A Champion Against Cancer, Now Under Siege

AUSTIN, Tex. — Barry Bonds. Marion Jones. Alex Rodriguez. Roger Clemens. There is no shortage of athletes who have fallen from grace, their achievements on the playing field and their public stature compromised by accusations of cheating or revelations of criminal or otherwise repugnant behavior.

The case of Lance Armstrong is far more complex. Having survived testicular cancer that metastasized to his lungs and his brain, Mr. Armstrong — who went on to win a record seven Tour de France titles — has become a powerful symbol of the possibilities of life after the disease. He has also become a world-class philanthropist, his Livestrong foundation doling out $31 million last year on behalf of cancer patients.

But now that he and his former team are subjects of a federal investigation into doping activities, those in the interdependent circles of his world are concerned that the inquiry will tarnish or erode all he has built.

“There are just so many unknowns at this point,” Doug Ulman, the chief executive of Livestrong and a cancer survivor, said in an interview at the foundation’s airy new headquarters here. “That’s the most frustrating thing.”

To Dr. John R. Seffrin, the chief executive of the American Cancer Society, the investigation should be irrelevant. Whatever Mr. Armstrong’s transgressions as an athlete, he said, they pale in comparison with the good he has done.

“Lance Armstrong has done more to destigmatize cancer than anyone,” Dr. Seffrin said.

Few would dispute that Mr. Armstrong is a splendid athlete, gifted and dedicated, or that he is a magnificent publicist for his cause. Since 2004, when Livestrong and its corporate partner Nike gave the world the yellow bracelet to signify that the wearer had been touched by cancer, more than 70 million have been distributed.

But his competitive side is also compelling. A power-wielding, polarizing figure in cycling, Mr. Armstrong, who turns 39 next month, has a reputation for being a brutal competitor and an aggressive self-promoter. A day after spending three weeks as his teammate at the 2009 Tour, the winner, Alberto Contador, who has supplanted Mr. Armstrong as the world’s best rider, said in Spanish: “He is a great rider and did a great Tour. Another thing is on a personal level, where I have never admired him and never will.”

Mr. Armstrong has long fended off suspicions that his Tour titles were tainted by performance-enhancers, and he has never officially tested positive for any illegal substances. (At the 1999 Tour, he failed a test for a corticosteroid but produced a doctor’s note for it.)

Through one of his lawyers, Mr. Armstrong declined to be interviewed for this article.

During the Tour de France in July, he issued perhaps his most forceful statement on the issue: “As long as I live, I will deny it. There was absolutely no way I forced people, encouraged people, told people, helped people, facilitated. Absolutely not. One hundred percent.”

But Mr. Armstrong’s vehement claims of innocence amid the acknowledged widespread cheating in professional cycling strike many as far-fetched.

In cycling, he is also known as a control freak, an intense micromanager of his image and of the complicated apparatus that is a professional cycling team.

“He’s the most binary guy I’ve ever met,” said Bill Strickland, a cyclist and writer who has known Mr. Armstrong since 1994 and whose recent book “Tour de Lance” followed Mr. Armstrong as he prepared for the 2009 Tour after a three-year hiatus from the event. “He told me his motto is Win/lose, live/die. He equates winning with living and losing with dying. Every moment you’re around him, he wants to win. You can be in a conversation with him and he’ll try to get the upper hand. It never lets down.”

Cycling teams are built to focus on and nurture one star whom the other riders, known by the French word domestiques, support by blocking the wind, for instance, and ferrying water. And in his book, Mr. Strickland described a telling incident from the 2003 Tour.

Early in the race, Victor Hugo Peña, a domestique for Mr. Armstrong’s United States Postal Service team, briefly moved ahead of Mr. Armstrong in the standings and wore the yellow jersey signifying the overall leader. But Mr. Armstrong insisted that Mr. Peña continue to perform the chores of a domestique, a flagrant usurpation of Tour tradition, an embarrassment to Mr. Peña and a purposeful reminder of cycling’s social order.

“That was so typical of who he is,” Mr. Strickland said. “To those of us who saw that, it was criminal. And so perfectly Lance.”

At races, Mr. Armstrong is a titillating presence, always at the center of a throng. Fans, some living with cancer, gather several deep around his team bus, hoping to glimpse or touch him. “It’s like being at Lourdes,” Mr. Strickland said.

Some of what makes Mr. Armstrong’s character difficult to parse is the blinding sheen of his celebrity. Between his divorce from Kristin Richard, with whom he had three children, and his relationship with Anna Hansen, who is expecting their second child, his string of girlfriends included the singer Sheryl Crow, the actress Kate Hudson and the fashion designer Tory Burch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/sports/cycling/22armstrong.html?ref=sports

As Mission Shifts in Iraq, Risks Linger for Obama

WASHINGTON — The official end of America’s combat mission in Iraq next week will fulfill the campaign promise that helped vault President Obama to the White House, but it also presents profound risks as he seeks to claim credit without issuing a premature declaration of victory.

As columns of vehicles crossed the border and troops arrived to happy homecomings last week, Mr. Obama released a restrained written statement and made a one-sentence reference at a pair of fund-raisers. While some called it the end of the seven-year war, Mr. Obama sought to avoid the sort of “mission accomplished” moment that haunted his predecessor.

But the White House wants to find a way to mark the moment and remind voters just two months before midterm elections that he delivered on his vow to pull out combat forces. Mr. Obama plans to make a high-profile speech on the drawdown next week, and aides are discussing whether to have him meet with returning troops. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will address the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Indianapolis on Monday.

The symbolism of the departing troops that played out on network television masked the more complex reality on the ground. Even as the last designated combat forces leave and the mission formally changes on Aug. 31 to a support role, 50,000 American “advise and assist” troops will remain in the country for 16 months more, still in harm’s way and still armed for combat if necessary. What’s more, Iraq’s future remains fraught with challenges amid a stubborn political impasse and a continuing low-grade insurgency.

“Political posturing is the norm in Washington, and claiming victory and an end to a war is far more popular than bearing the burden of leadership and dealing with reality,” Anthony H. Cordesman, a military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, wrote on the center’s Web site on Friday. “The Iraq war is not over and it is not ‘won.’ In fact, it is at as critical a stage as at any time since 2003.”

Denis R. McDonough, chief of staff of the National Security Council, said the administration had no illusions.

“Does anybody believe the violence is going to stop entirely and the opponents to stability and progress in Iraq are going to stand down? No,” he said. “But we do know that the Iraqi security forces are in a position to take that role on themselves increasingly.”

The official transition from Operation Iraqi Freedom to Operation New Dawn is as much a change in labels as it is a change in mission. With violence far below its peak in 2006 and 2007, American forces have increasingly taken a back seat to the Iraqi security units they trained.

But after seven years of a war started by President George W. Bush on the basis of false intelligence, the desire for finality, and perhaps closure, has focused attention on this moment and provoked a fresh discussion in Washington about what it all has meant.

After hundreds of billions of dollars, more than 4,400 American military deaths and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and perhaps many more, was it worth it? Did toppling a dictator and nursing a fledgling if flawed democracy make a difference? And did the United States salvage credibility by sticking it out and finally stabilizing Iraq even if not winning the clear-cut victory originally envisioned?

“If we can’t have a victory parade, we at least ought to be able to make some definitive conclusions,” said Andrew J. Bacevich, a military specialist at Boston University who lost a son in Iraq and has written a new book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.” “And it just doesn’t seem that we are going to do so. We want to just move on, sadly.”

In part, that owes to the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, where Mr. Obama is sending more troops, as well as the fragile economy at home, where millions of Americans are looking for work. And so while his opposition to the Iraq war animated his early candidacy, it seems almost a secondary issue these days.

During a fund-raising speech in Ohio last week, for instance, Mr. Obama mentioned the Iraq transition only in passing. “We are keeping the promise I made when I began my campaign for the presidency: by the end of this month, we will have removed 100,000 troops from Iraq, and our combat mission will be over in Iraq,” he said, a line he later repeated at a fund-raiser in Miami.

As they mark the moment, Democrats generally make no mention of the troop buildup and strategy change ordered by Mr. Bush in 2007, which many credit with turning around the war and making it possible to end combat now. By the time Mr. Bush left office, he had sealed an agreement with Iraq to withdraw all American troops by the end of 2011. After taking office, Mr. Obama ordered an intermediary deadline of drawing down to 50,000 by the end of this month.

Mr. Bush showed up unannounced at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport earlier this month to greet troops returning from Iraq. While no news media were invited, video posted on YouTube by troop supporters showed him in casual clothes shaking hands and posing for pictures with troops as they entered the terminal one by one.

Mr. Bush has declined to discuss the mission change, but former advisers see it as a validation that after all the pain and the blood, Iraq may finally be in a better place, governed by a freer, more democratic system that could yet serve as a model in an otherwise largely authoritarian Middle East.

“We can take a certain measure of satisfaction from the success in Iraq,” L. Paul Bremer III, the former Iraqi occupation administrator, said in an interview. “It’s not a complete success yet, obviously, but building democracy takes time.”

He added that “a successful Arab-Muslim democracy basically puts the lie to the Islamic extremists” who maintain that democracy is anathema to Islam and advocate a harsh form of rule.

Stephen J. Hadley, who was Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, said the current transition was due to the surge ordered by the former president and opposed by Mr. Obama when he was a senator. But he said he was glad that Mr. Obama’s team “has gone through a transition” and that it seemed to be taking pride in accomplishments in Iraq. He said he hoped that the administration would see the task through.

“If they do, they can rightly claim some measure of credit, and I would be the first to give them credit,” Mr. Hadley said. “But they need to stay focused and stay engaged.”

For Mr. Obama, this moment is a reminder of the lesson his predecessor learned after declaring the end of major combat operations on an aircraft carrier in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner in 2003. Iraq was a messy war with no tidy end. “There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship,” Mr. Bush later concluded.

Mr. Obama has come to the same realization, in almost the exact same words.

“There will be no simple moment of surrender to mark the journey’s end,” he declared last spring.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/us/politics/22obama.html?ref=politics

Nonprofit Fund Faces Questions About Conflicts and Selection Procedures

In late July, the Social Innovation Fund, a new $50 million federal program aimed at financing the replication of nonprofit programs that work, made its first grants.

But what was supposed to have been an emblem of the administration’s commitment to nonprofit groups has become instead a messy controversy over potential conflicts of interest and the process used to select the grantees.

Several of the 48 independent reviewers who vetted the initial 54 applications for the grants were surprised by some of the winners because they had awarded them mediocre scores.

Critics noted that the executive director of the fund, Paul Carttar, had worked at New Profit Inc., a nonprofit group that helps promising social programs. New Profit Inc. received a $5 million grant from the fund.

Similarly, Patrick Corvington, the official who oversees the Corporation for National and Community Service, where the fund resides, previously worked for a foundation that financed a program operated by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, better known as LISC. The foundation won a $4.2 million grant.

Marta Urquilla, senior adviser to the fund, said Mr. Carttar and Mr. Corvington played no role in selecting the winners. “We knew the things people are saying now would be said,” Ms. Urquilla said, “and so we made sure each application got its fair chance and stood on its own merits.”

But the fund has not disclosed who reviewed the grants — or who applied for them or the ratings the applicants received, information that often is provided by many other government agencies that make grants.

In soliciting applications, the fund published a detailed set of criteria it would use to evaluate them, but the process by which they would be vetted was unclear. Last week, it disclosed more information about the procedures, including that the applications went through four stages, as well as the number of organizations culled after each.

“The bare minimum would be to release the names of the peer reviewers, the names of the applicants and the score they each received,” said Dean Zerbe, a former tax counsel to Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has persistently scrutinized the Corporation for National and Community Service’s grants and programs.

The fund was created with the passage of the SERVE America Act last year and quickly became one of the hottest topics for discussion in the nonprofit sector, which saw it as a means of getting government financing for young but promising programs at a time when the economy has crippled much fund-raising and hobbled many endowments.

The 11 winners effectively serve as conduits to channel the grant money to other nonprofit organizations that operate successful programs that can be expanded to serve more people in more areas. The winners must match the government’s money, which also must be matched by the final recipients, potentially trebling the fund’s financial effect.

The broader goal, Ms. Urquilla said, is to develop a network of intermediaries like the grant winners that can identify promising programs and connect them to donors and other sources of financing to allow them to expand.

The criticism has led the fund to decide to publish redacted versions of the winning applications in the coming weeks, together with the ratings they were given by various panels and how those compare with applications that did not win. “We fully embrace open government and the trend toward greater transparency,” Ms. Urquilla said. “We just want to make sure we do it in a deliberative and responsive way.”

The disclosures may not satisfy the critics, though.

Ruth McCambridge, editor of the Nonprofit Quarterly magazine, said that she may file a request for all the applications under the Freedom of Information Act. “This is supposed to be a learning process,” Ms. McCambridge said. “That’s the way the people at the fund have billed it, and applicants for the next round of funding, if there is one, might find it useful to see what didn’t work the first time around.”

She questioned why the fund would not release the names of the applicants or the peer reviewers and why it asked the reviewers to shred their work when it was finished.

Steven Goldberg, one of the reviewers, a consultant and author of “Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets: Why Philanthropy Doesn’t Advance Social Progress,” said he had no problem with destroying the paperwork related to the review — “as a lapsed lawyer, I can see that you don’t want people to be looking too much at how the sausage gets made”— but thought it would be a good idea to publish the names of the reviewers and applicants.

“My impression over all is that it was a very conscientiously designed and managed process, and they probably overcompensated to make sure it’s all done scientifically,” said Mr. Goldberg, who on Friday wrote a lengthy riposte to Nonprofit Quarterly’s coverage of the issue.

Other reviewers, though, questioned the secrecy surrounding the selection process, particularly since it was being imposed by an administration that has pledged to greatly increase transparency.

“This is not a private, grant-making institution, it’s the federal government,” said Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University who has served as a reviewer for other federal grants and contracts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/us/22nonprofit.html?ref=politics

In the Berkshires, Dinner’s Not Far Away

IT’S hard to dismiss the current locavore boom in the Berkshires as mere fashion. In fact, the national enthusiasm for eating farm-to-table has roots in western Massachusetts. The nation’s first agricultural fair was held in Berkshire County in the early 19th century, and in 1986, when the country’s first two community-supported agriculture farms were established, one was in the southern Berkshires.

Such farms, which offer a share of their harvest in exchange for a seasonal financial commitment, are now a mainstay of the farm-to-table movement. But it’s no surprise that the idea found such fertile ground in the Berkshires, said Barbara Zheutlin, director of Berkshire Grown, an organization dedicated to the region’s agriculture. Her group is another legacy of the vibrant, community-oriented food activism that was well under way by the mid-1980s.

This quiet history has no better modern incarnation than Susan Sellew, 60, maker of Monterey Chevre. Ms. Sellew, a native of New Marlborough, laughingly traces her skills to an affliction of “Old MacDonald” syndrome in the 1960s and ’70s. Determined not to buy anything she could learn to make herself, she was soon preparing her own honey, maple syrup, sausages and soap.

Goats were a source of food, but Ms. Sellew fell in love with their mischievous nature and obvious intelligence.

“They’re like cats,” she said. “They believe everything they do is just perfect.” Making cheese from their milk was an afterthought, “the perfect justification to keep more goats,” she said.

Three decades ago, Ms. Sellew returned to her grandfather’s forested land in Monterey. She and her husband at the time, Wayne Dunlop, spent months clearing fields and building a barn from the lumber they cut. They named it Rawson Brook Farm.

Ms. Sellew has 50 animals and does not want more, so that she can follow personalities and physical traits from generation to generation. But flourishing demand for her cheese, and her policy of never refusing a local customer, means that it may be hard to find in urban markets. Nevertheless, look for Monterey Chevre in Zabar’s in New York.

Better yet, stop by the farm (185 New Marlboro Road, Monterey; 413-528-2138), where the goats are named for constellations and Julia Roberts characters, and the rotating milking table, hand-fashioned by Ms. Sellew from a truck axle, bears an admonition to “Honor the Udder.”

(Slide shows of Rawson Brook and other Berkshire farms are at berkshirefoodjournal.com.)

Ms. Sellew isn’t immune to trends — the goats occasionally snack on kelp — but she’s also been around long enough to understand that back-to-the-farm movements come and go. She sees the current round as different, especially in the Berkshires, where longstanding activism is supplemented by increasingly food-savvy tourists.

Frances Duncan, a locavore blogger, agrees.

“The Berkshires are really on the cusp of breaking into a more sustainable economy, via local foods and agriculture,” she said. The result is not just an invigorated farming industry, she added, but an explosion of small, upscale producers.

Assembling a picnic is the best way to sample this bounty. If the most famous instance of Berkshires alfresco dining was the mountaintop luncheon of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, the modern, hike-free version is an evening repast on Tanglewood’s music-lapped lawns.

For more than a quarter-century, Berkshire food lovers have bought many of their provisions at Guido’s in Pittsfield (1020 South Street; 413-442-9912, guidosfreshmarketplace.com). This year there’s another option in the city’s resurgent downtown: the Market, a trendy, cleanly designed deli (391 North Street; 413-395-9766; themarketpittsfield.com). In addition to sandwiches, the Market sells artisanal ice cream, jams, cheeses and hot dogs of grass-fed beef — all made in the region. Flying off the shelves with particular speed is Ooma Tesoro’s marinara sauce, perfect on pasta or pizza and a storybook tale of small-business triumph. Then there’s Berkshire Bark, a tiny chocolate producer founded in 2006. Just glancing at its Pretzelogical concoction probably costs half an hour on the treadmill, but it’s worth every step.

White wine is the typical accompaniment to most starlit Tanglewood spreads. But some music may demand something stronger, in which case the buzz is all about Chris Weld at Berkshire Mountain Distillers in Sheffield.

Returning home from California in 2004, Mr. Weld searched for an innovation-friendly agricultural community and soon found an overgrown apple orchard on the site of a 19th-century spa. A biochemist, he thought of distilling, and by 2008 he was marketing a small collection of gin, vodka and rum to quick national acclaim.

More than a century ago, water from the spa on his property was sold as a curative in New York. Now spirits produced on the same soil are being sold at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, and at modern speakeasies like PDT in the East Village. Mr. Weld’s spirits are sold at restaurants in the Berkshires and also at Nejaime’s Wine, which has three locations (800-946-3988; nejaimeswine.com).

Restaurants across the region are offering more opportunities to enjoy a locavore gin and tonic while someone else does the cooking. One of the best is Allium in Great Barrington (42/44 Railroad Street; 413-528-2118; alliumberkshires.com), where the friendliness of the servers seems uncompromised by their devotional knowledge of the entire menu’s provenance. As this year’s harvest rolls in, try dishes like heirloom tomatoes with raspberries and housemade ricotta.

The Berkshires’ latest culinary hit, though, is Nudel, in Lenox (37 Church Street; 413-551-7183; nudelrestaurant.com), which Bjorn Somlo opened last fall.

Mr. Somlo, who previously cooked in New York, takes full advantage of his locale, often stopping by farms in the morning to choose ingredients for the evening menu. He’s particularly keen to serve meat from nearby farms, so when a farmer offered lamb necks, Mr. Somlo turned them into dinner. More traditional cuts come from across the Berkshires and from Northeast Family Farms, an organization that links chefs to family-run farms.

The presumption on Nudel’s menu is that everything is fresh: if a vegetable arrived frozen, it’s labeled as such. Mr. Somlo’s emphasis on openness is reflected in the architecture of his tiny restaurant, where diners can sit at a bar overlooking the kitchen.

In winter, of course, options for regional ingredients are more limited. Nudel’s slogan is “seasonally inspired,” and in the off season Mr. Somlo obtains whatever he can nearby, “while accepting the truth of where we are.” For après-ski, try his beef shank stew with Overmeade beets.

Even warmer months can bring some notoriously fickle weather in this part of the country (as Melville and Hawthorne found out when a thunderstorm interrupted their picnic).

Mr. Somlo has the versatility to roll with most meteorological punches. But such in-the-moment cooking doesn’t preclude the occasional bout of nostalgia, most recently for this spring’s asparagus, which was available for just 10 days before weather ruined the crop.

“That asparagus, it was awesome,” he said with a sigh. “And then it was gone.”

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/travel/22journeys.html?hp

For Imam in Muslim Center Furor, a Hard Balancing Act

Not everyone in the Cairo lecture hall last February was buying the imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s message. As he talked of reconciliation between America and Middle Eastern Muslims — his voice soft, almost New Agey — some questioners were so suspicious that he felt the need to declare that he was not an American agent.

Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.

If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.

Small investors are “losing their appetite for risk,” a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.

One of the phenomena of the last several decades has been the rise of the individual investor. As Americans have become more responsible for their own retirement, they have poured money into stocks with such faith that half of the country’s households now own shares directly or through mutual funds, which are by far the most popular way Americans invest in stocks. So the turnabout is striking.

So is the timing. After past recessions, ordinary investors have typically regained their enthusiasm for stocks, hoping to profit as the economy recovered. This time, even as corporate earnings have improved, Americans have become more guarded with their investments.

“At this stage in the economic cycle, $10 to $20 billion would normally be flowing into domestic equity funds” rather than the billions that are flowing out, said Brian K. Reid, chief economist of the investment institute. He added, “This is very unusual.”

The notion that stocks tend to be safe and profitable investments over time seems to have been dented in much the same way that a decline in home values and in job stability the last few years has altered Americans’ sense of financial security.

It may take many years before it is clear whether this becomes a long-term shift in psychology. After technology and dot-com shares crashed in the early 2000s, for example, investors were quick to re-enter the stock market. Yet bigger economic calamities like the Great Depression affected people’s attitudes toward money for decades.

For now, though, mixed economic data is presenting a picture of an economy that is recovering feebly from recession.

“For a lot of ordinary people, the economic recovery does not feel real,” said Loren Fox, a senior analyst at Strategic Insight, a New York research and data firm. “People are not going to rush toward the stock market on a sustained basis until they feel more confident of employment growth and the sustainability of the economic recovery.”

One investor who has restructured his portfolio is Gary Olsen, 51, from Dallas. Over the past four years, he has adjusted the proportion of his investments from 65 percent equities and 35 percent bonds so that the $1.1 million he has invested is now evenly balanced.

He had worked as a portfolio liquidity manager for the local Federal Home Loan Bank and retired four years ago.

“Like everyone, I lost” during the recent market declines, he said. “I needed to have a more conservative allocation.”

To be sure, a lot of money is still flowing into the stock market from small investors, pension funds and other big institutional investors. But ordinary investors are reallocating their 401(k) retirement plans, according to Hewitt Associates, a consulting firm that tracks pension plans.

Until two years ago, 70 percent of the money in 401(k) accounts it tracks was invested in stock funds; that proportion fell to 49 percent by the start of 2009 as people rebalanced their portfolios toward bond investments following the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. It is now back at 57 percent, but almost all of that can be attributed to the rising price of stocks in recent years. People are still staying with bonds.

Another force at work is the aging of the baby-boomer generation. As they approach retirement, Americans are shifting some of their investments away from stocks to provide regular guaranteed income for the years when they are no longer working.

And the flight from stocks may also be driven by households that are no longer able to tap into home equity for cash and may simply need the money to pay for ordinary expenses.

On Friday, Fidelity Investments reported that a record number of people took so-called hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts in the second quarter. These are early withdrawals intended to pay for needs like medical expenses.

According to the Investment Company Institute, which surveys 4,000 households annually, the appetite for stock market risk among American investors of all ages has been declining steadily since it peaked around 2001, and the change is most pronounced in the under-35 age group.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/business/22invest.html?_r=1&hp