In Filing, Casino Operator Admits Likely Violation of an Antibribery Law

 In its annual regulatory report published by the commission on Friday, the Sands reported that its audit committee and independent accountants had determined that “there were likely violations of the books and records and internal controls provisions” of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

 The disclosure comes amid an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the company’s business activities in China.

 It is the company’s first public acknowledgment of possible wrongdoing. Ron Reese, a spokesman for the Sands, declined to comment further.

The company’s activities in mainland China, including an attempt to set up a trade center in Beijing and create a sponsored basketball team, as well as tens of millions of dollars in payments the Sands made through a Chinese intermediary, had become a focus of the federal investigation, according to reporting by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in August.

 In its filing, the Sands said that it did not believe the findings would have material impact on its financial statements, or that they warranted revisions in its past statements. The company said that it was too early to determine whether the investigation would result in any losses. “The company is cooperating with all investigations,” the statement said.

 The Sands’ activities in China came under the scrutiny of federal investigators after 2010, when Steven C. Jacobs, the former president of the company’s operations in Macau, filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit in which he charged that he had been pressured to exercise improper leverage against government officials. He also accused the company of turning a blind eye toward Chinese organized crime figures operating in its casinos.

 Mr. Adelson began his push into China over a decade ago, after the authorities began offering a limited number of gambling licenses in Macau, a semiautonomous archipelago in the Pearl River Delta that is the only place in the country where casino gambling is legal.

 But as with many lucrative business spheres in China, the gambling industry on Macau is laced with corruption. Companies must rely on the good will of Chinese officials to secure licenses and contracts. Officials control even the flow of visitors, many of whom come on government-run junkets from the mainland.

 As he maneuvered to enter Macau’s gambling market, Mr. Adelson, who is well known in the United States for his financial and political clout, became enmeshed in often intertwining political and business dealings. At one point he reportedly intervened on behalf of the Chinese government to help stall a House resolution condemning the country’s bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics on the basis of its human rights record.

 In 2004, he opened his first casino there, the Sands Macau, the enclave’s first foreign owned gambling establishment. This was followed by his $2.4 billion Venetian in 2007.

 Some Sands subsidiaries have also come under investigation by Chinese authorities for violations that included using money for business purposes not reported to the authorities, resulting in fines of over a million dollars.

 Success in Macau has made Mr. Adelson, 78, one of the richest people in the world. He and his wife, Miriam, own 53.2 percent of Las Vegas Sands, the world’s biggest casino company by market value. Last year, Forbes estimated his fortune at $24.9 billion.

 Mr. Adelson became the biggest single donor in political history during the 2012 presidential election, giving more than $60 million to eight Republican candidates, including Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, through “super PACs.” He presides over a global empire of casinos, hotels and convention centers.

Michael Luo and Thomas Gaffney contributed reporting.

Read More..

Texas Monthly: Sign Language Interpreters Bring Live Music to the Deaf

On the last night of the 2012 Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, the sun set over a crowd of thousands who had stood for hours waiting to see Jack White, the headliner. A figure strode onto the stage, setting off a cascade of cheers.

But it was not Jack White, the singer-guitarist, it was Barbie Parker, the festival’s lead sign language interpreter.

Ms. Parker, a Texas native, and members of her Austin-based company, LotuSIGN, had interpreted more than 20 bands’ sets for deaf and hard of hearing festival attendees that weekend. As evidenced by the positive reception she received, her interpretations had won over a good part of the hearing audience as well.

At live music shows, Ms. Parker, 45, does not just sign lyrics — she communicates the entire musical experience. She mouths the words. She plays air guitar and air drums. She jams along with the bands.

“Music is such a large part of who I am,” she said. “I want to be able to open up that experience.”

Ms. Parker was bored in her accounting job and had two young children when she enrolled in her first formal American Sign Language class at San Antonio College about 20 years ago. She became fascinated with interpretation after reading a book about it at her local library and, in a chance encounter just hours after reading it, met the sister of a friend who happened to be an American Sign Language interpreter.

Ms. Parker is now an integral part of Austin’s deaf community. Her two adult sons are proficient in A.S.L., and her company has provided sign language interpretation at music festivals across the country for several years. Next week, she and other LotuSIGN interpreters will take the stage with artists at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin for the sixth year in a row.

The number of deaf and hard of hearing music fans taking advantage of interpretation at free shows held at Auditorium Shores as part of SXSW has risen noticeably in the past few years, Frank Schaefer, the officer manager for the festival, said in an e-mail. The increase can be attributed, at least in part, to a growing number of interpreters who specialize in that kind of work.

A good interpreter is adept at signing, but Ms. Parker also wants her team to impart the emotions and feelings music conveys. Lauren Kinast, 44, who lost her hearing gradually, attended a Rolling Stones concert signed by LotuSIGN interpreters. Ms. Kinast had listened to the Stones growing up, but when she saw Ms. Parker and a colleague interpret their music, she came away with a greater appreciation of the band.

“Everything made it different, better,” Ms. Kinast typed in an interview. “Having the songs interpreted in my language, understanding the emotions behind it, the meaning behind it, and being a part of the concert experience just took my love for them several notches up.”

Ms. Parker first gained recognition in the mid-2000s for interpreting music at the funeral of the parent of a well-known member of the deaf community in Austin. At one point during the service, she needed to sign an emotional musical performance.

“The singer got inspired, so the interpreting had to get inspired,” Ms. Parker said. The signing seemed to further stir the singer, which further moved Ms. Parker. “There was a kind of reverb,” she said. “The deaf audience was just — I just saw these jaws drop open like, ‘Oh, that’s what it’s like.’ ”

After that, she began receiving requests to interpret at weddings, children’s recitals and, of course, live shows. In 2007, she started her own company, Alive Performance Interpreting, which in 2009 became LotuSIGN.

“They’re five-star interpreters,” said Stacy Landry, the program manager for the local government’s deaf and hard of hearing services in Travis County. (Ms. Parker has obvious clout in the field — her traditional interpreting services were used in January when she intepreted President Obama’s Inaugural Address in Washington.)

LotuSIGN interpreters specialize in analyzing lyrics for the artist’s intent in a song. But sign language interpretation, no matter where it takes place, is about more than translating words into gestures and signs. The interpreter must communicate an overall experience by expressing the speaker’s tone, the meaning behind phrases and idioms, and even if someone’s cellphone interrupts an otherwise-silent lecture hall.

One year, Ms. Parker interpreted at a Sheryl Crow concert held to celebrate of one of Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France titles. He was asked to take over on the drums for one of Ms. Crow’s songs.

“Well,” Ms. Parker said, “he wasn’t any good.”

Ms. Parker let the discomfort show on her face as she imitated Mr. Armstrong’s uneven drumming. She nodded subtly to assure perplexed members of the deaf audience that she was indeed doing this on purpose.

As the audience reacted, Ms. Parker saw a deaf man elbow the hearing man next to him and cringe. The hearing man nodded and made a similar pained face.

“They had this shared experience,” Ms. Parker said. The deaf man was truly part of the crowd.

LotuSIGN is working to mentor others in the hope of expanding access to live events. “You can’t do it without a lot of experience,” Ms. Parker said. “It is the hardest work I have ever done.”

Kathryn Jepsen is the deputy editor of Symmetry magazine.

Read More..

Texas Monthly: Sign Language Interpreters Bring Live Music to the Deaf

On the last night of the 2012 Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, the sun set over a crowd of thousands who had stood for hours waiting to see Jack White, the headliner. A figure strode onto the stage, setting off a cascade of cheers.

But it was not Jack White, the singer-guitarist, it was Barbie Parker, the festival’s lead sign language interpreter.

Ms. Parker, a Texas native, and members of her Austin-based company, LotuSIGN, had interpreted more than 20 bands’ sets for deaf and hard of hearing festival attendees that weekend. As evidenced by the positive reception she received, her interpretations had won over a good part of the hearing audience as well.

At live music shows, Ms. Parker, 45, does not just sign lyrics — she communicates the entire musical experience. She mouths the words. She plays air guitar and air drums. She jams along with the bands.

“Music is such a large part of who I am,” she said. “I want to be able to open up that experience.”

Ms. Parker was bored in her accounting job and had two young children when she enrolled in her first formal American Sign Language class at San Antonio College about 20 years ago. She became fascinated with interpretation after reading a book about it at her local library and, in a chance encounter just hours after reading it, met the sister of a friend who happened to be an American Sign Language interpreter.

Ms. Parker is now an integral part of Austin’s deaf community. Her two adult sons are proficient in A.S.L., and her company has provided sign language interpretation at music festivals across the country for several years. Next week, she and other LotuSIGN interpreters will take the stage with artists at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin for the sixth year in a row.

The number of deaf and hard of hearing music fans taking advantage of interpretation at free shows held at Auditorium Shores as part of SXSW has risen noticeably in the past few years, Frank Schaefer, the officer manager for the festival, said in an e-mail. The increase can be attributed, at least in part, to a growing number of interpreters who specialize in that kind of work.

A good interpreter is adept at signing, but Ms. Parker also wants her team to impart the emotions and feelings music conveys. Lauren Kinast, 44, who lost her hearing gradually, attended a Rolling Stones concert signed by LotuSIGN interpreters. Ms. Kinast had listened to the Stones growing up, but when she saw Ms. Parker and a colleague interpret their music, she came away with a greater appreciation of the band.

“Everything made it different, better,” Ms. Kinast typed in an interview. “Having the songs interpreted in my language, understanding the emotions behind it, the meaning behind it, and being a part of the concert experience just took my love for them several notches up.”

Ms. Parker first gained recognition in the mid-2000s for interpreting music at the funeral of the parent of a well-known member of the deaf community in Austin. At one point during the service, she needed to sign an emotional musical performance.

“The singer got inspired, so the interpreting had to get inspired,” Ms. Parker said. The signing seemed to further stir the singer, which further moved Ms. Parker. “There was a kind of reverb,” she said. “The deaf audience was just — I just saw these jaws drop open like, ‘Oh, that’s what it’s like.’ ”

After that, she began receiving requests to interpret at weddings, children’s recitals and, of course, live shows. In 2007, she started her own company, Alive Performance Interpreting, which in 2009 became LotuSIGN.

“They’re five-star interpreters,” said Stacy Landry, the program manager for the local government’s deaf and hard of hearing services in Travis County. (Ms. Parker has obvious clout in the field — her traditional interpreting services were used in January when she intepreted President Obama’s Inaugural Address in Washington.)

LotuSIGN interpreters specialize in analyzing lyrics for the artist’s intent in a song. But sign language interpretation, no matter where it takes place, is about more than translating words into gestures and signs. The interpreter must communicate an overall experience by expressing the speaker’s tone, the meaning behind phrases and idioms, and even if someone’s cellphone interrupts an otherwise-silent lecture hall.

One year, Ms. Parker interpreted at a Sheryl Crow concert held to celebrate of one of Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France titles. He was asked to take over on the drums for one of Ms. Crow’s songs.

“Well,” Ms. Parker said, “he wasn’t any good.”

Ms. Parker let the discomfort show on her face as she imitated Mr. Armstrong’s uneven drumming. She nodded subtly to assure perplexed members of the deaf audience that she was indeed doing this on purpose.

As the audience reacted, Ms. Parker saw a deaf man elbow the hearing man next to him and cringe. The hearing man nodded and made a similar pained face.

“They had this shared experience,” Ms. Parker said. The deaf man was truly part of the crowd.

LotuSIGN is working to mentor others in the hope of expanding access to live events. “You can’t do it without a lot of experience,” Ms. Parker said. “It is the hardest work I have ever done.”

Kathryn Jepsen is the deputy editor of Symmetry magazine.

Read More..

Alaska Airlines, Flying Above an Industry’s Troubles

Damon Winter/The New York Times

For decades, flights over spectacular Alaskan landscapes could end with devilishly difficult landings. More Photos »

FLYING over Alaska in the wintertime is a spectacular experience. At 35,000 feet, the state’s rugged beauty unfolds, a succession of white mountain peaks against steel-blue skies, icy lakes and frozen rivers that snake as far as the eye can see. It’s an awesome sight, wild and pristine, that glows in a thousand hues of red, orange and pink when the sun sets against the horizon.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

The pilots Dan Kaplin and Tom Peebles complete a safety check before a short flight from Wrangell, about 200 miles southeast of Juneau, to Petersburg. More Photos »

But then, you have to land.

Juneau’s airport is surrounded by mountains, the approach often buffeted by treacherous wind shear. Sitka’s one small runway is on a narrow strip of land surrounded by water. And in Kodiak, the landing strip ends abruptly at a mountainside. The airport approach is so tricky that first officers are not allowed to land there; only captains are trusted to do so.

Doug Wahto knows these airports well. He grew up in Juneau, worked as a commercial fisherman and builder and started flying with Alaska Airlines in 1970. As a pilot, he honed the art of reading wind conditions by looking at how snow blew over mountain ridges.

Mr. Wahto retired six years ago, but not before seeing the transformation of flying in Alaska and of the airline where he spent his career. Alaska Airlines is puny compared to the major carriers: it has 124 planes, while United Airlines has more than 700 and four times as many passengers. But because of the state’s topography and extreme weather, it was the first to develop satellite guidance, a navigation technique that has transformed landing at Alaska’s tricky airports. The technique is now at the heart of the Federal Aviation Administration’s plan to modernize the nation’s air traffic system, a project that is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars over the coming decades.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist,” Mr. Wahto says, “or a crusty old dog like me to fly these approaches anymore.”

Largely because of that technology, flying in Alaska is now remarkably reliable — even in the dead of winter, when it is snowing, when there are just two hours of daylight, when runways are made slippery by ice or sleet, when winds blow at more than 50 miles an hour and pilots can barely see out the windshield. When, in other words, no one in his right mind would want to land a Boeing 737 with 140 passengers on a 6,000-foot runway.

Alaska Airlines, in fact, had the industry’s best on-time performance for the third consecutive year in 2012, with 87 percent of flights landing on time, according to FlightStats, a data provider.

That reliability means a lot in a state where air travel is often the only option, and where Alaska is the only commercial jet carrier with in-state routes. The airline flies to 16 towns accessible only by plane or boat, and, in doing so, ferries food and medical supplies, takes thousands of oil workers above the Arctic Circle and operates as the biggest air shipper for the state’s fisheries.

This role as primary transport for in the state is still a healthy business, but Alaska Airlines has prospered by expanding its services. From its Seattle base, it now has a bigger presence than other airlines along much of the West Coast. In 2007, it moved into Hawaii; its flights to the state now account for 20 percent of its available seat miles, an industry standard for measuring capacity. That is more than the 17 percent in Alaska itself.

Megamergers, most recently of US Airways and American Airlines, have redrawn the boundaries of domestic carriers, concentrating the business as never before. Alaska Airlines, for its part, has cultivated staunch independence. Unlike carriers that have faced bankruptcy or acquisition, Alaska has turned a profit for 33 of the last 39 years. In 2012, it had a record $316 million in net income, up 29 percent from 2011.

Although it started in a sparsely populated, meteorologically unwelcoming, financially challenging corner of the country, Alaska has built a successful franchise that is the envy of many rivals.

Read More..

Varied Views of a Border

In some spots along the Mexican-American border, a well-fortified fence extends as far as the eye can see, while in others a wall ends abruptly in the ocean. Beyond these images of the United States’ southern border, we are interested in your photos.

An aerial view of the border fence in Tijuana, Mexico, where it meets the Pacific Ocean.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.

An aerial view of a Border Patrol vehicle along a section of the border wall south of Mission, Tex., near the Rio Grande. In this case engineers built the wall along an existing levee in the floodplain just north of the river.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.

An aerial view of the Rio Grande, which snakes its way through the Rio Grande Valley. Many do not understand the difficulty of building fences or monitoring thick brushland along the river. It is also complicated to block American farmers from accessing the river, which irrigates crops in this agricultural region.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.

The rusted old border wall separates Tijuana, Mexico, right, and a Border Patrol-controlled buffer zone, left. Once high volumes of drug trafficking in this impoverished area have diminished significantly.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.

The Border Patrol installed an iron fence to keep drug smugglers from using their roads to move drugs. This is an area south of Mission, Tex., where the river is quite narrow and easy to cross or float drugs across.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.

A border fence ends in the rugged terrain in East Tijuana. This photograph was taken in the mountains east of San Diego.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.

Migrants hoping to arrive in California by boat are traveling more and more northward to elude border patrol. Torrey Pines State Beach (pictured) is more than 30 miles from the border but was once a popular location because of its proximity to the road.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.

A woman makes her way back to Mexico at the Nogales Port of Entry in Nogales, Ariz.
Joshua Lott for The New York Times.

Read More..

Economix Blog: Bernanke Defends Stimulus as Necessary and Effective

The Federal Reserve’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, picked an unusual time to offer his most recent defense of the Fed’s campaign to stimulate the economy: 7 p.m. on a Friday night in San Francisco, 10 p.m. back home on the East Coast.

The basic message was the same as Mr. Bernanke delivered to Congress earlier this week: The Fed regards its current efforts as necessary and effective, and the risks, while real, are under control.

“Commentators have raised two broad concerns surrounding the outlook for long-term rates,” Mr. Bernanke told a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “To oversimplify, the first risk is that rates will remain low, and the second is that they will not.”

If rates remain low, it may drive investors to take excessive risks. If rates jump, investors could lose money – not least the Fed.

Regarding the first possibility, Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed was keeping a careful eye on financial markets. But he noted that rates were low in large part because the economy was weak, and that keeping rates low was the best way to encourage stronger growth. “Premature rate increases would carry a high risk of short-circuiting the recovery, possibly leading — ironically enough — to an even longer period of low long- term rates,” he said.

At the other extreme, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed could “mitigate” any jump in rates by prolonging its efforts to hold rates down, for example by keeping some of its investments in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities.

Three more highlights from the question-and-answer session after the speech.

1. Mr. Bernanke, asked about the outlook for the Washington Nationals, responded by accurately quoting the “Las Vegas odds” of a World Series appearance: 8/1.

2. Although the decision may be made under a future chairman, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed should continue to offer “forward guidance” — predicting its policies — even after it concludes its long effort to revive the economy.

“Providing information about the future path of policy could be useful, probably would be useful, under even normal circumstances,” he said in response to a question. “I think we need to keep providing information.”

3. Not surprisingly, Mr. Bernanke often is asked to reflect on the financial crisis. He offered something a little different than his normal response on Friday night.

“In many ways, in retrospect, the crisis was a normal crisis,” he said. “It’s just that the intuitional framework in which it occurred was much more complex.”

In other words, there was a panic, and a run, and a collapse – but rather than a run on bank deposits, the run was in the money markets. Improving the stability of those markets is something regulators have yet to accomplish.

Read More..

U.S. Judges Offer Addicts a Way to Avoid Prison

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Emily Leitch of Brooklyn, with her son, Nazir, 4, was arrested for importing cocaine but went to “drug court” to avoid prison.

Federal judges around the country are teaming up with prosecutors to create special treatment programs for drug-addicted defendants who would otherwise face significant prison time, an effort intended to sidestep drug laws widely seen as inflexible and overly punitive.

The Justice Department has tentatively embraced the new approach, allowing United States attorneys to reduce or even dismiss charges in some drug cases.

The effort follows decades of success for “drug courts” at the state level, which legal experts have long cited as a less expensive and more effective alternative to prison for dealing with many low-level repeat offenders.

But it is striking that the model is spreading at the federal level, where judges have increasingly pushed back against rules that restrict their ability to make their own determination of appropriate sentences.

So far, federal judges have instituted programs in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington. About 400 defendants have been involved nationwide.

In Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday, Judge John Gleeson issued an opinion praising the new approach as a way to address swelling prison costs and disproportionate sentences for drug trafficking.

“Presentence programs like ours and those in other districts mean that a growing number of courts are no longer reflexively sentencing federal defendants who do not belong in prison to the costly prison terms recommended by the sentencing guidelines,” Judge Gleeson wrote.

The opinion came a year after Judge Gleeson, with the federal agency known as Pretrial Services, started a program that made achieving sobriety an incentive for drug-addicted defendants to avoid prison. The program had its first graduate this year: Emily Leitch, a Brooklyn woman with a long history of substance abuse who was arrested entering the country at Kennedy International Airport with over 13 kilograms of cocaine, about 30 pounds, in her luggage.

“I want to thank the federal government for giving me a chance,” Ms. Leitch said. “I always wanted to stand up as a sober person.”

The new approach is being prompted in part by the Obama administration, which previously supported legislation that scaled back sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine. The Justice Department has supported additional changes to the federal sentencing guidelines to permit the use of drug or mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration for certain low-level offenders and changed its own policies to make those options more available.

“We recognize that imprisonment alone is not a complete strategy for reducing crime,” James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “Drug courts, re-entry courts and other related programs along with enforcement are all part of the solution.”

For nearly 30 years, the United States Sentencing Commission has established guidelines for sentencing, a role it was given in 1984 after studies found that federal judges were giving defendants widely varying sentences for similar crimes. The commission’s recommendations are approved by Congress, causing judges to bristle at what they consider interference with their judicial independence.

“When you impose a sentence that you believe is unjust, it is a very difficult thing to do,” Stefan R. Underhill, a federal judge in Connecticut, said in an interview. “It feels wrong.”

The development of drug courts may meet resistance from some Republicans in Congress.

“It is important that courts give deference to Congressional authority over sentencing,” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, a member and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. He said sentencing should not depend “on what judge happens to decide the case or what judicial circuit the defendant happens to be in.”

At the state level, pretrial drug courts have benefited from bipartisan support, with liberals supporting the programs as more focused on rehabilitation, and conservatives supporting them as a way to cut spending.

Under the model being used in state and federal courts, defendants must accept responsibility for their crimes and agree to receive drug treatment and other social services and attend regular meetings with judges who monitor their progress. In return for successful participation, they receive a reduced sentence or no jail time at all. If they fail, they are sent to prison.

The drug court option is not available to those facing more serious charges, like people accused of being high-level dealers or traffickers, or accused of a violent crime. (These programs differ from re-entry drug courts, which federal judges have long used to help offenders integrate into society after prison.)

In interviews, the federal judges who run the other programs pointed to a mix of reasons for their involvement.

Read More..

U.S. Judges Offer Addicts a Way to Avoid Prison

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Emily Leitch of Brooklyn, with her son, Nazir, 4, was arrested for importing cocaine but went to “drug court” to avoid prison.

Federal judges around the country are teaming up with prosecutors to create special treatment programs for drug-addicted defendants who would otherwise face significant prison time, an effort intended to sidestep drug laws widely seen as inflexible and overly punitive.

The Justice Department has tentatively embraced the new approach, allowing United States attorneys to reduce or even dismiss charges in some drug cases.

The effort follows decades of success for “drug courts” at the state level, which legal experts have long cited as a less expensive and more effective alternative to prison for dealing with many low-level repeat offenders.

But it is striking that the model is spreading at the federal level, where judges have increasingly pushed back against rules that restrict their ability to make their own determination of appropriate sentences.

So far, federal judges have instituted programs in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington. About 400 defendants have been involved nationwide.

In Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday, Judge John Gleeson issued an opinion praising the new approach as a way to address swelling prison costs and disproportionate sentences for drug trafficking.

“Presentence programs like ours and those in other districts mean that a growing number of courts are no longer reflexively sentencing federal defendants who do not belong in prison to the costly prison terms recommended by the sentencing guidelines,” Judge Gleeson wrote.

The opinion came a year after Judge Gleeson, with the federal agency known as Pretrial Services, started a program that made achieving sobriety an incentive for drug-addicted defendants to avoid prison. The program had its first graduate this year: Emily Leitch, a Brooklyn woman with a long history of substance abuse who was arrested entering the country at Kennedy International Airport with over 13 kilograms of cocaine, about 30 pounds, in her luggage.

“I want to thank the federal government for giving me a chance,” Ms. Leitch said. “I always wanted to stand up as a sober person.”

The new approach is being prompted in part by the Obama administration, which previously supported legislation that scaled back sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine. The Justice Department has supported additional changes to the federal sentencing guidelines to permit the use of drug or mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration for certain low-level offenders and changed its own policies to make those options more available.

“We recognize that imprisonment alone is not a complete strategy for reducing crime,” James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “Drug courts, re-entry courts and other related programs along with enforcement are all part of the solution.”

For nearly 30 years, the United States Sentencing Commission has established guidelines for sentencing, a role it was given in 1984 after studies found that federal judges were giving defendants widely varying sentences for similar crimes. The commission’s recommendations are approved by Congress, causing judges to bristle at what they consider interference with their judicial independence.

“When you impose a sentence that you believe is unjust, it is a very difficult thing to do,” Stefan R. Underhill, a federal judge in Connecticut, said in an interview. “It feels wrong.”

The development of drug courts may meet resistance from some Republicans in Congress.

“It is important that courts give deference to Congressional authority over sentencing,” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, a member and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. He said sentencing should not depend “on what judge happens to decide the case or what judicial circuit the defendant happens to be in.”

At the state level, pretrial drug courts have benefited from bipartisan support, with liberals supporting the programs as more focused on rehabilitation, and conservatives supporting them as a way to cut spending.

Under the model being used in state and federal courts, defendants must accept responsibility for their crimes and agree to receive drug treatment and other social services and attend regular meetings with judges who monitor their progress. In return for successful participation, they receive a reduced sentence or no jail time at all. If they fail, they are sent to prison.

The drug court option is not available to those facing more serious charges, like people accused of being high-level dealers or traffickers, or accused of a violent crime. (These programs differ from re-entry drug courts, which federal judges have long used to help offenders integrate into society after prison.)

In interviews, the federal judges who run the other programs pointed to a mix of reasons for their involvement.

Read More..

Jennifer Sultan Pleads Guilty to Selling Prescription Drugs

At the height of dot-com mania 13 years ago, Jennifer Sultan and a few colleagues sold their small technology company for $70 million in stock and cash. She and her boyfriend rented a large house in the Hamptons for the summer and bought a spacious loft near Union Square.

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Jennifer Sultan faced 15 years to life on the top charge against her, and a potential for more prison time on other counts.

In the years since, that temporary flush of wealth evaporated and Ms. Sultan, 38, developed an addiction to prescription painkillers.

On Friday, she sat handcuffed in a courtroom at State Supreme Court in Manhattan. In exchange for a promise of a four-year prison sentence, she pleaded guilty to selling prescription painkillers and conspiring to sell a firearm.

She was arrested last July and accused of being part of a ring that sold prescription drugs and guns. Four others arrested with Ms. Sultan had already pleaded guilty. One, Nicholas Mina, a former New York City police officer, agreed to serve more than 15 years in prison as part of a plea bargain under which he admitted stealing guns from his colleagues’ precinct house lockers and selling them. Mr. Mina was also addicted to prescription painkillers.

Though Ms. Sultan’s lawyer said she had hoped for less than four years, she faced 15 years to life in prison on the top count against her and the potential for more prison time on other charges. She said little in court but smiled broadly several times as she spoke quietly with her lawyer, Frank Rothman.

“She was happy to be done with it, but she was not happy with the sentence,” Mr. Rothman said afterward.

Ms. Sultan grew up in West Long Branch, N.J., five miles north of Asbury Park, and graduated from New York University in 1996. She and her boyfriend at the time, Adam Cohen, worked at a company, Live Online, that was an early pioneer in live streaming events on the Internet.

After the sale of Live Online, efforts by Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen to start other technology companies failed. Ms. Sultan explored other interests, including acupuncture and holistic health.

Early last year, a city narcotics investigator discovered an advertisement Ms. Sultan had placed on Craigslist offering prescription painkillers for sale. She and Mr. Cohen were still living in the penthouse loft near Union Square that they bought after the sale of Live Online.

Five times from February through June, she sold pills to an undercover officer, according to her indictment. One sale took place at the Starbucks on Union Square. In another, she sold 183 oxycodone tablets to the officer for $4,400 at a Starbucks in the Flatiron district near the school where she was studying acupuncture.

A separate investigation into the ring that sold stolen guns and pain medication picked up Ms. Sultan sending a text message to the man accused of being the ringleader, Ivan Chavez, saying she wanted to sell him a .357 Magnum handgun for $850, according to a separate indictment obtained by the Manhattan district attorney.

Mr. Chavez was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen, who was not accused of participating in the drug and guns ring, filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Last August, the bankruptcy judge ordered them to vacate the loft to allow a bankruptcy trustee to sell it. The 5,600-square-foot loft is still listed for sale at just under $6 million.

She has been incarcerated since her arrest in July because she was unable to raise $85,000 for bail. With credit for good behavior and time served since her arrest, Ms. Sultan could be released from prison in about two years.

Read More..

IHT Rendezvous: Muslims Seek Dialogue With Next Pope

LONDON — As the Catholic Church’s cardinal electors gather at the Vatican to choose a new pope, Muslim leaders are urging a revival of the often troubled dialogue between the two faiths.

During the papacy of Benedict XVI, relations between the world’s two largest religions were overshadowed by remarks he made in 2006 that were widely condemned as an attack on Islam.

In a speech at Regensburg University in his native Germany, Benedict quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor as saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

In the face of protests from the Muslim world, the Vatican said the pope’s remarks had been misinterpreted and that he “deeply regretted” that the speech “sounded offensive to the sensibility of Muslim believers.”

For many in the Muslim world, however, the damage was done and the perception persisted that Benedict was hostile to Islam.

Juan Cole, a U.S. commentator on the Middle East, has suggested that although the pope backed down on some of his positions, “Pope Benedict roiled those relationships with needlessly provocative and sometimes offensive statements about Islam and Muslims.”

Despite the Vatican’s efforts to renew the interfaith dialogue by hosting a meeting with Muslim scholars, hostilities resumed in 2011 when the pope condemned alleged discrimination against Egypt’s Coptic Christians in the wake of a church bombing in Alexandria.

Al Azhar University in Cairo, the center of Islamic learning, froze relations with the Vatican in protest.

Following the pope’s decision to step down, Mahmud Azab, an adviser on interfaith dialogue to the head of Al Azhar, said, “The resumption of ties with the Vatican hinges on the new atmosphere created by the new pope. The initiative is now in the Vatican’s hands.”

Mahmoud Ashour, a senior Al Azhar cleric, insisted that “the new pope must not attack Islam,” according to remarks quoted by Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, and said the two religions should “complete one another, rather than compete.”

A French Muslim leader, meanwhile, has called for a fresh start in the dialogue with a new pope.

In an interview with Der Spiegel of Germany this week, Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, said of Benedict, “He was not able to understand Muslims. He had no direct experience with Islam, and he found nothing positive to say about our beliefs.”

Reem Nasr, writing at the policy debate Web site, Policymic, this week offered Benedict’s successor a five-point program to bridge the Catholic and Muslim worlds.

These included mutual respect, more papal contacts with Muslim leaders and a greater focus on what the religions had in common.

“There has been a long history of mistrust that can be overcome,” she wrote. “No one should give up just yet.”

Read More..

F-35 Jets Returned to Service by Pentagon

The Pentagon lifted its grounding of the new F-35 jet fighter on Thursday after concluding that a turbine blade had cracked on a single plane after it was overused in test operations.

The office that runs the program said no other cracks were found in inspections of the other engines made so far, and no engine redesign was needed.

It said the engine in which the blade cracked was in a plane that “had been operated at extreme parameters in its mission to expand the F-35 flight envelope.”

The program office added that “prolonged exposure to high levels of heat and other operational stressors on this specific engine were determined to be the cause of the crack.”

All flights were suspended last week for the 64 planes built so far once the crack, which stretched for six-tenths of an inch, was found during a routine inspection.

Pratt & Whitney, which makes the engines, investigated the problem with military experts. The company, a unit of United Technologies, said on Wednesday that the crack occurred after that engine was operated more than four times longer in a high-temperature flight environment than the engines would in normal use.

The F-35, a supersonic jet meant to evade enemy radar, is the Pentagon’s most expensive program and has been delayed by various technical problems. The program could cost $396 billion if the Pentagon builds 2,456 jets by the late 2030s.

Read More..

Jane C. Wright, Pioneering Oncologist, Dies at 93

Dr. Jane C. Wright, a pioneering oncologist who helped elevate chemotherapy from a last resort for cancer patients to an often viable treatment option, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Guttenberg, N.J. She was 93.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Jane Jones, who said her mother had dementia.

Dr. Wright descended from a distinguished medical family that defied racial barriers in a profession long dominated by white men. Her father, Dr. Louis T. Wright, was among the first blacks to graduate from Harvard Medical School and was reported to be the first black doctor appointed to the staff of a New York City hospital. His father was an early graduate of what became the Meharry Medical College, the first medical school in the South for African-Americans, founded in Nashville in 1876.

Dr. Jane Wright began her career as a researcher working alongside her father at a cancer center he established at Harlem Hospital in New York.

Together, they and others studied the effects of a variety of drugs on tumors, experimented with chemotherapeutic agents on leukemia in mice and eventually treated patients, with some success, with new anticancer drugs, including triethylene melamine.

After her father died in 1952, Dr. Wright took over as director of the center, which was known as the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation. In 1955, she joined the faculty of the New York University Medical Center as director of cancer research, where her work focused on correlating the responses of tissue cultures to anticancer drugs with the responses of patients.

In 1964, working as part of a team at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, Dr. Wright developed a nonsurgical method, using a catheter system, to deliver heavy doses of anticancer drugs to previously hard-to-reach tumor areas in the kidneys, spleen and elsewhere.

That same year, Dr. Wright was the only woman among seven physicians who, recognizing the unique needs of doctors caring for cancer patients, founded the American Society of Clinical Oncologists, known as ASCO. She was also appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke, led by the heart surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey. Its recommendations emphasized better communication among doctors, hospitals and research institutions and resulted in a national network of treatment centers.

In 1967, Dr. Wright became head of the chemotherapy department and associate dean at New York Medical College. News reports at the time said it was the first time a black woman had held so high a post at an American medical school.

“Not only was her work scientific, but it was visionary for the whole science of oncology,” Dr. Sandra Swain, the current president of ASCO, said in a telephone interview. “She was part of the group that first realized we needed a separate organization to deal with the providers who care for cancer patients. But beyond that it’s amazing to me that a black woman, in her day and age, was able to do what she did.”

Jane Cooke Wright was born in Manhattan on Nov. 30, 1919. Her mother, the former Corinne Cooke, was a substitute teacher in the New York City schools.

Ms. Wright attended the Ethical Culture school in Manhattan and the Fieldston School in the Bronx (now collectively known Ethical Culture Fieldston School) and graduated from Smith College, where she studied art before turning to medicine. She received a full scholarship to New York Medical College, earning her medical degree in 1945. Before beginning research with her father, she worked as a doctor in the city schools.

Dr. Wright’s marriage, in 1947, to David D. Jones, a lawyer, ended with his death in 1976. She is survived by their two daughters, Jane and Alison Jones, and a sister, Barbara Wright Pierce, who is also a doctor.

As both a student and a doctor, Dr. Wright said in interviews, she was always aware that as a black woman she was an unusual presence in medical institutions. But she never felt she was a victim of racial prejudice, she said.

“I know I’m a member of two minority groups,” she said in an interview with The New York Post in 1967, “but I don’t think of myself that way. Sure, a woman has to try twice as hard. But — racial prejudice? I’ve met very little of it.”

She added, “It could be I met it — and wasn’t intelligent enough to recognize it.”

Read More..

Jane C. Wright, Pioneering Oncologist, Dies at 93

Dr. Jane C. Wright, a pioneering oncologist who helped elevate chemotherapy from a last resort for cancer patients to an often viable treatment option, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Guttenberg, N.J. She was 93.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Jane Jones, who said her mother had dementia.

Dr. Wright descended from a distinguished medical family that defied racial barriers in a profession long dominated by white men. Her father, Dr. Louis T. Wright, was among the first blacks to graduate from Harvard Medical School and was reported to be the first black doctor appointed to the staff of a New York City hospital. His father was an early graduate of what became the Meharry Medical College, the first medical school in the South for African-Americans, founded in Nashville in 1876.

Dr. Jane Wright began her career as a researcher working alongside her father at a cancer center he established at Harlem Hospital in New York.

Together, they and others studied the effects of a variety of drugs on tumors, experimented with chemotherapeutic agents on leukemia in mice and eventually treated patients, with some success, with new anticancer drugs, including triethylene melamine.

After her father died in 1952, Dr. Wright took over as director of the center, which was known as the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation. In 1955, she joined the faculty of the New York University Medical Center as director of cancer research, where her work focused on correlating the responses of tissue cultures to anticancer drugs with the responses of patients.

In 1964, working as part of a team at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, Dr. Wright developed a nonsurgical method, using a catheter system, to deliver heavy doses of anticancer drugs to previously hard-to-reach tumor areas in the kidneys, spleen and elsewhere.

That same year, Dr. Wright was the only woman among seven physicians who, recognizing the unique needs of doctors caring for cancer patients, founded the American Society of Clinical Oncologists, known as ASCO. She was also appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke, led by the heart surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey. Its recommendations emphasized better communication among doctors, hospitals and research institutions and resulted in a national network of treatment centers.

In 1967, Dr. Wright became head of the chemotherapy department and associate dean at New York Medical College. News reports at the time said it was the first time a black woman had held so high a post at an American medical school.

“Not only was her work scientific, but it was visionary for the whole science of oncology,” Dr. Sandra Swain, the current president of ASCO, said in a telephone interview. “She was part of the group that first realized we needed a separate organization to deal with the providers who care for cancer patients. But beyond that it’s amazing to me that a black woman, in her day and age, was able to do what she did.”

Jane Cooke Wright was born in Manhattan on Nov. 30, 1919. Her mother, the former Corinne Cooke, was a substitute teacher in the New York City schools.

Ms. Wright attended the Ethical Culture school in Manhattan and the Fieldston School in the Bronx (now collectively known Ethical Culture Fieldston School) and graduated from Smith College, where she studied art before turning to medicine. She received a full scholarship to New York Medical College, earning her medical degree in 1945. Before beginning research with her father, she worked as a doctor in the city schools.

Dr. Wright’s marriage, in 1947, to David D. Jones, a lawyer, ended with his death in 1976. She is survived by their two daughters, Jane and Alison Jones, and a sister, Barbara Wright Pierce, who is also a doctor.

As both a student and a doctor, Dr. Wright said in interviews, she was always aware that as a black woman she was an unusual presence in medical institutions. But she never felt she was a victim of racial prejudice, she said.

“I know I’m a member of two minority groups,” she said in an interview with The New York Post in 1967, “but I don’t think of myself that way. Sure, a woman has to try twice as hard. But — racial prejudice? I’ve met very little of it.”

She added, “It could be I met it — and wasn’t intelligent enough to recognize it.”

Read More..

Media Decoder Blog: Barnes & Noble Rethinks Its Strategy for the Nook

7:15 p.m. | Updated Barnes & Noble, reporting a sharp drop in sales of its Nook tablets, said on Thursday that it would pull back on its ambitions for its device business, shrinking it in size while focusing more on digital content.

Calling Nook sales over the holiday period an “obvious disappointment,” the bookseller’s chief executive, William Lynch, said the company was taking “significant actions to right size investments” in its digital hardware division through steep cuts in advertising and the manufacturing of devices. Mr. Lynch made his remarks in a conference call with analysts shortly after Barnes & Noble reported a 26 percent decline in the fiscal third quarter for the Nook segment, which includes digital tablets and e-readers.

The retrenching of the Nook unit represents a setback to the Barnes & Noble plan to build up its device business as a way of staying competitive in the rapidly changing e-book market. Last year, the company separated the division from the rest of its operations and struck deals with Microsoft and Pearson for hundreds of millions of dollars in financing — signs that it viewed its digital business as the linchpin of future growth.

But the Nook, while drawing favorable reviews, failed to gain traction against more popular tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad, and its performance over the 2012 holiday season was tepid. Barnes & Noble warned last month that Nook sales for the quarter would fall below expectations, and executives hinted recently that the strategy of operating in the highly competitive tablet space had run its course.

“The Nook is not a failure, not technically,” said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. “If you go back two years and ask the Nook product managers how many Nooks they would want to sell by now, I bet they have blown past that number. The problem is the fact that the overall tablet market has actually blown way past the Nook’s performance.”

While saying that Barnes & Noble remained committed to the tablet and e-reader market, Mr. Lynch said the company would adjust its strategy quickly. “We are not going to continue doing what we’re doing,” he said in the conference call.

The results announced Thursday underscored the challenges. The company said that Nook revenue declined to $316 million for the quarter that ended Jan. 26, from $426 million over the same period a year ago. Losses in the unit increased to $190 million, from $83 million last year, as measured before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

Over all, the company had a net loss in the quarter of just over $6 million, compared with net income of $52 million a year ago. Revenue in all three major units — Nook, retail and college — was down.

The losses were largely because of lower-than-anticipated sales, inventory charges and higher operating expenses because of advertising costs, the company said.

Mr. Lynch said Thursday that a reformulated Nook strategy would focus more on digital content like e-books and magazines, sales of which increased by 6.8 percent in the quarter. He also said the company planned to be a leader in “digital education” and that it expected that to be a growth area.

In the call with analysts, Mr. Lynch was pressed on whether Barnes & Noble’s digital content was really proprietary. Mr. Lynch acknowledged that what the bookseller possessed was the ability to sell publishers’ content, but he insisted that it was “a strategic asset that is hard to replicate.”

Wall Street seemed heartened by the company’s acknowledgment that it needed to recalibrate its device business, perhaps anticipating that it would accelerate a breakup of the device and retail units. Shares of Barnes & Noble rose 3.35 percent, to close at $15.74.

The company said that there was clear evidence that digital trade book sales were “flattening,” meaning that the bookseller’s physical retail position would be strong in the future. Mr. Lynch said Barnes & Noble continued to take market share from other physical book retailers. The company also promoted prototypes for new stores to be opened in malls and the growth of the college bookstore business.

Combined with the announcement on Monday that Leonard Riggio, the company’s chairman and largest shareholder, was considering purchasing the retail segment, the news added a positive gloss to the brick-and-mortar business that it had not had for some time.

That notion got some support with the earnings report. Retail sales fell just more than 10 percent in the quarter, largely because of the closing of some unprofitable stores. But Barnes & Noble had largely anticipated the lower revenue and despite the sales decline, retail profits increased 7.3 percent, to $212 million, in part because of higher sales margins and “expense management,” the company said.

Despite the shift in digital strategy, Mr. Lynch emphasized that the company was not abandoning the Nook division.

“Nook Media has been financing itself since October of 2012 due to the strong investment partners we’ve been able to attract in Microsoft and Pearson,” he said. He added that the Nook segment and the physical stores drove traffic to each other and needed to remain in partnership.

But analysts sounded a skeptical note. “Barnes & Noble stands at a fork in the road and rather than choose one path, it will likely need to split into two companies and let the retail business go down one path while freeing the Nook division to go down another,” said Mr. McQuivey, of Forrester. “There’s no guarantee that either path will lead to the promised land, but the two units are facing such different challenges and such unique prospects that it doesn’t make sense for them to try to work together to solve such different problems.”

Read More..

Malaysia Said to Open Fire on Armed Filipinos

MANILA — Shots have been fired in a tense standoff between a group of armed Filipinos and Malaysian police officer who have them surrounded in a remote northeast area of Malaysia, a Philippine presidential spokesman said Friday.

The group, which is occupying an isolated village in attempt to revive a historical claim to the area, tried early Friday morning to breach the perimeter established by Malaysian police, said Ricky Carandang, a Philippine presidential spokesman.

The group claims the territory in Malaysia’s Sabah State as its own, and has rejected a plea from President Benigno S. Aquino III of the Philippines to leave. The group’s seizure of the coastal village has complicated relations between the Philippines and Malaysia.

After the group tried to breach the perimeter, the Malaysian police fired warning shots to force them to return to the cordoned off area and no one was injured, Mr. Carandang said.

“They apparently tried to leave the area and were stopped,” Mr. Carandang said by telephone. “We have conflicting reports but this is what we have verified so far.”

The group’s leader, who is based in Manila, claimed on Friday that the Malaysian police opened fire on them. The leader, Prince Rajah Mudah Agbimuddin Kiram, told the Philippine radio station DZBB that the group was fighting back and that there had been Filipino casualties.

The episode began Feb. 12, when the group, which is seeking to revive a historical claim to part of Borneo, arrived by boat from the Philippines and seized the land. The Philippines on Monday sent a navy vessel to the area with medical and diplomatic personnel to pick up the group or escort them back to the Philippines, hoping to resolve the situation.

Mr. Aquino said Tuesday that his government had sent emissaries to meet with Mr. Kiram to resolve the issue.

“These are your people, and it behooves you to recall them,” Mr. Aquino said to the leader in his Tuesday statement. “It must be clear to you that this small group of people will not succeed in addressing your grievances, and that there is no way that force can achieve your aims.”

The Philippines has been coordinating with the Malaysian government to resolve the issue peacefully, but Malaysian police officials in the area where the standoff is taking place had earlier suggested that they were prepared to use force if necessary.

Floyd Whaley reported from Manila, and Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong.

Read More..

Boeing Shows Dreamliner Battery Plan to Japanese Government

TOKYO — Boeing on Thursday presented the Japanese government with its plan to address battery problems on its new 787 Dreamliner, stressing that added protections against possible battery fires and overheating are more than enough to allow its planes back in the air.

Japanese investigators, however, have maintained that there is still not enough evidence to show that the batteries themselves are the cause of fires, and that a shock could have caused them to overheat. That could complicate Boeing’s efforts to get regulators around the world to approve their fixes, because they focus only on containing any problems that might arise in the batteries.

The Japanese assertions have put Japan’s transport safety board at odds with American investigators, who have said publicly that there was no such surge in electrical current from outside the battery. The lithium-ion batteries on the 787 are made by GS Yuasa of Japan.

Raymond L. Conner, the chief executive of Boeing’s commercial airplane division, who is in Tokyo for talks with Japanese government officials, airliners and suppliers, gave a public apology for the problems with the 787 and said that he was confident that the battery fixes were a “permanent” solution that ensured the batteries would not be a danger going forward.

“What we did today was to discuss these solutions that we are looking at that could be final solutions,” Mr. Connor told reporters after meeting with the Japanese transport minister, Akihiro Ota.

“We feel this solution takes into account any possible event that could occur,” he said, “any causal factor that could cause an event, and we are very confident that we have a fix that will be permanent and allow us to continue to use the technology.”

He denied that there was any disagreement between the American and Japanese positions on the needed fixes. He said that Boeing continued to have a “great relationship” with GS Yuasa, the battery maker.

Boeing has delivered 50 787s so far to eight airlines, and it expects to sell thousands of the fuel-efficient jets. But a battery caught fire on one Japan Airlines plane parked in Boston on Jan. 7, and smoke forced another 787 operated by All Nippon Airways to make an emergency landing in Japan.

Boeing has proposed separating the battery cells with insulation to keep heat from spreading from one to another. It also would build a fireproof container around the batteries and add tubes to vent smoke or hazardous gases out of the plane.

Japanese officials would like to Boeing to add a voltage monitor to detect any electric surges from outside the battery. Boeing officials said they did not think they needed this.

Read More..

Well: Think Like a Doctor: The Man Who Wobbled

The Challenge: Can you solve the medical mystery of a man who suddenly becomes too dizzy to walk?

Every month, the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to try their hand at solving a medical mystery. Below you will find the story of a 56-year-old factory worker with dizziness and panic attacks. I have provided records from his two hospital visits that will give you all the information available to the doctor who finally made the diagnosis.

The first reader to offer the correct diagnosis gets a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” and the satisfaction of solving a case that stumped a roomful of specialists.

The Patient’s Story:

The middle-aged man clicked his way through the multiple reruns of late-late-night television. He should have been in bed hours ago, but lately he hadn’t been able to get to sleep. Suddenly his legs took on a life of their own. Stretched out halfway to the center of the room, they began to shake and twitch and jump around. The man watched helplessly as his legs disobeyed his mental orders to stop moving. He had no control over them. He felt nauseous, sweaty and out of breath, as if he had been running some kind of race. He called out to his wife. She hurried out of bed, took one look at him and called 911.

The Patient’s History:

By the time the man arrived at Huntsville Hospital, in Alabama, the twitching in his legs had subsided and his breathing had returned to normal. Still, he had been discharged from that same hospital for similar symptoms just two weeks earlier. They hadn’t figured out what was going on then, so they weren’t going to send him home now.

The patient considered himself pretty healthy, but the past year or so had been tough. In 2011, at the age of 54, he had had a mild stroke. He had no medical problems that put him at risk for stroke — no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol, no diabetes. A work-up at that time showed that he had a hole in his heart that allowed a tiny clot from somewhere in his body to travel to the brain and cause the stroke. He was discharged on a couple of blood thinners to keep his blood from making more clots. He hadn’t really felt completely well, though, ever since. His balance seemed a little off, and he was subject to these weird panic attacks, in which his heart would pound and he would feel short of breath whenever he got too stressed. Mostly he could manage them by just walking away and focusing on his breathing. Still, he never felt as if he was the kind of guy to panic.

And he had always been quick on his feet. The first half of his career he had been in the steel business — building huge metal trusses and supports. He and his team put together 60-plus tons of steel structures every day. For the past decade he had been machining car parts. After his stroke, work seemed to get a lot harder.

The Dizziness:

A few weeks ago, he stood up and wham — suddenly the whole world went off-kilter. He felt as if he was constantly about to fall over in a world that no longer lay down flat. His first thought was that he was having another stroke. He went straight to his doctor’s office. The doctor wasn’t sure what was going on and sent him to that same emergency room at Huntsville Hospital. After three days of testing and being evaluated by lots of specialists, his doctors still were not sure what was going on. He hadn’t had a heart attack; he hadn’t had a stroke. There was no sign of infection. All the tests they could think of were normal.

The only abnormal finding was that when he stood up, his blood pressure dropped. Why this happened wasn’t clear, but the doctors in the hospital gave him compression stockings and a pill — both could help keep his blood pressure in the normal range. Then they sent him home. He was also started on an antidepressant to help with the panic attacks he continued to have from time to time.

You can read the report from that hospital admission below.

You can also read the consultation and discharge notes from that hospital visit here.

He had been home for nearly two weeks and still he felt no better. He tried to go back to work after a week or so at home, but after driving for less than five miles, he felt he had to turn around. He wasn’t sure what was wrong; he just knew he didn’t feel right. Then his legs started jumping around, and he ended up back in the hospital.

The Doctor’s Exam:

It was nearly dawn by the time Dr. Jeremy Thompson, the first-year resident on duty that night, saw the patient. Awake but tired, the patient told his story one more time. He had been at home, watching TV, when his legs started jumping on their own and he started feeling short of breath. His wife sat at the bedside. She looked just as worried and exhausted as he did. She told the resident that when he spoke that night at home, his speech was slurred. And when the ambulance came, he could barely walk. He has never missed this much work, she told the young doctor. It’s not like him. Can’t you figure out what’s wrong?

The resident had already reviewed the records from the patient’s previous hospital admissions. He asked a few more questions: the patient had never smoked and rarely drank; his father died at age 80; his mother was still alive and well. The patient exam was normal, as were the studies done in the E.R.

The first E.R. doctor thought that his symptoms were a result of anxiety, culminating in a full-blown panic attack. The resident thought that was probably right. In any case he would discuss the case with the attending in a couple of hours during rounds on the new patients. Till then, he told the worried couple, they should just try to get a little sleep.

An Important Clue:

Dr. Robert Centor was definitely a morning person. His cheerful enthusiasm about teaching and taking care of patients made him a favorite among residents. At 7:30 that morning, he stood outside the patient’s door as Dr. Thompson relayed the somewhat frustrating case of the middle-aged man with worsening dizziness and panic attacks. Then they went into the room to meet the patient. He was a big guy, tall and muscular with the first signs of middle-aged thickening around his middle. His complexion had the look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Dr. Centor introduced himself and pulled up a chair as the rest of the team watched. He asked the patient what brought him to the hospital.

“Every time I get up, I get dizzy,” the man replied. Sure, he had had some balance problems ever since his stroke, he explained, but this felt different – somehow worse. He could hardly walk, he told the doctor. He just felt too unstable.

“Can you get up and show us how you walk?” Dr. Centor asked.

“Don’t let me fall,” the patient responded. He carefully swung his legs over the side of the bed. The resident and intern stood on either side as he slowly rose. He stood with his feet far apart. When asked to close his eyes as he stood there, he wobbled and nearly fell over. When he took a few steps, his heel and toes hit the ground at the same time, making a strange slapping sound.

Seeing that, Dr. Centor knew where the problem lay and ordered a few tests to confirm his diagnosis.

You can see the review report and notes for the patient’s second hospital visit below.

Solving the Mystery:

What tests did Dr. Centor order? Do you know what is making this middle-aged man wobble? Enter your guesses below. I’ll post the answer tomorrow.

---

Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the Comments section below. The correct answer will appear tomorrow on Well. The winner will be contacted. Reader comments may also appear in a coming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

.

Read More..

Well: Think Like a Doctor: The Man Who Wobbled

The Challenge: Can you solve the medical mystery of a man who suddenly becomes too dizzy to walk?

Every month, the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to try their hand at solving a medical mystery. Below you will find the story of a 56-year-old factory worker with dizziness and panic attacks. I have provided records from his two hospital visits that will give you all the information available to the doctor who finally made the diagnosis.

The first reader to offer the correct diagnosis gets a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” and the satisfaction of solving a case that stumped a roomful of specialists.

The Patient’s Story:

The middle-aged man clicked his way through the multiple reruns of late-late-night television. He should have been in bed hours ago, but lately he hadn’t been able to get to sleep. Suddenly his legs took on a life of their own. Stretched out halfway to the center of the room, they began to shake and twitch and jump around. The man watched helplessly as his legs disobeyed his mental orders to stop moving. He had no control over them. He felt nauseous, sweaty and out of breath, as if he had been running some kind of race. He called out to his wife. She hurried out of bed, took one look at him and called 911.

The Patient’s History:

By the time the man arrived at Huntsville Hospital, in Alabama, the twitching in his legs had subsided and his breathing had returned to normal. Still, he had been discharged from that same hospital for similar symptoms just two weeks earlier. They hadn’t figured out what was going on then, so they weren’t going to send him home now.

The patient considered himself pretty healthy, but the past year or so had been tough. In 2011, at the age of 54, he had had a mild stroke. He had no medical problems that put him at risk for stroke — no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol, no diabetes. A work-up at that time showed that he had a hole in his heart that allowed a tiny clot from somewhere in his body to travel to the brain and cause the stroke. He was discharged on a couple of blood thinners to keep his blood from making more clots. He hadn’t really felt completely well, though, ever since. His balance seemed a little off, and he was subject to these weird panic attacks, in which his heart would pound and he would feel short of breath whenever he got too stressed. Mostly he could manage them by just walking away and focusing on his breathing. Still, he never felt as if he was the kind of guy to panic.

And he had always been quick on his feet. The first half of his career he had been in the steel business — building huge metal trusses and supports. He and his team put together 60-plus tons of steel structures every day. For the past decade he had been machining car parts. After his stroke, work seemed to get a lot harder.

The Dizziness:

A few weeks ago, he stood up and wham — suddenly the whole world went off-kilter. He felt as if he was constantly about to fall over in a world that no longer lay down flat. His first thought was that he was having another stroke. He went straight to his doctor’s office. The doctor wasn’t sure what was going on and sent him to that same emergency room at Huntsville Hospital. After three days of testing and being evaluated by lots of specialists, his doctors still were not sure what was going on. He hadn’t had a heart attack; he hadn’t had a stroke. There was no sign of infection. All the tests they could think of were normal.

The only abnormal finding was that when he stood up, his blood pressure dropped. Why this happened wasn’t clear, but the doctors in the hospital gave him compression stockings and a pill — both could help keep his blood pressure in the normal range. Then they sent him home. He was also started on an antidepressant to help with the panic attacks he continued to have from time to time.

You can read the report from that hospital admission below.

You can also read the consultation and discharge notes from that hospital visit here.

He had been home for nearly two weeks and still he felt no better. He tried to go back to work after a week or so at home, but after driving for less than five miles, he felt he had to turn around. He wasn’t sure what was wrong; he just knew he didn’t feel right. Then his legs started jumping around, and he ended up back in the hospital.

The Doctor’s Exam:

It was nearly dawn by the time Dr. Jeremy Thompson, the first-year resident on duty that night, saw the patient. Awake but tired, the patient told his story one more time. He had been at home, watching TV, when his legs started jumping on their own and he started feeling short of breath. His wife sat at the bedside. She looked just as worried and exhausted as he did. She told the resident that when he spoke that night at home, his speech was slurred. And when the ambulance came, he could barely walk. He has never missed this much work, she told the young doctor. It’s not like him. Can’t you figure out what’s wrong?

The resident had already reviewed the records from the patient’s previous hospital admissions. He asked a few more questions: the patient had never smoked and rarely drank; his father died at age 80; his mother was still alive and well. The patient exam was normal, as were the studies done in the E.R.

The first E.R. doctor thought that his symptoms were a result of anxiety, culminating in a full-blown panic attack. The resident thought that was probably right. In any case he would discuss the case with the attending in a couple of hours during rounds on the new patients. Till then, he told the worried couple, they should just try to get a little sleep.

An Important Clue:

Dr. Robert Centor was definitely a morning person. His cheerful enthusiasm about teaching and taking care of patients made him a favorite among residents. At 7:30 that morning, he stood outside the patient’s door as Dr. Thompson relayed the somewhat frustrating case of the middle-aged man with worsening dizziness and panic attacks. Then they went into the room to meet the patient. He was a big guy, tall and muscular with the first signs of middle-aged thickening around his middle. His complexion had the look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Dr. Centor introduced himself and pulled up a chair as the rest of the team watched. He asked the patient what brought him to the hospital.

“Every time I get up, I get dizzy,” the man replied. Sure, he had had some balance problems ever since his stroke, he explained, but this felt different – somehow worse. He could hardly walk, he told the doctor. He just felt too unstable.

“Can you get up and show us how you walk?” Dr. Centor asked.

“Don’t let me fall,” the patient responded. He carefully swung his legs over the side of the bed. The resident and intern stood on either side as he slowly rose. He stood with his feet far apart. When asked to close his eyes as he stood there, he wobbled and nearly fell over. When he took a few steps, his heel and toes hit the ground at the same time, making a strange slapping sound.

Seeing that, Dr. Centor knew where the problem lay and ordered a few tests to confirm his diagnosis.

You can see the review report and notes for the patient’s second hospital visit below.

Solving the Mystery:

What tests did Dr. Centor order? Do you know what is making this middle-aged man wobble? Enter your guesses below. I’ll post the answer tomorrow.

---

Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the Comments section below. The correct answer will appear tomorrow on Well. The winner will be contacted. Reader comments may also appear in a coming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

.

Read More..

I.B.M. Exploring New Feats for Watson

Robert Caplin for The New York Times

I.B.M. plans to serve a breakfast pastry devised by Watson and the chef James Briscione at its meeting on Thursday.

I.B.M.’s Watson beat “Jeopardy” champions two years ago. But can it whip up something tasty in the kitchen?

That is just one of the questions that I.B.M. is asking as it tries to expand its artificial intelligence technology and turn Watson into something that actually makes commercial sense.

The company is betting that it can build a big business by taking the Watson technology into new fields. The uses it will be showing off to Wall Street analysts at a gathering in the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday include helping to develop drugs, predicting when industrial machines need maintenance and even coming up with novel recipes for tasty foods. In health care, Watson is training to become a diagnostic assistant at a few medical centers, including the Cleveland Clinic.

The new Watson projects — some on the cusp of commercialization, others still research initiatives — are at the leading edge of a much larger business for I.B.M. and other technology companies. That market involves helping corporations, government agencies and science laboratories find useful insights in a rising flood of data from many sources — Web pages, social network messages, sensor signals, medical images, patent filings, location data from cellphones and others.

Advances in several computing technologies have opened this opportunity and market, now called Big Data, and a key one is the software techniques of artificial intelligence like machine learning.

I.B.M. has been building this business for years with acquisitions and internal investment. Today, the company says it is doing Big Data and analytics work with more than 10,000 customers worldwide. Its work force includes 9,000 business analytics consultants and 400 mathematicians.

I.B.M. forecasts that its revenue from Big Data work will reach $16 billion by 2015. Company executives compare the meeting in San Jose to one in 2006, when Samuel J. Palmisano, then chief executive, summoned investment analysts to I.B.M.’s offices in India to showcase the surging business in developing markets, which has proved to be an engine of growth for the company.

I.B.M. faces plenty of competitors in the Big Data market, ranging from start-ups to major companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and the SAS Institute. These companies, like I.B.M., are employing the data-mining technology to trim costs, design new products and find sales opportunities in banking, retailing, manufacturing, health care and other industries.

Yet the Watson initiatives, analysts say, represent pioneering work. With some of those applications, like suggesting innovative recipes, Watson is starting to move beyond producing “Jeopardy” style answers to investigating the edges of human knowledge to guide discovery.

“That’s not something we thought of when we started with Watson,” said John E. Kelly III, I.B.M.’s senior vice president for research.

I.B.M.’s Watson projects are not yet big money makers. But the projects, according to Frank Gens, chief analyst for IDC, make the case that I.B.M. has the advanced technology and deep industry expertise to do things other technology suppliers cannot, which should be a high-margin business and give I.B.M. an edge as a strategic partner with major customers. And the new Watson offerings, he said, are services that future users might be able to tap into through a smartphone or tablet.

That could significantly broaden the market for Watson, Mr. Gens said, as well as ward off potential competition if question-answering technology from consumer offerings, like Apple’s Siri and Google, improve.

“It will take years for these consumerized technologies to compete with Watson, but that day could certainly come,” Mr. Gens said.

John Baldoni, senior vice president for technology and science at GlaxoSmithKline, got in touch with I.B.M. shortly after watching Watson’s “Jeopardy” triumph. He was struck that Watson frequently had the right answer, he said, “but what really impressed me was that it so quickly sifted out so many wrong answers.”

Read More..