In San Francisco, Anticipation for a Rare Sight: Snow
By JESSE McKINLEY NY TIMES
SAN FRANCISCO — It is not snowing in San Francisco. To repeat: not snowing.

Amid the type of wide-eyed anticipation usually reserved for the arrival of a pope, a president or a particularly good pinot, residents of San Francisco were giddy and girding for the possibility of a dusting of snow on Friday, as a powerful Pacific storm coincided with a blast of cold Canadian air.

The resulting mix had left city dwellers looking skyward for the first significant snowfall here since February 1976, when an inch fell, according to the National Weather Service.

“I can’t wait. It’ll be crazy,” said Marisa Belaski-Farias, 23, a graphic design student who grew up in Hawaii and has never seen snow in person. “I have a cardboard box at home. Hopefully there will be enough snow to sled.”

That outing might have to wait. By early Friday morning, the storm had delivered only soaking rain and howling gales, as the Canadian cold front lingered to the north of the city. But minute-by-minute reports on television promised that snow was coming by late afternoon, with live team coverage and ominous outlooks.

“Right now, it’s just rain for us, but the cold air is getting closer,” said Steve Paulson, the weatherman for KTVU, the Fox affiliate, at 6 a.m. “It’s getting closer.”

The very possibility that San Francisco could see snowfall has led to a flurry of activity by online wiseacres. The Web site Isitsnowinginsfyet.com was set up to answer whether it was snowing in the city, and mock terror bounced around the Twittersphere.

“Apparently going to snow today in San Francisco for first time in 35 years,” wrote the aptly named Anastasia Frost (@tummytickle), a British woman visiting the city. “Dear weather, please stop showing off & just give us the sun.”

Several Web sites also got into the fun, including the Bay Citizen, which labeled the mere idea of snow as “SnO.M.G.,” an apparent homage to both Valley girls and the East Coast’s recent spate of blizzards, which were called Snowmageddon.

There were, of course, more serious responses.

On Thursday, the San Francisco mayor, Edwin M. Lee, was warning of unseasonable cold and asking city homeless shelters to increase their capacity and outreach to the indigent.

“City agencies are working together to ensure that homes and businesses are protected and the public is safe during these severe weather storms,” said Mr. Lee in a statement, adding that city crews would be monitoring for flooding and hazardous conditions on the roads. The city’s Department of Public Works was planning to offer free sandbags, and its emergency management department had activated its Incident Management Team to coordinate with other regional agencies in case of possible disruptions in utilities or transportation, city officials said.

Snow is more common outside the city, with scenic mountain peaks sometimes receiving small accumulations. And sure enough, as this storm approached, meteorologists were predicting the heaviest snow would fall in the upper elevations of Napa County, the wine-rich region to the north of the city, which could see six inches or more. Some parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains, to the south, were also expected to receive a half foot or more.

Steve Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Monterey, Calif., said snow was a rarity in San Francisco because moisture that hits Northern California is generally warmed above the freezing point over the Pacific before making landfall. In this case, however, the rain was being met by a blast of cold coming in overland from the north.

Mr. Anderson said snow could fall all the way to sea level in San Francisco by Saturday, as the front passes through, though it was more likely to be seen in places like Twin Peaks, a city neighborhood that sits at about 900 feet.

“It’s certainly not going to stick on the ground at sea level or around town,” Mr. Anderson said. “But there’s certainly a chance for white stuff on the hills.”

In classic San Francisco fashion, where weather can vary hour by hour and block to block, the early morning rains gave way to clear skies, with a prediction of more precipitation later in the day.

Still, for some residents, the hype over the rare weather had already turned their feelings to mush.

“I’m already over the snow in San Francisco,” wrote Michael Owens, a San Francisco Twitter user (@mko). “And it hasn’t even happened yet.”


Malia Wollan contributed reporting.

100 Years Later, the Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire Is Complete
By JOSEPH BERGER NY TIMES
In the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, there is a haunting stone monument to the garment workers who died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 but were never identified. It contains the bas-relief figure of a kneeling woman, her head bowed, seemingly mourning not only the deaths, but also the fact that those buried below were so badly charred that relatives could not recognize them.

Almost a century after the fire, the five women and one man, all buried in coffins under the Evergreens monument, remained unknown to the public at large, though relatives and descendants knew that a loved one had never returned from the burning blouse factory.

Now those six have been identified, largely through the persistence of a researcher, Michael Hirsch, who became obsessed with learning all he could about the victims after he discovered that one of those killed, Lizzie Adler, a 24-year-old greenhorn from Romania, had lived on his block in the East Village.

And so, for the first time, at the centennial commemoration of the fire on March 25 outside the building in Greenwich Village where the Triangle Waist Company occupied the eighth, ninth and 10th floors, the names of all 146 dead will finally be read.

The fire was a wrenching event in New York’s history, one that had a profound influence on building codes, labor laws, politics and the beginning of the New Deal two decades later.

Among the most anguishing aspects was the memory of the more than 50 young immigrant women and men who were forced to leap from the high floors to escape the inferno. However, many of the 146 victims — 129 women and 17 men — burned to death in the loft building, at Washington Place and Greene Street, and had no telltale jewelry or clothing to help identify them.

The day the six unidentified victims were buried was the culmination of the city’s outpouring of grief; hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers turned out in a driving rain for a symbolic funeral procession sponsored by labor unions and other organizations, while hundreds of thousands more watched from the sidewalks.

A century later, names and even circumstances have finally been attached to those “unknowns.”

“We consider his list to be the best ever produced on the question,” said Curtis Lyons, director of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University, which holds one of the most thorough repositories about the Triangle fire.

Workers United, the garment workers’ union, and David Von Drehle, who wrote “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” a 2003 history of the fire, said they also regarded Mr. Hirsch’s list as the most authoritative.

Descendants of those who perished, like a great-granddaughter of one 33-year-old victim, Maria Lauletti, were heartened by the news, though no one interviewed had yet made a decision whether to exhume bodies from the Evergreens cemetery and attempt a DNA match.

“It means that there’s recognition that she actually died in the fire,” said Mary Ann Lauletti Hacker, 57, of Fountain Hills, Ariz. “To me, that’s a finality. She positively can be part of the record of those who died.”

No New York City agencies and no newspapers at the time produced a complete list of the dead, Mr. Hirsch said. The most thorough list — 140 names — was compiled by Mr. Von Drehle when he wrote his book, and that was largely based on names plucked from accounts in four contemporary newspapers.

The obscurity of their names is evidence of the times, when lives were lived quietly and people were forced by economic and familial circumstances to swiftly move on from tragedies — with no Facebook or reality television cameras to record their every step and thought.

Mr. Hirsch, 50, an amateur genealogist and historian who was hired as a co-producer of the coming HBO documentary “Triangle: Remembering the Fire,” undertook an exhaustive search lasting more than four years. He returned to the microfilms of mainstream daily newspapers overlooked by researchers before him and to ethnic publications that he asked to have translated, like the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward and Il Giornale Italiano. He estimates that he consulted 32 different newspapers.

He looked for articles about people who, in the weeks after the fire, claimed that their relatives were still missing. He then matched what he discovered with census records, death and burial certificates, marriage licenses, and reports kept by unions and charities about funeral and “relief” payments made to the families of the dead. Lastly, he sought out the descendants of three of the unidentified to confirm that the names he found were still mourned as Triangle victims.

“I’m passionate about the history of this neighborhood,” Mr. Hirsch said of the combined Lower East Side and East Village, where most of the workers had lived. “From my window, I can see the stairs that Lizzie Adler had probably walked down to go to the factory the day of the fire.”

Typical of his illuminating morsels was an article in the Forward asking if anyone had seen Max Florin, a 23-year-old immigrant from Russia and one of the six unidentified victims. “We believe that he survived the fire, but from great fear and being upset he went mad and is wandering the streets,” the article said, in Mr. Hirsch’s rough paraphrasing. “He is of average height and was wearing a black suit.”

Mr. Hirsch began his quest modestly by trying to confirm existing lists. He found that they contained misspelled names, names of those who had actually survived and of those who had not worked at the factory. He was not surprised, given the bureaucratic fumbling and hurried journalism that often follows tumultuous disasters.

He also learned that a name of one identified victim had been omitted. He found an article bypassed by earlier compilers in The New York Times from March 31, 1911, about someone named Jacob Dashefsky, who had come forward six days after the fire to say that his sister Bessie, 25, a Russian immigrant, had not returned home. Her body was identified through dental records and barely missed being buried at the funeral for the unidentified on April 5, 1911. That finding convinced him that there were others who had been omitted for similar reasons.

Mr. Hirsch visited the graves of each of the known victims, who had been buried in 16 cemeteries, to further ensure a comprehensive list. At Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, Queens, he came across what he called “my Rosetta Stone.”

He was looking for the monument for Isabella Tortorelli, 17, but instead found a family monument whose Italian inscription spoke of “due sorelle” — two sisters — who perished in the fire. Mr. Hirsch had never seen the name of Isabella’s older sister, Maria Giuseppa Lauletti, on any list before. He checked with the Calvary office and was told that her body was not in the grave.

He located her granddaughter, Mrs. Hacker, in Arizona, who told him that the family had never been able to single out Ms. Lauletti’s body among the unidentified bodies, suggesting that she was probably buried at Evergreens. She also informed him that Ms. Lauletti had been an immigrant from Sicily and the mother of five children, four of whom were put in an orphanage after the fire.

On his own, Mr. Hirsch found a 1912 report by the Red Cross that sought to protect the anonymity of the families receiving cash payments but whose details matched that of Ms. Lauletti. It also revealed that the mother of “Number 85,” as Ms. Lauletti had been identified, was “almost crazed with grief” and “did nothing but moan and weep for weeks.”

Is that biological determinism in your genes, or are you Gaga about free will?
Frank Furedi From: The Australian

I AM a huge fan of Lady Gaga, which is why I was so disappointed by the release of what has been described as the "new gay anthem": Born This Way.
Sadly Lady Gaga, the manic new queen of reinvention, has fallen prey to the fatalistic doctrine of biological determinism. Earlier this month she boasted to Vogue: "I am the excuse to explore your identity." But now there are no excuses, the exploration is over. Her song informs us that "God makes no mistakes", we are simply "born this way".

In other words your identity is not so much a matter of individual choice but a result of your genetic make-up. Her disturbing avowal of biological determinism resonates with the present fatalistic zeitgeist that perceives human identity and behaviour as genetically driven.

Lady Gaga personifies the growing tendency towards fossilisation of identity. That her self-consciously outrageous cultivation of the unexpected has led to the traditionalist declaration that sexuality is natural is not surprising. Since the 1960s identity politics has fluctuated between the individualistic celebration of choice and self-invention and the conformist quest for legitimacy.

By the end of the 70s the politics of identity lost its liberal impulse and insisted that it be respected and recognised for itself.

It was at this point that identity came to be represented as a fact of life that one is born with rather than a subject of choice.

Increasingly the refrain "I was born this way" served as a demand for the celebration of identity.

The fossilisation of identity acquired its most dramatic dimension in the former gay liberation movement. In the early 70s the gay liberation movement insisted there was nothing natural about sexuality. It argued that sexual preference involved a matter of choice and that desire was not the product of biological programming. That was then.

Since the 90s there has been a growing tendency to represent homosexuality as not a choice influenced by sexual desire but the inexorable consequence of a so-called gay gene.

Researchers have been busy discovering genes that prove that homosexuals are born, not made.

In September 1991, Newsweek ran a front cover picture of a baby with the question "Is this child gay?" The idea that homosexuals are born this way has now become integral to gay identity. According to gay gene theory your sexuality is natural and immutable.

There are still a few gay activists such as Peter Tatchell who are prepared to argue against this dogma. But increasingly it is considered bad manners to question the doctrine that sexual orientation is immutable.

The main reason the naturalisation of sexual desire has been embraced by the gay and establishment is because they believe it encourages tolerance and respect for sexual minorities.

The "scientific discovery" that homosexuality is natural serves to counter critics who claim that it is abnormal or unnatural.

Unfortunately the doctrine of immutability serves to diminish the belief in free will and the capacity for moral independence.

This is not surprising since the active and experimenting dimension of the pursuit of self-determination is antithetical to the politics of identity.

When humanity is reduced to genes: Lady Gaga's fatalistic anthem speaks to everyone preoccupied with their identities. No matter whether "you're black, white, beige, chola descent", she sings "rejoice and love yourself".

What she really means is accept your immutable identity. This all-inclusive appeal to the fossilisation of identity enjoys formidable cultural affirmation in Western societies.

These days virtually every form of human behaviour is interpreted as the outcome of genetic programming. Brain research and evolutionary psychology is mobilised to prove that even people's beliefs and opinions are expressions of their genetic dispositions.

Apparently political debate is a waste of time since "political positions are substantially determined by biology and can be stubbornly resistant to reason".

So claims John Alford, an American political scientist who also notes that "trying to persuade someone not to be liberal is like trying to persuade someone not to have brown eyes".

Apparently our political views are built into our brains.

Once biological determinism captures the cultural imagination, one discovery follows the next. So scientists from the University of California and Harvard have published research that claims to have discovered a "liberal gene" that disposes people to new ideas and alternative lifestyles.

From this perspective, liberalism, tolerance and a disposition to new ideas is not so much an acquisition acquired through the exercise of individual judgment than a consequence of a transmitter in the brain called DRD4.

Indeed, moral reasoning itself is depicted as a function that can be explained through the working of the brain.

So philosopher Paul Thagard has offered an explanation of the meaning of life through drawing on research from neuroscience rather than on moral and culturally informed beliefs.

These days the idea that we are born this way dominates popular culture. It is not simply our sexual desires that are pre-programmed. Serial killers are not so much evil people as damaged children who just cannot control their destructive urges. The television series Dexter features an almost lovable mass murderer who simply cannot refrain from killing -- in this case nasty -- people. You see, he was born this way.

Don Draper, the main protagonist of Mad Men, also was born this way. His brutal childhood dooms him to a life of inner turmoil and anxiety.

So when Gaga sings "in the religion of the insecure/I must be myself", the myself is not so much an accomplishment of self-determination but of a biological accident. There is more than hint that what she has in mind is not so much the affirmation of the self but a deference to fate.

Thankfully, the experience of human endeavour tells us that who we are need not be determined by a biological accident.

Yes, our genes influence our behaviour. But this does not determine who we are. We are not the slaves of our biology and possess a formidable capacity to make our own world and on a good day to even choose who we want to be.

And that's a far better message for a Lady Gaga anthem

Before Deadly Rampage, Some Saw Warning Signs

By LIZ ROBBINS
He was caught up in drugs, some people said, as both a dealer and a user. Other people knew him for the graffiti he scrawled alongside a desolate freight line that runs between Brooklyn and Queens. They saw him as a short-tempered bully, who had come to the United States as a child from Ukraine and never found his way.

No one in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, it seemed, quite understood the young man, Maksim Gelman, but most everyone who knew him agreed on one disturbing thing: He had a deep, unquenchable obsession for a young neighborhood woman who had rebuffed him, Yelena Bulchenko. Mr. Gelman killed Ms. Bulchenko on Friday, the police said, along with three others, in a frantic 28-hour span.

Mr. Gelman, 23, who had immigrated in 1994, was being held in Brooklyn. He is accused of four murders, two assaults and two robberies.

He will be charged in Manhattan later in the week, a law enforcement official said, in the assault on a subway passenger, Joseph Lozito, the final victim before three police officers subdued and arrested Mr. Gelman on a No. 3 train near Times Square on Saturday.

One clue to the crime rampage seemed to be sprayed on the cement walls alongside a sunken track bed of the freight line under the overpass of Ocean Avenue.

Near the top of a wall, in bright cherry red letters, the name “Yelena” had been spray-painted. Farther along the wall, the name was spray-painted again, near a pink heart.

On the opposite side of the tracks, there was the word “Max,” which the police said they believed was Mr. Gelman’s tag.

On Sunday, neighbors of Ms. Bulchenko, a dental assistant, mourned her loss and spoke angrily of Mr. Gelman. “There were definitely warning signs,” one neighbor, Gabriell Kiernan, 32, said. “We told her not to have anything to do with him. She was scared of him.”

Friends of Ms. Bulchenko said that after briefly becoming friendly with Mr. Gelman last summer, she had been afraid of him. The two never dated, the friends said, and as Ms. Bulchenko became more alarmed over his behavior, she refused to answer his telephone calls or answer the door when he appeared without warning outside her home.

One time in late summer, according to Ms. Kiernan, Mr. Gelman pounded on the door, yelling that he would kill her if she did not open it for him. She did not.

According to a police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing, there were no records of Ms. Bulchenko’s having filed a complaint to the police.

“He was nobody,” Gerard Honig, 24, said of Mr. Gelman. He added that he had been Ms. Bulchenko’s boyfriend over the last two and a half months.

Mr. Honig said Mr. Gelman had called her repeatedly though she had had no desire to talk to him.

Ryan Rosario, 20, said he had also dated Ms. Bulchenko and had introduced her to Mr. Gelman. They had briefly been friendly, with Ms. Bulchenko even going to the pool at the apartment complex where he lived with his mother and her companion.

But when Mr. Gelman started being verbally abusive and calling her repeatedly, she started pulling away from him, the friends added.

How Mr. Gelman’s life came apart, and how he brought those closest down with him, was the subject of the continued police investigation on Sunday.

Mr. Gelman and his mother, Svetlana, had come to New York two years after Mr. Gelman’s father immigrated from Ukraine through refugee status, the police said.

The father later gained citizenship but returned to Ukraine. His son and wife became citizens around 2005, the police said.

Mr. Gelman had attended Lincoln High School, according to a former student there, but it was unclear if he had graduated; he was known around school as being a skateboarder.

Mr. Gelman had been arrested 10 times since 2003, several times for graffiti-writing, but most recently, in January, for possession of crack cocaine.

“When I was little he kind of did bully me,” said Filip Bendersky, 14, a neighbor. “He used to take my water guns and put in hot sauce and soap.”

But Mr. Gelman’s pranks and taunting later turned into spite, and worse. He was behaving so belligerently and menacingly one night last fall at the Blue Velvet Lounge, on Avenue U, that the lounge’s owner said she had to make him leave.

“You learn to tell the difference between when a person is just talking, and when somebody has aggressive intent,” said Yana Levin, 37, the owner.

“He was saying, ‘Oh, you might regret it. You’ll throw me out now, but you might live to regret it.’ ”

Mr. Gelman may have fulfilled another threat in the killings that, according to the police, he started just past 5 a.m. Friday at his mother’s apartment on East 27th Street, near Emmons Avenue.

After arguing with his mother’s companion, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, over whether he could borrow Mr. Kuznetsov’s 2004 Lexus, Mr. Gelman stabbed him at least 11 times with a kitchen knife, the police said.

He left his mother uninjured and raced off with the car to Ms. Bulchenko’s home.

She was not there, and, the police said, he fatally stabbed her mother, Anna Bulchenko, and six hours later ambushed Ms. Bulchenko in her home, killing her as he had once threatened to do.

Then, the police said, he sped off, rammed a green Pontiac Bonneville and stabbed the driver, Arthur DiCrescento, 60, before stealing his car.

Headed north on Ocean Avenue, the Bonneville struck a pedestrian, Stephen Tannenbaum, and killed him, the police said.

The police said they found four kitchen knives in Mr. Kuznetsov’s Lexus. Other knives were in the kitchen sink at his mother’s house. Mr. Gelman was found with two knives on him, a large kitchen knife he used to stab the subway passenger, and one smaller pocketknife, the police said.

When he was arrested, Mr. Gelman was wearing a black and yellow warm-up jacket that belonged to Sheldon Pottinger, 25, the owner of a 2001 Nissan; according to the police, Mr. Gelman slashed him on the hands and then stole his car on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

Mr. Pottinger said in an interview that he recognized the jacket immediately on television.

On Sunday in the 61st Precinct station house where he was held overnight, Mr. Gelman refused to be fingerprinted, authorities said, but one law enforcement official said he did not have to be restrained.

As he was being taken from the station house about 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Gelman cursed and yelled that it “was a setup” as he was led to a vehicle.

In the hours before he appeared in court, he told officers that he was “a sacrificial lamb,” according to one law enforcement official.

In his appearance, Mr. Gelman said nothing to the court. The public defender representing him on Sunday, Michael Baum, said Mr. Gelman understood the charges against him. No plea was entered and no bail was set, and another hearing was scheduled for Monday.


Jack Begg, Joseph Goldstein, Colin Moynihan and Ethan Wilensky-Lanford contributed reporting.

You Call This a Republican?
Scott Brown was the Tea Party’s first big electoral coup—in Massachusetts, no less. Then Ted Kennedy’s successor began siding—again and again—with Barack Obama. Now some angry Tea Partiers want to oust him.
by Andrew Romano NEWSWEEK
Scott Brown isn’t himself. Which is to say, he isn’t sounding much like the square-jawed, truck-driving, barn-jacket-bedecked Scott Brown—the calm, cool, collected Captain America—who stunned the political world a year ago by winning the special election to replace Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. It’s lunchtime in the blue-collar town of Pittsfield, Mass., and Brown, who’s touring the Berkshires for the first time since taking office, is addressing a crowd of 200 Rotarians in the grand ballroom of the Crowne Plaza hotel. At first he seems poised enough. He makes fun of himself for announcing that his daughters were “available” in his first speech as a senator-elect. He reminisces about how he “drove too fast” and sneaked into concerts while summering nearby as a teen. He even jokes that he “did very well” in 2010 with the notoriously liberal locals. “I won the town of Otis,” he says. “That’s about three votes.”

But then, as the sedate audience sips chowder and grazes on cold cuts, something seems to set Brown off. According to the accepted Beltway storyline, the Bay State sent Brown to Washington to thwart an overreaching Democratic majority, thereby triggering the Tea Party “revolution” that would go on to fuel the GOP’s historic midterm gains. The problem with the official narrative, however, is that since arriving on the Hill, Brown has sided with Dems almost as often as he’s stymied them, defying his party on issues as diverse as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” financial reform, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and the February 2010 jobs bill. Now, as a reward for his independence, the Tea Partiers who took credit for Brown’s win are starting to turn against him. Democrats, meanwhile, remain suspicious.

The strain of walking such a fine line must be getting to Brown, because as soon as he finishes his initial round of pleasantries, he launches into a peevish rant about how unfair conservatives are being when they criticize him. “The Democrats are in charge!” he shouts, his voice reaching the high, strained register that teenagers typically use when they don’t want to take out the trash. “Does that mean I’m supposed to do nothing? That I’m supposed to vote with my party every single second of every single day? Why? I haven’t done it for 15 years in the state legislature. All of a sudden I’m supposed to be an ideologue? I’m not quite sure what the mystery is, folks. When I hear some of the comments…I don’t know what the mystery is. I said I was going down there to be a Scott Brown Republican, not someone who works for Harry Reid—or Mitch McConnell!” It’s as if Brown is no longer addressing the people in the room—again, they’re mostly Democrats. Instead, he seems to be fending off foes in Washington, real or otherwise. Unsure of how to react, the crowd quietly pokes at its meatloaf.

For Brown, winning a long-shot campaign in deep-blue Massachusetts to succeed one of the most liberal and lionized members of the Senate was the easy part. The real challenge was what came next: the struggle to define himself as a so-called Scott Brown Republican at a time when partisanship and polarization are more prevalent than ever. “A lot of senators do everything they can to avoid taking tough votes,” he tells NEWSWEEK. “But every single vote I’ve taken has been a tough vote for me.”

Brown’s party-of-one positioning has made him a uniquely powerful freshman—able, as he often reminds his constituents, to squelch legislation (as “the 41st vote”) or ensure its passage (as “the 60th”). But it has also exposed him to incessant attacks from both the left and the right. In early January, Republican activist Scott Wheeler announced that his PAC, which invested $95,000 in Brown’s 2010 campaign, will “do everything possible to see that [he] is defeated by a primary opponent when he faces reelection in 2012?.?.?.?because there is no difference between him and a Democrat.” A week later Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman John Walsh accused Brown of “trying to think his way through how people are going to evaluate his voting record as a document, as opposed to voting how he believes.” Adding to the pressure: nosy reporters following wherever he goes and wanting to know, as Brown puts it, “what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, when I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it.”

In the coming year, the crossfire will only intensify. With more Republicans in Congress, Brown is bound to face greater pressure to caucus with his party, and as 2012 approaches, Massachusetts’s liberal electorate will begin to exert its influence as well. The publicity won’t let up, either. Later this month Brown will release his autobiography, Against All Odds. Although the book is being kept under wraps until it hits stores, the publishing and political communities are already buzzing about its juicy revelations: that Brown was savagely beaten by his drunken stepfather at the age of 6; that he frequently stole food to eat, and once swiped LPs from a record store; and that he spent some rowdy nights at Studio 54 while working as a model in the 1980s.

But 2011 will also be a year of opportunity for the senator. “I mean, when we lost seats this year, the effect of that was probably [Brown’s] stock going up,” says a senior Democratic staffer. “That’s the reality.” If Brown can sustain his balancing act as he prepares for reelection, he’ll be well on his way to proving the impossible: that there’s still room in the post–Tea Party GOP—and, indeed, the country at large—for the kind of aisle-crossing politicians who’ve become increasingly endangered in recent years. The question now is whether he’s up to the challenge.

In conversation, Brown is reluctant to admit that he’s a moderate; he’d rather repeat robotic talking points about “focusing on jobs” and “moving our country forward.” But his centrism was apparent as soon as he set foot on the Hill last February. At the time, Democrats were pushing a $13 billion payroll-tax exemption for employers willing to hire unemployed workers. Republicans, meanwhile, were threatening to filibuster, as usual. Lacking the votes to overcome the logjam, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Brown. As Politico noted, it was a move “rife with irony” for Democrats “devastated” by his recent election. But on Feb. 22 the senator shocked Washington—and many of his fans—by announcing that he’d support the measure. His explanation? “I’m not from around here. I’m from Massachusetts.” Four other Republicans quickly followed Brown’s lead, and the jobs bill passed with votes to spare.

Although conservatives spent the next few weeks tut-tutting their would-be hero on TV and the Internet—“Benedict Brown” was one of the more memorable epithets—Brown would go on to behave in much the same fashion whenever a major bill was up for a vote. Which isn’t to say he’s been a renegade; so far Brown has voted with the GOP leadership 81.1 percent of the time, according to The Washington Post. But in an era when most senators score around 95 percent, Brown’s modest disobedience has been enough to set him apart.

Consider “don’t ask, don’t tell.” During the 2010 special election, Brown told the Massachusetts Family Institute that he supported the prohibition on gays from serving openly in the military. But he also said he would keep “an open mind” until the Pentagon released its forthcoming report on the policy. Within three days of the report’s late-November unveiling, Brown was telling Pentagon leaders, “I’ve been to many funerals, unfortunately, in my home state, for those soldiers, and one thing I never asked was, ‘Are they gay or straight?’?” Two weeks later he became the third Republican senator to come out in favor of repeal, guaranteeing its success.

The new START was a similar story. Brown’s mentor Mitt Romney was an early opponent of the U.S.-Russia nuclear pact, writing in July 2010 that it was President Obama’s “worst foreign-policy mistake yet.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed, advising his fellow Republicans to vote nay. And yet on Dec. 20 Brown announced that he’d “done [his] due diligence” and would join seven other Republicans in support of the treaty, virtually ensuring the two-thirds majority required for ratification. Conservatives again were apoplectic, accusing Brown of now “routinely sid[ing] against Republicans on social, fiscal, AND national security issues,” in the words of one National Review commenter. Brown was unbowed. “Gimme a break,” he said in Pittsfield. “I made my decision based on fact—not fiction, fear, or fallacy.”

But while occasional bouts of feel-good bipartisanship make for favorable headlines, Brown will also need to show some political cunning if he hopes to survive the rockier road ahead. The early signs suggest he’s ready. In August he waited until five other Republicans had signaled their support for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan—that is, just enough for confirmation—then announced he would be voting against her. It was masterful politics: a symbolically (but not mathematically) important display of loyalty that would give the senator some leeway to defy party leadership later on, when more was at stake.

His handling of Wall Street reform was just as shrewd. When the first Democratic drafts appeared over the summer, Brown was quick to make his disapproval known—while also hinting that he’d be “open” to compromise. The Democrats bit, and to secure his support they eagerly sanded off some sharp edges that had been irking big Brown campaign donors like MassMutual and State Street Bank. The bill passed with precisely 60 votes. As a bonus, Brown padded his sizable $7 million reelection war chest with $140,000 from banks and bankers—roughly 400 percent more than the average senator received from the financial industry during the same three-week negotiating period. Not pretty, but then, sausage making never is. “I think Brown is doing everything right,” says Mike Murphy, the GOP consultant who ran Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign. “He’s making sure he’s more aligned with the state than the Republican Party. He’s creating his own identity.”

Brown’s freshman year may have been one of the savviest in recent memory, but he’s far from infallible. Back in Pittsfield, the Rotarians are finishing their brownies, and the senator, who’s now mentioned that he “has to get out to the mountain to get some skiing in” twice in as many minutes, is running out of steam. When he opens the floor to questions, a senior citizen in a blue sweater raises his hand. “Could you explain this quantitative easing that [Fed chairman] Ben Bernanke is doing?” he asks. “I still don’t understand it.” Brown blinks. “What’s that?” he mutters. A few audience members repeat the phrase: “quantitative easing.” They seem to know all about the Fed’s recent decision to boost the economy by purchasing $600 billion in Treasury bonds—perhaps because Sarah Palin spent much of the autumn criticizing the maneuver. Their senator, however, is lost. “I’ve never heard [Bernanke] say that,” Brown finally admits.

In 2011 Brown will face questions far more challenging than quantitative easing. Republicans will want to know why he considers Massachusetts’s version of “Obamacare” to be a “superlative” program, as he put it in Pittsfield—and why, instead of falling in line with his repeal-happy colleagues, he’s partnered with Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon to introduce a bill allowing individual states to opt out of the new national health-care law as long as they create their own plan to provide universal coverage. Democrats will want to know whether he’s actually willing to work with the president on tough issues like education reform and deficit reduction, or whether, now that his party is gaining power, he’ll defer to McConnell and focus on ending Obama’s presidency instead of helping him to solve problems. And Massachusettians will want to know who deserves their votes in 2012: Brown, his sure-to-be-well-funded Democratic challengers, or the Tea Party types who are promising to topple him in the primary.

If Brown survives the onslaught without losing his balance—or his cool—he will have a chance to live up to the legacy of the dogged, accomplished senator he replaced. Like Brown, Ted Kennedy was considered a lightweight at first: a handsome, athletic neophyte who excelled at retail politics but didn’t boast much of a résumé; an upstart who defeated a seasoned state attorney general to win one of the most obsessed-over races of his time. Kennedy, of course, went on to author or cosponsor more than 850 bills during his 47 years in the Senate. He may have been a liberal, but he was also a master of bipartisan compromise. For a rookie like Brown—a rookie who’s fond of saying, “It’s not about Democrat or Republican”—there are far worse footsteps to follow.

With Daniel Stone

Suspect in Brooklyn Stabbing Spree Is Captured

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN NY TIMES
A fugitive with a knife, who the police said had left behind a calamity of murders and broken lives in Brooklyn, was captured by officers at Times Square on Saturday morning after stabbing another victim on a subway train near there, investigators said.

It was the culmination of a roller coaster of violence that included three fatal stabbings; a hit-and-run homicide; two other stabbings; four auto thefts, including two carjackings; death threats against several other people who got in the way; a dangerous manhunt by hundreds of police officers; and for millions of New Yorkers an around-the-clock ordeal of a killer on the loose in the city.

The all-night manhunt that led to several sightings in Brooklyn and Manhattan and to a cat-and-mouse chase through dark subway tunnels ended about 8:30 a.m., when the suspect, Maksim Gelman, 23, climbed up from the tracks, boarded a northbound No. 3 train and, the police said, stabbed a male passenger.

Witnesses on the train said it had pulled out of Pennsylvania Station and rolled north, but had stopped suddenly as it approached the Times Square station. They told of panic as the power went off and officers with flashlights and drawn guns ran through the cars toward the front where the attack had taken place, and riders ran back through the cars, fleeing the violence.

“At first I thought it was just a mechanical problem, and then we heard all these people saying there’d been a stabbing in one of the cars,” said Danielle Nugent, 23, a graduate student at Quinnipiac University who was in town to run a race in Riverside Park.

Moments after the stabbing, officers closed in and Mr. Gelman was handcuffed and taken into custody by two officers in the station at 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. Details of his arrest and the subway stabbing were sketchy. But the police said the victim was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center. His family said he was in stable condition.

The arrest was the climax of a 30-hour drama in which, investigators said, Mr. Gelman killed his mother’s companion and his former girlfriend and her mother in knife attacks at two apartments in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, then commandeered a car, stabbed the driver, then fatally struck a pedestrian and sped away.

The swirl of violence stunned the Russian community in Sheepshead Bay, where Mr. Gelman had lived for years and was known to neighbors as a troubled man with an arrest record and a reputation for a hair-trigger temper. Investigators said his last rage may have been touched off by the refusal of his mother’s companion, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, 54, a private ambulette driver, to let him use his Lexus.

In the apartment at 2830 East 27th Street, near Emmons Avenue, where they lived with Mr. Gelman’s mother, Svetlana Gelman, 48, the screaming two-minute argument ended at 5:09 a.m. on Friday, when, the police said, the young man attacked Mr. Kuznetsov with a kitchen knife, stabbing him numerous times.

The police were called, but by the time they arrived, Mr. Gelman had sped away in the gray 2004 Lexus and disappeared. The police released a picture of the 6-foot, 170-pound fugitive that was posted on news Web sites and blogs.

About 10 a.m., the police said, he entered the apartment of his former girlfriend, Yelena Bulchenko, 20, and her mother, Anna Bulchenko, 56, at 2466 East 24th Street, near Avenue Y. The younger woman was not there, but an argument with her mother followed. Mr. Gelman fatally stabbed the older woman a dozen times, investigators said.

Investigators said he then waited in the apartment for more than six hours until Yelena Bulchenko arrived home about 4:15 p.m. After a confrontation, he followed her outside and attacked her with his knife. She, too, was stabbed to death, the victim of a dozen wounds, investigators said.

“She was a sweet girl,” said Phil Kiernan, 36. “I knew her since she was young.” He recalled seeing Yelena Bulchenko’s body lying on the ground, with Mr. Gelman standing over her. “He’s screaming,” Mr. Kiernan said. “He’s killing her.” He said she had been stabbed in the neck. “I didn’t know who it was at first,” he said. “You know right away a neck wound is bad.”

Mr. Gelman sped away in the Lexus, the police said, but he apparently found his way blocked by a dark green Pontiac Bonneville at East 24th Street and Avenue U. The police said he rammed the rear of the Bonneville, then stormed out and dragged the driver, Arthur DiCrescento, 60, out of his vehicle and stabbed him in the chest.

Mr. Gelman then commandeered the Bonneville and drove north on Ocean Avenue. He struck a 62-year-old man, Stephen Tannenbaum, crossing Avenue R. The victim was taken to Kings County Hospital, where he died overnight. Mr. DiCrescento was taken to Lutheran Medical Center, and was reported in stable condition Friday night.

The violence touched off an all-night manhunt for Mr. Gelman. About 8 p.m. Friday, the search, which involved hundreds of officers and a number of helicopters, centered on a neighborhood at East 18th Street near Avenue R, in Brooklyn, where Mr. Gelman was reported to have been seen hiding in a garage. He was not found.

About 9:15 p.m., the Bonneville he had commandeered was found on 15th Street between Avenues H and I in Midwood, with the engine still running.

Mr. Gelman was next seen about 1 a.m. Saturday at Rochester Avenue and St. Johns Place in the Crown Heights section, where, the police said, he hailed a livery cab driven by Fitz Fullerton, 55. Mr. Gelman and Mr. Fullerton struggled, and the cab struck another vehicle.

The police said Mr. Gelman jumped out of the livery cab and fled. Minutes later, the police said he attacked another motorist, Shelden Pottinger, 25, in front of a church on Eastern Parkway near Rockaway Avenue. Threatening the driver with a knife, the police said, he pulled him out and drove off in the man’s car, a black 2001 Nissan Maxima. The car was later found abandoned in Queens.

Later in the morning, Mr. Gelman apparently entered the subway system. Following reports of a man seen in the subway tunnels, apparently walking along tracks and third-rail coverings, the police began scouring the Nos. 2 and 3 lines running from Brooklyn into Manhattan, walking along the tracks and riding in slow-moving subway trains.

The search led to the area around Pennsylvania Station shortly before 8:30 a.m., and then to a northbound No. 3 express that had just pulled out, heading for Times Square.

Mr. Gelman was believed to have climbed into the train from the tracks. The stabbing of the passenger apparently occurred as the train moved between the two stations. Passengers on the train told of riders, some leaving bloody footprints, rushing in panic toward the rear cars, and the police with drawn guns rushing toward the violence.

John Bodensiek, 53, a photographer from Princeton, N.J., was in the second car. He said that a scuffle had broken out in the first car moments after it pulled out of Pennsylvania Station heading uptown. He said other passengers told him later that Mr. Gelman had barged into the lead car claiming to be a police officer. When he was finally let off the train later, Mr. Bodensiek said, he glanced into the lead car.

“In the middle of the floor was just a pool of blood,” he said.

Dinesh Patel, 54, who operates a newsstand in the Times Square station, said he saw about 100 people running up the stairs from the platforms, heading for the turnstiles. He said he also saw 10 to 15 police officers, some with machine guns, and two men carrying a stretcher. He said people were shouting: “Go out! Go out!”

“I thought something, terrorism, something like that,” Mr. Patel said.

Soon afterward, all the staircases to the platforms for the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 trains were closed off with yellow police tape, and a confusion of people trying to make connections ensued.


Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, C. J. Hughes, Tim Stelloh and Ethan Wilensky-Lanford.

In Tokyo, a Crackdown on Sexual Images of Minors

By HIROKO TABUCHI NY TIMES
TOKYO — In a manga comic book that is well known here, “My Wife Is an Elementary School Student,” a 24-year-old teacher marries a 12-year-old girl as part of a top-secret social experiment.

There is no depiction of actual sex. But the teacher’s steamy fantasies fill the comic’s pages in graphic detail, including a little naked girl with sexually suggestive props.

Meanwhile, in a widely available new DVD, a real-life Japanese model poses in a tiny white bikini. She makes popcorn in a maid’s costume. She plays with a beach ball while being hosed down with water.

The model, Akari Iinuma, is 13 years old.

Japan, which has long been relatively tolerant of the open sale and consumption of sexually oriented material, lately has developed a brisk trade in works that in many other countries might be considered child pornography. But now some public officials want to place tighter restrictions on the provocative depictions of young girls — referred to as “junior idols”— that are prevalent in magazines, DVDs and Web videos.

One particularly big target is manga comic books that depict pubescent girls in sexual acts. It a lucrative segment of the $5.5 billion industry for manga, illustrated books drawn in a characteristic Japanese comic-book style.

A newly revised ordinance by Tokyo’s metropolitan government, which restricts the sale of such material, has prompted a national debate between its publishers and critics inside and outside Japan, who say the fare exploits children and may even encourage pedophilia. Other local and regional governments, including the Osaka Prefecture, are considering similar restrictions.

“These are for abnormal people, for perverts,” said Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, angrily throwing two comic books to the floor during an interview. Mr. Ishihara spearheaded the ordinance changes, which take effect in July.

While the revised law applies to an area containing only about a tenth of Japan’s population, Tokyo is the nation’s media capital and a de facto arbiter of the country’s pop culture boundaries. “There’s no other country in the world that lets such crude works exist,” Mr. Ishihara said.

To protest the ordinance, 10 of this country’s biggest publishers have said they will boycott the Tokyo International Anime Fair next month, Japan’s premier event for manga and animated films.

The new law specifically bars only the sale to minors of the restricted comics and videos. But industry executives say it will essentially end publication of the material by discouraging risk-averse publishers and booksellers from handling it at all.

“There are no victims in manga — we should be free to write what we want,” said Yasumasa Shimizu, vice president at Japan’s largest publishing company, Kodansha, which is participating in the boycott. “Creativity in Japanese manga thrives on an ‘anything goes’ mentality.”

Manga taps into a history of erotica that dates at least as far back as the ukiyo-e prints of 17th- to 19th-century Japan, including Hokusai’s famous portrayal of a fisherwoman and octopi in a salacious encounter. But it was as recently as the 1980s that comic magazines like Lemon People introduced a wider audience to sexual manga featuring young girls.

“There is a culture, an industry that worships youth and innocence,” said Mariko Katsuki, who published a book last year chronicling adults who are attracted to small children. “Much of the attraction is nonsexual, but sometimes it becomes a dangerous obsession.”

The new Tokyo law, which applies to anyone under 18, bans the sale of comics and other works — including novels, DVDs and video games — that depict sexual or violent acts that would violate Japan’s national penal code, as well as sex involving anyone under age 18. The ordinance also requires guardians to prevent children younger than 13 from posing for magazines or videos that depict them in sexually suggestive ways.

Legal experts say that Japan’s laws against child pornography are lax by international standards. Japan has banned the production or distribution of any sexually explicit, nude images of minors since 1999, when Parliament passed a law in response to international criticism of the wide availability of such works in the country. But even now, unlike the United States and most European countries, Japan does not ban the possession of child pornography.

In recent cases in the United States and Sweden, authorities have made arrests over manga books imported from Japan depicting sexual abuse of children. An American manga collector, Christopher Handley, pleaded guilty in 2009 to violating the 2003 Protect Act, which outlawed cartoons or drawings that depict minors in sexually explicit ways.

Japan’s 1999 law has also helped stamp out a formerly popular genre of photo books depicting nude under-age girls. One of the genre’s best-selling books, published in 1991, featured nude photos of the actress Rie Miyazawa, who was not yet 18 at the time of the photo shoot.

But in the last five or six years, books and videos have emerged that sidestep the law by featuring girls, some as young as age 6, posing in swimsuits that stop short of full nudity. These models, who are paid about 200,000 yen ($2,400) a shoot, often dream of careers in acting or music, industry insiders say.

Junior idol photo books and DVDs are widely available on Web sites like Amazon’s site in Japan and in specialized bookstores. At least eight magazines are devoted to such photos, including Sho-Bo, which features girls of elementary school age.

“I loved the white bikini,” Ms. Iinuma, the 13-year-old model, told the adult male fans who turned out at the Sofmap electronics store in Tokyo for an event to promote the release of her second DVD, “Developing Now.” It is a plotless 70 minutes of Ms. Iinuma in various costumes and poses.

At the gathering, Ms. Iinuma performed a short dance, spoke about the video shoot, then posed as men approached her to snap photos, while her mother looked on from the back of the room.

Hiromasa Nakai, a spokesman for the Japan Committee for Unicef, said the abundance of child pornography in Japan made it even easier for those who would normally not be considered as having clinical pedophilia, a psychiatric disorder characterized by a sexual obsession with young children, to develop a sexual interest in children.

“To a degree, it has become socially accepted to lust over young girls in Japan,” Mr. Nakai said. “Condoning these works has meant more people have access to them and develop an interest in young girls.”

There have been earlier moves to regulate pedophilic material in Japan, especially after the murders of four little girls in 1988-89 by a man police described as a pedophile. The case spurred local governments across Japan to adopt ordinances setting some limits to sales of pedophilic works, including a loose ratings system for explicit manga books imposed by the publishers themselves, and also set the stage for the 1999 anti-child pornography law.

Already the Tokyo government checks for “unwholesome” manga publications and can order publishers to label them as for adults only. But supporters of more regulation say those efforts have been sporadic.

“We believe that when the rights of adults or businesses violate children’s rights, children must come first,” said Tamae Shintani, head of Tokyo’s parent-teacher association for elementary schools. “But we also respect free speech, so the least we can ask is people keep their fetishes under wraps.”

The industry’s defenders say comparing manga to pedophilia involving real children is absurd. “Depicting a crime and committing one are two different things; it’s like convicting a mystery writer for murder,” said Takashi Yamaguchi, a Tokyo lawyer and manga expert.

Mr. Yamaguchi and others also contend that the Tokyo government pushed through the new regulations without ample debate. Some also worry that stronger regulations will harm an industry whose fortunes have already fallen in recent years; sales of comic magazines, in particular, have dropped by a third over the last decade, to $24.3 million in 2008.

The manga artist Takeshi Nogami, whose best-known work features high school girls riding military tanks, says he senses a disdain among policy makers toward manga itself. “They think reading manga makes you dumb,” he said.

In late December at the Comic Market, a self-published comic book fair that is held twice a year in Tokyo and attended by more than 500,000 people, manga titles depicting adults having sex with minors were on open display. And they were readily available to fans like Koki Yoshida, age 17.

“I don’t even think about how old these girls are,” Mr. Yoshida said. “It’s a completely imaginary world, separate from real life.”

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