My Life and Times

Joe Cavaretta/Associated Press

Kirk Kerkorian is offering to buy shares in General Motors. He tried to take over Chyrsler in the 1990's.

May 5, 2005
Kerkorian Seeking 9% Stake in G.M.
By DANNY HAKIM

DETROIT, May 4 - Kirk Kerkorian, the multi-billionaire casino operator and financier, said today that he was making an offer that would give him a stake worth nearly 9 percent in General Motors, the struggling Detroit auto giant whose stock recently hit a 12-year low. Coming from Mr. Kerkorian, an 87-year-old with a history of taking big stakes and exerting varying degrees of control over airlines, casinos, automakers and movie studios, the news surprised Detroit and Wall Street.

G.M. shares surged 18 percent, closing at $32.80, up $5.03.

Mr. Kerkorian's investment firm, Tracinda, said in a statement today that its acquisition was "solely for investment purposes." But Mr. Kerkorian has been known as an investor who rarely sits on the sidelines, asserting his will on the often struggling companies he buys in hopes of turning them around. He previously was Chrysler's largest shareholder and tried unsuccessfully in the 1990's to take over the company with the aid of its former chairman, Lee A. Iacocca. He is now in the midst of a legal battle with DaimlerChrysler over the terms of the 1998 merger between DaimlerBenz and Chrysler.

In an interview Wednesday morning, Mr. Kerkorian's personal lawyer, Terry Christensen, said the investment would be a passive one and added that Mr. Kerkorian would not seek a board seat or control over management. He also said that Mr. Kerkorian aimed for an investment of roughly 9 percent and was not looking for a larger stake at present.

And he said that Mr. Kerkorian had confidence in G.M.'s management, including the chairman and chief executive, Rick Wagoner.

"He's not really trying to judge management," Mr. Christensen said. "He's trying to judge the assets of the company, the ability of the company to right itself and get going strong again. He sees no reason why this management team can't do that. He believes they will do it."

But people on Wall Street and in Detroit say they are skeptical that Mr. Kerkorian would make a passive investment. Analysts floated several possibilities: Mr. Kerkorian would press G.M. to sell some of its lucrative non-automotive business, like its mortgage lending business; he would eventually try for various degrees of management control; or he would make himself enough of a nuisance that G.M. would buy his shares for a quick profit, a tactic he has used with companies like Columbia Pictures.

"Our expectation is that the Tracinda/G.M. story will take many twists and turns over many quarters," said John Casesa, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, who upgraded his rating on G.M. shares to neutral from sell after the announcement. "We expect G.M. to react vigorously and defiantly to Tracinda's actions. Given G.M.'s still considerable economic and political clout, we expect this to be a long, drawn-out battle."

"Given Kerkorian's successful track record of unlocking shareholder value, we feel we cannot continue to be a seller of G.M.," he said, adding that he thought Mr. Kerkorian might be interested in having G.M. sell or consider other options for the nonautomotive businesses, like its mortgage lending unit, that are part of the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, G.M.'s financing division.

Tracinda, which is owned by Mr. Kerkorian, said Wednesday that it had bought 22 million shares, or 3.9 percent of G.M., in the last few weeks. Tracinda said it was also offering $868 million, or $31 a share, for 28 million more G.M. shares. The offer represented a premium of 11.6 percent over G.M.'s closing price of $27.77 on Tuesday.

Mr. Christensen said Mr. Kerkorian thought G.M. had been oversold by the market and saw the investment as "a value investing play."

"Mr. Kerkorian's focus has always been, what are the assets of the company and what is the ability of the company to generate cash flow and to strengthen its position in the marketplace?" he said. "General Motors, he believes, has the assets and the cash flow, and the ability to generate more cash flow. Over time they have proven themselves to be an extremely strong competitor and he believes they will continue to prove that to be the case."

In a statement. G.M. said it learned about the offer today and would "not express a view on specific investor activity."

Born in Fresno, Calif., Mr. Kerkorian is the son of Armenian immigrants. He spent his youth boxing, among other things, and during World War II was a pilot who trained other pilots for the military. He built the charter airline Trans International in the 1960's, then sold it, bought it back and sold it again, and went on to develop hotels and casinos in Las Vegas.

Over the last half century, he has bought and sold Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the movie studio, three times, most recently last year, for a handsome profit. Shares of his MGM Mirage casino group have risen more than 50 percent in the last year, driven in part by its acquisition of the Mandalay Resort Group.

A less successful investment has been his stake in Chrysler, which depreciated considerably after the merger with DaimlerBenz. Mr. Kerkorian is suing DaimlerChrysler on the ground that he was misled about the terms of the merger, but a federal judge rejected that argument this year. Mr. Kerkorian is appealing.

Mr. Christensen, the lawyer, declined to offer specifics about what particular assets attracted Mr. Kerkorian to G.M.

"This is an endorsement of the American automobile industry and General Motors specifically," he added. "It is an endorsement of the industry and its future."

Gerald Meyers, a professor at the University of Michigan who was the chief executive of American Motors before it was sold to Renault in the 1980's, said the likely outcome would be for Mr. Kerkorian to force G.M. to buy out his shares.

"He's not going after the company," he said. "G.M. is not going to be well anytime soon and he knows that."

"The only thing I can make out of it is that he hopes he'll be bought out or that he truly will be patient and will wait for the stock to go up, which I can't imagine he can find on the horizon."

Certainly, G.M. is in rough shape. Last month, the company reported a $1.1 billion first-quarter loss, its largest quarterly loss in more than a decade, and the company has been pummeled this year by falling sales in the United States, particularly for large sport utility vehicles. Rising health care costs have also hurt; G.M. is the nation's largest private health care provider, giving coverage to 1.1 million American workers, retirees and their families. The array of problems have raised questions about G.M.'s long-term viability, though most analysts say it has adequate cash reserves to stave off a bankruptcy filing.

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Michael Dwyer for The New York Times

"The odds of a time traveler showing up are between one in a million and one in a trillion," says Amal Dorai, who conceived the convention


May 6, 2005
Time Travelers to Meet in Not Too Distant Future
By PAM BELLUCK

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 5 - Suppose it is the future - maybe a thousand years from now. There is no static cling, diapers change themselves, and everyone who is anyone summers on Mars.

What's more, it is possible to travel back in time, to any place, any era. Where would people go? Would they zoom to a 2005 Saturday night for chips and burgers in a college courtyard, eager to schmooze with computer science majors possessing way too many brain cells?

Why not, say some students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have organized what they call the first convention for time travelers.

Actually, they contend that theirs is the only time traveler convention the world needs, because people from the future can travel to it anytime they want.

"I would hope they would come with the idea of showing us that time travel is possible," said Amal Dorai, 22, the graduate student who thought up the convention, which is to be this Saturday on the M.I.T. campus. "Maybe they could leave something with us. It is possible they might look slightly different, the shape of the head, the body proportions."

The event is potluck and alcohol-free - present-day humans are bringing things like brownies. But Mr. Dorai's Web site asks that future-folk bring something to prove they are really ahead of our time: "Things like a cure for AIDS or cancer, a solution for global poverty or a cold fusion reactor would be particularly convincing as well as greatly appreciated."

He would also welcome people from only a few days in the future, far enough to, say, give him a few stock market tips.

Mr. Dorai and fellow organizers are the kind of people who transplant a snowblower engine into a sleeper sofa and drive the couch around Cambridge. (If the upholstery were bright red, it could be a midlife crisis convertible for couch potatoes.)

They built a human-size hamster wheel - eight feet in diameter. And they concocted the "pizza button," a plexiglass pizza slice mounted in their hallway; when pressed, it calls up a Web site and arranges for pizza delivery 30 minutes later. (For anyone wanting to try this at home, the contraption uses a Huffman binary code. It takes fewer keystrokes to order the most popular toppings, like pepperoni, more keystrokes for less popular extras, like onions.)

At the convention, they plan to introduce a robot with an "infrared pyro-electric detector," designed to follow anything that emits heat, including humans.

"It's supposed to be our pet," said Adam Kraft, 22, a senior.

"It needs fur," added David Nelson, 23, a graduate student.

While Mr. Dorai has precisely calculated that "the odds of a time traveler showing up are between one in a million and one in a trillion," organizers have tried to make things inviting.

In case their august university does not exist forever, they have posted the latitude and longitude of the East Campus Courtyard (42:21:36.025 degrees north, 71:05:16.332 degrees west).

A roped-off area, including part of an improvised volleyball court, will create a landing pad so materializing time-travel machines will not crash into trees or dormitories.

To set the mood, organizers plan to display a DeLorean - the sleek but short-lived 1980's car that was the time-traveling vehicle in the "Back to the Future" movies.

At first, Mr. Dorai urged people to publicize the event with methods likely to last. "Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper," he directed, "and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries!"

But Mr. Dorai said the response was so overwhelming that the police, concerned about security, had asked that anyone who had not replied by Wednesday not be allowed to attend.

No future-guests are confirmed as of yet, although one responder purports to be from 2026. But among the 100 likely attendees, there are those from another time zone - Chicago - and from New York, which at least likes to think of itself as light-years ahead.

"I'm keeping my fingers crossed," said Erik D. Demaine, an M.I.T. mathematician who will be one of the professors speaking.

There will also be two bands, the Hong Kong Regulars and Off-White Noise, performing new, time-travel-apropos tunes.

"If you subscribe to alternative-world theory, then time travel makes sense at some level," said Professor Demaine, who would like future-guests to bring answers to mathematical mysteries. "The universe is inherently uncertain, and at various times it's essentially flipping coins to make a decision. At any point, there's the heads version of the world and the tails version of the world. We think that we actually live in one of them, and you could imagine that there's actually many versions of the universe, including one where suddenly you appear from 10 years in the future."

If you can not imagine that, consider Erin Rhode's view of time travel.

"I kind of think if it's going to happen, it'll be the wormhole theory," said Ms. Rhode, 23, a recent graduate, adding, "If you create a stable wormhole," a hole in space, "people can go back to visit it."

William McGehee, 19, a freshman who helped build a "Saturday Night Fever"-like dance floor in his dorm, said, "It's pretty obvious if time travel does occur, then it doesn't cause the universe to explode."

And Sam McVeety, 18, a freshman, wondered if wearing a tinfoil hat would be comforting or insulting to future-people.

Mr. Dorai has had quirky brainstorms before: proposing the imprisonment of Bill Watterson, the retired cartoonist, to force him to continue his "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip; and donning the costume of M.I.T.'s mascot, the beaver, while climbing the statue of John Harvard, namesake of that other Cambridge college. That incident went awry when some Harvard men swiped a paw.

But Mr. Dorai's time travel idea seems to have legs.

"If you can just give up a Saturday night, there's a very small chance at it being the biggest event in human history," he said.

And if it is a flop, futuristically speaking?

Well, Mr. Dorai reasoned, "Certainly, if no one from the future shows up, that won't prove that it's impossible."

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Hadi Mizban/Associated Press

Shoes and clothes were left scattered on the ground where the bodies of at least 12 people who had been shot and killed were found buried at a garbage dump in Baghdad.

May 7, 2005
Insurgents Kill 26 More Iraqis; Tentative Deal on Completing Cabinet Is Reported
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 6 - Insurgents killed at least 26 Iraqis and wounded 48 more on Friday when a suicide bomber struck a public market in Suwaira, a town near Baghdad riven by sectarian violence, and another bomber attacked a bus carrying Iraqi policemen in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.

More than 200 Iraqis, most of them policemen or soldiers, have been killed in the last eight days in one of the most lethal stretches of violence since the invasion two years ago.

In northeast Baghdad, a worker digging with a shovel discovered the corpses of 12 men in their 20's and 30's who had been tortured, shot in the head execution-style and buried at least a week earlier, the Iraqi police said. An Iraqi police captain investigating the crime said the bodies had broken legs and arms and rope burns on their necks.

Amid the continued bloodshed, there were suggestions of a possible significant political breakthrough late Friday: Aides to the nation's top Shiite and Sunni lawmakers said they had reached a tentative agreement on the appointment of a new defense minister.

If the deal were to hold, it would end a drawn-out political logjam that has hurt relations between the Sunnis and Shiites and, in the view of American officials, contributed to increased insurgent violence.

But Iraqi leaders have time and again announced deals for top government posts, only to see their predictions fall apart.

The Shiite and Sunni aides would not identify the would-be defense minister, saying the name would be disclosed soon. While they said Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders had given their approval, Iraq's three-member presidency council and National Assembly must also sign off.

"It's done; we have a conclusion," Ahmad Najati, a spokesman for the highest-ranking Sunni Arab in the new government, Vice President Ghazi al-Yawar, said Friday night. A senior aide to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Laith Kubba, also said there was a tentative deal.

But Kurdish officials, who could effectively veto the nomination, could not be reached for comment. And a senior Shiite aide cautioned that on high-profile matters like this one, nothing is ever certain until the name is formally announced by the prime minister and approved by the National Assembly. "We've been burned before," the aide said.

Iraqi leaders are eager to get the new cabinet completed so they can devote more attention to the worsening violence.

On Friday, American military officials said that despite the heightened attacks, they have made tremendous progress against the insurgency. In an unusual statement suggesting that terrorists in Iraq were trying to compensate for strategic losses with news media coverage of their attacks, they said at least 20 "trusted lieutenants" or senior aides of the most wanted man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been captured or killed in recent months.

Military officials quoted Mr. Zarqawi's driver, Abu Usama, captured Feb. 20, as describing Mr. Zarqawi's reaction as he believed American forces were closing in. Mr. Zarqawi narrowly escaped capture, the military says, when he leapt from the vehicle Mr. Usama was driving.

"Zarqawi became hysterical," the military statement quotes Mr. Usama as saying. "Zarqawi did not know where he was because he demanded repeatedly, 'Who lives in this area? What sub-tribe is here?' "

The military said: "Zarqawi then quickly grabbed his American-made rifle with one magazine and an unknown amount of U.S. dollars and escaped. Mr. Zarqawi left behind his computer, pistols and more ammunition, which were all seized in the raid. It is believed Zarqawi went back to Haditha and hid with members of local tribes who continue to provide him support and sanctuary."

The Zarqawi aides captured recently include "terror-cell leaders, propaganda chiefs, bomb makers, drivers and other key lieutenants." Degradation of the Zarqawi network helped result in fewer attacks in February and March, the military said.

Iraqi political leaders hope a completed government will bolster the confidence of Iraqi citizens demoralized by the recent spate of attacks. But if the agreement on the defense minister were to fall through, it would deal another setback to efforts by the Shiite and Kurdish leaders who dominate the new administration to form a "unity" government that gives important jobs to members of all Iraq's major religious and ethnic groups, including the Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the Jan. 30 elections and are believed to make up most of the insurgency.

The defense post is the most important job allotted to the Sunnis, but Sunni leaders have complained that the Shiite leaders have rejected qualified candidates.

Indeed, by Friday night some Sunni Arab leaders were grumbling about the defense minister selection. One Sunni, Dr. Saleh Mutlak, a member of the National Dialogue Council, identified the defense candidate as Sadoon al-Dulaimi, a member of a powerful tribe in Anbar Province, which includes Falluja and Ramadi.

While he personally did not object to the selection, Dr. Mutlak said he was "not optimistic" about it, saying some Sunni Arab leaders believed Dr. Jaafari was relying too heavily on Sheik Yawar.

"The choosing has mostly been between Ghazi and Jaafari, so it is not the Sunnis' decision anymore," Dr. Mutlak said. "I think tomorrow they will not be happy."

If a final agreement is reached this weekend, it would be a quick turnabout from what had been heated negotiations. The new government, led by Dr. Jaafari, a Shiite, was sworn in Tuesday, but 6 of 35 cabinet positions were still unfilled amid disagreement over which Sunnis would fill some posts.

Shiite aides said other vacant posts had been decided, including the selection of Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, the son of a prominent Shiite cleric, as oil minister. Dr. Jaafari has not confirmed that selection.

American and some Iraqi officials said they hoped a completed cabinet would allow the new government to turn its attention to tamping down an insurgency that in the weeks after the election seemed to ebb. But since Dr. Jaafari announced the cabinet last week, insurgents have launched dozens of attacks.

On Friday, the blast in Tikrit was caused by a bomber driving an Opel sedan who rammed a bus, killing 10 policemen and wounding 3 policemen and 5 civilians. Later in the day, the Suwaira car bomber killed at least 16 people and wounded 40, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.

Meanwhile, Arab news channels replayed the grisly find of bodies in northeast Baghdad.

"Usually we find bodies lying in the streets, around two or three a day, but we haven't found such numbers before and buried like that," said Ali Mutashar, a 28-year-old worker, wearing filthy old clothes, as he walked near the grave site. "Nothing in the time we are living would surprise me any more."

Sabrina Tavernise, Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedy and Zaineb Obeid contributed reporting for this article.

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