On the 25th anniversary of the genesis of his game series Metal Gear, creator Hideo Kojima reflects on a career spent battling the stigma of working in video games in the second of a two part interview feature, exclusive to the Guardian Share 42 Email Solid Snake ... Kojima named his lead character after Snake Plissken, who was played by Kurt Russell in the John Carpenter film Escape From New York Despite finding like-minded individuals at Konami, Kojima's first couple of years at the studio were far from easy. For one, his directorial ambition was fiercely at odds with its orthodox Japanese institutional hierarchy. "Lost World was the first project I was assigned to and the game was cancelled after six months," he says. "It was a serious blow to all of us on the team. I couldn't believe it. After that I began to work on Metal Gear. Konami wanted a war game, because they were incredibly popular at that time. But I didn't want to make the same as everyone else so I started thinking of ways in which I could subvert the genre." It was at this point that Kojima's love for film came into play. "I remembered the film The Great Escape and thought this would be a good approach for something distinct. My first concept was for a game in which you were a prisoner of war and simply had to escape. If you were caught you'd be brought back to the prison. The idea was for a non-combat game. "But I had such a hard time convincing people. I had so many things going against me at that time. For one, my first game had been cancelled, so I hadn't released anything yet. Then I was working in quite a large creative group, and I was the youngest. Finally, the type of game I wanted to make didn't exist at that time. The odds were stacked against me and it was very hard to earn the trust of the team." After a few months of failing to make his voice heard, Kojima managed to convince the most senior member of the team to meet with him. "He listened to my frustrations," Kojima says, "and then approached one of the higher-ups in the company who must have seen something in me as he invited me to pitch my ideas for Metal Gear in front of everyone. Everyone in the team saw that it was a revolutionary idea, I think, and from then on, I had their support." The first Metal Gear was developed for the MSX, a home computer format that enjoyed a fraction of the market share of Nintendo's inaugural games console, the Famicom. While many would have seen being told to make a game for underdog technology as a drawback, Kojima turned it to his advantage. "The MSX audience was more technologically savvy than the Famicom audience and as such the game had a much wider influence than it perhaps might have if it had just released on Nintendo's hardware. "We spent a long time working on animations that wouldn't have been possible on the Famicom. I would go so far to say that, had I been working in the Famicom department from the beginning I probably wouldn't have come up with the idea for Metal Gear. The features of the systems are so different. And the game concept wouldn't have passed Konami's internal processing, which required more mainstream, family-friendly titles for the Famicom." Following the success of the game Konami commissioned a sequel, this time for the Nintendo hardware. As Kojima had been hired to work in the MSX division, he was kept separate from the Famicom team, only hearing about the project second hand. "I heard about Snake's Revenge through rumours, initially," he says. "I was quite new at the company and had no influence on the other departments. "Then one day I met someone on the train who worked in the Famicom department. He used to work for me and was now working on the sequel. He said: 'I don't think this is a true sequel. I think you should make the true sequel.' So on my way home I began to think about what that might look like. Without that encounter I probably wouldn't have pursued a proper sequel, and there might never have been a Metal Gear Solid." Kojima was merely a game designer at that time, and had no detailed knowledge of the budgets involved, but the trust he had gained from the first game caused Konami to pour more money into his sequel. "Because we were making a war game, Konami wanted the experience to be authentic, so every week they paid for us to visit a forest in the mountains nearby. We would dress up in military uniform and play games there. It was a good time." Even at this early point in his career, Kojima's directorial flair was irrepressible, and, without programming knowledge, he found himself frustrated by having to rely on programmers to bring his vision to life. "I would tell the programmers what I wanted to show on screen, when I wanted the dialogue to display, or a music cue to sound," he says. "But they wouldn't do it how I wanted. They would change it slightly to what they thought was best. "It was hugely frustrating making games at that time for me. I wanted to control everything. So, after the second Metal Gear launched, I developed my own scripting engine and decided to work on adventure games so that I could have complete control over when the animation played or when the music triggered. That's when I developed Snatcher and Policenauts. It was a way to take creative control back from the programmers." But by 1998, Kojima had been promoted to a managerial role at Konami, and enjoyed autonomy to choose the people he wanted on the team – staff who would complement his vision. One such hire was Yoji Shinkawa, an artist that Kojima hired straight out of college in 1994. "Shinkawa was born to be a video game artist," says Kojima. "As soon as I knew I was to be making Metal Gear Solid, I asked Shinkawa to join the team and his work, as much as anything, defined the series from there on." Metal Gear Solid's development coincided with a technological shift in the medium, that brought with it creative challenges: the move from 2D graphics (and the accompanying gameplay) to the third dimension. Kojima's team developed a 3D engine from scratch for the game and Shinkawa would work from home for months at a time creating the 3D models that would populate the game. "Yoji created real life 3D plastic models of all of the game's vehicles and as he used so many chemicals, he had to work from home as the fumes were harmful to the rest of the team," Kojima says. "I would visit his apartment every day to check that he was OK. The first time I went there the floor was covered in plastic parts." The game launched to critical acclaim and commercial success. Its brilliance was in the packaging of the idea, couching the hide-and-seek act of creeping through the shadows in a tight, carefully orchestrated scenario in which one man must infiltrate a radioactive waste facility armed with little more than a radio, a bandana and a packet of cigarettes. Despite the one-man army set-up, Metal Gear Solid's narrative offers more layers of complexity than a Rambo or a Bond movie, Kojima shying away from a chance for a character to soliloquise on the nature of warfare, or the role of solider pawn, those very same figures controlled by the player, on the battlefield. I ask whether the reaction to the game surprised him, or whether he knew he had created something special. "We worked so hard on that game that there wasn't even time to think about how it might be received," he says. "We were just making the game that we wanted to play and I don't think I had any expectations that it was going to be a big game. So when I heard it was selling well in America it didn't feel real. "I think the first time the game's success struck me was when I came to London in 1999. We visited Forbidden Planet to promote the game. I walked in and the shopkeepers knew about me. I couldn't believe it. It was the most surprising moment in my life." Despite this success, Kojima was most interested in impressing the woman who had supported him from the very beginning: his mother. "About that time I heard that my mother had stopped telling her friends what I did for a living," he tells me. "She was hugely supportive in the beginning. But after a decade or so her friends' sons and daughters all had high positions in big companies. I think she felt a little awkward about what I did by this point." But Metal Gear Solid's success convinced Konami to plough a huge amount of money into its sequel, developed for Sony's PlayStation 2. "We had so much more budget so we were able to go to Hollywood and hire a composer [Harry Gregson-Williams]," he says. "That was a huge moment for me, made all the better because Harry had heard of my games." Following Metal Gear Solid 2's release, Kojima was listed by Newsweek as one of the 'Top 10 People To Watch In 2003'. "After that, my mother began to tell all of her friends about what I did," says Kojima, laughing. "It was sweet. By that time she was 70 years old. But she decided that she was going to play through my games. "It took her an entire year to complete Metal Gear Solid 3. She would get her friends to help her. When she defeated The End [a character the player faces off against in one of the game's final missions] she called me up and said: 'It is finished'." Today, there is little that Kojima would change about his career, and he has no regrets: "Looking back, I am thankful that I didn't go into the film industry," he says. "If I had joined that industry I wouldn't have been able to make the kind of films I wanted to, and I really enjoy the games I make now." Indeed, Kojima has lost none of his infectious energy and drive to create. He arrives to work at 6.30am each day, and spends an hour meditating on his life before heading into the business of the day, which is split equally between managerial responsibilities and creative ones. "I wouldn't have taken the managerial role if I wasn't heavily involved in the creative process too," he says. "I have to have a creative role otherwise I simply wouldn't come into work. I try to always have a game design role as part of my responsibilities at any one time. If I didn't have this, I wouldn't be able to do what I do." One part of his daily ritual stems from even earlier than his formative days working as a game designer for the MSX. Now 48, Kojima's father's influence on him is still very apparent in his routine. Every day, no matter how busy his schedule, the designer takes 90-odd minutes to watch a film at his desk. "It's part of my ritual to watch a new film every day, no matter what," he says. "It's important to me." Sensing that the habit is as much a tribute to his father's demand that the family watch a film a day as it is a way to draw creative inspiration from another medium, I venture the question: "Do you think your father would have been proud of what you do?" "I don't think..." he says, quietly. "I mean. If he was still alive… Well, I don't think he would be unhappy about my choice."
Roughly 40 examiners from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and 70 staff members from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are embedded in the nation’s largest bank. They are typically assigned to the departments undertaking the greatest risks, like the structured products trading desk. Even as the chief investment office swelled in size and made increasingly large bets, regulators did not put any examiners in the unit’s offices in London or New York, according to current and former regulators who spoke only on condition of anonymity. Senior JPMorgan executives assured the bank’s watchdogs after the financial crisis that the chief investment office, with hundreds of billions in investments, was not taking risks that would be a cause for concern, people briefed on the matter said. Just weeks before the trading losses became public, bank officials also dismissed the worry of a senior New York Fed examiner about the mounting size of the bets, according to current Fed officials. The lapses have raised questions about who, if anyone, was policing the chief investment office and whether regulators were sufficiently independent. Instead of putting the JPMorgan unit under regular watch, the comptroller’s office and the Fed chose to examine it periodically. The bank pushback also suggests that JPMorgan had sway over its regulators, an influence that several said was enhanced by the bank’s charismatic chief executive, Jamie Dimon, long considered Washington’s favorite banker. Now, as regulators scramble to determine whether the chief investment office took inappropriate risks, some former Fed officials are asking whether the investigation should be spearheaded by the New York Fed, where Mr. Dimon has a seat on the board. Some lawmakers and former regulators also have reservations about the comptroller’s office, which is investigating the trade and was the primary regulator for JPMorgan’s chief investment unit. “The central question is why Jamie Dimon was able to so successfully convince both its regulators that there was nothing to see at the chief investment office,” said Mark Williams, a professor of finance at Boston University, who also served as a Federal Reserve Bank examiner in Boston and San Francisco. “To me, it suggests that he is too close to his regulators.” Regulators, for their part, say they cannot micromanage a bank or outlaw its risk taking and did not bow to bank pressure when assigning examiners. William C. Dudley, president of the New York Fed, has said that JPMorgan’s losses did not pose a threat to the bank’s viability. In a statement on Friday, the comptroller of the currency, Thomas J. Curry, said, “I am committed to ensuring this agency provides strong supervision for all of the institutions we oversee.” Regulators are not typically stationed at divisions like JPMorgan’s chief investment office, which are known as Treasury units. The units hedge risk and invest extra money on hand, and tend to make short-term investments. But JPMorgan’s office, with a portfolio of nearly $400 billion, had become a profit center that made large bets and recorded $5 billion in profit over the three years through 2011. Officials of JPMorgan declined to comment on its relationships with regulators. Long before the recent trading blunder, JPMorgan had a pattern of pushing back on regulators, according to more than a dozen current and former regulators interviewed for this article. That resistance increased after Mr. Dimon steered JPMorgan through the financial crisis in better shape than virtually all its rivals. “JPMorgan has been screaming bloody murder about not needing regulators hovering, especially in their London office,” said a former examiner embedded at the bank, adding, in reference to Mr. Dimon, “But he was trusted because he had done so well through the turmoil.” Even now, executives at JPMorgan disagree with some regulators over how quickly the bank should unwind the soured trade, according to people briefed on the negotiations. JPMorgan would like to be done with the bad bet that has resulted in at least $3 billion in losses already, but senior executives argue it is a delicate process, especially as traders and hedge funds on the opposite side of the trade seize on the fact that JPMorgan is under pressure to exit the position.
NEW YORK — A man who claims to have abducted and strangled Etan Patz, who vanished 33 years ago Friday, has suffered from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and hallucinations, his attorney said as the man had his first court appearance since making his surprise confession a day earlier. Pedro Hernandez, 51, did not enter a plea to a second-degree murder charge filed earlier Friday. He also did not speak during a hearing that lasted just a few minutes. As his court-appointed attorney, Harvey Fishbein, outlined what he called Hernandez's "long psychiatric history," Hernandez sat slumped in a chair, clad in an orange jumpsuit, his hands manacled behind his back. Hernandez has been held at New York's Bellevue Hospital because of his apparent mental instability, and he and Fishbein appeared via a video linkup to a Manhattan courtroom shortly after Manhattan Dist. Atty. Cyrus Vance Jr. announced the charges. "This is the beginning of the legal process, not the end," Vance said in a statement that reflected the challenges of prosecuting a case in which there is no body, no physical evidence linking Hernandez to the crime, and a defendant with an apparent history of mental illness. "There is much investigative and other work ahead." Even though Hernandez says he committed the murder, his motive remains unclear. Patz's parents and at least one investigator became convinced years ago that a convicted pedophile serving time on an unrelated charge was the culprit. In 2004, a civil court ruled the man, Jose Ramos, responsible for Etan's death. Ramos denied involvement. Hernandez was not asked to enter a plea, and Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. ordered a psychiatric examination for him. Assistant Dist. Atty. Armand Durastanti also said no bail should be considered, and none was requested. "It has been 33 years and justice has not yet been done in this case," Durastanti said, noting the haste with which Etan's life was ended on May 25, 1979, as he made the short walk from his Manhattan apartment to his school bus stop. "This is approximately 110 yards. He has not been seen or heard from since." The hearing coincided withNational Missing Children's Day, which President Reagan proclaimed in 1983 in honor of Etan. He was the first child to have his picture appear on a milk carton, part of the nationwide awareness movement that ensured his face would be familiar to anyone buying milk. His disappearance — on the first day his parents, Stan and Julie Patz, had let him walk to the school bus alone — also is seen as marking the end of an era when it was not unusual for young children to walk to school or go out to play without parents by their sides. For decades, the case haunted the street in the now-trendy SoHo neighborhood where Etan's parents, Stan and Julie Patz, still live. Neither parent has spoken out about Hernandez's sudden confession, which came a month after the FBI and New York police dug up the basement of a nearby building in search of Etan's remains. None was found. But the renewed publicity about the case from that dig apparently nudged someone close to Hernandez to tip police that he might be involved in Etan's disappearance. At the time the boy vanished, Hernandez was an 18-year-old stock clerk at a corner grocery store near the Patz home. He moved to New Jersey shortly after Etan vanished, and he had told some people over the years that he had "done a bad thing and killed a child in New York," New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in announcing Hernandez's arrest on Thursday. Kelly said Hernandez was brought in for questioning on Wednesday and told police he had lured Etan into the store with promises of a soda, taken him into the basement, strangled him, and put the body into an alley with the trash. The body never was found, and Kelly said he didn't expect to find any physical evidence to corroborate Hernandez's confession. But he said Hernandez was able to provide enough details of the crime to convince police he was telling the truth. Neither the Patz family nor Hernandez's appeared at the Friday court hearing, and Hernandez's wife has not commented on her husband's arrest. According to the Associated Press, the Rev. George Bowen Jr., the pastor at Hernandez's church, said that Hernandez's wife and daughter visited him Thursday after he was in custody. "They were just crying their eyes out," AP quoted Bowen as saying. "They were broken up. They were wrecked. It was horrible. They didn't know what they were going to do."
NEW YORK — A man who claims to have abducted and strangled Etan Patz, who vanished 33 years ago Friday, has suffered from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and hallucinations, his attorney said as the man had his first court appearance since making his surprise confession a day earlier. Pedro Hernandez, 51, did not enter a plea to a second-degree murder charge filed earlier Friday. He also did not speak during a hearing that lasted just a few minutes. As his court-appointed attorney, Harvey Fishbein, outlined what he called Hernandez's "long psychiatric history," Hernandez sat slumped in a chair, clad in an orange jumpsuit, his hands manacled behind his back. Hernandez has been held at New York's Bellevue Hospital because of his apparent mental instability, and he and Fishbein appeared via a video linkup to a Manhattan courtroom shortly after Manhattan Dist. Atty. Cyrus Vance Jr. announced the charges. "This is the beginning of the legal process, not the end," Vance said in a statement that reflected the challenges of prosecuting a case in which there is no body, no physical evidence linking Hernandez to the crime, and a defendant with an apparent history of mental illness. "There is much investigative and other work ahead." Even though Hernandez says he committed the murder, his motive remains unclear. Patz's parents and at least one investigator became convinced years ago that a convicted pedophile serving time on an unrelated charge was the culprit. In 2004, a civil court ruled the man, Jose Ramos, responsible for Etan's death. Ramos denied involvement. Hernandez was not asked to enter a plea, and Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. ordered a psychiatric examination for him. Assistant Dist. Atty. Armand Durastanti also said no bail should be considered, and none was requested. "It has been 33 years and justice has not yet been done in this case," Durastanti said, noting the haste with which Etan's life was ended on May 25, 1979, as he made the short walk from his Manhattan apartment to his school bus stop. "This is approximately 110 yards. He has not been seen or heard from since." The hearing coincided withNational Missing Children's Day, which President Reagan proclaimed in 1983 in honor of Etan. He was the first child to have his picture appear on a milk carton, part of the nationwide awareness movement that ensured his face would be familiar to anyone buying milk. His disappearance — on the first day his parents, Stan and Julie Patz, had let him walk to the school bus alone — also is seen as marking the end of an era when it was not unusual for young children to walk to school or go out to play without parents by their sides. For decades, the case haunted the street in the now-trendy SoHo neighborhood where Etan's parents, Stan and Julie Patz, still live. Neither parent has spoken out about Hernandez's sudden confession, which came a month after the FBI and New York police dug up the basement of a nearby building in search of Etan's remains. None was found. But the renewed publicity about the case from that dig apparently nudged someone close to Hernandez to tip police that he might be involved in Etan's disappearance. At the time the boy vanished, Hernandez was an 18-year-old stock clerk at a corner grocery store near the Patz home. He moved to New Jersey shortly after Etan vanished, and he had told some people over the years that he had "done a bad thing and killed a child in New York," New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in announcing Hernandez's arrest on Thursday. Kelly said Hernandez was brought in for questioning on Wednesday and told police he had lured Etan into the store with promises of a soda, taken him into the basement, strangled him, and put the body into an alley with the trash. The body never was found, and Kelly said he didn't expect to find any physical evidence to corroborate Hernandez's confession. But he said Hernandez was able to provide enough details of the crime to convince police he was telling the truth. Neither the Patz family nor Hernandez's appeared at the Friday court hearing, and Hernandez's wife has not commented on her husband's arrest. According to the Associated Press, the Rev. George Bowen Jr., the pastor at Hernandez's church, said that Hernandez's wife and daughter visited him Thursday after he was in custody. "They were just crying their eyes out," AP quoted Bowen as saying. "They were broken up. They were wrecked. It was horrible. They didn't know what they were going to do."
At what point does the zeal of youthful idealism wear off? In Simon Gray's play The Common Pursuit, now in a rather prosaic revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company, it erodes slowly over time until dreams become a distant mirage and betrayals, professional and personal, turn the erosion into a landslide. For the sextet of Cambridge students - five young men and the girlfriend of one - who set out to start a new literary magazine in the 1960's, the years take an exceptionally heavy toll. Compromise and infidelity, both to scholarly standards and to one another, alter the landscape and lower expectations. Each in his way becomes the thing he once most despised. The magazine, to be named Common Pursuit, is the brainchild of Stuart Thorne. It will be dedicated solely to literary excellence, focused on poetry, and Stuart has recruited four other students to join him in the enterprise. To the suggestion that his criteria might be elitist, he responds "well, someone has to be elitist." The group he brings together is a cross-section of collegiate types. There is Humphry Taylor, a poet-philosopher who is the brightest of the lot and, at the outset, a closet gay; Nick Finchling, a chain-smoking, incipient alcoholic whose flamboyance is matched only by his egotism; Peter Whetworth, a sexoholic history major nicknamed Captain Marvel for his prowess between the sheets; Martin Musgrove, a moneyed and enthusiastic outsider whose essay on cats is rejected for the first issue; and Marigold Watson, Stuart's devoted girlfriend and a sort of cheerleader for the project. Lest anyone doubt Stuart's passion for poetry, we see him in the opening scene leap from Marigold's embrace - coitus quite literally interruptus - to recruit Cambridge's leading poet into contributing some verse to the fledgling magazine. Back in his rooms, the others argue over whether they are listening to Vivaldi or Bach and indulge in the old undergraduate pastime of denigrating the literary merits of their peers. Fast forward nine years and disillusion has already set in. The past two numbers of the magazine have failed to appear, the printers haven't been paid, and eviction notices on its office have been issued. On top of it all, Marigold is pregnant. Only the London Arts Council can save Common Pursuit from going under and Stuart learns he may not be the final arbiter on literary merit after all. One man's poetry may be another's doggerel and vice versa. If there is any fizz left in this bubbly and ultimately sad play, it has gone flat in the current revival. The exuberance of the opening scene is forced and any humor is mostly lost in the rushed delivery of some of the lines. The acerbity of the zingers with which the individual characters skewer their literary rivals - vitriol being a Gray trademark - is oddly diluted. And while there is a sense of sorrow over the treachery inflicted among these onetime friends, it is more gloomy than poignant. Gray, who died in 2008, made a career of writing plays set in academia, and was himself a university lecturer. Among his more frequently revived plays are Butley (1971) and Quartermaine's Terms (1981). The Common Pursuit was first produced in 1984, directed by Harold Pinter, and revised by Gray a few years later. The Roundabout revival, directed by Moises Kaufman, never quite finds either the passion with which the magazine is launched or the depth of disappointment at the duplicity that follows. Some of the roles are miscast. Kristen Bush is consistently convincing as Marigold. Josh Cooke and Jacob Fishel have their moments as Stuart and Martin, respectively, and Tim McGeever is stoic as Humphry.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — The federal judge in the John Edwards trial closed her courtroom Friday afternoon to deal with what she called a "juror matter," and then sent the jury home for the Memorial Day weekend with no verdict reached. U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Eagles did not disclose what she and lawyers for both sides discussed during the 35 minutes the courtroom was closed to reporters and spectators. Jurors will return for a seventh day of deliberations Tuesday morning. Before deliberations began on May 18, the jury foreman, a financial consultant, told the judge that he might have an upcoming scheduling conflict. On Friday, Eagles told lawyers for both sides to arrive early Tuesday in case she needs to discuss a juror matter with them. As she does at the close of each session, Eagles reminded jurors not to discuss the case with anyone — even fellow jurors — outside the jury room, and to avoid all media reports about the trial. The jury of eight men and four women must decide whether $925,000 in payments from two wealthy patrons were illegal campaign contributions during Edwards' failed race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Edwards contends the payments were private gifts not directly related to the campaign. After a sixth day of deliberations, it was not possible to determine whether the jury was divided over guilt versus acquittal, or merely being thorough and meticulous. The longer deliberations drag on, the greater the likelihood of a split verdict or, if disagreements cannot be resolved, a hung jury. Jurors have asked to review more than 60 trial exhibits focusing on payments made to hide Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter, whom he had hired as a campaign videographer. The jury has met for about 34 hours over six days, after having listened to 31 witnesses and examined hundreds of exhibits during the monthlong trial. Jurors troop in and out of the wood-paneled courtroom a couple of times a day, a collection of ordinary citizens in jeans, slacks and summer dresses. Some looked weary Friday. Others appeared restless. The faces of one or two jurors suggested mild annoyance. Edwards, 58, unfailingly neat and trim in a dark suit, has studied jurors closely during their brief courtroom appearances over the past week, appraising their demeanor from his regular seat at the defense table. The former U.S. senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee is charged with six counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions. He faces up to 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines if convicted and sentenced to maximum penalties. Jurors' requests for exhibits this week indicate they have plowed through the first two counts, which involve $725,000 in checks from billionaire heiress Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, an ardent Edwards supporter. Jurors now appear to be finishing up deliberations over the next two counts, involving payments from the late Fred Baron, a wealthy Texas lawyer who was Edwards' national finance chairman. Prosecutors say Edwards orchestrated the payments to cover up the affair and prevent his campaign from collapsing in scandal. The defense says the payments were intended to hide the affair from Edwards' wife, Elizabeth Edwards, who had grown increasingly suspicious of her husband. The other two counts against Edwards accuse him of causing his campaign to file false finance reports and conspiring to accept and conceal illegal contributions through "trick, scheme or device." The jurors must reach a unanimous decision on each count to convict. Eagles has instructed them that prosecutors don't have to prove that the sole purpose of the payments was to influence the election — only that there was a "real purpose or an intended purpose" to do so. However, Eagles also told the jurors: "If the donor would have made the gift or payment notwithstanding the election, it does not become a contribution merely because the gift or payment might have some impact on the election." david.zucchino@latimes.com
ISTANBUL (AP) -- An Israeli who rescued a distressed climber on Mount Everest instead of pushing onward to the summit said Friday that the man he helped, an American of Turkish origin, is like a brother to him. Nadav Ben-Yehuda, who was climbing with a Sherpa guide, came across Aydin Irmak near the summit last weekend. In that chaotic period, four climbers died on their way down from the summit amid a traffic jam of more than 200 people who were rushing to reach the world's highest peak as the weather deteriorated. In a telephone interview with The Associated Press, Ben-Yehuda, 24, appeared proud that Irmak, 46, had made it to the summit, noting that he is one of a small number of "Turkish" climbers to reach the top. Irmak left Turkey for New York more than two decades ago, but remains proud of his Turkish heritage. The friendship stands in contrast to the political tension between Turkey and Israel, which were once firm allies. "Aydin, wake up! Wake up!" Ben-Yehuda recalled saying when he found his friend in the darkness. The American, he said, had been returning from the summit but collapsed in the extreme conditions, without an oxygen supply, a flashlight and a rucksack. Ben-Yehuda, who developed a friendship with Irmak before the climb, had delayed his own ascent by a day in hopes of avoiding the bottleneck of climbers heading for the top. There have been periodic tales of people bypassing stricken climbers as they seek to fulfill a lifelong dream and reach the summit of Everest, but Ben-Yehuda said his decision to abandon his goal of reaching the top and help Irmak was "automatic," even though it took him several minutes to recognize his pale, gaunt friend. "I just told myself, `This is crazy.' It just blew my mind," Ben-Yehuda said. "I didn't realize he was up there the whole time. Everybody thought he had already descended." The Israeli carried Irmak for hours to a camp at lower elevation. Both suffered frostbite and some of their fingers were at risk of amputation. Ben-Yehuda lost 20 kilograms (44 pounds) in his time on the mountain, and Irmak lost 12 kilograms (26 pounds), said Hanan Goder, Israel's ambassador in Nepal. Goder had dinner with the pair after their ordeal. "They really have to recover mentally and physically," Goder said. "They call each other, `my brother.' After the event that they had together, their souls are really linked together now." The ambassador said the rescue was a "humanitarian" tale that highlighted the friendship between Israelis and Turks at a personal level, despite the deteriorating relationship between their governments. One of the key events in that downward, diplomatic spiral was an Israeli raid in 2010 on a Turkish aid ship that was trying to break the Israeli blockade on Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of eight Turkish activists and a Turkish-American. The Jerusalem Post, which reported that Ben-Yehuda would have been the youngest Israeli to reach Everest's summit, spoke to Irmak by telephone during the dinner that Goder hosted. "I don't know what the hell is going on between the two countries," the newspaper quoted Irmak as saying. "I don't care about that. I talked to his (Ben-Yehuda's) family today and I told them you have another family in Turkey and America." Ben-Yehuda, who spoke to the AP just before leaving Nepal for urgent medical treatment in Israel, said he could not say with certainty how he would have reacted if he had come across a stricken climber he did not know. Oxygen is in such short supply and the conditions are so harsh, he said, that people on the mountain develop a kind of tunnel vision. "You just think about breathing, about walking, about climbing," he said. According to Ben-Yehuda, the fundamental questions going through the mind of a climber heading for the peak are: "Are you going to make it?" and "When is the right time to turn back?" And once a climber begins the descent, the all-embracing question becomes: "How fast can I go down?" Ben-Yehuda said his military training in Israel helped shape his reflexive dec
