Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales

The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.

Read More..

Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases

A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.

The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.

“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”

Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.

So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.

The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.

However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”

She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”

Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.

If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.

Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.

“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.

A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.

Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.

Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.

“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”

The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.

But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”

“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”

Read More..

Drivers With Hands Full Get a Backup: The Car

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Jesse Levinson of Stanford develops safety and self-driving systems like one on this Volkswagen Toureg that detects obstacles.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Driving around a college campus can be treacherous. Bikes and scooters zip out of nowhere, distracted students wander into traffic, and stopped cars and speed bumps suddenly appear. It takes a vigilant driver to avoid catastrophe.

Advanced Systems
Are on the Move

New technologies are changing the way cars are driven.
— John Markoff

Already in Some Cars

Antilock brakes

Electronic stability control

Lane keeping

Lane departure warning

Pedestrian detection

Driver fatigue/distraction alert

Cruise control/adaptive cruise control

Forward collision avoidance

Automatic braking

Automated parking

Adaptive headlights

Traffic sign detection

Coming

Traffic jam assistance

Super cruise control

Night assistance thermal imaging

V2X communications

Intersection assistance

Traffic light detection

Jesse Levinson does not much worry about this when he drives his prototype Volkswagen Touareg around the Stanford University campus here. A computer vision system he helped design keeps an unblinking eye out for pedestrians and cyclists, and automatically slows and stops the car when they enter his path.

Someday soon, few drivers will have to worry about car crashes and collisions, whether on congested roads or on empty highways, technology companies and car manufacturers are betting. But even now, drivers are benefiting from a suite of safety systems, and many more are in development to transform driving from a manual task to something more akin to that of a conductor overseeing an orchestra.

An array of optical and radar sensors now monitor the surroundings of a growing number of cars traveling the nation’s highways, and in some cases even track the driver’s physical state. Pedestrian detection systems, like the one that Mr. Levinson, a research scientist at Stanford’s Center for Automotive Research, has helped design, are already available in luxury cars and are being built into some midrange models.

The systems offer auditory, visual and mechanical warnings if a collision is imminent — and increasingly, if needed, take evasive actions automatically. By the middle of this decade, under certain conditions, they will take over the task of driving completely at both high and low speeds.

But the new systems are poised to refashion the nature of driving fundamentally long before completely autonomous vehicles arrive.

“This is really a bridge,” said Ragunathan Rajkumar, a computer science professor who is leading a Carnegie Mellon University automated driving research project partly financed by General Motors. “The driver is still in control. But if the driver is not doing the right thing, the technology takes over.”

Although drivers — at least for now — remain responsible for their vehicles, a host of related legal and insurance issues have already arisen, and researchers are opening a new line of study about how humans interact with the automatic systems.

What the changes will mean to the century-old American romance with the car remains to be seen. But the safety systems, the result of rapid advances in computer algorithms and the drastically falling cost of sensors, are a practical reaction to the modern reality of drivers who would rather talk on the phone and send text messages than concentrate on the road ahead and drive.

Four manufacturers — Volvo, BMW, Audi and Mercedes — have announced that as soon as this year they will begin offering models that will come with sensors and software to allow the car to drive itself in heavy traffic at speeds up to 37 miles per hour. The systems, known as Traffic Jam Assist, will follow the car ahead and automatically slow down and speed up as needed, handling both braking and steering.

At faster speeds, Cadillac’s Super Cruise system is intended to automate freeway driving by keeping the car within a lane and adjusting speed to other traffic. The company has not said when it will add the system to its cars.

Already actions like steering, braking and accelerating are increasingly handled by computer software rather than the driver.

“People don’t realize that when you step on antilock brakes it’s simply a suggestion for the car to stop,” said Clifford Nass, a director at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. How and when the car stops is left to the system.

The automobile industry has been motivated to innovate by growing evidence that existing technologies like the antilocking braking systems and electronic stability control have saved tens of thousands of lives.

In November, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended that all new cars be equipped with collision avoidance technologies, including adaptive cruise control and automatic braking. Two states — California and Nevada — have passed laws making it legal to operate self-driving cars as long as a human being is inside, able to take over.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently reported that one system, electronic stability control, or E.S.C., which digitally detects the loss of traction and compensates automatically, saved 2,202 lives from 2008 to 2010. Federal safety regulations began phasing in electronic stability control on small trucks and passenger vehicles in 2007.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the federal agency that recommended that all new cars be equipped with collision avoidance technologies. It was the National Transportation Safety Board, not the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Read More..

IHT Rendezvous: Hostages Caught Up in France's African Intervention

LONDON — The widespread satisfaction expressed in France at the government’s decision to intervene militarily against Islamic militants in Mali was tempered on Saturday by news of a failed overnight French hostage rescue mission on the other side of Africa.

After reports emerged from Somalia of a helicopter-borne commando raid in the south of the country, Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French defense minister announced that a hostage was believed to have been killed by his captors in an operation in which a French soldier died and another was missing.

The hostage, identified as Denis Allex, was a French secret service agent who had been held by Somalia’s Islamist Al Shabab militia since 2009. His captors, who may have seized the missing French soldier during the raid, claimed Mr. Allex was still alive and they planned to put him on trial.

Mr. Le Drian said there was no connection between the military operations in Mali and Somalia. The hostage rescue mission would have happened earlier, he told a news conference, if the conditions had been right.

However, news of the Somali raid prompted speculation that the action might have been prompted by France’s concern that its Mali intervention would spur retaliation against its citizens held captive in Africa.

These include eight hostages seized in Mali and neighboring states by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, one of the groups involved in last year’s Islamist takeover of northern Mali.

The decision of President François Hollande to send French forces into action in Mali to counter an offensive by Islamist militias that control the north of the country has been greeted with broad cross-party support at home.

Libération newspaper said it could represent a positive turning point in the presidency of Mr. Hollande, “who did not hesitate in the face of the very real risk of seeing the establishment of a terrorist state in the heart of the dark continent.”

Families of the hostages, however, expressed fears for the fate of their loved ones, with some demanding why military action to free them had not been taken earlier.

Jean-Pierre Verdon, the father of one captive, Philippe Verdon, told France’s RTL broadcaster: “Making war on terrorists is a matter for the state, but our obsession is the hostages.”

A leader of the regional Al Qaeda group last month accused France of blocking negotiations on a deal that would have led to freeing the captives.

Mathieu Guidère, a French academic expert on the region, speculated at the time that the government wanted to send a message to the militants that the capture of French citizens would not affect its foreign policy.

The government was trapped in an “infernal logic,”, according to Mr. Guidère, a professor at the University of Toulouse.

“The more the government declares it will intervene in Mali to support African forces, the more French citizens will be kidnapped,” he told Le Figaro in December. “If you want to fight terrorism, you don’t go about announcing it in advance.”

Before news came through of the abortive overnight raid in Somalia, the intervention in Mali had attracted support across the political spectrum in France.

Jean-François Copé, head of the center-right opposition U.M.P., said: “It was high time to act to prevent the establishment of a narco-terrorist state.”

François Fillon, a former U.M.P. prime minister said: “The fight against terrorism demands national unity beyond partisan differences.”

With Mr. Hollande now facing a second crisis in Africa, it is a political honeymoon that may not last.

Read More..

DealBook: Wells Fargo Profit Jumps 24% in Quarter, Driven by Mortgage Gains

8:46 a.m. | Updated

Wells Fargo reported $5.1 billion in profit for the fourth quarter on Friday, a 24 percent increase, driven by the bank’s lucrative mortgage business.

Seizing on low-interest rates that have spurred a flurry of refinancing activity, the bank again notched record profits. For the last 12 quarters, profits at the bank have increased.

In this latest quarter, Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, reported earnings of 91 cents a share, which exceeded analysts’ expectations. Ahead of the report, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters estimated that the bank would report earnings of 89 a share.

Wells Fargo, unlike many of its rivals, has been able to steadily increase its revenue. The first bank to release fourth-quarter earnings, Wells Fargo reported $21.95 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, up 7 percent from a year earlier.

Much of the revenue gains stemmed from the bank’s consumer lending business, as borrowers jumped on record low interest rates to refinance their mortgages. Wells Fargo, which dominates the market as the nation’s largest mortgage lender, notched $125 billion in mortgage originations, up from $120 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011. Refinancing applications accounted for nearly 75 percent of that total.

The big profit in the group came from the extra money that Wells Fargo makes bundling the mortgages into bonds and selling them to the government. In the fourth quarter, the bank reported $2.8 billion of so-called net gains on its mortgages activities, up 51 percent from the previous year.

Under the tenure of its chief executive, John G. Stumpf, Wells Fargo has aggressively expanded into the mortgage market, a strategy that might help the bank surpass its rivals in profits, notably JPMorgan Chase.

Wells Fargo’s net interest margin, a closely watched profit metric that measures the difference between the interest the bank collects and the interest it pays on its own borrowings, was down slightly to 3.56 percent, from 3.89 percent a year earlier.

Profit in the community banking division, which spans Wells Fargo’s retail branches and mortgage business, increased 14 percent to $2.9 billion.

The bank successfully courted more cash from depositors, adding $72 billion in total core checking and savings deposits than a year earlier.

“The company’s underlying results were driven by solid loan growth, improved credit quality, and continued success in improving efficiency,” Wells Fargo’s chief financial officer, Tim Sloan, said in a statement.

The bank has benefited from sweeping federal stimulus initiatives that have buoyed the mortgage business. The Treasury Department has helped spur Americans to refinance their mortgages.

Wells Fargo is the reigning titan in the mortgage industry, generating roughly a third of all the mortgages across the United States. Mortgage originations continued to climb, up 4 percent to $125 billion.

Adding to its mortgage-related profit, Wells Fargo reported a $926 million profit from its servicing business, in which the bank collects payments from homeowners. That’s up roughly 6 percent from a year earlier.

Alongside the consumer loan business, Wells Fargo had gains in its wealth management business, a particular focus for the bank to defray the impact of federal regulations that dragged down profits elsewhere.

Still, Wells Fargo’s profit from residential mortgages could wane this year if the Federal Reserve halts its extensive bond buying spree.

Working to move beyond the mortgage crisis woes that have dogged the bank, Wells Fargo has been brokering deals with federal regulators. Wells Fargo was one of 10 banks that signed onto an $8.5 billion settlement this week with the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve over claims that shoddy foreclosure practices may have led to the wrongful eviction of homeowners.

The sweeping federal pact ends a deeply flawed review of millions of loans in foreclosure that was mandated by federal regulators in 2011. The review, which was ended this week, began in November 2011 amid mounting public fury that bank employees were churning through hundreds of foreclosure filings without reviewing them for accuracy.

In addition to the settlement, the bank set aside $1.2 billion to prevent foreclosures.

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: Taking a Zen Approach to Caregiving

You try to help your elderly father. Irritated and defensive, he snaps at you instead of going along with your suggestion. And you think “this is so unfair” and feel a rising tide of anger.

How to handle situations like this, which arise often and create so much angst for caregivers?

Jennifer Block finds the answer in what she calls “contemplative caregiving” — the application of Buddhist principles to caregiving and the subject of a year-long course that starts at the San Francisco Zen Center in a few weeks.

This approach aims to cultivate compassion, both for older people and the people they depend on, said Ms. Block, 49, a Buddhist chaplain and the course’s lead instructor. She’s also the former director of education at the Zen Hospice project in San Francisco and founder of the Beyond Measure School for Contemplative Care, which is helping develop a new, Zen-inspired senior living community in the area.

I caught up with Ms. Block recently, and what follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Let’s start with your experience. Have you been a caregiver?

My experience in caregiving is as a professional providing spiritual care to individuals and families when they are facing and coping with aging and sickness and loss and dying, particularly in hospital and hospice settings.

What kinds of challenges have you witnessed?

People are for the most part unprepared for caregiving. They’re either untrained or unable to trust their own instincts. They lack confidence as well as knowledge. By confidence, I mean understanding and accepting that we don’t know all the answers – what to do, how to fix things.

This past weekend, I was on the phone with a woman who’d brought her mom to live near her in assisted living. The mom had been to the hospital the day before. My conversation with the daughter was about helping her see the truth that her mother needed more care and that was going to change the daughter’s responsibilities and her life. And also, her mother was frail, elderly, and coming nearer to death.

That’s hard, isn’t it?

Yes, because we live in a death-denying society. Also, we live in a fast-paced, demanding world that says don’t sit still — do something. But people receiving care often need most of all for us to spend time with them. When we do that, their mortality and our grief and our helplessness becomes closer to us and more apparent.

How can contemplative caregiving help?

We teach people to cultivate a relationship with aging, sickness and dying. To turn toward it rather than turning away, and to pay close attention. Most people don’t want to do this.

A person needs training to face what is difficult in oneself and in others. There are spiritual muscles we need to develop, just like we develop physical muscles in a gym. Also, the mind needs to be trained to be responsive instead of reactive.

What does that mean?

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re trying to help your mother, and she says something off-putting to you like “you’ve always been terrible at keeping house. It’s no wonder you lost my pajamas.”

The first thing is to notice your experience. To become aware of that feeling, almost like being slapped emotionally. To notice your chest tightening.

Then I tell people to take a deep breath. And say something to themselves like “soften” to address that tightness. That’s how you can stay facing something uncomfortable rather than turning away.

If I were in this position, I might say something to myself like “hello unhappiness” or “hello suffering” or “hello aging” to tether myself.

The second step would be curiosity about that experience. Like, wow, where do I feel that anger that rose up in me, or that fear? Oh, it’s in my chest. I’m going to feel that, stay with it, investigate it.

Why is that important?

Because as we investigate something we come to understand it. And, paradoxically, when we pay attention to pain it changes. It softens. It moves. It lessens. It deepens. And we get to know it and learn not to be afraid of it or change it or fix it but just come alongside of it.

Over hours, days, months, years, the mind and heart come to know pain. And the response to pain is compassion — the wish for the alleviation of pain.

Let’s go back to what mother said about your housekeeping and the pajamas. Maybe you leave the room for five minutes so you can pay attention to your reaction and remember your training. Then, you can go back in and have a response rather than a reaction. Maybe something like “Mom, I think you’re right. I may not be the world’s best housekeeper. I’m sorry I lost your pajamas. It seems like you’re having a pretty strong response to that, and I’d like to know why it matters so much to you. What’s happening with you today?”

Are other skills important?

Another skill is to become aware of how much we receive as well as give in caregiving. Caregiving can be really gratifying. It’s an expression of our values and identity: the way we want the world to be. So, I try to teach people how this role benefits them. Such as learning what it’s like to be old. Or having a close, intimate relationship with an older parent for the first time in decades. It isn’t necessarily pleasant or easy. But the alternative is missing someone’s final chapter, and that can be a real loss.

What will you do in your course?

We’ll teach the principles of contemplative care and discuss them. We’ll have homework, such as ‘Bring me three examples of someone you were caring for who was caring toward you in return.’ That’s one way of practicing attention. And people will train in meditation.

We’ll also explore our own relationship to aging, sickness, dying and loss. We’ll tell our stories: this is the situation I was in, this is where I felt myself shut down, this was the edge of my comfort or knowledge. And we’ll teach principles from Buddhism. Equanimity. Compassion. Deep inner connectedness.

What can people do on their own?

Mindfulness training is offered in almost every city. That’s one of the core components of this approach.

I think every caregiver needs to have their own caregiver — a therapist or a colleague or a friend, someone who is there for them and with whom they can unburden themselves. I think of caregiving as drawing water from a well. We need to make sure that we have whatever nurtures us, whatever supplies that well. And often, that’s connecting with others.

Are other groups doing this kind of work?

In New York City, the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care educates the public and professionals about contemplative care. And in New Mexico, the Upaya Zen Center does similar work, much of it centered around death and dying.

People who want to read about this might want to look at a new book of essays, “The Arts of Contemplative Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work” (Wisdom Publications, 2012).

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: Taking a Zen Approach to Caregiving

You try to help your elderly father. Irritated and defensive, he snaps at you instead of going along with your suggestion. And you think “this is so unfair” and feel a rising tide of anger.

How to handle situations like this, which arise often and create so much angst for caregivers?

Jennifer Block finds the answer in what she calls “contemplative caregiving” — the application of Buddhist principles to caregiving and the subject of a year-long course that starts at the San Francisco Zen Center in a few weeks.

This approach aims to cultivate compassion, both for older people and the people they depend on, said Ms. Block, 49, a Buddhist chaplain and the course’s lead instructor. She’s also the former director of education at the Zen Hospice project in San Francisco and founder of the Beyond Measure School for Contemplative Care, which is helping develop a new, Zen-inspired senior living community in the area.

I caught up with Ms. Block recently, and what follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Let’s start with your experience. Have you been a caregiver?

My experience in caregiving is as a professional providing spiritual care to individuals and families when they are facing and coping with aging and sickness and loss and dying, particularly in hospital and hospice settings.

What kinds of challenges have you witnessed?

People are for the most part unprepared for caregiving. They’re either untrained or unable to trust their own instincts. They lack confidence as well as knowledge. By confidence, I mean understanding and accepting that we don’t know all the answers – what to do, how to fix things.

This past weekend, I was on the phone with a woman who’d brought her mom to live near her in assisted living. The mom had been to the hospital the day before. My conversation with the daughter was about helping her see the truth that her mother needed more care and that was going to change the daughter’s responsibilities and her life. And also, her mother was frail, elderly, and coming nearer to death.

That’s hard, isn’t it?

Yes, because we live in a death-denying society. Also, we live in a fast-paced, demanding world that says don’t sit still — do something. But people receiving care often need most of all for us to spend time with them. When we do that, their mortality and our grief and our helplessness becomes closer to us and more apparent.

How can contemplative caregiving help?

We teach people to cultivate a relationship with aging, sickness and dying. To turn toward it rather than turning away, and to pay close attention. Most people don’t want to do this.

A person needs training to face what is difficult in oneself and in others. There are spiritual muscles we need to develop, just like we develop physical muscles in a gym. Also, the mind needs to be trained to be responsive instead of reactive.

What does that mean?

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re trying to help your mother, and she says something off-putting to you like “you’ve always been terrible at keeping house. It’s no wonder you lost my pajamas.”

The first thing is to notice your experience. To become aware of that feeling, almost like being slapped emotionally. To notice your chest tightening.

Then I tell people to take a deep breath. And say something to themselves like “soften” to address that tightness. That’s how you can stay facing something uncomfortable rather than turning away.

If I were in this position, I might say something to myself like “hello unhappiness” or “hello suffering” or “hello aging” to tether myself.

The second step would be curiosity about that experience. Like, wow, where do I feel that anger that rose up in me, or that fear? Oh, it’s in my chest. I’m going to feel that, stay with it, investigate it.

Why is that important?

Because as we investigate something we come to understand it. And, paradoxically, when we pay attention to pain it changes. It softens. It moves. It lessens. It deepens. And we get to know it and learn not to be afraid of it or change it or fix it but just come alongside of it.

Over hours, days, months, years, the mind and heart come to know pain. And the response to pain is compassion — the wish for the alleviation of pain.

Let’s go back to what mother said about your housekeeping and the pajamas. Maybe you leave the room for five minutes so you can pay attention to your reaction and remember your training. Then, you can go back in and have a response rather than a reaction. Maybe something like “Mom, I think you’re right. I may not be the world’s best housekeeper. I’m sorry I lost your pajamas. It seems like you’re having a pretty strong response to that, and I’d like to know why it matters so much to you. What’s happening with you today?”

Are other skills important?

Another skill is to become aware of how much we receive as well as give in caregiving. Caregiving can be really gratifying. It’s an expression of our values and identity: the way we want the world to be. So, I try to teach people how this role benefits them. Such as learning what it’s like to be old. Or having a close, intimate relationship with an older parent for the first time in decades. It isn’t necessarily pleasant or easy. But the alternative is missing someone’s final chapter, and that can be a real loss.

What will you do in your course?

We’ll teach the principles of contemplative care and discuss them. We’ll have homework, such as ‘Bring me three examples of someone you were caring for who was caring toward you in return.’ That’s one way of practicing attention. And people will train in meditation.

We’ll also explore our own relationship to aging, sickness, dying and loss. We’ll tell our stories: this is the situation I was in, this is where I felt myself shut down, this was the edge of my comfort or knowledge. And we’ll teach principles from Buddhism. Equanimity. Compassion. Deep inner connectedness.

What can people do on their own?

Mindfulness training is offered in almost every city. That’s one of the core components of this approach.

I think every caregiver needs to have their own caregiver — a therapist or a colleague or a friend, someone who is there for them and with whom they can unburden themselves. I think of caregiving as drawing water from a well. We need to make sure that we have whatever nurtures us, whatever supplies that well. And often, that’s connecting with others.

Are other groups doing this kind of work?

In New York City, the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care educates the public and professionals about contemplative care. And in New Mexico, the Upaya Zen Center does similar work, much of it centered around death and dying.

People who want to read about this might want to look at a new book of essays, “The Arts of Contemplative Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work” (Wisdom Publications, 2012).

Read More..

Visit by Google Chairman May Benefit North Korea

BEIJING — As a work of propaganda, the images that North Korea circulated this week showing Google’s executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, touring a high-tech incubation center are hard to beat.

Adrian Bradshaw/European Pressphoto Agency

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, at left wearing a tie, and former Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico spoke to reporters in Beijing on Thursday after returning from North Korea.

With former Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico at his side, Mr. Schmidt, who is fond of describing the Internet as the enemy of despots, toured what was presented as the hub of the computer industry in one of the world’s most pitiless police states. Both men gazed attentively as a select group of North Koreans showed their ability to surf the Web.

It is unclear what the famously hermetic North Koreans hoped to accomplish by allowing the visit. But the photos of the billionaire entrepreneur taking the time to visit the nation’s computer labs were bound to be useful to a new national leader whom analysts say needs to show his people that their impoverished nation is moving forward.

It will matter little, those experts say, that the visitors were bundled against the cold, indoors — a sign of the country’s extreme privation — or that the vast majority of North Koreans have no access to computers, much less the Web beyond their country’s tightly controlled borders.

The men’s quixotic four-day trip ended Thursday much the way it began, with some analysts calling the visit hopelessly naïve and others describing it as valuable back-channel diplomacy at a time when Washington and Pyongyang are not on speaking terms (again).

“I’m still spinning my wheels to figure out a plausible motivation for why they went,” said Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea specialist at the International Crisis Group.

Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Richardson insist they accomplished some good — showing the world has not forgotten the plight of an American detained in the North, and at least trying to nudge the tightly sealed nation a bit closer to the fold of globally connected nations.

“As the world becomes increasingly connected, their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their  physical world, their economic growth and so forth,” Mr. Schmidt told reporters after arriving at Beijing International Airport. “We made that alternative very, very clear.”

The unofficial visit, however, raised hackles in Washington, and provided rich fodder for commentators and comedians. Even before the Americans left Pyongyang, someone created an account on Tumblr, the popular social blogging site, called “Eric Schmidt looking at things,” that parodied sites (themselves parodies) featuring the country’s leaders earnestly inspecting livestock, soldiers or leather insoles. (Mr. Schmidt is shown looking intently at computer screens, “the back of a North Korean Student,” and Mr. Richardson.)

Others were less kind. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, took to Twitter to call the self-appointed delegation “useful idiots,” and John R. Bolton, a former United Nations ambassador, said the delegation was unwittingly feeding the North Korean propaganda mill as it sought to burnish the credentials of Kim Jung-un, the nation’s leader, who is in his 20s.

“Pyongyang uses gullible Americans for its own purposes,” Mr. Bolton wrote in The New York Daily News.

The State Department said it did not think the timing of the visit was “particularly helpful,” given efforts by the United States to rally international support for tougher sanctions following North Korea’s recent launching of a rocket that intelligence experts say could help in the development of missiles that could one day reach the United States.

As if on cue, the North Korean news media hailed the visit by “the Google team” — which included Jared Cohen, who leads Google’s think tank — highlighting their visit to the mausoleum where Mr. Kim’s grandfather and father lie in state. There, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Schmidt “expressed admiration and paid respect to Comrade Kim Il-sung and Comrade Kim Jong-il,” the North’s main party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said.

Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea, Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco, and Edward Wong from Beijing.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 11, 2013

An earlier version of this article paraphrased incorrectly State Department comments about the visit to North Korea by Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Richardson. The Department said it did not think the timing of the visit was “particularly helpful.” It did not call the visit “not particularly helpful.”

Read More..

India Ink: Insurgents in Jharkhand Plant Bombs Inside Dead Bodies

Maoist insurgents in Jharkhand state have started to hide explosive devices in the bodies of their enemies, police officials said, a new tactic in the long battle between Indian security forces and the insurgents.

On Monday, rebels killed nine Central Reserve Police Force paramilitary soldiers and three villagers in an ambush in the Karmatiya forest area of Latehar district, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) southwest from the state capital of Ranchi, said state police chief Gauri Shankar Rath. After the insurgents retreated into the woods, the Central Reserve Police Force on Wednesday found the body of Babulal Patel, 29, a constable, with stitches in his abdomen, he said.

His body was flown to Ranchi by helicopter and taken to the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences for an autopsy. When the doctors saw the stitches, they grew alarmed and called the top security officials, Binay Kumar, a doctor there, said.

Using X-rays, members of a bomb disposal squad detected an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., in the soldier’s stomach. With the help of doctors, it took over two hours for the bomb disposal unit to remove the explosive and defuse it outside.

“The I.E.D. connected with detonator batteries and a small solar panel weighing about 2.45 kilograms was extracted with utmost care from the body of the security personnel,” said Dr. Kumar. “Even a small mistake or a little pressure could have exploded the bomb device, triggering a major casualty inside the hospital,” he said. “The abdomen was stitched with surgical precision.”

A similar I.E.D. had detonated when the security personnel, along with some villagers, had removed the body of another colleague in the forest area. Three villagers were killed in that explosion on Wednesday.

Jharkhand’s police chief, Mr. Rath, said this was the first time the Maoist had used bodies as booby traps.

“With this inhuman act, the Maoists have now made it clear that they do not have any regard for human dignity, values and human lives,” said Mr. Rath. “This incident has crossed all limits of cruelty. We’ll definitely retaliate when the time comes.”

Mr. Rath called the Maoists’ most recent attack on security personnel “well planned.”

The state police official said the Maoists had ambushed the security forces under the leadership of Deo Kumar Singh, also known as Arvindji, considered among the top 10 Maoists commanders in Jharkhand and Bihar. “He has executed several deadly operations in the past,” Mr. Rath said.

Latehar’s superintendent of police, Kranti K. Garhdeshi, said that Mr. Singh also was an expert in I.E.D.’s and landmines.

In the past decade, hundreds of security personnel and civilians have been killed in battles with the Maoist insurgents in Jharkhand. The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has declared the insurgents the biggest internal security threat in India.

Read More..

Wall Street Flattens Out

Stocks rose ever so slightly on Wall Street on Thursday as stronger-than-expected exports in China, the world’s second-biggest economy, raised hopes for a more robust recovery in the global economy this year.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index added 0.2 percent, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.1 percent and the Nasdaq composite index was flat in morning trading.

Data showed China’s export growth rebounded sharply to a seven-month high in December, a strong finish to the year after seven straight quarters of slowdown, even as demand from Europe and the United States remained subdued.

Ford shares gained 3.2 percent after it doubled its first-quarter dividend to 10 cents a share, despite a recent drop in market share.

Adding to the bullish sentiment, Spanish benchmark government bond yields fell below 5 percent to a 10-month low on the back of a strong bond auction that raised more than the targeted amount. European stock markets were mostly higher after the European Central Bank kept benchmark interest rates steady.

“The market’s more positive and it owes a lot of that to the Chinese economic data,” said Art Hogan, managing director of Lazard Capital Markets in New York, adding that the success of the Spanish auction was also of note.

Shares of the upscale jeweler Tiffany dropped 6 percent after it said earnings for the year through Jan. 31 will be at the lower end of its forecast.

Molycorp shares dropped 20 percent after the company said revenue and cash flow would be lower than expected this year due to lower rare-earth prices.

Nokia shares jumped 14 percent on Wall Street after the Finnish handset maker said its fourth-quarter results were better than expected and that the mobile phone business achieved underlying profitability.

Read More..

Institute of Medicine Studying Concussions in Young Athletes

The Institute of Medicine, a federally financed research group, has started a 15-month investigation into sports-related concussions sustained by young athletes.

An ad hoc committee of scientists, which held its first meeting Monday, “will conduct a study on sports-related concussions in youth, from elementary school through young adulthood, including military personnel and their dependents,” according to the Web site of the institute, part of the National Academies of Science.

The committee will look at the causes of concussions and the “relationships to hits to the head or body during sports, and the effectiveness of protective devices and equipment.”

The committee will also review screening, diagnosis, treatment and long-term consequences of concussions and head hits.  

Read More..

Institute of Medicine Studying Concussions in Young Athletes

The Institute of Medicine, a federally financed research group, has started a 15-month investigation into sports-related concussions sustained by young athletes.

An ad hoc committee of scientists, which held its first meeting Monday, “will conduct a study on sports-related concussions in youth, from elementary school through young adulthood, including military personnel and their dependents,” according to the Web site of the institute, part of the National Academies of Science.

The committee will look at the causes of concussions and the “relationships to hits to the head or body during sports, and the effectiveness of protective devices and equipment.”

The committee will also review screening, diagnosis, treatment and long-term consequences of concussions and head hits.  

Read More..

Baseball Dumping Dugout-to-Bullpen Landlines

The reserve clause is dead. And so are wool uniforms. There are no longer eight teams in each league. And the Houston Astros have departed the National League.

 Major League Baseball is now about to disconnect the landlines that link dugouts to bullpens. Long after the rest of society embraced cellphones, managers and coaches will soon be able to discuss pitching changes on Samsung Galaxy S III phones.

The 21st-century 4G dugout-to-bullpen connection that is being created by T-Mobile USA as part of its wireless sponsorship with Major League Baseball was announced Tuesday at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

 “This is baseball’s continued push into the digital age,” said Tim Brosnan, Major League Baseball’s executive vice president for business. “It’s also about a very aggressive wireless provider that sought us out to create this unique communications platform.”

Baseball had not thought of a dugout-to-bullpen phone system in its talks with various wireless providers about a national sponsorship over the past decade, Brosnan said.

The wireless system will be tested at the World Baseball Classic in Arizona in March. After assessing how it works and fixing any problems, baseball will roll it out in the major leagues. Whether each stadium will have it in 2013 has not been determined.

T-Mobile’s sponsorship plans also include enhancing network connectivity for fans at all ballparks and helping MLB Advanced Media create content for smartphones and tablets.

To create the dugout-to-bullpen communications system, each ballpark will get the equivalent of a small cellular system with a miniature cell tower.

But while wireless companies like T-Mobile are continuously trying to broaden their national coverage territory, the dugout-to-bullpen system will have limits enforced by a technology called geo-fencing. So, managers and pitching coaches will not be able to chat with the bullpen coach from the pitcher’s mound. And bullpen coaches cannot ask, “Can you hear me now?” once they leave the bullpen’s environs.

“The guidance we’ve been given is that we shouldn’t fundamentally change what makes baseball baseball,” said Mark McDiarmid, T-Mobile’s vice president for engineering. “There is reason to be cautious about how far the coach could move away from the dugout before the umpires might think it’s inappropriate.”

Baseball is not shifting to cellphones because of an incident during the eighth inning of Game 5 of the 2011 World Series when the noise at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington caused Derek Lilliquist, the Cardinals’ bullpen coach, to misunderstand Manager Tony La Russa’s instructions about which relievers should start warming up.

Twice, La Russa asked that Jason Motte get up. Lilliquist apparently did not hear the first request. When La Russa called again to get Motte ready, Lilliquist thought he was asking for Lance Lynn. The miscommunication led to La Russa’s surprise when he summoned a right-hander and Lynn arrived at the mound, not Motte. Lynn stayed in long enough to issue an intentional walk; Motte quickly got ready and replaced him.

Lilliquist might well have heard La Russa’s instructions if they had used the cellphone system, with multiple microphones, noise mitigation and the ability to raise audio levels.

 Given T-Mobile’s investment over the next three years, it is not surprising that each dugout’s branded cellphone docking station — about the size of a personal computer tower — will be about as visible to TV cameras as the Gatorade vessel is.

But, Brosnan said, baseball has not ordained the obvious commercial tie-in: that each call to the bullpen on Fox, ESPN and TBS’s national telecasts be sponsored by T-Mobile.

Read More..

Three Kurdish Activists Killed in Central Paris

Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Members of the Kurdish community in France protested on Thursday near the institute in Paris where three Kurdish women were found killed.

PARIS — Three Kurdish women, including a founding member of a leading militant group fighting for autonomy in Turkey, were shot to death at a Kurdish institute in central Paris, police officials said on Thursday, potentially jeopardizing efforts to negotiate a cease-fire in the decades-old conflict.

News reports identified the women as Sakine Cansiz, a founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by the initials P.K.K. , Fidan Dogan, the head of the institute and a representative of the Kurdistan National Committee, and Leyla Soylemez, a youthful Kurdish activist.

The women’s bodies were discovered shortly before 2 a.m. on Thursday, according to Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, adding that the antiterror department of the prosecutor’s office will oversee the investigation. She confirmed that Ms. Dogan, born in 1984, and Ms. Soylemez, born in 1988, were victims in the killings, but declined to confirm the identity of the third woman.

“No hypothesis can be excluded at this stage” about the motive for the killing, she said.

Visiting the crime scene on Thursday, Interior Minister Manuel Valls called the shootings “intolerable” and said they were “without doubt an execution.” The violence at the Kurdish Institute of Paris, in the city’s 10th district near the Gare du Nord railroad station, seemed to open a new chapter in the often murky annals of Kurdish exile life.

In recent years, Turkey has sought to clamp down on the activities of Kurdish activists outside of Turkey. Sizable exile communities in France, Germany, Belgium and Denmark have established civic and media organizations that Kurdish officials say are a refuge from Turkish censorship.

Turkey has accused some of the institutions of being fronts for separatist activities or terrorism.

Analysts in Turkey argued that it seemed to be no coincidence that the killings had come just days after reports of the peace negotiations involving Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the P.K.K. who was incarcerated in 1999 in a fortresslike prison on the western Turkish island of Imrali.

While Kurdish militants blamed Turkey for the shootings in Paris, Turkish officials said the women could have been killed because of feuding within the P.K.K.

Huseyin Celik, the deputy chairman of the ruling party in Turkey, said the episode seemed to be part of an internal dispute but offered no evidence to support the claim.

“Whenever in Turkey we reach the stage of saying ‘friend, give up this business, let the weapons be silent,’ whenever a determination emerges on this, such incidents happen,” Mr. Celik told reporters in Ankara. “Is there one P.K.K.? I’m not sure of that.”

French police officials said a murder investigation had been opened. The bodies and three shell casings were found in a room at the institute. The women were all said to hold Turkish passports.

The P.K.K. has been fighting a bitter guerrilla war against the Turkish authorities for almost three decades to reinforce demands for greater autonomy. The conflict, which has claimed some 40,000 lives, is fueled by competing notions of national identity rooted in the founding of modern Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey, the United States and the European Union have labeled the P.K.K. a terrorist organization, but sympathy for the group and its goals remains widespread in many towns in Turkey’s rugged southeast.

Restive Kurdish minorities span a broad region embracing areas of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and parts of the former Soviet Union. Regional turmoil in recent years has emboldened Kurdish separatists inspired by the example of Iraqi Kurds who control an autonomous zone. Turkey also fears that the civil war in neighboring Syria could strengthen the separatist yearnings of Kurds there, feeding Kurdish activism in Turkey.

The killings, which apparently took place Wednesday, inspired hundreds of Kurdish exiles to gather outside the institute on Thursday, chanting “We are all P.K.K.!” and accusing Turkey of assassinating the three women, abetted by the French president, François Hollande.

The bodies were first discovered in the early hours of Thursday by Kurdish exiles who had become concerned about the whereabouts of the women.

The victims had been alone in the building on Wednesday and could not be reached by telephone in the late afternoon, according to Leon Edart, who manages the center. Mr. Edart, speaking to French reporters, suggested the victims may have opened the door to their killer or killers.

Dan Bilefsky reported from Paris, Alan Cowell from London, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul. Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.

Read More..

Analysts Skeptical as Majority Owner Takes Role as Chief Executive of Sears

Elise Amendola/Associated Press

A Sears in Peabody, Mass.

Just hours after a board discussion on Monday, a note went out to Sears Holdings employees from Edward S. Lampert, the company’s majority owner and chairman, that he would now be its chief executive.

“I believe in our company,” Mr. Lampert wrote.

But not everyone shares his optimism.

Seven years after he engineered the merger of Sears and Kmart, Mr. Lampert’s plans for the company face a new round of skepticism.

On Monday, Sears announced that its chief executive of two years, Louis J. D’Ambrosio, would be stepping aside because of a health issue in his family and that Mr. Lampert would assume the role. Despite the unexpected departure, Sears is not expected to change course.

“The reality is, Eddie’s been running the company the whole time,” said Gary Balter, an analyst at Credit Suisse.

Mr. Lampert once stepped back from day-to-day management, but more recently he has increased involvement in Sears as he has scaled back his influence on other investments. He maintains an office at Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill., although he lives on the East Coast.

If employees “wanted to make merchandising decisions, they had to fly up to Connecticut to get approval from Eddie. He was making day-to-day decisions in this company, and clearly he’s making the capital decisions,” Mr. Balter said.

But Mr. Lampert is a money man, not a merchant, and analysts question his plans for reviving Sears, which has faltered since he combined Sears and Kmart. It has valuable assets, they say, but sales and profitability continue to slide. In his most recent chairman’s letter, Mr. Lampert outlined some ways he wanted to take Sears forward, including building on its loyalty program and expanding what he called “integrated” options — allowing shoppers to buy online, in stores, via mobile devices or a combination. He highlighted Sears’s liquidity options and its ownership of and access to cash from Lands’ End, the clothing retailer Sears bought in 2002, and its real estate, “should the circumstances warrant.” He further wrote, “We do not expect to utilize or execute all of these options,” but he said he wanted to reassure vendors.

“If you’re unwilling to try new things, and to fail and learn, you don’t have a shot,” Mr. Lampert said in an interview last year. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful, but you have to try to change.”

Mr. Lampert’s new role as chief executive of a struggling company is a new one for him.

When he was younger, Mr. Lampert made a name for himself with his fast rise through the ranks at Goldman Sachs, his brash courtship of Wall Street idols like Richard Rainwater and Robert Rubin and, when he started his investment fund ESL Investments in 1988, the high returns at the fund. He invested in struggling retailers like AutoNation and AutoZone in the 1990s and early 2000s, then bought a controlling stake in Kmart when it was in bankruptcy. In 2005, he completed the merger with Sears.

And, adding some Hollywood flair to the story line, after being kidnapped at gunpoint from a parking garage in 2003, Mr. Lampert, after being held for about 30 hours, managed to negotiate his own release.

Fortune called the billionaire “the best investor of his generation.” Bloomberg Businessweek asked if he was “The Next Warren Buffett?”

But Sears value has declined since then. His initial idea was to combine the best of Sears and Kmart and sell some appealing locations to competitors. But the recession meant the real estate was no longer in demand, and now many large retailers are downsizing or closing stores.

As the real estate options diminished, Sears was losing sales. The people Mr. Lampert hired to run the company were not retailers, and instead had backgrounds in fast food, supply chains and technology.

Sears’s sales have declined for five straight years, and its market capitalization now is 15 percent of what it was at the beginning of 2006. In the third quarter, the company lost $498 million, up from $410 million for the same quarter in 2011. Sales fell by $548 million, to $8.9 billion.

In the last year, Mr. Lampert has directed a cleanup of the balance sheet. He sold some valuable real estate, spun off business units and reduced inventory to assuage liquidity concerns after a dismal 2011 holiday sales season.

This year, it spun off a profitable hardware retail division and part of its stake in Sears Canada.

Read More..

Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

Read More..

Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

Read More..

Chinese Man Pleads Guilty in Copyright Violation Case

Nearly five years ago, a Chinese man named Xiang Li registered several domain names, including www.crack99.com, and embarked on an ambitious, and ultimately illegal, venture.

Mr. Li, who was based in Chengdu, paid a network of computer experts to scour the Internet to find commercial software they could “crack,” meaning they bypassed security protocols designed to prevent unauthorized access or reproduction.

Ultimately, Mr. Li offered more than 2,000 pirated software products that could be used as applications in the military, engineering, space exploration, mathematics and explosive simulation, and sold them at a fraction of their retail price, which federal prosecutors said was over $100 million.

Among his biggest customers were an electronics engineer at NASA and the chief scientist at a government military contractor, but his clients also included students, inventors and small-business owners. Mr. Li sold the products for $20 to $1,200, accepting payments by Western Union and MoneyGram, according to government documents.

But Mr. Li’s criminal enterprise officially ended last year when he was arrested by undercover agents. On Monday, he pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Delaware to one count of conspiring to steal copyrighted software. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.

Mr. Li, who is 36, could not be reached for comment, nor could his lawyer, Mingli Chen. Mr. Li’s wife, Chun Yan Li, was also indicted on charges of participating in the illegal scheme; she remains at large, presumably in China, officials said.

Mr. Li was arrested in June 2011 in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands during a meeting that had been arranged by undercover agents posing as American businessmen. The agents arranged the meeting under the guise of picking up their purchase of pirated software, design packaging and 20 gigabytes of proprietary data, and to discuss a plan to transmit cracked software over the Internet so they could resell it to small businesses in the United States.

After the arrest, agents recovered six disks from Mr. Li containing an assortment of data pirated from an unidentified American software company, including military and civilian aircraft image models and a software module containing data about the International Space Station.

Edward J. McAndrew, one of the prosecutors on the case, said Mr. Li’s arrest was among the largest criminal copyright cases to be successfully prosecuted by the government.

Mr. McAndrew and his colleague, David L. Hall, explained in court documents that once Mr. Li obtained cracked software, he would advertise it on his Web sites, which also included www.cad100.net and www.dongle-crack-download.com. Mr. Li’s customers would then wire him money, some of which he deposited in an account at the Bank of China. From February 2008 to June 2011, Mr. Li and his customers exchanged more than 25,000 e-mails about pirated products, according to the government, which obtained a search warrant for his Gmail account.

Mr. Li used his Gmail account to orchestrate more than 500 illegal transactions with customers in at least 28 states and more than 60 foreign countries, according to court documents. Software was pirated from more than 200 manufacturers.

Mr. McAndrew said none of the pirated software obtained by the undercover agents from Mr. Li contained classified material. But Mr. McAndrew said the government could not determine whether any classified material was distributed to other buyers since it did not have access to all the pirated products that Mr. Li sold.

One of Mr. Li’s biggest customers was Cosburn Wedderburn, a NASA electronics engineer, who bought 12 cracked software programs with a retail value exceeding $1.2 million. Another was Dr. Wronald Best, chief scientist at an unidentified government contractor that provides services to the United States military and law enforcement, like radio transmissions, microwave technology and vacuum tubes used in military helicopters. Dr. Best exchanged more than 260 e-mails with Mr. Li to obtain 10 cracked software programs, with a retail value of more than $600,000, prosecutors said.

Both Mr. Wedderburn and Dr. Best pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Both are awaiting sentencing.

Starting in January 2010, undercover agents began buying pirated software from Mr. Li’s Web sites, receiving electronic files with the pirated software or hyperlinks that allowed the agents to download the software from servers in the United States.

In all, the agents paid the Lis $8,615 for the software.

For instance, in January 2010, the agents bought a pirated copy of Satellite Tool Kit 8.0, a software product from Analytical Graphics that has a retail value of more than $150,000. The software includes several functions used by the military and intelligence communities, including three-dimensional warfare simulations.

Mr. Li’s e-mails suggest he was aware of the illegality of his venture, prosecutors say. “I am not a crack production engineers (my job is to collect)(.) This is an international organization created to crack declassified document (s),” he said in a 2009 e-mail. In another he wrote, “I need to use your money to seek the help of experts to cracker master I earn 10 percent of the profits.”

One customer asked who did the cracking. “Experts crack,” Mr. Li wrote. “Chinese people. Sorry can not reveal more.”

Read More..

The Lede Blog: Armstrong Set to Appear on Oprah Next Week, as New Allegation Surfaces

Last Updated, Wednesday, 10:48 a.m. The year before his seventh and final Tour de France victory, Lance Armstrong offered to donate “in excess of $150,000″ to the antidoping agency in charge of keeping American athletes from using performance-enhancing drugs, according to the organization’s chief executive.

The latest accusation against Armstrong, the disgraced former cyclist, was made by the current head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, Travis Tygart, in an interview with CBS News posted online on Tuesday. In October, Usada stripped Armstrong of all of his titles and barred him from competition for life following the release of a 202-page report into what the agency called “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”

As my colleague Juliet Macur reported, Armstrong, who has so far denied all allegations of cheating, “has told associates and antidoping officials that he is considering publicly admitting that he used banned performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions during his cycling career.” Late Tuesday, Oprah Winfrey announced that she “will speak exclusively with Lance Armstrong in his first no-holds-barred interview,” to be broadcast next week on her network.

BREAKING NEWS: Looking forward to this conversation with @lancearmstrong: http://t.co/GwSmBhdW #NextChapter

— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) 9 Jan 13

As the cycling journalist Lionel Birnie notes, the Oprah Winfrey Network is a joint venture with Discovery Communications, the broadcaster that sponsored Armstrong’s team in 2005.

Lance is going on Oprah, partly-produced by Discovery Channel, sponsors of Lance’s 7th and final fraudulent Tour win. Somehow fitting.

— Lionel Birnie (@lioneljbirnie) 9 Jan 13

Samantha Lane, a reporter for The Age in Australia, pointed out on Twitter that Winfrey and Armstrong looked comfortable together in a photograph published in the May 2004 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine with an interview of the cyclist before that year’s Tour de France.

Oprah & Lance, in happier times (pic from her website). http://t.co/TMpMfYfk

— Sam Lane (@SamJaneLane) 9 Jan 13

The network’s logo was emblazoned across the victor’s yellow jersey Armstrong wore on the top step of the podium in Paris that year, as he lectured “the people that don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics.”

Directly addressing those who accused him of doping that day, Armstrong said, “I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry you can’t dream big and I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles, but this is one hell of a race, this is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe. You should believe in these athletes and you should believe in these people. I’m a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live and there’s no secrets — this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it.”

The notion of Armstrong confessing on Oprah was pre-mocked nearly two years ago by the bike racers and cartoonists Andy Shen and Dan Schmalz in their cult comic strip about the soap-operatic world of professional cycling, “As the Toto Turns,” for nyvelocity.com.

Another journalist who writes about cycling, Shane Stokes, suggested that Armstrong might expect Winfrey to go easy on him, since she let another disgraced athlete, Marion Jones, claim during a 2008 interview that she had used performance-enhancing drugs unintentionally.

Marion Jones claimed during a 2008 interview with Oprah Winfrey that she had used performance-enhancing drugs unintentionally.

Just after news of the interview broke, Kathy LeMond, whose husband, Greg, is now the only American to win the Tour de France, offered to put Winfrey in touch with people who could give her a crash course on the culture of professional cycling.

.@Oprah I hope you get educated before the interview. I know people that can help you.

— Kathy LeMond (@KathyLeMond) 9 Jan 13

Joe Lindsey of Bicycling Magazine asked his Twitter followers to help Winfrey by suggesting some tough questions.

I am trying to anticipate some of “no holds barred” questions in Oprah’s Lance interview. How about some suggestions? #questionsforlance

— joelindsey (@joelindsey) 9 Jan 13

That’s pretty good. RT @BBQ44 what did you tell your kids or will/have you? #questionsforlance

— joelindsey (@joelindsey) 9 Jan 13

The complete CBS interview with the antidoping official is scheduled to be broadcast on Wednesday, during the premier of a new program, “60 Minutes Sports.” In one portion released on Tuesday, Tygart said it was “totally inappropriate” that Armstrong had donated about $100,000 to the International Cycling Union, a regulatory body involved in drug testing, during his career. He then revealed that someone representing Armstrong had offered to give the American antidoping agency more than $150,000 at some point in 2004. “It was a clear conflict of interest for Usada,” Tygart said. “We had no hesitation in rejecting that offer.” Pressed further about the amount of the proposed donation, Tygart said that it was about $250,000.

In another portion of the interview, broadcast on the CBS Evening News on Tuesday, Tygart said that Armstrong had tried to intimidate former teammates who had testified to a federal grand jury about his doping. The official also revealed that he personally had received death threats as a result of his investigation into the cancer survivor who was once a hero to millions.

Read More..

Frequent Flier: When Even 4 Hours of Layover Time Isn’t Enough

William Boutelle cycling on Lismore Isle in Scotland. He is  a psychiatrist at ServiceNet, which provides clinical services in Northampton, Mass.

Q. How often do you fly for business?

A. About twice a month, mostly domestic.

Q. What’s your least favorite airport?

A. Philadelphia International. Something always gets messed up there, without fail.

Q. Of all the places you’ve been, what’s the best?

A. The Greek islands. I love the people, their sense of independence, the ambience and, let’s face it, the islands are great for a beer on the beach.

Q. What’s your secret airport vice?

A. I don’t know if it’s a vice, but I try to always book a layover in Denver. There’s a great restaurant in the airport where I can get the best filet mignon. It’s my red meat quota until I get another chance to fly through there.

I WORKED for more than 30 years for the government as a psychiatrist with the Department of Veterans Affairs system. I flew all the time for meetings and other bureaucratic events. I now work in the private sector as a psychiatrist, and still fly for business about  twice a month.

I don’t like flying much. If I could take a train, that’s what I would do.  I don’t mind talking to seatmates, but I don’t advertise what I do. I might say I’m a doctor, and if they ask me what kind, I’ll usually answer “a pretty good one.”  I don’t want to get into a discussion about psychiatry when I’m trapped in a plane.

I’ve had my share of flying misadventures, but nothing like one recent experience where everything that could go wrong, did.

My wife and I were coming home  from Scotland. We booked plenty of time between our flight from Edinburgh to London and then on to Boston. We booked through a  British carrier, but the  London-to-Boston leg was subcontracted to an American carrier. We were feeling very hopeful that everything was going to go smoothly. That is, until we  got to the airport and saw the plane we were supposed to board was empty. Other travelers were gathering, so we figured that we were in the right place. After about  90 minutes, we found out the delay was caused by fog at Heathrow.

We finally boarded, but then we sat on the runway for another hour because we couldn’t take off because of the backup at Heathrow. We started with a four-hour cushion of time between leaving Scotland, landing in London and then going to Boston. So much for that, and even more time was eaten up as we  circled Heathrow because of continued congestion.

We finally landed, but then had to wait for an open gate, and then found out we had to be bused to a terminal. By the time we got to Heathrow Terminal 5, our Boston flight was gone.

We went to the flight connections desk, where about 2,000 people were in line ahead of us. I called the American carrier whose flight we missed and was told that since it wasn’t a simple round-trip booking, I would have to buy another ticket to get home. I refused, and was told to call  the British carrier with whom I booked the ticket originally.

They told me that we could get on a flight offered by the same American carrier I had just spoken with. Fine by me. It was leaving in 90 minutes. I asked what gate the flight was departing from. It was Terminal 3. It took 45 minutes to get there, only to find out bookings for the flight had closed.

I’m pretty sure tears of frustration were streaming down my face as I explained we had just been sent there from Terminal 5. They found our names, which was great, but we still had to clear security, and then make it to the gate. I was beat up at this point, but we finally boarded our flight home only to discover that we left a backpack at security. The attendant gave me 10 minutes to run back to security and then run back to the plane.

I’m 72 years old. I thought I was going to die, but somehow ran the mini-marathon. When I finally sat down on the plane, we were delayed another 30 minutes. I drank wine. We landed in Boston. My luggage was lost. It did arrive one week later, dirty laundry still intact. After that ordeal, I figured someone might have at least washed it.

 

 

By William Boutelle, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joanraymond@nytimes.com

Read More..