Flat Press

The Federal Communications Commission could soon allow inflight cell phone use, but U.S. airlines aren't eager change their own rules - or equipment - to enable such calls.

The five largest U.S. airlines, which account for about 90% of the nation's air travel, all say their current plans do not include allowing for calls, even though they will look at the rules once they are passed.

"A clear majority of customers who responded to a 2012 survey said they felt the ability to make voice calls on board would detract from -- not enhance -- their experience," said Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Air Lines last week.

Emerging from Los Angeles’s vast eastern sprawl, the freeway glides over a narrow pass and slips gently into the scrubby, palm-flecked Coachella Valley.

Turn south, and you head into Palm Springs with its megaresorts, golf courses and bustling shops. Turn north, and you make your way up an arid stretch of road to a battered city where empty storefronts outnumber shops, the Fire Department has been closed, City Hall is on a four-day week and the dwindling coffers may be empty by spring.

The city, Desert Hot Springs, population 27,000, is slowly edging toward bankruptcy, largely because of police salaries and skyrocketing pension costs, but also because of years of spending and unrealistic revenue estimates. It is mostly the police, though, who have found themselves in the cross hairs recently.

“I would not venture to say they are overpaid,” said Robert Adams, the acting city manager since August. “What I would say is that we can’t pay them.”

Though few elected officials in America want to say it, police officers and other public-safety workers keep turning up at the center of the municipal bankruptcies and budget dramas plaguing many American cities — largely because their pensions tend to be significantly more costly than those of other city workers.

Central Falls, R.I., went bankrupt in 2011 because its police and firefighters’ pension fund ran out of money. Vallejo, Calif., went bankrupt after more than 20 police officers suddenly retired from its force of 145, fearing that if they waited they would lose their contractual right to cash out their unused sick leave and vacation time; the payouts totaled several million dollars, and Vallejo did not have the money. Miami weathered such a run in September 2010, when 154 police and firefighters retired en masse after city commissioners voted to make it harder to retire before age 50, use intensive overtime to raise pensions, and earn cash payouts.

Some lucky fliers capitalized on a computer error Thursday to buy inexpensive flights on Delta Air Lines.

From about 10 a.m. to noon Eastern, certain Delta fares on the airline’s website and other booking sites were showing up incorrectly, offering some savvy bargain hunters incredible deals.

A round-trip flight between Cincinnati and Minneapolis for February was being sold for just $25.05 and a round trip between Cincinnati and Salt Lake City for $48.41. The correct price for both of those fares is more than $400.

Trebor Banstetter, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based airline, said that the problem had been fixed, but that “Delta will honor any fares purchased at the incorrect price.”

New Department of Transportation regulations, aimed at truth in advertising, require airlines to honor any mistake in fares offered.

Jackie Fanelli, 27, learned about the fares from a friend’s Facebook page. She tried to buy a $98 round-trip first-class ticket from her home city, Baltimore, to Honolulu on Priceline.com but the transaction did not process.

The governor of Connecticut arrived at ESPN’s expansive campus here to celebrate the groundbreaking of the sports media giant’s 19th building, a digital center that would be the new home of “SportsCenter.” It was August 2011, and this was the third visit in a year by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, whose first was about three weeks before his election.

This time, Mr. Malloy brought a hard hat, a shovel and an incentive package for ESPN potentially worth $25 million.

ESPN is hardly needy. With nearly 100 million households paying about $5.54 a month for ESPN, regardless of whether they watch it, the network takes in more than $6 billion a year in subscriber fees alone. Still, ESPN has received about $260 million in state tax breaks and credits over the past 12 years, according to a New York Times analysis of public records. That includes $84.7 million in development tax credits because of a film and digital media program, as well as savings of about $15 million a year since the network successfully lobbied the state for a tax code change in 2000.

For Mr. Malloy and other public officials in Connecticut, the conventional wisdom is that any business with ESPN is good business. After all, ESPN is Connecticut’s most celebrated brand and a homegrown success story, employing more than 4,000 workers in the state.

In the United States, Lenovo is still best known as the Chinese company that bought IBM’s PC business in 2005.


In China, it is better known as the world’s new No. 1 PC maker, a force to be reckoned with in smartphones and a bellwether for the nation’s economic and technological might.

The laptop maker is already the second-largest smartphone brand in China, after Samsung Electronics. Lenovo, which has never had modest plans, wants to build on that success and begin pushing into the United States and other wealthy markets in 2014.

“I’ll be very clear: Our aspiration is someday to be No. 1 in the mobile space,” said J. D. Howard, a Lenovo vice president who is in charge of developing the company’s smartphone business outside China. “I know it sounds crazy, but even five years ago, if I had said we’d be No. 1 in PCs, people would have said we were crazy.”

The company must balance — some would say blend — American and Chinese cultures. It has dual headquarters, in Beijing and Morrisville, N.C. Eighteen nationalities are represented among the top 100 managers. While it has had success worldwide in PCs and with its new smartphones in China, its good fortune in developed markets, dominated by entrenched Apple and Samsung, is anything but assured.

SOFIA, Bulgaria, Ervin Ivanov, a fourth-year medical student, is sure he’ll leave Bulgaria, and he is sure that most of his classmates will too.

“Probably most of them are thinking of working in other countries, working in European countries, but not in Bulgaria, definitely,” Mr. Ivanov, 22, said while standing in the hallway of a Soviet-era medical school here.

Even though he is debt-free because the state subsidizes much of the cost of education, he dreams of practicing in Switzerland or Germany because those countries offer far higher pay and more advanced and specialized medical systems.

“I think of myself as European,” said Mr. Ivanov, an aspiring oncologist.

On the first day of 2014, nine European Union states, including Germany, France, the Netherlands and Britain, will lift labor restrictions for Bulgarians and Romanians. But already, skilled and even many unskilled laborers have found many ways to work in those countries. A look at income data shows why Bulgarians and Romanians might continue to seek greener pastures.

The wealthiest one-fifth of society in Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007, have a lower median income than the poorest one-fifth of society in Britain, France, Germany or other wealthy European states, according to a review of income data obtained from Eurostat, the statistics office.

Obviously, this does not necessarily mean that being poor in Britain, France or Germany is better than being in the top income bracket in Bulgaria or Romania: The cost of living is vastly lower in Sofia than in London.

But the lure of higher pay cannot be ignored when barriers come down, particularly as Bulgaria’s unemployment has increased sharply over the last half-decade. After bottoming out around 6 percent at the end of 2008, it has steadily risen to 13.2 percent in October.

Interviews in December with residents of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, revealed widespread frustrations with the succession of governments, corruption and the country’s inability to shake off its Soviet roots. It has also been unable to lift itself from being Europe’s poorest nation. (Bulgaria’s output, per capita, is last among the European Union’s 28 states, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.)

A common joke here goes like this: “There are two ways out of Bulgaria’s problems: Terminal 1 and Terminal 2,” referring to the two terminals at Sofia’s airport.

Despite that, many said they wanted to stay home, in part because joining the European Union brought a measure of hope. Some mentioned the unrest in Ukraine as a cautionary tale.

Polina Naydenova, 24, who is studying international law, said she wanted to stay where she had “my friends, my family and my life.” She hopes she will “somehow have the chance to change things constructively” in her native country. Another law student, Petar Kyosev, 24, said he hoped to move to Amsterdam, but also would eventually return. “I’m trying to do my best to stay here, but my country is not doing its best to make me stay,” he said.

Liliya Vlaeva, 26, an economics student, said she would stay. “The living standard here in Bulgaria is not so high as in Great Britain, in London for example,” she said. “The salaries for young people are enough, in my opinion, to live well — not as rich people, but to live O.K.”

But she said many of her classmates who study abroad opt not to return. “I know about 10 or 15 people from the last year that did this, in different countries,” she said. “They are people who are not coming back, but it is a personal decision.”

Bulgaria also has a large and often impoverished minority of Roma, or Gypsies. “I don’t see any hope in the coming 20 years; the only way is working abroad,” said Minko Angelov, 57, a Rom who was laid off at a local Coca-Cola bottler, speaking outside a state employment center. Since he speaks only Bulgarian and Russian, he is reluctant to travel through Europe. “The language is a big problem,” he said.