The company said the deal will resolve hundreds of lawsuits from Toyota owners who said the value of their cars and trucks plummeted after a series of recalls stemming from claims that Toyota vehicles accelerated unintentionally. Steve Berman, a lawyer representing Toyota owners, said the settlement is the largest in U.S. history involving automobile defects. "We kept fighting and fighting and we secured what we think was a good settlement given the risks of this litigation," Berman told The Associated Press. The proposed deal was filed Wednesday and must receive the approval of U.S. District Judge James Selna, who was expected to review the settlement Friday. Toyota said it will take a one-time, $1.1 billion pre-tax charge against earnings to cover the estimated costs of the settlement. Berman said the total value of the deal is between $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against Toyota since 2009, when the Japanese automaker started receiving numerous complaints that its cars accelerated on their own, causing crashes, injuries and even deaths. The cases were consolidated in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana and divided into two categories: economic loss and wrongful death. Claims by people who seek compensation for injury and death due to sudden acceleration are not part of the settlement; the first trial involving those suits is scheduled for February. As part of the economic loss settlement, Toyota will offer cash payments from a pool of about $250 million to eligible customers who sold vehicles or turned in leased vehicles between September 2009 and December 2010. The company also will launch a $250 million program for 16 million current owners to provide supplemental warranty coverage for certain vehicle components, and it will retrofit about 3.2 million vehicles with a brake override system. An override system is designed to ensure a car will stop when the brakes are applied, even if the accelerator pedal is depressed. The settlement would also establish additional driver education programs and fund new research into advanced safety technologies. "In keeping with our core principles, we have structured this agreement in ways that work to put our customers first and demonstrate that they can count on Toyota to stand behind our vehicles," said Christopher Reynolds, Toyota vice president and general counsel. Current and former Toyota owners are expected to receive more information about the settlement in the coming months. Some information is also available at http://www.ToyotaELsettlement.com , a website created for Toyota owners affected by the settlement. "We are extraordinarily proud of how we were able to represent the interests of Toyota owners, and believe this settlement is both comprehensive in its scope and fair in compensation," Berman said. Toyota has recalled more than 14 million vehicles worldwide due to acceleration problems in several models and brake defects with the Prius hybrid. The automaker has blamed driver error, faulty floor mats and stuck accelerator pedals for the problems. Plaintiffs' attorneys have spent the past two years deposing Toyota employees, poring over thousands of documents and reviewing software code, but the company maintains those lawyers have been unable to prove that a design defect — namely Toyota's electronic throttle control system — was responsible for vehicles surging unexpectedly. Both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and NASA were unable to find any defects in Toyota's source code that could cause problems. The company has been dogged by fines for not reporting problems in a timely manner. Earlier this month, NHTSA doled out a record $17.4 million fine to Toyota for failing to quickly report floor mat problems with some of its Lexus models. Toyota paid a total of $48.8 million in fines for three violations in 2010. Toyota President Akio Toyoda appeared before Congress last year and pledged to strengthen quality control. Recent sales figures show the company appears to have rebounded following its safety issues. ___ Online: Settlement website: http://www.ToyotaELsettlement.com
Thứ Ba, 1 tháng 1, 2013
Tour Bus Crash Kills 9 in Oregon
The charter bus carrying about 40 people lost control around 10:30 a.m. on snow- and ice-covered lanes of Interstate 84 in a rural area of eastern Oregon, according to the Oregon State Police. The bus crashed near the start of a 7-mile section of road that winds down a hill. The bus came to rest at the bottom of a snowy slope and landed upright, with little or no debris visible around the crash site. More than a dozen rescue workers descended the hill and used ropes to help retrieve people from the wreckage in freezing weather. The bus driver was among the survivors, but had not yet spoken to police because of the severity of the injuries the driver had suffered. Lt. Greg Hastings said the bus crashed along the west end of the Blue Mountains, and west of an area called Deadman Pass. The area is so dangerous the state transportation department published specific warnings for truck drivers, advising it had "some of the most changeable and severe weather conditions in the Northwest" and can lead to slick conditions and poor visibility. St. Anthony Hospital in Pendleton treated 26 people from the accident, said hospital spokesman Larry Blanc. Five of those treated at St. Anthony were transported to other facilities. I-84 is a major east-west highway through Oregon that follows the Columbia River Gorge. Umatilla County Emergency Manager Jack Remillard said the bus was owned by Mi Joo travel in Vancouver, B.C., and state police said the bus was en route from Las Vegas to Vancouver. A woman who answered the phone at a listing for the company confirmed with The Associated Press that it owned the bus and said it was on a tour of the Western U.S. She declined to give her name. A bus safety website run by the U.S. Department of Transportation said Mi Joo Tour & Travel has six buses, none of which have been involved in any accidents in at least the past two years. The bus crash was the second fatal accident on the same highway in Oregon on Sunday. A 69-year-old man died in a rollover accident about 30 miles west of the area where the bus crashed. A spokesman for the American Bus Association said buses carry more than 700 million passengers a year in the United States. "The industry as a whole is a very safe industry," said Dan Ronan of the Washington, D.C.,-based group. "There are only a handful of accidents every year. Comparatively speaking, we're the safest form of surface transportation." The bus crash comes more than two months after another chartered tour bus in October veered off a highway in northern Arizona, killing the driver and injuring dozens of passengers who were mostly tourists from Asia and Europe. Authorities say the driver likely had a medical episode.
With a Parent at War, a Holiday of Pain and Pride
It is nothing unusual for Alexandra Alfield, a 17-year-old senior whose father, a Special Forces soldier, has been gone since August and for six of the last nine years. “I do miss him,” she said, “but I’m just so accustomed to it.” As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 66,000 American troops from Afghanistan, the parents of Fort Campbell students are still going off to war. Nearly 10,000 men and women from the 101st Airborne, a third of the active-duty troops based here, are either in Afghanistan or getting ready to go. Still more parents here have been deployed with units like the Fifth Special Forces Group and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, whose members piloted the helicopters in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. That has made the high school, which is run by the Defense Department and is one of only four secondary schools on military bases in the United States, something of a window into the pain, pride and resentment felt by the families of the all-volunteer military force, which has borne the burdens of 11 years of war. The high school, which has about 700 students and is open to any 9th to 12th grader who lives on the 100,000-acre post along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, is by definition physically and psychologically cut off from the world outside the gates. But at no time is that sense of isolation more acute than now, when many of the students’ parents are deployed while the rest of the country’s interest in Afghanistan has moved on. “No one really cares,” Tyisha Smith, a 19-year-old senior, said of the outside world. “Your father goes, gets deployed. War — it’s normal. It’s not like a big deal that we’re still at war.” But Ms. Smith said she was struggling to manage the pressures of her final year in high school while her father was away and she was living with her stepmother. The reality of his deployment with the 101st Airborne is never far away. “It’s starting to hit me that there’s a possibility that he could die,” she said. “I just hope he comes home.” School administrators point to a bright spot: not as many parents are gone this year as there were at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when nearly everyone in the school had a parent deployed and the post was a virtual ghost town. But that hardly makes the modest one-story school typical. A strict dress code bans jeans and T-shirts, so students wear tucked-in collared shirts with khakis or dark pants. Presidents turn up a lot: Mr. Obama spoke at the post in May 2011, and George W. Bush visited three times while he was president. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met earlier in 2011 with the Fort Campbell High School football team. And the death of a parent is something to be mourned but overcome. Only months after his father was killed in Afghanistan in June 2008, Josh Carter, a starting linebacker, helped lead the Falcons to their second of three straight state championships. “My dad would want me to keep going,” Mr. Carter, now a student at Western Kentucky University, said in an interview over the summer. Administrators say that perhaps five other students have lost parents in the wars in recent years. Many other parents have been wounded or have received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. The students readily call their school a “bubble,” both comforting and claustrophobic, because of the dangers their parents face. “If you went to off-post schools, you couldn’t exactly talk to a teenager because they wouldn’t understand what you’re going through,” said Larissa Massie, a 17-year-old senior whose father is home but has had two deployments to Iraq.
Toyota to Settle Class-Action Suits Over Sudden Accelerations
The proposed settlement, filed in a Federal District Court in California, would be one of the largest of its type in automotive history. If the agreement is approved by Judge James V. Selna, Toyota would make cash payments for the loss of value on vehicles affected by multiple recalls and install special safety features on up to 3.2 million cars. While there are still individual personal-injury and wrongful death lawsuits pending against Toyota, in addition to an unfair business practice case brought by the attorneys general of 28 states, the class-action case was the largest legal action related to economic losses by vehicle owners. The suit was filed in 2010 after numerous complaints were made to federal regulators that Toyota vehicles were accelerating suddenly without warning and causing accidents and injuries. Toyota has recalled more than eight million vehicles in the United States for problems related to floor mats that could become entangled with accelerator pedals, or pedals that could stick with the throttle open. But the class-action case contended that Toyota’s electronics systems were at fault. After a long investigation, government officials concluded last year that there was no evidence that faulty electronics systems contributed to the acceleration issues. But a subsequent review of that inquiry by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences found that federal regulators had lacked the expertise to monitor electronic controls in automobiles. The company has been fined more than $60 million by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for failing to inform regulators of internal information about the sudden acceleration, which the company has largely attributed to driver error. The recalls mushroomed into broader problems for Toyota, which had long enjoyed a pristine reputation for quality, safety and reliability, and the class-action suit was a lingering obstacle to its steady comeback from the acceleration issues, which included testimony by its chief executive, Akio Toyoda, before Congress. “This agreement marks a significant step forward for our company, one that will enable us to put more of our energy, time and resources into Toyota’s central focus: making the best vehicles we can for our customers,” said Christopher P. Reynolds, Toyota’s chief legal officer in the United States. Under the proposed settlement, Toyota agreed to create a fund of $250 million to pay claims to former owners of cars affected by the acceleration recalls. The company also agreed to install so-called brake override systems on cars whose pedals could stick or become trapped in floor mats. The company said it had already installed the systems on 2.6 million vehicles but that an additional 550,000 cars had not received the equipment. In addition, the settlement provides a customer support program for more than 16 million current Toyota owners, who will be eligible for free repairs on certain parts for up to 10 years. Toyota has also agreed to contribute $30 million to finance automotive safety research related to driver behavior and unintended acceleration. The lead law firm for the plaintiffs estimated that the overall settlement could total $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion. “We are pleased that Toyota has agreed to a settlement that was both extraordinarily hard-fought and is exceptionally far-reaching,” said Steve Berman, the lawyer who led the settlement talks for the plaintiffs. The amount a Toyota owner may receive for economic loss will be determined by a settlement administrator. In its statement, Toyota said it would take a one-time charge of $1.1 billion against earnings to cover the costs of the class-action case as well as possible costs to resolve a consumer-protection lawsuit filed in California and the unfair-business-practices case. One legal expert said the settlement appeared large but may be part of Toyota’s longer-term strategy to move beyond the acceleration scandal. “The class is very large, so each plaintiff will not receive very much,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “The timing of this and the huge fine Toyota recently agreed to pay suggest Toyota may be concerned about the personal injury cases, in which several trials are set for this spring.” Toyota has recovered much of the sales lost in the aftermath of the sudden-acceleration problems in 2010 and its supply-chain troubles caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The company’s sales in the United States have increased 28 percent this year, about double the pace of growth for the overall market. One industry analyst said the proposed class-action settlement would help Toyota continue to rebuild its reputation and market share. “Toyota wants to put its unintended acceleration recalls behind it once and for all,” said Jesse Toprak, an analyst with the auto research site TrueCar.com. “As costly as it may be, this settlement will allow them to remove most of the lingering financial uncertainty.”
Occupy Movement Was Investigated by F.B.I. Counterterrorism Agents, Records Show
The F.B.I. records show that as early as September 2011, an agent from a counterterrorism task force in New York notified officials of two landmarks in Lower Manhattan — Federal Hall and the Museum of American Finance — “that their building was identified as a point of interest for the Occupy Wall Street.” That was around the time that Occupy Wall Street activists set up a camp in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, spawning a protest movement across the United States that focused the nation’s attention on issues of income inequality. In the following months, F.B.I. personnel around the country were routinely involved in exchanging information about the movement with businesses, local law-enforcement agencies and universities. An October 2011 memo from the bureau’s Jacksonville, Fla., field office was titled Domain Program Management Domestic Terrorist. The memo said agents discussed “past and upcoming meetings” of the movement, and its spread. It said agents should contact Occupy Wall Street activists to ascertain whether people who attended their events had “violent tendencies.” The memo said that because of high rates of unemployment, “the movement was spreading throughout Florida and there were several Facebook pages dedicated to specific chapters based on geographical areas.” The F.B.I. was concerned that the movement would provide “an outlet for a lone offender exploiting the movement for reasons associated with general government dissatisfaction.” Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the F.B.I. has come under criticism for deploying counterterrorism agents to conduct surveillance and gather intelligence on organizations active in environmental, animal-cruelty and poverty issues. The disclosure of the F.B.I. records comes a little more than a year after the police ousted protesters from Zuccotti Park in November 2011. Law-enforcement agencies undertook similar actions around the country against Occupy Wall Street groups. Occupy Wall Street has lost much of its visibility since then, but questions remain about how local and federal law-enforcement officials monitored and treated the protesters. The records were obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a civil-rights organization in Washington, through a Freedom of Information request to the F.B.I. Many parts of the documents were redacted by the bureau. The records provide one of the first glimpses into how deeply involved federal law-enforcement authorities were in monitoring the activities of the movement, which is sometimes described in extreme terms. For example, according to a memo written by the F.B.I.’s New York field office in August 2011, bureau personnel met with officials from the New York Stock Exchange to discuss “the planned Anarchist protest titled ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ scheduled for September 17, 2011.” “The protest appears on Anarchist Web sites and social network pages on the Internet,” the memo said. It added: “Numerous incidents have occurred in the past which show attempts by Anarchist groups to disrupt, influence, and or shut down normal business operations of financial districts.” A spokesman for the F.B.I. in Washington cautioned against “drawing conclusions from redacted” documents. “The F.B.I. recognizes the rights of individuals and groups to engage in constitutionally protected activity,” said the spokesman, Paul Bresson. “While the F.B.I. is obligated to thoroughly investigate any serious allegations involving threats of violence, we do not open investigations based solely on First Amendment activity. In fact, the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.’s own internal guidelines on domestic operations strictly forbid that.” But Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, said the documents demonstrated that the F.B.I. had acted improperly by gathering information on Americans involved in lawful activities. “The collection of information on people’s free-speech actions is being entered into unregulated databases, a vast storehouse of information widely disseminated to a range of law-enforcement and, apparently, private entities,” she said. “This is precisely the threat — people do not know when or how it may be used and in what manner.” The records show little evidence that the members of the movement planned to commit violence. But they do describe a discussion on the Internet “regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement about when it is okay to shoot a police officer” and a law-enforcement meeting held in Des Moines because “there may potentially be an attempt to stop the Iowa Caucuses by people involved in Occupy Iowa.” There are no references within the documents to agency personnel covertly infiltrating Occupy branches. The documents indicate, however, that the F.B.I. obtained information from police departments and other law-enforcement agencies that appear to have been gathered by someone observing the protesters as they planned activities. The documents do not detail recent activities by the F.B.I. involving Occupy Wall Street. But one activist, Billy Livsey, 48, said two F.B.I. agents visited him in Brooklyn over the summer to question him about planned protests at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and about plans to celebrate the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in September. The agents, Mr. Livsey said, told him they knew he was among a group of people involved in the Occupy Wall Street “direct action” group that distributed information about the movement’s activities. He said he felt unnerved by the visit. “It was surprising and troubling to me,” Mr. Livsey said.
Russia Urges Assad to Negotiate with His Opponents
During a news conference with his Egyptian counterpart in Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said he had urged a visiting Syrian government delegation “to maximally put into action its declared readiness for dialogue with the opposition.” Mr. Lavrov also said Moscow had requested a meeting with Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, the head of the largest exile Syrian opposition coalition. Sheik Khatib, a former imam of the historic Umayyad mosque in Damascus, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that he was open to the idea of such a meeting but would refuse to travel to Moscow for it. He also said Russia must issue a “clear condemnation of the crimes committed by the Syrian regime.” Though the United States, Britain and several Persian Gulf nations have recognized the opposition coalition as the sole representative of the Syrian people, Moscow has so far refused. In recent weeks, though, Russia has shown signs that it is distancing itself from Mr. Assad, though it maintains that his fate is a matter for Syrians to decide. Speaking at the same news conference, the Egyptian foreign minister, Mohamed Kamel Amr, tried to highlight the common ground between the Egyptian and Russian governments, saying they both rejected any foreign intervention in the conflict and favored a political transition. He also said Mr. Assad had to leave Syria, revealing the wide gap in positions between Russia and other nations trying to mediate the crisis, a gap that may yet derail the talks. In the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Thursday, Lakhdar Brahimi, the international envoy on Syria, said a transitional government with full executive authority should be established, perhaps within months, and should rule the country until elections could be held. Mr. Brahimi did not say who would serve in such a government, and he offered no details about the role that Mr. Assad would play — if any — during a transitional period. But his comments suggested that if Mr. Assad remained in the country, he would retain none of his authority. “All the powers of government should be with this government,” Mr. Brahimi said of the proposed transitional authority. His comments were his most detailed since he traveled on Sunday to Syria, where he met with Mr. Assad and Syrian opposition members in an effort to revive hopes of a political solution to the crisis. But even as Mr. Brahimi and other international diplomats warned Thursday of the high cost Syrians would pay if his efforts failed, there was no immediate sign of a new diplomatic formula that would be acceptable to the government and its opponents. “The situation is bad and worsening,” Mr. Brahimi said. “The Syrian people are suffering unbearably. We do not speak in a vacuum about theoretical things.” Over the past month, Mr. Brahimi, as the special Syria representative from the United Nations and the Arab League, has consulted extensively with the United States and Russia in hopes of fulfilling an accord reached in Geneva this summer calling for dialogue between Syria’s government and the opposition. Russia, a leading ally of the Assad government, has long pointed to the Geneva agreement, which calls for the creation of a transitional government and for talks between the antagonists, as the only acceptable basis for resolving the conflict. However, the agreement does not address Mr. Assad’s fate, which is a crucial problem because many in the opposition say he must step down as a precondition for talks. In Damascus on Thursday, Mr. Brahimi also denied that he had proposed a specific plan, as many opposition members had asserted in recent days. And he said the United States and Russia had not reached any agreement that he was pressing Mr. Assad to accept. “I wish there was a U.S.-Russia proposal for me to sell,” he said. “I did not come here to sell.” The envoy said the Geneva framework “includes elements that are sufficient for a plan to end the crisis in the next few coming months,” mentioning a peacekeeping force to monitor a cease-fire and the establishment of a transitional government. He said that the transition “should not be allowed to lead to the collapse of the state and its institutions.” Mr. Brahimi’s comments were met with pessimism by members of the largest opposition coalition, who have long said that any arrangement that left Mr. Assad in the country was unacceptable. They have also called for the dismantling of state institutions tied to repression by the government, especially the security and intelligence services. As insurgent groups make gains against the Syrian military, the political opposition has shown even less willingness to compromise. “His initiative is very late, and it is very much detached from what’s actually happening on the ground and on the battlefield,” said Ahmad Ramadan, a coalition member who is in Turkey. “We will not discuss any transitional government before Bashar al-Assad steps down.” In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, on Thursday praised efforts to produce a peaceful transition but ruled out any role for Mr. Assad in the process. Frederic C. Hof, who served as a special adviser on Syria to the State Department, said in an e-mail that Mr. Brahimi’s efforts amounted to “a long shot.” “Assad is not yet persuaded that he needs to yield power and get out,” Mr. Hof said. “There is no solution that involves him sticking around, even as a figurehead.”
Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, and Kareem Fahim from Beirut, Lebanon.
In Shift, Israel Lets Building Materials Into Gaza
Israeli officials said that construction materials would now be allowed in on a daily basis via the Kerem Shalom crossing on Israel’s border with Gaza. The shipment on Sunday came in addition to 34 trucks of gravel that crossed into Gaza over the weekend from Egypt, which also had Israel’s approval. The materials from Egypt were earmarked for housing complexes and other construction projects that the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, pledged to pay for when he visited Gaza in October. The easing of restrictions on imports is a result of continuing talks in Cairo meant to anchor the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza. Israel is holding the discussions with Egypt and has no direct contact with Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Israel has strictly controlled the entry of building materials. Israeli officials have argued that such materials could otherwise be used by militants for manufacturing weapons or constructing tunnels and bunkers. In return for loosening the movement of goods, Israeli officials say, Egypt is expected to help prevent the smuggling of weapons into Gaza. Maj. Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Israeli authority responsible for the crossings, said that Israel had approved the transfer of materials to the private sector “against the background of the talks with the Egyptians and the quiet that has prevailed” in the past five weeks along the Israel-Gaza border. Soon after the cease-fire was announced, the fishing zone off the Gaza coast was extended for Palestinian fishermen from three nautical miles to six nautical miles, and Palestinian residents of Gaza were given more access to lands in a buffer zone imposed by Israel along the border. Taher al-Nounou, a spokesman for the Hamas government in Gaza, said Sunday that the construction materials coming from Egypt would increase to 100 trucks a day and that as part of the cease-fire agreement with Israel, more goods, including cars, would enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing. “Israel is aware now that it will lose a lot financially if it doesn’t sell its goods to the consumers in Gaza,” Mr. Nounou added. The last round of hostilities began in mid-November when Israel began an assault on the enclave after militants there stepped up rocket attacks against southern Israel. During eight days of fighting, Israel bombed more than 1,000 targets in Gaza and the militants fired more than 1,500 rockets into Israel, leaving more than 160 Palestinians and 6 Israelis dead. With the cease-fire, the parties agreed to begin dealing with broader issues like easing restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza. The sides have revealed little detail about the progress of talks in Cairo. Israel has played down the shift in its blockade policy, presumably not wanting to feed the Hamas assertions of victory over Israel in the latest conflict, particularly ahead of Israeli elections on Jan. 22. But Israeli officials have explained the willingness to ease restrictions in terms of trying to ensure the longevity of the cease-fire. They say that the discussions over the deal have also provided Israel with a welcome channel of communication with the new Egyptian leadership under President Mohamed Morsi, seen here as important for the preservation of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The election of Mr. Morsi, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader, brought Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood, closer to Cairo. The ousted president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, was hostile to the Islamists and helped Israel impose a tight blockade on Gaza after Hamas took over there in 2007. But Egypt under Mr. Morsi’s leadership has also remained cautious, and expectations in Gaza that the border with Egypt would be thrown open have not yet been realized. Israel began to ease restrictions on many imports into Gaza in 2010, under international pressure after a deadly Israeli raid on a Turkish boat that was trying to breach the naval blockade. Most everyday products were allowed in. But Israel continued to ban cement, steel and other building materials for the private sector and some other products that Israel deemed a security risk. Gaza contractors came to rely on getting construction materials that were smuggled in from Egypt through a vast network of tunnels running under the border. For that reason, some in Gaza were not particularly impressed by news of building materials arriving from Israel. Majdi Qawalishi, who owns a brick factory in Gaza City, said that the gravel that came through the tunnels from Egypt was significantly cheaper than gravel from Israel, saving him about $300 per day. “I am not really bothered about the Israeli building materials,” he said, “as long as those from Egypt are widely available.”
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Gaza.
Critic’s Notebook: Reality Shows Reached for Extremes in 2012
The character, Rick Salter, is talking about a wildly successful reality competition show he created in which contestants undergo various kinds of torture: they’re deprived of food one week, branded the next week, and so on. The show becomes a national phenomenon, finding the perverse side of the public taste, until things spin out of control. Rick, incidentally, is undergoing torture of his own. He spends most of the novel trapped under a gigantic entertainment system in his house, which has toppled, pinning him beneath. We learn about “The King of Pain” as he looks back on the show’s epic rise and fall while waiting for someone to come along and free him from his metaphorically apt prison. The novel is by Seth Kaufman, a Brooklyn writer whose résumé includes time at TVGuide.com and as a reporter for Page Six at The New York Post. And it seems particularly appropriate for 2012, a year in which the reality genre offered some stunning fare. There were shows and one-shot specials whose mere titles were jolting: “I Was Impaled,” on Discovery Fit & Health; “Wives With Knives,” on Investigation Discovery; “My Giant Face Tumor,” on TLC. There were series that insulted whole groups of people, like “American Gypsies,” on the National Geographic Channel, and “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding,” on TLC; and “Breaking Amish,” on TLC, and “Amish Mafia,” on Discovery. There was — again on TLC, easily the leader in this type of sludge — “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” Which should lead us all to do some-soul searching here at year’s end. Was 2012 a nadir for reality TV? Can the offerings possibly get any worse in 2013? Is “The King of Pain” (Sukuma Books), amusing as it is, the last satire that will ever be written about reality television because the genre has become too ludicrous to parody? Mr. Kaufman, at least, isn’t worried that reality-TV reality is going to make reality-TV fiction unwritable. “At first glance you might think so, but parody and satire are proving quite flexible these days,” he said in an e-mail interview. “ ‘The Daily Show’ and The Onion make us laugh when we should be furious or heartbroken. So I think reality shows — from the petty, freak-show vérité soap-docs like ‘Real Housewives’ to weirdo-docs of ‘Extreme Couponing’ and ‘I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant’ to ‘enter-pain-ment’ shows like ‘Survivor’ and ‘Killer Karaoke’ — will continue to provide a lot to laugh and wince at.” And talk about. “As long as channels can market these shows so they remain in the national conversation at work, on Facebook and in the news, reality TV will continue to be fertile subject matter for anyone interested in modern culture,” Mr. Kaufman said. “And that’s because the questions posed by reality TV are endless. Are we what we watch? Are these shows abusive? Does that make us voyeurs for watching them? Or is it O.K. because, hey, the contestants are exhibitionists?” And, he noted, “There are many world events that make you think it is reality that is un-parody-able, not just reality TV.” A scan of the most appalling reality shows of the past year may be cause for dismay, but people who work in the genre note another side to the spectrum. “I think there’s a lot of redeeming reality television out there,” said Jason Carbone, founder of the production company Good Clean Fun and executive producer of shows like the Style Network’s “Tia & Tamera,” a likable and relatively circumspect show about the adult lives of twins who were stars of the 1990s comedy “Sister, Sister.” “I think that it’s probably not as loud as some of the shows.” Mr. Carbone suggested that, like every type of television, reality TV has cycles, with current trends perhaps influenced by viewers’ need to forget the economy. “They like to feel better about their own lives,” he said, “and reality TV offers up a lot of people whose lives are far worse than our own.”
N.Y.U. and Others Offer Shorter Courses Through Medical School
But now one of the nation’s premier medical schools, New York University, and a few others around the United States are challenging that equation by offering a small percentage of students the chance to finish early, in three years instead of the traditional four. Administrators at N.Y.U. say they can make the change without compromising quality, by eliminating redundancies in their science curriculum, getting students into clinical training more quickly and adding some extra class time in the summer. Not only, they say, will those doctors be able to hang out their shingles to practice earlier, but they will save a quarter of the cost of medical school — $49,560 a year in tuition and fees at N.Y.U., and even more when room, board, books, supplies and other expenses are added in. “We’re confident that our three-year students are going to get the same depth and core knowledge, that we’re not going to turn it into a trade school,” said Dr. Steven Abramson, vice dean for education, faculty and academic affairs at N.Y.U. School of Medicine. At this point, the effort involves a small number of students at three medical schools: about 16 incoming students at N.Y.U., or about 10 percent of next year’s entering class; 9 at Texas Tech Health Science Center School of Medicine; and even fewer, for now, at Mercer University School of Medicine’s campus in Savannah, Ga. A similar trial at Louisiana State University has been delayed because of budget constraints. But Dr. Steven Berk, the dean at Texas Tech, said that 10 or 15 other schools across the country had expressed interest in what his university was doing, and the deans of all three schools say that if the approach works, they will extend the option to larger numbers of students. “You’re going to see this kind of three-year pathway become very prominent across the country,” Dr. Abramson predicted. The deans say that getting students out the door more quickly will accomplish several goals. By speeding up the production of physicians, they say, it could eventually dampen a looming doctor shortage, although the number of doctors would not increase unless the schools admitted more students in the future. The three-year program would also curtail student debt, which now averages $150,000 by graduation, and by doing so, persuade more students to go into shortage areas like pediatrics and internal medicine, rather than more lucrative specialties like dermatology. The idea was supported by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to President Obama, and a colleague, Victor R. Fuchs. In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March, they said there was “substantial waste” in the nation’s medical education. “Years of training have been added without evidence that they enhance clinical skills or the quality of care,” they wrote. They suggested that the 14 years of college, medical school, residency and fellowship that it now takes to train a subspecialty physician could be reduced by 30 percent, to 10 years. That opinion, however, is not universally held. Other experts say that a three-year medical program would deprive students of the time they need to delve deeply into their subjects, to consolidate their learning and to reach the level of maturity they need to begin practicing, while adding even more pressure to a stressful academic environment. “The downside is that you are really tired,” said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting agency for medical schools in the United States and Canada. But because accreditation standards do not dictate the fine points of curriculum, the committee has approved N.Y.U.’s proposal, which exceeds by five weeks its requirement that schools provide at least 130 weeks of medical education. The medical school is going ahead with its three-year program despite the damage from Hurricane Sandy, which forced NYU Langone Medical Center to evacuate more than 300 patients at the height of the storm and temporarily shut down three of its four main teaching hospitals. Dr. Abramson of N.Y.U. said that postgraduate training, which typically includes three years in a hospital residency, and often fellowships after that, made it unnecessary to try to cram everything into the medical school years. Students in the three-year program will have to take eight weeks of class before entering medical school, and stay in the top half of their class academically. Those who do not meet the standards will revert to the four-year program.
Raid on Kenyan Village Said to Leave 30 Dead
Thirteen children, six women, 11 men and nine attackers were killed said police official Anthony Kamitu. Forty-five houses were set on fire during the attack, Kenya Red Cross spokeswoman Nelly Muluka said. Kamitu who is leading police operations to prevent attacks in the region, said that the Pokomo tribe of farmers raided a village of the semi-nomadic Orma herding community at dawn in the Tana River Delta. He said the raiders were armed with spears and AK-47 rifles. At least 110 people were killed in clashes between the Pokomo and Orma in August and September. The tit-for-tat cycle of killings may be related to a redrawing of political boundaries and next year's general elections, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Kenya, Aeneas C. Chuma, said late August. However, on the surface the violence seems driven by competition for water, pasture and other resources, he said. Dhadho Godana, a member of parliament from the region and Defense Minister Yusuf Hajji have been accusing each other of involvement in the fighting. The two have testified before a commission of inquiry led by a High Court judge investigating the clashes Political tensions and tribal animosities have increased due to competition among potential candidates in the March election. Violence after Kenya's last general election, in late 2007, killed more than 1,000 people. Officials are working to avoid a repeat during March's presidential election, but episodes of violence around the country are raising fears that pockets of the country will see violence during the voting period. The Tana River area is about 430 miles (690 kilometers) from the capital, Nairobi. The utilization of the Tana River water has been at the middle of a conflict pitting the Pokomo against the Orma, according to research by the Institute of Security Studies in 2004, following clashes in the Tana River area in 2000 to 2002. The Pokomo claim the land along the river and the Orma claim the waters of the river, said the research by Taya Weiss, titled "Guns in the Borderlands Reducing the Demand for Small Arms." At least 108 people died in the 2000-2002 clashes, according to the parliamentary record. The longstanding conflict between the two tribes had previously resulted in relatively low casualties but the increased availability of guns has caused the casualties to escalate and more property to be destroyed, said the report. It said a catalyst to the conflict was the collapse of three irrigation schemes at Bura, Hola, and Tana Delta, which influenced residents' lifestyles in terms of employment and sources of income. "The collapse of these schemes forced the nomadic pastoralists to move during the wet season, while the farmers remained along the river. During the dry season the pastoralists move back to the river in search of water and pasture," it said. The Tana River area has the characteristics of any other conflict-prone area in Kenya: underdevelopment, poor infrastructure, poor communication and social amenities, and social marginalization, according to the report. "Communities are arming themselves because of the need to defend against perceived attacks," said the report. "They feel that the government security machinery has not been able to effectively respond to violence. Isolation has led to increased demand for guns."
ArtsBeat: ‘The Hobbit’ Stays No. 1 at the Box Office
The weekend before Christmas is typically a weird one for Hollywood. It is one of the only periods all year when a movie’s performance over its first three days does not necessarily signal how good (or bad) total ticket sales will be; ticket buyers may still materialize in significant numbers over the holiday week.
“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” distributed by Warner Brothers, was No. 1 at North American theaters over the weekend, taking in about $36.7 million, for a two-week total of $149.9 million, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office data. Placing second was “Jack Reacher,” which overcame prerelease troubles — Paramount canceled promotional events after the Connecticut school massacre — to sell about $15.6 million in tickets; “Jack Reacher,” which cost roughly $60 million to make, received an A-minus score from audiences in exit polls, boding well for word of mouth.
Judd Apatow’s heavily marketed comedy “This Is 40” (Universal) was third, taking in about $12 million. That total was in line with expectations, and Universal deemed it “good.” But audiences gave Mr. Apatow’s weakly reviewed movie a B-minus in exit polls, indicating a rough road ahead. But it cost a relatively inexpensive $35 million to make.
DreamWorks Animation’s “Rise of the Guardians” was fourth, taking in about $5.9 million, for a five-week total of $79.7 million. Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (Disney) continued to chug along, placing fifth, with an estimated $5.6 million in ticket sales, for a seven-week total of $116.8 million.
U.S. Civilian Is Killed at Police Headquarters in Kabul
The American victim was identified as Joseph Griffin, 49, of Mansfield, Ga., who had worked for DynCorp International as a police trainer since July 2011, according to a DynCorp spokeswoman, Ashley Burke. Afghan officials identified the suspect as a woman named Nargis, a 33-year-old sergeant in the national police force who worked in the Interior Ministry’s legal and gender equality department, and whose husband is also a member of the police force. A person at Kabul police headquarters, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information, said the attacker had shot the American adviser in the head at close range with a pistol and then was immediately arrested by other Afghan police officers. The person added that both American and Afghan officials were questioning her, and he said she was distraught. The police said they did not believe the attack was related to terrorism and that the suspect had no known connections with insurgents. The Afghan news station TOLO cited Afghan officials as saying that the woman, who had crossed multiple police checkpoints before she fired her gun, had graduated from the national police academy in 2008, in one of its first female classes. The effort to recruit and train female police officers has been fraught with difficulty. Eupol, the European police organization active in police training here, says there are only 380 female police officers in Kabul, and even fewer in the provinces, despite a goal by the Interior Ministry of recruiting 5,000 by the end of 2014. Insider attacks, in which members of the Afghan security services have turned against their foreign allies, have greatly increased in the past year, with 61 American and other coalition members killed, not including the episode on Monday, compared with 35 deaths the previous year, according to NATO figures. Monday’s attack — the first insider attack known to be committed by a woman — came after a lull in insider shootings after the military instituted a series of precautions meant to reduce them. The most recent episode was on Nov. 11, when a British soldier was killed in Helmand Province. American and Afghan officials have been struggling to figure out how large a factor Taliban infiltration or coercion has been in such attacks. Although insurgent contact has been clear in some cases, many of the attacks have seemed to come out of personal animosity or outrage, attributed to culture clash or growing Afghan anger at what they see as an unwelcome occupation by the United States and its allies. “The loss of any team member is tragic, but to have this happen over the holidays makes it seem all the more unfair,” Steven F. Gaffney, the chairman of DynCorp, said in a statement. The company also released a statement attributed to the victim’s wife, Rennae Griffin. “My husband was a thoughtful, kind, generous and loving man who was selfless in all his actions and deeds,” it said. In other violence on Monday, a coalition member was killed in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, and an Afghan Local Police commander killed five fellow officers at a checkpoint in Jowzjan Province in the north. Dur Mohammad, the commander at the checkpoint, shot and killed five officers under his command, according to Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat, the provincial police chief. He said the commander fled after the shooting. General Ghairat did not offer a motive, but said that Mr. Mohammad had connections with the Taliban in the area. The Afghan Local Police program, which seeks to bring armed elements — including some former insurgents — into government service, has drawn criticism because of a series of episodes in which the armed elements have switched allegiances, sometimes repeatedly.
Obama Blames ‘Sloppiness’ for Benghazi Attack
Mr. Obama, in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” reaffirmed a decision by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to carry out all 29 of the panel’s recommendations, including sending 225 additional Marine guards to embassies and consulates and revamping how threat warnings are used to secure posts. “My message to the State Department has been very simple, and that is we’re going to solve this,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re not going to be defensive about it; we’re not going to pretend that this was not a problem — this was a huge problem.” Mr. Obama said one major finding — that the State Department relied too heavily on untested local Libyan militias to safeguard the compound in Benghazi, Libya — reflected “internal reviews” by the government. “It confirms what we had already seen based on some of our internal reviews; there was just some sloppiness, not intentional, in terms of how we secure embassies in areas where you essentially don’t have governments that have a lot of capacity to protect those embassies,” Mr. Obama said. Four State Department officials were removed from their posts this month after the five-member panel led by a former ambassador, Thomas R. Pickering, criticized the “grossly inadequate” security at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi that was attacked on Sept. 11, leading to the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has been one of the fiercest critics of the administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack, said on Sunday that the Senate should delay confirmation hearings on Mr. Obama’s choice to be his next secretary of state, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, until Mrs. Clinton fulfills her promise to testify to Congress. “I want to know from the secretary of state’s point of view, ‘Were you informed of the deteriorating security situation?’ ” Mr. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” “ ‘Were all these cables coming out of Benghazi? Did they ever get up to your level? And if they didn’t, that’s a problem. If they did, why didn’t you act differently?’ I think it’s very important to know how the intelligence coming from Libya, how it was received in the State Department, so we can learn and correct any mistakes.” Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, also said on the same program that it was important to hear from Mrs. Clinton. “The problem was the right people apparently either didn’t make the decision or didn’t analyze the intelligence, because I think if you looked at the intelligence, you would have substantially beefed up the security in that particular mission, in Benghazi,” Ms. Feinstein said. “It didn’t happen sufficiently.” The senators made these comments before it had been made public on Sunday that Mrs. Clinton had been hospitalized with a blood clot stemming from a concussion she suffered earlier this month.
Real Estate Market Along Coast Upended by Hurricane
But that was before Mr. Vento and his wife watched from the top floor as 10 feet of water ruined the home in which they had raised their three children. Last week, he sold it for $279,000, less than half his original asking price, unable to wait for a better offer. “I was fortunate to get what I got,” he said. “I’m 72 years old. What am I going to do? Wait until I’m 82? By that time I’d be living in a nursing home.” The real estate market along the New York and New Jersey coastlines has been as upended by Hurricane Sandy as the houses tossed from their foundations. In places where waterfront views once commanded substantial premiums, housing prices have tumbled amid uncertainty about the costs of rebuilding and the dangers of seaside living. Homeowners have had to decide quickly whether to sell out or pour more money in to fix storm-damaged homes, as the real estate speculators who have descended on these areas make offers that would have been preposterous just two months ago. Some owners have indignantly balked and even gone so far as to take houses that were already on the market off, waiting for values to rebound. But many others who lack the means or the desire to rebuild say they have no choice but to try to get out from under these properties for whatever they can. “They’ve had enough,” said Steve Kaplan, 49, an investment banker from Long Beach, on Long Island, who has been buying damaged properties there since the storm. “They are going to move on, they don’t want to deal, they don’t want to redo their house.” “There’s an opportunity here,” Mr. Kaplan added, “that you can buy houses for cash because they want to move on very quickly.” Experts are divided on whether the effects of the storm on property values reflect a new reality for waterside areas or whether prices will come back stronger, as they did in Lower Manhattan, where prices tumbled after the Sept. 11 attacks. Real estate agents are urging patience, worried that entire communities are hemorrhaging value. In the meantime, a range of real estate prospectors have arrived. A truck advertising a company that buys distressed homes for cash started patrolling the waterlogged neighborhoods along the Rockaways, in Queens, almost immediately after the storm. Signs offering the services of similar companies have cropped up like crab grass in front of supermarkets on Long Island. And there were so many paltry offers for properties on Craigslist that one person posted: “Real estate is high enough and many are trying to suck the life out of people who have lost homes, cars and all their possessions. Where are your hearts and consciences?” But the cash-in-hand these companies offer may be too desperately needed for some homeowners to pass up. Ryan Case, a partner at Seaside Funding, a national “flip company” that often offers 60 percent to 70 percent below market rate for properties, acknowledged that would-be sellers would be wise to ignore his agents’ offers. “We are not your best option,” he said. Yet those who find bargain-basement offers tough to swallow — compared with the value their houses had before the storm — sometimes find themselves with little alternative. Mr. Case recounted how one New Jersey woman reacted with outrage at his company’s offer. “She said, ‘I’ll burn the house before I sell it to you guys to make a profit,’ ” he said. But she called back a week later to see if the offer still stood. There have also been amateur speculators, who see a chance to realize the dream of owning a second home or an investment property. Mr. Kaplan and his friend Bob Gregor talked for years about buying houses in Long Beach, their hometown. But it was not until a few weeks after the hurricane that they finally went shopping.
Cara Buckley contributed reporting.
Victim of Gang Rape in India Dies at Hospital in Singapore
The woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student whose rape on Dec. 16 had served as a reminder of the dangerous conditions women face in India, died “peacefully,” according to a statement by Dr. Kelvin Loh, the chief executive of Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore. The woman, whose intestines were removed because of injuries caused by a metal rod used during the rape, has not been identified. She was flown to Singapore on Wednesday night after undergoing three abdominal operations at a local hospital. She had also suffered a major brain injury, cardiac arrest and infections of the lungs and abdomen. “She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds, but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome,” Dr. Loh’s statement said. After word of her death spread, protesters gathered in New Delhi at Jantar Mantar, a popular site for demonstrations. By noon, the crowd had swelled to several hundred, most of them young men. Upamanyu Raju, 21, a student at Delhi University, said he has been attending protests since a day after the rape victim was admitted to the hospital because of the "utter atrocity of what happened." Mr. Raju said he has given his younger sister pepper spray and a Swiss Army knife, but he worries that won’t protect her. "It’s wrong to stop girls from going out" of the house, he said, but there’s little choice because the city is so unsafe for women. The roads leading to India Gate, the site of earlier protests that had turned violent, had been barricaded by the police, and nearby subway stations were closed. More than 40 police units have been deployed in the area, including 28 units of the Central Reserve Police Force, which are national anti-insurgency troops. The police have arrested six people in connection with the attack, Indian officials said. Revulsion and anger over the rape have galvanized India, where women regularly face sexual harassment and assault, and where neither the police nor the judicial system is seen as adequately protecting them. Top officials now say that further change is needed, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his “deepest condolences.” “We have already seen the emotions and energies this incident has generated,” he said in a statement. “It would be a true homage to her memory if we are able to channelize these emotions and energies into a constructive course of action.” The government, he said, is examining “the penal provisions that exist for such crimes and measures to enhance the safety and security of women.” The six men arrested in the case will be charged with murder, the Delhi police said Saturday morning, as they, too, asked citizens to remain calm. "We appeal to the people that they maintain peace," Satyendra Garg, a joint commissioner of the police, said in a televised interview. "We want the situation in Delhi to normalize as soon as possible," he said. Until then, he added, Delhi commuters will have to plan their travel carefully and be aware of the restrictions. Activists and lawyers in India have long said that the police are insensitive when dealing with crimes against women, and that therefore many women do not report cases of sexual violence. India, which has more than 1.3 billion people, recorded 24,000 cases of rape last year, a figure that has increased by 25 percent in the past six years. On Thursday, Delhi government officials said they would register the names and photographs of convicted rapists on the Delhi police Web site, the beginning of a national registry for rapists. The family of an 18-year-old woman in the northern Indian state of Punjab who was raped last month by two men and committed suicide on Wednesday blamed the police on Friday for her death. Relatives of the woman say she killed herself because the police delayed registering the case or arresting the rapists. If the police “had done their job, she would be alive today,” the woman’s sister, Charanjit Kaur, 28, said in a phone interview. “They didn’t listen to us; they didn’t act.” On Friday, the Punjab high court intervened, asking the police to explain their delay. Three police officers have been suspended in the case, according to news media reports. Punjab police officials did not respond to phone calls seeking comment. Ms. Kaur said the men abducted her sister from a place of worship near the small town of Badshahpur on Nov. 13, then drugged and raped her repeatedly. When her sister reported the attack at the local police station a few days later, she was asked to describe it in graphic detail and was “humiliated,” Ms. Kaur said. Over the next few days, she said, her mother and sister were repeatedly called to the police station and forced to sit all day. But the case was not registered for two weeks, as police officials and village elders tried to broker a deal between the men accused of the rape and the victim. In some parts of India, women are commonly married to men who have raped them. Ms. Kaur said the police told her family that, because they were poor, they would not be able to fight the matter in court. “They kept putting pressure on my family to take money or marry the accused or just somehow settle the matter,” she said. After no agreement was reached, the police registered the case, but made no arrests. The victim was stalked by the men accused of the rape, who threatened to kill her and her family if she refused to drop the complaint, her suicide note said. “They have ruined my life,” the note read, Ms. Kaur said. It named two men and a woman who allegedly helped them in the kidnapping. Those men have been arrested, the police said.
Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Keith Bradsher contributed from Hong Kong..
Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?
Claudia Steinman saw her husband’s BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody’s mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — “Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear Dr. Steinman, I have good news for you. The Nobel Assembly has today decided to award you the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2011.” Before she finished reading, Claudia was hollering at her daughter to wake up. “Dad got the Nobel!” she cried. Alexis, still half-asleep, told her she was crazy. Her father had been dead for three days. 
Ralph Steinman in 1983. He would become his most compelling experiment. 
The cell Steinman hoped would save his life looks something like a sea anemone or a ruffled shrimp dumpling. The Nobel Foundation doesn’t allow posthumous awards, so when news of Ralph Steinman’s death reached Stockholm a few hours later, a minor intrigue ensued over whether the committee would have to rescind the prize. It would not, in fact; but while newspapers stressed the medal mishap (“Nobel jury left red-faced by death of laureate”), they spent less time on the strange story behind the gaffe. That Steinman’s eligibility was even in question, that he’d been dead for just three days instead of, say, three years, was itself a minor miracle. In the spring of 2007, Steinman, a 64-year-old senior physician and research immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, had come home from a ski trip with a bad case of diarrhea, and a few days later he showed up for work with yellow eyes and yellow skin — symptoms of a cancerous mass the size of a kiwi that was growing on the head of his pancreas. Soon he learned that the disease had made its way into nearby lymph nodes. Among patients with his condition, 80 percent are dead within the first year; another 90 percent die the year after that. When he told his children about the tumor over Skype, he said, “Don’t Google it.” But for a man who had spent his life in the laboratory, who brought copies of The New England Journal of Medicine on hiking trips to Vermont and always made sure that family vacations overlapped with scientific symposia, there was only one way to react to such an awful diagnosis — as a scientist. The outlook for pancreatic cancer is so poor, and the established treatments so useless, that any patient who has the disease might as well shoot the moon with new, untested therapies. For Steinman, the prognosis offered the opportunity to run one last experiment. In the long struggle that was to come, Steinman would try anything and everything that might extend his life, but he placed his greatest hope in a field he helped create, one based on discoveries for which he would earn his Nobel Prize. He hoped to reprogram his immune cells to defeat his cancer — to concoct a set of treatments from his body’s own ingredients, which could take over from his chemotherapy and form a customized, dynamic treatment for his disease. These would be as far from off-the-shelf as medicines can get: vaccines designed for the tumor in his gut, made from the products of his plasma, that could only ever work for him. Steinman would be the only patient in this makeshift trial, but the personalized approach for which he would serve as both visionary and guinea pig has implications for the rest of us. It is known as cancer immunotherapy, and its offshoots have just now begun to make their way into the clinic, and treatments have been approved for tumors of the skin and of the prostate. For his last experiment, conducted with no control group, Steinman would try to make his life into a useful anecdote — a test of how the treatments he assembled might be put to work. “Once he got diagnosed with cancer, he really started talking about changing the paradigm of cancer treatment,” his daughter Alexis says. “That’s all he knew how to do. He knew how to be a scientist.” First, Steinman needed to see his tumor. Not an M.R.I. or CT scan, but the material itself. The trouble was that most people with his cancer never have surgery. If there’s cause to think the tumor has spread — and there usually is — it may not be worth the risk of having it removed, along with the bile duct, the gallbladder, large portions of the stomach and the duodenum. Luckily for Steinman, early scans showed that his tumor was a candidate for resection. On the morning of April 3, 2007, less than two weeks after his diagnosis, he went in for the four-hour procedure at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, just across the avenue from his office at Rockefeller University.
Ralph Steinman in 1983. He would become his most compelling experiment. The cell Steinman hoped would save his life looks something like a sea anemone or a ruffled shrimp dumpling. The Nobel Foundation doesn’t allow posthumous awards, so when news of Ralph Steinman’s death reached Stockholm a few hours later, a minor intrigue ensued over whether the committee would have to rescind the prize. It would not, in fact; but while newspapers stressed the medal mishap (“Nobel jury left red-faced by death of laureate”), they spent less time on the strange story behind the gaffe. That Steinman’s eligibility was even in question, that he’d been dead for just three days instead of, say, three years, was itself a minor miracle. In the spring of 2007, Steinman, a 64-year-old senior physician and research immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, had come home from a ski trip with a bad case of diarrhea, and a few days later he showed up for work with yellow eyes and yellow skin — symptoms of a cancerous mass the size of a kiwi that was growing on the head of his pancreas. Soon he learned that the disease had made its way into nearby lymph nodes. Among patients with his condition, 80 percent are dead within the first year; another 90 percent die the year after that. When he told his children about the tumor over Skype, he said, “Don’t Google it.” But for a man who had spent his life in the laboratory, who brought copies of The New England Journal of Medicine on hiking trips to Vermont and always made sure that family vacations overlapped with scientific symposia, there was only one way to react to such an awful diagnosis — as a scientist. The outlook for pancreatic cancer is so poor, and the established treatments so useless, that any patient who has the disease might as well shoot the moon with new, untested therapies. For Steinman, the prognosis offered the opportunity to run one last experiment. In the long struggle that was to come, Steinman would try anything and everything that might extend his life, but he placed his greatest hope in a field he helped create, one based on discoveries for which he would earn his Nobel Prize. He hoped to reprogram his immune cells to defeat his cancer — to concoct a set of treatments from his body’s own ingredients, which could take over from his chemotherapy and form a customized, dynamic treatment for his disease. These would be as far from off-the-shelf as medicines can get: vaccines designed for the tumor in his gut, made from the products of his plasma, that could only ever work for him. Steinman would be the only patient in this makeshift trial, but the personalized approach for which he would serve as both visionary and guinea pig has implications for the rest of us. It is known as cancer immunotherapy, and its offshoots have just now begun to make their way into the clinic, and treatments have been approved for tumors of the skin and of the prostate. For his last experiment, conducted with no control group, Steinman would try to make his life into a useful anecdote — a test of how the treatments he assembled might be put to work. “Once he got diagnosed with cancer, he really started talking about changing the paradigm of cancer treatment,” his daughter Alexis says. “That’s all he knew how to do. He knew how to be a scientist.” First, Steinman needed to see his tumor. Not an M.R.I. or CT scan, but the material itself. The trouble was that most people with his cancer never have surgery. If there’s cause to think the tumor has spread — and there usually is — it may not be worth the risk of having it removed, along with the bile duct, the gallbladder, large portions of the stomach and the duodenum. Luckily for Steinman, early scans showed that his tumor was a candidate for resection. On the morning of April 3, 2007, less than two weeks after his diagnosis, he went in for the four-hour procedure at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, just across the avenue from his office at Rockefeller University.
Potent Storm Hits Wide Swath of U.S. and Moves East
By Wednesday afternoon, more than seven inches of snow had fallen in Indianapolis, the National Weather Service reported, and by the evening more than 18 inches covered parts of Illinois. Detroit, under a heavy snowstorm, declared snow emergencies in some parts of the city, according to local reports, asking cars not to park on the street to make room for snow plows. More than 1,500 flights were canceled on Wednesday, according to the Web site Flight Aware, which also listed delays of an hour to two hours at airports across the Eastern United States.
The brunt of the storm was expected to hit western New York and extend into central Maine through Thursday morning, forecasters said, an area that could get 12 to 18 inches of snow. In Buffalo, as much as two inches each hour could be falling by Thursday morning, combined with 30-mile-per-hour winds, according to the Weather Service.
In New York City, the slushy snow that fell initially gave way to heavy rain and sustained wind of up to 35 miles per hour, and gusts as high as 60 miles per hour were expected overnight, said Tim Morrin, Observation Program Leader at the National Weather Service. The heavy rain, up to 1.8 inches overnight, could lead to flooding in areas with poor drainage, Mr. Morrin said. There is a coastal flood warning in effect during high tides Wednesday and early Thursday “along the Battery, Bergen Point, the mouth of the Hudson and portions of the western Long Island Sound,” he added. Flights into Newark and LaGuardia airports were delayed by more than two hours on Wednesday evening, and flights into John F. Kennedy International were held up for over an hour, according to the Federal Aviation Authority. The storm, Mr. Morrin said, is not due to taper off until Thursday afternoon. In Westchester County, where some wires went down after 7 p.m. in Larchmont, 2,300 customers were without electricity on Wednesday evening, said Chris Olert, a spokesman for Con Edison. On Tuesday, parts of the country unaccustomed to a white Christmas were hit hard by snow, including Little Rock, Ark., where nine inches fell, and parts of Oklahoma, where seven inches of snow contributed to a 21-vehicle pileup on an interstate outside Oklahoma City, the authorities said. While that accident caused no serious injuries, a car crash in Major County, in northern Oklahoma, killed a 28-year-old woman as the vehicle she was riding in struck a tractor-trailer on a snowy highway, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said. Also Tuesday, a man died outside Houston when he got out of his car to remove a tree that had fallen in high winds and blocked the road. As he tried to drag the tree away, a second tree fell and crushed him, according to the Harris County sheriff’s office. More than 200,000 people remained without power on Wednesday, many in Arkansas, where winds toppled power lines and trees. Thirty-four tornadoes were reported from Texas to Mississippi on Tuesday, prompting Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi to declare a state of emergency after several counties were battered by storms, including a twister that destroyed homes in Pearl River County, said Danny Manley, the county’s emergency management director. A tornado also rolled through downtown Mobile, Ala., causing significant damage to Murphy High School and tearing off part of the roof of Trinity Episcopal Church, according to the Mobile County Emergency Management Agency. No serious injuries were reported. In California, two people died Monday in avalanches in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where there was heavy snowfall over the weekend, the authorities said. Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.
Egypt Constitution Passes, Economic Crunch Looms
In a clear sign of anxiety over the economy, the turbulence of the past month and expected austerity measures ahead have some Egyptians hoarding dollars for fear the currency is about to take a significant turn for the weaker. The battle over the constitution left Egypt deeply polarized at a time when the government is increasingly cash-strapped. Supporters of the charter campaigned for it on the grounds that it will lead to stability, improve the grip of Morsi and his allies on state institutions, restore investor confidence and bring back tourists. "In times of change, politics are the driver of the economy and not the other way around," said Mourad Aly, a media adviser for the political arm of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, the backbone of Morsi's presidency and the main group that backed the constitution. But there are already multiple fights on the horizon. The U.S. State Department bluntly told Morsi it was now time to make compromises, acknowledging deep concerns over the constitution. "President Morsi, as the democratically elected leader of Egypt, has a special responsibility to move forward in a way that recognizes the urgent need to bridge divisions, build trust, and broaden support for the political process," said Patrick Ventrell, acting deputy spokesman. "We hope those Egyptians disappointed by the result will seek more and deeper engagement. " He said Egypt "needs a strong, inclusive government to meet its many challenges." After a spate of resignations of senior aides and advisers during the constitutional crisis, Morsi appeared to have lost another member of his government late Tuesday night when his communications minister posted on his Twitter account that he was resigning. The minister Hany Mahmoud said he "couldn't cope with the culture of government work, particular in the current conditions of the country." The resignation could not be immediately verified because it came so late at night. Morsi signed a decree Tuesday night that put the new constitution into effect after the election commission announced the official results of the referendum held over the past two weekends. It said the constitution has passed with a 63.8 percent "yes." Turnout of 32.9 percent of Egypt's nearly 52 million registered voters was lower than most other elections since the uprising nearly two years ago that ousted authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak Morsi is expected to call for a new election of parliament's lawmaking lower house within two months. In the meantime, the traditionally toothless upper house, the Shura Council, will hold legislative power. But the chamber is overwhelmingly Islamist-dominated so any laws it passes could spark a backlash from the opposition. Many fear a legal crackdown on independent media, highly critical of Islamists. In a bid to reach out to opposition, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood said he hoped the charter will be a "good omen" for Egyptians. "Let's all begin to build the renaissance of our country with free will, good intentions and strong determination, men, women, Muslims and Christians," Mohammed Badie said on his Twitter account. But the opposition said the passing of the document is was not the end of the political dispute. Critics fear the constitution will usher in Islamic law in Egypt and restrict personal freedoms. "This is not a constitution that will last for a long time," said Khaled Dawoud, a spokesman for the main opposition group, the National Salvation Front, vowing to fight for more freedoms, social and economic rights.
With a Parent at War, a Holiday of Pain and Pride
It is nothing unusual for Alexandra Alfield, a 17-year-old senior whose father, a Special Forces soldier, has been gone since August and for six of the last nine years. “I do miss him,” she said, “but I’m just so accustomed to it.” As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 66,000 American troops from Afghanistan, the parents of Fort Campbell students are still going off to war. Nearly 10,000 men and women from the 101st Airborne, a third of the active-duty troops based here, are either in Afghanistan or getting ready to go. Still more parents here have been deployed with units like the Fifth Special Forces Group and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, whose members piloted the helicopters in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. That has made the high school, which is run by the Defense Department and is one of only four secondary schools on military bases in the United States, something of a window into the pain, pride and resentment felt by the families of the all-volunteer military force, which has borne the burdens of 11 years of war. The high school, which has about 700 students and is open to any 9th to 12th grader who lives on the 100,000-acre post along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, is by definition physically and psychologically cut off from the world outside the gates. But at no time is that sense of isolation more acute than now, when many of the students’ parents are deployed while the rest of the country’s interest in Afghanistan has moved on. “No one really cares,” Tyisha Smith, a 19-year-old senior, said of the outside world. “Your father goes, gets deployed. War — it’s normal. It’s not like a big deal that we’re still at war.” But Ms. Smith said she was struggling to manage the pressures of her final year in high school while her father was away and she was living with her stepmother. The reality of his deployment with the 101st Airborne is never far away. “It’s starting to hit me that there’s a possibility that he could die,” she said. “I just hope he comes home.” School administrators point to a bright spot: not as many parents are gone this year as there were at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when nearly everyone in the school had a parent deployed and the post was a virtual ghost town. But that hardly makes the modest one-story school typical. A strict dress code bans jeans and T-shirts, so students wear tucked-in collared shirts with khakis or dark pants. Presidents turn up a lot: Mr. Obama spoke at the post in May 2011, and George W. Bush visited three times while he was president. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met earlier in 2011 with the Fort Campbell High School football team. And the death of a parent is something to be mourned but overcome. Only months after his father was killed in Afghanistan in June 2008, Josh Carter, a starting linebacker, helped lead the Falcons to their second of three straight state championships. “My dad would want me to keep going,” Mr. Carter, now a student at Western Kentucky University, said in an interview over the summer. Administrators say that perhaps five other students have lost parents in the wars in recent years. Many other parents have been wounded or have received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. The students readily call their school a “bubble,” both comforting and claustrophobic, because of the dangers their parents face. “If you went to off-post schools, you couldn’t exactly talk to a teenager because they wouldn’t understand what you’re going through,” said Larissa Massie, a 17-year-old senior whose father is home but has had two deployments to Iraq.
At Queens High Rise, Fear, Death and Myth Collided
The action she captured played out by flashlight beam, illuminating elderly men and women swaddled in coats, robes, sweaters, hats and scarves in their apartments. “It’s cold, so cold,” one gray-haired man said in Russian, sounding short of breath. The privately owned high rise had been without heat, water or working elevators since the evening of the storm. In the lobby, Rodney Duff, a burly resident in a black sweatshirt, made a grim prediction. “Two hundred seniors that can’t move up and down these stairs,” Mr. Duff said. “One of them is going to die in this building tonight.” Those scenes inside the complex, known as the Sand Castle, soon appeared in a disturbing five-minute video on YouTube, telling what has become a familiar story in the storm’s aftermath. Like thousands of other vulnerable city residents, the tenants endured hunger, cold and fear for days, deprived of assistance and, in some cases, vital medicines. Almost everyone — the residents, their families, the building owners, city officials and aid workers — was poorly prepared for the magnitude of need caused by power failures that persisted long after the hurricane had passed. But the video produced by Ms. Balandina, who was volunteering aid and pulled out her camera because she was horrified at what she was seeing, made this story all its own. After YouTube viewers witnessed the desperation at the Far Rockaway complex, some sprang into action. Aid convoys rumbled in from out of state. People as far away as Britain called City Hall, pleading that officials help the Sand Castle. Ambulances were summoned there by residents of Pennsylvania. Facebook reports and blog posts, some by people who had not visited the buildings, even circulated accounts of multiple bodies being removed from the complex when the power was out. Those reports were not borne out by the police, medical examiner and health department records, but they contributed to the making of a myth, a social-media tale that seemed believable amid so much misery. After the lights came on nearly two weeks after the storm, Danny Sanchez, an assistant superintendent, used a master key to enter Apartment C on the 13th floor of Building B, where no one had answered the door on repeated visits. There, he found Thomas S. Anderson, 89, who had lived alone, face up on the floor beside his bed. His was the sole death at the Sand Castle, where no one in the days after the storm could claim to understand the full story of what was happening and what it meant. The New York City medical examiner’s office classified Mr. Anderson’s death as natural after consulting with his doctor. A World War II veteran, he was buried the next week with military honors at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island. Without an autopsy, the specific factors that preceded his death and the possible ways the post-hurricane conditions might have contributed to it — A fall in his unlighted studio? Heart disease worsened by stress? — will never be known. But what can be said for certain is that Mr. Anderson spent his last days largely alone in the dark, trapped high above the ground without heat, dependent on the haphazard good will of others for his survival. Perpetually Cool Mr. Anderson projected cool well into his 80s, a tattooed, earring-wearing great-grandfather with a white Van Dyke mustache that curved into a goatee. He wore glasses and rarely left his apartment without a baseball cap or beanie and his clip-on, yellow-tinted shades. Before retiring, Mr. Anderson, a native of North Carolina, had worked in a post office and as a supervisor at Marboro Books in Lower Manhattan, a chain acquired by Barnes & Noble. He once took tailoring classes to learn to make his own suits, and loved baseball — he had played with an old-timers club in Harlem called The Unknowns and watched or attended nearly every Mets game. In his early 20s, he was an Army infantryman who served in the Pacific during World War II and earned several decorations, his daughter, Jannette Elliott, said.
Alain Delaquérière, Lisa Schwartz and Jack Styczynski contributed research.
Follow Sheri Fink on Twitter: @SheriFink
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