Wednesday, September 5th 2007
Boomer Esiason, at left, and Craig Carton
Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton kicked off their morning show on radio station WFAN yesterday without anything close to a “boom,” which means “mission accomplished” for all concerned.
After the messy and awkward firing of longtime morning host Don Imus in April, WFAN and parent CBS clearly wanted a show more about football anecdotes than Larry Craig jokes.
But morning shows also need edge, and it’s way too early to tell how the new team will create the critical sense that, at any moment, something unexpected and riveting could happen.
Because Carton showed no sign yesterday of the “bad boy” reputation he got at 101.5 in New Jersey, Esiason never had to play the “good cop” many see as part of that dynamic.
Meanwhile, the fact that both guys are broadcast veterans ensured that yesterday’s debut didn’t sound like a “first” show. Carton handles the mechanics – going to breaks, taking calls – and since he has a quick tongue, he gets his full share of airtime. At times, he seemed to hold back to let Esiason finish a story.
Imus’ newsman, Charles McCord, has left the show, and WFAN, so Tracy Burgess did a shortened news break. But the best supporting player was sports guy Chris Carlin, whose good-natured exchange of barbs with Esiason recalled the liveliest parts of the Imus show.
The biggest question yesterday was content. Almost the whole show was devoted to football, which seemed odd on a day when the city had at least two major baseball stories in the return of Pedro Martinez and a possible injury to Roger Clemens.
A fluffy interview with New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, in that context, seemed marginal, and left the impression that WFAN wanted former football star Esiason to be able to stay in the pocket on his first day.
Presumably there will be plenty of time for him to scramble.
BAGHDAD, Sept. 12 —
A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s
rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks
among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent
breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to
find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a
functioning government here.Senior Iraqi negotiators met in Baghdad on Wednesday in an attempt
to salvage the original compromise, two participants said. But the
meeting came against the backdrop of a public series of increasingly
strident disagreements over the draft law that had broken out in recent
days between Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi oil minister, and
officials of the provincial government in the Kurdish north, where some
of the nation’s largest fields are located.Mr. Shahristani, a senior member of the Arab Shiite coalition that
controls the federal government, negotiated the compromise with leaders
of the Kurdish and Arab Sunni parties. But since then, the Kurds have
pressed forward with a regional version of the law that Mr. Shahristani
says is illegal. Many of the Sunnis who supported the original deal
have also pulled out in recent months.The oil law — which would govern how oil fields are developed
and managed — is one of several benchmarks that the Bush
administration has been pressing the Iraqis to meet as a sign that they
are making headway toward creating an effective government.Again and again in the past year, agreement on the law has been
fleetingly close before political and sectarian disagreements have
arisen to stall the deal.One of the participants in Wednesday’s meeting, Deputy Prime
Minister Barham Salih, who has worked for much of the past year to push
for the original compromise, said some progress had been made at the
meeting, but that he could not guarantee success.“This has been like a roller coaster,” said Mr. Salih,
who is Kurdish. “There were occasions where we seemed to be
there, where we seemed to have closure, only to fail at that.”“Given the seriousness of the issue, I don’t want to
create false expectations, but I can say there is serious effort to
bring this to closure,” he said.The legislation has already been presented to the Iraqi Parliament,
which has been unable to take virtually any action on it for months.
Contributing to the dispute is the decision by the Kurds to begin
signing contracts with international oil companies before the federal
law is passed. The most recent instance, announced last week on a
Kurdish government Web site, was an oil exploration contract with the
Hunt Oil Company of Dallas.The Sunni Arabs who removed their support for the deal did so, in
part, because of a contract the Kurdish government signed earlier with
a company based in the United Arab Emirates, Dana Gas, to develop gas
reserves.The Kurds say their regional law is consistent with the Iraqi
Constitution, which grants substantial powers to the provinces to
govern their own affairs. But Mr. Shahristani believes that a sort of
Kurdish declaration of independence can be read into the move.
“This to us indicates very serious lack of cooperation that makes
many people wonder if they are really going to be working within the
framework of the federal law,” Mr. Shahristani said in a recent
interview, before the Hunt deal was announced.Kurdish officials dispute that contention, saying that they are
doing their best to work within the Constitution while waiting for the
Iraqi Parliament, which always seems to move at a glacial pace, to
consider the legislation.“We reject what some parties say — that it is a step
towards separation — because we have drafted the Kurdistan oil
law depending on Article 111 of the Iraqi Constitution, which says oil
and natural resources are properties of Iraqi people,” said Jamal
Abdullah, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government.
“Both Iraqi and Kurdish oil laws depend on that article,”
Mr. Abdullah said.The other crucial players are the Sunnis and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
Some members of one of the main Sunni parties, Tawafiq, which insists
on federal control of contracts and exclusive state ownership of the
fields, bolted when it became convinced that the Kurds had no intention
of following those guidelines.But the prime minister’s office believes there is a simpler
reason the Sunnis abandoned or at least held off on the deal: signing
it would have given Mr. Maliki a political success that they did not
want him to have. “I think there is a political reason behind
that delay in order not to see the Iraqi government achieve the real
agreement,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Mr.
Maliki. Mr. Rikabi was at Wednesday’s meeting.Ali Baban, who as a senior member of Tawafiq negotiated the
compromise, said that allegation was untrue. “I have a good
relationship” with Mr. Maliki, he said. “This is an issue
of Iraqi unity. This could cause a split in this country.”Mr. Maliki has suggested returning to the original language agreed
to in February and trying once again to push the law through
Parliament. Mr. Salih says there is basic agreement on returning to
that language, but conceded that Sunni participants in
Wednesday’s meeting might insist on a deal that includes changes
to the Iraqi Constitution to safeguard their interests in the
distribution of revenues. A law on how the revenue should be shared is
being developed as a critical companion piece of legislation to the
draft law.The central element of the compromise was agreed to in February
after months of difficult negotiations among Iraq’s political
groups.The main parties in those negotiations were Iraqi Kurds, who were
eager to sign contracts with international oil companies to develop
their northern fields; Arab Shiites, whose population is concentrated
around the country’s southern fields; and Arab Sunnis, with fewer
oil resources where they predominate.Those facts meant that the compromise law had to satisfy both the
Sunni insistence that the central government maintain strong control
over the fields as well as the push by the Kurds and Shiites to give
provincial governments substantial authority to write contracts and
carry out their own development plans.Somehow negotiators managed to strike that balance, but soon after,
the agreement began to crumble. Many of the negotiations centered on a
federal committee that would be set up to review the contracts signed
with oil companies to carry out the development and exploitation of the
fields. The Kurds objected to any requirement that the committee would
have to approve contracts. So in a nuanced bit of language, the
negotiators gave the committee the power only to reject contracts that
did not meet precisely specified criteria.But problems immediately cropped up after the cabinet approved the
draft law and, in what seemed to be a perfunctory step, it went to a
council that was supposed to hone the language to be sure it complied
with Iraqi legal conventions.When the draft emerged from that council, the members of some
parties, particularly the Kurdish ones, thought that the careful
balance struck in the draft had been upset, and they accused Mr.
Shahristani of meddling. Then the law languished in Parliament and,
said Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, the Kurds decided to
send a signal that they would not wait indefinitely and signed the
contract with Dana Gas.“It served as a reminder: ‘If you keep stalling, life goes on,’ ” said Mr. Zebari, who is Kurdish.
On Monday the Kurdistan Regional Government, or K.R.G., issued
another rejoinder to the oil minister’s views that the
Kurds’ moves were illegal. “His views are irrelevant to
what the K.R.G. is doing legally and constitutionally in
Kurdistan,” the regional government said.Mr. Shahristani was apparently traveling and did not respond to
e-mail messages sent Wednesday. But Saleem Abdullah al-Juburi, a
Tawafiq member who participated in Wednesday’s meeting, gave his
own assessment of the Kurdish agreements with Hunt and Dana Gas.
“The contracts are not legal,” he said.Reporting was
contributed by Ahmad Fadam, Ali Hamdani and Khalid al-Ansary from
Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from northern Iraq.
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CHRIS CROCKER: GOTCHA AMERICA LOVES TO MAKE FUN OF BRITNEY SPEARS
Looks beautifully sweet…
| GUARDIAN Wednesday September 12, 2007 By MARTIN GRIFFITH Associated Press Writer RENO, Nev. (AP) – Steve Fossett survived a nearly 30,000-foot plunge in a crippled balloon, a dangerous swim through the frigid English Channel and hours stranded in shark-infested seas. But 10 days after he took off on a routine flight and never returned, doubts were growing Wednesday as to whether he was still alive. Fossett was scouting sites to attempt to break a land-speed record when his small plane disappeared.
“It’s frustrating, but not tiring,” said George Mixon, a crew member with the Colorado Civil Air Patrol who has been part of the search since Sunday. Survival experts say a trained outdoorsman such as Fossett should have been able to signal rescuers with the emergency beacon from the plane or with his specially equipped wristwatch. Even if those didn’t work, he could have built a fire or an X made of rocks or sticks, they said. “He’s either so injured he can’t signal or he’s perished,” said David McMullen of Berkeley, Calif., a leader of the hiking group Desert Survivors, whose members frequently venture into some of the country’s harshest terrain. Fossett took off on Sept. 3 in a single-engine plane from a private airstrip about 80 miles southeast of Reno. He didn’t leave a flight plan. Maj. Cynthia Ryan of the Nevada Civil Air Patrol said Tuesday she’s still betting on Fossett’s “sheer grit and determination” to keep him alive. “We still find people against all odds,” she said. “Maybe he’s got a couple of broken arms and can’t signal.” Such injuries would worsen Fossett’s chances of finding water in the 17,000-square-mile search area – about twice the size of New Jersey. Authorities believe he was carrying only one bottle of water. “No food, that’s not a problem. No water, that’s a problem. That’s a harsh desert out there,” said Lee Bergthold, director of the Palmdale, Calif.-based Center for Wilderness Studies and a former Marine Corps survival instructor. People can go only two or three days without water in the summer, experts say, and Fossett would be hard-pressed to find water in unfamiliar country, even if he was in good health. Nevada, the driest state in the nation with less than 10 inches of precipitation a year, had an unusually dry winter, and stream flows usually diminish by the late summer even in wet years. “At this point, you’d be lucky to find him alive,” Bergthold said. Temperatures in the search area have been in the 80s and 90s, with lows in the 50s and 60s. Shelter from the sun would be just as important as water, McMullen said. McMullen knows what he’s talking about. Six years ago, he found himself stranded with a severely sprained ankle for three nights in Death Valley National Park. He stayed in the shade of a tree until he was rescued by a military helicopter, with the help of a detailed itinerary he had left his wife. “You’ll lose water faster than you can absorb it in heat, and that’s why a shelter is so important,” he said. McMullen and other survival experts faulted Fossett for not filing a flight plan, which might have allowed searchers to focus on a smaller area. “The itinerary I filed for my 2001 hike saved my life,” McMullen said. — Associated Press writers Sandra Chereb in Minden and Scott Sonner in Reno contributed to this story. — |
Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) — New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick apologized today for videotaping New York Jets coaches during a National Football League game.
Belichick, whose team has won three of the last six Super Bowl title games, said in a statement issued by the Patriots that he spoke with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell this week and explained that the case stemmed from his own interpretation of the league rules.
NFL security removed a Patriots employee suspected of attempting to steal the Jets’ signals and seized his video camera and tape during the Sept. 9 season-opening game in East Rutherford, New Jersey, won by New England 38-14. Belichick said the Patriots hadn’t been notified of any league ruling.
“I want to apologize to everyone who has been affected, most of all ownership, staff and players,” the coach said. He declined to elaborate in a televised news conference held just after the statement was released.
NFL spokesman Greg Aiello and Jets spokesman Bruce Speight didn’t immediately return messages at their offices seeking comment.
ESPN reported on its Web site yesterday that Goodell has determined the Patriots broke league rules and is considering sanctions, including docking them “multiple draft picks.”
Green Bay Packers President Bob Harlan told ESPN that his team’s security guards identified the cameraman as the same one who was removed from the sidelines of a game against the Patriots at Lambeau Field on Nov. 19, 2006.
League Warning
Former Jets quarterback Boomer Esiason said the NFL circulated a memo last September warning of severe penalties for videotaping other teams’ signals. He also said the Patriots’ success made them targets for critics around the league.
The Patriots have won almost 70 percent of their games since Belichick became coach in January 2000. He is the only NFL coach to win three Super Bowls in four years and his 13-3 playoff record is the second-best in league history, behind Vince Lombardi, for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named.
“Everyone’s piling on right now, there’s no question about it,” Esiason, now an NFL analyst for CBS, said in an interview. “There’s 31 other teams that would love to knock the Patriots off their perch.”
The episode is the latest in a rivalry between the Jets and Patriots that Bill Parcells, who coached both teams, termed a “Border War.”
Teams Rivalry
Parcells left the Patriots in 1997 following a Super Bowl appearance and took over the Jets a month later. In 2000, Belichick took the job coaching the Jets, quit after one day, and then accepted a job coaching New England 3 1/2 weeks later.
Last year, the Jets hired Patriots assistant Eric Mangini as coach and Belichick refused to shake his hand after their first meeting of the season. New England also filed tampering charges with the NFL after the Jets held contract talks with former Patriots wide receiver Deion Branch, who wound up being traded to Seattle by New England.
The New York Herald Sun 