Celebrated in Asia, Little Known in America
ORLANDO, Fla. — It is the all-American girl’s study as conceived by a Hollywood set director. In addition to her growing collection of trophies, Yani Tseng has displayed two dozen Starbucks mugs from all over the world, an ad for a local pizzeria and a plush Angry Bird scowling from a loving cup. Only the 8 ½-by-11 certificate noting Tseng’s completion of a Level 4 English class hints at her deepest
Tseng, 22, is the world’s No. 1 female golfer, a one-name celebrity in her native Taiwan and the spark of the sport’s next big boom, in her homeland and in China.
She is the youngest golfer, man or woman, to win five major titles. For her next act, Tseng wants to win over America. She may find it easier to become the first woman to win a calendar Grand Slam.
With the exception of superstars like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, golfers are faint stars in the American firmament, outshined by football, basketball and baseball players. For a female golfer to make the rounds of the morning talk shows, all the planets have to align. It happened in September, but the player was not Tseng, who had won eight tournaments by then. It was Lexi Thompson, a tall, blond American teenager fresh off her first professional victory.
Over the past decade, the L.P.G.A. has had a proliferation of South Koreans in its ranks after the success of Se Ri Pak. Since 2008, its overall schedule has been downsized, but the number of tournaments in Asia has been rising.
Among the official events added this year was one in Taiwan, which Tseng fittingly won for the 10th of her 11 worldwide titles in 2011.
The crowds that met Tseng at the airport when she arrived for the event were so large, she required the same security detail that accompanied the pop star Lady Gaga when she performed there. It was the same story on the course, where Tseng’s large following led her 92-year-old grandmother to ask if she had paid to have all the people brought in.
“It was so much fun,” Tseng said, adding, “Now I know what Tiger feels.”
After the success of the event, organizers in Taiwan paid handsome appearance fees to lure 8 of the top 10 female golfers to New Taipei City this week for what amounts to a curtain call: an 18-hole skins game, followed by the Taiwan Ladies Professional Golf Association Invitational.
Tseng’s fame in Asia dwarfs her profile in the United States, which raises the question: in an increasingly globalized world, does it matter if the brightest stars shine in the East or West? Robert Thompson, a professor of mass media and popular culture at Syracuse, said, “We have this prejudice that it does not matter if you’re huge anywhere else, that the only real sign of success is if you’re famous in the United States.”
He added: “If I were advising her, I don’t think I’d put being famous in the United States at the top of my list. When you’re really famous in Asia, there are billions who know you, compared to millions in the U.S. I’d tell her to keep playing the way she’s playing and if she doesn’t make the highlights on ESPN, oh well.”
Last year, a Chinese company, looking ahead to 2016, when golf becomes an Olympic sport, reportedly offered Tseng millions of dollars, the use of a private jet and an apartment in Beijing to change her nationality so she could represent China.
“I didn’t think too much about that,” Tseng said. “I’m just very proud to represent Chinese everywhere.”
At a tournament in China last month, Tseng was asked about playing against men, as her mentor Annika Sorenstam once did in a PGA Tour event. She said if the opportunity presented itself, she would like to try it. Within days, a tournament director in Puerto Rico offered her a sponsor exemption to his 2012 event.
“It was really nice to have people who really pay attention to you,” said Tseng, who declined the invitation. “I feel like every word I say now, I can really inspire people.”
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Being President Is Tough but Usually Not Fatal, a Study Concludes
Being President Is Tough but Usually Not Fatal, a Study Concludes
WASHINGTON — Finally, some happy news for President Obama.
Despite a common assumption that life in the Oval Office prematurely ages its occupants and speculation that it may even shorten life spans, a new statistical analysis has found that most presidents have actually lived longer than other American men their age. And all living presidents have either already surpassed the average expected life span or are likely to do so.
S. Jay Olshansky, an expert on aging at the University of Illinois at Chicago, gathered the evidence and concluded that 23 of the 34 presidents who died of natural causes “lived beyond the average life expectancy for men of the same age when they were inaugurated.”
“We don’t die of gray hair and wrinkled skin,” said Dr. Olshansky, whose findings will be published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Olshansky first became intrigued by presidential longevity when he heard chatter in the news media about the signs, around Mr. Obama’s 50th birthday celebration in August, that the president was aging quickly. Commentators dwelled on the gray hair above his temples, the deepening creases around his mouth and the bags under his eyes that seemed to betray a weariness in one of the most stressful jobs on earth. There was even speculation that presidents age two years for every one they spend in the White House.
But after 25 years of research on life expectancy, Dr. Olshansky was skeptical that the job was taking years off of presidents’ lives. After all, presidents in past eras had survived the perilous early years in times when many children were carried off by fevers and other ailments before the advent of antibiotics. Also, most presidents have been college-educated, wealthy and provided with the best medical care — advantages that would seemingly have improved their odds.
So Dr. Olshansky, who specializes in biodemography, the study of factors that influence the duration of life, set out to gather the data needed to answer the question. Examining medical records would have told him what ailed individual presidents, but would not have enabled him to compare their life spans to the average. So instead he relied on standard life tables and public data about the presidents’ years of birth and inauguration to calculate how long each would have been expected to live on the day he was inaugurated. He excluded the four presidents who were assassinated.
To account for claims that presidents age twice as fast while in the White House, he subtracted two days of life from every day in office. He compared the estimated life span at age of inauguration with how long each president who died of natural causes lived. The mean age of the presidents who died of natural causes was 73.0 years compared with an estimated 68.1 years they would have been expected to live had they aged twice as fast while in office.
Some presidents have worried about the signs of aging, and may have even dyed their hair. In 2009, an executive for Clairol wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times that Nancy and Ronald Reagan brought their own hair colorist to the White House. It is unknown whether presidents’ stressful years in office accelerated the outward evidence they were aging, but they have generally served at ages when their hair would have been graying and their skin wrinkling anyway, Dr. Olshansky said.
Among American presidents, some have been exceptionally long-lived. Four survived into their nineties. Gerald R. Ford was 93.5 when he died; Reagan 93.3; John Adams 90.7; and Herbert Hoover, 90.2.
The first eight presidents lived on average 79.8 years at a time when life expectancy for men in the United States was likely to have been under 40, Dr. Olshansky said.
More recently the trend has been greater longevity. From Herbert Hoover through Reagan, excluding John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated, seven of the eight presidents lived longer than expected, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died at 63 but served for 12 years. Their average age at inauguration was 58.9 years and average expected age of death, assuming presidents aged twice as fast while in office, was 68.9 years. The average actual age at death was 81.6 years. The exception was Lyndon B. Johnson who died of heart disease at 64.
Maria Elkin contributed reporting from Washington.
WASHINGTON — Finally, some happy news for President Obama.
Despite a common assumption that life in the Oval Office prematurely ages its occupants and speculation that it may even shorten life spans, a new statistical analysis has found that most presidents have actually lived longer than other American men their age. And all living presidents have either already surpassed the average expected life span or are likely to do so.
S. Jay Olshansky, an expert on aging at the University of Illinois at Chicago, gathered the evidence and concluded that 23 of the 34 presidents who died of natural causes “lived beyond the average life expectancy for men of the same age when they were inaugurated.”
“We don’t die of gray hair and wrinkled skin,” said Dr. Olshansky, whose findings will be published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Olshansky first became intrigued by presidential longevity when he heard chatter in the news media about the signs, around Mr. Obama’s 50th birthday celebration in August, that the president was aging quickly. Commentators dwelled on the gray hair above his temples, the deepening creases around his mouth and the bags under his eyes that seemed to betray a weariness in one of the most stressful jobs on earth. There was even speculation that presidents age two years for every one they spend in the White House.
But after 25 years of research on life expectancy, Dr. Olshansky was skeptical that the job was taking years off of presidents’ lives. After all, presidents in past eras had survived the perilous early years in times when many children were carried off by fevers and other ailments before the advent of antibiotics. Also, most presidents have been college-educated, wealthy and provided with the best medical care — advantages that would seemingly have improved their odds.
So Dr. Olshansky, who specializes in biodemography, the study of factors that influence the duration of life, set out to gather the data needed to answer the question. Examining medical records would have told him what ailed individual presidents, but would not have enabled him to compare their life spans to the average. So instead he relied on standard life tables and public data about the presidents’ years of birth and inauguration to calculate how long each would have been expected to live on the day he was inaugurated. He excluded the four presidents who were assassinated.
To account for claims that presidents age twice as fast while in the White House, he subtracted two days of life from every day in office. He compared the estimated life span at age of inauguration with how long each president who died of natural causes lived. The mean age of the presidents who died of natural causes was 73.0 years compared with an estimated 68.1 years they would have been expected to live had they aged twice as fast while in office.
Some presidents have worried about the signs of aging, and may have even dyed their hair. In 2009, an executive for Clairol wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times that Nancy and Ronald Reagan brought their own hair colorist to the White House. It is unknown whether presidents’ stressful years in office accelerated the outward evidence they were aging, but they have generally served at ages when their hair would have been graying and their skin wrinkling anyway, Dr. Olshansky said.
Among American presidents, some have been exceptionally long-lived. Four survived into their nineties. Gerald R. Ford was 93.5 when he died; Reagan 93.3; John Adams 90.7; and Herbert Hoover, 90.2.
The first eight presidents lived on average 79.8 years at a time when life expectancy for men in the United States was likely to have been under 40, Dr. Olshansky said.
More recently the trend has been greater longevity. From Herbert Hoover through Reagan, excluding John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated, seven of the eight presidents lived longer than expected, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died at 63 but served for 12 years. Their average age at inauguration was 58.9 years and average expected age of death, assuming presidents aged twice as fast while in office, was 68.9 years. The average actual age at death was 81.6 years. The exception was Lyndon B. Johnson who died of heart disease at 64.
Maria Elkin contributed reporting from Washington.
Japan Split on Hope for Vast Radiation Cleanup
Japan Split on Hope for Vast Radiation Cleanup
FUTABA, Japan — Futaba is a modern-day ghost town — not a boomtown gone bust, not even entirely a victim of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that leveled other parts of Japan’s northeast coast.
Its traditional wooden homes have begun to sag and collapse since they were abandoned in March by residents fleeing the nuclear plant on the edge of town that began spiraling toward disaster. Roofs possibly damaged by the earth’s shaking have let rain seep in, starting the rot that is eating at the houses from the inside.
The roadway arch at the entrance to the empty town almost seems a taunt. It reads:
“Nuclear energy: a correct understanding brings a prosperous lifestyle.”
Those who fled Futaba are among the nearly 90,000 people evacuated from a 12-mile zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant and another area to the northwest contaminated when a plume from the plant scattered radioactive cesium and iodine.
Now, Japan is drawing up plans for a cleanup that is both monumental and unprecedented, in the hopes that those displaced can go home.
The debate over whether to repopulate the area, if trial cleanups prove effective, has become a proxy for a larger battle over the future of Japan. Supporters see rehabilitating the area as a chance to showcase the country’s formidable determination and superior technical skills — proof that Japan is still a great power.
For them, the cleanup is a perfect metaphor for Japan’s rebirth.
Critics counter that the effort to clean Fukushima Prefecture could end up as perhaps the biggest of Japan’s white-elephant public works projects — and yet another example of post-disaster Japan reverting to the wasteful ways that have crippled economic growth for two decades.
So far, the government is following a pattern set since the nuclear accident, dismissing dangers, often prematurely, and laboring to minimize the scope of the catastrophe. Already, the trial cleanups have stalled: the government failed to anticipate communities’ reluctance to store tons of soil to be scraped from contaminated yards and fields.
And a radiation specialist who tested the results of an extensive local cleanup in a nearby city found that exposure levels remained above international safety standards for long-term habitation.
Even a vocal supporter of repatriation suggests that the government has not yet leveled with its people about the seriousness of their predicament.
“I believe it is possible to save Fukushima,” said the supporter, Tatsuhiko Kodama, director of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo. “But many evacuated residents must accept that it won’t happen in their lifetimes.”
To judge the huge scale of what Japan is contemplating, consider that experts say residents can return home safely only after thousands of buildings are scrubbed of radioactive particles and much of the topsoil from an area the size of Connecticut is replaced.
Even forested mountains will probably need to be decontaminated, which might necessitate clear-cutting and literally scraping them clean.
The Soviet Union did not attempt such a cleanup after the Chernobyl accident of 1986, the only nuclear disaster larger than that at Fukushima Daiichi. The government instead relocated about 300,000 people, abandoning vast tracts of farmland.
Many Japanese officials believe that they do not have that luxury; the evacuation zone covers more than 3 percent of the landmass of this densely populated nation.
“We are different from Chernobyl,” said Toshitsuna Watanabe, 64, the mayor of Okuma, one of the towns that was evacuated. “We are determined to go back. Japan has the will and the technology to do this.”
Such resolve reflects, in part, a deep attachment to home for rural Japanese like Mr. Watanabe, whose family has lived in Okuma for 19 generations. Their heartfelt appeals to go back have won wide sympathy across Japan, making it hard for people to oppose their wishes.
FUTABA, Japan — Futaba is a modern-day ghost town — not a boomtown gone bust, not even entirely a victim of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that leveled other parts of Japan’s northeast coast.
Its traditional wooden homes have begun to sag and collapse since they were abandoned in March by residents fleeing the nuclear plant on the edge of town that began spiraling toward disaster. Roofs possibly damaged by the earth’s shaking have let rain seep in, starting the rot that is eating at the houses from the inside.
The roadway arch at the entrance to the empty town almost seems a taunt. It reads:
“Nuclear energy: a correct understanding brings a prosperous lifestyle.”
Those who fled Futaba are among the nearly 90,000 people evacuated from a 12-mile zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant and another area to the northwest contaminated when a plume from the plant scattered radioactive cesium and iodine.
Now, Japan is drawing up plans for a cleanup that is both monumental and unprecedented, in the hopes that those displaced can go home.
The debate over whether to repopulate the area, if trial cleanups prove effective, has become a proxy for a larger battle over the future of Japan. Supporters see rehabilitating the area as a chance to showcase the country’s formidable determination and superior technical skills — proof that Japan is still a great power.
For them, the cleanup is a perfect metaphor for Japan’s rebirth.
Critics counter that the effort to clean Fukushima Prefecture could end up as perhaps the biggest of Japan’s white-elephant public works projects — and yet another example of post-disaster Japan reverting to the wasteful ways that have crippled economic growth for two decades.
So far, the government is following a pattern set since the nuclear accident, dismissing dangers, often prematurely, and laboring to minimize the scope of the catastrophe. Already, the trial cleanups have stalled: the government failed to anticipate communities’ reluctance to store tons of soil to be scraped from contaminated yards and fields.
And a radiation specialist who tested the results of an extensive local cleanup in a nearby city found that exposure levels remained above international safety standards for long-term habitation.
Even a vocal supporter of repatriation suggests that the government has not yet leveled with its people about the seriousness of their predicament.
“I believe it is possible to save Fukushima,” said the supporter, Tatsuhiko Kodama, director of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo. “But many evacuated residents must accept that it won’t happen in their lifetimes.”
To judge the huge scale of what Japan is contemplating, consider that experts say residents can return home safely only after thousands of buildings are scrubbed of radioactive particles and much of the topsoil from an area the size of Connecticut is replaced.
Even forested mountains will probably need to be decontaminated, which might necessitate clear-cutting and literally scraping them clean.
The Soviet Union did not attempt such a cleanup after the Chernobyl accident of 1986, the only nuclear disaster larger than that at Fukushima Daiichi. The government instead relocated about 300,000 people, abandoning vast tracts of farmland.
Many Japanese officials believe that they do not have that luxury; the evacuation zone covers more than 3 percent of the landmass of this densely populated nation.
“We are different from Chernobyl,” said Toshitsuna Watanabe, 64, the mayor of Okuma, one of the towns that was evacuated. “We are determined to go back. Japan has the will and the technology to do this.”
Such resolve reflects, in part, a deep attachment to home for rural Japanese like Mr. Watanabe, whose family has lived in Okuma for 19 generations. Their heartfelt appeals to go back have won wide sympathy across Japan, making it hard for people to oppose their wishes.
Whimsical Texting Icons Get a Shot at Success
Whimsical Texting Icons Get a Shot at Success
Say you wanted to invite a friend to happy hour. You could send a simple text message, but that would be boring. Instead, why not send a cartoony picture of two clinking beer mugs?
That’s the kind of thing Alicia Fernandez, a student in fashion marketing at Berkeley College in New York, likes to send to friends. “Instead of saying ‘I love you,’ I’ll just use a heart,” she said. “Or when I’m writing ‘LOL,’ I’ll put a laughing-crying face instead.”
Ms. Fernandez is talking about emoji, which are the more elaborate cousins of emoticons — those creative combinations of colons, parentheses and other punctuation that people use to drop a facial expression into a text message or e-mail.
But unlike emoticons, emoji don’t require tilting your head sideways to make sense of the image. They are a kind of pictorial alphabet stored on a phone that can be displayed in place of the regular keyboard, making it easy to tap out a visual message.
Outside their native Japan, emoji have been available to in-the-know smartphone owners for some time via add-on applications. But now they may be on the verge of going mainstream in the United States, thanks in part to Apple’s latest update to its iPhone software. The latest version, iOS 5, comes with an installed library of emoji that can be turned on as an “international keyboard” in the device’s settings.
Apple declined to comment on its decision to add emoji, but it was most likely driven by a global standardization of the format last year that was meant to ensure that a picture of a cute cat will still look like a cute cat on a different phone in a different country. The move has put emoji on the radar of many more iPhone and iPod Touch owners.
Shawn Roberts, 39, a lawyer in Oklahoma City who was familiar with using emoji in e-mail services like Gmail, said they were an entertaining way to communicate with his 9-year-old son, Sam. Mr. Roberts said he and Sam often use pictures of tiny footballs or basketballs as they trade banter about sports and coming games.
“It’s just fun,” he said. “And it lets you convey a little more emotion or feeling in messages.”
Emoji have long been popular among cellphone users in Asia. They first emerged in Japan in the 1990s, said Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Japan and the United States. Cellphone carriers first added the images to differentiate their phones from those of rivals, and they caught on as an efficient way to quickly convey a specific thought, mood or joke.
Since so many of our daily interactions are happening over mobile phones, it makes sense that people would crave new ways to convey meaning other than plain text, said S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.
“Text as a medium is particularly dull when it comes to expressing emotions,” Professor Sundar said. “Emoticons open the door a little, but emoji opens it even further. They play the role that nonverbal communication, like hand gestures, does in conversation but on a cellphone.”
Professor Sundar also said Apple’s decision might be part of a larger business strategy that is intended to give the company a leg up on its competition. With features like emoji directly in the software, the company is fashioning a unique mobile culture — not unlike how BlackBerry Messenger, the popular chat application for BlackBerry phones, forms a cultlike following among its users.
It is hard to gauge whether emoji will thrive in the West. In Japan, at least, they are more than a cute novelty, having become “a very established part of Japanese texting culture,” Professor Ito said.
But some things may be lost in translation in emoji’s journey. For example, the emoji of a smiling coil of human waste is a popular way to express dissatisfaction in Japan, but doesn’t have quite the same resonance in the United States. And while the iPhone has emoji for steaming bowls of ramen, balls of rice and cups of sake, there aren’t any for common Western items like pizza.
Certain combinations of characters have become pictographs in Japan, used to convey a specific meaning. For example, a knife and fork emoji, followed by a question mark and a smiley face, could signify an invitation to dinner.
Emoji can also be used for more elaborate forms of communication. A blog called Narratives in Emoji offers stories and movie plots in emoji shorthand. A recent entry titled “Titanic,” 14 characters long, begins with a ship’s anchor and ends with a broken heart.
Say you wanted to invite a friend to happy hour. You could send a simple text message, but that would be boring. Instead, why not send a cartoony picture of two clinking beer mugs?
That’s the kind of thing Alicia Fernandez, a student in fashion marketing at Berkeley College in New York, likes to send to friends. “Instead of saying ‘I love you,’ I’ll just use a heart,” she said. “Or when I’m writing ‘LOL,’ I’ll put a laughing-crying face instead.”
Ms. Fernandez is talking about emoji, which are the more elaborate cousins of emoticons — those creative combinations of colons, parentheses and other punctuation that people use to drop a facial expression into a text message or e-mail.
But unlike emoticons, emoji don’t require tilting your head sideways to make sense of the image. They are a kind of pictorial alphabet stored on a phone that can be displayed in place of the regular keyboard, making it easy to tap out a visual message.
Outside their native Japan, emoji have been available to in-the-know smartphone owners for some time via add-on applications. But now they may be on the verge of going mainstream in the United States, thanks in part to Apple’s latest update to its iPhone software. The latest version, iOS 5, comes with an installed library of emoji that can be turned on as an “international keyboard” in the device’s settings.
Apple declined to comment on its decision to add emoji, but it was most likely driven by a global standardization of the format last year that was meant to ensure that a picture of a cute cat will still look like a cute cat on a different phone in a different country. The move has put emoji on the radar of many more iPhone and iPod Touch owners.
Shawn Roberts, 39, a lawyer in Oklahoma City who was familiar with using emoji in e-mail services like Gmail, said they were an entertaining way to communicate with his 9-year-old son, Sam. Mr. Roberts said he and Sam often use pictures of tiny footballs or basketballs as they trade banter about sports and coming games.
“It’s just fun,” he said. “And it lets you convey a little more emotion or feeling in messages.”
Emoji have long been popular among cellphone users in Asia. They first emerged in Japan in the 1990s, said Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Japan and the United States. Cellphone carriers first added the images to differentiate their phones from those of rivals, and they caught on as an efficient way to quickly convey a specific thought, mood or joke.
Since so many of our daily interactions are happening over mobile phones, it makes sense that people would crave new ways to convey meaning other than plain text, said S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.
“Text as a medium is particularly dull when it comes to expressing emotions,” Professor Sundar said. “Emoticons open the door a little, but emoji opens it even further. They play the role that nonverbal communication, like hand gestures, does in conversation but on a cellphone.”
Professor Sundar also said Apple’s decision might be part of a larger business strategy that is intended to give the company a leg up on its competition. With features like emoji directly in the software, the company is fashioning a unique mobile culture — not unlike how BlackBerry Messenger, the popular chat application for BlackBerry phones, forms a cultlike following among its users.
It is hard to gauge whether emoji will thrive in the West. In Japan, at least, they are more than a cute novelty, having become “a very established part of Japanese texting culture,” Professor Ito said.
But some things may be lost in translation in emoji’s journey. For example, the emoji of a smiling coil of human waste is a popular way to express dissatisfaction in Japan, but doesn’t have quite the same resonance in the United States. And while the iPhone has emoji for steaming bowls of ramen, balls of rice and cups of sake, there aren’t any for common Western items like pizza.
Certain combinations of characters have become pictographs in Japan, used to convey a specific meaning. For example, a knife and fork emoji, followed by a question mark and a smiley face, could signify an invitation to dinner.
Emoji can also be used for more elaborate forms of communication. A blog called Narratives in Emoji offers stories and movie plots in emoji shorthand. A recent entry titled “Titanic,” 14 characters long, begins with a ship’s anchor and ends with a broken heart.
Pearl Harbor Still a Day for the Ages, but a Memory Almost Gone
Pearl Harbor Still a Day for the Ages, but a Memory Almost Gone
HONOLULU — For more than half a century, members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gathered here every Dec. 7 to commemorate the attack by the Japanese that drew the United States into World War II. Others stayed closer to home for more intimate regional chapter ceremonies, sharing memories of a day they still remember in searing detail.
But no more. The 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack will be the last one marked by the survivors’ association. With a concession to the reality of time — of age, of deteriorating health and death — the association will disband on Dec. 31.
“We had no choice,” said William H. Eckel, 89, who was once the director of the Fourth Division of the survivors’ association, interviewed by telephone from Texas. “Wives and family members have been trying to keep it operating, but they just can’t do it. People are winding up in nursing homes and intensive care places.”
Harry R. Kerr, the director of the Southeast chapter, said there weren’t enough survivors left to keep the organization running. “We just ran out of gas, that’s what it amounted to,” he said from his home in Atlanta, after deciding not to come this year. “We felt we ran a good course for 70 years. Fought a good fight. We have no place to recruit people anymore: Dec. 7 only happened on one day in 1941.”
The fact that this moment was inevitable has made this no less a difficult year for the survivors, some of whom are concerned that the event that defined their lives will soon be just another chapter in a history book, with no one left to go to schools and Rotary Club luncheons to offer a firsthand testimony of that day. As it is, speaking engagements by survivors like Mr. Kerr — who said he would miss church services on Sunday to commemorate the attack — can be discouraging affairs.
“I was talking in a school two years ago, and I was being introduced by a male teacher, and he said, ‘Mr. Kerr will be talking about Pearl Harbor,’ ” said Mr. Kerr. “And one of these little girls said, ‘Pearl Harbor? Who is she?’
“Can you imagine?” he said.
The formal announcement of the disbanding will come in the ceremony that will begin here at 7:40 a.m. on Wednesday, with a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m. (12:55 p.m. Eastern time), 70 years to the minute from when the Japanese attack began. Nearly 3,000 people are expected to attend the commemoration at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center, overlooking the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial.
William H. Muehleib, the national president of the association, made it here from his home in Virginia Beach for the ceremony and the announcement. He said he hoped many other survivors would come as well, but, he said, those who came, came on their own.
No group meetings or social events are on the schedule. “The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association doesn’t have anything planned,” he said.
The association was founded in 1958 with a roster of 28,000, all members of the military who had been on the island of Oahu the morning of the attack. It was granted a Congressional charter in October 1985. Mr. Muehleib said membership had fallen to 2,700 as of Sept. 1; though he said that given the continuing death toll and the declining health of men who are all around 90 years old or older, that figure exaggerates the actual strength of the organization, which is why the board voted to close down.
“With the advanced age and ill health of our membership and the declining numbers of members, it was obvious that we could not continue the requirements that corporate 501C lays on our membership and on our board,” Mr. Muehleib said, referring to the group’s tax-exempt, nonprofit status. In other words, there were just not survivors to continue to fill the positions of president, vice president, treasurer and secretary.
HONOLULU — For more than half a century, members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gathered here every Dec. 7 to commemorate the attack by the Japanese that drew the United States into World War II. Others stayed closer to home for more intimate regional chapter ceremonies, sharing memories of a day they still remember in searing detail.
But no more. The 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack will be the last one marked by the survivors’ association. With a concession to the reality of time — of age, of deteriorating health and death — the association will disband on Dec. 31.
“We had no choice,” said William H. Eckel, 89, who was once the director of the Fourth Division of the survivors’ association, interviewed by telephone from Texas. “Wives and family members have been trying to keep it operating, but they just can’t do it. People are winding up in nursing homes and intensive care places.”
Harry R. Kerr, the director of the Southeast chapter, said there weren’t enough survivors left to keep the organization running. “We just ran out of gas, that’s what it amounted to,” he said from his home in Atlanta, after deciding not to come this year. “We felt we ran a good course for 70 years. Fought a good fight. We have no place to recruit people anymore: Dec. 7 only happened on one day in 1941.”
The fact that this moment was inevitable has made this no less a difficult year for the survivors, some of whom are concerned that the event that defined their lives will soon be just another chapter in a history book, with no one left to go to schools and Rotary Club luncheons to offer a firsthand testimony of that day. As it is, speaking engagements by survivors like Mr. Kerr — who said he would miss church services on Sunday to commemorate the attack — can be discouraging affairs.
“I was talking in a school two years ago, and I was being introduced by a male teacher, and he said, ‘Mr. Kerr will be talking about Pearl Harbor,’ ” said Mr. Kerr. “And one of these little girls said, ‘Pearl Harbor? Who is she?’
“Can you imagine?” he said.
The formal announcement of the disbanding will come in the ceremony that will begin here at 7:40 a.m. on Wednesday, with a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m. (12:55 p.m. Eastern time), 70 years to the minute from when the Japanese attack began. Nearly 3,000 people are expected to attend the commemoration at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center, overlooking the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial.
William H. Muehleib, the national president of the association, made it here from his home in Virginia Beach for the ceremony and the announcement. He said he hoped many other survivors would come as well, but, he said, those who came, came on their own.
No group meetings or social events are on the schedule. “The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association doesn’t have anything planned,” he said.
The association was founded in 1958 with a roster of 28,000, all members of the military who had been on the island of Oahu the morning of the attack. It was granted a Congressional charter in October 1985. Mr. Muehleib said membership had fallen to 2,700 as of Sept. 1; though he said that given the continuing death toll and the declining health of men who are all around 90 years old or older, that figure exaggerates the actual strength of the organization, which is why the board voted to close down.
“With the advanced age and ill health of our membership and the declining numbers of members, it was obvious that we could not continue the requirements that corporate 501C lays on our membership and on our board,” Mr. Muehleib said, referring to the group’s tax-exempt, nonprofit status. In other words, there were just not survivors to continue to fill the positions of president, vice president, treasurer and secretary.
Dip in Consumer Spending Slows Growth in Brazil
Dip in Consumer Spending Slows Growth in Brazil
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s kinetic economy sputtered in the third quarter, officials announced Tuesday, ending a long stretch of growth and pointing to some of the headwinds now facing Brazil and big economies in Asia, notably India and China.
A decline in consumer spending contributed to a slight contraction in the third quarter from the previous three months, according to Brazil’s statistics agency. Economists now see Brazil’s growth in 2011 slowing to 3 percent or lower, a sharp reversal from a booming 2010 in which the economy surged 7.5 percent, the country’s highest growth rate in two decades.
Fearing a deeper slowdown, Brazilian authorities last week introduced a fiscal stimulus package, including tax cuts on some appliances and food, intended to get consumers to spend again.
The package was a break from policies earlier this year when the authorities actively sought to cool an economy thought to be overheating. Consumer spending had been growing substantially, fueled by a surge in newly available credit, and the authorities repeatedly raised interest rates and taxes in an effort to slow it down.
But Brazil’s recent boom seems to have fizzled, at least for now, though financial markets reacted calmly on Tuesday to the growth report, reflecting sentiment here that the government still has various policy tools at its disposal to stimulate growth. The Bovespa index for the São Paulo stock exchange climbed 1 percent on Tuesday, while Brazil’s currency, the real, strengthened slightly to close at almost 1.8 to the dollar.
“Brazil differs from other economies that are facing structural problems, which suggests a long period of low growth,” said Rodrigo Telles da Rocha Azevedo, a principal at Ibiúna, an asset management company in São Paulo. “Brazil’s problem is more cyclical, giving us space for measures to reverse declines in consumption and investment.”
Brazil still boasts indicators that suggest that the economy is far from a crisis. Unemployment fell in October to 5.8 percent, a historic low, from 6 percent the previous month. The country also maintains $352 billion in foreign currency reserves, compared with just $54 billion at the end of 2005.
Still, concerns are emerging over domestic issues like insufficient infrastructure stretched thin by the economic growth of recent years and a labor force that lacks some of the skills needed by companies to proceed with ambitious expansion plans.
One megaproject in Brazil’s arid northeast, which would redirect the flow of the San Francisco River, seems in danger of becoming a massive white elephant, according to a report over the weekend in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, which published photographs of abandoned concrete works cracking under the sun.
The vigor of Brazil’s currency is another concern. While the real has fallen more than 10 percent against the dollar since July, it remains resilient. A strong real makes Brazil costlier than other countries, and it is seen as diminishing the competitiveness of industry here by making its manufactured products more expensive in export markets.
“Apart from the currency appreciation, imports of industrial goods have grown very fast,” said José Márcio Camargo, an economist at the Catholic University here. He said that contagion from Europe’s debt crisis was still less worrisome than the strong real and other domestic problems, including a high tax burden and poor infrastructure.
New concerns from abroad may also be on the horizon. China, Brazil’s largest trading partner, is showing some signs of cooling off, with new reports of weakness in manufacturing and services. Unlike Brazil, China is still growing at a healthy clip. But Chinese authorities have also introduced measures in recent days aimed at stimulating growth.
Elsewhere in Asia, India is facing slower growth and high inflation. And closer to home, Argentina, South America’s second-largest country and an important trading partner for Brazil, still has a growing economy but is struggling with capital flight as uncertainty persists over economic policies there.
Despite problems at home and abroad, Brazilian authorities remain sanguine about their ability to avoid a prolonged slump.
Finance Minister Guido Mantega said that stimulus measures introduced this month would quickly return the economy to growth, characterizing the disappointing figures as “temporary.”
“The condition is reversible,” he told reporters, emphasizing that salaries and the job market remained unaffected by the economic slowdown.
Lis Moriconi contributed reporting.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s kinetic economy sputtered in the third quarter, officials announced Tuesday, ending a long stretch of growth and pointing to some of the headwinds now facing Brazil and big economies in Asia, notably India and China.
A decline in consumer spending contributed to a slight contraction in the third quarter from the previous three months, according to Brazil’s statistics agency. Economists now see Brazil’s growth in 2011 slowing to 3 percent or lower, a sharp reversal from a booming 2010 in which the economy surged 7.5 percent, the country’s highest growth rate in two decades.
Fearing a deeper slowdown, Brazilian authorities last week introduced a fiscal stimulus package, including tax cuts on some appliances and food, intended to get consumers to spend again.
The package was a break from policies earlier this year when the authorities actively sought to cool an economy thought to be overheating. Consumer spending had been growing substantially, fueled by a surge in newly available credit, and the authorities repeatedly raised interest rates and taxes in an effort to slow it down.
But Brazil’s recent boom seems to have fizzled, at least for now, though financial markets reacted calmly on Tuesday to the growth report, reflecting sentiment here that the government still has various policy tools at its disposal to stimulate growth. The Bovespa index for the São Paulo stock exchange climbed 1 percent on Tuesday, while Brazil’s currency, the real, strengthened slightly to close at almost 1.8 to the dollar.
“Brazil differs from other economies that are facing structural problems, which suggests a long period of low growth,” said Rodrigo Telles da Rocha Azevedo, a principal at Ibiúna, an asset management company in São Paulo. “Brazil’s problem is more cyclical, giving us space for measures to reverse declines in consumption and investment.”
Brazil still boasts indicators that suggest that the economy is far from a crisis. Unemployment fell in October to 5.8 percent, a historic low, from 6 percent the previous month. The country also maintains $352 billion in foreign currency reserves, compared with just $54 billion at the end of 2005.
Still, concerns are emerging over domestic issues like insufficient infrastructure stretched thin by the economic growth of recent years and a labor force that lacks some of the skills needed by companies to proceed with ambitious expansion plans.
One megaproject in Brazil’s arid northeast, which would redirect the flow of the San Francisco River, seems in danger of becoming a massive white elephant, according to a report over the weekend in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, which published photographs of abandoned concrete works cracking under the sun.
The vigor of Brazil’s currency is another concern. While the real has fallen more than 10 percent against the dollar since July, it remains resilient. A strong real makes Brazil costlier than other countries, and it is seen as diminishing the competitiveness of industry here by making its manufactured products more expensive in export markets.
“Apart from the currency appreciation, imports of industrial goods have grown very fast,” said José Márcio Camargo, an economist at the Catholic University here. He said that contagion from Europe’s debt crisis was still less worrisome than the strong real and other domestic problems, including a high tax burden and poor infrastructure.
New concerns from abroad may also be on the horizon. China, Brazil’s largest trading partner, is showing some signs of cooling off, with new reports of weakness in manufacturing and services. Unlike Brazil, China is still growing at a healthy clip. But Chinese authorities have also introduced measures in recent days aimed at stimulating growth.
Elsewhere in Asia, India is facing slower growth and high inflation. And closer to home, Argentina, South America’s second-largest country and an important trading partner for Brazil, still has a growing economy but is struggling with capital flight as uncertainty persists over economic policies there.
Despite problems at home and abroad, Brazilian authorities remain sanguine about their ability to avoid a prolonged slump.
Finance Minister Guido Mantega said that stimulus measures introduced this month would quickly return the economy to growth, characterizing the disappointing figures as “temporary.”
“The condition is reversible,” he told reporters, emphasizing that salaries and the job market remained unaffected by the economic slowdown.
Lis Moriconi contributed reporting.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Chipper Remnants of a Life Turned Sour
Chipper Remnants of a Life Turned Sour
She didn’t leave much behind. That’s the inescapable fact of Amy Winehouse‘s posthumous collection, “Lioness: Hidden Treasures.”
The album’s 12 songs are the leftovers from a singer and songwriter who was promising on her 2003 debut album, “Frank”; fully herself and even more promising on her 2006 album, “Back to Black”; and then a long, sad story until her death from alcohol poisoning this year. The transformation from the confident, sly, sweet-and-sour-voiced 18-year-old in 2002 to the scratchy, ravaged latter-day star is the album’s back story, even as the music stays chipper.
Like her two previous albums, “Lioness,” made with the same producers (Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson), wraps retro arrangements — 1960s soul, girl groups, old reggae — around a bluntly modern persona. The idea was already full-blown in 2003, when Winehouse recorded the acerbic big-band ballad “Best Friends, Right?,” which finally surfaces here.
Other previously unreleased tracks add to the pathos of Winehouse’s decline. The tabloid-ready one is “Between the Cheats,” recorded in 2008. It’s a defiant vow of loyalty to her husband at the time, Blake Fielder-Civil, recorded a few months before he was imprisoned for assault on a bar owner. The backup is four-chord doo-wop as she sings, “I would die before I’d divorce you/I’d take a thousand thumps for my love.” Her vocal is jazzy, jumpy and improvisational, with the flutter she picked up from Erykah Badu and the flintiness she learned from Dinah Washington. It’s also thin, slurred and sometimes unintelligible.
“Like Smoke,” a 2008 song about being proudly fickle, stretches out two shaky verses and some scat singing that Winehouse left behind with a present-day rap by Nas that alludes to Occupy Wall Street. “A Song for You,” the Leon Russell anthem of a musician’s prideful self-pity, wraps an overelaborate post-facto arrangement around a fitful, scattered vocal from 2009: shards of musicianship, straining to cohere.
By contrast, “Half Time,” a neo-soul track from 2002 that sways like a song from Ms. Badu, is a budding songwriter’s tribute to the healing power of music: “The melody it feeds my soul/the tune tears me apart and it swallows me whole.” For Winehouse, its promise of hope and bliss in music didn’t come true.
“Lioness” ekes out all it can from the archives. It has cover songs recorded in 2002, back when Winehouse was getting started, like “The Girl From Ipanema” with a slightly forced hip-hop beat. It has preliminary versions of songs from “Back to Black,” including a slower, less sardonic take on “Tears Dry” (later “Tears Dry on Their Own”), and a one-take run-through of “Wake Up Alone” that’s nonchalantly bluesy.
A 2011 version of the Gerry Goffin-Carole King song “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” is different from the one Winehouse recorded for the 2004 soundtrack of “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” — trading acoustic rhythm guitar for a booming 1960s soul production — but is built around the same Winehouse vocal track. “Lioness” also includes the duet she recorded with Tony Bennett in March 2011, “Body and Soul,” which was recently released on his album and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her phrasing is savvy, her voice tattered.
Had she survived, Winehouse might have had new insights into private turmoil, and a voice with eloquent scars. “Lioness” is just the scraps of what might have been.
She didn’t leave much behind. That’s the inescapable fact of Amy Winehouse‘s posthumous collection, “Lioness: Hidden Treasures.”
The album’s 12 songs are the leftovers from a singer and songwriter who was promising on her 2003 debut album, “Frank”; fully herself and even more promising on her 2006 album, “Back to Black”; and then a long, sad story until her death from alcohol poisoning this year. The transformation from the confident, sly, sweet-and-sour-voiced 18-year-old in 2002 to the scratchy, ravaged latter-day star is the album’s back story, even as the music stays chipper.
Like her two previous albums, “Lioness,” made with the same producers (Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson), wraps retro arrangements — 1960s soul, girl groups, old reggae — around a bluntly modern persona. The idea was already full-blown in 2003, when Winehouse recorded the acerbic big-band ballad “Best Friends, Right?,” which finally surfaces here.
Other previously unreleased tracks add to the pathos of Winehouse’s decline. The tabloid-ready one is “Between the Cheats,” recorded in 2008. It’s a defiant vow of loyalty to her husband at the time, Blake Fielder-Civil, recorded a few months before he was imprisoned for assault on a bar owner. The backup is four-chord doo-wop as she sings, “I would die before I’d divorce you/I’d take a thousand thumps for my love.” Her vocal is jazzy, jumpy and improvisational, with the flutter she picked up from Erykah Badu and the flintiness she learned from Dinah Washington. It’s also thin, slurred and sometimes unintelligible.
“Like Smoke,” a 2008 song about being proudly fickle, stretches out two shaky verses and some scat singing that Winehouse left behind with a present-day rap by Nas that alludes to Occupy Wall Street. “A Song for You,” the Leon Russell anthem of a musician’s prideful self-pity, wraps an overelaborate post-facto arrangement around a fitful, scattered vocal from 2009: shards of musicianship, straining to cohere.
By contrast, “Half Time,” a neo-soul track from 2002 that sways like a song from Ms. Badu, is a budding songwriter’s tribute to the healing power of music: “The melody it feeds my soul/the tune tears me apart and it swallows me whole.” For Winehouse, its promise of hope and bliss in music didn’t come true.
“Lioness” ekes out all it can from the archives. It has cover songs recorded in 2002, back when Winehouse was getting started, like “The Girl From Ipanema” with a slightly forced hip-hop beat. It has preliminary versions of songs from “Back to Black,” including a slower, less sardonic take on “Tears Dry” (later “Tears Dry on Their Own”), and a one-take run-through of “Wake Up Alone” that’s nonchalantly bluesy.
A 2011 version of the Gerry Goffin-Carole King song “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” is different from the one Winehouse recorded for the 2004 soundtrack of “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” — trading acoustic rhythm guitar for a booming 1960s soul production — but is built around the same Winehouse vocal track. “Lioness” also includes the duet she recorded with Tony Bennett in March 2011, “Body and Soul,” which was recently released on his album and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her phrasing is savvy, her voice tattered.
Had she survived, Winehouse might have had new insights into private turmoil, and a voice with eloquent scars. “Lioness” is just the scraps of what might have been.
Sarkozy and Merkel Push for Changes to Europe Treaty
Sarkozy and Merkel Push for Changes to Europe Treaty
PARIS — Under the pressure of financial crisis and with the euro currency at stake, the two main leaders of the euro zone said Monday that they would together push to remake the European Union into a more integrated political and economic federation, with tight legal restraints on how much debt national parliaments can issue.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, meeting here at the start of a crucial week that will end with a European Union summit meeting on Thursday and Friday, called for amendments to European treaties that would include centralized oversight over budgets and automatic sanctions against countries that violate firmer rules on deficits.
The changes are among the most sweeping proposed since European countries began coordinating their economic policies in the aftermath of World War II. They would effectively subordinate economic sovereignty to collective discipline enforced by European technocrats in Brussels.
“We want to make sure that the imbalances that led to the situation in the euro zone today cannot happen again,” Mr. Sarkozy told a joint news conference. “Therefore we want a new treaty, to make clear to the peoples of Europe that things cannot continue as they are.”
It is unclear if promises of future action will be enough to pacify markets, which have been testing the resolve of European leaders for months. They initially responded with relief on Monday, with stocks and the euro rising, but lost some of those gains after Standard & Poor’s put 15 European nations on credit watch because of disagreements about how to tackle short-term and long-term threats to financial stability.
Mrs. Merkel, warmly embracing the French president despite their often testy relationship, insisted that the euro zone must be effectively re-established under a different set of rules. “We want structural changes that go beyond agreements,” she said. “We need binding debt brakes.”
By pressing for a new treaty the French and German leaders took big risks on two fronts. Their proposal threatens to divide the 17 European Union countries that use the euro from the 27 nations that are part of the larger European Union, some of which, like Britain, are likely to reject intrusive budget oversight from Brussels. And it remains uncertain how warmly national parliaments and voters even within the euro zone will embrace the changes.
The two leaders are aiming to develop a clear consensus among the other members of the euro zone that they will push ahead with a new treaty. They appear to be calculating that such a signal of solidarity will be enough to persuade the European Central Bank, the only institution in Europe with enough financial firepower to defend the ability of member states to raise money on bond markets, that it has enough political cover to move more aggressively to protect vulnerable countries like Italy and Spain.
Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy did not directly address the role of the central bank, which operates independently. But many European analysts have concluded that the Germans, who have been among the most wary of an expanded role for the bank, will implicitly endorse a bolder intervention in the markets if European nations accept more intrusive rules.
Mr. Sarkozy said the Franco-German aim was to have treaty changes drafted and agreed upon by the end of March. But ratification will take longer. In France, for instance, Mr. Sarkozy will not try to ratify any treaty change until after legislative elections that finish on June 17. Even if he is re-elected president in May, not a sure thing, he may lose his majority in Parliament.
There is another crucial issue, too, which is the process of ratification. If Ireland decides that these changes are fundamental enough to be approved by referendum, it may slow matters further. Ireland rejected the last European treaty in a referendum, before European colleagues forced Dublin to vote again.
And it may be that voters are wary of “more Europe,” and that their growing disaffection has not been overtaken by their concerns over the fate of the euro.
The two leaders, to reach a joint position, did some bargaining on Monday. Mrs. Merkel wanted oversight of national budgets to be exercised by Brussels, with the European Court of Justice the ultimate arbiter, with the power to veto budgets and send them back to national parliaments to review. Mr. Sarkozy, the political inheritor of Gaullism, did not want to give any supranational body that much authority over an elected national parliament, a view shared by other countries, too.
PARIS — Under the pressure of financial crisis and with the euro currency at stake, the two main leaders of the euro zone said Monday that they would together push to remake the European Union into a more integrated political and economic federation, with tight legal restraints on how much debt national parliaments can issue.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, meeting here at the start of a crucial week that will end with a European Union summit meeting on Thursday and Friday, called for amendments to European treaties that would include centralized oversight over budgets and automatic sanctions against countries that violate firmer rules on deficits.
The changes are among the most sweeping proposed since European countries began coordinating their economic policies in the aftermath of World War II. They would effectively subordinate economic sovereignty to collective discipline enforced by European technocrats in Brussels.
“We want to make sure that the imbalances that led to the situation in the euro zone today cannot happen again,” Mr. Sarkozy told a joint news conference. “Therefore we want a new treaty, to make clear to the peoples of Europe that things cannot continue as they are.”
It is unclear if promises of future action will be enough to pacify markets, which have been testing the resolve of European leaders for months. They initially responded with relief on Monday, with stocks and the euro rising, but lost some of those gains after Standard & Poor’s put 15 European nations on credit watch because of disagreements about how to tackle short-term and long-term threats to financial stability.
Mrs. Merkel, warmly embracing the French president despite their often testy relationship, insisted that the euro zone must be effectively re-established under a different set of rules. “We want structural changes that go beyond agreements,” she said. “We need binding debt brakes.”
By pressing for a new treaty the French and German leaders took big risks on two fronts. Their proposal threatens to divide the 17 European Union countries that use the euro from the 27 nations that are part of the larger European Union, some of which, like Britain, are likely to reject intrusive budget oversight from Brussels. And it remains uncertain how warmly national parliaments and voters even within the euro zone will embrace the changes.
The two leaders are aiming to develop a clear consensus among the other members of the euro zone that they will push ahead with a new treaty. They appear to be calculating that such a signal of solidarity will be enough to persuade the European Central Bank, the only institution in Europe with enough financial firepower to defend the ability of member states to raise money on bond markets, that it has enough political cover to move more aggressively to protect vulnerable countries like Italy and Spain.
Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy did not directly address the role of the central bank, which operates independently. But many European analysts have concluded that the Germans, who have been among the most wary of an expanded role for the bank, will implicitly endorse a bolder intervention in the markets if European nations accept more intrusive rules.
Mr. Sarkozy said the Franco-German aim was to have treaty changes drafted and agreed upon by the end of March. But ratification will take longer. In France, for instance, Mr. Sarkozy will not try to ratify any treaty change until after legislative elections that finish on June 17. Even if he is re-elected president in May, not a sure thing, he may lose his majority in Parliament.
There is another crucial issue, too, which is the process of ratification. If Ireland decides that these changes are fundamental enough to be approved by referendum, it may slow matters further. Ireland rejected the last European treaty in a referendum, before European colleagues forced Dublin to vote again.
And it may be that voters are wary of “more Europe,” and that their growing disaffection has not been overtaken by their concerns over the fate of the euro.
The two leaders, to reach a joint position, did some bargaining on Monday. Mrs. Merkel wanted oversight of national budgets to be exercised by Brussels, with the European Court of Justice the ultimate arbiter, with the power to veto budgets and send them back to national parliaments to review. Mr. Sarkozy, the political inheritor of Gaullism, did not want to give any supranational body that much authority over an elected national parliament, a view shared by other countries, too.
Many Workers in Public Sector Retiring Sooner
Many Workers in Public Sector Retiring Sooner
MADISON, Wis. — As states and cities struggle to resolve paralyzing budget shortfalls by sending workers on unpaid furloughs, freezing salaries and extracting larger contributions for health benefits and pensions, a growing number of public-sector workers are finding fewer reasons to stay.
The numbers of retirees are way up in Wisconsin, where more applications to retire have been filed this year than ever before. Workers in California’s largest public employee pension system have retired at a steadily increasing rate over the last five fiscal years. In New Jersey, thousands more teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public workers filed retirement papers during the past two years than in the previous two years.
In part, the flood of retirements reflects a broader demographic picture. Baby boomers, wherever they work, have begun reaching the traditional retirement age.
But increasingly workers fear a permanent shift away from the traditional security of government jobs, and they are making plans to get out now, before salaries and retirement benefits retreat further.
“You start to feel like, ‘What will they do next?’ ” said Bob McLinn, 63, a labor union president who left his job with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections in March, earlier than he planned, after political leaders pressed to cut benefits and collective bargaining rights for workers.
“There’s always been this promise that if you came to work and did your job, at the end there would be your reward — a defined retirement. The idea was you could retire with respect and dignity. But that whole idea has been slashed now, and I felt like, ‘What is the point?’ ”
In some places, the rise in retirement has brought welcome and needed financial news. Kansas announced last month that it would save $34.5 million over two years because more than 1,000 workers had agreed to accept cash and health insurance incentives to leave. State officials said they had yet to determine which of the positions of departing workers they considered critical enough to refill.
But some experts and workers question the ultimate result of so much leaving, saying it is already leaving some governments short-staffed (and, in some cases, obliged to pay overtime) and at risk of losing institutional knowledge and technical expertise as older workers vanish.
“What we’re going to see is a lot of young people reinventing the wheel,” said Karen Gunderson, 56, who retired this year from her information technology job with the State of Wisconsin after 26 years, a few years sooner than she had intended, saying she felt that public workers were being “turned into scapegoats” for a troubled economy.
“We’re going to waste a lot of tax dollars with young people attempting things that were tried before. You can get people cheaper, but whether you save money, I don’t know.”
The pattern of retirements, while pronounced in some states and towns, has by no means played out everywhere. In fact, a countervailing trend — of delaying retirement and staying put — has been clear since after 2008, when the national recession and the shortage of jobs (and of potential second careers in the private sector) made people queasy about making moves at all.
Certainly, the number of state and local public-sector workers has been shrinking since the second half of 2008, a necessary, useful scaling back in the eyes of some political leaders facing major budget shortfalls. Across the nation, there were 71,000 fewer state government workers in November than there were a year ago, and 180,000 fewer local government workers, federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
But a broad survey of about 100 public retirement systems suggests a rate of retirement that has remained within a relatively steady range in recent years, said Keith Brainard, research director for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. “Before I would call this a trend, it would need to continue for another year or two,” he said.
Still, even with lingering queasiness over jobs and the larger economy, there are other signs that the mood of public workers is turning toward retirement, a worrisome possibility for some already precarious, underfunded pension plans.
In 2009, a survey of more than 400 state and local governments found that about 85 percent of public workers were postponing retirement (presumably because of the grave economy), while fewer than 9 percent were accelerating their retirement dates. This year, a similar survey by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, a nonprofit research group, found 40 percent still delaying their retirements, with nearly a quarter speeding up their retirement dates.
Already, the trend is apparent in places where lawmakers have made the clearest calls for decreasing workers’ benefits or increasing their contributions for health care insurance and pension plans. And in the last two years, 41 states have made significant changes to at least one of their retirement plans, the National Conference of State Legislatures found.
In Alabama, an unusually high number of school employees — 1,600 — asked to retire this month, leaving some students uncertain midyear about who will be teaching them. Lawmakers there had approved increases to the cost of health insurance for those who retire before they are eligible for Medicare or have fewer than 25 years of service, and the law goes into effect on Jan. 1, setting off a flood of applicants who wanted to beat the change.
In Florida, more than twice as many workers applied to be part of a deferred retirement program in May and June as had the year earlier, protecting them from cuts to pension benefits that legislators put into effect as of July 1.
And in Ohio, where a law cutting collective bargaining passed this year (and was later repealed) and where bills are still pending over raising the age and years of service for eligibility for a public-sector pension, applications for retirement rose 39 percent in the first 10 months of the year compared with a year earlier.
But here, in Wisconsin, the battle over public workers may have been the loudest. Republican leaders said their only hope of balancing the state’s budget was to require workers to pay more for their pensions and health care premiums and to significantly reduce collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions.
Union supporters pushed back, leading an effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker next year over the issue. But government workers also left: 16,785 workers filed retirement applications as of Oct. 31, while in all of 2010, 11,750 workers had done so.
“It’s about fear,” said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association. “A lot of people are seeing this war on public employees and saying, let’s get out.”
Governor Walker, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this article.
For some states, the increase in retirements has been a planned outcome, a budget fixer. In recent years, places like Minnesota and New York offered incentives for employees to retire sooner than they may have planned. In 2010, New York State processed 30,772 retirement applications, more than ever before, and state officials attributed 12,000 of those to an early retirement incentive.
The surprise, though, came in 2011, when no such incentive was offered. In a year after a special retirement deal, applications to leave usually drop off. This year, state officials said, they have not.
MADISON, Wis. — As states and cities struggle to resolve paralyzing budget shortfalls by sending workers on unpaid furloughs, freezing salaries and extracting larger contributions for health benefits and pensions, a growing number of public-sector workers are finding fewer reasons to stay.
The numbers of retirees are way up in Wisconsin, where more applications to retire have been filed this year than ever before. Workers in California’s largest public employee pension system have retired at a steadily increasing rate over the last five fiscal years. In New Jersey, thousands more teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public workers filed retirement papers during the past two years than in the previous two years.
In part, the flood of retirements reflects a broader demographic picture. Baby boomers, wherever they work, have begun reaching the traditional retirement age.
But increasingly workers fear a permanent shift away from the traditional security of government jobs, and they are making plans to get out now, before salaries and retirement benefits retreat further.
“You start to feel like, ‘What will they do next?’ ” said Bob McLinn, 63, a labor union president who left his job with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections in March, earlier than he planned, after political leaders pressed to cut benefits and collective bargaining rights for workers.
“There’s always been this promise that if you came to work and did your job, at the end there would be your reward — a defined retirement. The idea was you could retire with respect and dignity. But that whole idea has been slashed now, and I felt like, ‘What is the point?’ ”
In some places, the rise in retirement has brought welcome and needed financial news. Kansas announced last month that it would save $34.5 million over two years because more than 1,000 workers had agreed to accept cash and health insurance incentives to leave. State officials said they had yet to determine which of the positions of departing workers they considered critical enough to refill.
But some experts and workers question the ultimate result of so much leaving, saying it is already leaving some governments short-staffed (and, in some cases, obliged to pay overtime) and at risk of losing institutional knowledge and technical expertise as older workers vanish.
“What we’re going to see is a lot of young people reinventing the wheel,” said Karen Gunderson, 56, who retired this year from her information technology job with the State of Wisconsin after 26 years, a few years sooner than she had intended, saying she felt that public workers were being “turned into scapegoats” for a troubled economy.
“We’re going to waste a lot of tax dollars with young people attempting things that were tried before. You can get people cheaper, but whether you save money, I don’t know.”
The pattern of retirements, while pronounced in some states and towns, has by no means played out everywhere. In fact, a countervailing trend — of delaying retirement and staying put — has been clear since after 2008, when the national recession and the shortage of jobs (and of potential second careers in the private sector) made people queasy about making moves at all.
Certainly, the number of state and local public-sector workers has been shrinking since the second half of 2008, a necessary, useful scaling back in the eyes of some political leaders facing major budget shortfalls. Across the nation, there were 71,000 fewer state government workers in November than there were a year ago, and 180,000 fewer local government workers, federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
But a broad survey of about 100 public retirement systems suggests a rate of retirement that has remained within a relatively steady range in recent years, said Keith Brainard, research director for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. “Before I would call this a trend, it would need to continue for another year or two,” he said.
Still, even with lingering queasiness over jobs and the larger economy, there are other signs that the mood of public workers is turning toward retirement, a worrisome possibility for some already precarious, underfunded pension plans.
In 2009, a survey of more than 400 state and local governments found that about 85 percent of public workers were postponing retirement (presumably because of the grave economy), while fewer than 9 percent were accelerating their retirement dates. This year, a similar survey by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, a nonprofit research group, found 40 percent still delaying their retirements, with nearly a quarter speeding up their retirement dates.
Already, the trend is apparent in places where lawmakers have made the clearest calls for decreasing workers’ benefits or increasing their contributions for health care insurance and pension plans. And in the last two years, 41 states have made significant changes to at least one of their retirement plans, the National Conference of State Legislatures found.
In Alabama, an unusually high number of school employees — 1,600 — asked to retire this month, leaving some students uncertain midyear about who will be teaching them. Lawmakers there had approved increases to the cost of health insurance for those who retire before they are eligible for Medicare or have fewer than 25 years of service, and the law goes into effect on Jan. 1, setting off a flood of applicants who wanted to beat the change.
In Florida, more than twice as many workers applied to be part of a deferred retirement program in May and June as had the year earlier, protecting them from cuts to pension benefits that legislators put into effect as of July 1.
And in Ohio, where a law cutting collective bargaining passed this year (and was later repealed) and where bills are still pending over raising the age and years of service for eligibility for a public-sector pension, applications for retirement rose 39 percent in the first 10 months of the year compared with a year earlier.
But here, in Wisconsin, the battle over public workers may have been the loudest. Republican leaders said their only hope of balancing the state’s budget was to require workers to pay more for their pensions and health care premiums and to significantly reduce collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions.
Union supporters pushed back, leading an effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker next year over the issue. But government workers also left: 16,785 workers filed retirement applications as of Oct. 31, while in all of 2010, 11,750 workers had done so.
“It’s about fear,” said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association. “A lot of people are seeing this war on public employees and saying, let’s get out.”
Governor Walker, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this article.
For some states, the increase in retirements has been a planned outcome, a budget fixer. In recent years, places like Minnesota and New York offered incentives for employees to retire sooner than they may have planned. In 2010, New York State processed 30,772 retirement applications, more than ever before, and state officials attributed 12,000 of those to an early retirement incentive.
The surprise, though, came in 2011, when no such incentive was offered. In a year after a special retirement deal, applications to leave usually drop off. This year, state officials said, they have not.
Fund-Raising Gains New Urgency for Gingrich Camp
Fund-Raising Gains New Urgency for Gingrich Camp
With just four weeks to go until the Republican primary season begins, Newt Gingrich spent his Monday not on the hustings of Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina, but in Midtown Manhattan, prospecting for what his newly resurgent campaign needs most desperately: money.
Bolstered by strong debate performances and top billing in some recent Republican polls, Mr. Gingrich cruised into the Union League Club for a fund-raiser and news conference, followed by private meetings with potential high-dollar donors around Manhattan. Shortly before dinnertime, he made his campaign debut before the “Monday Meeting,” a weekly gathering at the Grand Hyatt that draws a mix of conservative financiers and intellectuals who are known for their fund-raising clout.
The unusual excursion underscored the enormous challenge Mr. Gingrich faces as he seeks to take advantage of a late surge in popularity: At a time when most of the Republican candidates are hustling for votes, Mr. Gingrich must, in matter of weeks, build a fund-raising infrastructure that can finance last-minute campaign trips, advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts in the early states and give him staying power to compete beyond them.
“He’s an old master at it, and he ought to be successful, because he’s now center-stage,” said Alfred Hoffman Jr., a real estate developer from Florida who is one of the top Republican fund-raisers in the country. “But it’s not just a question of how he can do it all in a month. It’s a question of how much he can spend in Iowa in a month.”
The challenge is especially stark for Mr. Gingrich, who until now has been among the weakest fund-raisers in the field.
In late September, at the close of the most recent fund-raising period, Mr. Gingrich reported that his campaign was more than $1 million in debt, three times the cash he had on hand. By that point, he had raised less than $2.9 million. By contrast, Mr. Romney had raised more than $32 million through Sept. 30.
Mr. Gingrich’s campaign said last month that he had raised $4 million since the beginning of the fourth quarter, fueled by his debate performances and conservative message. In an interview on Monday, his spokesman, R. C. Hammond, said that Mr. Gingrich would prevail by running a lean and strategic campaign, though he acknowledged that other candidates, such as Mr. Romney, would have an edge in fund-raising.
“We don’t have to pay for consultants, we don’t need speechwriters — the candidate knows what he’s going to say,” Mr. Hammond said.
Mr. Gingrich begins his new push in a month when many wealthy donors and bundlers are more likely to be found skiing in Aspen or basking in the Caribbean than crowding into fund-raising dinners.
And while Mr. Gingrich, like other would-be grass-roots candidates, is counting on an outpouring of small checks, he has won the allegiance of only a small number of the high-dollar donors who can help a candidate raise tens of millions of dollars over a few months.
As of September, only 293 donors had given Mr. Gingrich the maximum primary donation of $2,500; Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, Representative Ron Paul of Texas, and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah, all attracted more such donors. And Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, reported nearly 8,000 donors who had contributed the maximum, while Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had close to 5,000.
But Mr. Gingrich has a number of factors working in his favor. In the years since he stepped down as speaker, he has built a network of consulting and advocacy groups that has allowed him to develop a fund-raising base and ties to executives in industries like health care and energy. (An alumna of those efforts, Amy Pass, is now heading Mr. Gingrich’s fund-raising efforts.) He has close ties to wealthy Republican benefactors like Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul.
And after his campaign all but collapsed in the summer amid criticism from aides that he was not sufficiently serious about the race, Mr. Gingrich has learned to operate on a shoestring, using interviews by the news media and other free publicity to keep himself in the public eye and piggybacking campaign events onto a book-signing tour.
A fund-raising event on affluent Hilton Head Island, S.C., last week drew just over a dozen donors, each paying $500 to have breakfast with Mr. Gingrich.
“Campaigns do cost money,” he said. “We’re probably the most frugal campaign of modern times.”
In a sign of his comeback, Mr. Gingrich recently acquired another trapping of a full-fledged presidential campaign: The allegiance of a nominally independent “super PAC,” Solutions 2012, which is run by Gingrich supporters. Super PACs are permitted to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money.
“It’s our objective to fill in those gaps that Speaker Gingrich is perhaps unable to fill in his own campaign, in terms of getting people out to the polls and messaging undecided voters,” said Charlie Smith, the treasurer of Solutions 2012.
The campaign has recruited about a dozen supporters to lead Mr. Gingrich’s finance team and bring in more large donors, said Mr. Hammond, the spokesman, though he declined to say who those supporters were.
If Mr. Gingrich is forced to rely chiefly on small donors, his campaign could provide the best test yet of the Republican fund-raising elite’s waning, but still potent, power to guide the course of the quadrennial nominating contest.
“They haven’t gotten it yet, those people in New York,” said Gay Gaines, a prominent Republican activist and fund-raiser in Palm Beach, Fla., who is backing Mr. Gingrich.
“Many of those people I know, and quite a few of them really wanted Chris Christie to run,” Ms. Gaines added, referring to the governor of New Jersey. “They turned somersaults to get him to run, and that man said no. So they say, I guess it’s Romney. And guess what? It’s not going to work. It doesn’t matter how much money they’ve raised.”
With just four weeks to go until the Republican primary season begins, Newt Gingrich spent his Monday not on the hustings of Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina, but in Midtown Manhattan, prospecting for what his newly resurgent campaign needs most desperately: money.
Bolstered by strong debate performances and top billing in some recent Republican polls, Mr. Gingrich cruised into the Union League Club for a fund-raiser and news conference, followed by private meetings with potential high-dollar donors around Manhattan. Shortly before dinnertime, he made his campaign debut before the “Monday Meeting,” a weekly gathering at the Grand Hyatt that draws a mix of conservative financiers and intellectuals who are known for their fund-raising clout.
The unusual excursion underscored the enormous challenge Mr. Gingrich faces as he seeks to take advantage of a late surge in popularity: At a time when most of the Republican candidates are hustling for votes, Mr. Gingrich must, in matter of weeks, build a fund-raising infrastructure that can finance last-minute campaign trips, advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts in the early states and give him staying power to compete beyond them.
“He’s an old master at it, and he ought to be successful, because he’s now center-stage,” said Alfred Hoffman Jr., a real estate developer from Florida who is one of the top Republican fund-raisers in the country. “But it’s not just a question of how he can do it all in a month. It’s a question of how much he can spend in Iowa in a month.”
The challenge is especially stark for Mr. Gingrich, who until now has been among the weakest fund-raisers in the field.
In late September, at the close of the most recent fund-raising period, Mr. Gingrich reported that his campaign was more than $1 million in debt, three times the cash he had on hand. By that point, he had raised less than $2.9 million. By contrast, Mr. Romney had raised more than $32 million through Sept. 30.
Mr. Gingrich’s campaign said last month that he had raised $4 million since the beginning of the fourth quarter, fueled by his debate performances and conservative message. In an interview on Monday, his spokesman, R. C. Hammond, said that Mr. Gingrich would prevail by running a lean and strategic campaign, though he acknowledged that other candidates, such as Mr. Romney, would have an edge in fund-raising.
“We don’t have to pay for consultants, we don’t need speechwriters — the candidate knows what he’s going to say,” Mr. Hammond said.
Mr. Gingrich begins his new push in a month when many wealthy donors and bundlers are more likely to be found skiing in Aspen or basking in the Caribbean than crowding into fund-raising dinners.
And while Mr. Gingrich, like other would-be grass-roots candidates, is counting on an outpouring of small checks, he has won the allegiance of only a small number of the high-dollar donors who can help a candidate raise tens of millions of dollars over a few months.
As of September, only 293 donors had given Mr. Gingrich the maximum primary donation of $2,500; Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, Representative Ron Paul of Texas, and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah, all attracted more such donors. And Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, reported nearly 8,000 donors who had contributed the maximum, while Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had close to 5,000.
But Mr. Gingrich has a number of factors working in his favor. In the years since he stepped down as speaker, he has built a network of consulting and advocacy groups that has allowed him to develop a fund-raising base and ties to executives in industries like health care and energy. (An alumna of those efforts, Amy Pass, is now heading Mr. Gingrich’s fund-raising efforts.) He has close ties to wealthy Republican benefactors like Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul.
And after his campaign all but collapsed in the summer amid criticism from aides that he was not sufficiently serious about the race, Mr. Gingrich has learned to operate on a shoestring, using interviews by the news media and other free publicity to keep himself in the public eye and piggybacking campaign events onto a book-signing tour.
A fund-raising event on affluent Hilton Head Island, S.C., last week drew just over a dozen donors, each paying $500 to have breakfast with Mr. Gingrich.
“Campaigns do cost money,” he said. “We’re probably the most frugal campaign of modern times.”
In a sign of his comeback, Mr. Gingrich recently acquired another trapping of a full-fledged presidential campaign: The allegiance of a nominally independent “super PAC,” Solutions 2012, which is run by Gingrich supporters. Super PACs are permitted to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money.
“It’s our objective to fill in those gaps that Speaker Gingrich is perhaps unable to fill in his own campaign, in terms of getting people out to the polls and messaging undecided voters,” said Charlie Smith, the treasurer of Solutions 2012.
The campaign has recruited about a dozen supporters to lead Mr. Gingrich’s finance team and bring in more large donors, said Mr. Hammond, the spokesman, though he declined to say who those supporters were.
If Mr. Gingrich is forced to rely chiefly on small donors, his campaign could provide the best test yet of the Republican fund-raising elite’s waning, but still potent, power to guide the course of the quadrennial nominating contest.
“They haven’t gotten it yet, those people in New York,” said Gay Gaines, a prominent Republican activist and fund-raiser in Palm Beach, Fla., who is backing Mr. Gingrich.
“Many of those people I know, and quite a few of them really wanted Chris Christie to run,” Ms. Gaines added, referring to the governor of New Jersey. “They turned somersaults to get him to run, and that man said no. So they say, I guess it’s Romney. And guess what? It’s not going to work. It doesn’t matter how much money they’ve raised.”
In Southern Arizona, Rare Sightings of Ocelots and Jaguars Send Shivers
In Southern Arizona, Rare Sightings of Ocelots and Jaguars Send Shivers
PHOENIX — The Serengeti is associated with safaris. The Maasai Mara, too. But southern Arizona?
A series of recent sightings of rare wild cats in the southern part of the state has prompted considerable excitement among wildlife experts and camera-toting naturalists alike. Twice this year, the Arizona Game and Fish Department has announced sightings in the southeast of endangered ocelots, small spotted cats with jaguarlike markings.
A third ocelot sighting reported on Friday by a homeowner who snapped some blurry photos of an odd-looking cat was probably a serval, an African cat popular in the pet trade, state officials said Saturday. The animal had long ears, long legs and appeared to have only solid spots instead of the solid spots and haloed spots on an ocelot.
On Nov. 19, it was a rare jaguar that was seen in the same part of the state — the first confirmed appearance of that elusive and endangered cat in Arizona since 2009. The jaguar is the third-largest feline after the tiger and the lion, and the only one found in the wild in the Western Hemisphere.
Donnie Fenn, a professional guide based in Benson, Ariz., who specializes in mountain lion hunts — which are fairly common in Arizona — was taking his 10-year-old daughter out on her first lion hunt that morning when his pack of eight hounds took off in a frenzy. Before he knew it, he said, the dogs had a creature cornered in a tree, which he saw from afar with a telephoto lens was not the mountain lion he was looking for but instead an endangered jaguar.
“I was scared,” Mr. Fenn said in a telephone interview on Friday. “I didn’t know if that thing was going to turn on me. I could feel its power. It was twice the size of a big mountain lion. It was definitely the experience of a lifetime.”
Mr. Feen said that his dogs were scratched pretty badly by the cornered jaguar, who probably had roamed north from Mexico.
In June, a helicopter pilot working along the border for the federal Department of Homeland Security reported seeing a jaguar in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, officials said. Because the pilot had previously seen mountain lions, which are sometimes confused by the non-experts with jaguars, and was able to hover about 100 feet above the spotted cat and clearly describe it, wildlife experts took the report seriously. But biologists who went to the scene about a week after the spotting could not find tracks, hair or droppings from the animal, making it an unconfirmed sighting.
Mr. Fenn, 32, made sure to confirm his run-in with the jaguar, which took place in an undisclosed mountain range in Cochise County. He crept up close after the jaguar was chased up a mesquite tree and took photos and a video of the animal. He also notified state wildlife officials, who were later able to find 15 hair samples left behind by the animal and a tree trunk that showed signs of being climbed by a large clawed animal. Experts believe Mr. Fenn saw an adult male jaguar that weighed about 200 pounds.
“What’s so appealing to the general public is that jaguars are so exotic,” said Mark Hart, a spokesman for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. “They are jungle cats from Central and South America, and the fact that they might be in our state really gets people’s attention. It’s a romantic notion.”
Mr. Fenn, whose Chasin’ Tail Guide Service offers five-day mountain lion hunts for $3,500, said his Web site has been barraged with hits since the jaguar sighting. And his daughter Alyson, initially disappointed that she did not get her first mountain lion kill that day, now realizes that seeing a jaguar was memorable, too.
“It was quite an experience, even if she didn’t get to kill anything,” Mr. Fenn said.
PHOENIX — The Serengeti is associated with safaris. The Maasai Mara, too. But southern Arizona?
A series of recent sightings of rare wild cats in the southern part of the state has prompted considerable excitement among wildlife experts and camera-toting naturalists alike. Twice this year, the Arizona Game and Fish Department has announced sightings in the southeast of endangered ocelots, small spotted cats with jaguarlike markings.
A third ocelot sighting reported on Friday by a homeowner who snapped some blurry photos of an odd-looking cat was probably a serval, an African cat popular in the pet trade, state officials said Saturday. The animal had long ears, long legs and appeared to have only solid spots instead of the solid spots and haloed spots on an ocelot.
On Nov. 19, it was a rare jaguar that was seen in the same part of the state — the first confirmed appearance of that elusive and endangered cat in Arizona since 2009. The jaguar is the third-largest feline after the tiger and the lion, and the only one found in the wild in the Western Hemisphere.
Donnie Fenn, a professional guide based in Benson, Ariz., who specializes in mountain lion hunts — which are fairly common in Arizona — was taking his 10-year-old daughter out on her first lion hunt that morning when his pack of eight hounds took off in a frenzy. Before he knew it, he said, the dogs had a creature cornered in a tree, which he saw from afar with a telephoto lens was not the mountain lion he was looking for but instead an endangered jaguar.
“I was scared,” Mr. Fenn said in a telephone interview on Friday. “I didn’t know if that thing was going to turn on me. I could feel its power. It was twice the size of a big mountain lion. It was definitely the experience of a lifetime.”
Mr. Feen said that his dogs were scratched pretty badly by the cornered jaguar, who probably had roamed north from Mexico.
In June, a helicopter pilot working along the border for the federal Department of Homeland Security reported seeing a jaguar in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, officials said. Because the pilot had previously seen mountain lions, which are sometimes confused by the non-experts with jaguars, and was able to hover about 100 feet above the spotted cat and clearly describe it, wildlife experts took the report seriously. But biologists who went to the scene about a week after the spotting could not find tracks, hair or droppings from the animal, making it an unconfirmed sighting.
Mr. Fenn, 32, made sure to confirm his run-in with the jaguar, which took place in an undisclosed mountain range in Cochise County. He crept up close after the jaguar was chased up a mesquite tree and took photos and a video of the animal. He also notified state wildlife officials, who were later able to find 15 hair samples left behind by the animal and a tree trunk that showed signs of being climbed by a large clawed animal. Experts believe Mr. Fenn saw an adult male jaguar that weighed about 200 pounds.
“What’s so appealing to the general public is that jaguars are so exotic,” said Mark Hart, a spokesman for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. “They are jungle cats from Central and South America, and the fact that they might be in our state really gets people’s attention. It’s a romantic notion.”
Mr. Fenn, whose Chasin’ Tail Guide Service offers five-day mountain lion hunts for $3,500, said his Web site has been barraged with hits since the jaguar sighting. And his daughter Alyson, initially disappointed that she did not get her first mountain lion kill that day, now realizes that seeing a jaguar was memorable, too.
“It was quite an experience, even if she didn’t get to kill anything,” Mr. Fenn said.
Kennedy Center Honors Five Virtuosos
Kennedy Center Honors Five Virtuosos
WASHINGTON — On Nov. 29, 1962, a 7-year-old named Yo-Yo Ma gave a dazzling cello performance here at a televised concert that kicked off fund-raising efforts to build what is now the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
That connection came full circle this weekend, as a long roster of luminaries gathered at the White House and the State Department to celebrate the lives and careers of the five performers selected to receive the Kennedy Center Honors, including Mr. Ma, now 56.
Along with Mr. Ma, the actress Meryl Streep, the singer and songwriter Neil Diamond, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and Barbara Cook, the Broadway and cabaret singer, received the 34th annual honors for lifetime achievement in the performing arts.
On Sunday night, Herbie Hancock, Sarah Jessica Parker, Elmo and Robert De Niro, a 2009 Kennedy Center recipient, celebrated the event at a Kennedy Center gala, which is scheduled to be broadcast Dec. 27 on CBS.
At the reception on Sunday, President Obama illustrated the vast appeal of Mr. Diamond’s lyrics. “Everybody sings Neil Diamond songs,” he said, “no matter how many drinks they’ve had.”
The honorees accepted their medallions during a dinner at the State Department on Saturday night, applauded by guests including former President Bill Clinton, the actress Anne Hathaway, the comedian Stephen Colbert and the soprano Renee Fleming.
Colleagues, friends and — as Mr. Clinton, himself a saxophonist, described his relationship with Mr. Rollins — “just a fan,” offered toasts, praising the honorees for enduring at the top of their crafts.
Over a career that has spanned more than six decades, Mr. Rollins, 81, created a signature improvisational style with jazz standards like “St. Thomas” and “Oleo.”
The versatility that Ms. Streep, 62, has shown in roles including a Holocaust survivor in “Sophie’s Choice” and a demanding fashion editor in “The Devil Wears Prada,” have earned her the most Academy Award nominations of any actress and the National Medal of Arts.
At the dinner, the writer and director Nora Ephron marveled at Ms. Streep’s ability to transform into the characters she portrays, offering a word of caution to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about Ms. Streep, who played Ms. Ephron in “Heartburn.”
“When you met her tonight — and I’m sure you thought she was charming — she was just soaking you up,” Ms. Ephron said. “And someday, you will see her in a movie about your life and discover the horrifying truth that she is better at being you than you are.”
The award comes during a big year for Mr. Diamond, 70, who was engaged in September and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March. He wrote “Sweet Caroline” for Caroline Kennedy after her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, and the song has become the unofficial anthem of several major league sports teams.
Ms. Cook, 84, has been one of the premier interpreters of musical theater works since her breakthrough performance on Broadway in 1956 as Cunégonde in “Candide.”
At the gala on Sunday, Matthew Broderick recalled taking Ms. Parker to see Ms. Cook perform at the Café Carlyle early in their courtship.
“I don’t think he knew at the time the sort of special memory he was creating at the time for us,” said Ms. Parker, who has been married to Mr. Broderick for 14 years.
Mr. Broderick interrupted, “Oh, I knew.”
Mr. Colbert spoke glowingly of Mr. Ma on Saturday.
“He’s the greatest cellist in the world, but you can tell that that doesn’t really mean that much to him. What means something to him is actually playing the cello,” he said. “He’s above my critique.”
WASHINGTON — On Nov. 29, 1962, a 7-year-old named Yo-Yo Ma gave a dazzling cello performance here at a televised concert that kicked off fund-raising efforts to build what is now the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
That connection came full circle this weekend, as a long roster of luminaries gathered at the White House and the State Department to celebrate the lives and careers of the five performers selected to receive the Kennedy Center Honors, including Mr. Ma, now 56.
Along with Mr. Ma, the actress Meryl Streep, the singer and songwriter Neil Diamond, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and Barbara Cook, the Broadway and cabaret singer, received the 34th annual honors for lifetime achievement in the performing arts.
On Sunday night, Herbie Hancock, Sarah Jessica Parker, Elmo and Robert De Niro, a 2009 Kennedy Center recipient, celebrated the event at a Kennedy Center gala, which is scheduled to be broadcast Dec. 27 on CBS.
At the reception on Sunday, President Obama illustrated the vast appeal of Mr. Diamond’s lyrics. “Everybody sings Neil Diamond songs,” he said, “no matter how many drinks they’ve had.”
The honorees accepted their medallions during a dinner at the State Department on Saturday night, applauded by guests including former President Bill Clinton, the actress Anne Hathaway, the comedian Stephen Colbert and the soprano Renee Fleming.
Colleagues, friends and — as Mr. Clinton, himself a saxophonist, described his relationship with Mr. Rollins — “just a fan,” offered toasts, praising the honorees for enduring at the top of their crafts.
Over a career that has spanned more than six decades, Mr. Rollins, 81, created a signature improvisational style with jazz standards like “St. Thomas” and “Oleo.”
The versatility that Ms. Streep, 62, has shown in roles including a Holocaust survivor in “Sophie’s Choice” and a demanding fashion editor in “The Devil Wears Prada,” have earned her the most Academy Award nominations of any actress and the National Medal of Arts.
At the dinner, the writer and director Nora Ephron marveled at Ms. Streep’s ability to transform into the characters she portrays, offering a word of caution to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about Ms. Streep, who played Ms. Ephron in “Heartburn.”
“When you met her tonight — and I’m sure you thought she was charming — she was just soaking you up,” Ms. Ephron said. “And someday, you will see her in a movie about your life and discover the horrifying truth that she is better at being you than you are.”
The award comes during a big year for Mr. Diamond, 70, who was engaged in September and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March. He wrote “Sweet Caroline” for Caroline Kennedy after her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, and the song has become the unofficial anthem of several major league sports teams.
Ms. Cook, 84, has been one of the premier interpreters of musical theater works since her breakthrough performance on Broadway in 1956 as Cunégonde in “Candide.”
At the gala on Sunday, Matthew Broderick recalled taking Ms. Parker to see Ms. Cook perform at the Café Carlyle early in their courtship.
“I don’t think he knew at the time the sort of special memory he was creating at the time for us,” said Ms. Parker, who has been married to Mr. Broderick for 14 years.
Mr. Broderick interrupted, “Oh, I knew.”
Mr. Colbert spoke glowingly of Mr. Ma on Saturday.
“He’s the greatest cellist in the world, but you can tell that that doesn’t really mean that much to him. What means something to him is actually playing the cello,” he said. “He’s above my critique.”
Kennedy Center Honors Five Virtuosos
Kennedy Center Honors Five Virtuosos
WASHINGTON — On Nov. 29, 1962, a 7-year-old named Yo-Yo Ma gave a dazzling cello performance here at a televised concert that kicked off fund-raising efforts to build what is now the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
That connection came full circle this weekend, as a long roster of luminaries gathered at the White House and the State Department to celebrate the lives and careers of the five performers selected to receive the Kennedy Center Honors, including Mr. Ma, now 56.
Along with Mr. Ma, the actress Meryl Streep, the singer and songwriter Neil Diamond, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and Barbara Cook, the Broadway and cabaret singer, received the 34th annual honors for lifetime achievement in the performing arts.
On Sunday night, Herbie Hancock, Sarah Jessica Parker, Elmo and Robert De Niro, a 2009 Kennedy Center recipient, celebrated the event at a Kennedy Center gala, which is scheduled to be broadcast Dec. 27 on CBS.
At the reception on Sunday, President Obama illustrated the vast appeal of Mr. Diamond’s lyrics. “Everybody sings Neil Diamond songs,” he said, “no matter how many drinks they’ve had.”
The honorees accepted their medallions during a dinner at the State Department on Saturday night, applauded by guests including former President Bill Clinton, the actress Anne Hathaway, the comedian Stephen Colbert and the soprano Renee Fleming.
Colleagues, friends and — as Mr. Clinton, himself a saxophonist, described his relationship with Mr. Rollins — “just a fan,” offered toasts, praising the honorees for enduring at the top of their crafts.
Over a career that has spanned more than six decades, Mr. Rollins, 81, created a signature improvisational style with jazz standards like “St. Thomas” and “Oleo.”
The versatility that Ms. Streep, 62, has shown in roles including a Holocaust survivor in “Sophie’s Choice” and a demanding fashion editor in “The Devil Wears Prada,” have earned her the most Academy Award nominations of any actress and the National Medal of Arts.
At the dinner, the writer and director Nora Ephron marveled at Ms. Streep’s ability to transform into the characters she portrays, offering a word of caution to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about Ms. Streep, who played Ms. Ephron in “Heartburn.”
“When you met her tonight — and I’m sure you thought she was charming — she was just soaking you up,” Ms. Ephron said. “And someday, you will see her in a movie about your life and discover the horrifying truth that she is better at being you than you are.”
The award comes during a big year for Mr. Diamond, 70, who was engaged in September and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March. He wrote “Sweet Caroline” for Caroline Kennedy after her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, and the song has become the unofficial anthem of several major league sports teams.
Ms. Cook, 84, has been one of the premier interpreters of musical theater works since her breakthrough performance on Broadway in 1956 as Cunégonde in “Candide.”
At the gala on Sunday, Matthew Broderick recalled taking Ms. Parker to see Ms. Cook perform at the Café Carlyle early in their courtship.
“I don’t think he knew at the time the sort of special memory he was creating at the time for us,” said Ms. Parker, who has been married to Mr. Broderick for 14 years.
Mr. Broderick interrupted, “Oh, I knew.”
Mr. Colbert spoke glowingly of Mr. Ma on Saturday.
“He’s the greatest cellist in the world, but you can tell that that doesn’t really mean that much to him. What means something to him is actually playing the cello,” he said. “He’s above my critique.”
WASHINGTON — On Nov. 29, 1962, a 7-year-old named Yo-Yo Ma gave a dazzling cello performance here at a televised concert that kicked off fund-raising efforts to build what is now the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
That connection came full circle this weekend, as a long roster of luminaries gathered at the White House and the State Department to celebrate the lives and careers of the five performers selected to receive the Kennedy Center Honors, including Mr. Ma, now 56.
Along with Mr. Ma, the actress Meryl Streep, the singer and songwriter Neil Diamond, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and Barbara Cook, the Broadway and cabaret singer, received the 34th annual honors for lifetime achievement in the performing arts.
On Sunday night, Herbie Hancock, Sarah Jessica Parker, Elmo and Robert De Niro, a 2009 Kennedy Center recipient, celebrated the event at a Kennedy Center gala, which is scheduled to be broadcast Dec. 27 on CBS.
At the reception on Sunday, President Obama illustrated the vast appeal of Mr. Diamond’s lyrics. “Everybody sings Neil Diamond songs,” he said, “no matter how many drinks they’ve had.”
The honorees accepted their medallions during a dinner at the State Department on Saturday night, applauded by guests including former President Bill Clinton, the actress Anne Hathaway, the comedian Stephen Colbert and the soprano Renee Fleming.
Colleagues, friends and — as Mr. Clinton, himself a saxophonist, described his relationship with Mr. Rollins — “just a fan,” offered toasts, praising the honorees for enduring at the top of their crafts.
Over a career that has spanned more than six decades, Mr. Rollins, 81, created a signature improvisational style with jazz standards like “St. Thomas” and “Oleo.”
The versatility that Ms. Streep, 62, has shown in roles including a Holocaust survivor in “Sophie’s Choice” and a demanding fashion editor in “The Devil Wears Prada,” have earned her the most Academy Award nominations of any actress and the National Medal of Arts.
At the dinner, the writer and director Nora Ephron marveled at Ms. Streep’s ability to transform into the characters she portrays, offering a word of caution to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about Ms. Streep, who played Ms. Ephron in “Heartburn.”
“When you met her tonight — and I’m sure you thought she was charming — she was just soaking you up,” Ms. Ephron said. “And someday, you will see her in a movie about your life and discover the horrifying truth that she is better at being you than you are.”
The award comes during a big year for Mr. Diamond, 70, who was engaged in September and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March. He wrote “Sweet Caroline” for Caroline Kennedy after her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, and the song has become the unofficial anthem of several major league sports teams.
Ms. Cook, 84, has been one of the premier interpreters of musical theater works since her breakthrough performance on Broadway in 1956 as Cunégonde in “Candide.”
At the gala on Sunday, Matthew Broderick recalled taking Ms. Parker to see Ms. Cook perform at the Café Carlyle early in their courtship.
“I don’t think he knew at the time the sort of special memory he was creating at the time for us,” said Ms. Parker, who has been married to Mr. Broderick for 14 years.
Mr. Broderick interrupted, “Oh, I knew.”
Mr. Colbert spoke glowingly of Mr. Ma on Saturday.
“He’s the greatest cellist in the world, but you can tell that that doesn’t really mean that much to him. What means something to him is actually playing the cello,” he said. “He’s above my critique.”
Vice President of Harvard Will Lead Bates College
Vice President of Harvard Will Lead Bates College
Clayton Spencer, the vice president for policy at Harvard University, has been named the eighth president of Bates College, a small liberal arts institution in Lewiston, Me., effective July 1.
Ms. Spencer has served at Harvard since 1997, under four presidents; before that she was chief education counsel in the United States Senate.
Born in North Carolina, Ms. Spencer graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, where she serves as a trustee, and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, winner of the moot court competition and chairwoman of the Public Interest Council. She practiced law at Ropes & Gray in Boston, then served as an assistant United States attorney in Boston before going to work on Capitol Hill.
Ms. Spencer, 56, whose full name is Ava Clayton Spencer, is a second-generation college president. Her father, Samuel Reid Spencer Jr., a Harvard-educated historian, served as president of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., from 1957 to 1968 and Davidson College in North Carolina from 1968 to 1983.
Ms. Spencer will succeed Nancy J. Cable, who has served Bates as interim president since July 1, when Elaine Hansen, the previous president, resigned to become the executive director of the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University.
Clayton Spencer, the vice president for policy at Harvard University, has been named the eighth president of Bates College, a small liberal arts institution in Lewiston, Me., effective July 1.
Ms. Spencer has served at Harvard since 1997, under four presidents; before that she was chief education counsel in the United States Senate.
Born in North Carolina, Ms. Spencer graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, where she serves as a trustee, and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, winner of the moot court competition and chairwoman of the Public Interest Council. She practiced law at Ropes & Gray in Boston, then served as an assistant United States attorney in Boston before going to work on Capitol Hill.
Ms. Spencer, 56, whose full name is Ava Clayton Spencer, is a second-generation college president. Her father, Samuel Reid Spencer Jr., a Harvard-educated historian, served as president of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., from 1957 to 1968 and Davidson College in North Carolina from 1968 to 1983.
Ms. Spencer will succeed Nancy J. Cable, who has served Bates as interim president since July 1, when Elaine Hansen, the previous president, resigned to become the executive director of the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University.
Private-College Presidents Getting Higher Salaries
Private-College Presidents Getting Higher Salaries
Presidents at 36 private colleges earned more than $1 million in 2009, up from 33 the previous year, according to a study by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The annual study, using data from federal tax documents, found that the median compensation — including salary and benefits — was $385,909, a 2.2 percent increase from the previous year. The median base salary increased by 2.8 percent to $294,489.
The highest-paid president in 2009 was Constantine Papadakis of Drexel University. Mr. Papadakis, who died in April that year, earned $4,912,127, most of it from life insurance and previously accrued compensation paid to his widow. His base salary was $195,726.
The next three top earners — William R. Brody of Johns Hopkins University ($3,821,886); Donald V. DeRosa of University of the Pacific ($2,357,540); and Henry S. Bienen of Northwestern University ($2,240,775) — also left their presidencies.
The three highest earners who remained as chief executives were Nicholas S. Zeppos of Vanderbilt University ($1,890,274); Charles H. Polk of Mountain State University, in West Virginia ($1,843,746); and Shirley Ann Jackson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ($1,771,877).
While the private colleges in the study — The Chronicle’s similar study of salaries at public universities appears in the spring — spent an average of 0.4 percent of their budgets on presidential salaries, there were outliers.
Mr. Polk’s $1.8 million compensation amounted to 3.5 percent of the budget at Mountain State University, which has had accreditation problems and a low 2.5 percent graduation rate for first-time, full-time students, according to The Chronicle’s report.
Although presidential pay generally has little effect on the budget, its symbolic importance makes it a likely target of criticism at a time when pay inequities have become a rallying point for the Occupy protest movement, Jack Stripling, a reporter at The Chronicle said in a call with journalists on Friday. He pointed out that Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, came under fire from an Occupy group last month even though her salary of $1.3 million is less than 1 percent of the institutional budget.
While the typical president earned 3.7 times as much as the average pay and benefits of a full professor at the same institution, the study found great variations. Kevin J. Manning at Stevenson University in Maryland earned $1,491,655 — 16.1 times as much as the pay and benefits of the average full professor there.
Five other presidents earned at least 10 times as much as a typical professor at their colleges: Ms. Jackson of Rensselaer; Mr. Zeppos of Vanderbilt; Frances Lucas of Millsaps College, in Jackson, Miss.; Jehuda Reinharz of Brandeis University (he is no longer president); and J. Timothy Cloyd of Hendrix College, in Conway, Ark.
At the other end, Patrick E. White at Wabash College in Indiana earned $239,207, about twice the average professor’s compensation at the college.
The Chronicle’s interactive graphic on presidential compensation is at chronicle.com/compensation. Salaries for private college presidents have grown far more, adjusted for inflation, in recent years than professorial pay.
In the decade from 1999-2000 to 2009-10, average presidential pay at the 50 wealthiest universities increased by 75 percent, to $876,792, while professorial pay increased 14 percent, to $179, 970.
“The job of college president has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, as have the demands,” David L. Warren, the president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said in a statement. “There is just a small pool of candidates who possess the skill set that is required and are willing to take on the stressful 24/7 nature of the position.”
Pressure on private college presidents is increasing on many fronts, Mr. Warren said, including budgetary challenges, uncertainty about the sustainability of the traditional financial model, calls for further regulation, greater competition, growing student financial need, and consumer concerns about rising tuition.
A study released last year by the Council of Independent Colleges found that less than one in four chief academic officers at private colleges planned to pursue a presidency.
Presidents at 36 private colleges earned more than $1 million in 2009, up from 33 the previous year, according to a study by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The annual study, using data from federal tax documents, found that the median compensation — including salary and benefits — was $385,909, a 2.2 percent increase from the previous year. The median base salary increased by 2.8 percent to $294,489.
The highest-paid president in 2009 was Constantine Papadakis of Drexel University. Mr. Papadakis, who died in April that year, earned $4,912,127, most of it from life insurance and previously accrued compensation paid to his widow. His base salary was $195,726.
The next three top earners — William R. Brody of Johns Hopkins University ($3,821,886); Donald V. DeRosa of University of the Pacific ($2,357,540); and Henry S. Bienen of Northwestern University ($2,240,775) — also left their presidencies.
The three highest earners who remained as chief executives were Nicholas S. Zeppos of Vanderbilt University ($1,890,274); Charles H. Polk of Mountain State University, in West Virginia ($1,843,746); and Shirley Ann Jackson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ($1,771,877).
While the private colleges in the study — The Chronicle’s similar study of salaries at public universities appears in the spring — spent an average of 0.4 percent of their budgets on presidential salaries, there were outliers.
Mr. Polk’s $1.8 million compensation amounted to 3.5 percent of the budget at Mountain State University, which has had accreditation problems and a low 2.5 percent graduation rate for first-time, full-time students, according to The Chronicle’s report.
Although presidential pay generally has little effect on the budget, its symbolic importance makes it a likely target of criticism at a time when pay inequities have become a rallying point for the Occupy protest movement, Jack Stripling, a reporter at The Chronicle said in a call with journalists on Friday. He pointed out that Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, came under fire from an Occupy group last month even though her salary of $1.3 million is less than 1 percent of the institutional budget.
While the typical president earned 3.7 times as much as the average pay and benefits of a full professor at the same institution, the study found great variations. Kevin J. Manning at Stevenson University in Maryland earned $1,491,655 — 16.1 times as much as the pay and benefits of the average full professor there.
Five other presidents earned at least 10 times as much as a typical professor at their colleges: Ms. Jackson of Rensselaer; Mr. Zeppos of Vanderbilt; Frances Lucas of Millsaps College, in Jackson, Miss.; Jehuda Reinharz of Brandeis University (he is no longer president); and J. Timothy Cloyd of Hendrix College, in Conway, Ark.
At the other end, Patrick E. White at Wabash College in Indiana earned $239,207, about twice the average professor’s compensation at the college.
The Chronicle’s interactive graphic on presidential compensation is at chronicle.com/compensation. Salaries for private college presidents have grown far more, adjusted for inflation, in recent years than professorial pay.
In the decade from 1999-2000 to 2009-10, average presidential pay at the 50 wealthiest universities increased by 75 percent, to $876,792, while professorial pay increased 14 percent, to $179, 970.
“The job of college president has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, as have the demands,” David L. Warren, the president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said in a statement. “There is just a small pool of candidates who possess the skill set that is required and are willing to take on the stressful 24/7 nature of the position.”
Pressure on private college presidents is increasing on many fronts, Mr. Warren said, including budgetary challenges, uncertainty about the sustainability of the traditional financial model, calls for further regulation, greater competition, growing student financial need, and consumer concerns about rising tuition.
A study released last year by the Council of Independent Colleges found that less than one in four chief academic officers at private colleges planned to pursue a presidency.
Plunging Deep (in Pockets) to See Titanic at 100
Plunging Deep (in Pockets) to See Titanic at 100
Down, down, down you go, for two and a half hours, jammed with two other people in a tiny submersible, all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — and all for a glimpse, through a five- or eight-inch porthole, of the ravaged remains of the once-grand ship where the Astors and the Strauses played, dined and, in some cases, died.
The trip is not for the claustrophobic, nor the 99 percent: a two-week cruise that includes one dive, lasting eight to 10 hours, costs $60,000.
But for fans of the Titanic, no price or privation is too great — especially with the 100th anniversary of the sinking coming up on April 15.
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Renata Rojas, a banker in New York City, said of diving more than two miles down to the muddy seabed. “I’ve been obsessed with the Titanic since I was 10 years old.”
With the centennial in mind, at least 80 people are expected to take the plunge down to the wreck, according to the company that runs the trips, Deep Ocean Expeditions.
And while this may be the most extreme observance in the works, there are myriad others: cruise ships will sail to the exact spot in the Atlantic where more than 1,500 Titanic passengers drowned; people will hold Titanic-themed dinner parties, complete with napkins bearing the flag of the White Star Line; and the Titanic Historical Society will hold a gala dinner at which people are welcome to dress as an officer, a crew member or a passenger “to create the ambience of a festive maiden voyage.”
Already, you can buy centennial books, jewelry and other memorabilia galore.
As for an undersea visit to the ship itself, this coming season may be your last chance. Although diving trips have been offered sporadically to paying tourists since the wreck was discovered in 1985, Deep Ocean Expeditions says it plans to discontinue the wreck tours permanently, no doubt to the disappointment of future generations of Titanic devotees and Leonardo DiCaprio fans.
“This is our last year of passenger operations,” said Rob McCallum, the expedition leader. “We won’t head to Titanic again.”
Next summer, however, passengers will travel in Russian Mir (“peace”) submersibles that can withstand the deep’s crushing pressures. Inside, a pilot and two tourists occupy a space less than seven feet wide, wearing layers of clothing to ward off the cold. Travelers bring a light lunch but are reminded that there are no toilet facilities.
“Your Mir will glide over the top of the wreck to look down into the cavern where Titanic’s famous grand staircase was once located,” Deep Ocean Expeditions promises on its Web site. “You will also spend time exploring the iconic bridge and promenade areas.”
Such a trip is not without its dangers — two people died in a submersible that once got entangled in a wreck off Florida — or without controversy. Scientists and scholars worry about new damage to the famous ship and new dishonor to a gravesite strewn with the shoes and other belongings of so many drowned people. However, they see the centennial as not only a potential threat but also an opportunity to lobby for a global accord that would establish rules for the Titanic’s protection.
“We need a basic agreement,” said James P. Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors the wreck.
Already, the site is quite littered. Passing cruise ships dump beer cans and garbage bags. On the seabed, the mini-submarines have set up memorial plaques with artificial flowers. At times, the subs have also accidentally bumped into the increasingly fragile wreck.
“It could get real crowded out there,” Dr. Delgado said of the centennial rush. Despite the legitimacy of wide public interest, he added, “there are some things that shouldn’t happen,” like dumping trash and leaving behind equipment.
The Titanic has long fascinated, because it symbolized the end of an era of technological innocence and seemed like a cosmic rebuke to privilege. Ten millionaires were on board, including the financier John Jacob Astor IV, the industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim and Isidor Straus of Macy’s, the world’s largest department store. All three perished with the ship.
Down, down, down you go, for two and a half hours, jammed with two other people in a tiny submersible, all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — and all for a glimpse, through a five- or eight-inch porthole, of the ravaged remains of the once-grand ship where the Astors and the Strauses played, dined and, in some cases, died.
The trip is not for the claustrophobic, nor the 99 percent: a two-week cruise that includes one dive, lasting eight to 10 hours, costs $60,000.
But for fans of the Titanic, no price or privation is too great — especially with the 100th anniversary of the sinking coming up on April 15.
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Renata Rojas, a banker in New York City, said of diving more than two miles down to the muddy seabed. “I’ve been obsessed with the Titanic since I was 10 years old.”
With the centennial in mind, at least 80 people are expected to take the plunge down to the wreck, according to the company that runs the trips, Deep Ocean Expeditions.
And while this may be the most extreme observance in the works, there are myriad others: cruise ships will sail to the exact spot in the Atlantic where more than 1,500 Titanic passengers drowned; people will hold Titanic-themed dinner parties, complete with napkins bearing the flag of the White Star Line; and the Titanic Historical Society will hold a gala dinner at which people are welcome to dress as an officer, a crew member or a passenger “to create the ambience of a festive maiden voyage.”
Already, you can buy centennial books, jewelry and other memorabilia galore.
As for an undersea visit to the ship itself, this coming season may be your last chance. Although diving trips have been offered sporadically to paying tourists since the wreck was discovered in 1985, Deep Ocean Expeditions says it plans to discontinue the wreck tours permanently, no doubt to the disappointment of future generations of Titanic devotees and Leonardo DiCaprio fans.
“This is our last year of passenger operations,” said Rob McCallum, the expedition leader. “We won’t head to Titanic again.”
Next summer, however, passengers will travel in Russian Mir (“peace”) submersibles that can withstand the deep’s crushing pressures. Inside, a pilot and two tourists occupy a space less than seven feet wide, wearing layers of clothing to ward off the cold. Travelers bring a light lunch but are reminded that there are no toilet facilities.
“Your Mir will glide over the top of the wreck to look down into the cavern where Titanic’s famous grand staircase was once located,” Deep Ocean Expeditions promises on its Web site. “You will also spend time exploring the iconic bridge and promenade areas.”
Such a trip is not without its dangers — two people died in a submersible that once got entangled in a wreck off Florida — or without controversy. Scientists and scholars worry about new damage to the famous ship and new dishonor to a gravesite strewn with the shoes and other belongings of so many drowned people. However, they see the centennial as not only a potential threat but also an opportunity to lobby for a global accord that would establish rules for the Titanic’s protection.
“We need a basic agreement,” said James P. Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors the wreck.
Already, the site is quite littered. Passing cruise ships dump beer cans and garbage bags. On the seabed, the mini-submarines have set up memorial plaques with artificial flowers. At times, the subs have also accidentally bumped into the increasingly fragile wreck.
“It could get real crowded out there,” Dr. Delgado said of the centennial rush. Despite the legitimacy of wide public interest, he added, “there are some things that shouldn’t happen,” like dumping trash and leaving behind equipment.
The Titanic has long fascinated, because it symbolized the end of an era of technological innocence and seemed like a cosmic rebuke to privilege. Ten millionaires were on board, including the financier John Jacob Astor IV, the industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim and Isidor Straus of Macy’s, the world’s largest department store. All three perished with the ship.
Charismatic Church Leader, Dogged by Scandal, to Stop Preaching for Now
Charismatic Church Leader, Dogged by Scandal, to Stop Preaching for Now
LITHONIA, Ga. — At the height of his power, Bishop Eddie L. Long would pack tens of thousands of people into his megachurch in the suburbs of Atlanta.
With his well-cut suits, passion for Bentleys, and dynamic, accessible style of preaching, he quickly climbed the list of the nation’s most powerful religious leaders.
He built his ministry, which stretches to Kenya and other countries, on a strong message of conservative Christianity that included promises of prosperity and attacks on homosexuality.
But life inside Bishop Long’s home had been crumbling. And on Sunday, members of his dwindling congregation heard news they had been bracing for.
Their charismatic bishop, who in May settled with five young men who accused him of sexual coercion and who has fought a series of other legal battles, said he was temporarily stepping away from the pulpit to try to save his marriage.
The announcement came after his wife, Vanessa Long, 53, filed for divorce Thursday. Friday, she recanted after “prayerful reflection” but later in the day changed her mind and said she did intend to end their marriage of 21 years. They have four children.
“Vanessa and I are working together in seeking God’s will in our current circumstances,” Bishop Long, 58, said in a statement issued by the church, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.
During services on Sunday, he told congregants that he was still their senior pastor and would continue to provide spiritual direction, but that he needed time to take care of “some family business.” Members attending services pledged support and said they would stay until his return.
“He needs to be with his family,” said Marilyn Arnold, a business manager. “It’s hard on his family. When he comes back, we’ll be here.”
But not everyone remains a believer. Valencia Miller, a property manager in Lithonia, said she left the church after the young men who accused the bishop of sexual impropriety came forward.
“A lot of us left. I mean, a lot,” she said in an interview Sunday.
Like others, she hopes that Bishop Long turns this temporary break into a permanent one.
“The church needs a cleansing,” she said. “I’m real disappointed. He was a man we all looked up to.”
Bishop Long took over the congregation in 1987 when it had a few hundred members. He built a following of 25,000, according to the church’s Web site, and reached millions more on TV.
Just after Easter, Bishop Long settled a lawsuit in which young men claimed that the pastor offered gifts, trips, and emotional and spiritual guidance that eventually led to sexual relations. One of the young men, Maurice Robinson, said in court records that his relationship with Bishop Long began when he was 15 and that on a trip to New Zealand the two engaged in sexual acts.
Bishop Long initially vowed to fight the charges, proclaiming his innocence and comparing himself to David who fought Goliath.
“I have five rocks and I haven’t thrown one yet,” he said when the charges were revealed.
Details of the settlement were to be kept secret, but people with knowledge of the case have put it at several million dollars paid over a period of years.
Some of the men have since spoken out, so lawyers for the church have tried to get part of the money returned, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
There have been other legal battles. Ten former members who attended church investment seminars are suing him, claiming he coerced them into investment deals that cost them their retirement savings. He recently reached a settlement in a lawsuit over a $2 million bank loan, much of which went unpaid after a real estate deal that went bad.
In 2007, Bishop Long was one of a half-dozen ministers whose tax-exempt status was investigated by a Senate committee.
Support for Bishop Long continues to shrink. Just before the sexual coercion settlement was announced, the Rev. Bernice King, the youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., left the church.
On Sunday, a small group of antigay, religious protesters stood outside the church urging Bishop Long to step down permanently. They said they planned to return every month until he left.
“He has a serious moral character flaw,” said Isaac Richmond, 73, the minister at the Church of Human Development in Memphis. “It’s a moral question and he’s a religious figure. We don’t want that image as a role model for young men in the African-American community.”
The Rev. Timothy McDonald, a Baptist minister in Atlanta and chairman of the group African-American Ministers in Action, said that attendance at the church had dropped to 4,000 from about 8,000 at one point this year. Still, he said, it remains a powerful force. “Even on his bad days, if he gets 4,000 or 5,000, he’s still larger than 94 or 95 percent of most churches,” he said.
Frank Cook, a contract administrator who has been a member for 20 years, is not going anywhere. “It’s all about restoring, forgiving and loving,” he said in an interview on Sunday. “We love Bishop Long and we’re going to keep coming.”
LITHONIA, Ga. — At the height of his power, Bishop Eddie L. Long would pack tens of thousands of people into his megachurch in the suburbs of Atlanta.
With his well-cut suits, passion for Bentleys, and dynamic, accessible style of preaching, he quickly climbed the list of the nation’s most powerful religious leaders.
He built his ministry, which stretches to Kenya and other countries, on a strong message of conservative Christianity that included promises of prosperity and attacks on homosexuality.
But life inside Bishop Long’s home had been crumbling. And on Sunday, members of his dwindling congregation heard news they had been bracing for.
Their charismatic bishop, who in May settled with five young men who accused him of sexual coercion and who has fought a series of other legal battles, said he was temporarily stepping away from the pulpit to try to save his marriage.
The announcement came after his wife, Vanessa Long, 53, filed for divorce Thursday. Friday, she recanted after “prayerful reflection” but later in the day changed her mind and said she did intend to end their marriage of 21 years. They have four children.
“Vanessa and I are working together in seeking God’s will in our current circumstances,” Bishop Long, 58, said in a statement issued by the church, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.
During services on Sunday, he told congregants that he was still their senior pastor and would continue to provide spiritual direction, but that he needed time to take care of “some family business.” Members attending services pledged support and said they would stay until his return.
“He needs to be with his family,” said Marilyn Arnold, a business manager. “It’s hard on his family. When he comes back, we’ll be here.”
But not everyone remains a believer. Valencia Miller, a property manager in Lithonia, said she left the church after the young men who accused the bishop of sexual impropriety came forward.
“A lot of us left. I mean, a lot,” she said in an interview Sunday.
Like others, she hopes that Bishop Long turns this temporary break into a permanent one.
“The church needs a cleansing,” she said. “I’m real disappointed. He was a man we all looked up to.”
Bishop Long took over the congregation in 1987 when it had a few hundred members. He built a following of 25,000, according to the church’s Web site, and reached millions more on TV.
Just after Easter, Bishop Long settled a lawsuit in which young men claimed that the pastor offered gifts, trips, and emotional and spiritual guidance that eventually led to sexual relations. One of the young men, Maurice Robinson, said in court records that his relationship with Bishop Long began when he was 15 and that on a trip to New Zealand the two engaged in sexual acts.
Bishop Long initially vowed to fight the charges, proclaiming his innocence and comparing himself to David who fought Goliath.
“I have five rocks and I haven’t thrown one yet,” he said when the charges were revealed.
Details of the settlement were to be kept secret, but people with knowledge of the case have put it at several million dollars paid over a period of years.
Some of the men have since spoken out, so lawyers for the church have tried to get part of the money returned, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
There have been other legal battles. Ten former members who attended church investment seminars are suing him, claiming he coerced them into investment deals that cost them their retirement savings. He recently reached a settlement in a lawsuit over a $2 million bank loan, much of which went unpaid after a real estate deal that went bad.
In 2007, Bishop Long was one of a half-dozen ministers whose tax-exempt status was investigated by a Senate committee.
Support for Bishop Long continues to shrink. Just before the sexual coercion settlement was announced, the Rev. Bernice King, the youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., left the church.
On Sunday, a small group of antigay, religious protesters stood outside the church urging Bishop Long to step down permanently. They said they planned to return every month until he left.
“He has a serious moral character flaw,” said Isaac Richmond, 73, the minister at the Church of Human Development in Memphis. “It’s a moral question and he’s a religious figure. We don’t want that image as a role model for young men in the African-American community.”
The Rev. Timothy McDonald, a Baptist minister in Atlanta and chairman of the group African-American Ministers in Action, said that attendance at the church had dropped to 4,000 from about 8,000 at one point this year. Still, he said, it remains a powerful force. “Even on his bad days, if he gets 4,000 or 5,000, he’s still larger than 94 or 95 percent of most churches,” he said.
Frank Cook, a contract administrator who has been a member for 20 years, is not going anywhere. “It’s all about restoring, forgiving and loving,” he said in an interview on Sunday. “We love Bishop Long and we’re going to keep coming.”
Italy’s Leader Unveils Radical Austerity Measures
Italy’s Leader Unveils Radical Austerity Measures
ROME — Telling Italians that the fate of their country and the euro was at stake, Prime Minister Mario Monti unveiled a radical and ambitious package of spending cuts and tax increases on Sunday, including deeply unpopular moves like raising the country’s retirement age.
The measures are meant to slash the cost of government, combat tax evasion and step up economic growth, so the country can eliminate its budget deficit by 2013. Mr. Monti took the steps in an emergency decree, which means they will take effect before he presents them to Parliament for formal approval.
Delivered ahead of a crucial summit meeting of European leaders this week, the new measures are aimed at showing that Italy — which is seen as both too big to fail and too big to bail out should it default on its immense debts — is committed to getting its finances in order.
The hope is that they will take some of the market pressure off Italy, whose borrowing costs have been pushed up in recent weeks to levels that have led other European countries to seek bailouts; once Italy has shown it is committed to austerity, the European Union can move ahead with broader plans to shore up the euro.
“If you want, call these the ‘Save Italy’ measures,” Mr. Monti said in a news conference after a cabinet meeting on Sunday, less than three weeks after taking office. “I wanted to give you a message of grave concern but also of great hope,” he told Italians, adding that he would work to spread the sacrifices with “equity” across the society.
A former European commissioner with no experience in the trenches of the Italian Parliament, Mr. Monti is expected to present the measures to both houses on Monday. Though the Parliament voted confidence in his government of technocrats by a wide margin last month, many legislators are reluctant to push through measures that might hinder their chances for re-election.
There are other hurdles as well. Labor unions are opposed to raising the retirement age, and industrialists say the measures are weighted too heavily toward tax increases that could stifle growth.
Mr. Monti, who is both prime minister and finance minister, faces the challenge of satisfying the demands of European leaders while making clear to Italians that they must take responsibility for solving the country’s longstanding structural problems.
“The huge public debt of Italy isn’t the fault of Europe; it’s the fault of Italians, because in the past we didn’t pay enough attention to the well-being of the young and the future adults of Italy,” Mr. Monti said. Speaking of his proposals, he said, “We have had to share the sacrifices, but we have made great efforts to share them fairly.”
Among the new measures announced Sunday are sharp cuts to regional governments that could significantly change Italian politics by crimping the flow of patronage spending.
There appears to be little room now for traditional Italian political maneuvering. Though Italy’s economy is the third-largest in the euro zone, it has no forward momentum; economists expect it to contract in 2012 and stay flat in 2013. Meanwhile, the cost of servicing the country’s debts is claiming an ever larger share of its budget.
Mr. Monti must also convince risk-averse Italians that there is much at stake. Silvio Berlusconi, who was prime minister until a few weeks ago, repeatedly told his countrymen that the economy was fine, even though youth unemployment was high and rising, growth was flat and prices were outstripping wages.
“You will never hear me ask for a sacrifice because Europe asks for it, just as you will never hear me blame Europe for things that we should do and that are unpopular,” Mr. Monti said. “I would rather be considered unpopular, rather than Europe, because you can do without me, but not without Europe.”
Mr. Monti’s proposals include reintroducing an unpopular property tax that Mr. Berlusconi abolished in 2008 to fulfill a campaign promise. The new measures would also prohibit cash transactions above 1,000 euros ($1,340), in the hope of making tax evasion harder; raise the country’s value-added tax by two points to 23 percent starting in September; and give incentives to businesses to hire new workers.
The country’s new welfare minister, Elsa Fornero, a pension expert, choked with emotion at the news conference as she explained how Italians would be asked to sacrifice today in order to make the pension system less “arbitrary” and “more equitable” for future generations.
The standard retirement age, now 60 for many women and 65 for most men, would quickly rise to 62 and 66, with incentives to keep working until age 70; the standard age for women would eventually rise to match that for men. Pensions would be based on the number of years of contributions, not on the worker’s salary at the time of retirement, as is common now.
Before the cabinet meeting, Emma Marcegaglia, the president of the business organization Confindustria, called the austerity measures “heavy but indispensable,” adding that “the next 10 days will decide whether the euro will survive or not.”
But Ms. Marcegaglia added that her group had asked the government to recalibrate the mixture of tax increases and spending cuts once the measures have been passed.
The leader of the center-left Democratic Party, which supports the Monti government, called for more measures to fight tax evasion, a very widespread problem in Italy.
Susanna Camusso, the president of CGIL, Italy’s largest labor union, said the austerity measures “deal a very harsh blow to the incomes of pensioners.” Raising the retirement age would be “unsustainable for so many workers who would see their retirement prospects shaken and delayed by many years of work.”
ROME — Telling Italians that the fate of their country and the euro was at stake, Prime Minister Mario Monti unveiled a radical and ambitious package of spending cuts and tax increases on Sunday, including deeply unpopular moves like raising the country’s retirement age.
The measures are meant to slash the cost of government, combat tax evasion and step up economic growth, so the country can eliminate its budget deficit by 2013. Mr. Monti took the steps in an emergency decree, which means they will take effect before he presents them to Parliament for formal approval.
Delivered ahead of a crucial summit meeting of European leaders this week, the new measures are aimed at showing that Italy — which is seen as both too big to fail and too big to bail out should it default on its immense debts — is committed to getting its finances in order.
The hope is that they will take some of the market pressure off Italy, whose borrowing costs have been pushed up in recent weeks to levels that have led other European countries to seek bailouts; once Italy has shown it is committed to austerity, the European Union can move ahead with broader plans to shore up the euro.
“If you want, call these the ‘Save Italy’ measures,” Mr. Monti said in a news conference after a cabinet meeting on Sunday, less than three weeks after taking office. “I wanted to give you a message of grave concern but also of great hope,” he told Italians, adding that he would work to spread the sacrifices with “equity” across the society.
A former European commissioner with no experience in the trenches of the Italian Parliament, Mr. Monti is expected to present the measures to both houses on Monday. Though the Parliament voted confidence in his government of technocrats by a wide margin last month, many legislators are reluctant to push through measures that might hinder their chances for re-election.
There are other hurdles as well. Labor unions are opposed to raising the retirement age, and industrialists say the measures are weighted too heavily toward tax increases that could stifle growth.
Mr. Monti, who is both prime minister and finance minister, faces the challenge of satisfying the demands of European leaders while making clear to Italians that they must take responsibility for solving the country’s longstanding structural problems.
“The huge public debt of Italy isn’t the fault of Europe; it’s the fault of Italians, because in the past we didn’t pay enough attention to the well-being of the young and the future adults of Italy,” Mr. Monti said. Speaking of his proposals, he said, “We have had to share the sacrifices, but we have made great efforts to share them fairly.”
Among the new measures announced Sunday are sharp cuts to regional governments that could significantly change Italian politics by crimping the flow of patronage spending.
There appears to be little room now for traditional Italian political maneuvering. Though Italy’s economy is the third-largest in the euro zone, it has no forward momentum; economists expect it to contract in 2012 and stay flat in 2013. Meanwhile, the cost of servicing the country’s debts is claiming an ever larger share of its budget.
Mr. Monti must also convince risk-averse Italians that there is much at stake. Silvio Berlusconi, who was prime minister until a few weeks ago, repeatedly told his countrymen that the economy was fine, even though youth unemployment was high and rising, growth was flat and prices were outstripping wages.
“You will never hear me ask for a sacrifice because Europe asks for it, just as you will never hear me blame Europe for things that we should do and that are unpopular,” Mr. Monti said. “I would rather be considered unpopular, rather than Europe, because you can do without me, but not without Europe.”
Mr. Monti’s proposals include reintroducing an unpopular property tax that Mr. Berlusconi abolished in 2008 to fulfill a campaign promise. The new measures would also prohibit cash transactions above 1,000 euros ($1,340), in the hope of making tax evasion harder; raise the country’s value-added tax by two points to 23 percent starting in September; and give incentives to businesses to hire new workers.
The country’s new welfare minister, Elsa Fornero, a pension expert, choked with emotion at the news conference as she explained how Italians would be asked to sacrifice today in order to make the pension system less “arbitrary” and “more equitable” for future generations.
The standard retirement age, now 60 for many women and 65 for most men, would quickly rise to 62 and 66, with incentives to keep working until age 70; the standard age for women would eventually rise to match that for men. Pensions would be based on the number of years of contributions, not on the worker’s salary at the time of retirement, as is common now.
Before the cabinet meeting, Emma Marcegaglia, the president of the business organization Confindustria, called the austerity measures “heavy but indispensable,” adding that “the next 10 days will decide whether the euro will survive or not.”
But Ms. Marcegaglia added that her group had asked the government to recalibrate the mixture of tax increases and spending cuts once the measures have been passed.
The leader of the center-left Democratic Party, which supports the Monti government, called for more measures to fight tax evasion, a very widespread problem in Italy.
Susanna Camusso, the president of CGIL, Italy’s largest labor union, said the austerity measures “deal a very harsh blow to the incomes of pensioners.” Raising the retirement age would be “unsustainable for so many workers who would see their retirement prospects shaken and delayed by many years of work.”
Long Lines and Scalpers: Rock Star? No, Leonardo
Long Lines and Scalpers: Rock Star? No, Leonardo
LONDON — It’s hard to think of anything that Alexander McQueen and Leonardo da Vinci have in common. One made clothes out of feathers, flowers, shells and lace. The other painted intensely naturalistic religious scenes and animated portraits. But both, it seems, have the rare power to please modern crowds.
Working five centuries apart, McQueen, the British fashion designer who committed suicide last year when he was 40, and Leonardo, the Renaissance inventor, scientist, draftsman and painter whose Mona Lisa and “Last Supper” are the most famous paintings in the history of art, have been the subject of two wildly popular museum shows this year, captivating the public to a degree no one anticipated.
Crowds waited up to four hours to see “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” until it closed in August at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. An event like few others at the Met, the show was extended twice, finally staying open until midnight its last two days. By the time the show closed on Aug. 7, attendance had hit 661,509, putting it among the Met’s 10 most popular shows, with McQueen right up there with Tutankhamen, the Mona Lisa and Picasso.
Now lines are forming at dawn outside the National Gallery here with a tenacious public patiently hoping to get the only 500 tickets a day not sold in advance for its blockbuster exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,” which opened last month and focuses on that artist’s years as court painter to Ludovico Maria Sforza, the duke of Milan, in the 1480s and 1490s. Because the works are so fragile, the show cannot travel and is on view only through Feb. 5. Museum officials say they do not have an estimate of how many people will have seen the show by the time it closes.
The advance tickets, which went on sale online in May, sold out the first week the show opened, prompting box-office Web sites to start scalping $25 tickets for up to $400. Luke Syson, the exhibition’s curator, said he knew the show would be a hit, but he was still amazed by the public’s response. “I am struck by how we invent this figure for the 21st century,” he said one recent morning, sipping a cappuccino in the National Gallery’s cafeteria. “These pictures communicate something that’s just out of reach. There’s always more than meets the eye.”
On view are 7 of Leonardo’s 14 extant paintings, along with works by artists in the school of Leonardo da Vinci as well as Giampietrino’s reproduction of “The Last Supper,” on loan from the Royal Academy in London. There are also 60 Leonardo drawings, 33 of which are from the Royal Collection. (About 10 of the show’s drawings relate to the apostles depicted in “The Last Supper.”)
Five years in the making, the exhibition is not only a feat of scholarship but also of diplomacy, with loans from museums in St. Petersburg, Krakow, Paris, New York, Rome and Milan.
Even though the exhibition has been billed as a once-in-a-lifetime event and has received rave reviews, Mr. Syson said he “wanted to make sure this wouldn’t be a Marx Brothers moment where we tried to cram as many people into the show as possible.” Adamant that there be crowd control so people can actually see the works properly, officials have limited the visitors admitted to 180 every half-hour, although people may stay as long as they like. That figure is under the 230-person maximum capacity of the galleries.
Taking a page from the Met, the National Gallery has extended the show’s hours. It now stays open until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays (it generally closes at 6 p.m.) and two more hours on Sundays, now closing at 7. For the show’s last two weeks the museum will be open until 10 every night, Michelle Gonsalves, a National Gallery spokeswoman, said. And for the first time ever it will be open on New Year’s Day.
“We advised people to book early,” Ms. Gonsalves said. And while the museum is aware of the frenzy to get the remaining tickets, it was surprised to learn that they were being scalped. She said the National Gallery’s security officers could tell if tickets had been scalped, and that visitors found with such tickets would not be allowed into the show. “We can’t say how we can tell, but we are doing spot checks,” she explained.
Despite all the madness Mr. Syson, who is leaving the National Gallery to become curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Met in January, has a message he hopes the exhibition is delivering: Realizing that Leonardo has recently been prized more as a scientist than as an artist, he wants the public to see how painting was actually central to the master’s way of thinking. Judging by the show’s popularity, that point is getting across.
“I don’t mean to sound like a mystical priest, but on some level these paintings communicate soul to soul,” he said. “Great art does work on people in mysterious ways.”
LONDON — It’s hard to think of anything that Alexander McQueen and Leonardo da Vinci have in common. One made clothes out of feathers, flowers, shells and lace. The other painted intensely naturalistic religious scenes and animated portraits. But both, it seems, have the rare power to please modern crowds.
Working five centuries apart, McQueen, the British fashion designer who committed suicide last year when he was 40, and Leonardo, the Renaissance inventor, scientist, draftsman and painter whose Mona Lisa and “Last Supper” are the most famous paintings in the history of art, have been the subject of two wildly popular museum shows this year, captivating the public to a degree no one anticipated.
Crowds waited up to four hours to see “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” until it closed in August at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. An event like few others at the Met, the show was extended twice, finally staying open until midnight its last two days. By the time the show closed on Aug. 7, attendance had hit 661,509, putting it among the Met’s 10 most popular shows, with McQueen right up there with Tutankhamen, the Mona Lisa and Picasso.
Now lines are forming at dawn outside the National Gallery here with a tenacious public patiently hoping to get the only 500 tickets a day not sold in advance for its blockbuster exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,” which opened last month and focuses on that artist’s years as court painter to Ludovico Maria Sforza, the duke of Milan, in the 1480s and 1490s. Because the works are so fragile, the show cannot travel and is on view only through Feb. 5. Museum officials say they do not have an estimate of how many people will have seen the show by the time it closes.
The advance tickets, which went on sale online in May, sold out the first week the show opened, prompting box-office Web sites to start scalping $25 tickets for up to $400. Luke Syson, the exhibition’s curator, said he knew the show would be a hit, but he was still amazed by the public’s response. “I am struck by how we invent this figure for the 21st century,” he said one recent morning, sipping a cappuccino in the National Gallery’s cafeteria. “These pictures communicate something that’s just out of reach. There’s always more than meets the eye.”
On view are 7 of Leonardo’s 14 extant paintings, along with works by artists in the school of Leonardo da Vinci as well as Giampietrino’s reproduction of “The Last Supper,” on loan from the Royal Academy in London. There are also 60 Leonardo drawings, 33 of which are from the Royal Collection. (About 10 of the show’s drawings relate to the apostles depicted in “The Last Supper.”)
Five years in the making, the exhibition is not only a feat of scholarship but also of diplomacy, with loans from museums in St. Petersburg, Krakow, Paris, New York, Rome and Milan.
Even though the exhibition has been billed as a once-in-a-lifetime event and has received rave reviews, Mr. Syson said he “wanted to make sure this wouldn’t be a Marx Brothers moment where we tried to cram as many people into the show as possible.” Adamant that there be crowd control so people can actually see the works properly, officials have limited the visitors admitted to 180 every half-hour, although people may stay as long as they like. That figure is under the 230-person maximum capacity of the galleries.
Taking a page from the Met, the National Gallery has extended the show’s hours. It now stays open until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays (it generally closes at 6 p.m.) and two more hours on Sundays, now closing at 7. For the show’s last two weeks the museum will be open until 10 every night, Michelle Gonsalves, a National Gallery spokeswoman, said. And for the first time ever it will be open on New Year’s Day.
“We advised people to book early,” Ms. Gonsalves said. And while the museum is aware of the frenzy to get the remaining tickets, it was surprised to learn that they were being scalped. She said the National Gallery’s security officers could tell if tickets had been scalped, and that visitors found with such tickets would not be allowed into the show. “We can’t say how we can tell, but we are doing spot checks,” she explained.
Despite all the madness Mr. Syson, who is leaving the National Gallery to become curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Met in January, has a message he hopes the exhibition is delivering: Realizing that Leonardo has recently been prized more as a scientist than as an artist, he wants the public to see how painting was actually central to the master’s way of thinking. Judging by the show’s popularity, that point is getting across.
“I don’t mean to sound like a mystical priest, but on some level these paintings communicate soul to soul,” he said. “Great art does work on people in mysterious ways.”
36 Hours in Mérida, Mexico
36 Hours in Mérida, Mexico
YUCATECANS are fiercely proud of their culture, sprinkling their Spanish with Mayan words and quick to recount the stories of resistance and revolution that set this region apart from the rest of Mexico for centuries. Somehow, those tales seem a little distant now in Yucatán’s capital, Mérida, a languid city of pastel mansions and evening promenades. The city, now one of the safest in Mexico, is an architectural jewel, and has one of the country’s largest historic centers outside Mexico City. Block after block of houses dating to the mid-19th century and earlier are in the midst of a restoration boom, and the city’s cultural and restaurant scenes are flourishing.
Friday
3 p.m.
1. YUCATECAN FEAST
Sample Yucatecan cuisine at the Hacienda Teya (Mérida-Cancún Highway, Kilometer 12.5; 52-999-988-0800; haciendateya.com), a 17th-century plantation that switched from cattle to henequen, used for making rope, at the end of the 19th century, and is just a 15-minute drive from downtown. From the colonial dining room, with walls that are filled with old photographs of Mérida in the early 1900s, the view stretches to the brilliant flamboyant trees that fringe the expansive grounds. Try the classics: sopa de lima, a fragrant chicken and tortilla soup flavored with lime juice (54 pesos, or about $4, at 13.7 pesos to the dollar); cochinita pibil, tangy slow-roasted pork marinated in citrus and a paste made from achiote seeds; or poc chuc, grilled pork marinated in sour orange juice (both 124 pesos).
5 p.m.
2. PROMENADE IN THE PLAZA
In the late afternoon, the whole city, it seems, congregates in the leafy Plaza Grande under the towers of Mérida’s austere 16th-century Cathedral of San Ildefonso. Have a sorbet at Sorbetería Colón on the north side (along 61st Street), then wander into the Governor’s Palace next door and take in the giant paintings depicting Yucatán’s violent history by the 20th-century Mérida-born artist Fernando Castro Pacheco. The Casa Montejo (506 63rd Street, 52-999-923-0633; museocasamontejo.com) on the south side, now a cultural center and museum, is the city’s oldest building, erected by Don Francisco Montejo, Yucatán’s conquistador, in the 1540s. Look for the carving of two Spanish conquistadors standing atop the heads of Indians on the facade. The four front rooms have been sumptuously restored to late-19th-century splendor. The gift shop sells excellent handicrafts. As night falls, walk north a few blocks to the small church of La Tercera Orden on the corner of 59th and 60th Streets, built by the Jesuits in 1618. You may catch a wedding or a quinceañera Mass.
9 p.m.
3. MOJITOS BY STARLIGHT
The outdoor bar at the Piedra de Agua hotel (498 60th Street, 52-999-924-2300; piedradeagua.com) has a spectacular view of the brilliantly lighted cathedral towers. Local groups play jazz and blues on Fridays. The specialties are mojitos (48 pesos) and lemon daiquiris accented with basil leaves (55 pesos). Try a pizza topped with huitlacoche, Mexico’s signature corn fungus (120 pesos).
Saturday
9 a.m.
4. CURBSIDE BREAKFAST
The Loría family have run the Wayan’e street stand for 20 years (92E 20th Street at 15th Street, Colonia Itzimná, 52-999-927-4160). They serve savory tacos and tortas throughout the morning, scooping fragrant fillings like smoky chicken fajitas and scrambled eggs with acelgas (Swiss chard) out of clay pots to customers seated at a stainless steel counter. All dishes are from 8 to 12 pesos.
11 a.m.
5. FROZEN IN TIME
During the henequen boom, when the agave plant was turned into rope for the world, Yucatán’s aristocratic landowners built magnificent houses, many of them now luxury hotels. But Hacienda Yaxcopoil (Federal Highway 261, Kilometer 186; 52-999-900-1193; yaxcopoil.com), about 20 miles south of Mérida, has been preserved as though in amber, a noble near-ruin where yellowing photos of the family that has owned it for five generations hang askew on the frescoed walls. For a fee of 50 pesos, you can wander through silent rooms offering a glimpse into the past, from the figurine of St. Geronimo in the chapel wearing a Yucatán straw hat, to French porcelain bathroom fixtures coated in dust. Mario Alberto Huchín Tun, 65, will give you a tour in Spanish; he is the third generation in his family to work on the hacienda. Take a taxi or hire a car service with a bilingual driver. Try Ralf Hollmann at Lawson’s Yucatán at 521-999-947-7599, lawsonsdriving.blogspot.com.
2 p.m.
6. A YUCATECAN DINER
At Chaya Maya (481 62nd Street at 57th Street, 52-999-928-4780), a woman in traditional Mayan dress makes corn tortillas in the window as families pile in. Try the house specialty, Los Tres Mosqueteros, or The Three Musketeers, which combines three classic Yucatecan dishes: relleno negro (a black sauce made from burnt chiles and spices) over pork; papadzul (an egg dish); and pipián (a sauce with a pumpkin seed base) over turkey, all for 70 pesos.
3 p.m.
7. GOODS TO RELAX IN
El Aguacate (604 58th Street, 52-999-928-6429; hamacaselaguacate.com.mx) sells hammocks for every budget. A finely woven cotton or nylon hammock, which takes about two months to weave, will cost about $175, but the cheapest one is about $20. (The store is in Mérida’s tiny red-light district, which is safe by day.) Back near the center, shop for a guayabera, a Cuban shirt worn untucked. It was a favorite with early 20th-century Yucatecan grandees, who would go to Cuba to stock up. After the Cuban Revolution, Yucatecans began making their own. A polyester-cotton blend at Guayaberas Jack (507A 59th Street, 52-999-928-6002; guayaberasjack.com.mx) costs about $30, and an embroidered linen model popular with Mexican presidents sells for about $170.
7 p.m.
8. FINE FOLK
Every Saturday, the city stages a free show for tourists and locals alike, featuring folk dancing, comedy, mariachi, marimba and romantic trova music (1 Paseo de Montejo at 49th Street, 52-999-928-1800; hotelcasasanangel.com). You can watch from the street or have a drink on the terrace of the Hotel Casa San Angel. For more information on cultural events, check “Yucatán Today,” the city’s free bilingual monthly tourist guide, yucatantoday.com.
9 p.m.
9. CHOCOLATE DELIGHT
At the restaurant inside Mérida’s newest boutique hotel, Rosas & Xocolate (480 Paseo de Montejo at 41st Street, 52-999-924-2992; rosasandxocolate.com), try the catch of the day prepared on a fried tortilla accompanied by prickly pear salad (180 pesos) or duck served with singed corn, local sausage, melon compote and a chile and raisin sauce (220 pesos).
11 p.m.
10. SMILIN’ IRISH
An Irish pub seems as though it would be out of place, but Hennessy’s Irish Pub (486A Paseo de Montejo, 52-999-923-8993; hennessysirishpub.com) is Mérida’s hippest night spot. The photos of the Irish countryside and ’80s classics on the soundtrack seem a little off, but the outdoor terrace on the Paseo de Montejo fills up.
Sunday
9 a.m.
11. RIDING DOWN THE AVENUE
Grab coffee at Café la Habana (corner of 59th and 62nd Streets, 52-999-928-0608), then explore the Paseo de Montejo, lined with Beaux Arts-style mansions, most of them built with henequen money. The most stunning is the Palacio Cantón, which houses the Regional Anthropology Museum (485 Paseo de Montejo, 52-999-923-0469; admission: 41 pesos). The street is closed to traffic to make way for cyclists between 8 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. every Sunday. Bikes are available for 15 pesos an hour from municipal offices at the corner of 62nd and 63rd Streets or along the avenue. For a map, go to merida.gob.mx/biciruta/.
Noon
12. TWO-STEP BACK IN TIME
Mérida’s old-time dancers go to the temporary stage at Santa Lucía Park, at 60th and 55th Streets, where they dance Mexican danzón and cha-cha-cha to live music under a canopy. The dancers’ moves recall a bygone time of smoky dance halls, and they dress the part.
IF YOU GO
Rosas & Xocolate (480 Paseo de Montejo at 41st Street, 52-999-924-2992; rosasandxocolate.com) is a 17-room luxury boutique hotel in two 1930s renovated mansions, decorated with the bright colors of the tropics. Even the spa serves chocolate treatments. Rates from $215 plus tax, includes full breakfast.
Los Arcos (448B 66th Street, 52-999-928-0214; losarcosmerida.com) is a three-room bed-and-breakfast in a renovated 1890s house crammed with bric-a-brac collected by the owner, David Reed, who serves breakfast in his luscious garden. Rates from $85.
Hotel Eclipse (491 57th Street, between 58th and 60th Streets, 52-999-923-1600; eclipsehotel.com.mx) has 14 rooms, all designed around a theme (lava, disco, zen). It is relatively cheap at 900 pesos a night (about $65), or less, with one of the hotel’s frequent promotions.
YUCATECANS are fiercely proud of their culture, sprinkling their Spanish with Mayan words and quick to recount the stories of resistance and revolution that set this region apart from the rest of Mexico for centuries. Somehow, those tales seem a little distant now in Yucatán’s capital, Mérida, a languid city of pastel mansions and evening promenades. The city, now one of the safest in Mexico, is an architectural jewel, and has one of the country’s largest historic centers outside Mexico City. Block after block of houses dating to the mid-19th century and earlier are in the midst of a restoration boom, and the city’s cultural and restaurant scenes are flourishing.
Friday
3 p.m.
1. YUCATECAN FEAST
Sample Yucatecan cuisine at the Hacienda Teya (Mérida-Cancún Highway, Kilometer 12.5; 52-999-988-0800; haciendateya.com), a 17th-century plantation that switched from cattle to henequen, used for making rope, at the end of the 19th century, and is just a 15-minute drive from downtown. From the colonial dining room, with walls that are filled with old photographs of Mérida in the early 1900s, the view stretches to the brilliant flamboyant trees that fringe the expansive grounds. Try the classics: sopa de lima, a fragrant chicken and tortilla soup flavored with lime juice (54 pesos, or about $4, at 13.7 pesos to the dollar); cochinita pibil, tangy slow-roasted pork marinated in citrus and a paste made from achiote seeds; or poc chuc, grilled pork marinated in sour orange juice (both 124 pesos).
5 p.m.
2. PROMENADE IN THE PLAZA
In the late afternoon, the whole city, it seems, congregates in the leafy Plaza Grande under the towers of Mérida’s austere 16th-century Cathedral of San Ildefonso. Have a sorbet at Sorbetería Colón on the north side (along 61st Street), then wander into the Governor’s Palace next door and take in the giant paintings depicting Yucatán’s violent history by the 20th-century Mérida-born artist Fernando Castro Pacheco. The Casa Montejo (506 63rd Street, 52-999-923-0633; museocasamontejo.com) on the south side, now a cultural center and museum, is the city’s oldest building, erected by Don Francisco Montejo, Yucatán’s conquistador, in the 1540s. Look for the carving of two Spanish conquistadors standing atop the heads of Indians on the facade. The four front rooms have been sumptuously restored to late-19th-century splendor. The gift shop sells excellent handicrafts. As night falls, walk north a few blocks to the small church of La Tercera Orden on the corner of 59th and 60th Streets, built by the Jesuits in 1618. You may catch a wedding or a quinceañera Mass.
9 p.m.
3. MOJITOS BY STARLIGHT
The outdoor bar at the Piedra de Agua hotel (498 60th Street, 52-999-924-2300; piedradeagua.com) has a spectacular view of the brilliantly lighted cathedral towers. Local groups play jazz and blues on Fridays. The specialties are mojitos (48 pesos) and lemon daiquiris accented with basil leaves (55 pesos). Try a pizza topped with huitlacoche, Mexico’s signature corn fungus (120 pesos).
Saturday
9 a.m.
4. CURBSIDE BREAKFAST
The Loría family have run the Wayan’e street stand for 20 years (92E 20th Street at 15th Street, Colonia Itzimná, 52-999-927-4160). They serve savory tacos and tortas throughout the morning, scooping fragrant fillings like smoky chicken fajitas and scrambled eggs with acelgas (Swiss chard) out of clay pots to customers seated at a stainless steel counter. All dishes are from 8 to 12 pesos.
11 a.m.
5. FROZEN IN TIME
During the henequen boom, when the agave plant was turned into rope for the world, Yucatán’s aristocratic landowners built magnificent houses, many of them now luxury hotels. But Hacienda Yaxcopoil (Federal Highway 261, Kilometer 186; 52-999-900-1193; yaxcopoil.com), about 20 miles south of Mérida, has been preserved as though in amber, a noble near-ruin where yellowing photos of the family that has owned it for five generations hang askew on the frescoed walls. For a fee of 50 pesos, you can wander through silent rooms offering a glimpse into the past, from the figurine of St. Geronimo in the chapel wearing a Yucatán straw hat, to French porcelain bathroom fixtures coated in dust. Mario Alberto Huchín Tun, 65, will give you a tour in Spanish; he is the third generation in his family to work on the hacienda. Take a taxi or hire a car service with a bilingual driver. Try Ralf Hollmann at Lawson’s Yucatán at 521-999-947-7599, lawsonsdriving.blogspot.com.
2 p.m.
6. A YUCATECAN DINER
At Chaya Maya (481 62nd Street at 57th Street, 52-999-928-4780), a woman in traditional Mayan dress makes corn tortillas in the window as families pile in. Try the house specialty, Los Tres Mosqueteros, or The Three Musketeers, which combines three classic Yucatecan dishes: relleno negro (a black sauce made from burnt chiles and spices) over pork; papadzul (an egg dish); and pipián (a sauce with a pumpkin seed base) over turkey, all for 70 pesos.
3 p.m.
7. GOODS TO RELAX IN
El Aguacate (604 58th Street, 52-999-928-6429; hamacaselaguacate.com.mx) sells hammocks for every budget. A finely woven cotton or nylon hammock, which takes about two months to weave, will cost about $175, but the cheapest one is about $20. (The store is in Mérida’s tiny red-light district, which is safe by day.) Back near the center, shop for a guayabera, a Cuban shirt worn untucked. It was a favorite with early 20th-century Yucatecan grandees, who would go to Cuba to stock up. After the Cuban Revolution, Yucatecans began making their own. A polyester-cotton blend at Guayaberas Jack (507A 59th Street, 52-999-928-6002; guayaberasjack.com.mx) costs about $30, and an embroidered linen model popular with Mexican presidents sells for about $170.
7 p.m.
8. FINE FOLK
Every Saturday, the city stages a free show for tourists and locals alike, featuring folk dancing, comedy, mariachi, marimba and romantic trova music (1 Paseo de Montejo at 49th Street, 52-999-928-1800; hotelcasasanangel.com). You can watch from the street or have a drink on the terrace of the Hotel Casa San Angel. For more information on cultural events, check “Yucatán Today,” the city’s free bilingual monthly tourist guide, yucatantoday.com.
9 p.m.
9. CHOCOLATE DELIGHT
At the restaurant inside Mérida’s newest boutique hotel, Rosas & Xocolate (480 Paseo de Montejo at 41st Street, 52-999-924-2992; rosasandxocolate.com), try the catch of the day prepared on a fried tortilla accompanied by prickly pear salad (180 pesos) or duck served with singed corn, local sausage, melon compote and a chile and raisin sauce (220 pesos).
11 p.m.
10. SMILIN’ IRISH
An Irish pub seems as though it would be out of place, but Hennessy’s Irish Pub (486A Paseo de Montejo, 52-999-923-8993; hennessysirishpub.com) is Mérida’s hippest night spot. The photos of the Irish countryside and ’80s classics on the soundtrack seem a little off, but the outdoor terrace on the Paseo de Montejo fills up.
Sunday
9 a.m.
11. RIDING DOWN THE AVENUE
Grab coffee at Café la Habana (corner of 59th and 62nd Streets, 52-999-928-0608), then explore the Paseo de Montejo, lined with Beaux Arts-style mansions, most of them built with henequen money. The most stunning is the Palacio Cantón, which houses the Regional Anthropology Museum (485 Paseo de Montejo, 52-999-923-0469; admission: 41 pesos). The street is closed to traffic to make way for cyclists between 8 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. every Sunday. Bikes are available for 15 pesos an hour from municipal offices at the corner of 62nd and 63rd Streets or along the avenue. For a map, go to merida.gob.mx/biciruta/.
Noon
12. TWO-STEP BACK IN TIME
Mérida’s old-time dancers go to the temporary stage at Santa Lucía Park, at 60th and 55th Streets, where they dance Mexican danzón and cha-cha-cha to live music under a canopy. The dancers’ moves recall a bygone time of smoky dance halls, and they dress the part.
IF YOU GO
Rosas & Xocolate (480 Paseo de Montejo at 41st Street, 52-999-924-2992; rosasandxocolate.com) is a 17-room luxury boutique hotel in two 1930s renovated mansions, decorated with the bright colors of the tropics. Even the spa serves chocolate treatments. Rates from $215 plus tax, includes full breakfast.
Los Arcos (448B 66th Street, 52-999-928-0214; losarcosmerida.com) is a three-room bed-and-breakfast in a renovated 1890s house crammed with bric-a-brac collected by the owner, David Reed, who serves breakfast in his luscious garden. Rates from $85.
Hotel Eclipse (491 57th Street, between 58th and 60th Streets, 52-999-923-1600; eclipsehotel.com.mx) has 14 rooms, all designed around a theme (lava, disco, zen). It is relatively cheap at 900 pesos a night (about $65), or less, with one of the hotel’s frequent promotions.
Sócrates, Brazilian Soccer Star and Activist, Dies at 57
Sócrates, Brazilian Soccer Star and Activist, Dies at 57
RIO DE JANEIRO — Sócrates, the soccer great and medical doctor who transcended the sport through his involvement in Brazil’s pro-democracy movement and his outspoken defense of his own bohemian excesses, died on Sunday in São Paulo, Brazil. He was 57.
The cause was septic shock from an intestinal infection, according to a statement from Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, where he was admitted on Saturday.
Sócrates, the captain of Brazil’s team in the 1982 World Cup, had been hospitalized three times in the last four months. In recent interviews, he had described liver problems related to decades of heavy drinking, for which he was sometimes pilloried.
“This country drinks more cachaça than any other in the world, and it seems like I myself drink it all,” he once told an interviewer, referring to the popular Brazilian spirit made from fermented sugar cane. “They don’t want me to drink, smoke or think?”
“Well,” he said, “I drink, smoke and think.”
His exuberant style reflected an expansive and multifaceted career. In addition to playing soccer, he practiced medicine and dabbled in coaching and painting. He also wrote newspaper columns, delving into subjects as varied as politics and economics, and made forays into writing fiction and acting on the stage.
Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira was born on Feb. 19, 1954, in the Amazonian city of Belém do Pará, Brazil. His upbringing was more privileged than that of many Brazilian professional soccer players, who often rise from abject poverty.
Emerging in the 1970s as a promising young player in Ribeirão Preto, in the interior of São Paulo State, he studied medicine while playing for provincial teams before attaining his medical degree at 24. After that, he moved to Corinthians, the famous São Paulo club with a big following among Brazil’s poor.
Known to his fans as Doctor and Big Skinny, a reference to his spindly 6-foot-4-inch frame, Sócrates arrived at Corinthians at a time of intense political activity in São Paulo, a period when anger and resistance were coalescing against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil.
Sócrates, in addition to organizing a movement advocating greater rights for Corinthians players, spoke at street protests in the 1980s calling for an end to authoritarian rule. That movement helped usher in a transition to democracy.
Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, praised Sócrates in a statement on Sunday.
“Dr. Sócrates was a star on the field and a great friend,” said Mr. da Silva, a Corinthians fan who is being treated for throat cancer at the hospital where Sócrates died. “He was an example of citizenship, intelligence and political consciousness.”
On the field, Sócrates was known as a wily strategist who could elegantly employ his signature move, a back-heel pass. At a time when many players maintained a clean-cut appearance, Sócrates had a beard and sometimes appeared with his long hair held back in a headband, like the tennis star Bjorn Borg.
Fans of Sócrates mention his name in the same breath as Brazilian soccer greats like Pelé, Ronaldo and Romário. But unlike those players, he was never part of a World Cup championship team.
The team he captained in 1982 was considered among the best to play the game, but it lost to Italy, 3-2, in the second round. In the 1986 World Cup, Sócrates missed a penalty kick in a quarterfinal loss to France.
Revered for his rebellious irreverence and his “heel of gold,” he deplored the way Brazilian soccer had evolved in recent years, criticizing the new playing styles as “bureaucratic” and “conservative.”
“Being sensible isn’t always the best thing,” Sócrates told The Guardian in 2010.
While Sócrates often defended his nonconformist style, he struggled publicly with his demons, too.
In televised comments this year, he described his struggle with alcoholism, leading to a broader debate in Brazil over the country’s drinking habits. As recently as August, he said that he had abstained from drinking “so that my liver can unite the conditions to be balanced.”
He is survived by his wife and six children, The Associated Press reported.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Sócrates, the soccer great and medical doctor who transcended the sport through his involvement in Brazil’s pro-democracy movement and his outspoken defense of his own bohemian excesses, died on Sunday in São Paulo, Brazil. He was 57.
The cause was septic shock from an intestinal infection, according to a statement from Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, where he was admitted on Saturday.
Sócrates, the captain of Brazil’s team in the 1982 World Cup, had been hospitalized three times in the last four months. In recent interviews, he had described liver problems related to decades of heavy drinking, for which he was sometimes pilloried.
“This country drinks more cachaça than any other in the world, and it seems like I myself drink it all,” he once told an interviewer, referring to the popular Brazilian spirit made from fermented sugar cane. “They don’t want me to drink, smoke or think?”
“Well,” he said, “I drink, smoke and think.”
His exuberant style reflected an expansive and multifaceted career. In addition to playing soccer, he practiced medicine and dabbled in coaching and painting. He also wrote newspaper columns, delving into subjects as varied as politics and economics, and made forays into writing fiction and acting on the stage.
Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira was born on Feb. 19, 1954, in the Amazonian city of Belém do Pará, Brazil. His upbringing was more privileged than that of many Brazilian professional soccer players, who often rise from abject poverty.
Emerging in the 1970s as a promising young player in Ribeirão Preto, in the interior of São Paulo State, he studied medicine while playing for provincial teams before attaining his medical degree at 24. After that, he moved to Corinthians, the famous São Paulo club with a big following among Brazil’s poor.
Known to his fans as Doctor and Big Skinny, a reference to his spindly 6-foot-4-inch frame, Sócrates arrived at Corinthians at a time of intense political activity in São Paulo, a period when anger and resistance were coalescing against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil.
Sócrates, in addition to organizing a movement advocating greater rights for Corinthians players, spoke at street protests in the 1980s calling for an end to authoritarian rule. That movement helped usher in a transition to democracy.
Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, praised Sócrates in a statement on Sunday.
“Dr. Sócrates was a star on the field and a great friend,” said Mr. da Silva, a Corinthians fan who is being treated for throat cancer at the hospital where Sócrates died. “He was an example of citizenship, intelligence and political consciousness.”
On the field, Sócrates was known as a wily strategist who could elegantly employ his signature move, a back-heel pass. At a time when many players maintained a clean-cut appearance, Sócrates had a beard and sometimes appeared with his long hair held back in a headband, like the tennis star Bjorn Borg.
Fans of Sócrates mention his name in the same breath as Brazilian soccer greats like Pelé, Ronaldo and Romário. But unlike those players, he was never part of a World Cup championship team.
The team he captained in 1982 was considered among the best to play the game, but it lost to Italy, 3-2, in the second round. In the 1986 World Cup, Sócrates missed a penalty kick in a quarterfinal loss to France.
Revered for his rebellious irreverence and his “heel of gold,” he deplored the way Brazilian soccer had evolved in recent years, criticizing the new playing styles as “bureaucratic” and “conservative.”
“Being sensible isn’t always the best thing,” Sócrates told The Guardian in 2010.
While Sócrates often defended his nonconformist style, he struggled publicly with his demons, too.
In televised comments this year, he described his struggle with alcoholism, leading to a broader debate in Brazil over the country’s drinking habits. As recently as August, he said that he had abstained from drinking “so that my liver can unite the conditions to be balanced.”
He is survived by his wife and six children, The Associated Press reported.
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