Apple CEO’s pay takes big hit vs. record 2011 package

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook’s 2012 compensation package of just over $ 4 million is a huge cut on paper for the top executive of the most valuable U.S. corporation, after a 2011 package fattened by more than $ 376 million in long-term stock awards.

Cook received the largest single pay package awarded to a company CEO in about a decade when he replaced Apple‘s legendary co-founder, Steve Jobs, shortly before Jobs’ death in October 2011.

The maker of the iPhone and iPad made the 2012 compensation disclosures in a regulatory filing on Thursday. Cook, who is in his early 50s, joined Apple in 1998 and became CEO in August 2011.

Virtually all of Cook’s $ 376 million bonus in 2011 was in stock awards that will vest in two chunks – one in 2016 and the other in 2021. This structure was intended to keep Jobs’ longtime lieutenant at the helm for many years.

In terms of base salary, Cook actually received a 50 percent increase to $ 1.4 million for 2012, and the same 200 percent bonus that other top Apple executives like CFO Peter Oppenheimer earned, Apple said in a regulatory filing on Thursday.

The 2012 compensation package for Cook also pales in comparison with his 2010 pay, which was 14 times higher, when he served as chief operating officer.

But Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Group – which counts Apple stock as the biggest holding among the approximately $ 2 billion it manages – said Cook’s package was “normal CEO compensation.”

For example, Yahoo Inc’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, a former Google Inc high-flyer hired this year to try to turn around the struggling Internet icon, won a pay package worth more than $ 70 million. Despite her lack of a CEO track record, her basic pay is comparable to Cook’s, with about $ 1 million in annual salary and up to $ 2 million in an annual bonus.

Oracle Corp’s Larry Ellison, one of the most highly paid chief executives in the United States – and also the world’s sixth-richest man, according to Forbes – received total compensation for the year ended May 31, 2012, of $ 96.2 million – almost all of it in stock options.

That compared with $ 77.6 million for Ellison in the prior year.

Cook’s longtime boss, Jobs, famously received $ 1 a year in salary in the three years before he stepped down, though in 2000 he too received a stock option that analysts say was valued at almost $ 600 million at the time.

Cook will not receive any stock awards for 2012, Apple said in Thursday’s filing.

The 2012 package includes a salary of $ 1.4 million and a nonequity bonus of $ 2.8 million. Cook’s base salary actually increased in 2012 from the $ 900,000 he earned in 2011.

While Apple’s shares are roughly 35 percent higher than when Cook became CEO, they have fallen more than 27 percent since October, when they hit a $ 700.10 high. The stock has declined amid investor worries about intensifying competition in the mobile phone market and growth prospects in important markets including China.

Apple shares were down 1.3 percent at $ 506.35 on the Nasdaq on Thursday afternoon.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew and Liana Baker in New York, Jim Finkle and Tim McLaughlin in Boston and Edwin Chan in San Francisco,; editing by Kenneth Barry and Matthew Lewis)

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Net loss: Brooklyn fires coach Avery Johnson

NEW YORK (AP) — Avery Johnson was fired Thursday as coach of the Brooklyn Nets, who have fallen to .500 in their season of new surroundings and elevated expectations.

General manager Billy King announced the dismissal in a statement. Assistant P.J. Carlesimo will coach the Nets at home Friday against Charlotte, according to someone with knowledge of the plans. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because details were to be provided at a news conference later in the day.

"The Nets ownership would like to express thanks to Avery for his efforts and to wish him every success in the future," owner Mikhail Prokhorov said in a statement.

After a strong start to their first season in Brooklyn, the Nets have lost 10 of 13 games to fall well behind the first-place New York Knicks, the team they so badly want to compete with in their new home.

But after beating the Knicks in their first meeting Nov. 26, probably the high point of Johnson's tenure, the Nets went 5-10 and frustrations have been mounting.

The Nets were embarrassed by Boston on national TV on Christmas, then were routed by Milwaukee 108-93 on Wednesday night for their fifth loss in six games.

Star guard Deron Williams recently complained about Johnson's offense, and Nets CEO Brett Yormark took to Twitter after the loss to Celtics to voice his displeasure with the performance.

Brooklyn started the season 11-4, winning five in a row to end November, when Johnson was Eastern Conference coach of the month. But he couldn't do anything to stop this slump, one the Nets never anticipated after a $350 million summer spending spree they believed would take them toward the top of their conference.

Johnson has been the Nets' coach for a little more than two seasons. He went 60-116 with the Nets, who moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn to start the 2012-13 season. Johnson coached the Dallas Mavericks to a spot in the NBA Finals in 2006.

This is the NBA's second coaching change this season following the dismissal of Mike Brown by the Los Angeles Lakers.

Johnson arrived in New Jersey with a 194-70 record, a .735 winning percentage that was the highest in NBA history, but had little chance of success in his first two seasons while the Nets focused all their planning on the move to Brooklyn.

They looked to make a splash this summer when they re-signed Williams and fellow starters Gerald Wallace, Brook Lopez and Kris Humphries, traded for Atlanta All-Star Joe Johnson, and added veteran depth with players such as Reggie Evans, C.J. Watson and Andray Blatche.

Johnson didn't have a contract beyond this season but seemed to have the confidence of Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire who before the season said he had faith in "the Avery defense system."

Some predicted the Nets would finish as high as second in the East behind defending champion Miami, and the projections seemed warranted when the Nets started quickly amid much fanfare. But all the good publicity faded in recent weeks once the losing started.

Williams, who has struggled this season, stirred the waters when he expressed his preference for the offense he ran under Jerry Sloan in Utah before a loss to the Jazz. Williams and Johnson, nicknamed "Brooklyn's Backcourt" and expected to be one of the best in the NBA, have shot poorly and rarely meshed.

The Nets were embarrassed near the end of their 93-76 loss to Boston, when fans exited early amid a chant of "Let's go Celtics!"

"Nets fans deserved better," Yormark tweeted after the game. "The entire organization needs to work harder to find a solution. We will get there."

Not under Johnson, though.

The Nets should be able to entice a big-name coach with Prokhorov's billions and the chance to play in a major market at Barclays Center, the $1 billion arena that has drawn praise in the city and from visiting teams.

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Measles: Measles Epidemic Is Spreading in Central Africa

Jehad Nga for The New York Times

An internally displaced persons camp in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to recent violence in the country, a spreading measles epidemic is further endangering the lives of thousands of children there.

A large measles epidemic is spreading in Central Africa, endangering the lives of thousands of children, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders warned last week.

Since October, the charity has vaccinated more than 226,000 children in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization has also treated nearly 13,000 Congolese for the effects of the disease.

Measles is very contagious. In places where many children are malnourished and vitamin-deficient, it kills 1 percent to15 percent of those who don’t receive medical care, Doctors Without Borders estimated. (Even in the United States in the 1990s, although cases were rare, the fatality rate was 0.3 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In AIDS patients, the rate is 30 percent.)

The eastern Congo basin has serious shortages of medical workers and of drugs. While there is no treatment for measles itself, antibiotics can save those who develop pneumonia, meningitis or other secondary infections. Measles can also cause blindness by scarring the eyeball.

The outbreak is taking place despite enormous success against the disease worldwide. According to a study released earlier this year, deaths from measles have dropped by almost 75 percent since 2000.

Most of the lives saved were in Africa and India. Measles shots are often cited as one of the chief reasons that deaths of children under age 5 around the world have fallen steadily.

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Senate Leader Says Deal Is Unlikely Before Fiscal Deadline

WASHINGTON — Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, warned Thursday that there was scant time to put together a Congressional deal to avert the impending fiscal crisis and that no resolution was in sight.

T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Senator Harry Reid arrived at the Capitol on Thursday in Washington.

“I have to be very honest,” Mr. Reid said as the Senate convened in an unusual session between Christmas and New Year’s Day. “I don’t know time-wise how it can happen now.”

Mr. Reid offered his pessimistic assessment shortly before President Obama, cutting his vacation short, arrived back in Washington on Air Force One. White House officials said that before leaving Hawaii, Mr. Obama had spoken separately by phone with each of the four Congressional leaders about the status of negotiations, but they gave no details of the discussion.

Mr. Obama is expected to invite all four lawmakers to meet on Friday. In a related development, House Republicans were told to return to Washington on Sunday. Republican senators were planning to convene at the Capitol — normally somnolent during Christmas week — to strategize.

On the Senate floor Thursday, Mr. Reid excoriated House Republicans for failing to consider a Senate-passed measure that would extend lower tax rates on household income up to $250,000. He urged House members to return to the Capitol to put together at least a modest deal to avoid the more than half-a-trillion dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to begin in January.

“The American people are waiting for the ball to drop,” Mr. Reid said, “but it’s not going to be a good drop.”

A spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, confirmed that he had spoken with the president, and said that Mr. McConnell was “happy to review what the president has in mind.” But the spokesman, Don Stewart, said Senate Democrats had not come ahead with a plan.

“When they do, members on both sides of the aisle will review the legislation and make decisions on how best to proceed,” Mr. Stewart said.

Mr. Reid said that absent a move from Republicans, the Senate would move forward this week on a national security measure concerning espionage, as well as a bill to help states that have suffered hurricane damage, with multiple votes possible.

“We are here in Washington working,” Mr. Reid said, “while the members of the House of Representatives are out watching movies and watching their kids play soccer and basketball and doing all kinds of things. They should be here.”

Senators, frustrated, pessimistic and in some cases downright miserable, returned to Washington with no clear fiscal agenda. Senator Ben Nelson, a retiring Democrat of Nebraska, arrived shortly after midnight on Thursday on a flight that was delayed more than four hours. As he walked through the airport, he lamented the deteriorating political comity that he has observed during two terms in the Senate and two terms as a Democratic governor of a conservative state.

“There are folks who are elected who have come here with an agenda to do nothing and want to stop everything,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview. “It may be the new norm – blocking everything.”

For Mr. Nelson, who decided against seeking a third term, the looming fiscal crisis would be the final legislative act of a political career built around a bipartisan voting record. He said he was not confident that a real deal could be reached that would be acceptable to both sides, considering that Congress is filled with many people “who didn’t accept the 2008 presidential election and haven’t accepted the 2012 election either.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

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United Arab Emirates Arrests Suspects in Terror Plots

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (Reuters) — Security forces in the United Arab Emirates have arrested members of a cell made up of militants from Saudi Arabia and the emirates who were planning to carry out attacks in both countries and in other states, the official Emirates News Agency said on Wednesday.

The federation of seven emirates, a major oil exporter and an ally of the United States, has had no attacks by Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. But Islamist sentiment has risen in recent years, and Dubai, a business and tourism hub that attracts many Westerners, could make an attractive target for militants, analysts say.

The suspects had acquired materials and equipment for use in what the news agency called terrorist operations.

“The security authorities in the U.A.E., in coordination with the related security parties in Saudi Arabia, announced the arrest of an organized cell from the deviant group that was planning to carry out actions against national security of both countries and some brotherly states,” the agency said, without elaborating.

The phrase “deviant group” is often used by the authorities in Saudi Arabia to describe Al Qaeda.

In August, the Saudi authorities arrested a group of militants in Riyadh — mostly Yemeni nationals — suspected of having links to Al Qaeda. Thousands of people believed to be militants have been arrested since dozens were killed in terrorist attacks between 2003 and 2006 on Saudi residential compounds and offices for foreign workers and on government facilities.

The United States has poured aid into Yemen to stem the threat of attacks from the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and to try to prevent any spillover of violence into Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter.

In 2010, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, formed with the merger of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi branches, said it was behind a plot to send two parcel bombs to the United States. The bombs were intercepted in Britain and Dubai.

Though the emirates have escaped much of the upheaval that has shaken the Arab world, the authorities have moved swiftly to stem any sign of political dissent, detaining more than 60 Islamists this year over suspected threats to state security and links to foreign groups.

Those detainees, who belong to an Islamist group called Al-Islah, have confessed to setting up a secret organization with an armed force whose aim was to take power and establish an Islamic state, the local news media reported in September. The group denied the accusations.

Many of the detained Islamists are from the more religiously conservative northern emirates like Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah, which produced one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

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Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An outage at one of Amazon‘s web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc‘s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.

The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.

Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, California, has 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide, of which more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the outage and could have potentially been affected, Evers said.

Evers said the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing center in Virginia and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users by 11:00 p.m. PST on Monday.

The event marks the latest in a series of outages from Amazon Web Services, with one occurring in April of last year that knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare.

“We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented,” Evers of Netflix said.

“We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night,” he added.

Officials at Amazon Web Services were not available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company’s contracts with Amazon.

(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and Matt Driskill)

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Red Sox get All-Star closer Hanrahan from Pirates

BOSTON (AP) — The Red Sox have acquired All-Star closer Joel Hanrahan from the Pittsburgh Pirates in a six-player deal.

Boston completed the trade Wednesday, also receiving infielder Brock Holt. The Red Sox gave up right-handers Mark Melancon and Stolmy Pimentel, infielder Ivan DeJesus Jr. and first baseman-outfielder Jerry Sands.

Over the past two seasons, the right-handed Hanrahan had 76 saves, fourth most in the National League, and a 2.24 ERA. Last season, he was 5-2 with a 2.72 ERA and 36 saves.

Holt spent most of last season at Double-A Altoona, then hit .292 in 24 games with the Pirates, all in September.

Melancon was 0-2 with a 6.20 ERA in 41 relief appearances in his only season with Boston. Pimentel spent the season at Double-A Portland. Sands and DeJesus were obtained in a trade that sent Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Aug. 25.

The Red Sox also announced the signing of free agent shortstop Stephen Drew, who agreed to a one-year contract early last week. That reported $9.5 million deal was contingent on the former Oakland Athletic and Arizona Diamondback passing a physical.

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Well: Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.

Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr. Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.

But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.

Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.

To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to plan and execute hunts as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.

But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.

To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in a variety of mammals, including dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongeese, goats, sheep and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.

The researchers also looked at recent experiments in which mice and rats were systematically bred to be marathon runners. Lab animals that willingly put in the most miles on running wheels were interbred, resulting in the creation of a line of lab animals that excelled at running.

Interestingly, after multiple generations, these animals began to develop innately high levels of substances that promote tissue growth and health, including a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth.

What all of this means, says David A. Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and an author of a new article about the evolution of human brains appearing in the January issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology, is that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter.

“We think that what happened” in our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, he says, is that the more athletic and active survived and, as with the lab mice, passed along physiological characteristics that improved their endurance, including elevated levels of BDNF. Eventually, these early athletes had enough BDNF coursing through their bodies that some could migrate from the muscles to the brain, where it nudged the growth of brain tissue.

Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think and reason toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and being smarter now allowed them to move more efficiently.

And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later.

The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D. Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr. Raichlen, of the new article.

And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”

Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr. Raichlen says, and almost unprovable.

But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr. Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.

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Irish Travelers, Gathering for Christmas, Flood a Town

RATHKEALE, Ireland — Christmas in Ireland is a time of homecomings, with joyous family reunions at airports and ferry piers. But the largest single gathering of all briefly turns this little town into the only place in Ireland where armed police officers patrol the streets 24 hours a day to deter internecine feuds and other disorderly conduct.

Usually, Rathkeale is an unremarkable rural town in County Limerick, but every year at this time, cavalcades of Irish nomads — known as travelers — return here to the place they regard as their spiritual home. It is an opportunity to hold fairy-tale weddings and christenings, and to settle old scores. The highly mobile families are deeply interwoven through marriage and kinship, and extremely suspicious of outsiders and the authorities.

For about six weeks of the year, the town’s population swells to 4,500 from 1,500, and ostentatious displays of wealth are common. Expensive sport utility vehicles create gridlock in the narrow streets and alleyways, trailers and mobile homes clutter the sidewalks and young men speed through the surrounding country lanes in their sports cars.

A long history of violence between clans hangs like a cloud over the travelers. When they congregate at Christmas, brawls involving knives, cudgels, iron bars and screwdrivers have been known to erupt, and traffic violations multiply. Last year alone, the police seized 30 vehicles for various offenses.

Over the past couple of decades, the travelers have bought or built houses in Rathkeale. The rows of extravagant, mock-Georgian mansions that have sprung up just off the main street are boarded up for most of the year but come alive around Christmas when their owners return, mainly from Britain but also from increasingly far-flung places.

The Rathkeale travelers have long had a reputation for business acumen, making fortunes by developing property, dealing antiques, trading in scrap metal and asphalt paving. But in recent years, a growing body of evidence has fueled suspicions that not all of the money flowing into Rathkeale comes from strictly legal transactions and that the property deals are a form of money laundering.

“People won’t say a bad word against them in public because they’re afraid of getting a bottle through the window — or something a lot worse,” said one Rathkeale resident, who did not want to be named. “Who really believes tarring driveways or fixing gutters gets you those massive houses or flashy cars?”

Certainly, travelers with links to Rathkeale have made headlines for all the wrong reasons in recent years.

Five members of one family were sentenced to prison this month after being found guilty of forcing vulnerable men to work for them under virtually slavelike conditions. According to court documents, the British police believe that the family owns several properties in Rathkeale, and the British authorities are working with their Irish counterparts to seize the family’s assets.

Others with Rathkeale connections have been jailed for various offenses from Australia to Iceland, including smuggling and handling counterfeit goods. In 2010, two men were caught trying to buy illegal black rhino horns from undercover federal agents.

Edward Grace, the deputy chief of law enforcement with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, said the agency expected “more indictments of members of the Rathkeale Irish Traveler group.”

“These Irish Traveler gang members are the middlemen in the operation that also involves Chinese and Asian gangs,” he said. “They have access to large amounts of cash to buy the horns, and they have the network to sell them on at exorbitant prices. Some people will say, ‘What’s the harm here? These animals are already dead.’ But they are fueling an illegal trade and that means more incentive to kill endangered species.”

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Rondo leads Celtics past Nets 93-76

NEW YORK (AP) — Rajon Rondo scored 19 points in his first full game against Brooklyn this season, and the Boston Celtics beat the Nets 93-76 on Tuesday in another game with some heated moments between the division rivals.

Rondo, sidelined in the first meeting and thrown out of the second after shoving Nets forward Kris Humphries into the courtside seats, outplayed counterpart Deron Williams and helped the Celtics take control early.

Rookie Jared Sullinger tied a career high with 16 points and Jeff Green had 15 for the Celtics (14-13), who avoided falling under .500 with just their second victory in six games.

Gerald Wallace and Brook Lopez each scored 15 for the Nets, who have lost four of five.

The Celtics took control with a 23-5 run in the second quarter. They had 11 assists on 13 baskets and outscored the Nets 34-18 in the period.

A month after the teams scuffled in Boston, there was another skirmish in the fourth quarter that resulted in four technical fouls, but that was the most fight the Nets put up in a disappointing performance on the national stage of the Christmas opener. They were never in the game after the first 20 minutes, and their fans headed to the exits with under 2 minutes left as a "Let's go Celtics!" chant broke out.

Williams had only 10 points on 3-of-7 shooting and Joe Johnson, his partner in a high-priced backcourt, shot 4 of 14 for his 12 points.

Boston's Kevin Garnett had eight points and 10 rebounds on the day he tied Charles Oakley for 15th place on the NBA's career list with his 1,282nd game. He was also front and center when things got testy.

Wallace was fouled with 9:31 remaining and appeared to hold onto Garnett's uniform to balance himself and not fall. But Garnett objected to how long Wallace hung on, and they said something to each other as they tried to push themselves free. That led to technical fouls on the two, along with Andray Blatche and Courtney Lee.

Sullinger delivered a flagrant foul on Wallace a few minutes later, but there was nothing further.

In the Nets' Nov. 28 victory in Boston, Rondo, Humphries and Wallace were ejected.

It was the second quarter of that game where things got away from the Celtics, and Rondo's frustrations soon followed. He shoved Humphries after the Nets forward fouled Garnett, ruining the point guard's chance to extend what was then a 37-game streak with double digit assists by finishing with three. He had five assists and six rebounds Tuesday.

This time, the second period belonged to the guys in green.

With the Celtics down three, Green had six points in a 10-0 run that made it 36-29. After Johnson's basket, Boston answered with a 13-3 spurt. Jason Terry made a 3-pointer before Rondo converted a three-point play to push the Celtics' lead to 49-34 with 3:56 to go.

Notes: As with everyone playing on Christmas, players, coaches and referees wore green ribbons in tribute to the families of Sandy Hook Elementary School. ... Humphries was out with an abdominal strain and will be re-evaluated after the Nets return from Milwaukee. He had mostly been a starter but then didn't play at all Sunday against Philadelphia. ... Feeling Avery Bradley isn't ready yet, Celtics coach Doc Rivers decided not to bring the guard on this four-game road trip so he can continue working his way back from shoulder surgery in Boston. Rivers said the shoulder is strong but that Bradley has had only 2½ practices.

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