State prisons not ready to end court oversight, official says

SACRAMENTO — A court-appointed monitor said Friday that Gov. Jerry Brown's quest to end judicial oversight in state prisons is "not only premature, but a needless distraction" from improving care for mentally ill inmates.

Special Master Matthew Lopes cited dozens of suicides last year, long isolation instead of treatment and lapses in care as reasons federal oversight should continue.

Lopes' assessment, in a report filed Friday with the U.S. District Court, came after he visited two-thirds of California's prisons. He had intended to see all 33 lockups, he said, but soon determined that only Sacramento — not individual wardens — could fix the underlying problems with mental health treatment in the corrections system.

A spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said the agency would have a full response to the 609-page report later.

Brown wants the courts to halt oversight of the mental health services and withdraw orders to reduce overcrowding. He declared last week that California has "one of the finest prison systems in the United States" and that inmates get "far better" medical care, including mental health care, in prison than those outside.

Lopes disagreed.

"Any attempt at a more abrupt conclusion to court oversight would be … not only premature but a needless distraction from the important work that is being done in the quality improvement project," he told the court.

He was especially critical of the suicide rate in California prisons.

He said there were at least 32 suicides in state prisons last year, averaging one every 11 days. Lopes said that translates to almost 24 suicides per 100,000 inmates, a 13% increase over 2011 and well above the national suicide rate of 16 deaths per 100,000 prisoners.

The state's high suicide rate prompted a 2010 court order to adopt suicide prevention practices. Lopes said the state has made progress on those steps, but fewer than one out of four prisons hold suicide prevention team meetings as required and only three prisons complied with the requirement for five-day follow-ups with inmates discharged from crisis care.

"The problem of inmate suicides … must be resolved before the remedial phase of the Coleman case can be ended," Lopes wrote, referring to the 2001 lawsuit that led to the appointment of a special master. "The gravity of this problem calls for further intervention. To do any less and to wait any longer risks further loss of lives."

Assistant Secretary of Communications Deborah Hoffman said, "We take suicides very seriously and have one of the most robust suicide prevention programs in the nation."

Lopes also said in his report that all 11 outpatient care hubs in the prison system still conduct inmate counseling sessions in public, despite the need for confidential settings, and 10 of those hubs fail to offer at least 10 hours of structured therapy per week, a provision Lopes said "should be made a priority."

A training program designed to help prison guards interact with mentally ill inmates and mental health providers showed no improvement in use-of-force incidents or missed treatment sessions, Lopes said.

He also documented instances of mentally ill inmates being housed for extended periods in isolation units. At Kern Valley State Prison, mentally ill offenders had been isolated as long as 292 days. The court compliance rate is 30 days.

Families of mentally ill inmates expressed their own frustration.

Blanca Gonzalez said her 31-year-old son's mental state has deteriorated since his incarceration. She said he was put into segregation on Thanksgiving and not moved to a psychiatric unit until last week.

"I am watching my son die in front of me and no one seems to care," Gonzalez said.

paige.stjohn@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 19

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @geekdads on Twitter.

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WGA’s new media nominees include “Dexter,” “Walking Dead” projects

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The writers of projects based on cable TV hits “Dexter” and “The Walking Dead” were among the nominees for outstanding achievement in writing for new media and videogames announced Wednesday by the Writers Guild of America.

John Esposito was nominated for “The Walking Dead: Cold Storage” and Scott Reynolds was nominated for “Dexter Early Cuts” in the derivative new media category.

To be eligible for awards, a stand-alone new media program or episodes written for a new media series must have first been exhibited on a new media platform – from the Internet to cell phones – between December 1, 2011 and November 30, 2012.

In original new media, nominations went to Jay Rodan for “Lauren,” Michael Cyril Creighton for “Jack in a Box,” Cory Cavin, Bill G. Grandberg and Josh Lay for “Model Wife,” and Morgan Evans for “The Untitled Webseries That Morgan Evans Is Doing.”

In videogame writing, the nominees were Marv Wolfman for “Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two,” Bruce Feirstein for Activision’s “007 Legends,” Christopher Schlerf for Microsoft’s “Halo 4,” John Garvin for Sony’s “Uncharted: Golden Abyss,” Richard Farrese and Jill Murray for Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation,” and the team behind “Assassin’s Creed III.”

Winners will be honored at the 2013 Writers Guild Awards on Sunday, February 17, at simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Business Briefing | Medicine: F.D.A. Clears Botox to Help Bladder Control

Botox, the wrinkle treatment made by Allergan, has been approved to treat adults with overactive bladders who cannot tolerate or were not helped by other drugs, the Food and Drug Administration said on Friday. Botox injected into the bladder muscle causes the bladder to relax, increasing its storage capacity. “Clinical studies have demonstrated Botox’s ability to significantly reduce the frequency of urinary incontinence,” Dr. Hylton V. Joffe, director of the F.D.A.’s reproductive and urologic products division, said in a statement. “Today’s approval provides an important additional treatment option for patients with overactive bladder, a condition that affects an estimated 33 million men and women in the United States.”

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Analysis: Amid Tears Lance Armstrong Leaves Unanswered Questions in Oprah Winfrey Interview

In an extensive interview with Oprah Winfrey that was shown over two nights, Lance Armstrong admitted publicly for the first time that he doped throughout his cycling career. He revealed that all seven of his Tour de France victories were fueled by doping, that he never felt bad about cheating, and that he had covered up a positive drug test at the 1999 Tour with a backdated doctor’s prescription for banned cortisone.

Armstrong, the once defiant cyclist, also became choked up when he discussed how he told his oldest child that the rumors about Armstrong’s doping were true.

Even with all that, the interview will most likely be remembered for what it was missing.

Armstrong had not subjected himself to questioning from anyone in the news media since United States antidoping officials laid out their case against him in October. He chose not to appeal their ruling, leaving him with a lifetime ban from Olympic sports.

He personally chose Winfrey for his big reveal, and it went predictably. Winfrey allowed him to share his thoughts and elicited emotions from him, but she consistently failed to ask critical follow-up questions that would have addressed the most vexing aspects of Armstrong’s deception.

She did not press him on who helped him dope or cover up his drug use for more than a decade. Nor did she ask him why he chose to take banned performance-enhancing substances even after cancer had threatened his life.

Winfrey also did not push him to answer whether he had admitted to doctors in an Indianapolis hospital in 1996 that he had used performance-enhancing drugs, a confession a former teammate and his wife claimed they overheard that day. To get to the bottom of his deceit, antidoping officials said, Armstrong has to be willing to provide more details.

“He spoke to a talk-show host,” David Howman, the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said from Montreal on Friday. “I don’t think any of it amounted to assistance to the antidoping community, let alone substantial assistance. You bundle it all up and say, ‘So what?’

Jeffrey M. Tillotson, the lawyer for an insurance company that unsuccessfully withheld a $5 million bonus from Armstrong on the basis that he had cheated to win the Tour de France in 2004, said his client would make a decision over the weekend about whether to sue Armstrong. If it proceeds, the company, SCA Promotions, will seek $12 million, the total it paid Armstrong in bonuses and legal fees.

“It seemed to us that he was more sorry that he had been caught than for what he had done,” Tillotson said. “If he’s serious about rehabbing himself, he needs to start making amends to the people he bullied and vilified, and he needs to start paying money back.”

Armstrong, who said he once believed himself to be invincible, explained in the portion of the interview broadcast Friday night that he started to take steps toward redemption last month. Then, after dozens of questions had already been lobbed his way, he became emotional when he described how he told his 13-year-old son, Luke, that yes, his father had cheated by doping. That talk happened last month over the holidays, Armstrong said as he fought back tears.

“I said, listen, there’s been a lot of questions about your dad, my career, whether I doped or did not dope, and I’ve always denied, I’ve always been ruthless and defiant about that, which is probably why you trusted me, which makes it even sicker,” Armstrong said he told his son, the oldest of his five children. “I want you to know it’s true.”

At times, Winfrey’s interview seemed more like a therapy session than an inquisition, with Armstrong admitting that he was narcissistic and had been in therapy — and that he should be in therapy regularly because his life was so complicated.

In the end, the interview most likely accomplished what Armstrong had hoped: it was the vehicle through which he admitted to the public that he had cheated by doping, which he had lied about for more than a decade. But his answers were just the first step to clawing back his once stellar reputation.

On Friday, Armstrong appeared more contrite than he had during the part of the interview that was shown Thursday, yet he still insisted that he was clean when he made his comeback to cycling in 2009 after a brief retirement, an assertion the United States Anti-Doping Agency said was untrue. He also implied that his lifetime ban from all Olympic sports was unfair because some of his former teammates who testified about their doping and the doping on Armstrong’s teams received only six-month bans.

Richard Pound, the founding chairman of WADA and a member of the International Olympic Committee, said he was unmoved by Armstrong’s televised mea culpa.

“If what he’s looking for is some kind of reconstruction of his image, instead of providing entertainment with Oprah Winfrey, he’s got a long way to go,” Pound said Friday from his Montreal office.

Armstrong acknowledged to Winfrey during Friday’s broadcast that he has a long way to go before winning back the public’s trust. He said he understood why people recently turned on him because they felt angry and betrayed.

“I lied to you and I’m sorry,” he said before acknowledging that he might have lost many of his supporters for good. “I am committed to spending as long as I have to to make amends, knowing full well that I won’t get very many back.”

Armstrong also said that the scandal has cost him $75 million in lost sponsors, all of whom abandoned him last fall after Usada made public 1,000 pages of evidence that Armstrong had doped.

“In a way, I just assumed we would get to that point,” he said of his sponsors’ leaving. “The story was getting out of control.”

In closing her interview, Winfrey asked Armstrong a question that left him perplexed.

“Will you rise again?” she said.

Armstrong said: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s out there.”

Then, as the interview drew to a close, Armstrong said: “The ultimate crime is the betrayal of these people that supported me and believed in me.”

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Colorado movie theater reopens after shooting

AURORA, Colo. — A quiet crowd gathered Thursday at what is now Century Aurora for an "evening of remembrance." Young employees offered candy, sodas and popcorn to visitors who mingled inside the complex, which had been painted soft blues, greens and yellows.

The movie theater where a gunman killed 12 people and injured dozens more last July reopened under a new name after extensive remodeling. The governor, mayor, theater officials and a few hundred victims, families and community members attended, but relatives of several who died boycotted the event.

In one aisle, a young man comforted a young woman as she cried. A small room was set up with tables and tissues for those who might need a quiet space to grieve.

Corbin Dates, 23, who said he was in the second row of Theater 9 during the rampage and escaped with a small burn from a bullet casing, called the event empowering.

"Evil doesn't have the best of me and it never will," he said.

But Scott Larimer, whose son John Larimer, 27, was killed, did not come. He was among those who called for a boycott after receiving a brief email shortly after Christmas inviting him to the ceremony and to an unspecified movie.

"They were treating it like I lost my raincoat there and not my son," he said. "I'm not sure if they're just trying to drum up support so they can just reopen their theater and make some money, or what it is."

The fate of the Century 16 theaters was the subject of much debate in the aftermath of one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, for which James E. Holmes, 25, has been ordered to stand trial. City officials launched an online survey to gauge public opinion and said the response was overwhelming in favor of reopening.

But earlier this month, 15 family members of nine people killed wrote a letter to Cinemark, the theater's owner, blasting the invitation to the opening and criticizing the company for showing "ZERO compassion to the families of the victims whose loved ones were killed in their theater."

One of them, Jerri Jackson, said Cinemark had never contacted her before she received the invitation, which was sent by a victims' group on Cinemark's behalf.

"I would have thought early on that they would have contacted us and offered their condolences, tried to do something for the families, but they've done nothing," she said. Her son Matt McQuinn, 27, was among the dead.

Some who came to the ceremony had a different perspective.

"We will not let this tragedy define us," Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan said during the 30-minute remembrance. "Aurora is strong, Aurora is caring, and our focus remains on the road before us."

Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper acknowledged the families who were absent but praised Cinemark and its chief executive for working closely with the community in the aftermath of the shooting.

"Everyone heals. Some slower, some in different ways. Some wanted this theater open, some didn't," Hickenlooper said. "For many here tonight, this is the path to healing."

After the ceremony, everyone was invited to stay for a screening of "The Hobbit."

Tom Sullivan, whose son Alex Sullivan, 27, died, came to the remembrance. He and other family members spent several minutes exploring the complex before taking a seat for the ceremony. He sees the theater as part of his community, which supported him after the death of his son.

"The people of Aurora decided that's what they wanted," to reopen the theater. "So I decided, 'Well, that's what we'll do,'" he said. "The people of Aurora have done everything they can to help us through this very difficult time."

paloma.esquivel@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 18

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Bolshoi’s artistic director attacked in Moscow

MOSCOW (AP) — The artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater‘s ballet troupe was attacked with acid in Moscow and his eyesight is threatened, the theater said Friday.

Sergei Filin, a 42-year-old former ballet star, was approached Thursday night by an unknown man who splashed acid on his face as he got out of his car outside his home in central Moscow, Russian television reported.

Bolshoi spokeswoman Katerina Novikova, who visited Filin at the hospital Thursday night, told The Associated Press that his condition is stable but his eyesight is threatened.

Filin was appointed artistic director of the Bolshoi‘s ballet company in March 2011. He danced for the Bolshoi on and off from 1988 to 2004 when his sustained a severe injury onstage.

The theater’s director general Anatoly Iksanov told Russia’s Channel One that he believes the attacked is linked to Filin’s work.

“He was a man of principle and never compromised,” Iksanov said. “If he believed that this or that dancer was not ready or was unable perform this or that part, he would turn them down.”

Several stars at the Bolshoi including Nikolai Tsiskaridze, one of its most celebrated dancers, have complained about what they call Filin’s unfair treatment of dancers at the Bolshoi.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The Neediest Cases: Medical Bills Crush Brooklyn Man’s Hope of Retiring

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

John Concepcion and his wife, Maria, in their home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. They are awaiting even more medical bills.

Retirement was just about a year away, or so John Concepcion thought, when a sudden health crisis put his plans in doubt.

For the past 100 years, The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. To celebrate the 101st campaign, an article will appear daily through Jan. 25. Each profile will illustrate the difference that even a modest amount of money can make in easing the struggles of the poor.

Last year donors contributed $7,003,854, which was distributed to those in need through seven New York charities.

2012-13 Campaign

Previously recorded:

$6,865,501

Recorded Wed.:

16,711

*Total:

$6,882,212

Last year to date:

$6,118,740

*Includes $1,511,814 contributed to the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

“I get paralyzed, I can’t breathe,” he said of the muscle spasms he now has regularly. “It feels like something’s going to bust out of me.”

Severe abdominal pain is not the only, or even the worst, reminder of the major surgery Mr. Concepcion, 62, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, underwent in June. He and his wife of 36 years, Maria, are now faced with medical bills that are so high, Ms. Concepcion said she felt faint when she saw them.

Mr. Concepcion, who is superintendent of the apartment building where he lives, began having back pain last January that doctors first believed was the result of gallstones. In March, an endoscopy showed that tumors had grown throughout his digestive system. The tumors were not malignant, but an operation was required to remove them, and surgeons had to essentially reroute Mr. Concepcion’s entire digestive tract. They removed his gall bladder, as well as parts of his pancreas, bile ducts, intestines and stomach, he said.

The operation was a success, but then came the bills.

“I told my friend: are you aware that if you have a major operation, you’re going to lose your house?” Ms. Concepcion said.

The couple has since received doctors’ bills of more than $250,000, which does not include the cost of his seven-day stay at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. Mr. Concepcion has worked in the apartment building since 1993 and has been insured through his union.

The couple are in an anxious holding pattern as they wait to find out just what, depending on their policy’s limits, will be covered. Even with financial assistance from Beth Israel, which approved a 70 percent discount for the Concepcions on the hospital charges, the couple has no idea how the doctors’ and surgical fees will be covered.

“My son said, boy he saved your life, Dad, but look at the bill he sent to you,” Ms.  Concepcion said in reference to the surgeon’s statements. “You’ll be dead before you pay it off.”

When the Concepcions first acquired their insurance, they were in good health, but now both have serious medical issues — Ms. Concepcion, 54, has emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Mr. Concepcion has diabetes. They now spend close to $800 a month on prescriptions.

Mr. Concepcion, the family’s primary wage earner, makes $866 a week at his job. The couple had planned for Mr. Concepcion to retire sometime this year, begin collecting a pension and, after getting their finances in order, leave the superintendent’s apartment, as required by the landlord, and try to find a new home. “That’s all out of the question now,” Ms. Concepcion said. Mr. Concepcion said he now planned to continue working indefinitely.

Ms. Concepcion has organized every bill and medical statement into bulging folders, and said she had spent hours on the phone trying to negotiate with providers. She is still awaiting the rest of the bills.

On one of those bills, Ms. Concepcion said, she spotted a telephone number for people seeking help with medical costs. The number was for Community Health Advocates, a health insurance consumer assistance program and a unit of Community Service Society, one of the organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The society drew $2,120 from the fund so the Concepcions could pay some of their medical bills, and the health advocates helped them obtain the discount from the hospital.

Neither one knows what the next step will be, however, and the stress has been eating at them.

“How do we get out of this?” Mr. Concepcion asked. “There is no way out. Here I am trying to save to retire. They’re going to put me in the street.”

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DealBook: Michael Dell’s Empire in a Buyout Spotlight

The computer empire of Michael S. Dell spreads across a campus of low-slung buildings in Round Rock, Tex.

But his financial empire — estimated at $16 billion — occupies the 21st floor of a dark glass skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

It is there that MSD Capital, started by Mr. Dell 15 years ago to manage his fortune, has quietly built a reputation as one of the smartest investors on Wall Street. By amassing a prodigious portfolio of stocks, companies, real estate and timberland, Mr. Dell has reduced his exposure to the volatile technology sector and branched out into businesses as diverse as dentistry and landscaping.

Now, Mr. Dell is on the verge of making one of the biggest investments of his life. The 47-year-old billionaire and his private equity backers are locked in talks to acquire Dell, the company he started with $1,000 as a teenager three decades ago, in a leveraged buyout worth more than $20 billion. MSD could play a role in the Dell takeover, according to people briefed on the deal.

The private equity firm Silver Lake has been in negotiations to join with Mr. Dell on a transaction, along with other potential partners like wealthy Asian investors or foreign funds. Mr. Dell would be expected to roll his nearly 16 percent ownership of the company into the buyout, a stake valued at about $3.5 billion. He could also contribute additional personal money as part of the buyout.

That money is managed by MSD, among the more prominent so-called family offices that are set up to handle the personal investments of the wealthy. Others with large family offices include Bill Gates, whose Microsoft wealth financed the firm Cascade Investment, and New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who set up his firm, Willett Advisors, in 2010 to manage his personal and philanthropic assets.

“Some of these family offices are among the world’s most sophisticated investors and have the capital and talent to compete with the largest private equity firms and hedge funds,” said John P. Rompon, managing partner of McNally Capital, which helps structure private equity deals for family offices.

A spokesman for MSD declined to comment for this article. The buyout talks could still fall apart.

In 1998, Mr. Dell, then just 33 years old — and his company’s stock worth three times what it is today — decided to diversify his wealth and set up MSD. He staked the firm with $400 million of his own money, effectively starting his own personal money-management business.

To head the operation, Mr. Dell hired Glenn R. Fuhrman, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and John C. Phelan, a principal at ESL Investments, the hedge fund run by Edward S. Lampert. He knew both men from his previous dealings with Wall Street. Mr. Fuhrman led a group at Goldman that marketed specialized investments like private equity and real estate to wealthy families like the Dells. And Mr. Dell was an early investor in Mr. Lampert’s fund.

Mr. Fuhrman and Mr. Phelan still run MSD and preside over a staff of more than 100 overseeing Mr. Dell’s billions and the assets in his family foundation. MSD investments include a stock portfolio, with positions in the apparel company PVH, owner of the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, and DineEquity, the parent of IHOP and Applebee’s.

Among its real estate holdings are the Four Seasons Resort Maui in Hawaii and a stake in the New York-based developer Related Companies.

MSD also has investments in several private businesses, including ValleyCrest, which bills itself as the country’s largest landscape design company, and DentalOne Partners, a collection of dental practices.

Perhaps MSD’s most prominent deal came in 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, when it joined a consortium that acquired the assets of the collapsed mortgage lender IndyMac Bank from the federal government for about $13.9 billion and renamed it OneWest Bank.

The OneWest purchase has been wildly successful. Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman executive who led the OneWest deal, has said that the bank is expected to consider an initial public offering this year. An I.P.O. would generate big profits for Mr. Dell and his co-investors, according to people briefed on the deal.

Another arm of MSD makes select investments in outside hedge funds. Mr. Dell invested in the first fund raised by Silver Lake, the technology-focused private equity firm that might now become his partner in taking Dell private.
MSD’s principals have already made tidy fortunes. In 2009, Mr. Fuhrman, 47, paid $26 million for the Park Avenue apartment of the former Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard S. Fuld. Mr. Phelan, 48, and his wife, Amy, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, also live in a Park Avenue co-op and built a home in Aspen, Colo.

Both are influential players on the contemporary art scene, with ARTNews magazine last year naming each of them among the world’s top 200 collectors. MSD, too, has dabbled in the visual arts. In 2010, MSD bought an archive of vintage photos from Magnum, including portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mahatma Gandhi, and has put the collection on display at the University of Texas, Mr. Dell’s alma mater.

Just as the investment firms Rockefeller & Company (the Rockefellers, diversifying their oil fortune) and Bessemer Trust (the Phippses, using the name of the steelmaking process that formed the basis of their wealth) started out as investment vehicles for a single family, MSD has recently shown signs of morphing into a traditional money management business with clients beside Mr. Dell.

Last year, for the fourth time, an MSD affiliate raised money from outside investors when it collected about $1 billion for a stock-focused hedge fund, MSD Torchlight Partners. A 2010 fund investing in distressed European assets also manages about $1 billion. The Dell family is the anchor investor in each of the funds, according to people briefed on the investments.

MSD has largely remained below the radar, though its name emerged a decade ago in the criminal trial of the technology banker Frank Quattrone on obstruction of justice charges. Prosecutors introduced an e-mail that Mr. Fuhrman sent to Mr. Quattrone during the peak of the dot-com boom in which he pleaded for a large allotment of a popular Internet initial public offering.

“We know this is a tough one, but we wanted to ask for a little help with our Corvis allocation,” Mr. Fuhrman wrote. “We are looking forward to making you our ‘go to’ banker.”

The e-mail, which was not illegal, was meant to show the quid pro quo deals that were believed to have been struck between Mr. Quattrone and corporate chieftains like Mr. Dell — the bankers would give executives hot I.P.O.’s and the executives, in exchange, would hold out the possibility of giving business to the bankers. (Mr. Quattrone’s conviction was reversed on appeal.)

The MSD team has also shown itself to be loyal to its patron in other ways.

On the MSD Web site, in the frequently asked questions section, the firm asks and answers queries like “how many employees do you have” and “what kind of investments do you make.”

In the last question on the list, MSD asks itself, “Do you use Dell computer equipment?” The answer: “Exclusively!”

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated when an MSD affiliate raised money from outside investors for a hedge fund. It was last year, not earlier this year. The article also misstated which hedge fund and its focus. It was MSD Torchlight Partners, a stock-focused hedge fund, not MSD Energy Partners, an energy-focused hedge fund.

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European regulators ground the Boeing 787 Dreamliner

European regulators ordered all Boeing 787 Dreamliners grounded Thursday, following the lead of U.S. aviation safety officials. (David McNew / Getty Images / January 17, 2013)

By Henry Chu

January 17, 2013, 2:27 a.m.

LONDON – European air-safety officials followed their American counterparts’ lead Thursday by grounding Boeing 787 Dreamliner jumbo jets after a series of worrisome incidents aboard the new aircraft.

The European Aviation Safety Agency, or EASA, announced that it was adopting the Federal Aviation Administration’s directive, issued Wednesday, ordering all 787s taken out of service. Jeremie Teahan, a spokesman for the EASA, said the action was taken “to ensure the continuing airworthiness of the European fleet.”

As a practical matter, the decision by European regulators will affect only two 787s being used by the Polish airline LOT. But the move increases pressure on Boeing, which insists that its new passenger jet is safe but has promised to work with the FAA to resolve any concerns.

Doubts about the 787’s safety grew after a fire aboard a plane parked at Boston’s airport and an emergency landing by an All Nippon Airways flight whose crew reported a strange smell and noticed indications of a problem with a lithium-ion battery.

The FAA’s directive was issued less than a week after U.S. transport officials deemed the 787 safe to fly. The agency said that Boeing now had to “address a potential battery fire risk in the 787.”

Teahan said the EASA would “carefully monitor the situation and is prepared to provide any support the FAA may require in their investigation.”

ALSO:

London copter crash kills 2

FAA grounds entire fleet of Boeing 787s

Germany to bring home its gold by 2020

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 17

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

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TODAY’S PUZZLE:

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Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

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Bigelow directs “Zero Dark Thirty” torture critics to Washington

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The director of Oscar-nominated thriller “Zero Dark Thirty” on Wednesday defended the film’s depiction of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, saying criticism would better be directed at the U.S. officials who ordered such policies.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Kathryn Bigelow said she personally opposed any use of torture, but said it was a part of the decade-long hunt for the al Qaeda leader that the film could not ignore.

“Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement,” Bigelow wrote of criticism of the movie’s torture scenes from Washington politicians, the media and human rights groups.

“I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen,” said Bigelow, who won two Oscars in 2010 for her Iraq war movie “The Hurt Locker.”

“Zero Dark Thirty” was nominated last week for five Academy Awards in February, including best picture, screenplay and actress for Jessica Chastain.

But Bigelow was overlooked in the directing category in a snub that many Hollywood awards watchers attributed to weeks of negative publicity over the film.

A group of senators in December chided distributor Sony Pictures in a letter, calling the film “grossly inaccurate and misleading” for suggesting torture helped the United States capture bin Laden in May 2011.

Actor David Clennon, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that selects Oscar winners, has urged fellow members not vote for the movie, accusing it of promoting torture.

However, in its first week of nationwide release, the movie topped the North American box office on Sunday, taking in $ 24 million.

Bigelow said her personal belief was that “Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore. War, obviously, isn’t pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.”

“Bin Laden wasn’t defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation,” she concluded.

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Some With Autism Diagnosis Can Recover, Study Finds

Doctors have long believed that disabling autistic disorders last a lifetime, but a new study has found that some children who exhibit signature symptoms of the disorder recover completely.

The study, posted online on Wednesday by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, is the largest to date of such extraordinary cases and is likely to alter the way that scientists and parents think and talk about autism, experts said.

Researchers on Wednesday cautioned against false hope. The findings suggest that the so-called autism spectrum contains a small but significant group who make big improvements in behavioral therapy for unknown, perhaps biological reasons, but that most children show much smaller gains. Doctors have no way to predict which children will do well.

Researchers have long known that between 1 and 20 percent of children given an autism diagnosis no longer qualify for one a few years or more later. They have suspected that in most cases the diagnosis was mistaken; the rate of autism diagnosis has ballooned over the past two decades, and some research suggests that it has been loosely applied.

The new study should put some of that skepticism to rest.

“This is the first solid science to address this question of possible recovery, and I think it has big implications,” said Sally Ozonoff of the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. “I know many of us as would rather have had our tooth pulled than use the word ‘recover,’ it was so unscientific. Now we can use it, though I think we need to stress that it’s rare.”

She and other experts said the findings strongly supported the value of early diagnosis and treatment.

In the study, a team led by Deborah Fein of the University of Connecticut at Storrs recruited 34 people who had been diagnosed before the age of 5 and no longer had any symptoms. They ranged in age from 8 to 21 years old and early in their development were in the higher-than-average range of the autism spectrum. The team conducted extensive testing of its own, including interviews with parents in some cases, to gauge current social and communication skills.

The debate over whether recovery is possible has simmered for decades and peaked in 1987, when the pioneering autism researcher O. Ivar Lovaas reported that 47 percent of children with the diagnosis showed full recovery after undergoing a therapy he had devised. This therapy, a behavioral approach in which increments of learned skills garner small rewards, is the basis for the most effective approach used today; still, many were skeptical and questioned his definition of recovery.

Dr. Fein and her team used standardized, widely used measures and found no differences between the group of 34 formerly diagnosed people and a group of 34 matched control subjects who had never had a diagnosis.

“They no longer qualified for the diagnosis,” said Dr. Fein, whose co-authors include researchers from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; the Institute of Living in Hartford; and the Child Mind Institute in New York. “I want to stress to parents that it’s a minority of kids who are able to do this, and no one should think they somehow missed the boat if they don’t get this outcome.”

On measures of social and communication skills, the recovered group scored significantly better than 44 peers who had a diagnosis of high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome.

Dr. Fein emphasized the importance of behavioral therapy. “These people did not just grow out of their autism,” she said. “I have been treating children for 40 years and never seen improvements like this unless therapists and parents put in years of work.”

The team plans further research to learn more about those who are able to recover. No one knows which ingredients or therapies are most effective, if any, or if there are patterns of behavior or biological markers that predict such success.

“Some children who do well become quite independent as adults but have significant anxiety and depression and are sometimes suicidal,” said Dr. Fred Volkmar, the director of the Child Study Center at the Yale University School of Medicine. There are no studies of this group, he said.

That, because of the new study, is about to change.

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Regulators Around the Globe Ground Boeing 787s

Kyodo News, via Reuters

The 787 that made an emergency landing in Japan on Wednesday. All 137 passengers and crew members were evacuated safely.

Regulators around the globe ordered the grounding of Boeing 787s on Thursday until they could determine what caused a new type of battery to catch fire on two planes in recent days.

The directives in Europe, India and Japan followed an order Wednesday by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounding the planes operated by U.S. carriers.

The decisions are a result of incidents involving a plane that was parked in Boston and one in Japan that had to make an emergency landing Wednesday morning after an alarm warning of smoke in the cockpit.

In Japan on Thursday, the transportation ministry issued a formal order to ground all 787s indefinitely, until concerns over the aircraft’s battery systems are resolved. All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines had already voluntarily grounded their 787s on Wednesday.

European safety regulators also said they would ground Dreamliners, affecting LOT of Poland, the only carrier that operates the jets in that region. In India, the aviation regulator grounded all six of the 787s operated by the state-owned carrier Air India.

LAN Airlines of Chile said it was following suit, acting in coordination with the Chilean Aeronautical Authority.

And on Thursday, Qatar Airways said it would follow the F.A.A.’s decision and ground its five 787s, effective immediately.

The F.A.A.’s emergency directive, issued Wednesday night, initially applies to United Airlines, the only American carrier using the new plane so far, with six 787s.

Boeing, based in Chicago, has a lot riding on the 787, and its stock dropped nearly 3.4 percent Wednesday to $74.34. The company has outlined ambitious plans to double its production rate to 10 planes a month by the end of 2013. It is also starting to build a stretch version and considering an even larger one after that.

“We are confident the 787 is safe and we stand behind its overall integrity,” Jim McNerney, Boeing’s chief executive, said in a statement.

The grounding — an unusual action for a new plane — focuses on one of the more risky design choices made by Boeing, namely to make extensive use of lithium-ion batteries aboard its airplanes for the first time.

Until now, much of the attention on the 787 was focused on its lighter composite materials and more efficient engines, meant to usher in a new era of more fuel-efficient travel, particularly over long distances. The batteries are part of an electrical system that replaces many mechanical and hydraulic ones that are common in previous jets.

The 787’s problems could jeopardize one of its major features, its ability to fly long distances at a lower cost. The plane is certified to fly 180 minutes from an airport. The U.S. government is unlikely to extend that to 330 minutes, as Boeing has promised, until all problems with the plane have been resolved.

For Boeing, “it’s crucial to get it right,” said Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. “They’ve got a brief and closing window in which they can convince the public and their flying customers that this is not a problem child.”

The 787 uses two identical lithium-ion batteries, each about one and a half to two times the size of a typical car battery. One battery, in the rear electrical equipment bay near the wings, is used to start the auxiliary power unit, a small engine in the tail that is used most often to provide power for the plane while it is on the ground. The other battery, called the main battery, starts the pilot’s computer displays and serves as a backup for flight systems.

The maker of the 787’s batteries, GS Yuasa of Japan, has declined to comment on the problems.

Boeing has defended the novel use of the batteries and said it had put in place a series of systems meant to prevent overcharging and overheating.

In a conference call last week with reporters, Boeing’s chief engineer for the 787, Mike Sinnett, said that the company had long been aware of possible problems with lithium-ion batteries but that it had built in numerous redundant features to keep any problems with the batteries from threatening the plane in flight. He said that the batteries had not had any problems in 1.3 million hours of flight and that Boeing was trying to understand what had caused the problems.

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Confession could be bad for Lance Armstrong's bank account

Now that Lance Armstrong has finally admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs during his storied athletic career, the shamed cyclist could be pulled into courtrooms around the globe for legal battles with people seeking millions of dollars.

That's one of the many downsides to the confession of a once-adored athlete who for more than a decade not only denied doping but aggressively counterattacked his accusers.

But a significant question remains about whether there is an upside to his coming clean in an interview with Oprah Winfrey scheduled to air later this week.

The confession potentially represents a first step in trying to rebuild his tarnished public image. It might also help in persuading sports officials to reduce his lifetime ban so that the 41-year-old might someday compete in sanctioned triathlons and marathons.

Armstrong faces an uphill climb.

"For him to chart a course to redemption is really complicated and would take a lot of time," said Adam Hanft, a branding and crisis communications strategist. "It's not going to be reversed with a TV appearance."

In his 21/2-hour interview at a downtown Austin, Texas, hotel, Armstrong was forthcoming about the doping allegations that dogged him during a career that included seven Tour de France victories, Winfrey told "CBS This Morning" on Tuesday.

"I don't think 'emotional' begins to describe the intensity or the difficulty he experienced in talking about some of these things," she said, declining to provide further details.

Armstrong has come under increasing pressure in the months since the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency enforced the ban and issued a 1,000-plus-page report that accused him of leading "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."

With 11 former teammates providing depositions, he was stripped of his Tour championships and lost several big-money sponsors, including Nike, that had made him one of the sporting world's richest endorsers.

Now, Armstrong stands to lose a large chunk of his personal wealth, reported at about $100 million.

His most pressing concern appears to be a federal whistle-blower lawsuit filed by former teammate Floyd Landis, who was stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title for doping. The suit accuses Armstrong of defrauding the U.S. Postal Service, which sponsored his racing team for a number of years.

Armstrong's attorneys have met with government officials to discuss, among other things, how much the Postal Service was actually damaged by his misconduct, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who is not authorized to speak publicly.

During those talks, settlement figures were discussed, the person said.

A lengthy federal investigation into Armstrong and his team was dropped early last year without charges being brought. It remains to be seen whether the criminal statute of limitations has elapsed, but the Department of Justice could join in the civil suit.

The False Claims Act, the basis of whistle-blower suits, carries heavy penalties, including triple damages and fines, said Mike Morse, a Philadelphia-based lawyer who specializes in such cases.

"Violations of the federal False Claims Act can expose him to some really significant monetary damages," Morse said. "There could also be a whole host of private lawsuits."

Reacting to early allegations of Armstrong's doping, a Dallas-based promotional company declined to pay him a $5-million bonus for winning the 2004 Tour de France. He sued and received a $7.5-million settlement.

Now SCA Promotions plans to sue Armstrong to get its money back. "We do expect to file soon," said Jeffrey Dorough, the company's in-house counsel. "We don't know what impact the interview will have until we see it."

The government of South Australia state has said it will seek to recoup several million dollars in appearance fees paid to Armstrong for competing in the Tour Down Under from 2009 through 2011.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 16

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Stuart Scott’s cancer back – but he tweets he’s fighting hard

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – ESPN anchor Stuart Scott tweeted that his cancer has returned, but that he’s fighting hard.

How hard? He went from tweeting Monday night about his health to hosting SportsCenter, as if nothing were wrong. As he hosted, he was inundated with supportive tweets.

“Blessed by prayers… I’m back in the Fight,” Scott wrote. “C reared its head again. Chemo evry 2 wks but I’ll still work, still work out..still #LIVESTRONG”

In another tweet, he said that after chemotherapy treatments he goes straight to work out, doing either P90X or mixed martial arts.

Scott was treated for cancer in 2007 after doctors found malignant tissue following an emergency appendectomy. He returned to work at ESPN a month later.

In January 2011, Scott began undergoing chemotherapy after more cancerous tissue was removed. He again returned after a month.

Scott has become a symbol of hope for many who have loved ones fighting the disease or who are fighting it themselves. He traded tweets with some of them after his latest announcement.

He also tweeted Tuesday: “Don’t like using profanity on Twitter but some of my fav well wishes R the good folks who say #F@$ KCancer… I can’t spell it out but I AGREE.”

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Boosting Your Flu Shot Response

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

As this year’s influenza season continues to take its toll, those procrastinators now hurrying to get a flu shot might wish to know that exercise may amplify the flu vaccine’s effect. And for maximal potency, the exercise should be undertaken at the right time and involve the right dosage of sweat, according to several recent reports.

Flu shots are one of the best ways to lessen the risk of catching the disease. But they are not foolproof. By most estimates, the yearly flu vaccine blocks infection 50 to 70 percent of the time, meaning that some of those being inoculated gain little protection. The more antibodies someone develops, the better their protection against the flu, generally speaking. But for some reason, some people’s immune systems produce fewer antibodies to the influenza virus than others’ do.

Being physically fit has been found in many studies to improve immunity in general and vaccine response in particular. In one notable 2009 experiment, sedentary, elderly adults, a group whose immune systems typically respond weakly to the flu vaccine, began programs of either brisk walking or a balance and stretching routine. After 10 months, the walkers had significantly improved their aerobic fitness and, after receiving flu shots, displayed higher average influenza antibody counts 20 weeks after a flu vaccine than the group who had stretched.

But that experiment involved almost a year of dedicated exercise training, a prospect that is daunting to some people and, in practical terms, not helpful for those who have entered this flu season unfit.

So scientists have begun to wonder whether a single, well-calibrated bout of exercise might similarly strengthen the vaccine’s potency.

To find out, researchers at Iowa State University in Ames recently had young, healthy volunteers, most of them college students, head out for a moderately paced 90-minute jog or bike ride 15 minutes after receiving their flu shot. Other volunteers sat quietly for 90 minutes after their shot. Then the researchers checked for blood levels of influenza antibodies a month later.

Those volunteers who had exercised after being inoculated, it turned out, exhibited “nearly double the antibody response” of the sedentary group, said Marian Kohut, a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State who oversaw the study, which is being prepared for publication. They also had higher blood levels of certain immune system cells that help the body fight off infection.

To test how much exercise really is required, Dr. Kohut and Justus Hallam, a graduate student in her lab, subsequently repeated the study with lab mice. Some of the mice exercised for 90 minutes on a running wheel, while others ran for either half as much time (45 minutes) or twice as much (3 hours) after receiving a flu shot.

Four weeks later, those animals that, like the students, had exercised moderately for 90 minutes displayed the most robust antibody response. The animals that had run for three hours had fewer antibodies; presumably, exercising for too long can dampen the immune response. Interestingly, those that had run for 45 minutes also had a less robust response. “The 90-minute time point appears to be optimal,” Dr. Kohut says.

Unless, that is, you work out before you are inoculated, another set of studies intimates, and use a dumbbell. In those studies, undertaken at the University of Birmingham in England, healthy, adult volunteers lifted weights for 20 minutes several hours before they were scheduled to receive a flu shot, focusing on the arm that would be injected. Specifically, they completed multiple sets of biceps curls and side arm raises, employing a weight that was 85 percent of the maximum they could lift once. Another group did not exercise before their shot.

After four weeks, the researchers checked for influenza antibodies. They found that those who had exercised before the shot generally displayed higher antibody levels, although the effect was muted among the men, who, as a group, had responded to that year’s flu vaccine more robustly than the women had.

Over all, “we think that exercise can help vaccine response by activating parts of the immune system,” said Kate Edwards, now a lecturer at the University of Sydney, and co-author of the weight-training study.

With the biceps curls, she continued, the exercises probably induced inflammation in the arm muscles, which may have primed the immune response there.

As for 90 minutes of jogging or cycling after the shot, it probably sped blood circulation and pumped the vaccine away from the injection site and to other parts of the body, Dr. Kohut said. The exercise probably also goosed the body’s overall immune system, she said, which, in turn, helped exaggerate the vaccine’s effect.

But, she cautions, data about exercise and flu vaccines is incomplete. It is not clear, for instance, whether there is any advantage to exercising before the shot instead of afterward, or vice versa; or whether doing both might provoke the greatest response – or, alternatively, be too much and weaken response.

So for now, she says, the best course of action is to get a flu shot, since any degree of protection is better than none, and, if you can, also schedule a visit to the gym that same day. If nothing else, spending 90 minutes on a stationary bike will make any small twinges in your arm from the shot itself seem pretty insignificant.

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Rights Group Reports on Abuses of Surveillance and Censorship Technology

A Canadian human rights monitoring group has documented the use of American-made Internet surveillance and censorship technology by more than a dozen governments, some with harsh human rights policies like Syria, China and Saudi Arabia.

Jakub Dalek of the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Thor Swift for The New York Times

Morgan Marquis-Boire led the research with Mr. Dalek.

The Citizen Lab Internet research group, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, used computer servers to scan for the distinctive signature of gear made by Blue Coat Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif.

It determined that Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic employed a Blue Coat system that could be used for digital censorship. The group also determined that Bahrain, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela used equipment that could be used for surveillance and tracking.

The authors said they wanted to alert the public that there was a growing amount of surveillance and content-filtering technology distributed throughout the Internet. The technology is not restricted from export by the State Department, except to countries that are on embargo lists, like Syria, Iran and North Korea.

“Our findings support the need for national and international scrutiny of the country Blue Coat implementations we have identified, and a closer look at the global proliferation of dual-use information and communications technology,” the group noted. “We hope Blue Coat will take this as an opportunity to explain their due diligence process to ensure that their devices are not used in ways that violate human rights.”

A spokesman for Blue Coat Systems said the firm had not seen the final report and was not prepared to comment.

In 2011, several groups, including Telecomix and Citizen Labs, raised concerns that Blue Coat products were being used to find and track opponents of the Syrian government. The company initially denied that its equipment had been sold to Syria, which is subject to United States trade sanctions.

Shortly afterward, Blue Coat reversed itself and acknowledged that the systems were indeed in Syria, but it said that the devices had been shipped to a distributor in Dubai, and said that it thought that they had been destined for the Iraqi Ministry of Communications.

The Citizen Lab research project was led by Morgan Marquis-Boire and Jakub Dalek. Mr. Marquis-Boire, a Google software engineer, has during the last year been involved in a variety of research projects aimed at exposing surveillance tools used by authoritarian regimes. He said that he carefully segregated his work at Google from his human rights research.

Last year, Mr. Marquis-Boire used computer servers to identify the use of an intelligence-oriented surveillance software program, called FinSpy, which was being used by Bahrain to track opposition activists.

On a hunch last month, the researchers used the Shodan search engine, a specialized Internet tool intended to help identify computers and software services that were connected to the Internet. They were able to identify a number of the Blue Coat systems that are used for content filtering and for “deep packet inspection,” a widely used technology for detecting and controlling digital content as it travels through the Internet.

The researchers stressed that they were aware that there were both benign and harmful uses for the Blue Coat products identified as ProxySG, which functions as a Web filter, and a second system, PacketShaper, which can detect about 600 Web applications and can be used to control undesirable Web traffic.

“I’m not trying to completely demonize this technology,” Mr. Marquis-Boire said.

The researchers also noted that the equipment does not directly fall under the dual-use distinction employed by the United States government to control the sale of equipment that has both military and civilian applications, but it can be used for both political and intelligence applications by authoritarian governments.

“Syria is subject to U.S. export sanctions,” said Sarah McKune, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab. “When it comes to other countries that aren’t subject to U.S. sanctions it’s a more difficult situation. There could still be significant human rights impact.”

The researchers also noted that a large number of American and foreign companies supplied similar gear in what Gartner, the market research firm, described as a $1.02 billion market in a report issued in May 2012.

The researchers said that some American security technology companies, like Websense, had taken strong human rights stands, but had declined to grapple with the issue of the possible misuse of the technology.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 16, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab Internet research group. She is Sarah McKune, not McCune.

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SoCal Edison destroyed downed poles before inspection

A state probe into the widespread power outages caused by a furious 2011 windstorm was unable to determine whether toppled utility poles met safety standards because Southern California Edison destroyed most of them before they could be inspected.

The winds that roared through the San Gabriel Valley knocked down hundreds of utility poles, snapped cables and uprooted scores of trees, leaving nearly a quarter of a million Edison customers without power, some for a full week.

In a report released Monday, the California Public Utilities Commission found that at least 21 poles were unstable because of termite destruction, dry rot or other damage before tumbling over in wind gusts of up to 120 mph on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 2011.

But more than 75% of the 248 Edison poles that were knocked down in the storm were destroyed by the utility before they could be inspected, a violation of commission rules.

"At the onset of [power] restoration efforts, preservation of failed poles was not made a priority by Southern California Edison," the report says.

Of the 248 poles that failed, partial segments of only about 60 poles were collected and delivered for analysis by commission engineers — the remaining poles were "discarded by SCE staff," according to the report.

Efforts to reconstruct downed poles, many of them sliced into segments smaller than 10 inches, "were immensely hindered by the nature of SCE's collection and cataloging methodology," investigators reported.

Edison workers scattered small pole segments in various collection bins, "making it nearly impossible to determine which failed pole they belonged to," according to investigators.

A spokesman for the utility declined to comment on the report, saying the utility was in the process of formulating a statement.

Commission investigators also found that at least 17 wire pole support systems did not meet safety standards.

The report calls on Edison to update its emergency response procedures and test them on a yearly basis.

Officials will consider formal enforcement actions, including financial penalties, if Edison does not comply.

In a statement Monday, U.S. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) — who represents Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino and other San Gabriel Valley cities — called for "immediate action" to ensure the issues raised in the report would not recur.

"This report confirms that by following such regulations and by asking for mutual assistance, power could have been restored more quickly," Chu said.

Former Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, who until recently represented part of the affected area, said the report "confirms what everyone who lived through the windstorm knew from personal experience, that Edison was not prepared and public safety and consumers suffered as a result."

State Sen. Carol Liu (D-La Cañada Flintridge) said the report raises fears that Edison equipment might sustain similar damage in future disasters.

"I am concerned that service and safety doesn't seem to be their priority," said Liu, who is married to California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey.

The report comes less than a year after an Edison-commission study determined the utility had inadequate plans in place for emergencies and communicating with the public. The study, by Maryland-based Davies Consulting, also said the utility could have shortened power restoration time by one day or more by doing a better job of tracking and preparing for bad weather.

At the same time, the consultant commended Edison for having adequate staffing and managing a response that left no workers or customers injured.

joe.piasecki@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 15

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Will.i.am on top as Bowie returns to UK charts

LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. producer will.i.am’s collaboration with Britney Spears topped the British pop charts on Sunday as David Bowie notched up his first top 10 single in two decades with his surprise new release.

Launched without warning on Bowie’s 66th birthday, the single “Where Are We Now?” caused widespread media interest, and charted in sixth place despite only having been available for five days.

It was his first new song in almost a decade and produced his best chart performance since 1986, when he reached number two with “Absolute Beginners”, the Official Charts Company said.

Topping the chart was “Scream and Shout” by will.i.am, featuring Britney Spears, giving her a first British number one since 2004.

U.S. country-pop star Taylor Swift‘s “I Knew You Were Trouble” moved up to second, with James Arthur, winner of the British version of the “X Factor” TV talent show last year, dropping from first to third with “Impossible”.

In the album chart, singer Emeli Sandé returned to number one with “Our Version of Events”, which has now spent 48 consecutive weeks in the Top 10.

Last week’s chart-topper “18 Months” by Scottish producer and singer Calvin Harris dropped to second place, and English singer Jake Bugg rose a place to third with his eponymous album.

R&B star Rihanna climbed three to fourth with “Unapologetic”. The only new entry in the top 10 was the soundtrack from the Oscar-nominated film musical “Les Miserables”, which debuted in fifth.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Turning to the Web for a Medical Diagnosis

Thirty-five percent of American adults said they have used the Internet to diagnose a medical condition for themselves or someone else, according to a new Pew Research Center study. Women are more likely than men to turn to the Internet for diagnoses. Other groups more likely to do so are younger people, white adults, people with college degrees and those who live in households with income above $75,000.

The study, released by Pew’s Internet and American Life Project on Tuesday, points out that Americans have always tried to answer their health questions at home, but that the Internet has expanded the options for research. Previous surveys have asked questions about online diagnoses, but the Pew study was the first to focus on the topic with a nationally representative sample, said Susannah Fox, an associate director at Pew Internet. Surveyors interviewed 3,014 American adults by telephone, from August to September 2012.

Of the one in three Americans who used the Internet for a diagnosis, about a third said they did not go to a doctor to get a professional medical opinion, while 41 percent said a doctor confirmed their diagnosis. Eighteen percent said a doctor did not agree with their diagnosis. As far as where people start when researching health conditions online, 77 percent said they started at a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo, while 13 percent said they began at a site that specializes in health information.

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