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Liberia declares curfew, seals Ebola-infested communities The curfew will take effect as of 9pm Wednesday and will last until 6am each day

MONROVIA (AA) – Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has imposed a nighttime curfew throughout the country as part of efforts to battle an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the West African country.

“We have been unable to control the spread due to continued denials, cultural burying practices, disregard for the advice of health workers and disrespect for the warnings by the government,” the president said.

“As a result, and due to the large population concentration, the disease has spread widely in Monrovia and [its] environs,” she added.

“It has thus become necessary to impose additional sanctions to curb the spread overall, and particularly in those areas of intensity,” Sirleaf asserted.

The curfew will take effect as of 9pm Wednesday and will last until 6am each day.

Under the curfew order, all entertainment centers – including video clubs – will close by 6pm daily.

In recent months, Ebola – a contagious disease for which there is no known treatment or cure – has claimed more than one thousand lives in West Africa.

According to the World Health Organization, Liberia had documented 786 laboratory-confirmed, probable and suspected cases of infection as of August 13.

It has also registered 413 laboratory-confirmed, probable and suspected Ebola deaths, including 58 reported on August 12 and 13.

On July 7, President Sirleaf declared a 90-day state of emergency throughout the country due to the outbreak.

She had earlier ordered the immediate closure of all schools throughout the country and put all non-essential staff at government ministries and agencies on 30-day compulsory leave.

The tropical fever, which first appeared in 1976 in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, can be transmitted to humans from wild animals.

It also reportedly spreads through contact with the body fluids of infected persons or of those who have died of the disease.

-Sealed communities-

Meanwhile, two communities that continue to report mass Ebola deaths have been sealed off.

The West Point Township near capital Monrovia, where an Ebola holding center was looted Saturday, and Dolo Town in Margibi County are both being quarantined due to the high level of reported Ebola cases.

State security forces have already set up roadblocks at all the communities’ entry and exit points.

“We woke up this morning and saw soldiers in our community; our people are in panic,” Geo-Varnie Brooks, a Dolo community leader, told Anadolu Agency.

“The government should have told us and put all measures in place before putting us under quarantine,” he fumed.

The restrictions are intended to aid the fight against transmission following reports from some communities of dead bodies being thrown in the streets and people relocating to other counties or crossing into other areas under cover of darkness.

All this, the government believes, has contributed to the rapid spread of the virus.

In recent weeks, the government has warned those from affected counties to remain inside their communities and refrain from relocating in hopes of containing the virus.

© 2014, Evelyn T. Kpadeh. All rights reserved. – The views expressed here are purely those of the author and not necessarily those of the publishers. – Newstime Africa content cannot be reproduced in any form – electronic or print – without prior consent of the Publishers. Copyright infringement will be pursued and perpetrators prosecuted.

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A former Stamford-based managing director of Jefferies Group has lost a bid to overturn his conviction for defrauding investors in mortgage bond trades after the financial crisis.

In a decision issued late Wednesday, Chief Judge Janet Hall of the U.S. District Court in New Haven, ruled prosecutors sufficiently proved that Jesse Litvak, 39, had lied to customers about the prices of residential mortgage-backed securities, in an effort to make more money for Jefferies and for himself.

Prosecutors had accused the trader of swindling customers such as AllianceBernstein Holding out of more than $2 million from 2009 to 2011 by inflating bond prices, lying about what Jefferies paid for bonds and inventing sellers.

Jurors convicted Litvak on all 15 counts he faced on March 7.

"Litvak exploited the opacity of the RMBS market to his victims' detriment and to (Jefferies') and his own advantage," Hall wrote in a 24-page decision. "A rational jury could have concluded that, absent Litvak's lies, his victims could have negotiated a better deal with him."

Ross Garber and Patrick Smith, two of Litvak's lawyers, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

The decision cleared the way for Litvak to be sentenced on July 23. Prosecutors are seeking a nine-year prison term and a $5 million fine. Litvak, a married father of two, has said a prison term of no more than 14 months is fair.

Litvak's criminal case is the first against an individual arising from a 2009 law banning major fraud against the United States through the $700 billion federal bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Part of Litvak's fraud targeted participants in the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP), a TARP initiative designed to invigorate a moribund mortgage debt market, prosecutors said.

In seeking a judgment of acquittal or a new trial, Litvak had argued his customers were professional money managers who knew whether the bond prices on their trades were fair. He also said his activities were immaterial to his customers' decisions, and commonplace in the industry.

Hall pointed to testimony from former customers that Litvak's lies "mattered to them" and affected the prices they paid.

As to the TARP fraud charge, Hall said there was ample evidence, including online chats, to show Litvak knew his customers were conducting transactions to help the government, including trades through the PPIP.

Jefferies, a unit of Leucadia National Corp, agreed five days after the Litvak verdict to enter a nonprosecution agreement and pay $25 million to settle criminal and civil probes into its alleged failure to properly supervise traders.

A native resident of New York, Litvak graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1997. He began his career at RBS Greenwich Capital in June 1997 and joined Jefferies's Stamford office in April 2008.

The case is U.S. v. Litvak, U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut, No. 13-cr-00019.

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A 26-year-old soldier from Baytown who joined the Army only last year was one of three members of the 4th Brigade Combat Team from Fort Campbell, Ky., who died Sunday when they came under attack in Afghanistan.

Spc. Keith Erin Grace Jr., a vehicle driver, died along with Staff Sgt. Octavio Herrera, 26, of Idaho, and Sgt. Jamar Avery Hicks, 22, of Arkansas. The nature of the attack was not released by the U.S. Department of Defense, which said only that the incident was combat-related. The three were killed near the town of Dzadran, which is in the Khost province near the Pakistan border in southern Afghanistan and a site of repeated insurgent activity.

Grace came from difficult family circumstances and was placed for adoption at birth, friends said. His adoptive mother died when he was about 12. By that time, he had survived bone cancer that they said should have killed him.

"He shouldn't have made it, but he pulled through it and survived 100 percent," said longtime friend, Garland Davis, who said he regarded Grace as a brother, though there was no legal or blood connection.

"He was a very positive person. Truly, he was the strongest person I've ever known," Davis said. "I'll never meet anyone like him again."

Grace joined the Army in January 2012 and was stationed in Fort Campbell in May of last year. The 4th Brigade Combat Team, a unit of the 101st Airborne, was deployed to Iraq this spring. His military awards include one National Defense Service Medal, one Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and an Army Service Ribbon.

Grace grew up in Baytown and graduated from Lee High School in 2006. He worked in a variety of jobs before deciding to join the military. Friends said he was looking for something that would give his life structure and possibly lead to a career.

"He was an extremely hard worker and was very, very funny," said friend Natalie Ingram, who met Grace about five years ago. "His positive attitude is hard to even describe, it was so strong. He took everything as it came to him. He survived cancer and went through countless family struggles. He had a very tough background, but he had a great attitude and made everyone comfortable."

Davis said his parents, Michael and Mary Davis, served as Grace's surrogate parents to the point that Grace referred to them that way. He said Grace had no relationship with his biological father and only a marginal connection with his biological mother.

'He chose us'

"We were his family because he chose us," Davis said. "He's been through hell and back with his family, but he always has had a smile on his face. He never picked fights, never tried to create a problem. He was stuck in a bad position and he tried to better himself. He ended up falling in love with the Army, and he loved this country. He paid the ultimate sacrifice, but joining the military was truly the best thing for him."

A funeral will be held when Grace's remains are returned home, Davis said.


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Girls barred from Utah dance for short skirts

TOOELE, Utah (AP) — A Utah public high school principal has apologized to dozens of teens who were turned away from their homecoming dance because their dresses were deemed too short, in what parents and students called a “homecoming spirit massacre.”

Stansbury High principal Kendall Topham held four assemblies Monday, telling students the school’s dress code policy was too vague to be properly enforced and vowing to hold a free dance to make up for Saturday’s dress debacle.

As many as half of those who arrived at the dance ended up not going in after their dates and friends were barred from entering. Among those turned away: Homecoming Queen Erica Alvey.

The school’s handbook states that dress for formal events should be “at or near knee length,” leaving room for interpretation.

“They told me that it was showing my knees so it was too short, and in order to get into the dance I had to put on leggings,” Alvey told the Deseret News. “So I did, and I got back in the dance, but that was before I realized that this thing was going to turn into such a big issue.”

Students and parents took to Facebook after the dance to protest, posting examples of sparkly dresses an inch or two above the knee that school officials said broke the rules.

Some parents, including Michael Johnson, went to the school Saturday night after their children called to say they couldn’t attend. Johnson told The Salt Lake Tribune he doesn’t have a problem with the school imposing a dress policy, but he said it was too vague.

His daughter wore a black dress with ruffles ending about an inch above her knee. The family had paid to get the dress lengthened before the dance to make sure it would meet the school’s requirements.

Several students wore their homecoming dresses to class Monday in protest of the dress code. They also signed a petition to have the dress code changed to be more specific with input from the student body.

Meanwhile, Topham apologized to students Monday.

“As much as we want to have a certain level of appropriateness and reasonableness, there was never any intention for people to leave heartbroken and disgruntled and confused and frustrated,” he said. “So that apology needed to happen and it did happen.”

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Your Opinion: Not the proper time to seek tax hike

Dear Editor:

This is an alert to the school board: the taxpayers are tapped out with any new property taxes. To start with, the state workers (Cole County/Jefferson City’s largest employer is the state) lost their 1 percent to 2 percent pay raise by the raise in Social Security tax by the federal government. The taxes we are already paying on our property does not equate to the value of our property. Most properties have been devalued by the housing bubble, but the property taxes haven’t fallen.

A lot of people are barely making it from one paycheck to another. More importantly, their hard-earned money goes to pay the mortgage or rent, groceries, gas and utilities, etc. Even if they are paying rent, if property taxes go up, so will their rent. Has the board even considered what kind of economy we are all living in? Stagnant, to say the least, much less Obamacare with all the taxes attached to it this year, next year and beyond.

The people I have talked with about this added tax, tell me no way. I agree, this is not the time economically to raise property taxes. And too, what about all the parochial schools and their students? They are not bused to school or financed by anyone’s tax dollars, but yet the parents are still paying property taxes.

It seems to me, the school board needs to rethink their “dream” campus school(s) and do what the taxpayers have done, cut back and take austere measures if need be. I just want the council/chamber and school board to stop with all the tax measures, annexations, conference center, etc. The taxpayers have grown weary of the constant wanting of more taxes, while really doing little for their constituents.

And, by the way, I understand the need for a new high school, but with the economy like it is, this is not feasible at this time. I was a 1964 graduate of Jefferson City.

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Photo detail

Part of a 15-ton lump of fat and other debris coagulated inside a main London city sewer, which took many days to clear from the drain, it was announced Tuesday. Utility company Thames Water says it has cleared what it calls the biggest “fatberg” ever recorded in Britain, a 15-ton blob of congealed fat and baby wipes the size of a bus.

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Mind the fat: Huge blob of it found in UK sewer (VIDEO)

It may look like an iceberg, but there’s nothing cool about it.

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TORONTO, Dec. 27, 2012 /CNW/ - ADIRA ENERGY LTD. (TSXV: ADL) (OTCBB: ADENF) (FRANKFURT: AORLB8).  Adira Energy Ltd. ("Adira" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Ministry of Energy and Water of the State of Israel (the "Ministry") has granted an extension of the date for the execution of a drilling contract of the first well on the Yitzhak offshore license from December 31, 2012 to June 30, 2013.

Jeffrey E. Walter, Chief Executive Officer of Adira Energy stated: "This extension allows Adira additional time in order to obtain the rig required to drill the well on Yitzhak while currently focusing on the imminent drilling of Gabriella."

About Adira Energy Ltd.

Adira Energy Ltd. is an oil and gas company which is focused in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Company has three petroleum exploration licenses offshore Israel; the Gabriella, Yitzhak and Samuel Licenses. These licenses are located respectively 10 km offshore between Netanya and Ashdod, 17 km offshore between Hadera and Netanya and adjacent to the coast between Ashkelon and Bat-Yam. The Company also has an option on the Yam Hadera License, offshore Israel, which is located 30 kilometers offshore Israel, between Hadera and Haifa and North West of Adira's Yitzhak license.

Forward-Looking Statement Disclaimer

This press release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical facts are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the Company's internal projections, estimated or beliefs, concerning, among other things an outlook on the estimated amounts and timing of exploration work and capital expenditures or other expectation, beliefs, plans, objectives, assumption, intentions or statements about future events or performance, which are considered by management to be reasonable at the time made. Actual events or results may differ materially. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the statements are reasonable, it cannot guarantee future results since such results are inherently subject to significant business, economic, corporate, political and social uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward looking statements made by, or on behalf of, the Company and the foregoing stated factors are not exhaustive. The statements contained herein are made as of the date hereof and the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any forward looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. Company shareholders and potential investors should carefully consider the information contained in the Company's filing with Canadian securities administrators at before making investment decisions with regard to the Company.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE: Adira Energy Ltd.

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Previous Article Next Article

Vitamin E May Delay Decline in Mild-to-Moderate Alzheimer’s Disease

Study Shows Benefit in Activities of Daily Living and Savings in Caregiver Time with Vitamin E

Released: 26-Dec-2013 4:00 PM EST
Embargo expired: 31-Dec-2013 4:00 PM EST
Source Newsroom: Mount Sinai Medical Center
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Citations JAMA, JAN-1, 2014

Newswise — NEW YORK, NY –Dec. 26, 2013 – Difficulty with activities of daily living often affect Alzheimer's patients, which is estimated to affect as many as 5.1 million Americans. These issues are among the most taxing burdens of the disease for caregivers, which total about 5.4 million family members and friends. New research from the faculty of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai working with Veterans Administration Medical Centers suggests that alpha tocepherol, fat-soluble Vitamin E and antioxidant, may slow functional decline (problems with daily activities such as shopping, preparing meals, planning, and traveling) in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease and decrease caregiver burden. There was no added benefit for memory and cognitive testing with the vitamin. The study is published online first in the Jan. 1 Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Since the cholinesterase inhibitors [galantamine, donepezil, rivastigmine], we have had very little to offer patients with mild-to-moderate dementia,” said Mary Sano, PhD, trial co-investigator, and professor in the department of psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and director of research at the James J. Peters Veteran’s Administration Medical Center, Bronx, New York. “This trial showed that vitamin E delays progression of functional decline by 19% per year, which translates into 6.2 months benefit over placebo.”
The finding is valuable because vitamin E is easy to purchase at local drugstores and it is also inexpensive. The clinical trial investigators believe it can be recommended as a treatment strategy, based on the double-blind randomized controlled trial.

The Veteran’s Administration Cooperative Randomized Trial of Vitamin E and memantine in Alzheimer’s Disease (TEAM-AD examined the effects of vitamin E 2,000 IU/d, 20 mg/d of memantine, the combination, or placebo on Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study/Activities of Daily Living (ADCS-ADL) Inventory Score. Cognitive, neuropsychiatric, functional, and caregiver measures were secondary outcomes. A group of 613 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease were in the study, which was launched in August 2007 and finished in September 2012 at 14 Veterans Affairs Medical Centers.

Dr. Sano previously led a study on vitamin E in patients with moderately severe Alzheimer’s disease. She found that the vitamin slowed disease progression in this group of patients as well.

Kenneth Davis, MD, Chief Executive Officer and President of the Mount Sinai Health System and Gustave L. Levy Distinguished Professor, applauded the study. “This study is the first to show an added benefit for vitamin E in mild-to-moderate disease,” he said. “Now that we have a strong clinical trial showing that vitamin E slows functional decline and reduces the burdens on caregivers, vitamin E should be offered to patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease.” Research by Dr. Davis and colleagues contributed to the establishment of conventional medical therapies for Alzheimer’s disease.

The Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program funded the TEAM-AD trial. (#CSP-546)
About the Mount Sinai Health System

The Mount Sinai Health System is an integrated health system committed to providing distinguished care, conducting transformative research, and advancing biomedical education. Structured around seven member hospital campuses and a single medical school, the Health System has an extensive ambulatory network and a range of inpatient and outpatient services—from community-based facilities to tertiary and quaternary care. The System includes approximately 6,600 primary and specialty care physicians, 12-minority-owned free-standing ambulatory surgery centers, over 45 ambulatory practices throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, and Long Island, as well as 31 affiliated community health centers. Physicians are affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is ranked among the top 20 medical schools both in National Institutes of Health funding and by U.S. News & World Report.

For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org.
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A poll that I recently conducted among several of David Pasternack’s friends and colleagues yielded a nearly unanimous result. The question was: if Dave were a fish, what kind would he be? The answer was: a tuna. One respondent, Artie Hoernig, a commercial fisherman who also operates a retail fish market and restaurant in Island Park, New York, was more specific. “Absolutely a bluefin tuna,” he said, referring to a species that I’d heard Pasternack characterize as “like a freight train swimming in the ocean.” A minority opinion from his father, Mel (“striped bass—wild, big, good fighter”), dovetailed with Dave’s own measured self-appraisal: “Half tuna, half striper, I guess. Tuna for the thrill of the chase, the hunt. I love to catch a tuna. And striped bass is the king of the fish inshore. It’s our native fish, and I grew up catching ’em, you know.” He went on, “Basically, I’ve fished my whole life. I started fishing with my father when I was about five, in Jamaica Bay, off of Floyd Bennett Field, in Brooklyn. Snapper, bluefish, blowfish, flounder. I fished regularly with a guy named Captain Lou. I always fished with older guys. It was, like, somebody would introduce me and they’d take me under their wing. People don’t necessarily do that anymore, which is too bad, because that’s how you learn—‘You’re tying it that way? No, you tie it that way.’ If you wanna catch a lot of fish, you’ve gotta take an aggressive approach. And what’s the point of fishing if you don’t wanna catch ’em?”

Pasternack is the chef and co-creator of Esca, a five-year-old fish restaurant on West Forty-third Street, in Manhattan. His recipes are unaffectedly refined, and he defines his culinary creativity in elliptical, prosaic terms: “It’s passion, plus knowing when something needs a little something”—the emblem of a cook, or, for that matter, any artist who knows what to put in and what to leave out. A focussed, sensible fellow, he understands the fish business better than just about anyone, in ways intuitive, visceral, and pragmatic. Before dawn one spring morning at the Fulton Fish Market, as we were admiring a machete-wielding Ecuadorean who, with the celerity of a Jedi, was quartering and trimming a mattress-sized yellowfin tuna, Pasternack noticed a neatly pressed silver-haired gent standing nearby. He said to me softly, “A good old-fashioned ‘made’ guy. Nice guy. But he’s notorious. The market was run by ’em for years, until they passed the RICO laws and then these guys were supposed to be banned. I’m surprised to see him here, even though he owns the business. And if you print the name of the business I’ll have no glass left in my windows.”

Local climate and geography have surprisingly little bearing upon the experience of eating in New York. The foods most closely identified with the city at street level—pizza, pastrami, pretzel, dim sum, falafel—all made their way here on immigrant tides. And the past decade has witnessed an exoticism that often seems more than a little forced. When a phenomenon like Jean-Georges Vongerichten creates an empire in Manhattan, his ambition—which presumes, of course, that a critical mass of people will ante up the equivalent of a mortgage payment for a meal—reflects a high-wire determination to move far beyond his Alsatian roots. (French-Thai fusion! Malay-Thai street food!) Pasternack happens to be Jewish and Esca happens to be resolutely Italian (if unlike any other Italian restaurant in the city). Whatever. Compared with New York’s other celebrated chefs, he has stayed unusually close to home; Esca is, among other things, the direct consequence of his years of experience with a rod and reel. Pasternack lives in Long Beach and, for a while, had a habit of schlepping to Esca, on the Long Island Rail Road, plastic garbage bags containing fish that he’d caught the previous day. “But I’d be exhausted by the time I made the walk from Penn Station,” he said. So he persuaded his wife, Donna Peltz, to make deliveries in their 1988 Toyota sedan, which she did until two years ago, when he decided that he could justify investing in a truck. No other restaurant in the city—not now and presumably not ever—offers year-round wild game that has been personally bagged by the chef.

Before Esca (“bait,” in Italian), Pasternack worked for two decades in a succession of mostly French-themed New York restaurants, bistros, and brasseries, and before that he attended culinary school at Johnson & Wales, in Providence, Rhode Island. During his year and a half in Providence, he drove every weekend to his home town, Rockville Centre, a Nassau County suburb only a few miles inland (or only a madeleine-like sea breeze) from the South Shore of Long Island. Then, after he found work and began living in Manhattan, he stayed connected to the old neighborhood by renting a room or an apartment close to the beach. As often as he could manage, he spent his days off fishing, in the bays and inlets and in the wide-open Atlantic, from the Rockaways to Montauk Point. He took stripers, tuna, flounder, fluke, sea bass, porgies, cod, weakfish, bluefish, mackerel, the inadvertent shark—in his concise inventory, “whatever swam.” Though there’s no mistaking Pasternack for a literary type, spending time with him got me thinking about the way a chef’s evolution can mirror that of a novelist. In the same way that a fiction writer can rely upon the dictum “write about what you know,” Pasternack, as much as a New York-born-and-bred chef can, has thrived by cooking best what he knows best.

In the differentiation between executive chefs, celebrity chefs, and working chefs, Pasternack is plainly in his element in the third category. He doesn’t have a cell phone or respond to e-mail, but he’s easy to get hold of. His office, in effect, is the same spot in the kitchen where he cuts fish, orders supplies, conceives menus, plates food, and supervises his staff. He’s at Esca five, sometimes six days a week, typically from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Though he rents a pied-à-terre on the East Side, most nights he takes the train home to Long Beach, where he and Donna live with their year-old daughter, Ruby, in a red brick and rose stucco bungalow with a detached garage. My first glimpse inside the garage was a moment of recognition: suspended from the rafters were two punching bags. Days when Pasternack is neither working nor fishing, he likes to ride his bicycle along the Long Beach boardwalk—it extends nearly two and a half miles—and then spend a half hour thumping the heavy bags. On or off the job, whether he’s giving instructions in Spanglish to a fish cleaner (“Antonio, you’re gonna take this abajo and this abajo and you’re gonna keep ’em separado, O.K.?”) or butchering a side of veal or setting the hook in a fish that’s on the line, he has the authority of a nimble middleweight, at once firmly grounded and light on his feet. He’s five nine, with powerful arms and shoulders and a creeping waistline. At forty-one, he looks his age. He has short light-brown hair that’s receding and thinning at the crown, a nose you notice, broad cheeks, a strong jaw, blue-gray eyes, and often a slightly weary demeanor. His smile is wry and asymmetrical, listing toward starboard. About every third day, he’s clean-shaven.

The kitchen at Esca is relatively small—two levels, six hundred square feet in all—but for the twenty or so prep cooks, line cooks, runners, and dishwashers who circulate during peak hours, it probably feels less crowded than others they’ve worked in, because the boss isn’t inclined toward histrionics or harangues. He speaks in a low, even register, with an inflection and delivery that are pure South Shore, which is basically blue-collar Brooklynese that’s moved farther out on Long Island. “St. Francis said you have to speak in the vernacular, and that’s Dave,” Mel Pasternack, a semi-retired trial attorney, told me. “When he talks to a fishmonger, he speaks fishspeak.”

“The fish business is very complicated, very complicated,” Dave says when the conversation turns to catch limits, size limits, quotas for different species in different jurisdictions, and the vagaries of a marketplace in which the law of supply and demand regularly conflicts with conservation laws that often strike commercial fishermen as impractical and convoluted. In general, his sympathies lie with the fishermen. Which is to say that Pasternack is a resourceful guy who has cultivated mutually beneficial relationships with certain other guys: “My striped-bass guy called this morning. . . . I was talking to a guy who just came back from Florida. He was snook fishing every day. . . . Whenever Mike goes cod fishing, I’m his guy. . . . The way they ship stuff now is pretty amazing. Here, try this opah. It’s also called moonfish. Fatty, right? A lot of natural fat to it. Kinda has that tuna texture? With a completely different flavor. Very buttery, almost swordfishy. Opah comes from somewhere in the Pacific. I can speak to a guy, he’ll call me at eleven or twelve o’clock, the fish’ll be here when I get here the next morning. . . . A lot about buying fish is spontaneity. A guy called me yesterday and told me what he had and what he recommended. You’d have to be an idiot to buy what he didn’t recommend. I talked to a guy this morning, he was unloading a boat of monkfish. I bought some of the monkfish livers from him, to make pâté. He also had big jumbo scallops. And I bought a box of blackfish from him. . . . I called my crab guy last week. To find out when he’s gonna have blue claws and softshells. He told me to call him back in a month. I call guys all the time.”

The great majority of restaurants in the city, from cozy to corporate, buy all their fish through a single supplier. Pasternack deals with at least fifty: brokers; wholesalers; gill-netters; dredgers; and pinhook, or rod-and-reel, anglers. On any given day, salmon might arrive from Alaska; abalone and black cod from British Columbia; giant clams from Puget Sound; mahogany clams, sea urchins, and diver scallops from Maine; spot prawns from Santa Barbara; pink snapper and John Dory from New Zealand; yellowtail from Japan or California; red snapper, pompano, mahi-mahi, and grouper from the Gulf of Mexico; sardines from Portugal or California; scorpionfish, branzino, orata, and calamari from the Mediterranean; red mullet from Senegal; Arctic char from Iceland; octopus from South Carolina, Portugal, or Thailand; halibut, hake, skate, monkfish, fluke, flounder, kingfish, weakfish, sea bass, striped bass, scallops, sole, and tuna from up and down the East Coast; oysters from Long Island, Rhode Island, Maine, the Canadian Maritimes. Almost all of it is wild, and none of it has ever been frozen, nor will it be. (The freezer at Esca, no larger than a domestic fridge, is reserved for pasta and desserts.) The fish travel by truck, express mail, air freight, courier, U.P.S. Some arrive at the kitchen still flopping.

Pasternack speaks almost daily with Rod Mitchell, the owner of Browne Trading Company, in Portland, Maine, where hundreds of boats a month unload at the Portland Fish Exchange, the largest display fish auction in the country. Mitchell, who has been described as the “fish purveyor to the stars” but prefers to call himself a “fish picker,” combines his talent for scrutinizing individual fish with a global overview of the seafood trade, and he regards Pasternack as an ideal customer. “Dave’s quest is to have as many different kinds of fish as he can and still be able to sell them all,” he told me. “He wants to know every kind of fish that he can get his hands on. If I mention something he hasn’t heard of before, he says, ‘Send it.’ He can get something new and taste it raw, and he knows exactly what to do with it. I’m about to send him a new fish from Brazil, pintado. It’s also called a tigerfish. Amazing-looking. It makes you imagine that it could walk. It has no scales, and its skin is colored like a tiger’s. It’s never been imported tothe United States before. It’s a fish we found at a seafood exposition in Brussels. The minute I saw it, I thought of Dave.”

Every weekday, Pasternack dispatches a buyer, Roberto Nuñez, and a driver (“Tony, the truck guy”) to the Fulton Fish Market. About once a week, he shows up at the Fulton market for the pre-dawn rounds (a ritual that, lamentably, will soon be drained of its echt-Manhattan flavor, when the market relocates to Hunts Point, in the Bronx). Pasternack moves briskly from stall to stall, with an open mind and the confidence that if he doesn’t see what he likes (“Some weeks the market’s good, some weeks it has shit”) he’ll find something else somewhere else that will excite him. Certain dishes appear on the Esca menu three hundred and sixty-three days a year: Sicilian fish stew, Amalfitano fish soup, linguine with mahogany clams, spaghetti with a whole lobster, squid-ink pasta with cuttlefish, fritto misto, marinated anchovies and sardines, grilled octopus. But the guiding principle is that everything is provisional—dependent upon the quality of the available ingredients and upon Pasternack’s sensibility (“There is no system; it’s more about mood”)—and that, of course, there are always plenty more fish in the sea.

Invariably, when I’ve dropped by Esca to see Pasternack, I’ve found him just inside the open doorway of the kitchen, on the ground-floor level, armed with a very sharp knife. The first fish I watched him perform surgery on was a forty-pound halibut that had recently been swimming in the vicinity of Portland. His workstation—situated to afford an unobstructed view of the line cooks and prep cooks at the grill, sauté, and pasta stations, and to allow him to inspect every dish before it leaves the kitchen—is two and a half feet deep and nine feet wide, sufficient to accommodate the occasional four-hundred-pound tuna. His knife was German, with a twelve-inch blade, one of a dozen of varying sizes that he keeps in a plastic tray within easy reach. “I sharpen my knives every Saturday,” he said. “Nobody touches my knives. Not even my wife. They’re sacred.”

Downstairs, the halibut had already been scaled, gutted, and shorn of its dorsal and pelvic fins. It took Pasternack about a minute to remove the first fillet, drawing the knife handle toward him in sure, even strokes, with his left hand, as he proceeded along the spine. He lifted and flipped the fish, reinserted the knife laterally, just behind the pectoral fin, cut to the caudal fin, and severed the second fillet. He separated the flesh from the skin of both fillets as cleanly and economically as if he were peeling apples. The carcass was headed for the soup kettle, but not quite yet. “The head’s gonna be my lunch,” he said as he harvested two plum-sized lumps of cheek meat. Then he began trimming the fillets. “Pretty nice halibut,” he said. “This time of year they can be on the spawn. The meat can be a little milky.” Not in this instance, however. From each fillet he cut out the bloodline, a dark-meat layer that extends lengthwise below the dorsal fin, and sectioned the collar into strips for fritto misto. “You know, this is a fish that you’re paying six and a half dollars a pound for. You’re gonna lose at least thirty-five or forty per cent. So you’ve got to utilize the whole animal. That’s where your knife really makes all the difference.” The halibut’s primary destiny was to be carved into seven-ounce serving portions, poached, and accompanied by smashed fava beans from Pennsylvania and a vinaigrette made with ramps from upstate New York. Twenty-seven dollars, à la carte.

Esca has seating for sixty—a hundred and ten in pleasant weather, when an outdoor patio is opened—and on a normal day each table fills four times. Pasternack fillets and slices fish throughout the morning and during lunch, breaks for a couple of hours in midafternoon, and then resumes until seven o’clock. He multitasks in a self-assured manner—announces orders to the line cooks; talks on the phone; consults with the front-of-the-house managers, nodding when he hears that there’s someone in the dining room whom he should meet and greet; gives instructions to the kitchen runners, who shuttle one aluminum tray after another laden with freshly gutted fish—all the while wielding knives with the same rhythmic, delicate precision. How often does he cut himself? “Only when somebody asks me that question. No, actually, not that much. But I’m due.” A wall phone with an extra-long cord rings at all hours, and Pasternack usually answers it himself, always with the same greeting: “Kitchen.”

Between the moment he first looks at a fish and the moment he finishes filleting it, he often changes his mind about what he’s going to do with it. If it’s perfectly fresh yet doesn’t look perfect (it hasn’t been bled properly;it’s bruised; it was caught in a net and drowned and the flesh is now too opaque; spawning season is under way and the texture seems a bit flabby or “funky”), it won’t be right for the house specialty, crudo—sashimi-sized slices of raw fish that have been accented with sea salt, olive oil, and lemon juice, or with other condiments. But it would still be fine grilled or pan-seared or sautéed. I once asked him to try to articulate the process of creating a new dish. What, precisely, is he thinking when he combines raw fluke with sea beans, radish, and salt? Geoduck (a.k.a. giant clam crudo) with sugar-baby watermelon or artichoke? “I don’t know, man,” he replied. “It’s a very hard question to answer. I think it’s more experience than anything else. Experience dictates that you understand certain things about certain ingredients at certain times of year. You look in the fridge and you have to be able to work with what you have, in season. But it can’t be arbitrary. That’s the problem with a lot of these young cooks. They don’t yet get the idea of how flavors can work, how you have to take into consideration acidity, texture, the properties of various oils. They think they’re being creative but they’re pushing the envelope too much. People like Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, what makes them so good is that their food is creative but they know the boundaries.”

I suppose it’s odd to say that I’ve been struck by Pasternack’s empathy for fish, given his recurring role in their demise, but he nevertheless seems intent upon doing honor to the deceased, characteristically by doing no more than necessary to evoke essential flavors and unembellished subtleties. Not that he’s unwilling to call a fish a fish. One day, as I watched him reduce an eight-pound mahi-mahi to about thirty bites of crudo, he showed me its pearly, iridescent pale-pink flesh and said, “You don’t always see it this color. Sometimes the meat’s a little grayer.” On the other hand, mahi-mahi is “a very stupid fish. You catch one and you leave him in the water and all the others’ll follow and you can catch ’em all. Not very smart. Good eating, though.”

Next, he went to work on a Pacific sturgeon, scraping away a yellow adipose layer that looked like chicken fat. “Atlantic sturgeon is a protected species,” he said. “This fish was caught in the Columbia River, in Washington. It’s called a bullet because of the shape. Actually, they’re always a little dirty. But this is one of my personal favorites. Really fatty, like eating a piece of pork.”

From time to time, I would prompt him with fish names and he would respond with an off-the-cuff Pasternackian taxonomy.

Flounder: “The quintessential Long Island fish. In New England, they’ve got scrod. Maine, they’ve got haddock. Long Island, it’s flounder. I was born to flounder fish. I fished for them in Jamaica Bay, South Bay, Hewlett Harbor, under the Meadowbrook Bridge, Island Park, East Rockaway. It was a really abundant fish. But the flounder haven’t coöperated in the last couple of years.”

Cod: “Cod is God. The Spaniards came here in search of cod. Italians, the same thing. It’s a great, versatile fish. Unfortunately, none of them seem to make that right turn at Montauk anymore.”

Porgy: “Ghetto fish. It’s a fish that’s usually associated with minorities. A great fish. But not considered your mainstream white-bread fish. I grill it. Sweet meat. Phenomenal skin.”

Hake: “In the cod family but sweeter, softer in texture than cod, not as rich; half the price of cod. I like it roasted, because it can get really caramelized on the outside without doing anything. It’s just got a lot of natural sugars.”

Bluefish: “Godzilla. The other quintessential Long Island fish. Pound for pound, the hardest-fighting fish there is. Ferocious, eats anything, bites anything that gets in its way. Powerful, elusive. You could stick a beer can on a hook with bait inside and the fish’ll bite the beer can.”

Pasternack’s first restaurant job was more turf than surf. At fourteen, he bused tables in a Rockville Centre steak house whose charms included the bookies who hung out at the bar and the pictures of photo finishes that hung on the walls. Not until his mid-twenties, while cooking at La Reserve, an old-school French place near Rockefeller Center, did he commit to the notion that this was what he would do with his life. By then, he’d gone to college for a year; spent a winter cooking in Vermont and a couple of years at Provence, in Greenwich Village; earned a diploma from Johnson & Wales; and worked in a hotel kitchen in Dallas long enough (less than a week) to recognize that he belonged back in New York. He left La Reserve after three years, following the death of André Gaillard, the French-Vietnamese chef who had hired him, and for the next five years stayed in motion as a line cook or sous-chef in a number of busy, trendy restaurants: Bouley, Steak Frites, Prix Fixe, and Sam’s (where he met Donna Peltz, who was tending bar). He was in his early thirties and feeling that he was spinning his wheels when Terrance Brennan, a former sous-chef at Le Cirque who had also been at Prix Fixe, asked him to come to Picholine, a year-old bistro near Lincoln Center. Brennan had a clear idea of what he wanted Picholine to be and the good sense to give Pasternack plenty of latitude. When Ruth Reichl, in a 1996 review in the Times, awarded the restaurant three stars, it was understood that Pasternack, the chef de cuisine, deserved much of the credit. One of his signature dishes was seared sturgeon with caviar sauce; the fish was served with a reduction of shallots, white wine, champagne vinegar, tarragon, and peppercorns whisked with a beurre blanc, to which malossol caviar was added at the last moment. Typical of Pasternack’s cooking style at Picholine, it was labor-intensive (that is, French) in a way that his style at Esca is decidedly not.

While at Prix Fixe, he’d become friendly with Susan Cahn, whose family owned Coach Farms, and who often worked at their goat-cheese stand in the Union Square farmers’ market. Through her, he met her husband-to-be, Mario Batali, who was then merely a robustly talented chef, not yet a food-culture demigod and conglomerateur. Batali and his partner Joe Bastianich, who between them had interests in five Manhattan restaurants (this was 1999; they’re now up to ten), dined frequently at Picholine. They could see that Pasternack was crazy about fish yet otherwise demonstrably sane, and, conveniently, they had an available location, Fricco Bar, an underperforming trattoria on Forty-third Street west of Ninth Avenue.

“Joe and Mario kept coming into Picholine and saying, ‘Come on, let’s do something,’ ” Pasternack recalled. “They asked me what I wanted to do. I said a seafood restaurant, Provençal style. I wanted to call it Rascasse. That’s the name of a very important fish in the whole Mediterranean culture. Bony, spiny, gnarly, a basic ingredient in bouillabaisse, zuppa di pesce, fritto misto. Joe said, ‘Can you make it Italian?’ I said, ‘A good cook is a good cook. I can do it Chinese if you need to.’ He said, ‘Let’s make a deal.’ ”

That fall, Pasternack accompanied Batali and Bastianich on a ten-day excursion to Italy. Starting out in Venice, they ate and drank their way up the Adriatic coast, toward Trieste and Istria, in northern Croatia. (On a subsequent trip, Batali and Pasternack and Simon Dean, who became a manager of and partner in Esca, spent a week in Amalfi, Sorrento, and Naples.) “We met my buddies who were fishmongers and restaurateurs,” Bastianich, who owns vineyards in Friuli and Tuscany and is the co-author of a book on Italian regional wines, told me. “We found out that everyone was eating raw fish. We had thought we were going to come back with ideas along the lines of what you would consider classic Venetian-style food—risottos and brodetto di pesce. Crudo was a revelation.”

They tasted, among other things, raw scampi, orata, branzino, lobster, scallops, and sole—briny, sweet, chewy, buttery, and enhanced only by lemon, olive oil, and sea salt. Immediately, they knew that the Esca kitchen would become a testing laboratory for crudo—a term that Bastianich more or less coined. (The word crudo means “uncooked,” but when it appears on a menu in Italy it typically refers to prosciutto.)

“Joe conceptualized the idea behind our crudo selections,” Batali told me. “And Dave’s taken the ball and run around the bases several times with it. A month before we opened, we were in the kitchen, trying this and that. Dave did a crudo that was a giant sea scallop with tangerine oil, pink peppercorns, and some Sicilian sea salt. And it was a giant moment. It was: Holy shit, this is gonna be a great restaurant.”

This is, perhaps, benignly revisionist history. According to Pasternack, none of them had quite foreseen that crudo would become the hallmark of Esca, or anticipated that the restaurant would generate such instant enthusiasm. “The crudo appetizers at Esca are the freshest, most exciting thing to happen to Italian food in recent memory,” William Grimes wrote in the Times. Nor could Pasternack have predicted that his handiwork would inspire so much mimicry. “Imitated by many, copied by few,” he likes to say about the post-Esca proliferation of crudo, which has become appetizer fare in such unlikely locales as Cleveland, Denver, and St. Louis.

Each day, Esca offers a dozen or so wallet-lightening crudo options. Thirty dollars, for instance, will bankroll a tasting selection that amounts to two bites each of, say, pink snapper with black lava sea salt, weakfish with a thin sliver of preserved blood-orange rind, opah with baby fennel and wild-fennel pollen, yellowtail with Gaeta-olive aioli, kingfish with pickled fiddlehead, and fluke with sea beans and radish. “Raw fish makes a statement about quality,” Pasternack told me. “People don’t eat raw fish at just any restaurant.” And he draws a firm distinction between crudo and ordinary American sushi and sashimi. “I always liked sushi—and I lived above a sushi place for four years—but I thought it always tasted the same. Place A was the same as Place B as Place C.”

One night last spring, I observed Pasternack adroitly handling a crudo crisis that materialized as he was preparing a guest-chef banquet at the James Beard House, in Greenwich Village. (In 2004, the James Beard Foundation honored him as the New York chef of the year.) Pasternack and his crew had come expecting to serve dinner to seventy-two, but, at the last minute, the Beard House staff had allowed an extra table of eight. Not counting the oysters that were served before everyone was seated, the menu included two crudo courses. The first of these consisted of two morsels of black sea bass garnished with lemon juice, sea salt, pepper, and a sprig of salad burnet, a green that looks like parsley and tastes like cucumber. The bass had been cut by Pasternack that morning, and now eighty plates were lined up in the kitchen—eight of them empty. A loaves-and-fishes moment, of sorts. Somehow he discerned sixteen pieces of bass that could be halved, a sleight-of-knife executed so that no one in the dining room would notice. As he drizzled olive oil over each portion, he said, “How was that for creative management?” A faint smile. “They’ll go home. They just won’t necessarily go home full.”

“For a lot of American chefs, it’s hard to understand how simple things are in Italy,” Batali said. “That was our idea, both with the crudo and with how Esca presents fish in general. It’s all in the ingredients. When Dave talks about the difference between the fluke in Sheepshead Bay and the fluke from some other part of Long Island, you know that in fact one does taste different from the other. Dave has a real understanding of what the Italians call materia prima—the raw ingredients—and making them available for the palate to explore.”

It hasn’t proved to be a professional or interpersonal liability that Pasternack’s instinctive Italian sensibility doesn’t extend to actually speaking the language (though he possesses a sizable vocabulary of kitchen nouns and adjectives). One of the waitresses at the Beard House addressed him in Italian throughout the evening; he would occasionally nod, and nothing was apparently lost in translation. In the area of Long Island where he grew up there is a great deal of cultural overlap between Italian-Americans and Jews. For whatever reason—and probably not merely because in the twenty-eight years since his bar mitzvah he has consumed immeasurable quantities of pork and shellfish—his diction, body language, and general affinities make him come across like a bit player in “GoodFellas,” so much so that he’s occasionally prone to identity confusion. A few years ago, for an appearance with Bryant Gumbel on “The Early Show,” he prepared a crudo that consisted of ivory salmon, fresh soybeans, lemon juice, sea salt, and olive oil. Gumbel asked, “How important is it what kind of oil you use on these fish?”

“Oil is essential,” Pasternack replied. “When we talk about oil, we talk only about extra-virgin olive oil. Because it’s like the Japanese put the soy sauce, us Italians, we put the olive oil.”

When he got home, his father, who had been watching, called and said, “What’s with this ‘us Italians’ business? We’re Jewish. Remember?”

“My wife’s half Italian,” Dave replied.

“Davey,” Mel Pasternack felt constrained to point out, “you don’t inherit that.”

A spring weekday, shortly after noon. In the Esca dining room—pale-yellow walls; brown leather banquettes; brass Art Deco sconces; a floor-to-ceiling expanse of Italian wines along one wall; a cherry-blossom arrangement that would shame a Christmas tree; otherwise, no dazzle and pleasantly little noise—orders are discreetly punched into a computer. Moments later, they emerge from a small printer on the kitchen counter where Pasternack works his way through a pile of striped bass while orchestrating the lunch flow. “Four times,” he informs Pablo Martínez, at the garde-manger station—meaning that a party of four have placed their orders and are now ready for their amuse-gueules, a plate of grilled bruschetta topped with a mélange of cannelloni beans, smoked mackerel, olive oil, red onions, and parsley. As the first-course dishes leave the kitchen, he glances at a clock, scrawls the time on the printout, and clips it to a shelf at eye level. At the appropriate moment, he will cue his crew—Sarah Ochs, the sous-chef; Katie O’Donnell, the sauté cook; Mike Sneed, at the pasta station—to mobilize the entrées.

“Pablo, you got two asparagus, two caprese, and a mindora. You got a third caprese gonna go with the oysters and you got a fourth caprese gonna go with another asparagus. . . . Give me a chicken, got an octo, I got skate with a cod. I got a snapper with an octo, I got branzino. . . . We got two stripers, a cod, a snapper, an orata, and a fett”—fettuccine. “I got two times. . . . Two, two. Misto, order branzino, order snapper, a cod, make sure you got a branzino ahead of a cod, you got a cod, two stripers, snapper, and then an orata. . . . Double octo, and make ’em look soigné, Sarah. Put up a cod in a minute. You got another big branzino, you got a pimente. Mike, order two fetts. . . . All right, Pablo, you’re gonna give me two asparagus, two caprese, and a spigola. Katie, you got asparagus and a caprese. Mike, you got the fett, it goes with the caprese. . . . Two two three three two. . . . Order three stripers and a porgy, another asparagus with arugula, another asparagus with a mista. . . . All right, Mike, spaghetti pimente. You got another spaghetti following the second branzino. You got a spaghetti with an orata. You got a spigola, snapper, skate, and an orata. . . .”

The temperature literally rises, but the atmosphere remains coolly businesslike. When Simon Dean, the Esca manager, wanders in holding an envelope and a magazine and says, “Dave, here’s a piece of what looks like hate mail. Also, here’s your copy of the latest issue of Private Air Magazine: Life at the Speed of Luxury,” Pasternack replies, “It’s a little hard right now to be funny. I’d love to, but . . .” In fact, his mood is sanguine. A very nice piece of fish arrived that morning, a crimson shoulder cut from a seven-hundred-pound bluefin tuna—by way of Rod Mitchell, in Portland. “There’s a lot of competition for these fish,” he says. “I don’t want to say I’m at the bottom of the pecking order. But I’m near the bottom. Plenty of people will pay a lot more than I will.” At eighteen dollars a pound, the bluefin is too expensive to grill or sauté, so half of it will become crudo. The other half will go to Bistro du Vent, a calculatedly jointlike joint just around the corner, on Forty-second Street, that Pasternack and his Esca partners opened last January. There it will also be served raw, an appetizer à la steak tartare.

Four crudo plates are ready to be dispatched, but Pasternack first squirts a piece of bluefin with lemon juice, sprinkles it with pepper, sea salt, and olive oil, hands it to me, and declares, “This is the king of tuna, man. Think steak, filet mignon. This is what the Japanese’ll pay exuberant prices for.”

As it happens, he’s just returned from Japan himself—his first visit, the highlight of which was a daily perambulation through Tsukiji, Tokyo’s wholesale fish market (“like walking inside an aquarium”). He’d made the trip as the guest of Hiromi Go, an Esca regular.

“Hiromi’s a very popular Japanese singer,” he says. “He’s like Elvis Presley over there. He’s getting ready to record, like, his sixtieth album. He’s been coming here for years and I’m always saying to him, ‘When are you taking me to Tokyo?’ So his wife set it up. I cooked two dinners, one for twelve people and one for forty. The second was in a Shinto shrine. I ate quite a few things I’d never had before.”

Such as?

“Whale. It’s really only fresh in Scandinavia, Russia, and Japan. Very interesting. A tuna-y texture and a liver-y finish. You know, in Japan they raise horses in the style of Kobe beef—massage it, give it sake, beer, different grains and grasses, play music for it. So I did a crudo dish that was horse, whale, and fatty tuna all on the same plate. They all looked alike. The whale could have been the tuna and the tuna could have been the horse.”

A waiter comes in with the news that a customer has requested cocktail sauce to accompany what might best be described as an order of the original crudo—a half-dozen Peconic Bay oysters. Having just seen Pasternack gracing tidbits of abalone, weakfish, and opah with, respectively, gaila melon, crushed almonds, and olio verde, I expect him to take offense. Instead, he reaches into a knee-level cooler and removes a mixture of horseradish, fresh chiles, lemons, ketchup, capers, and olive oil. “It’s their money,” he says. “Give ’em what they want, they’ll come back.”

So that includes tartar sauce with the fritto misto?

“No. They ask for that, which I think happens maybe twice a year, we tell ’em we don’t have it.” He shrugs. “What’re they gonna do? Hey, we don’t have it, we don’t have it.”

I once asked Joe Bastianich, who enjoys sport-fishing for tuna, about his experiences on the water with Pasternack, and he said, “Dave’s fishing, that’s a little too blue-collar for me.” For his part, Pasternack, who seems constitutionally incapable of condescension, has said, “I don’t understand freshwater fishing. That’s too Zen for me, too proper. Saltwater fishing, you know, there’s a lot more blood and guts.” A few years ago, Pasternack was invited, along with some other New York chefs, to a culinary event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While there, he went fly-fishing on the Green River with Ed Artzt, a frequent Esca patron who was formerly the chief executive of Procter & Gamble. “It was my first time fly-fishing,” Pasternack said. “I was good, I was a natural. I was the only guy who actually caught anything. I caught a cutthroat. After I took it off the hook, I went to open the cooler and everybody on the boat kind of looked at me like, What are you doing? I’m like, ‘Dinner.’ They go, ‘No, everything here’s catch-and-release.’ I said, ‘I spent the whole day to catch this one fish and we’re gonna throw it back?’ ”

My recollection of my first fishing outing with Pasternack, though it took place fairly recently, is somewhat spotty. We were aboard a commercial boat called the Sorry Charlie, about three miles from Point Lookout, Long Island. As the tide was running out, a brisk wind was blowing in, which meant that conditions were, by my standards, insufficiently calm. I spent part of the morning in the cabin, seated atop a cooler, resting my head against a wall, wondering when the Dramamine was going to kick in, and smiling weakly when my shipmates periodically impugned my manhood. The captain, Mike Wasserman, struggled nobly to stay anchored over an old shipwreck that was a reliable gathering spot for black sea bass. He succeeded well enough for the group—five of us were fishing—to land about twenty-five keepers and store them in the live well. “The Rolls-Royce of fish,” Pasternack, who caught the most, said. “Steamed, fried, poached, baked, sautéed, grilled—I’ll take a black sea bass any day over a piece of tuna.” In the afternoon, we moved close to the shore and, using clams for bait, hauled in dozens of stripers that had been trailing a clam dredger as it repeatedly plowed a half-mile stretch parallel to Rockaway Beach. At the end of the trip, Pasternack bought everything in the live well and the coolers, plus Wasserman’s catch from the previous day: a hundred or so bass, and three conger eels that were headed for the zuppa di pesce.

The next time I went to sea was a sultry July day, when Pasternack was in quest of bluefish with his friend, piscatorial mentor, and supplier Artie Hoernig, the captain of Smokey III, a thirty-one-foot Down East-type cabin cruiser that he docks in Island Park. We met at 7 a.m. in the parking lot of Artie’s South Shore Fish Market, where we were joined by Pete Hession, a retired U.P.S. driver. Hoernig, who is in his late fifties, has a mahogany tan, a neatly trimmed silver beard, bloodshot blue eyes, and an inexhaustible supply of fish stories. The date, he announced, happened to be the eighteenth anniversary of one of his most gratifying adventures, the landing of a seven-hundred-and-eighty-two-pound mako shark. That same year, Pasternack, then in his mid-twenties, caught a three-hundred-pound bull shark near Key West. He had the head mounted, and it hung in his bedroom until a couple of years ago, when his wife told him, “Either the garage or you give it away.” It now occupies wall space at Artie’s market, right next to the head of the mako.

Hoernig went inside and returned with the day’s bait, twenty pounds of fresh and thirty pounds of frozen bunker, two flats of frozen spearing that would be used as chum, and ten pounds of frozen squid. A half hour later, this cargo got loaded onto the boat, along with three large coolers filled with crushed ice, and by nine o’clock we’d reached our destination, an area five miles offshore where Hoernig had planted about forty-five lobster pots.

The ocean surface was oddly placid. Hoernig: “It’s like a fucking lake.”

Hession: “I hope we see a breeze.”

Pasternack: “The only breeze we’re gonna see out here, Pete, is thunderstorms.”

Using bait-casting reels with forty-pound-test wire leaders and heavy-test monofilament backing, we tossed treble hooks baited with thick chunks of bunker into water about sixty feet deep. From the get-go, the bluefish were excitable. Pasternack quickly landed a seven-pounder, I caught one, Pasternack caught another. Then things got quiet for about fifteen minutes. “One, two, three, and that’s it?” Hoernig said. “Probably a fucking mako’s down there chasing these bastards.”

When they resumed biting, Hoernig would say, “Davey’s in!” or Hession would say, “Oh, Artie’s in!” Then: “Pete’s in!” Bluefish have notoriously sharp teeth and strong jaws, and the most prudent way to get one into a boat is with a gaff. As promised, there was ample gore—bluefish blood and bunker guts. At times, we had three fish on the line simultaneously. By eleven o’clock, we’d filled one cooler. A half hour later, Hoernig switched to an ultra-light spinning rod and tied on a bucktail jig baited with a piece of squid, rigged for what’s referred to on the South Shore as “fluking.” He soon landed a two-and-a-half-pounder, and Pasternack, in a competitive spirit, got busy fluking, too. Occasionally, someone would lower a white plastic bucket over the side and fill it with water for washing our bloody hands. As the midday sun poured down, Pasternack and Hoernig took to cupping handfuls and dousing their heads. “I’m getting fucking ready to jump in, man,” Pasternack said. It was not yet one o’clock when the second cooler reached capacity—mostly blues, a few fluke, a sea bass. Time to go pull lobster pots.

Citing my journalistic priorities, I managed to steer clear of the heavy lifting. As Hoernig eased the boat alongside a buoy, Pasternack would use a gaff to grab the submerged rope, and Hession would wrap a couple of turns around a small electric winch attached to the starboard gunwale. Invariably, the ropes were coated with algae the consistency of sodden shredded wheat and the lobster traps were encrusted with tiny mussels the size of split peas. The first few pots contained little Jonah and calico crabs and conch, and porgies flapping like birds, but were lobster-free. “No wonder your lobster’s so expensive,” Pasternack said.

“A labor of love,” he said to me as he tossed clumps of algae overboard and prepared to dump putrescent bunker carcasses from the mesh bait bag inside a trap. Pasternack wore a plain white T-shirt, loose-fitting gray athletic shorts, white crew socks, calf-length white rubber boots, and an F.D.N.Y. Rescue cap. Varieties of fish flesh were pasted to his clothing, but he didn’t appear to mind, unlike Hession, who concluded that the best way to clean the filth from his bluejeans was to tie them to a fishing line and drag them behind the boat. Which seemed like a clever idea until the line snapped, stranding him in his green plaid boxers. (“All I can say, Pete, is you’re a victim of circumstance,” Hoernig told him.)

Some squid eggs—transparent Gummi-worm-like masses—clung to one of the traps. I asked Pasternack whether he’d ever eaten them. He said that he hadn’t, but that he’d tasted octopus eggs in Italy. Almost defensively, he added, “I ate bunker. I got Artie to eat it, too. Little ones. They fried ’em in his restaurant. We called ’em Hewlett Bay anchovies. The sardines of Long Island. It was good, right, Artie? People squirted lemon juice on ’em.” He leaned over with the squid eggs, handed them to me, and said, “Here, put this in the cooler.”

They hoisted twenty-two traps, good for twenty-one lobsters. As Pasternack relaunched traps by sliding them down a plank and off the rear of the boat, he whistled “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

“You like blue-fishing?” he asked me as we headed back.

Yes, I did.

He leaned against the gunwale. In the background: Atlantic Beach and the high-rises of the Rockaways. The sun was in his face, he was bloody and sweaty and due for a shave. Lunch had been a turkey-and-cheddar sub, and there were dabs of mayo at the corners of his mouth. “I told you, I don’t always catch the biggest one, but I’m always catching ’em,” he said. “Some guys are only about catching big fish. I’ve always been for quantity. I like to eat ’em. I’m a meat-and-potatoes guy.”

I asked what he would do with the bluefish at Esca.

Palms up, he shook his head. “There’s lots of good stuff to work with now,” he said. “Lobster mushrooms. Great corn. Good tomatoes are starting to show up. This time of year it’s easy to be a cook.” Today, though, he’d been fishing and truly hadn’t given it a thought. But tomorrow, back in the kitchen, he’d have an idea.

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Mark Singer, a longtime contributor to the magazine, is the author of several books, including “Character Studies.”

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Obama Official Unveils Clemency Initiative

, New York Law Journal

Deputy Attorney General James Cole Thursday enlisted the help of the New York bar to draft clemency petitions for prison inmates serving inordinately long sentences for non-violent drug crimes.

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US U-20s fall on penalties to Mexico in Torneo

For the second time in three days, the United States Under-20 side drew 1-1 before losing on penalty kicks in the Torneo de las Americas in Kennesaw, Ga.

The Americans earned a tie against Mexico on Sunday in the tournament capper. In the 70th minute, defender Gale Agbossoumonde (above) pounced on his own rebound, putting it past Mexican goalkeeper Rafael. El Tri's Taufic Guarch opened the scoring seven minutes prior.

After fulltime, the game went straight to penalty kicks. Mexico prevailed 4-2 courtesy of misses by Dillon Powers and Sebastian Lletget. Agbossoumonde and Alex Zahavi scored for Thomas Rongen's squad.

New York's Juan Agudelo and Philadelphia's Amobi Okugo played the entire match as Rongen chose not to make any substitutions.

Mexico were crowned Torneo champions with the result. They defeated Colombia 4-1 on penalties on Saturday in a match that finished 2-2 in regulation. Erick Vera and Rene Zamora scored for the winners, while Juan Cabezas and Miguel Julio scored for the losing side.

USA: 18-Jonathan Kempin, 3-Korey Veeder, 19-Sebastien Ibeagha, 22-Gale Agbossoumonde, 5-Greg Garza, 21-Dillon Powers, 2-Amobi Okugo, 16-Sebastian Lletget, 17-Juan Agudelo, 10-Alex Zahavi, 9-Omar Salgado

Subs Not Used: 13-Tristan Bowen, 15-Bryan de la Fuente, 24-Eduardo Fernandez, 14-Fuad Ibrahim, 7-Alex Molano, 8-Moises Orozco, 23-Conor Shanosky, 4-Parker Walsh, 4-Cesar Zamora

Head Coach: Thomas Rongen

MEX: 12-Rafael, 13-Héctor Acosta (3-Kristian Álvarez, 14-Néstor Araujo, 2-Alexis Loera, 18-Erick Vera (8-César Ibáñez, 57), 6-Diego de Buen (7-Saul Villalobos, 57), 16-Octavio Aceves (5-René Zamora, 64), 15-Martín Ureil, 10-Jorge Mora (11-Ulises Davila, 64), 20-David Izazola (9-Taufi Guarch, 57), 19-Edson Rivera (17-Alan Pulido, 57)

Subs Not Used: 1-Antonio Rodríguez, 4-Luis Ramos

Head Coach: Juan Carlos Chávez Zárate

Noah Davis covers the United States national team for Follow him on Twitter at @noahedavis.

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China, its Hackers, and the American Media

The New York Timesrevelation that Unit 61398 of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) systematically hacked into U.S. computer networks has emerged as the latest salvo in the increasingly contentious Sino-American rivalry. While the story presented fresh evidence of Chinese hacking -- in stunning detail -- the aftermath presents more questions than answers.

Who, exactly, authorized the attacks carried out by Unit 61398?

On the surface, this question seems fatuous and unnecessary -- the Chinese political system, like the American one, places the military under civilian leadership. However, the PLA has consistently operated with great autonomy, and there are occasionally rumors that China's political leaders don't always know what the military is doing. James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on Chinese cyber-security, put it this way: "The first time some parts of the Chinese government probably encountered this story was through reading The New York Times." Could Unit 61398 have been reporting to military, rather than political, superiors?

Read the entire story at The Atlantic.

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Key Military Health Surveillance Website Was Down for Nearly a Month

Steve Cukrov/

The website of the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center -- which provides weekly summaries of flu cases within the Defense Department, among other things -- was shut down for much of January due to “technical difficulties” the Center declined to identify.

The AFHSC website also hosts the Defense Medical Surveillance System, which provides up-to-date and historical data on diseases and medical events, and the Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System, which tracks diseases in 35 countries and  hosts monthly reports focused on key medical topics.

The “website has experienced technical difficulties,” Navy Capt. Kevin Russell, AFHSC director, said in a statement. “As a result, the website was taken offline to resolve these issues,” which were fixed last week. “AFHSC clearly posted a telephone number and email address at the site to contact us for materials and information regularly housed on the site,” he said.

“As a matter of policy and for reasons of operations security, the Department of Defense, under which the AFHSC operates, does not comment on the specific technical details involving administration of its networks, or external Internet sites,” he added.

Dr. Remington Nevin, a former Army epidemiologist who is now a student in public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, criticized the lack of openness.

“The mission of AFHSC is to provide timely data and analysis to military health decision makers and, by extension, to their civilian overseers and the public,” he said. “The seeming acceptance of a month-long outage in AFHSC's primary method of dissemination of this information is inconsistent with this mission, and suggests a troubling absence of transparency within the military public health community.”

Get the Nextgov iPhone app to keep up with government technology news.

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Apple iPad 5's Biggest Competitor Could Be The... iPad Mini 2

No kidding

According to RBC Capital Markets analyst Amit Daryanani, the upcoming Apple iPad 5's biggest competitor could be another product from the same stable. According to Daryanani, the upcoming retina iPad Mini 2, expected to be unveiled alongside the iPad 5, will steal the show. His research has churned out numbers, which are 65% and 35% for the iPad Mini 2 and iPad 5 respectively. What do these numbers signify? Nothing much, just the expected market share to be captured by either tablet once they are released into the wild. Note that the smaller tab has been forecast to capture as much as twice the market share as the 5th successor to the original iPad, unveiled by the iconic Steve Jobs himself back in 2009.

Apple is expected to announce both the new iPad models on October 22.


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CFB 24/7

Scout's Take: WVU's Charles Sims has Matt Forte-like talent

Christopher Jackson / Associated Press
West Virginia RB Charles Sims has rushed for 943 yards and nine TDs and also has 43 receptions.

The reported devaluation of the running back position has, in my opinion, been greatly exaggerated.

Although runners are definitely receiving fewer carries, the overwhelming majority of NFL teams are incorporating the running back into the passing game to take advantage of mismatches in space. This trend has certainly altered the job description of the position, leading scouts to covet running backs with the ability to contribute as a runner and receiver from the backfield. Based on this premise, the name certain to generate a ton of buzz leading up to the draft is West Virginia RB Charles Sims.

NFL Exposure

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Check out the top 10 all-time players from West Virginia.

A 6-foot, 213-pound senior, Sims is the most versatile running back in the college game, with a set of skills that should make him a nightmare to defend at the next level. He is a smooth, fluid runner on the edges but possesses the size and strength to grind effectively between the tackles. Those traits are enough to make him an effective player in any offense, but it is his superb receiving skills that will make him an offensive coordinator's dream at the next level.

Sims capably runs every route in the book with grace and precision and displays receiver-like hands on the perimeter. He is a natural playmaker in the passing game on screens and option routes, which makes it easy to get him touches in the game plan without burdening him with a heavy workload as a runner.

Studying Sims' game throughout the fall, I envision him having a Matt Forte-like impact in the pro game. He has the ability to churn out 100-yard rushing games, but crafty offensive coordinators will take advantage of his versatile skills to make him a dynamic backfield weapon capable of tallying 100-plus scrimmage yards (combination of rushing and receiving yards) on a weekly basis.

Follow Bucky Brooks on Twitter @BuckyBrooks.

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George LAMBERT | Miss Alison Preston and John Proctor on Mearbeck Moor

Russia 1873 – Australia 1930
Australia 1887-1900; England 1900-01; France 1901-02; England 1902-21; Australia from 1921
Miss Alison Preston and John Proctor on Mearbeck Moor 1909
oil on canvas
100.2 (h) x 126.5 (w) cm
signed and dated 'GEO.W.LAMBERT/ 1909' lower right
The Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art, Perth
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This country image of a man, woman, animals and shot game was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1909 as Mearbeck Moor, Yorkshire. It was commissioned by the seated man, John Proctor, with the spoils of the hunt at his feet, his gun resting against his knee, his dogs lying exhausted. Beside him stands his niece.

Yet Lambert constructed the image so it told another story as well: that of the emerging role of women at that time. He showed Miss Alison Preston as a woman in her own right; he placed her standing at the apex of the composition, wearing a modern riding habit and confidently holding the reins of the horse.

By showing Proctor in hunting dress as if he were a sporting gentleman on a country estate, Lambert created a deliberate artifice. John Proctor was, in fact, not a member of the landed gentry in north Yorkshire but a barrister in London. We do not know whether there was any association with the village of Mearbeck.

Contemporary critics approved of this work, and observed that Lambert had achieved a sense of cohesion in the painting. In 1920 J.S. MacDonald suggested that this was the first painting which gave him a substantial ‘lift’ in Britain, and that it brought him many other commissions. He added that Lambert wryly declared that ‘what really convinced the English picture buyer as to his painting capabilities, was the rendering correctly of the double barrel of his sporting patron’s shot gun’ (MacDonald, p.12).

Laurence Housman noted in the Manchester Guardian on 1 May 1909 that ‘the most interesting portraits of the year are, once more, the groups and single figures of private people, which under the Furse influence, have found an open air setting on moorland or hill’, and placed Lambert’s work among these.

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Jan 25, 2013 7:38 PM

middle to upper carb possible fish jaw/bone

Hi I need some confirmation on this from middle to upper carboniferous find Ive been told on another forum that this is fish bone probably a jaw from a small juvenille , would appreciate one of the museum experts advice on this ,  found north east wales area old quarry talus from floor

cefn Y fedw sandstone / bowland shale boundary

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Butterflies and Moths of the World Generic Names and their Type-species

Genus details

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Crambus Fabricius, 1798 . Entomologia systematica (Suppl.) : 420, 464.

Available Name

Homonyms: 1

Higher classification:

Phalaena pascuella Linnaeus, 1758. Systema Naturae (Edn 10), 1: 535.    [BHLBHL]

Type-species designation:
by subsequent designation by Curtis , 1826. British entomology 3: 109. [(but cited as 'erigatus Fab.')]

Type specimens:
See BHL scanned Type-species page: .

Nye (1975) stated:-

Cerambus has been used as the original generic name for species which are now in the Noctuidae.

Fletcher & Nye (1984) stated:-

Invalid type-species designation: Latreille, 1810, Considérations générales sur l'Ordre naturel des Animaux: 441, cited four species, all of which were originally included. See also: Argyroteuchia Hübner, [1825]; Chilus Billberg, 1820; Palparia Haworth, 1811; Tetrachila Hübner, 1822.

CRAMBUS was included within the subfamily CRAMBIDAE: CRAMBINAE by Munroe & Solis, in Kristensen (1999).

Learn more about Crambidae in Wikipedia

Search the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) for references to CRAMBUS and included species.

Junior name(s):
Argyroteuchia Hübner, 1825: 364.
Chilus Billberg, 1820: 93.
Palparia Haworth, 1811: 481.
Tetrachila Hübner, 1822: 52-55, 66-79.

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