Magellan radar image of Wheatley crater on Venus. This 72 km diameter crater shows a radar bright ejecta pattern and a generally flat floor with some rough raised areas and faulting. The crater is located in Asteria Regio at 16.6N,267E.
Image: NASA/GSFC [high-resolution]
Caption: NASA
NEW YORK (AP) — When the lights went out at the Super Bowl, CBS’ telecast got a jolt.
The power outage in the Super Dome in New Orleans sent the network scrambling and silenced its announcers for about half an hour. The remarkable scene — probably the most-watched “we’re having technical difficulties” moment in television history — also made CBS’ broadcast compelling at a time when the game was looking like a blow-out.
Early in the game’s second half, a portion of the Superdome lost power, including CBS’ broadcasting booth where Jim Nantz and Phil Simms were calling the game. It led to an awkward, ambient few moments of darkness and quiet in a broadcast that’s otherwise nonstop noise. A highly orchestrated media event was suddenly forced to improvise.
It took several minutes and numerous commercial breaks for CBS to find its footing and inform viewers of the situation. Social media went wild with a stream of joke conspiracy theories.
Eventually, CBS sideline reporter Steve Tasker — the MVP on the night, regardless of the play on the gridiron — announced the problem of a “click of the lights” to viewers. Later, the halftime crew anchored by host James Brown returned to fill time with football analysis. Brown said a power surge caused the outage.
That left the CBS NFL Today crew of Brown, Dan Marino, Bill Cowher and Shannon Sharpe to improvise by talking football. With little awareness of the power outage, the group bantered about the game to pad for time, even though viewers at that point had little interest in football strategy. Marino claimed halftime performer Beyonce knocked the lights out.
Calm and collected, Nantz and Simms finally returned from their unexpected exile as the lights came back on. Simms said he momentarily thought they were going to have to call the rest of the game from the sidelines.
“Hey, the next time you decide to plug in your phone charger, give us a warning, will you?” said Nantz.
“I was doing some of my best work during that blackout,” replied Simms.
CBS issued a statement later in the game, saying that “we lost numerous cameras and some audio powered by sources in the Super Dome.” The network said it used backup power and that “all commercial commitments during the broadcast are being honored.”
The power outage may have had the ironic effect of keeping viewers glued to their TVs, amazed at seeing the biggest TV event of the year momentarily shut down. At the time of the outage, the game was becoming a rout, with the Baltimore Ravens beating the San Francisco 49ers 28-6.
But afterward, momentum shifted and the 49ers rallied, making it a close game that went down to the wire before the Ravens edged out a 34-31 victory. Close contests are essential for retaining a big Super Bowl audience, so the shift that followed the outage held major ratings implications for CBS. The last three years, the game has successively set viewership records. Last year’s Super Bowl drew 111.3 million average viewers for NBC.
But ratings are a mere point of pride for CBS, with the ads sold-out well in advance, (some at more than $ 4 million a pop). The game was also streamed live on both CBSSports.com and NFL.com.
The chaos of the power failure outshined all other aspects of CBS’ broadcast, which had seemed certain to focus on a handful of storylines: the head coaching brothers John and Jim Harbaugh (CBS scored their parents on the pregame); the threat to player safety by head injuries (a pregame segment took an optimistic view); and Ray Lewis’ final game and fraught legacy.
Nantz reminded viewers during the game of the 2000 double murder case in which Lewis testified against two men and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction of justice. But Sharpe, Lewis’ former teammate, let him completely evade the subject in a pregame interview.
Nantz also smartly predicted the Ravens possibly taking a safety willingly at the end of the game for the sake of time and field position. Simms initially dismissed the idea, but it was what the Ravens elected to do and it was successful.
CBS didn’t overplay the Harbowl angle (if anything, it felt more like the Beyonce Bowl), and didn’t flash to the parents in the crowd until the second quarter. Director Mike Arnold did land the money shot of the game: The two coaches embracing at midfield after the game. (Its cameras and microphones also caught Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco celebrating with profanity.)
But this year’s Super Bowl broadcast will be remembered for the blackout — how CBS handled and benefited from an awkward situation. Nantz put the fitting final word on the Ravens’ win: “The adversity they faced tonight was to somehow rekindle the energy after it had been taken — literally — out of the building.”
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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle
Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News
The drug, known as ALN-PCS, inhibits a protein in the body known as PCSK9. Such drugs might one day be used to treat millions of people who do not achieve sufficient cholesterol-lowering from commonly used statins, such as Lipitor.
The Medicines Company will pay $25 million initially and as much as $180 million later if certain development and sales goals are met, under the deal expected to be formally announced Monday. It will also pay Alnylam, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., double-digit royalties on global sales.
That is small payment for a drug with presumably a huge potential market, probably reflecting that Alnylam is still in the first of three phases of clinical trials, well behind some far bigger competitors.
The team of Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is already entering the third and final stage of trials with their PCSK9 inhibitor, as is Amgen. Pfizer and Roche are in midstage trials.
ALN-PCS is different from the other drugs. It uses a gene-silencing mechanism called RNA interference, aimed at shutting off production of the PCSK9 protein. The other drugs are proteins called monoclonal antibodies that inhibit the action of PCSK9 after it has been formed.
Alnylam and the Medicines Company hope that turning off the faucet, as it were, will be more efficient than mopping the floor, allowing their drug to be given less frequently and in smaller amounts.
But that has yet to be proved. No drug using RNA interference has reached the market.
The Medicines Company, based in Parsippany, N.J., generates almost all of its revenue from one product — Angiomax, an anticlotting drug used when patients receive stents to open clogged arteries.
Dr. Clive A. Meanwell, chief executive of the company, said that PCSK9 inhibitors are likely to be used at first mainly by patients with severe lipid problems under the care of interventional cardiologists, the same doctors who use Angiomax. “It really is quite adjacent to what we do,” he said.
The Medicines Company licensed Angiomax from Biogen Idec, where the drug was invented and initially developed under a team led by Dr. John M. Maraganore, who is now the chief executive of Alnylam.
“It’s a bit like getting the band back together,” Dr. Maraganore said.
At the center of the government’s insider trading case against a former portfolio manager at the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors is a trade that directly involves Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire owner of the fund.
New details about the case have emerged that could cast doubt on the way that trade has been portrayed by the authorities, suggesting a possible line of defense for the portfolio manager and raising questions about whether the government will be able to build a case against Mr. Cohen, who has long been in the cross hairs of an investigation for insider trading on Wall Street.
Federal prosecutors have claimed that SAC dumped millions of shares of two pharmaceutical companies in 2008 after the former employee, Mathew Martoma, received secret information from a doctor about problems with a new Alzheimer’s drug.
In bringing its charges, the government said that SAC not only sold out of its position, but also bet against — or shorted — the drug companies’ stocks before the public announcement of the bad news. The SAC short position, according to prosecutors, allowed it to earn big profits after shares of the companies, Elan and Wyeth, plummeted.
“The fund didn’t merely avoid losses, it greedily schemed to profit further by shorting Elan and Wyeth stock,” said April Brooks, a senior F.B.I. official in New York, during a press conference on Nov. 20, the day Mr. Martoma was arrested.
Internal SAC trading records, according to people directly involved in the case, indicate that the hedge fund did not have a negative bet in place in advance of the announcement of the drug trial’s disappointing results. Instead, the records indicated that SAC, through a series of trades, including a complex transaction known as an equity swap, had virtually no exposure — neither long nor short — heading into the disclosure of the drug data.
A different narrative surrounding the firm’s trading could help Mr. Martoma, who has pleaded not guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy in what the government calls the most lucrative insider trading case ever charged.
The government, however, does have powerful evidence against Mr. Martoma. Prosecutors say the fund avoided losses by selling its roughly $700 million stake in Elan and Wyeth. If, as the government says, Mr. Martoma caused SAC to sell the shares — and then short them — while possessing important, nonpublic information, that would constitute an insider trading crime. And prosecutors have secured the testimony of the doctor who says he leaked the drug trial data to Mr. Martoma.
Still, perhaps more important, the trading records may complicate a government effort to pursue a case against Mr. Cohen. The SAC founder has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and has said he acted appropriately at all times.
In bringing charges against Mr. Martoma, prosecutors appeared to be circling nearer to Mr. Cohen. The criminal complaint against Mr. Martoma noted that Mr. Cohen had spent 20 minutes on the telephone with the portfolio manager the night before SAC began selling its shares. Prosecutors have not claimed that Mr. Cohen knew that Mr. Martoma had confidential information about the drug trials. (Mr. Martoma has refused so far to cooperate in helping the government build a case against his former boss.)
Yet if the 2008 trade is a possible avenue for the government, it is running out of time to bring a case against Mr. Cohen. Under the statute of limitations for insider trading crimes, the government would have to file a criminal case against him by mid-July. That deadline is the five-year anniversary of the trade in question, unless it could prove a conspiracy with Mr. Martoma that continued well past then.
Prosecutors have not sought to reach a “tolling agreement” with Mr. Cohen, which would allow the government additional time to bring a case past the statute of limitations, according to people briefed on the matter. The S.E.C., meanwhile, is weighing whether to file a civil fraud lawsuit against the fund connected to the drug-stock trades.
All this comes as a Feb. 14 cutoff approaches for SAC clients to ask for their money back. The fund has told employees that it expects at least $1 billion in withdrawals from the $14 billion fund amid the intensifying investigation. SAC has a standard quarterly redemption deadline.
Several other factors could make it difficult for the government to implicate Mr. Cohen. SAC is well known for its aggressive, rapid-fire trading style, and several former employees say that there is nothing unusual about the fund’s exiting a large position over just a few days.
“It’s one thing to bring an insider trading charge against a market novice who pours his 401(k) into a stock after hanging up the phone with an insider,” said Morris J. Fodeman, a former prosecutor and now a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. “But it’s far more difficult to make a case against a sophisticated hedge fund that routinely takes large positions and employs complex trading strategies.”
Moreover, both inside and outside SAC, there had been much controversy and debate surrounding the effectiveness of the Alzheimer’s drug, called bapineuzumab, leading up to the July 2008 release of the companies’ clinical results. Mr. Martoma’s colleagues in SAC’s health care group raised specific concerns with Mr. Cohen about the wisdom of holding such a large position in the two companies. And while preliminary data announced by Elan and Wyeth in June offered encouraging news, they also suggested potential problems.
“We believe potentially confounding factors will continue to fuel controversy over bapineuzumab,” wrote Caroline Y. Stewart, a drug stock analyst with Piper Jaffray, reacting to the preliminary results.
On July 11, another Wall Street analyst, Jonathan Aschoff at Brean Murray Carret & Company, raised red flags about a sharp run-up in the price of Elan’s shares heading into the presentation of the data.
“We have numerous concerns with the clinical development of bapineuzumab, and what we viewed to be underwhelming top-line Phase 2 results make us highly doubtful of success,” Mr. Aschoff wrote. “In our opinion, this strategy only serves to increase clinical risk and stoke our pessimism.”
The uncertainty relating to the Alzheimer drug’s clinical results could help explain what led Mr. Cohen to hedge SAC’s position so that it had “neutral exposure,” in Wall Street parlance, heading into disclosure of the trial results.
The short positions that SAC established in Elan and Wyeth were matched almost perfectly to offset an equity swap that effectively provided the fund with exposure to 12 million Wyeth shares, according to the SAC documents. An equity swap mimics ordinary shares and gives investors like hedge funds the benefits of stock ownership without actually owning the shares. Funds often use these complex derivatives to accumulate a large position but not tip off the market.
When government officials announced the case against Mr. Martoma, they made no mention of the swap. Instead, they emphasized how SAC had jettisoned its Elan and Wyeth shares and then brazenly accumulated short positions in both companies.
“The charges unsealed today describe cheating — coming and going,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in opening remarks during the press conference. “Specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side.”
The government noted the swap position in its court papers, but did not factor it into SAC’s overall gains and losses in Elan and Wyeth. Because SAC did not trade the Wyeth swap, instead leaving the position in place, it could not be part of any insider trading charge.
Representatives for the United States attorney’s office and the S.E.C. declined to comment. An SAC spokesman declined to comment, as did Charles A. Stillman, the lawyer for Mr. Martoma.
Prosecutors have built their case against Mr. Martoma by securing the cooperation of Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor who ostensibly leaked to him the confidential data about the drug being jointly developed by Elan and Wyeth. The companies hired Dr. Gilman to oversee the clinical trials. SAC paid Dr. Gilman about $108,000 as a consultant.
The government said that Mr. Cohen’s fund accumulated a roughly $700 million combined stake in Elan and Wyeth based on Mr. Martoma’s recommendation. SAC’s equity swap with respect to Wyeth, however, added $566 million in exposure.
On Thursday, July 17, 2008, as the drug trials neared completion, Dr. Gilman told Mr. Martoma that patients were experiencing serious side effects, the government said. Three days later, on a Sunday, with the markets closed, Mr. Martoma had the 20-minute conversation with Mr. Cohen, according to telephone records cited in the criminal complaint. Prosecutors said that Mr. Martoma told his boss that he was no longer “comfortable” with the investments.
On Monday morning, July 21, at Mr. Cohen’s direction, SAC’s head trader began selling the fund’s 10.5 million shares of Elan and 7.1 million shares of Wyeth. By July 29 — the day that the companies announced the trial results — SAC had not only sold out of its Elan and Wyeth holdings but also established short positions in the stocks. SAC was short about 4.5 million shares of Elan and 3.3 million shares of Wyeth. The fund also purchased a small number of Elan put options, a bet that the company’s shares would decline.
The 12 million-share equity swap position in Wyeth, however, counterbalanced the short exposure. SAC was short 4.5 million shares of Elan but, taking the swap into account, effectively long about 8.7 million shares of Wyeth. On July 30, the first trading day after the companies disclosed the negative trial results, Elan’s stock fell about 42 percent and Wyeth’s stock dropped about 12 percent.
Federal prosecutors said that SAC’s trading ahead of the announcement allowed the fund to avoid $194 million in losses by exiting the Elan and Wyeth positions, and then also earn about $83 million on the short trades. But SAC also had paper losses of about $70 million on its Wyeth swap, almost entirely negating any gains from the short sales.
While such details would seem to contradict how authorities have described the trading, prosecutors could argue that SAC had little choice but to leave the swaps in place, and that was part of the strategy to trade on inside information. That is because selling a swap would be difficult to do without attracting attention in the marketplace. If SAC had sold its swaps, it would have had to notify the Wall Street bank that it entered into the swap transaction with and, in turn, the bank’s trader would have most likely sold the shares on the open market.
GLEN ROSE, Texas—
Erath County Sheriff Tommy Bryant said Kyle, 38, and a second man were found dead at Rough Creek Lodge's shooting range west of Glen Rose, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Stephenville Empire-Tribune. Glen Rose is about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth.
Bryant did not immediately return phone calls to The Associated Press seeking comment late Saturday and early Sunday. A woman who answered the phone at the lodge where the shooting occurred declined comment and referred calls to the sheriff's office.
Investigators did not immediately release the name of the second victim, according to the newspapers.
Witnesses told sheriff's investigators that a gunman opened fire on the men around 3:30 p.m. Saturday, then fled in a pickup truck belonging to one of the victims, according to the Star-Telegram. The newspapers said a 25-year-old man was later taken into custody in Lancaster, southeast of Dallas, and that charges were expected.
Lancaster police did not immediately return calls for comment.
The motive for the shooting was unclear.
Kyle wrote the best-selling book, “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History,” detailing his 150-plus kills of insurgents from 1999 to 2009.
Kyle was sued by former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura over a portion of the book that claims Kyle punched Ventura in a 2006 bar fight over unpatriotic remarks. Ventura says the punch never happened and that the claim by Kyle defamed him.
Kyle had asked that Ventura's claims of invasion of privacy and “unjust enrichment” be dismissed, saying there was no legal basis for them. But a federal judge said the lawsuit should proceed. Both sides were told to be ready for trial by Aug. 1.
It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.
The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly interactive visualization that avoids distracting the viewer while still imparting a great amount of information.
Meanwhile, a selection of tweets are projected, along with latest hashtags and mentions, all while tracking total tweets, words, and characters. The length of the two gray lines on the display represent the number of characters and words in each tweet.
Though it’s one of the most beautiful, Tweetping is far from the first to display geotagged tweet information; coders have built sites to display election tweets, adjustable parameter maps, and even 3-D visualizations.
Tweetping even represents Antarctica, but not the ISS. And there’s no pause button; like Twitter itself, Tweetping’s data accrues incessantly; there’s no off switch but the back button.
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Mark Wahlberg and his teddy bear co-star “Ted” will be presenters at the Oscars, the telecast producers announced Friday morning.
The duo, stars in Oscar host Seth MacFarlane‘s comedy about a man trying to turn his immature, hedonistic lifestyle around for a woman he is dating. His indulgent teddy bear, the eponymous Ted, proves to be an obstacle in that transformation.
The film is now the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.
“We are happy to make it possible for Mark and Ted to make their debut appearance on the Oscar stage,” Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the show’s producers, said in a statement. “And we won’t deny that Ted used his pull with our host to get himself the booking.”
Wahlberg has twice been nominated for Academy Awards, in 2006 for his supporting role in “The Departed,” and in 2010 as a producer of the Best Picture nominee “The Fighter.”
Wahlberg and the MacFarlane-voiced Ted share the stage with a star-studded list of Oscar performers, including singers Adele, Norah Jones and Barbra Streisand. The Oscars will be broadcast on February 24 from the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center.
“I’m excited to present an Oscar with Mark Wahlberg,” Ted said in the statement. “I’m spending the next month learning to pronounce ‘Quvenzhané.’”
TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.
VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.
MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.
It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”
It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.
The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.
Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.
Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.
Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”
Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.
“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”
“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”
Dr. Waldo M. Ellison
Richard Fee initial evaluation
Feb. 5, 2010
Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.
Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.
“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”
Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik.
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with small-time criminals, “clearly knows that he crossed the line” and generally sees “the difference between right and wrong.”
Today, the burly, 48-year-old former policeman is struggling with a very different sort of suspect. Reassigned to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, to lead what has become one of the world’s most sweeping investigation into the bankers whose actions contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Hauksson now faces suspects who “are not aware of when they crossed the line” and “defend their actions every step of the way.”
With the global economy still struggling to recover from the financial maelstrom five years ago, governments around the world have been criticized for largely failing to punish the bankers who were responsible for the calamity. But even here in Iceland, a country of just 320,000 that has gone after financiers with far more vigor than the United States and other countries hit by the crisis, obtaining criminal convictions has proved devilishly difficult.
Public hostility toward bankers is so strong in Iceland that “it is easier to say you are dealing drugs than to say you’re a banker,” said Thorvaldur Sigurjonsson, the former head of trading for Kaupthing, a once high-flying bank that crumbled. He has been called in for questioning by Mr. Hauksson’s office but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Yet, in the four years since the Icelandic Parliament passed a law ordering the appointment of an unnamed special prosecutor to investigate those blamed for the country’s spectacular meltdown in 2008, only a handful of bankers have been convicted.
Ministers in a left-leaning coalition government elected after the crash agree that the wheels of justice have ground slowly, but they call for patience, explaining that the process must follow the law, not vengeful passions.
“We are not going after people just to satisfy public anger,” said Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, Iceland’s minister of industry, a former finance minister and leader of the Left-Green Movement that is part of the governing coalition.
Hordur Torfa, a popular singer-songwriter who helped organize protests that forced the previous conservative government to resign, acknowledged that “people are getting impatient” but said they needed to accept that “this is not the French Revolution. I don’t believe in taking bankers out and hanging them or shooting them.”
Others are less patient. “The whole process is far too slow,” said Thorarinn Einarsson, a left-wing activist. “It only shows that ‘banksters’ can get away with doing whatever they want.”
Mr. Hauksson, the special prosecutor, said he was frustrated by the slow pace but thought it vital that his office scrupulously follow legal procedure. “Revenge is not something we want as our main driver in this process. Our work must be proper today and be seen as proper in the future,” he said.
Part of the difficulty in prosecuting bankers, he said, is that the law is often unclear on what constitutes a criminal offense in high finance. “Greed is not a crime,” he noted. “But the question is: where does greed lead?”
Mr. Hauksson said it was often easy to show that bankers violated their own internal rules for lending and other activities, but “as in all cases involving theft or fraud, the most difficult thing is proving intent.”
And there are the bankers themselves. Those who have been brought in for questioning often bristle at being asked to account for their actions. “They are not used to being questioned. These people are not used to finding themselves in this situation,” Mr. Hauksson said. They also hire expensive lawyers.
The special prosecutor’s office initially had only five staff members but now has more than 100 investigators, lawyers and financial experts, and it has relocated to a big new office. It has opened about 100 cases, with more than 120 people now under investigation for possible crimes relating to an Icelandic financial sector that grew so big it dwarfed the rest of the economy.
To help ease Mr. Hauksson’s task, legislators amended the law to allow investigators easy access to confidential bank information, something that previously required a court order.
Parliament also voted to put the country’s prime minister at the time of the banking debacle on trial for negligence before a special tribunal. (A proposal to try his cabinet failed.) Mr. Hauksson was not involved in the case against the former leader, Geir H. Haarde, who last year was found guilty of failing to keep ministers properly informed about the 2008 crisis but was acquitted on more serious charges that could have resulted in a prison sentence.
A West Hollywood psychiatrist who pleaded guilty to felony drug dealing after pills he prescribed turned up for sale on Craigslist will be able to get his medical license back in a year under an agreement announced Friday by the Medical Board of California.
The sanction, though harsh by board standards, allows Nathan Kuemmerle, 40, a former methamphetamine user, to treat patients again as soon as next February.
As a result of the criminal charges, Kuemmerle had lost his privilege to prescribe controlled substances and must apply to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration if he wants it restored. Kuemmerle agreed to undergo random drug testing, enroll in a physician ethics class and seek psychological counseling, among other conditions.
Kuemmerle was featured in a Dec. 30 Times report on the state's failure to use its vast prescription drug database to identify reckless prescribing by physicians.
In 2009, Kuemmerle was the state's most prolific prescriber of Adderall, a widely abused stimulant, records show. His prescribing drew scrutiny only after Redondo Beach narcotics detectives arrested a suspected drug dealer peddling Adderall pills on Craigslist. The suspect identified Kuemmerle as the source of the prescriptions.
Two months later, a second suspected drug dealer arrested in Arizona also pointed authorities to Kuemmerle. When drug agents checked the state's prescription drug database, known as CURES, they discovered that in 2009 Kuemmerle prescribed nearly four times as many of the highest-dose Adderall pills as the No. 2 doctor on the list, records show. Additionally, records show, he was the state's No. 2 prescriber of the most highly controlled narcotic painkillers.
Kuemmerle was arrested and pleaded guilty in 2011 to drug dealing and was sentenced to three years' probation.
Federal agents had alleged that Kuemmerle was selling prescriptions to people he had never seen, much less examined, records show. Kuemmerle wrote an average of 15 prescriptions per day for controlled substances over a four-year period, a figure a medical expert described as "remarkably high," records show.
Narcotics detectives said they were amazed that Kuemmerle was able to prescribe so many drugs undetected for so long, even though state authorities had access to a database that collected a record every time a pharmacy dispensed one.
Kuemmerle could not be reached for comment.
The types of drugs Kuemmerle prescribed are fueling an epidemic of overdose deaths that has drawn the attention of drug enforcement agencies, lawmakers and medical authorities. The response has largely focused on illicit sources of prescription drugs, such as pharmacy robberies and teens stealing from home medicine cabinets.
But a Times investigation of more than 3,700 prescription drug deaths in Southern California found that nearly half of the decedents had a doctor's prescription for one or more of the medications that caused or contributed to their deaths.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged states to mine prescription drug monitoring databases to identify and stop reckless prescribers. At least six states do so. California does not.
lisa.girion@latimes.com
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