The Neediest Cases: Disabled Young Man and His Protective Mother Deal With Life’s Challenges

Though he would prefer to put his socks on without his mother’s help, Zaquan West, 25, does not have a choice.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Joann West is a constant caretaker for her son, Zaquan. Though Ms. West works as a receptionist, the family fell behind on rent.

For the past 100 years, The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. To celebrate the 101st campaign, an article will appear daily through Jan. 25. Each profile will illustrate the difference that even a modest amount of money can make in easing the struggles of the poor.

Last year donors contributed $7,003,854, which was distributed to those in need through seven New York charities.

2012-13 Campaign

Previously recorded:

$3,104,694

Recorded Thursday:

$137,451

*Total:

$3,242,145

Last year to date:

$2,862,836

*Includes $596,609 contributed to the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

The Youngest Donors

If your child or family is using creative techniques to raise money for this year’s campaign, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line on Facebook or talk to us on Twitter.

A genetic disorder has encumbered Mr. West all his life, but he has needed assistance with this particular task since only last year. In November 2011, he had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his left thigh that was as big as a football, but he was left less flexible.

“He doesn’t do well with disability, with the label,” his mother, Joann West, 55, said. “He doesn’t tell people that he has a disability. If they can’t see it, they just can’t see it.”

When her son was 13 months old, Ms. West learned he had neurofibromatosis, a disorder that causes tumors to grow on the nerves and, in some cases, to infringe on vital organs, or as was the case last year, to become malignant. It also creates large bumps on the skin known as nodules.

At ages 5 and 8, Zaquan had operations to remove neurofibromatosis clusters that were eating away at his left hip bone. The disease has left his left leg a few inches shorter than his right. After each operation, he had to relearn how to walk.

Because of his physical disability, he was placed in a special-education class at school and given the same homework every night, his mother said.

“I advocated for him,” Ms. West said. “I kept fighting, because he was no dummy. He was physically impaired, not mentally. I went out of my way to try to give him a better life. The system would have failed him more than it did if I hadn’t stepped in.” Her efforts led to his being moved from a special-education classroom to a regular one in second grade.

Ms. West, a single mother, acknowledges that her protective instincts made her a very controlling parent, and she did not allow Zaquan out of the house much, which limited his friendships.

“I was afraid for him,” she said. “The streets, they don’t care about your disability.”

When Mr. West entered high school, it was the first time he had truly been away from his mother’s watchful eyes. He began skipping class, often going to the park or wandering their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, neighborhood with truant friends. He eventually dropped out of school.

“It was just me being out on my own and making my own choices,” Mr. West recalled.

Though she did not agree with her son’s decisions, Ms. West said that his need to explore was in some ways a result of her actions. “At a point, I stepped back,” she said, “to allow him to do certain things on his own and do what he wanted to do.”

In 2007, a couple of years after he dropped out, Mr. West joined the Door, an organization focused on empowering young people to reach their potential. There, he obtained his high school equivalency diploma.

Today, Mr. West is job hunting so that he can help pay his and his mother’s expenses.

But paying the monthly bills has become a struggle, Ms. West said, in part because of a recent change in her budget. In August, after an increase in income, they stopped receiving $324 a month in food stamps. The additional income did not cover all their expenses, however, and Ms. West eventually fell behind in the rent on their apartment.

Ms. West, who has been employed in various administrative jobs, currently works as a receptionist for Howie the Harp Advocacy Center, an agency that provides employment help to people with psychiatric disabilities. Her annual salary is about $25,000 before taxes. Her son receives $646 in Social Security disability benefits. After the family’s food stamps were cut off, Mr. West applied individually, and he now receives $200 in food stamps each month.

With the addition of Mr. West’s disability benefits and food stamps, their net monthly income is $2,213. Their contribution for the Section 8-subsidized apartment Ms. West has lived in for the past 30 years is $969.

Knowing she was in need of help, Ms. West’s boss told her about the Community Service Society, one of the organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. And the society drew $1,598 from the fund to cover her debt.

Ms. West remains a constant caretaker for her independent-minded son, who, she says, has come to accept her help grudgingly. She says that even if they are not on speaking terms after a disagreement, she is there to lend him a hand.

Both are continuing to deal with the inevitable challenges: Mr. West is awaiting word from doctors on whether a new growth in his lungs is cancerous. But one of his greatest assets, given all that he has overcome, is that he is comfortable in his own skin.

“I’m just always going to be me,” he said, “so why deal with somebody else?”

Read More..

After Fighting Markets, Europe Now Prefers Working With Them

BRUSSELS — Buoyed by an agreement to establish a single supervisor to watch over the biggest banks in countries that use the euro, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, declared victory Friday over global financial markets, declaring them “totally wrong” for “seriously questioning whether the euro and indeed European integration would survive.”

Mr. Barroso’s triumphal comments, made at the end of a two-day summit meeting of the European Union’s 27 member states, could still prove premature, but they do signify a noteworthy evolution in the thinking of a Brussels bureaucracy that has long either ignored financial markets or denounced them as an alien and predatory force.

When the Greek debt crisis exploded three years ago, European officials often tended to vilify global markets and rating agencies, blaming “speculators” for the turmoil then stirring serious doubts about the long-term viability of the euro currency and even the entire “European project,” a six-decade-old venture to knit the region together through a gradual pooling of sovereignty.

As the crisis has developed, however, officials at the union’s headquarters in Brussels have stopped denouncing markets and learned instead to argue with them, presenting concrete steps to address their concerns. The banking supervisor deal, which will place about 150 of the most important banks in the 17 countries that use the euro under the supervision of the European Central Bank, is just part of a wide array of measures introduced over the last year to calm worries about the stability of Europe’s banks, government finances and, by extension, the union’s fundamental institutions.

“One of the big problems of Brussels has been that it is so remote from financial markets,” said Guntram B. Wolff, a former European Commission official who is deputy director of Bruegel, an independent economic research center in Brussels, the Belgian capital. “Now there is much more of a view of what is going on in the markets. This is a good thing.”

The traditional remoteness from, and often distaste for, financial markets, Mr. Wolff said, is largely a function of Brussels’ distance from major financial centers. The nearest is London, which for reasons of British domestic politics and fears in the city’s financial sector of meddling by the European Union, has often had testy relations with functionaries of the European Commission, the group’s main administrative and policy-making arm.

But ideology has also played a role, with many Brussels officials looking askance at what they have tended to scorn as an Anglo-Saxon preoccupation with markets, a phenomenon exemplified by the former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Mrs. Thatcher is despised by many so-called Eurocrats because of her robust hostility to the organization’s goal of an “ever closer union,” a mission laid out in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, and her insistence that Europe should focus instead on building a common market for goods and services and keeping the sovereign powers of individual states intact.

“The European Parliament has many rooms named after famous Europeans, but there is no Margaret Thatcher room and there never will be one,” predicted Derk-Jan Eppink, a Dutchman elected to the parliament by voters in Belgium and vice president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group. A member of the legislature’s budget and economic monitoring committees, Mr. Eppink said he had nonetheless noticed a sharp shift in attitudes toward markets among his colleagues and also E.U. officials since the debt crisis began shaking investors’ faith in the euro’s future.

“At the beginning of the crisis, everyone was always talking about greedy speculators and Wall Street sharks,” but such views were now “limited mainly to the hard left,” he said. “There has been a change in thinking. These markets and rating agencies are not widely seen anymore as an alien force of evil but as basically investors who don’t want to lose their money.”

“This changed over the past year,” Mr. Eppink added, when officials and politicians in Brussels “realized that many problems in the euro zone were bought on by ourselves, not by sharks and speculators.”

Carsten Brzeski, senior economist at ING Bank in Brussels, said, “It has been a steep learning curve, not just for the commission but also for markets.”

Accustomed to viewing the European Union through an American prism, many investors took fright at Europe’s fragmented and glacial decision-making process, Mr. Brzeski said. European officials, for their part, he added, often viewed the wild swings of the market, and the pain this caused as borrowing costs in Greece and Spain soared, with uncomprehending horror.

A big reason anxiety about markets has waned is that they have stayed calm in recent months, largely in response to a pledge this summer by the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, to “do whatever it takes” to defend the euro. The previous panic among investors has lifted to the point that the central bank has so far not needed to make any of the bond purchases Mr. Draghi vowed to make to shore up the debt of troubled countries.

Mr. Wolff, of the Bruegel research center, said this week’s summit meeting, far more tranquil and methodical than many previous conclaves, was an important step forward, but by no means the end of Europe’s troubles.

“There is a sense of direction at the moment, but the crisis is not over,” he said, warning that a grim economic outlook for next year, which will see much of the euro zone in recession, could upend the current optimism, especially if anger over unemployment — now at over 25 percent in Greece and Spain — leads to serious social unrest and political tumult.

James Kanter contributed reporting.

Read More..

Ray Briem dies at 82; all-night radio host in L.A.

Ray Briem, the longtime KABC-AM talk show host who ruled all-night radio for nearly three decades with his phone calls to the famous and the quirky and his opinionated banter slamming liberals, championing conservative causes and extolling the big-band music he loved, died Wednesday at his Malibu home. He was 82.

The cause was cancer, said his son Bryan.

Briem spent most of his life on the radio, reaching his largest audience as the host of a popular midnight-to-5 a.m. talk show on KABC from 1967 to 1994. During those 27 years he helped set the mold for what has become a major radio genre.

WALK OF FAME: Visit Ray Briem's star

"We consider him one of the most important radio talk-show hosts of all time," said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, the main trade publication for the talk radio industry. "There were only a handful of stations in the entire country doing talk then. It hadn't been formulated, researched, standardized and consulted. It was all based on these creative characters … and Ray Briem was one of the originals."

One of the first conservatives to establish a beachhead in radio, Briem dominated the post-midnight hours, consistently attracting the largest ratings of any overnight talk show. The year he left KABC he was drawing 15.7% of the available audience, a remarkable share in any era. He was also one of the station's most effective pitchmen, whose show "brought in more than a million dollars a year in revenue," said former KABC General Manager George Green.

His political crusades also turned tides.

Briem gave Proposition 13 author Howard Jarvis a regular platform during the 1970s and was credited by Jarvis for helping build the public groundswell that led to the anti-tax measure's resounding victory in 1978. Its passage proved that conservative radio did not play "only to the fringe," Briem said, but had mainstream appeal. "We spoke to the people, and the people responded," he told The Times in 1996.

The veteran broadcaster later bolstered the campaign for Proposition 187 led by Harold Ezell, who credited Briem with helping to get the controversial initiative cutting state services for illegal immigrants on the 1994 state ballot.

Briem also defended President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, which so endeared him to one loyal listener that when she died at 100 she left Briem her house.

An avid pilot, Briem sold the house to buy an airplane.

"He was of a different era," said Michael Jackson, another talk-radio icon who was a daily presence on KABC but attracted a more liberal base than Briem. "Politically we disagreed on almost everything, but I liked him — you couldn't help it. He had no affectation. He cared about the caller. He was always fair.... And his audience trusted him."

Briem was born Jan. 19, 1930, in Ogden, Utah, where his mother was a teacher and his father was a railroad engineer. He briefly attended the University of Utah, where he studied chemistry but abandoned his plans for a science career after "he blew up his chemistry set in the house," his son said.

By then Briem already had the radio bug. When he was 15, he and his buddies conceived a 15-minute radio drama called "The Adventures of Vivacious Vicky" that Ogden's tiny radio station agreed to air. When a staffer at the station went on a drunken binge on V-E Day in 1945, Briem was asked to fill in. Later that year, he was hired full time.

He worked with Armed Forces Radio during the Korean War, hosting live shows with big-name bands, including those led by Harry James, Guy Lombardo, Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

In 1953, after completing his military service, Briem moved to Los Angeles to spin records at KGIL-AM. He remained a deejay through the early 1960s, including a stint in Seattle where he worked for King Broadcasting on both its radio and TV outlets. He hosted a popular teen dance show that led fans to call him "the Dick Clark of Seattle."

In 1958, he married Elsie Child. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964. He is survived by their two children, Bryan, of Malibu, and Kevin, of San Diego; and five grandchildren.

In 1960 Briem came to Los Angeles to deejay at KLAC-AM. He was mentored there by Joe Pyne, the abrasive forerunner of confrontational talk show hosts such as Wally George, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. When the station asked Briem to switch to nighttime talk, "I went into it kicking and screaming," and endured a steep learning curve, he told The Times. "I realized what a dumb head I was. I knew very little about politics or the workings of government, and the first year I was an embarrassment."

But he built up a following during his seven-year stint, engaging listeners with straightforward topics, "like cats, frogs and even submarines," he said in a 1966 Times interview, noting that the submarine show elicited a call from a Nazi U-boat commander who had settled in L.A.

Briem also made "Kooky Calls," the most celebrated of which featured a Hogansville, Ga., police chief who regaled L.A. night owls with stories about confiscating and testing Georgia moonshine. When Briem brought the chief to Hollywood for a week of V.I.P. treatment, he was met by a welcoming party of 300 KLAC listeners.

When Briem was hired at KABC in 1967, he continued to fill the hours with unusual phone calls. One of his most memorable long-term phone pals was Vladimir Pozner, the Radio Moscow commentator who went on to become a Western media celebrity.

After thousands of nights helping the lonely and insomniac pass the hours, Briem "pulled the plug" in 1994. KABC threw him a retirement party at the Century Plaza, which drew more than 1,000 Briem listeners who paid $50 apiece to see their idol and listen to some of his favorite musical artists, including Frankie Laine and the Mills Brothers.

WALK OF FAME: Visit Ray Briem's star

"I'm 65 and my body says staying up all night ain't the right thing to do," he told The Times shortly before he retired. "You never get used to it. Your biological clock, your circadian rhythms are always upset. There will be times when I will miss it, but being able to sleep at night — oh, how wonderful! That will more than compensate for the pangs of not having a forum."

His retirement was brief. Less than a year later he was back on the air, anchoring an afternoon drive show for KIEV-AM. He retired for good in 1997.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Dec. 22 at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 575 Los Liones Drive, Pacific Palisades.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Read More..

A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 14

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

Read More..

Sitar maker: Ravi Shankar’s legacy inspires others

NEW DELHI (AP) — The walls of Sanjay Sharma‘s music shop are lined with gleaming string instruments and old photographs of legendary musicians.

Beatles George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Indian classicial musicians Zakir Hussain, Shiv Kumar Sharma and Vishwamohan Bhatt. And the man who brought these two very different musical worlds together: Ravi Shankar.

Like his grandfather and father before him, Sharma built, tuned and repaired instruments for the sitar virtuoso, who introduced Westerners to Indian classical music, and through his friendship with Harrison became a mainstay of the 1960s counterculture scene.

From his tiny shop tucked into the crowded lanes of central Delhi’s Bhagat Singh market, Sharma traveled the world with Shankar. Late in the maestro’s life, as his health and strength flagged, he even designed a smaller version of the instrument that allowed him to keep playing.

Shankar, who died Tuesday at age 92, was “a saint, an emperor and lord of music,” Sharma says in a tribute posted to the website of his sought-after shop, Rikhi Ram’s Music.

“When I opened my eyes there was him,” says Sharma, 44, surrounded by display cases full of sitars, sarangis (a stringed instrument played with a violin-like bow), guitars, tabla drums and sarods, a deeply resonating instrument played by plucking the strings.

Shankar “was music and music was him,” he says.

Sharma’s grandfather started the business in 1920 in the northern city of Lahore, now in Pakistan. He met a young Ravi Shankar at a concert there in the 1940s. Following the India-Pakistan partition and the relocation of the shop to New Delhi, the family began making sitars for Shankar in the 1950s.

By then, the musician was already famous in India and beginning to collaborate with some of the greats of Western music, including violinist Yehudi Menuhin and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.

The Beatles visited in 1966 and bought instruments, memorialized in some of the many photographs that line the shop’s walls. Another shows Shankar’s daughter and the heir of his sitar legacy, Anoushka Shankar. But there is no picture of another Shankar daughter, American singer Norah Jones, who was estranged from her father.

Sharma’s own father succeeded his grandfather as the supplier of Shankar’s sitars. And then Sharma himself in the 1980s.

The bedroom-sized shop has two counters, one for conducting business and one for working on instruments under the beam of a large work lamp. Wood shavings and dust cover the floor of a workshop at the back.

As he chatted with visiting Associated Press journalists on Thursday, Sharma worked on a sitar, peering through his glasses as he used a mallet to hammer in a new fret. He plucked the strings, and as the sound resonated around the room, he leaned close in to the instrument and listened intently to the vibrations. Satisfied with the results, he moved on to the next fret.

It takes 15 months for a sitar to be ready for use. The actual crafting of the instrument from red cedar and hollowed-out, dried pumpkins takes three months. Then, it is left untouched to go through what is called “Delhi seasoning,” in which the extremes of New Delhi’s climate — blistering summer, followed by a brief monsoon, and a near-freezing, three-month winter — work their magic.

In 2005, a serious bout of pneumonia left Shankar with a frozen left shoulder.

“He was growing old and he wanted to experiment and change the instrument” so he could continue playing, Sharma says.

Sharma, a large, balding man, created what he calls the “studio sitar,” a smaller version of the instrument. But holding it was still difficult. So Sharma went to a Home Depot near Shankar’s San Diego, California-area home and bought some supplies to build a detachable stand.

The musician was thrilled. Sharma says Shankar told him, “Your father was a brilliant sitar maker, but you are a genius.”

Shankar was performing in public until a month before his death. Despite ill health, he appeared re-energized by the music, Sharma said.

Now, as Sharma mourns the giant of Indian music, he also worries about the future of the art itself. He sees traditional Indian instruments gradually losing their place in their own country to zippy, electronic Bollywood music.

“We are losing the originality and the core of our Indian music,” says Shankar, himself a trained Hindustani classical musician who plays the sitar and tabla, the Indian pair-drums.

At the same time, Shankar’s work as a global ambassador of music has borne fruit, Sharma says: “Because the music has gone to the West, we’re getting lots of new musical aspirants from the Western countries.”

When jazz artist Herbie Hancock was in New Delhi a few years ago, he stopped by Sharma’s shop to buy a sitar.

And in one of the shop’s display windows gleams a newly crafted sitar made of teak.

“That,” Sharma said, “is for Bill Gates.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Recipes for Health: Red Cabbage, Carrot and Broccoli Stem Latkes — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I love finding things to do with broccoli stems. I find that allowing the cabbage mixture to sit for 10 to 15 minutes before forming the latkes allows the cabbage to soften a bit, and the latkes hold together better.

5 cups shredded red cabbage

1/2 pound carrots, shredded (about 1 1/2 cups)

1 1/2 cups shredded peeled broccoli stems

2 tablespoons sesame seeds

2 teaspoons caraway seeds

1 teaspoon baking powder

Salt to taste

3 tablespoons oat bran

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

3 tablespoons cornmeal

2 tablespoons buckwheat flour

3 eggs, beaten

About 1/4 cup canola, grape seed or rice bran oil

1. Heat the oven to 300 degrees. Line a sheet pan with parchment and place a rack over another sheet pan.

2. In a large bowl mix together the shredded cabbage, carrots, broccoli stems, baking powder, sesame seeds, caraway seeds, salt, oat bran, flour, cornmeal and buckwheat flour. Taste and adjust salt. Add the eggs and stir together. Let the mixture sit for 10 to 15 minutes.

3. Begin heating a large heavy skillet over medium heat. Take a 1/4 cup measuring cup and fill with 3 tablespoons of the mixture. Reverse onto the parchment-lined baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining latke mix. You should have enough to make about 30 latkes.

4. Add the oil to the pan and heat for 3 minutes or until hot. When it is hot (hold your hand a few inches above – you should feel the heat), slide a spatula under one portion of the latke mixture and transfer it to the pan. Press down with the spatula to flatten. Repeat with more mounds. In my 10-inch pan I can cook four at a time without crowding; my 12-inch pan will accommodate four or five. Cook on one side until golden brown, about four to five minutes. Slide the spatula underneath and flip the latkes over. Cook on the other side until golden brown, another two to three minutes. Transfer to the rack set over a baking sheet and place in the oven to keep warm.

5. Serve hot topped with low-fat sour cream, Greek yogurt or crème fraîche.

Yield: about 30 latkes, serving 6

Advance preparation: You can prep the ingredients and combine everything except the eggs and salt several hour ahead. Refrigerate in a large bowl. Do not add salt until you are ready to cook, or the mixture will become too watery, as salt draws the water out of the vegetables.

Nutritional information per serving: 226 calories; 14 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 4 grams polyunsaturated fat; 8 grams monounsaturated fat; 93 milligrams cholesterol; 20 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 151 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 7 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

Read More..

Degrees of Debt: Colleges’ Debt Falls on Students After Construction Binges

John Freidah for The New York Times

Harvard University continues to expand its Allston campus as part of a multibillion-dollar effort to maintain its position atop the academic heap.

Some call it the Edifice Complex. Others have named it the Law of More, or the Taj Mahal syndrome.

A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt. Oftentimes, students are stuck picking up the bill.

Overall debt levels more than doubled from 2000 to 2011 at the more than 500 institutions rated by Moody’s, according to inflation-adjusted data compiled for The New York Times by the credit rating agency. In the same time, the amount of cash, pledged gifts and investments that colleges maintain declined more than 40 percent relative to the amount they owe.

With revenue pinched at institutions big and small, financial experts and college officials are sounding alarms about the consequences of the spending and borrowing. Last month, Harvard University officials warned of “rapid, disorienting change” at colleges and universities.

“The need for change in higher education is clear given the emerging disconnect between ever-increasing aspirations and universities’ ability to generate the new resources to finance them,” said an unusually sobering introduction to Harvard’s annual report for the fiscal year ended in June.

The debate about indebtedness has focused on students and graduates who have borrowed tens of thousands of dollars and are struggling to keep up with their payments. Nearly one in every six borrowers with a student loan balance is in default.

But some colleges and universities have also borrowed heavily, spending money on vast expansions and amenities aimed at luring better students: student unions with movie theaters and wine bars; workout facilities with climbing walls and “lazy rivers”; and dormitories with single rooms and private baths. Spending on instruction has grown at a much slower pace, studies have shown. Students end up covering some, if not most, of the debt payments in the form of higher tuition, room and board and special assessments, while in some instances state taxpayers pick up the costs.

Debt has ballooned at colleges across the board — public and private, elite and obscure. While Harvard is the wealthiest university in the country, it also has $6 billion in debt, the most of any private college, the data compiled by Moody’s shows.

At the Juilliard School, which completed a major renovation a few years ago, debt climbed to $195 million last year, from $6 million in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2002. At Miami University, a public institution in Ohio that is overhauling its dormitories and student union, debt rose to $326 million in 2011, from $66 million in 2002, and at New York University, which has embarked on an ambitious expansion, debt was $2.8 billion in 2011, up from $1.2 billion in 2002, according to the Moody’s data.

The pile of debt — $205 billion outstanding in 2011 at the colleges rated by Moody’s — comes at a time of increasing uncertainty in academia. After years of robust growth, enrollment is flat or declining at many institutions, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. With outstanding student debt exceeding $1 trillion, students and their parents are questioning the cost and value of college. And online courses threaten to upend the traditional collegiate experience and payment model.

At the same time, the financial crisis and recession created a new and sometimes harrowing financial calculus. Traditional sources of revenue like tuition, state appropriations and endowment returns continue to be squeezed, even as the costs of labor, health care for employees, technology and interest on debt have generally increased.

Students are requiring more and more financial aid, a trend that many believe is unsustainable for all but the wealthiest institutions.

“We’ve had a lot more downgrades than upgrades in the last five years,” said John C. Nelson, managing director of the higher education and health care practice at Moody’s, which has a negative outlook on all but the top state universities and private schools. “There is going to be a thinning out of the ranks.”

For now, the worst financial struggles are confined to stand-alone professional schools and small, tuition-dependent private colleges. For instance, $63 million in debt has left Mount St. Mary’s University, a small Roman Catholic college in Maryland, with thin financial resources and junk-rated credit, according to a Moody’s rating in March.

“We borrowed a lot of money, but we had no choice,” said Thomas H. Powell, the university’s president, who maintains, despite the credit rating, that it has regained its footing and has no need for additional debt. “I wasn’t going to watch the buildings fall down.”

Almost no one is predicting colleges will experience default rates on par with those of indebted students and graduates, at least not anytime soon. While payments on debt principal and interest have increased over all, they remain a manageable piece of the expense pie for most institutions, partly because of historically low interest rates, financial analysts said.

Read More..

Jenni Rivera jet linked to troubled company and executive

So far, this much is clear: Jenni Rivera, one of the most celebrated artists in the Latin world, died when her private jet went into a dive. The plane plummeted nose-first, 28,000 feet in 30 seconds, leaving its wreckage — and the remains of Rivera and six others — splayed across the side of the mountain like a wash of pebbles.

The investigation at the remote Mexican crash site is now in full swing, and authorities have not said whether they suspect maintenance problems or pilot error. But scrutiny has fallen on the plane and its pilots, one of whom was 78 years old. Interviews and documents link the jet to a troubled company — and an executive who was once imprisoned for faking the safety records of planes he bought from the Mexican government and sold to private pilots in the United States.

According to federal aviation records, the Learjet 25 carrying Rivera from a performance in Monterrey, Mexico, was built in 1969 and was owned by a Las Vegas company called Starwood Management LLC.

A Starwood executive, Christian E. Esquino Nunez, was accused of conspiring with associates in the 1990s and 2000s to falsify records documenting the history of planes they bought and sold — tail numbers, inspection stamps and logbooks. Esquino's "fraudulent business practices ... put the flying public at risk," federal authorities argued in documents obtained by The Times.

"We had a forewarning that this is what he is," Timothy D. Coughlin, an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, said. "Essentially they would manufacture the records ... that would indicate that maintenance was up to date. They would create them out of whole cloth." Once Esquino brought the planes across the border for sale, "it was open season," Coughlin said.

Coughlin prosecuted the case against Esquino in 2005, resulting in a guilty plea that sent Esquino to a federal prison in Lompoc, Calif., for two years.

After his release from prison, Esquino was deported from Southern California to his native Mexico, where he lives today.

For 20 years, Esquino has been embroiled in a briar of legal allegations, many involving airplanes — a bankruptcy and a restraining order, criminal indictments and civil judgments, cocaine-distribution charges, even a role in an alleged conspiracy to airlift relatives of the late Moammar Kadafi out of Libya.

On Wednesday, Esquino told The Times by telephone from Mexico City that the flight was not a charter as authorities have said. Rather, Rivera was in the final stages of buying the plane from Starwood for $250,000; the flight was offered as a free "demo."

Esquino, 50, described himself as Starwood's operations manager, and said he understood why his past would place him under scrutiny in the wake of the accident.

"Obviously my past — there is a story to it," he said. "It's unavoidable that they are going to look at my past.... I think it's fair to bring it up right now and question it."

However, he said, the jet was perfectly maintained. He said the only conceivable explanation for the crash was that pilot Miguel Perez Soto suffered a heart attack or was incapacitated in some way, and that a younger co-pilot, Alejandro Torres, was unable to save the plane. (Authorities stressed that they have not determined a cause of the crash or whether the plane had any problems.)

"We're all grieving," Esquino said. "I'm definitely very sorry that this happened."

Esquino said it was not a mistake to put a 78-year-old pilot at the helm of the flight. Perez had a valid license to fly in Mexico, authorities said Wednesday, but U.S. aviation sources said that in the United States, Perez was licensed to fly only under conditions that didn't require the use of instruments and was not allowed to carry passengers for hire.

Esquino said he had known and trusted Perez for 30 years. "I couldn't think of anyone more qualified," he said.

Rivera, 43, a famed Mexican American performer, mother of five and master of a growing international business empire, was killed Sunday when the private jet carrying her and four members of her entourage crashed near Iturbide, Mexico.

Rivera had sold 20 million albums, lived in a massive estate in Encino, was preparing to make her American network television debut and was at the height of her career.

The same plane, according to U.S. aviation records, sustained "substantial" damage in 2005 when a fuel imbalance left one wing tip weighing as much as 300 pounds more than the other. The unnamed pilot, despite having logged more than 7,000 hours in the air, lost control while landing in Amarillo, Texas, and struck a runway distance marker. No one was injured.

Esquino called that accident "minor" and said the plane had flown without issue for 1,000 hours since then.

Starwood formed in March 2007, two months after Esquino was released from prison. He probably knew, federal officials said Wednesday, that he would be unable to receive a license to buy and sell U.S.-registered aircraft following the federal charges and his deportation. Nevada employment records list Esquino's sister-in-law, Norma Gonzalez, as the sole corporate officer of Starwood. But according to allegations contained in court documents, it was Esquino — who has operated at times under the name Eduardo "Ed" Nunez — who was actually running the show.

Read More..

Hallelujah! Google Maps Returns to Apple's iPhone

The wait is now, finally over. Google Maps is in Apple’s App Store, available for both the iPhone and iPad, bringing hope to those who have been having trouble getting around since the Apple mapocalypse.

Google’s app, which arrived late Wednesday night, improves on the Google-powered maps app that Apple shipped included in iOS before version 6 — when Apple ditched Google to go out on its own.
The most important new feature, of course, is turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation.

Unlike Apple’s maps app, Google’s navigation feature isn’t integrated with Siri. But it’s also much less likely to direct you into the Pacific ocean.

Other differences: Google Maps uses Zagat listings, and Google’s own local search, for charting and rating restaurants and retailers, while Apple uses Yelp. And if you have a Google account you can sign in to sync searches, directions, and favorite places between your iPhone, iPad and other computers.

Public transit, a glaring omission from Apple Maps, shows up on iOS’s Google Maps too. So bus, subway, train, walking and driving directions are all here. And what would Google Maps be without Street View integration? Google Maps on iOS has that too, with the ability to view 360-degree panoramas of both outside streets and the inside of businesses.

Google is also releasing a Google Maps SDK for iOS, which will allow third-party app developers to incorporate Google Maps inside of Apple Maps. The new Google Maps app runs on any iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that can run iOS 5.1 or newer and its available in 40 countries and 29 languages.

Read More..

McAfee arrives in U.S. from Guatemala

MIAMI (Reuters) – Computer software pioneer John McAfee, who is wanted for questioning in Belize over the murder of a fellow American, arrived in Miami on Wednesday evening after he was deported by Guatemala, according to fellow passengers on an American Airlines flight.

After landing, McAfee, 67, was escorted from the plane by airport security officers, passengers said. Shortly afterward, he tweeted, “I am in South Beach,” referring to the popular tourist area on Miami Beach.

“Some people felt uncomfortable that he was on our flight. … We all knew the story,” said Maria Claridge, 36, a South Florida photographer who was on the Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s flight to Miami.

McAfee, who was seated in the coach section and had a whole row to himself, was wearing a suit and was “very calm” during the flight, she added.

“He looked very tired, he looked like a man who hadn’t slept in days. I’d say he even looked depressed,” said another passenger, Roberto Gilbert, a Guatemalan who lives in Miami.

McAfee had been held for a week in Guatemala, where he surfaced after evading police in Belize for nearly a month following the killing of American Gregory Faull, his neighbor on the Caribbean island of Ambergris Caye.

Police in Belize want to quiz McAfee as a “person of interest” in Faull’s death, although the technology guru’s lawyers blocked an attempt by Guatemala to send him back there.

Authorities in Belize say he is not a prime suspect in the investigation. McAfee has denied any role in Faull’s killing.

The goateed McAfee has led the world’s media on a game of online hide-and-seek in Belize and Guatemala since he fled after Faull’s death, peppering the Internet with pithy quotes and colorful revelations about his unpredictable life.

“I’m happy to be going home,” McAfee, dressed in a black suit, told reporters shortly before his departure from Guatemala City airport on Wednesday afternoon. “I’ve been running through jungles and rivers and oceans and I think I need to rest for a while. And I’ve been in jail for seven days.”

Guatemala’s immigration authorities had been holding McAfee since he was arrested last Wednesday for illegally entering the country with his 20-year-old Belizean girlfriend.

The eccentric tech pioneer, who made his fortune from the anti-virus software bearing his name, has been chronicling life on the run in a blog, www.whoismcafee.com.

He said he had no immediate plans after reaching Florida.

“I’m just going to hang in Miami for a while. I like Miami,” he told Reuters by telephone just before his plane left. “There is a great sushi place there and I really like sushi.”

BELIZE STILL WAITING

Residents of the Belizean island of Ambergris Caye, where McAfee has lived for about four years, said McAfee and Faull, 52, had quarreled at times, including over McAfee’s unruly dogs.

McAfee says Belize authorities will kill him if he turns himself in for questioning. He has said he was being persecuted by Belize’s ruling party for refusing to pay some $ 2 million in bribes.

Belize’s prime minister has rejected the allegations, calling McAfee paranoid and “bonkers.

Belize police spokesman Raphael Martinez said the country still wanted to question McAfee about the Faull case.

“He will be just under the goodwill of the United States of America. He is still a person of interest, but a U.S. national has been killed and he has been somewhat implicated in that murder. People want him to answer some questions,” he said.

Martinez noted that Belize’s extradition treaty with the United States extended only to suspected criminals, a designation that did not currently apply to McAfee.

“Right now, we don’t have enough information to change his status from person of interest to suspect,” he said.

Residents and neighbors on Ambergris Caye said McAfee was unusual and at times unstable. He was seen to travel with armed bodyguards, sporting a pistol tucked into his belt.

The predicament of McAfee, a former Lockheed systems consultant, is a far cry from his heyday in the late 1980s, when he started McAfee Associates. McAfee has no relationship now with the company, which was sold to Intel Corp.

McAfee was previously charged in Belize with possession of illegal firearms, and police had raided his property on suspicions that he was running a lab to produce illegal synthetic narcotics. He said he had not taken drugs since 1983.

“I took drugs constantly, 24 hours of the day. I took them for years and years. I was the worst drug abuser on the planet,” he told Reuters before his arrest in Guatemala. “Then I finally went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that was the end of it.”

(Writing by Dave Graham, Michael O’Boyle and David Adams. Reporting by Sofia Menchu and Mike McDonald.; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..