The mines are located in Sussex County, N. J., and yield an ore unique in its lithological characteristics, and is the only known locality where Franklinite and red oxide of zinc has been found, but by whom and at what era these mines were discovered, is not authentically established. They were known, and extensive mining operations were carried on, before any permanent, settlements were made by the whites, in their immediate neighborhood, as several shafts and galleries still remaining on Sterling Hill clearly prove. These old works, from the fact that Lord STIRLING was once the owner of the lands upon which they are situated, have been attributed to him. The time Lord STIRLING became the owner has not been ascertained, but an original survey of the tract made in 1749 describes "the old mine holes." A section has been taken from the remains of a red cedar, that has grown in one of the pits since the working was abandoned, and it proves that period to have been more than one hundred and twenty years ago. In 1755, an old mining pick was found in one of the galleries by a hunter, who subsequently settled in the vicinity, and has a son, now a very aged man, living in the county.

Lord STIRLING caused a large quantity of the Franklinite ore to be mined, and taken to the Charlottenburgh furnace, of which he was a proprietor; but the attempt to smelt it as an ore of iron proved unsuccessful, and most of the ore, removed at a great expense over mountain roads, ninety-five years ago, may now be seen at Charlottenburgh.

The late Dr. BRUCE, of New-York, was the first who called public attention to these mines, by publishing a scientific account of them, embracing an analysis, and also furnishing a list of the associated minerals. He was followed in 1819 by Profs. KEATING and VANNUXEN, who furnished the Philosophical Society, of Philadelphia, with an interesting paper, describing the Jeffersonite, associated with the Zinc and Franklinite.

The late Dr. SAMUEL FOWLER, about 45 years since, became the owner of these mines, and, to scientific attainments uniting practical business talents of the highest order, appears to have really been the first one to appreciate their value, and made several efforts to have them worked. He made liberal offers to induce others to join him in the enterprise, but the untried natures of the ore, and the difficulties in obtaining competent operatives caused a failure of his plans -- without lessening in his mind the value of the ore, and the ultimate success that would be likely to attend future attempts to work it. While he was a member of the House of Representatives of the United States Congress, a law was passed, directing the Secretary of the Treasury to cause a standard set of weights and measures to be prepared for the use of the Government in the different Customhouses. F.R. HASLER, then Superintendent of the Coast Survey, was intrusted by the Secretary with the execution of this important duty, and Mr. FOWLER was successful in having New-Jersey Red Oxide of Zinc reduced to alloy with copper to form the brass used for these standards.

Not succeeding in enlisting capitalists to work on a large scale, he strove to encourage individual enterprise, to develop the commercial value of these extensive repositories of minerals, by frequent and liberal contributions from his own resources; but want of scientific knowledge of the character of the mineral, or a too rigid adherence to the plans used in working the sulphurets sand carbonates of zinc, as practiced in Europe, prevented the achievement of success. It is also to be presumed, as is often the case, the Doctor was imposed upon by charlatans and pretenders, who laid claim to possessing the true Philosopher's Stone, whose magic touch was to transform the hills of Stirling and Franklin into metallic zinc and iron.

Dr. FOWLER, a few years before his decease, conveyed a portion of these mines to the Franklin Company, an incorporation which was obtained by him for the purpose of working them; but the attempt proved unsuccessful. The company failed, the property passing into the hands of Messrs. AMES & ALGER, of Boston. A quantity of [???] and Franklinite ore was taken by them to Mr. ALGER's foundry at South Boston, where Mr. ALEXANDER E. OSBORNE, the present metallurgist of the Bergen Point Copper Smelting Establishment, distilled metallic zinc from the red ore, after separating it by a magnet from its Franklinite. He also reduced Franklinite in a crucible, making iron and steel of a superior quality.

Summary: The mines are located in Sussex County, N. J., and yield an ore unique in its lithological characteristics, and is the only known locality where Franklinite and red oxide of zinc has been found, but by whom and at what era these mines were discovered, is not authentically established. They were known, and extensive mining operations were carried on, before any permanent, settlements...


[UPDATE: On Sept. 28, China Unicom announced an iPhone price point more than twice as high as the one in this press report. See here.]

iPhones in China will be relatively expensive, but monthly charges will be among the lowest in the world.

So says the Xinhua News Agency, the official press service of the Chinese Communist government, quoting an unnamed “insider” at China Unicom CHU .

According the Xinhua report published early Friday, China’s No. 2 carrier will roll out the iPhone shortly after the Oct. 1-8 National Day holiday in four models: 3G 8GB, 3G 16GB, 3GS 16GB, and 3GS 32GB.

The entry-level version, the 8GB iPhone 3G, will cost 2,075 yuan ($303) according to this report — more than three times its U.S. retail price ($99).

But the iPhones in China will be bundled with two-year service packages that are considerably cheaper than AT&T’s T . According to Xinhua, the lowest-price service package will cost 126 yuan per month, about $18.45. (AT&T charges its U.S. iPhone customers a minimum of $39.99/mos. for voice service plus a mandatory $30/mos. for data.)

Total cost for China Unicom customers over two years: $746. Total cost for AT&T customers: $1,779.

These prices are slightly different than those quoted by China Business Times earlier this week. According to that report, China Unicom had set an “internal launch date” of Oct. 15 for two models: an 8 GB iPhone 3G selling for 1,999 yuan ($293) and a 16 GB iPhone 3G for 2,999 yuan ($439). Both models were said to be offered with 2 year contracts starting at 186 yuan ($27) a month.

China Unicom announced late last month that it had struck a deal with Apple AAPL to carry the iPhone in China, beating out giant China Mobile CHL . China Unicom has 140 million subscribers; China Mobile has nearly three times that many.

Summary: [UPDATE: On Sept. 28, China Unicom announced an iPhone price point more than twice as high as the one in this press report. See here.] iPhones in China will be relatively expensive, but monthly charges will be among the lowest in the world. So says the Xinhua News Agency, the official press service of the…


Ashley Moore and Justin Bieber

03/21/2015 AT 09:50 AM EDT

spent Friday night at the Staples Center to watch the Los Angeles Clippers play the Washington Wizards – but it looks like he may have been more interested in someone sitting next to him than the players on the court.

Bieber was seen cuddling in the lap of model Ashley Moore. The pair have been hanging out at least since 2013: Last year, Bieber posted a photo of Moore in black Calvin Klein undewear. He cheekily captioned it, "Ash I see u in ur #Calvin's."

Moore isn't the only model in Bieber's social circle: Yovanna Ventura and Hailey Baldwin (who he's

The "Baby" singer hasn't confirmed any new romances since he split from on-again, off-again girlfriend Selena Gomez last year. Meanwhile, Gomez has

with DJ and collaborator Zedd.

Ashley Moore and Justin Bieber

Noel Vasquez / GC Images

Summary: The singer and model Ashley Moore spent Friday night at a Clippers game


Tom Hurndall was a peace activist and an aspiring photojournalist. His photographs, alongside his journals, bear witness to the often terrible, sometimes uplifting, events he saw and experienced while living among families in Iraq, in a refugee camp in Jordan, and in the Gaza Strip. It was there on 11 April 2003 that he was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier while attempting to rescue a child who had been pinned down by gunfire. He died nine months later in hospital in London. He was 22.

It is difficult, then, to look dispassionately at the photographs in The Only House Left Standing: The Middle East Journals of Tom Hurndall, which is published by Trolley Books this week. They are a mixture of reportage and citizen journalism of the most intense kind; a visual record of struggle and conflict left by someone who comes across as extraordinarily committed and fearless. As his writings show, though, Hurndall grappled with his fear every day. He travelled to Baghdad in 2003, one of a group of "human shields" who arrived just before the invasion by American and British troops, determined to protest the war in the most direct and dangerous way. In a series of articles emailed to Manchester Metropolitan University's student magazine, Pulp, he wrote honestly and without self-pity about his constant doubts and creeping fears. One sentence stands out: "When a man must lie to himself to do what he knows he should, that is when you know he is terrified."

It is hard to equate these words, this kind of self-knowledge, with the handsome, short-haired, unshaven young man who smiles out from the first photograph in the book, cigarette in hand. He looks like a student about to begin a gap year, having just landed in some faraway country where adventure awaits. Like the emails and articles that punctuate the book, the photographs grow in intensity as his journey becomes ever more difficult, ever more dangerous.

He took photographs inside a power station in Baghdad, on the streets of Amman, and in the Al-Rweished refugee camp just five kilometres from the Iraq border. He had an eye for light and shadow, for the snatched portrait, and for capturing a mood, whether joyful or sombre. By April 2003, he had arrived in Israel and, as the veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk writes in his foreword, was heading "inexorably towards Gaza where he was confronted by the massive tragedy of the Palestinians".

In Jerusalem, on 3 April, he wrote of the death of Rachel Corrie, who had been crushed to death by an Israeli defence force bulldozer while acting as a human shield near the Rafah refugee camp. "I wonder how few or many people heard it on the news and just counted it as another death, just another number … "

In the final section of the book, Rafah, Gaza, 06-11 April 2003, there is a series of Hurndall's photographs from the frontline of the protests against the Israeli tanks and D-9 bulldozers demolishing Palestinian houses. They are both dramatic and oddly intimate, a view from the ground of dirt and destruction, chaos and violence as well as the strange sense of calm determination that comes from the civilians in bright orange jackets who line up before these massive and intimidating machines.

In his journal, Hurndall describes that day's events: "It was strange. As we approached, and the guns were firing, it sent shivers down my spine, but nothing more than that." The entry ends: "Any one of us could be watched through a sniper's sights at this moment. The certainty is that they are watching, and it is on the decision of any one Israeli soldier or settler that my life depends …"

The last picture that Hurndall took was a black-and-white shot of a street in Rafah at 1.30pm on 11 April 2003: a burnt-out car in the foreground, two children in the middle distance. The final picture in the book was taken by someone else. It shows him being carried unconscious by two local youths, both of whom are shouting for help. To the left, another youth is clutching his head in horror and despair. What looks like a camera bag is hanging from Hurndall's waist. Beneath it, the dusty street is stained with blood.

In the frantic few minutes before this picture was taken, according to a first-hand account by the local co-ordinator of the International Solidarity Movement, Hurndall had rescued a young boy "trapped under fire behind a sand mound". Having carried the boy to safety, he went back to the same spot to rescue a young girl and, "as he was attempting to carry her, he got hit in the forehead by an Israeli sniper bullet".

Hurndall's journals, as Fisk puts it, "show a remarkable man of remarkable principle". His photographs, too, are testament to the strength of his commitment to the cause of non-violent protest, and to his courage. He caught the world around him in all its uncertainty and, as it grew more dangerous and threatening, his eye grew keener. The images he produced became, by turns, more unflinching and reflective. They tell their own story of a brief life lived to the full.

To celebrate the publication of a photobook called Lyrics of Love, the first solo show of the work of the great Lithuanian photographer, Algirdas Šeškus, runs at London's White Space Gallery from 1-10 March. The exhibition brings together some of his iconic images from the 1970s. His style is impressionistic and centres on the everyday in keeping with his idea that photography should remain true to its origins. Lyrics of Love is a break with his more recognisable work, and presents often-romantic glimpses of a country that is part-real, part a product of his rich, visual imagination. A long overdue acknowledgment of a photographic pioneer.

Summary: Peace activist Tom Hurndall died at 22 after being shot by an Israeli sniper. His images and articles, that grew in intensity as his journey became more difficult, are published in a new book, writes Sean O'Hagan


A few weeks after Apple Inc. AAPL fumbled the issue of using criminal background checks in hiring processes, Koch Industries has banned job application questions about candidates’ criminal pasts.

The private corporation with subsidiaries in manufacturing, refining, trading, and investment made the move in March, joining other U.S. companies and a national movement trying to make it easier for ex-offenders to find work. “As a large United States-based manufacturing company that employs 60,000 American workers we shouldn’t be rejecting people at the very start of the hiring process who may otherwise be capable and qualified, and want an opportunity to work hard,” Mark Holden, general counsel of the company, said in a statement to Fortune.

Based in Wichita, Kansas, Koch Industries is run by billionaire CEO Charles Koch, who—along with his brother David, an executive vice president and board member at the company—is known for supporting Republican political candidates and for holding staunch libertarian views. Charles Koch is also a vocal advocate for reforming the country’s criminal justice system. In an op-ed in January, Koch and Holden wrote that overcriminalization “affects us all but most profoundly harms our disadvantaged citizens.” Their op-ed asked, “If ex-offenders can’t get a job, education or housing, how can we possibly expect them to have a productive life?”

That question has been at the heart of the growing so-called ban the box movement, which prohibits employers from immediately asking jobseekers to disclose their criminal histories. One hundred cities and counties have adopted a ban the box policy, as have 16 states, with the governors of Vermont and Virginia signing executive orders to implement such rules this year. Six of those states have hiring laws that apply to private companies, in addition to public employers.

Individual corporations—like Koch Industries—have also acted independent of government regulations to remove criminal background checks from their own job application processes. In 2014, Bed Bath & Beyond stopped automatically rejecting job applicants with criminal histories. That same year, Target TGT rolled out a nationwide campaign to eliminate an application question that asked jobseekers about their criminal past. Wal-Mart WMT and Home Depot HD have done the same.

Apple came under fire earlier this month for a policy that banned workers with a felony conviction in the past seven years from working on the construction of the tech giant’s new spaceship-like headquarters in Cupertino, California. The company later stopped the practice. “We recognize that this may have excluded some people who deserve a second chance,” the company said in a statement at the time.

Job application questions about criminal histories are thought to discriminate against the 70 million American adults with criminal records and to have a disproportionately negative effect on persons of color, who make up more than 60% of the country’s incarcerated population. The majority of employers rely on criminal background checks despite their potentially harmful effects: almost 7 out of 10 companies use them.

Summary: The move mirrors CEO Charles Koch's staunch support of criminal justice reform.


Claude Kipnis, the French-born mime who toured the United States with his own company to critical acclaim, died of cancer at the Mount Sinai Medical Center yesterday. He was 42 years old and lived in Brooklyn.

Mr. Kipnis was the founder of the Israeli Mime Theater, which he led in its New York debut at the Theater de Lys in 1966. He settled in the United States that year to found his Claude Kipnis Mime Theater.

A student of Marcel Marceau, Mr. Kipnis also founded and managed the Claude Kipnis Mime School of New York. He illustrated his technique in ''The Mime Book,'' published in 1974.

Mr. Kipnis and his company incorporated into some of their stage episodes the music of Stravinsky, Bartok and Mussorgsky, as well as Mozart's ''Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.'' Studied Philosophy

He was born in Paris and studied philosophy before deciding on a stage career. Starting in 1956, he trained for three years under Mr. Marceau and moved to Israel in 1959.

His international reputation took flight in Paris in 1965 when the Israeli Government entered his troupe in that year's season of the Theater of the Nations.

Mr. Kipnis also collaborated with Sarah Caldwell in staging the American premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's ''Moses and Aaron'' by the Boston Opera Company.

In 1968 he appeared with the New York Philharmonic under Andre Kostelanetz at Lincoln Center, acting out Dukas's ''The Sorcerer's Apprentice.''

His company was praised as an ''excellent mime theater'' by Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times, who wrote of a 1970 New York appearance that its group pieces ''carry messages and metaphors that are both timeless and incisive.'' ''Mime is an ancient art,'' Miss Kisselgoff noted after a program at the 92d Street Y's Kaufmann Concert Hall in 1974, ''but Claude Kipnis knows very well how to adapt it to today's audience.''

Mr. Kipnis also appeared on television and with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. Mr. Kipnis continued on tour until last fall, when his illness, melanoma, took its toll. His company was performing in California at his death.

Mr. Kipnis is survived by his wife, Dina; two sons, Joel and Eric, and his parents, Abraham and Sonia Kipnis.


By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt RED DRAGON. By Thomas Harris. 348 pages. Putnam. $13.95.

THESE frightening days, when it seems you can be murdered just for the look on your face, it's simple enough to understand the appeal of Thomas Harris's ''Red Dragon,'' a new thriller by the author of ''Black Sunday.'' There really are monsters out there in the streets, Mr. Harris seems to be saying - destructive lunatics who may not be worth even trying to understand. There are ''pure sociopaths'' out there like Dr. Hannibal (The Cannibal) Lecter, one of Will Graham's earlier catches, who has to be watched carefully even when he's under guard.

'''On the afternoon of July 8, 1976,' Dr. Lecter 'complained of chest pain,' '' Dr. Frederick Chilton, chief of staff of the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, warns Will Graham just as Graham is about to visit Lecter with the hope of getting some clues to his current case. '' 'His restraints were removed in the examining room to make it easier to give him an electrocardiogram. One of his attendants left the room to smoke, and the other turned away for a second. The nurse was very quick and strong. She managed to save one of her eyes.' '' Liberalism Arises

'' 'You may find this curious,' '' Chilton goes on. ''He took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. 'Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing? His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue.' '' And Chilton adds: ''I don't think we're any closer to understanding him than the day he came in.''

But he's just the sort of madman who's liable to stick you up for your loose change these days, we can't help thinking. That's why it's so peculiar that the author of ''Red Dragon'' seems to be going kneejerk liberal halfway through his story.

Here Mr. Harris has invented an even more vicious psychopath than Dr. Lecter - one Francis Dolarhyde, known variously as the Tooth Fairy, after his predilection for biting the corpses he makes out of people, or the Red Dragon, after the painting by William Blake, ''The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun,'' which has inspired him. Dolarhyde likes to knock off whole families, then arrange the remains of the husband and children into an audience, and practice unspeakable sexual rites on the body of the wife after sticking her full of the shards of broken mirrors.

Here Will Graham has been called out of retirement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation because he has this slightly scary empathy for psychopaths, and an exciting manhunt has begun, built around a lot of fancy up-to-date police lab work and the brilliant intuitive explosions that keep going off in Graham's mind. Here a thunderous climax is shaping up, with Graham stalking the Dragon and the Dragon possibly stalking Graham's wife and stepchild.

And all of a sudden Mr. Harris flashes back to the Dragon's childhood, and describes the trauma of his growing up: his parents' abandonment of him, the teasing he got in the orphanage for having a cleft palate, his mistreatment at the hands of a nutty grandmother, who looked like George Washington on the dollar bill and threatened to emasculate Francis with a pair of scissors just for having to go to the bathroom at night.

Is Mr. Harris kidding? Is he trying to make fun of liberals who seek all explanations for evil in unhappy childhoods? Actually not, because the most obvious effect of this flashback is to develop a sufficiently good side of Dolarhyde to attract a blind woman who falls in love with him. This way there's twice as much to worry about in the unfolding of the subsequent plot - not only whether the Dragon will get the next family he's stalking, but also whether the Dragon will overcome the still human side of Dolarhyde and thus cause him to murder the woman who has come to trust him. And this way the groundwork is laid for twice as surprising an ending to the story than we might have expected had Dragon-Dolarhyde been a onedimensional force for evil. Walking at Shiloh

But the inadvertent side effect of the flashback to Dolarhyde's childhood is to get one thinking about the sources of evil in the world. And this serves to focus heightened attention on Will Graham's reflections while walking the battlefield of Shiloh one ''soft April day'': ''Now, drifting between memory and narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh was not sinister; it was indifferent. Beautiful Shiloh could witness anything. Its unforgivable beauty simply underscored the indifference of nature, the Green Machine. The loveliness of Shiloh mocked our plight.''

And: ''In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain. There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.''

And: ''He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against. He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine.''

The more I think about this, the less I like it, if only because, connected as it is to the story it embellishes, it suggests that evil is a matter of biology, and has little to do with moral choice.

But I have to acknowledge my gut response to Mr. Harris's thriller. It hits us in our outrage, and titillates the part of us all that would like to get rid of evil with a gun.


WASHINGTON, Dec. 10— The assertion that Chief Justice Warren E. Burger discussed ''issues before the Court'' with President Nixon illustrates a dilemma that faces Supreme Court

Justices any time they venture beyond the Court's marbled cloister. In his memoirs, John D. Ehrlichman describes a 1970 breakfast meeting at which he, President Nixon and Attorney General John N. Mitchell ''openly discussed'' school integration and busing. But his account is so sketchy as to make it impossible to assess the propriety of the Chief Justice's reported role.

On the one hand, Justices and Presidents have dined and consulted together in the past without ethical questions being raised. On the other hand, any judge who discusses a pending case privately with one of the parties involved would be violating judicial ethics.

But from the Ehrlichman account, which uses the word ''issue,'' rather than ''case,'' it is unclear what was discussed by whom at the breakfast, which was held while the High Court was considering an important North Carolina desegregation case. Chief Justice Burger has declined to comment on the Ehrlichman report.

Mr. Ehrlichman's brief account raises more questions than it answers, for example: Did the Chief Justice accept a summons from the White House to discuss ''school busing?'' Or did he receive a social invitation to breakfast only to find the hot topic served up along with the croissants? Did he offer his own views, or did he simply respond in a noncommittal fashion to the President's expressions of dislike for busing? Mr. Ehrlichman does not say.

The Court decided its busing case four months after the breakfast, the Chief Justice writing an opinion for a unanimous Court that upheld the concept of busing for the purpose of school integration.

That the Administration's lobbying, if that is what it was, did not have the desired result still leaves other questions unanswered. Assuming that it was proper for Chief Justice Burger to accept the invitation, should he have cut off the talk about busing? Should he have walked out? Should he have declined to enter the White House at all? How insulated should judges be? A Most Active Chief Justice

These are not new questions, and they are not new in relation to Warren E. Burger. In 12 years on the Supreme Court, he has been one of the most activist Chief Justices in modern history, seeking the widest possible audience for his forceful, even passionate pronouncements on public issues. He has always viewed his office as a bully pulpit he observed in a speech three years ago at Fordham Law School that judges had an obligation to speak out on matters that affected the administration of justice.

The notion, he said in that speech, that the three branches of the Federal Government ''should remain in solitary isolation or logictight compartments has no basis in reason, law, history or tradition.'' The Chief Justice went on to observe that ''it may well be that I have been too circumspect, too cautious, too restrained in pressing the needs of the courts.''

However, the line between issues that affect the courts and issues of general public concern is often indistinct. Any issue that engenders public debate will almost inevitably reach the Court in one form or another. Earlier this year, for example, Chief Justice Burger gave a highly publicized speech to the American Bar Association about crime in which he proposed that judges ought to be able to deny bail to prisoners likely to commit crimes if released.

The issue, ''preventive detention,'' is now before the Court in a constitutional case from Nebraska. Intervention in Bankruptcy Bill

Three years ago, Chief Justice Burger intervened in a Congressional debate on a bill to overhaul the Federal bankruptcy system by creating new bankruptcy courts. Unsatisfied with the final bill, he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade President Carter to veto it. The constitutionality of the new bankruptcy courts is now before the Supreme Court in a case that the Justices are to hear in the spring.

While he has been more active than most of his predecessors, and, in the process, has probably raised more eyebrows, he is accurate when he says that neither law nor history mandates pristine isolation for Supreme Court Justices.

In fact, since 1938, Congress itself has required a degree of extrajudicial involvement on the part of Chief Justices by designating the holder of that post as the head of the Judicial Conference of the United States. The conference of 25 Federal judges is the policy-making body for the Federal courts. It regularly conveys legislative recommendations to Congress and, in a distinctly legislative function of its own, promulgates the rules that govern procedure and evidence in the Federal courts.

As for relations between Justices and Presidents, nothing in the account by Mr. Ehrlichman, who was a Nixon adviser, indicates that the Nixon-Burger relationship even approached the closeness between Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter and President Roosevelt, or between President Johnson and his longtime friend and adviser, Associate Justice Abe Fortas. Fortas 'Proud' to Serve Johnson

Justice Fortas told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was ''proud'' of his continued service as an adviser to President Johnson after he joined the Supreme Court. Justice Frankfurter and President Roosevelt consulted frequently.

In June, 1941, Justice Frankfurter advised the President to go against his personal preference and name Harlan F. Stone, a Republican, as Chief Justice. ''When war does come,'' Justice Frankfurter told the President, according to Chief Justice Stone's biographer, Alpheus T. Mason, ''the country should feel that you are a national, the nation's President, and not a partisan President.''

Those were, perhaps, simpler days, when behavior that today has been touched by the hint of scandal in a would-be best-seller was considered, if it was considered at all, a normal encounter between men operating at the heights of power. In the unlikely event that future Presidents and Justices cultivate such unabashed closeness, they are not likely to do so before witnesses.


WHEN I travel, I enjoy comparing notes with my counterparts in other places - places that often share some of the problems facing Westchester County. So when I made a trip to Tibet, 12,000 feet above sea level at the ''Roof of the World,'' I looked for an opportunity to discuss shared problems and solutions.

In Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, I sought out political representatives on the municipal level - four members of the Political Consultative Committee (the local legislative body), including one who was the reincarnation of a dead Buddhist monk.

In a country where bodies cannot be cremated for lack of fuel but are instead taken to the mountain tops to be fed to birds, seven other Americans and I met these men in an unheated room, warmed only by our heavy coats and the ubiquitous bottomless teacup.

Our translator was a native Tibetan, a former noblewoman who had been educated in India. She spoke perfect English and worked as a guide for the 400 Westerners who are permitted into Tibet each year now, after a 30-year ban on such travelers.

Mr. L., a soft-spoken and exceedingly dignified man, wore a traditional Tibetan sheepskin coat and an untraditional gray felt fedora. He represents Lhasa on the Political Consultative Committee, an advisory body to the ultimate decision-makers in Peking.

He is also the only man I have ever met who actually has owned people - 5,000 people, to be precise - in this century. Before 1950, when the Chinese carried out the ''Peaceful Liberation'' of Tibet, Mr. L. was a nobleman of the ancient feudal theocracy, which dominated the mountain kingdom for thousands of years. Church was state in those days, in a system where leading lamas and landed aristocrats ruled a country of servant monks and peasant serfs.

Although I quickly discarded any thought of discussing problems and solutions common to Tibet and Westchester County, I was fascinated by the incredible range of differences between our worlds.

Take just one example. In 1950, according to a Chinese bureaucrat who has lived in Lhasa for 20 years, the invading Chinese troops had to build the road as they marched on Lhasa because there were no paved roads in the country at that time. This was because:

1. There were no wheeled vehicles, since yak and donkey were more practical on steep mountains.

2. The Buddhist focus on reincarnations and the afterlife made major public works unnecessary and frivolous.

3. The pantheistic superstitions of the peasants included a fear that if the land were dug up, evil spirits might be unleashed.

4. Noblemen and ruling lamas, some educated in the best of Western schools, knew that isolation was the best defense against change in this small and mountainous kingdom.

I thought it best not to go into the intricacies of the Highway Trust Fund Act as we know it in Westchester County, though I did point out that increasing truck, bus and car traffic in Lhasa would benefit from separate lanes for bicycles and motor vehicles.

After the ''reappropriation'' of the area by the Chinese, who had for centuries considered Tibet part of China, Mr. L. reformed his ways. He no longer lives ''by exploiting the people,'' and the people he owned are now workers for the People's Republic of China. Mr. L. receives a modest pension ($140 a month) for his work on the council.

Mr. Y. had been a minister to the Dalai Lama, the monk-king who fled to India in 1959, and a ''professor'' to lamas -part of a small and elite group that ruled over the other 95 percent of the lamas. The latter were, in effect, slaves to the ruling theocracy.

Mr. Y.'s monastery owned more than 100 estates and 10,000 serfs. The monasteries subdivided the land throughout much of Tibet; 25 percent of all males in the country became lamas, attached to the monasteries. Now the former serfs and the former lamas work in the agricultural communes or on work crews patterned on the Chinese model.

Mr. C. had been a smaller landowner, with two estates and 200 serfs. Today, he said, he is ''happy now that I am no longer exploiting the people.'' At least he was alive.

When asked whether World War II had had an impact on Tibet, neither our interpreter nor the four legislators were sure of the date of that war. We needed no further explanation of Tibetan forays into international policy.

Mr. R. was one of the highest lamas in Tibet, recognized at the age of 4 as the reincarnation of a famous monk. He was only 12 years old at the time of the rebellion in 1959, when nobles fought nobles over the issue of supporting or resisting the Chinese takeover. He now works for the political committee. We became mesmerized as he spoke about the Buddhist approach to life and death in Tibet.

He responded most enthusiastically to questions about Buddhism, freed from the restraint and necessary woodenness required when discussing political questions. Lama Buddhism preaches, he said, the need for individual goodness to improve one's lot in future incarnations. People are poor because they were bad in a previous life. The contradiction between such extreme fatalism in Tibetan Buddhism and the popular revolution of China is tremendous; it was a very revealing reflection of the difficult problem China still faces in steering Tibet toward the goal of material progress.

In that frigid room on a rocky plateau in Tibet, it was impossible to share the complex issues of our increasingly technological government with men who must work out a new Tibetan approach to such basic issues as sanitation, food and water distribution. But I did come away with one significant conclusion that I believe is relevant to our life in Westchester.

Although we have much to do in managing and improving the complex governmental structure that makes our society work, we Americans live in the most democratic, affluent, advanced and relatively unpolluted country in the world. Perhaps nowhere in the world is this, which we take so much for granted, so clear as in the fiercely barren and beautiful mountains of Tibet.


BY the time the players left McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket from the baseball game that had begun at 8 o'clock the night before, the dawn of Easter Sunday was glowing across the Rhode Island sky.

''Look at that,'' Sam Bowen of the Pawtucket Red Sox said. ''We might as well have sunrise services.'' And when Louis Aponte, a Pawtucket pitcher, arrived home at his apartment, his wife, Ximora, wondered, as wives will, where her husband had been all night.

''At the ball park,'' Louis Aponte said. ''Don't you lie to me,'' his wife said. But yes, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings of the International League had indeed been at the ball park all that time, all 32 innings, all 8 hours and 7 minutes - the longest game in innings and in elapsed time in the history of organized baseball. And the game still is not over. Suspended at 4:07 A.M., with the score 2-2, it will be resumed on June 23.

''We were supposed to resume it Sunday,'' said Ben Mondor, the owner of the Pawtucket club, ''but both teams felt it was in their best interests, especially for their pitchers, to wait until the next time Rochester came here. So we just played the regular Sunday afternoon game.''

Harold Cooper agreed. Harold Cooper, the president of the International League, lives in Columbus, Ohio, where the league headquarters are. But last Saturday night, the game in Pawtucket was grinding toward 12:50 A.M., after which no inning is supposed to begin, according to the league constitution, when the rival managers approached Jack Lietz, the chief of the umpire crew.

''But that 12:50 rule isn't in my umpire's manual,'' Jack Lietz told them. ''I've got to go by my manual.''

And so the game went on. And on. And on. Each team had scored a run in the seventh and another in the 21st. Soon they were passing milestones -the American League record of 24 innings, which occurred twice, both involving the Philadelphia A's, in 1906 and 1945; the major-league record of 26 innings, a 1-1 classic between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves in 1920; the previous minor-league record of 29 innings, established in 1966 by Miami and St. Petersburg of the Florida State League, and the elapsed-time major-league record of 7 hours 23 minutes set by the Mets and the Giants in the second game of a Shea Stadium doubleheader in 1964.

''By the 30th inning,'' Ben Mondor says, ''I was really starting to be concerned about the players being so groggy somebody might get hurt.''

By then the Pawtucket manager, Joe Morgan, was long gone, having been ejected in the 21st inning for disputing an umpire's call. But he sat around under the stands with some of his players' wives and children, many of whom fell asleep. Around 3 o'clock Mike Tamburro, the Pawtucket public relations director, phoned Harold Cooper at his Columbus home. Cooper's wife, Eloise, told Tamburro that her husband would call him back.

''It's from Pawtucket,'' she told her husband. ''They're still playing.'' ''They're still what?'' Harold Cooper said. ''It's almost 4 o'clock in the morning. They can't still be playing.'' But they were. Harold Cooper phoned and spoke to Jack Lietz, who told him the game was about to enter the bottom of the 32d inning. ''If it's still tied at the end of the inning,'' Harold Cooper told the crew chief, ''suspend the game and get some sleep.'' After using 13 dozen baseballs, the totals were 2 runs, 17 hits and 3 errors for Rochester, which used only four pitchers; 2 runs, 19 hits and 1 error for Pawtucket, which used eight pitchers. Dave Huppert of Rochester caught the first 31 innings. Jim Umbarger, the last Rochester pitcher, allowed only four hits and struck out nine over the last 10 innings. In all, there were 59 strikeouts.

''The amazing thing,'' says Doc Edwards, the Rochester manager, ''is that our four pitchers issued only four walks in 32 innings, and one of them was intentional.''

Some of the hitters suffered through an eight-hour slump. Dallas Williams, the Rochester center fielder, went 0 for 12 and Russ Larribee, the Pawtucket designated hitter, went 0 for 11, striking out eight times.

''In a game like this,'' said Wade Boggs, the Pawtucket third baseman, ''you can have a bad week in one night.'' With a chilling wind dropping the temperature below 40 degrees after midnight, the crowd of 1,740 had dwindled to 20 when the umpires suspended the game. By then, hot dogs and coffee and hot chocolate were available at no charge, courtesy of the Pawtucket management. Several youngsters were among the 20 survivors, each of whom will receive a Pawtucket season pass.

''The last time we came to a game, we had to leave early,'' one youngster's father explained. ''This time I promised we'd stay for the whole game. I had to keep my promise.''

Sunday morning a collector of baseball memorabilia offered $1,000 for Bill George's official scoresheet, which took up four scorebook pages. But it will be displayed in the Baseball Hall of Fame instead.

''In the Sunday afternoon game,'' Ben Mondor says, ''we were tied 3-3 in the ninth and I thought, 'Oh, no, not again.' '' But then Sam Bowen of Pawtucket hit a three-run homer for a 6-3 victory and both teams went home to catch up on their sleep and wait for June 23 when baseball's longest game will get longer.

Illustrations: Photo of Rod Card and his son


PARIS, June 21— Arguments about the Israeli raid on Iraq's nuclear reactor and the international fallout are obscuring more decisive issues.

A week from Tuesday, Israel is going to elect a new Knesset and thereby choose its leader for perhaps the next five years. These are crucial years that may well result in Israel's future in peace or the gravest damage not only to the Jewish state but to most of the world, including the United States.

Convention has it that only those with the right to vote should interfere in national elections. This is regularly honored more in the breach than the observance, though with a degree of diffidence.

Thus the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir did all she could short of open declarations to help Richard Nixon win re-election in 1972. Germany's Helmut Schmidt came out against Jimmy Carter in 1976. In French elections of 1974 and 1981, Moscow sided with Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the losing side this time.

But there are times when outsiders have so much at stake in another country's elections that even a pretense of noninterference must be abandoned. I think that is the case with Israel now.

Leaving aside the raid and its blatantly electoral timing, Menachem Begin's continuance in power would be too much of a risk for the world at large, as well as for Israel, to contemplate without clear comment.

Mr. Begin is a stubborn, narrow-minded man whose vision is limited to denouncing the past. As much as Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion used his daring and resolve to shape the future, Mr. Begin uses his great political skill and stamina to deny it. His extraordinary statement, in connection with Chancellor Schmidt's dealing with Saudi Arabia on more modest terms than does the U.S. or France, that all Germans are and always will be guilty of the Holocaust was pathetically revealing of mental blockage.

Menachem Begin has one great achievement to his credit - peace with Egypt. In domestic terms, he has been a disaster, with skyrocketing inflation and now the incredibly ugly sight of some of his North African Jewish supporters launching violent attacks on opposition party meetings.

Even the peace with Egypt was wanting, flawed in the stingy focus on legalisms and failure to match the courageous initiative of Anwar Sadat with a gesture of spirit. A farsighted statesman, with peace for his country as his greatest goal, would have followed the treaty immediately with some unilateral measures starting the West Bank on the road to autonomy.

Mr. Begin insisted that Israel should not give something for nothing, as though communal good will were nothing, and the haggling negotiations have bogged down in sterility. The result is that the distressed Arabs of the occupied territories are now more hostile to Israel, more supportive of the P.L.O., more opposed to the Camp David agreement than ever. They could have been given hope of accommodation. They could have come to see Sadat as the man who made the breakthrough for them too, and the Arab radicals who use the Palestinian cause as cover could have been more isolated.

Instead, Egypt is isolated and Israel is dangerously alone. There is a watershed date ahead: April 1982, when the rest of the Sinai is to be returned to Egypt. Mr. Sadat is waiting patiently but afterwards he must be expected to try to repair his relations with the other Arabs.

It is common talk in Western chancelleries that if things go on as they are, after next April there will be a change in Egyptian policy to Israel's serious detriment. Mr. Begin traded the Sinai for peace with Egypt, but his subsequent policies can lose him the benefits of peace as well as the buffer territory.

The pity is all the greater because other men involved in the negotiations developed warm relations that give live meaning to a piece of paper. This comes across in the new book by Ezer Weizman, Menachem Begin's former Defense Minister. Despite his terrible temper, Mr. Weizman became firm friends with Anwar Sadat and his then Defense Minister, Mohammed el-Gamasy.

But the men go and their friendships go with them if they are not broadened and enlarged, threatening Israel's survival in the middle of the Middle East. If conciliation can't be spread, war can spread, to engulf everyone.

Mr. Begin doesn't think this way. He hunkers down in his corner, blasting the world with words and bombs, and it brings him a certain popularity among frightened Israelis who have not been offered a more hopeful, stirring glimpse of the future.

It isn't too late for Israel to turn back to a more promising course. But it is too late to suppose that Menachem Begin's nature will enable him to lead the way.

There are no new Ben Gurions on the Israeli horizon, but there is a choice in Israel next week between plunging blindly toward catastrophe or averting it. It is too important for Israel's own sake and for the rest of the world to let partisan emotions of the moment black out the future.


Questions are based on news reports in The Times this week. Answers appear on page 13.

1. The baptism of Tobias Governor Bartosiewicz, pictured above, was in the news. Why? 2. ''The United States has made a commitment to Saudi Arabia to move forward,'' said a Government announcement. What commitment is it, and why has it created a controversy?

3. For the first time in three years, some children walked to school instead of to a bus stop in an American city. What city is it, and what had occurred?

4. A building both spired and inspiring will be celebrated in the coming week. What building is it, and what is the occasion? 5. More than 40 college football coaches converged on Villanova for a ''going-out-of-business sale.'' Explain. 6. A substance made from cowhide, shark cartilage and plastic has been used successfully in certain operations at the Massachusetts General Hospital. What is it?

7. ''Oh, well, I think that's just great,'' said President Reagan in a radio phone-in call he placed to Representative Eugene V. Atkinson, a Pennsylvania Democrat. Why was the President's remark significant?

8. ''He has this wonderful ability to captivate you for two hours about himself,'' remarked Bernard Rome, a newly declared candidate, about the incumbent he hopes to unseat. For what office is he running, and of whom was he speaking?

9. The buildup of United States and Soviet naval forces is causing growing concern among 36 countries in the region where it is taking place. In what body of water is the buildup occurring?

10. ''Watching the Watchdog,'' a television program on a CBS-owned station, focused on ''20/20,'' an ABC-TV news magazine. What was at issue?

12. The company formerly known as Western Onion has something to sing about. Explain. 13. The Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings used 13 dozen balls in an 8-hour and 7-minute game, the longest in innings and in elapsed time in the history of organized baseball. How many innings did the game run before game was interrupted and scheduled for resumption?

14. One-third of the country's condominiums and one-tenth of its houses are said to be purchased by the fastest-growing segment of the nation's home-buying market. What is that segment?

15. The Hollywood entertainment community, apparently afraid of a McCarthy-like witch hunt, has almost completely boycotted two days of recent hearings. What were the hearings about?

16. The observances were low key in Cuba last weekend as an anniversary was celebrated. What was it? 17. Robert Alexander Kennedy Runcie will visit six cities in his official capacity on a tour of the United States and will also stop at a farm because of his interest in pig breeding. Who is he?

18. Insomnia, which affects at least 75 million Americans, is almost always caused by psychological factors, according to recent studies. True or false?

19. Four horses and three cows were impounded as the Bureau of Indian Affairs began a roundup on an Arizona reservation. What was at issue?

20. Shearson Loeb Rhodes Inc., a leading Wall Street brokerage house, is to be acquired by a well-known financial company. What company is it?

21. George M. Steinbrenner 3d, principal owner of the New York Yankees, and Sonny Werblin, president of Madison Square Garden, are contemplating joining forces. For what purpose?

Illustrations: photos associated with questions 1 and 11


ATLANTIC CITY, Nov. 25— This resort city, in turmoil because of mounting crime and prostitution, land-buying efforts by the gaming industry and bizarre political manueverings, was in another uproar today.

Public Safety Commissioner Willie B. Clayton, who created one stir Monday when he announced that he was promoting himself to deputy police chief, prompted another one today by suggesting that prostitution be legalized.

Mr. Clayton and Police Chief Joseph Allmond argued that attempts to control prostitution attracted by the city's nine casino hotels were frustrated by low fines and rare jail sentences.

As did his self-promotion announcement, the Commissioner's proposal on prostitution drew immediate criticism. State Senator Steven P. Perskie, an Atlantic City Democrat who is the new Senate majority leader, said the chances of the Legislature's legalizing prostitution were ''between nonexistent and zilch.''

William Downey, executive director of the Atlantic City Casino Hotel Association, described the gaming industry as ''incensed'' by the proposal.

''We abhor it both individually and corporately,'' he said. The city has a history of prostitution, but the problem, according to state and municipal officials, was exacerbated after the first legal gambling casino opened here in 1978. The crime rate also escalated.

Meanwhile, a fellow member of the five-member Board of Commissioners, Assemblyman Michael J. Matthews, was moving to seek revocation of Mr. Clayton's move to make himself a Deputy Police Chief. Emergency Meeting Called

Mr. Matthews called an emergency meeting of the board for Friday to vote on whether to void Mr. Clayton's promotion and the promotion of four other police inspectors to the deputy chief rank. Mr. Clayton had made all five promotions simultaneously.

The Assemblyman, who is Commissioner of Revenue and Finance, said that, if the board did not rescind the promotions, he would ask Superior Court to declare them illegal.

He added that he would not pay the salary increases that went with the promotions. Assemblyman Matthews said City Solicitor Matthew H. Powals had informed him that the promotions violated a 1976 city ordinance limiting the Police Department to one deputy chief.

When Mr. Clayton was elected to the commission last year he was a police captain, and he took a leave form the force to serve as commissioner. After six months in office, he promoted himself to inspector, which carries a salary of $38,575 compared with $32,943 for a captain. This week, he promoted himself to deputy chief, which would pay him $46,800 if he returns to the force.

A return to the force is likely, because Atlantic City's electorate voted overwhelmingly Nov. 3 to change the city's government from a commission form back to that of a mayor and parttime council. The new elections will be held in May.

Commissioner Matthews, who will be a candidate for Mayor, said it was a case of ''a lame duck commissioner'' arranging a better job for himself while he still could.

The commission passed a resolution Tuesday requiring a vote of the full commission rather than unilateral action by a single commissioner to approve personnel changes involving city employees with salaries of $20,000 or more. The vote was 4 to 1, with Commissioner Clayton opposed.

The action came a day too late to affect Mr. Clayton's selfpromotion. Commissioner Joseph Pasquale, who was the only Deputy Police Chief before Monday, said in an interview that Mr. Clayton's promotion should be rescinded and he should be relieved of his supervisory responsibilities over the Police Department.

Commissioner Pasquale said Mr. Clayton could remain in charge of the Fire Department and the city's lifeguards. Federal Bureau of Investigation figures show that the crime rate in Atlantic City soared last year to second in the nation, behind only that of Miami.

Mr. Clayton said in an interview that the figures were misleading because they were based on Atlantic City's population of 40,000, excluding the millions of people who come here to gamble.

He said his promotions were legal, based on a resolution under which he accepted his duties as Public Safety Commissioner, and he would support them in court if necessary.

Illustrations: photo of Willie Clayton


JERUSALEM, April 30— Israeli authorities continued their crackdown on Palestinian nationalists today by dismissing a fourth elected mayor on the occupied West Bank.

Mayor Wahid Hamdallah of Anabta, a town about 40 miles north of Jerusalem, was removed from office on the order of the army commander of the central district, Maj. Gen. Uri Orr.

Mr. Hamdallah, who was elected Mayor in 1976, was convicted by a military tribunal on April 25 of two offenses - violating a military order restricting him to his hometown and possessing literature of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He had been given a suspended prison sentence and a fine, but it has been clear from the beginning of the case that the authorities wanted him dismissed.

The move was part of a campaign against West Bank Arab militants that began after Defense Minister Ariel Sharon hired an Israeli professor of Arabic literature, Menachem Milson, to govern the territory under a ''civilian administration.'' Declaring that he was at the head of ''perhaps the greatest political battle we have been engaged in since 1948,'' Mr. Milson is trying to uproot the Palestine Liberation Organization from the West Bank. Denounces 1976 Elections

He has denounced the 1976 municipal elections - often cited by Israeli officials as an example of Israeli democracy for the Arabs - as undemocratic because of reported threats made by the P.L.O. against moderate candidates.

Mr. Milson has sought the dismissal of pro-P.L.O. mayors, citing as one reason their refusal to meet with him in his capacity as ''civilian administrator.''

The ouster of Mayor Ibrahim Tawil of El Bireh in mid-March set off violent demonstrations that are continuing sporadically. A total of 13 Arabs have been killed by Israeli forces, the same number of people killed in Israel by Arab guerrillas in all of 1981. Two other Mayors, Karim Khalef of Ramallah and Bassam al-Shaka of Nablus, were also dismissed at Mr. Milson's urging, and Israeli officers have replaced them.

In addition, the dismissed mayors have been barred from traveling from town to town or meeting with one another. Journalists who have tried to interview them have sometimes been blocked by soldiers, and last week the broadcasting authority, at Government urging, decided that no television or radio interviews with Palestinian activists would be broadcast.

The West Bank reporter for the Israeli television, Rafik Halabi, is also understood to be facing possible removal from his position in an effort to curtail West Bank coverage. Portrayal of Elections Disputed

Mr. Milson's portrayal of the 1976 elections as undemocratic has been challenged by Israeli officials who were involved in them and from Israeli reporters who covered them. ''Milson is rewriting history,'' one said, asserting that the P.L.O. supporters who were swept to victory represented popular sentiment.

Mr. Milson has given no instances to back up his charge that the voting was manipulated by threats.Mayor Hamdallah was described by military sources as having maintained close contacts with P.L.O. figures and with having followed their instructions on instigating strikes and demonstrations in his town.

Among his offenses cited by military sources were ''subversion and instigation'' and his ''involvement in political affairs not directly related to his activities as mayor - he signed protest petitions, issued manifestoes and protests.''

Mr. Hamdallah could not be reached for comment immediately. ---- Mine Wounds Israeli Soldier Special to the New York Times

TEL AVIV, April 30 - An Israeli soldier was injured today in the explosion of a land mine planted in southern Lebanon by Arab guerrillas, the military command here reported today. The soldier was hospitalized after his vehicle hit a mine near Dibel, three miles from the Israeli border, in territory controlled by Maj. Saad Haddad, a Lebanese allied with Israel.

The Israelis said the mining was a breach of the cease-fire agreement reached last July. A clause in the agreement bans ''hostile military activity directed into the Haddad area or from it.''


Several years before he was appointed to the United States Supreme Court in 1939, Prof. Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School stated the philosophy he thought should guide all appointees to the highest court.

''When a man goes on the Supreme Court,'' Frankfurter wrote, ''he permanently takes the veil.'' But Frankfurter did not follow his own advice and legal historians and political scientists agree that because he was not the cloistered cleric he spoke of, Frankfurter was a fair representative of his Supreme Court brethren.

Indeed, in his numerous forays into the political realm, documented in Prof. Bruce Murphy's forthcoming Oxford University Press book, ''The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices,'' Frankfurter was hardly a trail-blazer.

Supreme Court justices have often been political animals, either advising Presidents, campaigning for them, or, like Stephen Field, Charles Evans Hughes or William O. Douglas, desiring the Presidency themselves.

Chief Justice Roger Taney advised Jackson on the constitutionality of certain bills; Salmon P. Chase helped draft the 14th Amendment, and many of their peers have not been any more mindful of the elusive, ever-changing standards of judicial propriety to which they are supposedly subject. He Says Rule Is 'Don't'

''The general rule regarding extrajudicial activity is 'don't,' '' said Walter Murphy, a Princeton political science professor, the author of ''Elements of Judicial Strategy.'' ''But it is a moral proscription,'' he said, that''a lot of judges have not followed.''

According to the author of the study of Frankfurter and Justice Louis D. Brandeis, both men engaged in political activities for the most patriotic of motives. But that, scholars say, does not obviate the dangers.

''The spirit in our country is one of a separation of powers; that by being separate, the powers will check each other,'' said David J. Denalski, a professor of political science at Stanford University. ''When there is an intermixture behind closed doors, when it becomes a constitution between friends, the system cannot defend itself against tyranny.''

In devising a government of checks and balances, the founding fathers fought for an independent judiciary. With that in mind, the Constitution includes specific provisions guaranteeing Federal judges life tenure and salaries that cannot be reduced except for misbehavior. Strictures on Two Roles

The Constitution also decreed that Federal judges were not to sit in Congress at the time they were on the bench. Yet because of the nation's need for talented men in public affairs and the relative quiescence of the early Supreme Court, which met for no more than 10 days and decided no cases in its first three terms, judges were free to do almost anything else in their spare time.

Chief Justice John Jay freely consulted with Washington on such matters as the scope of the President's powers of appointment and the writing of his State of the Union Message. Justices Samuel Chase, James Iredell and Bushrod Washington all campaigned for Presidential candidates in 1800.

Generally speaking, however, as the Supreme Court gained in power and prestige and came under greater public scrutiny, the range of acceptable outside activities narrowed. The barriers between the branches might still be broken down occasionally, particularly in times of war. Furthermore, the Justices remained relatively free to lobby for legislative reform of the Federal judiciary, or even to promote the appointments of future colleagues on the High Court.

But while the institution of the Supreme Court and the rhetoric surrounding it became more olympian, little could be done to change the intensely partisan political personalities of some of those appointed to it. This was particularly so since their political patrons in the White House often desired their services. Justices like William Moody, Brandeis and Frankfurter, did not so much forgo extrajudicial activities as go underground with them.

The situation reached its most pronounced state during the New Deal. With the exception of Frankfurter, all of those appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin D. Roosevelt -Hugo Black, James Byrnes, Stanley Reed, Frank Murphy, Robert Jackson and William O. Douglas - came from political backgrounds. Many were frequent off-the-record White House guests who freely dispensed their advice on a variety of topics. This situation aroused concern on the part of Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone.

Through such activity, Stone wrote Roosevelt, a Justice ''exposes himself to attack and indeed invites it, which because of his peculiar situation inevitably impairs his value as a judge and the appropriate influence of his office.''

Yet even Stone could shed his judicial robe on occasion, as when President Truman sought, and received, the Chief Justice's approval of Harold Burton for a seat on the court.

Despite Stone's admonition, the problem persisted. Abe Fortas's role as a key adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson did not end when President Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1965. Moreover, John D. Ehrlichman's recently published memoirs of his years in the White House say that Chief Justice Warren E. Burger discussed certain matters then pending before the court, most notably, school busing, with President Nixon himself. Wartime Seen as a Factor

Some of Frankfurter's former clerks, including Joseph L. Rauh Jr. and Edward F. Prichard Jr., say there is a clear distinction between the ethics of advising a President in wartime and discussing cases pending before or destined for the Court.

''There's always been a difference between talking about political matters and legal or juridical ones,'' said Mr. Prichard, a lawyer in Lexington, Ky. ''If Burger talked about lawsuits I think that is shockingly beyond anything that Frankfurter did.''

Such a distinction, however, does not loom large nowadays. Alexis de Tocqueville's assertion, ''Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question'' seems truer now than ever before.

According to Andrew Kaufman, a professor at Harvard Law School, changes in legal ethics and public expectations, rather than in the nature of the judicial selection process, may offer the best hope of curbing abusive extrajudical activities in the future. The Watergate era, a more vigilant press and the more ''political'' role assumed by the courts in recent years, he says, make arrangements like that enjoyed in secret by Brandeis and Frankfurter much less likely to recur. More Severe Now, He Says

''I don't think there existed a well-defined body of professional opinion that would say that what Brandeis and Frankfurter did was clearly out of bounds,'' he said. ''But the restrictions on what is appropriate for a judge to do in 1982 are much more severe than they were in the 1920's and 1930's.''

''Judges are doing things these days which are much grander, and that makes people look at them through a magnifying glass,'' he continued.

Bruce Murphy, the author of the study, said that the issue of extra-judicial activity posed a more fundamental choice to the public.

''Given the political nature of individuals appointed to the Supreme Court,'' he said, ''and the likelihood that the press and public will come to know about any future political activities , we are left with two alternatives. We can either create a strict standard eliminating such activity entirely, or change public expectations so that when activities are revealed, no damage to the Court will result.

''That decision,'' he continued, ''rests ultimately with the public, because in the final analysis it is the public which is the repository of the court's power.''

Illustrations: photo of Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandels


CHICAGO, April 23— Denis Savard and Rich Preston scored second-period goals tonight to help the Chicago Black Hawks to a 2-0 victory over the St. Louis Blues and a berth in the semifinals of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

By winning the series, four games to two, the Black Hawks will face the Vancouver Canucks Tuesday night in Chicago in the opening game of another four-of-seven-game series.

Chicago qualified for the semifinals for the first time in eight seasons.

Tony Esposito, the goalie, celebrated his 39th birthday with his sixth playoff shutout. Savard, who set a club scoring record this season with 119 points, scored the first goal midway in the second period when he took a pass from Glen Sharpley and lifted the puck over Mike Liut. A short time later, Terry Ruskowski, behind the St. Louis net, passed in front to Preston, who jammed in the puck. Bruins Win in Overtime to Tie Series

QUEBEC, April 23 (UPI) - Peter McNab scored his second goal of the game at 10 minutes 54 seconds of sudden-death overtime tonight to give the Boston Bruins a 6-5 triumph over the Quebec Nordiques. That set up a seventh and deciding game Sunday night at Boston Garden in the four-of-seven-game Adams Division final series.

McNab scored after Terry O'Reilly barged down the right side and managed a weak shot on John Garrett, the Quebec goalie. McNab, left unguarded at the crease, knocked the rebound into the far side of the net.

The victory ended a three-game losing streak for the Bruins, winners of the opening two games at home.


The old way to diet was abstinence. You couldn't eat your cake and have it too; you had to choose.

That way is probably still the only way, but Americans seem determined to prove there's an alternative. It is called Light, as in light (nouvelle cuisine) dining and light (tastes great vs. less filling) beer. Now California vintners are finding an enthusiastic market for something called light wine.

This is familiar white table wine from which a quarter of the alcoholic content, and a quarter of the calories, have been removed. People in the business think that by 1990 it may account for a full 10 percent of the wine market. It seems to follow a long trend, away from darker high-proof spirits to lighter spirits, from spirits to regular wine and now to light wine.

How weighty is the difference? A typical glass of light chablis has 57 calories, compared with the usual 76. It's easy to see why people concerned about health and weight care; that is not a trivial improvement. To burn off 19 calories, one would have to jog more than 300 yards. What's hard to grasp is why people so responsive to 19-calorie differences are so unresponsive to an older logic, and arithmetic. Not having the glass of light wine would save 1,000 yards.

Summary: Proof Negative   The old way to diet was abstinence. You couldn't eat your cake and have it too; you had to choose.


FORTUNE — The days of predicting crimes are almost upon us, and it’s not just the NSA standing behind the curtain pulling the levers.

Police departments around the country have been using big data with some success to anticipate where crime hotspots will appear, and cities like Seattle are using algorithms not just to anticipate where crime will occur in the next few weeks, but where it will occur in the next few hours.

A more Phillip K. Dick-inspired dystopian technology, recently described by Bloomberg, claims to accurately predict the probability that someone will commit a felony based on only a few details, ranging from eye and skin color, to whether a person has tattoos, to the number of traffic tickets the subject has.

While this new technology may seem most helpful to law enforcers (and potential felons with access to laser tattoo removal), such smart, simple data analysis can also save your business or make you rich.

MORE: Where are the cries from the ratings agencies?

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently announced a shift in its investigations of accounting fraud, suggesting that the regulator is starting to pay more attention to this area.

After the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the SEC focused on insider trading and other activities that keep hedgies tossing and turning at night on their gold-plated sheets. It was as if Enron never happened. And, judging by recent comments and actions from the SEC, the next Enron may be going on undetected right now.

“We have to be more proactive in looking for it,” Scott Friestad, a senior SEC enforcement official, told the Wall Street Journal in May. “There’s a feeling internally that the issue hasn’t gone away.”

This neglect should terrify businesses that are heavily dependent on suppliers who provide deals that seem too good and anyone who has asked of his employer, “How are they getting away with … ?”

It should also invigorate investors looking for a big score.

The SEC has been developing an accounting quality model dubbed Robocop that uses diffuse data to determine which companies deserve closer scrutiny. This fraud-detection software will crunch vast amounts of information, examining apparent conflicts in various performance measures, such as the difference between a company’s net income and cash generated.

The model also will incorporate analysis of unstructured data, such as how the word choices in the Management Discussion and Analysis section of a company’s 10-K filing can predict whether a company is likely to be cheating in its financial reporting.

The SEC’s model, when fully implemented, will likely dredge up some horrific frauds. And shady companies are already developing ways to avoid detection.

Still, while the SEC perfects its model, businesses and investors can get ahead of the game with a minimal investment in time and money. Even those companies that don’t have data scientists on staff would benefit from allowing some employees to devote a few hours to learning programming languages like Python and statistical analysis software like R. This software allows people to easily gather data and use that data to test questions they may have. There are tons of free tutorials and ready-made packages for these programs available online that allow anyone to analyze 10-K’s (which can be downloaded en masse in text form from the SEC) within a few hours.

Many interesting questions — like “does the length of a company’s 10-K reveal anything about the quality of management’s reporting?” — have already been asked. It’s up to companies to use the reams of data available to them to scrutinize the firms they do business with. This kind of information can ensure that fraud committed by a supplier doesn’t affect your company’s reputation or ability to deliver on commitments.

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The government has made clear that employees are the first line of defense against fraud, and the rewards promised to whistleblowers can be extremely lucrative. A person who questions an employer’s behaviors can now use data analysis to get a better sense of whether she is on the right track.

Investors, too, have a responsibility (and a tremendous incentive) to develop the skills to make smart decisions in a world where access to information is becoming increasingly more available to even the smallest trader playing with his IRA.

Those who learn how to measure the quality of accounting numbers, the complexity of what management is saying, and other details that are easily available and quantifiable will have an advantage that will not only lead to stronger returns but will also result in more honest, open public companies.

Predicting crime may be on the not-too-distant horizon, but right now we can detect fraud with increasingly greater accuracy. All we need is a critical mass of people, from enforcement agencies to day traders, to work with available data and share their successes.

Summary: The SEC is developing data analysis techniques that will likely dredge up some horrific cases of accounting fraud. And shady companies are already developing ways to avoid detection.


Shares of American Superconductor Corp. plunged 33 percent Friday after the Devens company said its $6 million copyright infringement case was dismissed by a Chinese court and a hearing on its $450 million trade secret case was scheduled on or about May 11.

American Superconductor, which makes software used to manage energy grids, brought suit against its former Chinese customer, Sinovel Wind Group Ltd., in 2011. The suits claimed that Sinovel breached its contract with American Superconductor and allegedly stole its technology.

Sinovel has repeatedly denied that it engaged in intellectual property theft.

The company said it would immediately appeal the dismissal to the Beijing Higher People’s Court. Previously, it had appealed the case up to China’s Supreme People’s Court on jurisdictional issues, and prevailed.

“This ruling by the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court is not unexpected,” said company president Daniel P. McGinn in a statement. “Given the importance of protecting the intellectual property of US companies, we look forward to continuing to work with the US government to protect our interests.”

In midafternoon trading, American Superconductor shares were trading at $6.66, down $3.34, or 33 percent.

Summary: American Superconductor Corp.’s case was dismissed by a Chinese court.


Three hours of music. A 10-piece band, with choral and string arrangements. A recapitulation of several decades and movements in jazz, with emphasis on the soul-jazz and political streams of the 1970s.

All this by a group of millennials from Los Angeles who weren’t born when John Coltrane built his double quartet, or when Leon Thomas sang of uplift and empowerment over Pharoah Sanders arrangements — two among many reference points listeners may spot along the journey.

“The Epic,” the 172-minute extravaganza from tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington, which came out in May, earns its title honestly.

Beaming in from LA, where jazz never died but its musicians formed different connivances than their New York peers, as session musicians and contributors to rock and hip-hop projects, it represents another entry in a reclaiming of jazz from the inside — the spiritual traditions; the deep weave of black history — now well underway.

It belongs in a loose family with recent R&B projects led by pianist Robert Glasper and by singer-bassist Esperanza Spalding, or, more closely, by New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott — whose “Christian aTunde Adjuah,” a 2012 double CD, is matched in intensity and range by “The Epic,” and exceeded considerably in length.

“The Epic” arrived blessed with street cred from Washington’s appearances on two landmark recent releases at the progressive end of the pop scene: Flying Lotus’s 2014 album “You’re Dead” and rapper Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 magnum opus “To Pimp a Butterfly,” where Washington plays on the song “u” and arranges strings throughout.

The buzz from those records, plus Washington’s pedigree touring with the likes of Chaka Khan and Snoop Dogg, are taking the “Epic” tour to larger venues than the usual jazz spots. The band plays the Sinclair in Cambridge on Thursday.

But — fair warning — although “The Epic” appears on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder records, it contains nary a trace of hip-hop or electronica. Instead it shows the fluency of artists like bassist Thundercat (Stephen Bruner); his brother, drummer Ronald Bruner Jr.; keyboardists Cameron Graves and Brandon Coleman (on piano and churchy organ); and singer Patrice Quinn — members of a tight-knit LA scene unbound by genre policing as they explore a lineage in black music that doesn’t always get due appreciation.

Washington, 34, came up in the tradition, the son of a saxophonist named Rickey Washington. Jazz in LA is as old as the Great Migration, from the Central Avenue bars of the 1930s to the rise of local prodigies like Eric Dolphy and Dexter Gordon, as well as the formative spells in the city of Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, and others.

“LA was known to be a music place,” Washington says. “They cultivated themselves while they were here. The ingenuity was here, but not the opportunity.” The labels were on the East Coast, the money there or in Europe. But a local scene remained, including parents and teachers of many of Washington’s crew.

“I met Ronald Bruner when I was 3,” Washington says. “His dad and my dad played together.” At Washington’s third birthday party, Bruner, then a toddler, grabbed hold of his brand-new drum set. “I got mad: ‘Don’t let the baby play my drum set!’”

Bruner met Brandon Coleman and drummer Tony Austin in grade school. Washington met trombonist Ryan Porter while in junior high school, Coleman and bassist Miles Mosley in high school, and Quinn soon after. A cipher formed, deploying in various combinations in LA clubs, using various names: The Unit, The West Coast Get Down.

By late 2011, a welter of sideman work threatened to crowd out their own ideas. “I had just started touring with Chaka Khan,” Washington says. “Thundercat put out [his debut] ‘Golden Age of Apocalypse,’ and that lit a fire under all of us. We were all jumping from gig to gig. We needed to take some time to focus on our own music.”

After agreeing to make an album on Brainfeeder, Washington found the crew eager to record projects of their own as well. They secured a loft space for the month of December, canceled their gigs, and recorded frenetically.

“It was like a music sweatshop,” Washington says. “Afterwards, we definitely had to take some time off from each other. We were even there on New Year’s Eve. As I look back in hindsight, the focus of it was pretty amazing.”

It took three years to release “The Epic,” as the work wasn’t over: Washington still had to direct the choir and orchestral parts, and swat away any skeptics who challenged his choice to put out a triple album, instead of a more concise outing.

“To me, the album felt like one thing,” Washington says. He felt guided by a recurring dream — a kind of martial arts saga about an old man on a mountain and warriors in the village below — that stitched the movements together.

On disc, each section of “The Epic” has its own identity: the first elegiac, orchestral, yearning; the second sinewy, closer to bebop foundations; the third a kind of resolution, grounded in a celebration of Malcolm X’s memory. The songs are long, but with remarkably few passages that drift off into the wallpaper.

If the length seems a challenge to today’s allegedly short-attention-span generation, Washington sees it as an invitation to binge, as one might with a TV series or video game. Most of all, he invites the rest of the world to note what’s been brewing in the City of Angels.

“It feels like we’ve been doing something for a long time that we believed in, but no one really knew about,” he says. “This part’s been hidden for generations — my dad, his friends, they were all brilliant. It feels like we’ve been living for a long time in the dark, and the sun just came out.”

Summary: Leading an ensemble of LA friends and peers, saxophonist Kamasi Washington comes to the Sinclair behind one of the year’s most surprising records.


The word "bubble" in association with markets has been mentioned in the press 4,600 times this year, a high profile industry commentator has noted, and it could be a worrying trend if the talk of bubbles continues at this pace, analysts told CNBC.

On Sunday, the co-founder of Morgan Stanley subsidiary ConvertBond.com Lawrence McDonald, who is a well-known market commentator and New York Times contributor, tweeted the statistic and estimates that "bubble" mentions could reach 7,900 by the end of this year.

By comparison, the word was mentioned in news 6,850 times in 2007, the year before onset of the global financial crisis, and 6,800 times in 1999, before the dotcom crash of 2000, he noted.

According to Evan Lucas, market strategist at IG, the bubble talk could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the commentators talking about "bubbles" and "overvaluations" often have positions in markets.

"More and more newswires are concentrating on terms like 'bubble,' 'overvalued,' 'overstretched,' 'premium pricing' etc.," Lucas said. "It almost creates a snowball effect, as bearish commentators take bearish positions and then tell their clients to do the same. Eventually the bulls become exhausted and the bears take over."

Strategists say this bearishness could soon play out in markets with the current bull-run in major stock markets nearing "tipping point," and as investors question the economic fundamentals behind the rally.

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"The S&P 500 is struggling to find a reason to go higher and European indices have been trading lower for the past 4-5 weeks after the German Dax hit a record high. Meanwhile, the Australian stock market cannot get past its recent 6.5 year high," said Lucas.

Currently the S&P 500 is trading at 18.84 times earnings, the Nikkei is trading at 18.86, the Australian stock exchange at 16.11 and the German Dax at 16.11. In contrast, China's stock market, which is considered cheap by many industry watchers, is trading at 9.7 times earnings.

Read MoreUp, up and away! Tech trading above bubble highs

Summary: The word 'bubble' has been mentioned by the press 4,600 times this year, and if bubble talk continues, it could be signaling a worrying trend.


Bank of England Governor Mark Carney warned last week that U.K. inflation was expected to fall below zero in coming months, but would hit the central bank's 2 percent target within two years' time—sooner than earlier forecasts.

In an accompanying open letter to U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Carney said the current period of falling prices was "temporary" and a "fundamentally distinct phenomenon from deflation."

However, Brettell highlighted that Monetary Policy Committee member Martin Weale, who until December had voted for a rise in interest rates, appeared to disagree. Last week, Weale said the risk of low inflation expectations causing a deflationary spiral was a reason behind him abandoning calls for a rate rise.

Howard Archer, chief U.K. economist at IHS Global Insight, said a brief period of U.K. deflation very possible, but was "largely good news for economy."

Tuesday's figures are likely to push back expectations of a rise in interest rates in Britain even further back. The Bank of England suggested last week that there wouldn't be an interest rate hike this year, saying that market interest rates don't indicate a hike until mid-2016—"materially lower than had been implied three months ago."

Summary: Price growth in the U.K. in January fell to its lowest level since records began, marking a move closer deflationary territory.


Partovi explained that he first started to wonder why organic food was so expensive when he had his first child and started caring about the type of food he was feeding her. He felt guilty that he was able to afford nutritious and organic foods, just because he was more affluent than others.

"I felt like it should be possible for everybody regardless of their economic status to be able to feed their kids the healthiest, best food," he said.

When Partovi began looking into why organic food was so expensive, he discovered it was because of a simple mismatch between supply and demand. Wal-Mart recently surveyed its customers and discovered that 91 percent of customers want to eat organic and natural foods.

Thus, the demand for organic food is enormous, and the supply is not able to grow fast enough to keep up with the demand.

"Anytime you have that kind of situation, you have a systemic shortage, this means there are a lot more people who want organic food than there is product available for them, and that's what leads to high prices," Partovi said.

He attributed this imbalance between supply and demand to government programs that tilt the playing field for agricultural farmers. Essentially, he said, the government subsidies are set up to reward those farmers who grow maize, or corn, and soy rather than those who grow fruits and vegetables. Thus, the supply for corn and soy is now beyond the amount that humans can eat and the price of vegetables has increased dramatically.

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"I believe in capitalism, but the invisible hand hasn't been able to do its job properly. It's had little invisible handcuffs," he added.

Partovi further explained that there are not enough policies rewarding organic farmers for making the three-year transition to turn their fields organic. And while organic farming does cost a little bit more in terms of how much land is needed, he stated that the overall cost of organic farming is less than traditional agricultural methods because it takes a lot less fossil fuels and chemicals.

"If you can find a way to farm that reduces those inputs, the total product at the end of the day might be able to produce as much food at lower total cost," Partovi added.

Summary: Jim Cramer speaks to Ali Partovi on his venture to make money on organic cropland.


The oil market is oversupplied. While U.S. production is off its peak due to a declining rig count, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are producing at record levels. Combined with refineries in the U.S. and Europe shutting for their fall maintenance, things look very bleak for oil prices.

I think the market will make a run at $34 per barrel by March 2016; the first quarter of 2016 will look the bleakest. These are about the lows we saw back in December 2008 and early 2009. I predict crude oil inventories in the U.S. will rise to an 85-year high of over 500 million barrels.

Read MoreUS crude oil's break-even cost: How low can it go?

While low prices have helped the consumer with lower gasoline prices, very low oil prices will become a drag on the economy. In fact, low commodity prices around the world have detrimental effects on particular countries that in aggregate is bad news. Think copper for Chile and cocoa in the Ivory Coast.

Members of OPEC are feeling the pain as their economies slow down. States such as North Dakota, Texas, Wyoming and Colorado have increased spending based on royalty revenues from the industry. Now these states have to cut back and cope with job losses. And some cities are now seeing some decline in sales-tax revenues.

When oil prices decline, drilling declines and that leads to less demand for oil that has affected companies like United States Steel in Ohio. And of course if the factory closes, the local area economy of restaurants, doughnut shops and movie theaters get affected.

In Canada, oil sands prices are around $20 per barrel. The province of Alberta is in serious trouble due to the high concentration of oil production with layoffs and a serious contraction in investment. And this even leads to a decline in crude by rail shipments impacting the railroads.

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Very low oil prices are going to continue to affect crude-oil production and investment, but the flip side is that there is a lot of money on the sidelines looking to invest in this sector because many, like myself, are of the opinion that the low prices won't last for long. If your time horizon is two to three years, oil prices will recover and investing in producers, oil services and midstream companies will pay off.

And, oil production in the U.S. is declining. Demand is increasing and forecasts are being revised upwards. Investment in oil production is being postponed, delayed or canceled. The market has pretty much discounted all geopolitical risk around the world. Something will give and it may be social unrest in a place like Venezuela or Nigeria that results in a supply disruption triggering a price rise.

Summary: Oil prices may not recover until after Q1 2016 but it’s not all bad news for the sector, says oil analyst Andy Lipow. Here's how to play it.


On U.S. "economic exceptionalism," Wien noted the relative strength of American economy following the global recession of 2008. U.S. stocks, the dollar and gross domestic product have all outperformed other developed countries.

"While the United States has many social and government policy problems that are likely to be with us for some time, there is little question that the performance of the economy since the Great Recession has been impressive compared to other industrialized countries," he wrote.

Wien noted that such a position doesn't guarantee endless strong stock returns, but said he still doesn't believe valuations of companies are yet excessive.

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On oil, Wien predicted price levels would rise as demand, particularly from emerging markets like China, India and the Middle East, picks up. He also said U.S. shale production, a key reason for the surge in supply, will remain modest until prices increase.

"Taking a look at past periods when the price of oil has had sharp declines shows a consistent pattern of rapid, not slow, recoveries," Wien said, noting he expects a price increase by year end.

On Europe, Wien said he had changed his mind from a few months ago on the region's economic recovery.

He noted that the Ukraine-Russia ceasefire and a resolution to the Greek debt crisis have added stability. Combined with the European Central Bank stimulus program, a weak currency—good for exports—and the low price of oil, the euro zone will not be stuck in a recession and deflation.

Finally, Wien voiced optimism on Japan. He noted strong corporate profits, wage growth and corporate share buybacks as examples that the economy was better off than many investors believe.

Plus, Wien said, officials are committed to more stimulus if necessary.

"If the increase in inflation and growth does not happen because of natural economic forces, the Bank of Japan will increase the money supply to make it more likely," Wien wrote. "Either way the outlook for the Japanese economy and its stock market is favorable."

Read MoreA huge sentiment split in market

The Blackstone Group has almost $300 billion in assets under management, including private equity, real estate and credit funds. The firm is led by co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman.

Summary: Top Blackstone strategist Byron Wien explores four key macroeconomic issues and why many investors are getting them wrong.


Momentum has grown to restrict toy guns over the past year, set off in part by the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was playing with a toy gun when he was shot by a police officer in Cleveland in November. In 2015, lawmakers in Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Ohio and Washington introduced legislation to create or amend toy gun laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Half a dozen states, as well as Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., already have laws on the books, according to the organization.

Mr. Schneiderman's office said the enforcement actions have two goals: cut down on crimes that involve toy guns, like robberies, and help prevent split-second mistakes by the police that can end in death. Since 1994, there have been at least 63 shootings in New York State because of toy or imitation guns, according to the attorney general's office, at least eight of them ending in fatalities.

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"One of the problems we have is there are so many guns in our society that it makes people jumpy, including law enforcement," said Leah Gunn Barrett, the executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. "Even the most well-trained people can make mistakes, and we want to minimize the chance of that happening."

Federal law requires toy guns to have an orange strip near the tip, but more restrictive measures can vary by state and city. New York State law prohibits the sale of black, blue, silver or aluminum toy guns, for example, while New York City is stricter: Imitation guns must be brightly colored, or translucent, among other restrictions.

The attorney general's office sent cease-and-desist letters to Walmart, Sears, Kmart, Amazon and a cluster of smaller toy websites in December. As part of the settlements, the retailers have agreed that they will sell only toy guns that comply with the city standard throughout the state.

Most of the illegal toy gun sales came through third-party sellers on Amazon, Mr. Schneiderman's office said. But Walmart will pay the bulk of the civil penalties because it was found to have violated terms of a 2003 agreement to keep such products out of New York. While Walmart had not sold any illegal toy guns in its stores, consumers in New York purchased 149 of them through its website.

Since 2003, the retailer has successfully blocked the sale of some toy guns into New York, according to Randy Hargrove, a Walmart spokesman, but three models had made it through.

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"Once the New York attorney general expressed concern with certain items sold at Walmart.com we blocked the shipment of those items into the state," Mr. Hargrove said in an email, adding that the company had revised its policies to prevent toys from slipping through in the future. "We are pleased we were able to resolve this matter, along with several other retailers."

A spokesman for Sears Holdings, which also owns Kmart, said in an email that the company was "pleased" to resolve Mr. Schneiderman's concerns. A spokesman for Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

Summary: A handful of big retailers agreed to keep realistic-looking toy guns off their shelves as part of a deal with the New York attorney general's office.