Murray battles to Malisse victory

  Murray took his time before finding his edge and putting Malisse away Andy Murray battled into the third round of the Rome Masters with a seesaw victory over Belgium's Xavier Malisse.

Three breaks of serve to one helped the fourth seed take the first set 6-2.

But world number 41 Malisse reversed things in the second set, taking it by the same scoreline.

Murray broke early in the final set and although Malisse soon broke back, the Scot immediately secured the vital break and went on to finish the match with an ace as he took the set 6-3.

Murray will play the winner of the match between Viktor Troicki and Potito Starace for a place in the quarter-finals.

Still stunned by last week's shock loss to Brazilian Thomasz Bellucci in Madrid, the Scot never quite found his rhythm - and his familar problems at dealing with his own frustrations surfaced as he lurched in and out of form.

With the French Open fast approaching on 22 May, Murray overdid the drop shots while his first-serve percentages were way too low until the final stages.

He said afterwards: "It was a tough match. I concentrated badly throughout and I've got to get better at it. When I settled down and focused I played some nice stuff but there were too many loose games.

"On this surface you need to be patient and work harder for every point. It's good to get through but it was too up and down. I just need to get the matches now. I need to get better - the main thing for me is the concentration."

Maria Sharapova won her second-round match in less than an hour

The world number four was at his most erratic in the second set, which began with an ill-tempered loss of serve, unleashing Malisse to play some of the best tennis of the match.

Malisse attacked at will to force a decider but Murray recovered his concentration and energy levels to break his opponent twice in the decider, and even though he remained far from decisive in some keenly-contested games - needing six game points before going 5-2 up - the match was his.

In the other floodlit match, fifth seed Robin Soderling beat Fernando Verdasco 2-6 7-5 6-4, but only after the Spaniard had squandered three break-points, two through double-faults.

Other second round winners were seventh seed Tomas Berdych, Richard Gasquet (16) and Jarkko Nieminen of Finland.

The two seeds involved in first-round matches were Stanislas Wawrinka (14) and Nicolas Almagro (9), and they duly got through their contests.

In the women's event, seventh seed Maria Sharapova needed just 54 minutes to blaze into the third round with a thumping 6-1 6-1 win over fellow Russian Ekaterina Makarova.

Second seed and reigning French Open champion Francesca Schiavone took a little longer to dispatch American qualifier Christina McHale 6-3 6-1.

First round winners included 12th seed Andrea Petkovic, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova (16) and Shahar Peer (10).

Murray battles to Malisse victory

  Murray took his time before finding his edge and putting Malisse away Andy Murray battled into the third round of the Rome Masters with a seesaw victory over Belgium's Xavier Malisse.

Three breaks of serve to one helped the fourth seed take the first set 6-2.

But world number 41 Malisse reversed things in the second set, taking it by the same scoreline.

Murray broke early in the final set and although Malisse soon broke back, the Scot immediately secured the vital break and went on to finish the match with an ace as he took the set 6-3.

Murray will play the winner of the match between Viktor Troicki and Potito Starace for a place in the quarter-finals.

Still stunned by last week's shock loss to Brazilian Thomasz Bellucci in Madrid, the Scot never quite found his rhythm - and his familar problems at dealing with his own frustrations surfaced as he lurched in and out of form.

With the French Open fast approaching on 22 May, Murray overdid the drop shots while his first-serve percentages were way too low until the final stages.

He said afterwards: "It was a tough match. I concentrated badly throughout and I've got to get better at it. When I settled down and focused I played some nice stuff but there were too many loose games.

"On this surface you need to be patient and work harder for every point. It's good to get through but it was too up and down. I just need to get the matches now. I need to get better - the main thing for me is the concentration."

Maria Sharapova won her second-round match in less than an hour

The world number four was at his most erratic in the second set, which began with an ill-tempered loss of serve, unleashing Malisse to play some of the best tennis of the match.

Malisse attacked at will to force a decider but Murray recovered his concentration and energy levels to break his opponent twice in the decider, and even though he remained far from decisive in some keenly-contested games - needing six game points before going 5-2 up - the match was his.

In the other floodlit match, fifth seed Robin Soderling beat Fernando Verdasco 2-6 7-5 6-4, but only after the Spaniard had squandered three break-points, two through double-faults.

Other second round winners were seventh seed Tomas Berdych, Richard Gasquet (16) and Jarkko Nieminen of Finland.

The two seeds involved in first-round matches were Stanislas Wawrinka (14) and Nicolas Almagro (9), and they duly got through their contests.

In the women's event, seventh seed Maria Sharapova needed just 54 minutes to blaze into the third round with a thumping 6-1 6-1 win over fellow Russian Ekaterina Makarova.

Second seed and reigning French Open champion Francesca Schiavone took a little longer to dispatch American qualifier Christina McHale 6-3 6-1.

First round winners included 12th seed Andrea Petkovic, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova (16) and Shahar Peer (10).

Survivor of Dust Bowl Now Battles a Fiercer Drought

With a drought continuing to punish much of the Great Plains, this one stands out. Boise (rhymes with voice) City has gone 222 consecutive days through Tuesday with less than a quarter-inch of rainfall in any single day, said Gary McManus, a state climatologist. That is the longest such dry spell here since note-keeping began in 1908.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused in part by the careless gouging of the earth in an effort to farm it, created an epic environmental disaster. Experts say it is unlikely to be repeated because farming has changed so much. Boise City recovered from the Dust Bowl and has periodically enjoyed bountiful years since.

But this drought is a reminder of just how parched and unyielding life can be along this wind-raked frontier, fittingly called No Man’s Land, and it is not clear how many more ups and downs Boise City can take.

“The community is drying up,” Mark Axtell, the area’s only funeral director, said on a walk through the cemetery, where brown tufts of buffalo grass crunched underfoot.

In the last decade, Boise City lost almost 16 percent of its population, according to the 2010 census. Just 1,312 people live here now — far fewer than the 3,000 who bought the first lots in 1908, only to discover that they had been hoodwinked. The land was inhospitable, and promises of railroads, water and trees (Boise is from the French “le bois,” meaning trees) were a fraud.

Boise City became the county seat for Cimarron County. But now, the county, too, has sagged. In the last decade it lost 21 percent of its population. Its 2,475 residents are spread so thin over such a wide expanse that an average of only 1.3 people occupy each square mile.

The young have little reason to stay. The old are dying or moving away to be closer to their children or to medical facilities, since Boise City’s only nursing home has closed.

“Last year, we did half as many funerals as the year I took over,” said Mr. Axtell, 48, who bought the business 25 years ago. “Last year was my fourth consecutive low year.”

The plunge in funerals prompted him to buy a cafe last year to supplement his income. Called the Rockin’ A, its 12 tables have become the town’s social hub.

But the main street outside is deserted, and many storefronts are shuttered. Most people shop at the Wal-Mart 60 miles away.

Residents blame a lack of jobs — not the drought — for the town’s decline. Dry spells come and go, they say, and coping with them is baked into their psyches. Many who live here are descended from those souls who endured the Dust Bowl and have reaped harvests aplenty since; they are bound to the land and not easily discouraged.

“Your die-hards will stay here,” Rebecca Smoot, 58, whose family homesteaded here in the early 1900s, said during breakfast at the Rockin’ A. She lives in Boise City but works as a corrections officer just over the border in Texas. “They stayed here during the Dirty Thirties when everyone else was moving. That’s the way a lot of the people ended up with a lot of the land.”

Those who stayed then are deemed successful now, though many were too poor at the time to leave with the “Okies.”

Huston Hanes, 87, who lived through the Dust Bowl on a farm in eastern Cimarron County, said he would never forget the wind blowing fine dust particles throughout his house and how quickly the wet cloths he held over his face to protect his lungs would turn black. But he said he was glad his family stayed.

“We have hard times, but any place you go, you’re going to have some adversity,” he said with a shrug. “We don’t have that many tornadoes.”

 

Scuffle Over On-Demand Movies Portends Battles to Come

The blow-up is between studios and theater owners over a plan to slip some movies into homes through on-demand video shortly after they arrive in theaters. For Mr. Dodd, the new chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, it is the first industry crisis since he started in late March.

“I’m the new kid on the block,” Mr. Dodd said in an interview by phone on Friday, acknowledging that both his relative inexperience and the need to stay out of business decisions made by individual studios had kept him largely out of the battle. “Each company has to make up its own mind.”

Studios, exhibitors and filmmakers are arguing about the future of the business, and whether people in coming years will be more likely to watch movies in theaters or in increasingly sophisticated home setups mimicking the quality, immediacy and, perhaps, cost, of today’s theatrical experience.

Last week, four studios — Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Warner Brothers — took the first step in their arrangement with DirecTV to release films two months after their theatrical release.

The first premium on-demand offering came on Thursday, as DirecTV offered Sony’s “Just Go With It,” with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, for $30. Two dozen filmmakers, including James Cameron and Peter Jackson, fired back with an open letter criticizing the experiment as a threat to theaters.

The fight separated allies who had recently joined to spend billions of dollars to upgrade theaters for digital and 3-D projection, and had used their combined political might to thwart proposed trading in a financial exchange based on box office revenue.

The rift underscores how little Mr. Dodd or anyone else can do to buffer the jolts in a film business where the greatest challenges are not the labor disputes or public policy battles that were wrangled by past Hollywood statesmen like the MCA chairman Lew R. Wasserman or the long-serving M.P.A.A. chief Jack Valenti.

Rather, the greatest challenges are philosophical and include business choices largely outside the reach of a trade association, which is limited by antitrust law from interfering in decisions that are really about business rather than public policy — hence Mr. Dodd’s unaccustomed restraint. In fact, the difficulties facing the industry are likely to become tougher as film companies feel their way toward a digital future that is only beginning to unfold.

“What’s really going on is that the architecture of the industry is changing,” said Jeff Berg, chairman of the International Creative Management agency.

Speaking by telephone last week, Mr. Berg predicted increasingly rapid waves of change that would overtake the movie business, as companies struggle to replace disappearing DVD revenue with income from both digitally enhanced theaters and new approaches, like so-called digital lockers, that will allow viewers to store films they have paid for in a pirate-proof virtual space that permits repeat viewing.

“There’s a big narrative that’s going to be very disruptive,” Mr. Berg said.

The fierce response by executives from big movie chains like Cinemark, AMC and Regal to the studios’ relatively cautious step with on-demand is clearly more about setting a line for future battles than it is about losing money from an Adam Sandler comedy that left most theaters weeks ago.

“I have not felt this level of concern about a practice of the studios among our members,” said John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, which helped organize the filmmakers’ protest letter (in keeping with that association’s view that it can to some extent oppose the plan without violating the antitrust laws that have held back the M.P.A.A.).

Mr. Fithian, also speaking last week, said theater owners had been particularly shocked about the way they learned of the on-demand program: while they were gathered last month at the CinemaCon movie convention in Las Vegas, shortly after Mr. Dodd delivered an address voicing enthusiasm for the moviegoing experience. The report appeared on the Web site of the trade publication Variety.

 

Abrupt Turn as Facebook Battles Suit

Before the cinematic Winklevoss twins battled with Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of Facebook, and before the company’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin became estranged from his friend Mr. Zuckerberg, there was Paul Ceglia.

In one of the strangest tales to hit Silicon Valley in years, Mr. Ceglia, a wood-pellet salesman from upstate New York, last year filed suit saying that a 2003 work-for-hire contract between him and Mr. Zuckerberg, then 18, entitled him to an 84 percent stake in Facebook. ?

Mr. Ceglia’s own history did nothing to lend credibility to his improbable claim. In 1997, he pleaded guilty to possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Texas, and last year, he was arrested, charged with fraud and had his business shut down by Andrew Cuomo, then the New York State attorney general.?

But the skepticism and scorn initially heaped on Mr. Ceglia’s claims turned to astonishment last week when he added some ammunition to his case. Mr. Ceglia filed an amended complaint in federal court in New York written by lawyers from DLA Piper, a law firm with offices around the world. It includes excerpts from e-mails purportedly exchanged between him and Mr. Zuckerberg and that, if authentic, could become a major headache for Facebook.

So far, neither Mr. Ceglia nor his lawyers have produced originals of the e-mails or the contract. Facebook says the e-mails were fabricated, and that although there was a 2003 contract, it was doctored. The company has called the lawsuit a fraud.

“This man is a convicted felon with a history of fraud charges,” said Orin Snyder, a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, which is representing Facebook. “His?revised complaint is simply his latest scam — supported by a doctored?contract and fake e-mails.”?

Still, the details laid out in the new complaint, as well as Mr. Ceglia’s new legal team, which also includes a former attorney general of New York, are giving skeptics pause.

“It is a little harder to dismiss him out of hand,” said Scott C. Dettmer, a longtime Silicon Valley lawyer who has advised start-ups and founders for decades. ?Even so, Facebook watchers point to a series of inconsistencies and unanswered questions in the case. For one, the 2003 contract was signed about a year before Facebook was created, and most historical accounts of the company say Mr. Zuckerberg had not yet conceived the social networking site at that time.

Skeptics have also asked why Mr. Ceglia waited so long to come forward with his claims. Mr. Ceglia , through his lawyers, declined to be interviewed for this article and he did not respond to a Facebook message asking for comment. But last year, he told Bloomberg News that he had simply forgotten about the contract with Mr. Zuckerberg. The explanation did not satisfy most skeptics, given that well before last year, Facebook was worth billions, and had become ensconced in popular culture. Also, some of the other disputes over its origins had been well publicized by that time.

?When asked by The New York Times to produce the original documents backing up Mr. Ceglia’s complaint, Robert W. Brownlie, a partner at DLA Piper, declined. ? “That will come out during the course of litigation,” Mr. Brownlie said. “Anyone who claims this case is fraudulent and brought by a scam artist will come to regret those claims.” ?

Mr. Ceglia’s new legal team includes Dennis C. Vacco, a former New York attorney general now in private practice in Buffalo, who did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Brownlie said he was skeptical about Mr. Ceglia’s claims initially, but performed due diligence to ensure the documents were authentic. He said that he had not seen the originals himself, but that others on the team had and that he was confident of their authenticity.

If Mr. Ceglia’s tale is real, it would be a significant rewriting of Facebook’s early history, as documented in one movie, two books and scores of newspaper and magazine articles.

 

Abrupt Turn as Facebook Battles Suit

Before the cinematic Winklevoss twins battled with Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of Facebook, and before the company’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin became estranged from his friend Mr. Zuckerberg, there was Paul Ceglia.

In one of the strangest tales to hit Silicon Valley in years, Mr. Ceglia, a wood-pellet salesman from upstate New York, last year filed suit saying that a 2003 work-for-hire contract between him and Mr. Zuckerberg, then 18, entitled him to an 84 percent stake in Facebook. ?

Mr. Ceglia’s own history did nothing to lend credibility to his improbable claim. In 1997, he pleaded guilty to possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Texas, and last year, he was arrested, charged with fraud and had his business shut down by Andrew Cuomo, then the New York State attorney general.?

But the skepticism and scorn initially heaped on Mr. Ceglia’s claims turned to astonishment last week when he added some ammunition to his case. Mr. Ceglia filed an amended complaint in federal court in New York written by lawyers from DLA Piper, a law firm with offices around the world. It includes excerpts from e-mails purportedly exchanged between him and Mr. Zuckerberg and that, if authentic, could become a major headache for Facebook.

So far, neither Mr. Ceglia nor his lawyers have produced originals of the e-mails or the contract. Facebook says the e-mails were fabricated, and that although there was a 2003 contract, it was doctored. The company has called the lawsuit a fraud.

“This man is a convicted felon with a history of fraud charges,” said Orin Snyder, a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, which is representing Facebook. “His?revised complaint is simply his latest scam — supported by a doctored?contract and fake e-mails.”?

Still, the details laid out in the new complaint, as well as Mr. Ceglia’s new legal team, which also includes a former attorney general of New York, are giving skeptics pause.

“It is a little harder to dismiss him out of hand,” said Scott C. Dettmer, a longtime Silicon Valley lawyer who has advised start-ups and founders for decades. ?Even so, Facebook watchers point to a series of inconsistencies and unanswered questions in the case. For one, the 2003 contract was signed about a year before Facebook was created, and most historical accounts of the company say Mr. Zuckerberg had not yet conceived the social networking site at that time.

Skeptics have also asked why Mr. Ceglia waited so long to come forward with his claims. Mr. Ceglia , through his lawyers, declined to be interviewed for this article and he did not respond to a Facebook message asking for comment. But last year, he told Bloomberg News that he had simply forgotten about the contract with Mr. Zuckerberg. The explanation did not satisfy most skeptics, given that well before last year, Facebook was worth billions, and had become ensconced in popular culture. Also, some of the other disputes over its origins had been well publicized by that time.

?When asked by The New York Times to produce the original documents backing up Mr. Ceglia’s complaint, Robert W. Brownlie, a partner at DLA Piper, declined. ? “That will come out during the course of litigation,” Mr. Brownlie said. “Anyone who claims this case is fraudulent and brought by a scam artist will come to regret those claims.” ?

Mr. Ceglia’s new legal team includes Dennis C. Vacco, a former New York attorney general now in private practice in Buffalo, who did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Brownlie said he was skeptical about Mr. Ceglia’s claims initially, but performed due diligence to ensure the documents were authentic. He said that he had not seen the originals himself, but that others on the team had and that he was confident of their authenticity.

If Mr. Ceglia’s tale is real, it would be a significant rewriting of Facebook’s early history, as documented in one movie, two books and scores of newspaper and magazine articles.