Oklahoma’s Ban on Gay Marriage Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules

Abstract: A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled Tuesday that the state’s constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage violated the federal Constitution, the latest in a string of legal victories for gay rights and one that occurred in the heart of the Bible Belt. The state’s ban on marriage by gay and lesbian couples is “an arbitrary, irrational exclusion of just one class of Oklahoma citizens from a governmental benefit,” wrote Judge Terence C. Kern of United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, in Tulsa, deciding a case that had languished for nine years. The amendment, he said, is based on “moral disapproval” and does not advance the state’s asserted interests in promoting heterosexual marriage or the welfare of children. “We’re jubilant, we’re over the moon,” said one of the plaintiffs, Sharon Baldwin, 45, who has lived with her partner and co-plaintiff, Mary Bishop, 52, for 17 years. The two both work as editors at The Tulsa World newspaper and had just arrived at work on Tuesday afternoon when the city editor told them of the decision. “We’re taking the day off,” Ms. Baldwin said. The decision will not take effect immediately, and an appeal is almost certain, leaving prospects uncertain for gay couples. “We are disappointed in the ruling,” said District Attorney Tim Harris of Tulsa County, who represented the Tulsa County clerk, a defendant because the office issues marriage licenses. “We will need to review the decision and talk with our client” about appeal options, he said. The ruling comes less than a month after a federal judge in Utah reached the same conclusion , declaring that state’s restrictive marriage amendment unconstitutional. Some 1,300 couples rushed to marry before Utah obtained a temporary stay from the United States Supreme Court, blocking further marriages while the issue is considered by a federal appeals court. Gay rights advocates in Oklahoma will not enjoy a similar window of marriage opportunity. In view of the Utah ruling, Judge Kern, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, stayed his decision in anticipation of an appeal by Oklahoma to the same appeals court where the Utah case is being heard, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver. Image Sharon Baldwin, left, and Mary Bishop, two of the four plaintiffs in the Oklahoma suit, at a gay rights event last October. Credit Eric Turner/Associated Press With so many marriages in limbo, the Utah appeal is on an expedited schedule, with written arguments due by late February. It is unclear whether an appeal by Oklahoma would proceed in tandem or on a slower schedule. Over the past year, the number of states authorizing same-sex marriage, whether through legislation or court order, has grown to 17, or 18 if Utah is included. But Tuesday’s decision was only the third time that a federal court has acted to void a state constitutional amendment on marriage, following the Utah decision in December and a 2010 ruling in California that eventually overturned Proposition 8. In New Mexico in December and New Jersey in October, state supreme courts ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, calling discrimination illegal under state constitutions. These followed similar state-level judicial decisions in Connecticut, Iowa and Massachusetts. In 11 other states, most recently Hawaii and Illinois, same-sex marriage was approved by legislatures or by popular vote. More than 30 states have passed amendments or laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman. Buoyed by a Supreme Court decision in June that declared parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, advocates have filed dozens of lawsuits to challenge the bans. The Oklahoma amendment under question, stating that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman,” was adopted by referendum in 2004 with 75 percent of the vote. The challenge to the amendment was filed soon after by two lesbian couples. Ms. Baldwin and Ms. Bishop sought the right to marry, while Gay Phillips and Susan Barton, who were legally married in California, sought recognition of their status by the state, which is under the strong control of Republican conservatives. Judge Kern found that his court did not have jurisdiction over the second question, whether Oklahoma must honor a same-sex marriage performed in another state. But with his decision against the state’s own ban on such marriages, “Judge Kern has come to the conclusion that so many have before him — that the fundamental equality of lesbian and gay couples is guaranteed by the United States Constitution,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, in a statement Tuesday.

Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage
Oklahoma
Decisions and Verdicts
Terence C Kern


Will Gowanus Lounge Blog Survive Its Creator?

Abstract: ROBERT GUSKIND was serious to the point of obsession about his blog, Gowanus Lounge , founded in 2006. So Sam Coker, an information technology specialist from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who over the years helped Mr. Guskind maintain the site, knew something was wrong. Around 10:30 p.m. on Monday, March 2, Mr. Guskind e-mailed Mr. Coker in frustration to complain that Gowanus Lounge was running slowly, a recurrent problem. Over the next hour, the two men exchanged e-mail messages as Mr. Coker shut down the site and worked to stabilize it. The following day, when he had not received a reply to his last message, he confided his concern to his wife, Heather Letzkus. “I told Heather, ‘There’s something wrong,’ ” he said. “ ‘He’s always available.’ ” Ms. Letzkus, a blogger and a friend of Mr. Guskind’s, tried to telephone him, but his voice mailbox was full. Mr. Guskind’s body was later discovered by his wife, Olivia Kissin, in their Park Slope row house. The medical examiner’s office has not yet determined the cause of death. Even while mourning the loss of her friend, Ms. Letzkus found herself thrust into the position of literary executor. There were Mr. Guskind’s photographs on Flickr.com to be salvaged and preserved, along with his videos on YouTube. But the largest question concerned the fate of Gowanus Lounge, for years a respected resource for Brooklynites. Mr. Guskind, known for his prodigious reporting, brought both humor and outrage to his coverage of the borough. Would the blog survive its creator? And if it did, what sort of a creature would it be? These questions have been on the minds of Mr. Guskind’s readers and fellow bloggers, as newspapers and blogs have reported his death and the comments sections have become repositories for fond remembrances. Pondering the future of Gowanus Lounge, Chris Kreussling, who writes the blog Flatbush Gardener, invoked what he called the founder’s syndrome, in which an individual is so lodged in the public imagination as an institution’s leader — George Plimpton and The Paris Review come to mind — that many people wonder if the vision can endure without its creator. This affliction need not apply to Gowanus Lounge, Mr. Kreussling said, owing to the blog’s popularity and the sense of community Mr. Guskind had cultivated around it. “I think there are a lot of people who share that vision and could keep it going,” he said. Others disagreed. “By adding new posts,” said Katia Kelly, a blogger from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, “you’re basically pushing Bob’s work down. I want Bob’s work to be there when I click on Gowanus Lounge instead of somebody else pushing his work into oblivion.” What will happen next is uncertain. Any decision about the blog’s long-term future, Ms. Letzkus said, ultimately lies with Mr. Guskind’s wife, who declined to be interviewed. Mr. Guskind’s final post was a picture of an abandoned maroon couch on the sidewalk, part of his “Street Couch Series.” The caption, with its uncharacteristic misspellings, nevertheless seemed to encapsulate Mr. Guskind’s all-encompassing love for his borough. “Before the snow there was his mangificent pleather spsecimen on the streets of north Brooklyn,” it read. “It brought us great joy.”

Blogs and Blogging (Internet)
Computers and the Internet
Greenpoint (NYC)
Guskind Robert


Bill O’Reilly and Fox News: They’re in It Together

Abstract: Hours after the news broke that Brian Williams had misrepresented his account of a helicopter trip in Iraq, he issued an on-air apology. NBC News started an investigation, and within days had suspended Mr. Williams, calling his actions “wrong and completely inappropriate.” When the magazine Mother Jones reported that Bill O’Reilly had engaged in self-aggrandizing rhetoric about his coverage of the Falklands war, he called one of the authors of the article “an irresponsible guttersnipe” and used his nightly show to fight back against his accusers. His bosses at Fox News, including the chief executive, Roger Ailes, rallied to his defense. Fox’s handling of the controversy says a lot about the network. It also says a lot about its most visible star, a man who perhaps more than any other has defined the parameters and tenor of Fox News, in the process ushering in a new era of no-holds-barred, intentionally divisive news coverage. Since dethroning CNN’s Larry King as the king of cable news almost 14 years ago, Mr. O’Reilly has helped transform a start-up news channel into a financial juggernaut, with estimated annual profits of more than $1 billion. He and Fox News have risen not on the back of big interviews or high-impact investigations but on the pugnacious brand of conservatism personified by Mr. O’Reilly. “Bill’s credibility with his audience is not based on his record as a traditional journalist,” said Jonathan Klein, a former president of CNN/U.S. “His credibility, in the view of his fans, is based on his trenchant analysis of the events of the day, his pulling no punches, his willingness to call it like it is.” There are other differences between the two controversies. The incident at the center of Mr. O’Reilly’s occurred more than 30 years ago; Mr. Williams’s happened in 2003. And his accusers are journalists, not military veterans as they were in Mr. Williams’s case. But the most meaningful point of distinction — and the reason Mr. O’Reilly’s job is almost certainly safe — is that he is not an anchorman, with all of the cultural weight that title carries. He’s a professional provocateur. The accusations against Mr. O’Reilly, which have since been substantiated by other journalists in Argentina at the time, have played neatly into the network’s narrative of being the conservative outlier in an industry dominated by liberals. “Fox News has a market; the market is people who don’t trust the news media,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. “That strategy requires personalities like Bill O’Reilly to be under attack from the rest of the news media. When something like this flares up, it gets incorporated into a programming strategy.” David Corn, one of the authors of the Mother Jones article and a former Fox News contributor, said he received the tip about Mr. O’Reilly the day after NBC News announced its suspension of Mr. Williams for six months without pay. According to Mr. Corn’s source, Mr. O’Reilly had repeatedly made false claims about his experience covering the Falklands war as a young CBS News correspondent. Mr. Corn and Daniel Schulman, the other reporter on the article, soon discovered what Mr. Corn describes as a pattern of misrepresentation in Mr. O’Reilly’s statements about his experiences in the Falklands. Last Thursday, the two Mother Jones reporters emailed a Fox News spokeswoman a list of questions. The first one read: “In numerous instances — on his television and radio shows and in his book, ‘The No Spin Zone’ — Bill O’Reilly has said that he was in a ‘war zone’ during the Falklands war when he was a correspondent at CBS News. But it appears no American correspondents were allowed in the Falkland Islands war zone during the conflict. How does Mr. O’Reilly explain his comments?” Fox did not respond. Mr. O’Reilly has since said that he never claimed he had reported from the Falkland Islands, where the fighting occurred. “I said I covered the Falklands war, which I did,” he said last Friday. He went on to describe his coverage of protests in the aftermath of the war on the streets of Buenos Aires, more than 1,000 miles from the Falklands. In the days after the Mother Jones article was published, Mr. O’Reilly mounted an aggressive campaign against the article and its authors on Fox, and aired a video clip and an interview with a former NBC journalist that he said supported his version of events. He also threatened a New York Times reporter that he would come after her “with everything I have” if he deemed her reporting unfair. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said. “This is as serious as it gets.” This is not the first time that Mr. O’Reilly or a member of his staff tried to intimidate a journalist. On Tuesday, the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel wrote about being verbally accosted by one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers after she criticized Mr. O’Reilly for implying that a young woman who had been raped was partly to blame. In an interview on Monday about his Falklands reporting, Mr. O’Reilly defended his accounts. “Every single thing I said is true,” he said. Fox News did not make Mr. O’Reilly or Mr. Ailes available for this article. Other reports have since emerged questioning some of Mr. O’Reilly’s other assertions. Most notably, Media Matters has challenged Mr. O’Reilly’s claims that he was outside the Palm Beach, Fla., home of an acquaintance of Lee Harvey Oswald when he killed himself with a shotgun in 1977. Mr. O’Reilly has been ensnared in controversy before. In 2004, he was sued by a former “O’Reilly Factor” producer for sexual harassment. The suit was settled about two weeks after it was filed. He has long fashioned himself as a kind of embattled underdog, a product of working-class Long Island who felt out of place at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government — where he earned a graduate degree — and at Washington dinner parties. For years he was a low-profile TV news journeyman doing stints in Denver, Dallas, Hartford and Scranton, Pa., before joining CBS News in New York. Mr. O’Reilly invariably chafed against the constraints of traditional TV news and often quarreled with management. In 1986, Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, hired Mr. O’Reilly after hearing him deliver a eulogy at the funeral of a mutual friend. Five years later, with his career at ABC News seemingly stalled, Mr. O’Reilly left the network to join “Inside Edition” as a correspondent and anchor. He brought an edge and point of view to the syndicated tabloid show. Then, in 1996, Mr. Ailes, impressed by the Mr. O’Reilly’s brash assertiveness, gave him his own show on his new, 24-hour cable news network, Fox News Channel. “And, by the way, everyone advised me not to,” Mr. Ailes later reflected. “Because he had been in the business 25 years, and he was never a star.” That changed quickly at Fox. Liberated from the shackles of network propriety and given a Democratic president embroiled in scandal, Mr. O’Reilly channeled his combative, partisan nature into a hit show. Soon he had moved from 6 p.m. to prime time, and was toppling a variety of better-known hosts on competing networks, including Mr. King. “Larry King loved everybody and Bill O’Reilly doesn’t love anybody,” said the journalist Michael Kinsley, a former co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” “The truth is I sort of prefer the second. It makes for better television.” (Mr. O’Reilly once said Mr. Kinsley would not understand an argument he was making about detainees’ rights on Guantánamo Bay until terrorists “cut off his head.”) “The O’Reilly Factor” is a big moneymaker for Fox, bringing in more than $100 million in advertising revenue in 2014, according to the marketing research company Kantar Media. The show drew an average of nearly three million viewers a night over the last month. And its popularity among conservatives has made Mr. O’Reilly an influential force in Republican politics. Last month, he met privately with the former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush. (Mr. O’Reilly’s guest list is by no means limited to members of the right. President Obama sat down for two pre-Super Bowl interviews with him.) Mr. O’Reilly is also one of the country’s best-selling authors. His memoir, “A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity,” has sold more than a million copies, according to his Amazon profile. His “Killing” franchise — a series of narrative nonfiction books about the assassinations of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, with 12 million copies in print worldwide — is also enormously popular, despite drawing criticism for factual inaccuracies. His first book, in 1998, was a crime novel, “Those Who Trespass,” a violent and sexually explicit revenge fantasy about an unhinged broadcast journalist who covered the Falklands war. After experiencing a career setback while covering the conflict, the journalist murders the network executives and correspondents who have slighted him. Mr. O’Reilly knows perfectly well what his audience wants: a justice-seeking vigilante, whether he’s the protagonist of a fictional thriller or sitting behind a news desk. His popularity may not be built on his credibility as a news anchor, but Mr. O’Reilly’s audience is loyal, and the current flap seems unlikely to damage his reputation among his fans. It could have the opposite effect. “The viewers of Fox are more apt to dismiss this as an unfair attack on their beloved anchor,” said Mark Feldstein, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland. On Monday night, when Mr. O’Reilly addressed the controversy on the air, his audience was more than 10 percent larger than the previous week.

Bill O'Reilly
Fox News Channel
Falkland Islands
Brian Williams
NBC News
TV
News media,journalism
The O'Reilly Factor


Militants Attack Somalia’s Parliament

Abstract: MOGADISHU, Somalia — Militants attacked Somalia’s Parliament building on Saturday, with a bomber detonating a car filled with explosives at the building’s entrance followed by several other explosions and an assault by gunmen, witnesses and Somali officials said. At least 15 people, mostly assailants, were killed, and more than a dozen guards were wounded, an official said. The assailants were repelled by members of the Somali security forces and the African Union’s peacekeeping mission in Somalia, known as Amisom. Witnesses said that after the car bomber struck the African Union and Somali troops who were guarding an entrance to the Parliament building, a gun battle erupted as militants stormed the building, where a session of Parliament was underway. Several members of Parliament reached by phone said they were safe, but two lawmakers were reportedly wounded outside the building, according to colleagues who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the news media. Col. Ali Houmed, a spokesman for the African Union mission, said that two African Union soldiers and 13 assailants were killed in the initial attack or the subsequent fighting and that 10 members of the Somali security forces and four peacekeepers were wounded. Both Somali and African Union forces “resisted the attackers courageously,” Colonel Houmed said. He added that some of the militants were wearing government uniforms, increasing the challenges faced by the guards. The gun battle began around 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, and explosions and gunfire continued to be heard well into the afternoon. The Shabab, an Islamist militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack. The group was driven out of Mogadishu, the capital, in 2011, but it still controls parts of southern Somalia. Image Police officers carried the body of a peer after Saturday’s attack. The Shabab, an Islamist militant group, claimed responsibility. Credit Mohamed Abdiwahab/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Its fighters have carried out similar attacks in Mogadishu, including assaults on the presidential palace, the city’s court complex and the United Nations compound, and its fighters killed 67 people at a Kenyan shopping mall last year. Last month, the Shabab killed two lawmakers in separate attacks in Mogadishu. The minister for national security, Abdikarim Hussein Guled, resigned Saturday night, according to an announcement carried live on the state-run radio station in Mogadishu. The announcement cited security lapses in the capital in connection with the recent series of militant attacks. On Saturday, the bodies of the dead and wounded, surrounded by pools of blood, could be seen near an entrance gate to the Parliament building. The roads around the building were closed, and ambulance sirens could be heard across the city. The deputy minister for national security, Ibrahim Isak Yarow, said in televised remarks that the attack had been foiled and that all members of Parliament in the building had been safely evacuated. Late Saturday, the bodies of Shabab fighters who were killed in the attack were displayed during a visit to the scene by Prime Minister Abdiweli Sheikh Ahmed. Earlier on Saturday, Mr. Ahmed condemned what he called a “cowardly” attack on the Somali Parliament by terrorists, and he praised the Somali security forces and the African Union peacekeepers for their swift response. “The security forces are working hard to contain the situation,” Mr. Ahmed said. “All members of Parliament have all been accounted for, and the facts surrounding the incident are currently under investigation.” Nicholas Kay, the special representative of the United Nations secretary general for Somalia, also condemned the attack. “I am appalled and condemn the attack on Somalia’s Federal Parliament,” Mr. Kay said. “The Federal Parliament represents the people of Somalia and their hopes and aspirations for a peaceful and stable future. Today’s attack is an attack against the people of Somalia for which there can be no justification.” The United States said it would “continue to stand firmly with the Federal Government of Somalia and the many international partners working to support its efforts” to root out the threat posed by the Shabab “and to build a more secure and prosperous future for the Somali people,” said Marie Harf, the State Department’s deputy spokeswoman, in a statement on Saturday. “Cowardly acts such as these will not shake our resolve.”

Legislature
Mogadishu
Bombs
Fatalities,casualties
African Union
Somalia


Crystal Cathedral Files for Bankruptcy

Abstract: Crystal Cathedral, the landmark megachurch in Orange County, Calif., where the “Hour of Power” is taped, filed for bankruptcy protection, church officials announced Monday. “Budgets could not be cut fast enough to keep up with the unprecedented rapid decline in revenue due to the recession,” Sheila Schuller Coleman, the church’s senior pastor, said in a statement. In a news conference on Monday, church officials said ministry outreach and programs, including the weekly broadcast, would continue. But the church, which is $55 million in debt, has reduced the number of stations that it pays to broadcast the program. “Challenging situations are nothing new to our 55-year ministry,” said the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, who founded the church in a drive-in theater and was instrumental in starting the worship broadcast in 1970. A decade later, the church moved to a cavernous glass building that seats almost 3,000 on a 40-acre campus in Garden Grove. Since 2006, church leadership has changed hands three times. Dr. Schuller retired, passing control to his son. Robert A. Schuller left in 2008, leaving his sister in charge. Crystal Cathedral’s leadership announced the sale of unused property and the layoffs of 50 employees in January to cushion a 27 percent drop in revenue since 2008. The church also canceled this year’s “Glory of Easter” pageant, a holiday staple here. In April, the church’s vendors agreed to a 90-day “voluntary moratorium” on payments, the church statement said. The deal expired in July. “As is often the case, negotiations and decisions do not move fast enough to satisfy all parties,” the church said. “A small number of creditors chose to file lawsuits and obtained writs of attachment.”

Crystal Cathedral
Bankruptcies
Churches
Orange County (Calif)


Oscar G. Mayer, of Meat Company’s 3rd Generation, Dies at 95

Abstract: MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Oscar G. Mayer, retired chairman of the Wisconsin-based meat processing company that bears his name, died Monday in Fitchburg, Wis. He was 95. Mr. Mayer’s wife, Geraldine, said he died of old age at HospiceCare in Fitchburg. He was the third Oscar Mayer in the family that founded Oscar Mayer Foods, which was once the largest private employer in Madison. His grandfather, Oscar F. Mayer, died in 1955 and his father, Oscar G. Mayer Sr., died in 1965. Mr. Mayer retired as chairman of the board in 1977 at the age of 62, soon after the company recorded its first $1 billion year. The company was later sold to General Foods, and is now a division of Kraft, which was spun off from Altria Group in 2007. Mr. Mayer’s first wife, Rosalie, died in 1998. He married Geraldine Fitzpatrick in 1999.

Oscar Mayer Foods Corp
Kraft Foods Incorporated
Deaths (Obituaries)


Two Producers of ‘Boyhood’ May Be Denied Chance at Awards

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — Some prospective awards-night glory may elude two producers of one of the year’s most distinctive films — “Boyhood,” by the director Richard Linklater — because of stringent rules governing the assignment of credits by the Producers Guild of America, a person briefed on the situation said on Friday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity The two producers who may be affected are John Sloss, a prominent indie film producer and lawyer, and Jonathan Sehring, the president of IFC Films, which financed and is distributing “Boyhood.” While Mr. Sloss and Mr. Sehring are among four credited producers on the movie, they were barred from consideration for a Producers Guild award. The Wrap, an entertainment and media news site, first reported the step on Thursday. The two producers eligible for the Producers Guild award are Mr. Linklater and Cathleen Sutherland. The guild has long fought to make the term producer a designation for a specific filmmaking craft, rather than a catchall for those who helped a movie toward production. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences generally, but not always, lines up with the guild guidelines in assigning producer credits for Oscar purposes. “Boyhood” is unusual in that Mr. Linklater, its writer and director, began shooting the film in 2002. The movie, which follows the growth of a boy played by Ellar Coltrane, received financial and other support from Mr. Sloss and Mr. Sehring. In a statement, Mr. Sloss and Mr. Sehring said: “Boyhood’ was made in a unique and unconventional way and our job was to ensure that Rick had the creative freedom” to make his atypical film. “We’re thrilled that audiences have embraced this labor of love,” they added. Tightened rules governing the assignment of producers credits for awards purposes followed a controversy in 1999, when Harvey Weinstein, whose Miramax Films was a backer of “Shakespeare in Love,” was one of five credited producers who accepted its best picture Oscar. The new rules made it more difficult for a financier to claim awards credit, and gave considerable weight to those who were present on a film set. A representative of the producers guild confirmed the guild's decision concerning "Boyhood" but declined further comment. The producers guild will present its annual awards on Jan. 24, 2015. The Oscar ceremony follows on Feb. 22.

Movies
Producers Guild of America
John Sloss
Jonathan Sehring
Richard Linklater
Boyhood
Shakespeare in Love


Exonerated Man Reaches $10 Million Deal With New York City

Abstract: After three years of litigation, Jabbar Collins, a man who spent 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, has reached a $10 million settlement with New York City. Mr. Collins had been convicted of the 1994 killing of an Orthodox rabbi. He was released from prison in 2010, when a federal judge vacated his conviction and criticized the district attorney’s office for its handling of Mr. Collins’s trial. The case is notable because it exposed questionable policies under the former Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes. Along the way, Mr. Collins’s lawyer, Joel B. Rudin, deposed Mr. Hynes and his top assistants, providing a rare look at how a powerful district attorney ran his office. Mr. Rudin accused the office of detaining reluctant witnesses in hotel rooms until they agreed to testify, and of advising its lawyers not to take notes when prosecution witnesses gave inconsistent statements to avoid potentially exculpatory evidence. The city’s lawyers have challenged these claims. The settlement is also notable for its size: Mr. Collins will receive a little more than $600,000 per year served, about a third less than the five men exonerated in the Central Park jogger case, who settled with the city this summer for about $1 million for each year in prison. The lawsuit was scheduled to go to trial in October. Mr. Collins, 42, began fighting his conviction while at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum security state prison, tracking down witnesses who had testified against him and filing Freedom of Information Law requests. He was convicted of fatally shooting the rabbi, Abraham Pollack, as Mr. Pollack was collecting rent in an apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At trial, three witnesses said that Mr. Collins had talked about killing the rabbi or placed him at the scene of the crime. But as Mr. Collins researched the case from prison and contacted the witnesses, he uncovered problems with their stories. One said he had been offered a perk by the district attorney’s office in return for testimony, and two others said they had been threatened by lawyers for the office. Mr. Collins also found that a prosecutor did not turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense. Mr. Collins tried and failed to obtain a new state trial based on the evidence he had found. He sought a resolution in federal court, and enlisted the help of Mr. Rudin. In 2010, as a judge heard arguments about potential prosecutorial misconduct in his trial, the district attorney’s office agreed to vacate the murder conviction and to not retry Mr. Collins. The wrongful-conviction settlement is one of several the city has reached this year, including a $6.4 million settlement for David Ranta, a man who spent 23 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. The city is facing several more such lawsuits as erroneous convictions from the crime-ridden 1980s and 1990s continue to be vacated. Kate O’Brien Ahlers, a spokeswoman for the city’s Law Department, said that “after evaluating the claims and Mr. Collins’s specific case circumstances, we believe this settlement is fair and is in New York City’s best interests.” “The district attorney’s office previously conceded that exculpatory evidence was withheld from Mr. Collins when he went to trial back in 1995,” she said, adding that the conviction and sentencing “resulted from violations of his constitutional rights.” In July, Mr. Collins settled with the state under the Unjust Conviction Act for $3 million. “We view this as a $13 million settlement,” Mr. Rudin said, adding that the city calculated the state’s settlement in its negotiations. “Thirteen million is a lot of money, although nothing can restore the loss of the best years of his life.” Mr. Collins said in a statement that his goals were to “expose the illegal practices of District Attorney Hynes and to help drive him from office,” to “obtain personal vindication and to demonstrate my innocence,” and to receive compensation to balance the years in prison and the harm done to him and his family. Mr. Rudin said, “The revelations in Jabbar Collins’s groundbreaking lawsuit of pervasive misconduct in Brooklyn led to more cases being overturned.”

Jabbar Collins
False arrest
NYC
Charles Hynes


‘Money Drop’ Losers, Right After All, Unsure About Playing Again

Abstract: Which product was sold in stores first: Post-it Notes or the Sony Walkman? Gabe Okoye was sure he knew the answer. Mr. Okoye, 25, and his girlfriend, Brittany Mayti, 23, were the contestants on the very first episode of “Million Dollar Money Drop,” a Fox game show that had its premiere on Monday. Mr. Okoye was confident about the Post-it Notes — so confident that he persuaded Ms. Mayti to go along. Together, they wagered $800,000 of the $880,000 they had banked, out of the $1 million the show’s producers had challenged them to keep at the beginning of the program. They were wrong, Fox said. True to the show’s title, wads of hundred-dollar bills dropped off the table with a loud whoosh. The studio audience gasped, and Mr. Okoye hung his head in his hands, bent over as if he had been punched in the stomach. “It’s O.K., baby,” Ms. Mayti told him, “we still have more money.” Minutes later, they lost the remaining $80,000 and went home not only empty-handed, but “devastated,” she said, about the loss of so much money. Mr. Okoye thought to himself, “I have to make it up to her one million dollars’ worth.” But he was right about the Post-it Notes. In an embarrassing about-face, the show’s producers acknowledged on Thursday that they had “incomplete information” about the history of Post-it Notes, and they invited Mr. Okoye and Ms. Mayti back to try again. They did not, however, return the $800,000. The couple said they harbored no grudge toward Fox, and had not decided whether to accept the invitation. “To go through that again — maybe to lose again — that’s a lot of stress,” Mr. Okoye said by telephone Thursday night. Up until the Post-it Notes question, the couple had been on a roll. Only two questions still loomed. “There’s no way to recreate the type of situation we had, the adrenaline we had,” Ms. Mayti said. “We’ll just never know,” he added. Capitalizing on the holiday season, Fox scheduled “Million Dollar Money Drop” for four nights in a row this week. It is scheduled to return for a few nights in January. “Money Drop,” based on a British series, is the inverse of most game shows, in that it gives players a million dollars at the beginning and challenges them to hold onto it by answering seven questions in a row correctly. It’s an intoxicating concept. “Sometimes people can conceive the fact of having that much money,” Mr. Okoye said, “but once it’s right in front of you — you can touch it, you can smell it — it becomes much more real.” In the history of game show blunders, Monday’s mistake ranks right up there with the episode of ABC’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” in 1999 that wrongly asserted that Lake Michigan was larger than Lake Huron. When the producers of “Millionaire” learned that the contestant’s answer was correct, they invited him back on the show. As in the “Millionaire” case, the producers of “Million Dollar Money Drop” “decided to confront it head on — which of course brings them a lot of positive publicity,” said Tim Brooks, a television historian, in an e-mail message. Mr. Brooks’s assessment: “Brilliant!” But the publicity was almost entirely negative earlier in the week when viewers started to litigate Post-it Notes vs. Walkman online — and when Fox initially defended the wrong answer. There was a spike in Google search traffic for the term “Post-it Note” immediately after the telecast on Monday night, and by Tuesday morning, message board threads had popped up about the topic and viewers had prodded television reporters to investigate. Web searches confirmed that the Walkman had reached store shelves in 1979, but there was uncertainty about the introduction of Post-it Notes. The notes were invented by 1977, but were not sold nationally until 1980. Mr. Okoye did some searching, too, but “I didn’t trust Wikipedia,” he said. “I was just like, ‘Little old me can’t be right over a big company like Fox.’ It’s that type of doubt,” he said. On Wednesday, as online attention peaked, Jeff Apploff, the game show’s executive producer, stood by the Walkman answer. In a statement, he said the show’s researchers had spoken “directly” with 3M, the maker of Post-it Notes, “and they confirmed that although they had given out free samples in test markets in 1977 and 1978, it wasn’t until 1980 that Post-its were sold in stores.” On Thursday, he said the information from 3M was “incomplete.” In a new statement, Mr. Apploff said the show had learned that “the product was originally tested for sale in four cities under the name ‘Press ’N Peel’ in 1977, sold as ‘Post-its’ in 1979 when the rollout introduction began and sold nationwide in 1980.” He thanked viewers “who brought this to our attention.” Mr. Apploff noted in the Thursday statement that the Post-it Notes question “was not the deciding question in their game.” That is why Fox is not paying the couple. “Million Dollar Money Drop” has not yet been renewed for a second season, raising the question of how the couple would actually return to the show. “Regardless of a Season 2, we’ll set something up for them to play again,” a Fox spokeswoman said. In the meantime, the couple, who said on the show that they had been dating for about a year and that they wanted to save money for a wedding, have been left to ponder what might have been. Since the taping in September, awkward conversations about the show have “sparked up like, here and there,” Mr. Okoye said. She laughed as he mimicked her side of the conversation: “Well, if it wasn’t for you, we would have. ...” She interjected: “I didn’t say that!” “She took it better than anyone else would have taken it,” he said. Ms. Mayti replied, “It actually made our relationship stronger.” Speaking of the wrong-turned-right answer, Mr. Okoye said, “Now it has me thinking, ‘What else is wrong out there?’ ”

Television
Contests and Prizes
News Corporation
Million Dollar Money Drop (TV Program)
Okoye Gabe
Mayti Brittany


A Treasury Secretary at the Center of Obama’s Most Pressing Policies

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Jacob J. Lew, President Obama’s second-term Treasury secretary, has kept such a low profile in these relatively placid economic times, compared with his crisis-era predecessor, that it seemed he might end up best known for his pending decision to pick a woman for portraiture on the $10 bill . No more. This week Mr. Lew announced new tax regulations that helped foil the biggest tax-dodging deal to date — Pfizer’s pharmaceutical merger with Allergan, based in low-tax Ireland — and will probably discourage more corporate “inversions” that send American corporate headquarters overseas. Last week he took to both television and a prestigious think tank to define the future of the United States’ sanctions policies , after the Treasury’s moves to unwind some sanctions on Iran, for accepting nuclear limitations, while imposing others on that country and North Korea. Mr. Lew is leading Mr. Obama’s history-making re-engagement with Cuba as well as efforts to resolve Puerto Rico’s financial crisis. And on Monday, he will deliver another administration policy manifesto — “America and the Global Economy: The Case for U.S. Leadership” — at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, and in a 5,000-word essay in Foreign Affairs magazine. Those events, culminating with this week’s surprisingly muscular tax clampdown and his own public relations efforts, have raised Mr. Lew’s profile higher than any time since he became secretary three years ago. That has brought praise from Democrats, and harsh criticism from Republicans and some business groups, which say the Treasury is overreaching its authority and damaging the economy. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist, called the tax regulations “administrative attacks that raise the cost of capital” at a time “of chronic slow growth and poor productivity.” Mr. Lew succeeded Timothy F. Geithner, another self-effacing career public servant, but one who assumed national and international prominence in overseeing the Treasury during the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Yet Mr. Lew, in an interview, bristled at the implication that until now his stewardship had been low-key. “If you look at any of the periods of the last three-plus years that I’ve been secretary, there have been issues that have been high-profile issues at every point. There is a coincidence that there are a number of things happening at the same time now,” he said. “I can’t tell you why some things get people’s attention more than others, but there hasn’t been a slow period in the time I’ve been here,” Mr. Lew added. “If anything, it’s been surprising to me how intense it is and how nonstop the inbox is.” His outbox has included two previous rounds of anti-inversion regulations to stem corporate tax avoidance, in each of the last two years. Also: showdowns with congressional Republicans over the periodic need to raise the nation’s debt limit; negotiating, unsuccessfully, with Republicans to overhaul the corporate tax code to close loopholes and lower tax rates; and enforcing economic sanctions — against countries, terrorist groups, individuals and companies — that have become a major tool of foreign policy in recent years. Mostly below the radar, Mr. Lew has kept busy managing economic diplomacy with China as well as the European Union, Argentina, Ukraine and Greece. He has put into effect banking regulations mandated by the postcrisis Dodd-Frank law, over the objections of Republicans and industry lobbyists. Last year he secured a long-sought, diplomatically dicey overhaul of the International Monetary Fund to reduce the influence of Europe and Persian Gulf states so that emerging nations like China could have prominence in the organization befitting their economic heft. Even so, the widespread image of Mr. Lew has been that of a low-profile steward for a low-profile time, at least relative to the eventful first years of the Obama administration during a global recession and with the nation’s financial, housing and auto sectors near collapse. Both of Mr. Obama’s choices to head the Treasury — Mr. Lew, known as Jack, and Mr. Geithner — had résumés long on jobs in government, not in finance, industry or elective office like many past secretaries. Both could chafe at the demands of political celebrity and a secretary’s role as the public face of economic policy for the world’s richest power. “It certainly is nothing I ever asked for,” Mr. Lew said of his job, and broke into laughter. But Mr. Obama, who favors a tight inner circle, promoted him, Mr. Lew said, “for reasons that had to do with my own personal record and his relationship with me.” “Tim and Jack are both old-school staffers at heart: They’re willing to accept credit when it’s given, but they won’t seek it out,” said Mark Patterson, who was chief of staff at the Treasury for Mr. Geithner and then briefly for Mr. Lew. Within the administration and among those who deal with the Treasury, Mr. Lew is seen as a cautious technocrat, with a grasp of issues and which levers to pull that reflects his experience over decades — as top adviser in the Reagan era to the House speaker, Thomas P. O’Neill; budget director to both President Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama; deputy to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff. That grasp of policy facts and Mr. Lew’s intensity of argument have at times annoyed members of Congress in both parties. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, is not one of them — although, he said, “We’ve had some spirited discussions about the budget sometimes.” “It’s easy to see how the president feels very comfortable with Secretary Lew,” Mr. Wyden said. “He’s very knowledgeable on the substance, but he’s been around politics enough so that he gets the intersection of politics and policy.” The secretary and the senator, who have known each other since Mr. Wyden served in the House and Mr. Lew advised Speaker O’Neill, talk weekly about pending matters. So Mr. Wyden was among the few in Washington or corporate America who were not surprised by the regulations introduced this week against “serial inverters” like Allergan and foreign parent companies’ “earnings stripping” their new American subsidiaries to reduce their American taxes. “I like the approach,” Mr. Wyden said. Tony Fratto, who was an adviser to all three Treasury secretaries of President George W. Bush, does not. He called the new regulations “a horrible precedent” stretching the Treasury’s authority “to the breaking point.” But he had praise generally for Mr. Lew’s tenure as Treasury secretary. “It’s one of the two or three biggest jobs in the cabinet — you are going to be in the limelight. He is not a guy who seeks the limelight,” Mr. Fratto said. What Mr. Lew does well, he added, is the quiet, behind-the-scenes work of reaching out to hear from all sides on issues: “Having worked for three Treasury secretaries, and knowing Geithner a little, I think Jack is probably the best of them.”

Jacob J Lew
Treasury Department
Budget
US Economy
Corporate tax
US Foreign Policy
Cuba


Japan’s Home Run King Arrested

Abstract: Wladimir Balentien, who broke Japan’s single-season home run record last year, has been arrested in Florida on domestic violence charges, the police said. Court records indicate that Balentien is facing a felony false imprisonment charge and a misdemeanor battery charge after a weekend confrontation at his wife’s Miami-area home. Balentien is an outfielder with the Tokyo Yakult Swallows and hit 60 homers last year, breaking Sadaharu Oh’s longstanding record of 55. Balentien previously played for the Cincinnati Reds and the Seattle Mariners.

Baseball
Domestic violence
Yakult Swallows
Wladimir Balentien


HSBC Adds Two Independent Directors to Board

Abstract: LONDON — The British bank HSBC said on Tuesday that it was adding two independent directors to its board. Irene Yun Lien Lee, the executive chairwoman of the Hong Kong property investment company Hysan Development Company, will join the lender’s board of directors on July 1, while Pauline van der Meer Mohr, the president of the executive board of Erasmus University Rotterdam, will join HSBC on Sept. 1. “I am delighted to welcome both Irene and Pauline to the HSBC Holdings Board,” Douglas Flint, the HSBC chairman, said in a news release . Ms. Lee, 61, has worked more than 30 years in finance, including stints at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Citigroup. She currently serves as a director on the boards of two of HSBC’s subsidiaries. Ms. van der Meer Mohr, 55, began her career in the legal profession and has previously worked as an executive at Royal Dutch Shell Group and ABN Amro Bank. The appointments are for three-year terms.

Banking and Finance
Board of directors
Douglas Flint
Hysan Development
ABN AMRO Holding
Citigroup
Royal Dutch Shell
London
Hong Kong


In Gaza, Airstrikes and Economic Stress Make for an Anxious Ramadan

Abstract: GAZA CITY — War during Ramadan has a particular tension. It is not just the normal anxiety of airstrikes in a crowded city , no matter how carefully Israel tries to target them. But the holy month of Ramadan falls this year in a particularly hot and humid Gaza July, and observant Muslims are fasting, not even drinking water, until sunset and iftar, the evening meal. In the market of the Jabaliya refugee camp, normally bustling on a Ramadan Friday, most of the shops are shuttered. The conflict aside, the new military-dominated government of Egypt has largely shut the tunnel system that fed the economy (and the rocket-import business, too). In its struggle with the Palestinian Authority, dominated by Fatah, Hamas is running low on cash, so many workers have not been paid, or have been only partly paid, for months now. Add to that a banking problem that has shut most of the A.T.M.s, and there is little money to spend in one of the most important months of the Islamic year. Then there is the conflict, which may quickly escalate if Israel decides on a large ground operation in Gaza to better destroy the ability of Hamas and other groups, like Islamic Jihad, to launch ever-more sophisticated rockets deeper into Israel. “Ramadan usually brings every good thing,” said Muhammad Ahmad, whose fruit stall was doing little business. So far on Friday afternoon, he’d taken in only 50 shekels, when normally during Ramadan, he said, he would take in 1,000 shekels a day. “This war in Gaza has caused a kind of fear and stress and tension,” he said. “People are afraid to go out of their homes.” Video Gazans and Israelis braced for further conflict as Hamas fired more rockets into Israel and Israel continued its aerial assaults on Gaza. Credit Credit Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The reluctance to spend time in public places is shared now in Israel, too, as the rockets rain down. But Israel is a larger, much more modern polity, which has equipped itself with shelters, air-raid sirens and a missile-defense system. Gazans are quick to note the disparity in the death tolls from this war, in which more than 100 Palestinians have died, more than half of them civilians, according to the United Nations Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs . One Israeli has died thus far, a woman in Haifa who had a heart attack running to a shelter; an Israeli soldier was in serious condition with shrapnel wounds. At Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, photographers and camera crews waited at the entrance for any ambulance that might roll up with a wounded person. Inside, there were a few men on stretchers, bloody and dotted with shrapnel wounds, and one girl, age 7, who had been severely wounded in an attack on a house in Al-Bureij, in central Gaza. She was brought here as a particularly difficult case, and Dr. Ayman al-Sahbani, the head of the emergency medicine, said she was likely to die. Dr. Sahbani was upset but professional. He and most of his 10 doctors and 10 nurses had been at the hospital for four days without going home, he said. Al-Shifa has treated about half of the more than 600 Palestinians wounded so far, he said, with some pride. It could cope, he said, “if the fighting does not escalate.” “We have drugs and consumables for three weeks in normal times,” he said. “Now, we’re reduced, but if it gets worse, with a ground invasion, it could be all gone in a day.” Not that he couldn’t use more doctors and specialist surgeons, he said. What bothers him is the number of children he has had to treat, he said. “So we hope it will stop. I know this is political, but we doctors think only of humanity, and we see kids crying and wounded or dying, and it has a big psychological impact.” Like most Gazans, Dr. Sahbani would not fault Hamas but rather “the siege and the occupation.” As a Palestinian Authority employee, he lost his salary when he continued to work in Al-Shifa under the Hamas government, which did pay him, though less. “I’m a doctor and this is an emergency room,” he said. “How could I not work?” But for the last three months, even he has not been paid. He has not had permission to leave Gaza for three years, he said. “It’s been more than eight years of siege,” he said, noting shortages “of gasoline, of electricity, of medical supplies and building materials,” let alone the nearly sealed borders. “Now we’re being bombed, and where can we go?” he asked. “There’s nowhere to go.” It is a plaint heard regularly here, with particular pathos during hostilities. Gazans see themselves as living in a poor territory that nobody cares about, a kind of “prison,” as they like to say, trapped between Israel, an ambivalent or unfriendly Egypt and the closely patrolled sea. Not even fellow Palestinians in the West Bank really care for them, they say. Of course, they are also prisoners of their situation, both defended and endangered by Hamas and other, more radical Islamic groups, which are devoted to resistance against Israel and thoroughly embedded among the noncombatants of an overcrowded population with no ability to leave. There is understated criticism of the conflict, though mostly directed at Israel. Nawaf al-Najar, 57, shopping with his wife, Nawal, for groceries for their large family, used to be a construction worker in Israel but is now unemployed. He lives off intermittent charity and United Nations food parcels for refugees, and has trouble finding the money for Nawal’s diabetes medicine. After blaming Israel for the war and its “imperial policies,” Mr. Najar turned philosophical, and even slightly subversive. “War never achieves political goals, but just destroys the people,” he said. “War is the language of the ignorant, and it is fought by the ignorant.” But it is not far away. Nearby, on what is known as Intelligence Street, because of the Palestinian Authority intelligence headquarters that once functioned there, young men kicked at broken glass and stared at the remainder of a house struck by an Israeli bombing early Friday. The attack was apparently aimed at the resident of an apartment there, who was killed; the building, which also housed a small grocery store and bakery, was collapsing. Piles of soot-covered plastic bottles of soda were in the rubble, along with blasted packages of Huggies diapers. One man walked by and said simply: “This was the bakery I used.”

Gaza Strip
Ramadan
Palestinians
Hamas
Israel
Military
Egypt


U.N. Chief Says Myanmar Yields on Aid Workers

Abstract: BANGKOK — Myanmar ’s military junta promised on Friday to allow into the country “all aid workers” of any nationality, after three weeks of blocking most assistance to cyclone victims, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon , announced. Mr. Ban’s statement was met with surprise and wariness by relief officials here and American officials in Washington, not least because the pledge was delivered on the eve of an international donors’ conference in Myanmar this weekend. While the junta has largely ignored international criticism of its response to the May 3 storm, which left some 134,000 people dead or missing, it is asking for $11.7 billion in reconstruction money. That is nearly Myanmar’s annual gross domestic product. Mr. Ban did not release details of his discussions with the junta or say whether it was now promising a free flow of volunteers and what aid officials say is desperately needed relief. But he told reporters traveling with him, “I had a very good meeting with the senior general, particularly on these aid workers,” referring to Senior Gen. Than Shwe. Taken off guard, relief officials said a critical issue would be how free access would be to hard-hit areas, where the United Nations said aid had reached only 25 percent of the storm’s 2.4 million victims. In recent days, Myanmar has allowed a modest flow of supplies and relief workers into the country, but the junta continues to bar foreigners from entering the badly damaged Irrawaddy Delta to assess the damage and coordinate the delivery of aid. Lionel Rosenblatt, past president of the humanitarian agency Refugees International, said, “Translating what you hear in a place like that into reality, we will have to wait and see what will happen.” In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, was also cautious. “We have a whole bunch of visa applications,” he said. “Will they grant them? Under what conditions? Are they simply going let them go to Rangoon, or will they let them do their jobs?” Rangoon is the former name for Yangon, the principal city of Myanmar. At the Pentagon on Friday, officials said they had received no official notification that the government of Myanmar would approve increased relief flights by American military cargo planes. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the United States military had carried out 50 such flights since the cyclone. He said the American military could vastly increase the daily flow of supplies if the government of Myanmar gave its approval for more flights or for naval vessels to assist in the effort. At the United Nations in New York, Mr. Ban’s deputy spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said the secretary general had spent two hours with the senior general, 40 minutes of which were one-on-one, with no aides present. Mr. Ban has done the same in meetings with other leaders he has sought to pressure. Asked whether the secretary general’s announcement risked putting a government with scant international credibility and a notorious human rights record in an unduly positive light, she said that the general had promised Mr. Ban increased cooperation. “Obviously there is going to be follow-up on this now, but what the secretary went there for was to seek these assurances, and from what we can see, he has received them from the man in authority,” she said. In the diplomatic campaign to provide cyclone relief, in fact, human rights and political freedoms in Myanmar have been all but ignored, despite being almost the sole focus of the United Nations and Western nations for nearly two decades. In talking with reporters, for instance, Mr. Ban did not mention Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy advocate whose freedom from house arrest has been the chief demand of the international community and whose latest period of detention expires and is up for renewal next week. If her detention is renewed, human rights workers said, the junta will be perpetuating an abuse in the presence of Mr. Ban and foreign diplomats. “With the cyclone, the whole political side of the crisis has just dropped off the map,” said Benjamin Zawacki, a researcher with the human rights group Amnesty International. Mr. Ban’s meeting with General Shwe came on the second day of a visit during which he took a helicopter tour of affected areas and met with government officials and relief workers. He then flew to Chengdu, China, on Saturday to survey the earthquake relief efforts there, The Associated Press reported. At the donors’ conference on Sunday, Mr. Ban is scheduled to meet with representatives of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, which reached an agreement with the junta this week to coordinate humanitarian assistance. Although the United Nations says more than a million people are still in urgent need of food, water, shelter and medical supplies, the junta insists that “the emergency phase of the operation is over” and that international donors should focus on reconstruction, which would include instead large amounts of machinery and materials. “This discrepancy is a confidence gap that has to be verified, that has to be reconciled,” said the Asean secretary general, Surin Pitsuwan. “Whether the Sunday pledging conference will be successful or not depends on the ability to reconcile the difference.” He added that without international access to the worst-hit areas, “The shared concern is we don’t know the extent of the damage.” The conference comes during a weekend of political significance for the junta. On Saturday, the generals will carry out a second round of voting in a referendum on a Constitution that guarantees them amnesty for past and future crimes, and legally cements the military’s half-century of dominance. This second round is being carried out in the most devastated areas, where people who may not has received relief supplies will be handed ballots and where some refugees are being evicted from shelters that are to be used as polling places. The lack of focus on these more political issues is frustrating to Burmese exiles. “If the donors don’t deliver a strong message to the military regime, the generals will get away again and the U.N. will become again another laughingstock,” said Soe Aung, a spokesman for the National Council of the Union of Burma, a coalition of opposition groups based in neighboring Thailand. The junta has insisted that politics have no place during the current crisis. In the government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, the front page was taken up almost entirely with a photograph of General Than Shwe meeting with cyclone survivors. A headline reads, “The government is taking relief, rehabilitation and preventive measures against natural disasters for storm-hit regions and victims.” Mr. Ban’s visit was reported more modestly, on an inside page, under the headline: “International humanitarian assistance should not be politicized.”

Myanmar
Cyclones
Foreign Aid
Ban Ki-moon
United Nations
Shwe Than
Freedom and Human Rights
Cyclone Nargis
International Relations


Efforts to Inspire Students Have Borne Little Fruit

Abstract: An occasional column on developments in what educators call STEM — for science, technology, engineering and math. Five years ago, President Obama began the Educate to Innovate initiative , a series of private-public partnerships with companies and nonprofits that was intended to get more students fascinated by science, technology, engineering and math — the so-called STEM fields. Last month, Mr. Obama hosted his fourth science fair at the White House — four more than any other president has held. “As a society, we have to celebrate outstanding work by young people in science at least as much as Super Bowl winners,” Mr. Obama said. The celebration of the best and brightest would inspire other students, the organizers hoped, spurring them to higher achievements. But that goal has been an elusive one. In the United States, public education is run at the state and local levels, so any presidential education initiative is inevitably indirect. Even so, the first group of Educate to Innovate programs in 2009 was a hodgepodge. The makers of “Sesame Street ” had already planned a focus on science that year and said that they would also explore how scientists deduce conclusions from observations in their next season. Discovery Communications set aside a commercial-free block of science programming on its Science Channel network . Time Warner Cable said it would air public service announcements promoting science and math. Technology companies set up a contest for students to write their own video games . Jack D. Hidary , an entrepreneur in finance and technology, announced National Lab Day, an effort to match teachers with scientists willing to volunteer help with hands-on projects. In the first year, administration officials like Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, visited schools to take part. The second year, Mr. Hidary renamed it the National Lab Network to emphasize that the projects lasted more than one day. Then it faded. Mr. Hidary said the effort has been winding down for the last year and a half. Its Twitter account has been silent for a year. Mr. Hidary nonetheless described the project as a success, a “catalytic initiative” that showed the way for other groups. By design, the National Lab website made it easy to download curriculum materials and for teachers and scientists to connect, but it did not follow up to see how well everything worked in the classroom. “We know we had direct influence on thousands and thousands of teachers,” Mr. Hidary said. Mr. Hidary said he expected real improvements would take longer, and he was right. The scores of American students on the Program of International Student Assessment , last administered in 2012, have not budged much. Mark S. Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research , a nonprofit research organization in Washington, was not a fan of Educate to Innovate in 2009, and still is not. “From my perspective, this has not gotten a lot of attention,” he said. Plus, Dr. Schneider said, the STEM jobs challenge is not that the United States lacks academics with science doctorates, but rather that the country needs more people with two-year technical degrees to fill mid-skill positions, like for X-ray technicians. “It doesn’t seem we have addressed that in any serious way,” he said. A successor to the National Lab Network is a new organization started last year, US2020 , which is aiming to recruit one million volunteer mentors willing to commit to at least 20 hours a year working in the schools. “We’re looking for sustained efforts,” said Eric Schwarz, executive chairman of the group. He predicted that school days eventually would get longer, and that outsiders might be teaching during many of those hours. If the White House initiatives have not brought a sea change in science education, they have served to provide focus to those around the country who want to help, Mr. Schwarz said. A group like US2020 might have come along anyway, but it would not have happened so quickly without the White House beating the drum. “I think the White House has been incredibly helpful by naming this as a priority,” he said. “They’ve helped to get us thinking differently.”

Barack Obama
Science and Technology
Mathematics
K-12 Education
Jack D Hidary


For Obama, a First Step Is Not a Misstep

Abstract: BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government on Monday left little doubt that it favors a withdrawal plan for American combat troops similar to what Senator Barack Obama has proposed, providing Mr. Obama with a potentially powerful political boost on a day he spent in Iraq working to fortify his credibility as a wartime leader. After a day spent meeting Iraqi leaders and American military commanders, Mr. Obama seemed to have navigated one of the riskiest parts of a weeklong international trip without a noticeable hitch and to have gained a new opportunity to blunt attacks on his national security credentials by his Republican rival in the presidential race, Senator John McCain. Whether by chance or by design, the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq chose a day when Mr. Obama was in the country to provide its clearest statement yet about its views on the withdrawal of American troops. After a weekend of dispute about precisely what Mr. Maliki was suggesting, his spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, told reporters in Baghdad, “We cannot give any timetables or dates, but the Iraqi government believes the end of 2010 is the appropriate time for the withdrawal.” Mr. Obama has said he would seek to withdraw American combat forces over 16 months if he is elected president, starting upon taking office in January, meaning his plan would be completed on roughly the same timetable as suggested by the Iraqis. The Bush administration has signaled a willingness to work with the Iraqis on their desire to begin setting at least a general “time horizon” for reducing the American military presence, leaving Mr. McCain at risk of becoming isolated in his position of firm opposition to a withdrawal timetable. The central tenet of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is suddenly aligned with what the Iraqis themselves now increasingly seem to want. Not only have the developments offered Mr. Obama a measure of credibility as a prospective world leader in a week when his every move is receiving intensive attention at home and abroad, but it has complicated Mr. McCain’s leading argument against him: that a withdrawal timeline would be tantamount to surrender and would leave Iraqis in dangerous straits. Mr. McCain is hardly conceding the point. He continued to hammer away at Mr. Obama’s judgment on national security, saying on Monday that Mr. Obama had gotten it badly wrong when he opposed sending additional American troops last year to help stabilize Iraq. Republicans said Iraq would never have reached the point where it could reasonably call for a reduction in the American presence without the troop increase, a policy championed by Mr. McCain over the objections of Mr. Obama and most other Democrats. “The fact is, if we had done what Senator Obama wanted to do, we would have lost,” Mr. McCain told reporters in Kennebunkport, Me. “And we would have faced a wider war. And we would have had greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region. And Iran would have increased their influence.” American military commanders have also expressed qualms about setting a specific timetable for withdrawal, suggesting that to do so could risk reversing the progress made in Iraq since the United States increased its troop presence last year. On Sunday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Michael Mullen, told Fox News that the consequences of setting a two-year timeline for removing American combat troops “could be very dangerous.” For a day, at least, the images of the two presidential candidates offered a sharp contrast. In an interview on “Good Morning America” on ABC, Mr. McCain talked about securing the “Iraq-Pakistan border,” a momentary misstatement of geography. (American forces are pursuing terrorists along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border; Iraq does not border Pakistan.) His aides staged an event where he was seen riding in a golf cart in Maine with the first President George Bush, while Mr. Obama flew over Iraq in a helicopter with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander. During his visit to Iraq, Mr. Obama said it was important that the Iraqi government take charge of its own affairs. “I think it is very important we build on this progress and recognize Iraqi sovereignty,” he said shortly after meeting with Mr. Maliki and as he was starting a meeting with one of Iraq’s vice presidents, Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni. The talk of a strict timetable appeared to worry Mr. Hashimi. Sunni Muslims fear that a rapid withdrawal would leave them vulnerable to Shiite Muslim efforts to further diminish their power. Rather, he said the emphasis should be on the Iraqi army’s readiness. The comments on troop withdrawal came after a weekend of controversy between the United States and Iraqi governments over a German news report that Mr. Maliki had expressed support for Mr. Obama’s proposal to withdraw American combat troops within 16 months of January. On Friday, President Bush agreed to a “general time horizon” for pulling out troops without mentioning any dates. Mr. Obama, on the latest leg of his first overseas tour as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, arrived in the Iraqi capital in the early afternoon after first stopping in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. General Petraeus met briefly with Mr. Obama when he arrived at the Baghdad airport, and they flew by helicopter to the Green Zone, where the American Embassy and many Iraqi government offices are situated, an American military official said. Mr. Obama met with Mr. Maliki; President Jalal Talabani; Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser; and other Iraqi officials at the prime minister’s residence in the Green Zone. He and the two senators traveling with him, Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, and Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, had dinner with General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. In an interview with ABC News on Monday in Baghdad, Mr. Obama said he would not be locked into a false choice between a rigid timetable for withdrawal that ignored changing conditions in Iraq and “completely deferring” to the recommendations of military commanders. He said his conversation with General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker focused on “what’s adequate for our security interests, factoring in the fact that not only do we have Afghanistan, which I believe is the central front on terror, but also the fact that if we’re spending $10 billion a month over the next two, four, five years, then that’s $10 billion a month that we’re not using to rebuild the United States or drawing down our national debt or making sure that families have health care.” Before meeting with Mr. Hashimi, Mr. Obama said he was “pleased with the progress taking place” and said it was his impression that among Iraqis there was “more optimism about what is happening.” He spoke of more “activity taking place, the people in the shops, the traffic on the streets” and said, “Clearly, there’s been an enormous improvement.” Mr. Obama’s trip is cloaked in secrecy and high security, and aides have also worked to avoid images like the one that caused a headache for Mr. McCain in a visit to Iraq, when he suggested that safety had improved as he walked through a market that was heavily protected by military personnel. Mr. McCain, whose aides are frustrated by the level of attention being paid to Mr. Obama this week, criticized Mr. Obama as not recognizing the reductions in violence and improvements in Iraq. “He’s been completely wrong on the issue,” Mr. McCain said, offering a reminder to voters that Mr. Obama is “someone who has no military experience whatsoever.” That biographical difference, of course, is a central reason for Mr. Obama’s across-the-world detour from the domestic presidential campaign. From Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq for three straight days, it is difficult to find a picture of Mr. Obama not surrounded by American commanders or troops.

Presidential Election of 2008
Obama Barack
Iraq


Summer Gas Prices Expected to Be Modestly Lower

Abstract: HOUSTON — As the Memorial Day weekend and the summer driving season approach, gasoline prices are easing. But most drivers will find prices only modestly lower than a year ago. Nationwide, the price of a gallon of regular gasoline has been drifting lower by about half a cent a day over the last month, and energy analysts say that trend should continue over the next few weeks, in at least some states. “Drivers are getting a respite,” said Rodney L. Waller, a senior vice president at Range Resources, an oil and gas company based in Fort Worth. “But it’s a tenuous respite based on all the changes in the global oil market and the opening and closings of refineries across the U.S.” Gasoline prices are dropping primarily because of a decline in global crude oil prices, stemming from an easing of tensions in the Middle East and growing oil supplies, bolstered in recent months by the rapid return of Libyan oil exports and increased production from Saudi Arabia. Because oil is priced in dollars, the firming value of the dollar in recent weeks in the wake of the European financial crisis has also helped reduce prices. The sluggish global economy has also reduced demand for oil and other commodities, particularly in Europe. Demand growth in China, a main driver of oil prices in recent years, has slowed in recent months. And while gasoline demand in the United States has diminished in recent months because of the soft economy, oil supply inventories recently reached a 22-year high. Gasoline prices on the East Coast have fallen in part because one large refinery in Philadelphia that was scheduled to be closed by Sunoco at the end of June is now expected to remain open through at least most of the summer while the private equity firm the Carlyle Group negotiates to form a joint venture. Prospects for future gasoline prices in the region have also improved since Delta Air Lines bought an idled Pennsylvania refinery, which will probably produce more gasoline for the market by October. On the West Coast, however, particularly around Los Angeles, gasoline prices have actually risen in recent weeks because several refineries were forced to suspend operations because of power failures and repairs to compressors. But those problems are expected to be cleared up by June, and energy experts expect prices to ease afterward. The diverging refinery situations are reflected in the wide gap in gasoline prices from one coast to the other. The average price for regular gasoline on Thursday was $3.92 a gallon in New York but $4.31 a gallon in California. The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline on Thursday was $3.67, nearly 30 cents below the high for the year reached in early April. A year ago, the average prices stood at $3.85 a gallon. Energy analysts say prices this summer should remain a few cents lower than last year but about 75 cents a gallon above the level in the summer of 2010. The economic effect of the lower prices is tentative because prices could easily surge again. “Compared to 2009 and 2010, these are still stiff prices,” said Tom Kloza, the chief oil analyst at Oil Price Information Service. “People talk about this wonderful dividend, but measured against history, gasoline still represents a considerable slice of consumer disposable income.” Mr. Kloza projected that the national average price for regular gasoline during the Memorial Day weekend would be at most only a few pennies below the current price, and would range from $3.50 to $3.75 for the rest of the summer. Light sweet crude, the benchmark of New York trading, remained stubbornly above $100 a barrel for most of the last year. In recent weeks it has fallen to just above $90, and remained near that level on Thursday. The spike in oil prices last year was because of the turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East, especially the loss of more than a million barrels a day of high-quality crude from Libya during the insurrection against the Qaddafi dictatorship. After easing for a few months, prices surged again early this year over fears that Iran might block supplies from passing through the Strait of Hormuz in response to tightening European and United States sanctions or the possibility of an Israeli or American attack on Iranian nuclear plants. The sanctions have reduced Iranian exports, but increased exports from Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iraq have so far more than compensated for the drop-off in China, India and other Asian countries that have relied on supplies from Iran. Total OPEC output of oil and other liquid fuels is at a record high of 37.5 million barrels a day, despite the loss of Iranian exports. But oil analysts warn that prices could surge again if instability interrupts production in any number of shaky producing nations. Traders were watching how a second round of talks between members of the United Nations Security Council, Germany and Iran would proceed this week, but there appeared to have been little progress. Hopes that Iran would be willing to curb its nuclear program had helped send oil prices lower, but further tightening of sanctions on Iran could send crude prices higher in the months ahead. “If there are any problems on the supply side, as in Iran, Libya or Nigeria, then prices will be right back up,” said Michael C. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research. “Global inventories are not that high, and production is pretty much flat out in OPEC. A lot depends on how negotiations go with Iran.” While production in the United States is about a million barrels a day higher than last year, now reaching 5.9 million barrels a day, several other international producers outside of OPEC are not doing nearly as well. Unrest in South Sudan has halted nearly half a million barrels a day of production. Offshore oil spills have dented output in China and Brazil, and production from the North Sea continues to decline.

Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)
United States
Economic Conditions and Trends


A Pearl Buck Novel, New After 4 Decades

Abstract: Forty years after being written, an unpublished novel by Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, will be released this fall, her publisher said on Tuesday. The manuscript was stumbled upon in a storage unit in Texas and returned to the Buck family in December in exchange for a small fee, said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of Open Road Integrated Media, the publisher. Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is believed to have completed the manuscript for the book, “The Eternal Wonder,” shortly before she died of cancer in 1973, said her son Edgar S. Walsh, who manages her literary estate. The novel is one of dozens that the prolific Buck completed during her lifetime, a tumultuous eight decades that took her as a young child from her birthplace, Hillsboro, W.Va., to China, where her father worked as a Presbyterian missionary. While in her late 30s, she wrote “The Good Earth,” her second and most famous novel, a compassionate portrait of Chinese farmers that was published in 1931 and became the biggest-selling novel in the United States for two successive years. After Buck returned to the United States, she continued to write both fiction and nonfiction until the end of her life, churning out material at a pace that prompted the writer John Hersey to remark that she had produced “probably 70 too many” books. (Open Road estimates that she wrote about 100 books, including fiction, nonfiction and commentary.) Image Pearl S. Buck in 1942. Credit Hulton Archive/Getty Images Oprah Winfrey revived the Buck canon by choosing “The Good Earth” as one of her book club selections in 2004. Now the publisher of Buck’s digital backlist, Open Road is trying to move her work into wider circulation again. Last year it announced that 13 of Buck’s novels, including “The Good Earth,” “The Promise” and “A House Divided,” would be released as e-books for the first time in an effort to reach an audience beyond print readers. The recently discovered book was described by the publisher as “the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax, an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris and on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever — and, ultimately, to love.” Ms. Friedman, a former chief executive of HarperCollins, founded Open Road in 2009. “All of the themes that were important to Pearl Buck are in this book,” she said. “The main character, the love, the attention to detail of the Chinese artifacts, the relationship this young man has. She writes in a way that is absolutely hypnotic.” Mr. Walsh said that his mother spent her last four years in Vermont, and when she died, her estate was in disarray. How two copies of the book, a typed version and a photocopied manuscript in Buck’s handwriting, made it to Texas, he said, remains a mystery to the family. “After my mother died in Vermont, her personal possessions were not carefully controlled,” he said. “The family didn’t have access. Various things were stolen. Somebody in Vermont ran off with this thing, and it eventually ended up in Texas.” Image A photocopy of the manuscript for the Pearl S. Buck novel “The Eternal Wonder.” Credit Open Road Integrated Media Peter Conn, a professor of English and education at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography,” said that of Buck’s contributions, she most notably commanded the imagination of American readers with her descriptions of China. “Pearl Buck strongly shaped Western and specifically American perceptions of China to an extent that had not been seen in the past,” he said. “She actually can make claim to a unique kind of cultural achievement, which is to prepare Americans for the increasingly tangled relationship we were going to have with China for the next 70 or 80 years.” Mr. Conn said that Buck’s work began to drop off in quality during the 1940s, and that the books that came afterward were not “consistently as interesting, with a few exceptions.” The Nobel Prize in Literature, which is awarded for a body of work, cited Buck’s “rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China” and her “biographical masterpieces.” She wrote two biographies of her parents, members of the Southern Presbyterian Mission who were ardently devoted to their work. Although Mr. Conn has not yet read “The Eternal Wonder,” being released on Oct. 22 in paperback and e-book formats, he said he was intrigued to hear that it was set partly in Korea, where Buck did much of her work. “There are probably passages of interest,” he said. “She’s an extraordinary woman who led an incomparably fascinating life.”

Books
Pearl S Buck
Open Road Integrated Media


In a Corner of China, Macao Keeps Its Distinct Mix

Abstract: MACAO — Long before words like “multiculturalism” and “fusion cuisine” entered the modern lexicon, Aida de Jesus and her forebears were mashing up food, language and DNA from far-flung corners of the globe. A 95-year-old chef whose ancestry is drawn from Goa, Malacca and other former outposts of the Portuguese empire, Senhora de Jesus, as she prefers to be called, grew up celebrating Christmas and Chinese New Year with meals that relied on Portuguese sausage, bok choy and galinha cafreal, a chicken dish with an African pedigree. She spoke Portuguese at school, Cantonese on the street and a lively creole known as Patuá with “the girls.” “We Macanese are always mixing it up,” Senhora de Jesus said with a giggle, speaking in English, as she sat in the restaurant her family has run for decades. “We are very adaptable.” But these days the Macanese — as this former Portuguese colony’s mixed-race residents are called — are swimming against a demographic tide that threatens to subsume their rich cultural cocktail. Always outnumbered by the Chinese migrants and Portuguese traders who crammed into this densely settled speck in the Pearl River Delta, the Macanese who stayed after Beijing took back the territory in 1999 are decidedly in the minority. Fewer than 10,000 Macanese reside here; by contrast, Macao ’s population of 500,000 is about 95 percent Chinese and rising. “There are probably more Macanese living in California and Canada than Macao,” said Miguel de Senna Fernandes, a lawyer and playwright whose father, something of a local cultural institution, chronicled the lives of ordinary Macanese in a series of novels. “Now that we are part of China, we are facing a very absorbing, overpowering force.” Not that Mr. Fernandes is giving up. In addition to organizing social events through his group, the Macaenses Association , he has also emerged as the Don Quixote of Patuá, which is listed by Unesco as an endangered language. He helped publish a dictionary of Patuá expressions, and for the past 18 years he has staged an annual play that revives what local people call “doci papiaçam,” or sweet speech, a stew of archaic Portuguese, Malay and Singhalese spiced with English, Dutch and Japanese, and more recently, a large helping of Cantonese. Mr. Fernandes, 50, traces his fascination with Patuá to his grandmother, who would slip into it when gossiping with friends during “chá gordo,” or fat tea, a typically Macanese interpretation of English high tea whose overabundance of Malaysian noodles, codfish fritters and custard tarts explains the fat. “Drawn by their laughter, I would hide in the corner and later ask my grandmother about expressions I’d never heard before,” he said. More often than not they were unsuitable for an 8-year-old’s ears but his grandmother would oblige with sanitized translations, followed by an admonishment to stick to studying proper Portuguese. “The old-timers considered Patuá broken or bad Portuguese,” he said, “but since then I’ve been hooked.” The language is among the last of the creoles that once flourished in the constellation of ports that made up Portugal’s Asian and African holdings. Unlike British colonizers who maintained some distance from their subjects in Hong Kong, just an hour’s ferry trip from Macao, the Portuguese frequently married local women who then converted to Catholicism. Alan Baxter, a linguist at the University of Macao and an expert on Portuguese-based creoles, said the roots of Patuá extend back to the 16th century, when Portuguese traders and their camp followers did business with Africans, Indians and Malays, then sailed onward to other colonies in the empire. “Imagine if you went somewhere new and were deprived of knowledge of a local language and merely picked up the useful bits you heard to get yourself fed,” he said, explaining its evolution. The Cantonese contributions to Patuá came much later, starting in the late 19th century, after the walls dividing Macao’s Portuguese and Chinese quarters were torn down and the two groups began to mingle. These days Macanese give their laundry to a “mainato” — from the southern Indian language Malayalam — and they address their beloveds as “amo chai,” a mix of the Portuguese “amor” and the Cantonese expression for “little one.” Verbs are unconjugated, nouns are repeated to suggest the plural and words are sometimes assembled in a way that mimics the structure of classic Chinese idioms. Early on this language served the mixed-blood Macanese well, fostering their role as a bridge between Macao’s Portuguese rulers and its predominantly Chinese inhabitants. More recently, after they began sending their children to Portuguese schools, the Macanese became indispensable as managers and bureaucrats. By the time China took over administration of the enclave after more than 400 years of Portuguese rule, the Macanese dominated the territory’s civil service. Although most visitors these days are quickly sucked into Macao’s casinos — among them The Venetian , one of the world’s largest — those who wander the city’s narrow cobblestone streets are struck by the effortless coexistence of Orient and Occident. Incense-suffused Buddhist temples, pastel Baroque churches, Portuguese bakeries and dried shark fin dispensaries are crammed together without complaint. That same intermingling plays out in the lives of the Macanese, many of whom are devoted Catholics but give their children small red envelopes of cash on the Lunar New Year. Come Mid-Autumn Festival, another Chinese holiday, they take to the streets with rabbit-shaped lanterns. “Many of us have been educated in Europe, but no Macanese would dare move to a new house without consulting a feng shui expert,” said Carlos Marreiros , an architect who designed the Macao pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. “I’m a Christian but I also believe God is a big ocean and all the rivers of religion are running to meet him.” In the years leading up to the transfer to China, thousands of apprehensive Macanese left, with many settling in Portugal. But over the past decade, as Beijing stayed true to its promise to give Macao 50 years of relative autonomy, the emigration has slowed and a small but steady number have returned. One irresistible draw has been breakneck economic growth, mostly spurred by gambling and construction, which last year helped drive 20 percent growth in the economy. Fueled by players from the mainland, Macao’s gambling revenue is now quadruple that of the Las Vegas Strip. The impact on local people has been mixed. A law that bars nonresidents from working as croupiers and dealers has helped deliver well-paid jobs but it has also lured prized teachers out of the classroom. The draw has also been irresistible to young people, a growing number of whom are dropping out of high school or skipping college to head straight to the casino floor. All that prosperity has brought other downsides as well: frenzied real estate speculation is pricing local people out of the housing market. The sleepy Macao that many once held dear is increasingly subsumed by the horn-honking and manic rhythms commonly associated with Hong Kong. “Everything is happening very fast: construction is fast, business is fast and everyone is more stressed,” said José Sales Marques, 55, the enclave’s last Portuguese mayor, who now works to promote better ties between Macao and Europe. “Prosperity is wonderful, but at the end of the day all that money can’t buy you a culture and an identity.” Filomeno Jorge is determined to keep alive one strand of that identity. Every Wednesday he rustles up the seven other members of his band, Tuna Macaense , to run through a startlingly diverse repertory that includes Portuguese fados, Cantonese ballads and Filipino pop songs. The mainstays, however, are vintage Patuá, some dating from 1935, when the band was first established by José dos Santos Ferreira, a poet and lyricist widely credited with bringing cultural legitimacy to the Macanese dialect. At one time, Tuna Macaense had three dozen members and the band was known for making unannounced visits at weddings and birthday parties. “They would travel on foot through the streets because Macao so small,” said Mr. Jorge, a security manager at the MGM Macau who joined the band 25 years ago. “We can’t do that now because there is too much traffic.” Although Tuna Macaense is blessed with frequent gigs, Mr. Jorge, 54, is increasingly preoccupied with finding new blood for the band, a quest that has so far been unsuccessful. “All of us in the band are over 50,” he said. “After we die, our music will die, and I can’t let that happen.”