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The San Juan Weeekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

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The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Puerto Ricans Killed Annually

by Cargoship Toxic Fumes T

he air quality in and around the Port of San Juan is among the poorest in EPA Region 2, an area that also encompasses all of New York and New Jersey. A key factor is the sulfur emissions of vessels. Sulfur dioxide is a toxic, corrosive gas that causes chemical burns and damages the respiratory tract. Sulfur pollutants in fuels results in and coincides with particulate matter and overall cleanliness. For this reason, the sulfur content of gasoline and most fuels sold in Puerto Rico is legally limited to no more than 15 parts per million. It’s not hard to wrap your head around why sulfur pollutants must be controlled. What is hard to understand is why regulators are lax in controlling vessel sulfur emissions that are linked to 60,000 annual deaths worldwide.

Most ocean-going vessels use residual fuel, an unrefined leftover after distilled fuels are extracted from crude oil, with a typical sulfur content of 35,000 parts per million. The high sulfur content of this residual fuel makes shipping one of the biggest sources of sulfur pollution. In many coastal areas, vessels account for the

majority of total sulfur emissions. A striking perspective is that the seven old steamships moving containers between the mainland and Puerto Rico emit more sulfur effecting Puerto Rico than all of the cars in Puerto R ico.

Over the years other fuels got cleaner, and so with no change in dirty vessel fuel the pollutants coming from ship smokestacks grew as a percent of the total. Regulating fuel used in international waters has been difficult and the issue wasn’t broadly addressed until a few years ago. The impetus for change was a study by leading experts linking dirty vessel fuel with 60,000 annual deaths worldwide and projecting deaths would increase to 84,000 by 2012.

Most important, the study indicated that the mortality effect would decline proportionate with improved vessel fuel cleanliness.

Armed with new facts that arguably make dirty vessel emissions the biggest remedial environmental issue most people have probably never heard of, the International Maritime Organization, a U.N. body regulating shipping worldwide,

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Exquisite Cuisine in an Oppulent Setting mandated a phase-in of cleaner vessel fuel as measured by sulfur content. The new regulations culminate with all vessels using fuel with no more than 1,000 parts per million of sulfur by 2020. The phase-in will begin in designated emission control areas in 2015.

The EPA proposed and the IMO approved an emission control area extending 200 miles from the U.S. mainland. More recently the EPA proposed an emission control area generally extending 50 miles from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands which has received preliminary approval by the IMO. Inexplicitly, the EPA has just proposed a change that cancels out much of the benefits from the Puerto Rico emission control area by having the new IMO standards not apply to steam powered vessels until 2020. Saying they make up “a fraction of a percent of the world fleet”, the EPA erroneously considers the impact inconsequential. The EPA is wrong and the impact on Puerto Rico is anything but inconsequential. The frequent and short voyages of steamships serving Puerto Rico have much of their sulfur emissions occurring within designated emission control areas. By one estimate, the seven steam-powered container vessels serving Puerto Rico emit 46% of the sulfur in the emission control areas and if the steamship waiver is approved there will be no reduction in their toxic pollution.

The filth of this fuel is compounded by the relative fuel inefficiency of these old steamships. The sulfur emissions within the emission control areas from each of these vessels can be linked with 16 deaths every year. The EPA’s proposed steamship waiver will adversely affect Puerto Rico more than any area because of the high concentration of old steamships. The EPA’s proposed steamship waiver will reward the most toxic vessels afloat and allow them to continue to pollute Puerto Rico for another decade. The EPA should be challenged on a nonsensical proposal that will have such a disproportionately adverse affect on Puerto Rico. .

In fact, given the adverse effect of vessel sulfur emissions on Puerto Rico’s air quality, it is shipping companies that use cleaner fuel ahead of the mandated dates that should be rewarded with additional business by environmentally responsible corporations. This market based approach could clean up vessel fuel much quicker than the IMO timeline. Greater awareness related

to the effect of vessel sulfur emissions is the main ingredient needed for a market based solution to take hold.

What are the sulfur emissions of the shipping companies you do business with?

How do they compare to other shipping companies? There are some shipping companies whose vessels already use fuel with a sulfur content of no more than 15 parts per million. All vessels can readily use this cleaner fuel. The air quality in Puerto Rico would improve markedly if companies using shipping services moved their containers on carriers that already use cleaner fuel or require their carriers to switch to cleaner fuel, regardless of the IMO regulations. Companies that use shipping services which go beyond the mandated fuel standards may find this fits well with their policies and enhances relationships with stakeholders. Given the new information on the toxic effect of vessel sulfur emissions, it’s hard to see leading Puerto Rico companies not incorporating this factor into their decision making process.

The new IMO fuel standards should be the outside point in terms of both timeline and cleanliness factor for vessels serving Puerto Rico. With corporations telling shipping companies and individuals telling corporations that cleaner fuel matters, the market can shorten the timeline and lower the cleanliness factor, resulting in an immediate and sharp improvement in San Juan’s air quality. Delay translates into hundreds of needless Puerto Rican deaths.

This environmental issue is a no-brainer.

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The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

“There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom”

By Kenneth D. McClintock

T

hose words spoken many decades ago by Martin Luther King as the people of Ghana acquired freedom as they unshackled themselves from colonialism are words that President Obama has used* to describe the change taking place in Egypt.

It is a spirit that must develop in Puerto Rico to unshackle America’s citizens in Puerto Rico from the lack of freedoms that prevent them from participating in the election of their national government, be it that of an independent nation, or the United States national government, ruled by a President in whose election residents of Puerto Rico do not participate, governed by a Congress in which they lack voting representation, and whose laws are interpreted by a Judiciary whose members are nominated and confirmed with no say from Puerto Rico.

After the Puerto Rico Democracy Act, passed by a solid bipartisan margin in the House, died in the United States Senate, the burial ground of so many of Puerto Rico’s past hopes, our best hope now is what President Obama’s upcoming Puerto Rico report may say about status and what action our local government will take to allow 3.7 million American citizens to express themselves about their future.

A process must be put in place for our people’s cry for freedom to be channeled through the ballot box and not in the streets, as the lack of democracy in Egypt forced that people to do.

Remarks by Obama On Egypt

T

HE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place.

This is one of those moments. This is one of those times. The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same.

By stepping down, President Mubarak responded to the Egyptian people’s hunger for change. But this is not the end of Egypt’s transition. It’s a beginning. I’m sure there will be difficult days ahead, and many questions remain unanswered. But I am confident that the people of Egypt can find the answers, and do so peacefully, constructively, and in the spirit of unity that has defined these last few weeks. For Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.

The military has served patriotically and responsibly as a caretaker to the state, and will now have to ensure a transition that is credible in the eyes of the Egyptian people. That means protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency law, revising the constitution and other laws to make this change irreversible, and laying out a clear path to elections that are fair and free. Above all, this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table. For the spirit of peaceful protest and perseverance that the Egyptian people have shown can serve as a powerful wind at the back of this change.

The United States will continue to be a friend and partner to Egypt. We stand ready to provide whatever assistance is necessary -- and asked for -- to pursue a credible transition to a democracy. I’m also confident that the same ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that the young people of Egypt have shown in recent days

can be harnessed to create new opportunity -- jobs and businesses that allow the extraordinary potential of this generation to take flight. And I know that a democratic Egypt can advance its role of responsible leadership not only in the region but around the world.

Egypt has played a pivotal role in human history for over 6,000 years. But over the last few weeks, the wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egyptian people demanded their universal rights.

We saw mothers and fathers carrying their children on their shoulders to show them what true freedom might look like.

We saw a young Egyptian say, “For the first time in my life, I really count. My voice is heard. Even though I’m only one person, this is the way real democracy works.”

We saw protesters chant “Selmiyya, selmiyya” -- “We are peaceful” -- again and again.

We saw a military that would not fire bullets at the people they were sworn to protect.

And we saw doctors and nurses rushing into the streets to care for those who were wounded, volunteers checking protesters to ensure that they were unarmed.

We saw people of faith praying together and chanting – “Muslims, Christians, We are one.” And though we know that the strains between faiths still divide too many in this world and no single event will close that chasm immediately, these scenes remind us that we need not be defined by our differences. We can be defined by the common humanity that we share.

And above all, we saw a new generation emerge -- a generation that uses their own creativity and talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears; a govern-

ment that is responsive to their boundless aspirations. One Egyptian put it simply: Most people have discovered in the last few days…that they are worth something, and this cannot be taken away from them anymore, ever.

This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence -- not terrorism, not mindless killing -- but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.

And while the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can’t help but hear the echoes of history -- echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice.

As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana while trying to perfect his own, “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.” Those were the cries that came from Tahrir Square, and the entire world has taken note.

Today belongs to the people of Egypt, and the American people are moved by these scenes in Cairo and across Egypt because of who we are as a people and the kind of world that we want our children to grow up in.

The word Tahrir means liberation.

It is a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom.

And forevermore it will remind us of the Egyptian people -- of what they did, of the things that they stood for, and how they changed their country, and in doing so changed the world.

Thank you.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

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February 17 - 23, 2011

Agriculture to Sponsor Rural Community Facilities A griculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has announced investments in projects in 24 states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to improve rural community facilities such as schools, health care facilities, libraries, and ďŹ rst responder services and equipment. Mr.Vilsack says, - these projects will bring lasting improvements that are essential to maintaining strong rural economies and vibrant communities as we work to win the future.

For example, one city will receive

a loan and a grant to renovate a library. A preliminary architectural report has indicated that mold in the building is a health and safety concern and is jeopardizing some of the oldest documents.

Another small city has been selected to receive a grant to purchase equipment to operate and maintain two residential facilities for at-risk youth.

Puerto Rico has extensive alternative programs all of which could be eligible and any one would greatly help our community.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

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February 17 - 23, 2011

The Cuban rumba and dance troupe Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, scheduled to be part of the “¡Sí Cuba!” festival coming to New York this spring.

The Arts of Cuba

By LARRY ROHTER

T

he Cuban rumba and dance troupe Los Muñequitos de Matanzas hasn’t performed in New York in nearly a decade. Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, which mixes Afro-Caribbean dance and classical European ballet and was founded in 1959, has never been to the United States. Neither have the socially conscious photographers Adonis Flores and Cirenaica Moreira.

All those and more than two dozen other artists will take part in a wide-ranging festival of Cuban arts that will last more than two months in locations around New York this spring. The festival, called “¡Sí Cuba!,” is one of the most significant indications that cultural relations between the United States and Cuba are thawing after nearly a decade in a deep freeze.

The festival, which is to be announced formally on Wednesday, is scheduled to run from March 31 to June 16, with nearly every form and style of Cuban arts and culture represented, in settings as diverse as Carnegie Hall and the outdoor Big Screen Project; 14 city arts organizations will be taking part. Music, film, dance, painting, theater, photography and literature are all included, and dozens of performers and artists are expected to come from Cuba for the events.

“We felt that this was the right time to do this, and New York the right place,” said Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is the driving force behind the festival and will host many of the events. “There’s an optimism

in the air about freeing up more interactions, which makes things feel very different than they did during the Bush administration and offers an opportunity for all of us to present work of a really high level in concentrated form.”

Ms. Hopkins and other festival organizers said their only objectives were to showcase the richness of Cuban culture and build bridges between American and Cuban creative artists. But with both the Obama administration and the dictatorship of Fidel and Raúl Castro showing interest in reducing longstanding tensions between the two countries, the event obviously has political connotations too.

“Both governments have clearly identified the cultural space as a safe space for them to pursue connections between the two countries, so this fits very well into that context,” said Julia E. Sweig, author of “Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know” and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This could be like Ping-Pong diplomacy, except that it’s happening in the cultural sphere.”

The Obama administration began loosening restrictions on travel to and from Cuba nearly two years ago, which led to a trickle of Cuban artists traveling to the United States and enabled American arts presenters to visit Havana and investigate the scene there. Last month the White House announced new measures that permit Americans to send money to Cuban citizens; expand opportunities for travel to Cuba by academic, religious and cultural groups; and allow charter flights from more American airports.

“When we were closed, and it was hard for Cuban artists to travel to the U.S., they were still producing and having their shows,” said Ben RodríguezCubeñas, a Cuban-American who is chairman of the Cuban Artists Fund, which is devoted to promoting cultural exchanges. Mr. Rodríguez-Cubeñas returned on Sunday from Havana, where he was coordinating arrangements for the festival. “Cuba has always had a vibrant arts scene, and Americans are now rediscovering that.”

For its part, the Cuban government has recently eased some restrictions on private economic activity, which, Mr. Rodríguez-Cubeñas noted, allows artists more creative and financial leeway. In addition, some of those scheduled to participate in the festival,

The San Juan Weekly among them a group of more than a dozen young visual artists exhibiting under the name Queloides (“Scar Tissue”), tackle subjects that until recently might have created political difficulties for them, like the racism present in a country whose black majority is led by a white gerontocracy.

Two painters, Alberto Casado and Rocío García, will have a joint show called “Concealed Faces” because they “deal with issues that aren’t that much in evidence in our media,” Corina Matamoros, curator of contemporary Cuban art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, said in a telephone interview from that city. “That doesn’t mean they are directly political, but they address some of the less visible spheres of society, like crime, poverty and sexual identity.”

The Cuban artists participating in the festival include a handful of very familiar names, like the National Ballet of Cuba, led by the 90-year-old Alicia Alonso. But there are also lesser-known groups like El Ballet Folklórico Cutumba and Danza Contemporánea de Cuba; that troupe will perform at the Joyce Theater in May. “We’ve been trying to invite this company for quite a long time, because they are very well trained, and their repertory is really quite fantastic,” said Linda Shelton, executive director of the Joyce. “They’ve had some training in Martha Graham technique, but their choreography really has developed without much influence of American choreographers, so we think New Yorkers will want to see what the dance scene there is like.”

Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, founded 60 years ago, last played in New York in 2002. At the other end of the musical spectrum, the rapper Telmary Díaz will be performing on April 23 at BAMCafé.

“Among aficionados of drumming and Santeria, this really is the premier group, and people have been asking me for years when they were going to be coming back,” said Robert H. Browning, artistic director of the World Music Institute, which is sponsoring Los Muñequitos de Matanzas’ May performances at Symphony Space. “We tried to bring them again two or three times, but Cuba was always on the bad list.”

Several Cuban-American artists have also been invited to participate in festival events, literary readings and concerts among them. Cristina García, the author of “Dreaming in Cuban” and other novels, said that will create opportunities for creative artists on both sides of the Straits of Florida to get to know one another — and each country’s works — better.

“I plan to stay in New York for three or four weeks to partake of these riches, which are not the kind of thing you normally have any real access to,” she said.

“And I think it’s wonderfully advantageous for them too. Not only are they desperate for connections and influences and eager to see what is happening in all the different realms of the art world here, I also think they want to strut their stuff. I’m sure they are thinking this will lead to other invitations and travel, if things go well.”

Events in which Cuban artists are involved are contingent on their getting approval to leave their country and visas to travel to the United States. That was often a problem during the Bush administration, but organizers say they are less worried now, even though restrictions on the ability to pay Cubans for their work in the United States remain in place.

“It’s obviously not done until it’s done,” said Susan L. Segal, president of the Americas Society, which will be sponsoring readings and panels on novels and plays and a multimedia exhibition focused on posters and film. “But this is a very prestigious festival, so I can’t imagine they will have problems getting visas.”

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

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Mainland

Obama Plans to Rescue States With Debt Burdens

By MICHAEL COOPER and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

P

resident Obama is proposing to ride to the rescue of states that have borrowed billions of dollars from the federal government to continue paying unemployment benefits during the economic downturn. His plan would give the states a two-year breather before automatic tax increases would hit employers, and before states would have to start paying interest on the loans.

The proposal, which administration officials said would be included in the 2012 budget that the president is scheduled to unveil next week, was greeted coolly by Republicans on Capitol Hill, who warned that the plan would ultimately force many states to raise their unemployment taxes in the years to come.

But the White House is calculating that the proposal will ultimately appeal to Republicans because it involves a tax moratorium right now for hard-hit states during a still-fragile economic recovery.

Administration officials will make the case that the plan helps the economy and states in the short run, while bringing overdue changes to the unemployment insurance system in the long run.

And Republican lawmakers could find themselves under pressure from Republican governors, whose states owe the federal government billions of dollars.

The administration is also betting that employers will back the proposal, especially in states where their taxes would otherwise go up. Michigan, for instance, owes the federal government $3.7 billion it borrowed to pay unemployment benefits. Under current law the state would be forced to pay $117 million in interest to the federal government this fall, and the federal tax on employers would automatically step up each year to repay the debt.

The state’s newly elected Republican governor, Rick Snyder, has been lobbying for relief; his press secretary, Sara Wurfel, said that while they would need to see the details of the plan, they would “very likely welcome the much-needed relief.”

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said, “We are giving help to some states who have had to borrow and not been able yet to pay back.”

The states are in a tough spot. Many entered the recession with too little money in their unemployment trust funds, and they quickly ran through what little they had as unemployment rose and remained stubbornly high month after month.

With their own trust funds depleted, 30 states borrowed $42 billion from the federal government to continue pa-

ying unemployment benefits.

The federal stimulus act gave states a break on the interest for those loans for nearly two years, but that grace period ended Dec. 31. That has left hard-hit states, which have already laid off employees, cut services and raised taxes, facing an estimated $1.3 billion in interest payments to Washington due this fall.

Even more worrisome, to some states, is that current law would effectively raise taxes on employers by about $21 per worker in nearly half the states so they could start paying down their debt, which states worry would put pressure on businesses that have already been reluctant to hire in the downturn.

In his budget, officials said, Mr. Obama will call for deferring interest payments on the debt and postponing the automatic tax increases. Then, in 2014, to bring that money back into federal coffers, the administration proposes to raise the minimum level on which employers pay taxes.

Current law requires states to collect unemployment taxes on at least the first $7,000 of income; that minimum has not been raised in decades.

The president’s proposal would raise that minimum taxable wage base to $15,000. The rate of the federal portion of the unemployment taxes would then be lowered, so the proposal would not raise federal taxes on states that do not owe the federal government money. But it would speed the rate at which states that do owe money repay the federal government, and allow states to collect more unemployment taxes to rebuild their trust funds if they do not lower their tax rates.

It was that prospect — that the hig-

her wage base would lead to higher taxes for states after 2014 — that drew rebukes from Republicans in Congress.

Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan, who is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, dismissed the plan. “We need to reform our unemployment programs, but any plan that relies on more than doubling the tax base and then continuing to raise payroll taxes in perpetuity isn’t going anywhere in the House,” he said in a statement.

But if nothing is done, taxes will go up much sooner: employers in three states are already paying higher federal unemployment taxes because they have been in debt to the federal government longer, and soon nearly half the states

could be in their position.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the National Employment Law Project, two research organizations that are releasing a report on Wednesday calling for something very similar to the administration’s proposal, calculated that delaying the automatic tax increases until 2014 would save employers $5 billion to $7 billion in taxes.

The Obama administration plans to hammer that point. “Our view in response to anyone who wants to do nothing,” said a senior administration official, “is that their plan is about increasing taxes in some of the hardest-hit states involuntarily in 2011 and 2012, as opposed to giving states a choice on how to repay the federal government starting in 2014.”

Republicans in Congress might feel pressure from their counterparts in statehouses around the country: states with Republican governors, including Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, owe the federal government billions of dollars.

And 18 states have already raised their minimum taxable wage base to $15,000 or more, according to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies.

Iris J. Lav, a senior adviser at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a co-author of the report, said that the unemployment system has “a constellation of problems that need to be solved.”

“The near-term problem is the economy is not yet O.K.,” she said. “And both the interest payments and the principal repayments are cutting into employers, and it makes great sense to postpone them. The larger question is how you get states to solvency.”

Mainland 10

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Lawmakers’ End of Earmarks Affects Local Programs Large and Small

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

G

one for now are the likes of the taxpayer-financed teapot museum, or studies on the mating habits of crabs.

But also shelved are a project to help consolidate information about warrants in Brazos County, Tex., and staffing for two new shelters for abused women and children in Salt Lake City. A rural Wisconsin county will not be able to upgrade its communication system, and a road in Kentucky will not be widened next year.

Across the country, local governments, nonprofit groups and scores of farmers, to name but a few, are waking up to the fact

that when Congress stamped out earmarks last week, it was talking about their projects, too.

Tensions are particularly acute in districts where new conservative lawmakers, many of whom criticized throughout their campaigns the practice of quietly inserting earmarks into spending bills, are coming face to face with local governments and interest groups who were counting on federal dollars to help shore up their own collapsing budgets.

The issue is hardly limited to Republican districts. Democrats, led by President Obama — who recently said earmarks were a bad thing — also agreed to give up

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the practice. Last week, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee who has long cherished earmarks, announced that they would be banned from this year’s appropriations bills. But he was not happy about it.

“The reality,” Mr. Inouye said, “is that critical needs in communities throughout the country will be neglected: roads and bridges in disrepair, job training programs shuttered, and vital resources for national defense and law enforcement cut off, to name just a few.”

Many citizens, even those who sympathize with cuts in spending, insist that not all pork is cured with the same untoward salt. “I do agree we have to cut from somewhere,” said Steve Tribble, the county judge executive of Christian County in Kentucky, where a planned road project is now imperiled. “I am against some earmarks,” he said. “Not the good ones. I can promise you this is not a road to nowhere.”

In Burnett County in Wisconsin, the loss of a $1 million federal earmark to help pay for modernizing its communication system could result in a property tax increase, said the county administrator, Candace Fitzgerald.

“This is very, very expensive,” Ms. Fitzgerald said, explaining that the area’s rugged terrain made it hard to erect the equipment needed for the upgrades, which she were required by the federal government. “It’s going to kill that little tax base up there,” she said of her county’s most farflung corner.

Representative Sean Duffy, Republican of Wisconsin, who devoted part of his 2010 campaign to criticizing the penchant of his predecessor, David R. Obey — a Democrat who retired after four decades in Congress — for securing earmarks, said he traveled to his district last week to gently explain to local governments that times had changed.

Even Mr. Duffy had come to see not every earmark was of the much-maligned teapot museum quality, and he would help his constituents “work through the grant process” to secure needed financing other ways.

But there’s the rub. With President Obama proposing a five-year freeze on domestic spending, and the Republicancontrolled House vowing to cut spending in federal agencies by hundreds of millions of dollars, it almost certain that every agency will have far less money to spend on thousands of legitimate projects that were approved after extensive review. Simply put, without earmarks to turn to, far more applicants will be scrambling for a smaller pot of grant money.

The result? Scores of lawmakers are going to find themselves explaining to the people back home why their bridges will not be finished, their rape-victim programs canceled before they started, their federal requirements ignored. As Ms. Fitzgerald said of Mr. Duffy, “He definitely is going to

be hearing from us.”

Spending for earmarks accounts for less than half of 1 percent of total federal spending, but it can be crucial chunks of change for localities. The practice has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, as some lawmakers have been prolific users of earmarks while others, supported by some government watchdog groups, have criticized them as too lightly scrutinized engines of corruption that add needlessly to government spending. There were about $8 billion in earmark requests in the 2011 omnibus spending bill that failed to get through the last Congress.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who has made earmarks one of his signature targets, sends Twitter messages about the ones he finds most offensive. “$1,000,000 for improvements to a pond in Maplewood, MN — those are some lucky frogs,” read one.

The issue gained political potency with the Republicans’ ascent in the House, led by its earmarks-despising new speaker, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, and followed by President Obama’s comments and pressure from opponents in both parties that became too great to ignore.

Many new lawmakers say localities, not federal taxpayers, should pay for new bike paths, local cultural organizations and other projects that benefit only their community. But some earmarks are for projects that have broader impact, like national parks, large research centers on university campuses or military installations.

For instance, in South Dakota, roughly $12 million had been set aside to modernize a training center at Ellsworth Air Force Base. “Currently training requirements are fulfilled in a 58-year-old facility that has reached the end of its lifecycle and is costly to maintain,” said an Air Force spokeswoman, Elizabeth Gosselin.

Others are projects that are potentially attractive to Republicans and Democrats alike. In the Texas district recently won by Representative Bill Flores, a Republican, a $300,000 program that would serve law enforcement agencies across Brazos County, and $2.3 million for a research center at Baylor University, among the county’s largest employers, are now left hanging.

In an e-mail, Mr. Flores said he was aware of the earmarks requested in the last Congress for Baylor and Brazos County.

“In keeping with my promises,” he added, “I will fully support the earmark moratorium to ensure that we focus on balancing the budget and creating a more transparent and accountable process for necessary spending.”

Outside of the earmark process, however, it is difficult for freshman lawmakers to exert any influence over federal agencies to direct money to particular projects.

Under the new ban, some projects will no doubt still get federal money. Others will be shelved, or in the case of nonprofits, receive more private financing.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

11

Mainland 12

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

On Health Care, Justice Will Prevail

By LAURENCE H. TRIBE

T

HE lawsuits challenging the individual mandate in the health care law, including one in which a federal district judge last week called the law unconstitutional, will ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court, and pundits are already making bets on how the justices will vote.

But the predictions of a partisan 5-4 split rest on a misunderstanding of the court and the Constitution. The constitutionality of the health care law is not one of those novel, one-off issues, like the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, that have at times created the impression of Supreme Court justices as political actors rather than legal analysts.

Since the New Deal, the court has consistently held that Congress has broad constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. This includes authority over not just goods moving across state lines, but also the economic choices of individuals within states that have significant effects on interstate markets. By that standard, this law’s constitutionality is open and shut. Does anyone doubt that the multitrillion-dollar health insurance industry is an interstate market that Congress has the power to regulate?

Many new provisions in the law, like

the ban on discrimination based on preexisting conditions, are also undeniably permissible. But they would be undermined if healthy or risk-prone individuals could opt out of insurance, which could lead to unacceptably high premiums for those remaining in the pool. For the system to work, all individuals — healthy and sick, risk-prone and risk-averse — must participate to the extent of their economic ability.

In this regard, the health care law is little different from Social Security. The court unanimously recognized in 1982 that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” to maintain the financial soundness of a Social Security system from which people could opt out.

They know that if they need emergency-room care that they can’t pay for, the public will pick up the tab. This conscious choice carries serious economic consequences for the national health care market, which makes it a proper subject for federal regulation.

Even if the interstate commerce clause did not suffice to uphold mandatory insurance, the even broader power of Congress to impose taxes would surely do so.

Clear case for the law’s constitutionality, it’s distressing that many assume its fate will be decided by a partisan, closely divided Supreme Court. Justice Antonin

Scalia, whom some count as a certain vote against the law, upheld in 2005 Congress’s power to punish those growing marijuana for their own medical use; a ban on homegrown marijuana “necessary and proper” to effectively enforce broader federal regulation of nationwide drug markets. To imagine Justice Scalia would abandon that fundamental understanding of the Constitution’s necessary and proper clause because he was appointed by a Republican president is to insult both his intellect and his integrity.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom many unfairly caricature as the “swing vote,” deserves better as well. Yes, his opinion in the 5-4 decision invalidating the federal ban on possession of guns near schools is frequently cited by opponents of the health care law. But that decision in

1995 drew a bright line between commercial choices, all of which Congress has presumptive power to regulate, and conduct like gun possession that is not in itself “commercial” or “economic,” however likely it might be to set off a cascade of economic effects. The decision about how to pay for health care is a quintessentially commercial choice in itself, not merely a decision that might have economic consequences.

Only a crude prediction that justices will vote based on politics rather than principle would lead anybody to imagine that Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Samuel Alito would agree with the judges in Florida and Virginia. Those judges made the confused assertion what is at stake here is personal liberty — the right not to purchase.

Justice Clarence Thomas can be counted a sure vote against the health care law, he alone has publicly stressed his principled disagreement with the whole line of post-1937 cases that interpret Congress’s commerce power broadly.

There is every reason to believe that a strong, nonpartisan majority of justices will do their constitutional duty, set aside how they might have voted had they been members of Congress and treat this constitutional challenge for what it is — a political objection in legal garb.

For Federal Programs, a Taste of Market Discipline

By DAVID LEONHARDT

W

ouldn’t it be nice if taxpayers somehow get a refund for programs that didn’t work?

Programs that fail to make a difference — like of those that train workers for jobs — endure indefinitely. Policy makers don’t know which work and which don’t.

Competition, which punishes laggards in the private sector, is typically absent in the public sector.

American policy makers thinking about how to bring some of the competitive discipline of the market to government programs, and they have hit on an intriguing idea.

The idea goes by one of two names: pay for success bonds or social impact bonds. Nonprofit groups like foundations pay the initial money for a new program and also oversee it. The government will reimburse them several years later, possibly with a bonus — but only if agreed-upon benchmarks show the program is working.

If it falls short, taxpayers owe nothing.

A nonprofit group named Social Finance is playing a role akin to venture capitalist. It has raised about $8 million from investors, including the Rockefeller Foundation. Social Finance also oversees three

social service groups helping former prisoners find work, stay healthy and the like.

For the investors to get their money back starting in 2014 — with interest — the recidivism rate must fall at least 7.5 percent, relative to a control group. If the rate falls 10 percent, the investors will receive the sort of return that the stock market historically delivers. “It’s been only a few months,” says Tracy Palandjian, who recently opened a new Social Finance office in Boston, “but the numbers are coming in O.K.” Antony Bugg-Levine of the Rockefeller Foundation told me it had invested in the project for two main reasons. One, it expected to get its money back and then be able to reuse it. Two, if social impact bonds

work, they have the potential to attract forprofit investors — and vastly expand the pool of capital that’s available for social programs.

Social impact bonds have limitations.

It’s hard to see how private money could ever pay for multibillion-dollar programs like Medicaid or education.

Execution of any bond program will be complicated. It will depend on coming up with right performance measures, which is no small matter. Done wrong, measures will end up rewarding programs lucky (or clever) enough to enroll participants who are more likely to succeed no matter what.

A recent review found that 10 major social programs had been rigorously evaluated over the past two decades, using the scientific gold standard of random assignment. Only one of the 10 — Early Head Start, for infants, toddlers pregnant women — was a clear success. Yet all 10 still exist, and largely in their original form.

Jon Baron, the president of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy in Washington, points out that the social problems addressed by antipoverty programs have not gotten much better in years. School test scores have barely changed. College graduation rates for low-income students have stagnated. The poverty rate is as high as it was in 1981. Median household income is

lower than it was in 1998.

The Obama administration’s seven pilot programs create bonds for job training, education, juvenile justice and care of children’s disabilities. $100 million for bonds come out of budgets of other programs, to stay consistent with Mr. Obama’s announced freeze on non-security spending.

Beyond the impact of any single program, the bonds have the potential to nudge all government agencies to pay more attention to results. Mr. Obama, after all, campaigned as a reformer who wanted to create a sleek, efficient “iPod government.” He has had some success, like the expansion of a program — backed by years of solid evidence — in which nurses go to the homes of new at-risk parents to counsel them.

Over all the administration has not done enough to improve government efficiency.

Making government work better will be all the more important in the years ahead.

The free market is not going to solve many of our biggest problems, be it stagnant pay or spotty medical care. And government — in Washington and locally — is going to be financially squeezed for a long time.

There never was a good excuse for wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that didn’t work. But now, especially, there’s no excuse.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

13

EDUCATION 14

The San Juan Weeekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Whites Less Than Half US Infant Population

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

W

hites continued to decline as a share of the American population in 2009, and they now represent less than half of all 3-year-olds, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of census data released Monday.

The country’s young population is more diverse than ever, with whites now in the minority in nursery schools, preschools and kindergartens in eight states — Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas — and the District of Columbia, according to William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings. That was up from six states in 2000.

“We are on our way to having a majority of minority students in U.S. schools,” Mr. Frey said.

Nationally, whites accounted for 58.8 percent of all school enrollment in 2009, Mr. Frey said, citing the new data, which measured enrollment from preschool to graduate school as of October 2009. That was down from 64.6 percent in 2000, a decline that came with falling birthrates as the white population aged.

Population growth has come instead from Hispanics, blacks and Asians, whose children represent ever larger shares of the

school population. Twenty-three percent of children in kindergarten were Hispanic in 2009, up from 18 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1989. Hispanics now account for nearly a fifth of all enrollment from nursery school through college, Mr. Frey said.

The United States has been experiencing the biggest surge of immigrants since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when European immigrants considerably expanded the population.

And while immigrants have long taken to cities, more recently they have spread throughout the nation, creating diverse student populations in places that had been overwhelmingly white.

The states whose white children dipped to below 50 percent of nursery school and kindergarten enrollment most recently were Arizona, Florida and Nevada, Mr. Frey said. Next in line are Georgia, Louisiana and Maryland, he said.

The gap between the country’s diverse young population and its older white one is raising difficult issues for policy makers, who are trying to balance the growing costs associated with the aging white population with the need for financing to educate an increasingly diverse youth.

Education experts who have studied the issue say the United States is lagging behind in educating minority students.

The past big wave of immigrants took more than a generation to integrate into the economy through education, they say,

a delay the country can ill afford in today’s age of global competitiveness.

“These students will be an important source of our labor-force growth as baby boomers begin retiring,” Mr. Frey said.

Few Students Show Proficiency in Science, Tests Show

By SAM DILLON

O

n the most recent nationwide science test, about a third of fourth graders and a fifth of high school seniors scored at or above the proficiency level, according to results released.

Only one or two students out of every

100 displayed the level of mastery that the federal panel governing the tests defines as advanced, the government said.

“I was rather dismayed at the relatively lackluster performance at the top of the achievement levels,” said Alan Friedman, a former chief executive of the New York Hall of Science who sits on the board

that oversees the federal tests.

The science tests, known as the National Assessment of Education Progress, were administered in early 2009 to about 308,000 fourth graders and eighth graders and 11,000 12th-graders. They tested students’ knowledge and abilities in the physical sciences, life science and earth and space sciences, the government said.

Because the Education Department changed the test since it was last administered in 2005, the latest results cannot be used to determine whether science achievement has risen or declined in recent years.

But the results showed that a smaller proportion of 12th graders demonstrated proficiency in science than in any other subject that the government has tested since 2005 — except history.

Twenty-one percent of the nation’s 12th graders scored at or above the proficient level in science on the 2009 tests, compared with 42 percent who demonstrated proficiency on the most recent economics exam, and 38 percent and 26 percent, respectively, on the most recent nationwide reading and math tests.

The latest science results included state-by-state breakdowns for fourth- and eighth-grade students in 46 states, and for the global system of schools run by the Defense Department. A higher proportion of fourth-grade students scored at or above the proficient level in New Hampshire — 47 percent — than in any other state.

In Montana, 41 percent of eighth graders scored at or above proficiency and 2 percent scored at the advanced level, higher proportions than any other state.

Students in Mississippi ranked last in the tests.

The bipartisan panel that sets policies on the federal tests groups students according to three achievement levels: advanced, proficient and basic.

To be considered proficient in science, fourth-grade students should be able to recognize that gravitational force constantly affects an object, eighth-grade students should be able to relate characteristics of air masses to global regions, and high school seniors should be able to evaluate two methods for helping to control an invasive species, the government said.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

15

Whether Large or Small, They’re Big Dogs on Campus

By SARAH MASLIN NIR

D

r. Evil had his cat, Mr. Bigglesworth; President Obama has Bo; even Jabba the Hut had an interstellar critter named Salacious Crumb. And at the seats of power in some of New York City’s private schools, there’s sometimes something fluffy curled around the chair legs.

“Animals have an interesting ability to humanize the people that they are around,” said Robert Lauder, the head of Friends Seminary in the East Village. Mr. Lauder has at least a brace of finches cheeping in his office at all times, and used to have a Boston terrier that skittered around his desk. “It’s another way of making contact with somebody in a position of authority who can be somewhat remote-seeming,” he says. “A dog is sort of a common denominator.”

Bart Baldwin, the headmaster of the St. Luke’s School in the West Village, has Roxy, a gregarious golden retriever. Roxy is the school’s de facto icon.

She is immortalized in photographs on his office bookshelf and in a small statuette students made of her that takes pride of place on his desk.

Not every dog is suited for school mascot status, though, said Liz Palika, a dog trainer and behaviorist and co-author of “Dogs at Work: A Practical Guide to Creating Dog-Friendly Workplaces.”

“There’s an awful lot of variables at school I’d want to be careful about, including all the kids,” she said.

“Is the dog trustworthy with kids? What happens if a child comes dashing in and pounces on the dog when he’s asleep?”

Trolley, a 125-pound bull mastiff owned by David B. Harman, the headmaster of Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, spent her puppyhood on the school’s 25-acre campus in Bay Ridge. But when she started getting protective of Mr. Harman’s family around other dogs, the principal decided she was better off on a farm in Maine.

“Kids would sort of throw themselves on the dog,” he said. “She was always fine with that, but I just got scared.”

Now students come to his offices at the school’s Bay Ridge and Park Slope campuses begging for the privilege of walking Fenway, the affable 5-year-

old Labrador retriever who assumed Trolley’s role.

“The little ones will lie down with the dog in the dog bed; I’ll be sitting at my desk, typing on my computer,” Mr. Harman said. “I joke that it’s a cheap ploy to get kids to come into my office.”

Fenway goes to sports events and has even been an item in the school’s fund-raising auction, where the privilege of having him visit a child’s class has gone for $1,000. (Fenway and Trolley are both baseball references, Fenway Park being the Red Sox stadium and Trolley referring to the old Brooklyn Dodgers, which got their name from fans who dodged trolleys to get to the ballpark.)

Save for service dogs, you won’t find a personal pet in any New York City public school. “Children have allergies, plus dogs can bite,” said Marge Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education. School, she said, is “just not a place for dogs.” Earlier this year, a public school principal in Far Rockaway, Queens, was accused of taking her dog to work and having her staff walk it.

At the Hewitt School, a private all-girl school on the Upper East Side, dogs are a new addition to the community. Maggie, a Labrador retriever with a blond shag befitting her California origin, arrived via Palo Alto last September along with the school’s newly appointed headmistress, Joan Lonergan.

“It is the most awesome dog,” said Robin Adelson, whose daughter Kyla Shinder, 12, is in the sixth grade. “The first week of school, I got ‘Maggie reports’ every day.” Kyla would tell her mother, “‘Maggie was very tired today; Maggie loves me, she came over to lick my hand; I think Maggie remembered me today.’”

Maggie, Ms. Adelson said, wanders the ground level and stands sentry on a staircase landing, where she can sniff scents wafting from the cafeteria. “It definitely slows people down on the

stairs — and that’s a good thing,” Ms. Adelson said. “There is something to be said for animal therapy; she makes the kids so comfortable and at home — she’s just a fixture there already, and she only just arrived.”

In a landscape where some private schools have banned peanut butter for fear of students’ allergies, a shaggy dog comes with similar risks.

In Mr. Baldwin’s office at St. Luke’s, parents who come for conferences on his big couch share it with Roxy, whether she is there or not: tufts of her blond fur scatter the sofa.

“I am sure that there are people who are concerned about it,” said Mr. Lauder at Friends. “New York City parents are concerned about every possible issue.” But, he added: “I’ve never known a dog allergy to be life threatening.

The worst you 28 AÑOS OFRECIENDO SERVICIO get with a dog is sort of a cough or a sneeze.”

At Poly Prep, Mr. said he had had Ave.Harman Muñoz Marín, Caguas, P.R.never 00725 (Al lado Ja a parent complain about allergies. In the 11 years he has been taking dogs & P E T C E N T E R to school, he has encountered only one glitch, he Cuido $ 15.00D/N said: “We had a problem Grooming a $ 25.00 + Tax a couple years ago when Todos los días (no incluye desenrredo) a child was skipping Exijan su certificado, no dejen que los classes to walk the dog. engañen sin experiencia.

He’d say to the teachers, El #1 CON DOS ‘Oh, I am out walking the headmaster’s dog,’ GROOMERS CERTIFICADOS Tene and itCsounded mos official.” h i h u It wasn’t. ahu a The ruse swas discovered, and the student punished: his dog(787) 744-0829 walking privileges were (787) 662-9081 reduced.

Wine

16

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

In Teroldegos, the Thrill of the Obscure

By ERIC ASIMOV

P

EOPLE often complain to me that wine confuses them.

They don’t want to memorize the myriad names and places. They want it to be effortless and easy.

Just last week, at a trade-sponsored conference on Italian wines in New York City, a noted American importer assailed the complicated nature of Italian wine-labeling laws, which he said were irrelevant to American consumers and should be simplified.

I understand the feeling. Most people don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what they eat or drink. That’s why franchise restaurants were invented. And mass-market pinot grigio.

And wine bureaucracies, which are often more concerned with increasing the sales of big commercial brands than with promoting the little-known appellations and grapes, visionary producers and distinctive styles that give many wine cultures their depth, mystique, grace and beauty.

No doubt, for example, many people will not want to burden themselves with learning about an obscure red grape like teroldego. It’s not easy to pronounce (tehr-AWLdeh-go) and hardly mellifluous.

Only a handful of producers outside northeastern Italy have it in their repertory, and very few examples make it to American shores.

But bottles like the 2007 Teroldego Rotaliano from Elisabetta Foradori are worth the effort to seek out. The wine is dark garnet, almost purple but not inky, with the aroma of dark fruit layered with smoke and earth. On the palate it is fresh and lively, with just the right amount of cleansing bitterness to leave the mouth refreshed. Unusually, when you swallow, the lingering effect is of texture rather than flavor.

You feel the pleasant reminder of its light tannic grip.

Esoteric, wonderful wines and grapes like teroldego can be found all over Italy, and indeed, around many historically wine-producing regions. For drinkers, they add richness and context at the meager price of modest exertion. Sure, we could

live simply on pinot grigio and sangiovese, and never risk the tinge of fear and confusion that comes from trying something new and different.

But then we’d miss out on frappato and aglianico, fumin and romorantin, mencía and trousseau, and countless other individualized pleasures.

Not to treasure a wine like teroldego is like asking why anyone cares about culatello or guanciale when we already have boiled ham and bacon. Most people won’t care, and that’s fine. But for people who’ve savored the creamy, smooth, delicately porky flavor of a rosy swatch of culatello, the great ham of Emilia-Romagna, it’s a silly question. Of course we need teroldego!

That we still have teroldego to enjoy at all is due to the labors of a few dedicated growers and winemakers, especially Elisabetta Foradori herself. She was barely more than a teenager in 1985 when she took over her family’s estate. Her father had died young, and the wine culture of the prime teroldego zone, Campo Rotaliano, a wide plain in Trentino, had become largely industrial. The dominant clone of teroldego in the area, as Ms. Foradori tells it, had been selected to emphasize quantity over quality, resulting in anemic, uninteresting wines.

She took on the job of studying the history of the grape. Over the last 25 years she has worked relentlessly to restore its genetic diversity so that the wines would be deeper, purer and more complex.

“A whole variety had to be rebuilt, viticultural practices had to be brought back to quality levels, the soil had to be enriched with life, the plants brought to an equilibrium,” she recounted in an e-mail. “I myself have changed with the variety, and I find myself to be a different person, watching and listening to the land and to nature in a different way.”

At $22 or so a bottle, Foradori’s Teroldego Rotaliano, the official appellation for the teroldego wines of the region, is a very good value, and is delicious immediately. Ms. Foradori makes another teroldego, Granato, around $50. It’s denser and richer, and when it’s young it shows the polished effect of the small oak barrels in which it is aged. Give it 10 years or so, though, and the oak falls away to reveal a spicy complexity.

Personally, I prefer the freshness of the less expensive bottle over the more refined Granato.

While the Foradori teroldego is by far the most widely available, others are also making their distinctive versions. Fedrizzi Cipriano’s 2009 Teroldego Rotaliano is rounder

and plusher than the Foradori. From outside the official zone, Endrizzi makes a charming, fruity, pleasant teroldego, sold in one-liter bottles for about $17. I’m still looking for a Teroldego Rotaliano from Roberto Zeni.

Strangely, some of the best teroldegos I’ve had are not even from Trentino. Nearby in Alto Adige, Nusserhof makes minute amounts of what this Tyrolean producer playfully labels “Tyroldego.” It’s delicious, too, but very different from the Foradori, more savory with licorice and herbal flavors adding complexity. In Veneto to the east, Marion, an excellent producer of Valpolicella and Amarone, makes a funky, rich, complex teroldego, but this, too, is extremely difficult to find.

Elsewhere, you occasionally stumble upon patches of teroldego in the most unexpected places. Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat grows some in Santa Barbara County, Calif., though I’ve never had the opportunity to try it. Red Tail Ridge in the Finger Lakes even makes a little sparkling teroldego, though I’ve never seen it.

Still, don’t expect a sudden deluge of teroldego. It is destined most likely to remain arcane, not because it’s secret or impenetrable. It just requires a little initiative and patience.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

17

ART

Diego Velazquez Spanish Baroque Painter

S

panish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez was a court painter to King Philip IV during the Baroque period. Although a master of history painting and genre-painting, he is especially renowned for his portrait art - completing over 20 portraits of the King along with others of the Royal Family and their friends. His best known works include his masterpieces Las Meninas, 1656 (Museo de Prado) and the Equestrian Portrait of Duke de Olivares, 1634 (Museo del Prado, Madrid). (See also: Spanish Baroque Artists).

Born in Seville in 1599 to a Portuguese family, little is known of his early life. It is believed he initially studied fine art painting and drawing under the artist Francisco de Herrera the Elder but unable to bear his temper tantrums, he shortly went to apprentice under the artist Francisco Pacheco instead. Although Pacheco was a less accomplished artist, he was more tolerant and better connected in society.

Velazquez married Pacheco’s daughter when he turned 20. His works showed an acute understanding of realism. His early pictures and sketches are mainly studies of still life as he strove to discover his own style. Important works from this time include, The Water Carrier of Seville, c.1618 (Apsley House), Two at Breakfast (Apsley House), Christ in the House of Martha an Mary (National Gallery, London), Nativity of the Prado (1619), Adoracion de los Reyes, 1619, The Adoration of the Magi and Jesús y Los Peregrinos de Emaús, 1626.

In 1622 he moved his family to Ma-

La Rendición de Breda

drid, and became court painter to King Philip IV. The regular salary gave him the freedom to pursue his passion for portraiture, as unsalaried artists were reliant on (mainly religious) public commissions for a living.

Portraits remained the chief part of his workload for 20 years. One of his enemies was to say ‘he only knows how to paint heads’.

To which the artist replied, ‘they pay me a great compliment, for I know of no one else who can do as much’.

In 1627 Philip launched a competition for the Best Painter in Spain, which Velazquez won. Unfortunately the picture was destroyed in a fire at the palace in 1734. In 1629 he took his first trip to Italy to study the Old Masters of the Renaissance, and

Cristo Crucificado

Diego Velázquez although there are no records about whom he met or what he saw, he came back with a new vigor. On his return he painted the first of many portraits of the young prince Don Baltasar Carlos. Unlike other traditional artists, Velazquez painted his subject

Pope Innocent X

devoid of pomp and ceremony. He painted several equestrian portraits of the King, and the sculptor Montafles modelled a statue on one of these portraits (the painting no longer exists). The sculpture was cast in bronze by the Florentine sculptor Pietro Tacca and now stands in the Plaza de Oriente at Madrid.

At this point in time, Velazquez met the Flemish artist Rubens, who had come on a mission to the King of Spain. Velazquez was so inspired by this meeting with one of the acknowledged giants of Baroque painting, that he set off again for a study trip to Italy.

On his return he executed two large paintings, Joseph’s Coat and the Forge of Vulcan, c.1631 (Prado Museum). Other paintings from this period include Apolo en la Fragua de Vulcano, 1630 (Museo del Prado, Madrid), The Lady with a Fan, c.1638 (The Wallace Collection, London) and the Equestrian portrait of Duke de Olivares, 1634.

Continues on page 18

ART

18

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Las Meninas

La Tunica de José

Bautista. His wife died within a few days of Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon also found the funeral and was buried alongside him. inspiration in his works.

Works by Velazquez can be seen in the Unfortunately the church was destroyed by the French in 1811 and the location of his best art museums across the world. grave is no longer known.

Legacy

Comes from page 17 In his final years - one of the most famous painters in Spain - he produced some of his best masterpieces, demonstrating a bright and fluid use of colour. These include portraits of the Royal Family children including the Infanta Margarita and the sickly Prince Felipe Prospero. Las Meninas, 1656 shows several figures in a large room in the Spanish court of King Philip. The young Infanta Margarita is surrounded by a group of ladies in waiting, bodyguards, dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, in a mirror, you can see the King and Queen, and the artist portrays himself painting a canvas. The use of mirror reflection echoes the Arnolfini Portrait, 1483 by Jan van Eyck. There is an elusiveness to the work that suggests art and life

are an illusion. Because of its complexities, it is one of the most analyzed works in Western art.

Stricken with a sudden fever, Velazquez died in 1660 and was buried in the Fuensalida vault of the church of San Juan

Until the 19th century his works were not very well known outside of Spain where he was an influence on painters like Zurbaran, the Naples-based Jusepe Ribera and Bartolome Esteban Murillo. He is often quoted as a key influence on the artist Edouard Manet who called him the ‘painters of painters’. His vivid brushstrokes were supposed to have inspired the young Manet to bridge the gap between Realism and Impressionism. Future artists such as Pablo Picasso,

Las Hilanderas

Philip IV Principe Baltasar Carlos

Felipe IV a Caballo

La Reina Isabel de Borbón

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

19

New York Times Editorials Speakers’ Corner on the Nile

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I

’m in Tahrir Square, and of all the amazing things one sees here the one that strikes me most is a bearded man who is galloping up and down, literally screaming himself hoarse, saying: “I feel free! I feel free!” Gathered around him are Egyptians of all ages, including a woman so veiled that she has only a slit for her eyes, and they’re all holding up cellphones taking pictures and video of this man, determined to capture the moment in case it never comes again.

Aren’t we all? In 40 years of writing about the Middle East, I have never seen anything like what is happening in Tahrir Square. In a region where the truth and truth-tellers have so long been smothered under the crushing weight of oil, autocracy and religious obscurantism, suddenly the Arab world has a truly free space — a space that Egyptians themselves, not a foreign army, have liberated — and the truth is now gushing out of here like a torrent from a broken hydrant.

What one hears while strolling around are all the pent-up hopes, aspirations and frustrations of Egyptians for the last 50 years. I know the “realist” experts believe this will all be shut down soon. Maybe it will. But for one brief shining moment, forget the experts and just listen. You have not

heard this before. It is the sound of a people so long kept voiceless, finally finding, testing and celebrating their own voices.

“We got a message from Tunis,” Hosam Khalaf, a 50-year-old engineer stopped me to say. “And the message was: Don’t burn yourself up; burn up the fear that is inside you. That is what happened here. This was a society in fear, and the fear has been burned.” Khalaf added that he came here with his wife and daughter for one reason: “When we meet God, we will at least be able to say: ‘We tried to do something.’ ” This is not a religious event here, and the Muslim Brotherhood is not running the show. This is an Egyptian event. That is its strength and its weakness — no one is in charge and everyone in the society is here.

You see secular girls in fashionable dress sitting with veiled women. You see parents pushing their babies wearing “Mubarak must leave” signs. You see students in jeans and peasants in robes. What unites all of them is a fierce desire to gain control of their future.

“This is the first time in my life I get to say what I think in public,” said Remon Shenoda, a software engineer. “And what is common here is that everyone wants to say something.”

Indeed, there is a powerful sense of theft here, that this regime and its cronies not only stole wealth, but they stole some-

A Terrible Divide

By BOB HERBERT

T

he Ronald Reagan crowd loved to talk about morning in America. For millions of individuals and families, perhaps the majority, it’s more like twilight — with nighttime coming on fast.

Look out the window. More and more Americans are being left behind in an economy that is being divided ever more starkly between the haves and the have-nots. Not only are millions of people jobless and millions more underemployed, but more and more of the so-called fringe benefits and public services that help make life livable, or even bearable, in a modern society are being put to the torch.

Employer-based pensions, paid vacations, health benefits and the like are going the way of phone booths and VCRs. As poverty increases and reliable employment becomes less and less the norm, the dwindling number of workers with any sort of job security or guaranteed pensions (think teachers and other modestly compensated public employees) are being viewed with increasing contempt. How dare they enjoy a modicum of economic comfort?

It turns out that a lot of those jobs

were never so secure, after all. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us: “At least 44 states and the District of Columbia have reduced overall wages paid to state workers by laying off workers, requiring them to take unpaid leave (furloughs), freezing hew hires, or similar actions. State and local governments have eliminated 407,000 jobs since August 2008, federal data show.”

We have not faced up to the scale of the economic crisis that still confronts the United States.

Standards of living for the people on the wrong side of the economic divide are being ratcheted lower and will remain that way for many years to come. Forget the fairy tales being spun by politicians in both parties — that somehow they can impose service cuts that are drastic enough to bring federal and local budgets into balance while at the same time developing economic growth strong enough to support a robust middle class. It would take a Bernie Madoff to do that.

In the real world, schools and libraries are being closed and other educational services are being curtailed. Police officers are being fired. Access to health services for poor families is being restricted. “At least

thing so much more precious: the future of an entire generation of Egyptians, whom they refused to empower or offer any inspiring vision worthy of this great civilization.

“All Egyptian people believe that their country is a great country with very deep roots in history, but the Mubarak regime broke our dignity in the Arab world and in the whole world,” said Mohamed Serag, a professor at Cairo University. By the way, everyone here wants to give you their name and make sure you spell it right. Yes, the fear is gone.

Referring to Egypt’s backward public education system that depends so much on repetition, one young girl was wearing a sign urging Mubarak to leave quickly. It said: “Make it short. This is history, and we will have to memorize it at school.”

Grievances abound. An elderly woman in a veil is shouting that she has three daughters who graduated from the college of commerce and none of them can find jobs. There are signs everywhere asking about Mubarak, a former Air Force chief.

Questions such as: “Hey Mr. Pilot, where did you get that $17 billion?”

You almost never hear the word “Israel,” and the pictures of “martyrs” plastered around the square are something rarely seen in the Arab world — Egyptians who died fighting for their own freedom not against Israel.

When you enter the square now, one row of volunteers checks your ID, another frisks you for weapons and then you walk through a long gauntlet of men clapping and singing an Egyptian welcome song.

I confess, as I walked through, my head had a wrestling match going on inside. My brain was telling me: “Sober up — remember, this is not a neighborhood with happy endings. Only bad guys win here.”

And my eyes were telling me: “Just watch and take notes. This is something totally new.”

And the this is a titanic struggle and negotiation between the tired but still powerful, top-down 1952 Egyptian Armyled revolution and a vibrant, new, but chaotic, 2011, people-led revolution from the bottom-up — which has no guns but enormous legitimacy. I hope the Tahrir Square protesters can get organized enough to negotiate a new constitution with the army.

There will be setbacks. But whatever happens, they have changed Egypt.

After we walked from Tahrir Square across the Nile bridge, Professor Mamoun Fandy remarked to me that there is an old Egyptian poem that says: “ ‘The Nile can bend and turn, but what is impossible is that it would ever dry up.’ The same is true of the river of freedom that is loose here now. Maybe you can bend it for a while, or turn it, but it is not going to dry up.”

29 states and the District of Columbia,” according to the budget center, “are cutting medical, rehabilitative, home care, or other services needed by low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities, or are significantly increasing the cost of these services.”

For a variety of reasons, there are not enough tax revenues being generated to pay for the basic public services that one would expect in an advanced country like the United States. The rich are not shouldering their fair share of the tax burden. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to consume an insane amount of revenue. And there are not enough jobs available at decent enough pay to ease some of the demand for public services while at the same time increasing the amount of taxes paid by ordinary workers.

The U.S. cannot cut its way out of this crisis. Instead of trying to figure out how to keep 4-year-olds out of pre-kindergarten classes, or how to withhold life-saving treatments from Medicaid recipients, or how to cheat the elderly out of their Social Security, the nation’s leaders should be trying seriously to figure out what to do about the future of the American work force.

Enormous numbers of workers are in grave danger of being left behind permanently. Businesses have figured out how to prosper without putting the unemployed back to work in jobs that pay well and offer

decent benefits.

Corporate profits and the stock markets are way up. Businesses are sitting atop mountains of cash. Put people back to work?

Forget about it. Has anyone bothered to notice that much of those profits are the result of aggressive payroll-cutting — companies making do with fewer, less well-paid and harder-working employees?

For American corporations, the action is increasingly elsewhere. Their interests are not the same as those of workers, or the country as a whole. As Harold Meyerson put it in The American Prospect: “Our corporations don’t need us anymore. Half their revenues come from abroad. Their products, increasingly, come from abroad as well.”

American workers are in a world of hurt. Anyone who thinks that politicians can improve this sorry state of affairs by hacking away at Social Security, Medicare and the public schools are great candidates for involuntary commitment.

New ideas on a grand scale are needed.

The United States can’t thrive with so many of its citizens condemned to shrunken standards of living because they can’t find adequate employment. Long-term joblessness is a recipe for societal destabilization. It should not be tolerated in a country with as much wealth as the United States. It’s destructive, and it’s wrong.

20 February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weeekly

LETTERS Earn It To the Legislature of Puerto Rico: Last month all you did was fret over that Traverzo character. But the NPP got even this month booting Farinacci over family bochinche. And now the drug-test circus. While the tragedy exploding at UPR has yet to tickle your fancy. You force us to pay you outrageous salaries, but you seldom do anything useful, it all never-ending nonsense. Give me a reason why the people of Puerto Rico ought to have any respect for you.

Mariano Marte, Santurce

Our Tyranny What might you tell me about the goings-on in Cairo? Don’t they remind you a bit of UPR/ Capitolio/Sheraton? We the people get fed up with tyrants and explode. Police over there have sluaghtered over 20 students already. Eat your heart out, Figueroa Sancha.

In a very real sense the 3,000 dead on 9/11 were murdered by Washington. Who followed the policy that worked for them in Latin America through the 20th century. Installing oppressive dictatorships and supplying them with little arsenals. And they assassinated El Che and subdued by force of arms hald a dozen nations who thought themselves sovereign, wherever cloak and dagger didn’t work, that is, think Chile and Argentina. Only Cuba didn’t work out for them, and got treated like the Romans did Carthage.

And now the US repeat the scheme in the Middle East. But it’s imprudent not to weigh the difference in circumstances. Mere distance renders the Americans relatively weaker visà-vis the Islamists. And bear in mind that, had they failed in this hemisphere, they would’ve had to face a community of nations united in their hatred for the Eagle of the North, I think it would’ve meant the beginning of the end for the United States. Egypt is the most potent nation of the Arab world. What happens if the insurrection against Mubarak’s tyrannical corrupt puppet government triumphs in favor of the Islamic element? Next thing they’d be manufacturing atom bombs and other Arab nations joining them and that would be the end of the unipolar geopolitics we’ve lived since Reagan and the Pope undermined the government integrity of the USSR, taking advantage precisely of the dramatic democratization effort there.

Short-term solutions that thwart the liberty and socioeconomic development of others are bound to blow up in your face in the long run.

And this brings us back to Puerto Rico. We have a chief executive that, manipulating an imperfect constitution, ours, has neutralized the Judicial Branch. If you sue Fortuño for violating your Constitutional rights, all you’ll get from Fortaleza is a guffaw. Federal Court is still available, but you know it takes years for

a case to clear the Supreme Court and while the cat sleeps the mice wreak havoc.

By dint of his new power Fortuño is undoing higher public education and labor capabilities and police repression becomes absolute. Like the Latin American autarchies we see in the soaps. All while all Latin America is doing away with that sort of thing. But, what if we have a Cairo in Puerto Rico? For starters don’t vote for the NPP in 2012, I hear the PRPR is running again. And support the UPR strikers, do it now!

Danilo Alvarez, Hato Rey

Dumb Laws “Ma’am, would you buy two notebooks for us? We need them for school. Badly. And we’re not allowed inside,” a couple of middle schoolers pleaded with me at the entrance to Plaza del Mercado Mall in Río Piedras, ten-dollar bill in hand. There’s an ordinance that youngsters aren’t allowed into stores before three o’clock.

Lawmakers here are adept at pandering to every paying lobbyist. Yet they lack the disposition to legislate with minimal common sense.

It’s not something they attach much importance to.

Frágola Serpieri , Santurce

Suggestion to UPR students: Simply skip this semester and do readmission for August. You’ll find that one semester in the long run is insignificant and you’ll make your point, specially if enough of you do it. A 50% drop in enrollment would be a rude awakening to Fortuño et al. And when you get back it’ll only be $400. Perhaps nothing if you’ve made an impression.

Samaria Salcedo, Caparra Hts.

Strawberries & Cowards Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.

It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out.

It doesn’t matter much to me.

Strawberry Fields Forever (1967) THE BEATLES To Gov. Fortuño: Who is the coward? Is it García Padilla who frets over your better half’s penchant for little strawberries? Meaning worklessly earning her pay, much like you do. Or is it you, who look the other way while your ruffians humiliate

and maltreat our children and our women and defile our dignity as a community, who are the coward?

Neither. We the People are the cowards.

We who don’t have the “manly firmness,” as Jefferson would’ve put it, to do something about you.

Bob Harris, Condado

Fathoming penepeístas Today’s penepeístas appear consumate sadists, fellows intent on evil by dint of sheer obduracy, witness the Governor’s offhandish dismissal of the egregious violations of human rights taken place at UPR/Capitolio delivered into our living-room TVs. To fathom their bizarre thinking you have to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It’s the Main Kampf of a perverted scheme for society, innocently monikered neoliberalism, yet it’s neither new nor liberal. The premise is we must all fight to survive and the victor then claims the spoils, a winner-takes-all set-up in which “losers” are disposed of and community, in both the macro and the micro, is ever strengthened and refined. Yes, Darwin.

But Charles Darwin, through his trek on the Beagle, observed the survival of the fittest, not as a recipe for prosperity, but as the down side of nature, pain and suffering are not good things and he was a God-fearing man, the ranting of Fundamentalists nothwithstanding.

Lius Fortuño is actually more a bureaucrat than a leader, a feckless figurehead. The mind behind such perverted ideology is Kenneth McClintock’s. And the offing is the abdication of the responsibilty of the state for the welfare of its citizens.

But the posture is hypocritical. Do the scions of the rich have the same chance as the rest of us? They seem to believe so actually, when you haven’t made it like they can, they look down on you, like you’re inferior somehow. Sure, they went to Princeton, got married even, while you had to earn a living and scrounge to have your own pad of get ahead a bit professionally. When lizards and partidges compete in the wild nature provides no such headstart.

The University of Puerto Rico, insofar as it’s a vehicle for social mobility, stands in the way, must be brought down, and with it, a generation hence, the middle class. But aren’t the latter the buffer between the ensconced oligarchs and the rabid dispossessed, we who catch the bullets before they reach Milla de Oro and Montehiedra?

There’s a solution to that too. It’s called the police state.

Nevertheless, even in the forest species that cooperate have the upper hand over those that fight it out. Ma Nature isn’t as mean as she’s made out to be. And not as mean as the penepeístas. Not even close.

Jackson Winters, Isla Verde

The San Juan Weeekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

21

LETTERS Egyptian Example In front of the hallowed gates of the University, Ghandi met Eichmann. Passive resistence by the students was dealt with employing a life-threatening attack. The penepeístas and Figueroa Sancha insisted that when a Riot Squad gorilla pushes his finger into the neck of a limp demostrator on the street, straight into the carotid artery to interrupt bloodflow to the brain, he knows what he’s doing and is not be secondguessed by the ignorant rest of us. Luckily a city cardiologist went on TV to explain the deadly potential.

Not too long ago, in the Bosnia-Herzegovina War, rape was used as a weapon, to humiliate and intimidate the population into submission. At the UPR road sit-in you clearly saw on TV that police tough holding the girl down in the back of a police vehicle, deliberately cupping and squeezing her left breast and then her right. No, he wasn’t removing her from anywhere. The take was through a long lens, you could tell by the blurred silhouettes on the sides and the flattened perspective, so I’d bet he was unaware he was on the air live. Was he that desperate for a woman? Or was he encouraged to do this for effect?

Watch what’s happening in Cairo. Those are men and women standing up to tyranny. We’re just couch-potato cowards. We don’t have what it takes to defend our children and our women. No wonder we don’t even own our own island. We don’t deserve to.

Javier Acevedo, Ocean Park

Tyranny Reaching Out To Egyptian Pres. Mubarak: Your security people just don’t hack it. You must phone our governor. Her employs humanoid atavisms overgrown on anabolic steroids, straight out of the Island of Dr. Moreau, if you fancy H.G. Wells, the mere sight of them is terrifying.

First, they throw people on the floor, kneel on them, all 300 pounds of each, and torment them with electricity. Then, it’s the job of commanders passing by to kick such captives repeatedly into the groin. And if troublemakers then resort to Ghandi and lie limp on the road, obstructing traffic, the governor’s unforgiving troopers use their fingers to interrupt bloodflow to the brain. A small fraction of those subjected to this will suffer permanent brain damage or croak, but that’ll teach a lesson to the rest. And when women take part, the best trick is to grab and squeezed their breasts on TV, in view of family, boyfriend and community, in a Moslem country like yours, this has to be an ice-breaker.

And the best part is it’s all done here under the American flag by a statehooder government.

Make sure you secure footage from local TV sta-

tions, in case Obama and Hillary give you lip.

What? You wouldn’t subject your own people to such bullying? Do you wanna stay president or don’t you?

Paul Théron, Condado

Yet More Fortaleza Trickery Fortuño to UPR students: We’ll help you pay the $800---maybe---but you have to enroll for the semester first, sign up for the payment schedule.

Then we’ll let you know in a few weeks whether or not the money’s run out by the time we got to you. If so, well, we’ve clipped you for the $800, you should’ve skipped the semester, silly.

And remember what Ygrís and I did to you for trusting us last time, how I unforgettably packed the Council of Higher Education, just like I did to the Supreme Court. Yes, Mussolini would be proud of me. And the joke’s on you.

Jennifer Contreras, Condado

Feckless Diletante “This is not the Puerto Rico I want. But you must hear both sides of the story, we all have to work together,” utters the Governor every time the brown hits the fan. The clown doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.

Nevertheless, the cue to maltreat citizens comes from him, his vehement obsequiousness toward the police and Arch-thug Figueroa Sancha, despite the human-rights transgressions and the public outcry.

Yesterday students and riot squaders pelted rocks at each other for the first time. In 1970 rocks were followed by bullets and death.

I’d say Fortuño should step aside and allow a conscientious leader to take charge of the Commonwealth.

Bob Harris, Condado

Unintended Consequences Some independentistas wanted to be cute and contrived the infamous pivazos. Yes, and those begat Aníbal Acevedo, who nobody fathomed would turn out such an incompetent nut, then he begat Fortuño, a conniving tyrant wannabe, whom Jefferson and Madison would certainly be ashamed of. The outcome has been so horrific that we’ve blanked our minds on how casually we got here. From this end Pedro Rosselló looks like a knight in shining armor.

Might he deign to ride in and save us after we treated him so shabbily.

Julián Acevedo, Ocean Park

The Day Democracy Died The US/PR Constitution restricts the function of a supreme court to “cases and contoversies,” meaning they can’t tell you how your divorce would go if you haven’t filed for one. No such court may decide hypotheticals, none within the mainland ever does, it would make such a venue a laughing stock. Yet the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico did just that. Between UPR strikes they ruled they’re illegal, on the justification there might be another in the future, yes, a hypothetical.

How can high justices break the law so publicly and get away with it? You see, packed by Gov. Fortuño with NPP hacks, it’s power, not legality, that matters, the US/PR Constitution is no longer operational on our island. Preposterous?

Such machinations have been done many times by ascendant fascist regimes, most memorably at the dawn of the Third Riech, in Mussolini’s Italy and in Perón’s Argentina. Sort of the way Senator Palpatine maneuvered in Revenge of the Sith.

And remember the UPR Board of Trustees had agreed to a compromise with the striking students and Fortuño packed the board with toads of his and the new composition reneged on everything and demanded the $800 “quota” now being imposed by brute force.

Today I read the penepeístas have made a criminal offense protests “that interfere with the functioning of government educational entities.”

Any rally is in whatever measure disruptive, particularly if it’s known police are putting their thick fingers into the carotids of limp demonstrators and grabbing and squeezing young girls’ breasts and it’s all on TV. So we’re talking an end to freedom of speech and to peaceably assemble and of the right to petition the government for redress of grievances and to be secure within one’s person.

The last time Puerto Rico became a dictatorship was under a charismatic leader, people willingly delivered their prerogatives into the hands of a fatherly shepherd. Now they’re simply being seized by a corrupt brute with a facetious grin.

Juan Pérez, Altamira

The San Juan Weekly Send your opinions and ideas to: The San Juan Weeekly PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 Or e-mail us at:

sanjuanweeklypr@gmail.com Telephones: (787) 743-3346 · (787) 743-6537 (787) 743-5606 · Fax (787) 743-5500

Kitchen

22

February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Olive Oil and Coconut Brownies Time: 45 minutes, plus cooling 3/4 cup olive oil, plus more to grease pan 1/3 cup cocoa powder 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped 2 large eggs 2 large egg yolks 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 1/2 cups sugar 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt 2 1/2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped 2 cups shredded sweetened coconut Fleur de sel, for sprinkling.

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Lightly grease a 9-by-13-inch baking pan.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the cocoa powder and 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons boiling water until smooth. Add the unsweetened chocolate and whisk until the chocolate

has melted. Whisk in the olive oil.

Add the eggs, yolks and vanilla, and continue to whisk until combined.

Add the sugar, whisking until fully incorporated. Using a spatula, fold in the flour and salt until just combined. Fold in the bittersweet chocolate pieces.

3. Pour half the batter into the prepared pan and smooth with a spatula.

Sprinkle 1 cup of the shredded coconut on top of the batter. Pour in the remaining batter and smooth. Top with remaining coconut. Sprinkle with fleur de sel and bake until just set and firm to the touch, about 25 to 30 minutes. (These brownies solidify as they cool, so inserting a toothpick to check for doneness will not work; it does not come out clean.) Transfer the pan to a wire rack and allow to cool completely before cutting into 1-inch squares.

Yield: 30 brownies.

February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Pepperoni: On Top

By JULIA MOSKIN

A

CROSS the United States, artisanal pizza joints are opening faster than Natalie Portman movies. But inside those imported ovens, pepperoni — by far America’s most popular pizza topping — is as rare as a black swan.

In these rarefied, wood-fired precincts, pizzas are draped with hot soppressata and salami piccante, and spicy pizza alla diavola is popular. At Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland, Calif., there is local-leek-and-potato pizza. At Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, dried cherry and orange blossom honey pizza. At Motorino in the East Village, brussels sprouts and pancetta.

But pepperoni pizza? Geddoutahere!

What, exactly, is pepperoni? It is an air-dried spicy sausage with a few distinctive characteristics: it is fine-grained, lightly smoky, bright red and relatively soft. But one thing it is not: Italian.

“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title: “How Italian Food Conquered the World.” “Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that

name, though some salamis from Calabria and Abruzzo in the south are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mr. Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.

Pepperoni certainly has conquered the United States. Hormel is the biggest-selling brand, and in the runup to the Super Bowl this Sunday, the company has sold enough pepperoni (40 million feet) to tunnel all the way through the planet Earth, said Holly Drennan, a product manager.

Michael Ruhlman, an expert in meat curing who is writing a book on Italian salumi, doesn’t flinch from calling pepperoni pizza a “bastard” dish, a distorted reflection of wholesome tradition. “Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.” He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.

But some of the most respected meatheads in the country are beginning to take pepperoni seriously.

“I can’t make salami fast enough

as it is, and now the pizza chefs are begging me for pepperoni,” said Paul Bertolli, founder and self-proclaimed “curemaster” of Fra’ Mani, the salumi specialist in Oakland. Mr. Bertolli is in a research-and-development phase on a pepperoni, because of demand from expert pizzaiolos like Chris Bianco of Bianco in Phoenix and Craig Stoll of Delfina in San Francisco. “There’s nothing quite like that spicy, smoky taste with pizza,” he said.

Mr. Bertolli believes that pepperoni’s smokiness, beef content and fine grind are more characteristic

23

Kitchen

of German sausages like Thüringer, suggesting a possible Midwestern connection. “I’ve never seen a smoked sausage anywhere in Italy,” he said.

Normally, Mr. Bertolli confines himself to products and processes that are almost painfully traditional, and a nose-to-tail ethos that he applies to the pasture-raised, antibiotic-free pigs he buys. (Except the ears; Mr. Bertolli says they have too much crunch even to be used in headcheese.) For Mr. Bertolli’s pepperoni, he will avoid the nitrites used by commercial producers in favor of celery juice, an effective and natural preservative, though it does not produce the same appetizing color in the finished product as the chemical versions.

No one is claiming that pepperoni is difficult to find. Large producers like Volpi, Patrick Cudahy (makers of the No-Char line used by many pizzerias in the Northeast), Columbus and Ezzo are considered top-of-theline among pizzeria owners. Opinion is divided on whether a slice of the stuff should curl when cooked, or lie flat. Some say that the little cups of cooked pepperoni perform an important job: confining the spicy, molten fat from pouring out over the surface of the pizza.

But a pepperoni that lives up to the handmade, high-quality standards of the artisanal-food movement and also replicates the soft, chewy, smoky-hot-sweetness of the commercial product? That’s the grail.

Otto, the Greenwich Village pizzeria opened by Mario Batali in 2003, cures its own pepperoni, in a small subterranean chamber now overseen

by Dan Drohan, the restaurant’s chef.

In 2007, following a crackdown on illicit cured meats by the New York City

Continues on page 24

Kitchen

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February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Potato Salad With Pepperoni and Vinegar Adapted from Torrisi Italian Specialties, Manhattan Time: 30 minutes 3 pounds small red-skinned potatoes, not peeled 6 garlic cloves, peeled 10 to 12 sprigs thyme 1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns Salt 1/4 cup olive oil 6 sage leaves, fresh or dried 1 tablespoon dried oregano 8 ounces pepperoni, finely chopped or ground 6 large shallots, peeled and thinly sliced 1/4 cup white wine vinegar Ground black pepper.

Comes from page 23 Health Department, Otto became the first restaurant in the city to receive formal permission to air-cure its own meats, a process that must take place within a specific range of humidity and temperature in order to be safe and effective.

Pepperoni is the most popular topping at Otto, said Mr. Drohan, and the restaurant goes though more than 100 pounds a week of red-wine-colored pepperoni, made from Berkshire pork shoulder and flavored with fennel pollen (rather than the usual fennel seed), paprika and cayenne.

Outside the pizza universe, it’s rare to see pepperoni in a restaurant kitchen. Chorizo is everywhere; soppressata, with its pearly grains of fat, all the rage. But only at Torrisi Italian Specialties, the small Mulberry Street restaurant dedicated to upgrading Italian-American flavors, is there evidence of true pepperoni creativity. It serves pepperoni vinaigrette, pepperoni snow, and minced pepperoni mixed into warm crushed potatoes with oregano and vinegar to make the potato salad of dreams.

“We buy three different kinds for different culinary purposes,” said Mario Carbone, a co-owner and chef.

Alps brand is good for cooking, he said, “Pepperoni just wants to give out that wonderful orange grease.”

Salumeria Biellese is best for slices, he added, and a super-salty-smoky version from Vermont Smoke and Cure makes an intensely flavorful garnish for raw seafood. For the snow, Mr.

Carbone briefly freezes the whole sausage, then grates it on a Microplane into feathery shreds that melt when they come to rest atop a hot soup, like potato or bean.

A block farther along Mulberry Street, on a stretch that is suddenly reclaiming its Italian-American culinary heritage, is a pizzeria called Rubirosa that opened in November. There’s no more noble lineage in American pizza than Rubirosa’s: the chef and coowner Angelo Pappalardo (always called A. J.) grew up on Staten Island working in his father Giuseppe’s pizzeria, Joe and Pat’s, where the crusts are thin, ethereal and legendary.

The pizzas at Rubirosa are almost identical, with sauce spread almost all the way to the edge and a sauce lightly balanced between tangy and sweet. The pepperoni pieces, no bigger than a nickel, are sliced each day (many pizzerias now buy pre-cut pepperoni, which toughens quickly).

When Albert Di Meglio, a bornand-raised Staten Islander, came on board at Rubirosa as co-chef, he said he had big plans for the pepperoni pie. “I thought we’d do some kind of local salumi, something from Little Italy down the street.” He was wrong.

Although Mr. Pappalardo has cooked at high-end Italian restaurants like Esca and Osteria da Circo, and all the pasta at Rubirosa is made by hand, the pepperoni is Hormel. Its familiar texture and taste, Mr. Di Meglio said, won out.

“A. J. said ‘Give the people what they want,’ ” Mr. Di Meglio said.

“And he was right.”

1. Bring a large pot of water to boil over high heat. Add potatoes, garlic, thyme, peppercorns and 2 tablespoons of salt, then boil until potatoes are

just tender, 10 to 15 minutes depending on size.

2. Meanwhile, heat oil in a large pan over medium heat until shimmering.

Add sage and oregano and fry until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the pepperoni, lower heat to medium-low, and render fat from the meat for about 2 minutes. Add shallots and cook, stirring occasionally, until tender, 8 to 10 minutes.

3. When the potatoes are done, drain them, discard garlic, thyme and peppercorns, and lightly crush potatoes with the back of a fork. Keep warm in a bowl, covered with a kitchen towel.

4. Add the vinegar to the skillet and stir, scraping up any brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Pour mixture over warm potatoes, toss and add salt and pepper as needed. Serve warm.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

25

Egypt’s Last Pharaoh F

arouk I of Egypt (11 February 1920 – 18 March 1965), was the tenth ruler from the Muhammad Ali Dynasty and the penultimate King of Egypt and Sudan, succeeding his father, Fuad I, in 1936. His full title was “His Majesty Farouk I, by the grace of God, King of Egypt and Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, of Kordofan, and of Darfur.” He was overthrown in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, and was forced to abdicate in favor of his infant son Ahmed Fuad, who succeeded him as King Fuad II. He died in exile in Italy. His sister was Princess Fawzia Fuad, first wife and Queen Consort of the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The great-great-grandson of Muhammad Ali Pasha, Farouk was of Albanian descent as well as native Egyptian descent through his mother the Queen. Before his father’s death, he was educated at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, England. Upon his coronation, the hugely popular 16-year-old King Farouk made a public radio address to the nation, the first time a sovereign of Egypt had ever spoken directly to his people in such a way: And if it is God’s will to lay

on my shoulders at such an early age the responsibility of kingship, I on my part appreciate the duties that will be mine, and I am prepared for all sacrifices in the cause of my duty... My noble people, I am proud of you and your loyalty and am confident in the future as I am in God. Let us work together. We shall succeed and be happy. Long live the Motherland!

Farouk was enamored of the glamorous royal lifestyle. Although he already had thousands of acres of land, dozens of palaces, and hundreds of cars, the youthful king would often travel to Europe for grand shopping sprees, earning the ire of many of his subjects.

He was most popular in his early years and the nobility largely celebrated him. For example, during the accession of the young King Farouk, “the Abaza family had solicited palace authorities to permit the royal train to stop briefly in their village so that the king could partake in refreshments offered in a large, magnificently ornamented tent they had erected in the train station.”

Farouk’s accession initially was encouraging for the populace and nobility, due to his youth and Egyptian roots through his mother Nazli Sabri. However, the situation was not the same with some Egyptian politicians and elected government officials, with whom Farouk quarreled a lot, despite their loyalty in principle to his throne.

During the hardships of World War II, criticism was leveled at Farouk for his lavish lifestyle. His decision to not put out the lights at his palace in Alexandria, during a time when the city was blackedout because of German and Italian bombing, was deemed particularly offensive by Egyptian people. Due to the continuing British occupation of Egypt, many Egyptians, Farouk included, were positively disposed towards Germany and Italy, and despite the presence of British troops, Egypt remained officially neutral until the final year of the war.

Consequently, the royal Italian servants of Farouk were not interned, and there is an unconfirmed story that Farouk told British Ambassador Sir Miles Lampson (who had

an Italian wife), “I’ll get rid of my Italians when you get rid of yours”.

In addition, Farouk was known for harboring certain Axis sympathies and even sending a note to Hitler saying that an invasion would be welcome. Farouk only declared war on the Axis Powers under heavy British pressure in 1945, long after the fighting in Egypt’s Western Desert had ceased.

Farouk is also reported as having said “The whole world is in revolt. Soon there will be only five Kings left—the King of England, the King of Spades, the King of Clubs, the King of Hearts, and the King of Diamonds.”

Overthrow Farouk was widely condemned for his corrupt and ineffectual governance, the continued British occupation, and the Egyptian army’s failure to prevent the loss of 78% of Palestine to the newly formed State of Israel in the 1948 Arab-Is

Continues on page 26

26 Comes from page 25 raeli War. Public discontent against Farouk rose to new levels. In the CIA, the project to overthrow King Farouk, known internally known as “Project FF [Fat Fucker]”, was initiated by CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. after CIA disappointment at King Farouk for not improving the functionality and usefulness of his government. The CIA supported the coup d’état against King Farouk by not opposing the efforts of the free officers to overthrow him.[8] Finally, on 23 July 1952, the Free Officers Movement under Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a military coup that launched the Egyptian Revolution of 1952.

Farouk was forced to abdicate, and went into exile in Monaco and Italy where he lived for the rest of his life. Immediately following his abdication, Farouk’s baby son, Ahmed Fuad was proclaimed King Fuad II, but for all intents and purposes Egypt was now governed by Naguib, Nasser and the Free Officers.

On 18 June 1953, the revolutionary government formally abolished the monarchy, ending 150 years of the Muhammad Ali dynasty’s rule, and Egypt was declared a republic.

The revolutionary government quickly moved to auction off the King’s vast collection of trinkets and treasures. Among the more famous of his possessions was one of the rare 1933 Double Eagle coins, though the coin disappeared before it could be returned to the United States.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Exile and death Farouk fled Egypt in great haste; his abandoned possessions— including a huge collection of pornography—became an object of curiosity and ridicule. On his exile from Egypt, Farouk settled first in Monaco, and later in Rome, Italy.

On 29 April 1958, the United Arab Republic issued rulings revoking the Egyptian citizenship of Farouk.

He was granted Monegasque citizenship in 1959 by his close friend Prince Rainier III. The blue-eyed Farouk was thin early in his reign, but later gained enormous weight. His taste for fine cuisine made him dangerously obese, weighing nearly 300 pounds (136 kg)—an acquaintance described him as “a stomach with a head”.

He died in the Ile de France restaurant in Rome, Italy on 18 March

1965. He collapsed and died at his dinner table following a characteristically heavy meal. While some claim he was poisoned by Egyptian Intelligence, no official autopsy was conducted on his body. His will stated that his burial place should be in the Al Rifa’i Mosque in Cairo, but the request was denied by the Egyptian government under Gamal Abdel Nasser, and he was going to be buried in Italy. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia stated he would be willing to have King Farouk buried in Saudi Arabia, upon which President Nasser agreed for the former monarch to be buried in Egypt, not in the Mosque of Al Rifai’ but in the Ibrahim Pasha Burial Site.

A likely apocryphal story about Farouk’s lavish living in exile was that he refused to donate money to aid poverty on the basis that “If I donate my fortune to buy food, all of Egypt eats today, eats tomorrow, and the day after that they are starving once again”, thus rationalizing his high living.

In addition to an affair with the British writer and siren Barbara Skelton, among numerous others, Farouk was married twice,

with a claim of a third marriage His first wife was Safinaz Zulficar (1921–1988), the daughter of Youssef Zulficar Pasha. Safinaz was renamed Farida upon her marriage.

They were married in 1938, and divorced in 1948, producing three daughters.

Farouk’s second wife was a commoner, Narriman Sadek (1934–2005). They were married in 1951, and divorced in 1954, having only one child, the future King Fuad II. Whilst in exile in Italy, Farouk met Irma Capece Minutolo, an opera singer, who became his companion. In 2005, she claimed that she married the former King in 1957.

Style The ostentatious king’s name is used to describe the bad imitation Louis XV-style furniture known as “Louis-Farouk”. The imperial French style furniture became fashionable among Egypt’s upper classes during Farouk’s reign so Egyptian artisans began to mass-produce it. The style uses ornate carving, is heavily gilded, and covered in very elaborate cloth.

San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

27

modern love

The Hardest Lesson to Learn

By KIM PHILLEY

I

BROKE UP with my boyfriend because too many proper nouns had come between us. He is Nigerian; I am American. He survived the Warri Crisis; I survived art school in inner-city Baltimore. He has been a professional soccer player; I am a former lecturer in English literature. We live in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which is where we met, at an African bar called Do It All. My name is Kim. His name is Shady.

The first hurdle was his name. His Christian name is Shadrack, but people have been calling him by the diminutive since he was a little boy.

In those early love-swept days, gushing via cellphone to my mother in Idaho as I picked my way through the improbable traffic of Phnom Penh — a Honda scooter with three baskets of live pigs tethered to its back; a recent hospital escapee riding side-saddle on a motorbike, dangling her own IV bag from a wooden pole she holds aloft like a trident — I would carefully refer to my boyfriend by his tribal name, Chibuzor.

Until he said: “Baby, I hate it when people call me that. I don’t even speak my tribal language. I told you I grew up in the city. I’m a city boy.”

At 32, I’ve stumbled enough in love to develop a few generalist’s theories about the differences between men and women.

First among them is that women are slow to reveal, while men tell you who they are up front. For example, if you are a few days into getting to know a man and he tells you he’s loath to have children, or a recovering addict, or has “mommy issues,” take it at face value. He wants you to know this large fact because he believes it defines him.

On our first date, we walked the inky streets of my neighborhood to a Khmer restaurant called Guitare de l’Amour. He ordered a single Coke and watched me eat, claiming he wasn’t hungry. Later we returned to my apartment and sat on the balcony, where I lighted a votive candle. To the baleful cries of dogs in an alley, his face halfhidden by the flickering shadow-light, he began to tell me stories, violent stories vivid with menace, from the Niger Delta where he grew up.

“Our torchlight went off, and during all the time we were digging the grave we’ve been hearing screams in the forest,” he said. “But we are so lucky, baby, because one of the boys helping us is a smoker. So, I dig her grave with his lighter.”

Why had he been called upon to bury the little girl, the child of a relative? Because she had died while her father was away, and the body could not wait.

“I bury her myself, you know,” he continued. “I put her back in the coff and put the coff in the grave I dug. After we finished, would you know the lighter exploded? We went out of the forest with phones, with only the light from our mobile phones.”

Before I go on, I should explain: Although I am a white American girl, I spent most of my childhood in Jakarta and Bangkok. Because of a motorcycle wreck, my left leg is held together with titanium rods. I am a recovering addict who has relapsed four times. I guess these are things I would want someone close to know about me: permanent hardware, large facts.

And I think this is what Shady was trying to tell me on our first date: that he is a Warri boy. That his English may not be perfect because he spent his high school years playing soccer and guarding his female friends against rape in a schoolyard that was often ablaze with rebel fires.

That because of his wits, athleticism, dumb luck and good family (blessings that he calls, simply, “God’s grace”), he

survived tribal war.

I remember telling him a bit of my own story that night: of how sick I’d been all through my 20s, suffering from a debilitating bladder condition that spurred my addiction to painkillers, and how grateful I now feel for living in a place where I don’t have to be defined by my past, by old traumas, by a tired identity as a sick person, a troubled person, someone people worry about.

As I confessed, he traced the line of my thigh with a finger and then offered up two words from the darkness: “I understand.”

Five months later I broke up with him. I had been thinking too much: about the differences in our backgrounds, about how ridiculous or suspect our relationship might seem to the folks back home. It had finally occurred to me that I could refer to him as Shadrack when talking to my family. I began to relax into his name and slip — Shadrack soon gave way to Shady. But I still cringed every time my parents tried to get around the English connotations of his nickname by drawing out different vowel sounds: asking after SHAH-dee or how is SHAD-ee doing?

I think our breakup (by then we were living together and had spoken of marriage and children) hit him like a biblical casting out, an exile through which he could wander forever but never recover.

He fasted for seven days. He broke into our apartment, now mine, and sprinkled the floor with flowers.

After consulting his prophet in Nigeria, he paid a Khmer boy to collect two bottles of water, one from the Mekong River and another from a filthy urban lake. He then let the water sit for another week, as per his prophet’s instruction, until a strong-smelling scum rode the top of each specimen. He then bathed in them, rubbing the fouled, distant water of the monsoons, of the Mekong, deep into his dreadlocks, smooth face, rough tattoos and hard abdominals.

Other than the wake of red carnations he left on my floor, I had no idea he was taking these decidedly spiritual actions to win me back. I went away to Indonesia for a month, waterlogged from crying and sodden with the feeling that our relationship had been a fever dream, a non sequitur, a strange story inhabited by impossible characters.

One prays fervently for a certain outcome, hoping that matter itself might be changed, twisted and reshaped by our sincere desires. But how often do we consider that we ourselves are matter and might be subject to the prayers of others, vulnerable, if you believe, to their transformative powers, to subliminal restructurings launched from afar?

When I returned from my trip I was ill in both heart and body. I began taking a pain medicine to which I had once been addicted; narcotics are easily procured from any pharmacy in Cambodia, which does not require a prescription.

Somewhere in the haze of my first weeks back in Phnom Penh, I had the instinct to call Shady. It wasn’t a fantasy about our getting back together or a plot, just an urge to ask him out for beef fried rice.

THAT was four months ago. I no longer have dreams of us lying together in bed while my mother looks on disapprovingly, or of living alone in a strange hotel room that we entered with a stolen key.

A few weeks later, I told him I was taking pain pills again and he asked me to hand them over before leaning back and saying, “There is a spiritual solution to your problem.” He asked if I would stop the pills immediately and then fast and pray for five days. If I agreed, he would fast and pray with me.

I have gone through many attempts to quit the pills, but I have never gotten off of them as quickly or with such a sense of support. If I was tempted to whine, I considered the fact that Shady wasn’t eating, either, and for no better reason than his concern for me.

I broke my fast with three cups of coffee, and in the first flood of caffeine I grabbed my dictionary and told him we were going to institute a language learning system: I would define one English word for him each day, something that came up in the course of our conversations, and write the word’s meaning on a piece of paper. In return, he had to write down and translate for me a phrase of pidgin English.

The next morning I woke early and shuffled to the refrigerator for coffee beans. Before I could swing open the door, my eyes spied the yellow sheet of paper, dangling from a weak magnet, on which I had written: “Contort = to twist, bend, draw out of shape. A person who performs gymnastic feats involving contorted postures is a contortionist.”

Underneath it, he had written in pidgin: “Shady, Make we day go house.”

And underneath that, in a bolder hand, “English: Shady, let’s go home.”

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February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Egypt Army Sets 6 Month Blueprint, Future Role Unclear

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

T

he military officers who have governed Egypt since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak on Friday have laid out a brisk six-month timetable in which to draft constitutional amendments, submit them to a referendum and elect a new government, stirring debate about the military’s long-term intentions.

Some in the opposition welcomed the timetable as evidence that the officers were eager to turn over power to a civilian authority. But others, noting that the military has so far excluded civilians from the transitional government, questioned whether the speedy schedule might signal just the opposite. They worry that the military might be trying to manipulate events to preserve its power by rushing the process and denying political parties and candidates enough time to organize for a meaningful, fair election that could elect a strong civilian government.

Two generals on the governing Supreme Military Council presented the plan — which calls for writing the amendments in 10 days and holding the referendum within two months — in a meeting on Sunday night with the revolution’s young leaders.

The meeting appeared to be the military’s first significant outreach to the civilian opponents of Mr. Mubarak, and two of the young protest organizers, true to their movement’s Internet roots, promptly summarized the meeting in a post on Facebook.

“The first time an Egyptian official sat down to listen more than speak,” they wrote of their meeting with the generals, Mahmoud Hijazi and Abdel Fattah. The two young leaders, Wael Ghonim and Amr Salama, also praised the generals’ attentive demeanor and the absence of the usual “parental tone (you do not know what is good for you, son).”

Still, the two reserved judgment about the military’s plan, and others in the group said their coalition had yet to make a final assessment of it.

“This meeting was just for the military

to tell us about their plans,” said Shady elGhazaly Harb, one of the revolution’s young leaders. “We have asked for another meeting this week to tell them about our plans. Then we will see.”

Egypt has effectively been under direct military control since Sunday, when the council suspended the Constitution and dissolved Parliament. And some in the opposition, including the Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, have repeatedly warned that hasty elections could leave the fledgling democracy so weak that it could invite the rise of another military strongman.

A communiqué issued on Monday by the Supreme Military Council appeared to walk a fine line in grappling with a variety of problems in governing a restive Egypt.

In responding to a series of strikes by state workers, journalists and the police on Monday, the council issued a forceful exhortation that some read as a veiled threat, although it did not threaten specific penalties.

A Western diplomat who knows Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the defense minister and leader of the military government, said it was clear that he did not relish his high-profile role and did not want to keep it.

“My strong sense is there is no real desi-

re to prolong this period,” the diplomat said.

“The field marshal does not seem really interested in being the government of Egypt. He would prefer to take the armed forces back, to have their very large and very comfortable arrangement in Egyptian society and let the civilians take charge of government.”

But, the diplomat said, it remained to be seen whether a swift transition to democracy was possible. “The issue is whether this is the best thing or not the best thing,” he said.

Some of the young protest organizers who met with the generals said they were troubled that the military seemed cool to the idea of negotiating with Mr. ElBaradei, a more experienced figure whom the organizers have chosen as their point man for talks.

“We tried to tell them they should, but they weren’t welcoming to him,” said Mr. elGhazaly Harb, a 32-year-old surgeon. “We hope it is not definitive.”

As it moved to stabilize the country at home, the new military government also lodged formal requests with the European Union and the British government to freeze the assets of all the senior officials of Mr. Mubarak’s government.

Mr. Mubarak’s son, Gamal, a former investment banker and senior official of the former governing party, owns a house in London that is valued at about $10 million.

The younger Mr. Mubarak has become a focus of criticism since his father’s ouster because of the vast wealth he and his friends seemed to have amassed from the privatization of Egypt’s state-run businesses.

One of his friends, the steel magnate and political power broker Ahmed Ezz, made a public appearance on Monday for the first time since the protests began three weeks ago. Once known for his brash, commanding demeanor, he spoke in a television interview in humble tones and sought to distance himself from the violence last week, when gangs of men associated with the governing party assaulted the protesters in Tahrir Square.

Rumors swirled about the whereabouts of the former president, who has

not been seen in public since he bucked plans for a graceful exit and delivered a defiant reassertion of his power in a speech on Thursday night. He had reportedly left Cairo for his vacation home in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik.

On Monday, Egypt’s ambassador to the United States, Sameh Shoukry, said on NBC’s “Today” show that Mr. Mubarak, 82, was “possibly in somewhat of bad health.”

In recent appearances, Mr. Mubarak had appeared to have fully recuperated from gallbladder surgery in Germany last year.

But two Cairo newspapers — one of them state-run — reported that Mr. Mubarak was depressed and refusing to take his medication, and that he had fainted at his vacation home. The reports could not be confirmed.

Meanwhile, in Cairo, small groups of transportation workers, ambulance drivers and park employees marched for better pay.

And in an incongruous display of revolutionary fervor, hundreds of police officers — who only recently had tried to crush the public protests — staged a second day of demonstrations outside the Interior Ministry to demand better wages. Officials said they had promised to double police salaries and benefits in an attempt to get the police back on the street to stop the protests.

On the island of Zamalek, a group of archaeologists demonstrated for jobs and for the ouster of the antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, whom they accused of corruption.

The central bank ordered all banks to close on Monday after a strike at one privately owned institution. Tuesday is a holiday celebrating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, and the banks will not reopen until Wednesday. The stock market is expected to remain closed all week.

Eager to tamp down the strikes, the governing military council urged employees to return to work. “It was noticed that some sectors in the state organized protests despite the return of normal life at a time where all groups and sectors of the population should come together,” a spokesman announced on state television.

In addition to harming the economy, the statement warned, the protests create “a climate when irresponsible elements may carry out illegal acts.” But the military stopped short of threatening any action if strikers did not heed its call.

Two of the revolutionary organizers also said they had received approval from the generals to begin a campaign to raise about $17 billion to rebuild Egypt and compensate the families of those killed during the revolt. And in their Facebook post, they said they were encouraged about the prospects for democracy.

“We all sensed a sincere desire to preserve the gains of the revolution and the unprecedented respect for right of young people to express their views,” they wrote, calling the revolution “a historic achievement that has not happened since the era of the pharaohs.”

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

29

Stress of Sliding Plates Builds Near Chile

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

W

hen a magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Chile last February, geophysicists and seismologists were not surprised. The quake’s epicenter was on a roughly 200-mile stretch of a fault where stresses had been building for nearly two centuries, and experts had expected that one day the strain would be relieved in a cataclysmic event.

But as scientists have pored over volumes of data from what may turn out to be the best-studied major earthquake yet, they have concluded that the ground movement during the quake did not relieve the stresses as anticipated.

The greatest seismic slip was outside the 200-mile segment, known as the Darwin gap since Charles Darwin happened to witness the last earthquake along it, in 1835.

“The pattern of slip was quite different from what would have been expected,” said Stefano Lorito, a geophysicist with the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Rome. While there was one area of slip south of the epicenter that was within the Darwin gap, he said, the area of greatest movement was north of the gap in an area where an 8.0 earthquake occurred in 1928.

Dr. Lorito said the findings show that “there is a fraction of the gap that probably did not rupture.” In addition, he said, the 2010 quake may have added to the stress in the unruptured area, increasing the odds of another major earthquake, although it would probably not be as large as the one last year.

Dr. Lorito is the lead author of a paper published last month in the journal Nature Geoscience describing the slip patterns, based on analysis of tsunami observations and land deformation data from GPS and satellite-based sensors.

But his study is far from the last word on the Chilean

quake. At a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union about a dozen slip patterns were presented, according to Onno Oncken, a geophysicist with the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam.

Dr. Oncken himself was an author of a study published in Nature in September that showed a different slip pattern. His study analyzed only seismic data — recordings of the shock waves, which do not show how the land deformed — from the event. He said it was not unexpected that the patterns would change when GPS and other deformation data was analyzed.

“It’s not surprising anybody at this early stage of data evaluation,” Dr. Oncken said. “We are learning more and more on a practically daily basis.”

“I expect this is going to be the best-observed large earthquake that we’ve ever had,” he added.

But as for Dr. Lorito’s suggestion that the 2010 event may have increased the chances of another earthquake, Dr. Oncken expressed caution, saying there were relatively few data points in the area where a new quake was forecast.

“Personally I would not have dared make such a strong statement,” he said.

The quake, which killed more than 500 people, occurred in a subduction zone, where one tectonic plate is sliding beneath another. In this case, the Nazca plate is sliding eastward beneath the South American plate at a rate of about three inches a year. The movement causes stresses to build up at the plate boundary. In the 2010 quake those stresses were relieved when the western edge of the South American plate suddenly moved westward and upward. Because much of the movement was underwater, the quake spawned a tsunami that was responsible for many of the deaths.

Jian Lin, a geophysicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is also studying the earthquake, although

his analysis is focused more on the buildup of stress before the quake than its release. Dr. Lin said that although the various slip patterns presented so far differ in some ways, researchers generally agree that the slip occurred in two “patches,” one to the north of the epicenter and one to the south. Although the quake started at the epicenter, off the Maule region, much of the rupture occurred elsewhere.

“The southern patch did indeed fill some of the Darwin gap,” he said. “This is where the models differ — some models have more slipping in the southern patch, some have less. But I think with all models, part of the Darwin gap remains.”

While the Chilean quake may end up being a particularly well-studied one, Dr. Lin argued that the discrepancies in the slip patterns among the various research groups demonstrated there was still not enough data. “Much of the quake occurred underwater, and underwater we have no instruments,” he said.

“Now that we know that this part could still rupture, now it’s time to put instruments in the ocean as soon as possible,” Dr. Lin said. “If we don’t do it, we’ll have exactly the same problem the next time.”

30

February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

U.N. Food Agency Issues Warning on China Drought

By KEITH BRADSHER

T

he United Nations’ food agency issued an alert on Tuesday warning that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.

China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades, for national security reasons. Any move by China to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher than the record levels recently reached.

“China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets,” said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, in the Philippines.

The state-run news media in China warned Monday that the country’s major agricultural regions were facing their worst drought in 60 years. On Tuesday the state news agency Xinhua said that Shandong Province, a cornerstone of Chinese grain production, was bracing for its worst drought in 200 years unless substantial precipitation came by the end of this month.

World wheat prices are already surging, and they have been widely cited as one reason for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. A separate United Nations report last week said global food export prices had reached record levels in January. The impact of China’s drought on global food prices and supplies could create serious problems for less affluent countries that rely on imported food.

With $2.85 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, nearly three times that of Japan, the country with the second-largest reserves, China has ample buying power to prevent any serious food shortages.

“They can buy whatever they need to buy, and they can outbid anyone,” Mr. Zeigler said. China’s self-sufficiency in grain prevented world food prices from moving even higher when they spiked three years ago, he said.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said Tuesday that 12.75 million acres of China’s 35 million acres of wheat fields had been affected by the drought. It said that 2.57 million people and 2.79 million head of livestock faced shortages of drinking water.

Chinese state news media are describing the drought in increasingly dire terms.

“Minimal rainfall or snow this winter has crippled China’s major agricultural regions, leaving many of them parched,” Xinhua reported. “Crop production has fallen sharply, as the worst drought in six decades shows no sign of letting up.”

Xinhua said that Shandong Province, in the heart of the Chinese wheat belt, had

received only 1.2 centimeters, or about half an inch, of rain since September. The report did not provide a comparison for normal rainfall for the period.

The Food and Agriculture Organization, in its “special alert” on Tuesday, said the drought’s effects had been somewhat tempered by relatively few days of subzero temperatures and government irrigation projects. The agency went on to caution that extreme cold, with temperatures of minus 18 degrees Celsius (just below zero Fahrenheit), could have “devastating” effects.

Kisan Gunjal, the F.A.O. food emergency officer in Rome who handles Asia alerts, said by telephone that if rain came soon and temperatures warmed up, then the wheat crop could still be saved and a bumper crop might even be possible.

On Tuesday, Chinese meteorological agencies were warning of frost for the next nine nights in the heart of Shandong Province, with temperatures falling as low as 21 degrees Fahrenheit. They forecast little chance of precipitation in the next 10 days except for the possibility of a light rain or a dusting

of snow on Wednesday or Thursday.

Mr. Gunjal said the special alert on China was the first that the F.A.O. had issued anywhere in the world this year. There was only one last year, expressing “grave concern” about food supplies in the Sahel region of Africa, notably Niger.

President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, China’s top two officials, made separate visits to drought-stricken areas last week, and each called for “all-out efforts” to cope with the water shortage.

Typically, world food reports barely mention China, partly because many details of the country’s agriculture production and reserves are state secrets. But China, in fact, is enormously important to the world’s food supply, especially if something goes wrong.

The heat wave in Russia last summer, combined with floods in Australia in recent months, has drawn worldwide attention to the international wheat market, because Russia and Australia have historically been big exporters. But China’s wheat industry has existed in almost total isolation from the rest of the world, with virtually no exports

or imports, until last year, when modest imports began. Yet it is enormous, accounting for one-sixth of global wheat output. The statistical database of the United Nations’ food agency shows that in 2009, the last year available, China produced almost twice as much wheat as the United States or Russia and more than five times as much as Australia.

Currently, the ground in the country is so dry from Beijing south through the provinces of Hebei, Henan and Shandong to Jiangsu Province, just north of Shanghai, that trees and houses are coated with topsoil that has blown off parched fields.

China’s national obsession with selfsufficiency in food includes corn, another crop that is grown and consumed entirely in China with minimal imports or exports.

Little known outside of China, the country’s corn industry actually grows one-fifth of the world’s corn, according to F.A.O. statistics.

China’s corn crop is mostly in the country’s northern provinces, where the drought is worst now.

Mr. Gunjal said the success or failure of the corn crop, as well as the rice crop, would depend mostly on rainfall this spring and summer, not the shortage of rain this winter.

Winters tend to be dry in southern China, the world’s largest rice-producing region. But this winter is drier than most.

China had about 55 million tons of wheat in stockpiles as of last summer, Mr. Gunjal said. That was equal to about half the annual harvest.

China is already the world’s largest importer of soybeans, which are oilseeds, not a grain. China buys soybeans mainly for use as animal feed, because the Chinese diet is shifting toward more meat.

San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

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FASHION & BEAUTY

Take One Last Look

By CATHY HORYN

F

ashion writers and professionals have been complaining about the motley nature of the shows since the mid-1970s, when designers moved their presentations to hotel ballrooms and, through the use of theatrical lighting and choreographed models, introduced performance to their shows.

Commenting on a Ralph Lauren show, in 1977, the critic Kennedy Fraser noted “the absurdity of staring solemnly at a pair of jeans with the aid of searchlights,” and in the case of an Anne Klein show at the Plaza, wished that the models would just act naturally instead of like “figures on a Grecian vase.”

So in a way nothing has changed.

Despite a trend in the ’90s for low-key presentations in lofts and galleries, designers came back to extravagant shows and beefed up the celebrities. The chief attribute of the new space at Lincoln Center seemed to be to get people in and out as fast as possible, so that the area could be cleared for the next paying occupant. If there was a chance to create an exceptional atmosphere — say, on the high-tech level of Alexander McQueen’s last runway show, with robotic cameras and giant video screens — it wasn’t evident this season. Most of the shows, apart from a change in backdrop, looked pretty much identical.

Isaac Mizrahi as much as acknowledged this reality with a show called IM Xerox. At first I read this to mean I Am Xerox, or Instant Message, and maybe the double meaning was intentional. For grainy rose prints on glossy white cotton, he used what were presumably Xeroxed images. The collection highlighted his friendly tailoring, with the jackets of white trouser suits snipped open in the back, and there were classic Mizrahi touches like smocking and Peter Pan collars in a trompe l’oeil of crystals.

Like many designers, though, Mr. Mizrahi was taken with the idea of veiling a dress with a longer duplicate in nylon-shaded chiffon or beaded black chiffon, an obvious trick that made me wonder how we reached a point in fashion where pantyhose now demand attention.

L’Wren Scott, who began her fashion career as a Paris model and then became a stylist for photographers like Herb Ritts, founded her label about five years ago on the unradical notion of a slowly evolving wardrobe. New additions to her glamorous style, based on her own life and long frame, could work with existing pieces. Stores demand more and more deliveries from designers — 10 per year is not uncommon — and Ms. Scott, to her credit, resists the idea of duplicating herself pointlessly. She shows

her clothes in a small setting, to about 70 journalists and retailers, who are fed lunch, because she is pragmatic about how they would be perceived in a big, bland space.

Among her additions this season is a sheer, loose jacket with an attached belt that she showed over a matching cream camisole and wide-leg trousers. She sort of jokingly called it her safari look. A variation came in gold lace, worn with a knit tank top and creamy satin pajama pants with a strip of lace down the sides.

The sheer jackets didn’t scream transparency and could be worn over just about anything. And the relaxed silhouette was a nice departure from Ms. Scott’s fitted style.

Indeed, if there was a demerit to the collection, it was that she did not offer a similar looseness in her evening looks. The embroidered dresses, as well as a ruffled gown in navy velvet, were beautiful, but you wanted to see how she would have handled light volumes. She did have a number of soft, below-theknee dresses in peach and sunflower, and a smoky, abstract print rendered from a photo of wind-blown palms.

Were the cardigan sweaters that Oscar de la Renta showed on Thursday — the end of the New York spring shows — a bid for Michelle Obama’s attention?

There sure were a lot of them, often scattered with appliquéd flowers. Some of the dresses, like one in white cotton voile and embroidered lace with a black ribbon sash, would look great on her.

In recent seasons, Mr. de la Renta has sought to make his clothes more distinctive and rich, without necessarily looking materialistic, and the palette has been full of interesting, hard-to-find colors. That approach hasn’t changed. A loose-back silk crepe dress in a shibori print of azalea-red stripes, worn with a wide belt, looked fresh; he used the same Japanese tie-dye method for a green sleeveless dress and a white silk faille coat with a tattersall print. The day clothes, some of them weirdly accessorized with sheer gloves that looked (from a distance) like the disposable latex kind, spoke knowingly to women who follow Mr. de la Renta, rather than fashion.

When it came to the evening clothes, though, a different signal bleeped through the yards of embroidered gazar and taffeta, as well as a strapless dress of pure white swan’s down. Mr. de la Renta, one of the last of the big-time Seventh Avenue dressmakers, who has built a following in Europe, seemed to be saying the rich are spending more. More interesting, they are tilling an old-fashioned garden of conservative tastes.

Calvin Klein used to have very big, noisy shows, but for several years the company has been holding them in its

headquarters off Seventh Avenue. This has allowed Francisco Costa to do subtle, experimental things that demand to be seen at close range. Sometimes those gestures have been tedious.

But on Thursday, Mr. Costa presented a superb collection of modern, self-contained clothes. Done mostly in tones of black and white, with a flash of cobalt or orange-red, the shapes seemed to hover between firm structure and airy volumes. And most of the fabrics were conventional stuff like silk crepe and cotton twill, so the pattern-making and the

cutting had to be precise.

Mr. Costa used panels and simple vents to give a sense of dimension to the clothes — without feeling that something needed to be added — and large, flat pockets were integral to the design as well as practical. Some of the long dresses had a panel of pleats and most were tied (shades of the American designer Valentina?) with a simple cord. No effort showed. In fact, he made it appear with his spare shapes that he got a lot out of very little.

FASHION & BEAUTY

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February 17 - 23, 2011

San Juan Weekly

Familiarity Breeds Comfort

By CATHY HORYN

I

f irony is the thread that runs through modern fashion, then the Chanel cardigan jacket is the eye of the needle.

Just about everyone has interpreted it. But what happens when you use a Japanese method of tie-dyeing and combine the results with soft tweed? And is there a double irony in the fact that young Japanese women are crazy about Chanel?

Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the designers of Proenza Schouler, must have sensed the possibilities. They were certainly up to the challenge in a show on Wednesday night full of charm and sophistication. As a bonus, they also came up with an appealing silhouette — soft, languid, below the knee — that would work for a lot of women.

The shapes were relatively simple: superlight jackets in terry tweed, slim skirts in shibori-dyed silks and T-shirt dresses done in the same method, so that the colors seemed to run together. This has been a season of combining colors, but here, again, Proenza’s palette of apricot and salmon mixed with black and sulfurous shades of yellow for chiffon slips over black bras, was distinctive.

If Ralph Lauren’s fringed pants and beaded deerskin vests seem just another ride into the old RL sunset, you might be missing something. Mr. Lauren, in a fine show on Thursday, added too much beaded fringe, lace and metallic shine in his Western collection for it to be anything other than an appreciative take on the urban cowgirl.

He could have done it up a bit more, actually. But he made his point with an Annie Oakley fringed jacket in offwhite leather with an embroidered tulle blouse and white linen shorts. She’s worldly, no hick. There were also things like cavalry shirts (including a minidress version in suede) and pretty hand-crocheted pieces, along with serape bags and steer-head belt buckles. But the cool elements strive to paint the town in beaded fringe. Go ahead and stare.

For 20 years, Anna Sui has used fashion to chronicle the lives and obsessions of young women. She paid close attention and never urged anything too extreme on them. On Wednesday night at Lincoln Center, with the five doll-like members of the Korean group the Wonder Girls staring inertly from the front row, I wondered if there is another designer who has introduced more subcultures to her audiences.

This time the subculture was a little hard to locate; it was somewhere between “Days of Heaven” — or, rather people who think about that 1978 film — and the West Coast, maybe a few years earlier. The palette was a faded sampler of blues, browns and cream, and the loose smocks and dresses with apron fronts, in combinations of Liberty prints, chambray and crochet, bespeak a generation of dreamers who still think of taking a summer road trip.

Ms. Sui also added scuffed boots in the Frye style, suede sandals with cork platforms and socks, and afghan cardigans.

Fashion constantly recycles the past. This process seems to go beyond a need to find material for the next season; it also suggests a deeper need to find a connection. So Marc Jacobs revisits the ’70s, and Narciso Rodriguez goes back to a time in the ’90s that was particularly meaningful to him. But what if your reference point is a collection shown only a year ago? Is the borrowing legitimate?

People will have to decide for themselves if Reed Krakoff’s wrapped panel dresses with a band at the hip tread too closely on Balenciaga’s spring 2010 styles, and if the association bothers them. But for Mr. Krakoff, whose collection was done predominantly in sleek white fabrics and deep red tissue-thin leather, it means he isn’t allowing himself the chance to develop his own ideas for his new label.

The styles he put on the runway were certainly good-looking, and they were accessorized with bangles and sandals with boar hair bristles around the ankles. He also offered slim trousers with a panel at the waist, not unlike a Helmut Lang style.

Personally, I preferred the attitude of a long, skinny wrap skirt in a black superfine twill worn (a bit low on the hips) with a white jersey T-shirt inset with a black leather panel. The look gave off a sense of energy and confidence, and it didn’t play any silly games.

The San Juan Weekly

Olga Tañón By: Daniel Morales Pomales

O

lga Tañón is synonymous with musical excellence. She has sold over four million records worldwide to a demanding base of fans.

Debuted as a soloist with the production “Sola” in 1992, demonstrating consistency, thanks to her dedication and passion in all stages. The little girl who sang hymns in Church, acted in school theater productions and competed as young at eight years in several talent shows, is now a latin music superstar.

Played a variety of musical genres, ranging from pop to merengue and ballad from salsa to boogaloo-lived moments of great emotion in a brilliant career. In 1992 she was given her first award after her solo releases. Was recognized as Tropical Revelation at the Applause Awards, an award which was followed by TV y Novelas award that year. Continued distinction as Agüeybana Award (1993), TV y Novelas, Best Orchestra of the Year (1993): ASCAP, Tropical Singer (1993); Tu Música, Best Merengue Recording (1994), Association of Entertainment Critics of New York ( ACE), Best Female Vocalist (1994), Women Tropical Revelation (1994) and the most beautiful face Puerto Rican Television (1994 and 1995), awarded by the readers of the Teve Guía Magazine. In 1995, Olga joined these awards statuettes Farándula, Album of the Year for her album Siente el amor (1994).

February 17 - 23, 2011

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34 Over the years, the Tañon’s fire continued spreading and more medals came: Tu Música Awards, Best Musical Production (1996); Magazine Artists, Outstanding Merengue Singer (1997); Billboard Latin Music Awards, Best Album Women of the Year and Tropical Salsa (1998) and the Dominican Republic Casandra Award as Outstanding Foreign Group (1998).

For her vocal power, La Mujer de Fuego has been awarded the most prestigious awards worldwide. The five-time Grammy ® winner has worked tirelessly since her childhood. In 2000 she got her first Grammy ®, awarded by the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in recording his first live album Olga Viva, Viva Olga. Also, in February 2002 she became the first and only female artist to win the Latin Grammy ® American for two consecutive years with its production Yo Por Ti. Her fourth Grammy ® and first in the Pop category received it in 2003 with its production Sobrevivir. Una nuueva Mujer, Olga in 2006 won his fifth Grammy ®, this time in the Tropical Contemporary category.

In 2007 Tiempos proudly won the Latino and Latin Soloist of the Year and success in top-selling debut in the Women’s Billboard Tropical list and number one in digital sales.

The album was certified gold by the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) and won a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Tropical Album. That year Mexico also awarded the Premio de la Gente Tropical Artist or Group of the Year.

In Venezuela she made history as the first woman to win a double diamond at the Premios Orquídea granted by that country, while Ritmo Latino awards granted Columbia House Tropical Year and Best Female

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Recording Artist. Note the land of Bolivar also awarded the key to the city of Maracaibo and she was the absolute winner of the Top Festival Barquisimeto Fair to get the Platinum Award and a double platinum.

This is the first singer to hold this award with a record attendance of over 120 thousand people.

In 2008, she was awarded a Premio Lo Nuestro a La Trayectoria, a fitting tribute to her 20 year career. In November of that year, Venezuela once again surprises with Premio Orquídea Urano. Also the first international artist of the Venezuelan Association of Performers and Producers of Phonograms (AVINPRO).

She is the absolute queen of Premio Lo Nuestro possessing 24 awards, distributed in categories: Tropical Album of the Year, Female Artist of the Year Tropical, Tropical Song of the Year, Best Merengue Performance and Audience Favorite, etc. .

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) praised her work as composer for the song “Flaca o gordita” included in her gold record, Soy como tú, in the category of Best Tropical Composition.

Tañón has taken fire to major international cities to packed houses, including the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, the Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas, Venezuela, four functions, the Anayansi Theatre of Panama and the Nexstage at Grand Prairie in Texas, becoming the first Latina to perform at the stage. p g

In addition, Olga is the first Puerto Rican artist fillingBass Hall Concert Hall in Dallas, Texas, one of the most prestigious in the world.

Two years later with Hakim at the World Economic Forum at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, shared the stage with stars like Bono, Ravi Shankar, Renee Flemming, Peter Gabriel, India Arie, Lauryn Hill, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones and Phil Ramone. Also sang at the famed Radio City Music Hall, where she made a duet with Hakim as part of One World Jam, which was recorded and then transmitted through the CBS television network nationwide in the United States.

With Fuego en Vivo, recorded live during a trilogy of concerts at the Coliseo Roberto Clemente in Puerto Rico, marking the global debut of Evolution Tour, which has already been seen by millions of fans in countries like the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, Guatemala, Perú and Italy.

One of the major projects that was w recently designed in collaboration Yanni Voices, a musical labora production of world-renowned produ Greek pianist Yanni, where the multifaceted artist presents two mult cuts of authorship. “Viviré por ti”, a beautiful ballad in which Tañón Tañó sings a duet with the tenor teno Nathan Pacheco and was selected as a letter of introducsele tion to this global distribution which wh conquered the airwaves in the t U.S. and Latin America.

In 2009, revolutionized the mar2 ket with the release of two digital singles, re supported t d by b her h record label Music Musa Mia. “Pasión Morena”, the first digital release in the history of Hispanic music and simultaneously to print, radio, television and the Internet. Immediately, “Amor entre tres” was selected as the main theme of the telenovela Venezuela Whole Life and Passion Morena to the soapopera of the same name in TV Azteca, Mexico. Grupomanía Next, our star recorded the song “Carita linda” also dominated the radio charts across the country.

In August, Tañón swept at a festival in Acapulco with Gilberto Santa Rosa. As part of philanthropic work, 1 million 200 thousand people in the Paz Sin Fronteras concert with fellow Colombian Juanes. Also was part of the twenty-second edition of the Annual Hispanic Heritage Awards, given by the White House where was awarded the Prize in Arts.

Another success has been launched “Hablemos D” an interactive internet

broadcast, with which the artist is able to meet every month with fans from all over the world and the day of its debut audience broke records by achieving over 200 thousand visitors during its first transmission.

Peru’s Congress this year applauded the feat by exalted working women, for career achievement and human sensitivity. Also, the singer was worthy of three awards in Texas for Lifetime Achievement, Best Tropical Artist and Best Female Vocalist.

Absent from the stage in 2009 with the launch of a concept album entitled 4 / 13, special project that includes a CD in which the artist delivers new songs, songs that until now were only available in digital format and some of its acclaimed concert Live Evolution Tour. As bonus tracks, included a DVD containing several medleys filmed live during his presentation at the Coliseo Roberto Clemente in Puerto Rico. The single from this CD / DVD, “Navidad Boricua”, ranked first in the ranking radial. Olga also closed with a flourish juror in the Mexican reality Academy program, which aired the Mexican broadcaster TV Azteca and recordbreaking audiences.

Olga Tanon, retains two decades as a true queen of the show ... Day after day she writes another page in the history of Latin music.

Discography Sola 1992, 1993 Mujer de Fuego, 1994 Siente el amor 1996 Nuevos Senderos Te acordaras de mi 1998, 1999 Olga Viva, Viva Olga 2001 Yo por ti, 2002 Sobrevivir, 2003 A Puro Fuego 2005 Una nueva muejr, 2006 Soy como tú 2007 Tiempos/ Exitos en dos tiempos, 2008 Fuego en Vivo 2009 4 / 13, 2010 Exitos de Reventón, 2011 Ni una lagrima más

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

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Dangerous Liaisons Shines at San Juan Bellas Artes

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xcellent Version.

Almost twenty years ago Contraparte presented this play which I can still remember; the good job that Jorge Ramos did in the role of De Valmont. Those that saw the movie version with Glenn Close and John Malkovich, have an idea of what is good acting. Contraparte has done it again. Good casting, eceedingly good taste in regard to scenery and costumes at xlarge; the only missing item; the powdered white wigs and hair dressing worn by the ladies during that pre Revolution period.

The plot revolves around the frivolity of the main occupation for the encumbered

members of the nobility that gave France the most undignified qualities of social mores.

The members of the high social strata only had one motivation; love intrigues an it’s unfaithful affairs, besides France; England also is representative of this type of literature in this type of drama. Congreve and Sheridan follow the parallel trends as we can vividly appreciate in this work by Christopher Hampton, based in the 18th Century French novel by Pierre Chardou.

The plot is trivial yet complicated that it would be the ideal T.V. soap opera so plagued on intrigue there is no limit to all kinds of amorous situations leading to

Tommy Torres Brings Grammy to PR

T

he Puerto Rican singer and composer Tommy Torres received the highest award for music; the Grammy for the production of ‘Paradise Express’ from the spanish singer Alejandro Sanz.

“A Grammy Pa’ Puerto Rico” and “A million thanks for your greetings and good energy”were the words he wrote in the Twitter network minutes after the announcement of the prize. The broadcast aired live on the Internet.

“I am very proud to receive my first

Grammy on the eve of St. Valentines the day of love and friendship. Paradise Express is an album we did with friends and with all the love in the world” added the artist through cyberspace.

The husband of actress Karla Montoig, thanked Sanz for his consideration and Alicia Keys for “sharing a piece of soul “ The music producer dedicated the award to all those who follow his career on Facebook and Twitter. “My Grammy is for you that have given me so much love this year“.

compromising complications, resulting in rape, murder, fighting a duel over a rivalry between lovers, and what have you.

Everything revolves around the central character Madame de Merteuil, played superbly by a diva of the local stage, Cordelia González. She overshadows the rest of the cast. An actor’s voice has to carry on to the last row; so established the great Sarah Bernhart. Cordelia González has that kind of voice, audible even when the lines are done in “sotto voce”. Unfortunately, her antagonist the vicount De Valmount José Félix Gómez muttered his lines mostly with a dark mumbling tone, besides looking somewhat clumsy in the period’s brocade costume. madame De Tourvel, acted by Luisa de los Rios, as the victim of her hostess, fell in the trap of the melodrama, nevertheless, her potential qualities of a good actress.

Luz María Rondón, and Sara Jarque can be mentioned indulging in the same melodramatic trend, a small part but not the least significant was sincerely played by Nelson del Valle, as the naive, manipulated Chevalier Daneny, as one more victim of De Marteuia and her machinations.

The lights contributed to enhance the play; masterfully done conveying the right effect in the right spot as required by the changes of atmosphere. Without removing the scenery. Congratulations Contraparte, as well as the good intended staff.

Max González

36 February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Lymph Node Study Shakes Pillar of Breast Cancer Care

By DENISE GRADY

A

new study finds that many women with early breast cancer do not need a painful procedure that has long been routine: removal of cancerous lymph nodes from the armpit.

The discovery turns standard medical practice on its head. Surgeons have been removing lymph nodes from under the arms of breast cancer patients for 100 years, believing it would prolong women’s lives by keeping the cancer from spreading or coming back.

Now, researchers report that for women who meet certain criteria — about 20 percent of patients, or 40,000 women a year in the United States — taking out cancerous nodes has no advantage. It does not change the treatment plan, improve survival or make the cancer less likely to recur. And it can cause complications like infection and lymphedema, a chronic swelling in the arm that ranges from mild to disabling.

Removing the cancerous lymph nodes proved unnecessary because the women in the study had chemotherapy and radiation, which probably wiped out any disease in the nodes, the researchers said. Those treatments are now standard for women with breast cancer in the lymph nodes, based on the realization that once the disease reaches the nodes, it has the potential to spread to vital organs and cannot be eliminated by surgery alone.

Experts say that the new findings, combined with similar ones from earlier studies, should change medical practice for many patients. Some centers have already acted on the new information. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan changed its practice in September, because doctors knew the study results before they were published. But more widespread change may take time, experts say, because the belief in removing nodes is so deeply ingrained.

“This is such a radical change in thought that it’s been hard for many people to get their heads around it,” said Dr. Monica Morrow, chief of the breast service at Sloan-Kettering and an author of the study, which is being published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The National Cancer Institute paid for the study.

Doctors and patients alike find it easy to accept more cancer treatment on the basis of a study, Dr. Morrow said, but get scared when the data favor less treatment.

The new findings are part of a trend to move away from radical surgery for breast cancer. Rates of mastectomy, removal of the whole breast, began declining in the 1980s after studies found that for many patients, survival rates after lumpectomy and radiation were just as good as those after mastectomy.

The trend reflects an evolving understanding of breast cancer. In decades past, there was a belief that surgery could “get it all” — eradicate the cancer before it could spread to organs and bones. But research has found that breast cancer can begin to spread early, even when tumors are small, leaving microscopic traces of the disease after surgery.

The modern approach is to cut out obvious tumors — because lumps big enough to detect may be too dense for drugs and radiation to destroy — and to use radiation and chemotherapy to wipe out microscopic disease in other places.

But doctors have continued to think that even microscopic disease in the lymph nodes should be cut out to

improve the odds of survival. And until recently, they counted cancerous lymph nodes to gauge the severity of the disease and choose chemotherapy. But now the number is not so often used to determine drug treatment, doctors say. What matters more is whether the disease has reached any nodes at all. If any are positive, the disease could become deadly. Chemotherapy is recommended, and the drugs are the same, no matter how many nodes are involved.

The new results do not apply to all patients, only to women whose disease and treatment meet the criteria in the study.

The tumors were early, at clinical stage T1 or T2, meaning less than two inches across. Biopsies of one or two armpit nodes had found cancer, but the nodes were not enlarged enough to be felt during an exam, and the cancer had not spread anywhere else. The women had lumpectomies, and most also had radiation to the entire breast, and chemotherapy or hormoneblocking drugs, or both.

The study, at 115 medical centers, included 891 patients. Their median age was in the mid-50s, and they were followed for a median of 6.3 years.

After the initial node biopsy, the women were assigned at random to have 10 or more additional nodes removed, or to leave the nodes alone. In 27 percent of the women who had additional nodes removed, those nodes were cancerous. But over time, the two groups had no difference in survival: more than 90 percent survived at least five years.

Recurrence rates in the armpit were also similar, less than 1 percent. If breast cancer is going to recur under the arm, it tends to do so early, so the follow-up period was long enough, the researchers said.

One potential weakness in the study is that there was not complete follow-up information on 166 women, about equal numbers from each group. The researchers said that did not affect the results. A statistician who was not part of the study said the missing information should have been discussed further, but probably did not have an important impact.

It is not known whether the findings also apply to women who do not have radiation and chemotherapy, or to those who have only part of the breast irradiated. Nor is it known whether the findings could be applied to other types of cancer.

The results mean that women like those in the study will still have to have at least one lymph node removed, to look for cancer and decide whether they will need more treatment.

But taking out just one or a few nodes should be enough.

Dr. Armando E. Giuliano, the lead author of the study and the chief of surgical oncology at the John Wayne Cancer Institute at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., said: “It shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but it will. It’s hard for us as surgeons and medical oncologists and radiation oncologists to accept that you don’t have to remove the nodes in the armpit.”

Dr. Grant W. Carlson, a professor of surgery at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, and the author of an editorial accompanying the study, said that by routinely taking out many nodes, “I have a feeling we’ve been doing a lot of harm.”

Indeed, women in the study who had the nodes taken out were far more likely (70 percent versus 25 percent) to have complications like infections, abnormal sensations and

fluid collecting in the armpit. They were also more likely to have lymphedema.

But Dr. Carlson said that some of his colleagues, even after hearing the new study results, still thought the nodes should be removed.

“The dogma is strong,” he said. “It’s a little frustrating.”

Eventually, he said, genetic testing of breast tumors might be enough to determine the need for treatment, and eliminate the need for many node biopsies.

Two other breast surgeons not involved with the study said they would take it seriously.

Dr. Elisa R. Port, the chief of breast surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, said: “It’s a big deal in the world of breast cancer. It’s definitely practice-changing.”

Dr. Alison Estabrook, the chief of the comprehensive breast center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt hospital in New York said surgeons had long been awaiting the results.

“In the past, surgeons thought our role was to get out all the cancer,” Dr. Estabrook said. “Now he’s saying we don’t really have to do that.”

But both Dr. Estabrook and Dr. Port said they would still have to make judgment calls during surgery and remove lymph nodes that looked or felt suspicious.

The new research grew out of efforts in the 1990s to minimize lymph node surgery in the armpit, called axillary dissection. Surgeons developed a technique called sentinel node biopsy, in which they injected a dye into the breast and then removed just one or a few nodes that the dye reached first, on the theory that if the tumor was spreading, cancer cells would show up in those nodes. If there was no cancer, no more nodes were taken. But if there were cancer cells, the surgeon would cut out more nodes.

Although the technique spared many women, many others with positive nodes still had extensive cutting in the armpit, and suffered from side effects.

“Women really dread the axillary dissection,” Dr. Giuliano said. “They fear lymphedema. There’s numbness, shoulder pain, and some have limitation of motion. There are a fair number of serious complications. Women know it.”

After armpit surgery, 20 percent to 30 percent of women develop lymphedema, Dr. Port said, and radiation may increase the rate to 40 percent to 50 percent. Physical therapy can help, but there is no cure.

The complications — and the fact that there was no proof that removing the nodes prolonged survival — inspired Dr. Giuliano to compare women with and without axillary dissection. Some doctors objected. They were so sure cancerous nodes had to come out that they said the study was unethical and would endanger women.

“Some prominent institutions wouldn’t even take part in it,” Dr. Giuliano said, though he declined to name them. “They’re very supportive now. We don’t want to hurt their feelings. They’ve seen the light.”

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Fitness: A Walk to Remember?

Study Says Yes

By PAULA SPAN

I

n healthy adults, the hippocampus — a part of the brain important to the formation of memories — begins to atrophy around 55 or 60. Now psychologists are suggesting that the hippocampus can be modestly expanded, and memory improved, by nothing more than regular walking.

In a study published on Jan. 31 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers randomly assigned 120 healthy but sedentary men and women (average age mid-60s) to one of two exercise groups. One group walked around a track three times a week, building up to 40 minutes at a stretch; the other did a variety of less aerobic exercises, including yoga and resistance training

Timing of Baby Food Tied to Obesity Risk

By TARA PARKER-POPE with bands.

After a year, brain scans showed that among the walkers, the hippocampus had increased in volume by about 2 percent on average; in the others, it had declined by about 1.4 percent.

Since such a decline is normal in older adults, “a 2 percent increase is fairly significant,” said the lead author, Kirk Erickson, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh. Both groups also improved on a test of spatial memory, but the walkers improved more.

While it is hard to generalize from this study to other populations, the researchers were delighted to learn that the hippocampus might expand with exercise. “And not that much exercise,” Dr. Erickson pointed out.

People don’t even have to join a gym, he noted. They just need shoes.

F

eeding an infant solid food before 4 months of age increases the baby’s risk of becoming obese by the toddler years, a new study shows.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School studied the eating patterns of 847 children enrolled in Project Viva, an ongoing study of how diet and environment influence the health of mother and child.

In the most recent study, about two-thirds of the mothers breast-fed their babies for at least four months, while the remaining mothers gave their babies formula. By the time the children were 3 years old, 75 of them, or 9 percent, were obese.

Among breast-fed infants, the

37

timing of solid food introduction was not associated with obesity.

But formula-fed babies who had been introduced to solid foods before 4 months of age were six times more likely to be obese by age 3.

The findings were published this month in the medical journal Pediatrics.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that mothers breast-feed exclusively for at least four months, but preferably six months. The group notes that most babies are ready to begin eating solid food between 4 and 6 months of age. The academy advises mothers to continue breast-feeding after introduction of solid foods until the child is at least a year old.

It’s not clear why the timing of solid food was linked with obesity risk among the formula-fed babies in the study. It may be that mothers who use formula are less tuned in to their baby’s hunger and satiety cues. Or early feeding of solid food could be a sign of other unhealthy behaviors that influence a child’s weight. For instance, mothers who use formula and offer solid food before four months may have a tendency to use food to soothe a fussy child or be more prone to less healthful eating themselves.

38 February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Ensuring Domestic Tranquillity During Sleepovers

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

I

n every iteration of the interminable discussion of the new book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” someone inevitably brings up the crucial issue of the sleepover — the childhood ritual in which the author, Amy Chua, wouldn’t let her daughters take part.

The sleepover, along with its cousin the slumber party, has apparently become an essential part of childhood, for boys as well as for girls.

“My impression is that sleepovers are a phenomenon of the suburbs and they started taking off in the ’50s and ’60s,” said Paula Fass, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the editor of the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood. In their big new suburban homes, she suggested, children for the first time had their own bedrooms, suitable for entertaining.

Some adults probably worried about strange houses or sleep deprivation, but children knew what they wanted, and the sleepover has thrived — no thanks to parents, pundits or pediatricians.

In a recent article for The Chicago Tribune, “Sleepover Survival Guide,” Heidi Stevens quotes an expert who notes that my own professional organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, doesn’t offer age guidelines for sleepovers and slumber parties.

In fact, searching the archives of the journal Pediatrics, I found only a single reference to sleepovers, one that will make perfect sense to all those parents who distrust “strangers”: the academy recommends that after a sleepover, you check your child for head lice.

But there’s a reason that simple guidelines are next to impossible. Sleepovers raise a whole array of emotional issues for children and parents: separation, sleeping in a strange place, playing by another family’s rules. This is a case where you really have to know your own child, the other family, the whole situation — and the other family needs to know about your child, too.

Many children as young as 8 or 9 (or even younger) do fine with a good friend and a familiar family.

But anxieties can loom at any age. The classic children’s book on the subject is “Ira Sleeps Over,” by Bernard Waber (Sandpiper, 1975), in which a boy worries about taking his beloved teddy bear to a sleepover while his older sister warns darkly that if he does he will be mocked.

“Clearly, kids who have some separation anxiety

issues — it’s not a sleep disorder per se — may have some difficulty negotiating the sleepover experience,” said Dr. Judith Owens, a pediatrician who is director of sleep medicine at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington. “I certainly have had some kids come to our house who I ended up driving home at 10 at night.”

Then there is what Ms. Stevens’s article called “emotional bloodshed.” Bullying can happen anywhere, of course, but it can become particularly intense in a nest of sleep-deprived pre-teenagers. (This is not a new phenomenon. Another classic sleepover tale, Shirley Jackson’s short story “Pajama Party,” from 1957, revolves around the complexities of which 11-year-old girl is willing to sleep near whom after doing or saying what mean thing.)

Sleepovers also come up when you talk about nocturnal enuresis, or bed-wetting. Even occasional sufferers can see sleepovers as occasions of anxiety and humiliation — or just as impossible, forbidden activities, symbols of “normal childhood” from which they are excluded. Medications can be used at times to help older children stay dry through a sleepover night.

Other medications can complicate sleepovers.

Drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for example, can wear off as the evening wears on, and a highly impulsive, risk-taking child can be a potent addition to the slumber party mix. (I speak here as the host’s mother, who found herself in the middle of the night tending to some of the resulting injuries.) Here again, it is important to be sure that the host parents are fully apprised about any such issues.

In particular, “you definitely want to warn other parents if your child may sleepwalk or have a sleep terror,” said Dr. Jodi A. Mindell, a psychologist who is associate director of the Sleep Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and author with Dr. Owens of “Take Charge of Your Child’s Sleep” (Marlowe, 2005).

Sleep terrors, which are most common from 4 or 8, can persist until puberty. These episodes — in which a child sits up in bed, screaming, looking terrified, and does not respond to comfort or reassurance — tend to be more frightening for the observers than for the child, who typically doesn’t remember the episode by the next day.

Since sleep deprivation is a risk factor for such episodes, Dr. Owens said, they have an increased chance of occurring at a sleepover or the night after.

In addition, she continued, “some kids are more likely

to have sleepwalking episodes if they’re in a strange household.” Hosts need to be aware, so they can take precautions: hang a bell on the doorknob of the room where the child is sleeping, block off stairs, make sure the front door is locked.

Both sleep experts agreed that the rules for sleepovers and slumber parties should reflect common sense. “Do it in moderation,” Dr. Owens said. “Don’t have two sleepovers in a row on a weekend, think about planning ahead, maybe doing a prophylactic nap the afternoon before. Maybe planning the next day not to do anything that’s going to require too high-level cognitive process or emotional regulation.”

This night away from home, this now iconic childhood activity — a step toward mock independence and at the same time an intense exposure to peer standards and pressures — defies simple guidelines but calls for family conversations which range from individual medical issues to social norms and parental judgment.

And that is probably why the sleepover has made such a handy vehicle for discussing the “tiger mother” questions of parental rules, rigor and responsibility.

Parents may see this as an opportunity for judgment and discussion; for their children, though, the sleepover has become something between a cultural totem and an ineluctable component of the pursuit of happiness.

“By the 1980s, you had to sleep over; otherwise your parents were oppressing you,” Professor Fass said. “It was already, by the 1980s, not a privilege but a right.”

Pneumonia DNA Morphs To Dodge Vaccines

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

R

esearchers from seven countries have collaborated to analyze how a single strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria has morphed over 30 years and spread across the world, in an attempt to overcome the development of antibiotics and vaccines.

The research is the first detailed genetic picture of the evolution of a specific strain of pneumonia, resulting in a family tree of sorts. The researchers

analyzed samples from North and South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Their findings appear in the current issue of the journal Science.

In looking at more than 240 samples, they found that since 1984, when the strain was first identified in Spain, it has turned over about three-quarters of its genome.

Over time, the bacteria mutated to better resist antibiotics and vaccines.

The researchers found that it underwent

both recombination, in which the DNA shuffles around, and base substitutions, in which individual nucleic acids in a DNA sequence change.

That means that certain samples they tested are not treatable with existing vaccines, which target certain gene clusters that have now changed.

In the past, genomic sequencing of bacteria was time-consuming and laborious, but new technology has sped up the process, and will perhaps help speed up the development of new vac-

cines, said Stephen Bentley, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and one of the study’s authors.

“I think this going to be really important going forward,” he said. “We can start to do this kind of analysis routinely; then we will be able to have really valuable information for how to introduce antibiotics and new vaccines.”

He and his colleagues are now studying several other strains of the pneumonia bacteria.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

39 SCIENCE / TECH

City Is Looking at Sewage Treatment as a Source of Energy

By MIREYA NAVARRO

N

ew York City’s sewage presents a daunting and costly challenge: it creates foul odors and often contaminates waterways.

But the city is now casting its sewage treatment plants and the vast amounts of sludge, methane gas and other byproducts of the wastewater produced by New Yorkers, as an asset — specifically, as potential sources of renewable energy.

For the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which is to issue its strategy on Wednesday, it is a shift. Until now, the agency has mainly played the role of water utility and environmental steward rather than energy producer.

But like other cities around the country looking to reduce both the costs of sewage treatment and disposal and the heat-trapping greenhouse gases emitted in the process, New York is beginning to look at its waste as an untapped resource.

Heating fuel can be extracted from sludge and butanol, an alternative fuel to gasoline, from the algae generated by wastewater. Sewage treatment plants could sell methane gas to provide power to homes. Such projects represent a more sustainable long-term approach to managing a wastewater treatment process that costs the city about $400 million annually, not including capital investments.

“There’s nothing in here that’s pie in the sky,” Caswell F. Holloway, the city’s commissioner of environmental protection, said of the plan. “While we’re early in the process, it’s real.”

New Yorkers currently produce some 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater daily. The agency is seeking vendors to

develop a plant to produce both electricity and heat or steam near its Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant; the power would heat the plant and be sold to the market.

The agency is also studying proposals for solar and wind projects on Staten Island, including one that would place solar panels on the 200,000-square-foot roof of the Port Richmond Wastewater Treatment Plant, and another for a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine at the Oakwood Beach Wastewater Treatment Plant.

“If what you’ve got is lemons, of course you try to make lemonade,” said Eric. A. Goldstein, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council in New find uses for the resulting daily yield of the city’s natural gas network next year to York who monitors the environmental agency. “It’s taking existing infrastructu1,200 tons of sludge, a residual that is cu- heat 2,500 homes. rrently sent to landfills in Suffolk County, City environmental officials said re and outfitting it to help solve other city N.Y., and Virginia. they were also seeking private partners to problems.”

City officials, who hope to have a contract by 2013, said the solid could be harvested for gases that produce clean energy and could be used in more traditional ways, too, as fertilizer or as paving and building materials.

The biggest potential source of energy, officials said, is the methane gas from sewage treatment plants’ digesters.

About half of the methane produced by re-evolution because of the city’s plants is already used to meet the large time span,” said about 20 percent of the energy demands John Wiens, the Stony Broof the city’s 14 sewage plants, whose elecok biologist who authored tric bills run to a total of about $50 million the paper in the journal a year. Now the city wants to market the Evolution. other half, which is burned off and wasDr. Wiens analyzed ted.

DNA samples of 170 moThrough a partnership with Nadern and fossilized frogs tional Grid that is already in the works, to approximate the dates officials said, the Newtown Creek Wasof loss and re-evolution of tewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn is the teeth. expected to add enough methane gas to

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Most frogs have teeth on their upper jaws, which may ollo’s Law, a theory propo- have made the re-evolution in the sed by the scientist Louis tree frog, known as Gastrotheca Dollo in the 1800s, states guentheri, easier, Dr. Wiens said. that when a particular trait is lost “They already had teeth in in a species, it never comes back. the upper jaw, so they had the It’s one explanation for why enamel, dentine and other neceshumans no longer have tails, birds sities,” he said. “There was a way and turtles are toothless and snakes to facilitate new teeth after 200 mihave stayed limbless. llion years.”

But a new analysis, done by a The species is the only known researcher at Stony Brook Universi- modern frog species with lower ty, found that while frogs lost teeth teeth, though certain other species in the lower jaw at least 200 mi- with upper teeth do have toothlike llion years ago, a particular type of structures on the lower jaw. marsupial tree frog regained those “That’s a big question now: lower teeth about 20 million years What’s keeping the other frogs ago. from developing real teeth on the “It’s a very clear-cut case of lower jaw?” Dr. Wiens said.

A Frog Evolved to Regain the Teeth Its Ancestors Jettisoned

D

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

40 SCIENCE / TECH

To Defend Against Disease, a Plant Checks the Clock

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

P

lants, like many other organisms, have circadian clocks that help them anticipate various environmental and biological events that occur at precise times of the day. Processes like photosynthesis, fragrance emission and time of bloom are all regulated by this timekeeping mechanism.

Now, researchers report in the journal Nature that genes in certain plants fend off infections with the help of the clock as well.

Twenty-two genes in the plant Arabidopsis, all connected to the plant’s ability to resist infection, were expressed only from the evening onward, peaking at dawn.

The timing corresponds with the formation of spores in a funguslike pathogen that attacks the

plant and results in a condition known as downy mildew disease. The disease weakens the plant and forms an unsavory coating of fuzzy mildew.

“From what we know, the pathogen forms spores at night and disseminates them at dawn, so that’s when the infection threat is highest,” said Xinnian Dong, a biologist at Duke University and one of the study’s authors.

During the day, when the pathogen is not likely to attack, the genes were not expressed.

This is the first time researchers have been able to make a functional connection between the circadian clock and pathogen resistance, Dr. Dong said.

She believes that if researchers can sort out the intricacies of the relationship between pathogens and hosts, and their circadian rhythms, there

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

N

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

T

An Arabidopsis plant with downy mildew disease, caused by a fungus-like pathogen.

DNA Sheds New Light on Polynesian Migration

At Martian North Pole, Dunes That Shift and Slide he dark basalt sand dunes around the edge of Mars’ North Pole are approximately the size of Texas and stand more than 100 feet high.

The dunes were long thought to be stagnant formations, but high-resolution images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter now reveal that the dunes are among the most active landscapes on the planet.

“We just did not have the tools to see what was happening,” said Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, lead author of a study in Science. “Now we’re able to take pictures and see things that only have subtle differences in contrast, and that’s what has really enabled us to see the changes on the dunes.”

The researchers studied hundreds of images over the period of two Martian years, or four Earth

may be practical applications.

Pesticide treatments could be timed to have maximum impact, for instance. Or it may even be possible to determine ideal times for administering medications in humans, she said.

years. During the winter months, a blanket of dry ice covers the dunes and destabilizes the sand, Dr. Hansen said. As a result, the sand moves, causing avalanches and creating new alcoves.

In the images the scientists have looked at, about 40 percent of the dunes seem to have gone through some modification over the two Martian years. In certain spots, hundreds of cubic yards of sand had come down the face of the dunes in avalanches.

If their funding continues, the team plans to keep observing changes in the dunes, since the Reconnaissance Orbiter has enough fuel to stay in orbit until 2020.

“People don’t tend to think of Mars as being geologically active today, and that’s what’s these images are showing us,” Dr. Hansen said.

ew genetic research reveals that the migratory story of the Polynesians may be more ancient and complicated than previously thought.

For years, it was generally accepted that Polynesians originated in modern-day Taiwan and began moving south and east about 4,000 years ago. This migration account is based on the research of linguists, the findings of archeologists and some genetic analysis.

But a new study in The American Journal of Human Genetics reports that Polynesians began migrating thousands of years earlier, not from Taiwan, but from mainland Southeast Asia.

The study looked at mitochondrial DNA, which gives information about maternal ancestry. The researchers compared DNA samples from more than 4,700 people in Southeast Asia and Polynesia.

Based on this, they determined that Polynesians arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea at least 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, via Indonesia, and presumably left the mainland about 10,000 years ago.

Linguists believe that Polynesian languages belong to the Austronesian language family, which originated in Taiwan.

Though the new research seems to leave the linguists in the lurch, Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Leeds in Britain and one of the study’s authors, believes there might be a reasonable explanation.

“It’s still possible there was the elite movement from Taiwan much later that transferred the language,” he said. “The idea would be that we do have very minor lineages that look like they came to Bismarck about 3,500 years ago and may have caused a language shift.”

The original migration from the mainland may have had to do with natural climate change.

“They may have just ended up there because of sea level rises occurring at the time, and the formation of an archipelago,” Dr. Richards said.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

41 SCIENCE / TECH

Safeguarding Sage Grouse and Their Elaborate Courtship Dance

By JIM ROBBINS

W

hen permanent settlement began in the West some 16 million greater sage grouse lived on the steppes of the high plains.

There may now be as few as 200,000 of these ground-dwelling birds, famous for their elaborate courtship dance, and they are on the decline, hit especially hard by oil and gas development. Their dwindling numbers warrant protection as an endangered species, federal officials say. Because other species need listing first, though, and because protections for endangered species are widely reviled in the West, a unique way of managing the birds is under way.

The Sage Grouse Initiative, a project administered by the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service, targets for protection three-quarters of the birds on about a quarter of total sage grouse habitat. Officials call it a triage approach to conservation — protecting land where habitat is mostly intact and ignoring much of the land that has been degraded by energy development and other things.

“We’re targeting like a laser beam those places where there are a lot of birds,” said David E. Naugle, an associate professor of wildlife at the University of Montana and scientific adviser to the project.

The effort is also unique because it covers so much land — some 56 million acres across 11 Western states.

Nothing near this scale has been done with a species in trouble. The project received $18 million last year and $30 million this year from the conservation service. Last week, the conservation service announced the addition of $23 million to buy conservation easements on core habitat.

“The federal government really stepped up in a meaningful way to keep sage grouse off the endangered species list,” said Tom Remington, director of the Colorado Division of Wildlife, which is not involved in the effort. “It’s mind-boggling that they did it so fast and it’s as well funded as it is. And applying science in this way is unprecedented.”

Noah Greenwald, a biologist with the Center For Biological Diversity, which focuses on endangered species, thinks the plan is good, but doesn’t go far enough. The sage grouse initiative “is voluntary,” Mr. Greenwald said.

“We hope the promises are kept, but things can fall through the cracks.”

Neither, he said, does the plan protect sage grouse habitat on federal

land damaged by energy development, and plans to protect the birds in those areas are not nearly as strong as an endangered designation would be. The group has sued to force listing of the bird so it receives full protection under the law.

The effort began with the locations of the biggest, healthiest populations.

In each state leks have been well tallied — a lek is like a sage grouse town square, a critical area where the birds carry out courtship rituals and mate. Counting birds on the lek in the spring gave biologists a solid estimate of numbers.

The spring breeding rite of the sage grouse is one of the bird world’s most dramatic courtships. For a month or so dozens of males, which are the largest grouse in North America and can weigh up to seven pounds, show up at the grassy lek and jockey for territory with displays — puffing up a huge collar of white chest feathers, fanning their tail feathers and making popping sounds by slapping together two small yellow air bladders on their chests. The birds clash and feathers fly, all in an effort to prove superiority and claim a few more square feet of ground than other birds.

By April the females fly in, and some researchers joke that it’s the wildlife equivalent of the bars during spring break in Florida. “It’s chaos,” said Dr. Naugle. As the air is filled with the popping of air bladders, “everyone starts displaying and strutting and trying to woo the females.” The top male may mate with three-quarters of the females.

Within the 56 million acres, the conservation service is concentrating on ranch land with the highest numbers of birds and best habitat, called core areas, and working to improve it. It’s a last, large-scale effort to stem

the bird’s decline, and should it fail the bird will probably receive strict protection across its range.

The program is part of the 2008 federal farm bill, and the lead agency is the conservation service, whose main mission is to provide financing and technical help to farmers and ranchers. An idea at the heart of the initiative, though, is that a better-managed ranch will also improve habitat for sage grouse, and a more profitable ranch means it’s less likely to be sold for subdivisions.

The project worked to improve habitat on 1,000 square miles last year and will work with ranchers on 3,000 square miles this year. The conservation service, said Dr. Naugle, is the key to doing so much in so short a time.

“They have an army already in place to create these kind of outcomes,” he said.

The program, heavily based on research into the impact on grouse from such things as livestock grazing and barbed-wire fences, comes down to ranchers like Ben Lehfeldt. Mr. Lehfeldt runs sheep and cattle north of Billings, in a part of central Montana that is still rich in sage grouse. As he rides along a dirt road through his remote, wind-swept ranch across gentle sagebrush-studded swells, Mr. Lehfeldt points out plastic tags the size of playing cards affixed to miles of barbed-wire fence. Sage grouse fly low, just feet off the ground, and fences kill hundreds of birds a year. This marking of some fences and the removal of others, for a total of 180 miles of fence, should prevent 800 to 1,000 collisions annually, according to a study done at the University of Idaho. Ranchers have also put ramps in the tanks they use to water cattle to allow a bird that falls into a tank to climb out.

Mr. Lehfeldt said he liked the approach. An endangered species designation would have meant restrictions and no financing. So it would have been a lot more contentious. “It would have made things a lot harder if they did,” Mr. Lehfeldt said. The energy industry has also fought the designation.

The forests of silver-green sagebrush are vital to every aspect of the grouse’s life. The birds need heavy grass beneath the two- to three-foothigh sagebrush, for cover from predators during nesting and brood rearing, so eight new water tank locations will enable Mr. Lehfeldt to let his cattle and sheep range more widely in this dry country, which will allow prairie grasses to grow taller. Where land has been

tilled, ranchers are paid to reseed to native prairie.

The program began last year, and this spring biologists will begin monitoring to see what effect the changes have had.

“We’re expecting an 8 to 10 percent increase in nest success,” based on these steps, Dr. Naugle said. “If it doesn’t increase we’ll tweak the habitat management to reach those benefits.

It’s adaptive management, and we monitor every step of the way.”

While the Endangered Species Act would protect the bird by law, this program is voluntary. It can have hefty incentives. Ranchers can receive a total from farm programs of up to $450,000 over 10 years, but have to match some of that. Still, it is enough for ranchers to make changes in management right away that may otherwise have taken years, or may never have been made.

In some places, especially on federal land, efforts to protect the birds will not be made. Energy development has turned much of Wyoming’s sagebrush steppes into a network of roads, power lines and other development. Because the birds don’t tolerate disturbance, their numbers have suffered badly. A boom in wind power turbines and subdivisions are problems as well because of the roads and traffic associated with them. A wild card in this project is West Nile virus. Where Dr. Naugle has studied grouse, there is 25 percent mortality during outbreak years. Moreover, settling ponds that the energy industry uses to store water extracted with the gas breed mosquitoes, carrier of the virus, and the industry is searching for ways, including mosquito-eating fish, to cope with the problem.

Canada’s experience with sage grouse has been a dark lesson for biologists here. Western Canada once had flourishing populations. Primarily because of energy development there are now just 200 birds in Saskatchewan and fewer than a hundred in Alberta, and there are concerns the Alberta population will soon disappear.

Because of their strong flavor, sage grouse are not a widely hunted game species. They are important as an umbrella species — if their diverse habitat is protected, it protects other prairie species, from migratory song sparrows to pygmy rabbits and mule deer.

“This initiative is one of the most important I have seen in a decade, to preserve high-quality habitat,” said Ben Deeble, sagebrush coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation in Missoula. “They are bringing in the best new science to analyze impacts.”

PEOPLE

42 February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

How Hef Got His Groove Back

By CHARLES McGRATH

H

ugh Hefner already has his final resting place picked out and paid for: a crypt next to Marilyn Monroe’s in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Not that he has plans to use it anytime soon. Hefner, who will turn 85 in April, lives these days what appears to be the life of an invalid, or even of a cosseted mental patient: wearing pajamas all day; rarely venturing out of the house; taking most of his meals in his bedroom — the menu seldom varying, the crackers and potato chips carefully prescreened to remove any broken ones. He is hard of hearing in his right ear and has an arthritic back that causes him to lumber a little when he walks. But he is in otherwise enviable shape for an octogenarian.

Fully recovered from a 1985 stroke, he appears to have all his marbles and an undiminished energy level. He still manages to have sex, popping Viagra as the occasion warrants. And thanks to the surprisingly successful reality show “The Girls Next Door,” he has a brand-new fan cohort: women, even many middle-aged ones, who no longer regard him as a degrading smut peddler — the publisher of a magazine that Gloria Steinem once said made a female reader feel like a Jew studying a Nazi manual — but as a benign and indulgent paterfamilias, a kind of fairy godfather turning worthy, wholesome-looking young women into platinum-haired, big-bosomed princesses whose every need is provided for.

Hefner — or Hef, as he is known to just about everyone — is famous for bestowing presents of plastic surgery on his many girlfriends and may well have gifted himself. His neck is taut and wattle-free. His skin, owing to infrequent sun exposure and generous bastings with baby oil, has a Madame Tussaud-like smoothness and suppleness. One former girlfriend has said that in the bedroom, with his clothes off, he practically glows in the dark.

Over Christmas, Hefner surprised celebrity watchers by posting on Twitter that he had become engaged to 24-year-old Crystal Harris, the latest and, if he is to be believed, the last in the endless string of young women who have paraded through his bedchamber: most of them blond, many with names ending in a vowel and all of them with mammary tissue that appears to have been injected with helium. Hefner has been married twice before, so the notion of his settling down again may represent the triumph of hope over experience. But a few days before Christmas, he told me: “This is it. This is a very, very special one. I expect to spend the rest of my life with her.”

A couple of weeks later, Hefner was on the business pages, trying to buy back his own company. That he is still around, still making news, is, depending on your point of view, either remarkable or a little embarrassing. He is, on the one hand, a great success story — a man who turned his

sexual daydreams into a fortune — and, on the other, a fossil who doesn’t understand that the sexual revolution ended decades ago and that, in any event, it wasn’t for geezers. Some observers on Wall Street used to think that the best thing that could happen to Playboy would be for Hefner to act his age and honorably take up his slot next to Monroe. David Miller, an analyst at the investment firm Caris & Company, once said, “We believe that Mr. Hefner’s death could result in a material stock-price uptick.”

Last summer, however, Hefner startled even his own board by announcing that he wanted to make Playboy Enterprises, which he took public in 1971, private again.

He offered the stockholders $5.50 a share, or more than 30 percent beyond what the stock was trading for. But this was slim consolation to investors who had been unhappily watching Hefner live like a sultan at their expense while the value of their shares declined to single digits from a high of $32.19.

Strictly speaking, Playboy Enterprises, and not Hefner, owns the Playboy Mansion, a 1920s Gothic-style spread southwest of Hollywood. Hefner pays rent and covers non-business-related expenses. The company pays for the upkeep of the house and grounds, and the salaries of the 80-employee staff, which includes a round-the-clock kitchen crew and a team of 13 who take care of Hef’s personal and business needs. Last year Hefner’s bill was $800,000, while the company kicked in $2.3 million.

Early in January, Hefner sweetened his offer to $6.15 a share, and the board recommended that the stockholders accept it.

Miller suggested recently that Hefner, who once said that his life would be over if Playboy was sold, was trying to cling to the magazine, which sooner or later would have been farmed out to a licensee had the company stayed public. But all along, Hefner’s position has been that the stock is undervalued, and David Bank, a media analyst at RBC Capital Markets, tends to agree. “I think Hefner is incredibly shrewd,” he told me. “But when I take off my analyst’s hat and put on my psychologist’s hat, it’s something of an enigma to me. I don’t know that many 84-year-olds who are reducing their liquidity.”

Whoever owns it, the Playboy empire is unlikely ever to regain its former glory or influence. The original clubs and resorts were closed years ago. The circulation of Playboy magazine, the bedrock of the empire, has declined from a peak of 7 million in the ’70s to 1.5 million today. The ready availability of Internet pornography has not been good for business, and for a while Playboy appeared to have been crowded off the newsstands by the so-called lad magazines — Maxim, Stuff, FHM and the like — which depicted a culture that was less about “mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz,

Hefner, 84, and his fiancée, Crystal Harris, 24, at the Playboy Mansion. sex,” as Hefner wrote in his first Playboy editorial, than about guys chugging beer, telling fart jokes and giving one another wedgies.

But like its founder, Playboy magazine has survived, if a little wizened, longer than its detractors imagined. Of the major lad mags, only Maxim still stands, and one of its former editors, 36-year-old Jimmy Jellinek, two years ago became editorial director of Playboy, second in command to Hef. “I aged out of the Maxim demographic,” he said recently. “The lad mags were predicated on instant gratification, on living the consequence-free life. It was the credit boom, and money was free. You could do whatever you wanted. The magazines were both a symptom of and a metaphor for everything that happened.”

In the realm of men’s magazines, Playboy, which Jellinek champions with the ardor and occasional near-breathlessness of a convert, now represents enduring, oldfashioned values. Jellinek compared it to a vinyl record in a world of MP3 files.

Hefner still supervises the layouts and chooses all the photographs, which by today’s standards are practically chasteseeming. Airbrushed and lustrous, their pubic hair (if there is any) as carefully fluffed as their tresses, the Playboy nudes are suffused with an unearthly, almost Platonic radiance; and as the critic Joan Acocella once pointed out, those enormous breasts, miracles of buoyancy and cantilevering, make the women seem less sexy, oddly, than childish and innocent. They’re like little girls with balloons.

In some ways the magazine is little changed from the one so many of us read in our youth. The Playboy Advisor is still

there, dispensing worldly advice; the notvery-funny party jokes are still on the back of the centerfold; Gahan Wilson is still drawing cartoons; readers are still writing in to dispute who killed J.F.K.; and there is Hef himself, with his arm around a couple of blondes. Playboy continues to publish some very good writing, as it has since the ’60s, yet it remains a fantasy magazine of sorts, and nearly 60 years on, with Hefner still presiding, the exact nature of that fantasy seems a little clearer. The Playboy dream was never — or never only — about limitless, guilt-free sex; it was about limitless, guilt-free sex as a manifestation of a theme even more far-fetched but nevertheless surprisingly durable in the American imagination: the possibility that you might never have to do anything as embarrassing as grow old.

Hefner is a little odd, certainly, but not a sleazebag. He has none of Bob Guccione’s oiliness, or Larry Flynt’s leering vulgarity.

His manner is open and direct, and his language is as clean as a Midwestern Rotarian’s.

By his own lights, having purged himself of the shame and hypocrisy that is part of most Americans’ sexual baggage, he leads a life that is exceptionally honest and moral. It’s also a life that is exceptionally well documented. He has been written about so often and for so long that in interviews now he tends to recycle himself, saying the same things over and over again, not in a bored, rote fashion but as if they had just occurred to him. He complains a lot about America’s puritanical, contradictory attitudes toward sex and likes to say that he is a “one-eyed man in a blind world.” He also thinks that most men would kill to be in his place.

No one is more fascinated by Hefner’s success and longevity than Hefner himself.

He is a self-inventor, in the great American tradition of Jay Gatsby, William Randolph Hearst and Howard Hughes (before he became a recluse and started hoarding his urine), and he is also a great self-chronicler, a kind of hyper Pepys. In the attic of the mansion is an archive of continually updated scrapbooks now closing in on 2,400 volumes. The later ones tend to feature page after page of photographs devoted to mansion get-togethers and theme parties: Hefner, sometimes a little weary-looking, smiling his trademark wide-mouthed smile while his arms encircle a clutch of smiling young lovelies, barebreasted or not, depending on the occasion, who after a while grow indistinguishable.

Leafing through the albums, you get the feeling that these events, once famous and risqué, now take place simply so that they can be documented and generate more photographs.

Far more interesting are the earlier volumes, some of which are collections of stuff Hefner began keeping as a child. They include cartoons, a series of detective stories modeled on Conan Doyle and several issues of an illustrated horror magazine called Shudder. Hefner — a dreamy, solitary child, bright but socially immature — was already

February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly a publisher of sorts, churning out copy and writing editor’s notes to his readers. Most remarkable of all is a comic book, called “School Daze,” that Hefner, or an alter ego called Goo Heffer, worked on all through his years at Steinmetz High School in Chicago, depicting the larksome good times of an inseparable group of high-school pals.

Hefner really was the center of such a group. At the end of his sophomore year, in the first of many self-transformations, he made himself over, changing his hair style, buying a new wardrobe, learning to jitterbug and turning from Hugh — skinny, awkward and self-conscious, to judge from photographs then — into Hef, or Hep Hef, a jive cat. The metamorphosis apparently worked, bringing Hefner newfound popularity. Yet the comic strip, painstakingly drawn, beautifully inked, suggests that he was also spending long hours in an imaginary high school of his own invention.

Later strips deal with Hefner’s Army career (he enlisted right after high school but became a typist and never saw any action) and with the creation of Playboy in 1953, when Hefner was 27 and at a low point in his life. “When I was young I always thought, I’m going to do something very special, or else I’m going to be nobody,” he told me, and in the early ’50s failure looked more likely. He had a crummy job, had only just moved out of his parents’ house and was frustrated with his marriage to Mildred Williams, a high-school classmate.

A late bloomer sexually, Hefner didn’t masturbate until he was 18, and after years of foreplay, he finally managed to lose his virginity when he was 22, but he read Kinsey as if Kinsey were a prophet and became a student of marriage manuals and sex handbooks. Playboy was the sort of sophisticated, sexually adventurous publication he fantasized about. He scrounged money, including $1,000 from his mother, and laid the first issue out on the kitchen table, writing much of the copy himself. His greatest piece of luck was his choice of the first centerfold: a nude calendar photo of Marilyn Monroe taken four years before. It remains by far the sexiest of all Hefner’s pinups. Where subsequent Playmates all have a health-club aura, as if they’ve lately come from the tanning bed or a Pilates session, Monroe, flushed and languorous, looked as if she just had an orgasm.

Playboy very quickly made Hefner a wealthy man, and by the end of the ’50s enabled the second great transformation of his life, when Hefner, now divorced, instead of just leaving little traces of himself in the magazine’s photo spreads — a necktie, a pipe, a cocktail glass — stepped forward and became Mr. Playboy, a debonair bedroom savant who actually lived the life his magazine dreamed about. From that point on it becomes increasingly difficult to discern where Playboy leaves off and Hefner begins.

You can see the transformed Hef most vividly in clips from “Playboy’s Penthouse,” a black-and-white TV show that ran for a couple of seasons in the late ’50s and early ’60s. There, greeting the viewer at the door

to his top-floor pad, is tuxedo-clad, pipesmoking Hef, looking a lot like Don Draper, giving a weekly house party for people like Tony Bennett, Count Basie, Buddy Rich and Sammy Davis Jr., who, at a time when white and African-American performers seldom appeared together, would drop by and entertain and sometimes (because real liquor was served and the show was shot out of sequence) start off tipsy and then sober up.

Mr. Playboy’s heyday was the ’70s, when, as the money poured in, Hefner took to wearing pajamas round the clock, working from his bedroom, where he also slept with pretty much whomever he chose, and jetting around in the Big Bunny, his customized DC-9. The ’80s, though, were his anni horribiles. Overexpanded, the business went sour, Hefner clashed with the Reagan administration and the Moral Majority and in 1985 he suffered a stroke, in part brought on, he insisted, by the unfavorable publicity surrounding the 1980 murder of the Playmate Dorothy Stratten.

Hefner now says that his 1989 marriage to Kimberley Conrad, January Playmate of the Month the year before, was an attempt to seek refuge — a “safe harbor from the waves.” “I was not well, and I felt my years,” he told me. “I felt much older then than I do today.” He and Conrad broke up in 1998, though they did not divorce until 12 years later. “During the marriage I was faithful,” he said to me emphatically, “and she was not.” (Hefner, for all his advanced views, clings to the double standard and has never entirely got over his first wife’s admission that while they were engaged she had an affair with a high-school coach.)

The aftermath, he now admits, was “overcompensation,” as he began dating posses of women, including one named Brandy and a pair of twins named Sandy and Mandy. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he said, laughing at himself. At one point, early in his ’80s, he was living with seven young women and trying vainly to enforce a 9 o’clock curfew to keep them from dating anyone else.

“You’d think that the well would run dry — the number of people willing to expose themselves by becoming Playmates,”

Mary O’Connor, Hefner’s 82-year-old assistant, said to me. “But it doesn’t. It just keeps flowing.” O’Connor, who has worked for Hefner for four decades, is a tall, nononsense woman, a former car-racing promoter, who has seen just about everything.

Back when Playboy was headquartered in Chicago, she ran the Playboy Mansion there when it was partly a dorm for the Bunnies who worked in Hefner’s club. Among her duties now, along with buying the fabric for Hefner’s custom-made PJ’s and making his health care appointments, is looking after the mansion’s guest list — the select few who, after giving their names to a speakerequipped boulder by the main gate, are allowed to proceed up the driveway, past the “Playmates at Play” sign and perhaps a wandering peacock or two, and enter the fabled pleasure palace, scene of countless late-night, clothing-optional get-togethers — and inviting new female talent to Hefner’s parties and frequent movie nights. “I can’t tell you how many pictures we get from girls saying: ‘I love you, Hef. I want to be your girlfriend,’ ” O’Connor said, shaking her head. “Once we got an envelope from overseas, and there was no address except a drawing of a rabbit.”

The Sunday before Christmas, there were a number of potential Playmates on hand at the mansion, all in red dresses, many wearing Santa hats. They posed for pictures and stood around the baronial entrance hall, giving off an invisible force field intimidating to the shy middle-aged visitor.

The first thing you notice about these women — or, to be honest, the second, but it seems impolite to linger on the first — is their skin: radiant, blemish-free, glowing with a dewiness that was presumably the epidermal standard in those ultraviolet-free days back in Eden. Had the weather been better (L.A. was in the midst of a nearly weeklong deluge), they might have visited the mansion’s zoo and aviary, bounced on the backyard trampoline, cavorted topless in the underwater grotto. Instead they played pinball in the game room, enjoyed cocktails and a buffet dinner and then assembled in the living room — some on the floor, some on Hef’s couch, their places as preci-

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sely allocated as the chairs at a levee of the Sun King — for a showing of that evening’s film.

Hefner loves movies, and screens at least three a week: a classic film on Friday and Saturday and a new release on Sunday. As many as 50 or 60 guests — old pals, hangers-on, assorted B-listers — will attend these screenings, which are part of a schedule as rigid and unvarying as that of a monarch. Monday night is Manly Night, when Hefner gets together with his cronies, many of whom have been showing up for years. Tuesday is Girls’ Night, when he plays games of Uno and dominoes with his retinue. Wednesday is reserved for cards (more ancient buddies), and Thursday is Family Night, for hanging out with Marston and Cooper, the sons from his marriage to Kimberley Conrad. There are also seasonal theme parties, like the ones for Easter, Halloween and Hefner’s birthday, and a naughty Midsummer Night’s Dream fete, held in August, not in midsummer, where the dress code specifies lingerie or sleepwear. These occasions figure in Hefner’s calendar the way Trooping the Colour and the annual visit to Balmoral figure in the queen’s — as rituals enshrined by custom — and they are, not coincidentally, a good place for a potential consort to be noticed.

Hefner first glimpsed Kendra Wilkinson, a star of “The Girls Next Door,” who now has a reality show of her own, when she was passing out Jell-O shots while wearing nothing but some strategically placed body paint at his birthday party in 2004. He spotted Crystal Harris, dressed as a French maid, at his Halloween party in 2008.

What do the women see in him? A friend, a mentor and a meal ticket more than a sex symbol, most likely. Live-in status at the mansion brings with it — or used to bring, before Hefner pledged himself to Harris — a stipend of $1,000 a week, paid out in cash by Hefner every Friday, and there was also free hair care, a car allowance and additional sums available for breast and dental implants and for special-occasion clothing. Sex with Hefner was not a requirement, strictly speaking, though most of his girlfriends did sleep with him, it appears, either out of gratitude or because of pressure from the others.

When I asked Crystal Harris whether her relationship with Hefner was sexual, she looked at me for a moment. “I don’t know how to respond to that,” she said, and then added, after a pause: “You mean sexual relations? Sure.” But she went on: “Hef has hooked up with a lot of people, but that’s not what makes him happy these days. He’s much happier just cuddling and snuggling with the dog.” They watch a lot of old movies together, she said, and she also likes trying to break him out of his unbudging routine. Just recently she persuaded him to try sushi and shepherd’s pie.

“Well, I guess I know what I like,” Hefner said when I asked him if he didn’t think it odd that as he got older and older, his girlfriends remained the same age, all in

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44 February 17 - 23, 2011

Comes from page 43 their 20s and all conforming to an unoriginal model of perky blond buxomness. He was in his standard daywear — red silk smoking jacket and black silk pajamas — and sipping a Pepsi while sitting in the mansion’s largely bookless library underneath a huge breast-baring ceramic bust of Barbi Benton, one of the few brunettes ever to catch his eye. “You do give up something in the process,” Hefner went on, acknowledging that most of his girls have never listened to his kind of music — jazz and the big bands of the ’30s and ’40s — and have never heard of Betty Grable and Alice Faye (who probably imprinted that sexy blond template on him in the first place). “But you gain something, too. There is something wonderful in the student-teacher relationship — the rediscovery, the chance to have a relationship with a younger woman. It permits you to see the things you love with a fresh eye, makes them exciting again. And I don’t think there’s any question that surrounding yourself with youth keeps you younger.”

This avuncular, nurturing Hefner, and not the sleek, night-owl playboy of decades past, is the one who emerges on “The Girls Next Door,” and may account in part for the success of that show. “The Girls Next Door,” which the E! network began showing on Sunday evenings in 2005, surprised even people at E! by attracting a huge viewership primarily composed not, as you might imagine, of heavy-breathing teenage boys but of women in the very profitable 18-to-34 age group.

Even Kevin Burns, a friend of Hefner’s

who produced the show, has trouble explaining its appeal. One of his more recondite theories is that the three girls (besides Wilkinson, there were Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt) happened to illustrate the Aristotelian triad of ethos, logos and pathos, or honesty, brains and emotion. Hef, on the other hand, as the critic Daphne Merkin has pointed out, seems less lascivious than distantly, absent-mindedly affectionate. He’s like the TV dad on “Father Knows Best” and other Stone Age programs.

People in the Playboy company talk a lot about the “brand,” a sort of emanation from the magazine that they believe has in some ways transcended Hef himself. Hefner’s daughter, Christie, who was chairwoman and C.E.O. of Playboy Enterprises from 1988 to 2009, told me that once when she was in China, where there are hundreds of stores selling Playboy merchandise but where the magazine itself cannot be published, someone asked when her father had joined the company. The brand is a label that can be attached to stuff — not just thongs and rabbit-head necklaces like the one Carrie Bradshaw wore for a while in “Sex and the City,” but bar glasses, pool cues, bath and shower products and tank tops for dogs — and there is a huge and growing market for this merchandise overseas, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe.

The brand, not the magazine, is the moneymaker these days. Playboy is getting back into the gambling business, licensing its brand to casinos in Macau and Las Vegas.

The Playboy television channel, meanwhile, is trying to advance from raunchiness

The San Juan Weekly to coolness with its new Saturday-evening program, “Brooklyn Kinda Love,” in which Brooklynites all appear to be childless, pierced and tattooed. An elderly pipe-smoking gent in a bathrobe would be weirdly out of place here. Yet the Playboy brand still depends at some level on the imagery of the debonair smoothie who created the magazine, the kind of guy who knows his way around the bedroom but is also well informed about neckwear, stereos and shoe care and who gives big parties at his mansion.

Hefner is “iconic,” his friends and associates like to say, and lately there has been an effort to burnish and preserve the icon. In 2008 Steven Watts published “Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream,” an authorized biography that treated its subject with the care and depth usually reserved for statesmen and political figures. Last summer, Brigitte Berman came out with “Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel,” an adulatory documentary film (made with Hefner’s cooperation) that emphasizes his many contributions to civil rights and freedom of speech. For years now the producer Brian Grazer and the director Brett Ratner have been talking about making a biopic, possibly starring Robert Downey Jr., and there have even been discussions about a possible Hefner musical.

What happens if, or when, the icon is no longer personally available is inevitably on the minds of many people associated with Playboy. Though he is not pushing a succession plan, Hefner is pleased that his sons — Marston, who is 20, and Cooper, who is 19 — have begun to take an interest

in the magazine. He told me that Cooper, an avid cartoonist, reminds him a lot of himself at the same age. To judge from a couple of brief conversations, however, neither of the Hefner boys shares the braininess of their 58-year-old half-sister, Christie, a summa cum laude Brandeis graduate; nor, for that matter, do they display much of the self-inventiveness, born both of awkwardness and ambition, that characterized their father at the same stage in his life. They’re sweet and slightly spacey and seem a little young for their age — a result, probably, of growing up in a world that is a real-life version of what is for most adolescent boys only a guilty fantasy.

“I prefer to think of it as when he’s not active, not when he’s not around,” Christie Hefner said, talking about the future. She and Richard Rosenzweig, the executive vice president of Playboy Enterprises and a longtime friend of Hefner’s, like to imagine that he will become a beloved, eternally brandable figure like Walt Disney. “It will be easier to perpetuate my story when I’m not around,” Hefner told me. “Because then nobody will be pissed off that I’m still getting laid.” He also pointed out that his mother lived to be 101. Then he went back upstairs to his legendary bedroom, which these days is a bit of a mess: stacks of old movies on tape and DVD, knickknacks and tchotchkes everywhere, childhood photographs on the mantel, panties dangling from a chandelier and, nestled together on a sofa, a couple of hundred stuffed animals. It looks less like a love nest than the cave of a hoarder unable to let go.

Iraq’s Last Patriot

By ANTHONY SHADID “

W

e came in naïve about what the problems were in Iraq,” Gen. Raymond Odierno, the American military commander in Iraq, told me last August, a few days before he was to end his third tour. He had spent four years in Iraq.

“I don’t think we understood what I call the societal devastation that occurred, we didn’t realize how damaged Iraq had been from 1980, in the Iran-Iraq war.” The list went on: Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the 1991 gulf war, international sanctions that crippled Iraq’s middle class. “And then,” Odierno added, “we attacked to overthrow the government.” The same naïveté affected American efforts to mold Iraqi politics, with its ethnic and sectarian divisions. “We just didn’t understand it,” Odierno said.

I asked him if the United States had made those divisions better or worse. “I don’t know,” he said, with what felt like sincerity. “There’s all these issues that we didn’t understand and that we had to work our way through. And did maybe that cause it to get worse? Maybe.”

As the U.S. completes its drawdown of military forces in Iraq, the country is so-

lidifying its own sectarian and ethnic divisions — the culmination of a process that began with the invasion in 2003. Not that these divisions are new in Iraq. They simmered even as the country was created after World War I and assumed stark form under Saddam Hussein. He ruled by empowering members of his own Sunni tribe; he waged a genocidal war against Iraq’s Kurds in the north and crushed an uprising among the Shiite majority in the south. But after deposing Hussein and the Baath Party, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority constructed something unprecedented: a political system that ignored class, nationalist and other dynamics in favor of a simple calculus of Sunni, Shiite and Kurd.

Whether that system will become permanent was tested last year. The national parliamentary elections in 2010 were supposed to give Iraqis a solid basis on which to retake control of their country. The leading parliamentary lists were headed by two familiar names: Ayad Allawi and Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Allawi was a secular Shiite from an elite family, a burly man, born in 1945, who was active in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party until he fell out with the leader and went abroad in 1971. Based in London,

Ayad Allawi, leaving a reception with Iraqi tribal leaders in October 2010.

Allawi devoted himself to shadowy exile politics, leading a group called Iraqi National Accord and cultivating ties with the Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s MI6, all aimed at the eventual overthrow of Hussein. Nuri al-Maliki was a very different person: a Shiite believer from relatively humble origins, five years younger than Allawi, whose political career depended on advancing Shiite interests. He fled Iraq in the late 1970s after being sentenced to death.

In exile, he toiled with the Shiite Dawa Party, an Islamist group that he joined as a college student in 1970 and that Hussein outlawed.

Maliki built relationships with Syria and

Iran. He was chosen as prime minister in 2006 on the assumption that he would be a weak and malleable leader, but he proved to be both an able schemer and ruthless when he needed to be, including in the use of military force. After four years in office, he was by far Iraq’s most powerful politician.

In the 2010 elections, Maliki led, in essence, the Shiite list, aimed at advancing the interests of the Shiite majority, while Allawi led a more diverse set of parties and politicians with a broad commitment to a secular future for Iraq.

Allawi won, barely. But then this fragile secular victory began, slowly and over

February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly a period of months, to fall apart. As America withdraws, Iraqis are left to wonder why their tentative democracy has come down to this, and whether some better future might still be possible.

The vote on March 7, 2010, began with a barrage of blasts in Baghdad and other cities and ended before nightfall. Even in Falluja, a town long synonymous with the insurgency, scratchy loudspeakers that once carried messages urging resistance to the American occupation now implored residents to defy the bombs and vote. To a remarkable degree, they did, and for the first time in post-Hussein Iraq, the country could claim to have a relatively representative national vote, free of boycotts.

When the results were finally tallied, Allawi’s list won 91 seats, the most in Parliament. Maliki came in a close second, with 89 seats. Frustrated and angry, Maliki set about trying to reduce Allawi’s edge. “No way we will accept the results,” he vowed.

He demanded a recount. He called some of the winners on Allawi’s list “terrorists held in Iraqi prisons.” Over the next two months, with his consent, a government body of dubious legality looked for candidates — disproportionately, those on Allawi’s list — to disqualify on the basis of their supposed ties to the Baath Party.

None of it mattered in the end. On June 1, after three months of legal challenges and disqualifications, Iraq’s highest court ratified the results of the election. All the wrangling failed to change a single seat.

Allawi still had 91, Maliki 89. Two weeks later, Parliament convened for the first time, in an 18-minute session that would mark the Legislature’s last meeting for five months.

And so Iraq’s politicians settled into a long summer of bullying and flirting, brinksmanship and bargaining, all aimed at creating a coalition government with the minimum of 163 members needed to gain a majority in Parliament and name the next prime minister.

Maliki had the power of incumbency, which enabled him to shape the perceptions of him by the United States, his foes and the rivals he courted. The negotiations drew the interest of Turkey, Iran and every other neighbor of Iraq. Vice President Joseph Biden regularly called Iraqi officials for freewheeling conversations and visited Baghdad to try to push the process toward a conclusion. Maliki, with a disadvantage in votes but the ability to exploit his position as the sitting prime minister, wasn’t going to be hurried.

Allawi had neither incumbency nor Maliki’s political appetites and acumen, but he did have the advantage of close relationships with some of the country’s most influential politicians — from the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani to Adel Abdul Mahdi, a leading Shiite figure whom he counts as a childhood friend. In American-sponsored polling over those months, Allawi drew far higher approval ratings than Maliki. A clear majority of Iraqis believed he had earned the right to form a government — and that a government without him would be illegitimate.

LLAWI’S ASCENT With Ahmad Chalabi at an Iraqi National Congress convention in New York, 1999.

The negotiations represented the pivot not only on which Iraq’s future would turn but also on which direction America’s legacy would take. In rhetoric at least, and to his supporters who disproportionately came from Iraq’s Sunni Arab and secular segments, Allawi was the answer to all the tumult the Americans unleashed and began institutionalizing with the tragicomic reign of L. Paul Bremer III as American proconsul in 2003 and 2004. He captured the nostalgia for a time — preinvasion, and to some degree pre-Hussein — when asking whether someone was Sunni or Shiite was ill mannered, even insolent. There were, after all, more subtle ways to figure it out.

Allawi’s promise was that he would swing the pendulum back to this bygone Iraq. “I was raised in a different way,” he told me in one of our first conversations.

Born to a wealthy Shiite family, Allawi was never in need. His father was a doctor and a member of Parliament; his mother hailed from Lebanon’s Osseiran family, one of the most prominent clans in that country. (“A decent background,” Allawi says nonchalantly.) His Baghdad was a different city: fashion on River Street and culture on colonnaded Rashid Street, with its restaurants and cinemas. Nearby shops offered the tastiest pastries, the best coffee and the most delicious ice cream. Officials, sheiks and men of letters chatted at the Parliament Cafe. Allawi has a picture hanging in his home of Rashid Street circa 1937.

This is the stuff of nostalgia, in which Iraq is remembered as a far more pleasant place than it ever was. Allawi doesn’t engage in too much of it — he’s not a sentimental man — but he does speak to what it represents: an ideal that preceded war with Iran in the 1980s, the American-backed sanctions or the staccato bursts of invasion, occupation and civil war.

“I said I used to come as a child to Najaf with my family, and one of the protocols of going to Najaf was to visit your father,” he said, recounting a conversation a few years ago with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, father of an influential Shiite leader and the son of an ayatollah, Mohsen al-Hakim, once the most powerful in Iraq. “We saw Christians, Sunnis, Shiites in his house. So I asked him, why does it have to be different now?”

That ideal — as much a narrative of class as of sect — is heard especially from members of the diaspora that inhabits Syria,

Jordan and the West. One of them is Faruq Ziada, a Baghdadi I met during the 2003 invasion. He left the country in 2006, and in our last conversation he darkly suggested that his departure, along with that of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, was not coincidental but rather meant to eliminate vestiges of Iraqi secularism. “This is part of the plan,” he told me. “The plan is to get rid of all Iraqis who can think, who know what’s good and bad, to kick them all out of Iraq, so those who are ruling — what is left — are the illiterate, backward, needy, hungry and broken.”

Allawi and this diaspora represent a sense of entitlement and protest over lost privilege. His speech is arrogant and aristocratic, with little attempt at flattery. He has an opportunistic side but comes across as more sincere the longer you are with him, and it is hard to question his desire for that older, imagined Iraq where, as he put it, “an Iraqi can be a Christian, can be a Muslim, can be a Sunni, can be a Kurd, can be a Turkoman, but this guy still remains an Iraqi.” Maysoon al-Damluji, a candidate from Allawi’s list, who hails from another aristocratic family, told me that Allawi was “a civilized gentleman”: “He doesn’t have a sectarian hair on him.” For her and others — and Allawi himself — he was the best hope to, as his party put it, overturn a situation “based on sectarian quotas” that “lacks belief in real participation.”

The great problem with this vision was that it seemed always to be tugged back to a political energy source that had nothing to do with democratic participation: the one-party Baathism that brought Hussein himself to power. Allawi joined the Baath Party in the 1960s, while still in high school.

Colleagues say the party was suited to him for two reasons. One was his toughness. A schoolmate at the Jesuit-run Baghdad College, Waiel Hindo, remembered him as “a fighter,” and his picture from the leatherbound yearbooks, showing a burly youth with a wry grin wearing a tie too short, says as much. “If he wanted to play handball, everybody would leave the court because they were afraid of him,” Hindo recalled.

“That was Ayad Allawi.” The other quality was his social prominence, coming as he did from a well-connected Baghdad family, which proved useful in springing him from jail in the years of plotting before the Baath Party, with young Allawi’s help, returned to power in 1968.

Allawi says he had a falling out with Hussein and other Baathist leaders in 1970.

He made his way to London, where he studied medicine and, in time, was reportedly contacted by British intelligence, which later introduced him to the Central Intelligence Agency. Some of his critics contend he was still working with the party abroad in those years, as an intelligence operative. But by 1975, he had clearly cut his ties with the party for which he had worked for a decade and a half. Three years later, he managed to survive an attempt on his life in London, for which he blamed Hussein. As with other Allawi stories, the details differ each time he tells them. In one account, he shouts at his

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fleeing attackers, who nearly severed his leg with an ax, “You tell Saddam I am going to survive this, and I’ll take your eyeballs out.”

To me, he said his parting words were: “If I die, I am sure that the Iraqi people will take revenge. And if I live, you will go to justice, you and Saddam.”

Allawi spent months recovering in the hospital, then kept a low profile for the next decade. He re-emerged on the public scene after the 1991 gulf war, when he led the Iraqi National Accord, which catered to former Baathists like himself and soon forged close ties to the C.I.A. After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, he was named by Paul Bremer to the Iraqi Governing Council, a sham body even to its own members, who never really agreed on what it was supposed to do: provide cover for American occupation, or help rule a collapsing state. The following year, American officials essentially handed Allawi the position of interim prime minister. Some who worked with him at the time remember an impetuous man, authoritarian and occasionally vulgar. A former colleague tells a story of him skipping an appointment with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2004 with the excuse that he had a headache.

Another recounted a story that still makes the rounds: when American and Iraqi forces were fighting followers of the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr, Allawi brushed off concerns about damaging the shrine of Imam Ali, one of Shiite Islam’s most sacred locales, with no more than a vulgar remark. (Allawi denies both these accounts.)

The image that has lingered — call it neo-Baathist — is at the heart of Allawi’s quandary. People hate Allawi because he seems like, as one resident in the neighborhood of Karada put it to me, “a second Saddam Hussein.” Then again, people like Allawi for the same reason: because he amounts to, as another resident in the same neighborhood put it to me, “Saddam without a mustache.”

Unfortunately or fortunately, Allawi has it both ways. “The Baath Party won’t return to power openly, but in the shadows they could creep back in,” Abu Mustafa Ali, a burly storekeeper in Sadr City, Baghdad’s vast Shiite slum, explained to me during a day I spent there. Allawi was their agent, he told me.

“Learning in youth,” he said, quoting a proverb, “is like engraving a stone.”

“Iraq was not sectarian — only now is it becoming sectarian,” Allawi told me one day in his office as the summer’s negotiations dragged on. “And the sectarianism is only among the elite, the political elite, not within the people of Iraq.” I told him what Ahmad Chalabi has said, that “sectarian politics gets votes in Iraq.”

“But is winning votes the answer to our problems?” Allawi asked.

The abstractness and pensiveness of that question suggest something of what makes Allawi an interesting person but also what makes him a frustratingly ineffectual politician. Meanwhile, Maliki was reaching out to potential allies while staying confident that the longer he lasted, the less likely a coalition without him would arise in Iraq’s

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Comes from page 45 distrustful, dysfunctional political climate.

Maliki schmoozed and made promises to any and all, and he managed to overcome animosities that left him barely on speaking terms with key figures like Barzani, the Kurdish president.

Allawi, a man better incarnated as strongman, operative or exile, was not very good at dealmaking. He pointedly refused to answer a question about whether he trusted Maliki. “We know there are a lot of incentives being offered,” he told me in the summer, laughing, “and a lot of pressures and threats being offered and being done and made.” Maysoon alDamluji, the spokeswoman, was blunter.

I asked whether Allawi and the rest of his list were clever enough to split other alliances. “I don’t know if we are,” she admitted. “They,” she said of Allawi and his allies, “are too polite.”

Even his closest allies complained that he traveled too much (in one week, he managed to visit Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Britain, where his family lives for reasons of safety).

As common were the complaints that he was arrogant and moody; after choosing not to join the government formed in 2006, he refused to attend a single session of Parliament. “He has sort of a superiority complex,” said a critic who was once a confidant. “He feels that he is probably the cream of the cream of politicians, and this is a tragedy if a politician has this sort of feeling.”

The most stinging words I heard during the summer were from Ryan Crocker, the former United States ambassador to Iraq. He echoed Allawi’s former confidant but was sharper about what he described as Allawi’s “reluctance to be engaged.”

“Frustrating often,” Crocker called him, “sometimes almost tragic in the sense of the fatal flaw. He’s got good ideas, good instincts, but he has never really made the transition from exiled figure to indigenous politician. It’s sad, because Allawi, as much as any and more than most, I think, taps that discontent in the Iraqi population over the current trend in things. I’m just afraid he’s backing away from it.”

All of this was true, of course, but the more I spoke with Allawi, the more I wondered whether the forces arrayed against him were simply too great, even if he somehow managed to overcome his ample flaws. I wondered whether Chalabi’s remark — the idea that, in Iraq today, sectarianism wins votes — held more truth for the country that emerged after the American invasion than Allawi’s nostalgia.

It certainly was true in Sadr City. The brilliance of the movement loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, a populist cleric who holds sway in the neighborhood, is its ability to read the street. It takes pride in it, and as demagogues, its cadres can sacrifice truth for theater. There was plenty of that during the election and after, as leaflets made the rounds at the Friday prayers, where thousands gather each week. In one leaflet,

Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni and ally of Allawi’s, was pictured over a passage that supposedly quoted him saying, “No place will be left for the Shiites to rule Iraq, even for a month.” Opponents are pictured with Ali Hassan al-Majid, the particularly bloodthirsty lieutenant of Hussein’s nicknamed Chemical Ali. No one around here seemed to rule out the prospect of the Baath Party returning, and Abu Mustafa, the burly storekeeper, saw it as part of a grander conspiracy. It was remarkable how many people shared the sentiment. In store after store, there was a sense — even among people who were fond of Allawi, and they were not few — that, in essence, he was not one of them. However Shiite he might be, he still spoke a Sunni language.

“Ayad Allawi will take us back to what we had before,” Abu Mustafa told me, as we sat at his counter, children interrupting us to buy candy. “I was one of the people who liked him in the beginning.

He was a strong man. But I see the people with him on his list and those people, very honestly, are from the Baath Party, and they’re sectarian.”

When I asked him who, he shrugged. “I can’t remember all their names.”

For Allawi’s opponents, Allawi, though Shiite, was the head of a Sunni bloc, and the Shiite majority — as understood by Iraq’s religious Shiite parties — would not permit a bloc representing the Sunni minority to name the prime minister. “This is the fundamental issue,” said Qassem Daoud, a minister in Allawi’s government who ran unsuccessfully on a rival list. “No one in the Shiite community would accept it.”

The very definition soon became a fierce point of contention since each side knew the import of the symbolism. To be a secular bloc made Allawi’s list more nationalist and hence more palatable; to be Sunni made it merely one constituency among three, and a junior one at that. Both interpretations were plausible. It would be the American Embassy’s reading that would prove decisive.

By the end of the summer, as Christopher R. Hill ended an unmoored 16 months as American ambassador here, it had become clear where the U.S. stood.

The embassy makes a point of no longer stage-managing Iraqi politics — the way, say, Zalmay Khalilzad did as ambassador from 2005 to 2007, when he would show up unexpectedly for breakfast with politicians and banter with clerics in Persian.

“We don’t want to give the impression that we’re picking winners and losers,” says James F. Jeffrey, Hill’s successor as ambassador. But even if times had changed, there was still the perception of decisive American influence, and even as Allawi told me, perhaps tongue in cheek, that he was “still very optimistic” about becoming prime minister, American officials were saying otherwise, particularly in private. In essence, they accepted the argument of Maliki and other religious Shiite leaders: that Allawi represented the Sunni

The San Juan Weekly bloc. Though there was some dissent, the embassy did little to suggest it thought otherwise in those crucial summer months, and as long as Allawi was perceived as the candidate synonymous with Sunni restoration, he could not win.

The last gasp was an effort by Allawi’s list to throw its support behind a compromise candidate, Allawi’s childhood friend, Adel Abdul Mahdi. But the stars never aligned, and in one of our interviews, Allawi complained bitterly that the opportunity was missed. “He didn’t push at all, not hard enough, not at all,” he said of Abdul Mahdi. “No, no, he was sitting, waiting for everybody to do the work, and this is not right, you know. It’s something which should have happened.”

It was the very same critique that virtually everyone made of Allawi himself.

By October, Maliki seemed a sure thing to return to power, Allawi’s support within his own list began to crumble and the recriminations started. “I don’t know what really the attitude of the United States is and why,” Allawi told me just before Maliki’s triumph became clear. “I can understand why Iran is saying, ‘We don’t accept Allawi.’ This is to me quite clear.

But with the United States, I really don’t know. Although they say they are not taking part and they are not taking sides, the fact remains that the prime minister is encouraged, it seems to me, by — at least I would put it this way, no one is telling him to transfer peacefully power and to work with others.”

One senior Western diplomat suggested the negotiations had become a souk in the end — “what are you selling and what’s the price,” as he described it.

Indeed, in the ensuing week, as Maliki’s writ looked more and more permanent, many on Allawi’s list — most of whom never really got along with one another — went their own way and struck their own deals with the prime minister. There was no shortage of cynicism, as the spoils were divided, in a game that Kamal Kirkuki, the candid Kurdish Parliament speaker, may have captured best. I asked him why the Kurds would back Maliki, whom they long disliked, over Allawi, with whom they have enjoyed a long relationship.

I expected him to say something about some of Allawi’s allies — ardent Sunni Arabs and nationalists whose rhetoric often sounds anti-Kurdish and chauvinist.

He didn’t. “If you have two people, and one of them is promising but lying to you and the other is refusing to promise anything,” he explained to me, “you will still prefer the first.”

Maliki’s victory ended eight months of utter political dysfunction, and what have become Iraq’s key players were all represented in some fashion. “A big step for Iraq” is how an American briefing paper described the result. “A government that is made in Iraq.” Former American diplomats were less encouraged. Before it had all finished, Crocker offered a typically insightful prediction. “There will be a little for everybody, probably,” he said. “It’s

going to be fairly inclusive among the elite.

But the promises that are made, the deals that are dealt, are really not going to involve any promises or commitments to make life better for people in Iraq. That’s just not what the transaction is in Iraqi politics.”

Effectiveness, in other words, was sacrificed for consensus, or as the briefing paper had it, “the first truly inclusive and cross-sectarian government.” The only problem is, it could easily be argued that this was the first truly sectarian government, making permanent those inchoate forces that Odierno mentioned. Allawi represented a step back from a system that, simply put, has little concept of equal rights, no tendency toward secularism and no notion of a broader nation. The election in March offered the best, and maybe the last, chance to provide an alternative construct to the ethno-sectarian model whose best example is the very troubled state of Lebanon. The opportunity was missed because of assumptions deemed truths, ensuring that a prewar cliché of 2003 became reality in 2010.

As Allawi’s cousin, Ali Allawi, an incisive author and former government minister, put it to me, “Whether we like it or not, this will likely be the division of power in Iraq for some time.” The senior Western diplomat described it another way: “You end up with sectarian politics, and I just don’t know how you break out of it.”

In my first interview with Allawi, back in May, he offered a suggestion, with a laugh. “This is my advice to you — go and ask President Bush how Iraq is going to get out of this mess. Bush, Bush, your Bush, Bush Jr., you ask him. He’ll probably have the right answer. I think so. He introduced the de-Baathification, he introduced the dismantling of the army, he introduced the sectarian quotas in the Governing Council. He should know what he did — the process, how this process is going to move forward.”

By the last interview, in November, it was clear Iraq had still not got out of the mess. “Look, I carry two burdens,” he said. “I was a member of the Baath Party, I was a medical student when the change took place in Iraq and the Baath Party came to power. After a year, a year and a half, I felt guilty because I participated in the change.

“The second time,” he went on, “when we were in the opposition, we dreamed of changing the regime, going to the ballot boxes for the Iraqi people to choose their leaders and enjoying the rule of law, a real, proper rule of law, equality among Iraqis. Exactly the opposite was done.”

The opposition, he said, along with what he called “a blurred vision of the United States, has created, has exaggerated the creation of Sunni, Shiite and Kurd.”

I asked which was better — the Iraq of Saddam Hussein or the Iraq of today.

He shook his head with the disdain of an expatriate. “The only difference is that we have this democracy.” He uttered the word with contempt.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

47

San Cristobal Canyon A Natural Treasure of Puerto Rico

L

ocated between the towns of Aibonito and Barranquitas, the picturesque San Cristobal Canyon cuts its way dramatically through the Central Cordillera Mountains.

This is Puerto Rico’s only canyon and is a very popular hiking destination. The canyon is nine kilometers in length, with its deepest point being around 150 meters, and has the Usabon River flowing through it. Diverse vegetation clings tenaciously to the cliff sides of the canyon and several fast flowing waterfalls and crystal clear pools add to the dramatic beauty of this unique location in Puerto Rico.

The San Cristobal Canyon is somewhat off the beaten track and not that easy to locate, but locals will be

able to guide you. If you are traveling from Aibonito toward Barranquitas, you will most likely enter the canyon along the trail at Barrio Llanos. The trail is steep, and depending on weather conditions, may be wet and slippery. But those who have ventured in San Cristobal Canyon will tell you that it is well worth the effort. While hikers are permitted to explore the canyon without a guide, less experienced hikers may want to make use of a local guide who is familiar with the routes and will point out interesting flora and fauna along the way.

The Neblina waterfall (Cascada la Nablina) is Puerto Rico’s hig

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48 February 17 - 23, 2011

Comes from page 47 hest waterfall and is a breath-taking sight as it tumbles in a series of narrow streams over a cliff into a pool below. Be sure to take some time to enjoy a swim in this pure, clean water where you can watch the streams of water hitting the crags above and spraying out in all directions.

It is possible to hike quite a stretch

downstream where you will come across a second waterfall, a bit smaller than the first, but nonetheless beautiful. The river bed is very rocky in places and the fast flowing water is an awesome sight as it rushes over the rocks. Once you reach the third waterfall, it’s not possible to go any further and you’ll have to turn back.

Depending on your level of fitness and how much time you want

The San Juan Weekly

to spend splashing around in the pool below the Neblina waterfall, the hike takes around four hours.

Less energetic explorers can still get a great view of the canyon and its waterfalls from the top. If you de-

cide to go hiking, don’t rush it, but rather allow yourself to enjoy the peace and tranquility, along with the extraordinary beauty of the San Cristobal Canyon – one of Puerto Rico’s most beautiful natural treasures.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

possibility carried with it an unshakeable attraction.

First, however, there was the real Las Vegas to see. Just north of downtown, for example, was the Neon Museum, an openair repository of electric signs that also happened to be the perfect introduction to Las Vegas history. It began with the construction of the Hoover Dam in 1931, according to Justin Favela, the Las Vegas native who led the tour. Electricity transformed what had been a railroad town, making possible the gorgeous signs that gave Las Vegas an identity.

Lost in Las Vegas

By MATT GROSS

T

his was N9ne, at the Palms Casino Resort, a few blocks from the Las Vegas Strip, and it was definitely not my scene. The slick design — leather in muted colors, steel and aluminum accents, and silly lighting — I’ve dealt with worse. No, it was the clientele: big men with vigorous, voluminous hair, a penchant for untucked dress shirts, done-up women at their sides and a kind of frat-boy bluster that terrifies a balding, neurotic like me.

I came to know the men as the Shays.

It derives from an e-mail ex-boss once wrote, in which he spelled “touché” as “too shay.” Soon, a Vegas type had been profiled: manly at a glance, uninhibited, at ease with cocktail waitresses and expensive cars.

The Shays were everything I’d never been, and nothing I’d ever wanted to be, and yet, despite my snide superiority, I was fascinated and envious.

For most of my life, I’d been puzzled and perplexed by the city’s appeal this was the land of Liberace, a neon catwalk for the un-self-conscious preening of the “Swingers” crowd, a font of mob nostalgia for “Casino” fans.

In the last decade, I watched with disbelief as Sin City became the embodiment of American delusion, a boondoggle of billiondollar debts and the “Ocean’s” series of movies, in which nothing was at stake except vast riches and the chance to wear nice clothes as you walked along thick carpet. Las Vegas had been developed not to appeal to cash-poor, overeducated, unconfident introverts.

Thenthe entire American economy collapsed. With it went Las Vegas: those mega-hotels, where millions of people gambled away money they didn’t have, were

suddenly empty; so were the newly built, now foreclosed-upon McMansions. Today the city’s unemployment rate is 14.9 percent, possibly the highest in the nation. Las Vegas had been humbled.

At the Beat’s counter, I ordered an iced coffee and came face to face with Lady Luck, in the flesh.She was, it turned out, a blond, tattooed 23-year-old regular who calls herself Krissee Danger and worked at the XXX Church. (It provides support for porn and sex addicts.) Raised a Calvinist in Grand Rapids, Mich., she’d moved here from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 2008, just as the economy was falling apart, and had in that short span of time become an expert in all the cool, nontouristy things to do in Las Vegas.

All I’d told her was that I’d come to get lost in Las Vegas, and the information began to gush. Why, just across the street, she said, was the El Cortez Hotel, thriving since the 1940s, when Bugsy Siegel owned the place — I should stay in the new, boutique wing, the Cabana Suites, whose huge postmodern Art Deco rooms were awesome.

At night, she said, I wouldn’t need to go far, either: The Beat was right on Fremont Street, a once blighted, now resurgent downtown block that had great bars and a nice kebab shop. Next to the Beat, she said, a video arcade/bar would be opening soon, but until then there was the Pinball Hall of Fame, a warehouse of more than 300 classic pinball machines and video games, on the east side of town.

I’d hit the jackpot. The Cabana Suites?

Awesome, indeed: comfortable and colorful, glam (bright green walls, a buttoned“leather” headboard) but stately (a bathroom of gray marble). And at $72 a night, I might even have enough money left over to lose in the casinos, an option whose sudden

Casino themes shifted, from the Old West to Orientalism to Family-Friendly.

Other details hinted at the city’s unconventionality: Moulin Rouge, whose elegantly calligraphed sign now rested in this boneyard, had broken ground as the first integrated casino. Designed by Betty Willis, only woman to penetrate boys’ club of neon-makers; she created the Stardust sign, an Atomic Age icon, and the famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign.

What amazed me as much as the neon beauty was the dedication of people to pre-

49 serving and understanding the city’s imperiled past. One evening, as I was driving through downtown, I hit the brakes when I spotted Lost Vegas, an antiques shop where every little bit of Las Vegas history was on sale. Commemorative boxing pins, a Marilyn Monroe mannequin, ashtrays from seemingly every casino throughout history — it was incredible. I bought an unopened deck of cards ($10) from the long-gone Dunes I had some gaming to do.

The Pinball Hall of Fame was my next stop. Back in college, I’d quit playing video games entirely. They had devoured my days the way I imagined hard drugs might an addict’s, and when Doom, one of the original first-person shooters, came out, I knew I had to stop.

These innocent, lovingly restored pinball games, dating back to 1947’s Heavy Hitter, wouldn’t be a problem. I plunked quarters into games both modern (Avatar; better than the movie) and ancient (the kitschy Impacto), and enjoyed myself immensely.

I stumbled on Robotron 2084, a 1982 video game with frantic action and all-encompassing sound design. One quarter vanished another and another. I was getting in too deep (I could almost taste the abyss), I wrenched myself away. My heart was racing with adrenaline and anxiety, but I was proud. I’d shown self-control. I could even sit down to a wee tiny little bit of blackjack one of these nights.

Next few days, I’d eat excellent noodles and pork chops at Pho Kim Long, decent Taiwanese at Ay-Chung Cafe and late-night snacks at Fukuburger, a food truck whose Karai burger — topped with cucumbers, avocado cream, spicy mayo and a habanerospiked soy sauce — was the best burger I’d had in years. I wasn’t even drunk.

I loved Fuku’s scene, too. Within a couple of minutes of arriving, I was talking about hot dogs with two guys, one from Chicago, the other from Washington, and Robert Magsalin, known as Mags, one of Fuku’s owners, was fetching us free egg-yolk shooters

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50 Comes from page 49 with pickled daikon. Why was Mags being so friendly? For that matter, why was everyone in Las Vegas? From Krissee and Mags to the El Cortez security guard, people just wanted to chat, and never in a way that felt like a tourist-outreach campaign.

To my surprise, I was really beginning to like this place and, even odder, to respect it. Life here was easy: I could eat Asian food and explore old Las Vegas during the day, and at night I could head downtown for a microbrew at the brick-arched Griffin or a mezcal cocktail at Downtown, a slick bar owned by Jennifer, the Palms V.I.P. host, and her husband, Michael. And if I needed an escape, I could always drive into the desert to catch a corny but fun Old West melodrama at Bonnie Springs Ranch or go hiking in the startling beauty of Red Rock Canyon. Las Vegas, I’d long known, was a party town.

And so, with two days left, I checked out of the Cabana Suites and into the Wynn, a 45-story, 2,716-room glass-and-steel arc of luxury and excess. My room, larger than my first New York apartment, was decked out in cream leather and pale fabrics, and the tap of a button spread the curtains to reveal the glowing Strip below. The Wynn was not at all my style, but man, it was comfortable.

That was the night I decided, at Jennifer’s behest, to visit the Palms and plunge myself deep into the world of the Shays. For a while, as I sat at the steakhouse bar, I assumed I’d be discovered, and beaten to a nerdy, interloping pulp.

But then I found out that the bartender, A. C., had a daughter a week older than mine; we showed off iPhone photos of our kids, and the thaw began. Next, a man named Glenn Schwartz sat beside me, and as we chatted about the city, I learned that he was a publicist who has represented everyone from Milton Berle to Penn & Teller to Bill Nye the Science Guy. Very cool. Even here, deep in Shays territory, conviviality ruled, stereotypes faltered.

But there was one thing I had to do before leaving Las Vegas. I had to gamble.

This was going to be a problem. Once upon a time, back when I had an office job, I used to spend afternoons playing blackjack with the guys in my department. We’d play only 50 cents or a dollar a hand, but over time, I noticed, I was coming out ahead.

And that, I knew, was dangerous. I quit.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Not long afterward I became the Frugal Traveler columnist for The New York Times, and embarked on years of costconscious voyages during which throwing money away on card games was out of the question. Though I’m no longer bound by frugality, that sense is still embedded in my consciousness, a frustrating component of my control-issue neuroses.

All of which is to say, this wasn’t going to be easy. On my last night in Las Vegas, I strolled along the Strip, taking photos

of the garish lights and the poorly dressed tourists, and wishing on some level that I could simply enjoy myself as they were, freely and unironically.

At the Cosmopolitan hotel, I stopped.

This was a new multibillion-dollar development, and the style was much closer to my own: urban and contemporary. The hotel’s interiors, by David Rockwell, were truly beautiful, particularly the bead-bedecked Chandelier Bar, and its array of restaurants impressive. At Jaleo, a tapas bar run by José Andres, I ate excellent pan con tomate and butifarra stew, and discussed food trucks and Buddhist chants with the woman seated next to me, a visiting San Franciscan named Christine.

At last, full of wine and olive oil, I made my way back to the Wynn, having decided I could lose $300 — no more. Still, I circled the blackjack tables for 10 minutes, unable to sit down. Should I join a game in progress, or find an empty table? What if I do something wrong? I was paralyzed.

And then, suddenly, I wasn’t. I picked an empty table, handed $300 to the dealer and placed a $25 chip — the minimum bet — on the green felt.

Within five minutes, I was up $150 — and confounded. I’d spent so much time worrying about how much I could lose that I hadn’t considered where to stop if I was

winning. A comped bourbon appeared at my side, and, well, it felt rude to leave so early.

Ten minutes later, at 1:59 a.m., I was broke. I took my barely sipped drink to the elevator, but outside my room I paused. On my previous “Getting Lost” trip, to China, I’d visited a Buddhist temple and drawn a very lucky fortune: No. 23. Now I had an idea.

Back down at the casino floor, I handed $40 to the roulette dealer, and put all my chips on 23, figuring Buddha or God or Lady Luck might intervene at the last minute. The wheel spun, the little ball bounced ... and then the dealer took my chips away.

The next morning, it was time for penance. I drove west, out past strip malls and neighborhoods of foreclosed homes, to Red Rock Canyon, where for two hours I ran up hills, along sandy trails and across dry riverbeds, inhaling the untainted air and gazing at the infinite variety of colors and textures. The $340 loss stung, even now, and yet I tried to take a Buddhist approach.

The money was, like so many things in Las Vegas, an illusion, an unnecessary attachment merely getting in the way. Perhaps, I thought, that’s why everyone in Las Vegas, winners and losers alike, is so happy — because the bond between man and property is so tenuous.

WHERE TO STAY If you’re staying downtown, it’s hard to do better than El Cortez Cabana Suites (651 East Ogden Avenue; 800-634-6703, eccabana.com; from $57 a night). If you really want to save money, nearby is the Gold Spike (217 Las Vegas Boulevard North; 702-384-8444; goldspike.com), whose newly renovated Ikea-style rooms start at $39.99.

On the Strip, you can’t really go wrong with the Wynn (3121 Las Vegas Boulevard South;

702-770-8000, wynnlasvegas.com) or the Cosmopolitan (3708 Las Vegas Boulevard South; 702-215-5500; cosmopolitanlasvegas.com), get ready to spend $200 on your room.

WHAT TO DO Neon Museum (821 Las Vegas Boulevard North; 702-387-6366; neonmuseum. org; tours, twice daily except Sunday, $15 should be your first daytime stop, followed by a trip to Sam’s Town (5111 Boulder Highway; 702-456-7777; samstownlv.com), a hotel-casino whose atrium hosts a laserlight-and-water show with an animatronic bear and beaver. The Pinball Hall of Fame (1610 East Tropicana Avenue; 702-597-2627; pinballmuseum.org) wonderful place to rid yourself of excess quarters — and delve into history of pinball and video games.

West of Vegas proper is Red Rock Canyon (State Route 159; www.blm.gov/nv; admission $7 per car), a nearly 200,000-acre National Conservation Area where you can go hiking, camping and rock climbing.

About five miles farther down Route 159 is Bonnie Springs Ranch (702-875-4191; bonniesprings.com; admission $20 per carload of up to six people), a re-creation of an Old West town with a petting zoo, gift shops, a restaurant-saloon and awesomely corny shows. Don’t miss the hanging!

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK Downtown Las Vegas not yet prime dining destination, El Sombrero (807 South Main Street; 702-382-9234) is good for a meal Beat Coffeehouse and Records (520 Fremont Street; 702- 409-5563; thebeatlv. com) serves food, including Slap & Tickle sandwich, a peanut butter and jelly with bacon and pickled jalapeños — delicious.

After dark, pop into Griffin (511 Fremont Street; 702-382-0577) good beer, Downtown Cocktail Room (111 Las Vegas Boulevard South; 702-880-3696; thedowntownlv.com) mixed drinks or Beauty Bar (517 Fremont Street; 702-598-1965; thebeautybar.com) local bands.

Eating is much better out on Spring Mountain Road, runs through heart of Chinatown. Think Korean barbecue, Sichuan noodles, food trucks (follow @fukuburger on Twitter for locations), Hawaiian poke, Vietnamese sandwiches, Filipino bakeries, Malaysian satay, Japanese izakayas .... Stop and indulge at will. This is Las Vegas.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

51

Consumer Agency Tightens Aguada Plant Closing Scrutiny of Baby Sleep Products S T

By ANDREW MARTIN

hree years ago, Dr. Bradley Thach, a professor of pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis, published findings that had the potential to upend nurseries across the nation, and perhaps save some lives too.

In reviewing data from the Consumer Products Safety Commission, Dr. Thach concluded that crib bumpers — the padding wrapped around the inside of a crib that often matches the bedding—were killing babies. In a 10-year period beginning in 1995, he found 27 suffocation deaths involving bumper pads, and he theorized that many more might have occurred because of inconsistencies in the data.

“Because bumpers can cause death, we conclude that they should not be used,” he warned.

The Consumer Products Safety Commission initially ignored the findings. Last summer, it reached the same conclusion as a trade group representing product manufacturers, which asserted that other factors, like a crib crowded with pillows or babies sleeping on their stomachs, might have been a factor in those deaths, rather than the bumpers.

As a result, most parents remained unaware of the debate over the safety of crib bumpers.

Now, prompted by consumer advocates and news reports highlighting potential dangers, the commission has reversed itself and decided to take a deeper look at crib bumpers as part of a broader regulatory crackdown on the hazards of an extensive line of baby sleep products that have been blamed for more injuries and deaths.

The sweeping overview is another sign of a heightened regulatory atmosphere among many agencies in the Obama administration.

For example, in September, the commission, along with the Food and Drug Administration, warned parents not to use sleep positioners intended to keep babies on their backs. Some sleep positioners were marketed to parents as reducing the risks of sudden infant death syndrome, but in fact, the agencies said, the products had caused the suffocation death of 12 babies over the last dozen years or so.

Then, in October, the commission warned parents about the dangers of baby monitor cords and urged them to keep the cords away from cribs, bassinets and play yards.

Since 2004, the commission has received six reports of babies being strangled by the cords.

In December, the commission approved the first new mandatory standards for cribs in nearly two decades. The new rules banned existing designs for drop-side cribs, which have been blamed for entrapping and killing at least 32 babies since 2000, and required more rigorous testing on all cribs.

In addition, day care centers will be required to replace over the next two years any cribs that do not comply with the new regulations.

Nancy A. Cowles, executive director of Kids In Danger, a nonprofit organization that monitors the safety of children’s products, said the new crib standards were “a huge leap forward,” after years of relative inaction by the safety commission.

“It’s the safest in the world,” she said of the new standards.

The crackdown on baby sleep products was brought about by a confluence of factors. After an influx of contaminated products, including toys from China, Congress passed the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act of 2008 which gave the commission — long criticized as toothless — more money and authority.

As part of the new law, Congress mandated that the commission issue mandatory standards for more than a dozen baby products, including strollers, bassinets, high chairs and cribs, replacing voluntary guidelines that had been the norm. News reports documenting baby deaths from unsafe products, particularly in The Chicago Tribune, put additional pressure on the commission.

Since 2007, more than 10 million cribs have been recalled, and Inez Tenenbaum, who was named chairwoman of the commission by President Obama in 2009, said she had made the safety of baby sleep products a top priority, or what she calls the “Safe Sleep” campaign.

In an interview, Ms. Tenenbaum said that when she became chairwoman she put together a team of experts to review 10 years of injury and fatality data on cribs. The result was 19 crib recalls and expedited regulations, actions which she says have “cleaned up the marketplace.”

She said the commission had also tried to educate parents about how to keep a sleeping baby safe, distributing a video to pediatricians’ offices and hospitals.

In the next year, Ms. Tenenbaum said her agency would be writing new regulations for bassinets and toddler beds. She declined to comment on why the commission had not taken more forceful action sooner.

Even with a renewed focus on the safety of baby sleep products, Ms. Tenenbaum and others acknowledge that obstacles remain.

Though the commission has ordered the recall of millions of cribs and other sleep products, many of them are still being used by parents. In addition, some parents and caregivers continue to put babies to sleep on their stomachs; experts recommend that babies be put to sleep on their backs to prevent against suffocation or sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. And for all the attention on defective products, the majority of deaths of sleeping infants are caused by suffocation from pillows and other bedding that crowds a crib.

A commission report from July found that 531 dea-

mart Modular Technologies since 1995 produced computer memory chips for printers and servers in Puerto Rico.

Now down to 248 employees, it once had over 1100. Due to reduced demand it will close in the nearterm. Roughly $3 million in employees severance and $4 million other closing costs will be incurred.

The company had previously shut down its operations in the Dominican Republic retaining plants in Brazil, Malasia and California.

ths from 1992 to May 2008 were associated with pillows or cushions, an average of 35 deaths a year. In a vast majority of the cases, the babies were placed to sleep on their stomachs. In half the cases, the infants were put to sleep on top of a cushion or pillow.

There also remains some debate about what is safe for babies and what isn’t.

Several small manufacturers offer products that promise to reduce the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome, though medical experts and regulators remain dubious.

Indeed, the F.D.A. says products that claim to prevent SIDS would be considered medical devices and therefore would require agency approval.

For instance, the Web site Eve’s Best claims that the BabeSafe mattress cover it sells has been “100 percent successful in preventing SIDS (crib death) for over 12 years.”

The cover is promoted as preventing toxic gas from leaking out of the mattress, one controversial theory for the cause of SIDS. “As a parent, I can tell you that the opinions of ‘government regulators’ as well as the A.A.P. mean absolutely nothing to me,” said Evie Maddox, who runs the Eve’s Best Web site, referring to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

She said the cover was so safe that babies could sleep on their stomachs. “There are many well-educated parents out there who feel the same,” she said in an e-mail late last year.

Manufacturers of baby products, meanwhile, have challenged allegations that their products are unsafe. Michael Dwyer, executive director of the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association, said critics frequently claimed that a product was unsafe based on emotion, whereas his members relied on science-based facts.

After federal authorities warned parents not to buy sleep positioners, the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association suggested that parents could continue using them, as long as they used them properly.

And the association disputes the Dr. Thach’s findings on crib bumpers. Mr. Dwyer said the association commissioned its own study and found that it was often unclear what caused the babies’ death since there were other things crowded in the cribs, like pillows or soft toys. The association recommends that crib bumpers be firm, rather than pillowlike, and be removed from the crib when a baby is able to stand.

“Whereas bumpers may have been mentioned as being present in the crib, we really challenge whether the bumper was the cause,” he said.

For his part, Dr. Thach said he remained available to talk to regulators and industry officials about his findings.

He noted that it was nearly impossible to buy bedding for a crib without bumpers.

“They are still selling them,” he said. “People see these in stores and assume they are safe.”

52

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Insider Inquiry Steps Up Its Focus on Hedge Funds

BY PETER LATTMAN AND AZAM AHMED

T

he government has taken its strongest action against hedge funds as part of a vast investigation into insider trading on Wall Street.

Federal prosecutors announced charges against three hedge fund managers, depicting a “triangle of trust” in which the three shared tipsters and illegally pooled confidential information about publicly traded technology companies. The complaint also details a brazen cover-up that involved destroying computer hard drives with pliers and tossing them into random Manhattan garbage trucks in the dead of night.

Two of the managers charged, Noah Freeman and Donald Longueuil, were accused of insider trading while employed at SAC Capital Advisors, the Stamford, Conn., hedge fund run by the billionaire Steven A. Cohen. The two join several other former SAC employees who have been ensnared by the government’s investigation. Neither SAC nor anyone now at the fund has been accused of wrongdoing, and it is cooperating with the investigation.

The recent charges stem in part from the investigation that led to the arrest in October 2009 of Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire co-founder of the Galleon Group and the most prominent hedge fund executive charged with insider trading. But government investigators have been increasingly examining hedge fund traders’ use of socalled expert network firms. These research firms are essentially matchmakers, connecting hedge funds with employees at public companies and other specialists who are paid to provide the funds with insight into their businesses and industries.

Over the last 16 months, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, has charged 46 people with insider trading.

Of those, 29 have pleaded guilty. At least eight associates of expert network firms have been charged.

Now prosecutors have turned their focus and harsh words to the hedge funds that they say traded on confidential information.

Mr. Bharara said that while there was nothing inherently wrong with hedge funds or expert network firms, “if you have galloped over the line; if you have repeatedly made a mockery of market rules; if you have converted a legitimate enterprise into an illegal racket, then you have done something wrong and you will not get a pass.”

At a news conference, Mr. Bharara deplored the prevalence of illegal trading on Wall Street. He said that, given the scope of the allegations, “we are not talking simply about the occasional corrupt individual; we are talking about something verging on a

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney, has charged 46 people with insider trading crimes. He deplored the prevalence of illegal trading on Wall Street. corrupt business model, for the defendants seem to have taken the concept of social networking and turned it into a criminal enterprise.”

The complaint announced, which accuses the three of trading on confidential information passed along by insiders at technology companies, also describes how two of the hedge fund managers tried to conceal their crimes.

After reading news articles in November about a grand jury investigation into insider trading, Mr. Longueuil destroyed the flash drive on which he had logged his conversations with company insiders, as well as two external hard drives bearing incriminating evidence, the complaint says.

It says he recounted his actions in a taped telephone conversation with Mr. Freeman.

“You take two pairs of pliers, and then you rip it open,” Mr. Longueuil, said, according to the complaint. “Pulled the external drives apart. … Put ’em into four separate little baggies, and then at 2 a.m. … 2 a.m. on a Friday night, I put this stuff inside my black North Face … jacket, … and leave the apartment and I go on like a 20 block walk around the city … and try to find a, a garbage truck … and threw the [expletive] in the back of like random garbage trucks, different garbage trucks … four different garbage trucks.”

At the news conferenc, Mr. Bharara called the cover-up effort described in the complaint “something out of a bad movie” and joked that this probably was the first time that a Wall Street portfolio manager used pliers as “a tool of the trade.”

SAC said in a statement, “We are outraged by the alleged actions of two former employees, which required active cir-

cumvention of our compliance policies and are egregious violations of our ethical standards.”

It added, “They were employed at SAC for a short time and were dismissed in January 2010 and June 2010, respectively, due to poor performance.”

Mr. Freeman, 35, worked at SAC from July 2008 to mid-2010 and was based in Boston. He has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government. His lawyer, Benjamin E. Rosenberg, declined to comment.

Mr. Longueuil, 34, worked at an SAC unit from June 2008 to January 2010. He was arrested at his Manhattan home. Mr. Longueuil’s lawyer, Craig Carpenito, declined to comment.

The third fund manager charged with insider trading was Samir Barai, 39, a former Citigroup executive who ran Barai Capital Management. He has surrendered to authorities. His analyst, Jason Pflaum, 38, was also charged. He has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government.

Evan Barr, a lawyer for Mr. Barai, declined to comment. Mr. Pflaum’s lawyer, Michael Grudberg, declined to comment.

The charges against the two former SAC employees add to the list of people and funds identified in the insider trading investigation with ties to the hedge fund, one of the largest and most successful on Wall Street.

Richard Choo-Beng Lee, who worked at a unit of SAC from 1999 through 2004, pleaded guilty in 2009 to insider trading related to activity after he left SAC. Level Global Investors and Diamondback Capital Management, two hedge funds started by top SAC executives, were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in January. Each fund has said it is not

a target of the investigation and is cooperating with authorities.

In January, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil insider trading charges against Trivium Capital Management and its owner, Robert Feinblatt, a former SAC trader. Mr. Feinblatt’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.

Tuesday’s developments are part of what Mr. Bharara, the United States attorney, has described as “rampant” insider trading on Wall Street. His office is preparing to try Mr. Rajaratnam, the Galleon co-founder, this month. Mr. Rajaratnam maintains his innocence.

The charges against Mr. Rajaratnam and a number of his associates helped spawn the latest prosecutions involving expert network research firms.

Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement at the S.E.C., cited Primary Global Research, a “matchmaking” firm with eight associates who have been charged with insider trading.

“The only matching that was going on here was to match theft with greed,” he said.

The S.E.C. brought parallel civil charges against the three fund managers and the analyst. The commission accuses them of netting more than $30 million in profits from trading on confidential information provided to them by insiders at companies including Seagate Technology and Fairchild Semiconductor.

Expert networks began over the last decade as Wall Street banks scaled back their internal research departments. They have also grown as a result of Regulation Fair Disclosure, a decade-old S.E.C. rule that requires publicly traded companies to disclose material information to all investors at the same time.

Hedge funds eager to find an investment edge began paying the firms to connect them with employees of publicly traded companies and other industry specialists. Roughly one-third of professional money mangers use expert network firms, according to a recent study.

Mr. Bharara’s office has used extraordinary investigative tactics to prosecute insider trading. Much of the evidence that federal prosecutors have used to bring charges, including those announced, has come from telephone wiretaps.

Janice K. Fedarcyk, who is in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York office, underscored the power of using wiretaps as a prosecutorial tool.

“The evidence laid out in the complaint is largely the defendants’ own words,” Ms. Fedarcyk said. “For all their presumed sophistication, they lacked a mobster’s betterhoned instincts for conversational discretion. That was to our great advantage.”

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

53

Malpractice Bill Raises Issues About a Lawsuit

By BARRY MEIER

T

he lawmaker and retired obstetrician sponsoring a Congressional bill to sharply cut medical malpractice awards was involved in $500,000 settlement of malpractice lawsuit. Action brought by pregnant woman who charged inappropriate care caused the loss of her fetus.

Money paid in 2007 to settle medical malpractice lawsuit against several doctors, including Representative Phil Gingrey, who worked for decades as an obstetrician before elected to Congress in 2002.

Settlement of lawsuit, which had been reinstated after being dismissed at trial, occurred before a second trial was scheduled to begin. The lawsuit claimed, Dr. Gingrey and two other obstetricians failed to properly diagnose the woman’s appendicitis.

Her appendix burst, leading to the loss of her fetus and other complications including a stroke, court papers show.

The legislation being sponsored by Dr. Gingrey would, among other things, limit damages for pain and suffering in malpractice cases to $250,000, restrict fees paid to lawyers representing patients and create alternative means to lawsuits for resolving

medical disputes.

The bill would also bar the awarding of punitive damages in cases brought against manufacturers of drugs, medical devices and other products that are approved, cleared or licensed for sale by the Food and Drug Administration.

Dr. Gingrey’s proposal is supported by medical groups, including the American Medical Association. Its opponents include the American Association for Justice, which represents plaintiffs’ lawyers.

In the statement, Dr. Gingrey’s office provided on Tuesday, he defended curbing damages under new legislation: “Too often our medical liability system benefits third parties over patients, allowing investors and law firms to reap huge percentages of rewards instead of the injured parties who need them most.”

President Obama again last month promised lawmakers that he was willing to work with Republicans to address medical malpractice reform. The administration has yet to put forward its proposal.

Obstetricians are more frequently sued for malpractice than many other types of doctors. A decision by a doctor or his or her insurer to settle a case does not mean that

they did not care appropriately for a patient.

In a pretrial deposition, Dr. Gingrey testified that he had been sued at least three other times over malpractice during his long career. In one case, a jury found against him; in another case, there was a settlement; and in another case, the patient dropped the action, he testified.

The $500,000 settlement involving Dr. Gingrey arose from a case filed in 2002. At that time, a Georgia couple, Kimberly D. Walker and Scott M. Walker, sued him, two other obstetricians, a Georgia hospital and two surgeons.

Among other things, the lawsuit charged that the doctors had failed to properly diagnose that Mrs. Walker, who was experiencing severe abdominal pains, nausea and other problems, was suffering from acute appendicitis.

When Mrs. Walker’s appendix burst, it caused a huge infection that led to the loss of her 15-week-old fetus. She also developed respiratory distress, and after a month on a mechanical ventilator, suffered a stroke that left her partially disabled, court papers state.

Robert U. Wright, one of the lawyers who represented the Walkers, said the hospital and surgeons had settled the claims

against them for an undisclosed sum.

However, Dr. Gingrey and two colleagues at the obstetrics practice where he worked had not settled, and the lawsuit against them went to trial in 2004.

After about a week of testimony by the plaintiffs, the judge issued a directed verdict dismissing the lawsuit against Dr. Gingrey and his colleagues. At that time, Dr. Gingrey, who had become a congressman two years earlier, spoke about the case.

“It was a major distraction from my Congressional responsibilities,” Dr. Gingrey was quoted by Roll Call, a newspaper, as saying at that time. “It is a great relief to be out from under that.”

However, in 2005, a Georgia appeals court ordered a retrial after holding that the trial judge had erred in entering the directed verdict. That court also said that there were disputed issues of fact that a jury could decide, including differing accounts

by Dr. Gingrey and Mr. Walker about the treatment of Mrs. Walker.

The settlement involving Dr. Gingrey was made before a second trial was scheduled to start. The $500,000 was paid by an insurer, and it covered Dr. Gingrey, the other two obstetricians and the practice itself.

Plans Near for Freddie and Fannie

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

O

bama administration and Republicans are into a game of chicken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with each side daring the other to advance a plan replacing the two housing finance companies.

One possibility favored by some of President Obama’s economic advisers, and by many Republicans, would not create any federal replacement for Fannie and Freddie, leaving the private markets to provide mortgages for most Americans. The alternative approaches instead would continue some form of federal mortgage backstop.

The report will describe a plan for winding down the two companies, which were taken over by the government in 2008.

Initial steps will include preventing the companies from buying loans larger than $625,500, and increasing the fees they charge for loan guarantees, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to pre-empt the official release.

The report will describe reforms in other areas of the mortgage business, including enhanced borrower protections, changes in mortgage servicing to address the industry’s failure to work with borrowers who fall behind on payments, and new steps to clean up loan securitization, the bundling of loans for sale to investors.

House Republicans, outlined a plan to end government ownership of the two companies, and campaigned on the issue in the fall. They have since adopted a more cau-

tious posture. Instead of pushing forward with legislation, they have scheduled a hearing to weigh alternatives.

The diminished urgency on both sides reflects the political realities of powersharing, the fear of doing further damage to housing prices, and a great deal of uncertainty about the best approach to rebuilding the mortgage business.

Representative Scott Garrett, the Republican who is chairman of the House subcommittee that deals with housing finance, told a mortgage conference the government should leave the mortgage business.

But he added that he was not yet ready to move forward with legislation, telling the audience that he intended to explore the issues and develop a consensus.

There remains a general agreement among members of both parties that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should disappear. The question is what should take their place.

The administration’s decision to present a menu of options rather than a single plan reflects internal divisions. Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Shaun Donovan, Housing secretary, are among the advisers who believe that the government must provide a backstop for the industry, in part to ensure the loan availability. Some of the president’s economic advisers, however, believe that such a guarantee amounts to an unnecessary subsidy, transferring taxpayer money to private lenders.

“The administration sees a lot of advantage in not stepping out strongly in one

particular path because House Republicans will view that as an easy target,” said Mr. Barr, who has returned to his position as a professor of law at the University of Michigan. “If you lay out a bunch of options, you preserve the ability to have a conversation where after a long period of time you achieve a consensus outcome.”

Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill share the administration’s view that it makes sense to press Republicans to move forward with their plan.

“They told me they knew the answer,” said Representative Barney Frank, ranking Democrat on House Financial Services Committee, referring to Republican insistence housing should be addressed in last year’s legislation on financial regulation.

One compromise in administration’s proposal would reduce the government’s role to a last line of defense for the mortgage market. A version of this idea has been advocated by David S. Scharfstein, a finance professor at Harvard who previously worked as an adviser to Mr. Geithner.

Mr. Scharfstein’s proposal to create a new government-owned corporation for the purpose of providing guarantees to mortgage investors. During normal times, the insurer would guarantee no more than 10 percent of mortgages, in times of crisis, the government could raise that cap, offering guarantees to a broader range of investors so that money continues to flow into the mortgage market and credit remains available.

“We think private markets can do a

good job providing mortgage credit during normal times, but the value of a government guarantee is really most pronounced during times of crisis”.

The administration’s plans for winding down Fannie and Freddie are likely to command support on both sides of the political aisle. Roughly 90 percent of the money invested in mortgages currently flows through Fannie, Freddie and the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees loans of lesser value.

The government already has told Fannie and Freddie to raise the fees that lenders are charged, reducing the incentive to sell loans to the government, encouraging private alternatives.

The White House also plans to express support for allowing limits on the size of loans the companies can buy to drop back to a maximum of $625,500. Congress voted in 2008 to raise that limit as high as $729,750, which will expire in September.

The companies also will be required to gradually reduce their huge portfolios of mortgage-backed securities, which they purchased as investments. Losses in those portfolios led the government to seize the companies in 2008.

“We’re going to lay out a set of reforms to crowd private capital back in the business, to dial back the role of the government over time,” Mr. Geithner said in a recent interview on the “Charlie Rose” show. That would create a window of several years to work out what happens next.

54

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Medical Treatment, Out of Reach

By ANDREW POLLACK

L

ate last year, Biosensors International, a medical device company, shut down its operation in Southern California, which had once housed 90 people, including the company’s top executives and researchers.

The reason, executives say, was that it would take too long to get its new cardiac stent approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

“It’s available all over the world, including Mexico and Canada, but not in the United States,” said the chief executive, Jeffrey B. Jump, an American who runs the company from Switzerland. “We decided, let’s spend our money in China, Brazil, India, Europe.”

Medical device industry executives and investors are complaining vociferously these days that the industry’s competitive edge in the United States and overseas is being jeopardized by a heightened regulatory scrutiny.

The F.D.A., they and others say, appears to be reacting to criticism that its approvals for some products had been lax, leading to a spate of recalls of some unsafe medical devices, like implanted defibrillators and hip replacements.

Now, executives of device companies say the F.D.A. has gone too far in flexing its regulatory muscle, and they worry that a slower, tougher approval process in a weakened economy could chill investments and cripple innovation.

In addition, they say that American patients are being deprived of the latest technology because companies routinely seek approval for new devices in Europe first.

For instance, heart valves that can be installed through a catheter instead of open-heart surgery have been available in Europe since 2007 but will not be available in the United States until late this year at the earliest.

“Ten years from now, we’ll all get on planes and fly somewhere to get treated,” said Jonathan MacQuitty, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with Abingworth Management.

Marti Conger, a business consultant in Benicia, Calif., already has. She went to England in October 2009 to get an implant of a new artificial disk for her spine developed

by Spinal Kinetics of Sunnyvale, Calif.

“Sunnyvale is 40 miles south of my house,” said Ms. Conger, who has become an advocate for faster device approvals in the United States. “I had to go to England to get my surgery.”

Stenum Spine Hospital in Germany has performed disk surgery on 1,000 Americans over the last eight years, said Jim Rider, the hospital’s American marketing agent.

Acknowledging industry concerns, the F.D.A. on Tuesday proposed creating an “innovation pathway” aimed at speeding regulatory reviews of a small number

of groundbreaking devices. And last month the agency announced measures it said would make the regulatory process more predictable for the vast majority of devices.

“A consistent and predictable review process will stimulate investment here at home and keep jobs from going overseas,” Dr. Jeffery Shuren, the director of the agency’s medical device division, told reporters.

But Dr. Shuren said the F.D.A. would not relax its standards, arguing that Europe’s system might be too lax. He said that a breast implant, a lung sealant and an implant for elbow fractures were approved in Europe but not in the United States, and then had to be taken off the market in Europe for safety reasons.

“We don’t use our people as guinea pigs in the U.S.,” he said Medical device executives said they welcomed the steps, but continued to express concerns. Consumer advocates, like Dr. Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen, however, said that device regulation was already much less stringent than for drugs and that the F.D.A. was caving in to industry demands rather than ensuring consumer safety.

Dr. Charles Rosen, a spine surgeon who is also president of the Association for Medical Ethics, said that the newest devices were not always best. He said he had at least 50 patients who had suffered serious problems from an older artificial disk. Many of those patients, he said, had gone to Europe to get them before they were available in the United States.

Just since November, three reports — two sponsored by device industry trade groups and one conducted by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers — have raised concerns about the F.D.A. approval process. One report found that the rate of recalls in Europe was similar to that in the United States, suggesting faster approvals overseas were not hurting patients.

The complaints are driven in part by financial pressures. Venture capitalists, because of the financial crisis and their own poor returns, have less money and need quicker returns on their investments from the companies they back.

Bigger device companies also complain about the F.D.A., but not as much as struggling start-ups. “The F.D.A. is asking for larger trials, more thoughtful trials, all in the interest of the American public,” said Dr. Stephen N. Oesterle, senior vice president for medicine and technology at Medtronic.

To be sure, the United States remains the clear world leader in medical device innovation, according to the report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Some 32 of the 46 medical technology companies with annual sales exceeding $1 billion are based in the United States, the report said.

Still, the report said the United States’ lead was slipping.

Available in Europe, a heart valve from Edwards Lifesciences of the type implanted using a catheter instead of open-heart surgery.

Device companies have been seeking early approval in Europe for years because it is easier. In Europe, a device must be shown to be safe, while in the United States it must also be shown to be effective in treating a disease or condition. And European approvals are handled by third parties, not a powerful central agency like the F.D.A. But numerous device executives and venture capitalists said the F.D.A. has tightened regulatory oversight in the last couple of years. Not only does it take longer to get approval but it can take months or years to even begin a clinical trial necessary to gain approval.

Disc Dynamics made seven proposals over three years but could not get clearance from the F.D.A. to conduct a trial of its gel for spine repair, said David Stassen, managing partner of Split Rock Partners, a venture firm that backed the company. “It got to the point where the company just ran out of cash,” Mr. Stassen said. Disc Dynamics was shut down last year after an investment of about $65 million.

Dr. Shuren of the F.D.A. said the agency had concerns from preliminary studies that the material in the gel could cause cancer and that the gel would come out of the disk, requiring a new operation.

Some companies and investors are even contemplating forgoing the American market completely.

“We never intend to spend a nickel in the United States for clinical trials,” said William Starling, a venture capitalist who also runs Synecor, a device company incubator in North Carolina.

Mr. Starling is an investor in Spinal Kinetics, whose artificial disk was implanted in Ms. Conger in England.

The company began working with both the F.D.A. and European regulators in early 2005. It won approval in Europe in 2007 after testing its device in 30 patients and spending $4 million. Since then, thousands of the disks have been implanted.

Only last May did it receive approval for a final trial for F.D.A. approval that

would involve about 250 patients. But hardpressed investors are not willing for now to put up the $50 million or so the trial would cost, Mr. Starling said.

In the meantime, Spinal Kinetics is moving its manufacturing to Germany and has already laid off 20 people in Silicon Valley. One reason for the move, Mr. Starling said, was that some countries in Asia and Latin America allowed use of devices that have been approved in the country in which they are made. So moving manufacturing out of the United States opens up those markets.

Totally forsaking the lucrative American market could be difficult. While approval in Europe is easier, health care systems there tend to spend less on medical devices.

Even if a device were approved, doctors in Europe might not use it if there was not enough data proving it really works.

Some companies, however, are trying to generate some sales in Europe in an effort to be acquired by a bigger company, which could then afford to deal with the F.D.A. Dr. Shuren of the F.D.A. said in an interview that there had been “no conscious effort” to make device approvals tougher.

“We are dealing with increasingly more complex devices coming to market,” he said.

But numerous executives say agency reviewers seem to be more cautious as Congress and others criticize the agency for being too lenient. Critics cited two recent examples: the DePuy hip implant recalled last year and an instance in which top agency officials approved a knee repair implant, made by ReGen Biologics, over the strenuous objections of their scientific reviewers.

Pharmaceutical executives are also complaining about how tough the F.D.A. has become. But they are not forsaking the American market, in part because there is not a big disparity in the regulatory system for drugs between the United States and Europe.

Some figures bear out a toughening in devices. The F.D.A. last year granted 19 premarket approvals — the type of clearance required for the most highly regulated devices — down from 48 in 2000.

The average time to win an approval through the less stringent 510(k) pathway, which is used for most devices, rose to 116 days in fiscal year 2008 from 97 days in fiscal year 2002. Agency figures show there have been increases in the proportion of applications sent back for questioning.

Investment by American venture capitalists in the medical device sector has fallen 37 percent since 2007 to $2.3 billion last year, according to the MoneyTree survey from PwC, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters. That is steeper than the 27 percent drop for all venture capital investing.

Last year, total venture capital investing increased 19 percent while investment in medical devices fell 9 percent.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

55

Sports

Italy Hopes a Different Look Brings Success

By ROB HUGHES

H

ow times, and attitudes toward ethnicity, have changed in a full World Cup cycle.

The last time Germany and Italy met, the semifinal of the 2006 World Cup it was Italy triumphed in extra time after a tumultuous game that defined the tournament more than the final itself.

Aside from its two Polish-born strikers, Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski, Germany was as thoroughly German as could be. Italy fielded the Argentine-born Mauro Camoranesi on its right wing.

The Italian-Argentine mix is as old as international soccer itself.

Camoranesi, like Omar Sívori a generation before him, had the bloodline of Italian emigrants to Argentina. All that he lacked as a full Azzurri player was not knowing the words of the Italian national anthem.

Since 2006, Germany’s national team has transformed into an upwardly mobile fusion of multiethnic origins. If you have no previous ties at the senior national team level, Germany will integrate you for the greater good of die Mannschaft.

And we saw at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where Germany’s rising young team was among the most dynamic in the competition, just where this fresh integration is taking it.

Italy was a sad, aging, closed shop. Its coach, Marcello Lippi, clung to the old Az-

zurri and paid a humiliating price.

His successor, Cesare Prandelli, is looking anywhere and everywhere to find the talent to restore Italy’s pride and reputation.

He does not have approval in the country for his policy of fielding players of talent, regardless of origin.

Löw, Germany’s coach, is praised for his philosophy of open ethnic inclusion.

Prandelli fights opposition in the news media and much of the nation for exploring a similar path.

Unbowed, Prandelli intends to field Thiago Motta, a native of Brazil, as his key midfield player against Germany.

No one in Italy doubts the quality of Motta. Few would argue that Italy does not need a player who can command the team’s rhythm with a mixture of tactical nuance, passing ability and tackling, and someone who with late, energetic runs from midfield can score goals on the ground and in the air.

Inter Milan built its recent Italian, European and World Club Cup success largely on South American skills. Motta, born in São Paulo, has an Italian grandfather.

Critics in Italy think Motta came too close to being a full Brazilian national team player to be acceptable in the blue shirt. He played for Brazil’s youth team at the age of 17, which is allowed under FIFA rules.

He also played twice for Brazil at the 2003 Concacaf Gold Cup tournament.

While other nations fielded strong senior lineups in the Gold Cup, Brazil entered

its Olympic squad, effectively an under-23 roster.

At 28, Motta gets the chance he feared had passed him by. His career represents one other trait, sheer perseverance.

The only thing Motta lacked in life was physical soundness. His skills took him to Barcelona when he was 17, but his injured left knee had to be virtually rebuilt by Dr. Richard Steadman, a pioneering knee surgeon.

Barcelona let Motta go, and after short stops at Atlético Madrid and Genoa, he landed at Inter two seasons ago, in time to be a major part of the best team in Inter’s last half-century.

Even that had a painful side because last summer he revisited Steadman for an arthroscopy on the other knee.

Prandelli saw the effect of his return on Inter, and wanted to try out Motta for the national team.

Prandelli has been on a collision course

in his short spell as the Azzurri “Mister.” He selected the Brazilian-born, recently nationalized striker Amauri last August, then picked the Argentine-born Cristian Ledesma once Ledesma qualified by marrying an Italian.

The policy will not appease the critics until, or unless, someone proves, as Sívori did in the early 1960s, and as Camoranesi later did, that they are better than the fullblooded Italians.

Germany, with its diversity now unquestioned, will get the first impressions of Motta as he stakes a claim to partner with Roma’s Daniele De Rossi.

This comes just as Bayern Munich has ended a six-month argument with the Netherlands regarding the eternal problem of club versus country.

Munich threatened to seek compensation in court from the Dutch federation because it claimed that the Netherlands had recklessly played its wing Arjen Robben at the World Cup knowing he was injured.

The oft-injured Robben tore a thigh muscle during a World Cup warm-up game.

Bayern asked for him to be released from the tournament, but the Netherlands decided to play him — and he was quite superb right through to the final.

He was then unable to play until January. Munich and the Dutch federation ended their bitter argument with a compromise: the Netherlands will play a friendly at Bayern’s Allianz Arena in May 2012 with the proceeds going to the club.

Emotions Rev Stoudemire, but May Stall Him

By JONATHAN ABRAMS

A

mar’e Stoudemire responded like the perfect company man during the preseason when addressing the N.B.A.’s mandate to curtail excessive complaining by issuing technical fouls.

“It makes it a clean game, a fun game,” he said. “You let the officials do their jobs, and we do ours.”

A couple months into the regular season, Stoudemire’s stance has irreparably shifted. “It’s hard to control your emotions sometimes,” he said. “It’s like you’re in a cage and trying to get out.”

With 32 games left in the regular season, Stoudemire has 13, 3 short of drawing an automatic one-game suspension, and missing another game for every two addi-

tional technicals. Only Orlando’s Dwight Howard has more, with 14.

Stoudemire, Knicks’ leading scorer, had two league later rescinded, including one against the Philadelphia 76ers. The official called a technical for Stoudemire’s reaction to a foul called, nullifying a steal.

“Amar’e is where he has to keep everything in check or else lose a game,” Walsh said.He’s going to have to be really careful.”

Stoudemire’s technicals stem from a blend of complaints, lost debates, air punches and old-fashion bullying. Eight are for some form of arguing. The others were the result of brief player altercations, an extra push to Channing Frye here or a shove to Joel Anthony there.

Complaining became nearly as common in the N.B.A. as a dunk (Rasheed Wallace drew a record 41 technicals in 80 games a decade ago). The N.B.A. enacted the 16-technical threshold before the 2005-6 season, studying several years of totals and arriving at the number as a total that warranted an additional penalty. That was not enough of an deterrent.

The league reviews each technical and flagrant foul and adjusts them, if need

be. With more than a half-season under the new guidelines, officials use video to evaluate what violates the new rules. Having a video reference aids the officials, Litvin said. He added that fans were watching a cleaner game and coaches are happier because the less time players devote to complaining, the more they spend focused on returning to defense.

Through Sunday, officials have called 664 unsportsmanlike technicals, compared with 502 at the same point in 2009-10.

At this point in the 2008-9 season, 626 had been called.

As players like Howard, Stoudemire and Charlotte’s Stephen Jackson creep closer to the limit, there is also a belief that they will control themselves to avoid suspension.

Howard, who has only drawn about half of his technicals from the rule change, received his 15th technical last season with a month left. He stayed out of technical trouble the rest of the way.

Stoudemire is emotional on the court.

He talks — with teammates, officials and coaches. Sixers Coach Doug Collins complained to officials that Stoudemire kept playing after the whistle. Stoudemire, who was within earshot, smiled, walked toward

Collins and engaged him in a conversation.

“I don’t want to say it’s impossible,” Knicks Coach Mike D’Antoni said of Stoudemire avoiding more technicals. “It’s not impossible. But it makes it a little tougher.

That’s for sure. We just have to adjust to it.”

Traditionally, Stoudemire has ranked annually near the top technicals receivers.

He drew 13 last season in Phoenix, tying for fifth in the league, and has finished in the top five in three other seasons.

“He’s one of those guys that gets fired up,” said Raja Bell, once Stoudemire’s teammate with the Suns. “Whenever you are doing that, you’re riding the fine line. Some guys play much better when their emotional, they’re better.”

That is the test for Stoudemire and the others — locating that balance between better and suspended under the new rules before it is too late.

Eddy Curry and Anthony Randolph, both involved in trade speculation involving Carmelo Anthony, did not attend Tuesday’s practice. A team spokesman said they were absent because of personal reasons. ... Ronny Turiaf is doubtful to play Wednesday against the visiting Los Angeles Clippers because of a sprained right ankle.

Sports

56

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Olympic Sailing Looks to Go Extreme

By CHRIS MUSELER

T

he world’s top Olympic sailors were in South Florida reading wind and waves aboard two-person dinghies, keelboats and windsurfers at the recent Rolex Miami Olympic Classes Regatta. The sailing lineup has not really altered much in the last 20 years.

But that is about to change, and this regatta provided a sneak peek into the sport’s future.

While Olympic medalists were being towed to their courses, kiteboarders skimmed along at twice their speed attached to inflatable kites at the end of 80 feet of razor-thin lines.

A new Olympic slate of classes for 2016, proposed last fall by the International Sailing Federation, or ISAF, has turned the traditional sailing fleet on its head in the hope of attracting young viewers and higher television ratings and created a sort of X Games for sailing. If men’s and women’s kiteboarding is selected, it would replace windsurfing.

“The Olympics want to promote the most advanced levels of sailing,” said Mike Gebhardt, a two-time Olympic medalist in windsurfing who raced his kiteboard in Miami. “This is high speed, visibly athletic, there are crashes, and you can tell who’s winning. That’s what sells.”

To boost support, the International Kiteboarding Association has been showcasing the fledgling discipline of kiteboard course racing at Olympic class regattas starting with a demonstration at ISAF’s first sailing World Cup event last December in Melbourne, Australia, and in Miami.

The venerable Star keelboat, in which the sport’s famous America’s Cup and Olympic medalists currently compete, including Brazil’s triple gold medalist and world yachtsman of the year, Torben Grael, is marked for elimination.

“The Star’s best asset is the sailors,” the two-time Star gold medalist Mark Reynolds said. “It represents the best of the sport with medalists from other classes racing.”

Two coed events being proposed would also shift the gender split for Olympic sailing from nine men and seven women per national team to seven men and nine women.

“ISAF is on the right track to elevate the sport to a high standard,” said Gary Jobson, president of US Sailing and an ESPN and NBC sailing commentator.

“Young people want action and excitement, like the X Games and slopestyle

skiing.”

Jobson filmed the Miami event and said in a phone interview that it was time for an image change away from the coat and tie yachtsman.

Mandates by the International Olympic Committee have all Olympic sports re-evaluating the marketability of their events.

“The I.O.C. has moved from using a quantitative list to select events to an overall value-added selection process,” Christophe Dubi, sports director for the I.O.C. since 2008, said recently in a phone interview. “The criteria could be provenance or universality. It’s an issue of maximizing the platform we offer at the Olympics.”

Countries have until the ISAF May meeting to issue counterproposals for the 2016 slate but must offer full slates, as opposed to singling out one class for elimination or inclusion.

“Archery is a good example of a sport that is adapting,” Dubi said. “After consultation with TV and stakeholders, the format was made more compact and easier to understand in the final stages.

It has become one of our biggest TV products.”

He also pointed to the modern pentathlon, saying that combining running and shooting increased the appeal of the event.

Dubi said that sailing’s proposed slate of events is a good step forward but that the sport was still difficult to understand.

“Our most exciting images of the Games are from sailing,” Dubi said. “Your

stadium is the water and ISAF is working on making this more spectator-friendly.

This is what everyone should be doing.”

Dubi said sailing was in no risk of losing its place at the Olympics.

ISAF has long been challenged to make what is inherently a participatory sport a spectator sport, said the federation’s secretary, Jerome Pels, adding that the boats used are just as important to broadening appeal as how the sport is covered.

Left on the proposed slate are two men’s one-person classes, the Laser and Finn; the one-person women’s Laser Radial; the men’s 49er skiff; the women’s match racing in the Elliot 6 meter; and a new coed multihull event.

“There is a concern that new events like kiteboarding will be considered unfair,” Pels said. “Skiing’s snowboardcross came very much out of sports marketing and garnered huge popularity in Vancouver. You can come up with something a bit out of the box but stumble upon something very attractive.”

Pels said the sport changed the game and events for the 2008 Beijing Olympics to make it more understandable and television-friendly. The new RSX windsurfer is now the fastest class. The advent of on-water umpiring lets the results stand on the field of play and the new Medal Race format makes it such that the gold medal is more often than not determined in the double-points last race. In the past, the event could have been won before the last day of competition or the results could have been unknown until an offthe-water jury heard protests.

ISAF has also been working with the newly revamped America’s Cup, which will use high speed catamarans for the 2013 Cup, to help make a more marketable television package.

“If we can marry technology with the compelling nature of the sport, that will make people start paying attention,” said Richard Worth, chairman of the America’s Cup Event Authority and a former marketer for the UEFA responsible for the rise in popularity of European soccer.

The A.C.E.A. along with the recent United States yachtsman of the year Stan Honey, co-inventor of the digital first-down line and line of scrimmage in football, are testing over the next month a similar GPS technology overlay for live helicopter views of sailboat racing. This will show the viewer what is happening and who is winning at all times.

Beyond technology, Gebhardt believes Olympic sailing needs to be simple and exciting.

“People need to be updated and educated as they watch,” he said. “Right now kites are the fastest sailing craft on the planet: 55 knots. People will get it.”

The RSX windsurfers and Star sailors may have seen their future Olympic dreams fade as Gebhardt went skimming by in Miami. But Jobson believes at least the windsurfers’ future is safe, for now.

“Kiteboarding is a new thing,” he said. “At best it is an exhibition like windsurfing was at the 1984 Games in Long Beach. The Star has been around for 100 years. It has had a good run. Advancing is part of the Olympic spirit.”

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

57

Sports

Teaching New Players Old Tricks

By ADAM HIMMELSBACH

G

lenn Robinson’s 40th season as the men’s basketball coach at Franklin & Marshall College is not easily distinguished from those that preceded it.

Robinson still runs plays that he learned from Dean Smith, the former North Carolina coach, before Michael Jordan was a Tar Heel, and he still scribbles each day’s practice schedule on an index card before adding it to his collection, held together by a rubber band. When the Diplomats recently watched a team highlight film from 20 seasons ago, the players laughed because the offense was just like their own.

Last year, Robinson, 66, finally relented to pressure from his assistants and got a BlackBerry.

Although he knew it was a smartphone and not a fruit, he is still learning the difference between text messages and e-mails.

But Robinson’s old-school approach is clearly not shopworn; he has remained relevant by winning. He set the N.C.A.A. Division III record for career victories in 2004, and when Franklin & Marshall faces Gettysburg College on Wednesday, he will go for his 800th, each one coming at this 2,400-student liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pa. “It always surprises me to see these stories of longevity, with coaching being such a transient business,” said St. Joseph’s Coach Phil Martelli, who played for Widener College when it faced Robinson’s Franklin & Marshall teams in the mid-1970s. “You’re more apt to see a professor remain at one school for a long time than a coach. But I think Glenn sees himself as a professor.”

Robinson, whose father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad for 49 years, was raised in a duplex on the outskirts of West Philadelphia. He played basketball and baseball at Lansdowne-Aldan High School and at West Chester Univer-

sity, where he majored in physical education.

In 1968, he was hired as Franklin & Marshall’s intramural sports director, golf teacher and junior varsity basketball coach, despite having no experience in any of those areas.

“I told him he was crazy for going there,” said Robinson’s wife of 40 years, Kathy, who met him during breakfast at a West Chester dining hall in 1967. “All the smart kids went to Franklin & Marshall and were science and math majors, but they certainly weren’t athletes and they didn’t play basketball.”

When Robinson became the varsity coach in 1971, the Diplomats had not had a winning season in eight years. Robinson changed that by finishing 13-11 in 1973-74.

After befriending Smith at the 1980 Final Four, Robinson visited Chapel Hill, N.C., and was given access to the Tar Heels’ practices and their film room. At the end of the weeklong stay, Smith and Robinson sat in the lobby of the Carolina Inn and shared basketball philosophies for hours. When Robinson checked out of the hotel the next morning, Smith had paid his bill.

“On the flight home I was writing everything I had learned as fast as I could until we landed,” Robinson said. “I was just smart enough to realize what was going on.”

Robinson visited North Carolina twice more and also developed a friendship with the former U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden through coaching clinics. Wooden’s insight had more to do with fastidiousness than fast breaks; he explained things like the best way for players to put on socks and tie shoelaces. This attention to detail intrigued Robinson, who does not allow hats at team meals, untucked jerseys at practices or swearing anywhere.

“One player has sworn since I’ve been here, and we just stopped

dead,” the Diplomats assistant Brian Murphy said. “It was a freshman, and everybody ran over to him like, ‘Whoa, whoa, we don’t do that here.’ ” As a lower-division college, Franklin & Marshall does not lure the most talented athletes in the country, though it does bring in some of the smarter ones. The mean SAT score of its student body in fall 2010 was 1,306, and all but one of the basketball players who earned varsity letters under Robinson have graduated.

Robinson’s bailiwick is preparation. He does not draw up new plays during late-game timeouts, preferring that his team execute those it has mastered.

“Everything we do in a game is something we’ve done before,” the senior forward James McNally said.

The approach works. Robinson, with a career mark of 799-300, has guided the Diplomats to the N.C.A.A. tournament 21 times, including five Final Four appearances. This season, they are 17-4 and ranked No. 21 in Division III. “His guys are so well taught that he could probably take some from his first team and some from his team today, and they could still play together,” said Dave Pauley, the coach at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. “It’s a system of excellence.”

There have been opportunities for Robinson to coach at higher levels, but he never pursued them because he never wanted to leave.

Robinson likes that the stands are filled with locals even when the students are on Christmas break.

He likes sitting at the counter at the Willow Tree Restaurant each morning and ordering the breakfast special and knowing everyone’s name.

“If I’m down in the dumps because we lost the night before, you go in there and realize there’s other stuff going on in the world,” Robinson said. “It’s like how most coaches have a dog because it still wags its tail even if you had a bad game.”

He is such a fixture in the community that he was talked into running for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives as a Republican in 2002; he lost.

Robinson’s body of work is startling considering that Division III teams play fewer games than Division I teams, and because such successful coaches usually do not stay put at this level.

He does not coach to chase milestones, and when he decides to retire, he says he will not care if his win total is not at a round number.

He said he would like to spend more time golfing, and boating on Chesapeake Bay. After bad losses, he tells his wife he should have stopped coaching yesterday.

“But I think it keeps him young, being around the players,” said John Boyer, a Diplomats forward from the class of 1977.

And that is the main reason the 66-year-old coach with the old metal whistle still comes to practices with that glint in his eyes. He is happiest when he is teaching old plays to a new group of college students, and explaining why it is important they keep their jerseys tucked in and their shoelaces tied just so.

Sports

58

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Anthony Trade Talk Exacts Price

By HOWARD BECK

C

armelo Anthony’s virtual free-agent tour has been strikingly short on theatrics: no self-aggrandizing, no parade of executives genuflecting on his doorstep, no cozy backyard interviews.

This is nothing like “The Decision” that consumed the N.B.A. last summer. Anthony, the disgruntled Denver Nuggets forward, is wary of repeating the mistakes that corroded the public image of his good friend LeBron James.

Anthony not truly free agent, just discontented star wielding opt-out clause to force a trade. This is pre-emptive free agency. All he can do is play hard and keep his statements noncommittal.

At least 12 teams — 40 percent of the league — have been snared in the Anthony intrigue at some point in the last six months. It has rained havoc on locker rooms in Newark and Detroit, New York and Chicago and, of course, in Denver. More than 20 players — Nets and Knicks, Pistons, Bobcats and Timberwolves — have seen their names attached to a rumored Anthony deal.

Nets’ Devin Harris acknowledged being unnerved by the reports. The Nuggets’ Chauncey Billups, who wants to finish his career in Denver, was also bothered.

The rumors have appeared to take a mental toll on the Knicks’ Wilson Chandler and Danilo Gallinari.

The Pistons are still dealing with the fallout from an aborted three-way trade with the Nets and the Nuggets. At the peak of the talks, Detroit benched its onetime star Richard Hamilton, deepening a rift between them.

The failed trade also tarnished the Nets’ owner, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, and general manager, Billy King.

Teams in the Anthony hunt are hesitant to make even minor deals, knowing they may need their draft picks, trade exceptions and expiring contracts to send to Denver.

The wave of collateral damage claimed another team, with ESPN.com reporting Los Angeles Lakers could swap Andrew Bynum, their talented young center, for Anthony.

That report, as with so many others, was quickly picked apart and dismissed, classified as a warmed-over discussion from last summer or a means of provoking the Knicks into making a better offer.

Would they part with 23-year-old Bynum, who is one of the top centers in the league? Can they win a third straight championship without at least one bruising 7-footer? Are they so concerned about Kobe Bryant’s durability they feel compelled to add another high-volume perimeter scorer?

If Internet polls are indications, fans say yes 77 percent favored trade in poll on ESPN.com’s Los Angeles site.

An LATimes.com poll yielded similar support.

The Lakers’ interest is understandable. Four of their top players — Bryant, Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom and Derek Fisher — are over 30. Bryant is in his 15th season. At some point, they will have to replenish the lineup and find a new star to build around.

But giving up Bynum now, as the Lakers make their last run before Coach Phil Jackson retires, seems foolish. The Boston Celtics, their finals opponent in 2008 and 2010, are loaded with big men — Kevin Garnett, Kendrick Perkins,

Shaquille O’Neal and Glen Davis. The Lakers’ top rivals in the West, San Antonio and Dallas, are also well stocked.

Nuggets need Lakers to put pressure on Knicks — Anthony’s preferred destination. Donnie Walsh, the Knicks’ president, is hesitant to break up his young core, knowing he may be able to sign Anthony this summer.

Walsh has taken the long view in rebuilding, setting up the Knicks to have cap room in 2010, 2011 and 2012. There is really no desperation to land Anthony, a one-dimensional scorer who fills no obvious need.

Knicks have holes at center and in backcourt, find answers in 2011 free-agent class. Available big men include Tyson Chandler, Nene and Marc Gasol. Available guards include Jason Richardson, Jamal Crawford, Aaron Brooks and Rodney Stuckey. They get two impact players for the same price as signing Anthony.

2012 class include three of the N.B.A.’s best players: Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and Deron Williams.

Committing to Anthony now would shut the Knicks out of free agency for years. Waiting keeps their options open. In today’s N.B.A., there is always another superstar on the horizon and another drama waiting.

With Lack of Stars, College Men’s Basketball Finds Parity No. 7 Brigham Young and No. 6 San talent have left the season heavy on parity. There is room for a traditional outsider to emerge Diego State are candidates, Belmont, George election Sunday less than 4 weeks as a Final Four interloper, the way Butler did Mason, St. Mary’s, No. 21 Utah State, Cleveland State and Wichita State long shots. away, two vintage rivalry games offer last year, or as George Mason did in 2006.

Blue Devils had seemingly turned back a glimpse of what has been an unusual college men’s basketball season, one defined Kyrie Irving, Duke’s star freshman, has the clock to a time when Christian Laettner been out with a toe injury since December. and his feathered hair were the face of colleby missing stars as shining ones.

He is unlikely to return this season. ge basketball. Leading the way was Irving, At the top of the bill is No. 20 North who despite playing only eight games left Carolina at No. 5 Duke, which lost its role as an indelible impression by averaging 17.4 the heavy national title favorite when its star points and 5.1 assists. freshman point guard, Kyrie Irving, a poIrving’s injury leveled the playing field tential No. 1 overall pick in the N.B.A. draft, in college basketball, said Charlie Coles, the went down with a toe injury in December. coach at Miami University in Ohio, whose The Blue Devils (21-2) are still clusteteam has served as an early-season appetired alongside No. 1 Ohio State (24-0) and zer for Duke, Ohio State and Kansas.

No. 2 Kansas (23-1) as the best bets to win Even if Irving departs for the N.B.A., the N.C.A.A. tournament, but losses at FloDuke will have some blue-chip recruits to rida State and at St. John’s have shown Duke take his place. The commitment by Alex is not a runaway favorite.

Murphy, a forward considered a top-20 plaIn an earlier game, No. 11 Georgetown yer in the 2012 high school class, to attend (18-5) is at No. 12 Syracuse (20-4). They are Duke continued a blistering run for the Blue two of the better teams in the country’s most Devils. Duke also has a commitment from dominant conference, the Big East. But last the best player in the class of 2011, shooting year at this time, Syracuse’s Wesley Johnson guard Austin Rivers. He is the son of Bosand Georgetown’s Greg Monroe, who left ton Celtics Coach Doc Rivers and an early college early, were on their way to becoming favorite to become the No. 1 pick in the 2012 lottery picks in the N.B.A. draft. This season, N.B.A. draft. neither team has a talent like them. And it Having N.B.A. talent does not assure is a backhanded compliment to the league’s success, as Texas and Wake Forest have shown depth that it could land up to 11 teams in the in recent years. Still, it is always hard to pick N.C.A.A. tournament with only one player against teams that have stockpiled talent.

— Connecticut’s Kemba Walker — projected Duke and Kansas have three healthy as a sure first-round draft pick. potential first-round picks for the coming The dip of Duke and the absence of elite

By PETE THAMEL

S

draft. Besides Irving, Duke has guard Nolan Smith, wing Kyle Singler and forward Mason Plumlee. Kansas is the only other team considered to have three potential firstround picks with twin forwards Marcus and Markieff Morris and point guard Josh Selby.

Tricky to project Brigham Young and San Diego State deep into the tournament.

B.Y.U.’s Jimmer Fredette treated this season like personal Pop-a-Shot tournament, leading nation in scoring 27.6 points a game.

San Diego State looks like Butler with quality seniors and a fringe lottery first-round pick in sophomore star Kawhi Leonard.

No league has hemorrhaged more high-end talent than the Big East the past two seasons, when 10 players from the league made opening day N.B.A. rosters. But the league’s projected down year never materialized. The Big East blew away the competition in the preseason tournaments and could end up smashing its own record of sending eight teams to the N.C.A.A. tournament.

And as Georgetown and Syracuse chase a first-place Pittsburgh team short on elite talent but long on cohesiveness and toughness, the conference has emerged as a reflection of college basketball itself. With the missing stars looming large, it is hard to predict who will be shining in Houston come April.

And that is why this closing stretch of games could be college basketball at its fickle, unpredictable best.

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

59

Sports

What’s Always Been So Great About Green Bay

By DAVE ANDERSON

I

n more than 50 years of writing about professional football, my favorite trip was always to Green Bay. If you enjoyed pro football, you had to enjoy going to where the Packers predated the N.F.L., where Vince Lombardi’s teams won five championships in seven seasons (including a record three in a row that included the first two Super Bowls), where Brett Favre set passing records and where Aaron Rodgers and his Super Bowl XLV teammates were cheered at Lambeau Field.

I knew Lombardi when he was the Giants’ offensive coach in the 1950s, but I never really heard his voice that could melt snow until the Packers’ 1962 championship game against the Giants at Yankee Stadium.

With my newspaper. On strike, Jim Kensil of the N.F.L. office asked me to be his sideline spotter on the Packers’ bench. Confirm which player had recovered a fumble, be aware of injuries.

Early in the game, Jim Taylor, the Packers’ fullback, wobbled to the bench. In a pileup, somehow his upper teeth had been driven into his tongue and now, sitting next to where I was standing, he was spitting blood as if he had opened an artery.

With the Giants about to punt, Lombardi’s booming voice penetrated brutal cold with a wind blowing Giant quarter-

back Y. A. Tittle’s passes.

With another spit of blood, Taylor stood up, put on his green and gold helmet, trotted onto the field. He went on to gain 85 yards on a record 31 carries for a championship game. The Packers won, 16-7.

Lombardi went to Green Bay in 1959, the Packers were a disaster. They had not had a winning season since 1947, they earlier had won 6 of their record 13 N.F.L. titles, including the 1944 championship game against the Giants, 14-7, at the Polo Grounds.

I was there, freezing in the upper stands in left-center field and thinking I could always say, “I saw Don Hutson play.”

Hutson, wispy end credited with having invented pass patterns, was a decoy that day, with goal posts then on the goal line, he used his favorite tricks. Locking an arm around goal post, he spun free as Giants defender flew by.

Green Bay, it’s all about the Packers.

It’s a city of some 102,000, but compared with all the big-city franchises, Green Bay resembles a small town with a team — the only publicly owned franchise in the four major sports with by far the smallest market. And with the most devoted fans.

Some 80,000 names are on the waiting list for season tickets; recently rewarded fans went on the list in the 1950s. Much of their clothing is green and gold. The PressGazette’s old downtown office was the site

Vince Lombardi during the N.F.L. championship game on Jan. 1, 1967. He led the Packers to five titles in the 1960s. of the team’s humble birth on Aug. 11, 1919, when the population was 30,000.

That historic meeting run by Curly Lambeau, 21-year-old high school star who left Notre Dame after a year under Knute Rockne to take a job as a shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Company and George Calhoun, Press-Gazette sports editor.

Lambeau Field, the town shrine whe-

re bratwurst and beer is staple, is named for Curly, charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame as the Packers’ founder, player for 10 years and coach for 30 years with seven N.F.L. titles. Lambeau Field’s address is 1265 Lombardi Avenue.

To appreciate Packers’ still being in N.F.L. a century after their birth, it’s as if Louisville and Hartford were still in baseball’s National League, as they were in its original 1876 season; as if Providence were still in the N.B.A., as it was in the original 1946-47 season, when the N.B.A. was called the Basketball Association of America.

In N.F.L.’s first season, 1921, as the American Pro Football Association, towns, mostly in the Midwest, had teams that disappeared: Akron, Canton, Rock Island, Evansville, Dayton, Rochester, Hammond, Columbus, Tonawanda, Muncie and Louisville.

The Packers endured, but for all of their success, the community’s monetary support was needed to avert financial collapses in 1921, 1922, 1934 and 1950. If Wellington Mara, the longtime Giants owner, had not successfully argued in 1961 for all teams to share television income equally, Green Bay’s small market would surely have been its demise. The franchise would be in a different locale with a different nickname.

Even worse, pro football history wouldn’t be the same without what Green Bay and its Packers have accomplished.

Spring Is Hardly Just Around the Corner, but Baseball Is

By BEN SHPIGEL

A

round much of this winter-battered country, grass is only a rumor. Winter is but halfway over, and already enough snow has fallen in Boston to blanket its star second baseman, Dustin Pedroia, who stands 69 inches tall. Undoubtedly, another storm — or three — are coming.

But for fans residing in the East and Midwest, and in Texas, some of the worst is over. And spring training, an annual antidote, is almost here. For those keeping score, some pitchers and catchers will begin holding official workouts next Monday in Florida and Arizona, and fans can begin feeling optimistic about teams that will inevitably leave them frustrated and fuming.

Meanwhile, the intimidating winter of 2010-11 continues. Joe Bastardi, the chief long-range meteorologist for AccuWeather, was relatively optimistic, contending in a telephone interview that “the worst of the winter is over south of a line from New York to Philadelphia to Dodge City, Kan.” North of that line, he said, there could be more major storms, more snow days for kids, more trains that are not running. But at least those who are afflicted can read baseball stories with datelines from Clearwater and Scottsdale.

Already, there are dozens of players working out at various spring training sites.

Yankees starter Phil Hughes threw at the team’s complex in Tampa, and Derek Jeter, with much to prove after hitting .270 last season, took batting practice and fielded ground balls at shortstop.

“I’ve always been pretty good in my career in terms of forgetting about previous seasons, whether it was a good season or a bad season,” Jeter told The Associated Press.

Across the state in Port St. Lucie, the Mets’ David Wright was working out, too, even as the team’s owners continued to deal with a perilous lawsuit filed against them by the trustee representing the victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

Wright told reporters he had even reached out to Jeff Wilpon, the team’s chief operating officer, to express his support. But the trustee is seeking a billion dollars from the owners and Wright cannot do much about that.

In all, pitchers and catchers from 11 of the 30 teams — though not the Yankees (Feb. 15) or the Mets (Feb. 17) — will hold their first official workouts Monday. And almost faster than you can shovel out a driveway, the exhibition season will be under way, with a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Florida State on Feb. 24.

The defending champion San Francisco Giants open the Cactus League schedule the next afternoon against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

If it seems as if teams are assembling earlier than usual, it is because they are. To keep the World Series from again being played in November, spring training was moved up a few days.

And in order not to give those days right back, baseball, a sport that holds fast to its traditions, will begin in a most nontraditional fashion by having opening day on a Thursday, March 31.

Aside from season openers played outside the United States, opening day has fallen on a Sunday or a Monday every year since 1998. Only 10 times prior, and not since 1976, has the first pitch been thrown on a Thursday.

Six months later, the season will end Sept. 28, a Wednesday, the earliest conclusion since 2003, and the first time it will be scheduled to conclude on a day other than Sunday since 1990.

In between, intriguing highlights abound. On May 20, presuming it will have been dug out by then, Fenway Park will welcome the Chicago Cubs for the first time ever in a regular-season series. A month later, from June 24 to 26, the Florida Marlins

will play a home game 3,300 miles from home — at Safeco Field in Seattle, against the Mariners, because of a conflict at Sun Life Stadium with a U2 concert.

In another rarity, the first scheduled doubleheader in about 10 years is slated for July 16, when the host Oakland Athletics will play two games on a Saturday against the Los Angeles Angels.

Meanwhile, bigger changes loom for the sport. In all likelihood, this will be the final postseason under the old system, which rewarded the three division winners and a wild-card team. Momentum is gathering for the additions of two wild-card teams, one in each league. The new format is yet to be determined, but it is likely to be in place for 2012. Expansion of instant replay may not be far behind.

As for whether there will still be snow on the ground in the Northeast on opening day, Bastardi naturally could not say. But he did suggest that after a winter that could wind up as the coldest nationwide in more than 20 years, the beginning of the baseball season in places like Philadelphia, New York and Boston might not be as peaceful as it was a year ago.

Still, he added with a laugh: “There’s hope. The seasons will change eventually.”

And baseball is already here.

Sports

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The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Buffalo Billionaire Lifts Soccer in English Town

By JERÉ LONGMAN

T

he phone first rang a year ago in January. The caller identified himself as Bob Rich, a billionaire American businessman and sports team owner. He had English royals among his ancestors. For Christmas, his wife had bought him the title Lord of Bedlington. And he wanted to do something, well, lordly.

In particular, he wanted to sponsor the Bedlington Terriers soccer club.

This had to be a joke. A guy named Rich wanted to help finance a team that played at a stadium called Welfare Park? Right.

Americans invested in English soccer teams, but they opened their wallets for big clubs in the Premier League: Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Aston Villa. Who would possibly be interested in the Bedlington Terriers?

This was about as far below the Premier League as one could get. Bedlington was a ninth-tier team from the northeast of England, near the Scottish border. Its players were semiprofessional. Matches drew 60 to 100 fans. The team’s video department consisted of a guy who stood behind the goal and captured highlights on his iPhone.

“I thought someone was winding me up,” said David Holmes, the team’s chairman.

But Mr. Rich was serious. He was a frozen-food mogul from Buffalo, the chairman of Rich Products Corporation, ranked 488th on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, with an estimated wealth of $2 billion. A former athlete, he had tried out for the 1964 Olympic hockey team. And he knew a thing or two about sports marketing, since he already owned three minor league baseball teams, including the Buffalo Bisons, the Mets’ top minor league affiliate.

Mr. Rich felt a Rust Belt kinship with Bedlington, situated in what had been a center of England’s coal-mining industry. The mines were long closed.

Trains no longer stopped at the local station. This was now a bedroom community of about 15,000, with many people commuting to work in nearby Newcastle.

“There were a lot of similarities to Buffalo,” Mr. Rich, 70, said in a telephone interview. “They had lost their mining and we had lost our steel milling.”

That affinity led to one of the more improbable alliances in the world of international sports.

Mr. Rich’s company now has its name across the jerseys of Bedlington’s soccer team. It will soon install a scoreboard, the only one in the 22-team first division of the Northern League. And it will probably resod Welfare Park, where the field is in such fragile shape after a harsh fall and early winter that the Terriers could not play for 54 consecutive days between November and January.

There are no heating coils beneath Northern League fields, as there are at some stadiums in the Premier League, to melt the snow and frost, “only an old guy with a hair dryer,” said Mark Clennell, 28, a fan of the rival Whitley Bay. From the beginning, Mr. Rich made it clear that he did not want to buy the Bedlington team. American owners of English soccer clubs have been met with great skepticism after frequently incurring mounds of debt.

Instead, Mr. Rich bought a jersey sponsorship for about $16,000 a season and a new scoreboard costing “well north” of $50,000, but he never promised to “splash the cash,” as they say around here.

He intends to foster a kind of mentor-student relationship, lending his company’s expertise in promotions, groundskeeping and customer relations in hopes of creating a cultish buzz about the Bedlington Terriers as plucky underdogs.

The new scoreboard will flash advertising and be capable of showing video highlights. Mr. Rich plans to sell Bedlington jerseys at his minor league ballparks in the United States. He also hopes to persuade members of Bedlington terrier dog clubs in the United States to buy jerseys, shirts, jackets, scarves and hats featuring the woolly pooch on the official team crest. Proceeds from merchandise sales will go to the soccer team.

The aims are to attract more sponsors, boost finances and sign better players. Bedlington wants to move up a division or two, incrementally. It won the Northern League five years in a row from 1998 to 2002 but nearly disbanded five years ago because of financial distress. Now the club is run on a shoestring annual budget of about $128,000. Some stars in the Premier League make twice that in a week.

Club officials volunteer their time. The players are teachers, plasterers, carpenters, electricians and bricklayers. Expense money pays them $95 to $195 a week. At a match last Wednesday, which drew 63 paying customers, the team’s accountant operated the public-address system and handed out sofa cushions to supporters in the tiny grandstand.

A halftime raffle awarded a bottle of wine to one winner and a box of chocolates to the other. About the only connection to big-time soccer at Welfare Park was a sign at the box office that warned, “No vuvuzelas allowed.”

“We want to help them help themselves,” Mr. Rich said. “We can’t get into an arms race, but we can help them improve amenities and help them with their field so a guy won’t turn his ankle in a mud patch and help them so they’re not scrapping to make a payroll.”

Twice, Mr. Rich has seen the Terriers play, once last March and again in late January for his 70th birthday.

He shares a birthday with the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns, and joined club officials for a supper in Burns’s honor that included a poetry reading and ceremonial stabbing of the haggis.

Mr. Rich, whose father, Robert Sr., built the family fortune on nondairy whipped topping and creamer, was researching his genealogical history last year when he found an ancestor called the Lord of Bedlington.

“I didn’t even know where it was,” he said. “So I checked a map.”

Then he jokingly told his wife, Mindy, “I should be a lord.”

She replied, “I’ll buy one for you.” Lord of Bedlington happened to be available. These titles can be bought for as little as about $325, and his was on the low end, Mr. Rich said. For

the billionaire who has everything, it amounted to a Christmas stocking stuffer.

“You can’t question the legality of it, though you can probably question the taste of it,” the drolly self-deprecating Mr. Rich said. “Mine came with a plaque and a decoder ring. My fishing buddies call me Lord Bubba.”

Early word spread, incorrectly, that Mr. Rich would spend millions on the Terriers, just as Russian oligarchs and oil-rich sheiks did in the Premier League. Even a more modest infusion of money and visibility seems appreciated, though, in a village stung by the global recession.

“I’ve never seen it so bad before that the pubs shut,” said Robert Watson, 52, whose family has owned a newsstand here for nearly a century.

“Anything would help. We’ve lost everything.”

There is some wariness, too, along with the gratitude. Stuart Elliott, 33, the Bedlington captain who has played on bigger clubs just below the Premier League, noted that soccer was littered with owners and sponsors who threw lots of money at teams and then grew bored and walked away.

“That can cripple a club,” he said.

But, referring to Mr. Rich, the captain added: “So far he’s done what he said he would do. And he spent his 70th birthday watching us. He could have been on an island somewhere. We appreciate that.”

This season Bedlington ranks seventh in league play, not great but encouraging enough for locals to believe that better times may be ahead.

“The town lost its identity,” said John Garbutt, the Terriers’ vice chairman. “The team has been languishing.

All of a sudden, we’re on the up and up. We’re giving the community back its heart is the way I see it.”

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

61

Games

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9 Click the “check sudoku” button to check your sudoku inputs Click the “new sudoku” button and select difficulty to play a new game

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Wordsearch

Answers on page 62

62 February 17 - 23, 2011

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Refuse to be dictated to and continue to run the show on your own terms, but do tread carefully in love ties.

Be measured and careful with loved ones. This is not a good time to take anyone or anything for granted.

Life is too short for such nonsense. Run a mile from whatever drags you down. Mixed blessings abound.

Pick up on the good stuff; it’s free!

Make the most of social opportunities and do remember to have a laugh. Ditch regrets and build on strong foundations. Expect a bit of creative chaos; even as you try to be as organized as you have a mind to be. A bit of discipline would not go amiss. Nothing is set in stone, so stay ahead of the competition and be inspirational. Be productive.

Taurus

Scorpio

(April 21-May 21)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Placate awkward people with a beaming smile and continue to trust life. You can expect quite spectacular changes and challenges in the next while. The opportunity to redefine your life as you see fit is worth taking up. Take up your options only if they make sense to you and resonate deep within your soul. Be consistent.

If you do not make your best attempt now, you may regret it, so do proceed with confidence. Finances should now start to clear and resolve. It is a good time to negotiate and pin things down. Get in on the act with business deals and personal resolutions. You really can expect things to clarify before too long.

Gemini

Sagittarius

(May 22-June 21)

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Now is the right time to optimize romantic moments, so make every second count. It is impossible to please all of the people all of the time, so make sure that you at least are happy. It could prove to be costly to loosen the grip, but at least it will be fun! Perhaps it is time to push the boat out. A tricky situation does not have to defeat you.

Hold off with big decisions just a while longer. There is no point trying to pin something or someone down out-of-time. Your finances will soon settle and you can expect a lucky break soon enough. Be careful not to jump to hasty conclusions. Get your facts right before you speak up and compromise your good position.

Cancer

Capricorn

(June 22-July 23)

You have the edge; even though you are probably feeling quite exhausted and fed up at points. Discern what and whom is worthy of your precious energy. Good luck is with you, as always. Be decisive with what matters, never mind the rest. Do leave negative thoughts behind you. Unconventional love ties are worth a risk.

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Honour the work you have put into certain relationships and do not be defeated by questions and challenges. Give someone significant a second chance. You are destined to enjoy the thrill of the chase. Get in the groove. Now is the time to get busy with your best-laid plans. Tenacity and that winning smile will take you places.

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19) Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

In relationships guard against irrevocable You are all set to make a great impact. Give unusual love vibes a look-in, why not?

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Circumstances which are too challenging get Do not underestimate your ability to achieve great things. It is a good time to put yourself on the line professionally; though not in a pushy way. I hope that doesn’t sound like a contradiction. Suffice to say, it will benefit you to stand up for your treasured principles. So pipe up when asked; just do not shout to be heard. Be all you can be.

Be persistent and determined, then at least you will have tried. Your mind may be a whirlwind of activity, but be careful not to trip yourself up with premature action. Choose your moment and make your move. Balance holds the key to your success. Remember your original plans and tap into what you really want to achieve.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Rediscover your inspiration. What first captured your imagination? Did you move on too quickly from something that was actually very good for you? Tap into your dreams and visions once again. Give things a fighting chance and follow your heart not your head. Flow with an option that is working. You know it makes sense.

The San Juan Weekly

Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 61

The San Juan Weekly

February 17 - 23, 2011

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

Two Cows And A Chicken

Cartoons

63

Ziggi

64

February 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly