When the clock struck 12:01 a.m. Friday in New York, Arn Tellem was in his backyard in Los Angeles, hosting a cookout. This is not how an NBA agent typically celebrates the arrival of July.Rico says there's probably a sport he cares less about than basketball, but he can't think of it right now... (Curling, maybe. Nah, curling's better...)
In a normal year, Tellem would have been juggling phone calls and meetings, shuttling between players, coaches and general managers, managing the happy chaos that is free agency. But this is not a normal year.
At midnight Thursday— when free agency usually starts— the NBA declared a lockout, putting an indefinite moratorium on all league business.
With no meetings to arrange and no contracts to consider, Tellem invited a dozen colleagues from the Wasserman Media Group over for a barbecue. The guest of honor was the Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose— an agency client who happened to be in town. A year ago, at that same hour, Tellem was in his office with Joe Johnson and Mike Miller, welcoming eager delegations from the Knicks, the Miami Heat and the Atlanta Hawks. “This is quite a bit different,” Tellem said.
Everyone associated with the NBA is adjusting to new realities as the league navigates its first lockout in thirteen years. Negotiations have ceased, although a bargaining session could be held in the next two weeks. A resolution may not come for months.
In the meantime, players are barred from using team facilities and from communicating with team personnel at any level. Team officials are prohibited from discussing the lockout, under the threat of million-dollar fines.
And while Rose, the NBA’s most valuable player, could be found in Tellem’s backyard, he could not be found on the league’s home page. As the lockout commenced, the league stripped all images of its four-hundred-plus players from its web sites, replacing them with cheerleaders, mascots, and somber-looking portraits of Commissioner David Stern.
The Bulls’ site featured a large photo of the Luvabulls dance team. The Bulls’ roster was nowhere to be found.
Across the league, marketing employees have been instructed not to use player images in promotional material. The decision was tactical, not legal, according to the NBA. “We do not think it is appropriate to be using video and photography of current players at this time,” said Mike Bass, an NBA spokesman.
Gabe Feldman, the director of Tulane University’s sports law program, said there was no compelling legal reason to remove player images. He suggested the decision was “a symbolic move,” implying that the owners would not only shut down the league but would “stop promoting the players, too.”
The NBA home page now includes a “Labor Central” button and a prominent history section, which features, curiously enough, a photo of Oscar Robertson, a critical figure in the league’s labor history. Robertson sued the NBA in 1970 for the right to free agency. The case was settled in his favor in 1976. (Robertson’s NBA.com biography, which includes this bit of history, has been removed from the web site. The link still comes up in a Google search, however.)
In another twist, Stern said Thursday that the league would continue its community service programs, such as Basketball Without Borders, by using retired players. “Because we’re going to work hard to talk to our fans in a positive way,” he said.
Legends are also dominating the NBATV schedule, which on Saturday will feature a ten-hour block of dunk contests, all from 1994 and earlier, long before any of today’s players had entered in the league.
The league said it had no plans for layoffs or furloughs, although that could come if the labor stalemate stretches into the fall. The 1998 lockout lasted for six months. Many agents and team executives expect this one to be just as severe. There will be little urgency to settle the dispute until September, when teams must begin planning for training camps.
If there is an absolute deadline to salvage the season, it will be on or around 6 January. That is the date that the lockout ended in 1999, just in time to put together a fifty-game schedule. At the time, league officials said the season would have been lost had they waited longer.
For now, there are no games to cancel or highlights to miss. But free agency is a treasured time for fans, who will spend months wondering if Nene will leave Denver, if the Dallas Mavericks can re-sign Tyson Chandler and J. J. Barea and which teams will try to lure Marc Gasol out of Memphis. More than a hundred free agents are now in limbo.
The locked-out players broadcast their frustration, hopes, and wry humor on Twitter. Chris Kaman, the Los Angeles Clippers center, posted a photo of himself outside a Costco, with the message, “Gotta start buying in bulk now!” Derek Fisher, the president of the players union, struck a more sober tone: “To all our players, you have my word that I will do all I can to find a fair resolution. Nothing less.”
02 July 2011
Caring less than zero is difficult
Howard Beck has an article in The New York Times about the NBA lockout:
On a much smaller scale...
Jet-lagged but determined, Salomon Salcedo thought nothing of trekking to the small hilltop town of Castelfidardo in the Marches region of Italy on a muggy June afternoon to satisfy a lifelong desire, to buy a made-in-Castelfidardo accordion. “They’re the best,” said Mr. Salcedo, 50, a policy officer in Chile for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, who began playing the accordion when he was a child. “You won’t find them in stores; they have to be made to order,” said Mr. Salcedo, who was combining the visit with a work trip to Rome. “And this is the place to come.”
For some people, the idea of traveling almost 7,500 miles for one purchase may seem extreme. For accordion makers in Castelfidardo, however, it is a common occurrence. Ask around and prepare to be regaled with stories of delegations of Frenchmen, Argentines, and other aficionados traveling to this town, just south of the Adriatic port of Ancona, to buy a bit of Italian industrial excellence.
Just after World War Two, when entire accordion orchestras were fixtures in the festivities of Italian immigrants to the United States, Castelfidardo churned out its prize product by the tens of thousands. Now, years after the electric guitar became the instrument of choice in popular music— people here still point to Elvis Presley and the Beatles as economic nemeses— and the production of basic models largely moved to Asia, Castelfidardo has continued to shift its focus to quality from quantity. That has allowed the town to sustain a key industry, though in a much diminished form. “Our accordions are like bespoke apparel,” said Francesca Pigini (photo), a top manager for the company her grandfather started in 1946. “For us, it’s a pleasure and an enrichment to work and collaborate with artists and people who make music a big part of their lives.” Pigini is the largest accordion maker in Castelfidardo, splitting production between instruments tailored to traditional music like polkas, waltzes, or easy listening, and a classical repertoire, which grew considerably after Tchaikovsky introduced an accordion part in an 1883 suite— a milestone, accordionists say. The company makes about sixty models, costing from 2,000 to 30,000 euros, or $3,000 to $43,000.
Pigini is one of the few companies in Castelfidardo that still makes almost every component in-house, employing about forty skilled workers and producing about 1,500 accordions a year. (Mr. Salcedo, incidentally, planned to buy a Pigini, he said later in an email.) Pigini accordions count for a sizable chunk of Castelfidardo’s production, which has been inexorably eroded by changing musical tastes and, more recently, by the global economic crisis.
The story of how a five-thousand-year-old Chinese free reed instrument called the sheng metamorphosed into the modern-day accordion passes through Vienna, where the first patent was granted in 1829, and winds through several European cities. But as far as Castelfidardo is concerned, the accordion is a homegrown success story pinned to the ingenuity of Paolo Soprani, who opened his shop in 1863. Several stories told here romanticize the origins of Mr. Soprani’s inspiration— including improbable references to accordion-playing soldiers who fought at the Battle of Castelfidardo in 1860, one of the definitive skirmishes against papal troops that led to the unification of Italy.
But Beniamino Bugiolacchi, director of the International Accordion Museum in Castelfidardo, dismisses such legends, saying that Mr. Soprani’s major accomplishment was taking an artisanal activity and applying modern industrial strategies to increase the business.
Production in Castelfidardo peaked in 1953, when nearly two hundred thousand accordions were made in dozens of factories that employed about ten thousand workers. Accordion makers in other Italian towns also did brisk business. Today, only about two dozen companies remain, mostly small businesses employing about three hundred people, a number that has been stable for the last five years, Mr. Bugiolacchi said. Rising production costs shifted the competitive edge to manufacturers in Eastern Europe and, more recently, in South Korea and China.
But the precision and skills necessary to make accordions— which require the assembly of more than six thousand pieces— were easily transferred to other industries. Over the last thirty years, Castelfidardo has excelled in other sectors, like mechanics and woodworking.
“The accordion now accounts for around fifteen percent of Castelfidardo’s” output, said Paolo Picchio, president of Consorzio Music Marche Accordions, a consortium of manufacturers and promoters. “But the other 85 percent still has accordions to thank.” Apart from the manufacturers, there are also specialized companies that supply parts like the sound-making reeds or the folding bellows. “Castelfidardo is about high quality, and we’re in the high end of this market niche,” said Francesco Mengascini, whose company, which he runs with his father, makes about eight hundred accordions a year under the Beltuna brand. It could make more, he said, but the Mengascinis do not want to sacrifice quality, so they regularly turn down work. “We’re not great commercial experts, but we prefer to focus on the brand and satisfy clients.” The company exports about 95 percent of its production, he said, which translates into dozens of different models. Unlike many other instruments, accordions are not made to any standard, and those used in various countries typically have their own distinctive sounds, Mr. Mengascini said.
There are, for example, piano accordions (with a keyboard), and button accordions, and different systems exist for both the left and the right hands. There are Russian, Tyrolean, Belgian, German, Italian, and dozens of other variations on how buttonboards, keys, and bass systems are mounted, and manufacturers in general grumble that a single system would be a relief.
While China has become the world’s top producer of mainstream accordions, many in Castelfidardo view Asian manufacturing, where much of the production is for internal consumption, as a boon. Someday, they reason, all those young Chinese accordionists will seek out top-quality instruments. “We’re not pessimistic about the future, because some young Chinese players will become professionals, and once they’re looking for more important instruments where will they come? To Castelfidardo,” said Mr. Picchio, the consortium president who also is the artistic director of the annual international accordion festival here, which draws hundreds of performers and fans.
One reason to be negative, other manufacturers counter, is that skilled labor is becoming more difficult to find, as younger generations increasingly reject the years of training and technique required to make accordions. “They prefer to work in other sectors, computers being the main draw,” said Vincenzo Canali, the museum’s president and an accordion expert. Mr. Canali said that financial incentives to students might be the only way to draw people back to the trade. “In any case, work will always be available,” he said. “If nothing else, it’s a sure job.”
Ingenuity has helped to keep Castelfidardo’s main industry afloat. Marco Tiranti, an accordion tuner and restorer, decided to start his own business, Euphonia, which produces about twenty accordions a year. He formed the company two years ago after patenting an innovation that creates “a warmer, sweeter sound”. Mr. Tiranti acknowledged that the market for accordions was saturated, “and if you don’t have something new, it isn’t worth trying.” Still, the global crisis is taking its toll and Mr. Tiranti said that the community’s pulling together might be the best way to weather a difficult economy. Manufacturers, he said, could benefit from developing a coordinated approach to research and labor costs that could help invigorate the entire area. “Small may be beautiful,” he said, “but in a global market synergy may be the only way to survive.”
Nothing like having a few billion to bargain with
Chris Nicholson has an article in The New York Times about an Apple-and-Microsoft-against-Google deal:
Nortel Networks, the defunct Canadian telecommunications equipment maker, says it has agreed to sell more than six thousand patent assets to an alliance made up of Apple, Microsoft, and other technology giants for $4.5 billion in cash.Rico says the computer business makes for strange bedfellows, and Apple and Microsoft would be among the strangest...
The group of companies, which also includes Research in Motion, Sony, Ericsson, and EMC, beat out Google and Intel for the patents and patent applications that Nortel had accumulated when it was still one of the largest telecommunications equipment makers in North America.
Nortel, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009, said in a statement that it had sold its last remaining patents, covering businesses including wireless and networking technology and semiconductors, in an auction that it called “very robust”.
“The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world,” said George A. Riedel, chief strategy officer of Nortel.
Nortel delayed the auction once last month because of what it called “significant interest”, and started the sale on Monday. Nortel said it hoped to close the transaction in the third quarter.
In April, Google made a stalking-horse bid of $900 million for the patents, some of which are related to the wireless technology known as long-term evolution. Networks based on that technology, considered crucial to the future of telecommunications, are created to carry large amounts of data like streamed video to mobile devices. The Google offer was interpreted as a defensive move. The search giant was seeking intellectual property rights to shield itself from lawsuits as it moves deeper into the mobile business with its Android software. Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote at the time of the bid that it was supposed to “create a disincentive for others to sue Google. The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents,” Mr. Walker wrote.
Now, thousands of crucial patents will be in the hands of rivals like Apple and Microsoft, both of which have shown themselves to be much more aggressive in patent litigation than Google.
Mr. Walker said in an email that the auction’s outcome was “disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition”.
The sale will require approval from courts in Canada and the United States, Nortel said. About 2,600 of the patent assets are American. A joint hearing has been scheduled for 11 July.
Nortel, based in Mississauga in Ontario, was once a flagship Canadian company, but filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after losing nearly six billion dollars in 2008.
Since then, it has sold its wireless equipment business for $1.13 billion to the Swedish company Ericsson, which walked away with $340 million worth of patents from the auction. More recently, Ericsson bought Telcordia, an American telecom network equipment maker, for $1.15 billion.
In 2009, Nortel sold another unit dealing with enterprise solutions for $475 million to Avaya, a former AT&T unit that is now owned by private equity and which filed for an initial public offering of stock last month.
RIM, Canada’s most prominent technology company since Nortel collapsed, said in a separate statement that it had paid about $770 million for patents at the auction. The sale of patents raised more than the rest of Nortel’s disposals combined.
The company said it did not anticipate that holders of its common shares or preferred stock would benefit from the bankruptcy process. Creditor protection proceedings “will result in the cancellation of these equity interests,” Nortel said. Nortel was advised by Lazard. Nortel’s creditors’ committee, which includes the Bank of New York Mellon and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, hired Jefferies as its financial adviser for the auction, which saw the patent assets reap five times the stalking-horse bid.
No ipe? What is the world coming to?
The Coney Island Boardwalk, opened in 1923, has inspired songs (The Drifters’ Under the Boardwalk), plays (Herb Gardner’s The Goodbye People) and fiction (Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities). Now, it is inspiring a question of Talmudic complexity: Can a boardwalk be called a boardwalk if it is not made of boards?Rico says the reconstituted planks sound good, if not cheap...
Last summer, the City of New York began replacing the wooden boards on two short stretches of boardwalk with concrete strips as a pilot project for a more extensive overhaul of the structure, which extends for two and a half miles along the Brooklyn shoreline. The change is part of a move away from the tropical hardwoods like ipe (pronounced EE-pay) that have long been used by the city for benches, piers, and walkways. The woods are tough enough to withstand a fleet of garbage trucks, but their sources in the Amazon rain forest are being depleted. Under pressure from environmental groups like Rainforest Relief, the city has, since 2008, been trying to stop using them, and concrete has become the material of choice for boardwalks.
Officials at the Department of Parks and Recreation have promised that the section of several blocks of the Coney Island Boardwalk along the historic amusement area will remain hardwood. But everything else is vulnerable to conversion to concrete. The officials say other solutions have drawbacks. North American hardwoods are not as sturdy or long-lasting. Concrete, already used for at least one mile of the five-mile Rockaway Beach Boardwalk, so far seems the cheapest, most durable alternative. Concrete, parks officials say, costs $95 a square foot, compared with $127 for hardwood.
“It is an oxymoron,” Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, conceded in an interview last year when the pilot project was being considered. “Boardwalk has become eponymous, in the way Kleenex is for paper tissue. It is a generic term for an elevated oceanfront walkway, and other communities use concrete.”
That stance has ignited fierce opposition in Brooklyn for more than a year. Now, with the pilot projects complete and the city proceeding to the full-blown replacement, Community Board 13, whose views are only advisory, has spurned a plan for the next stage: five blocks at the Boardwalk’s eastern edge, from Brighton 15th Street to Coney Island Avenue, to be financed with $7.5 million in state money. About three weeks ago, the community board voted 21 to 7 against the latest compromise: running a twelve-foot-wide concrete lane down the middle of the fifty-foot-wide boardwalk to accommodate the wear and tear of garbage trucks and police cars. The remaining sides would be built out of planks made of recycled plastic that cost about $110 a square foot and last for years. That plan was supported by Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, who until then had pushed exclusively for wooden boards. Kevin Jeffrey, the borough parks commissioner, said a decision on how to proceed would be reached in two or three weeks.
Robert Burstein, 56, a schoolteacher who daily takes five-mile runs on the Boardwalk, said people flocked to it because they “want respite from concrete; we have concrete all around us.” A lifelong resident of the Coney Island-Brighton Beach area, he contends that concrete is tough on runners’ knees and other joints and “that’s going to cause injuries, whereas wood is a much more giving surface.” He and an ad-hoc group have gathered over a thousand signatures opposing any concrete sections. Mr. Burstein and Rainforest Relief’s director, Tim Keating, argue that other hardwoods, like black locust and white oak, can be used instead of rain-forest wood, and that lumber mills could produce the required boards at a reasonable price if the city’s order was large enough.
Mr. Jeffrey said that North American hardwood his agency had tested began to splinter in two or three years. Its use would repeat a current problem on the Boardwalk; aging boards warp and become dangerous, with people tripping or getting splinters. He acknowledged critics’ complaints that boards made of plastic are often slippery, but said they could be given more traction with a grainy coating. They also have the same amount of give as hardwood slats, he said. The pilot projects replaced wooden boards with concrete along two blocks near Ocean Parkway and four blocks along the wider western end of Coney Island. They used $15 million in federal economic stimulus funds as well as city money.
Preferring the wooden boards, Mr. Burstein said the parks department should relieve the strain on the Boardwalk by putting the heaviest vehicles— garbage trucks— on the beach itself. In his vision, trucks fitted with mechanical arms would ply the beach twice a day, picking up the nearly five hundred litter baskets by extending their arms over the Boardwalk’s railing.
In interviews on the Boardwalk on a recent sunny afternoon, natural wood was lauded for its sensual appeal. Lou Powsner, 90, a longtime member of the community board, who for decades owned a men’s clothing store on nearby Mermaid Avenue, recalled the smells when he visited the new boardwalk with his parents in the 1920s. “What I remember is the smell of fresh wood and the salt air, and it was magnificent,” Mr. Powsner said. He also remembered that the Coney Island Boardwalk— officially known as the Riegelmann Boardwalk, for the borough president who built it as a way of offering the public greater access to the beach— withstood storms like Hurricane Donna in 1960 relatively unscathed, while a concrete esplanade in nearby Manhattan Beach was mangled.
But concrete had its advocates, like Mila Ivanova. Ms. Ivanova, a Ukrainian immigrant from Odessa on the Black Sea who also walks the Boardwalk every day, said: “It’s very good, wood, but it’s old. It is shaking. Sometimes nails come up and you fall. Personally, I like everything new.”
Ruby Schultz, a zestful septuagenarian, said she liked the feel of real wooden boards yielding under her feet, a relief from the hard pavement of city streets. Ms. Schultz, a retired elementary-school teacher, accused the parks department of failing to maintain the wooden boardwalk so people would say: “Enough with the broken boards! Put the concrete down!”
Such suspicions were echoed in a way by Geoffrey Croft, founder of NYC Parks Advocates, a private group, who said the underlying problem was the city did not budget enough money for repairs, finding it politically more palatable to use borrowed capital funds for rebuilding. “We’re borrowing for maintenance,” Mr. Croft said. He, too, would like to keep the Boardwalk wood and not concrete. “A boardwalk is a boardwalk,” he said. “A sidewalk is a sidewalk.”
Rico will get there, eventually
Always wanted to visit Cuba? Well now you can, legally.
Thanks to policy changes by President Obama earlier this year designed to encourage more contact between Americans and citizens of the Communist-ruled island, the Treasury Department is once again granting so-called “people-to-people” licenses, which greatly expand travel opportunities for Cuba-bound visitors.
The licenses, created under President Bill Clinton in 1999, stopped being issued in 2003 under travel restrictions imposed by President George W. Bush. Subsequently, the number of travelers from the United States visiting Cuba legally dropped from more than two hundred thousand in 2003 to less than fifty thousand in 2004, according to estimates by Bob Guild, vice president of Marazul Charters in North Bergen, New Jersey, among the largest United States organizers of trips to Cuba. The new changes, which come on top of loosened restrictions for Cubans and Cuban-Americans visiting relatives in Cuba, are expected to push the number of travelers visiting Cuba this year to nearly half a million this year. “We estimate nearly four hundred thousand Cuban Americans will visit this year and another fifty thousand in other categories of legal travel,” said Mr. Guild of Marazul.
To be clear, it is still illegal for ordinary American vacationers to hop on a plane bound for Cuba, which has been under a United States economic embargo for nearly fifty years. True, plenty have dodged the restrictions— and continue to do so— by flying there from another country like Mexico or Canada (for Americans, traveling to Cuba is technically not illegal, but it might as well be since the United States prohibits its citizens from spending money in Cuba, with exceptions for students, journalists, Cuban-Americans, and others with legal reasons to travel there). While Washington has also expanded licensing for educational groups traveling to Cuba by loosening requirements, travelers joining an educational trip must still receive credit toward a degree. But the new people-to-people measures make it easier for United States citizens who do not have special status as working journalists or scholars to visit Cuba legally, so long as they go with a licensed operator.
“All a U.S. citizen has to do is sign up for an authorized program and they can go to Cuba. It’s as simple as that,” said Tom Popper, director of Insight Cuba, a travel company that took more than three thousand Americans to Cuba between 1999 and 2003, and was among the tour operators to apply for a license under the new rules earlier this year. It received its license at the end of June, and has planned 135 trips of three, seven, or eight nights over the next year.
But other organizations, including Collette Vacations, the National Geographic Society, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, are still waiting to hear from Washington. “They are not issuing them with any kind of speed,” said Janet Moore, owner of Distant Horizons, an authorized travel service provider to Cuba, who has been helping organizations apply for people-to-people licenses. For example, Harvard University, which is offering an alumni trip under the new rules, was among the first to receive the special people-to-people license, Ms. Moore said, while the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, which operated four trips to Cuba between 2001 and 2003, has yet to receive theirs. “The bottom line is yes, they have issued some licenses, but they are doing it at a snail’s pace,” she said. In all, only eight companies had been issued people-to-people licenses by the end of June, according to the Treasury Department. Thirty-five applications were still pending.
The trips aren’t your typical Caribbean vacation. Rather, the focus is on meeting local citizens and learning about the culture, not beach hopping and mojito-swilling. Days are filled with busy itineraries that may include visiting orphanages or speaking with musicians or community leaders. Guidelines published by the Treasury Department say the tours must “have a full-time schedule of educational exchange activities that will result in meaningful interaction between the travelers and individuals in Cuba”. But, besides the mingling, the trips— which can range from $1,800 for a long weekend in Havana to more than $4,000 for a week— usually include opportunities to visit historic sites like Old Havana, or, for longer itineraries, a visit to Cienfuegos, a picturesque city in the South.
In terms of hotels, “service may not be quite as good and the Internet connection is incredibly slow and frustrating,” said Ms. Moore of Distant Horizons. But, she said, “they have all the facilities you’d expect: swimming pools, little gyms. And there are a lot of very good private restaurants.” Don’t expect to stock up on those coveted Cuban cigars, however. Travelers aren’t allowed to bring cigars or rum back to the States, according to the Treasury Department.
Demand for Cuba is so strong that tour operators say that many of the trips already have long waiting lists. Learning in Retirement, an educational program associated with the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse, which is offering a ten-day people-to-people trip in April, said more than 65 people have already expressed interest for its 35 spots. “That’s just through word of mouth,” said Burt Altman, a retired professor who organized the trip. “We haven’t even put out the itinerary.”
“It’s the forbidden fruit,” said Mr. Popper of Insight Cuba. “It’s fifty years of pent-up demand for a country that 75 percent of Americans really, really want to travel to.”
Following is a list of planned people-to-people trips to Cuba.Rico says the embargo is still stupid; the best way to end Communism, in Cuba as in all the other places it is no more, is to buy it...
Harvard University's Alumni Association, alumni.harvard.edu, will take a group of 35 to Havana for five days in late October, led by Julio Cesar Pérez Hernández, the Cuban Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, to explore the city and meet professionals, including local artists and enjoy a private concert at the Ceramics Museum with guitarist Luis Manuel Molina. Cost: $3,880 a person based on double occupancy, including airfare from Miami.
Insight Cuba, insightcuba.org, is offering several trips that include a weekend in Havana that costs $1,795 and visits an orphanage; Callejon de Hammel, a community project promoting art, music and culture; the Instituto de Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (Cuban Institute of Friendship With the People), an international Cuban organization that promotes cultural relations between the United States and Cuba; and an eight-night Cuban Music and Art Experience ($4,095), where visitors meet the staff at Egrem, the Cuban state record company, participate in a percussion and dance workshop, visit local music schools and talk to musicians during rehearsal at a famous Havana jazz club.
Learning in Retirement, uwlax.edu/conted/lir/index.html, is offering a ten-day trip in April of 2012, visiting a range of professionals from Santiago de Cuba to Trinidad, including a violin maker and a dairy farm operator. Cost: $4,300 for members who pay a $35 annual fee.
Corcoran Gallery of Art & College of Art and Design, corcoran.org, plans to offer an eight-day trip in November, pending a license. The trip, led by Mario Ascencio, the museum’s library director, will explore the art scenes of Havana and Trinidad, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Guests will attend a cocktail reception at the Ludwig Foundation, which promotes Cuban contemporary artists, and meet local curators, artists and gallery owners. Cost: $3,700 a person, including round-trip airfare from Miami for guests who pay $60 for a museum membership.
Forgotten, but not gone
The New York Times has an editorial about slavery:
Anyone who thinks slavery ended with the Thirteenth Amendment is not paying attention. According to the latest State Department statistics, as many as one hundred thousand people in the United States are in bondage and perhaps 27 million people worldwide. The numbers are staggering.Rico says he could not agree more. While they're at it, they might want to think about abolishing marriage, too... (What? You don't think marriage is slavery? Do you know any married people?)
These victims of human trafficking are vulnerable men, women, or children coerced into servitude for sex or labor. They might be transported from Russia to Europe, from the Philippines to Dubai, or held in their hometown.
The stories are heartbreaking. The Cambodian girl sold to a brothel who was stabbed in the eye by the brothel’s owner when she fought back. The Middle Eastern woman hired as a domestic in London whose employers seized her passport and locked her away in the house. The teenager in Dallas forced into prostitution.
In 2000, the United States enacted an antitrafficking law and the United Nations adopted the Palermo Protocol. Both call for countries to criminalize trafficking, punish offenders, and provide shelter to victims.
In its 2011 trafficking report, the State Department concluded that last year only 32 of 184 countries fully complied with the standards set by the American law. The number on the list of the worst violators rose to 23 from 13. Two close United States allies, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, joined that list of shame.
There has been progress. In the last decade, 146 countries signed the protocol, and 128 of those passed laws banning human trafficking. That reflects a growing and encouraging acceptance of a problem once denied. There is still much to do. All nations should sign the protocol, pass tough national laws, and work vigorously to ensure their implementation. Abusers, including firms that hire trafficked employees, must be prosecuted, and victims protected. No human being should be enslaved.
Hem Day
A,E, Hotchner, the author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World, has an op-ed column today in The New York Times on the subject:
Early one morning, fifty years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.
There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life.
Ernest and I were friends for fourteen years. I dramatized many of his stories and novels for television specials and film, and we shared adventures in France, Italy, Cuba, and Spain, where, as a pretend matador with Ernest as my manager, I participated in a Ciudad Real bullfight. Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.
In 1959 Ernest had a contract with Life magazine to write about Spain’s reigning matadors, the brothers-in-law Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. He cabled me, urging me to join him for the tour. It was a glorious summer, and we celebrated Ernest’s sixtieth birthday with a party that lasted two days. But I remember it now as the last of the good times.
In May of 1960, Ernest phoned me from Cuba. He was uncharacteristically perturbed that the unfinished Life article had reached 92,453 words. The contract was for 40,000; he was having nightmares. A month later he called again. He had cut only five hundred words, he was exhausted and would it be an imposition to ask me to come to Cuba to help him?
I did, and over the next nine days I submitted list upon list of suggested cuts. At first he rejected them: “What I’ve written is Proustian in its cumulative effect, and if we eliminate detail we destroy that effect.” But, eventually, he grudgingly consented to cutting 54,916 words. He was resigned, surrendering, and said he would leave it to Life to cut the rest.
I got on the plane back to New York knowing my friend was “bone-tired and very beat-up”, but thinking he simply needed rest and would soon be his old dominating self again.
In November I went out West for our annual pheasant shoot and realized how wrong I was. When Ernest and our friend Duke MacMullen met my train at Shoshone, Idaho, for the drive to Ketchum, we did not stop at the bar opposite the station as we usually did, because Ernest was anxious to get on the road. I asked why the hurry.
“The feds.”
“What?”
“They tailed us all the way. Ask Duke.”
“Well, there was a car back of us out of Hailey.”
“Why are FBI agents pursuing you?” I asked.
“It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell. They’ve bugged everything. That’s why we’re using Duke’s car. Mine’s bugged. Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.”
We rode for miles in silence. As we turned into Ketchum, Ernest said quietly: “Duke, pull over. Cut your lights.” He peered across the street at a bank. Two men were working inside. “What is it?” I asked.
“Auditors. The FBI’s got them going over my account.”
“But how do you know?”
“Why would two auditors be working in the middle of the night? Of course it’s my account.”
All his friends were worried: he had changed; he was depressed; he wouldn’t hunt; he looked bad.
Ernest, Mary, and I went to dinner the night before I left. Halfway through the meal Ernest said we had to leave immediately. Mary asked what was wrong.
“Those two FBI agents at the bar, that’s what’s wrong.”
The next day Mary had a private talk with me. She was terribly distraught. Ernest spent hours every day with the manuscript of his Paris sketches, published as A Moveable Feast after his death, trying to write, but unable to do more than turn its pages. He often spoke of destroying himself and would sometimes stand at the gun rack, holding one of the guns, staring out the window.
On 30 November he was registered under an assumed name in the psychiatric section of St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota where, during December, he was given eleven electric shock treatments. In January he called me from outside his room. He sounded in control, but his voice held a heartiness that didn’t belong there ,and his delusions had not changed or diminished. His room was bugged, and the phone was tapped. He suspected that one of the interns was a fed.
During a short release he twice attempted suicide with a gun from the vestibule rack. On a flight to the Mayo Clinic, though heavily sedated, he tried to jump from the plane. When it stopped in Casper, Wyoming for repairs, he tried to walk into the moving propeller.
I visited him in June. He had been given a new series of shock treatments, but it was as before: the car bugged, his room bugged. I said it very gently: “Papa, why do you want to kill yourself?”
“What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?”
“But how can you say that? You have written a beautiful book about Paris, as beautiful as anyone can hope to write.”
“The best of that I wrote before. And now I can’t finish it.”
I told him to relax or even retire.
“Retire?” he said. “Unlike your baseball player and your prizefighter and your matador, how does a writer retire? No one accepts that his legs are shot or the whiplash gone from his reflexes. Everywhere he goes, he hears the same damn question: what are you working on?”
I told him he never cared about those dumb questions.
“What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them.” Then he turned on me. I was just like the others, pumping him for information and selling him out to the feds. After that day, I never saw him again.
This man, who had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid; afraid that the FBI was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option.
Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the FBI released its Hemingway file. It revealed that, beginning in the 1940s, J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.
In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.
I was in Rome the day he died. I did not go to Ketchum for the funeral. Instead I went to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, one of his favorite churches, and said goodbye to him there. I recalled a favorite dictum of his: man can be destroyed, but not defeated.
History for the day
01 July 2011
Don't mess with Texas; it's not just a phrase
Emanuella Grinberg has an article at CNN.com about Texas:
What does it mean to be a Texan? In the hearts and minds of many, Texas pride is summed up in four words that have adorned countless T-shirts and bumper stickers for nearly three decades: Don't mess with Texas.
To Mike Blair and Tim McClure, "Don't mess with Texas" will forever be the big hit of their careers, one that brought accolades and a few brushes with fame. They didn't invent the line for pride, though; at first, it was an anti-litter message. Blair and McClure were tasked in 1985 with devising a slogan for the Texas Department of Transportation's campaign to curb highway litter, which was costing the state roughly twenty million dollars a year to clean up.
Their target audience? Mostly "bubbas in pickup trucks", who were chucking beer cans and the like out their windows as well as the average Texan who felt that littering was his 'God-given' right, said McClure, a lifelong Texan from Corsicana and co-founder of the Austin-based GSD&M Advertising.
The ubiquitous line "Don't mess with Texas" is still used to discourage litter, and as a statement of Texas pride. The slogan first appeared on bumper stickers in 1985, before hitting the airwaves during the 1986 Cotton Bowl game. Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan played a rendition of The Eyes of Texas, ending with the simple utterance: Don't mess with Texas.
A series of two dozen television spots followed during the next dozen years, featuring various Texas musicians, thus giving birth to what has become the unofficial slogan of Texas pride and a milestone in marketing genius.
"The line became bigger than what the campaign was about. It was almost as much about the attitude of Texas and Texans at the time: the tough-talking, no-nonsense, go-about-our-business, get-things-done kind of attitude that has always been associated with Texans," said Blair, the executive vice president and creative director of GSD&M, who created the commercials in the first twelve years they ran.
"For us personally, there was a ton of satisfaction to know we created something that literally cleaned up the roads, and you could see the difference in the highways. It was just an absolute pleasure to have a part of something like that, to make the state cleaner, and I think a lot of people took pride in that."
McClure came up with the slogan in an eleventh-hour aha moment as he was taking a walk near his home, looking at the garbage, and recalling how his mother would tell him his room was a mess.
"It occurred to me that the only time I'd heard the word litter was in reference to dogs," he said. "Mess seemed like it would resonate better."
Initially, it was a tough sell to their clients in the Department of Transportation, a group of "buzz-cutted, conservative kind of characters" whose average age was about 107, the creators joked.
"The crowd was sprinkled with Keep America Beautiful and Keep Texas Beautiful folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males," McClure said. "The Keep Texas Beautiful lady said, 'Can we at least say please?' I said, 'No ma'am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it."
The pair got their way, and the rest is Texas-sized history. Between 1985 and 1997, the television spots featured contemporary icons of the day such as Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, and LeAnn Rimes. The spots were so popular that people began calling radio stations to request them and musicians were contacting McClure and Blair asking to appear in the ads.
"It was a life-changing experience really to be able to work with these kinds of people and have them appreciate what we were doing," Blair said. "Almost every single shoot went off without a hitch because people wanted to be there; they got what we were doing. All of these people were prideful Texans, others got here as fast as they could, as they say, so it was really a perfect storm, as we say in the advertising world."
The advertising world agreed in 2006 when it awarded the slogan a bronze plaque on the Advertising Week Walk of Fame on New York's Madison Avenue, choosing it over other memorable advertising memes such as Got Milk? and Nike's Just Do It.
The Department of Transportation continues to use the slogan under the stewardship of another advertising agency, currently to warn drivers of the dangers of pitching cigarette butts out the window, especially in a drought season.
The slogan will always resonate with Texans because it taps into what it means to be a Texan, the creators said. And what is that, exactly?
For Blair, it's spending summers as a teen on a dude ranch in Bandera, the cowboy capital of the state, waking up to the aromas of juniper bushes, mesquite trees, and cow manure.
For McClure, it's watching a huge star move across the skies above Houston one night and learning the next morning that what he'd seen was the Russian Sputnik, prompting the space race. "We never say we're from Houston or Austin. Every Texan, when they say where they're from, they'll say Texas," McClure said. "Texas is not only a state of mind, it's a state of heart, state of soul. There's a sense of bigger than life here. People here are tough and rugged, but know how to have a good time. They work hard but know how to have a good time, and I think they enjoy the very simplest of things in life."
Bad childhood equals a bad adulthood
CBS News has an article by Casey Glynn about a troubled young man now making trouble for others:
Upstate New York man Adam Croote, now accused of raping a ten-year-old girl, was the subject of a missing child case that received national attention in the 1990s, including getting his photograph taken with President Bill Clinton at the White House, authorities said. Croote has a troubled past that includes his father killing his mother, his abduction by his grandmother, and a sex crime conviction in Massachusetts.Rico says no photo, sorry; he's too ugly. But 'criminal obstruction of breathing'? That's a new one; perhaps they just could have said 'attempted strangling'...
The 23-year-old was charged with attacking a young girl he was babysitting at a home in Berne, near Albany, police said. He pleaded not guilty to attempted murder, rape, and other counts.
Croote reportedly knew the girl's family, and they asked if he could watch the child after she arrived home from school Monday afternoon. He is accused of raping the girl and trying to strangle her and break her neck after she screamed, police said. The girl, who managed to break free and escape the house, was treated at a hospital and released according to the Times Union of Albany.
Croote was convicted previously of forcible sexual contact in an incident with a female school employee while in Massachusetts in 2005.
When Croote was two-years-old his father, an army soldier, shot and killed Adam's pregnant mother and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
In 1992, Croote's maternal grandmother abducted him from his other grandmother, who was living at the time near Albany. The maternal grandmother, Margaret Zibura, and her husband, Frank, lived under assumed names with the boy for three years in Mildred, Kansas. The couple was arrested by the FBI in 1995.
At age 7 in 1996, he was photographed with President Clinton at the signing of an executive order to set aside space in every federal building for posting pictures of missing children.
Croote was being held Thursday without bail at the Albany County Jail on charges of attempted second-degree murder, rape, criminal sexual acts, sexual abuse, forcible touching, and criminal obstruction of breathing.
Don't try this yourself
Rico says that, just because this idiot got lucky, it doesn't mean you will (and you'll likely go to jail)...
Marching in Hama
Anthony Shadid has an article in The New York Times about Syria:
In what may mark a decisive turn in nearly four months of unrest, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the central city of Hama for what activists called the country’s biggest demonstration so far, returning the city that bore the brunt of a ferocious government crackdown a generation ago to the forefront of rebellion.Rico says remember when Latakia was known for tobacco?
Estimates of the crowd were difficult to verify, and activists have sometimes exaggerated the turnout in protests challenging more than four decades of rule by the Assad family. But the scenes of protesters pouring into a central square in the city, captured by activists and circulated on the Internet and Arab satellite channels, seemed to signal a new stage in an uprising that has so far only aspired to rival the mass protests that ousted authoritarian leaders in Egypt and Tunisia.
“Leave! Leave!” protesters chanted to a hip-hop beat.
After weeks of protests and crackdown, the uprising in Syria appears to have taken a compelling, if ambiguous turn. Diplomats speak of a stalemate, as neither protesters nor officials seem capable of mustering the strength to end the struggle on their terms. But new dynamics have emerged, as the opposition gathered in a rare meeting in Damascus this week, government officials have promised reform and protesters, in Hama in particular, have demonstrated a resilience that may prove impossible to break.
“It’s a challenge,” said a nurse and activist in the city, who gave his name as Abu Abdo. “Hama is swelling the tide of protests for the rest of Syria.” The military and security forces withdrew last month from the city, where a government crackdown in 1982 made its name synonymous with the brutality of the Syrian leadership. Since then, protests have gathered momentum. Each night, youths have converged on Aasi Square, which they have renamed Freedom Square. On successive Fridays, crowds have grown bigger, surpassing ten thousand last week, diplomats say.
Friday’s scenes were even more festive; one resident compared it to a carnival. Speakers climbed on cars and delivered speeches, slogans, and songs, they said. Others distributed water, falafel sandwiches, and bananas to the crowds on a hot summer day. “We didn’t even see a policeman,” said a 35-year-old opposition leader there who gave his first name as Mazen. “If the government pulls out all its security men from the streets on Friday, I can say that all cities will have as big demonstrations as Hama.”
Residents said protesters joined the rally Friday from the countryside, unimpeded by checkpoints that had existed only weeks before. In Hama itself, even the traffic policemen were gone. They said that after the rally, protesters picked up trash and cleaned the square, a scene redolent of Tahrir Square in Cairo in February, where demonstrators spoke of a new notion of citizenship as an old authoritarian order crumbled.
“The numbers are so intense in Hama,” said Omar Idlibi, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees, which have sought to represent the protesters.
Diplomats, activists, and Syrian officials have differed on the government’s strategy in Hama: whether the departure points to a government attempt to avoid casualties or to a military and security forces that are exhausted and overstretched. Syrian officials have pointed to Hama as evidence that one of the region’s most repressive governments can tolerate peaceful dissent, and suggested it is part of a new government approach to embrace what a Syrian diplomat called “much-needed reform”.
“In the city of Hama, people have been demonstrating in public places for two weeks without any incident, because they expressed their political viewpoints peacefully,” Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to the United States, wrote in a letter this week to the Syrian-American community that was circulated by email.
Residents there, though, have spoken in more jubilant terms, celebrating the departure of the military and security forces as a victory. Though the military and security forces have withdrawn from other towns and cities only to return in force, the size of the crowds Friday suggested that a renewed crackdown could only come at a very high cost. Hama carries symbolic significance, too: in the culmination of a struggle between an armed Islamist opposition and the government in 1982, the military stormed Hama, the country’s fourth-largest city, killing ten thousand people or more.
“The regime showed more restraint there because of the sensitivities and the symbolism of Hama,” said Peter Harling, a Damascus-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. “There was a desire on the part of the regime to contain this.”
While officials have ceded territory to the protesters, their administration appears to still function in Hama; a pro-government rally was organized there last month. But the psychological impact of a security apparatus that vanished in days has reverberated through a predominantly Sunni Muslim city still scarred by the events of 1982. “Oh, youth of Damascus,” went a chant shouted this week by youthful protesters in Aasi Square, “we’re in Hama and we’ve toppled the regime.”
“This regime doesn’t want to create a problem in Hama,” said Omar al-Habbal, a 57-year-old civil engineer there. “They don’t want to blow up an explosive situation.”
Large crowds were also reported in the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, from which the military withdrew to the outskirts last month. The military and security forces have also withdrawn from Abu Kamal, on the Iraqi border, and some Damascus suburbs. “As soon as the security forces pull out, the protests increase,” Mr. Idlibi said.
Syrian state television broadcast images of pro-government rallies in Damascus and Aleppo and, despite the scenes in Hama, the government still draws on substantial support, particularly among minorities, the middle class, and the business elite.
As in past weeks, violence erupted in several locales across the country, though the death toll was lower than past weeks. In Homs, a city to the south of Hama that has emerged as a nexus of the uprising. Mr. Idlibi said security forces killed three people, and residents said the military deployed armored vehicles into some neighborhoods. “You took our loaf of bread,” a resident there quoted protesters as chanting. “When we asked for it back, you fired at us instead.” Others shouted, “Leave!”
Syrian state television said that armed men in Homs fired on crowds and security forces, killing a civilian and a policeman. It also reported that armed men cut the road in a Damascus suburb and that in an exchange of fire with the gunmen, a civilian was killed. It was almost impossible to reconcile the discrepancy in the different accounts.
Throughout the uprising, the Syrian government has blamed most of the deaths on an armed uprising, and, indeed, diplomats have said there is evidence of armed opponents across Syria. But those diplomats and the protesters themselves contend that a clear majority of the demonstrations have remained peaceful and largely spontaneous.
Mr. Idlibi said security forces also killed three people in Idlib, a restive province in northwestern Syria, two in the capital’s suburbs and one in Latakia, on the coast.
Making Ohio dangerous
Rico says he doesn't know if it will be more or less dangerous, but Stephen Spencer Davis has a Slate article about changes in the law there:
Because nothing goes better than guns and crowded places, Ohio’s Republican Governor John Kasich signed a bill that will allow gun owners to carry concealed firearms into bars and other places where alcohol is served. Reuters reports that gun owners will now be permitted to carry concealed handguns into licensed establishments, including shopping malls and sporting venues. The law prohibits gun owners from consuming alcohol or being intoxicated when they carry their weapons into bars. This is probably a good idea.
Businesses retain the right to ban concealed weapons if they choose. The Cincinnati Bengals have indicated that they will prohibit spectators from bringing firearms to the stadium, which is also probably a good idea, given how depressed Bengals fans normally get right around the second week of the regular season.
The law also permits gun owners with concealed carry licenses to transport loaded handguns in motor vehicles without securing them.
Meanwhile, a law allowing Wyomingites to carry concealed firearms without a permit goes into effect Friday, the Billings Gazette reports. Wyoming joins Alaska, Arizona, and Vermont in allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns without undergoing background checks or firearms training, according to the Gazette.
Not that Rico cares...
Josh Voohees has an article at The Slatest about the NBA lockout:
Updated Friday at 9:55 a.m.: As promised, it's official. NBA owners locked out the players at 12:01 a.m., throwing next year's season into jeopardy.Rico says that, of all the sports he cares little about, basketball is the least of them... (Though he has friends and family who will, undoubtedly, miss it.)
We hope everyone likes NHL hockey, because next fall that may be the only major professional sport on American television.
NBA owners are set to lock out their players at midnight, after the two sides were unable to reach a new collective bargaining agreement. (NFL owners, likewise, locked out their players earlier this year, putting professional football's upcoming season in jeopardy.) The soon-to-be-official NBA lockout will mean that all league business is officially on hold, beginning with the free agency period that was set to open on Friday.
If history is any guide, a portion of the next regular season could also be lost: the last NBA lockout cut the league's 1998-99 regular season down to fifty games,from the usual 82.
The New York Times has more on the sticking points:
There is little hope for a speedy resolution this time, with owners seeking a major overhaul of the league’s economic system and players resisting any significant changes. The parties have hardly moved from their positions in the last 18 months of talks. Owners are insisting on a hard salary cap, shorter contracts and up to a 38 percent reduction in player salaries — which would represent the most dramatic changes to the system since the league first adopted the so-called soft salary cap in 1984.
Soon, the Fourth
Civil War for the day
Who ya gonna believe?
The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse. Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself. Since her initial allegation on 14 May, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said.
Senior prosecutors recently met with lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn and provided details about their findings, and the parties are discussing whether to dismiss the felony charges. Among the discoveries, one of the officials said, are issues involving the asylum application of the 32-year-old housekeeper, who is Guinean, and possible links to people involved in criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers will return to State Supreme Court in Manhattan today, when Justice Michael J. Obus is expected to consider easing the extraordinary bail conditions that he imposed on Mr. Strauss-Kahn in the days after he was charged. Indeed, Mr. Strauss-Kahn could be released on his own recognizance, and freed from house arrest, reflecting the likelihood that the serious charges against him will not be sustained. The district attorney’s office may try to require Mr. Strauss-Kahn to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, but his lawyers are likely to contest such a move. The revelations are a stunning change of fortune for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, who was considered a strong contender for the French presidency before being accused of sexually assaulting the woman who went to clean his luxury suite at the Sofitel New York.
A lawyer for the woman, Kenneth P. Thompson, in an email message, did not offer a direct rebuttal to the allegations. “Nothing changes one very important fact, namely, that Dominique Strauss-Kahn violently sexually assaulted the victim inside of that hotel room at the Sofitel,” he said.
Prosecutors from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who initially were emphatic about the strength of the case and the account of the victim, plan to tell the judge that they “have problems with the case” based on what their investigators have discovered, and will disclose more of their findings to the defense. The woman still maintains that she was attacked, the officials said. “It is a mess, a mess on both sides,” one official said.
According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded. That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing four hundred pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York, and Pennsylvania.
The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits, except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends.
In addition, one of the officials said, she told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.
In recent weeks, Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers, Benjamin Brafman and William W. Taylor III, have made it clear that they would make the credibility of the woman a focus of their case. In a 25 May letter, they said they had uncovered information that would “gravely undermine the credibility” of the accuser. Still, it was the prosecutor’s investigators who found the information about the woman.
The case involving Mr. Strauss-Kahn has made international headlines and renewed attention on accusations that he had behaved inappropriately toward women in the past, while, more broadly, prompting soul-searching among the French about the treatment of women. The revelations about the investigators’ findings are likely to buttress the view of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s supporters, who complained that the American authorities had rushed to judgment in the case. Some of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s allies even contended that he had been set up by his political rivals, an assertion that law enforcement authorities said there was no evidence to support.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn resigned from his post as managing director of the International Monetary Fund in the wake of the housekeeper’s accusations, and was required to post $1 million bail and a $5 million bond.
He also agreed to remain under 24-hour home confinement while wearing an ankle monitor and providing a security team and an armed guard at the entrance and exit of the building where he was living. The conditions are costing Mr. Strauss-Kahn $250,000 a month.
Prosecutors had sought the restrictive conditions in part by arguing that the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn was a strong one, citing a number of factors, including the credibility of his accuser, with one prosecutor saying her story was “compelling and unwavering”.
In the weeks after making her accusations, the woman, who arrived in the United States from Guinea in 2002, was described by relatives and friends as an unassuming and hard-working immigrant with a teenage daughter. She had no criminal record, and had been a housekeeper at the Sofitel for a few years, they said.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn was such a pariah in the initial days after the arrest that neighbors of an Upper East Side apartment building objected when he and his wife tried to rent a unit there. He eventually rented a three-story town house on Franklin Street in TriBeCa.
Under the relaxed conditions of bail to be requested on Friday, the district attorney’s office would retain Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s passport, but he would be permitted to travel within the United States.
The woman told the authorities that she had gone to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s suite to clean it and that he emerged naked from the bathroom and attacked her. The formal charges accused him of ripping her pantyhose, trying to rape her, and forcing her to perform oral sex; his lawyers say there is no evidence of force, and have suggested that any sex was consensual.
After the indictment was filed, Mr. Vance spoke briefly on the courthouse steps addressing hundreds of local and foreign reporters who had been camped out in front of the imposing stone edifice. He characterized the charges as “extremely serious” and said the “evidence supports the commission of nonconsensual forced sexual acts”. Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers, Mr. Brafman and Mr. Taylor, declined to comment.
The case was not scheduled to return to court until July 18. as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.
What a surprise... (Not)
Prominent American and European investment funds managed hundreds of millions of dollars in Qaddafi regime assets poorly, charging tens of millions of dollars in fees and producing low returns, according to a document obtained by the advocacy group Global Witness. The banks appeared to have taken advantage of a Libyan investment fund that was poorly managed and "a mess", according to a western official who spoke on condition of anonymity.Rico says, no, that's not Qaddafi's money burning, but it might as well be...
The document, a September 2010 summary of Libyan Investment Authority assets, showed poor performance by European and American money managers and a Libyan with close ties to the Qaddafi regime. Libyan Investment Authority officials complained that a $1.7 billion investment they made in six different funds generated returns far below the industry benchmark. “To date, we have paid in excess of eighteen million dollars in fees, for losing us thirty million dollars,” the report says at one point, referring to a fund reportedly managed by the son-in-law of the head of Libya’s state oil company.
The report, prepared by the London office of the consulting firm KPMG, shows that a three hundred million dollar Libyan investment in Permal, a hedge fund that is a unit of the Baltimore-based Legg Mason, lost forty percent of its value from January 2009 to September 2010. At the same time, Permal received $27 million in fees. “Consistently negative performance since inception,” Libyan officials said in the report. “Very high fees for no value.”
The Libyans voiced similar complaints about investments in funds managed by European firms that also lost value. Despite producing low returns, the Dutch firm Palladyne received nineteen million dollars in fees, the French bank BNP Paribas earned eighteen million dollars, Credit Suisse took almost eight million dollars and the Swiss firm Notz Stucki had five million dollars. KPMG analysts also warned that the Libyan Authority’s investment in such funds was too high compared with other types of investments. Representatives for the firms declined to respond publicly or could not be reached for comment. KPMG declined to comment, but The New York Times was able to independently verify the document’s authenticity.
An official at one firm criticized in the report, who spoke anonymously, blamed the poor investments on middlemen and denied that the firm had received high fees. “It’s not as straightforward a picture as it perhaps should be,” the official said.
In 2008, Goldman Sachs lost more than one billion dollars in Libyan Investment Authority money in currency and other trading, The Wall Street Journal reported in May. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether an offer by Goldman to pay a fifty million dollar fee as part of a package to help the fund recoup its losses violated American bribery laws. Goldman has denied any wrongdoing and declined to comment.
Doing business with Libya was legal for American companies from 2004 to 2011. American banks, oil companies, and construction companies rushed to do business in Libya after Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi renounced terrorism and halted his attempt to develop nuclear weapons and the Bush administration lifted sanctions in 2004. The Obama administration reimposed sanctions in February after the Qaddafi regime began brutally repressing an uprising in the country.
The creation of the Libyan Investment Authority in 2006 set off a frenzy in banking circles. Leading financial firms scrambled for the opportunity to manage the authority’s forty billion dollars in assets. Managing the sovereign wealth funds for oil-rich states— some of which are authoritarian— is an enormous business for Western banks. For example, the Libyan Investment Authority’s total assets grew by ten billion dollars over three months, to $64 billion in September of 2010 from $54 billion in June, according to the newly released document. The document also showed that the British bank HSBC became the Qaddafi regime’s largest Western banking partner in September of 2010, receiving $1.4 billion in Libyan money. The document showed that the amount of Libyan state oil money managed by HSBC soared to $1.42 billion in September of 2010 from $282 million in June of 2010. The document also corroborated a document leaked by Global Witness in May showing that Goldman Sachs managed about $45 million and JPMorgan Chase about $173 million for the Libyan regime in 2010. Société Générale and other European banks also helped the Qaddafi regime manage oil proceeds.
Under current American and British law, the business relationships between sovereign wealth funds and Western banks can be kept secret. In a statement, Global Witness called for such dealings to be made public, so that citizens of oil-rich and Western countries could understand what was taking place. “Banking secrecy laws still mean that citizens are left in the dark about how their own state’s funds are managed,” said Robert Palmer, a campaigner at Global Witness. “We can’t continue with a situation where information about how a state handles its assets is only made available once a dictator turns violently on his own people and information is leaked.”
Evidence of cronyism appears in the report as well. The state fund invested $300 million in a Palladyne fund managed by the son-in-law of the head of Libya’s state oil company, according to The Wall Street Journal. Forty-five percent of the $300 million investment was held in cash, the report said. In addition to losing $30 million while charging $18 million in fees, the fund performed 39 percent below a worldwide index of similar funds.
The Brits kick in
David Jolly has an article in The New York Times about Britain and Libya:
Britain is providing limited assistance to the Libyan rebels fighting the forces of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, including protective clothing for police officers, Foreign Secretary William Hague has said, a day after France acknowledged providing light weapons to the rebels.
The British military has furnished five thousand sets of body armor, over six thousand police uniforms, and five thousand high visibility vests and t-shirts, Foreign Minister William Hague said in a written statement to Parliament, adding that the supply of such equipment was “fully in line” with United Nations resolutions governing arms embargoes. “This equipment will enable the civilian police to carry out their functions more securely and better protect National Transitional Council representatives and the significant international and NGO communities in Benghazi, Misurata, and other areas of Libya,” Mr. Hague said.
A spokesman in Paris said the French military had recently provided the rebels with arms and ammunition, including assault rifles, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, the first Western government to acknowledge having done so. The aid, which was delivered along with food and medicines, did not include heavy weapons, he said, and was appropriate for civilians to use in self-defense.
With a “no-boots-on-the-ground policy” in Libya, the French, British, and United States governments are hoping that the rebels, with the aid of alliance airstrikes, will be able to topple the Qaddafi government. The British government said that it believes shipping arms to the rebels would be legal in some cases, a Foreign Office spokesman said, but is not doing so now. “We do think the United Nations resolutions allow in certain limited circumstances defensive weapons to be provided,” said the spokesman, who cannot be identified in line with government rules. “But the United Kingdom is not engaged in that. Other countries will interpret the resolution in their own way.”
Whitey, squeal? Of course he'll squeal
Michael Cooper and Richard Oppel have an article in The New York Times about Whitey Bulger:
During the sixteen years that James 'Whitey' Bulger spent on the lam, several of his former partners in crime testified that he had made payoffs to two dozen Boston police officers and half a dozen FBI agents over his long criminal career, giving them thousands of dollars and rings, a Meerschaum pipe and Lalique glass. But few lawmen— with the notable exception of John Connolly, his longtime handler at the FBI— were ever convicted of corruption.
Now that he is back in custody after his capture last week in Santa Monica, California, the looming question is whether Mr. Bulger, a longtime informant who fed information about his rivals to the FBI for years, in return for their protection, will squeal again.
“I think there are a whole bunch of people out there he could probably name” who are worried what he might say, said Robert Fitzpatrick, who was an assistant special agent in charge of the Boston office of the FBI in the 1980s, and who has testified that he tried, unsuccessfully, to end Mr. Bulger’s run as an informant.
The Bulger saga has been explored in trials, Congressional hearings, reams of newsprint, and a shelf of books. But a review in recent days of hundreds of pages of trial transcripts and court decisions, along with interviews with several former law enforcement officials and lawyers connected with the case, shows that, despite all the scrutiny, there has never been a full official reckoning of the public corruption that allowed Mr. Bulger to thrive. His partners have testified that former FBI agents were on the take, and named names, but in many cases, the agents simply denied it and nothing happened. A report promised years ago by a special prosecutor was never issued. It is unclear even now whether the government wants to reopen old wounds.
“It’s not always just the guy pulling the trigger who is guilty,” said Tom Foley, a retired state police commander who pursued Mr. Bulger with Ahab-like intensity for years, only to see him elude capture thanks to help from his FBI friends. “It’s also the people who set that up and allowed it to happen, and especially the people who had a responsibility to put a stop to it.”
Even if Mr. Bulger, 81, decides to talk, it is not clear that he has much to bargain with: he stands accused of nineteen murders, and some of his closest associates have implicated him. The statute of limitations has passed for most crimes he could talk about, and most former investigators are retired or dead. But former FBI agents and lawyers connected to the case say that Mr. Bulger may decide that he wants to settle a few scores.
For much of the 1980s, he turned the world of Boston law enforcement upside down. The
considered him and his partner Stephen (the Rifleman) Flemmi “top echelon” informants, but the pair seemed to get more from the bureau than they gave. Federal agents helped them by locking up rivals, protected them from other investigators, and tipped them off when witnesses threatened to implicate them. Those would-be witnesses quickly wound up dead, sometimes with their teeth removed to make it harder to identify the bodies.
In those days it was not just the lawmen who referred to the gangsters with colorful nicknames like Whitey and the Rifleman. Mr. Bulger had his own nicknames for the FBI agents he wined and dined and used, associates testified: Zip, Agent Orange, The Pipe, Doc, and Vino.
John Connolly was the FBI agent who handled both Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi, using their information to build high-profile cases against the Mafia. Mr. Bulger called him Zip because they came from the same South Boston housing project and had shared a ZIP code. But Mr. Connolly grew too close to his source. He was convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice in 2002, in part for tipping Mr. Bulger off in 1994 when he was finally about to be indicted. Then he was convicted of second-degree murder in 2008, for warning Mr. Bulger in 1982 that a man named John Callahan was likely to implicate him in several murders connected with an attempt to profit from World Jai Alai, a company with frontons in Connecticut and Florida. Mr. Callahan’s body was found in the trunk of a car at Miami International Airport, after an attendant noticed blood dripping from it.
A lawyer for Mr. Connolly, James E. McDonald, said that Mr. Bulger’s capture could stir things up. “If I were the Department of Justice prosecutors, I’d be nervous, because if Bulger starts to talk, the whole edifice they have created about John being the corrupt agent will have holes you could drive a truck through,” he said.
Mr. Connolly did not act alone. His supervisor at the FBI, John Morris, called Vino, admitted to taking $7,000 in bribes from Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi, beginning when he asked them to pay for his mistress to fly to a training session he was attending in Georgia. Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi took to calling him Vino after a 1981 dinner at the Hotel Colonnade in Boston, where he drank a great deal of wine. They later sent him a case, with $1,000 in it. But Mr. Morris was granted immunity when he agreed to cooperate with the government. Still, he may have the most to fear. Mr. Morris admitted that in 1988 he leaked information to the The Boston Globe, which has long done ground-breaking reporting on the Bulger saga, that Mr. Bulger was an FBI informant. His lawyer, Michael A. Collora, said that Mr. Morris did so in the hopes that exposing the troubled relationship would end it. But Mr. Bulger’s brother William M. Bulger, a former president of the Massachusetts State Senate, saw a more sinister motive. He testified before Congress in 2003 that the leak’s purpose was “bringing about the death of James Bulger”.
After Whitey Bulger became a fugitive, he called Mr. Morris with a threat: he vowed to take Mr. Morris with him if he went down. But Mr. Collora noted in an interview this week that Mr. Morris, who he said worked part-time at a wine store, had already admitted wrongdoing and had been granted immunity. The statute of limitations has run its course for most crimes, he said, and there are serious questions about what kind of witness Mr. Bulger would make. “A situation where you have a man who’s been on the lam for sixteen years, who says now I’ll help you out, even though he’s done nineteen murders?” he asked.
One memo that has received little scrutiny shows how officials in Washington were warned that the FBI’s Boston office was too close to Mr. Bulger. It was written in 1982, after the jai alai murders were linked to Mr. Bulger’s group, known as the Winter Hill Gang. An agent in the Miami office warned officials in Washington that local investigators were cutting the FBI out of the loop, in part because they believed “that some agents in the Boston FBI would not pursue allegations against the Winter Hill Gang vigorously.” Sean M. McWeeney, who was in charge of the bureau’s organized crime section, wrote that he held meetings in Washington and Tulsa, Oklahoma to reassure local investigators. It took two decades for the full story to get out, including Mr. Connolly’s role in the murders.
John McIntyre was another witness who never made it to the stand. He was a 32-year-old fisherman who agreed to cooperate with investigators in 1984 about Mr. Bulger’s involvement in drug and gun shipments. Tipped that there was an informer, Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi chained Mr. McIntyre to a chair and made him confess. They then tried to strangle him with a rope and, when that did not work, Mr. Flemmi testified, they shot him and removed his teeth.
A federal judge awarded Mr. McIntyre’s estate $3.1 million, finding that the federal government was liable for his death, because Mr. Connolly had leaked Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi enough information for them to identify him as an informer. Steven Gordon, the Concord, New Hampshire lawyer who represented the estate, said the government’s defense showed a continued refusal to come clean. “They allowed a whole city to come under siege,” he said.
When Mr. Bulger fled, some joked that he should be on the FBI’s Least Wanted list. In a 1999 ruling after hearings that helped expose the FBI’s dealings with Mr. Bulger, a Federal District Court judge, Mark L. Wolf, cited evidence that “raises questions concerning whether the FBI has consistently made its best efforts to apprehend” him. He noted that agents waited fifteen months before approaching Theresa Stanley, the first girlfriend Mr. Bulger fled with, who returned to Boston in 1995 because she disliked life on the road. Judge Wolf began his decision with a quotation by Lord Acton, who wrote, in 1861, that “every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. This case,” the judge wrote, “demonstrates that he was right.”
Not the kind of weed we were looking for
Richard Mabey, author of Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants, has an op-ed column in The New York Times about ancient British subversion:
As the United States celebrates the Fourth of July, perhaps we English finally should let you in on a little secret. You didn’t quite win total independence: we left behind a covert occupation force, in the shape of our weeds, which rapidly became your weeds, pesky and persistent.Rico says he hates weeds with the best of them (and will be out later, pulling them), and now he has yet another reason to be pissed off at the Brits...
They came as stowaways in those first shiploads of cattle and seed corn and none-too-hygienic European settlers. The New World’s ancient landscapes, unused to gung-ho farmers and trampling cattle, didn’t stand a chance. As East Coast forests were cleared, a riot of foreign weeds— dandelion, groundsel, dock— took over, promptly followed by European grasses. It came as a shock to me to discover that Kentucky bluegrass— which I’d thought as American as the haze over the Appalachians— was none other than our backyard meadow grass, which assuredly never looks blue under our gray skies.
While we’re at it, I should apologize for Charles Darwin, who made a joke in rather poor taste at the expense of his friend the American botanist Asa Gray. “Does it not hurt your Yankee pride,” he asked, “that we thrash you so confoundedly? I am sure Mrs. Gray will stick up for your weeds. Ask her if they are not a more honest, downright good sort of weeds.” (Mrs. Gray’s reply was impeccable: American weeds, she said, were “modest, woodland, retiring things; and no match for the intrusive, pretentious, self-asserting foreigners.”)
But this intrusive colonialism is, of course, the weeds’ way. They wouldn’t be the plants they are if they were not assertive, hugely adaptable, cosmopolitan. They’ve tagged onto the coattails of global trade, agricultural adventure, and gardening fashion, so that there is no real sense in which a weed can be said anymore to “belong” to any one nation. They are citizens of the world or, at least, of the world of frenzied environmental disturbance that humans spin around themselves. I find it oddly comforting to see familiar home weeds like bindweed and bracken in Manhattan back lots. Perhaps Americans feel similarly pleased to find North American fleabane (whose seeds are thought to have ended up in Europe inside a stuffed bird) flourishing on the stonework around the Bank of England. The commonest city weeds are now virtually identical across the planet. They seem to have the botanical right stuff for urban environments: streetwise and opportunistic, resilient fillers of metropolitan dead spaces.
But it would be stretching our “special relationship” too far to suggest that our shared weeds make up a kind of agreeable green commonwealth. Vagabond plants can change their behavior dramatically when taken away from their native habitats, and all their traditional predators and constraints. In Britain, the magenta sprays of purple loosestrife have made it one of our best-loved riverside flowers. It’s elegant and well behaved and knows its place. It figures in the margins of John Everett Millais’s unforgettable painting of a floating Ophelia, Hamlet’s rejected love interest, before she drowns. But it was inadvertently introduced to United States shorelines with dumped ships’ ballast in the early nineteenth century, and has become quite a different character, monolithic and invasive.
This is not, of course, the fault of the weeds. From the Japanese knotweed that jumped the walls of big country houses to become Britain’s most notorious plant demon, to the casually-ditched aquarium plants now suffocating Florida’s lakes and rivers, we create our own weed nuisances. This has been true since the very beginnings of civilization. We’ve opened opportunities for a whole range of adaptable plant species to gate-crash our ordered lives by the reckless way we treat the earth. It’s time, I think, for a new perspective on them, for a curiosity about why they are there, and a more critical view of our own role in their fortunes.
And it’s here, I feel, that American attitudes toward weeds have a lot to teach us Europeans. I learned the strict protocol of poison ivy recognition and respect from a farmer in Maryland, a mantra for which there is no equivalent for any of our toxic weeds. I’ve enjoyed the conspiracy theories and black jokes about kudzu vine in the South. (“Shut your windows at night.”) I give thanks for Thoreau’s 'Bean-Field' essay in Walden, the best literary defense of the ecological role of weeds. And for the incomparable Euell Gibbons, whose books revived weed foraging in Britain. All these approaches seem to me to accept that weeds are part of creation too, and that we need to find a way of living with them.
Bye-bye, Union Jack, hello Red
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
