inuk a receding hairline and a mullet. Mr. Godtfredsen’s picture is plausible, rather than photographic. It’s impossible to pick out an individual from a police lineup based on nothing but a genome. Dark hair, brown eyes and a stocky build could describe thousands of people who live in the Arctic today. It’s also important to bear in mind that genes rarely guarantee any particular traits; instead, they tend to be associated with them. So we can’t know for sure that having a so-called baldness gene meant that Inuk actually ended up bald. It’s certainly possible that he died too soon to find out. The better the portrait, the easier it is to forget all the complexity to the science behind it. Last October, the paleoartist Jay Matternes offered up a lovely portrait of a 4.4-million-year-old relative of humans, called Ardipithecus ramidus. Mr. Matternes was invited to paint the hominid by its discoverers, a team of American and Ethiopian scientists who had been digging up and analyzing Ardipithecus bones since the early 1990s and were finally ready to publish a detailed description. In Mr. Matternes’s portrait, Ardipithecus is not quite like anything alive today. It has long, apelike hands and feet and a round, apelike face. And yet it stands upright like a human. Mr. Matternes worked for years with the scientists on his reconstruction of Ardipithecus. First he drew its skeleton. Onto the skeleton he added muscles, and finally skin and hair. Mr. Matternes infused the picture with a deep artistic understanding of anatomy. But it is also a scientific hypothesis. The scientists maintain that Ardipithecus stood upright, based on the shapes of bones in its feet, legs, pelvis and spine. But those bones were not perfectly preserved, and the scientists couldn’t just snap them together like a Lego set. The pelvis was so fragmented that the scientists had to use a CT scanner to create three-dimensional models of its pieces, which they then analyzed in the virtual space of a computer. As a result, some other experts are not ready to endorse the vision of Ardipithecus that Mr. Matternes painted. That doesn’t mean Mr. Matternes is deceiving anyone. It just means that we, the viewers, have to bear in mind how scientists reconstruct the past. Mr. Matternes can only guess at the color of Ardipithecus by looking at living apes. It turns out that much older fossils hold clues to their hues. Last month the journal Science published a watercolor of a 150-million-year-old feathered dinosaur called Anchiornis. (Anchiornis was an ancient relative of living birds.) The painting, by the wildlife artist Michael DiGiorgio, shows the dinosaur with a crown of rufous plumage, a mottled face, a dark gray body and bold white stripes on its wings. Mr. DiGiorgio based his painting on a new analysis of the fossil of Anchiornis. Along with the dinosaur’s bones, the fossil also preserved feathers across its whole body. And in those feathers are microscopic structures called melanosomes. The size, shape and arrangement of the melanosomes help give color to the feathers of living birds. The new study on Anchiornis marks the first time that scientists were able to use melanosomes to map the colors of a dinosaur’s entire body. Like Mr. Matternes and Mr. Godtfredsen, Mr. DiGiorgio spent a long time planning his painting. First he sketched out the body of Anchiornis by studying its skeleton. Mr. DiGiorgio, who usually paints birds, was reminded of roadrunners, so he watched videos of the birds to get ideas about the dinosaur’s posture. He and paleontologists traded sketches back and forth for weeks before he was ready to add feathers. But the feathers were not quite like those of any living bird; for one thing, they covered the entire body of Anchiornis, even down to its feet. As detailed as Mr. DiGiorgio’s painting is, however, it may not tell the whole story of Anchiornis. Melanosomes are not the only structures that give feathers their colors, and so Anchiornis might have had other patterns on its plumage that have been lost to time. At best, Mr. DiGiorgio has given Anchiornis a base coat. Still, that’s better than no coat at all. And it’s vastly better than one taken from a bestiary’s pages.

Animals
Dinosaurs
Art
Science and Technology


France: Noriega Request Rejected

Abstract: A Paris appellate court on Friday rejected a request by the former Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega to be freed from prison pending a late June trial, deeming him a flight risk. Mr. Noriega has been held here since his extradition last month from the United States. He is to be tried on charges that he laundered $3 million in Colombian drug money through international banks and into French accounts in 1988 and 1989; Mr. Noriega has said the money came from payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, which once considered him a valued asset; his brother’s inheritance; and his wife’s personal fortune. A French court convicted him in absentia on the same charges in 1999. A lawyer for Mr. Noriega said his client would appeal.

Noriega Manuel Antonio
France
Extradition


Thomas Middelhoff, Ex-Chief of Bertelsmann, Must Remain in Jail During Appeal

Abstract: FRANKFURT — Thomas Middelhoff, the former chief executive of German media company Bertelsmann, must remain in jail while he appeals his conviction on charges that he embezzled from a subsequent employer, a court in the city of Essen said Thursday. That ruling denied Mr. Middelhoff’s request for release pending his appeal. It is the latest setback for the onetime corporate jet-setter, who was convicted of billing personal charter flights to Arcandor, a German retailer that hired him in 2004 to restore profitability. Mr. Middelhoff, 61, a former member of the board of directors of The New York Times Company, has been held since Friday, when the court found him guilty of 27 counts of embezzlement and three counts of tax evasion. He was sentenced to three years in prison . The charges stem from when Mr. Middelhoff was chief executive of Arcandor, operator of Karstadt, once Germany’s largest department store chain. The court found that Mr. Middelhoff took private flights on charter jets at the company’s expense, and sometimes made unauthorized commutes by helicopter to Arcandor headquarters in Essen from his home about 90 miles away. Arcandor went bankrupt in 2009, after Mr. Middelhoff was forced out, although Karstadt stores continue to operate, under new ownership. The court said Thursday that there was a risk that Mr. Middelhoff might flee — to avoid not only the prison sentence, but also additional criminal and civil proceedings against him. In a statement on Thursday, the court also cited Mr. Middelhoff’s “unclear financial situation, which has not become transparent from documents submitted in the meantime” by his lawyers. Mr. Middelhoff did not offer to post bail, the statement said. A spokesman for the court said that Mr. Middelhoff was being held in a jail in Essen. He can appeal the decision to keep him in custody. As chief executive of Bertelsmann beginning in 1998, Mr. Middelhoff tried to push the company into the digital age. But he clashed with the Mohn family that controls the company, and was ousted in 2002. Mr. Middelhoff was a member of The New York Times Company’s board of directors from 2003 until this spring.

Thomas Middelhoff
Embezzlement
Germany
Arcandor
Bertelsmann
Criminal Sentence
New York Times
Judiciary


SanDisk, Shifting to Business Customers, Surges

Abstract: MILPITAS, Calif. — Eli Harari demands that his drinking water arrive at room temperature. It’s an understandable desire for something moderate from a man who spends so much of his life battling extremes. Mr. Harari runs SanDisk , a Silicon Valley maker and seller of the high-speed memory that goes into products like iPods, smartphones, digital cameras and some laptops. This type of memory, known as flash, stands as something of a commodity in the technology world. And so SanDisk’s destiny tends to be ruled by the volatile laws of supply and demand, and the company has become accustomed to the booms and busts that reflect consumers’ changing tastes. At the moment, SanDisk, which fought a takeover bid in 2008, is booming once again. Its shares, which hovered just above $5 about 18 months ago, topped $50 last month and closed Friday at $41.47. With this performance, SanDisk has outperformed just about all of the major players in the technology game, including far flashier outfits like Apple and Google. “It’s somewhat of a cult stock,” said Hans Mosesmann, an analyst with Raymond James & Associates. “Over the past six months, it’s been rocking and rolling.” Mr. Harari, 65, will not gloat. “We fully expect there will be another downturn,” he said, during a recent meeting at the company’s headquarters here. “We have been through five of them in the last 22 years,” he said, adding that “you just have to understand that it is what it is.” What makes SanDisk’s revival more than just a fluctuation of supply and demand is that the company used the latest downturn as an opportunity to redirect its business. It shifted away from the fickle whims of the retail market, where it sells memory cards to individual consumers, and toward selling memory straight to device makers and sellers. According to analysts, these moves have given SanDisk more control over the price of its products and have complemented some cost-cutting measures to create a healthier company. Meanwhile, people following the market expect demand for memory to soar as new devices go on sale and the economy improves. “There is a lot of enthusiasm from a demand perspective for some of the new Apple products and other devices that have captured peoples’ imagination,” Mr. Mosesmann said. Like other chip makers, producers of memory are in a constant battle with the laws of physics. They have to design smaller, faster products that can hold more information, all the while working on a Lilliputian scale that is tough to fathom. SanDisk, for example, can arrange about 100 billion transistors on one of its thumbnail-size memory cards that fit into cellphones and other hand-held devices. “Most people think it’s just a piece of plastic,” Mr. Harari joked. Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk and the other producers of this high-speed flash memory receive few pats on the back for their efforts. As they accomplish one feat of engineering after another, the price of memory just tends to fall. In late 2008, as demand for technology products declined, a desperate situation arose for these companies: the selling price of memory fell below the cost to produce it. The memory companies responded by closing down older factories and halting plans to build new ones. In addition, they began trying to consolidate. In September 2008, Samsung offered $26 a share for SanDisk. Mr. Harari rejected the offer in a letter, saying Samsung had undervalued SanDisk. By November, the memory market had worsened and SanDisk’s shares had slipped to $5 a share, from $15 at the time of the Samsung bid. “It was very tough,” Mr. Harari said of this period. “We had to take some very drastic actions to get ourselves out of that situation, and we did.” SanDisk used to sell about two-thirds of its products through retail stores like Best Buy and Fry’s Home Electronics, with consumers buying memory cards to give their devices more storage space. The remaining third of SanDisk’s products went to companies making cellphones, music players and other devices. “Over the past 18 months, we’ve flipped those ratios,” Mr. Harari said. During the recession, SanDisk also cut its operating expenses by close to 25 percent, Mr. Harari said, while also laying off 12 percent of its employees. Maintaining tight relationships with the device makers will be crucial to SanDisk’s future as those companies look to use memory as a point of leverage, Mr. Harari said. Apple, for example, exerts tremendous influence in the flash memory market, accounting for 20 to 25 percent of the total orders, according to Daniel L. Amir, a senior research analyst at Lazard Capital Markets. SanDisk supplies memory to Apple, but it also competes against the iPod through its Sansa music players. Mr. Amir said that cellphone makers have shown increasing interest in memory add-on cards, as they try to give consumers options. In addition, competitors of Apple’s iPad have increased purchases of the high-speed memory. Mr. Harari added that he expected the demand for high-speed memory in laptops to increase. Analysts warn that another bust is always looming in the memory market. The major manufacturers have already announced plans to go forward with new chip plants, meaning that a greater supply of chips should be available by 2012. At that point, the price of memory could fall again. In addition, the memory makers are expected to struggle in their journey to improve storage capacity. “Some people have talked about there being a brick wall coming in three years or so,” Mr. Mosesmann said. “It’s not clear that SanDisk or anyone else in the industry has figured out how to get around these technological hurdles.” Chip makers, however, have shown a remarkable ability to overcome what seem to be impossible challenges, and Mr. Harari remains confident about SanDisk’s prospects. Over all, he is encouraged that the new wave of computing devices that have caught consumers’ attention all tend to rely on the type of memory SanDisk makes. He argued that device makers and entertainment companies would look more and more to memory cards as a way to drum up interest in their products by putting their own software, music and movies onto the tiny cards. In that regard, the memory card could evolve from dumb bits of plastic to tiny packages full of intelligence. “The business models are changing very rapidly,” Mr. Harari said.

SanDisk Corp
Computers and the Internet
Computer Chips
Electronics
Harari Eli


Thieves Used Lie About Prize to Steal From Retiree

Abstract: It was a mess, something he had not witnessed in his near century of living, and even with it settled, he gets wound up talking about it. The nerve! Fouling up his life! He sat in the corner, near the window, practically on top of the television — he likes the game shows and the arbitration court shows — and he snapped off the set. His simple Flatbush, Brooklyn, apartment was skinny, and he walked through it with a limp, that old leg injury. That wasn’t the thing that wound him up. He had been defrauded. The slimy con artists love to get their claws into old people, love the way they trust them, how they succumb to their sweet seductions. But did they have to target him? And he had bit, figuring why, yes, he had won a nice bundle of money for just picking up the phone and acknowledging this was Anthony Ross. And here he was 94, deep into retirement, needing all his dollars. Anthony Ross had put in the years, long years of hard work. He grew up in Aiken, S.C., where his father did gardening and field work and his mother raised chickens and hogs. He had five brothers and four sisters. All are dead. “Though I’ve got maybe 100 nephews and nieces,” he said. In 1927, when Mr. Ross was young, the family moved to New York, where his father did gardening. His father died in 1932, and his mother relocated them back to South Carolina. In 1945, Mr. Ross returned to New York to make his life, and has been here ever since. He became a machine operator in a Brooklyn steel mill, and he did that work for 16 years, right up until a big piece of steel toppled on him. “It took a crane and six men to get it off me,” he said. “They thought I was dead, but I wasn’t.” The accident crushed his left knee. The doctors, he said, wanted to amputate the leg, but he liked it too much. He was in the hospital for six months. He saved the leg but acquired a limp. “I quit steelwork, because I saw how many people were getting hurt,” he said. He became a porter in apartment buildings, a job with its own unpleasantries. “You put the garbage out and the rats and roaches and everything comes out,” he said. “Had to run from those rats, I sure did.” He was a porter for 37 years, retiring in 1990, when he was 72. “Figured I’d worked long enough,” he said. He had been married, but his wife died 15 years ago. He has a daughter, who lives in Queens. The fraud began in October of last year. He got a letter, followed soon by a phone call. A man told him he had won $38,000. “I didn’t know,” he said. “Maybe I had. I mean, man, this was money.” He received a check in the mail for $3,700. The instructions were to deposit it in his checking account and send back $2,800 for taxes to a Canadian address, then the balance of the money would follow. He complied. The $3,700 check naturally bounced, and he was out $2,800, plus bank fees. Now his account was overdrawn. His bank shut it down. He lives on just $1,545 a month from Social Security and his tiny pension. He could not pay his bills. A collection agency got involved. Unable to open another bank account with this pending, he had to use a check-cashing service to cash his monthly checks, paying their charges. He cut back on food. He lost weight. His blood pressure rose. His spirits sank. “I wouldn’t tell anybody,” he said. “I thought God would work out something for me. But he was tough.” Mr. Ross had been receiving home health care help through Heights and Hills, a member of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies . Learning about the fraud, the agency, one of those supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, provided $737 from the fund to settle with the collection agency pursuing him. Sensing his bruised self-esteem, it also spent $650 to buy living room furniture to replace his worn pieces — a sofa, chair and coffee table. He was sitting in the new chair. He has opened a new bank account. He has learned. “I’m never getting in any fraud no more,” he said. “If they call and say they’ve got money for me, I’m going to hang up that phone. Get lost, man.” He’s chipper again, getting out and about. A couple of weeks ago, he accompanied members of his local senior center to Atlantic City. Did he gamble? “Not me,” he said. “One woman went there with $500 in her pocket and she came back empty. She said, ‘Oh Lord, I’m not paying my landlord.’ She’s in a heap of trouble. “You’ve got to pay the landlord. I just sat down and ate everything I could eat. They had a nice buffet — eat all you want. So I ate.”


Ready or Not, Summer Swoon Arrives

Abstract: It seems a bit early to be the dog days of summer, but they seem to have crept up on us. No, the weather hasn’t yet turned beastly hot in most places. Baseball hasn’t yet totally separated into the haves and never-will-haves. There is still free agency drama to come in basketball and hockey. The N.F.L. went to the dogs months ago and it had nothing to do with summer. And yes, maybe the idea crept in because one of the dramas from Wimbledon involves Novak Djokovic trying to get his poodle into England . But the news has hit at least some sort of a summer swoon when we are contemplating whether or not receiver Terrell Owens had secret surgery on a secret knee injury and whether it means he will retire from a league that isn’t currently operating. Or why the forces of the universe can’t conspire to get Jets receiver Braylon Edwards to stop driving, his latest plea for revoked privileges being crashing his new car at 3:40 a.m. and claiming he was driving to a yacht club . Or whether or not the Nuggets’ assistant coach Adrian Dantley was fired by George Karl for refusing to sit in the right place on the bench. Or how a Major League Baseball team (the Dodgers) can go bankrupt — and no, we don’t mean morally. That happened sometime in the Mannywood era, if not earlier. The Los Angeles Times’s Chris Dufresne attempts to explain how the Dodgers lost a city, along with all their marbles, but keep in mind it is still a Major League Baseball team . Yes, there are less head-scratching things in the news, although a confluence of events in women’s sports might spark a discussion on just what some of these sports have to do to get attention. The Women’s World Cup kicks off today in Germany, which has become the perfect stage to rejuvenate the event, writes Jeff Kassouf on Foxsports.com . Interest has waned in the United States lately, matching the American team’s fortunes, while the current team strives to find its own identity following in the footsteps of the Mia Hamm generation, writes David Leon Moore in USA Today . It’s the powerhouse German team, however, that stands in the way of that these days, writes Grahame L. Jones in The Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, women’s golf has what seems to be a new transcendent star as 22-year-old Yani Tseng routed the field in the L.P.G.A. Championship , Rory McIlroy-style, but it has fallen so far off the map, a cartography expedition is being formed to locate it. So Tseng, whom SI.com’s golf experts believe has a limitless future, lives in no danger of being recognized out in public, at least outside of her native Taiwan. Wimbledon lost a bit of luster on the women’s side with Serena Williams’s loss on Monday, but her conquerer, Maria Bartoli of France, did her part to add to the tournament’s color by throwing her parents out of a match on Saturday. This did not make SI.com’s Jon Wertheim’s list of notable achievements of the first week, but perhaps it should have. Another candidate: not only is Djokovic’s dog a center of attention, he is gaining even more followers with his own Twitter page . The real-life stunning story of the weekend, though, is that of the Michigan basketball recruit Austin Hatch, who is fighting for his life after a plane crash that killed his father and stepmother. This is the second plane crash he has survived , the first having killed his mother and two siblings. Next to that, all the other news does seem to have gone to the dogs. Follow Leading Off on Twitter: twitter.com/zinsernyt

Djokovic Novak
Owens Terrell
Edwards Braylon
Tennis
Wimbledon Tennis Tournament
National Football League
Hamm Mia


Buffalo: Senecas Approve Smaller Casino

Abstract: The Seneca tribal council approved a plan on Saturday to build a casino in downtown Buffalo. The project, which calls for a $70 million to $90 million expenditure, will be smaller than the original $125 million plan. The move comes after the city refused to sell the Senecas a key street that divides the 9-acre site, decreasing the area available for construction, The Buffalo News reported. The Senecas said the casino, in the city’s warehouse district, will generate about 1,000 jobs.


With U.S.C. Speech, David Petraeus Is Back in Public Eye

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Since he resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency last November after acknowledging an extramarital affair, David H. Petraeus has all but vanished from the national scene. But in a speech on Tuesday night, Mr. Petraeus will seek to open a new chapter in his career — one that carves out a role for himself as a voice on energy, economic and veterans issues and in the private sector. Mr. Petraeus’s speech, which will take place at an event honoring veterans and the R.O.T.C. program at the University of Southern California, will begin with an account of the “personal journey” he has undergone since his resignation. “Needless to say, I join you keenly aware that I am regarded in a different light now than I was a year ago,” Mr. Petraeus will say, according to an advance text of his speech that was made available to The New York Times. “I am also keenly aware that the reason for my recent journey was my own doing,” he will say. “So please allow me to begin my remarks this evening by reiterating how deeply I regret — and apologize for — the circumstances that led me to resign from the C.I.A. and caused such pain for my family, friends and supporters.” The resignation of Mr. Petraeus, one of America’s most decorated four-star generals, marked a stunning end to a meteoric career in which he helped draft the military’s field manual on counterinsurgency; commanded the American-led coalition during the troop “surge” in Iraq; led the military effort in the more fraught Afghan conflict; and became the director of the C.I.A., where he urged, unsuccessfully, that the White House provide arms to a select cadre of Syrian rebels. President Obama accepted Mr. Petraeus’s resignation on Nov. 9, after Mr. Petraeus acknowledged the affair with a biographer, Paula Broadwell . Overnight, Mr. Petraeus left behind the days in which he would start work at 5 a.m. in a specially constructed intelligence office at his Arlington, Va., home before arriving at the C.I.A. at 7:15 a.m. Instead, he lived a largely homebound existence in which much of his contact with current and former associates was by e-mail. After resigning, Mr. Petraeus testified behind closed doors to Congress about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, but avoided public appearances and turned down a stack of news media requests to tell his story. Image David H. Petraeus during a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2010. He has kept a low profile since resigning as C.I.A. director in November after acknowledging an affair. Credit Luke Sharrett/The New York Times In recent months, however, Mr. Petraeus has increasingly appeared in public for lunches and dinners with former colleagues, foreign officials, members of Congress and policy experts. He met not long ago in New York with Fouad Ajami, the Middle East scholar, and recently attended a small off-the-record seminar on Iran at a Washington research institution. Acquaintances of Mr. Petraeus say he supported Mr. Obama’s decision to nominate John O. Brennan as his successor at the C.I.A., a view he communicated privately to two Republicans, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as well as to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mr. Petraeus has received offers from the financial community and has taken trips to New York to explore what one of his associates called “long-term opportunities.” He has been asked to serve as a consultant to major companies, been offered the opportunity to give paid speeches and is exploring positions in academia. Mr. Petraeus, 60, is also keeping up his physical fitness regimen, alternating between daily seven-mile runs and 25-mile bike rides. His post-government life is being managed by Robert B. Barnett, a lawyer who handles book deals for the Washington elite and who counts the last three American presidents as clients. Mr. Barnett said that Mr. Petraeus “has spent a lot of time with his family, and their collective focus is forward.” Tuesday’s speech was arranged long before Mr. Petraeus resigned. The University of Southern California, which describes itself one of the few universities to have maintained an unbroken relationship with the R.O.T.C. since World War II, has been active in helping veterans. A major theme of the speech is the importance of supporting the families of military personnel who have perished in America’s wars, caring for wounded service members and honoring the service of veterans. “There is often a view that, because an individual was a great soldier, he or she will naturally do well in and transition effortlessly to the civilian world,” Mr. Petraeus will say while listing some of the nonprofit veterans groups he is supporting. “In reality, the transition from military service to civilian pursuits often is quite challenging.” Mr. Petraeus’s wife, Holly, who works in Washington at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which handles consumer complaints from military service members and their families, will not be attending the event. Toward the close of the speech, Mr. Petraeus will return again to his own missteps. “I know that I can never fully assuage the pain that I inflicted on those closest to me and on a number of others,” he will say. “I can, however, try to move forward in a manner that is consistent with the values to which I subscribed before slipping my moorings and, as best as possible, to make amends to those I have hurt and let down.” Mr. Petraeus will also say that “life doesn’t stop with such a mistake; it can and must go on.”


From Texas, Harvard Captain Collin Zych Finds His Way

Abstract: BOSTON — Collin Zych, a senior free safety at Harvard , wakes up on a typical autumn Sunday feeling the aftershocks of most of the hits he made in the game the day before. He carries bumps and bruises, and his shoulders tend to ache. “Once you get back on field for practice, it all goes away,” he said, sounding almost cheerful about it. Zych (pronounced zitch), from Plano, Tex., is Harvard’s 137th football captain and is considered to be an N.F.L. prospect, but he has come a long way since his senior year in high school, when he and his coach made pitches just to get Harvard to pay attention to him. It rarely works that way, Harvard Coach Tim Murphy said. To locate candidates who are good players and who meet the university’s academic requirements, Harvard sends 5,000 questionnaires to high school coaches in the United States and Canada. “We recruit Texas hard,” said Murphy, who has 11 players from the state on his team, including three from Plano, a Dallas suburb. “It’s a big state, or as some people down there say, a big country.” It was not as if Zych totally eluded Harvard’s attention. He heard from Harvard when he was a junior at Plano East High School, and he was so interested in attending that he took part in a football camp there before his senior year. Then it was as if Zych dropped off the radar. No one really knows the reason. There were changes on Murphy’s staff, and Zych’s mother, Linda, said that the coaches might have thought that Collin, who has three siblings, did not want to attend a college that does not offer athletic scholarships. “He really felt pretty strongly,” his mother said. “Harvard was a school he really enjoyed visiting.” Zych had begun considering other Eastern programs — Columbia, Dartmouth, Holy Cross — but he wanted to give Harvard one more shot. He stopped by the office of Johnny Ringo, his coach at Plano East, and asked Ringo if he would try to nudge Harvard. Ringo sent new game film of Zych to Harvard. Zych sent an e-mail to Murphy in which he said he still wanted to play for the Crimson. Once Murphy saw the film, and noticed how ferocious and heady Zych was, Harvard became quite interested. “I let them know he was a can’t-miss kid,” Ringo said in a telephone interview. “We tried to convince him what kind of a kid he was, what kind of character he had, what kind of academic student he was. Once we did get in touch, they were great about getting him up there.” Ringo said he was only doing what he would do for other prospects. But Zych said emphatically that he might not have ended up at Harvard without Ringo’s help. Zych, who is studying economics, said he would like to pursue a career in finance when he stops playing football. He is not the first person to say that a Harvard education will probably open many doors. But it is interesting, to him, how far he has come. “Truthfully, I had no idea Harvard had a legitimate football team,” he said, smiling. After he enrolled at Harvard as a freshman, he was given a No. 32 jersey — a duplicate number. Because the coaches needed him in case of emergency for varsity games, he did not play a single snap for the junior varsity. But the varsity did not need him, either. Zych started nine games as a sophomore and led the Crimson in tackles as a junior. At 5 feet 11 inches and 195 pounds, he is not particularly large for a safety, but he hits hard and is considered by his coaches and his teammates to be sound fundamentally. “He’s just extraordinarily dependable, and in a big way,” Murphy said. “He is always, always, where he’s supposed to be when he’s supposed to be there.” Zych is amiable but somewhat stoic; he was not an automatic candidate to become Harvard’s captain as a senior. Players elect the captain, and there is only one for the season — and it is Harvard — so the captaincy carries an enormous amount of prestige. He was named captain after last season, in which Harvard finished 7-3 and lost in a driving rainstorm to Pennsylvania, the eventual Ivy League champion. Zych decided almost right away to take a different approach to being a captain than some of his predecessors. It is a Harvard tradition that the captain writes a letter on Harvard stationery to each player outlining the goals of the season. Depending on the captain’s personality, the tone of these letters can be very different. “It was the most professional, well-done letter since I’ve been here,” Ben Graeff, a junior defensive end, said of Zych’s letter. “There was no real big hoopla — or cursing, which my mom appreciated. It was all business. You felt like he was addressing you personally.” Rather than, as he said, “trying to pump people up in a very masculine way,” Zych wrote that the players should be thoroughly prepared heading into the season opener against Holy Cross (which Harvard won, 34-6). That they should hold one another accountable. That there be no slackers. Graeff said the team had taken Zych’s lead. “We’ve had some of the best defensive practices since I’ve been here,” he said. “Collin is one of those players who’s always up for practice.” After Harvard (2-1) lost to Brown in its Ivy League opener Sept. 25, Zych noticed a change in the way that some players prepared for the next game. It was as if they had received personal wake-up calls. They responded with a 35-10 victory against Lafayette. Harvard hosts Cornell on Saturday. Graeff has detected a change in Zych, too, saying, “Maybe he talks a little more on the field.” Graeff laughed, as if that were an accomplishment, but Zych really has come a long way since he walked into Johnny Ringo’s office as a senior and asked for a little push.


Bank of America’s Firing of Counsel Is Examined

Abstract: Four days after Bank of America shareholders voted to approve a merger with Merrill Lynch , Timothy J. Mayopoulos, the bank’s general counsel, was summoned to an executive suite. There, Bank of America’s chief risk officer told Mr. Mayopoulos that he was no longer needed at the company, but she gave no explanation of the unexpected dismissal, according to two people briefed on the meeting. Now, the timing of Mr. Mayopoulos’s dismissal is coming under a spotlight as Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and other federal investigators examine why the bank’s executives did not tell shareholders about billions of dollars worth of bonuses as well as huge losses at Merrill Lynch before the deal. Mr. Mayopoulos was let go the day the bank informed its board that Merrill was bleeding money at an unexpected pace. He was immediately escorted from the building without being permitted to return to his office, the people with knowledge of situation said. His dismissal came six days after Mr. Mayopoulos spoke with the bank’s chief financial officer about mounting losses at Merrill Lynch, which were not disclosed to shareholders before the deal closed. “I’d like to know why he was dismissed,” said Charles M. Elson, a Bank of America shareholder and a professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware. “If he was terminated because of disagreements on disclosure on Merrill, that’s relevant. It goes right back to the effectiveness of management. You can always disregard a general counsel’s advice, but the question is, Why did you?” As general counsel, Mr. Mayopoulos was responsible for advising the bank on its disclosure decisions. It is unclear how he advised executives to handle the information on Merrill’s bonuses and losses, which some shareholders later said would have changed their mind about approving the merger. In testimony to Mr. Cuomo’s staff in August, Mr. Mayopoulos cited legal ethics rules and declined to provide specifics on the advice he gave the bank. Mr. Cuomo asked the bank in a letter Tuesday to grant Mr. Mayopoulos and the bank’s other lawyers permission to respond. By invoking the confidentiality of legal advice, Bank of America was “hindering this office’s ability to make fair and fully informed decisions as to what charges, if any, to bring and whether individual Bank of America officers should be charged,” Mr. Cuomo’s office wrote. Bank of America has also cited attorney-client privilege in a separate case involving the Securities and Exchange Commission, with which the bank recently reached a $33 million settlement over disclosure issues. A federal judge who has blocked the settlement has also tried to get the bank to reveal more on the role played by Mr. Mayopoulos and the bank’s other lawyers, and the bank and the S.E.C. will file new documents with that judge on Wednesday. The chairman of a Congressional committee investigating the merger has also asked the bank to reveal documents related to these legal discussions. In testimony to Mr. Cuomo’s staff, Joe L. Price, the chief financial officer, said he relied on Mr. Mayopoulos’s advice on Dec. 3, the day before the shareholder vote, for the bank’s decision not to disclose Merrill’s mounting losses. Mr. Mayopoulos responded to Mr. Cuomo’s staff that he in turn had spoken with outside counsel about the matter. The bank’s outside law firm was Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Merrill Lynch worked with Shearman & Sterling. Both firms declined to comment. Kenneth D. Lewis, Bank of America’s chief executive, told Mr. Cuomo’s office this spring that Mr. Mayopoulos’s dismissal came at a time when the bank “had more executives than we needed because of this merger.” The bank chose one of its own executives, Brian T. Moynihan, over Merrill Lynch’s general counsel to fill the vacancy. Mr. Moynihan held the position for about a month before being shifted to head the bank’s investment banking unit. The departure of Mr. Mayopoulos, whose family still lives in Charlotte on the same street as Mr. Lewis, surprised executives at Merrill Lynch who had been meeting with him for weeks to figure out how the combined legal department would be arranged. He was involved in such a meeting when he was called in and dismissed, two people briefed on those discussions said. Bank of America issued a statement that said it had not in fact defended itself by saying it relied on its lawyers. The bank said it believed it had followed disclosure rules. Mr. Mayopoulos is now the general counsel of Fannie Mae. In a Feb. 2 recommendation letter provided by his lawyer, Ed Hinson, the bank said he had served “with distinction throughout his tenure with the company.” “The amazing thing about a guy like him is however he’s treated, he’ll do his duty,” Mr. Hinson said. “He’s not going to reveal confidential information.”

Merrill Lynch & Co
Bank of America Corp
Mayopoulos Timothy J
Cuomo Andrew M


Opposition Says No to Ukraine on Power Share

Abstract: KIEV, Ukraine — In a striking concession aimed at defusing Ukraine’s civil uprising and preserving his own grip on power, President Viktor F. Yanukovych on Saturday offered to install opposition leaders in top posts in a reshaped government, but they swiftly rebuffed the offer to the delight of thousands of protesters on the street craving a fuller victory in the days ahead. With mass protests spreading across the country, Mr. Yanukovych proposed one opposition figure, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, as prime minister and another, the former boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, as vice prime minister for humanitarian affairs. Mr. Yatsenyuk is a leader of Fatherland, the party of Mr. Yanukovych’s archrival, the jailed former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko. “No deal,” Mr. Yatsenyuk wrote on Twitter, addressing Mr. Yanukovych as thousands of angry protesters streamed to the still-occupied Independence Square, undeterred by the biting cold. “We’re finishing what we started,” he added. “The people decide our leaders, not you.” In a speech from the stage on the square, and in a news conference afterward, Mr. Yatsenyuk expressed more flexibility, but insisted that the embattled president was no longer in a position to dictate the terms of a deal. “We have our conditions,” he said, “not your conditions.” Those conditions, Mr. Yatsenyuk said, would include reconsideration of the far-reaching political and free trade agreements with the European Union that Mr. Yanukovych had promised to sign, but then abandoned. That decision set off the protests in late November. Mr. Yatsenyuk also said that Ms. Tymoshenko must be released from prison as European leaders have insisted. Many demonstrators on the streets of Kiev, the capital, including some involved in violent clashes with the police, have been demanding Mr. Yanukovych’s resignation, which he did not offer. And the fury of the crowd made clear that the leaders would almost certainly have faced a mutiny had they accepted the deal. “Shame!” some chanted as Mr. Yatsenyuk began his remarks by saying that the opposition was not afraid to lead the country. Others shouted, “Betrayer!” In a further complication, some of the most aggressive demonstrators are supporters of the nationalist Svoboda Party and its leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, who took part in the talks with Mr. Yanukovych but was not offered a position. Mr. Klitschko, who leads a party called the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, said that protesters would remain on the streets as negotiations continued. Mr. Yanukovych’s willingness to remove Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who has been his staunch ally through the more than two-month-long civic uprising, underscored just how much pressure he has been facing to contain the crisis. His offer came as protests continued to spread across the country on Saturday, with efforts to occupy or blockade government buildings underway in at least a dozen cities besides Kiev. In recent days, it has become increasingly clear that the elite Berkut riot police and other Interior Ministry troops are outnumbered and would face enormous challenges if asked to enforce a state of emergency. Late Friday night, a fragile truce had disintegrated in Kiev and the city again was convulsed in violence. In a move that suggested that his offers were more than theatrics aimed at dividing the opposition, Mr. Yanukovych also said he would be willing to roll back constitutional changes made at his direction that broadly expanded the powers of the presidency earlier in his term. He also agreed to make changes to a package of new laws that severely suppress political dissent, including freedoms of speech and assembly, which Mr. Yanukovych’s backers rammed through Parliament on Jan. 16. And he reiterated his offer to free all detained protesters who have not been charged with serious crimes. At his news conference late Saturday, Mr. Yatsenyuk said talks with Mr. Yanukovych would continue. “We do not reject the offer,” he said, “but we do not accept it.” The concessions were announced in a statement on the presidential website on Saturday after a negotiation session lasting more than three hours. The leadership changes were offered in a portion of the statement attributed to the minister of justice, Olena Lukash, who took part in the talks. Image President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, second from left, talked with opposition leaders in Kiev on Saturday. Credit Mykhailo Markiv/Presidential Press Service, via Associated Press Ms. Lukash said that Mr. Yanukovych had also agreed to engage in a public debate with Mr. Klitschko, who has said he plans to challenge Mr. Yanukovych in the presidential election next year. Mr. Yanukovych’s offer also called for reshaping the Central Election Commission to give opposition parties more influence — a step that is seen as important to preventing election fraud, which has been a persistent problem in Ukrainian balloting. Still, there seemed to be some strategizing in Mr. Yanukovych’s proposal, by offering the prime minister post to Mr. Yatsenyuk, rather than to Mr. Klitschko, who is more popular in public opinion polls and is likely to pose a sharper challenge in next year’s presidential campaign. Even before the three opposition leaders could return to Independence Square from the talks at the presidential headquarters, violence flared in the main conflict zone, near the Dynamo soccer stadium. Tires were once again set ablaze on the street, and protesters clashed with special police units inside Ukraine House, a public conference center nearby. Before offering the concessions, Mr. Yanukovych was pressed by two of the nation’s wealthiest men, the so-called oligarchs who control Ukraine’s industry and economy and also wield influence in Parliament. Both men warned, in separate statements, that Ukraine was in danger of splintering. System Capital Management, a conglomerate owned by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, regarded as a close ally of Mr. Yanukovych, issued a statement lamenting the loss of life in recent days and offering condolences. “Business cannot keep silent when people are killed; a real danger of breakup of the country emerges; when a political crisis can lead to a deep economic recession and thus inevitably result in lower standards of living,” the statement said. “It is only by peaceful action that the political crisis can be resolved. Any use of force and weapons is unacceptable.” Another billionaire, Petro Poroshenko, a member of Parliament who is viewed as a potential future presidential candidate, issued a statement calling on lawmakers loyal to Mr. Yanukovych to join with opposition leaders to reach a compromise. “Ukraine has never faced such a big threat,” Mr. Poroshenko said. “It’s no longer a political crisis. It’s a crisis of statehood. In danger are the lives of our fellow citizens, civil peace and territorial integrity.” “Anyone who fails to see it or denies it,” he added, “is either blind or a provocateur.” Mr. Poroshenko later appeared on the stage with the opposition leaders in Independence Square. Protesters gathered in the freezing cold made no secret of their displeasure with Mr. Yanukovych’s offer and their lack of trust in politicians, even those who have been leading the protest effort, like Mr. Yatsenyuk. “If he accepts this offer, he will be a betrayer,” said Volodymyr, declining to give his last name, an unemployed economist from the western city of Ivan-Frankivsk, who was wearing a helmet and respirator, common among those who have been at the center of clashes with the police. “If they accept it, they will all be political corpses,” he said, Before word came of Mr. Yanukovych’s concessions, opposition leaders had been bracing for a declaration of a state of emergency, which they warned would only lead to further bloodshed. Saturday also brought news that a protester injured during battles with the police had died in a Kiev hospital, raising the confirmed death toll to four. After Mr. Yanukovych backed away from the political and free trade agreements with Europe, he turned to Russia, which agreed to provide $15 billion in loans and discounts on natural gas to stave off an economic collapse that some experts warned was imminent. With its money on the line, Russia has also expressed consternation about the spreading protests. On Saturday, mass demonstrations and sieges of public buildings spread to at least three more cities, with thousands of protesters occupying the regional administration building in Vinnytsia, a city in central Ukraine about 90 miles from the border with Moldova. Demonstrators also blocked a government building in Chernihiv, north of Kiev, near the border with Belarus, and held a large rally in Poltava, about 200 miles southeast of Kiev. Those actions, combined with the violence in the capital, drew pleas — both domestically and from abroad — for calm and for a peaceful solution. Adrian Karatnycky, an expert on Ukraine at the Atlantic Council of the United States, a research group, said that the opposition leaders would almost certainly want guarantees of changes to the Constitution before agreeing to any deal. “This is a first offer from Yanukovych, a sign he has blinked,” Mr. Karatnycky said. “The concessions Yanukovych has made are signs that his base wants to sue for peace. But the offer is not enough, as there is no trust in him.”

Ukraine
Viktor F Yanukovych
Arseniy P Yatsenyuk
Vitali Klitschko


Broncos’ Pass Rusher May One Day Put the Chicken Before the Sack

Abstract: ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Von Miller is happy to show off the shiny, white, personalized high-tops he will wear in Saturday’s playoff game against the Baltimore Ravens. “I’m feeling kind of D. Rose-ish,” he said. Or to discuss his collection of 32 eyeglass frames, many of which, like the red, square, vintage Persol frames that are a personal favorite, were picked up during two-hour shopping trips to a store in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. “Jack Nicholson wears vintage Persols,” Miller noted. But to get Miller, one of the N.F.L.’s best pass rushers, to talk with the speed and enthusiasm with which he pursues quarterbacks, only one topic will do. “When it comes to chickens and turkeys,” Miller said, “I could talk all day.” He could, considering he went from taking one easy class at Texas A&M with the intention of sleeping through the semester to getting a minor in poultry science. More than the 18.5 sacks in his second season in the N.F.L. or the Gumby-like flexibility that helps him evade offensive linemen or even the eyeglasses that have become such a signature that a teammate gave him a carousel last Christmas to store them, it is a passion for poultry that might best represent the goofy, free-spirited nature of the anchor and energizer of the Denver Broncos’ defense. Miller, an outside linebacker, hopes to be the best defensive player in football, and then to become the best chicken farmer he can be. “I’m the only one that wears glasses and raises chickens and plays football the way I do,” Miller said, without much argument, even from a nearby teammate who was laughing. It would be a mistake, though, to confuse Miller’s playfulness and exuberance — in a 20-minute conversation, Miller brought up four times how much he loved football and hanging out in the locker room with his teammates — with a lack of seriousness about being one of the N.F.L.’s best defensive players. Miller is one of three second-year pass rushers — Houston’s J. J. Watt and San Francisco’s Aldon Smith are the others — who terrorized quarterbacks this season and whose teams are in the divisional round of the playoffs, which begins Saturday with the Broncos hosting the Ravens. The Broncos, who allowed the fourth-fewest points during the regular season, chose Miller second over all in the 2011 draft, just after Cam Newton went to Carolina. In a conversation this week, he repeatedly said he wanted to be the player the Broncos brought him in to be. Image The Broncos’ Von Miller recorded 18.5 sacks this season. He also has 32 eyeglass frames and a minor in poultry science from Texas A&M. Credit Grant Halverson/Getty Images Miller cannot quite articulate what he thinks that is. But Richard Smith, his position coach, can. “I think he has the potential to be better,” Smith said. “He can be one of the better players to ever play the game. If he continues to push himself and continues to work hard and if he wants that, he has the athletic ability to achieve that. A lot of his stuff is on natural ability. In 25 years in the N.F.L., he’s the most gifted player I’ve ever been around. He just has freakish athletic ability.” Smith and Miller have an odd-couple relationship. Miller is the laid-back youngster, and Smith is the gruff, old-school coach who told Miller he should not dance after a sack, until Miller told him that a company donated money to his foundation, Von’s Vision, which provides eye care to underprivileged children. Go ahead and dance, Smith told him. But Smith has also taken a special interest in Miller, riding him for everything from bringing food into the meeting rooms to plays in which he did not perform well. Smith makes Miller sit next to him during meetings, to keep Miller alert. He will occasionally call Miller into his office to show him the bad plays Miller made, not the “100 plays I could show you that are unbelievably great.” Miller calls Smith’s treatment of him “comical” but also credits him with his success. While Miller’s natural gift is pass rushing, Smith’s goal is to mold Miller into a more complete player. Progress has been made. Miller can set the edge on offensive linemen on running plays because of his strength, and this season he was used much more often in pass coverage than last season. According to ProFootballFocus.com, Miller was thrown at 24 times this season and allowed 19 receptions, a catch rate of 79.2 percent. He had an interception and broke up another pass. Last year, Miller was thrown at 13 times and allowed 11 receptions, a catch rate of 84.6 percent. He had no interceptions. Still, it is Miller’s ability to effortlessly contort his body that most amazes teammates. Miller says even he cannot fully explain it, except that he is trying to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible. But he eschewed most traditional weight training programs last off-season to focus on yoga sessions with the Giants’ Jason Pierre-Paul. Broncos linebacker Keith Brooking recalled a sack of Carson Palmer in Oakland, when Miller, rushing from the left side of the defense, ran at right tackle Khalif Barnes. As he approached, he lowered his right shoulder and then bent his knees, turning the corner with his knees just inches off the ground and his torso almost parallel to the grass. “You have a big offensive tackle, and he’s running as fast as he can straight up the field, and this guy is trying to push on him,” cornerback Champ Bailey said. “He has the flexibility to get low, run under that and pop back up as if he’s been standing tall the whole time. Nobody can do that. That’s amazing. And how do you pop up? Usually people fall on their face.” During the lockout two years ago, when lawyers representing the players union chose Miller to be the representative for the incoming rookies in a lawsuit against the league, Miller said he agreed to lend his name to the cause not to put himself in the spotlight, but to be a part of a group that included Mike Vrabel and Peyton Manning. “It’s a great feeling to have that I’m doing something for them,” Miller said at the time. “I enjoy being a great teammate.” Image Von Miller uses his uncanny flexibility to evade offensive linemen. “He can be one of the better players to ever play the game,” said Richard Smith, his position coach. Credit Garrett Ellwood/Getty Images Two years later, with 30 sacks to his name — eliciting comparisons to the former Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Derrick Thomas — and having established himself as the most important Broncos player other than Manning, Miller said he did not think about what he had accomplished so far. “That’s just what I do to keep myself grounded and humble, being the Von I’ve always been,” he said. “This is what’s always worked for me. I don’t sit and think about stuff.” But he has thought about what will come after football. After the professor of that first poultry class warned Miller that he could not coast through and still receive credit, Miller started to pay attention. Surrounded by students who planned to become farmers, he eventually took classes in poultry production and poultry genetics, and another in which students worked at a farm raising chickens. He said he believed that with the connections he made at Texas A&M, he could have a chicken farm up and running within a day, if he wanted. “It’s an easy lifestyle,” he said. “It’s a billion-dollar industry. Chickens and turkeys are both recession-proof.” At this, his teammate Robert Ayers, sitting nearby and eating Chick-fil-A for lunch, started laughing. “If you don’t eat chicken tenders, you use chicken broth to make soup,” Miller continued, picking up speed. “It’s a very, very elaborate industry. I enjoy checking on the birds once or twice a day, and just having a tranquil lifestyle.” There is nothing tranquil about Miller’s current lifestyle, of course. But Miller seems to have found the only job he might love as much as the one he already has. “Sad part about it — it doesn’t take long,” Miller said. “It’s like six to eight weeks before a chick becomes a chicken tender. We knocked that out in just a semester. The house raises the chicken, the lighting, auto feeding, letting owners know how many dead birds are in the house, the disease and humidity. Really, all you’ve got to do is pick up the dead birds.” Or the flattened quarterbacks.

Football
Broncos
Von Miller
Playoffs
Ravens


Robert Scarano, a Brooklyn Architect, Barred From Working

Abstract: Robert M. Scarano Jr., a Brooklyn architect who has long been criticized by community groups for flouting zoning laws , was barred by the Department of Buildings on Wednesday from filing construction plans — threatening, at least temporarily, his ability to work as an architect in the city. The order, which applies both to pending applications that Mr. Scarano has before the Buildings Department and to any new ones he might want to file, came after a scathing recommendation by an administrative law judge, who found that he had made numerous false statements about three properties in Brooklyn. The judge, Joan R. Salzman, accused Mr. Scarano of “deliberately overbuilding” and said some of his filings were “so deceptive that they call to mind out-and-out fraud.” “False filings lead to chaos,” she wrote. Mr. Scarano, the fourth architect to be barred from submitting documents under a 2007 state law, did not return calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman, Linda Alexander, said in a statement that his company, Scarano Architect PLLC , “is pursing all avenues available to reverse the erroneous rulings that were issued today.” Mr. Scarano’s lawyer, Raymond T. Mellon, said he would most likely challenge the constitutionality of the 2007 law, which authorizes the city to bar licensed architects. In the building boom of the last decade, Mr. Scarano emerged as one of Brooklyn’s more prolific and controversial architects, a favored choice of developers looking to capitalize on rising real estate values but the scourge of many community groups, who complained that his buildings dwarfed the structures around them, blocking views and sunlight. Now, city officials have found that they also often dwarfed the plans Mr. Scarano filed to get them built. “Mr. Scarano repeatedly submitted false documents in an attempt to circumvent the law and have illegal buildings approved,” the buildings commissioner, Robert D. LiMandri, said. “Licensed professionals must understand they have an obligation to follow the law so the safety and quality of life of our neighborhoods are not compromised.” The current charges grew out of a 2008 inquiry by the city’s Department of Investigation and the Buildings Department. In 2006, the city brought charges against Mr. Scarano claiming that he violated zoning rules or building codes in the design of more than two dozen apartment buildings, many in Williamsburg, and also that he failed to guarantee safe conditions at a building site on Ocean Parkway where a worker was killed in a wall collapse. The charges were settled. The city’s public advocate, Bill de Blasio, who opposed projects that Mr. Scarano designed in Carroll Gardens when Mr. De Blasio represented the neighborhood in the City Council, called the decision gratifying. He seemed to always have nine lives and get away with it.” Mr. De Blasio said. The implications for Mr. Scarano’s firm and its current projects were not immediately clear; another licensed architect in the office could, in theory, submit the firm’s applications and building plans. The firm’s Web site says it handles 300 projects a year. Mr. Scarano has said that 99 percent of his work was in New York City. Despite complaints about dozens of his projects in recent years, Mr. Scarano was ultimately brought down by his work on just three buildings, including one project, at 145 Snediker Avenue in East New York, where the issue was a lamppost. Judge Salzman found that Mr. Scarano took pictures that falsely gave the impression that a lamppost was farther away from a driveway than it actually was. “I find that the only purpose of respondent’s peculiar photographs was to try to elicit a final construction approval to which respondent’s client was in no way entitled,” she wrote, “and, in short, to deceive the department, or, in common parlance, to ‘put one over’ on the department, to ‘pull a fast one.’ ” Mr. Scarano was also cited for a raft of false or misleading statements in plans he submitted for an L-shape lot at Freeman Street and Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, in order to build bigger structures than were permitted. “These were not inadvertent errors,” the judge wrote. “Respondent knew what he was doing.”

Scarano Robert M Jr
Housing and Real Estate
Architecture
Brooklyn (NYC)


French Police Nearby, Girl Crouches for 8 Hours in Car With Slain Relatives

Abstract: PARIS — Apparently frozen in terror, a 4-year-old girl crouched silently for eight hours below her dead mother and grandmother in the back of a BMW on a forest road in the French Alps while just steps away investigators hunted for clues, officials said Thursday. The discovery of the girl, unharmed, around midnight on Wednesday provided a glimmer of relief after a grisly and murky attack near the village of Chevaline that left four people dead and a 7-year-old girl — thought to be the little girl’s older sister — hospitalized with a fractured skull. Three of the dead had been shot in the head, officials said. Law enforcement officials said the BMW appeared to belong to a British family who had been vacationing at a campground near Lake Annecy, a picturesque area in the Alps not far from the Swiss and Italian borders. Officials did not release the identities of the victims, but they said the car was registered to a man who was born in Baghdad in 1962 and had a British passport. British authorities identified him as the father, Saad al-Hilli, of Surrey, in southern England. They said he worked at Surrey Satellite Technology, a high-tech company based in Guildford, Surrey, that is owned by the EADS aerospace conglomerate that builds satellites. Mr. Hilli’s neighbors in the Surrey village of Claygate told the BBC that his wife’s name was Iqbal and that they had two daughters, Zainab, 7, and Zeena, 4. Investigators said they had uncovered no motive for the killings and no weapon was found. The bodies were discovered Wednesday by a British tourist, a former air force officer who was cycling by. He told the police that he had seen a seriously injured girl lying in front of the BMW, officials said. The car’s ignition was still engaged, they said, suggesting that the attack had just occurred. Investigators said the victims appeared to be a grandmother and two parents. The older woman, who French news reports said was a Swedish citizen, was found in the back of the car along with a woman thought to be Iqbal al-Hilli. Mr. Hilli was slumped over the steering wheel. About 15 bullet cartridges from an automatic weapon were strewed on the ground outside. Officials said it appeared that the three had been targeted, rather than being the victims of indiscriminate fire into the car. The fourth victim, a cyclist found near the car, has been identified by the French news media as Sylvain Mollier, a French father of three in his 40s, who lived a few miles from the scene and was most likely biking by during the attack. “It was clearly an act of extreme savagery, and it is obvious that whoever did this wanted to kill,” Éric Maillaud, the local prosecutor in Annecy, said at a news conference. Officials said that while they were still investigating the motive, one theory was that the killings were the result of an armed robbery gone awry, though they were not excluding the possibility of a family dispute that had turned deadly. The police told the radio network Europe 1 that another theory held that the family had accidentally disturbed a drug deal. Law enforcement officials said there were two attempted carjackings by an armed gang on the same night as the attack. They were investigating whether there was a link to the killings. Investigators said they had initially missed seeing the 4-year-old girl because they left the bullet-riddled car door closed to avoid disturbing evidence while waiting for forensic experts to arrive from Paris. Mr. Maillaud told reporters that the crime scene was straight out of a film. Referring to the 4-year-old, he said she could not distinguish between “the good or the bad people.” “She immediately smiled and began speaking in English when a gendarme took her in his arms and carried her out of the car,” he said. “She is in a hospital, but her life is not threatened, despite going through a tragedy by losing her family in such atrocious conditions.” The 7-year-old was airlifted to Grenoble University Hospital, according to French news reports. The two girls are under police protection, officials said. Autopsies on the dead were planned for Friday. The British Foreign Office said it was also investigating the killings. Speaking in London, where he was attending the Paralympic Games , President François Hollande of France said that the French authorities would do everything they could to find the killer or killers.

French Alps
Murders and Attempted Murders
France


Chapter Seven Named Trotter of the Year

Abstract: Chapter Seven was voted 2012 Trotter of the Year after 8 victories in 10 starts, beating out his stablemate Market Share. He earned $1.02 million this year and equaled the fastest mile on a one-mile racetrack by winning the Nat Ray Invitational in 1 minute 50.1 seconds at the Meadowlands.

Harness Racing
Awards Decorations and Honors