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Mets trade Cy Young winner Dickey to Blue Jays

NEW YORK (AP) — Eager for a new challenge and certainly a better chance to win, R.A. Dickey broke the news of his trade even before the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Mets.

A few minutes ahead of the teams announcing the seven-player swap Monday that sent the NL Cy Young winner to Toronto, he tweeted his thanks to Mets fans and added he was all set to pitch for the Blue Jays.

"Now that its official, I want to say that I don't have the words to express how grateful I am to you for the steadfast support," Dickey posted on Twitter. "Thank you for making me feel wanted."

"Looking forward to a new chapter with the Jays," he wrote.

Toronto acquired the 38-year-old knuckleballer and catchers Josh Thole and Mike Nickeas. The Mets got top catching prospect Travis d'Arnaud and catcher John Buck, plus minor league right-hander Noah Syndergaard and outfielder Wuilmer Becerra.

"It was an extraordinary privilege for us to be part of his career," Mets general manager Sandy Alderson said about Dickey on a conference call. "The final chapter has not been written."

Earlier in the day, Dickey and the busy Blue Jays agreed to a new contract, clearing the way for the Mets to send him to a team that's spending a lot of money trying to join baseball's elite. Toronto has now acquired All-Stars Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, Melky Cabrera and Dickey since the season ended.

Dickey was already signed for $5.25 million next year. His new contract adds two more seasons for $25 million — he will get $12 million in both 2014 and 2015, plus there's a club option for 2016 at $12 million with a $1 million buyout.

Dickey needed to pass a physical before the teams announced the deal. He became the fourth pitcher to win the Cy Young and be traded before the next season, joining David Cone, Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens.

Alderson said the Mets' preference going into the offseason was to re-sign Dickey. But as the winter meetings approached in early December, Alderson said Dickey's value "in a possible trade was also sky-rocketing. At some point, those lines crossed."

Several teams made runs at a deal for Dickey, with Texas and the Los Angeles Angels among those in the mix. Alderson said while some clubs popped in and out of trade talks, Toronto's interest remained steady.

Alderson said the Mets didn't completely decide to trade Dickey until they saw the final package that Toronto offered.

"This was a complicated deal," Alderson said.

The Blue Jays have missed the playoffs since winning their second straight World Series crown in 1993, and have boldly moved to reshape a team that went 73-89 last season in the rugged AL East.

Last month, they acquired a high-priced trio — Johnson and Buehrle on the mound, Reyes at shortstop — in a 12-player trade with the Miami Marlins.

Toronto later signed Cabrera, an All-Star outfielder with San Francisco whose season ended when he was suspended 50 games for a positive testosterone test.

Dickey was 20-6 with a 2.73 ERA last season, capping his rapid rise from the majors' scrap heap to an ace pitcher. He did it by perfecting a way to throw his floater faster than previous knuckleballers, and tossing it with exceptional control.

Dickey becomes part of a stellar rotation that includes Johnson, Buehrle and returning starters Ricky Romero and Brandon Morrow.

Thole gives the Blue Jays a catcher who is familiar with handling Dickey's knuckleball. He joined a lineup that features former home run champ Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, who hit 42 homers last season.

Despite a big spot in the rotation to fill minus Dickey, Alderson said the Mets were not giving up on next season.

"We certainly are not punting on 2013," he said.

D'Arnaud turns 24 in February. He hit .333 at Triple-A Las Vegas with 16 homers and 52 RBIs before tearing a knee ligament trying to break up a double play in June. He has been an All-Star at several levels during his climb through the minors.

Alderson called d'Arnaud the top catching prospect in the minors and predicted he could contribute on the major league level next year.

Popular with Mets fans, Dickey perturbed team management when he spoke about his contract situation last week during a club event at Citi Field for children displaced from their schools by Superstorm Sandy.

Dickey said he enjoyed playing for the Mets and added it would be "disappointing" if he went through his option year without a new deal and became a free agent.

"If that's the decision that they make, I feel like it would be unfortunate because it probably is going mean that I'm not going to be back," Dickey said then. "And that would be sad."

Buck was an All-Star with Toronto in 2010. The 32-year-old hit .192 with 12 home runs and 41 RBIs for Miami last season, then was part of the big trade between Marlins and Blue Jays.

The 20-year-old Syndergaard went 8-5 with a 2.60 ERA for Class A Lansing. The 18-year-old Becerra hit .250 with four RBIs in 11 games in the rookie Gulf Coast League.

Thole hit .234 with one homer and 21 RBIs in 104 games last season. The 26-year-old played four seasons with the Mets.

Nickeas split last season with the Mets and Triple-A Buffalo. The 29-year-old hit .174 with one homer and 13 RBIs for New York.

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N.I.H. to Start Initiatives to Raise Number of Minority Scientists

Few blacks enter biomedical research, and those who do often encounter obstacles in their career paths.

A study published last year found that a black scientist was markedly less likely to obtain research money from the National Institutes of Health than a white one — even when differences of education and stature were taken into account.

The institute has now announced initiatives aimed at helping blacks and other ethnic and racial groups who have been unrepresented among medical researchers, including a pilot program that will test a grant review process in which all identifying information about the applicant is removed.

The initiatives take a step further than addressing the problem identified in the study — the goal is to entice more minorities into the field.

“It needed to go well beyond that,” said Francis S. Collins, director of the N.I.H., “because even if we fixed that, it would still be the case that there would be a very distressingly low number of individuals from underrepresented groups who are part of what we’re trying to do in science.”

The N.I.H. program will provide research opportunities for undergraduate students, financial support for undergraduate and graduate students, and set up a mentoring program to help students and researchers beginning their careers.

When the program ramps up, it will cost about $50 million a year and support about 600 students.

The N.I.H. formed a group of 16 scientists to study the causes of the problem, and the group presented its recommendations in June. At a meeting this month of his advisory committee, Dr. Collins and other officials discussed how to implement the recommendations.

At the meeting, Dr. Reed Tuckson, an executive vice president and the chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group, who was one of the group’s co-chairman, acknowledged the controversies that would inevitably accompany the effort, especially as the N.I.H., like the rest of the federal government, could soon face sizable cuts in its budget.

“This is a heavy, laden issue which no matter which way you turn, someone is going to be irritated,” he said.

Dr. Tuckson, who is black, urged his colleagues to support the efforts. “A lot of people put themselves on the line,” he said.

The study last year, published in the journal Science, reviewed 83,000 grant applications between 2000 and 2006. For every 100 applications submitted by white scientists, 29 were awarded grants. For every 100 applications from black scientists, only 16 were financed.

After statistical adjustments to ensure a more apples-to-apples comparison, the gap narrowed but persisted.

That raised the uncomfortable possibility that the scientists reviewing the applications were discriminating against black scientists, possibly reflecting an unconscious bias. Members of other races and ethnic groups, including Hispanics, do not appear to run into the same difficulties, the study said.

Only about 500 doctoral degrees in a year in biological sciences go to underrepresented minorities, like blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.

To persuade more students to pursue this as a career, the N.I.H. aims to provide more summer research opportunities for undergraduates.

“That is the single strongest predictor of somebody deciding that that’s the career they want to pursue,” Dr. Collins said of mentored research.”

The program will also provide money to professors so that they can have more time to mentor students or train new mentors.

“They’re talking about a multipronged approach, which I think is a smart approach,” said Dr. Raynard S. Kington, president of Grinnell College in Iowa and a former deputy director of N.I.H. who was a co-author of the Science paper. “If they had just said, ‘We’re going to focus on review,’ I would have been deeply disappointed.”

Donna K. Ginther, an economics professor at the University of Kansas who led the Science study, has taken a closer look at a subset of 2,400 proposals included in the original study. It turns out, she said, that the black applicants published fewer papers and have fewer co-authors than other scientists.

That helps explain the financing gap, but also suggests that the professional networks of black scientists are smaller. “The hypothesis being that professionally, they’re not as integrated,” Dr. Ginther said, “and that’s why I think the mentoring network is such a good idea.”

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How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs to Get Its Way in Mexico

SAN JUAN TEOTIHUACÁN, Mexico — Wal-Mart longed to build in Elda Pineda’s alfalfa field. It was an ideal location, just off this town’s bustling main entrance and barely a mile from its ancient pyramids, which draw tourists from around the world. With its usual precision, Wal-Mart calculated it would attract 250 customers an hour if only it could put a store in Mrs. Pineda’s field.

One major obstacle stood in Wal-Mart’s way.

After years of study, the town’s elected leaders had just approved a new zoning map. The leaders wanted to limit growth near the pyramids, and they considered the town’s main entrance too congested already. As a result, the 2003 zoning map prohibited commercial development on Mrs. Pineda’s field, seemingly dooming Wal-Mart’s hopes.

But 30 miles away in Mexico City, at the headquarters of Wal-Mart de Mexico, executives were not about to be thwarted by an unfavorable zoning decision. Instead, records and interviews show, they decided to undo the damage with one well-placed $52,000 bribe.

The plan was simple. The zoning map would not become law until it was published in a government newspaper. So Wal-Mart de Mexico arranged to bribe an official to change the map before it was sent to the newspaper, records and interviews show. Sure enough, when the map was published, the zoning for Mrs. Pineda’s field was redrawn to allow Wal-Mart’s store.

Problem solved.

Wal-Mart de Mexico broke ground months later, provoking fierce opposition. Protesters decried the very idea of a Wal-Mart so close to a cultural treasure. They contended the town’s traditional public markets would be decimated, its traffic mess made worse. Months of hunger strikes and sit-ins consumed Mexico’s news media. Yet for all the scrutiny, the story of the altered map remained a secret. The store opened for Christmas 2004, affirming Wal-Mart’s emerging dominance in Mexico.

The secret held even after a former Wal-Mart de Mexico lawyer contacted Wal-Mart executives in Bentonville, Ark., and told them how Wal-Mart de Mexico routinely resorted to bribery, citing the altered map as but one example. His detailed account — he had been in charge of getting building permits throughout Mexico — raised alarms at the highest levels of Wal-Mart and prompted an internal investigation.

But as The New York Times revealed in April, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut down the investigation in 2006. They did so even though their investigators had found a wealth of evidence supporting the lawyer’s allegations. The decision meant authorities were not notified. It also meant basic questions about the nature, extent and impact of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s conduct were never asked, much less answered.

The Times has now picked up where Wal-Mart’s internal investigation was cut off, traveling to dozens of towns and cities in Mexico, gathering tens of thousands of documents related to Wal-Mart de Mexico permits, and interviewing scores of government officials and Wal-Mart employees, including 15 hours of interviews with the former lawyer, Sergio Cicero Zapata.

The Times’s examination reveals that Wal-Mart de Mexico was not the reluctant victim of a corrupt culture that insisted on bribes as the cost of doing business. Nor did it pay bribes merely to speed up routine approvals. Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance — public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.

Through confidential Wal-Mart documents, The Times identified 19 store sites across Mexico that were the target of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s bribes. The Times then matched information about specific bribes against permit records for each site. Clear patterns emerged. Over and over, for example, the dates of bribe payments coincided with dates when critical permits were issued. Again and again, the strictly forbidden became miraculously attainable.

Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.

But there is no better example of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s methods than its conquest of Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field. In Teotihuacán, The Times found that Wal-Mart de Mexico executives approved at least four different bribe payments — more than $200,000 in all — to build just medium-size supermarket. Without those payoffs, records and interviews show, Wal-Mart almost surely would not have been allowed to build in Mrs. Pineda’s field.

The Teotihuacán case also raises new questions about the way Wal-Mart’s leaders in the United States responded to evidence of widespread corruption in their largest foreign subsidiary.

Wal-Mart’s leadership was well aware of the protests here in 2004. (The controversy was covered by several news outlets in the United States, including The Times.) From the start, protest leaders insisted that corruption surely played a role in the store’s permits. Although woefully short on specifics, their complaints prompted multiple investigations by Mexican authorities. One of those investigations was still under way when Wal-Mart’s top executives first learned of Mr. Cicero’s account of bribes in Teotihuacán (pronounced Tay-o-tea-wah-KHAN).

But Wal-Mart’s leaders did not tell Mexican authorities about his allegations, not even after their own investigators concluded there was “reasonable suspicion” to believe laws had been violated, records and interviews show. Unaware of this new evidence, Mexican investigators said they could find no wrongdoing in Teotihuacán.

Wal-Mart has been under growing scrutiny since The Times disclosed its corruption problems in Mexico, where it is the largest private employer, with 221,000 people working in 2,275 stores, supermarkets and restaurants.

In the United States, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the federal law that makes it a crime for American corporations or their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials. Mexican authorities and Congressional Democrats have also begun investigations, and Wal-Mart has been hit by shareholder lawsuits from several major pension funds.

Wal-Mart declined to discuss its conduct in Teotihuacán while it is continuing its own investigation. The company has hired hundreds of lawyers, investigators and forensic accountants who are examining all 27 of its foreign markets. It has already found potentially serious wrongdoing, including indications of bribery in China, Brazil and India. Several top executives in Mexico and India have been suspended or forced to resign in recent months.

Wal-Mart has also tightened oversight of its internal investigations. It has created high-level positions to help root out corruption. It is spending millions on anticorruption training and background checks of the lawyers and lobbyists who represent Wal-Mart before foreign governments. The company has spent more than $100 million on investigative costs this year.

“We are committed to having a strong and effective global anticorruption program everywhere we operate and taking appropriate action for any instance of noncompliance,” said David W. Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman.

In Mexico, a major focus of Wal-Mart’s investigation is none other than the boxy, brown supermarket in Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field.

Eight years later, it remains the most controversial Wal-Mart in Mexico, a powerful symbol of globalism’s impact on Mexican culture and commerce.

As it turns out, the store also took on symbolic importance within Wal-Mart de Mexico, Mr. Cicero said in an interview. Executives, he said, came to believe that by outmuscling protesters and building in the shadow of a revered national treasure, they would send a message to the entire country: If we can build here, we can build anywhere.

City of the Gods

In ancient times, Teotihuacán was a sprawling metropolis of perhaps 150,000 people. The “city of the gods,” as the Aztecs called it, rose up around a vast temple complex and two great pyramids, the Sun and the Moon. The ancient city is long gone, buried under farm fields, small pueblos and the detritus of bygone civilizations. But the temple complex and pyramids remain, which is why Teotihuacán is so central to Mexico’s cultural patrimony.

Teotihuacán’s leaders naturally wanted to protect this legacy as they began work on a new zoning plan in 2001. To keep the town attractive as a tourist destination, they decided to limit development in the “archaeological zone,” a buffer of protected land that encircles the pyramids. At the same time, they wanted a plan that would lure more tourists into the town’s central square.

“People complained tourists didn’t go into town,” said Víctor Ortiz, a partner in the consulting firm the town hired to draw up its new zoning plan.

By early 2003, just as Mr. Ortiz’s firm was finishing its work, Wal-Mart de Mexico had settled on Teotihuacán as a ripe target for expansion. Its population, nearly 50,000, was growing fast, and its commerce was dominated by small neighborhood shops and a traditional public market in the central square — exactly the type of competition Wal-Mart de Mexico had vanquished in town after town.

Mr. Cicero, a trim, sharp-featured man, recalled how Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field jumped out as Wal-Mart’s real estate executives scoured aerial photographs of Teotihuacán. By putting one of Wal-Mart’s Bodega Aurrera supermarkets at the town’s main entrance, they could create a choke point that would effectively place the town off limits to competitors. There was also space to add other types of Wal-Mart stores — restaurants or department stores — down the road. “We would be slamming the gate on the whole town,” he said.

But Wal-Mart officials got a cold reception when they began to inquire about permits at Teotihuacán’s municipal offices. Saúl Martínez, an employee in the urban development office, recalled telling Wal-Mart’s representatives that a supermarket could not be built in Mrs. Pineda’s field, because the field was zoned for housing. Wal-Mart would need a zoning change. But a supermarket, he told them, was sure to generate strong opposition because of the traffic chaos it would create.

“Go look for something else,” he recalled telling Wal-Mart.

At first, Mr. Cicero’s team thought it had found a perfectly legal solution to the zoning problem. Only a narrow strip of land separated Mrs. Pineda’s field from Hidalgo Avenue, the main road into town. If Wal-Mart could build an entrance across that strip, zoning rules would let it rely on Hidalgo Avenue’s zoning, which allowed commercial development. But Wal-Mart could not get a right of way, despite months of trying.

By then, the municipality was rushing to complete its new zoning plan. Officials were already holding public meetings to present the plan and solicit feedback. A final vote was scheduled for Aug. 6, 2003.

The Times obtained four different copies of the new zoning map as it existed on the eve of the vote. All four, including two found in the town’s urban development office, confirm that housing was the only kind of development allowed on Mrs. Pineda’s field. There is no record of Wal-Mart seeking a last-minute change, and nine officials closely involved in drafting the plan all said in separate interviews that they were certain Wal-Mart made no such request.

“I would remember,” said Humberto Peña, then the mayor of Teotihuacán. “And if they would have asked that, my answer would have been no.”

After two years of painstaking work, Mr. Peña and the municipal council unanimously approved Teotihuacán’s new zoning plan on Aug. 6

The next day Mr. Peña sent the new map to the state’s Office of Urban and Regional Planning, a bureaucratic outpost of roughly a dozen employees in Toluca, the State of Mexico’s capital. The office’s main job was to verify that local zoning plans fit the state’s development goals. It also handled the critical final step — arranging publication of completed plans in the state’s official newspaper, the Government’s Gazette.

An Altered Map

If the council’s vote seemingly dashed Wal-Mart’s hopes for Teotihuacán, Wal-Mart de Mexico’s executives certainly acted as if they knew something the rest of the world did not.

On Aug. 12, records show, they asked Wal-Mart’s leadership in the United States to approve their plan to spend about $8 million on a Bodega Aurrera in Mrs. Pineda’s field. The request was approved by Wal-Mart’s international real estate committee, made up of 20 or so top executives, including S. Robson Walton, the company’s chairman.

The committee’s approval, records show, was contingent on obtaining “zoning for commercial use.”

By law, the state Office of Urban and Regional Planning could not make zoning changes on maps it reviewed. If there were problems, it was supposed to send the map back to the town for revisions. Teotihuacán’s plan, however, was quickly approved and then sent to the Government’s Gazette on Aug. 20.

It typically took the Gazette a few weeks to publish a new zoning plan. Only then did it become law. But even before Teotihuacán’s map was published, Wal-Mart de Mexico did two very curious things: First, it began an expensive soil mechanics study of Mrs. Pineda’s field, which it would later lease. Second, it submitted an application to the Business Attention Commission, a state agency that helps developers get permits.

The application and the soil study would have been a foolish waste of time and money, assuming the soon-to-be-published map matched what the Teotihuacán council approved on Aug. 6. It made perfect sense, though, for a company that had reason to believe the map would be published with a single strategically situated change.

The Times found evidence of that change on a computer disc stored in a shoe box inside the Office of Urban and Regional Planning. The disc, created by a senior official in the office, held a copy of Teotihuacán’s zoning map as it existed on Aug. 20, the day it was sent to the Government’s Gazette.

On the map, the zoning on Mrs. Pineda’s field had been changed to allow a commercial center.

“One thing I am sure of — this was altered,” Alejandro Heredia, a partner in the consulting firm that created Teotihuacán’s zoning map, said when he was shown that Aug. 20 map.

“It was surgical work,” he said, adding, “It would be quite a gift to someone who wanted to do something here.”

It was a safe bet that a single small change would not be noticed by Teotihuacán’s municipal council. Because of term limits, the entire council left office after the Aug. 6 vote. A new mayor, Guillermo Rodríguez, was sworn in with a new council on Aug. 17. In interviews, Mr. Rodríguez and members of the new council said they had no idea Wal-Mart had its eye on Mrs. Pineda’s field when they took office.

“They must have had to bribe somebody in order to make the illegal legal,” Mr. Rodríguez said when he was shown both the Aug. 20 map and the map approved on Aug. 6.

“Whatever happened here must be explained,” Jesús Aguiluz, a former high-ranking state official whose domain included the Office of Urban and Regional Planning, said when he was shown both maps. Only one person, he said, could explain what happened — Víctor Manuel Frieventh, then the director of the urban planning office.

“He was in charge totally,” Mr. Aguiluz said.

In interviews with The Times, people who worked in Mr. Frieventh’s office recalled a steady parade of favor-seekers — housing developers, wealthy landowners, politically wired businessmen — all hoping Mr. Frieventh would use his influence to shape zoning plans to favor their interests. Wal-Mart de Mexico, they said, was part of the parade.

During a two-hour interview with The Times, Mr. Frieventh jovially described how his predecessors had taken bribes to shift zoning boundaries. But he insisted he never met with anyone from Wal-Mart, and said he had nothing to do with the change to Teotihuacán’s map.

“It’s very strange,” he said, looking intently at the altered map.

The formal order to publish Teotihuacán’s new zoning plan was received by the Government’s Gazette on Sept. 11, 2003. The next day, internal Wal-Mart de Mexico records show, Mr. Cicero authorized five bribe payments totaling $221,000. According to the internal records, the bribes were for obtaining zoning changes to build five supermarkets. One of the payments, for $52,000, was for the Bodega Aurrera in Teotihuacán, Mr. Cicero said in an interview.

Wal-Mart de Mexico officials did not themselves pay bribes. Records and interviews show that payoffs were made by outside lawyers, trusted fixers dispatched by Mr. Cicero to deliver envelopes of cash without leaving any trace of their existence. Wal-Mart de Mexico’s written policies said these fixers could be entrusted with up to $280,000 to “expedite” a single permit. The bribe payments covered the payoffs themselves, a commission for the fixer and taxes. For some permits, it was left to the fixers to figure out who needed to be bribed. In this case, Mr. Cicero said, Mr. Frieventh was the intended recipient.

Mr. Frieventh, the son of a shoe-store owner, earned a government salary of less than $30,000 in 2003. However modest his pay, he was in the midst of amassing an impressive real estate portfolio. From 2001 to 2004, property records show, he bought up most of a city block in Toluca. The land costs alone were nearly 65 percent of his government pay during those years.

Asked if he had ever accepted anything of value from a Wal-Mart representative, Mr. Freiventh shook his head, chuckled and extended a hand, palm up. “Bring him to me so he can pay me, no? Have him bring it to me.”

Even with the right zoning, Wal-Mart still needed at least a dozen different permits to begin construction. But to apply for them, Mr. Cicero’s team first had to get a zoning certificate, which verified that a plot’s zoning was consistent with the proposed development.

Zoning certificates did not come from Mr. Frieventh’s office. They were issued by the state Office of Urban Operations, and Wal-Mart’s request went to Lidia Gómez, a career civil servant known as a stickler for rules. Ms. Gómez rejected Wal-Mart’s request. Wal-Mart tried again a few months later, and again Ms. Gómez said no, saying that even with Teotihuacán’s new map, a Bodega Aurrera would still run afoul of a rarely enforced federal guideline. Wal-Mart was dead in the water.

With help from Mr. Frieventh, Mr. Cicero’s team found a way around Ms. Gómez, and the law. Mr. Frieventh had no legal authority to overrule Ms. Gómez. But at Wal-Mart’s request, records show, Mr. Frieventh wrote a letter on government letterhead on March 9, 2004, that directly contradicted Ms. Gómez’s rulings. Citing the altered map, he wrote that Wal-Mart’s supermarket was indeed compatible with the zoning for Mrs. Pineda’s field.

Mr. Frieventh said he did not recall the letter, or why he wrote it. But Wal-Mart de Mexico immediately put the letter to work. It began applying for other permits, each time submitting the letter as if it were a valid zoning certificate.

One of its first applications was to the state agency that regulates roads.

There were obvious reasons for traffic regulators to balk at Wal-Mart’s permit request. Traffic, of course, was one of Teotihuacán’s biggest headaches, and a supermarket at the main entrance would only make matters worse. But there was a far bigger complication. The town had recently approved a long-term plan to ease congestion. The plan called for building a bypass road through Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field.

According to internal Wal-Mart records, Mr. Cicero authorized a $25,900 bribe for the permit, which was issued in less than two weeks. The paperwork approving it did not even mention the bypass road.

A Helpful Mayor

Teotihuacán’s municipal council had just finished its regular meeting on June 11, 2004, when the mayor, Guillermo Rodríguez, made an unusual request. He asked the council members to stick around and meet privately with some people from Wal-Mart. Instructions were given to turn off the video camera used to record public meetings. But the video operator disregarded the instructions, and the camera continued to roll.

“They are going to explain what they want to do here,” the mayor told his colleagues.

To build in Mrs. Pineda’s field, Wal-Mart now needed a construction license from Teotihuacán. Construction licenses were issued by Hugo Hernández, the town’s director of urban development. Yet Mr. Hernández had thus far declined to give Wal-Mart a license because it still lacked several approvals — an environmental permit, for example.

But Wal-Mart de Mexico had found a friend in Mayor Rodríguez, who now, in private, explained to the council why it was essential to act with speed and flexibility to help Wal-Mart build, regardless of the inevitable opposition.

“They say that if we don’t solve this quickly, they will leave,” he told the council members. Wal-Mart, he revealed, had raised the possibility of a donation. “They asked me, ‘What are you going to ask from us?’ I said, ‘Pay your taxes, reach an agreement, help the community.’ ”

Then he summoned Wal-Mart’s team, led by Jorge Resendiz, one of Mr. Cicero’s deputies.

Mr. Resendiz got to the point. In exchange for bringing jobs and low prices to Teotihuacán, Wal-Mart wanted something extraordinary. It wanted the council members to let Wal-Mart start construction even though it did not have all the required permits. And it wanted them to do it then and there, in private, without public hearings. Wal-Mart was in a rush to open for Christmas shopping. “Time is precious for us,” he said. “If we don’t start this unit in the coming days, we will have a delay.”

Mr. Rodríguez assured Mr. Resendiz that the council would give its approval the next week.

The mayor’s aggressive activism was out of character. In interviews, former aides and colleagues described Mr. Rodríguez as “insecure,” “easily manipulated” and “passive.” He was frequently absent during working hours. “My persistent thought was that I was disappointed by him,” said Mr. Peña, the former mayor who had been Mr. Rodríguez’s political mentor.

But according to Mr. Cicero, there was nothing accidental about Mr. Rodríguez’s enthusiasm. Wal-Mart de Mexico, he said, bribed Mr. Rodríguez to secure his support and that of his allies on the town council. The decision to bribe Mr. Rodríguez, he said, was blessed by Wal-Mart de Mexico’s leaders.

“I didn’t receive any money from Wal-Mart — no money,” Mr. Rodríguez insisted during two lengthy interviews with The Times.

But he struggled to explain why he began to spend tens of thousands of dollars in June 2004, the same month he emerged as Wal-Mart’s champion.

The spending is described in financial disclosure reports Mr. Rodríguez prepared himself under oath. The reports, obtained by The Times, show that he spent $30,300 to begin building a ranch on a hill overlooking the pyramids. He spent $1,800 more on a used Dodge pickup. He paid cash in both transactions.

As mayor, Mr. Rodríguez was paid $47,000 a year. His wife made $23,000 more working for the municipality. His spending spree in June nearly equaled their entire pay for the first half of 2004.

Even more remarkable was what happened six months later. Mr. Rodríguez swore in his disclosure reports that he had no savings as of Dec. 31, 2004. Yet on Jan. 1, 2005, he and his wife spent $47,700 in cash on improvements to their ranch, his reports show.

Before becoming mayor, Mr. Rodríguez had been the town comptroller, responsible for making sure municipal officials completed their financial disclosure reports correctly. Yet in the interviews, Mr. Rodríguez claimed over and over that the amounts he reported were “mistakes” or “approximate figures” or “generalized.”

He tried to be precise, he explained. “I now see it wasn’t so.”

But he did not dispute the overall spending pattern. From June 2004 to June 2005, he acknowledged, he spent “approximately” $114,000 building and furnishing his ranch, all in cash.

Wal-Mart’s investigators would ask Mr. Cicero how much Wal-Mart de Mexico had paid to bribe the mayor. About $114,000, he said.

Teotihuacán’s council members met again on June 18, 2004, a week after Mr. Rodríguez first introduced them to Wal-Mart. It was just after 7 a.m. and Mr. Resendiz took a seat up front. Item 7 on the agenda was Wal-Mart.

It was the first and only public airing of Wal-Mart’s plans. The council members spent 15 minutes discussing one of the largest construction projects in the town’s modern history.

Mr. Rodríguez announced they were there to give a “favorable or unfavorable opinion” of Wal-Mart’s supermarket. When a council member pointed out that Wal-Mart had not even submitted a formal written request, the mayor waved away the problem. “That’s a detail we omitted,” he said.

Mr. Hernández, the town’s urban development director, noted that Wal-Mart still did not have several permits it needed before the town could issue a construction license. He urged the council to stick to the rules.

Mr. Resendiz objected, saying Wal-Mart did not have time to spare.

The mayor pushed for a vote, suggesting that all they were doing was indicating general support while Wal-Mart rounded up its missing permits. He gave no indication that the vote constituted a final approval.

In interviews, council members said they viewed Wal-Mart’s proposal through the prism of lingering resentments toward their public markets. Residents had long complained about vendors inflating prices and rigging scales. They liked the way Wal-Mart challenged the old irritants of the Mexican shopping experience — stores that do not list prices; stores with no parking; stores with musty display cases.

The vote was unanimous for Wal-Mart. Days later, construction began.

Getting By the Guardians

The appearance of heavy excavation equipment in Mrs. Pineda’s field quickly aroused suspicion around town. The suspicions stemmed from Teotihuacán’s fraught relationship with the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, the official guardian of Mexico’s cultural treasures.

Because of the pyramids, INAH (pronounced EE-nah) is a major presence in Teotihuacán. Its approval is required to build anything inside the protected archaeological zone. Its officials patrol town looking for signs of illegal construction, and it is not hard to find stories about zealous inspectors stopping a homeowner from extending a kitchen a few feet.

It was also well known that INAH required excavations to be done with picks and shovels to minimize damage if digging uncovered ancient ruins. So the sight of bulldozers and backhoes stood out, especially when a sign went up announcing that a Bodega Aurrera was coming. Why, residents asked, should Wal-Mart get special treatment?

Among those who noticed was Sergio Gómez, an archaeologist and researcher for INAH. Mr. Gómez knew that before the agency issued a permit, it first had to officially “liberate” the plot by verifying that construction would not destroy valuable archaeological remains. That meant conducting a formal archaeological survey, with grid lines and exploration holes.

For any developer, a survey was risky. If significant remains were discovered, it could kill the project, or at least force lengthy delays. Yet Mr. Gómez had not seen any sign of a survey, an odd thing since a survey like this should have occupied a team of INAH researchers and laborers for a good six months. This, too, was a red flag.

Mr. Gómez was concerned enough to follow trucks from the site one day. When they dumped their loads, he could see fragments of pottery and other evidence of ancient remains. “I didn’t need to scratch the ground to see it,” he said in an interview.

Iván Hernández noticed, too. He was one of five INAH archaeologists who did surveys to liberate land for construction in the protected zone. He knew every major project in town, but nothing of this one.

Residents were also calling INAH to complain. The calls went to Juan Carlos Sabais, the agency’s top lawyer in Teotihuacán. He would have been the one to review the permit paperwork and prepare the official liberation letter for this plot. “We didn’t have a clue,” he recalled. “People were saying this was Wal-Mart, and we didn’t know a thing.”

Mr. Sabais led a party of INAH officials to the site to find out what was going on. They passed through a small crowd of angry residents. It was July 16, and construction was already well under way. There were several large excavations, one as deep as 16 feet, records show. Workers claimed they had an INAH permit, just not on site as the law required. Mr. Sabais ordered them to stop construction.“The crowd started clapping,” he said.

By the time Mr. Sabais returned to his office, senior INAH officials were calling from Mexico City demanding to know why he had halted construction. Only then, he said, did he discover that Wal-Mart had somehow managed to get a permit without a survey, or a liberation letter.

This bureaucratic miracle, Mr. Cicero would explain to Wal-Mart investigators and The Times, was made possible by another payoff. As Mr. Cicero described it, senior INAH officials had asked for an “official donation” of up to $45,000 and a “personal gift” of up to $36,000 in exchange for a permit.

Wal-Mart’s permit was signed by Mirabel Miró, then the agency’s top official in the State of Mexico. According to Ms. Miró, it was Wal-Mart de Mexico that made an improper offer of money. Her chief architect, she said, told her that Wal-Mart had approached him with an offer of a sizable “donation.” He wanted to accept, she said.

“I told him, ‘I don’t want a dime, not as a donation, not as anything, because it may be interpreted as something else,’ ” she said.

Sergio Raúl Arroyo, the director general of INAH, recalled in an interview that Ms. Miró had told him about Wal-Mart’s offer. He could not recall any other instance of a company offering a donation while it was seeking a permit. “That would have been totally irregular,” he said. “It was obvious we had to be very careful with these people.”

“I told Miró to accept no donations,” he added. “Not even a pair of scissors.”

And yet in June 2004, three weeks after Ms. Miró signed the permit, Mr. Resendiz spoke about a payment to INAH during his private meeting with Teotihuacán’s council. “INAH itself is asking us for a considerable contribution,” Mr. Resendiz said.

“We are going to formalize the contribution next Monday,” he added. “But it is a fact.”

Mr. Resendiz, who has been placed on administrative leave pending Wal-Mart’s investigation, declined to comment. Every INAH official interviewed, including Ms. Miró’s chief architect, Carlos Madrigal, denied accepting money from Wal-Mart.

But Mr. Sabais, the agency’s top lawyer in Teotihuacán, knew nothing about official donations or personal gifts on the day he stopped construction. All he knew was that he was being summoned to INAH’s headquarters in Mexico City. Over several tense meetings, he recalled, his bosses confronted their embarrassing predicament: INAH had halted construction even though Wal-Mart had the required permit. Yet the agency had given Wal-Mart that permit without first conducting a survey and liberating the land.

Fearing a public relations debacle, senior INAH officials concocted a trail of backdated documents to hide its blunders, Mr. Sabais said. He pointed to an INAH report dated April 2, 2004, seven weeks before the agency issued its permit. The report suggested Wal-Mart’s plot had been liberated after a 1984 survey. “This document,” Mr. Sabais said, “was made later to justify what had not been done.”

INAH officials would later tell multiple government inquiries that Wal-Mart’s plot had been liberated because of this 1984 survey.

The Times tracked down the 1984 survey. It had nothing to do with the land where Wal-Mart was building. The survey was done on a different plot several hundred yards away. The archaeologists who supervised and evaluated the survey were appalled to learn that it had been used to justify INAH’s permit for Wal-Mart. “This is a fraud,” Ana María Jarquín, one of the archaeologists, said in an interview.

In interviews last week, top INAH officials acknowledged for the first time that Wal-Mart’s plot had neither been surveyed nor liberated, either in 1984 or any other time, before construction began. They also made one other startling admission. The agency has long maintained no ancient remains were destroyed during construction. But Verónica Ortega, INAH’s top archaeologist in Teotihuacán, acknowledged it was indeed possible ancient remains were destroyed during the excavation before Mr. Sabais halted construction.

“I am not able to affirm categorically that no soil went out,” she said.

The work shutdown ordered by Mr. Sabais did not last long. Four days later, INAH allowed Wal-Mart to resume construction. The agency did take one precaution: it began an extensive survey, digging dozens of exploration wells alongside Wal-Mart’s crews.

A Gathering Protest

By now a loose protest movement had begun to form. Its leaders all had deep roots here. Lorenzo Trujillo owned produce stands in the public market. Emmanuel D’Herrera, a teacher and poet, had celebrated his son’s birth by tucking the boy’s umbilical cord in a crack atop the Moon pyramid. Emma Ortega was a spiritual healer who cared for patients a stone’s throw from the pyramid. “You feel that it’s part of you, and you are part of it,” she said.

The protesters immediately suspected something “dirty” had taken place, Ms. Ortega recalled. The first clue came on Aug. 1, 2004, when she and other protest leaders met with Mayor Rodríguez. By now the supermarket’s walls were being erected. They asked the mayor to show them the construction permit. The mayor, nervous and evasive, admitted Wal-Mart did not actually have one.

“So we were like, ‘Why are they there working?’ ” Ms. Ortega said. They asked the mayor to halt work and hold hearings. The mayor said he would think about it. Two days later, he issued Wal-Mart a construction license.

He signed it himself.

In response, the protesters demanded his resignation and filed the first of several legal challenges. Then they blockaded the construction site.

As word of the blockade spread, bells rang from a chapel in Purificación, the neighborhood where Wal-Mart was building. It was the alarm used to summon neighbors in an emergency. Residents marched toward the blockade.

“We thought they were there to support us,” Ms. Ortega recalled. “No. They were there to attack us.” The crowd descended on the small band of protesters, pushing and yelling insults until the blockade was broken.

What Ms. Ortega did not know was that Wal-Mart had already bought the support of Purificación’s neighborhood leaders. In interviews, several of those leaders recalled being invited to Mr. Rodríguez’s office to meet with the company’s representatives. The Wal-Mart people, the leaders said, offered money to expand their cemetery, pave a road and build a handball court. They offered paint and computers for Purificación’s school. They offered money to build a new office for the neighborhood leaders.

But the money came with strings: if there were any protests, they were expected to be visibly and loudly supportive of Wal-Mart.

Protest leaders began to get anonymous phone calls urging them to back off. In news conferences, the mayor dismissed them as a tiny minority of gadflies and self-interested local merchants. He insisted the town overwhelmingly favored Wal-Mart’s arrival, and as proof of his incorruptibility, he boasted of how he had rejected Wal-Mart de Mexico’s offer of a $55,000 donation to the municipal treasury.

But the tide turned as INAH’s archaeologists began to find evidence that Wal-Mart was building on ancient ruins after all. They found the remains of a wall dating to approximately 1300 and enough clay pottery to fill several sacks. Then they found an altar, a plaza and nine graves. Once again, construction was temporarily halted so their findings could be cataloged, photographed and analyzed. The discoveries instantly transformed the skirmish over Mrs. Pineda’s field into national news.

Student groups, unions and peasant leaders soon joined the protests. Opponents of other Wal-Marts in Mexico offered support. Influential politicians began to express concern. Prominent artists and intellectuals signed an open letter asking Mexico’s president to stop the project. Many were cultural traditionalists, united by a fear that Wal-Mart was inexorably drawing Mexico’s people away from the intimacy of neighborhood life, toward a bland, impersonal “gringo lifestyle” of frozen pizzas, video games and credit card debt.

The support emboldened the protesters. When the mayor held a news conference, they interrupted and openly accused him of taking bribes. They blockaded INAH’s headquarters and marched on Wal-Mart de Mexico’s corporate offices in Mexico City. “All we have found are closed doors and an ocean of corruption around the authorizations for this Wal-Mart,” Mr. D’Herrera told reporters with typical flourish.

Their allegations of corruption seeped into the news coverage in Mexico and the United States. In September 2004, an article in The Times included this passage: “How Wal-Mart got permission to build a superstore on farmland supposedly protected under Mexican law as an archaeological site has vexed the merchants here, who freely accuse the town, the state and the federal Institute of Anthropology and History of corruption.”

Open for Business

Back in Bentonville, Wal-Mart’s international real estate committee was aware of the growing attention from the news media, former members said in interviews. Some committee members cringed at the ugly optics of Wal-Mart literally bulldozing Mexico’s cultural heritage. “I kept waiting for someone to say, ‘Let’s just move sites,’ ” recalled one member, who, like others on the committee, asked not to be identified because of the continuing inquiry.

But top Wal-Mart de Mexico executives assured the committee that the situation was under control. They portrayed the protesters as a fringe group — “like they were from Occupy Wall Street,” another person recalled.

Despite multiple news accounts of possible bribes, Wal-Mart’s leaders in the United States took no steps to investigate Wal-Mart de Mexico, records and interviews show.

Mr. Tovar, the Wal-Mart spokesman, said that while executives in the United States were aware of the furor in Teotihuacán they did not know about the corruption allegations. “None of the associates we have interviewed, including people responsible for real estate projects in Mexico during this time period, recall any mention of bribery allegations related to this store,” he said.

In Mexico, government officials were looking for a way to quell the controversy. Mr. Arroyo, INAH’s director general, urged Wal-Mart de Mexico to build elsewhere. The state’s urban development ministry quietly searched for alternate sites outside the archaeological zone. Then, on Oct. 2, Mexico’s newspapers reported a major announcement: Arturo Montiel, the state’s governor, was looking for another site “that is better for all.”

With its supermarket more than half built, Wal-Mart de Mexico was not eager to accommodate the governor. The company raced to complete construction and mounted a public relations offensive. Executives argued that Wal-Mart de Mexico had scrupulously fulfilled every legal requirement: the zoning was correct, as confirmed by the map in the Government’s Gazette; necessary approvals had been duly obtained from INAH, traffic authorities and other agencies; the mayor himself had signed the construction license.

Not even a week after Mr. Montiel’s announcement, his top deputy told reporters there was, alas, no way to stop Wal-Mart. “We would be violating the law since they can tell us they complied with all that is required,” he explained.

The supermarket opened on Nov. 4, 2004. A year later, Mr. Cicero met with Wal-Mart’s lawyers and told his story for the first time. His allegations were shared with several of the same executives who were on the international real estate committee, records show. If the protesters’ vague allegations of corruption had been easy to dismiss, now they were coming from the person responsible for obtaining Wal-Mart de Mexico’s permits in Teotihuacán.

More important, Mr. Cicero’s allegations emerged as a comptroller for the State of Mexico was wrapping up a lengthy investigation into whether officials had acted unlawfully in granting permits to Wal-Mart de Mexico.

But Wal-Mart did not share Mr. Cicero’s allegations with any authorities in Mexico. “This is one of the areas we are reviewing as part of our ongoing investigation,” Mr. Tovar said.

When the comptroller’s office subsequently announced it had found no wrongdoing, it chided protesters for failing to present any specific proof.

The comptroller had been the protesters’ last hope. Most moved on, resigned to the idea that their struggle had been for nothing. But not Mr. D’Herrera. He continued to visit government archives, seeking access to Wal-Mart’s permit records. He kept appealing to public officials for help. “I shall continue my hunger strike until Wal-Mart leaves or until I die,” he wrote in a letter to Vicente Fox, Mexico’s president at the time.

Despite the passage of time, Mr. D’Herrera never wavered in his conviction that Wal-Mart must have paid bribes. He was appalled by the store’s impact on Teotihuacán, and infuriated that so few seemed to care. It did not go unnoticed when protest leaders were spotted shopping contentedly in the Bodega Aurrera, where people can buy everything from tortillas to tires, almost always at a substantial discount from local shops.

Friends and relatives urged Mr. D’Herrera to let it go, but he refused. “He became obsessed,” Ms. Ortega said. Mr. D’Herrera finally snapped. On May 16, 2009, he entered the Bodega Aurrera and placed a crude homemade bomb in a shopping cart. According to prosecutors, the bomb consisted of a small juice can containing gunpowder and nails. Mr. D’Herrera pushed the cart into the store’s home section, looked around to make sure the aisle was empty, and then lit a fuse poking from the can. His intent, he later wrote, was to kill himself and damage the store to draw public attention back to Wal-Mart. But all the blast did was knock him down and damage $68 worth of merchandise.

As he awaited trial from a prison cell, he continued his hopeless campaign. He wrote more letters to politicians. He asked his wife to publish his diatribes against Wal-Mart on an obscure poetry blog. Yet he clearly recognized the precariousness of his circumstances. He was thin and severely diabetic. His teeth were falling out. In early 2010, he asked a cellmate to deliver a letter to his wife in case he died in prison. A few months later, he had a brain hemorrhage and slipped into a coma. Death quickly followed. He was 62.

In his final letter to his wife, Mr. D’Herrera tried to explain why he had battled so long at such grievous cost.

“I am not leaving material patrimony for you and our son,” he wrote. “I’m leaving you a moral and political legacy, dying as I am for a cause, in defense of the Mexican culture.”

Josh Haner and James C. McKinley Jr. contributed reporting.

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Letter From Washington: U.S. Fiscal Deal Unlikely Without Compromise

WASHINGTON — As many Republicans reject higher tax rates for wealthier Americans, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, urges them to continue to resist, claiming that the economic boom of the 1990s and the resulting budget surplus were due to his leadership in Congress and not to President Bill Clinton’s early tax increases.

All economic indicators were heading downward before he became speaker, Mr. Gingrich said on the NBC television show “Meet the Press” on Dec. 9, and “virtually all the economic growth occurs after Republicans take control” of the House in 1995. The budget was balanced late in the decade because of the tax cut he engineered in 1997, he said.

To paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Mr. Gingrich is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts.

The arguments against higher taxes today and those used by Mr. Gingrich and his allies against the Clinton tax increase in 1993 are strikingly similar: They will destroy jobs and devastate economic growth, without cutting the deficit.

The facts: The Clinton tax increase on upper incomes, which brought the top rate to 39.6 percent, as President Barack Obama wants to do now, was enacted Aug. 6, 1993. Over the next 18 months, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of about 4 percent; unemployment dropped sharply, to 6 percent from 7.6 percent. The stock market rose moderately.

Deficits immediately began to narrow, shrinking to $22 billion in 1997 from $255 billion in 1993. In late 1997, a small tax cut that included a reduction in capital-gains levies and a child credit was passed, though the much larger tax increases enacted four years earlier were left largely untouched. The budget situation continued to improve, moving to surpluses over the next four years. Most economists credit this result to the climate of the decade, which Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and others said had been prompted by the 1993 legislation’s bolstering of consumer and investor confidence.

Now the Republican pursuit of lower marginal tax rates for the more affluent defies at least political reality. Polls show strong support for Mr. Obama’s position on the top rate.

Eliminating the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for upper-income Americans, taking the top rate to 39.6 percent, along with the accompanying changes on some deductions and exemptions, would raise about $600 billion in a decade.

During the presidential campaign, the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, floated the notion of capping deductions at $50,000 a year; that would raise less than $500 billion if, as would seem certain, it excluded charitable contributions; there would be other controversies, and it would hit middle-class taxpayers.

There are significant other tax elements apart from the rates. Some compromises will be necessary on scheduled increases in levies on dividends and capital gains. On the estate tax, although it goes exclusively to the rich, some Senate Democrats, like Max Baucus of Montana and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, favor a more generous break.

As the political tension mounts over the current fiscal deadlock — which, unless a deal is reached by Dec. 31, would increase taxes for everyone and force some draconian spending cuts — there will have to be trade-offs for any ultimate deficit-reduction deal. Congressional Republicans insist this will only be palatable if there are major cuts to entitlement programs, especially Medicare.

There are clear indications that the White House, despite the objections of some Democrats, would go along with significant changes, perhaps including a form of means testing for Medicare benefits, altering the cost-of-living adjustments for entitlements and taxes.

None of that will fly politically unless it is accompanied by significant revenue increases. Initially, Mr. Obama wanted $1.6 trillion over 10 years; he has pulled back to $1.4 trillion. If he gets an amount in excess of $1 trillion — which would require additional measures beyond ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy — a substantive deal on entitlements becomes more palatable.

Even if the current standoff over taxes and spending is resolved in the next two weeks, things are going to get messy early next year. Republicans are intent on using the need to increase the debt ceiling as leverage to force the White House to accept entitlement cuts; Mr. Obama is adamant that he won’t play Russian roulette with the debt ceiling again, a reference to last year’s market-rattling last-minute deal.

The only way to avoid that face-off is to devise some sort of enforcement mechanism before New Year’s Eve that would mandate action on entitlements and increased revenue next year. The test for the president in his second term is to get a deal that is market-credible, inspiring consumer and investor confidence.

The shorter-term test for the Republicans, as some operatives, like the former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour realize, is to move away from the issue of rates for the wealthy. One of the party’s liabilities in the 2012 elections was that it was seen as a protector of the privileged. Threatening a fiscal meltdown to protect lower tax rates for millionaires isn’t a corrective.

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Cisco hires bank to sell home wireless router unit: report

(Reuters) – Networking equipment company Cisco Systems Inc has hired Barclays to sell its Linksys home router unit, a report said on Sunday.

The business, which Cisco acquired for $ 500 million in 2003, will likely be valued for less because it has low margins, according to Bloomberg.

The sale is part of Cisco’s strategy to shed its consumer unit and focus on its software and technology services businesses.

Last year, Cisco axed its Flip camera business as part of this strategy.

(Reporting By Olivia Oran; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Moments of silence around NFL for shooting victims

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) — The New England Patriots silenced their "End Zone Militia" on Sunday night, paying tribute to the victims of the Connecticut school shooting by canceling the traditional scoring celebration in which men dressed as Revolutionary War soldiers fire muskets into the air.

Two days after 20 children and six adults were shot to death at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the Patriots joined teams across the NFL that honored the victims' memory by asking for a moment of silence and darkening their scoreboards.

New York Giants receiver Victor Cruz, after learning that he was the favorite player of one 6-year-old victim, wrote "R.I.P. Jack Pinto," ''Jack Pinto, my hero" and "This one is for you" on his shoes for the Giants game against the Falcons in Atlanta. Cruz said he called the boy's family after hearing he was a Giants fan and was told they planned to bury him in one of Cruz's No. 80 jerseys.

"I don't even know how to put it into words," Cruz said. "There are no words that can describe the type of feeling that you get when a kid idolizes you so much that unfortunately they want to put him in the casket with your jersey on. I can't even explain it."

The Patriots, the closest team to Newtown that was home on Sunday, wore a helmet sticker with the city seal and a black ribbon on it. The Giants, another popular team in southwestern Connecticut, affixed a decal with the school's initials — "SHES" — on their helmets. Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt wrote "Newtown, CT" on one of the gloves he wore in warmups and on both of his shoes for the game.

"We're playing football, and there's something much bigger going on in this world," Watt said. "I just wanted them to know, and I wanted everyone to know, that our thoughts are with them. Nothing is bigger than that. We played our game today, but honestly our thoughts are with them, the families, the teachers, the friends, the first responders, who had to go see that. My dad is a first responder. They were just kids."

Giants coach Tom Coughlin said the fact that the town was only about 90 minutes from New York City made the loss hit even harder.

"Being close to home, the players were greatly upset about it," he said. "Many of the players have young children so they can empathize with the parents who had young children killed. There was no one that escaped the effect of it, but that's not an excuse for why we played the way we played today."

In St. Louis, the players who wear No. 26 — Rams running back Daryl Richardson and Vikings cornerback Antoine Winfield — joined hands in a circle with their coaches at midfield before their game, surrounded by dozens of children wearing jerseys.

"I have a son that's in kindergarten. It choked me up because I would hate to be one of those parents," Rams running back Steven Jackson said. "You drop your kid off at school and he or she wants to go there and learn and better themselves, and to then go to the school and find that your child will no longer be with you. I couldn't imagine that thing."

The U.S. flag was at half-staff at Gillette Stadium, and a spokeswoman said the team planned to fire 26 flares into the air in a pregame ceremony before New England's night game against the San Francisco 49ers. Flags were also at half-staff in Baltimore, where the scoreboards went black as the public address announcer asked the crowd at the game between the Ravens and Denver Broncos to observe "silent reflection" in the wake of Friday's "horrific tragedy."

"As a parent you drop your kids off at school many times," said Miami Dolphins coach Joe Philbin, whose 21-year-old son Michael fell into a Wisconsin river and drowned in January. "It's hard to put into words what that community and those families must feel like. We obviously kept them in our prayers."

A moment of silence was observed at all 14 NFL games on Sunday; in Houston and in Arlington, Texas, the scoreboard went black. Members of the Buffalo Bills and Seattle Seahawks stood quietly with their heads down on their sideline while fans stood silently at the Rogers Centre in Toronto.

The Bills did continue their pregame habit of playing U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday," which they've played before every home game this season. The song is in reference to British troops shooting and killing unarmed protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland in January 1972.

In Chicago, Green Bay wide receiver Donald Driver retweeted the names of the victims. St. Louis defensive end Chris Long said after the 36-22 loss the Vikings that it was hard to feel sorry for himself.

"As we sit here and feel sorry for ourselves after losing a football game, it really helps put things in perspective," he said. "I was watching TV last night and saw a victim's parent and I was really moved by that, the strength that they were showing up there. If we can all show that strength, we'll be all right as a team and as people. "

___

AP Sports Writers R.B. Fallstrom in St. Louis, David Ginsburg in Baltimore, Nancy Armour in Chicago, Paul Newberry in Atlanta, John Wawrow in Toronto, Kristie Rieken in Houston and Brett Martel in New Orleans contributed to this report.

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Mislabeled Foods Find Their Way to Diners’ Tables

ATLANTA — The menu offered fried catfish. But Freddie Washington, a pastor in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who sometimes eats out five nights a week and was raised on Gulf Coast seafood, was served tilapia.

Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

Consumers are misled most frequently when they buy fish, investigators say, because diners have such limited knowledge about seafood. 

It was a culinary bait and switch. Mr. Washington complained. The restaurant had run out of catfish, the manager explained, and the pastor left the restaurant with a free dinner, an apology and a couple of gift certificates.

“If I’m paying for a menu item,” Mr. Washington said, “I’m expecting that menu item to be placed before me.”

The subject of deceptive restaurant menus took on new life last week when Oceana, an international organization dedicated to ocean conservation, released a report with the headline “Widespread Seafood Fraud Found in New York City.”

Using genetic testing, the group found tilapia and tilefish posing as red snapper. Farmed salmon was sold as wild. Escolar, which can also legally be called oil fish, was disguised as white tuna, which is an unofficial nickname for albacore tuna.

Every one of 16 sushi bars investigated sold the researchers mislabeled fish. In all, 39 percent of the seafood from 81 grocery stores and restaurants was not what the establishment claimed it was.

“This thing with fish is age old, it’s been going on forever,” said Anne Quatrano, an Atlanta chef who opened Bacchanalia 20 years ago and kick-started the city’s sustainable food movement. “Unless you buy whole fish, you can’t always know what you’re getting from a supplier.”

Swapping one ingredient for a less expensive one extends beyond fish and is not always the fault of the person who sells food to the restaurant. Many a pork cutlet has headed to a table disguised as veal, and many an organic salad is not.

The term organic is regulated by the Department of Agriculture, but many other identifying words on a menu are essentially marketing terms. Unscrupulous chefs can falsely claim that a steak is Kobe beef or say a chicken was humanely treated without penalty.

In cases of blatant mislabeling, a chef or supplier often takes the bet that a local or federal agency charged with stopping deceptive practices is not likely to walk in the door. “This has been going on for as long as I’ve been cooking,” said Tom Colicchio, a New York chef and television personality. “When you start really getting into this stuff, there’s so many things people mislabel.”

At Mr. Colicchio’s New York restaurants, all but about 5 percent of the meat he serves is from animals raised without antibiotics, he said. It costs him about 30 percent more, so he charges more. “Yet I have a restaurant down the street that says they have organic chicken when they don’t, and they charge less money for it,” he said. “It’s all part of mislabeling and duping the public.”

Consumers are misled most frequently when they buy fish, investigators say, because there are so many fish in the sea and such limited knowledge among diners. The Food and Drug Administration lists 519 acceptable market names for fish, but more than 1,700 species are sold, said Morgan Liscinsky, a spokesman with the agency.

Marketing thousands of species in the ocean to a dining public who often has to be coaxed to move beyond the top five — shrimp, tuna, salmon, pollock and tilapia — is not an exact science.

The line between marketing something like Patagonian toothfish as Chilean sea bass or serving langostino and calling it lobster is a fine one.

Robert DeMasco, who owns Pierless Fish, a wholesaler in New York, used a profanity to describe someone who buys farm-raised fish and sells it as wild. “But on some of this, they’re splitting hairs,” he said.

In 2005, a customer sued Rubio’s, a West Coast taco chain, for misleading the public by selling a langostino lobster burrito. The FDA ruled that practice acceptable, which allowed chains like Long John Silver’s and Red Lobster to sell the crustacean called langostino and legally attach the word lobster to it. Maine lobstermen and lawmakers fought the decision unsuccessfully.

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China Plans on Continuity in Economic Policy in 2013

BEIJING — An annual conference that helps set economic policy in China ended with a lengthy government statement Sunday warning of difficulties in the global economy as well as industrial overcapacity and financial-sector risks at home.

But a review of the two-day conference’s activities, which was released by the official Xinhua news agency, suggested few changes in existing economic policies, calling for continuity for the time being.

The statement endorsed tax cuts, continued curbs on real estate speculation and a broader effort to increase domestic consumption and wean the economy from its dependence on exports and investment.

“The opportunities facing us are no longer the traditional ones of simply entering the international division of labor, expanding exports and accelerating investments, but rather new opportunities forcing us to expand domestic demand, improve innovative capacities and promoting the transformation of the mode of development,” the statement said.

Held in December each year, the Central Economic Work Conference in theory is jointly run by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and by the government’s cabinet of ministers. In reality, the Standing Committee of the Politburo has the power, and all seven of its members attended the conference, together with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who left the standing committee last month but remains in office as prime minister until the National People’s Congress next March.

While China has many economic opportunities, “we must soberly recognize that there are still many risks and challenges confronting our national development,” the overview released by Xinhua said. “Problems with imbalances, ill-coordination and lack of sustainability remain pronounced.”

“The contradiction between downward pressures on the economy and relative overcapacity in production is deepening,” the statement continued. “Business operating costs are rising while innovative capacities are inadequate. There are latent risks in the financial sphere.”

Previous annual conferences have lasted three days. The government issued no explanation of why the conference this year appeared to last only two days, opening Saturday and closing Sunday.

The conference called for the agricultural sector to pay attention to maintaining an adequate food supply for the population, and endorsed continued urbanization, a favorite theme of the incoming prime minister next March, Li Keqiang.

“Urbanization is a historic task of our country’s modernization, and also possesses the greatest potential for expanding domestic consumption,” the statement said.

The statement called for continued but unspecified industrial reforms to address the problem of overcapacity. It was not clear what would be done to address risks in the financial sector, but a government official had said before the conference that China’s leaders were eager to move toward the introduction of a system of bank deposit insurance.

The precise details of discussions at Central Economic Work Conferences sometimes take days or weeks to dribble out.

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Voters in Egypt Cast Ballots on Draft Constitution

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

A polling site in Cairo on Saturday. Lines were long as a referendum on an Islamist-backed charter got off to an orderly start. More Photos »

CAIRO — Egyptians voted peacefully and in large numbers on Saturday in a referendum on an Islamist-backed draft constitution, hoping that the results would end three weeks of violence, division and distrust between the Islamists and their opponents over the ground rules of Egypt’s promised democracy.

Not long after polls closed at 11 p.m., the main Islamist group aligned with President Mohamed Morsi predicted a big win for ratification with a higher than expected turnout. The group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said that after counts from about 86 percent of the stations that voted Saturday, the first of two days of voting, ballots were running 59 percent in favor of the proposed constitution.

The opposition strongholds of Cairo and Alexandria, however, were still being counted.

A spokesman for the main coalition opposing the charter charged systematic violation of voting rules, but its leaders put off a final statement.

Regardless of the results, the unexpectedly heavy turnout and orderly balloting was yet another turning point for Egypt’s nearly two-year-old revolution. After three weeks of violence and threats of a boycott, voters appeared for the moment to pull back from the brink of civil discord and reaffirm their trust in the ballot box, spending hours in long lines to vote in the sixth national election since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak 22 months ago.

It remained to be seen if the losing side would accept the results, or how long the peace might last. Many who voted yes said they were doing so to end the chaos of the transition rather than to endorse the text of the charter. But the crowded polling places suggested a turn toward stability, if not necessarily the liberal outcome some revolutionaries had hoped for. Despite opposition warnings of chaos, the streets of the capital were free of major protests for the first time in weeks.

And if the constitution is approved by the margins his supporters predict, the smooth vote could fortify Mr. Morsi’s power and legitimacy.

Military officers guarded polling places, and there were few reports of violence. Egyptian state media reported nine injuries in clashes around the Nile Delta town of Dakahleya, and that unknown assailants threw Molotov cocktails near the headquarters of a liberal party that had been part of the opposition under Mr. Mubarak.

As they waited in line to vote, neighbors continued to spar over the contentious process that produced the charter. Some said that it had been unfairly steamrolled by Egypt’s new Islamist leaders over the objections of other parties and the Coptic Christian Church, and that as a result the new charter failed to protect fundamental rights.

Others blamed the Islamists’ opponents for refusing to negotiate, in an effort to undermine democracy because they could not win at the ballot box. Many expressed discontent with political leaders on both sides.

“Neither group can accept its opposition,” said Ahmed Ibrahim, 40, a government clerk waiting to vote in a middle-class neighborhood in the Nasr City area of Cairo. Whatever the outcome, he said, “one group in their hearts will feel wronged, and the other group will gloat over their victory, and so the wounds will remain.”

The referendum once promised to be a day when Egyptians realized the visions of democracy, pluralism and national unity that defined the 18-day revolt against Mr. Mubarak. But then came nearly two years of chaotic political transition in which Islamists, liberals, leftists, the military and the courts all jockeyed for power over an ever-shifting timetable.

The document that Egyptians voted on was a rushed revision of the old Mubarak charter, pushed through an Islamist-dominated assembly in an all-night session, after Christian and secular representatives quit in protest. Many international experts faulted the charter as a missed opportunity, stuffed with broad statements about Egyptian identity but riddled with loopholes regarding the protection of rights.

Worse still, for many, was the polarizing endgame the charter provoked. Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood said more than 35 of its offices, including its Cairo headquarters, had been attacked and vandalized over the last three weeks. A night of street fighting between his Islamist supporters and their opponents killed at least 10 people.

Many voters waiting in line on Saturday said they rejected the exploitation of religion by both sides: the Islamists who sought to frame the debate as an argument over Islamic law, and opponents who accused Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies of laying the groundwork for a theocracy.

Mayy El Sheikh and Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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