February 12, 2007
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- Today’s Papers,Market Attacks in Baghdad,CNBC Anchor, 8 Days, 10 Feet
8 Days, 10 Feet of Snow Still Not Done
Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York TimesWorkers tackling snowbanks around homes in Mexico, a community in Oswego County, N.Y.
8 Days, 10 Feet and the Snow Isn’t Done Yet
OSWEGO, N.Y., Feb. 11 — First the fire hydrants vanished. Then the tombstones. Then went the mailboxes, parked cars, front doors, stop signs and the bottoms of roadside billboards.
By the time the snow stopped falling this weekend over Oswego County in upstate New York, the streets were lined with snowbanks that obscured anyone walking behind them, shoveling crews were charging upward of $200 an hour to clear the tops of houses, and gawkers were driving in from hours away.
“This is the roof, right?” Mark Fahnestock, 27, asked his companion, Jessica Stiffler, 26, both of Lancaster, Pa., Sunday after he climbed a snowbank so tall that it merged with the roof of a church in Scriba. She took a photograph of him holding their 2-year-old daughter, Jazmine.
They had left home at 5:30 a.m. “We don’t get this kind of snow,” Ms. Stiffler said.
Oswego County, a rustic string of towns and villages on the southeastern rim of Lake Ontario, received 5 to 10 feet of snow over eight days. In one town, Redfield, the National Weather Service reported an unofficial total of 11 feet 8 inches, which would be a state record for snowfall from a single storm event. And the Weather Service said more snow was on the way.
By contrast, the New York City record, set exactly one year ago today, was 26.9 inches as measured in Central Park.
Life here took on an icy sort of absurdity. People posed for pictures on snowbanks as if they were atop Mount Everest. Someone turned a 25-foot mound of snow in the parking lot of Paul’s Big M supermarket in Oswego into a billboard for their snow-blowing service. Someone else painted a different sort of message next to it: a declaration of love, from Brian to Brooke.
A bouncer at Old City Hall bar in the city of Oswego cleared the steps outside by pouring salt from a beer pitcher. Workers at Novelis, an aluminum manufacturing plant, slept in an office to keep the factory running throughout the storm.
Homeowners dug zigzag mazes to their back doors, to their cars, to their porches. Some were for business, others for pleasure.
Tom Boney, 41, built one in his backyard to keep his three children entertained. “It’s good to get out of the house,” said Mr. Boney, who recently moved to Oswego from Wisconsin with his wife and children.
Last week, Gov. Eliot Spitzer declared a state of emergency for the area, sending in extra road-clearing crews and other help, and most of the major thoroughfares had been cleared by Sunday. The authorities said there had been some injuries related to snow removal in the county, but no deaths.
“We have, up to this point, considered ourselves very fortunate that the human-needs aspect has been minimal,” said Patricia Egan, Oswego County’s director of emergency management.
Considering their geography and past history of storms, the cities and towns near Lake Ontario were not unprepared. Anthony Leotta, Oswego’s longtime city engineer, said that its roads were built an average of about 50 percent wider than in other communities, to allow plows to navigate the streets easily and prevent snowbanks from stopping traffic.
Some residents shrugged off the snow the way San Franciscans shrug off earthquakes. They recited inch totals of previous lake-effect storms with pride, often recalling some time when it snowed harder.
Kevin Dwyer of Parish, who spent six hours carving a pathway to his back door out of five feet of snow, said he was not overly impressed by the storm. “This is the second-worst one,” he said, comparing it unfavorably to one a few years ago.
Still, the sheer quantity seemed to catch many others off guard. The State University of New York at Oswego, the alma mater of the television weatherman Al Roker and typically one of the last to give in to conditions, was forced to cancel classes for three days last week. “We don’t know that we have ever done that,” said Tim Nekritz, a college spokesman.
Armed with shovels and the phone numbers of roof clearers who advertised high on the lampposts, people went to work, plowing, blowing, scooping, pushing. On Sunday, a seven-man crew from Ithaca removed the snow from the roof of a house in the village of Mexico. They charged $215 an hour, for a three-hour job.
Others lent their labor. “Everybody pitches in,” said Steve Canale, 53, owner of the Press Box bar and restaurant on First Street in Oswego. “If somebody drives by with a plow, they’ll stop and help you.”
Restaurants, gas stations and supermarkets were doing a brisk business — slower than normal, merchants said, but steady.
Dipak Patel, the owner of a gas station in Parish, said he was running out of milk, bread and beer. Lori Lillie, who runs Lillie’s diner on Main Street in Parish, watched Sunday as table after table ordered bowl after bowl of cream of broccoli soup.
St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church on Cayuga Street also had a crowd. “A lot of people walked all the way across town just to get here,” said Phillip Kehoe, 51, a deacon.
Despite a reprieve for most of Sunday, forecasters said they expected more snow late last night as well as Monday and Tuesday.
A lake-effect snowstorm, in which cold, dry winds sweep across bodies of warmer lake water, was the cause of the powerful blast of snow, forecasters said, and is the usual cause of some of the area’s heaviest snowfall.
The official state record for snowfall from a single event is 10 feet 7 inches in Montague, in Lewis County, northeast of Oswego, from Dec. 26, 2001, to Jan. 1, 2002, said John Rozbicki, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Buffalo. He said that on Monday the Weather Service would begin a check of snowfall data from Redfield, including a review of radar results, before deciding whether the record had been broken.
“It could be that the snowfall total came from two separate events,” Mr. Rozbicki said. “We also have to check how often the person who took the measurements took the measurements, and how they were done.”
In Scriba, which received almost eight feet of snow, Joe Scozzari, 63, a lifelong resident, was clearing a path on the roof of his garage Sunday. “I’m retired,” he said with a shrug, holding his shovel. “The exercise will do me good.”
He worked happily, but quickly. “There’s more snow coming,” he said.
Trymaine Lee contributed reporting.
Top CNBC Anchor
Arnaldo Magnani/Getty ImagesCNBC’s Maria Bartiromo with racecar driver Mario Andretti at the 2004 gala for the Columbus Day parade in New York.
CNBCMaria Bartiromo as CNBC’s “Business Center” co-host in 1997.
Questions Grow About a Top CNBC Anchor
In November 2005, Citigroup gathered top clients at a lush spa resort in Napa Valley for two days of wine tasting and a chance to road test some of the hottest luxury cars on the market.
The test drivers included Todd S. Thomson, then the chief executive of Citigroup’s wealth management arm, car collectors, clients of the bank and Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC anchor and celebrity guest.
Their charge: To pick the 2006 car of the year for Robb Report, the luxury magazine. Like many of the judges, Ms. Bartiromo chose the bright red Ferrari Spider, according to one attendee. So did Mr. Thomson, a car enthusiast.
“It’s the ultimate package of sex and performance,” he told a reporter for the magazine.
With its blend of high living, glitz and privileged access, the event provides a glimpse of the rarefied world inhabited by Ms. Bartiromo, who, in her years as CNBC’s most recognizable face, has lent to the reporting of once gray business news a veneer of gloss and celebrity.
Socializing with sources is a long journalistic tradition, especially for television personalities whose renown often allows them to travel in the same elite circles as their subjects.
But for Ms. Bartiromo, who accompanied Mr. Thomson last fall on Citigroup’s corporate jet to a series of client and other bank-sponsored functions in China, her ability to gain entree into the exclusive and mostly male world of chief executives and financial titans has made her a valuable commodity to CNBC.
After Mr. Thomson’s abrupt departure from Citigroup, however, such ties have raised questions about her closeness to her sources, all of whom she also covers as the cable network’s top anchor. CNBC has said that it paid commercial fare to Citigroup for Ms. Bartiromo’s trip to China. And last week, Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, CNBC’s parent, voiced his support for Ms. Bartiromo and the cable network.
“Substantially, I don’t think she did anything wrong,” he said.
A CNBC spokesman said that Ms. Bartiromo flew commercial to the California event and that the network paid for her flight as it was network business.
Ms. Bartiromo declined to comment for this article. CNBC declined to comment on whether executives had any discussions with her concerning her relationship with Mr. Thomson. However, people inside of CNBC did say that she will continue to cover the company as part of her regular duties.
Whether it is providing a personalized video tribute — shot from inside the CNBC newsroom — to Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman of the buyout giant Blackstone Group to celebrate his 60th birthday or mingling with a source at a benefit for the New York City Ballet, Ms. Bartiromo’s proximity to the people she covers has created a model of journalism that jibes perfectly with CNBC’s mandate to ramp up its ratings by adding pizzazz and drama to its coverage.
Still, Mr. Thomson’s departure and Ms. Bartiromo’s connection to him have raised questions within the network over the possible tension between CNBC’s duty to pursue big financial news stories and its loyalty to Ms. Bartiromo.
On Dec. 11, after the appointment of Robert Druskin as chief operating officer of Citigroup, Ms. Bartiromo and Charles Gasparino, a CNBC on-air editor, had a brief on-air clash when Ms. Bartiromo remarked that an earlier report by Mr. Gasparino that Sallie L. Krawcheck would leave her job as chief financial officer did not pan out.
“That is not what I said,” Mr. Gasparino shot back. “I didn’t say that,” as he argued that Ms. Krawcheck and Mr. Thomson were no longer heirs to succeed Charles O. Prince as chief executive.
Subsequently, according to people with an understanding of how the story unfolded, Mr. Gasparino learned that, in fact, Mr. Thomson’s job was in jeopardy.
He explained this to Jonathan Wald, head of news programming, that he had been told by people within Citigroup that top management had examined Mr. Thomson’s conduct, specifically the occasions that Ms. Bartiromo joined him on the company jet. Mr. Wald told Mr. Gasparino to pursue the story, these people say.
When Ms. Bartiromo got wind of Mr. Gasparino’s reporting, she told Mr. Wald, complaining that her name was being dragged into the matter, these people say. Mr. Wald said that reporting the story was Mr. Gasparino’s job.
Nevertheless, Mr. Gasparino never reported on Mr. Thomson’s threatened job status. He was urged to proceed cautiously with the story, but some within the network say Ms. Bartiromo’s role in the story prevented it from being fully reported.
Mr. Wald adamantly disagrees with that interpretation. “We were clear from the beginning about reporting the story to the fullest. We did not air it because it was not adequately sourced. It didn’t meet our criteria from a journalist’s standpoint, and it clearly wouldn’t have met our lawyers’ criteria.”
On Jan 22, when Citigroup announced Mr. Thomson’s resignation, Mr. Gasparino could barely contain his frustration.
“Two weeks ago I caught wind that essentially Todd Thomson was out,” he said on air that morning when the news broke. Compounding this tension is the fact that no CNBC reporter or anchor has mentioned Ms. Bartiromo’s link to Mr. Thomson’s departure.
Typically, Ms Bartiromo’s interviewing style can be probing, aggressive and, her special access notwithstanding, she can make even some of her best sources sweat a bit on camera.
In an interview with Robert L. Nardelli, the recently ousted chief executive of Home Depot, she peppered him with sharp questions relating to his conduct and governance at the company. And a question posed to President Bush about his use of Google elicited a revealing response from the president as he referred to the search engine as “the Google.”
“She is not a marshmallow,” said Gerard R. Roche, the chairman of the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, who has been interviewed by Ms. Bartiromo.
John J. Mack, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, agreed, recalling an interview he had with her. “She put me on the spot big time,” he said, adding that he did not socialize with Ms. Bartiromo.
“She is a professional,” Mr. Mack said. “You can’t assume that you will go on air and that it will be a cakewalk.”
At the same time, the occasional gushing aside can betray an admiration for her subjects — many of whom she knows socially, either from events at the New York City Ballet, where she is a trustee, or her regular lunches at San Pietro, the favored restaurant of Wall Street titans.
“When we come back, the allure of John Mack,” she once said during an interview.
In many instances, the sentiment on Wall Street seems to be mutual.
It is an appreciation that dates back to Ms. Bartiromo’s early days in the mid-1990s, when she made a name for herself as the first journalist to report live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
“At the height of CNBC mania, we had these C.E.O.’s and celebrities beating down our door to ring the stock exchange bell,” said Robert T. Zito, a former executive vice president at the stock exchange. “The one thing they wanted to do was meet Maria.”
For the daughter of a restaurant owner in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, her rise to celebrity status — there are Web sites devoted to her, Joey Ramone wrote a song in her honor and she has recently trademarked her “Money Honey” nickname — has been meteoric.
And while much has been made of her Sophia Loren-like looks, her early career ascent was propelled by pluck, ambition and like another famous, albeit fictional, product of Bay Ridge, Tony Manero in “Saturday Night Fever,” a hunger to make it big across the river in Manhattan.
She switched from C. W. Post College to New York University, and in her first media job at WMCA Radio, she impressed the radio personality Barry Farber with her willingness to do more than her share of dirty work.
On one occasion, Mr. Farber recalled, he was sent “100 pounds of frozen North Carolina pork barbecue” and before it could melt, Ms. Bartiromo not only found a charity to take it, but delivered the meat herself in her own car. “She had the stuff and she knew how to deploy it,” he said.
In 1990, just out of college, she met Jonathan Steinberg, the son of Saul Steinberg, the corporate raider. As the two began dating, it was Mr. Steinberg, who presided over a personal finance magazine and a hedge fund, who attracted the media attention. The couple married in 1999.
But Ms. Bartiromo’s public profile would eclipse his. After a stint working for Lou Dobbs at CNN, she moved to CNBC in 1993. She became a star once she started broadcasting from the stock exchange floor.
As her recognition grew, so did the fortunes of CNBC, and it is estimated that her compensation exceeds $1 million.
And when she disclosed last year that the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, had told her in a conversation at the White House Correspondents dinner that the markets had misinterpreted his remarks on interest rates, her reputation as an insider became even more entrenched.
Despite the controversy, Ms. Bartiromo remains a staple of CNBC. And she has kept up her public appearances, and her sense of humor.
Earlier this month, she was scheduled to present a lifetime leadership award to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan at the CNBC executive achievement award ceremony, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said with a slight giggle as she stepped up to the dais. “But I had to fly commercial.”
Market Attacks in Baghdad Kill at Least 67
Khalid Mohammed/Associated PressCentral Baghdad’s Shorja Market after today’s attacks
Market Attacks in Baghdad Kill at Least 67
BAGHDAD, Feb. 12 — Four back-to-back explosions at two markets in central Baghdad killed at least 67 people and wounded 155 today, charring drivers in their cars, shredding stores and setting ablaze a seven-story building full of clothing stores that burned for more than six hours, witnesses and officials said.
The blasts — three at Shorja market, the capital’s largest bazaar, and one at Bab al-Sharji market a few blocks away — struck shortly after Iraq’s Shiite-led government marked the first anniversary, by the Islamic calendar, of an attack that destroyed a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra. That bombing, which shattered the shrine’s golden dome, ignited a wave of sectarian violence in Iraq that has yet to be extinguished.
With its timing and severity, today’s attack seemed intended to both fuel the country’s sectarian hatreds and upstage the new American-Iraqi security plan for Baghdad.
One thunderous explosion could be heard in the middle of an upbeat outdoor news conference by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki in the Green Zone, roughly two miles from the market. Mr. Maliki did not flinch at the sound of the blast or interrupt his remarks. (“I’m very hopeful that the Iraqis will work together to support the Iraqi security forces and police” — boom! — “who are in charge of the operation,” he said.)
Still, the bombing only underscored the challenge Mr. Maliki faces in trying to inspire public confidence as sectarian violence continues.
The attack at Shorja market was at least the fifth bombing there since August. It was one of more than a dozen strikes at markets over the past year, which have killed a total of more than 500 people. And it came on a day when the Iraqi High Tribunal ruled that Saddam Hussein‘s vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, should follow his former boss to the gallows, despite objections from American officials and Western observers, who feared that another rapid hanging would further undermine the credibility of Mr. Maliki’s government.
The court initially sentenced Mr. Ramadan to life in prison for his role in the killing of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail in the 1980s, and the Iraqi judges who switched his punishment to death “didn’t give any legal reasons for their change of action,” said Miranda Sissons, leader of the Iraq program at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York. She said no new evidence had emerged since Mr. Ramadan’s November conviction.
“The court is no longer making a judicial decision,” she said. “It’s political.”
There were calls for peace today, too — most notably from Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — but they were largely drowned out by fury and cries for vengeance.
After he was sentenced to death, Mr. Ramadan said he was innocent and promised that God “will take revenge on everyone who oppressed me.”
At Shorja market, where a roadside bomb, a car bomb and a truck bomb blew up just after noon local time, people directed their anger at Sunni insurgents who they believed were responsible for the attack.
Ali Hassan Flayha, a merchant from the market who witnessed the explosions, said the insurgents wanted only destruction, to stop daily life, kill as many people as possible and keep the public angry at the Iraqi and American governments.
“The insurgents won’t let us do our work,” he said. “They are shooting at us, kidnapping our workers, starting fires just to keep us a way from the market — and they’re using car bombs all the time.”
He said he could recall at least seven bomb attacks at the market since 2003. Bloodied bodies have become a familiar sight. Checkpoints and government protection have not.
“The goal of the insurgents is to show us that the government is weak,” he said. “We understand — they’re right.”
Mr. Flayha and other witnesses said that one of the bombs today was concealed in a pickup truck that parked outside the Abu Hanifa building, a seven-story concrete structure with shops and restaurants on the first floor, and clothing wholesale businesses filling the rest of the building.
The explosion, witnesses said, set the building on fire, trapping workers amid mannequins and clothing that burned like kindling and belched out smoke. Fire trucks arrived but were unable to put out the blaze for hours, leading some to question whether they had enough water.
In the streets, bodies sat in cars, blackened. Young men pushed wooden carts with wounded survivors, their heads and bodies bandaged.
At one point, about four hours after the explosions, Methal al-Alussi, a Sunni Arab member of Parliament, visited the scene. Merchants told him “you have to do something to help us.”
“We will try to figure it out,” said Mr. Alussi, who arrived encircled with more than 20 armed guards.
Meanwhile, in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora, which American and Iraqi troops initially labeled a success after clearing houses this summer, two people were killed in a drive-by shooting, an Interior Ministry official said. Three people were killed by mortar rounds in western Baghdad and the authorities found 28 bodies throughout the city.
In Diyala Province, where American and Iraqi troops have been fighting Sunni insurgents for control, gunmen publicly beheaded seven people, the police said. One group of suspected insurgents shot six people in the head in a public garden in one of Baquba’s northern neighborhoods. A few miles further north, another group of insurgents beheaded a policeman with a sword in a public square where children usually played soccer.
In both cases, the police said, the gunmen forced residents from their homes and made them gather to watch the killings.
Reporting was contributed by Qais Mizher, Ali Adeeb and Abdul Razzaq Al-Saiedi.
