With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American work-ers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.

That gulf helps explain why stock markets are thriving even as the economy is barely growing and un-employment remains high.

With millions out of work, compa-nies face little pressure to raise sala-ries while productivity gains allow businesses to increase sales without adding more workers. “So far in this recovery, corporations have cap-tured an unusually high share of the income gains,” said Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “The U.S. corporate sector is in a lot better health than the overall economy. And until we get a full recovery in the labor market, this will persist.”

The result has been a golden age for corporate profits, especially among multinational giants that are benefiting from faster growth in emerging economies like China and India. These factors, along with the Federal Reserve’s efforts to keep interest rates ultralow and encour-age investors to put more money into riskier assets, spurred traders to send the Dow past 14,000 to within 75 points of a record high last week.

Buoyant earnings have not translated into more jobs. Unem-ployment, after declining for three years, has been stuck at just below 8 percent since last September.

Corporate profits make up a larger share of national income than at any time since 1950, while the portion of income that goes to workers is near its lowest point since 1966, said Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays. Earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1 percent since the end of 2008, he said, but dispos-able income inched ahead by 1.4 per-cent annually over the same period.

“There hasn’t been a period in the last 50 years where these trends have been so pronounced,” Maki said. NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Doctors announced on Sunday that a baby had been cured of an H.I.V. infection for the first time, a startling development that could change how infected newborns are treated and sharply reduce the number of children living with the virus that causes AIDS.

The baby, born in rural Mis-sissippi, was treated with anti-retroviral drugs starting about 30 hours after birth, something that is not usually done. If further study shows this works in other babies, it will almost certainly be recommended globally. The United Nations estimates that 330,000 babies were newly infect-ed in 2011, the most recent year for which there is data, and that more than 3 million children glob-ally are living with H. I. V.

If the report is confirmed, the child would be only the second well-documented case of a cure in the world. That could give a lift to research aimed at a cure, some-thing that a few years ago was thought to be virtually impossi-ble, though some experts said the findings in the baby would prob-

ably not be relevant to adults.The first person cured was

Timothy Brown, known as the Berlin patient, a middle-aged man with leukemia who received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor genetically resistant to H.I.V. infection.

“For pediatrics, this is our Timothy Brown,” said Dr. Debo-rah Persaud, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and lead author of the re-port. “It’s proof of principle that we can cure H.I.V. infection if we can replicate this case.”

Persaud and other researchers spoke ahead of a presentation of the findings on Monday at the Con-ference on Retroviruses and Op- portunistic Infections in Atlanta.

Some outside experts said they needed convincing the baby had been infected. If not, this would be a case of prevention, something already done for babies born to infected mothers.

“The one uncertainty is really definitive evidence that the child was indeed infected,” said Dr. Daniel R. Kuritzkes, chief of in-

fectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Persaud and some other out-side scientists said they were cer-tain the baby — whose name and gender were not disclosed — had been infected. There were five positive tests in the baby’s first month of life — four for viral RNA and one for DNA. And once the treatment started, the virus lev-els in the baby’s blood declined in the pattern characteristic of infected patients.

Persaud said there was also little doubt that the child expe-rienced what she called a “func-tional cure.” Now 2 ›, the child has been off drugs for a year with no sign of functioning virus.

Dr. Yvonne Bryson, chief of global pediatric infectious dis-ease at the University of Califor-nia, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the Mississippi work, said she was certain the baby had been infected and called the finding “one of the most exciting things I’ve heard in a long time.” ANDREW POLLACK and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

SAN FRANCISCO — When Telvent, a company that moni-tors more than half the oil and gas pipelines in North America, discovered last September that the Chinese had hacked into its computer systems, it shut down remote access to its clients’ sys-tems. Company officials and American intelligence agencies then grappled with a fundamen-tal question: Why had the Chi-nese done it?

Was the People’s Liberation Army, which is suspected of being behind the hacking group, trying to plant bugs into the system so they could cut off energy supplies and shut down the power grid if the United States and China ever confronted each other in the Pa-cific? Or were the Chinese hack-ers just trolling for industrial secrets, trying to rip off the tech-nology and passing it along to China’s own energy companies?

Telvent managed to keep the hackers from breaking into its

clients’ computers.At a moment when corporate

America is caught between what it sees as two nightmares — pre-venting a crippling attack that brings down America’s most criti- cal systems and preventing Con-gress from mandating that the pri-vate sector spend billions of doll- ars protecting against that risk — the Telvent experience resonates as a study in ambiguity.

To some, it is prime evidence of the threat that President Obama highlighted in his State of the Union address, when he warned that “our enemies are also seek-ing the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institu-tions, our air traffic control sys-tems,” perhaps causing mass casualties. Obama called anew for legislation to protect critical infrastructure, which was killed last year by a G.O.P. filibuster af-ter lobbying by the Chamber of Commerce and other groups.

But the breach of Telvent,

which the Chinese government has denied, raises questions of whether those fears may be over-blown, or whether the nature of the threat has been misunder-stood. American intelligence of-ficials believe the greater danger to the nation’s infrastructure may not even be China, but Iran, because of its avowal to retaliate for the Stuxnet virus unleashed by the United States and Israel on one of its nuclear sites.

Security researchers say the majority of the hacker attacks ap-peared to be more about cyberes-pionage, intended to bolster the Chinese economy.

American intelligence experts believe that the primary reason China is deterred from conduct-ing an attack on infrastructure in the United States is the simple economic fact that anything that hurts America’s financial mar-kets or transportation systems would also have consequences for its own economy. (NYT)

RECOVERY IN U.S. IS LIFTING PROFITS,

NOT ADDING JOBS

As Hacking Against U.S. Rises, Experts Seek Motive

A Baby With H.I.V. Is Deemed Cured

F R O M T H E PAG E S O F

Monday, March 4, 2013 © 2013 The new york TimesFROM THE PAGES OF

midnight in New York

Blast Kills at Least 45 Pakistanis in KarachiA Political Gadfly Reflects a Wave

Cardinal Admits MisconductBritain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric,

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, acknowledged on Sunday that he had been guilty of sexual misconduct, a week after he announced his resignation, and said he would not attend the conclave to choose the next pope. The moves followed revelations that three current and one former priest had accused him of inappropriate sexual contact dating back decades. (NYT)

Kerry Announces Aid for EgyptSecretary of State John Kerry announced Sun-

day that the United States would provide $250 mil-lion in assistance to Egypt after Egypt’s presi-dent promised to move ahead with negotiations with the International Monetary Fund over eco-nomic reforms. After his meeting with President Mohamed Morsi, Kerry said the aid decision re-flected Egypt’s “extreme needs” and Morsi’s as-surance that Egypt would reach an agreement with the I.M.F. over a $4.8 billion loan package. A statement said that Kerry and Morsi had dis-cussed the need to ensure the fairness of Egypt’s

coming elections, but it did not mention any spe-cific political commitments. (NYT)

19 Die in Bangladesh UnrestBangladesh had yet another day of bloodshed

on Sunday, as at least 19 people died in angry skirmishes between the police and supporters of the country’s biggest Islamist political party. The supporters were protesting the recent convictions of their leaders by a special tribunal prosecuting accused war criminals from the country’s 1971 struggle for liberation. (NYT)

Queen Elizabeth II HospitalizedQueen Elizabeth II, who is 86, was admitted to

a London hospital on Sunday after experiencing symptoms of gastroenteritis, according to a state-ment issued by Buckingham Palace. The state-ment said that all the queen’s engagements for the next week would be postponed or canceled. A palace spokesman described the queen’s hospital-ization on Sunday as “a precautionary measure.” Gastroenteritis is an inflammation of the stom-ach lining and intestines. (NYT)

In Brief

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A powerful explosion ripped through a crowd of Shiites as they left a mosque in Karachi, Paki-stan’s largest city, on Sunday, kill-ing at least 45 people. It was the latest atrocity in an escalating campaign of countrywide sectar-ian violence.

No one claimed responsibility for the blast, which badly dam-aged two apartment blocks and spread fire through homes and shops. At least 149 people were wounded, city officials said.

But suspicion fell heaviest on Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni mili-tant group at the forefront of a wave of violence against Shiites that has killed about 200 people so far this year, and which is rapidly emerging as a substantial threat to Pakistan’s internal security.

“This is terrorism at its worst,” said Sardar Mehdi Musa, a lead-er of the Hazara Shiite minor-ity, which has borne the brunt of recent violence. “It’s a sign that things are only going to get worse.”

Last last month, the authorities in Punjab Province detained the Lashkar leader, Malik Ishaq, but as Sunday’s violence suggests, it seems unlikely that his detention will halt sectarian attacks.

In Karachi, rescue workers scrambled to find survivors amid scenes of striking devastation af-

ter the blast in Abbas Town, a ma-jority Shiite neighborhood. Early reports suggested the blast had been caused by a car bomb and that a second, smaller explosion might have been caused by the ig-nition of domestic gas canisters.

Fire spread through homes and shops; many women and children were among the dead, hospital officials said. Fayaz Leghari, the police chief of Sindh Province, said the police had intercepted ex-plosive-laden vehicles in the pre-vious two weeks after receiving

warnings of an impending attack. But they did not have specific in-telligence about Sunday’s attack.

President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, who was visiting Kara-chi at the time of the blasts, con-demned the attack. Ashraf said that those who attacked civilians were “serving the interests of an-tistate and antisocial elements,” according to the state-run news agency, The Associated Press of Pakistan. DECLAN WALSH and SALMAN MASOOD

ROME — A populist with wild hair, bulging eyes and untucked shirts, Beppe Grillo now holds the fate of Italy — and to some extent Europe — in his hands.

After winning a quarter of the votes in last week’s national elec-tions, Grillo, a comedian-turned-activist, is being courted by Italy’s traditional political players, but having thumbed his nose at them, he is having none of it. He has ruled out alliances, throwing Ital-ian politics into a logjam.

He refers to former Prime Min-ister Silvio Berlusconi as “the psycho dwarf” and has rejected appeals by Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the center-left Democrat-ic Party, to join forces, dismissing him as “a dead man walking.”

In a rare interview at his sea-side home in Marina di Bibbona on Sunday, Grillo said it would be “in-admissible” for him to ensure the stability of a future Italian govern-ment. “It would be like Napoleon making a deal with Wellington.”

Grillo typifies a new style of politician rising from the fires of Europe’s economic crisis and other countries where voters feel frustrated. Like Alexis Tsipras, the upstart in Greece who rode an anti-austerity wave to head the second-largest parliamentary party, or Yair Lapid, who tapped into a frustration with social in-equality in Israel, these politicians are not extremists.

In refusing to play ball with the establishment powers, they are fraying nerves in Brussels and Berlin. “There is the sense that the European project is at risk with what happens in Italy if Gril-lo blames the E. U. for problems along with Germany, the enforc-er,” said Moisés Naím, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endow-ment for International Peace in Washington. “If he gets away with that, other politicians will also do it, and there may be contagion.”

Now that Grillo’s Five Star Move- ment has a mandate, his chal-lenge will be to decide how to use it to change an establishment that has viewed him as a demagogic man who risks taking Italy down the path of Greece. “How can we be accused of destroying some-thing that’s already destroyed?” he said. “They’ve devoured the country, and now they can’t gov-ern.” LIZ ALDERMAN and ELISABETTA POVOLE

AkhtAr Soomro/reuterS

the attack suggests that Sunni militant groups are widening their brutal campaign against the country’s Shiite minority.

IntErnAtIonAl Monday, March 4, 2013 2

Three police officers knocked on the apartment door of a 15-year-old boy. He had already been on both sides of a police blotter: shot and stabbed, but also arrested for robbery. He ran in an East Harlem gang and lived with his grand-mother on the seventh floor of a public housing building, where the stairwells reeked of marijuana.

He was the type of teenager destined for trouble. And that was precisely why the officers were at his door on a recent winter night.

The New York City Police De-partment has embarked on a novel approach to deter juvenile robbers, essentially staging in-terventions and force-feeding outreach in an effort to stem a tide of robberies by dissuading those most likely to commit them.

Officers not only make repeated drop-ins at homes and schools, they will roll up on them in the streets, shouting out friendly hel-los, in front of their friends. The force’s Intelligence Division also deciphers each teenager’s street

name and gang affiliation. Detec-tives compile a binder on each teenager with photos from Face-book and arrest photos of the teen-ager’s associates.

The idea is to isolate these teen-agers from the peers with whom they commit crimes — to make them radioactive. “We are com-ing to find you and monitor every step you take,” said Joanne Jaffe, the department’s Housing Bureau chief. “And we are going to learn about every bad friend you have. And you’re going to get alienated from those friends because we are going to be all over you.”

Detectives spend hours moni-toring the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of teenagers in the program, known as the Juve-nile Robbery Intervention Pro-gram, and of their criminal associ-ates. They create a dummy Face-book page — perhaps employing a fake profile of an attractive teen-age girl — and send out “friend re-quests” as bait to get beyond the social network’s privacy settings.

Officers also seek to forge rela-tionships with the teenager’s fam-ily, drawing them in with perqui-sites like a hand-delivered turkey on Thanksgiving Eve. Officers might also shuttle family mem-bers to doctor’s appointments.

The approach comes at a time when gang violence has been blamed for higher murder and crime rates in cities like Chicago and Detroit, prompting federal and local law enforcement au-thorities to contemplate new ini-tiatives to try to quell the cycle of gang activity and violence.

The Police Department has giv-en presentations on its program at conferences from Monterey, Calif., to Washington, D.C. “I’m not aware of any police depart-ment nationally coming up with the same strategy or replicating what the N.Y.P.D. has done here,” said David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

WENDY RUDERMAN

LOS ANGELES — On Tuesday, voters in Los Angeles will go to the polls for a mayoral primary. But much of the attention will be on the three races for the school board, a battle that involves the mayor, the teachers’ union and a host of advocates from across the country who have poured millions of dollars into the races.

The outcome will have a pro-found impact on the direction of the nation’s second-largest school district. But the clash has also be-come a test case for those who want to overhaul public educa-tion, weakening the power of the teachers’ union, pushing for more charter schools and changing the

way teachers are hired and fired.After years of pressing to take

power away from local school boards, some advocates have di-rected their money and attention directly to school boards in the hope that they will support their causes.

Last month, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City donated $1 million to a coalition formed by Mayor Antonio Vil-laraigosa of Los Angeles to help elect candidates who will support the current superintendent and the policy changes he has pro-moted. Students First, a national advocacy organization created by Michelle A. Rhee, the former

schools chancellor in Washing-ton, donated $250,000 to the same cause.

So far, spending from outside groups, including the teachers’ union, had reached $4.4 million as of Friday, according to the city’s ethics commission.

In 2006, Villaraigosa tried to gain control of the city schools, but after his efforts failed, he moved to back school board candidates who he said would support his vision for drastic changes in the city’s schools. And this election, just months before he will end his final term in office, could determine the fate of his legacy.

JENNIFER MEDINA

WASHINGTON — With few avenues left for winning a com-prehensive budget deal that can reverse the across-the-board spending cuts that took effect over the weekend, President Obama has begun reaching out to sena-tors in a bid to isolate Republican leaders in Congress and force a compromise.

In a wide outreach to rank-and-file members of Congress, Obama hopes to build a broad consensus

on deficit reduction that includes new revenue, despite the uncom-promising stance of Republican leaders in the House and Senate.

“Our hope is that as more Re-publicans start to see this pain in their own districts, that they will choose bipartisan compromise over this absolutist position,” Gene Sperling, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, said Sunday on the NBC program “Meet the Press.”

Appearing immediately before him, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, reinforced his opposi-tion on Sunday to any deal to re-verse the cuts in defense and do-mestic programs — $85 billion this year and nearly $1 trillion over 10 years — that includes raising new revenue. But he did leave open a path to a comprehensive budget agreement that could restore at least some of the money at some point. JONATHAN WEISMAN

Couple Die in Wreck; Unborn Baby Survives

They were newlyweds barely into their 20s, looking forward to the joy of having their first child, when the unthinkable hap-pened. As their livery cab sped to the woman’s doctor through Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just after midnight Sunday, it was struck broadside by a BMW se-dan, whose driver and passen-ger then abandoned their own wrecked car and vanished into the night. The expectant par-ents, Raizy and Nathan Glau-ber, both 21, were killed. But their baby boy survived, de-livered prematurely in what friends and family hailed as a precious gift. (NYT)

Health Plans Asked to report Increases

The Obama administration says it will require health in-surance companies to report all price increases, no matter how small, to the federal gov-ernment so officials can moni-tor the impact of the new health care law and insurers’ com-pliance with it. Under current rules, the government requires insurers to report information on rate increases of 10 percent or more. New rules being issued by the administration will ex-tend this requirement to all rate increases for all health plans sold to individuals, families and small businesses — a total of 60 million people. (NYT)

Supply Ship Meets With Space Station

A private Earth-to-orbit de-livery service made good on its latest shipment to the Interna-tional Space Station on Sunday, overcoming mechanical dif-ficulty and delivering a ton of supplies. To NASA’s relief, the SpaceX company’s Dragon cap-sule pulled up to the orbiting lab with all of its systems in per-fect order. Station astronauts used a hefty robot arm to snare the unmanned Dragon, and three hours later, it was bolted into place. Among the items on board: 640 seeds of a flower-ing weed used for research, and food and clothes for the six men on board. (AP)

To Stem Robberies, Police Step In Before Crime

Los Angeles School Vote Draws Attention and Money

Obama Bids for a Budget Deal With Republican Senators

In Brief

nAtIonAl Monday, March 4, 2013 3

The nation’s biggest banks wrongfully foreclosed on more than 700 military members dur-ing the housing crisis and seized homes from roughly two dozen other borrowers who were cur-rent on their mortgage payments, findings that eclipse earlier esti-mates of the improper evictions.

Bank of America, Citigroup, JP-Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo uncovered the foreclosures while analyzing mortgages as part of a multibillion-dollar settlement deal with federal authorities, according to people with direct knowledge of the findings. In January, regula-tors ordered the banks to identify military members and other bor-rowers who were evicted in viola-tion of federal law.

The analysis, which was turned over to regulators recently, pro-vides the first detailed glimpse

into the extent of wrongful foreclo-sures. The banks had claimed that borrowers were rarely evicted by mistake, including military per-sonnel protected by federal law.

Housing advocates say the find-ings underscore the broader flaws with the foreclosure settlement. In the latest negotiations, the banks secured favorable terms for doling out some of aid, a deal that could diminish the relief to homeowners. Dan Petegorsky, national outreach manager with an advocacy group, the Campaign for a Fair Settlement, described the terms as a “step backwards” for homeowners.

Complaints that active military personnel and National Guard members were losing their homes while deployed in war zones set off national outrage and prompt-ed Congressional hearings in 2011.

When regulators forced them to take a close look at their loans, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America each discovered about 200 military members whose homes were wrongfully foreclosed on in 2009 and 2010, according to the officials with direct knowledge of the findings. Citigroup had at least 100 such foreclosures.

“It’s absolutely devastating to be 7,000 miles from your home fighting for this country and get a message that your family is being evicted,” said Col. John S. Odom, Jr., a retired Air Force lawyer in Shreveport, La. who represents military members in foreclosure cases. “We have been sounding the alarms that the banks are il-legally evicting the very men and women who are out there fighting for this country. This is a devastat-ing confirmation of that.” (NYT)

SAN FRANCISCO — Privacy is no longer just a regulatory head-ache. Increasingly, Internet com-panies are egging each other on to prove to consumers that their data is safe and in their control.

In some instances, established companies are trying to gain mar-ket advantage by casting them-selves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals. Mozilla, an un-derdog in the browser market, suggested last week that it would allow its users to disable third-party tracking software.

At the same time, Web platform companies are setting limits on other companies with which they do business. Last year, Apple be-gan requiring applications in its

operating system to get permis-sion from users before tracking their location or peering into cal-endars and contacts stored on an iPhone. Also, many companies are offering privacy tools, rang-ing from ways to encode Facebook posts to ways to secure personal data stored in the cloud.

At the RSA Conference, a secu-rity-focused industry gathering here last week, Brendon Lynch, chief privacy officer at Microsoft, declared that companies like his had come to appreciate the “mar-ket forces at play with privacy.”

“It’s not just privacy advocates and regulators pushing,” Lynch said. “Increasingly, people are concerned more about privacy as

technology intersects their life.”Earlier this year, the Redmond,

Wash.-based company signaled its sensitivity to user privacy by turning on, by default, an anti-tracking signal in its latest Inter-net Explorer browser. Microsoft also took aim at its rival Google with a marketing campaign de-claring that consumers were be-ing “scroogled” with targeted advertisements based on their e-mails and search histories.

Lynch’s counterpart at Google, Keith Enright, called that campaign “intellectually dishonest.” At the RSA Conference, Enright said Goo- gle took pains to secure consumer information and simplify privacy settings. SOMINI SENGUPTA

SAN FRANCISCO — Delyn Si-mons’s life has become an open phone app of commingled corpo-rate and personal information.

“I’ve got Dropbox, Box, YouSen-dIt, Teambox, Google Drive,” says the 42-year-old executive, nam-ing just five of the many services on her iPhone to store memos, spreadsheets, customer informa-tion and soccer schedules.

She and her colleagues at Mash-ery, a 170-employee company that helps other companies build even more apps, also share data on GroupMe, Evernote, Skype and Google Hangouts. “From the

standpoint of corporate I.T.,” she says, “my team is a problem.”

And how. “My peers are killing me,” says John Oberon, Mash-ery’s information technology chief. While the company’s most sensitive information is encrypted and available only to authorized executives, he says, “there’s only so much you can do to stop people from forwarding an e-mail or stor-ing a document off a phone.”

Chinese hackers are one prob-lem. But so are employees who put company information online with their smartphones and tablets.

Once the data leaves the cor-

porate network, protecting it be- comes much harder. Searching for the name of almost any company, plus the word “confidential,” yields supposedly secret documents.

Skyhigh Networks, which mon- itors the personal use of apps, has counted over 1,200 services used in corporate networks from per-sonal devices. “What makes an iPhone interesting and scary is what happens in the cloud, and how I can upload things with one device and then download them to another from someplace else,” says Rajiv Gupta, the Skyhigh C.E.O.

The problem of data leakage is

as old as someone taking a car-bon copy home. What is different today is how people can take data with a finger swipe. Companies do not want to stand in the way of “life splicing,” as the intermingling of home and work tasks is known, be- cause it mostly plays in their favor. They just want more security.

Companies also know little about what ad hoc corporate computing costs. “The popular term now when people bypass the in-house organ- ization is ‘shadow I.T.,’ ” says Sunny Gupta, chief executive of Apptio, which helps calculate I.T. spending. QUENTIN HARDY

Swiss Move to Curb Pay of Executives

Swiss residents voted Sunday to impose some of the most se-vere restrictions on executive compensation, ignoring a warn-ing from the business lobby that such curbs would undermine the country’s investor-friendly image. The vote gives share-holders of companies listed in Switzerland a binding say on the overall pay packages for execu-tives and directors. In addition, companies would no longer be allowed to give bonuses to ex-ecutives joining or leaving the business, or to executives when their company was taken over. Violations could result in fines equal to up to six years of sala-ry and a prison sentence of up to three years. (NYT)

official: France Won’t Extend Its Austerity

France’s finance minister said Sunday that his govern-ment won’t enact any more aus-terity measures this year, al-though it has acknowledged it won’t meet its deficit goal be-cause of slow growth. The gov-ernment had promised to re-duce its deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product this year to bring it into line with European Union rules and help right the economy. But now France has said that will be im-possible and has asked the Eu-ropean Union for an extension. Still, Pierre Moscovici said on Sunday that “we refuse to add austerity to the recession.” (AP)

Banks Uncover Wrongful Foreclosures on Soldiers

Web Privacy Becomes an Imperative for Businesses

For I.T. Managers, Chinese Hackers Aren’t Only Foe Hiding in the Shadows

In Brief

BUSInESS Monday, March 4, 2013 4

When a show about the walk-ing dead on basic cable beats every network show in the rat-ings demographic that advertis-ers care most about, you have to

wonder who the real zombies are.

A zombie, after all, is something that continues to

roam, and tries to devour all in its path even though its natural life is over — a description that does not sound that far-fetched when it comes to broadcast networks.

Last fall, “The Walking Dead” was the highest-rated show among viewers 18 to 49, the most sought-after age group, with a bigger audience than network winners like “The Big Bang Theory,” “American Idol,” “The Voice” and “Modern Family.”

Now the zombies are back for the second half of the show’s third season, and they continue to gnaw on everything in their path, including the broadcast

networks’ historical claim to be-ing the only place to find a mass audience. Three weeks ago, the zombies owned Sunday night, attracting 7.7 million viewers in the 18 to 49 range, more than any broadcast show in the land.

AMC has a spinoff chat show called “The Talking Dead,” and even that is making a big dent in network audiences. That same Sunday three weeks ago, “The Talking Dead” drew almost 2.8 million viewers ages 18 to 49, trumping NBC not just for the night, but for all of February.

Consumers are roaming om-nivores, hunting down whatever has heat. And network appoint-ment viewing has given way to foraging and bingeing.

AMC has always made sure that if someone wants to catch up with America’s favorite zom-bies, or “Breaking Bad” or “Mad Men,” two of its other hits, then past seasons are available — on demand, on Netflix or on iTunes.

As a result, the audience for “The Walking Dead” is up 51 percent overall last year, and it is one of the most consistently talked about shows on social media.

“It’s a big moment to those of us who are in the business,” said Josh Sapan, the chief ex-ecutive of AMC Networks, “but I don’t think the general public, especially young people, even think about where programming comes from.”

Audiences expect spicy and dark narratives, but the networks are still in the business of not of-fending mass audiences. And A-list actors are after their agents to get them onto a prestige cable show. “All around, it’s a very seismic change in the television industry,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research.

Programming rules — not platform or position on the dial. I watch all kinds of AMC shows, and I couldn’t tell you what chan-nel on the cable box they live on.

LOS ANGELES — Near the middle of “Oz the Great and Pow-erful,” James Franco, who plays the title character, surveys his be-wildering surroundings and mut-ters “Are you kidding me?”

On Friday, when this wizard and his hot air balloon land in theaters, Disney hopes ticket buyers won’t think the same thing.

No movie studio would have the nerve to remake “The Wizard of Oz,” the beloved 1939 musical ranked by the Library of Congress as the most watched film in histo-ry. But “Oz the Great and Power-ful,” a Disney-produced prequel, is nearly as intrepid. The company is betting that a new twist on a story moviegoers already love will re-sult in a hit on par with “Alice in Wonderland,” which took in more than $1 billion in 2010.

It’s a breathtaking gamble. “Oz,” at turns goofy and dark (and not a musical), cost about $325 million to make and market, according to people who worked on the movie who asked for anonymity to avoid conflict with Disney. Franco has never anchored a mainstream film. Because of copyright constraints, Disney was not able to repro-duce certain iconic imagery from the “The Wizard of Oz,” which is owned by Warner Brothers.

And audiences have already ral-

lied around a “Wizard of Oz” pre-quel: “Wicked” has been a Broad-way hit for nearly 10 years.

Disney’s marketers have not been cowed by the huge shadow cast by the original “Oz” — their ads for the film invite comparisons to the classic. But the popularity of the original may ultimately rep- resent the studio’s biggest chal-lenge. Is there room for a new cine- matic vision of “Oz,” as Disney believes? Or will audiences (and critics) be reluctant to embrace an “Oz” that does not look a certain way, have a certain tone and fea-ture a certain set of slippers?

Hollywood is confronting issues like these with greater regularity. Studios, ever-desperate for source material that is familiar and comfortable to consumers, have

leaned more heav-ily toward sequels and prequels.

But nostalgic properties are tricky. There are

liberties you can take and ones you cannot, producers say.

Sean Bailey, Disney’s president of movie production, said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the box office prospects of “Oz the Great and Powerful.”

Bailey and Alan F. Horn, Dis-ney’s new studio chairman, are un-der pressure to deliver a hit. “John Carter,” which opened a year ago, forced Disney to take a $200 mil-lion write-down, one of the larg-est in movie history. Since “John Carter,” releases on the Disney label have included “The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” which took in a ho-hum $51.9 million, and “Fran-kenweenie,” a critical success but a box office failure, which sold just $35.3 million in tickets in North America. BROOKS BARNES

Imagine being the HBO execu-tive who hears this from one of the channel’s producing partners: “We think there’s an opportunity for us to get into North Korea.”

The executive was Michael Lombardo, and the partner was Vice Media, the Brooklyn media company with something of a daredevil streak. The conversa-tion happened a month ago, when production was well under way on “Vice,” a newsmagazine that will premiere on HBO on April 5.

The company’s bosses said they were planning a visit to the secre-tive country, centered on an exhibi-tion basketball game with the for-mer N.B.A. star Dennis Rodman and three members of the Harlem Globetrotters. HBO decided to add what Lombardo said was “a little bit” of extra financing, beyond what it had agreed to pay for the newsmagazine. “It felt like some-thing that could be interesting for the show,” Lombardo, HBO’s president for programming, said.

By Friday, the trip wasn’t just “interesting,” it was international news. Kim Jong-un had showed up for the exhibition game in Pyong-yang the day before, making Rod-man and the film crew from Vice the first Americans known to have met the North Korean ruler since he inherited power from his father in 2011.

On television and online, people were debating which group was benefiting more from the publicity, Vice or the North Korean leader-ship. At the State Department, re- porters were demanding to know why the government wasn’t do-ing more to debrief Rodman about his interactions with the dictator whom he called his “friend.”

The “Vice” crew remains in North Korea. But Rodman re-turned home over the weekend, and in his first interview — on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday — he said Kim was “a great guy” and said “he wants Obama to do one thing, call him” — which gener-ated even more news headlines.

“This was not, and ‘Vice’ is not, about going in and doing the de-finitive story on North Korea and arms,” Lombardo said. “This was always intended to be, ‘You know what, let’s get our camera into an isolated country that we hear about, we read about and yet is hard for us to even picture.’ ”

BRIAN STELTER

At AMC, Zombies Help Topple Network Television

Disney Is Taking One More Trip to Land of ‘Oz’ Vice Media’s Role In Rodman’s Visit

The Media equaTion

David Carr

merie WeiSmiller WAllAce/WAlt DiSney PictureS

Disney’s prequel “oz the Great and Powerful” cost roughly $325 million to make and market.

BUSInESS Monday, March 4, 2013 5

CriTiC’s noTebook

Chris Suellentrop

LOS ANGELES — “Jack the Gi-ant Slayer” bombed at the North American box office over the weekend, teaching Warner Broth-ers a harsh lesson about deriva-tive subject matter, flawed release dates and imperfect marketing.

The movie, a PG-13 adaptation of the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale directed by Bryan Singer, took in about $28 million, enough for No. 1 but about half of what would have been considered a success. First place does not always mean as much at a time when studios spend so heavily on so-called tentpole films designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Warner Brothers and a financ-ing partner spent about $190 mil-lion to make “Jack the Giant Slayer.” Global marketing costs added another $80 million or so to the price tag. Jeff Goldstein, Warner Brothers’ executive vice president for domestic distribu-tion, defended the movie’s perfor-mance in a telephone interview on Sunday.

“Our audience in the United States was a little bit more nar-row than we wanted, but the Ca-nadian numbers are really strong, and the overseas reaction has exceeded our expectations,” he said. “The story on this movie is far from being written — we need more time.”

The problem: Disney’s “Oz the Great and Powerful,” which goes after a nearly identical audience,

rolls out around the world next weekend and is attracting very strong advance interest, accord-ing to box office analysts.

“Jack the Giant Slayer” took in $13.7 million over the weekend from release in 10 Asian countries, a result the studio called “stellar.” Warner Brothers hopes that “Jack the Giant Slayer” could ultimate-ly take in $225 million or more from foreign theaters — possibly enough for the movie to break even. (About 50 percent of global ticket sales go to theater owners.)

Regardless, “Jack the Giant Slayer” extends a grim streak for Warner. The studio won best picture at the Oscars for “Argo” — no small feat — but has now sustained four box office failures in a row, starting with “Gangster Squad” and continuing with the fantasy “Beautiful Creatures” and “Bullet to the Head.”

Goldstein noted that American moviegoers had not been respond-

ing to much of anything of late. For the weekend, ticket sales totaled about

$110 million, a 35 percent decline from the same three days last year, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box office data. Ticket sales so far this year total $1.55 billion, an 8 percent decline compared with the same period in 2012; attendance has de-clined 9 percent.

“Identity Thief” (Universal Pic-tures), one of the few movies to break out in recent months, was second for the weekend. It took in about $9.7 million, for a four-week total of $107.4 million.

“21 & Over,” a new R-rated teenage comedy from Relativity Media, was third, selling an esti-mated $9 million in tickets; it cost $13 million to make. “The Last Exorcism: Part II” (CBS Films) was fourth, with about $8 million in ticket sales. Fifth place went to “Snitch” (Lionsgate), which had $7.7 million in sales, for a two-week total of $24.4 million.

BROOKS BARNES

Fee, Fi, Fo, Fizzle: ‘Jack’ Dies at Box OfficeVideo games, as their name

suggests, combine the ancient human practice of formal play with moving pictures, a younger form. But the unsatisfying name

we are saddled with for this me-dium — itself ap-proaching middle age, if you date its history to the first

home console in 1972 and apply the rule that middle age begins when you are older than every current Major League Baseball player — doesn’t capture the es-sence of video games.

The defining feature of video games is interaction, the three-way conversation among design-er, machine and player. “Applied Design,” a new installation at the Museum of Modern Art — and an important one because it is the first time the museum has dis-played the 14 video games it ac-quired in November — attempts to isolate this relationship. The games, from Pac-Man to Cana-balt, are naked, without their packaging or other nostalgic trappings. There are no arcade cabinets, no outmoded consoles or computers to gawk at.

Instead, each game is austerely contained on a screen set against a gray wall, with a joystick or oth-er controller on a spare platform beneath it. The installation is “an experiment to isolate the experi-ence of the interaction itself,” said Paola Antonelli, the senior cura-tor of the museum’s department of architecture and design.

But remove interactivity, the ability of the player to commu-nicate with the machine (and, by extension, the designer), and you no longer have a video game. That’s why it’s disappointing that only 9 of the 14 games included in “Applied Design” are playable: Pac-Man, Tetris, Another World, Vib-Ribbon, Katamari Damacy, Portal, flOw, Passage and Cana-balt. The other five — Myst, Sim-City 2000, The Sims, EVE Online and Dwarf Fortress — are dis-played as video demonstrations.

Like any medium, games can be used to persuade and educate. But perhaps it’s time to devote a permanent space — it could be small and provisional, like this one — solely for MoMA visitors to interact with games as an excit-ing, unpredictable, purposeless mode of pleasure.

A Museum’s Games Are Not on Pedestals

Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.For solving tips and more KenKen puzzles: www.nytimes.com/kenken. For feedback: nytimes@kenken.comKenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. Copyright © 2013 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

Answers to Puzzles

KenKen

WArner BrotherS PictureS

Warner Brothers and a financing partner spent in the neighborhood of $190 million, and $80 million in marketing costs, for a film that made just about $28 million.

ArtS Monday, March 4, 2013 6

Between occasional tears and sips of cof-fee, Benjy Melendez recalled a band from the 1960s with British accents that had young girls from his South Bronx neighborhood swooning over songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “A Hard Day’s Night.”

The band was called the Ghetto Brothers. “I started the band with my brothers Robert and Victor when we were kids,” said Melendez, 60. “We first learned to harmonize by listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks, then we studied the Beach Boys and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and then the Beatles arrived and we were hooked. We worked the Beatles sound to such perfection that we were also known as Los Junior Beatles. The girls, oh man, they

used to chase us all around the block.”So did the police, as the Ghetto Broth-

ers soon became the name of a street gang started by Melendez, who was known in those days as Yellow Benjy.

“I had about 2,000 members, not only in the South Bronx but in Philadelphia, Chicago and Puerto Rico. We were known everywhere,” he said. “We were a band of brothers who were tough when we needed to be, but we were mostly about peace, diplomacy and singing.”

The only thing the Ghetto Brothers ever cut, Melendez said, was an album in 1972 called “Power-Fuerza,” a collection of eight songs by the Melendez brothers and five other musicians-turned-gang members.

Their album, which was distributed only lo-cally, went nowhere and faded into urban lore, where it lingered for more than 40 years until it was released worldwide in December by Truth & Soul Records, a Brooklyn-based label. “It’s a real melting pot of sound, with a lot of soul and Latin influence and a tremendous amount of rock and roll,” said Dan Akalepse, an owner of Truth & Soul Records.

Jorge Pabon, a graffiti artist, street dancer and disc jockey from East Harlem known as Popmaster Fabel, said the Ghetto Brothers are part of the early evolution of New York’s hip-hop history. “They were Santana meets Sly and the Family Stone meets The Stylistics meets the Beatles,” said Pabon, who is also an adjunct professor at New York University.

The turning point, Melendez said, came in 1971 when he sent his best friend, a fel-low gang member named Robert Benjamin Cornell, who was also known as Black Benjy, to broker a peace treaty between two rival Bronx gangs. During that meeting, Cornell was killed. “I was devastated because I was the one who sent Black Benjy out to make the peace,” said Melendez. As a result, he ar-ranged for a historic meeting that took place at the Madison Square Boys & Girls Club.

“There were over 300 leaders in attendance representing gangs like the Black Spades, the Savage Skulls and the Spanish Kings,” Me-lendez said. “We agreed to make the peace, and I invited all the gangs on Friday nights to our turf at 163rd Street and Prospect Avenue, where we performed for them in the street.”

Today, the four-man band, which now con-sists of Melendez and his son Joshua, as well as Robert Melendez and his son, Hiram (Vic-tor Melendez died 13 years ago) rehearses on Friday nights while waiting for a turn on another stage. “We received such great pub-licity when our old album was rereleased, but what we need now is a manager to help get us some good gigs around town,” Melendez said. “After all these years, the Ghetto Brothers can still bring people together through the power of good music.” VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

Not Just a Gang, and Not Just a Band

ACROSS 1 ___-Saxon 6 Chicago winter

clock setting: Abbr.

9 Daffodil-to-be13 Big name in

plastic wrap14 Performance for

one15 Norway’s capital16 Legal thriller

author who wrote “Presumed Innocent”

18 One-named supermodel from Somalia

19 “___ see now!” (“Aha!”)

20 End of the Greek alphabet

21 Thyroid, for instance

22 Illustrious warrior returning from battle

25 Diner coffee container

26 Rowing implements

27 Visitors to baby Jesus

30 Fake33 Laugh syllable36 King Tut, e.g.40 Skirt line41 Increase

42 Nevada city on the Humboldt River

43 “Little” Dickens girl

45 Bovine mouthful47 Four-time

Daytona 500 winner

54 Cover all the ___55 Wanders56 “No seating”

letters on Broadway

57 ___ the Red (Viking explorer)

58 Journalists’ office60 Talk up61 Finales62 Armstrong of jazz63 Something for

the needy64 When the sun is

out65 Enough

DOWN 1 Part of

N.A.A.C.P.: Abbr. 2 Cantina chip 3 Body part often

pulled in sports 4 Back muscle, for

short 5 Traveling, as a

band 6 Small Welsh dog

7 M.I.T. business school name

8 AAA offering 9 Water heater10 Law officer

wearing a star11 Grassy expanse

in the Southwest12 Name said

before and after James

14 One in court17 Some Feds21 West African

nation23 One-liner24 Artist Vincent

van ___27 “Whatever”

28 Ripen29 Sporting venue30 Fleeting craze31 “The Lord of

the Rings” tree creature

32 Wall St. debut34 Just fine35 Greek letter

that sounds like the end of 16-, 22-, 36-, 47- or 58-Across

37 Accounts of Scheherazade

38 Sit ___ by39 Make over44 Picks via ballot45 Hair parter

46 Andress of “Dr. No”

47 Yule song48 Sporting venue49 Rambunctious50 Low-voiced

chorus member51 Deplete52 Quest in a

Monty Python movie

53 Monopoly purchase before a hotel

54 Old VHS rival58 Homer’s

neighbor on “The Simpsons”

59 CD-___

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE

PUZZLE BY IAN LIVENGOOD

3/4/13 (No. 0304)

O L D G E E Z E R K A P P AR A R I N T O G O A L O A DC H I L D H O O D Z E P P OA R P T I P S S O C C E R

P O O L F L O U R NA B L E P A D D Y B L TI R O N M I N E R P E T I TD O N T M A K E M E L A U G HA W G E E T R E A S U R E R

N I L P O E M S T E R OO S S C A N O T I SM U L D E R D R A T D W IA G A R S P O I S O N O A KH A N N A T R A I L B I K EA R D O R S A L A D A T E A

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36 37 38 39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46

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57 58 59

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63 64 65

For answers, call 1-900-289-CLUE (289-2583), $1.49 a minute;or, with a credit card, 1-800-814-5550.Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 5,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year).Annual subscriptions are available for the best of Sunday crosswords from the last 50 years: 1-888-7-ACROSS.Read about and comment on each puzzle: nytimes.com/wordplay.

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CroSSWorD Edited By Will Shortz

joUrnAl Monday, March 4, 2013 7

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New York is one of 15 states that have banned the predatory, high-interest loans that payday lenders use to pillage low-income borrowers. But offshore lenders increasingly get around state laws by issuing predatory loans over the Internet. Worse still, as the Times’s Jessica Sil-ver-Greenberg reported, banks are profiting from the loans by letting the Internet lenders automatically withdraw payments from the borrower’s account, in some cases without his or her permission. When the accounts are over-drawn, the banks collect fat overdraft fees.

About 12 million borrowers turn to payday lenders each year. The loan model that lures them in is based on deception. Customers are told that they can borrow small amounts, per-haps a few hundred dollars, which they are supposed to repay in full within a short period, typically two weeks. The promotional mate-rial does not let on that the loans, which carry annual interest rates of 500 percent or more, are structured in a way that inevitably turns a short-term obligation into long-term debt.

A new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts finds, for example, that only about 14 percent of borrowers can afford to take enough out of their monthly budget to repay the average pay-day loan. Instead, average borrowers carry a debt for five months, during which time they pay repeated fees to renew the loan. By the fifth month, someone who borrowed $375 will have paid about $520 in interest alone. Many also resort to borrowing from another payday lender. Payday borrowers are more likely than others to default on credit card debt, to file for

bankruptcy or to lose their bank accounts be-cause of abuse of overdraft privileges.

New York State passed one of the strongest anti-usury laws in the nation in 1976, mak-ing it a felony for lenders to charge in excess of 25 percent interest. Still, New Yorkers are preyed upon by out-of-state payday lenders, which collect payments through automatic withdrawals. Under federal law, bank cus-tomers have a right to revoke automatic with-drawals. They can also close an account. A fed-eral lawsuit brought against JPMorgan Chase Bank by two customers in New York shows how difficult exercising these rights can be.

One plaintiff was besieged by lenders that had charged her an annual interest rate of nearly 800 percent and continually tried to debit her bank account, triggering $34 over-draft fees. She asked the bank in March 2012 to close her account, but it remained open for two months, during which the lenders tried to debit her 55 times, ringing up $1,523 in fees.

Chase has promised to revisit its policies, but judging from consumer complaints nationally, this problem is not unique to New York.

A bill pending in the U.S. Senate, known as the Safe Lending Act, would require all online lenders to comply with state laws that provide stronger consumer protections than the feder-al statutes. It would establish that loan borrow-ers have the right to stop lenders from raiding their bank accounts. State and federal regula-tors also need to bar banks from giving lend-ers access to the automatic payment system in states where predatory loans are illegal.

Airlines could start offering fares to travel-ers based on how regularly they fly, where they live and the kind of trip they are taking.

The world’s largest airlines have agreed to adopt a new standard for distributing airfare information that could significantly compro-mise the privacy of customers and allow carri-ers to charge travelers different prices for the same trip. Airlines, of course, already charge different fares based on when a ticket is pur-chased, whether a Saturday stay is included and so on, but they are now looking to go much further by seeking to differentiate among fliers based on personal characteristics.

The new standard, which was agreed to at a meeting of the International Air Transport Association in October, will allow airlines to ask customers searching for airfares through travel agents or Web sites to first provide their names, frequent flier numbers, contact details and other information before presenting them with prices. A few airlines are expected to test this approach this year, and it could be widely adopted in a few years, according to the trade group. A majority of the group’s 240 members, which include most American airlines, though not Southwest, voted for the standard.

It seems clear that the standard, called the

“new distribution capability,” as described by the group, could also be used to present higher fares to, say, a business traveler who airlines determine could pay more. Airlines will also have a big incentive to present much higher ba-sic prices when customers shop anonymously to encourage them to provide more informa-tion about themselves to see “special deals.”

Federal regulators have not yet studied the new standard. But the Department of Trans-portation has the authority to police unfair and deceptive practices, and it should demand safe-guards, like limiting the amount of personal in-formation airlines can require. So should the European Union, which has historically taken a tougher stand on privacy than the United States, and governments elsewhere. Regula-tors should also study whether the use of this new approach by most of the world’s airlines could result in illegal collusion to raise prices for travelers based on their characteristics.

Many airlines have struggled with high fuel costs and aggressive competition from low-fare carriers. They may be counting on the new airfare pricing standard to increase revenue and profits. It is hard to see how this approach could result in more competition or anything but higher costs for many travelers.

Conservatives like to say that their position is all about economic freedom, and hence mak-ing government’s role, in general, and govern-ment spending, in particular, as small as pos-sible. And no doubt there are conservatives who really have such idealistic motives.

When it comes to conservatives with actual power, however, there’s an alternative, more cynical view of their motivations — namely, that it’s all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, about giving more to those who already have a lot. And if you want a piece of evidence in favor of that view, look at the current state of play over Medicaid.

Medicaid, which provides health insurance to lower-income Americans, is a highly suc-cessful program that’s about to get bigger, because an expansion of Medicaid is one key piece of the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamac-are. There is, however, a catch. Last year’s Su-preme Court decision upholding the act opened a loophole that lets states turn down the Med-icaid expansion if they choose. And there has been a lot of tough talk from Republican gover-nors about standing firm against the terrible, tyrannical notion of helping the uninsured.

Now, in the end most states will probably go along with the expansion because of the huge financial incentives: the federal government will pay the full cost of the expansion for the first three years, and the additional spending will benefit hospitals and doctors as well as pa-tients. Still, some states are placing a condition on this aid, insisting it be run through private insurance companies. That tells you a lot about what conservative politicians really want.

Privatizing Medicaid will end up requiring more government spending, because there’s overwhelming evidence Medicaid is much cheaper than private insurance. Partly, this reflects lower administrative costs, because Medicaid neither advertises nor spends mon-ey trying to avoid covering people. But a lot of it reflects the government’s ability to prevent price gouging by hospitals, drug firms and oth-er parts of the medical-industrial complex.

You might ask why then will much of Obama-care run through private insurers. The answer is, raw political power. Letting the medical-industrial complex continue to get away with a lot of overcharging was a price President Obama had to pay to get health reform passed. And since the reward was that tens of millions more Americans will gain insurance, it was a price worth paying. But why would you insist on privatizing a health program that is already public, and that does a much better job than the private sector of controlling costs? The answer is pretty obvious: the flip side of higher taxpay-er costs is higher medical-industry profits.

So ignore all the talk about too much govern-ment spending and too much aid to moochers who don’t deserve it. As long as the spending ends up lining the right pockets, and the un-deserving beneficiaries of public largess are corporations, conservatives with actual power seem to like Big Government just fine.

E D I T O R I A L S O F T h E T I m E S

Bleeding the Borrower Dry

Frequent Fliers, Prepare to Pay More

PAUl KrUgMAn

Who Is Mooching?

oPInIon Monday, March 4, 2013 8

LeBron James wobbled, but only for a moment. He winced, flexed his left knee a few times, reset himself and returned to his unshakable agenda: soaring over a league of helpless challengers.

The image of James’s twisted knee Sunday afternoon had to send shudders through South Beach, and perhaps a perverse hope through Madison Square Garden, but none of it lasted very long. The only image anyone will remember is of James flying downcourt, converting another Knicks turnover into a spectacu-lar breakaway dunk, a final touch on a 99-93 victory.

With that, the Miami Heat avenged two blowout losses to the Knicks and put a little more distance between them. The Heat (43-14) have a seven-and-a-half-game lead over the Knicks (35-21) in the Eastern Conference.

James provided the clear edge as the Heat erased a 16-point defi-cit and dominated the second half, 54-34. He scored 12 of his 29 points in the fourth quarter, blocked Tyson Chandler’s layup attempt down the stretch, then lunged to steal J. R. Smith’s careless pass for the final dunk.

By that point, James’s third-quarter collision with Smith, the one that made James’s knee twist unnaturally, had long since been forgotten.

“That man don’t get hurt,” Car-melo Anthony, his close friend, said with a wry smile. “So we wasn’t buying that. He made some plays, made some shots.”

James also finished with 11 re-bounds, 7 assists and 3 steals as the Heat won their 14th straight game and ended the Knicks’ three-

game winning streak. “You’re not going to stop him,” Coach Mike Woodson said of James. “He’s fig-ured it out.”

The Knicks answered with An-thony, who had 32 points but went quiet in the second half, going 3 for 11 from the floor as Miami focused its defense on him and let the Knicks’ shooters roam free. The result was a barrage of missed 3-pointers, most of them by Smith, who went 3 for 14 from the arc for the game, drawing Woodson’s scorn afterward. Anthony did not take a shot in the final four min-utes and said afterward that he had hyperextended his right arm in the first half. He played down the injury.

James, in turn, said his knee was fine. “I was concerned, but I had a doctor look at it,” James said. “I will be all right.”

HOWARD BECK

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — The cold wind that buffeted the Honda Classic left a trail of debris. It creased the shiny image of the world No. 1, Rory McIlroy, who gave up the defense of his title in the middle of the second round. It whipped Tiger Woods, the world No. 2, like a pin flag. By Sunday’s conclusion, the leader board was so topsy-turvy, it produced a win-ner who had finished dead last in the field in his previous start.

Michael Thompson closed with a one-under 69, one of only five sub-70 rounds Sunday on PGA Na-tional’s Champions course, to seal a two-stroke victory over Geoff Ogilvy (69). Thompson finished at

minus-9, a startling improvement over his 16-over-par performance two weeks ago at the Northern Trust Open at Riviera Country Club. “The Northern Trust was a good thing in my life,” Thompson said. “It allowed me to focus on what I needed to do to play like I did this week.”

The tour stop outside Los Ange-les was Thompson’s third missed cut in four starts. With two months of the season gone, he had made $10,919, which wasn’t enough to cover his expenses. Upon return-ing to his home in Birmingham, Ala., Thompson spoke with his wife, Rachel, and his longtime swing coach, Susan Berdoy Mey-

ers. They helped him to see that if his worst fate was to play golf next year on the Web.com tour, he still had an enviable life.

There is maybe a lesson for McIlroy in the story of Thomp-son’s turnaround. McIlroy’s friends say he is putting too much pressure on himself to prove to the world that he is worthy of the mega-million-dollar deal he signed this year with Nike. In an interview with NBC, Jack Nick-laus, an 18-time major champion, described McIlroy’s withdrawal as “unfortunate” and said, “If he had thought about it for five min-utes, he wouldn’t have done it.” KAREN CROUSE

Neither Knicks Nor Twisted Knee Deters JamesEdwards Ends Skid

Carl Edwards pulled away on a late start to snap a 70-race winless streak Sunday, the sec-ond long drought that he has ended at Phoenix Internation-al Raceway. Edwards broke the longest slump of his career by winning at Phoenix in 2010. On Sunday, he won for the first time since Las Vegas in 2011 by leading the final 78 laps of the 312-mile race. The Daytona 500 winner, Jimmie Johnson, was second by inches. (AP)

Winner of Honda Classic Goes From Last to First

WEAtHErhigh/low temperatures for the 21 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday, Eastern time, and precipitation (in inches) for the 18 hours ended at 1 p.m. yesterday. Expected conditions for today and tomorrow.

Weather conditions: c-clouds, F-fog, h-haze, I-ice, Pc-partly cloudy, r-rain, S-sun, Sh-showers, Sn-snow, SS-snow showers, T-thunderstorms, Tr-trace, W-windy.

U.S. CItIES

Yesterday Today Tomorrowalbuquerque 67/ 35 0 64/ 32 W 56/ 35 Satlanta 42/ 30 0.01 58/ 46 S 61/ 34 TBoise 47/ 41 0.01 46/ 29 S 52/ 37 PcBoston 42/ 33 0.02 42/ 34 c 46/ 34 PcBuffalo 25/ 19 0.04 30/ 22 c 38/ 29 Pccharlotte 47/ 21 0 55/ 39 S 57/ 36 rchicago 34/ 15 0 35/ 28 c 33/ 26 Sncleveland 26/ 22 0.07 31/ 20 Pc 39/ 33 Sndallas-Ft. Worth 71/ 36 0 84/ 45 Pc 61/ 35 Sdenver 59/ 36 0.02 42/ 16 SS 45/ 25 Sdetroit 32/ 20 Tr 34/ 23 Pc 35/ 30 Sn

houston 69/ 32 0 78/ 56 W 68/ 39 TKansas city 41/ 24 0 45/ 27 c 36/ 22 SSLos angeles 70/ 56 0 67/ 52 Pc 68/ 50 PcMiami 63/ 52 0 70/ 54 S 77/ 63 SMpls.-St. Paul 32/ 18 0 29/ 21 Sn 31/ 15 Snnew york city 39/ 29 0 41/ 30 Pc 48/ 33 Sorlando 54/ 38 0 67/ 44 S 77/ 55 SPhiladelphia 39/ 29 0 43/ 30 Pc 48/ 34 PcPhoenix 77/ 54 0 75/ 56 S 81/ 57 PcSalt Lake city 46/ 35 0.18 37/ 24 S 47/ 33 SSan Francisco 58/ 51 0 59/ 44 S 59/ 48 cSeattle 50/ 36 0 53/ 38 Pc 49/ 37 rSt. Louis 40/ 19 0.02 49/ 35 c 40/ 26 SnWashington 42/ 30 0 46/ 30 S 45/ 36 r

ForEIgn CItIES Yesterday Today Tomorrowacapulco 94/ 70 0 89/ 70 S 89/ 69 Sathens 55/ 50 0.04 54/ 47 S 59/ 43 SBeijing 63/ 21 0 56/ 34 S 61/ 37 PcBerlin 43/ 34 0.04 46/ 33 S 51/ 35 SBuenos aires 73/ 57 0 72/ 61 Pc 75/ 63 Scairo 84/ 68 0 73/ 54 S 71/ 50 S

cape Town 86/ 68 0 93/ 64 S 82/ 61 Sdublin 46/ 37 0 46/ 39 Pc 49/ 45 rGeneva 43/ 32 0 53/ 34 S 58/ 40 Pchong Kong 63/ 55 0 69/ 60 S 70/ 62 SKingston 76/ 75 0.11 81/ 74 S 84/ 76 PcLima 84/ 69 0.01 81/ 71 c 81/ 70 cLondon 46/ 28 0 48/ 39 Pc 57/ 48 PcMadrid 57/ 37 0 55/ 46 r 52/ 45 ShMexico city 68/ 34 0 75/ 38 S 78/ 41 SMontreal 29/ 23 0.09 32/ 28 Sn 36/ 30 PcMoscow 16/ -4 0.06 14/ -2 SS 19/ 17 Pcnassau 68/ 61 0.02 73/ 64 S 76/ 65 PcParis 46/ 32 0 50/ 41 S 59/ 47 PcPrague 36/ 25 0 44/ 28 S 43/ 31 Srio de Janeiro 86/ 75 0 91/ 77 T 91/ 78 Trome 59/ 39 0 55/ 42 S 61/ 48 cSantiago 86/ 50 0 84/ 54 S 85/ 54 SStockholm 32/ 29 0 36/ 30 Pc 39/ 32 PcSydney 77/ 68 0.05 79/ 68 Pc 79/ 66 PcTokyo 46/ 39 0.02 49/ 39 Pc 54/ 43 SToronto 25/ 18 0.03 31/ 21 Pc 36/ 29 PcVancouver 46/ 41 0.02 52/ 38 Pc 47/ 37 rWarsaw 43/ 34 0.01 35/ 27 S 46/ 30 S

In Brief

n.H.l. SCorESSATURDAY’S LATE GAMESPittsburgh 7, Montreal 6, oTcarolina 6, Florida 2Vancouver 5, Los angeles 2San Jose 2, nashville 1Phoenix 5, anaheim 4, SoSUNDAYchicago 2, detroit 1, SoIslanders 3, ottawa 2, Sorangers 3, Buffalo 2, Socolumbus 2, colorado 1, oTdallas 4, St. Louis 1carolina 3, Florida 2Montreal 4, Boston 3Minnesota 4, Edmonton 2calgary 4, Vancouver 2

n.B.A. SCorESSATURDAY’S LATE GAMESPhiladelphia 104, Golden State 97chicago 96, nets 85Milwaukee 122, Toronto 114, oTPortland 109, Minnesota 94SUNDAYMiami 99, Knicks 93oklahoma city 108, L.a. clippers 104Sacramento 119, charlotte 83Memphis 108, orlando 82Washington 90, Philadelphia 87houston 136, dallas 103San antonio 114, detroit 75Indiana 97, chicago 92L.a. Lakers 99, atlanta 98

HEAt 99, KnICKS 93

SPortS Monday, March 4, 2013 9

London

Gareth Bale’s shots on goal have alternately been labeled laser beams, rockets or rips. His left foot has been described as

sweet or magi-cal or masterful. And his recent run of success

has inspired heady comparisons to Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ron-aldo or, in one particularly cre-ative turn of phrase in a British newspaper, a “mild-mannered bank clerk who goes to war and returns a hero.”

Hyperbole will never be an issue for English soccer observ-ers, but this level of hysteria is relatively new for Bale, the Tot-tenham Hotspur wing whose dra-matic finishes have captivated YouTube followers and elevated him to the most-talked-about player in the world.

Suddenly, Bale is everywhere: on highlight shows, in continual rumors about big-money trans-fers and, hilariously, on a variety of graphic T-shirts sold near the club’s stadium, White Hart Lane, including one featuring a picture of Bale’s face above the words “He Scores When He Wants.”

At this point, that sentiment does not seem so far-fetched.

Bale scored here Sunday, his 20th goal of the season in all com-petitions, and 9th in seven games, as Tottenham defeated Arsenal, 2-1, in the North London derby. The victory pushed the Spurs into third place in the Premier League, 2 points behind second-place Manchester City, 2 ahead of fourth-place Chelsea and — most pointedly for Tottenham fans, who have endured nearly 20 years of looking up at Arsenal in the standings — 7 points clear of the flailing Gunners.

Life has rarely been better for the Spurs and their fans. But even as a return to the Champions League next season seems all but certain, the double-edged reality of being Tottenham — and not, say, Real Madrid or Manchester United — means there will al-ways be a lingering question: how long can it last?

This is the reality of European soccer. Anytime a megastar like Bale emerges on a nonmegasized club, speculation about the even-tual sale of that star inevitably pops up with the frequency of rain clouds over Britain. Bale, 23, has been linked to Real Madrid — who are roughly the George Steinbrenner Yankees of Europe — and if Madrid offers a transfer

fee of, say, £70 million (about $105 million), it may be difficult for Tottenham to refuse.

“He won’t spend his entire ca-reer at Tottenham,” said Stewart Robson, a former English league player who now works as an ana-lyst for ESPN UK. “I think he will stay for another season. But it is difficult to see him playing for-ever with Tottenham. Tottenham will always be a club that has to

sell its very best players.”On Sunday, Bale capped his

day by taking part in a rousing teamwide celebration in front of Spurs fans. “We want to be back in the Champions League, and that showed in our celebrations afterward,” Tottenham’s captain, Michael Dawson, said.

They want Bale with them, too.Cliff Jones, a star wing for Tot-

tenham in the 1960s, has forged a relationship with Bale because of their shared backgrounds. Jones has joked with Bale that he has taken over the mantle of being the “new Welsh wizard,” and he says he admires Bale’s specificity when he stands over a free kick.

Like many Spurs fans, though, Jones’s praise for Bale came with a worrisome caveat. “Lots of big clubs will be looking for him now,” he said, frowning. “I think, in some way, it’s inevitable that he’ll be moved.”

Jones played 10 seasons with the Spurs. But that was a differ-ent time and a different Welsh-man.

Jones considered Bale’s plight for a moment, then brightened. “We’ll have to see about Gareth,” he said finally. “Right now, I think everyone is just happy to watch all that he can do.”

The television personality Keith Olbermann was in Los Angeles on Friday being deposed for a re-ported $70 million lawsuit he filed against his most recent employer, Current TV, with the trial expect-ed to begin in May. The verdict will put an official end to a one-year stint at Current that was supposed to last at least five.

But as one door closes, another has been quietly approached. At various times over the last year, Olbermann and his representa-tives have expressed interest in his return to the employer that made him famous: ESPN.

Olbermann’s interest included dinner at New York’s Four Sea-sons Restaurant with John Skip-per, ESPN’s president.

“Keith Olbermann, both person-ally and through a couple people I know, reached out to say, ‘Gee, I would love to have dinner,’ ” Skip-per said. “I agreed to dinner with Keith because I assumed he’d be provocative and witty and fun to have dinner with, and he was in-

deed lots of fun.“Clearly, he was looking to see if

there was an entry point to come back.”

Olbermann declined to discuss the details of the conversation.

“I had the privilege to spend some time with John Skipper,” he said. “His vision and charm were readily apparent, and judging by his leadership, his family name was prophetic.”

In the months since that dinner, Olbermann’s representatives have campaigned at ESPN for possible opportunities, according to a senior executive at the net-work and someone involved with Olbermann’s efforts. Both people asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the discussions.

Olbermann worked at ESPN from 1992 to 1997. A pivotal force in the starting of ESPN Radio, he became best known as one of the most popular anchors in the network’s history, co-hosting “SportsCenter” with Dan Patrick.

Olbermann briefly left Patrick’s side to help start ESPN2 but soon returned to ESPN. He and Patrick reunited and continued hosting the 11 p.m. “SportsCenter” until his contract expired in 1997. Olber-mann opted to leave sports and signed on for a politically themed talk show on MSNBC.

Some at ESPN were glad to see him go; he was considered the net-work’s most controversial person-ality. His encyclopedic knowledge of sports was not disputed, nor were his writing skills or on-air talent. But he alienated a sizable group in the company, who found him exasperating to work with.

Patrick said he would not be surprised if Olbermann returned to ESPN. “You can never say nev-er,” said Patrick, who now hosts NBC’s “Football Night in Ameri-ca,” as well as a syndicated sports-talk show. “What I can say is that if he does return, I won’t be back there with him doing ‘SportsCen-ter.’ I can promise you that.”

JAMES ANDREW MILLER

Tottenham Fans Serenade Their Hero While They Still Can

Keith Olbermann Is Angling for a Return to ESPN

on soCCer

Sam Borden

kerim okten/euroPeAn PreSSPhoto AGency

Gareth Bale is in his sixth season at tottenham.

Woman’s tryout lasts All of 2 Kicks

Lauren Silberman lined up for a kick at N.F.L. history, took a deep breath and booted the foot-ball. It barely went anywhere, traveling 19 yards, and she grabbed at her right leg. Still, it was good enough to make her the first woman to try out at a regional combine, even if her day lasted all of two kicks. Her second kick went only about 13 yards. (AP)

Winning Streak at 22Patrick Kane kept the Chica-

go Blackhawks’ record streak alive. Chicago extended its N.H.L.-record, season-opening points streak to 22 games Sun-day when Kane scored the tying goal with 2:02 left in regulation and had the only goal in a shoot- out. That lifted Chicago to a 2-1 win over the Detroit Red Wings on Sunday. (AP)

In Brief

SPortS Monday, March 4, 2013 10