Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.
Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.But this year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration will announce on Tuesday, Chicagoans may test their theories about clout on their computers. Using GPS technology, a new city Web site, ChicagoShovels.org, will provide a map of Chicago’s approximately 300 snowplows, making their way in real time through the neighborhoods. Anyone will have a clear view of who gets what first, and whether plows really sweep more rapidly beside the homes of the mayor, powerful aldermen — or even just the neighbor everyone hates.
“If that’s happening, you’ll see it,” Mr. Emanuel’s chief technology officer, John Tolva, said.
The snowplow tracker, which city officials expect to debunk the belief that routes are politically motivated, is but one element of a new computer package focused exclusively on snow — a fact of life in a city that prides itself on its stoic response to winter weather, but was clobbered last year by a blizzard that stranded scores of motorists on a thoroughfare along Lake Michigan.
In part, Mr. Tolva said, the idea to incorporate more technology into the city’s official answer to snow grew out of that blizzard, which dumped more than 21 inches and essentially closed down the city in early February. On their own, residents bonded over shoveling alleys, clearing sidewalks and even being trapped together on Lake Shore Drive, he said, so why not encourage all that bonding in advance online?
Among other elements of the new Web site: organization of a “Snow Corps,” which will match volunteers with mounds to shovel; winter-related computer applications to guide people when two inches of snow has fallen, alerting them to parking bans on city streets or, if it is too late, telling them where their car has been towed to; and an “adopt-a-sidewalk” program that will soon allow residents to share shoveling tools and claim shoveling responsibilities on a map.
It remains to be seen whether Chicagoans really wish to officially stake out shoveling responsibilities on sidewalks — even the ones right outside their homes. And ChicagoShovels.org offers no elegant computer solution to the age-old debate in this city: how to find a more dignified, efficient manner for claiming “dibs,” the long-established practice of placing chairs, cones, boxes or other junk to reserve a cleared parking space.
Still, Chicagoans will surely watch the snowplow tracker, which will share data the city was already collecting. The information is monitored in the city’s snow command center, where supervisors also track the slickness of bridges, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather maps and driving conditions captured by 1,000 cameras mounted around the city.
Oddly, though, in a winter season that some experts predicted would bring heavy snow, little has arrived so far. Like other cities in the Midwest, Chicago has spent millions of dollars less — $5.5 million less, in its case — because it needed tens of thousands of tons less road salt in December than it had the year before.
Thanks to superstition or history or both, no one here seemed willing to declare a trend. “I’m not calling this a mild winter yet,” Mr. Tolva said. And on Monday, Chicagoans awoke to snow.
As planned, he arrived that morning with a portfolio of his comic strips and charcoal sketches, some of which were sold through a Chelsea gallery. Kate Stanton-Paule, the teacher who had set up the meeting, accompanied him. But his first words upon entering the office were, like most things involving Justin, not in the script.
“Hello, everybody,” he announced, loud enough to be heard behind the company president’s door. “This is going to be my new job, and you are going to be my new friends.”
As the employees exchanged nervous glances that morning in January 2010, Ms. Stanton-Paule, the coordinator of a new kind of “transition to adulthood” program for special education students at Montclair High School, wondered if they were all in over their heads.
Justin, who barely spoke until he was 10, falls roughly in the middle of the spectrum of social impairments that characterize autism, which affects nearly one in 100 American children. He talks to himself in public, has had occasional angry outbursts, avoids eye contact and rarely deviates from his favorite subject, animation. His unabashed expression of emotion and quirky sense of humor endear him to teachers, therapists and relatives. Yet at 20, he had never made a true friend.
People with autism, whose unusual behaviors are believed to stem from variations in early brain development, typically disappear from public view after they leave school. As few as one in 10 hold even part-time jobs. Some live in state-supported group homes; even those who attend college often end up unemployed and isolated, living with parents.
But Justin is among the first generation of autistic youths who have benefited throughout childhood from more effective therapies and hard-won educational opportunities. And Ms. Stanton-Paule’s program here is based on the somewhat radical premise that with intensive coaching in the workplace and community — and some stretching by others to include them — students like Justin can achieve a level of lifelong independence that has eluded their predecessors.
“There’s a prevailing philosophy that certain people can never function in the community,” Ms. Stanton-Paule told skeptics. “I just don’t think that’s true.”
With some 200,000 autistic teenagers set to come of age in the United States over the next five years alone, little is known about their ability to participate fully in public life, or what it would take to accommodate them. Across the country, neighbors, employers, colleagues and strangers are warily interacting with young adults whose neurological condition many associate only with children.
Some advocates of “neurodiversity” call this the next civil rights frontier: society, they say, stands to benefit from accepting people whose brains work differently. Opening the workplace to people with autism could harness their sometimes-unusual talents, advocates say, while decreasing costs to families and taxpayers for daytime aides and health care and housing subsidies, estimated at more than $1 million over an adult lifetime.
But such efforts carry their own costs. In this New York City suburb, the school district considered scrapping Ms. Stanton-Paule’s program almost as soon as it began, to save money on the extra teaching assistants who accompanied students to internships, the bank, the gym, the grocery store. Businesses weighed the risks of hiring autistic students who might not automatically grasp standard rules of workplace behavior.
Oblivious to such debates, many autistic high school students are facing the adult world with elevated expectations of their own. Justin, who relied on a one-on-one aide in school, had by age 17 declared his intention to be a “famous animator-illustrator.” He also dreamed of living in his own apartment, a goal he seemed especially devoted to when, say, his mother asked him to walk the dog.
“I prefer I move to the apartment,” he would say, reluctantly setting aside the notebook he spent hours filling with tiny, precise replicas of every known animated character.
“I prefer I move to the apartment, too,” his father, Briant, a pharmaceutical company executive, replied on hard days.
Over the year that a New York Times reporter observed it, the transition program at Montclair High served as a kind of boot camp in community integration that might also be, for Justin, a last chance. Few such services are available after high school. And Justin was entitled to public education programs, by federal law, until only age 21.
Ms. Stanton-Paule had vowed to secure him a paid job before he left school — the best gauge, experts say, of whether a special needs student will maintain some autonomy later in life. She also hoped to help him forge the relationships, at work and beyond it, that form the basis of a full life.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 25, 2011
An article last Sunday about a young man with autism and his struggle for independence misspelled the surname of a Manhattan teenager. She is Paloma Kalisch, not Kalish.
As the weak economy has trudged on, they have leaned on credit cards to pay for holiday gifts, many bought at discounts. They are dipping into savings to cover spikes in gas, food and rent. They are substituting domestic vacations for international trips, squeezing more life out of their washing machines and refrigerators and switching to alternatives as meat prices have risen.
That leaves little room for a big increase in spending in 2012, economists say, a shaky foundation for the most important pillar of the American economy.
“The consumer is far from healthy,” said Steve Blitz, senior economist for ITG Investment Research.
Even the seemingly robust holiday shopping season is raising concern. After a strong start on Thanksgiving weekend, a pronounced lull followed, causing retailers to mark down products heavily in the week before Christmas. While final numbers for the season are not in, analysts say they are worried that retailers had to eat into profits to generate high revenues.
Consumer spending makes up 70 percent of the economy, so until it ignites, general growth is likely to be sluggish.
Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting company, projects growth of around 2 percent for the first half of this year, down from an estimate of 3.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 and just 1.8 percent in the third quarter.
For consumers, the reasons for the sluggishness are clear: incomes are essentially flat, job growth is modest, and more than 40 percent of the new jobs in the last two years have been in low-paying sectors like retail and hospitality.
While consumer spending is not “going to collapse,” said Joel Prakken, senior managing director at Macroeconomic Advisers, “there are some headwinds there.”
Sarah M. Manley, a marketing consultant with two young sons in Waconia, Minn., has developed coping strategies in the last few years. Laid off in 2008, she started a business. She and her husband can make their mortgage payments and are paying off debts from when a storm damaged their roof.
“It’s not necessarily that I’m saving more money, but I’m paying off some of the debts that were amassed during the last three years, just trying to make headway,” Ms. Manley said.
To do that, she has changed habits. She uses the app GasBuddy to check prices at nearby stations before she buys gas for her car. She buys seasonal food on sale and freezes it — for Valentine’s Day, she plans to prepare crab legs she bought and froze last summer — and she is stocking up on holiday hams. She has switched from buying milk in gallon containers to buying it for less in plastic bags from the local gas station.
For big purchases, like the laptop she bought last summer, Ms. Manley still relies on credit, but is careful. She opens credit card accounts offering an introductory rate of no interest, then closes them just before the annual percentage rate kicks in.
“Everybody’s learned how to be frugal in the last two or three years,” she said.
Economic indicators suggest that, while things may not get worse for consumers this year, they will not get much better. In the third quarter of 2011, the most recent period for which figures are available, consumer spending rose slightly more than 1 percent, according to the Commerce Department.
Although housing sales have recently shown signs of recovery, prices are still falling and mortgage lenders are cautious. In November, contracts represented by 33 percent of members of the National Association of Realtors did not close, up from just 9 percent a year ago.
And with more than one in every five borrowers still owing more than their homes are worth, many homeowners feel too pressed to spend on much more than the essentials.
The stock market did not help consumers, either. Because of turmoil in the markets in the late summer and early fall, household wealth declined by $2.4 trillion in that period, a contraction likely to make people think twice about big purchases.
Adding to the uncertainty, financial weakness in Europe, and the potential expiration of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance benefits in two months, could further soften spending.
Mitt Romney signed campaign pins for supporters at the Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds in Davenport, Iowa. More Photos ?
DES MOINES — Mitt Romney has grown so confident of his Iowa prospects that on Monday night he dropped all humble pretense and proclaimed, “We’re going to win this thing.” At the same time, Rick Santorum insisted that his momentum carried its own whiff of victory.
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The Iowa caucuses, the curious political ritual that will open yet another race for the White House on Tuesday, have a knack for turning second-place finishes into victories. And they are just as likely to produce losers — or deal surprises — as they are to coronate a clear-cut winner.
For all of the attention paid to the field of Republican presidential candidates on the final day of a frenzied burst of campaigning — it felt as if the weight of the Washington political and media establishment landed here on Monday — the race is only now beginning.
The polls have been recited as gospel, with Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum joining Representative Ron Paul of Texas at the top of the pack. If those findings hold true, each of the three will rush to claim victory as the contest moves to New Hampshire.
The outcome of the Iowa caucuses will set the tone for the race after a yearlong prelude that has been off the charts in its unpredictability.
Remember when Sarah Palin’s bus tour prompted the television pundit class to announce with certainty that she would run?
Who, five months ago, would have predicted that Herman Cain was going to hold a lead in the polls before evaporating? Newt Gingrich was up, then down, then up again; now he is down again.
And Rick Santorum? Two weeks ago, he struggled to get a group of reluctant insurance company employees at a downtown Des Moines office building to stick with him as he spoke during their lunch break. The only warmth he received in the room was from the sweater vest that has come to define him. By Monday, his events were so jammed that a supporter fainted during an overcrowded campaign stop.
His campaign said it was now looking beyond Iowa to consolidate support and emerge as the viable conservative alternative to Mr. Romney, a position the party’s evangelical base has long been seeking to fill.
Four years ago, Mr. Paul was a political punch line. What kind of Republican would call for a speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan and for Pentagon cuts? Apparently the kind who attends caucuses in Iowa, according to polls that have shown Mr. Paul at or near the top of the field here.
So one would have to be a fool to go too far out on a limb to predict what happens on Tuesday and beyond with any certainty — or assume there are no consequences for getting it wrong. (Imagine that.) Yet there is a finite set of twists and turns that can determine whether Republicans move past their internal differences and confront President Obama quickly.
Here is a look at some of the possibilities for Tuesday evening as Republicans gather at the caucuses, a series of meetings in 1,774 precincts across Iowa where voters declare their preferred presidential candidate.
Second Chance in Iowa
Iowa was a gamble for Mitt Romney. And even if it does not pay off in a clear-cut victory, his advisers were already crowing that they were heading into the rest of the nominating contest in better shape than they had once expected. There are two chief reasons: Mr. Gingrich and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, whose candidacies have been significantly wounded.
It is not as if there are no warning signs still on the horizon for Mr. Romney — many conservatives view him as a hold-your-nose front-runner — but his organization has always been built with a cushion for stumbles along the way. Even as he was crisscrossing Iowa in the final days of the caucus campaign, absentee ballots were landing in the mailboxes of his supporters in Florida, highlighting a depth of organization and planning that none of his rivals can match.
“We’re going to win this thing,” Mr. Romney told an overflowing crowd on Monday evening during one of his stops in a dawn-to-dusk day of Iowa campaigning.
If he wins the caucuses decisively, his most immediate challenge is avoiding overconfidence. The voters of New Hampshire, after all, have spent years elevating underdogs and dealing punishing lessons to offset the Iowa results. But Mr. Romney’s lead is so significant in New Hampshire, according to a long string of polls, that his rivals may be able to defeat him in the primary next Tuesday only if they consolidate their support.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 2, 2012
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the Reising Sun Cafe in Polk City, Iowa.
The man, Harry Burkhart, 24, was taken into custody without incident around 3 a.m. on Sunset Boulevard on the outskirts of Hollywood, close to a drug store and a gas station. He was charged with arson around 6 a.m. and was being held without bail.
“A serial arsonist has, I believe, been caught,” Sheriff Lee Baca of Los Angeles County, standing in front of a bank of television cameras, said at a news conference attended by a parade of elected officials.
Sheriff Baca called the suspect “perhaps the most dangerous arsonist in the county of Los Angeles that I can recall.”
Chief Charlie Beck of Los Angeles Police Department said Mr. Burkhart was a German national; few additional details about the case would be provided for now, he added.
Chief Beck said he hoped that the suspect was acting alone, but he refused to rule out the possibility of other people being involved. “That is our huge concern at this exact moment,” Chief Beck said. “We have every hope that he did. But we do not know that yet.”
Search warrants were being executed at Mr. Burkhart’s house, Chief Beck said, and information from those searches would help officials determine how many people were involved in setting the fires.
Still other officials, including Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, seemed more optimistic that this arrest would resolve the case. And they said that there had been no more fires after Mr. Burkhart, who was driving a van that contained some incendiary material, was taken into custody.
The arrest brought at least a temporary reprieve in an episode that dominated the New Year’s weekend here. The attacks began early Friday morning and continued the next three nights. In the end, 52 cars were set on fire. Since many of the cars were in carports or garages, a number of apartment buildings sustained serious damage as well.
The random attacks stirred anxiety in neighborhoods across the city. But there were no significant injuries in connection with the fires, the authorities said.
Mr. Burkhart’s arrest came after another chaotic night, as cars began exploding into flames after dusk. The streets were again flooded with police officers, detectives and fire investigators.
Chief Beck said the case would not have been solved without the release on Sunday of a videotape showing the suspect leaving a parking lot.
Shervin Lalezary, a reserve sheriff’s deputy who works for $1 a year, spotted the suspect and stopped him at Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. He was introduced to considerable applause at the news conference on Monday evening as he described the stop. “As soon as I put on my lights and initiated a traffic stop of the suspect vehicle, I had an L.A.P.D. vehicle behind me ready to go,” he said.
For the next two hours, the area was roped off and police helicopters rumbled overhead.
Although the police declined to rule out the possibility of accomplices, they said two other men arrested last week and charged with arson in connection with fires set in the same area were not related to Mr. Burkhart or these latest attacks.
Chief Beck said officials would release only limited information while the investigation continues.
“This is an ongoing investigation,” he said. “Details about the suspect will not be released tonight. Many questions will go unanswered. That is not because the investigation is dormant.”
Ian Lovett contributed reporting.
Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, has written books and given speeches about the importance of high-speed rail in the United States, and he supported a study for a high-speed line from Atlanta to Chattanooga, Tenn., sought by local boosters when he was in Congress. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas saw a role for high-speed rail in his failed $175 billion transportation plan to build what would have been called the Trans-Texas Corridor.
Even Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a small-government libertarian, signed a letter that several members of Texas’ Congressional delegation sent to federal officials in 2009 urging them to give the state money for rail studies to help it build “a truly ambitious and world-class high-speed rail network.”
But Mr. Gingrich may be the most outspoken Republican presidential candidate when it comes to his support of high-speed rail. He has spoken and written admiringly of China and France, and how far ahead of the United States they were when it comes to high-speed rail. He has opined that high-speed train lines would make sense in Florida and California — places the Obama administration sought to build them — and in the Northeast, among other places. And he has spoken of a role for government to help build a national rail network.
“If you want to be the most competitive country in the world in 2040 or 2050, you have to think large,” Mr. Gingrich said in 2009 at a videotaped forum sponsored by the National Governors Association and Building America’s Future, an infrastructure advocacy group. Mr. Gingrich’s large thought was for America to build high-speed magnetic levitation trains, as China has.
“Let’s go ahead and be really bold, and go head to head with the Chinese in developing and implementing maglev trains that move at 280, 300, 320 miles an hour,” Mr. Gingrich said in his speech, which Streetsblog.org, a transportation Web site, wrote about recently. “And you suddenly change all sorts of equations about how this country operates.”
Before the politics of rail was scrambled in recent years, Republican support for high-speed rail was not unusual. As recently as 2004, the Republican Party platform stated that “Republicans support, where economically viable, the development of a high-speed passenger railroad system as an instrument of economic development and enhanced mobility.”
But the politics of rail changed considerably after Mr. Obama persuaded Democrats in Congress to include $8 billion for passenger rail and high-speed rail in his $787 billion stimulus plan.
States initially competed fiercely for the money, but that shifted after the 2010 midterm elections swept Republicans into power in Congress and in many statehouses. New Republican governors in Ohio and Wisconsin rejected hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid that their states had won to build up their passenger rail systems.
Then Florida, which won $2.4 billion in federal money to build the nation’s first true high-speed rail system between Orlando and Tampa, sent back the money after its new Republican governor, Rick Scott, said it would be a boondoggle. Republicans in Congress have since blocked the Obama administration’s requests for more rail spending.
Against that backdrop, some rail advocates said it was a hopeful sign that some Republican presidential candidates have a history of supporting high-speed rail. “I hope that we can move past high-speed rail being a partisan issue — it certainly wasn’t always that way,” said Petra Todorovich, the director of America 2050, a branch of the Regional Plan Association, an independent urban research and advocacy group. “While politicians may differ over how to structure and manage high-speed rail, politicians on both sides of the aisle have recognized that there are certain corridors in the United States where this makes sense.”
Spokesmen for Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Perry did not respond to e-mails seeking comment about their views on rail. But Mr. Gingrich outlined his views in his 2008 book, “Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works,” saying that the California, Florida and the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington are all “very conducive to this kind of high-speed train investment.”
But he does take a different tack from the Obama administration and many Democrats by arguing that development of rail has been stymied by “union work rules,” the inefficiency of Amtrak, politicians in Washington who subsidize uneconomic routes and “the regulations and litigation involved in large-scale construction in the United States.”
A spokesman for Mr. Paul, Jesse Benton, said in an e-mail that Mr. Paul “thinks high-speed rail is a very exciting idea and could be a very worthwhile project in many cases.”
Mr. Benton said that Mr. Paul believed that development of high-speed rail should ideally be left to the private sector, but that he would favor providing federal tax credits and rolling back regulations to promote its development. He said the letter Mr. Paul signed with other members of the Texas delegation in 2009 — which sought federal money for studies that it said would help “attract the large number of high quality private and public sector investors that will be key to making this project a success” — was an effort to ensure that “an equitable portion of the money was spent in Texas so Texan taxpayers received some of their money back.” That letter was first reported by Newsweek in an article in October about fiscal conservatives seeking federal spending for their districts.
But rail projects are still a tough sell with many conservatives these days, as Mr. Gingrich hinted in his 2009 remarks at the governors’ forum. “Let me just close with what I think is the central issue, that I’m prepared to debate both with liberals and conservatives, but probably I’m of somewhat greater value in debating it with conservatives,” he said, speaking of the need to change the federal financing process. “You can’t talk about American national security in the long run without a fundamental redevelopment of this country economically. It is not possible. And you can’t talk about a competitive American economy without a dramatically more robust and more modern infrastructure.”
