It’s a short story, but we’re compulsively re-reading a report by Andy Newman on the arrest (by the ASPCA) of a little boy’s big sister. Monique Smith killed his hamster. ‘Monique picked up the biggest of the three hamsters, Sweetie, “took it out of the cage, and she slammed it on the floor,” Theresa Smith said. “It died on impact.”’ Okay, her bad. It’s what follows that’s strange.

This was on June 7, 2010. Tuesday night at 7, after a nine-month hunt for a suspect they described as evasive and uncooperative, law enforcement agents from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrested Monique Smith, 19, along Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick.

She was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals — a felony that carries a sentence of up to two years in prison — along with two misdemeanors, torturing animals and endangering the welfare of a child.

“Evasive and uncooperative”? “Nine-month hunt”? Nurse!

David Becker ought to resign his post as SEC General Counsel before you even have the chance to read this.

Both SIPC and Mr. Picard, the trustee for the Madoff estate, have proposed that the customers who withdrew funds before the fraud was uncovered should be allowed to keep only as much money as they put in. Initially, the full commission agreed and approved that approach in early 2009, according to the two people briefed on the discussions.

Mr. Becker joined the commission in February that year. By spring, he began meeting with lawyers for Madoff customers seeking a different formula. They wanted to let longer-term investors keep more money than those who had money with Mr. Madoff for shorter periods. Mr. Becker apparently dismissed arguments that investors were entitled to the amounts Mr. Madoff had listed on their final statements.

In the summer of 2009, Mr. Becker did reverse the commission’s earlier decision, however. His legal staff came up with a new proposal to reflect the length of time the money was invested, and the commissioners approved it at the end of the year. Some at the agency who worked with SIPC expressed dissent about the change, according to the people briefed on the deliberations.

Stephen P. Harbeck, the chief executive of SIPC, confirmed that his investor protection unit and the S.E.C. had initially agreed that victims should be able to keep only the money they had originally put into the Madoff firm. “Then they refined their opinion,” he said on Monday, referring to the S.E.C. He said that he did not know who had pushed for the change.

The S.E.C.’s definition, Mr. Harbeck said, would benefit anyone who withdrew more money from their Madoff accounts than they had put in. Mr. Becker’s family would be among them.

You might think that running an excellent public school in a town with property taxes that approach the US median income would be something of a breeze, but you’d be overlooking the updraft of rising expectations. Bronxville’s golden goose is having a harder time laying the right kind of eggs.

In Bronxville, 86 percent of the typical $43,000 property tax levied by the village goes to the school system, particularly to educate the growing grade school population. For the parents of these children — moving here in many cases from New York City — $43,000 is less than they would spend to put two or three children in a private school.

Adding to the pressure, younger couples, including the Pulkkinens, are buying their homes from empty-nesters, who often sell to escape the rising tax burden. Mary C. Marvin, the mayor, says this exodus is accelerating.

In a village covering one square mile, with a static population of 6,400 people, the elderly once constituted nearly 20 percent, but that proportion is steadily dropping. Most important, these empty-nesters paid substantial property taxes without swelling the school population.

“You want the taxes to be something these older people can pay,” the mayor said, “because when they sell, they sell to families with children, and the children cost more to educate than the taxes their parents pay.”

A book that hasn’t yet been published, The Origins of Political Order, is already stirring up very favorable buzz for its author, still the object of much misunderstanding for his first big title, The End of History.

Few people have yet read the book, but it has created a considerable stir in universities where he has talked about it. “You have to be bowled over by the extraordinary breadth of approach,” said Arthur Melzer, a political scientist at Michigan State University who invited Dr. Fukuyama to give lectures on the book. “It’s definitely a magnum opus.”

Dr. Melzer praised Dr. Fukuyama’s view that societies develop politically in several different ways, followed by selection of the more successful, rather than marching along a single road to political development. “It’s the kind of theory situated between the hyper-theory of Marx or Hegel and the thick description that certain anthropologists and historians aim at,” he said.

Georg Sorensen, a political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, also called the book a magnum opus, saying that it provides “a new foundation for understanding political development.” It is neither Eurocentric nor monocausal, but provides a complex, multifactor explanation of political development, Dr. Sorensen said. “In terms of discussing political order this will be a new classic,” he said.

Dr. Fukuyama burst into public view in 1989 with his essay “The End of History,” a title widely misunderstood to mean that no major turning points in history would occur in future. In fact the essay concerned the evolution of human societies and the belief by Hegel and Marx that history would be fulfilled when the ideal political order was achieved — the liberal state, in Hegel’s view; communism, in Marx’s.

Let’s all shed a tear for ousted, “martyred” patriarch Iranaeus of Jerusalem, a prisoner in his own apartment (which he won’t leave lest he be denied re-entry by his successor and “nemesis,” Theophilus). Not. Iranaeus was ousted from his life-tenure position in the wake of allegations of shady real-estate deals involving long-term leases of church-owned properties in the Old City (arguably Palestine) made to “fronts for a Jewish settlers group.” The moral of the story? Greeks Go Home! There are enough difficult tribal sortings in Jerusalem without the exotic import of Greek clergymen.

For many local members of the church, the goings-on in the patriarchate, particularly the land issues, have merely confirmed long-held grievances.

“The problem is that the patriarchs come from Greece,” said Khaled Ikhleif, a Palestinian taxi driver from Bethlehem in the West Bank. “They are foreign, not Arab, and they do not understand our problems.”

Mr. Ikhleif was attending epiphany celebrations at Qasr al-Yahud, a spot on the Jordan River where Jesus was said to have been baptized. The site, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is in a border area surrounded by minefields. After a procession and a ceremony led by Theophilos, pilgrims immersed themselves in the opaque, khaki-color water, momentarily oblivious to all dissension and discord.

While we wait for the tech boys at the Times to weigh in, there’s the almost tongue-tied rave by Janet Maslin that appears in today’s paper. 

The segments of “The Information” vary in levels of difficulty. Grappling with entropy, randomness and quantum teleportation is the price of enjoying Mr. Gleick’s simple, entertaining riffs on the Oxford English Dictionary’s methodology, which has yielded 30-odd spellings of “mackerel” and an enchantingly tongue-tied definition of “bada-bing” and on the cyber-battles waged via Wikipedia. (As he notes, there are people who have bothered to fight over Wikipedia’s use of the word “cute” to accompany a picture of a young polar bear.) That Amazon boasts of being able to download a book called “Data Smog” in less than a minute does not escape his keen sense of the absurd.

As it traces our route to information overload, “The Information” pays tribute to the places that made it possible. He cites and honors the great cogitation hives of yore. In addition to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the Mount Rushmore of theoretical science, he acknowledges the achievements of corporate facilities like Bell Labs and I.B.M.’s Watson Research Center in the halcyon days when many innovations had not found practical applications and progress was its own reward.

“The Information” also lauds the heroics of mathematicians, physicists and computer pioneers like Claude Shannon, who is revered in the computer-science realm for his information theory but not yet treated as a subject for full-length, mainstream biography. Mr. Shannon’s interest in circuitry using “if … then” choices conducting arithmetic in a binary system had novelty when he began formulating his thoughts in 1937. “Here in a master’s thesis by a research assistant,” Mr. Gleick writes, “was the essence of the computer revolution yet to come.”

Stacey Isaacson, by all human reports, is a fantastically gifted and effective teacher. But let a couple of dodos at the Tammany Courthouse “measure” her performance, using a formula out of RubeGoldberg, and you’ll “discover” that she’s really “worse” than 93% of her colleagues!

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.
The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.

Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.

Experience with the bureaucratic mind suggests that the “statistical model” becomes more onerous as the performance of students rises.

Who controls the sovereign wealth fund that Col Qaddafi’s son, Seif, set up a few years ago? Most of it appears to sit in Libyan banks, beyond the reach of Western sanctions.

The fund’s nominal head is Muhammad H. Layas, perhaps Libya’s most experienced international banker. He has had a leadership role in institutions including the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank, the only bank allowed to conduct international business during the imposition of United Nations sanctions against Libya; British-Arab Commercial Bank, a London-based wholesale bank now majority owned by Libya; and the Arab Banking Corporation, a Bahrain-based bank also majority controlled by Libya.

But while he was the titular head, bankers who have had dealings with the fund say that the real power was wielded by Mustafa Zarti, a close friend of Mr. Qaddafi whose title is deputy chief executive.

Brash and with an “in-your-face” style, according to people who dealt with him, Mr. Zarti went to school with Mr. Qaddafi in Austria. He is also his partner in a tuna farming enterprise, R. H. Marine Services, on the west coast of Libya.

Bankers who dealt with Mr. Zarti said he fancied himself quite a deal maker — very much taken with glossy Wall Street names like Goldman Sachs — and was known for his impulsive and unsuccessful investment decisions, like investing in Royal Bank of Scotland before it was bailed out.

We especially liked this part: “People who worked closely with the fund said that its inner workings were largely a mystery as bureaucratic inertia and lack of investment expertise kept it from being more active.”

Floyd Norris comments on the good news about employment.

But for now note that the last time the unemployment rate fell 0.9 percentage points in three months was in 1983. That was when the economy finally started to rise rapidly after the early 1980’s double-dip recessions.

An important point to remember is that almost every economic statistic has been looking up, with the notable exception of the jobs figure. Now it seems to be falling in line.

A Happy International Progress Day to you and yours!

Some clueless young persons who have founded an elite organization, the Native Club, were evidently unaware that the first rule of such associations is supposed to be a ban on publicity. No talking to the Times!  The second rule — anybody can rent a room at the Plaza — to to occupy a building to which you can deny entry by non-members.   

Membership parameters have also loosened. It’s no longer restricted to people who understand that the soft-shell crabs are the thing to order at Swifty’s. The group now includes musicians from the Lower East Side, a painter on the Upper West Side, even folks who hail from far-off lands like Connecticut (you can be an “honorary member” if you’re born outside the city, so long as you display the Native mind-set, Mr. Estreich explained).

Larger parties, like the one at the Plaza, amount to rush parties, where candidates are brought for inspection. A counsel of 14 administrators functions like a Sutton Place co-op board and decides whom to admit.

For the inner circle, there are also private parties, drawing 25 or so to members’ East Side town houses or art-filled SoHo lofts. No one talks about the rituals at those events. “That’s where we burn lambs,” joked Freddie Fackelmayer, a member who wears his hair in a dramatic swoop of forelocks — call it the Fop Flop — familiar from a thousand Ralph Lauren ads.

As everyone knows, American working women earn less than their male counterparts. Gail Collins, not a hawker of pie in the sky, suggests why that may change.

Americans are so used to the fact that women are capable of doing anything that we hardly ever discuss it. It’s been a long time since the leader of NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.”

A change that happened later, and the one that’s going to be driving the future, is that women’s ability to succeed in their work life is now a matter of concern for both sexes. The turning point for American women really came on the unknown day when the average American couple started planning their futures with the presumption that there would be two paychecks. In a country where no one has real power without a serious economic role, we entered a time when, whether we liked it or not, all hands were needed to keep the economic ship afloat. Even women who get the opportunity to stay home when their children are young have to be ready to jump back into the work force if their partner is suddenly laid off.

A while back, I was visiting a college in Connecticut where most of the students were the first in their families ever to go beyond high school. I was talking with a group of young men and women, and I asked the men how many of them felt it was very important that their future wife be a good earner.

All of them raised their hands.

When we were young, the position of symphony orchestra conductor was an appointment for life, and holding more than one post was uncommon. We’re just saying.

If the good old ways had been kept up, then everyone would have been spared the embarrassing tease of the Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine’s health-related absences from his other job in Boston.

Mr. Levine acknowledged that he might have bitten off too much. “From the very beginning I didn’t handle both jobs completely smoothly,” he said. “There was always for me a tightness in the schedule between finishing a group of things here and then having to go right away to another group of things somewhere else.” As a younger, healthier man, he said, he could handle that.

[snip]

Mr. Levine’s health problems sometimes seem to be scrutinized like those of a political leader or pope because he is an enormously influential figure in classical music. He plays a central role in one of the world’s leading opera houses, has the devotion of many major singers and directs one of the top orchestras around.

He has a large fan base and attracts donors. Administrators rely on his leadership to keep their institutions musically excellent. Audience members buy tickets for him, not — at least not yet — for the likes of his substitutes, including Sean Newhouse, an assistant conductor for the Boston orchestra who led Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 last weekend.

If Mr Levine were to die, or to retire altogether from the podium, his reputation as one of the greatest conductors of the Twentieth Century would be secure. Ambition at this stage is unseemly.

Pakistan’s political elite suffered yet another body-blow yesterday, with the assassination of the government’s only Christian minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, gunned down outside his home by thugs in vernacular costume.

In a sign of the retreat of the ruling party on the question of enacting more tolerant laws, Prime Minister Gilani pledged in Parliament earlier this year that the government had no intention of pursuing the reform agenda on the blasphemy laws. An alliance of conservative religious parties showed their strength in the major cities in early February, staging rallies of tens of thousands that called the government lackeys of the United States, and too reliant on a reform agenda. Alarmed by the rising tide of militant sentiments, senior American officials suggested to Mr. Zardari and Mr. Gilani that they make public speeches on the need for tolerance — “Churchillian” presentations, said one diplomat — but the leaders had cited lack of security and fear for their lives.

Mr. Bhatti had expressed nervousness about speaking out and had shunned public appearances, his aides said. One of Mr. Bhatti’s favorite sayings came from the inaugural address in 1947 of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who declared that Pakistan would not be a theocracy, and all religions would be respected. “I am receiving threats on speaking against the blasphemy law but my faith gives me strength and we will not allow the handful of extremists to fulfill their agenda,” Mr. Bhatti said shortly before his death.

The international advocacy group Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday that Mr. Bhatti’s killing represented the “bitter fruit of appeasement of extremist and militant groups” in the last several months. It called for an “urgent” reappraisal of the “political cowardice” that had overtaken the ruling party in the government, the Pakistan Peoples Party.

We’re reminded of Omar Ali’s epitaph-in-waiting for Pakistan’s ruling class: “They have armed, trained and encouraged their own executioners in the course of a demented scheme of trying to wrest Kashmir from India while laying the foundation for a mini-empire in central Asia.”

We are totally wowed. Even though we knew something of the polymathy of Natalie Portman, Natalie Angier’s report makes us gasp.

On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.

Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here. She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

No wonder we like The Other Boleyn Girl so much.

What do Wal-Mart, Duke University, and the Environmental Protection Agency have in common? They’re three among the thirty founders of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, a research institute that will investigate the conditions in which clothing is produced — a complicated business, to be sure (where was that zipper fabricated?). Reporter Tom Zeller cannot entirely conceal the too-good-to-be-true press-releaser quality of this news, but at least it will make an interesting failure, if fail it does.

The coalition’s tool is meant to be a database of scores assigned to all the players in the life cycle of a garment — cotton growers, synthetic fabric makers, dye suppliers, textile mill owners, as well as packagers, shippers, retailers and consumers — based on a variety of social and environmental measures like water and land use, energy efficiency, waste production, chemical use, greenhouse gases and labor practices.

A clothing company designer could then use the tool to select materials and suppliers, computing an overall sustainability score based on industry standards. If the score exceeds the company’s own sustainability goals — or if competitive pressures arising from a consumer label are compelling the company to bring scores down — designers could revise their choices with the tool.

Such a tool is a work in progress. It draws heavily from two earlier efforts — an environmental design tool developed by Nike, and an “Eco Index” begun by the Outdoor Industry Association last year. But these afford only a partial or approximate look at the potential effects of discrete industry segments.

Julie Bosman follows Paris Review editor and Grub Street sex symbol Lorin Stein on a literary debauch.

Money is a running concern. His own salary, around $150,000, is generous by literary-world standards. The magazine’s occasional fund-raisers, subscriber dollars, newsstand sales and private donations provide enough money to cover costs, and an endowment has been untouched since 2006. But Mr. Stein is under pressure not only to raise the magazine’s profile, but to lure more paying customers, relentlessly promote it and its writers, and dream up new ways of getting attention.

Sometimes, that means asking for favors from famous writer friends. At the Harper’s party, he spotted Ms. Smith, looking tall and elegant with her hair swept back.

Mr. Stein pounced. “You and Nick,” he said, referring to her husband, the writer Nick Laird. “I want you to be my guests at the magazine gala.”

She looked skeptical. “So you want my money?”

“No, we want to pimp the two of you,” he said. “You’ll have so much fun. We’ll pay for the baby sitter.”

Scott Shane takes a look at the role of Al Qaeda in the downfall of the Middle East’s autocracies — which, so far, has been “absolutely no role.” Have these upsets consigned militant jihadism to the dustbin, or have they on the contrary worked up some new opportunities for terrorists?

Abu Khaled, a Jordanian jihadist who fought in Iraq with the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggested that Al Qaeda would benefit in the long run from dashed hopes.

“At the end of the day, how much change will there really be in Egypt and other countries?” he asked. “There will be many disappointed demonstrators, and that’s when they will realize what the only alternative is. We are certain that this will all play into our hands.”

Michael Scheuer, author of a new biography of Mr. bin Laden and head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit in the late 1990s, thinks such enthusiasm is more than wishful thinking.
Mr. Scheuer says he believes that Americans, including many experts, have wildly misjudged the uprisings by focusing on the secular, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who are a natural draw for television. Thousands of Islamists have been released from prisons in Egypt alone, and the ouster of Al Qaeda’s enemy, Mr. Mubarak, will help revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies, he said.

All we can ask is that younger American voices will have a greater role in shaping this country’s responses to events on the fly. At bottom, what’s happening more or less violently in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere is bound to happen somehow or other all over the world, as the surging demographic of young people challenges the status quo not in the spirit of boredom and caprice that bedeviled the late 1960s but rather in the earnest pursuit of meaningful careers. Today’s kids want to grow up.

Further evidence that Park Slope is a grim and humorless part of town — a socialist suburbia nestling in Hither Brooklyn — will be found in a story filed this morning by two Times reporters, Anemona Hartocollis and Juliet Linderman: “At a Food Co-op, a Discordant Thought: Nannies Covering Shifts.”

Jeremie Delon, 31, an on-again, off-again member, admitted to taking some pleasure from the thought that co-op members might sometimes misbehave.

Mr. Delon said he had dropped out of the co-op five years ago, after a woman yelled at him for leaving his cart in the checkout line while he went back for an item he had forgotten (another violation of co-op rules). He rejoined recently after becoming a father.

He said the co-op had asked for a birth certificate as proof of the baby’s existence, and was now chasing down the baby’s mother, demanding that she join and put in her time, because all adult members of a household are required to work shifts.

“I’m a punk rocker at heart, so rules are tough for me,” Mr. Delon said. “Sometimes I ask myself if the co-op is really worth it.”

Some members conceded that having the nanny do the work was tempting. “In my fantasy, I’d have my nanny cover my shift,” Sarah Rivkin, 39, said. But she added that she knew that would be “inappropriate.”

Anyway, she said she would be too intimidated. A friend of hers had married a Cuban immigrant, who summed up why Ms. Rivkin felt that way.

“His assessment of the co-op is that the co-op is worse than socialism,” she said. “Because at least in a socialist country, if you know the right people, you can get out of it.”

Bon weekend à tous!

We’ll be damned: there are Times readers who will be surprised to learn that trial lawyers are a superstitious bunch. Or maybe not; maybe Benjamin Weiser and his editors are just pretending, so that they can share a lot of ridiculous anecdotes.  

“Trial lawyers believe in jinxes,” Mr. Finzi acknowledged from White Plains, where he is defending a man in a murder trial. Along with using his keen judgment and legal skills, Mr. Finzi made clear that he was doing whatever else was necessary.

“I’ve been up here 10 days,” he said earlier this month, “and I’ve had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch every single day.”

But Joshua L. Dratel questioned his colleagues’ adherence to superstition, asking, “If where I ate dinner last night decides the merits of a case, then what’s the point of even trying?”

And Steven M. Cohen, another veteran lawyer, observed, “You certainly wouldn’t want to learn that your heart surgeon or your 747 pilot always wears the same pair of underwear when it’s time to perform.”

Ah, but surgeons and pilots actually know what they’re doing. “Keen judgment” and “legal skills” don’t come into it.

No one does outrage more appealingly than Gail Collins. Her target today is Lone Star governor Rick Perry, who seems hell-bent on creating a populous underclass of unwanted, uneducated, and untrained Texans.

Meanwhile, Perry — having chosen not to help young women avoid unwanted pregnancies and not to pay enough to educate the booming population of Texas children — wowed the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington with his states’ rights rhetoric.

Which would be fine, as I said, if his state wasn’t in charge of preparing a large chunk of the nation’s future work force. Perry used to be famous for his flirtation with talk of secession. Maybe we should encourage him to revisit it.

One thing that the Editor learned during his sojourn in Texas in the 1970s was that many people down there seem to think that they’re living in an independent republic that’s occupied by noisome federales. Maybe it’s time for the United States to withdraw its forces (and its moolah) from the alien corn.