Washed It!

Ford Motor Co. demonstrated the growing strength of the U.S. auto industry Tuesday by posting a third-quarter profit of $1.7 billion, a 69% jump over the same period a year ago and surpassing a previous record set in 1997.

The automaker — which unlike General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group avoided bankruptcy reorganization last year — benefitted from both cost cutting and top-line performance, gaining U.S. market share and selling vehicles for higher prices.

“Overall, we are doing better than we expected through the first nine months of the year,” said Alan Mulally, Ford’s chief executive, “and we expect to deliver solid profits in the fourth quarter and for the full year.”

Ford has reduced its level of sales-incentive spending at the same time buyers are adding options to their cars and spending more, according to Edmunds.com, the auto information company. Edmunds.com estimated that buyers paid an average of $30,636 for a Ford in September, slightly higher than a year ago and up 10% from five years ago.

“For a long time, they weren’t really in the car market very strongly, depending mostly on trucks and SUVs. Now they have good cars, and the car market is where the action has been in recent years,” said Jessica Caldwell, an analyst with Edmunds.com.

Ford’s profit equaled 43 cents a share and compared with earnings of $1 billion, or 29 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier. It was the automaker’s sixth consecutive profitable quarter. Revenue fell to $29 billion from $30.3 billion a year earlier, before the company sold off Volvo, the Swedish automaker, to focus on its core Ford and Lincoln brands. Year to date, the company has earned $6.4 billion.

In early trading, Ford shares rose 7 cents to $14.22.

“This was another strong quarter,” said Mulally. “The key drivers for improvement in 2011 will be our growing product strength, a gradually strengthening economy and an unrelenting focus on improving the competitiveness of all our operations.”

On Friday, Ford plans to use some of the cash it is generating to pay off the remaining $3.6 million it owes to the United Auto Workers union retiree healthcare trust, which will save it about $330 million in annual interest expenses. The automaker borrowed heavily to stay afloat during the recession and is working to pay back those loans.

The payment will reduce the company’s total debt to $22.8 billion, a net reduction of $10.8 billion from the end of 2009. Ford said it expected its cash holdings to be equal to its total debt by the year’s end, earlier than it previously anticipated. Ford also plans a stock offering that would convert $3.5 billion in debt to common stock during the fourth quarter.

“We are clearly ahead of where we thought we would be on improving our balance sheet and repaying our loans,” Mulally said. “This allows us to reduce our annualized interest payments by over $800 million.”

Ford’s American operations had an operating profit of $1.6 billion, compared with $300 million in the same period a year earlier. The company was profitable in South America and in Asia, driven by gains in China and India, but lost money in Europe. The company said it expected its European operations to become profitable in this year’s fourth quarter.

Much of the automaker’s success is coming from a string of successful new products, such as the Fusion sedan and the Edge SUV. Truck sales, especially government and business fleet sales of the F-150 pickup also added to the quarterly profit, Caldwell said.

Ford’s latest vehicles have been well received by consumers.

“It’s much better than the Ford of five years ago,” Caldwell said.

Ford sales have risen 21% to 1.4 million vehicles through the first nine months of this year. That’s more than double the overall industry gain. Its share of the U.S. market has grown to 16.7% from 15.2% — the largest jump of any automaker this year, according to Autodata Corp.

The automaker has been able to restructure so it can operate profitably with what are considered historically low auto sales numbers.

There are some signs of a more robust rebound in the U.S. auto market, which was up about 10% through the first nine months of the year.

Mark Fields, Ford’s president of the Americas, said Monday that U.S. auto sales hit an annualized pace of about 12 million vehicles in October, its best rate so far this year. Automakers will report their October sales results next week.

jerry.hirsch@latimes.com

Ford third-quarter profit soars 69% over a year ago

The State Department issued a travel alert Sunday for American citizens in Europe in light of increased U.S. and European intelligence that a large-scale Al Qaeda attack may be imminent.

Intelligence officials in the U.S. and Europe have said an increase in activity in recent weeks suggests that a small cell of potential terrorists hiding in North Waziristan, a Pakistani tribal region, are preparing an attack that could be as spectacular as the 2008 raids in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people.

Plotters could be planning to use “a variety of means and target both official and private interests,” the State Department said, adding that Americans abroad should be careful on trains, subways and other transportation systems, and in visiting hotels, restaurants and tourist spots.

“U.S. citizens should take every precaution,” the travel alert said.

It is thought that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is behind the plot, and that if successful, it could become the largest terrorist action since the Sept. 11 attacks nine years ago.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are traveling in Europe at any given time — as tourists, college students and business professionals. But the State Department did not upgrade its alert to a warning, which could have led to widespread cancellations of airline and hotel bookings.

Nevertheless, many in Europe found themselves quickly aware of the situation.

With the Los Angeles Lakers and Minnesota Timberwolves in London preparing for a preseason game, the National Basketball Assn. promised to take “appropriate” measures to ensure their safety.

“The NBA is staying in contact with the U.S. Embassy, the CIA and Scotland Yard,” said Lakers spokesman John Black. “They are keeping us informed of the situation.”

European governments began warning of a possible attack last week.

In Britain, the threat of terrorism has been listed as “severe,” meaning an attack is highly likely. Britain’s Foreign Office also warned its citizens to be careful traveling in France.

French Defense Minister Herve Morin told Le Parisien newspaper that “the terrorist threat exists and could hit us at any moment.” But Morin said law enforcement officials were continuing to pursue would-be terrorists.

“Networks organizing themselves to prepare attacks are constantly being dismantled around the world,” he said. “It is good for the French to know this.”

The U.S. military in recent weeks has stepped up drone missile attacks on suspected hideouts in regions of Pakistan, and the U.S. is passing its intelligence to its European counterparts.

According to intelligence sources, the threat apparently arose after the arrest and interrogation of a German man of Pakistani origin who was being held at the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan. He is said to have provided information about the activities of half a dozen other men from Germany and England who were linked through Al Qaeda and were reportedly talking to other operatives in several European cities about upcoming strikes.

richard.serrano@latimes.com

U.S. issues travel alert for Europe amid threat of Al Qaeda attack

Reporting from Newport, Wales

It might be all over but the shouting for Europe’s Ryder Cup golf team, which turned a two-point deficit into a 9 ½-6 ½ lead here Sunday.

Europe, favored going into these three-day proceedings — which were turned into four-day proceedings by ongoing bad weather — gathered 5 ½ points out of a possible 6 and appeared to take the remaining drama out of this international competition.

The Ryder Cup will finish here on Monday, the first-ever fourth day of competition in its 83-year-history, with 12 singles matches. The United States needs a total of 14 points to retain the cup it won at Valderrama in Louisville in 2008, or 7½ more. Europe needs 14 ½,, or 5 more, to reclaim the cup.

With European players performing as superbly as expected, and with crowds of more than 40,000 hanging around despite the ever-present cloud bursts and sending roars of approval echoing throughout the valley at the Twenty Ten course every time a European player made a putt, the prospects for the Americans do not look good.

U.S. captain Corey Pavin put on a brave face, as he has throughout, and said, “I’m proud of our team today. I saw 12 players who fought hard and held their heads high.”

European captain Colin Montgomerie called the day “one of the greatest days for European golf we’ve had.”

The five European matches were won by the teams of Luke Donald and Lee Westwood, Graeme McDowell and Rory McIlroy, Padraig Harrington and Ross Fisher, Peter Hanson and Miguel Angel Jimenez, and Ian Poulter and Martin Kaymer. But perhaps the most excitement and drama was provided by the Molinari brothers of Italy, Edoardo and Francesco, who managed just a half-point in their match against Stewart Cink and Matt Kuchar, the best U.S. team to date here.

While the five other European teams were winning with some degree of ease, the Molinari’s, both Ryder Cup rookies, had lost their lead on the 13th hole. By the time they got to the 18th, Europe had five of the day’s possible six points in its pocket and Cink and Kuchar had a 1-up lead.

But Cink got tangled up in the rough and was out of contention on the hole early, and when it was time to putt, Kuchar had a shot at birdie from 25 feet and the Molinaris were each inside of 10, Francesco just three feet away for his birdie. Kuchar missed, Edoardo missed and Francesco calmly added the extra half point that seem to be taken by the Europeans as a huge psychological boost.

Montgomerie took special note afterwards.

“To do what they did at the last hole, two rookies, two brothers, coming down to that last hole with everybody in Europe who plays golf, watching,” he said. “Fantastic performance. …”

Pavin chose to say little about the failures of his team, choosing the high ground of good effort and another day tomorrow. Those failures would include the loss of Tiger Woods and Steve Stricker to Donald and Westwood, 6 and 5. It marked the worst loss ever for Woods in the Ryder Cup, and the biggest victory margin since Sam Torrance and Constantino Rocco beat Davis Love III and Jeff Maggert, 6 and 5, in 1995.

Another surprising result for the U.S. was the continued poor play of Phil Mickelson, who is ranked No. 2 in the world behind Woods. Mickelson lost with rookie Rickie Fowler to Poulter and Kaymer, and it marked his 17th Ryder Cup defeat, a record for U.S. players.

Interestingly, Pavin’s pairings for Sunday’s singles left Woods going off eighth and Mickelson 10th, perhaps so late in the proceedings that their results will be irrelevant.

bill.dwyre@latimes.com
Europe takes Ryder Cup lead with dominating performances

The two sisters wear Islamic head scarves and say they have no problem with their secular friends and classmates, who don’t. Yet on the streets, in classrooms and along the hallways of apartment buildings in the cramped Fatih district of Istanbul, Deniz and Daria Ker remind them every now and then that they’ll stew in a fiery hell if they don’t cover up.

“We say, ‘If a single strand of hair comes out and a man sees it, you’ll be damned for 40 years,’” says Daria, an 18-year-old high school student, a white head scarf covering her head as she helps her 20-year-old sister work the cash register of a children’s clothing store. “It’s a must in our religion.”

In much of Turkey, observant and secularist Muslims live largely apart, inhabiting different enclaves within big cities like Istanbul and in different regions of the country.

But in Fatih, an ancient district that’s home to about 450,000 people near the center of Turkey’s economic and cultural capital, members of the two main cultural camps are side by side. They interact, sometimes uncomfortably, every day.

For centuries, Istanbul has been a crossroads of East and West, straddling the European and Asian continents on either side of the Bosporus strait. Fatih, a mostly working- and lower-middle-class district on the city’s European side, is a microcosm of contemporary Turkey. As a growing and prosperous Muslim middle class rises to take the helm in Turkey, Fatih’s fate also may be a test for the country’s future, and possibly that of the West as it attempts to integrate Islam into its ethnic and religious landscape.

“Turkey is one country, but there is a polarization,” says Nilufer Narli, a professor of sociology at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, who has studied Fatih since the late 1990s. “The polarization isn’t new, but it has been sharpened within the last few years.”

In Fatih, the observant and secular share new five- to10-story apartment buildings as well as the ancient streets. They shop at the same large chain clothing stores and corner groceries. They bump against one another on crosswalks, stare at the same store displays, negotiate over the price of tomatoes.

Every day, people here grapple with questions that have confounded politicians and social scientists, questions about the meaning of faith and of sovereignty over public spaces.

“The secularists lived with secularists for 150 years. Religious people lived with their own kind for 150 years,” said Etyen Mahcupyan, director of the democratization program at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, an Istanbul think tank. “Now there is a social sphere where they are tangential to each other. They are touching each other.”

Cheap rents and proximity to the center of the city lured migrants from Turkey’s Anatolian interior to Fatih, Istanbul’s oldest neighborhood. Some of the wealthier and more secular residents moved to more exclusive enclaves, but many also remained.

A low-level cultural war between the country’s surging Islamic past and its century-old commitment to secularism unfolds daily on Fatih’s streets. It is a conflict between the “closed,” those families whose women wear the hijab, or head scarf, and publicly abide by a strict interpretation of Islam, and the “open,” the secular Turks who dominated the country politically and economically during the 20th century.

Class resentment fuels the tensions. Cosmopolitan Istanbul residents speak of Fatih as though it were Kandahar, a backwater of extremists huddled together. “Those people live together because they want to live that way,” said one resident of Bebek, an upscale northern suburb of Istanbul.

The subtle struggle plays out in how one presents oneself: in the cut of an outfit, the length of a woman’s skirt, the growth of stubble on a man’s face. It is felt in the duration of a stare at a scantily clad or heavily covered-up woman, or the rumble of an imam’s voice on the mosque loudspeaker as he recites a particularly moralistic passage from the Koran.

Residents say there’s no overt antagonism between the two groups, no violence or clashes on the street. Somehow, they say, they all work, walk and play next to one another, if not always with one another.

But what is unmistakable is a cultural chauvinism that is clearly practiced by the Islamists, one that frightens and angers many secular Turks who are worried that their cultural identity is being worn away.

“There’s no harsh pressure,” Hossein Avnikar, a local official, said of complaints by secular women that they’re constantly asked to cover up. “They say it. But they say it very sweetly.”

The observant speak of masoulieh tabliq, a Muslim’s responsibility to promote the faith, to get the unbelievers to believe and the less-observant to practice their religion more strictly. As Maksut Senocak, a religiously observant 50-year-old builder explained during a tea at one of the local cafes: “Of course they would tell each other what is sin, because our prophet and imams at the mosque are saying that we should.”

The neighborhood can be a cultural minefield, especially for secular women. Mediha Hasakin, 30, an accountant who has lived in Fatih her entire life, said she has begun to cover her shoulders or wear a jacket when she walks in or near certain areas, especially Carsamba, a neighborhood of 50,000 described by many as Istanbul’s most conservative.

“We’re being careful, up on the hill,” she said, gesturing toward the warren of narrow streets where men sport lengthy beards and skull caps, women dress in all-covering Arabian-style black abayas and restaurants remain shuttered in the daytime during the dawn-to-dusk fast of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

In old Istanbul quarter, Islamic and secular Turks grope toward coexistence

Anton Geesink, who helped make judo a universally popular sport by winning a gold medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, has died. He was 76.

Geesink died Friday, according to the Dutch state broadcaster NOS. He had spent several weeks in a hospital in his hometown of Utrecht, Netherlands. No other details were released.

The 6-foot-6 Geesink stunned Japan by becoming the first Westerner to win the World Judo Championship in 1961 in Paris, then won his Olympic gold three years later in Tokyo, the first time the Olympics included judo. He won another world title in Rio de Janeiro in 1965, along with a record 21 European championships.

At the 1964 Games, Japan dominated the judo competition, but its champion, Akio Kaminaga, was no match for Geesink in the open division, where there were no weight classifications. According to United Press International’s account of the match, Geesink “crushed Kaminaga to the mat and held him there for the required 30 seconds.”

Jim Bregman, a member of the U.S. judo team in 1964, told The Times in 1984: “The entire Japanese team returned to the locker room and wept, but this was no humiliation really.

“Anton was more than just a big guy, as many thought. What he was was a 6-foot-6, 300-pound technical genius, a very powerful, very fast judo player of consummate skill in a very large frame. Anton Geesink was quite the package.”

Antonius Johannes Geesink was born April 6, 1934, in Utrecht in the Netherlands. He first participated at the European championships in 1951, finishing second.

The International Olympic Committee praised Geesink as a “great athlete” who “dedicated his entire career to the promotion of sport and its values.” Geesink had been a member of the Olympic committee since 1987.

In 1999, Geesink received a warning from the committee in connection with a bribery scandal in the selection of Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympics. A foundation bearing his name received a $5,000 check from Tom Welch, the former Salt Lake City organizing committee chief. Geesink maintained that he did nothing wrong and that the money was not paid to him.

Geesink is survived by his wife, Jans, and their three children.

news.obits@latimes.com
Anton Geesink dies at 76; Olympic gold medalist popularized judo

Engineers began loading the fuel roads into a Russian-built nuclear power reactor on Iran’s southern Persian Gulf coast Saturday morning, a relatively important milestone in the construction and operation of the long-delayed plant, Iran’s state television reported.

The plant has become the center of an international controversy. Iranians, Russians and Americans have invested the reactor with a symbolic significance beyond its ability to produce electricity and advance Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The Bush administration’s former U.N. envoy, John Bolton, made waves and set off war jitters this week after he said in a television appearance that Israel had days to bomb the plant before the fuel cells were loaded or risk creating a radioactive cloud that would harm too many civilians. Iran countered with its own threat. “In that case we will lose a power plant, but Israel’s existence will be in danger,” Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahdi said.