Singapore Faces Life Without Lee

 

SINGAPORE — For most Singaporeans, it is inconceivable that the government does not have Lee Kuan Yew at the helm or very near it.

That break with the past came sooner than expected on Saturday with the announcement that Mr. Lee, 87, had relinquished the reverential title of “minister mentor” and stepped down from active politics after more than half a century at the very top.

Mr. Lee remains a member of Parliament and his son is prime minister, but he said over the weekend that he and Goh Chok Tong, another former prime minister, were stepping down from the cabinet to allow “a younger generation to carry Singapore forward in a more difficult and complex situation.”

“A younger generation, besides having a noncorrupt and meritocratic government and a high standard of living, wants to be more engaged in the decisions which affect them,” the statement said.

Mr. Lee has been the pre-eminent leader of Singapore, as flag-bearer of independence, as prime minister of the republic for 25 years and later another 21 years in the cabinet as senior minister and then as minister mentor.

No one is predicting that Mr. Lee’s exit will bring a shake-up of the tightly managed political system that helped turn Singapore from an economic backwater at independence in 1965 and fueled its transformation into a modern financial hub.

Rather, there was a sense that the blunt-speaking Mr. Lee, with his impatience of dissent — he once told The Straits Times, “We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think” — was out of touch with the mood and expectations of the people of Singapore, and it was time to move on.

That was underlined the month in the general election, which the governing People’s Action Party won but with smallest share of the vote since independence in 1965.

“The old way of doing things was increasingly being seen as anachronistic, and being out of touch or even being seen as dictatorial,” said Eugene Tan, assistant professor at the Singapore Management University. “And so I think it is a break from the past.”

Some of Mr. Lee’s comments may have cost the People’s Action Party votes at the election, other commentators have said. Mr. Lee said during the campaign that if a constituency voted for the opposition the voters would have “five years to repent.” Mr. Lee was unopposed in his constituency in the May 7 general election, but the People’s Action Party returned to power with only about 60 percent of the popular vote.

His son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, said after the election: “Many wish for the government to adopt a different style and approach. It marks a distinct shift in our political landscape.”

He has not made a decision on the resignations of Mr. Goh and his father, but was expected to finalize the new cabinet early this week.

The Straits Times, the city-state’s main newspaper, said in an analysis on Sunday that when Lee Kuan Yew took over, the nation “had yet to learn to read and write, far less to create jobs.”

“Close engagement of the mass citizenry was not only unnecessary but would have been a nonstarter.”

Now, the newspaper said, “there is not only an implicit acknowledgement that their styles may no longer be in sync with the expectations of a younger generation, but that they may also no longer have an instinctive sense of the ground.”

Still, there is no question that Mr. Lee’s policies, which have brought surging economic growth, will continue to guide Singapore for decades, analysts said. Any changes are likely to be only at the margins.

“In terms of policy substance, strategic directions, I don’t think there will be change,” said Mr. Tan. “I think we will see change in the form of government in terms of how policies are packaged, how they are presented, how they are communicated, implemented, how people are consulted.”

And while there will be political inclusiveness, there is unlikely to be complete tolerance of dissent, he added.

“We can certainly expect the government to be a lot more responsive, to pay more attention, to get more buy-in rather than trying to dictate to the people,” Mr. Tan said. “I

Singapore Faces Life Without Lee

 

SINGAPORE — For most Singaporeans, it is inconceivable that the government does not have Lee Kuan Yew at the helm or very near it.

That break with the past came sooner than expected on Saturday with the announcement that Mr. Lee, 87, had relinquished the reverential title of “minister mentor” and stepped down from active politics after more than half a century at the very top.

Mr. Lee remains a member of Parliament and his son is prime minister, but he said over the weekend that he and Goh Chok Tong, another former prime minister, were stepping down from the cabinet to allow “a younger generation to carry Singapore forward in a more difficult and complex situation.”

“A younger generation, besides having a noncorrupt and meritocratic government and a high standard of living, wants to be more engaged in the decisions which affect them,” the statement said.

Mr. Lee has been the pre-eminent leader of Singapore, as flag-bearer of independence, as prime minister of the republic for 25 years and later another 21 years in the cabinet as senior minister and then as minister mentor.

No one is predicting that Mr. Lee’s exit will bring a shake-up of the tightly managed political system that helped turn Singapore from an economic backwater at independence in 1965 and fueled its transformation into a modern financial hub.

Rather, there was a sense that the blunt-speaking Mr. Lee, with his impatience of dissent — he once told The Straits Times, “We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think” — was out of touch with the mood and expectations of the people of Singapore, and it was time to move on.

That was underlined the month in the general election, which the governing People’s Action Party won but with smallest share of the vote since independence in 1965.

“The old way of doing things was increasingly being seen as anachronistic, and being out of touch or even being seen as dictatorial,” said Eugene Tan, assistant professor at the Singapore Management University. “And so I think it is a break from the past.”

Some of Mr. Lee’s comments may have cost the People’s Action Party votes at the election, other commentators have said. Mr. Lee said during the campaign that if a constituency voted for the opposition the voters would have “five years to repent.” Mr. Lee was unopposed in his constituency in the May 7 general election, but the People’s Action Party returned to power with only about 60 percent of the popular vote.

His son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, said after the election: “Many wish for the government to adopt a different style and approach. It marks a distinct shift in our political landscape.”

He has not made a decision on the resignations of Mr. Goh and his father, but was expected to finalize the new cabinet early this week.

The Straits Times, the city-state’s main newspaper, said in an analysis on Sunday that when Lee Kuan Yew took over, the nation “had yet to learn to read and write, far less to create jobs.”

“Close engagement of the mass citizenry was not only unnecessary but would have been a nonstarter.”

Now, the newspaper said, “there is not only an implicit acknowledgement that their styles may no longer be in sync with the expectations of a younger generation, but that they may also no longer have an instinctive sense of the ground.”

Still, there is no question that Mr. Lee’s policies, which have brought surging economic growth, will continue to guide Singapore for decades, analysts said. Any changes are likely to be only at the margins.

“In terms of policy substance, strategic directions, I don’t think there will be change,” said Mr. Tan. “I think we will see change in the form of government in terms of how policies are packaged, how they are presented, how they are communicated, implemented, how people are consulted.”

And while there will be political inclusiveness, there is unlikely to be complete tolerance of dissent, he added.

“We can certainly expect the government to be a lot more responsive, to pay more attention, to get more buy-in rather than trying to dictate to the people,” Mr. Tan said. “I

Tornado Season Intensifies, Without Clear Scientific Consensus on Why

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — All the warning sirens echoing across the Great Plains, Midwest and Southeast this month leave little doubt that the tornado season — which has plowed a trail of destruction through communities from Oklahoma to Wisconsin to Georgia — is off to an unusually busy start.

So far this year, tornadoes have killed 41 people and torn apart countless neighborhoods and, this weekend, one major airport.

Now, as the country braces for several more days of potentially violent weather, meteorologists say the number of April tornadoes is on track to top the current record. There have been, according to preliminary estimates, about 250 tornadoes so far this month and, in all likelihood, more are still to come, said Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

“It’s unusual but it does happen,” said Howard Bluestein, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma who specializes in tornado research. “This isn’t a sign that the world is about to end.”

Those same experts note that drawing conclusions about the true size of, or reason for, an increase in tornado activity is difficult because historical statistics are unreliable due to changes in the way storms are tracked and measured.

Although the average number of April tornadoes steadily increased from 74 a year in the 1950s to 163 a year in the 2000s, nearly all of the increase is of the least powerful tornadoes that may touch down briefly without causing much damage. That suggests better reporting is largely responsible for the increase.

There are, on average, 1,300 tornadoes each year in the United States, which have caused an average of 65 deaths annually in recent years.

The number of tornadoes rated from EF1 to EF5 on the enhanced Fujita scale, used to measure tornado strength, has stayed relatively constant for the past half century at about 500 annually. But in that time the number of confirmed EF0 tornadoes has steadily increased to more than 800 a year from less than 100 a year, said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

In April 1974, for example, there was a record 267 tornadoes reported, but the actual number that occurred is believed to be closer to 500.

“Today we seem to know about every single tree branch knocked down,” Mr. Carbin said. “We have eyes everywhere, and we have radar and satellite. It would be very difficult for a tornado to sneak through unnoticed.”

Tornadoes form when warm moist air combines with powerful dynamic winds inside a thunderstorm, sending a funnel cloud spinning toward the ground. They are most common in spring, typically peaking in May.

Though scientists believe that climate change will contribute to increasingly severe weather phenomena, including hurricanes and thunderstorms, there is little consensus about how it may affect tornadoes.

It remains unclear, partly because of the lack of historical data and partly because of their unpredictable nature, whether they will increase in number or strength or geographic range.

The large number of tornadoes so far may simply reflect normal variability, said Mr. Brooks.

Those assurances do not mean much to people like Kandice Shaw, a frequent business traveler who arrived at her hometown airport in St. Louis to find most of the windows boarded up and many other signs of storm damage. She worried about the increase in violent weather this spring. “We’ve had nothing but tornadoes,” she said. “I feel like I’m living in the Land of Oz.”

 

Cases Without Borders: Without His Mother’s Milk, a Haitian Boy Is Lost

I got up and walked over to the hospital entrance. Because the emergency room had only two beds, and the hospital itself had limited resources, patients were sent through triage at the gate, and only those who could be treated were brought in. The others were turned away to seek care elsewhere.

Arriving at the gate, I could already smell the sharp odor of diarrhea. A young woman was holding a baby wrapped in a stained and tattered blanket. From the interpreter, I learned this was a 5-month-old boy with watery yellow diarrhea, vomiting and a decrease in oral intake during the previous four days.

Opening the blanket and looking at him, I was amazed that he was still alive. His chest looked like a chicken breast picked clean of meat. His mucus membranes were pasty dry, his eyes and fontanel were sunken and his skin hung off his arms and legs as if it were three sizes too large. At 5 months he weighed less than four and a half pounds.

The gastroenteritis, it turned out, was only what had tipped him over. On further questioning we learned that his mother had stopped nursing shortly after he was born because her “milk was bad,” and had been bottle-feeding him with watered-down 7Up soda.

Because he was so dehydrated, his veins had collapsed and the nurses in the emergency room weren’t able to place an intravenous line to give him fluids. It was clear that I’d have to insert a thick needle directly into his shinbone to deliver sterile saline solution with a syringe, an ounce at a time.

Never having done this before (though I had practiced on a raw chicken leg), I was nervous about the procedure. The only needle available was longer than his leg was thick, and I was afraid I would push it through and pin him to the mattress.

He hardly whimpered as the needle entered the tibial cavity with a crunch. We gave him the fluids and admitted him to the pediatric ward, but had no way of measuring his electrolytes. He continued to have severe diarrhea and died several hours after being admitted. While gastroenteritis can be fatal in otherwise healthy infants, his extreme malnutrition had made him more vulnerable, and we were unable to save him.

The Haitian belief in “bad milk” — “lèt gate,” in Creole — is well described by Paul Farmer in his book “Partner to the Poor” (University of California, 2010). It is one of the main reasons for the premature stopping of breast-feeding in Haiti, often with deadly consequences for the infant deprived of safe and dependable nourishment.

That same week, one of the nurses in our group was able to prevent something similar from happening to another infant for whom we were caring. Born a few hours before we arrived, and several weeks before his due date, he, too, weighed less than four and a half pounds.

He was placed in an incubator and given antibiotics, and he seemed to be doing well except for one thing: His mother refused to nurse him, or even to express milk to feed him by bottle. Denise, the nurse who cared for him the week we were there, could not understand why the mother refused so adamantly to feed her son.

She pressed the mother every time she saw her, explaining the advantages of breast milk over formula, until finally the mother explained that a previous child of hers had died in infancy, and that a houngan (voodoo priest) had told her that her milk was no good and that she must never nurse any subsequent babies or else they, too, would suffer a similar fate.

Each day Denise pleaded with her to try to nurse. On the third day, the maternal grandmother came to visit and had a long conversation with Denise, asking whether her daughter’s milk was somehow tainted. Denise assured her it was not.

The next day the mother agreed to try nursing her son. He had difficulty latching on, and she expressed a small amount into a bottle, which he eagerly gulped down.

The following morning she returned, nervous about how he had fared. Once she saw that he was fine, she unbuttoned her blouse and again tried to nurse, this time with better success. Over the next few days she continued to nurse him until she no longer needed to express into a bottle, and looked much more relaxed and in better spirits than she had since he was born.

The difference between breast milk and calorically depleted drinks, or formula prepared from water potentially contaminated with organisms that cause diseases like cholera, can be a matter of life or death. And so encouraging this young mother to give her son the sustenance he needed was a potentially lifesaving intervention, achieved through patience, education and the building of trust.

While it may not sound like much, the sad truth is that in Haiti all of these are hard to come by and remain very much in need.

Dr. Dennis Rosen is a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.

 

Cases Without Borders: Without His Mother’s Milk, a Haitian Boy Is Lost

I got up and walked over to the hospital entrance. Because the emergency room had only two beds, and the hospital itself had limited resources, patients were sent through triage at the gate, and only those who could be treated were brought in. The others were turned away to seek care elsewhere.

Arriving at the gate, I could already smell the sharp odor of diarrhea. A young woman was holding a baby wrapped in a stained and tattered blanket. From the interpreter, I learned this was a 5-month-old boy with watery yellow diarrhea, vomiting and a decrease in oral intake during the previous four days.

Opening the blanket and looking at him, I was amazed that he was still alive. His chest looked like a chicken breast picked clean of meat. His mucus membranes were pasty dry, his eyes and fontanel were sunken and his skin hung off his arms and legs as if it were three sizes too large. At 5 months he weighed less than four and a half pounds.

The gastroenteritis, it turned out, was only what had tipped him over. On further questioning we learned that his mother had stopped nursing shortly after he was born because her “milk was bad,” and had been bottle-feeding him with watered-down 7Up soda.

Because he was so dehydrated, his veins had collapsed and the nurses in the emergency room weren’t able to place an intravenous line to give him fluids. It was clear that I’d have to insert a thick needle directly into his shinbone to deliver sterile saline solution with a syringe, an ounce at a time.

Never having done this before (though I had practiced on a raw chicken leg), I was nervous about the procedure. The only needle available was longer than his leg was thick, and I was afraid I would push it through and pin him to the mattress.

He hardly whimpered as the needle entered the tibial cavity with a crunch. We gave him the fluids and admitted him to the pediatric ward, but had no way of measuring his electrolytes. He continued to have severe diarrhea and died several hours after being admitted. While gastroenteritis can be fatal in otherwise healthy infants, his extreme malnutrition had made him more vulnerable, and we were unable to save him.

The Haitian belief in “bad milk” — “lèt gate,” in Creole — is well described by Paul Farmer in his book “Partner to the Poor” (University of California, 2010). It is one of the main reasons for the premature stopping of breast-feeding in Haiti, often with deadly consequences for the infant deprived of safe and dependable nourishment.

That same week, one of the nurses in our group was able to prevent something similar from happening to another infant for whom we were caring. Born a few hours before we arrived, and several weeks before his due date, he, too, weighed less than four and a half pounds.

He was placed in an incubator and given antibiotics, and he seemed to be doing well except for one thing: His mother refused to nurse him, or even to express milk to feed him by bottle. Denise, the nurse who cared for him the week we were there, could not understand why the mother refused so adamantly to feed her son.

She pressed the mother every time she saw her, explaining the advantages of breast milk over formula, until finally the mother explained that a previous child of hers had died in infancy, and that a houngan (voodoo priest) had told her that her milk was no good and that she must never nurse any subsequent babies or else they, too, would suffer a similar fate.

Each day Denise pleaded with her to try to nurse. On the third day, the maternal grandmother came to visit and had a long conversation with Denise, asking whether her daughter’s milk was somehow tainted. Denise assured her it was not.

The next day the mother agreed to try nursing her son. He had difficulty latching on, and she expressed a small amount into a bottle, which he eagerly gulped down.

The following morning she returned, nervous about how he had fared. Once she saw that he was fine, she unbuttoned her blouse and again tried to nurse, this time with better success. Over the next few days she continued to nurse him until she no longer needed to express into a bottle, and looked much more relaxed and in better spirits than she had since he was born.

The difference between breast milk and calorically depleted drinks, or formula prepared from water potentially contaminated with organisms that cause diseases like cholera, can be a matter of life or death. And so encouraging this young mother to give her son the sustenance he needed was a potentially lifesaving intervention, achieved through patience, education and the building of trust.

While it may not sound like much, the sad truth is that in Haiti all of these are hard to come by and remain very much in need.

Dr. Dennis Rosen is a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.

 

Tornado Season Intensifies, Without Clear Scientific Consensus on Why

 

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — All the warning sirens echoing across the Great Plains, Midwest and Southeast this month leave little doubt that the tornado season — which has plowed a trail of destruction through communities from Oklahoma to Wisconsin to Georgia — is off to an unusually busy start.

So far this year, tornadoes have killed 41 people and torn apart countless neighborhoods and, this weekend, one major airport.

Now, as the country braces for several more days of potentially violent weather, meteorologists say the number of April tornadoes is on track to top the current record. There have been, according to preliminary estimates, about 250 tornadoes so far this month and, in all likelihood, more are still to come, said Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

“It’s unusual but it does happen,” said Howard Bluestein, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma who specializes in tornado research. “This isn’t a sign that the world is about to end.”

Those same experts note that drawing conclusions about the true size of, or reason for, an increase in tornado activity is difficult because historical statistics are unreliable due to changes in the way storms are tracked and measured.

Although the average number of April tornadoes steadily increased from 74 a year in the 1950s to 163 a year in the 2000s, nearly all of the increase is of the least powerful tornadoes that may touch down briefly without causing much damage. That suggests better reporting is largely responsible for the increase.

There are, on average, 1,300 tornadoes each year in the United States, which have caused an average of 65 deaths annually in recent years.

The number of tornadoes rated from EF1 to EF5 on the enhanced Fujita scale, used to measure tornado strength, has stayed relatively constant for the past half century at about 500 annually. But in that time the number of confirmed EF0 tornadoes has steadily increased to more than 800 a year from less than 100 a year, said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

In April 1974, for example, there was a record 267 tornadoes reported, but the actual number that occurred is believed to be closer to 500.

“Today we seem to know about every single tree branch knocked down,” Mr. Carbin said. “We have eyes everywhere, and we have radar and satellite. It would be very difficult for a tornado to sneak through unnoticed.”

Tornadoes form when warm moist air combines with powerful dynamic winds inside a thunderstorm, sending a funnel cloud spinning toward the ground. They are most common in spring, typically peaking in May.

Though scientists believe that climate change will contribute to increasingly severe weather phenomena, including hurricanes and thunderstorms, there is little consensus about how it may affect tornadoes.

It remains unclear, partly because of the lack of historical data and partly because of their unpredictable nature, whether they will increase in number or strength or geographic range.

The large number of tornadoes so far may simply reflect normal variability, said Mr. Brooks.

Those assurances do not mean much to people like Kandice Shaw, a frequent business traveler who arrived at her hometown airport in St. Louis to find most of the windows boarded up and many other signs of storm damage. She worried about the increase in violent weather this spring. “We’ve had nothing but tornadoes,” she said. “I feel like I’m living in the Land of Oz.”

 

Heat 97, 76ers 89: Heat’s Opening Win Over 76ers Isn’t Without Complaints

The 76ers, who have speed to burn, raced to a double-digit lead in the first quarter. The Heat charged back for a 97-89 victory, its recovery seemingly fueled as much by the three officials as by the Heat’s three superstars: LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

James, Wade and Bosh were a combined 18 of 44 from the floor and had 63 points among them. Doug Collins, Philadelphia’s coach, said that he thought if his team held those three players to fewer than 75 points, the 76ers would be in a position to win. What Collins had not counted on was the disparity in fouls: the Heat shot 39 free throws to the 76ers’ 15.

The Heat attempted 15 free throws in the second quarter, the frequent stoppages in play slowing Philadelphia’s rhythm more than the zone that Miami, in desperation, resorted to after the 76ers opened up a 33-19 lead with 11 minutes 46 seconds left in the first half.

“The game grinded to a halt,” said Collins, who sidestepped any criticism of the officiating for fear of being fined by the league.

“My grandkids will lose their college fund,” he added, “so I have to dance around it.”

Elton Brand, who finished with 17 points for Philadelphia — and made the only free throw he tried — expressed surprise at not getting to the line more. “It’s kind of discouraging,” he said. “At the same time, we know we have to keep going.”

James, Wade and Bosh gained a degree of notoriety last July for their preening debut after the decisions by James and Bosh to join Wade on the Heat. They exuded confidence then, and after 58 regular-season victories earned the Heat the second seed in the Eastern Conference, they had every reason to go into the series against the 76ers, who finished 41-41, with a certain amount of swagger.

The postseason debuts of James and Bosh for the Heat attracted an AmericanAirlines Arena sellout crowd of 19,600. And just in case anybody in the Miami locker room needed reassuring, blue paper strips the length of a child’s ruler were placed on each player’s cushioned cubicle before the game. On each was the saying “With confidence you have won before you have started.”

In the other locker room, the underdogs from Philadelphia could point to their 30-19 record since the start of 2011 to bolster their belief in themselves. The 76ers played the first quarter as if they expected every shot to fall, and nearly all of them did. They converted 11 of their first 14 field-goal attempts to race to a 25-11 lead after 8:02.

“They were playing at a different speed than us,” Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra said, adding, “They’re relentless with that athleticism, that quickness and the way they play.”

Collins says that confidence is leaked, not lost. “I don’t think anybody ever takes your confidence,” he has said. “I think you give it away.”

As the second quarter wore on and the 76ers’ shots stopped falling and the fouls started piling up, they sputtered, as if they were running low on nerve. Behind James’s 12 points in the quarter, the Heat took a 54-49 lead into halftime. Miami extended its advantage to 78-62 near the end of the third quarter.

Bosh, appearing in his first playoff game in three years, scored 15 of his game-high 25 points in the second half. He was 8 of 17 from the field, and after the game he lamented those nine missed shots.

“The plus is that after the first quarter, we settled down and did a good job on the defensive side,” he said.

A free throw by Bosh in the third minute of the fourth quarter gave the Heat an 11-point lead. Could the 76ers patch the leak in their confidence?

“How would we respond when they punched us in the mouth?” Collins said. “I thought we did very well.”

Led by Thaddeus Young (20 points), Philadelphia’s sixth man in title only, the 76ers whittled the Heat’s advantage to 88-87 with 2:03 left. Wade, who had picked up his fifth foul with 7:20 left, returned with 3:58 left and carried the Heat. He had 6 of his 17 points in the final two minutes and 2 of his 7 rebounds in the final 20 seconds to hold off the 76ers.

“He has the intelligence and he is savvy enough to play with five fouls,” Spoelstra said.

 

Chicago News Cooperative | Sports: With or Without Stars, the Bulls May Go Far

As the Bulls began the National Basketball Association playoffs against the Indiana Pacers on Saturday, they were blithely unburdened by the legacy of failure that dogs their contemporaries on the Chicago sports scene. Six championships in 45 years of existence will do that for a team, as will the indelible memory of the best there has ever been in hoops.

The Blackhawks are only a year removed from winning hockey’s grand prize, but so many missteps occurred during their 49 seasons between titles that last year’s endless victory celebration evoked a surreal feeling, as if it weren’t really happening — not to this team.

Sure enough, that team has scattered to the winds, a victim of salary-cap miscalculation that makes a Stanley Cup defense thoroughly unlikely.

Michael Jordan was making his seventh run at it when the Bulls achieved their first title in 1991. Before that they had never been to the finals, a 24-year stretch of futility that was almost Cub-like. But when five more championships followed in the next seven years, M. J. and his supporting cast were appropriately hailed as a dynasty.

That simply doesn’t happen here — not since the 1940s Bears had a Chicago team even hinted at domination. Jordan’s transcendence changed the way the city felt about itself.

Thirteen years have elapsed since the last Grant Park party, and the Bulls haven’t been within two playoff rounds of another championship since. Meanwhile, the Blackhawks, the Bears and the White Sox have all either won a title or played for one. Yet the memory of Jordan ruling the basketball world is so powerful that it sustains the image of a championship-caliber franchise, even though some of the moves made since he left suggest a head-scratching cluelessness. Think of Ron Mercer and Eddie Robinson as the Jordan and Scottie Pippen of a parallel universe.

That was Jerry Krause’s doing. Krause, the Bulls’ blustery former general manager, deserves Hall of Fame props for assembling two platoons of complementary talent that helped Jordan collect those rings. But his ego-driven, unseemly haste to prove he could win without M. J. led to some inexplicably bad decisions. Putting Tim Floyd — hopelessly overmatched as an N.B.A. coach — in the seat that Phil Jackson had occupied was probably the worst of them, though the cheesy pursuit of the uninterested Tracy McGrady was a better metaphor for how far the franchise had fallen. By the time he was moved aside in 2003, Krause had to go.

The climb back to respectability began with John Paxson’s elevation to basketball boss. That move begat Scott Skiles, who as coach orchestrated the first two post-Jordan playoff trips, including a tentative foray into the second round in 2007.

The Paxson-Skiles partnership ended badly, but there was an upside: failure to salvage a playoff berth from the wreckage of the 2007-8 season sent the Bulls into the draft lottery, and they emerged with Derrick Rose. That is franchise-altering good fortune, akin to the Portland Trail Blazers liking Sam Bowie more than Jordan in the 1984 draft. But it’s one thing to catch a break and quite another to know what to do with it.

Finding a coach who’s comfortable in his own skin is a good start. Jackson, as tranquil as Doug Collins was hyperkinetic, brought out qualities in Jordan that none of his other pro coaches could tap, most notably a team-first, share-the-ball (occasionally) mentality. Rose, having survived two years of Vinny Del Negro’s deer-in-the-headlights tutelage, is flourishing under Tom Thibodeau, an old N.B.A. soul with a knack for maximizing a player’s talents while neutralizing his shortcomings. Their relationship is likely to produce the league’s most valuable player as well as its coach of the year.

Skeptics maintain that the Bulls are too young and untested to win the title, though they entered the playoffs as the Eastern Conference’s top seed. The N.B.A. is star powered, especially at playoff time, and the Bulls have none besides Rose. (But the Thibodeau Effect on Luol Deng’s tidy all-around game can’t be discounted: Deng, the 26-year-old forward from Duke, is playing the best basketball of his life.)

And about all the Bulls have done since the calendar turned to 2011 is win: they are 41-10 since Jan. 1, including 8-0 against Boston, Miami and Orlando. Their 62 wins are a 21-game improvement over last season, with a new coach and eight new players.

?Still, doubt surrounds them. Carlos Boozer doesn’t get it done every night. Keith Bogans still can’t hit a shot. Joakim Noah’s manic energy has gone missing. Kurt Thomas somehow seems older than Dick Stockton.

We’ll see. This team grows on you. Rose is terrific, and Thibodeau is really good. Right now I see the Bulls handling Indiana before a tough seven-game series with the Orlando Magic in the second round. Then the Miami Heat unloads its guns and prevails in the conference finals.

Enjoy the run, regardless of where it leads. The N.B.A. is a mess, with several small-market outposts in financial distress, and an off-season of rancorous labor strife is a given. Pro basketball could be going away for a while, just as the Bulls are getting something going.

Maybe they could try out for the Cubs.

 

On Baseball: Rangers Move On And Fire Away Without Lee

The Yankees stashed Phil Hughes on the disabled list, essentially because of a sudden inability to throw hard. Their rookie right-hander, Ivan Nova, then failed to complete five innings for the second start in a row. In one night, two rotation spots looked fragile.

The Rangers, meanwhile, lined up three pitchers who did not start in their run to the World Series last fall. The Rangers had hoped to start the season with the injured right-handers Tommy Hunter and Brandon Webb in the rotation, and strongly considered shifting closer Neftali Feliz. Yet they started Saturday with a 2.50 earned run average, the lowest in the majors.

Matt Harrison lasted eight innings in a victory on Friday, and Derek Holland went seven and two-thirds innings in a 5-2 loss on Saturday. Alexi Ogando, who faces C. C. Sabathia on Sunday night, has won twice this season, allowing no runs.

“They have great stuff and they’re young,” said the left-hander C. J. Wilson, who started on opening day. “That’s the thing, people always discount guys that haven’t done it yet, but nobody has until they do it. So you have to look at the guys who have potential to do it.”

Holland, another left-hander, said he talked much more with Wilson than he did with Lee, who arrived last July with the Rangers comfortably in first place. Lee helped the team immensely in the playoffs, but not so much in the regular season; the Rangers won just 6 of his 15 starts.

The Yankees, who never had Lee, probably needed him more, especially after Andy Pettitte retired. They were smart to sign the veterans Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia, though their upside is limited. Hughes, 24, was supposed to be embarking on his prime, but for now he is lost, a slide that began well before the Rangers thrashed him twice in the American League Championship Series.

Hughes looked terrific last April, the way the Rangers’ pitchers look now. A lot can change in a long season. But Ron Washington, the Texas manager, said he sensed that Harrison, 25, and Holland, 24, had matured.

“When you’ve got youth, you never know when there’s going to be that hiccup,” Washington said. “In the first inning last night, when Harrison came out and threw all those balls?

“Last year, that would have snowballed. When he got into the fifth inning and couldn’t find the strike zone? That would have snowballed. When he got into the eighth inning and they started rattling him? That would have snowballed. But he stopped every threat.”

Holland, who beat the Yankees in relief in the playoffs, matched his career high with 118 pitches Saturday. Washington said he liked the matchups in the eighth inning, and Holland still seemed strong. With Nolan Ryan atop the organization and Mike Maddux guiding the pitchers, the Rangers preach endurance from their starters.

Wilson switched to the rotation from the bullpen last season and worked 204 innings, going 15-8. A hamstring injury slowed him this spring, but he has pitched well enough so far and sees a side benefit to his lighter workload in camp.

“I feel like, physically, it’ll allow me to maybe peak a little bit later this year,” Wilson said.

The Rangers, who sat out the playoffs in the first decade of the 2000s, can think confidently now about the postseason. The A.L. West is challenging, loaded with dominant starters. But the Rangers — who salute good plays with claw-and-antler hand motions — play with an endearing style.

“I saw it last year, with the claw and all that stuff,” said catcher Mike Napoli, a former Angel.

“You can always tell when teams have fun, and they’re loose and they go out and play hard. We didn’t like it because they were our rivals in the division. But I’m glad I’m a part of it now.”

The engine of the Rangers’ offense is Josh Hamilton, last season’s A.L. most valuable player, who could miss the next two months after breaking a bone in his right arm on a headfirst slide at the plate last Tuesday.

But the Rangers lost Hamilton, Nelson Cruz and Ian Kinsler for long stretches last season, and still wound up in the World Series.

Cruz and Kinsler are healthy now, and Michael Young — who had asked to be traded after the signing of Adrian Beltre bumped him off third base — is hitting .339. If their pitchers keep performing, the Rangers could stay in first place for a while.

“Character- and makeup-wise, this group’s off the charts,” Young said. “It’s a great group to be around every day, and I think it’s just the way every guy’s wired here. When you have 25 guys who are the same way, we feel like we can overcome a lot of things.”

 

US DoJ approves Google's acquisition of ITA, but not without stipulations

 By Darren Murph posted Apr 8th 2011 5:06PM The United States government may be dissolved tomorrow, but it's certainly taking care of one final piece of business before going into shutdown: this. If you'll recall, Google announced its intentions to acquire ITA for $700 million in July of last year, and as we cruise into the start of America's summer travel season, all signals are go. Today, the US Department of Justice approved Google's request to move forward with the buy, but rather than having the entire travel search market under its wing, El Goog's going to have to make a smattering of concessions in order to get the right signatures. For starters, the search monolith will allow ITA's existing client contracts to extend into 2016, and it'll let both current and new customers license ITA's QPX software on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms." No one's saying when the integration will be complete (or start, for that matter), but we're desperately anxious to see just how Kayak and Bing Travel react after this launches in earnest. Power to the searchers, as it were.

 

US DoJ approves Google's acquisition of ITA, but not without stipulations

 By Darren Murph posted Apr 8th 2011 5:06PM The United States government may be dissolved tomorrow, but it's certainly taking care of one final piece of business before going into shutdown: this. If you'll recall, Google announced its intentions to acquire ITA for $700 million in July of last year, and as we cruise into the start of America's summer travel season, all signals are go. Today, the US Department of Justice approved Google's request to move forward with the buy, but rather than having the entire travel search market under its wing, El Goog's going to have to make a smattering of concessions in order to get the right signatures. For starters, the search monolith will allow ITA's existing client contracts to extend into 2016, and it'll let both current and new customers license ITA's QPX software on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms." No one's saying when the integration will be complete (or start, for that matter), but we're desperately anxious to see just how Kayak and Bing Travel react after this launches in earnest. Power to the searchers, as it were.

 

US DoJ approves Google's acquisition of ITA, but not without stipulations

 By Darren Murph posted Apr 8th 2011 5:06PM The United States government may be dissolved tomorrow, but it's certainly taking care of one final piece of business before going into shutdown: this. If you'll recall, Google announced its intentions to acquire ITA for $700 million in July of last year, and as we cruise into the start of America's summer travel season, all signals are go. Today, the US Department of Justice approved Google's request to move forward with the buy, but rather than having the entire travel search market under its wing, El Goog's going to have to make a smattering of concessions in order to get the right signatures. For starters, the search monolith will allow ITA's existing client contracts to extend into 2016, and it'll let both current and new customers license ITA's QPX software on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms." No one's saying when the integration will be complete (or start, for that matter), but we're desperately anxious to see just how Kayak and Bing Travel react after this launches in earnest. Power to the searchers, as it were.