Helpful Linesman Hurts United; Barcelona Is Handed First Loss Since April

Helpful Linesman Hurts United; Barcelona Is Handed First Loss Since April

Manchester United conceded a contentious penalty after a linesman intervened in its 1-1 tie with Newcastle at Old Trafford on Saturday, dealing a blow to its bid to retain the English Premier League title.
United defender Rio Ferdinand was judged to have brought down Hatem Ben Arfa in the 61st minute, although replays suggested Ferdinand had made a perfectly legal tackle. The referee, Mike Jones, appeared happy to award a corner but a linesman, John Flynn, indicated a penalty should be awarded, causing several angry United players to surround the officials.

Demba Ba kept his composure to convert the penalty after a two-minute delay, drawing Newcastle even after United went ahead in the 49th minute on Javier Hernández’s goal.

“I didn’t think anyone in the ground thought it was a penalty apart from the assistant referee,” United Manager Alex Ferguson said.

Newcastle played the last 12 minutes with 10 men after Jonás Gutiérrez was shown a second yellow card for a foul on Patrice Evra.

Hernández had a goal disallowed for offside in the fourth minute of stoppage time. Second-place United is four points behind Manchester City, which plays at Liverpool on Sunday.

Third-place Tottenham closed within two points of United as Emmanuel Adebayor scored twice in a 3-1 win at West Bromwich Albion, and Chelsea scored three times in the first half for a 3-0 victory over Wolverhampton. Arsenal slipped two points behind the Blues after defender Thomas Vermaelen scored a goal after giving up an own goal in a 1-1 tie against Fulham.

FIRST LOSS FOR BARCELONA Real Madrid extended its lead to six points in the Spanish league after a comeback 4-1 win against nine-man Atlético Madrid and Barcelona’s first loss of the season.

Real Madrid overcame an early goal by Atlético to win its ninth straight league match and maintain its 12-year unbeaten run in the Spanish capital derby. The win was even sweeter when Getafe edged out Barcelona, 1-0, on Juan Valera’s second-half header. The defeat ended Barcelona’s 27-game unbeaten run, which dated to April.

JUVENTUS BACK IN FIRST Simone Pepe scored to give Juventus a 1-0 win at Lazio, putting his team back on top of the Serie A standings. Juventus took a one-point lead over Udinese, which had briefly held the top spot after its 2-0 win over Roma on Friday. Lazio is three points behind.

BUNDESLIGA LEAD CHANGE Borussia Dortmund took the league lead in Germany by defeating Schalke, 2-0. Dortmund had not beaten Schalke at home since 2007 but has now won seven of its last eight league games.

CRASH KILLS 6 IN TOGO At least six top-flight Togolese soccer players were killed and another 28 people were critically injured after a bus carrying their team plunged into a ravine and caught fire. In a statement read on national television, the government said those injured from the Etoile Filante club had been taken to the military wing of the Lome Central Hospital to receive urgent medical attention.

Recent Play Has Woods Confident of Victory

Recent Play Has Woods Confident of Victory

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — After contending at the Australian Open and helping the United States team to a victory over the International squad in the Presidents Cup, Tiger Woods will find out this week if his play in Australia was a mirage or a sign that he has turned the corner in his comeback.

The 35-year-old Woods is bullish about his chances to end a two-year victory drought when play starts Thursday at the Chevron World Challenge at Sherwood Country Club. Woods, the host of the event, is paired with Steve Stricker. At No. 6, Stricker is the highest-ranked player in the 18-man field, which includes eight players in the world top 20.

Graeme McDowell, who came from four strokes behind on the final day to beat Woods in a playoff last year, will not defend his crown. He is playing instead in a big-money event in South Africa.

Woods said the difference in his game now as opposed to a year ago was he no longer has to rely on his putter to save him from his wildness off the tee. He made a joke to drive home his point, knitting together questions in his pretournament news conference Wednesday about the state of his swing and a hockey goalie mask that bore his autograph that was for sale on eBay for nearly $5,000.

“I’m swinging the club well enough that you don’t need to walk out there with hockey helmets on,” Woods said.

There may be other hazards, though. The weather forecast for Thursday calls for gusts reaching 30 to 40 miles per hour. If Woods is not striking the ball solidly, his every flaw will be exposed in the wind.

After playing well in the wind in Sydney, finishing third in the Australian Open, Woods is confident he can weather any conditions.

“Playing in Oz for two weeks, it was fantastic,” he said. “I hit all shapes, all trajectories, and if you look at the rounds, I hit most of my shots pin-high. That’s an indication if the wind’s blowing that hard, that I’m really controlling my trajectory well.”

Woods had not gone a full season without a victory until 2010, and now he is staring at the possibility of going consecutive seasons without an individual title. It has been so long since Woods could taste victory, his good friend and fellow golfer Notah Begay asked him this week how it felt to be in that position late in the final round in Sydney.

“I told him I felt nothing,” Woods said, “and he said: ‘Good, because you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to be normal. You’re supposed to be there.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ ” He added: “On Sunday, I felt the same way I did the first three days, and that’s a good sign. I feel very comfortable being up there.”

Woods said the progress he had made since missing the cut at the P.G.A. Championship in August was palpable. “Absolutely, I can sense it,” Woods said. “I’ve made tremendous strides.”

When his ball-striking is solid, Woods said, everything is easier. “If you’re hitting the ball well, there’s very little stress because you’re missing all those golf shots in the right spot,” he said. “You’re not going to hit all perfect golf shots for 18 holes, but as long as you miss in the right spots, it’s easy to get up and down.”

As he talked about swing planes and shaping shots, Woods sounded like a geek in a gadget shop. He talked about there always being room to improve as if it were a good thing. “That’s the beauty of golf,” he said.

DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data

BGI, based in China, is the world’s largest genomics research institute, with 167 DNA sequencers producing the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day.

BGI churns out so much data that it often cannot transmit its results to clients or collaborators over the Internet or other communications lines because that would take weeks. Instead, it sends computer disks containing the data, via FedEx.

“It sounds like an analog solution in a digital age,” conceded Sifei He, the head of cloud computing for BGI, formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. But for now, he said, there is no better way.

The field of genomics is caught in a data deluge. DNA sequencing is becoming faster and cheaper at a pace far outstripping Moore’s law, which describes the rate at which computing gets faster and cheaper.

The result is that the ability to determine DNA sequences is starting to outrun the ability of researchers to store, transmit and especially to analyze the data.

“Data handling is now the bottleneck,” said David Haussler, director of the center for biomolecular science and engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It costs more to analyze a genome than to sequence a genome.”

That could delay the day when DNA sequencing is routinely used in medicine. In only a year or two, the cost of determining a person’s complete DNA blueprint is expected to fall below $1,000. But that long-awaited threshold excludes the cost of making sense of that data, which is becoming a bigger part of the total cost as sequencing costs themselves decline.

“The real cost in the sequencing is more than just running the sequencing machine,” said Mark Gerstein, professor of biomedical informatics at Yale. “And now that is becoming more apparent.”

But the data challenges are also creating opportunities. There is demand for people trained in bioinformatics, the convergence of biology and computing. Numerous bioinformatics companies, like SoftGenetics, DNAStar, DNAnexus and NextBio, have sprung up to offer software and services to help analyze the data. EMC, a maker of data storage equipment, has found life sciences a fertile market for products that handle large amounts of information. BGI is starting a journal, GigaScience, to publish data-heavy life science papers.

“We believe the field of bioinformatics for genetic analysis will be one of the biggest areas of disruptive innovation in life science tools over the next few years,” Isaac Ro, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a recent report.

Sequencing involves determining the order of the bases, the chemical units represented by the letters A, C, G and T, in a stretch of DNA. The cost has plummeted, particularly in the last four years, as new techniques have been introduced.

The cost of sequencing a human genome — all three billion bases of DNA in a set of human chromosomes — plunged to $10,500 last July from $8.9 million in July 2007, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.

That is a decline by a factor of more than 800 over four years. By contrast, computing costs would have dropped by perhaps a factor of four in that time span.

The lower cost, along with increasing speed, has led to a huge increase in how much sequencing data is being produced. World capacity is now 13 quadrillion DNA bases a year, an amount that would fill a stack of DVDs two miles high, according to Michael Schatz, assistant professor of quantitative biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.

There will probably be 30,000 human genomes sequenced by the end of this year, up from a handful a few years ago, according to the journal Nature. And that number will rise to millions in a few years.

In a few cases, human genomes are being sequenced to help diagnose mysterious rare diseases and treat patients. But most are being sequenced as part of studies. The federally financed Cancer Genome Atlas, for instance, is sequencing the genomes of thousands of tumors and of healthy tissue from the same people, looking for genetic causes of cancer.

Quiet Aide to Liu Helped Build a Donor Base Now Under Scrutiny

Quiet Aide to Liu Helped Build a Donor Base Now Under Scrutiny


She is an almost invisible figure in New York politics, a former insurance agent and single mother who unwinds at karaoke bars in Queens singing Taiwanese pop ballads in a gentle soprano voice.


But Mei-Hua Ru quietly wields considerable power in the city, having guided Comptroller John C. Liu’s rise from an obscure councilman 10 years ago to a major political force today.

It is Ms. Ru who, as a fluent speaker of Mandarin, Taiwanese and Cantonese, has helped connect Mr. Liu to a network of Chinese businessmen and civic leaders who now make up his donor base in the city’s Asian-American enclaves.

And it is Ms. Ru who acts as Mr. Liu’s most aggressive gatekeeper — known as much for locking his critics out of his public events as for making Mr. Liu available to appear at the festivals, parties and other gatherings hosted by his Asian-American supporters.

“Even though she’s in the background, she’s that strong and silent force,” said Vicki Shu, a friend of Ms. Ru’s, and a board member of the New York chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans. “And people who know his staff know that if you want to try to get to John, you have to get through Mei.”

Now, though, Ms. Ru has emerged as a central figure in a continuing federal investigation into whether thousands of dollars in illegal contributions have been funneled to the Liu campaign through a network of fictitious donors in the city’s Asian-American communities, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Last month, federal authorities arrested Xing Wu Pan, a fund-raiser for Mr. Liu, saying he had sought to help an F.B.I. agent posing as a businessman circumvent campaign contribution limits. An examination by The New York Times has also raised questions about the legality of donations to Mr. Liu, including whether some of the donors were reimbursed for their contributions.

In interviews this week, neither Mr. Liu’s lawyer, Paul L. Shechtman, nor his campaign spokesman, George Arzt, would characterize Ms. Ru’s relationship with Mr. Pan.

Ms. Ru, 43, who declined repeated requests to be interviewed for a profile over the last few months, has not been charged.

Interviews with dozens of Chinese-American community leaders suggest that Ms. Ru is a key to understanding the fund-raising machine created by Mr. Liu to harvest hundreds of thousands of dollars from new donors, especially among Asian-Americans in Queens.

Officially, Ms. Ru is the comptroller’s director of planning, or chief scheduler, earning $125,000 a year on his public payroll.

But she has greatly shaped Mr. Liu’s political organization, most recently recruiting its current treasurer, Jia Hou, known as Jenny, the 24-year-old daughter of a prominent Liu supporter. And major donors in Flushing and Chinatown say that Ms. Ru remains the main conduit for requests related to Mr. Liu.

In a statement to The Times, Mr. Liu praised Ms. Ru’s drive and passion, saying, “The simple fact that she’s had to deal with me while raising three wonderful kids shows how incredibly effective an individual she is, without whom I would not be where I am today.”

Mr. Liu was more expansive in an interview before The Times’s first article on his fund-raising was published on Oct. 12. He indicated that the newly installed treasurer, Ms. Hou, had a tough act to follow. “Mei was the heart and soul of the ’09 campaign,” he said then. “Now Jenny is the heart of the ’13 campaign. Mei volunteers her time. Many people who are used to dealing with Mei — they don’t like to be shifted to somebody else. But Jenny is taking hold, and she’ll soon be loved as much as Mei is.”

Ms. Ru grew up in Taiwan, eventually settled in Queens, and worked as an insurance sales agent for MetLife. She did not show much interest in politics until a decade ago, when she volunteered for one of Mr. Liu’s early City Council races.

The mother of three daughters, the oldest of whom is now in college, Ms. Ru quickly ascended in Mr. Liu’s organization, becoming political director.

She served as a Democratic district leader from 2006 to 2008. And in the fractious political world of Flushing, Ms. Ru was viewed as fiercely devoted to Mr. Liu. She told Sing Tao, a Chinese-language newspaper, in 2007 that her birthday wish was to work for the city’s first Asian-American mayor. There was little doubt whom she had in mind for the office

Camps Are Cleared, but ‘99 Percent’ Still Occupies the Lexicon

Camps Are Cleared, but ‘99 Percent’ Still Occupies the Lexicon

Whatever the long-term effects of the Occupy movement, protesters have succeeded in implanting “We are the 99 percent,” referring to the vast majority of Americans (and its implied opposite, “You are the one percent” referring to the tiny proportion of Americans with a vastly disproportionate share of wealth), into the cultural and political lexicon.

First chanted and blogged about in mid-September in New York, the slogan become a national shorthand for the income disparity. Easily grasped in its simplicity and Twitter-friendly in its brevity, the slogan has practically dared listeners to pick a side.

“We are getting nothing,” read the Tumblr blog “We Are the 99 Percent” that helped popularize the percentages, “while the other one percent is getting everything.”

Within weeks of the first encampment in Zuccotti Park in New York, politicians seized on the phrase. Democrats in Congress began to invoke the “99 percent” to press for passage of President Obama’s jobs act — but also to pursue action on mine safety, Internet access rules and voter identification laws, among others. Republicans pushed back, accusing protesters and their supporters of class warfare; Newt Gingrich this week called the “concept of the 99 and the one” both divisive and “un-American.”

Perhaps most important for the movement, there was a sevenfold increase in Google searches for the term “99 percent” between September and October and a spike in news stories about income inequality throughout the fall, heaping attention on the issues raised by activists.

“The ‘99 percent,’ and the ‘one percent,’ too, are part of our vocabulary now,” said Judith Stein, a professor of history at the City University of New York.

Soon there were income calculators (“What Percent Are You?” asked The Wall Street Journal), music playlists (an album of Woody Guthrie covers, promoted as a “soundtrack for the 99 percent”) and cheap lawn signs. And, inevitably, there were ads: a storefront near Union Square peddles “Gifts for the 99 percent.” A trailer for a Showtime television series about management consultants, “House of Lies,” describes the lead characters as “the one percent sticking it to the one percent.” A Craigslist ad for a three-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn has the come-on “Live Like the One Percent!” (in this case, in Boerum Hill).

These days, the language of the Occupy movement is being reappropriated in new ways seemingly every day. CBS ran a radio spot last that invited viewers to “occupy your couch.” On Thanksgiving, people joked online about occupying the dinner table. Now, on Facebook, holiday revelers are inviting friends to “one percent parties.”

Slogans have emerged from American protest movements, successful and otherwise, throughout history. The American Revolution furnished the world with “Give me liberty or give me death” and the still-popular “No taxation without representation.” The equal rights movement in the 1960s used the phrase “59 cents” to point out the income disparities between women and men. The civil rights movement embraced the song “We Shall Overcome” as a slogan. During the Vietnam War, protesters called on politicians to “Bring ’em Home” and “Stop the Draft.” More recently, supporters of Mr. Obama shouted “Yes, we can.”

The idea behind the 99 percent catchphrase has its roots in a decade’s worth of reporting about the income gap between the richest Americans and the rest, and more directly in May in a Vanity Fair column by the liberal economist Joseph E. Stiglitz titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” The slogan that resulted in September identified both a target, the “one percent,” and a theoretical constituency, everyone else.

Rhetorically, “it was really clever,” said David S. Meyer, a University of California, Irvine, professor who studies social movements. “Deciding whom to blame is a key task of all politics,” he wrote in his blog about the phrase.

“It’s something that kind of puts your opponents on the defensive,” he said in an interview.

In some cases even politicians who have been put on the defensive by the movement have resorted to the same rhetoric. When Philadelphia’s mayor, Michael A. Nutter, announced last week that the protesters there had to make way for a construction project, he emphasized that the project would be “built by the 99 percent, for the 99 percent.”

Xeni Jardin, the editor of the influential blog Boing Boing, which has featured the protests every day since they began, praised the slogan for capturing “a mounting sense of unfairness in America” and distilling it “into something very brief.”

But she also called it “fundamentally unfair” because within the so-called 99 percent that have slept at occupations across the country, there are many well-to-do college students but just as many, if not more, homeless individuals. “There are many shades of gray,” she said.

But attempts to mock or subvert the slogan seem not to have stuck; as Ms. Jardin put it, “How do you make fun of numbers?” A Tumblr blog that was set up to compete with “We Are the 99 Percent,” called “We Are the 53%,” (referring to the estimated percentage of Americans who pay federal income taxes) has not been updated for two weeks.

Ms. Stein at CUNY believes that the 99 percent rallying cry will have limited effect in the future. “I don’t think a good slogan is enough to revivify a movement or our politics,” she said.

But Mr. Meyer said the catchphrase is a useful one in that it gives continuity and coherence to a movement that is losing some of its camps in major cities across the country. “Occupy takes its name from the occupation,” he said. “If Occupy continues without occupations, what provides continuity with those people in Zuccotti Park? The slogan.”

The slogan was chanted again early on Wednesday morning in Los Angeles and Philadelphia as police there cleared out the Occupy campsites in each city. As they lost physical ground for their local movements, protesters told each other online, “You can’t evict an idea.”

F.T.C. Settles Privacy Issue at Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO — Accusing Facebook of engaging in “unfair and deceptive” practices, the federal government on Tuesday announced a broad settlement that requires the company to respect the privacy wishes of its users and subjects it to regular privacy audits for the next 20 years.


The order, announced by the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, stems largely from changes that Facebook made to the way it handled its users’ information in December 2009. The commission contended that Facebook, without warning its users or seeking consent, made public information that users had deemed to be private on their Facebook pages.


The order also said that Facebook, which has more than 800 million users worldwide, in some cases had allowed advertisers to glean personally identifiable information when a Facebook user clicked on an advertisement on his or her Facebook page. The company has long maintained that it does not share personal data with advertisers.


And the order said that Facebook had shared user information with outside application developers, contrary to representations made to its users. And even after a Facebook user deleted an account, according to the F.T.C., the company still allowed access to photos and videos.


All told, the commission listed eight complaints. It levied no fines and did not accuse Facebook of intentionally breaking the law. However, if Facebook violated the terms of the settlement in the future, it would be liable to pay a penalty of $16,000 a day for each count, the F.T.C. said.


Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, conceded in a lengthy blog post that the company had made “a bunch of mistakes,” but said it had already fixed several of the issues cited by the commission.


“Facebook has always been committed to being transparent about the information you have stored with us — and we have led the Internet in building tools to give people the ability to see and control what they share,” he wrote. By way of example, Mr. Zuckerberg pointed to more explicit privacy controls that the company introduced over the summer.


Facebook has long wanted its users to post content — links, opinions, pictures and other data — on their Facebook pages with minimal effort, or “friction,” as company executives call it. The settlement with the F.T.C. will undoubtedly require it to introduce more such friction.


The order requires Facebook to obtain its users’ “affirmative express consent” before it can override their own privacy settings. For example, if a user designated certain content to be visible only to “friends,” Facebook could allow that content to be shared more broadly only after obtaining the user’s permission.


On Tuesday evening there seemed to be some disagreement about what the agreement entailed. A Facebook spokesman said in response to a question that it did not require the company to obtain “opt in” data-sharing permission for new products.


But David Vladeck, director of the bureau of consumer protection at the F.T.C., said Facebook would have to inform its users about how personal data would be shared even with new products and services that it introduces over the next two decades. “The order is designed to protect people’s privacy, anticipating that Facebook is likely to change products and services it offers,” he said.


Ever since its public release in 2004, Facebook has drawn an ever-larger number of members, even as its sometimes aggressive approach to changes around privacy have angered some of its users.


“We’ve all known that Facebook repeatedly cuts corners when it comes to its privacy promises,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, wrote in an e-mail after the announcement. “Like most Internet companies, they thought they could get away with it. They didn’t.”


Facebook is also obliged to undergo an independent privacy audit every two years for the next 20 years, according to the terms of the settlement.


Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is part of a coalition of consumer groups that filed a complaint with the F.T.C., commended the order but said settlements with individual companies fall short of what is needed: a federal law to protect consumer privacy.


“We hope they will establish a high bar for privacy protection,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “But we do not have in the United States a comprehensive privacy framework. There is always a risk other companies will come along and create new problems.”


Several privacy bills are pending in Congress, and Internet companies have stepped up their lobbying efforts. The F.T.C., meanwhile, has ratcheted up its scrutiny of Internet companies. This year alone, it has reached settlement orders with some of the giants of Silicon Valley, including Google.


The order comes amid growing speculation about Facebook’s preparations for an initial public offering, which could be valued at more than $100 billion. The settlement with the F.T.C., analysts say, could potentially ease investors’ concerns about government regulation by holding the company to a clear set of privacy prescriptions.


“When you have an I.P.O. you don’t want investors to be skeptical or jittery,” said Ryan Calo, who leads privacy research at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “In order for you to be as valuable as possible, you want to make sure the seas are calm. This calms the seas.”

Valentine Is Chosen to Manage Red Sox

For more than a century, the rivalry between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox has been the stuff of legend, filled with large personalities and fiery competitors. Now add to that caldron Bobby Valentine, one of the more colorful and controversial figures in recent New York baseball history.


Valentine was hired Tuesday by the Red Sox, the Yankees’ chief rival in the American League East, to be their manager, according to a person in baseball with direct knowledge of the negotiations.


Valentine, who in six years managing the Mets taunted the Yankees and stoked a rivalry from across town, now will do so from Fenway Park. And he will do so with an expensive, talented team that many predicted would win the World Series last season before it collapsed in historic fashion.


The possibility of his managing the Red Sox was hardly considered a month ago, when the Red Sox were examining candidates who did not have Valentine’s experience or charisma. But with the team in a state of upheaval, it was decided a more seasoned and engaging personality was required.


While Valentine was in Japan this week on a charity tour, Ben Cherington, the Red Sox’ new general manager, extended the offer, and there was little negotiation involved, the person in baseball said. Valentine agreed, and he is expected back in the United States on Wednesday, with a news conference announcing his hiring expected to be held in the next few days.


The Red Sox needed a new manager after they declined to pick up the option on Terry Francona’s contract following the bitter disappointment of last season, when the Red Sox were eliminated from playoff contention on the final day of the season after holding a nine-game lead in September.


After the season, reports emerged of pitchers’ drinking beer and eating chicken in the clubhouse during games and of a general sense of tumult. Francona departed, and General Manager Theo Epstein left to become president of the Chicago Cubs. Epstein’s assistant, Cherington, took over and began the search for Francona’s replacement. He assembled a list of candidates that included the Brewers coach Dale Sveum, the former White Sox and Pirates manager Gene Lamont and the Blue Jays’ first-base coach, Torey Lovullo.


Valentine, 61, brings to Boston the experience of more than 3,000 games managed for the Texas Rangers, the Mets and the Chiba Lotte Marines in Japan.


It has been nine years since Valentine managed in major league baseball, but during his six-year tenure as the manager of the Mets, beginning at the end of the 1996 season, he set about reclaiming part of New York for the Mets and their fans. That included fueling the rivalry with the Yankees, starting with their first interleague game in 1997, when the Mets scored a surprising 6-0 victory at Yankee Stadium.


He took over a Mets team that had floundered for seven years and brought steady improvement, the pinnacle of which was the World Series in 2000.


His tenure was marked by success and controversy, as he weeded out players he did not think fit the team concept and feuded with General Manager Steve Phillips. Despite occasional flare-ups, Valentine became the first manager to lead the Mets to the playoffs in consecutive years, in 1999 and 2000.


After failing to reach the playoffs in 2001, and leading the Mets through a tumultuous season the next year, Valentine was fired. He went to Japan in 2004 and a year later led a previously moribund Chiba team to the Japan Series title. Since leaving Japan after the 2009 season, he has worked as an analyst for ESPN.


After losing out on managing opportunities with the Seattle Mariners, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Cleveland Indians and the Florida Marlins in recent years, Valentine faced doubts about whether he would manage again. Instead, he landed with one of the premier teams in sports.


Cherington’s first choice was Sveum, a former coach on Francona’s staff, but when ownership was not impressed Sveum took the Cubs job. At that point, the search widened, and the Red Sox president, Larry Lucchino, made it clear to Cherington that he wanted Valentine included in the search.


After meeting with the three key members of the Red Sox ownership group — Lucchino, John Henry and Tom Werner — Valentine had an eight-hour interview with Cherington and his staff. He impressed them with his insight, passion and vast knowledge of baseball.


Cherington might have been pressured into including Valentine on his list of candidates, but during the process he was clearly impressed by Valentine.


Among the many attributes that attracted Cherington to Valentine was his wealth of experience tangling with the Yankees.

Line Grows Long for Free Meals at U.S. Schools

Millions of American schoolchildren are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their families for the decades-old safety-net program.


The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.


The Agriculture Department has not yet released data for September and October.


“These are very large increases and a direct reflection of the hardships American families are facing,” said Benjamin Senauer, a University of Minnesota economist who studies the meals program, adding that the surge had happened so quickly “that people like myself who do research are struggling to keep up with it.”


In Sylva, N.C., layoffs at lumber and paper mills have driven hundreds of new students into the free lunch program. In Las Vegas, where the collapse of the construction industry has caused hardship, 15,000 additional students joined the subsidized lunch program this fall. In Rochester, unemployed engineers and technicians have signed up their children after the downsizing of Kodak and other companies forced them from their jobs. Many of these formerly middle-income parents have pleaded with school officials to keep their enrollment a secret.


Students in families with incomes up to 130 percent of the poverty level — or $29,055 for a family of four — are eligible for free school meals. Children in a four-member household with income up to $41,348 qualify for a subsidized lunch priced at 40 cents.


Among the first to call attention to the increases were Department of Education officials who use subsidized lunch rates as a poverty indicator in federal testing. This month, in releasing results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they noted that the proportion of the nation’s fourth graders enrolled in the lunch program had climbed to 52 percent from 49 percent in 2009, crossing a symbolic watershed.


In the Rockdale County Schools in Conyers, Ga., east of Atlanta, the percentage of students receiving subsidized lunches increased to 63 percent this year from 46 percent in 2006.


“We’re seeing people who were never eligible before, never had a need,” said Peggy Lawrence, director of school nutrition.


One of those is Sheila Dawson, a Wal-Mart saleswoman whose husband lost his job as the manager of a Waffle House last year, reducing their income by $45,000. “We’re doing whatever we can to save money,” said Ms. Dawson, who has a 15-year-old daughter. “We buy clothes at the thrift store, we see fewer movies and this year my daughter qualifies for reduced-price lunch.”


She added, “I feel like: ‘Hey, we were paying taxes all these years. This is what they were for.’ ”


Although the troubled economy is the main factor in the increases, experts said, some growth at the margins has resulted from a new way of qualifying students for the subsidized meals, known as direct certification. In 2004, Congress required the nation’s 17,000 school districts to match student enrollment lists against records of local food-stamp agencies, directly enrolling those who receive food stamps for the meals program. The number of districts doing so has been rising — as have the number of school-age children in families eligible for food stamps, to 14 million in 2010-11 from 12 million in 2009-10.


“The concern of those of us involved in the direct certification effort is how to help all these districts deal with the exploding caseload of kids eligible for the meals,” said Kevin Conway, a project director at Mathematica Policy Research, a co-author of an October report to Congress on direct certification.


Congress passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 to support commodity prices after World War II by reducing farm surpluses while providing food to schoolchildren. By 1970, the program was providing 22 million lunches on an average day, about a fifth of them subsidized. Since then, the subsidized portion has grown while paid lunches have declined, but not since 1972 have so many additional children become eligible for free lunches as in fiscal year 2010, 1.3 million. Today it is a $10.8 billion program providing 32 million lunches, 21 million of which are free or at reduced price.


All 50 states have shown increases, according to Agriculture Department data. In Florida, which has 2.6 million public school students, an additional 265,000 students have become eligible for subsidies since 2007, with increases in virtually every district.


“Growth has been across the board,” said Mark Eggers, the Florida Department of Education official who oversees the lunch program.


In Tennessee, the number of students receiving subsidized meals has grown 37 percent since 2007.

For New Coach at Ohio State, It’s First Down and $4 Million

Ohio State University hired Urban Meyer as its football coach Monday, giving him one of the richest contracts ever in college sports — the latest indication that the big business of college football is undeterred by the nation’s broader economic woes or by concern about the prominence of sports on campus.


The contract includes $4 million in base salary, bonuses — for everything from players’ graduation rates to playing in a national championship, up to $700,000 annually — and lump payments in 2014, 2016 and 2018. The deal is worth more than three times the $1.32 million that the university’s president, E. Gordon Gee, made in 2010, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.


Mr. Meyer and Ohio State reached the lucrative deal amid a chaotic year in college athletics. The University of Miami was rocked by a report that a donor lavished football players with gifts for years; and longtime assistants for the Penn State football and Syracuse men’s basketball teams are facing allegations that they sexually abused young boys. Several other prominent programs are being investigated by college athletics’ governing body, the N.C.A.A., for myriad violations.


Even the Buckeyes await potential N.C.A.A. sanctions because players traded memorabilia for cash and tattoos, which led to the ouster of Jim Tressel as their coach six months ago.


Still, the college football arms race shows no signs of slowing. To replace Mr. Tressel, Ohio State will invest at least $26.65 million over six years in Mr. Meyer, 47, who won two national championships at Florida. That will include an annual automobile stipend, a golf club membership, 50 hours of private jet use and 12 tickets to each home game.


“It’s symbolic of the condition we’re in,” said William C. Friday, the president of the University of North Carolina system from 1956 to 1986. “There’s an unrestrained salary march, where universities are trying to superimpose an entertainment industry on an academic structure. Any salary in that range is excessive.”


Even Mr. Gee, the university president who hired Mr. Meyer on Monday, has described the system as broken. In an interview with The New York Times in August, he said: “College athletics has gotten beyond itself. Do I think it’s broken? Yes.”


On Monday, Mr. Gee called Mr. Meyer’s contract “a mark of our dignity and nobility.”


“I’m not certain I’ve ever made as much as a football coach,” Mr. Gee said in a telephone interview. “We live in a world of markets and opportunities. A number of surgeons here make more than I do. I’m about having the best physics faculty, the best medical school faculty and the best football coach.”


Mr. Friday was a co-founder of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. He watched as shoe companies paid large sums to coaches, as broadcast deals boomed. What Mr. Friday called the “invasion of money for commercial television” started about 10 years ago, he said.


Now, by any financial measure, college football has never been more prosperous. Five sports conferences have signed billion-dollar broadcast deals, fueled by the popularity of football.


In the Pacific-12 Conference, where games were once shown on national networks and local channels, officials have decided to create six regional networks instead. The template: the network for the Big Ten Conference, which includes Ohio State. The Big Ten network, according to SNL Kagan, a research firm, earned $227.1 million for the conference in 2010.


Contracts for college football coaches have increased at a similarly rapid pace. If Mr. Meyer reaches his benchmarks for bonuses, he will be among — and may even surpass — the upper echelon of college football coaches: Mack Brown at Texas, Nick Saban at Alabama, Bob Stoops at Oklahoma and Les Miles at Louisiana State.


Mr. Gee said that according to Ohio State’s data on college football coaches’ salaries, Mr. Meyer would rank fourth among his peers, emphasizing that much of Mr. Meyer’s bonuses is tied to academics and his staying at O.S.U. for all six years.

Gingrich Wields History, Seeking to Add Chapter

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Newt Gingrich is a historian. He earned a Ph.D. in history. If you’ve forgotten, he’ll remind you.




During a six-candidate forum in Iowa recently, Mr. Gingrich dropped in references to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Capt. John Smith’s leadership of Jamestown, the French Revolution and, as a bonus, the Latin root of “secular.”


A few days earlier, as guests at a fund-raising breakfast forked into slabs of coffeecake, Mr. Gingrich told a lengthy anecdote about John Quincy Adams.


And in New Hampshire before that, he referred at a Tea Party forum to the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson’s abolition of federal judgeships and, again, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.


Mr. Gingrich taught college history before entering politics, and his historical references on the campaign trail are such a feature of his public remarks as to be nearly a rhetorical tic. They strike some as evidence that Mr. Gingrich is the smartest candidate in the room — and others that he is a man determined to let you know how much he knows.


In an election season rife with factual misstatements, deliberate and otherwise, Mr. Gingrich sometimes seems to stand out for exhibiting an excess of knowledge. It is hard to imagine him not knowing that the Battle of Lexington and Concord took place in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire, where Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota located it this year.


But in some ways Mr. Gingrich seems not just to know history, but to think of himself very self-consciously as part of it, and not always in a small way. In an interview with The New York Times in 2009, he said he subscribed to the historian Arnold J. Toynbee’s theory of “departure and return,” the notion that certain great leaders must endure a long political exile before returning to power. He indicated that Charles de Gaulle, the French general who became president only after years out of power, was a role model.


“Some people say he sounds arrogant. I see it as confidence,” said Josh Byrnes, an Iowa state representative who threw his support to Mr. Gingrich after he spoke at his daughter’s school. “I think what Newt’s doing, he’s using historical lessons to take on this current situation we’re in.”


Mr. Gingrich’s deep identification with this role was highlighted recently when he said in a debate that Freddie Mac, the home mortgage giant, had hired him as a “historian,” not a lobbyist, as it fought off government regulators before the financial crisis.


When it came out that Mr. Gingrich had earned as much as $1.8 million from Freddie Mac, he was mocked by liberal critics as the best-paid historian ever.


At a forum on Monday night in Charleston, Mr. Gingrich fingered his lapel pin and said it represented George Washington’s campaign flag, with “13 stars on a gold background representing the 13 states.”


Fellow historians are generally pleased that Mr. Gingrich brings history into the national conversation, even if some dispute his insights. Last year, he said he agreed with a controversial essay linking President Obama to a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” world view. On Conservativenet, a listserv of historians, Prof. Lawrence Squeri of East Stroudsburg State wrote the other day, “I always did feel that Gingrich should have stayed in academia, conducting seminars that would make students rave or fume and send impassioned posts to the Rate My Professors Web site.”


Mr. Gingrich has been out of power since quitting Congress under pressure in 1998, but has surged in recent polls, and he is fond of citing historical crucibles to dramatize the stakes he sees for the 2012 election. In South Carolina this month, he said the country was facing a “choice comparable, I think, to 1860 and it may be comparable in some ways to 1788,” a brainy reference, apparently, to the year the Constitution was debated and ratified.


Mr. Gingrich reminded the same audience, “I studied American history” and offered a lengthy back story to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. “In 1858, Stephen Douglas was the most famous man in the United States Senate,” he began.

For profit certification for teachers is booming

Denton: one afternoon on mid november jeff arington scattered 80 paper gingerbread men labeled with numbers across the floor of his high school disaster response class.
       The number corresponded with the severity of injuries ranging from burns to hysterical blindness.His student had to categoriza the men based on the level of medical attention each required.

TV Attack ads aim at obama early and often

inside the debate halls,the clash may be republican versus republican.But offstage,conversatieve ane mounting a unfied and expensive air assault on the candidates common opponent:prsident obama

California bullet train project advances amid cries of bondoggle

SACRAMENTO across the country,the era of ambitions public works projects seems to be over.Governments are shelving or rejecting plans for highways,rail roads and big buildings under the weight of collapsing revenues and voters resistance.
But not california.
With a brashness and ambition that evoke a california of a generation ago,state leaders starting with gov.
jerry brown have railled around a plan to build a 520 mile high speed rail line from los angelese to san francisco,cutting the trip from a six hour drive to a train ride of two hour and 38 minutes.And they are doing it in the face of what might seem like insurmountable political fiscales.

Black friday sales up 7% over 2010

The holiday shopping season got off to a strong start an black friday, with retail sales up 7 percent over last year,according to one survay.Now stores just have to keep buyers coming back without the promise of super savings.

buyers spent $11.4 billion at retail stores and malls, up nearly $1 billion from last year.According to a report released saturday by shopper track.It was the largest amount ever spent on the day that marks the beginning of the holyday shopping season,and the biggest year over year increase since 2007.

lindse lohan hot news!!!!!!!

ഹോള്ളിവുഡ്എല്‍ പ്രസിദ്ധി കു പ്രസിദ്ധി ആകാന്‍ അധികാന്‍ നേരം വേണ്ട.യുവനടി  ലിണ്ട്സേ ലോഹന്‍ ഉദാഹരണം.ദിസ്നേയ് ചിത്രങ്ങളിലൂടെ പ്രശസ്തയായ ലോഹന് പണവും പ്രശസ്തിയും കൊണ്ടുവന്ന ജീവിത ശൈലി ചുവടുതെറ്റി.മദ്യപിച്ചു വണ്ടി യോടിച്ച നടിക്ക് കേസിലകപെട്ട ശേഷം കോടതി കയറി ഇരങ്ങനെ നേരം ഉള്ളോ.ഒരു മാസം മുന്പ്  ഒരു കടയില്‍ നിന്നും നെക്ലേസ് അടിച്ചു മാറിയ കേസ് വേറെയും.

                                      കേസ് നടത്താനായി കയ്യിലുണ്ടായിരുന്ന കാശ് മുഴുവന്‍ ചെലവാക്കിയ നദി ഇപ്പോള്‍ വലിയ കടത്തിലാണ്.

Spanish masala malayalam new movie casting :dileep

ദിലീപും ലാല്‍ജോസും  ഒന്നിക്കുന്നു സ്പാനിഷ്‌ മാസലയിലൂടെ !!!!!!!




കമീല വര്ലരെ യദ്ര്ചികംയാണ് ചാര്‍ളിയെ കണ്ടുമുട്ടിയത്‌.ഒരു ഇന്ടിയക്കരനയത്തില്‍ താല്പര്യം കൊണ്ട് ചാര്ളിക്ക് ലഭിച്ചത് ഒരു മേല്വിലാസമാണ്.ഒരു പ്രോഗ്രാമുമായി ബന്ടപെട്ടു സ്പെയിനില്‍ എത്തിയ ചാര്ളിക്ക് തിരിച്ചു നാട്ടിലേക് പോകാന്‍ കഴിഞ്ഞില്ല.പരിചയക്കാരും മറ്റും ഇല്ലാത്ത ഈ നാട്ടില്‍ മലയാളം മാത്രം അറിയാവുന്ന ചാര്‍ളി ഇനി ഈ നാട്ടില്‍ എങ്ങനെ ജീവിക്കും ഈന്നു ആലോചിക്കുമ്പോഴാണ് കമീല മുന്നില്‍ പെടുന്നത്.ചാര്‍ളിയുടെ സത്യാവസ്ഥ തിരിച്ചറിഞ്ഞ കമീല അവിടെ തന്നെ ആരോ ജോലിയും ശരിയാകി കൊടുക്കുന്നു.
കമീല ജനിച്ചതും വളര്നത് ഇന്ത്യയിലാണ്.ഇന്ത്യയിലെ സ്പാനിഷ്‌ അമ്ബസടോര്‍ അയ ഫിലിപ്പ് ആദമിന്റെ മകലനും കംമേള.നന്നായി മലയാളം സംസാരിക്കാന്‍ അറിയുന്ന കമീല ഇന്ത്യന്‍ സംസാരത്തെ കുറിച്ചും ജീവിത രീതികളെ കുറിച്ചും നല്ല മതിപ്പാണ്.


ചരിളിയുടെ വരവ് കമീലയുടെ ജീവിതത്തില്‍ ഉണ്ടാക്കുന്ന മാറ്റങ്ങള്‍ ആണ് ചിത്രത്തില്‍ കാണിക്കുന്നത്.ലാല്‍ ജോസ് ചിത്രികരിക്കുന സ്പാനിഷ്‌ മസാല സ്പെയിനില്‍ ആണ് ചിത്രികരിക്കുന്നത്.

Prithviraj in loyi aaraman

ലൂയി ആറാമന്‍ 
പ്രിത്വി രാജിനെ കേന്ദ്ര കഥാപാത്രമാക്കി  ജെക്സണ്‍ ആന്റണി,രേജീസ് എസ്ടനി  എന്നിവര്‍ ചേര്‍ന് കഥ തിരകഥ സംഭാഷണം എഴുതി സംവിധാനം ചെയ്യുന്ന തിത്രമാണ് ലൂയി ആറാമന്‍ സിനിമ മൂവിസിന്റെ ബാനറില്‍ ബിജു ജോണ്‍ സതോഷ് മത്തായി   എന്നിവര്‍ ചേര്‍ന്  നിര്‍മിക്കുന്ന ചിത്രത്തില്‍  ലൂയിസ് എന്നാ കേന്ദ്ര കഥാപാത്രത്തെ യാണ് അവതരിപ്പിക്കുന്നത്‌. 
സംഗീതം: മെജോ ജോസഫ്‌
ചായാഗ്രഹണം: മധു നീലകണ്ഠന്‍