May 19, 2024
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How to get a seat from award miles, when customer service is a dead-end street, keeping an eye on bouncing prices online and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times.
Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/monday-reading-how-to-get-a-seat-from-award-miles/?partner=rss&emc=rss
The opposition leader, Alexis Tsipras, whose criticism of international bailouts propelled his party, Syriza, to win the second biggest bloc of parliamentary seats in the June 2012 elections, also said he did not believe Greece would be forced to withdraw from the group of 17 countries that use the euro currency. Greece’s heavy indebtedness has raised fears that the country could leave or be expelled from the euro zone, a possibility that many economists regard as a threat to the euro’s survival.
“They say I am the most dangerous man in Europe,” Mr. Tsipras said in an interview with the editorial board of The New York Times. “What I feel is dangerous is the policy of austerity in Europe. The Greek people have paid a heavy price.”
Mr. Tsipras was in New York as part of a trip to the United States that has included meetings in Washington with the International Monetary Fund and the Treasury Department. The trip is part of a campaign intended to bolster his credibility as a politician and to counter what his aides call the fictional portrayals of him as a financial bomb-thrower in Greece’s mainstream news media, controlled by the so-called oligarch families of privilege in the country who fear Syriza’s ascent to power.
Given the fragility of the conservative-led coalition that took over after the June elections, any no-confidence vote in Parliament could lead to new elections that give Mr. Tsipras the latitude to form a government. Recent polls put Syriza’s popularity at nearly 30 percent, about the same as the current coalition leader, the conservative New Democracy party.
This month Mr. Tsipras also visited Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy, which has been the driving force behind the insistence that Greece must endure sacrifices and impose fiscal discipline in exchange for help on its debt burden. Mr. Tsipras has argued that the strategy has not only been an expensive failure but has also increased Greece’s indebtedness relative to the size of its economy, where joblessness and cuts in wages and benefits have stoked widespread anger.
After six years of recession in Greece, he said, “we are witnessing a humanitarian crisis.”
The symptoms were on display this week in Athens, where striking subway workers, outraged over pay cuts, paralyzed a transit system that carries one million riders a day. The government on Friday used an emergency decree to halt the strike.
Mr. Tsipras said he would like to see a summit meeting that would result in an end to the austerity approach, which he said is needed to restart growth and avert a deeper economic malaise.
“We are suggesting an overall plan for a European solution,” he said. “A European conference on debt that would include all of the countries of the region facing a significant debt issue.”
He drew an analogy to the London Debt Agreement of 1953, in which postwar Germany’s debt was cut by 50 percent and the repayment spread over 30 years.
Mr. Tsipras said the German government, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, has held the possibility of expulsion from the euro zone over Greece as leverage for enforcing its austerity solution, but that in his view neither Germany nor its supporters want to see Greece exit the euro.
“The constant threats, that they will kick us out of the euro zone, is a strategy with no foundation,” he said. “It’s just a way to blackmail us.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/world/europe/alexis-tsipras-greece-opposition-leader-calls-for-debt-renegotiation.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Toyota’s green car champion, the impact of being in day care on behavior later, Twitter’s new video feature and other consumer news from The New York Times.
Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/friday-reading-the-greenest-cars-of-2013/?partner=rss&emc=rss
He was a decade older, a suave lawyer who courted her with flowers, rides in his powder-blue Cadillac and trips to glittering Manhattan nightclubs. He was married, though not to her.
Before long, tiring of his unfulfilled promises to divorce his wife, she ended their affair. He hired three men, who threw lye in her face, blinding her, and went to prison for more than a decade.
Afterward, she married him.
Linda Riss Pugach, whose blinding by her lover, Burton N. Pugach, in 1959 became a news media sensation, and whose marriage to Mr. Pugach in 1974 became an equally sensational sequel, died at Forest Hills Hospital in Queens on Tuesday at 75.
The cause was heart failure, said Mr. Pugach, her husband of more than 38 years and her only immediate survivor.
In 1974, The New York Times called the attack on Miss Riss “one of the most celebrated crimes of passion in New York history.” In the years since, the strange romance of Mr. and Mrs. Pugach (pronounced POOH-gash) has seldom been far from public view.
A book about the couple, “A Very Different Love Story,” by Berry Stainback, was published in 1976. More recently, the Pugaches were the subject of a widely seen documentary, “Crazy Love.”
Part cautionary tale, part psychological study, part riveting disaster narrative, the film, directed by Dan Klores, was released in 2007 to favorable, if somewhat astonished, notices.
In the decades after their marriage, the Pugaches seemed hungry for limelight. Although reporters who visited their home in the Rego Park section of Queens wrote often of their unremitting bickering, the couple just as often appeared in the newspapers or on television to declare their mutual devotion.
They received renewed attention in 1997, when Mr. Pugach, known as Burt, went on trial in Queens on charges that he had sexually abused a woman and threatened to kill her.
At the trial, at which Mr. Pugach represented himself, Mrs. Pugach testified on his behalf, telling him in open court, “You’re a wonderful, caring husband.” The alleged victim in the case was Mr. Pugach’s mistress of five years.
Mr. Pugach, who was convicted of only a single count — harassment in the second degree — of the 11 with which he was charged in that case, was sentenced to 15 days in jail.
“We loved each other more than any other couple could have,” Mr. Pugach, intermittently weeping, said of his wife in a discursive telephone interview on Wednesday. He added, “Ours was a storybook romance.”
But to judge from the news accounts then and now, the story in question was “Beauty and the Beast.” Or, more precisely, it was that story’s unseen second act — the one in which the title union has degenerated into long, grinding yet strangely indissoluble banality.
Linda Eleanor Riss was born in the Bronx on Feb. 23, 1937. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and she was reared by her mother, her grandmother and an aunt.
She graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx; when she met Mr. Pugach, who specialized in negligence law, she was working as a secretary at an air-conditioner dealership on Tremont Avenue there.
After breaking off her affair with Mr. Pugach, Miss Riss became engaged to another man.
The attack, in June 1959, scarred her face and left her almost completely blind; over time, she lost what sight remained. To the end of Mrs. Pugach’s life, her face was framed by large dark glasses.
After the attack, Mr. Pugach appeared determined to continue their relationship. He telephoned her to suggest that they reconcile and later wrote her a torrent of letters from prison.
“At one point,” The Times reported in 1959, “he was said to have promised, ‘I’ll get you a Seeing Eye dog for Christmas.’ ”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/nyregion/linda-riss-pugach-whose-life-was-ripped-from-headlines-dies-at-75.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
The agency head, Andreas Georgiou, a veteran of nearly two decades at the International Monetary Fund, first came under scrutiny in the fall of 2011, when a former Elstat employee, Zoe Georganta, claimed that Mr. Georgiou had inflated the agency’s official figure for Greece’s 2009 budget deficit, saying it amounted to more than 15 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
In an interview with The New York Times last year, the statistics chief said that some members of Elstat’s board represented vested interests that did not want the full extent of Greece’s dire finances to come to light. “We were faced with significant pressures through the board not to revise the deficit upwards on account of fully applying European Union rules, but to minimize it,” he said.
Greece’s governing coalition, headed by the conservative New Democracy party, has lately undertaken a campaign to stamp out lawlessness and corruption, in part to impress its European creditors that it is serious about dealing with the country’s deep-seated problems. However, critics charge that it is doing so by attacking a series of straw men while ignoring criminality and tax evasion among the business, professional and political elites that have run the country for decades.
This month, for example, the police raided a squatter house in Athens that had been occupied by leftists and a few anarchists for more than 20 years, even though the violence that had plagued the city for years had subsided in recent months. The opposition said that, far from a crackdown on lawlessness, the raid incited a new wave of violence and was, at base, intended to distract attention from a scandal that threatens to disclose rampant tax evasion by the wealthy and well connected.
The Greek financial crisis erupted in 2009, when an incoming Socialist government announced that the budget deficit was 12.4 percent of gross domestic product, more than twice the previous estimate of the former government, also headed by New Democracy. To date, neither the Socialists nor New Democracy have prosecuted any officials responsible for the understatement of the deficit.
It was about a year ago that prosecutors first summoned Mr. Georgiou, following the claims by Ms. Georganta that Elstat inflated the deficit beyond the 12.4 percent figure. They further called upon Parliament to consider whether the former Socialist prime minister, George Papandreou, and the former finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, should be investigated for their roles in expanding the deficit beyond 12.4 percent. A parliamentary committee last year found no wrongdoing by the politicians, vaguely highlighting instead “a lack of institutional knowledge of the euro zone.”
Since then Mr. Papaconstantinou, who appointed Mr. Georgiou as chief of the statistics service in June 2010, has been ensnarled in the tax evasion scandal, accused of removing names of family members from a list of more than 2,000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts that may have been used to avoid taxes.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/world/europe/greek-prosecutors-seek-inquiry-over-deficit-claims.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Armstrong, 41, will give a limited confession to Winfrey and will not provide details of the doping that antidoping officials have said occurred throughout his cycling career, said the two people, who did not want their names published for fear of jeopardizing their access to him.
He is scheduled to sit down with Winfrey in his home in Austin, Tex., on Monday, for the interview, which will be shown Thursday on the Oprah Winfrey Network. USA Today first reported the news late Friday.
Neither Armstrong nor Tim Herman, Armstrong’s lawyer in Austin, immediately returned an e-mail request for comment.
The New York Times reported Jan. 4 that Armstrong was considering admitting publicly that he had used banned drugs and blood transfusions. Last fall, after 11 of his former teammates had testified against him, he was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping and for his involvement in what officials called the most sophisticated, organized and professional doping program in sports history.
Armstrong is coming forward to discuss his past doping because he wants to persuade officials to lift his lifetime ban from Olympic sports so he can return to competing in triathlons and running events, according to people with knowledge of his plans.
Last month, Armstrong met with Travis Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, to begin discussing a way in which an admission from Armstrong could mitigate his punishment. Under the World Anti-Doping Code, athletes can receive up to a 75 percent reduction of a ban if they provide substantial assistance to antidoping authorities in building cases against other cheaters. For his ban to be reduced, though, Armstrong will have to give information about the people who helped him in his doping.
If Armstrong does confess, he is opening himself to more legal troubles than he has now. He has been named as a defendant in a federal whistle-blower case that contends that Armstrong and his associates on the United States Postal Service cycling team used taxpayer dollars to finance a systematic doping program. The government is considering joining that case as a plaintiff.
Armstrong may also have to repay $12 million he received from SCA Promotions, a company based in Dallas that paid him millions for winning several Tours de France. Jeffrey Tillotson, a lawyer for the company, said Friday that he was waiting to see the interview with Winfrey before filing a lawsuit asking Armstrong to return that money.
Armstrong is also being sued by The Sunday Times of London for more than $1.5 million over the settlement of a libel case. The newspaper paid Armstrong nearly $500,000 after it published claims from the book “L.A. Confidentiel” that he had used performance-enhancing drugs.
What worries Armstrong the most, said people with knowledge of the situation, is criminal charges that could arise from his confession. The United States attorney’s office in Los Angeles closed an investigation into Armstrong early last year regarding doping-related crimes, including fraud, money laundering and drug trafficking. Another United States attorney’s office could reopen that investigation, several lawyers involved in the case said, although that is unlikely.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/sports/cycling/lance-armstrong-will-confess-drug-use-to-oprah-winfrey-sources-say.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
The F.D.A. recommends lower doses of sleep drugs, tighter loan rules allow wiggle room for banks, people actually shop on phones and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times.
Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/friday-reading-lower-doses-of-sleep-drugs-advised-for-women/?partner=rss&emc=rss
Flu is widespread this year, Boeing says 787 is safe, a survey of mobile chargers and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times.
Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/thursday-reading-flu-is-widespread-this-year/?partner=rss&emc=rss
The cause was complications of recent surgery, his son Saul said.
Mr. Shapiro the poet was the author of a dozen books, published between 1953 and 2006. In spare, often epigrammatic style, his work explored the world around him, from street scenes to intimate portraits of family life, with its attendant pleasures and pain. It also examined what it meant for him to exist in that world — as a man, a husband, a father and a Jew.
In “The Mother of Invention,” published in Bomb magazine in 2011, Mr. Shapiro wrote:
On my desk are the bills from the living
and in my sleep are the bills from the dead.
“Emptiness is the mother of invention”
says my fortune cookie. July 23, 2010.
Brooklyn. I walk in the slow rain,
never less accomplished, never happier.
Why should I doubt the world has meaning
when even in myself I see mysterious purposes.
A crow drops down for a moment,
black, rabbinical garb, croaking Kaddish.
Though his work was not to every critic’s taste (some were discomforted by the vivid sexual language it could contain), others praised his dark humor, verbal economy and eye for detail.
Mr. Shapiro the editor was associated with The Times from 1957 until his retirement in 1995. He was variously an editor at The New York Times Magazine; the editor of The Times Book Review, a post he held from 1975 to 1983; and deputy editor of the magazine. In the early 1960s, as an editor at The Times Magazine, Mr. Shapiro made what was almost certainly his most inspired assignment. Reading about one of Dr. King’s frequent jailings, he telephoned the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The next time Dr. King was in jail for any significant period, Mr. Shapiro suggested, he should compose a letter for publication.
In April 1963, while jailed in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. King did just that. But according to several published accounts, including “Carry Me Home” (2001), Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of the civil rights movement, Mr. Shapiro was unable to persuade his superiors at the magazine to print it.
“Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which endures as one of the canonical texts of the civil rights movement, was published instead in The Christian Century, The New Leader and elsewhere.
Throughout his newspaper career, Mr. Shapiro continued writing poetry, with his work centering not only on small domestic subjects but also on vast ones like war and the pulsating life of cities.
New York loomed especially large, with landmarks like Schrafft’s and Russ Daughters, the purveyor of smoked fish, bagels and other stuff of life on East Houston Street, threading their way companionably through his verse. Hart Crane was an early influence, Mr. Shapiro often said; Charles Reznikoff was a later one.
Here, in its entirety, is Mr. Shapiro’s poem “New York Notes,” from his collection “How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems” (2001):
1.
Caught on a side street
in heavy traffic, I said
to the cabbie, I should
have walked. He replied,
I should have been a doctor.
2.
When can I get on the 11:33
I ask the guy in the information booth
at the Atlantic Avenue Station.
When they open the doors, he says.
I am home among my people.
Harvey Irwin Shapiro was born in Chicago on Jan. 27, 1924, to an observant Jewish family. His first words were Yiddish. When he was a boy, the family moved to Manhattan and later to Woodmere, on Long Island.
Mr. Shapiro’s studies at Yale were interrupted by World War II. Enlisting in the Army Air Forces, he flew 35 combat missions over Europe as a B-17 tail gunner and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Mr. Shapiro earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale in 1947 and a master’s degree in American literature from Columbia the next year.
In the mid-1950s, after teaching English at Cornell University and Bard College, Mr. Shapiro became an assistant editor at Commentary magazine. He was briefly the poetry editor (and an ad salesman) at The Village Voice and a fiction editor at The New Yorker before joining The Times.
Mr. Shapiro’s marriage to Edna Lewis Kaufman ended in divorce. A resident of Brooklyn Heights, he is survived by his companion, Galen Williams; two sons, Saul and Dan, from his marriage to Ms. Kaufman; and three grandchildren.
His other volumes of poetry include “The Eye” (1953), “The Light Holds” (1984) and “National Cold Storage Company” (1988). Mr. Shapiro also edited a well-received anthology, “Poets of World War II,” published by the Library of America in 2003.
As poets will, Mr. Shapiro sometimes wondered, poetically, how his own life would end. In these lines from “In a Bad Time,” published in his last collection, “The Sights Along the Harbor” (2006), he concluded thus:
Who created you? Jacob J. Shapiro
and Dorothy Cohen. They created me,
and my dead sister, Annette, and my
younger brother, Allan. Who will uncreate
you? Impossible to predict just now
but my money is on pastrami.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/books/harvey-shapiro-poet-of-new-york-and-beyond-dies-at-88.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Drowsy drivers pose major risks, health insurers raise some premiums by double digits, plenty of room on Maine’s ski slopes and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times.
Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/monday-reading-drowsy-drivers-pose-major-risks/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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