“For Jets, Success Far Beyond One Playoff Victory - New York Times” plus 4 more

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• For Jets, Success Far Beyond One Playoff Victory - New York Times
• High-stakes gambling among NBA players? Consider it team bonding - CNN Sports Illustrated
• Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected - New York Times
• Spain approves anti-piracy legislation - Variety
• Kings are sideshow at San Jose's Three Kings Day event - San Jose Mercury News

For Jets, Success Far Beyond One Playoff Victory - New York Times Posted: 10 Jan 2010 06:37 PM PST From his New Jersey basement Sunday afternoon, linebacker Bart Scott multitasked, alternately answering questions about his current team, the Jets, and rooting for his former team, the Baltimore Ravens, in its playoff game against the New England Patriots. Scott wanted a Ravens victory because he preferred to face the San Diego Chargers next weekend in the divisional round of the N.F.L. playoffs, instead of the Indianapolis Colts. Scott meant no disrespect to the Chargers, winners of 11 straight, but he wanted a less familiar opponent than the Colts, who hosted the Jets in late December. The more Scott watched the Ravens, the more his focus shifted, the more he saw in his former team what his current team has spent this season building. In the Ravens, he saw a philosophy, a system, a way of football that leads to sustained, not scattered, success. "In Baltimore, we had tradition," Scott said. "It was like baseball. Like we had a farm system. When guys went down, other guys came up. What mattered was the system." The system helped the Ravens win, 33-14, and grant Scott his wish, as the Jets will play the Chargers in San Diego next Sunday. Jets Coach Rex Ryan also watched his former team, and he said, "I saw that formula for success." The Jets won their first playoff game in five years Saturday, bouncing the Cincinnati Bengals from the postseason, 24-14. That triumph highlighted the philosophy installed by Ryan in his first season, the way he brought not only players with him from Baltimore, but also an approach to football. It also showcased the Jets' stable of young, skilled players, a testament to the eye of General Manager Mike Tannenbaum and his staff, the minimal impact of linebacker Vernon Gholston notwithstanding. These Jets are built to win now. And next season. And the season after that. On Saturday, the rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez threw for 182 yards and a touchdown, and his 80 percent completion percentage set a postseason franchise record. Another rookie, running back Shonn Greene, ran for 135 yards and another score, receiving key blocks from center Nick Mangold and tackle D'Brickashaw Ferguson, who were each drafted in the first round four years ago. The second-year tight end Dustin Keller caught three passes for 99 yards, including a 45-yard touchdown reception that put the Jets ahead for good. Cornerback Darrelle Revis, in his third season, recorded his latest interception. And another third-year player, linebacker David Harris, is the leading tackler on the league's top-ranked defense. "It came together faster than expected," Scott said. "We had a real turbulent regular season. Maybe those were all the lessons that we needed to learn." When the Jets hired Ryan last January, he promised to run the football and stop the run, promised to change the culture and instill toughness. But when the Jets lost six of seven games in one stretch, Ryan looked foolish for believing he could accomplish all that in one season. At least until the Jets won six of their last seven contests. Until their defense went the last three weeks without coughing up a lead. Until Sanchez went three weeks without a turnover. Skeptics have said the Jets backed into the playoffs, handed wins by Indianapolis and Cincinnati. Skeptics will note that the Jets' playoff victory also came against the Bengals, regarded among the weakest playoff teams in the American Football Conference. Scott sees something else. He sees the system implemented by Ryan allowing for strides made by the Jets' bevy of young skill players, and he believes that regardless of what happens next week, the Jets are built for another run next season, and another run the season after that. "In Baltimore, we never truly had a franchise quarterback, and we were still in contention for the playoffs most years," Scott said. "We think we have a franchise quarterback in Mark, a great coach in Rex and a roster filled with talent. Next year, we will take it to the next level." The Jets certainly have a deep roster. This season, they have proved that. They lost running back Leon Washington, their most dynamic player, to injury, and still led the N.F.L. in rushing. They lost Kris Jenkins, their defensive anchor, to injury, and still led the league in several defensive categories, including total defense. The Jets contend that system, philosophy and belief have augmented their talent. "A coach can change an atmosphere, and Coach Ryan has done that," said Revis, referring to the replacement of Eric Mangini after last season. "With Mangini, it wasn't good here. Everybody had mixed feelings about him, and you can't go far like that." Ryan presented his players with a postseason schedule last week. He even included a parade on Feb. 9, two days after Super Bowl XLIV. The Jets must play better next weekend to prove him correct for another week. Against the Bengals, they allowed 171 rushing yards, and Ryan said he had never won a playoff game when his team allowed that many. The Jets also committed nine penalties. Regardless, Scott looks at the Jets' roster and their coaching staff and looks ahead to future seasons. The Jets have tough decisions to make regarding contracts, the re-signing of their stable of young players. But they are built solid for this year, next year and beyond. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

High-stakes gambling among NBA players? Consider it team bonding - CNN Sports Illustrated Posted: 10 Jan 2010 06:01 PM PST When Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks, one of his first moves was to upgrade the team plane. So it was that he laid out nearly $50 million for a Boeing 757, flush with a weight room and facility for trainers to provide medical treatment. But the Mavericks' previous team plane had a unique feature as well: The front tire was painted in the manner of a roulette wheel. Why, you ask? When the players boarded the plane for road trips, an employee handed them envelopes containing their per diem meal money in cash. For a road trip of decent length, that could come to more than $1,000 per player. The players then pooled their money, and each selected a number to correspond with the roulette-wheel numbers on the plane's front tire. When the plane finally landed and stopped at the airstrip, an attendant inserted a peg into the tire. If the peg ended up wedged into your number, you won the pot. And the gambling didn't stop there. There was always the opportunity to earn your money back -- or lose more -- through card games, Madden video game competitions and shooting contests. Cedric Ceballos allegedly divorced a teammate from $50,000 by hitting a halfcourt shot. The teammate turned ashen -- not because he'd just lost more money than the average American will earn in a year, but because he had to figure out a way to discharge his debt without his wife finding out. Another story from those teams (this one apocryphal, but we'll tell it anyway): One player, signed to a 10-day contract, was a particularly easy mark. When his contract was about to lapse, players appealed to management to keep him around, citing his positive contributions to the club. Management obliged. The player was picked up by another team the following season, and to this day, it's not likely that he knows that his NBA career might never have come to pass if he hadn't been such a lousy gambler. Yes, well before an alleged card-game dispute between two Wizards -- a misnomer of the highest order -- metastasized into the first full-blown sports scandal of this young decade, intra-team gambling was already well-embedded in the culture of the NBA. Just consider the elements. You have a kennel of hyper-competitive alpha dogs, vast pastures of down time and wealth to the point of abstraction. But there's also this element: complicity from the superiors. The card games and shooting contests aren't conducted in secret chambers. Coaches, and even executives, encourage or, at the bare minimum, tacitly permit the high-stakes wagering. At a time when team chemistry is increasingly elusive -- when players walk into arenas with their ears wrapped in headphones and walk out wrapped by their entourages -- these games of chance pass for a team-bonding exercise. I once watched a well-regarded coach end a practice with a shooting contest, standing sentry over the money at halfcourt. He remarked that he could actually learn a great deal about players' mental toughness by watching how they performed with money and pride on the line. Naturally, sometimes these games can backfire and fray team bonds. Several years ago, a savvy Detroit player had allegedly cheated Jerry Stackhouse out of $2,000 in a card game. Stackhouse erroneously fingered Christian Laettner and cold-cocked him. Stories abound of Player X freezing out Player Y on the court, holdover aggression from a disputed wager or an unpaid debt. Several years ago, I wrote a short piece for SI on Aaron McKie, then a Philadelphia guard. Though one of the NBA's good guys, McKie boasted that he was supplementing his sizable salary with winnings at bouree, incidentally the same game that Washington's Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton were allegedly playing. "Shooting holes in their pockets," McKie said cackling. You couldn't help think that the losers, impliedly younger and less well-paid, probably didn't find it quite so funny. Arenas and Crittenton, of course, took the gambling feud to new levels. While understandably lost in the discussion, one wonders what role the underlying power dynamic played. Crittenton, who turned 22 on New Year's Eve, was a little-known reserve making $1,477,920. It's hardly chump change but nowhere near the $16 million that Arenas, 28, was scheduled to earn this season. It's bad enough when someone owes you money and is slow to pay; it's worse when the debtor makes more than 10 times your salary. In the wake of this Washington scandal, the New Jersey Nets have announced a ban on gambling while aboard the team plane. It sends the right message, but ultimately is unlikely to change the high-stakes culture. Until players lose their competitive jones, until they no longer have overnight wealth, until their superiors stop actively exhorting them to gamble... well, all bets are off. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected - New York Times Posted: 10 Jan 2010 06:37 PM PST ROME — More than a thousand African workers were put aboard buses and trains in the southern Italian region of Calabria over the weekend and shipped out to immigrant detention centers, following some of the country's worst riots in years. Skip to next paragraph Rioting by immigrants, mostly African, in Rosarno on Friday was some of Italy's worst in years. Africans work picking fruit in citrus groves in Calabria. The authorities began bulldozing immigrant encampments outside Rosarno on Sunday. The clashes began Thursday night in Rosarno, a working-class city amid citrus groves in Calabria, the toe of Italy's boot, after a legal immigrant from Togo was lightly wounded in a pellet-gun attack in a nearby city. It is not clear who pulled the trigger — the authorities said they were investigating whether organized crime had provoked the riots — but the consequences were severe. Blaming racism for the attack, dozens of immigrants burned cars and smashed shop windows in Rosarno in two days of riots, throwing rocks at local residents and fighting with the police. More than 50 immigrants and police officers were wounded, none seriously, and 10 immigrants and locals were arrested before the authorities began sending the immigrants to detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy on Saturday. The images emerging from Calabria over the weekend — of torched cars and angry African immigrants hurling rocks — were the most vivid example of the growing racial tensions in Italy, which have been exacerbated by an economic crisis whose depth has only recently been acknowledged in the national dialogue. Both the official and underground economies increasingly rely on immigrants, while Italy remains torn between acceptance and xenophobia. The riots also shone a bright light on a side of the country rarely seen in tourist itineraries. On Sunday, the authorities began bulldozing the makeshift encampments outside Rosarno where hundreds of immigrants live in what human rights groups describe as subhuman conditions. They are often paid less than $30 a day picking fruit, a job that many Italians see as beneath them. Organized crime syndicates are known to have a strong grip on every level of the Calabrian economy. "This event pulled the lid off something that we who work in the sector know well but no one talks about: That many Italian economic realities are based on the exploitation of low-cost foreign labor, living in subhuman conditions, without human rights," said Flavio Di Giacomo, the spokesman for the International Organization for Migration in Italy. The workers live in "semi-slavery," added Mr. Di Giacomo, who said, "It's shameful that this is happening in the heart of Italy." Pope Benedict XVI veered from his prepared remarks in his Angelus message on Sunday to denounce the violence in Calabria. "An immigrant is a human being, different in origin, culture and tradition, but he is a person to respect, with rights and duties," the pope said. He also criticized the "exploitation" of immigrants. It was not entirely clear if all the immigrants left willingly for the detention centers, or if some were forced to leave. In a reconstruction of the days of violence, the police said they were protecting the immigrants against would-be assailants, at least one of whom brandished a pistol. Some immigrants told the Italian news media that Calabrians had shot at them and beaten them with sticks in the riots, and a front-page editorial in La Repubblica on Sunday compared the situation to Ku Klux Klan violence in the United States in the 1960s. But other news reports said that many immigrants had fled their encampments in haste before the police began clearing them with bulldozers. Not all immigrants appear to have left the city, but those who are in the immigration centers with regular residence permits, or who had requested political asylum, are free to go, the interior minister, Roberto Maroni, said Sunday in a television interview. The others, he said, will be identified and deported. The riots in Rosarno were a rare instance in which an entire city was engulfed by immigrant violence. In September 2008, Italy sent 400 members of the National Guard to Castelvolturno, outside Naples, after violent protests broke out over the shooting deaths of six African immigrants in clashes with the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. Last February, immigrants set fire to the detention center on the island of Lampedusa, where many had been held awaiting deportation. There are 4 million legal immigrants in Italy, out of a population of 60 million, and even more illegal immigrants. And while many Italians rely on them to work in their businesses and take care of their young children or elderly parents, many Italians see the new arrivals as a threat. In television interviews, some Rosarno residents said they had lived peacefully alongside the immigrants and tried to give them work and food. But others were more hostile. "We've put up with them for 20 years," one man shouted in a television interview on Sky TG24. In recent years, the center-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has issued strong anti-immigrant statements. Mr. Berlusconi, who is recovering after being struck in the face with a statuette of the Milan cathedral by a mentally unstable man last month, has not commented on the riots. But in his interview on Sunday, the interior minister, Mr. Maroni, called the situation in Rosarno "the fruit of the wrong kind of tolerance." The day before, he had been quoted as saying the riots were the fruit of "too much tolerance." A member of the powerful Northern League Party, known for its anti-immigrant language, Mr. Maroni also defended a proposal introduced by his party last week to cap the number of immigrant students in public school classes at 30 percent. "Sometimes they speak different languages, and there's no common balance in the classroom," Mr. Maroni said. Human rights groups say that many African immigrants come to Italy with what appear to be legal offers of work in the agricultural sector in the south, often by paying middlemen more than $10,000 for the opportunity. When they arrive, the rights groups say, the immigrants often find that the agricultural outfits refuse to honor their end of the bargain, instead compelling the migrants to work under the table at wages far below the legal minimum wage. Often, the outfits that hire them have links to organized crime. Mr. Maroni has said in the past that the 'Ndrangheta, or Calabrian Mafia, is the most powerful organized crime group in Italy because its members are bound by strong blood ties, making it difficult to cultivate informants. Last week, two bombs were found at the main courthouse in Reggio, in what was widely seen as a message by the 'Ndrangheta to prosecutors trying to dismantle clans. Mr. Maroni also said that the notion that the 'Ndrangheta had provoked the riots was "one possible hypothesis" that the authorities were examining. In an interview in La Repubblica on Saturday, Roberto Saviano, the author of the bestseller "Gomorrah," about organized crime near Naples, called the immigrants in Rosarno courageous. "Immigrants are always braver than we are against the clans," Mr. Saviano said. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Spain approves anti-piracy legislation - Variety Posted: 10 Jan 2010 05:18 PM PST Country's federal court to block sites in violation MADRID -- The Spanish government approved anti-piracy legislation Friday that will allow National Audience, the country's federal court, to close or block websites facilitating unauthorized movie and music downloads. Included in a Sustainable Economy Bill, the new rulings offer content owners the opportunity to lodge copyright infringement complaints with an intellectual property commission at Spain's ministry of culture. The commission will filter complaints through to a judge at the Audience. The judge then has four days to decide whether to temporarily close the website, pending further investigation. Piracy is rampant in Spain. The Coalition of Creators and Content Industries has claimed that there are 200 peer-to-peer BitTorrent tracker services in Spain. In the past, Spanish courts have waived action against non-profit unauthorized peer-to-peer usage by end users. They have, however, moved to penalize P2P use for commercial purposes. The new regs are in line with this policy, said Dan Cryan, at entertainment analysis company Screen Digest, and are likely to be effective. "There is evidence that this, combined with the licensing of authorized content, can impact on online piracy," Cryan said, pointing to the example of South Korea. There the government allowed content owners to go after so-called "webhards," sites that facilitated file-sharing. The simultaneous licensing of legal content to "webhards" has encouraged the re-emergence of an online paid video sector in South Korea, Cryan observed. Spain, however, poses a posse of problems for anti-piracy moves. If some sites are blocked, others may emerge to take their place. Spain has seen little take up for mainstream online content services -- even those device-driven services, such as iTunes, PlayStation and Xbox, that have worked in other countries. PlayStation and Xbox only launched in November, Cryan pointed out. Also, at least from initial reports, it is unclear whether sites that switch to the trading of legal content will be able to survive. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Kings are sideshow at San Jose's Three Kings Day event - San Jose Mercury News Posted: 10 Jan 2010 06:30 PM PST At an event that was supposed to be in their honor, the three kings were just a sideshow Sunday at San Jose's Children's Discovery Museum. After all, how do you compete with the allure of sand tables and glue-paint walls among the under-5 crowd, or with winners of Sábado Gigante, the popular Spanish-language variety show, among the parents? So Gaspar, Balthazar and Melchior, aka Jorge Gonzalez, 20, Michael Lorenzo, 21, and Ozzie Valenciano, 19, obligingly acted as props for pictures while hundreds of child-chasing parents took in Mexican folk dancing and mariachi, made crowns and puppets and explored the museum's exhibits. The Discovery Museum's 12th annual Día de los Tres Reyes Magos was a weekend observance of Jan. 6, the day the wise men are said to have arrived in Bethlehem with gifts for the baby Jesus. Three Kings Day, also known as Epiphany, is a major celebration in much of the Christian world, including Spain and Latin America. In Mexico, depending on the region, children on Jan. 6 receive either toys or money in shoes strategically placed overnight, much as children in the U.S. hang stockings just before Christmas. Maria Corona of San Jose left money in the shoes of her daughter, Fatima, 7, in keeping with the tradition in Jalisco, her native state. On Sunday, Fatima had just finished performing a set of dances from Veracruz with the dance group Los Traviesos. The costumes included a flouncy white lace skirt with a black apron, red shawl and flower-studded headband. The footwork is not easy to master, Fatima said. The Discovery Museum began the Día de los Tres Reyes Magos weekend as an attempt to attract more Latino patrons. It has become an annual tradition when the big lavender-walled museum honors not the religious underpinnings but the secular celebration, as well as Mexican culture in general—art like papel picado, tissue paper cut into intricate geometric and other designs. Some activities were only vaguely related. Mia Avila, 2½, was patiently and earnestly manipulating scissors to cut threads of corn raffia tying together her corn-husk dolls. The hardest part of making the dolls, which actually are traditional to Indians of the northeastern United States, is ending up with a smooth round head, said Mia's mother, Cristina Avila of Redwood City. Visitors could make make-believe healthy pizza, which might be the only way young patrons would consider eating broccoli, eggplant and peppers on pizza. But the museum, nevertheless, signed up dozens for a "Kick Start Eat Smart Healthy Eating" pledge. The tiniest of visitors could paint water-color stars, slap pastel glue paint on a wall or measure and pour sand, among two floors of amusements. And parents could enjoy the crooning of homegrown talent, Manuel Romero, who sang on previous Tres Reyes stages, and budding 10-year-old star Gabriela Sepúlveda Magaña, who belted out tear-jerking ranchero songs. To applause, the two San Jose residents joined in a duet of "In Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home" and other standbys of country music, ranchero's cross-border soul cousin. Even though Three Kings Day in Mexico is generally celebrated as a family event rather than as a community gathering, the festivities at the San Jose museum were lovely, said Clara Rojas of San Jose, whose daughter Berenice Ramirez, 4, was performing folks dances. Meanwhile, the three kings, all student volunteers from Evergreen Valley College, mugged for photos. Maybe if they had brought frankincense, myrrh and gold, the three stand-ins might have attracted more attention. As it was, it took some doing to don the satin costumes, including a necklace, said Gaspar-Gonzalez. Attracting slightly more attention than the plastic pizza, the rosca de reyes, traditional Three Kings sweet bread, was offered to guests as samples. None of the pieces offered at the museum contained a minuscule plastic baby, normally hidden in each loaf. Whoever gets the piece with the baby, tradition dictates, hosts the next party. "That's me," said Maria Corona, who got one of five babies she embedded in her home-made bread. That means she'll be making tamales at the Día de la Candelaria, or Candlemas, party on Feb. 2. After that, she said, "Then we can say Christmas is over." Contact Sharon Noguchi at 408-271-3775. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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