July 6, 2005

Even for a Wall Street legend, it pays to be average. John J. Mack, who was named Morgan Stanley's chairman and chief executive last Thursday, has agreed to a five-year contract that will pay him as much as $25 million a year for the next year and a half -- or in the me-too meritocracy of Wall Street, at least as much as the average of his high-paid peers.

As the lobbying heats up in Washington over Unocal, a midsize American oil company, the battle lines in the takeover contest are now drawn clearly, if oddly, by its suitors. In one corner stands the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or Cnooc, a company controlled by a Communist government. Despite that, its pitch is straight out of the capitalist playbook: just let markets work, free of political meddling. And, yes, we have the higher bid, at $18.5 billion.

There are bad days at the office, and there are days like the one the Yankees inflicted on the Baltimore Orioles yesterday. Before Randy Johnson allowed a base runner, the Yankees had 10 runs and 11 hits, including three homers. The Orioles had made three errors.

Like a lot of aspiring filmmakers in Los Angeles, Cyrus Kar was obsessed with his project, a documentary about an ancient Persian king who championed tolerance and human rights even as he built an empire that stretched across the Near East. But Mr. Kar, 44, a naturalized American born in Iran, followed his dream where few others might have gone. In mid-May, he traveled to Iraq with an Iranian cameraman to film archaeological sites around Babylon. After a taxi they were in was stopped in Baghdad, the two men were arrested by Iraqi security forces, who found what they suspected might be bomb parts in the vehicle.

Gunmen ambushed the senior Bahraini and Pakistani diplomats in separate attacks as they drove through the capital on Tuesday, spurring Pakistan to announce the withdrawal of its ambassador from Iraq. Even as insurgents tried to undermine the new government by striking at Muslim envoys, Iraqi politicians made some progress on writing a new constitution, in an effort to give Iraq political legitimacy. In a meeting, Shiite and Kurdish politicians accepted 15 Sunni Arabs who had been chosen to increase Sunni representation on a constitutional committee.