Maxim Magazine Focuses on Military, Veterans and Their Families

Lance Murphey for The New York Times

A crew filming Maxim magazine’s Maximum Warrior contest in Crawfordsville, Ark.

CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ark. — Scaling elevator shafts and sliding through sewers in mud-caked fields at a military training camp here would not be what most people would call a vacation. But for 10 Special Operations soldiers from the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, participating in an event called the Maximum Warrior contest, these challenges had a singular aim: to be in Maxim magazine.

Lance Murphey for The New York Times

Producers and participants at the Maximum Warrior competition, an event arranged by  Maxim.

Maxim, a testosterone-fueled magazine featuring adolescent humor and plenty of scantily clad actresses, has become for today’s Army what Esquire was to soldiers fighting in World War II and Playboy was during the Vietnam War.

“They’ve got hot chicks, guns, cars, trucks, a little bit of everything,” said Christopher May, a 38-year-old master sergeant in the Marines based at Camp Pendleton in California. He decided to compete in the contest, sponsored by the magazine, to enhance his credibility with younger officers who are die-hard Maxim fans.

On a recent December day in Crawfordsville, 20 miles west of Memphis, as he sat at a barracks table littered with Maxim magazines and cleaned his .45-caliber Remington pistol, he said that Maxim was “the most common magazine hanging around” during his eight deployments. That popularity isn’t an accident. The magazine has focused on the military, veterans and their families as a source of growing readership.

In 2013, Maxim hopes to turn its annual “Salute to the Military” issue — which includes content like how to approach dating after losing a limb in combat and highlights of celebrities who have served in the military — into a quarterly publication. Maxim will continue to work with the U.S.O. on military-sponsored events. It also will continue to run the Maximum Warrior contest, and will use videos from the event online and on the Maxim Xbox app.

The unabashed celebration of the military sets Maxim apart from many mainstream publications. Matt Willette, a 42-year-old special operations manager for ATK Tactical Systems — Blackhawk, provided the uniforms for the Maximum Warrior competition because he said the company wanted to reach military consumers who often buy their own gear. Mr. Willette, who served in the Army from 1988 to 1996, also likes Maxim’s pro-military approach.

“Most guys in the military have not been treated well by the media,” Mr. Willette said. “So when we do find one like Maxim, we want to embrace it.”

When the editor in chief, Dan Bova, meets members of the military, he says, they have read the magazine so thoroughly that they quote back to him the magazine’s jokes and photo captions. They send letters thanking Maxim for cheering them up during hospital stays as they recover from losing limbs. They also have sent photographs posing with Maxim in a claustrophobic snow cave near the Arctic Circle, in a combat zone while wearing night-vision goggles, and outside Saddam Hussein’s bombed-out palaces.

In the January issue, Army Staff Sgt. Daniel Dyk submitted a photograph of himself and his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan with the following note: “Would have liked to have gotten a better angle showing the valley, but we’d been engaged by Taliban that day and couldn’t really stand up to get a better shot!”

Maxim still lags behind Men’s Health, the fitness bible, which was the top-selling magazine year to date at Army and Air Force exchanges, but Maxim has been very successful at penetrating the broader military culture.

Three-quarters of Maxim’s surveyed readers say they have friends or family who are serving in the military or are veterans, according to data tracked by Fresh Intelligence, a market research firm, and the magazine sells particularly well around military bases.

Karl Erickson, host of the Maximum Warrior series and a retired member of the Army’s Green Berets, who served from 1985 to 2010, said that Maxim’s cheeky humor and attractive women resonated with soldiers better than any other magazine.

“Overseas, you’re living in your body armor and you’re within arm’s reach of your weapon at all times,” Mr. Erickson said. “Any chance you can relax and put a smile on your face, you jump at it, and Maxim magazine does do that better than anyone else.”

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The Boss: For Kathryn Giusti, Two Wars Against Multiple Myeloma

MY identical twin sister, Karen, and I have two older brothers. We were raised in Blue Bell, Pa., where my father was a family physician and my mother was a nurse. We spent summers on Long Beach Island, N.J., where both of us were waitresses at a busy seafood restaurant.

Kathryn E. Giusti is the C.E.O. and co-founder of the Multiple Myeloma Research Founda- tion in Norwalk, Conn.

AGE 54

LOVES TO Watch her son, who plays baseball, and her daughter, a cheerleader, at their events.

My sister and I have always been best friends. We even went to the same college, the University of Vermont. I was scientifically inclined and majored in biology. We graduated in 1980, and my sister later became a lawyer.

I was accepted to medical school, but my father was opposed to that. He thought I was too impatient to cope with medicine’s bureaucracy. Instead, I took a job in sales at Merck, the drug maker.

To my chagrin, the company sent me to its site in West Point, Pa., very close to home. After two years, I moved over to work in the company’s marketing and communications area, but I began to realize that I needed some formal business education.

In 1983, I entered Harvard Business School, specializing in marketing. I met my husband, Paul Giusti, there. After we earned our M.B.A.’s in 1985, he started a real estate development business in the Midwest, and I joined Gillette in Boston in its personal care division.

We married in 1990 and moved to Chicago, and I worked briefly at Brach’s, the candy manufacturer, in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. I then joined G. D. Searle in Skokie, helping to develop new products like Ambien. Later, I was promoted to manage the company’s worldwide arthritis drugs division.

In late 1995, I was feeling tired and went in for a physical. Blood tests found that I had multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. I was shocked because I was only 37. My grandfather had had the disease, but I wasn’t in the usual demographic or age group. The scariest part was that there were no drugs in the pipeline to combat the cancer.

Our first child, Nicole, was about 2 when I received the diagnosis. I was determined that I was going to have another child, which I did. Our son, David, was born in 1997.

At that point, I did not expect to live beyond a few years, so we moved to New Canaan, Conn., to be closer to our families. Paul sold his company, but the new owners who were based in McLean, Va., asked him to remain as chief operating officer, which he did, working from a New Canaan office.

After our move, my sister and I organized a fund-raiser, garnering $400,000. We used that to start the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, which initially made grants to speed development of cancer-fighting drugs. (Later, it also worked with academic and clinical centers and pharmaceutical companies on initiatives like a tissue bank.) Six years later, in 2004, I started the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium to foster collaboration among cancer centers, to start a patient tissue bank for research and to encourage broader participation in clinical trials.

I was working full time and raising my family, but in 2005 my health began to deteriorate. In early 2006, I received a stem cell transplant. Karen donated the cells, and the operation was done at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. When I came home, I weighed 90 pounds and was bald and fragile.

It took several months to recover, but I returned to work later that year and kept building our network of 16 clinics and hospitals that participate in the clinical trials, tissue bank and genome research. We’ve raised $200 million since the foundation opened and are now focused on helping patients use individualized medicine to fight cancer.

I still get a huge knot in my stomach every two months, when I check in at Dana-Farber for my test results. But I believe we have made some real progress because I continue to work impatiently to cure this disease and other cancers as well.

As told to Elizabeth Olson.

Read More..

The Boss: For Kathryn Giusti, Two Wars Against Multiple Myeloma

MY identical twin sister, Karen, and I have two older brothers. We were raised in Blue Bell, Pa., where my father was a family physician and my mother was a nurse. We spent summers on Long Beach Island, N.J., where both of us were waitresses at a busy seafood restaurant.

Kathryn E. Giusti is the C.E.O. and co-founder of the Multiple Myeloma Research Founda- tion in Norwalk, Conn.

AGE 54

LOVES TO Watch her son, who plays baseball, and her daughter, a cheerleader, at their events.

My sister and I have always been best friends. We even went to the same college, the University of Vermont. I was scientifically inclined and majored in biology. We graduated in 1980, and my sister later became a lawyer.

I was accepted to medical school, but my father was opposed to that. He thought I was too impatient to cope with medicine’s bureaucracy. Instead, I took a job in sales at Merck, the drug maker.

To my chagrin, the company sent me to its site in West Point, Pa., very close to home. After two years, I moved over to work in the company’s marketing and communications area, but I began to realize that I needed some formal business education.

In 1983, I entered Harvard Business School, specializing in marketing. I met my husband, Paul Giusti, there. After we earned our M.B.A.’s in 1985, he started a real estate development business in the Midwest, and I joined Gillette in Boston in its personal care division.

We married in 1990 and moved to Chicago, and I worked briefly at Brach’s, the candy manufacturer, in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. I then joined G. D. Searle in Skokie, helping to develop new products like Ambien. Later, I was promoted to manage the company’s worldwide arthritis drugs division.

In late 1995, I was feeling tired and went in for a physical. Blood tests found that I had multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. I was shocked because I was only 37. My grandfather had had the disease, but I wasn’t in the usual demographic or age group. The scariest part was that there were no drugs in the pipeline to combat the cancer.

Our first child, Nicole, was about 2 when I received the diagnosis. I was determined that I was going to have another child, which I did. Our son, David, was born in 1997.

At that point, I did not expect to live beyond a few years, so we moved to New Canaan, Conn., to be closer to our families. Paul sold his company, but the new owners who were based in McLean, Va., asked him to remain as chief operating officer, which he did, working from a New Canaan office.

After our move, my sister and I organized a fund-raiser, garnering $400,000. We used that to start the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, which initially made grants to speed development of cancer-fighting drugs. (Later, it also worked with academic and clinical centers and pharmaceutical companies on initiatives like a tissue bank.) Six years later, in 2004, I started the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium to foster collaboration among cancer centers, to start a patient tissue bank for research and to encourage broader participation in clinical trials.

I was working full time and raising my family, but in 2005 my health began to deteriorate. In early 2006, I received a stem cell transplant. Karen donated the cells, and the operation was done at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. When I came home, I weighed 90 pounds and was bald and fragile.

It took several months to recover, but I returned to work later that year and kept building our network of 16 clinics and hospitals that participate in the clinical trials, tissue bank and genome research. We’ve raised $200 million since the foundation opened and are now focused on helping patients use individualized medicine to fight cancer.

I still get a huge knot in my stomach every two months, when I check in at Dana-Farber for my test results. But I believe we have made some real progress because I continue to work impatiently to cure this disease and other cancers as well.

As told to Elizabeth Olson.

Read More..

YouTube Ban Lifted in Pakistan, for 3 Minutes

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A ban on YouTube, which Pakistan imposed after an anti-Islam video caused riots in much of the Muslim world, was lifted Saturday, only to be reinstated — after three minutes — when it was discovered that blasphemous material was still available on the site.

After months of criticism of the ban, the government decided to allow Pakistanis to have access to YouTube again, saying steps had been taken to ensure that offensive content would not be visible. But those efforts apparently failed, and the authorities quickly backtracked.

The ban was imposed on Sept. 17 following violent protests in response to the video, which was made in the United States and ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad. The government then ordered all telecommunications companies to block Internet material deemed offensive to Muslims and urged people to report such material.

But the ban on YouTube came to be seen as censorship, and a growing number of the estimated 25 million Internet users in the country complained.

“This is purely a naked power play by the government and one that we should resist,” an editorial in The Express Tribune, an English-language daily newspaper in Karachi, Pakistan, said Friday. “This is about controlling our behavior and denying us access to the Internet.”

“We need to make it clear that we do not wish to regress to a dark age when a centralized authority controlled all access to information,” the editorial, observing the 100th day of the ban, went on to say. “Retreating to such an era would essentially mean that we were no longer living in a democracy.”

By Friday evening, Rehman Malik, the country’s interior minister, indicated that the ban would be lifted over the weekend. Mr. Malik said firewalls by government technicians were being installed to block pornographic and blasphemous material.

On Saturday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority directed local Internet service providers to make YouTube accessible. But by the afternoon, Geo, a private television news network that wields immense influence, reported that anti-Islam and blasphemous material was still available on YouTube. The criticism was led by Ansar Abbasi, a right-leaning journalist who often speaks out on morality and religion.

Yielding to the criticism, Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf then ordered providers to again block access to the video-sharing site.

The flip-flop drew an immediate rebuke from users and led to a flurry of jokes on Twitter about the government’s dithering and backtracking.

“YouTube is a huge convenience for users, who benefit from it for educational as well as entertainment purposes,” Zubair Kasuri, the editor of Flare, a Karachi-based telecommunications magazine, said in a telephone interview. Mr. Kasuri expressed surprise over the government’s failure to install an effective firewall mechanism despite having months to do so.

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Chinese Regulator’s Family Profited From Stake in Insurer

The New York Times

The Ping An International Finance Center, being built in Shenzhen. Ping An is among the world’s biggest financial institutions.

SHANGHAI — Relatives of a top Chinese regulator profited enormously from the purchase of shares in a once-struggling insurance company that is now one of China’s biggest financial powerhouses, according to interviews and a review of regulatory filings.

The regulator, Dai Xianglong, was the head of China’s central bank and also had oversight of the insurance industry in 2002, when a company his relatives helped control bought a big stake in Ping An Insurance that years later came to be worth billions of dollars. The insurer was drawing new investors ahead of a public stock offering after averting insolvency a few years earlier.

With growing attention on the wealth amassed by families of the politically powerful in China, the investments of Mr. Dai’s relatives illustrate that the riches extend beyond the families of the political elites to the families of regulators with control of the country’s most important business and financial levers. Mr. Dai, an economist, has since left his post with the central bank and now manages the country’s $150 billion social security fund, one of the world’s biggest investment funds.

How much the relatives made in the deal is not known, but analysts say the activity raises further doubts about whether the capital markets are sufficiently regulated in China.

Nicholas C. Howson, an expert in Chinese securities law at the University of Michigan Law School, said: “While not per se illegal or even evidence of corruption, these transactions feed into a problematic perception that is widespread in the P.R.C.: the relatives of China’s highest officials are given privileged access to pre-I.P.O. properties.” He was using the abbreviation for China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

The company that bought the Ping An stake was controlled by a group of investment firms, including two set up by Mr. Dai’s son-in-law, Che Feng, as well as other firms associated with Mr. Che’s relatives and business associates, the regulatory filings show.

The company, Dinghe Venture Capital, got the shares for an extremely good price, the records show, paying a small fraction of what a large British bank had paid per share just two months earlier. The company paid $55 million for its Ping An shares on Dec. 26, 2002. By 2007, the last time the value of the investment was made public, the shares were worth $3.1 billion.

In its investigation, The New York Times found no indication that Mr. Dai had been aware of his relatives’ activities, or that any law had been broken. But the relatives appeared to have made a fortune by investing in financial services companies over which Mr. Dai had regulatory authority.

In another instance, in November 2002, Dinghe acquired a big stake in Haitong Securities, a brokerage firm that also fell under Mr. Dai’s jurisdiction, according to the brokerage firm’s Shanghai prospectus.

By 2007, just after Haitong’s public listing in Shanghai, those shares were worth about $1 billion, according to public filings. Later, between 2007 and 2010, Mr. Dai’s wife, Ke Yongzhen, was chairwoman on Haitong’s board of supervisors.

A spokesman for Mr. Dai and the National Social Security Fund did not return phone calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Che, the son-in-law, denied by e-mail that he had ever held a stake in Ping An. The spokeswoman said another businessman had bought the Ping An shares and then, facing financial difficulties, sold them to a group that included Mr. Che’s friends and relatives, but not Mr. Che.

The businessman “could not afford what he has created, so he had to sell his shares all at once,” the spokeswoman, Jenny Lau, wrote in an e-mail.

The corporate records reviewed by The Times, however, show that Mr. Che, his relatives and longtime business associates set up a complex web of companies that effectively gave him and the others control of Dinghe Venture Capital, which made the investments in Ping An and Haitong Securities. The records show that one of the companies later nominated Mr. Che to serve on the Ping An board of supervisors. His term ran from 2006 to 2009.

The Times reported last month that another investment company had also bought shares in Ping An Insurance at an unusually low price on the same day in 2002 as Dinghe Venture Capital. That company, Tianjin Taihong, was later partly controlled by relatives of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, then serving as vice premier with oversight of China’s financial institutions. In late 2007, the shares Taihong bought in Ping An were valued at $3.7 billion.

The investments by Dinghe and Taihong are significant in part because by late 2002, Beijing regulators had granted Ping An an unusual waiver to rules that would have forced the insurer to sell off some divisions. Throughout the late 1990s, the company was fighting rules that would have required a breakup, a move that Ping An executives worried could lead to bankruptcy.

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Senate Leaders Racing to Beat Fiscal Deadline

WASHINGTON — Senate leaders and their aides spent Saturday searching for a formula to extend tax cuts for most Americans that could win bipartisan support in the Senate and final approval in the fractious House by the new year, hoping to prevent large tax increases and budget cuts that could threaten the fragile economy.

As part of the last-minute negotiations, the lawmakers were haggling over unemployment benefits, cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, taxes on large inheritances and how to limit the impact of the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income tax system that is intended to ensure the rich pay a fair share but that is increasingly encroaching on the middle class.

President Obama said that if talks between the Senate leaders broke down, he wanted the Senate to schedule an up-or-down vote on a narrower measure that would extend only the middle-class tax breaks and unemployment benefits. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said he would schedule such a vote on Monday absent a deal.

If Congress is unable to act before the new year, Washington will effectively usher in a series of automatic tax increases and a program of drastic spending cuts that economists say could pitch the country back into recession.

The president and lawmakers put those spending cuts in place this year as draconian incentives that would force them to confront the nation’s growing debt. Now, lawmakers are trying to keep them from happening, though it seemed most likely on Saturday that the cuts, known as sequestration, would be left for the next Congress, to be sworn in this week.

“We just can’t afford a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy,” Mr. Obama said Saturday in his weekly address. “The housing market is healing, but that could stall if folks are seeing smaller paychecks. The unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since 2008, but already families and businesses are starting to hold back because of the dysfunction they see in Washington.”

The fear of another painful economic slowdown appears to have accelerated deal-making on Capitol Hill with just 48 hours left before the so-called fiscal cliff arrives. Weeks of public sniping between Mr. Reid, the Democratic leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, ebbed on Friday evening with pledges of cooperation and optimism from both.

On Saturday, though, that sentiment was put to the test as 98 senators waited for word whether their leaders had come up with a proposal that might pass muster with members of both parties. The first votes in the Senate, if needed, are scheduled for Sunday afternoon.

“It’s a little like playing Russian roulette with the economy,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. “The consequences could be enormous.”

Members of Congress were mostly absent from the Capitol on Saturday, after two days of Senate votes on other matters and a day before both chambers were to reconvene. However, senior aides were working on proposals in their offices or at their homes.

Speaker John A. Boehner stopped by the Capitol briefly to see his chief of staff on Saturday afternoon. Mr. McConnell spent much of the day in his office.

Aides to Mr. Reid were expecting to receive offers from Mr. McConnell’s staff, but no progress was reported by midday. Even if the talks took a positive turn, Senate aides said, no announcement was expected before the leaders briefed their caucuses on Sunday.

The chief sticking point among lawmakers and the president continued to be how to set tax rates for the next decade and beyond. With the Bush-era tax cuts expiring, Mr. Obama and Democrats have said they want tax rates to rise on income over $250,000 a year, while Republicans want a higher threshold, perhaps at $400,000.

Democrats and Republicans are also divided on the tax on inherited estates, which currently hits inheritances over $5 million at 35 percent. On Jan. 1, it is scheduled to rise to 55 percent beginning with inheritances exceeding $1 million.

The political drama in Washington over the weekend was given greater urgency by the fear that the economic gains of the past two years could be lost if no deal is reached.

Some of the consequences of Congressional inaction would be felt almost at once on Tuesday, in employee paychecks, doctors’ offices and financial markets. Analysts said the effect would be cumulative, building over time.

An early barometer would probably be the financial markets, where skittish investors, as they have during previous Congressional cliffhangers, could send the stock market lower on fears of another prolonged period of economic distress.

In 2011, the political battles over whether to raise the nation’s borrowing limit prompted Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its rating of American debt, suggesting a higher risk of default. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 635 points in a volatile day of trading after the downgrade.

This month, traders have again nervously watched the political maneuvering in Washington, and the markets have jumped or dropped at tidbits of news from the negotiations. Two weeks ago, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, predicted that if lawmakers failed to reach a deal, “the economy will, I think, go off the cliff.”

Immediately — regardless of whether a deal is reached — every working American’s taxes will go up because neither party is fighting to extend a Social Security payroll tax cut that has been in place for two years.

Robert Pear and Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

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Well: Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.

Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr. Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.

But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.

Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.

To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to plan and execute hunts as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.

But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.

To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in a variety of mammals, including dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongooses, goats, sheep and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.

The researchers also looked at recent experiments in which mice and rats were systematically bred to be marathon runners. Lab animals that willingly put in the most miles on running wheels were interbred, resulting in the creation of a line of lab animals that excelled at running.

Interestingly, after multiple generations, these animals began to develop innately high levels of substances that promote tissue growth and health, including a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth.

What all of this means, says David A. Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and an author of a new article about the evolution of human brains appearing in the January issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology, is that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter.

“We think that what happened” in our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, he says, is that the more athletic and active survived and, as with the lab mice, passed along physiological characteristics that improved their endurance, including elevated levels of BDNF. Eventually, these early athletes had enough BDNF coursing through their bodies that some could migrate from the muscles to the brain, where it nudged the growth of brain tissue.

Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think and reason toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and being smarter now allowed them to move more efficiently.

And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later.

The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D. Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr. Raichlen, of the new article.

And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”

Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr. Raichlen says, and almost unprovable.

But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr. Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.

Read More..

Well: Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.

Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr. Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.

But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.

Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.

To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to plan and execute hunts as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.

But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.

To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in a variety of mammals, including dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongooses, goats, sheep and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.

The researchers also looked at recent experiments in which mice and rats were systematically bred to be marathon runners. Lab animals that willingly put in the most miles on running wheels were interbred, resulting in the creation of a line of lab animals that excelled at running.

Interestingly, after multiple generations, these animals began to develop innately high levels of substances that promote tissue growth and health, including a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth.

What all of this means, says David A. Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and an author of a new article about the evolution of human brains appearing in the January issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology, is that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter.

“We think that what happened” in our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, he says, is that the more athletic and active survived and, as with the lab mice, passed along physiological characteristics that improved their endurance, including elevated levels of BDNF. Eventually, these early athletes had enough BDNF coursing through their bodies that some could migrate from the muscles to the brain, where it nudged the growth of brain tissue.

Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think and reason toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and being smarter now allowed them to move more efficiently.

And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later.

The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D. Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr. Raichlen, of the new article.

And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”

Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr. Raichlen says, and almost unprovable.

But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr. Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.

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Bits Blog: Facebook Poke and the Tedium of Success Theater

There’s a big problem in social media right now.

It’s boring.

A crucial and indispensable source of news and information, absolutely. But more often than not, it’s also tedious and predictable.

Don’t get me wrong: My use of Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook has never been greater. But I’m growing tired of seeing everyone’s perfectly framed, glittering nightscapes of the Manhattan skyline, their impeccably prepared meals, those beautifully blurred views of the world from an airplane window seat. I’m getting tired of carefully crafting and sharing them myself.

As these media have matured and more of our colleagues, former flings, in-laws and friends have migrated to them, our use of them has changed. We’ve become better at choreographing ourselves and showing our best sides to the screen, capturing the most flattering angle of our faces, our homes, our evenings out, our loved ones and our trips.

It’s success theater, and we’ve mastered it. We’ve gotten better at it because it matters more. You never know who is looking or how it might affect your relationships and career down the road, and as a result, we have become more cautious about the version of ourselves that we present to each other and the world. Even Twitter, a service steeped in real-time and right-nowness, has added filters to its photo uploads, letting its users add a washed-out effect to their posts. It makes me miss the raw and unfiltered glimpses those services used to provide of the lives of my friends and the people I follow.

But the ubiquity of success theater is why I’ve become so fascinated with Snapchat and, more recently, Facebook Poke, services that let you send photos, messages and videos with a built-in shelf life, that self-destruct after a time interval that you choose. The beauty of these applications, perhaps their main redemptive quality, is that you can only send photos, messages and videos that you have created within the application. You cannot access your phone’s photo library for a more attractive self-portrait or an exotic locale to mask that you’re really sitting on the couch on Friday night in pajamas, wearing a face mask.

These applications are the opposite of groomed; they practically require imperfection, a sloppiness and a grittiness that conveys a sense of realness, something I’ve been craving in my communication. They transform the screen of your phone into a window into the life of your friend, wherever they are at that exact moment.

All of this is not to say that Snapchat or Facebook Poke have any permanent home in our daily routines. The applications, in their current iterations, have yet to gain significant traction in any of my social circles. Part of the fun is the novelty, as with any new service. And both have specific uses that are not as mainstream as services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even Tumblr. After all, it’s much harder to find your comfort level within them. It’s startling, at first, to see the poorly lit, grainy pictures of your friends’ unfiltered faces, to adjust to the intimacy of realizing that the video of your friend that just landed in your in-box is meant for your eyes only, and that you are expected to send something of equal or greater intimacy in return. It is also possible that over time, Snapchat, VidBurn and Facebook Poke will become warped by their own versions of success theater, or lose steam if they gain seedier reputations.

But they capture a behavior my closest friends and I had already begun to adopt: The practice of showing each other where we are at any given moment in time, either through a short video or photo of our workstations, our faces as we lie half-asleep in bed on rainy Sunday afternoons, a look into our lives that is reserved for only those closest to each other. It is an acknowledgement that the version of ourselves we share through other social media is not the truest one, and has not been for a long time.

This is a variation of the same impulse that made Chatroulette a viral hit, and something that Apple has tried to capture with FaceTime, Google with its Hangouts, even Color’s ill-fated last and final iteration. It’s enough to make me think that the real real-time social Web is coming, in one form or another.

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Gérard Depardieu Stirs Belgian Border Town

Benoit Tessier/Reuters

French actor Gérard Depardieu is accused by the French government of trying to dodge taxes by moving to Belgium.

NÉCHIN, Belgium — The last time a big star lit up this sleepy village of potato fields and rain-drenched pastures was in 1667, when the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, stopped by for the day. But even he may not have created quite the commotion caused by Gérard Depardieu, the celebrated actor, turbulent bon vivant and, since a visit to the mayor’s office here on Dec. 7 to register as a resident, France’s most reviled tax exile.

“I thought it was a joke,” said the mayor, Daniel Senesael, recalling his disbelief when he was first told that Mr. Depardieu intended to leave his mansion in Paris and move to Néchin, a rural settlement in Belgium with just 2,200 people, two cafes, a fast-food fry shop, a ruined chateau and no cinema.

“Let’s be honest, this is not Las Vegas,” Mr. Senesael said. “There are no lights and no discos. I get flooded with complaints when anyone suggests opening even a wind farm.”

Michel Sardou, a veteran French singer who has joined a frenzy of criticism directed at Mr. Depardieu in France, mocked the actor’s flight to Néchin, predicting that he would be “as bored as a rat” here. “So, there is some divine justice after all,” the singer joked on French television.

For Mr. Depardieu, and scores of wealthy French citizens who already live here, however, Néchin does have one seductive asset: it is beyond the reach of the French tax authorities but so close to France that an unmarked border running through the village puts the gardens of some properties in France and adjoining houses in Belgium.

“Our geographic situation makes us very attractive,” said Mr. Senesael, noting that Néchin is an easy place to get into and out of, with a nearby airport, a major highway and a railway station just a few miles away in the French city of Lille with regular high-speed trains to Paris, Brussels and London.

“Nobody should be astonished that big fortunes have found a certain fiscal advantage” in moving to this side of the border, said the mayor, whose domain covers Néchin and a cluster of other hamlets that form what is known as the Entity of Estaimpuis. Mr. Depardieu’s critics, he said, should direct their ire not at the actor but at the failure of European governments to harmonize tax rates across the 27 nations of the European Union.

A customs post and border guards disappeared decades ago from the end of Néchin’s main street, swept away by Europe’s effort after World War II to break down barriers that led to past conflicts and to allow for the free flow of goods, services and people.

Still firmly in place, however, are rigidly defined tax frontiers that mean that people living just a few yards from one another can pay vastly different levels of tax, particularly if they happen to be wealthy.

Belgium has higher income taxes for most people than in much of Europe, but the country is much easier on the rich than France, where the government of President François Hollande has announced a “temporary supertax” of 75 percent on annual incomes of more than 1 million euros, or about $1.3 million. France’s Constitutional Council on Saturday declared the tax unconstitutional, prompting the government to announce that it would introduce a revised version next year. France also has a “wealth tax” on assets worth more than $1.7 million, something that does not exist in Belgium, as well as far higher taxes on capital gains and inheritance.

“We’ve abolished border controls but not all the other stupidities,” said Philippe Vandenhemel, the owner of a garage just outside Néchin that sells and repairs imported American cars and was visited several times by Mr. Depardieu. (The actor apparently likes old American cars.)

Mr. Vandenhemel scoffed at attacks on the movie star by French politicians and commentators. “If I were in his shoes, I would do exactly the same thing and leave,” he said. Mr. Depardieu, he added, will benefit not only from lower taxes in Belgium but also from the fact that “we Belgians are not jealous and don’t mind people getting rich.”

“Jealousy is France’s national disease,” he said.

Mr. Hollande, who made a pledge to squeeze the rich to help reduce the government’s budget deficit a cornerstone of his successful election campaign this year, once said on television, “I don’t like the rich.” His right-wing predecessor and rival and in the May election, Nicolas Sarkozy, lost in part because he flaunted a liking for expensive watches and other accessories and the company of rich friends, a habit that earned him mockery as “Le Président Bling-Bling.”

Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.

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Well: Spinach Recipes for Health

Spinach goes well with all kinds of foods. It’s also a green that is easy to find year-round. As Martha Rose Shulman writes in this week’s Recipes for Health:

Spinach has remained a part of my holiday ritual. I love the convenience of bagged spinach, but I prefer the richness of the lush bunches I get at the farmers’ market. I don’t mind stemming and washing it, but if you are pressed for time the bagged spinach is a godsend, especially if you live in a cold climate and don’t have access to farmers’ market spinach in December.

Below are five new ways to add spinach to your meal. And for more spinach recipes, see “Making Spinach the Star of the Meal.”

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Spinach and Millet Timbale With Tomato Sauce
A timbale is a molded custard, somewhat similar to a quiche without a crust.

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Garlic Soup With Spinach
A quick and easy soup that is a great way to use any leftover turkey stock from Thanksgiving.

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Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach
This is a delicious meal no matter what variety of mushrooms you have on hand.

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Spinach Gnocchi
A considerably lighter version of the classic gnocchi made with spinach and ricotta.

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Spinach, Sardine and Rice Gratin
This classic Provençal gratin is a good way to work fish that is high in omega-3s into your diet.

Read More..

Well: Spinach Recipes for Health

Spinach goes well with all kinds of foods. It’s also a green that is easy to find year-round. As Martha Rose Shulman writes in this week’s Recipes for Health:

Spinach has remained a part of my holiday ritual. I love the convenience of bagged spinach, but I prefer the richness of the lush bunches I get at the farmers’ market. I don’t mind stemming and washing it, but if you are pressed for time the bagged spinach is a godsend, especially if you live in a cold climate and don’t have access to farmers’ market spinach in December.

Below are five new ways to add spinach to your meal. And for more spinach recipes, see “Making Spinach the Star of the Meal.”

---

Spinach and Millet Timbale With Tomato Sauce
A timbale is a molded custard, somewhat similar to a quiche without a crust.

---

Garlic Soup With Spinach
A quick and easy soup that is a great way to use any leftover turkey stock from Thanksgiving.

---

Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach
This is a delicious meal no matter what variety of mushrooms you have on hand.

---

Spinach Gnocchi
A considerably lighter version of the classic gnocchi made with spinach and ricotta.

---

Spinach, Sardine and Rice Gratin
This classic Provençal gratin is a good way to work fish that is high in omega-3s into your diet.

Read More..

World Briefing | Africa: South Africa’s President Gives a Biting Critique of Pets

President Jacob Zuma, left, said in a speech that the idea of having a pet was part of “white culture” and that people should focus on family welfare, the newspaper The Star reported Thursday. The president’s office sought to clarify the remarks, saying that he was encouraging “the previously oppressed African majority” to uphold its own culture. It also suggested the way in which the comments were reported, rather than the comments themselves, was divisive.

During his speech on Wednesday to a crowd in KwaZulu-Natal, Mr. Zuma’s home province, the president said that people who loved dogs more than people had a “lack of humanity” and that some people were trying in vain to “emulate whiteness,” The Star reported. In a statement, the South African presidency said that Mr. Zuma was trying to “decolonize the African mind post-liberation” and enable people to take pride in their heritage and not feel pressure to adopt customs of minority cultures. Animals can be cared for, was the message, but not at the expense of people.

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New York’s Mental Health System Thrashed by Services Lost to Storm

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Dr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum hospitals, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.

When a young woman in the grip of paranoid delusions threatened a neighbor with a meat cleaver one Saturday last month, the police took her by ambulance to the nearest psychiatric emergency room. Or rather, they took her to Beth Israel Medical Center, the only comprehensive psychiatric E.R. functioning in Lower Manhattan since Hurricane Sandy shrank and strained New York’s mental health resources.

The case was one of 9,548 “emotionally disturbed person” calls that the Police Department answered in November, and one of the 2,848 that resulted in transportation to a hospital, a small increase over a year earlier.

But the woman was discharged within hours, to the shock of the mental health professionals who had called the police. It took four more days, and strong protests from her psychiatrist and caseworkers, to get her admitted for two weeks of inpatient treatment, said Tony Lee, who works for Community Access, a nonprofit agency that provides supportive housing to people with mental illness, managing the Lower East Side apartment building where she lives.

Psychiatric hospital admission is always a judgment call. But in the city, according to hospital records and interviews with psychiatrists and veteran advocates of community care, the odds of securing mental health treatment in a crisis have worsened significantly since the hurricane. The storm’s surge knocked out several of the city’s largest psychiatric hospitals, disrupted outpatient services and flooded scores of coastal nursing homes and “adult homes” where many mentally ill people had found housing of last resort.

One of the most affected hospitals, Beth Israel, recorded a 69 percent spike in psychiatric emergency room cases last month, with its inpatient slots overflowing. Instead of admitting more than one out of three such cases, as it did in November 2011, it admitted only one out of four of the 691 emergency arrivals this November, records show. Capacity was so overtaxed that ambulances had to be diverted to other hospitals 15 times in the month, almost double the rate last year, in periods typically lasting for eight hours, officials said.

Dr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum Health Partners, Beth Israel’s parent organization, said he was proud of how much Continuum’s hospitals had done to handle psychiatric overflow since storm damage shuttered Bellevue Hospital Center, the city’s flagship public hospital; NYU Langone Medical Center; and the Veterans Affairs Hospital. But these days, he said, as he walks on Amsterdam Avenue between Continuum’s Roosevelt hospital on West 59th Street and its St. Luke’s hospital on West 114th Street, he notices more mentally ill people in the streets than he has seen in years.

“When you have the most vulnerable folks, all you need is one chink in the system and you lose them,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “Whether they lost their housing, or the outpatient services they usually go to were closed and they were lost to follow-up, they have become disconnected, with predictable results.”

Similar patterns are playing out in Brooklyn, where Maimonides Medical Center has been overwhelmed with mental health emergencies from the Coney Island vicinity since Coney Island Hospital, one of the city’s largest acute care psychiatric hospitals, suspended operations, hospital officials said.

“Triage has reached a different level: You have to get sicker to get in,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the chairman of psychiatry at Maimonides, citing a 56 percent increase in psychiatric emergency room visits there from Oct. 26 to Dec. 7, compared with the same period last year, and a 24 percent rise in admissions. The increase in admissions was possible only with emergency permission from the state to exceed licensed limits.

“Not only is there decreased capacity, because Bellevue and Coney Island are off line,” Dr. Kolodny added, “but there’s increased demand because the storm or the loss of their residence has been a stressor for mental illness.”

The storm battered a mental health system that still relies heavily on private nursing homes and substandard adult homes to house people with mental illness. Such institutions have a sordid history of neglect and exploitation, and the courts have repeatedly found that their overuse by the state isolated thousands of people in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Plans are under way to increase supportive housing — dwellings where mentally ill people can live relatively independently, with support services. But even before Hurricane Sandy, the expansion fell far short of demand.

The storm underscored the fragility of the system. Many disabled evacuees who were sent first to makeshift school shelters lost access to the psychiatric medications that kept their symptoms at bay, Dr. Kolodny said. Even those lucky enough to have the drugs they need are at greater risk of relapse as they experience crowded living conditions. “If they’re now sleeping in a gym with 100 people, that can tip them over the edge and start making them really paranoid,” he said.

On Staten Island, where the chief of psychiatry at Richmond University Medical Center says psychiatric resources have been stretched to the limit, clergy members report that mentally ill people transferred to a large adult home in New Brighton from one that was washed away in Far Rockaway, Queens, are now showing up at church rectories, begging for socks and underwear.

“It’s heartbreaking, because they just found us by chance,” said Margaret Moschetto, a missionary at the Church of Assumption-St. Paul in New Brighton. “They were just walking around the neighborhood. They really didn’t know where they were.”

Read More..

New York’s Mental Health System Thrashed by Services Lost to Storm

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Dr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum hospitals, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.

When a young woman in the grip of paranoid delusions threatened a neighbor with a meat cleaver one Saturday last month, the police took her by ambulance to the nearest psychiatric emergency room. Or rather, they took her to Beth Israel Medical Center, the only comprehensive psychiatric E.R. functioning in Lower Manhattan since Hurricane Sandy shrank and strained New York’s mental health resources.

The case was one of 9,548 “emotionally disturbed person” calls that the Police Department answered in November, and one of the 2,848 that resulted in transportation to a hospital, a small increase over a year earlier.

But the woman was discharged within hours, to the shock of the mental health professionals who had called the police. It took four more days, and strong protests from her psychiatrist and caseworkers, to get her admitted for two weeks of inpatient treatment, said Tony Lee, who works for Community Access, a nonprofit agency that provides supportive housing to people with mental illness, managing the Lower East Side apartment building where she lives.

Psychiatric hospital admission is always a judgment call. But in the city, according to hospital records and interviews with psychiatrists and veteran advocates of community care, the odds of securing mental health treatment in a crisis have worsened significantly since the hurricane. The storm’s surge knocked out several of the city’s largest psychiatric hospitals, disrupted outpatient services and flooded scores of coastal nursing homes and “adult homes” where many mentally ill people had found housing of last resort.

One of the most affected hospitals, Beth Israel, recorded a 69 percent spike in psychiatric emergency room cases last month, with its inpatient slots overflowing. Instead of admitting more than one out of three such cases, as it did in November 2011, it admitted only one out of four of the 691 emergency arrivals this November, records show. Capacity was so overtaxed that ambulances had to be diverted to other hospitals 15 times in the month, almost double the rate last year, in periods typically lasting for eight hours, officials said.

Dr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum Health Partners, Beth Israel’s parent organization, said he was proud of how much Continuum’s hospitals had done to handle psychiatric overflow since storm damage shuttered Bellevue Hospital Center, the city’s flagship public hospital; NYU Langone Medical Center; and the Veterans Affairs Hospital. But these days, he said, as he walks on Amsterdam Avenue between Continuum’s Roosevelt hospital on West 59th Street and its St. Luke’s hospital on West 114th Street, he notices more mentally ill people in the streets than he has seen in years.

“When you have the most vulnerable folks, all you need is one chink in the system and you lose them,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “Whether they lost their housing, or the outpatient services they usually go to were closed and they were lost to follow-up, they have become disconnected, with predictable results.”

Similar patterns are playing out in Brooklyn, where Maimonides Medical Center has been overwhelmed with mental health emergencies from the Coney Island vicinity since Coney Island Hospital, one of the city’s largest acute care psychiatric hospitals, suspended operations, hospital officials said.

“Triage has reached a different level: You have to get sicker to get in,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the chairman of psychiatry at Maimonides, citing a 56 percent increase in psychiatric emergency room visits there from Oct. 26 to Dec. 7, compared with the same period last year, and a 24 percent rise in admissions. The increase in admissions was possible only with emergency permission from the state to exceed licensed limits.

“Not only is there decreased capacity, because Bellevue and Coney Island are off line,” Dr. Kolodny added, “but there’s increased demand because the storm or the loss of their residence has been a stressor for mental illness.”

The storm battered a mental health system that still relies heavily on private nursing homes and substandard adult homes to house people with mental illness. Such institutions have a sordid history of neglect and exploitation, and the courts have repeatedly found that their overuse by the state isolated thousands of people in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Plans are under way to increase supportive housing — dwellings where mentally ill people can live relatively independently, with support services. But even before Hurricane Sandy, the expansion fell far short of demand.

The storm underscored the fragility of the system. Many disabled evacuees who were sent first to makeshift school shelters lost access to the psychiatric medications that kept their symptoms at bay, Dr. Kolodny said. Even those lucky enough to have the drugs they need are at greater risk of relapse as they experience crowded living conditions. “If they’re now sleeping in a gym with 100 people, that can tip them over the edge and start making them really paranoid,” he said.

On Staten Island, where the chief of psychiatry at Richmond University Medical Center says psychiatric resources have been stretched to the limit, clergy members report that mentally ill people transferred to a large adult home in New Brighton from one that was washed away in Far Rockaway, Queens, are now showing up at church rectories, begging for socks and underwear.

“It’s heartbreaking, because they just found us by chance,” said Margaret Moschetto, a missionary at the Church of Assumption-St. Paul in New Brighton. “They were just walking around the neighborhood. They really didn’t know where they were.”

Read More..

Marvell Ordered to Pay $1.17 Billion in Patent Case

Carnegie Mellon University said it was awarded $1.17 billion by a federal jury in Pittsburgh on Wednesday in a unanimous verdict that found the Marvell Technology Group had sold billions of semiconductors using technology developed at the university without a license.

The award is one of the largest in a patent infringement case, and comes after a $1 billion verdict awarded to Apple this summer over its smartphone design.

Carnegie claimed that Marvell had infringed on a pair of patents relating to fundamental technology for increasing the accuracy with which hard drive circuits read data from high-speed magnetic disks.

The patents were developed by José Moura, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering, and Aleksandar Kavcic, a former Ph.D. student now a professor at the University of Hawaii. Their work was supported by Carnegie’s Data Storage Systems Center, a university research organization.

During the trial, Marvell argued that it had not used the university’s technology and that those patents were invalid because similar systems had been developed elsewhere before the university filed for its patents. A company spokesman said Marvell would seek lower damages from the judge in post-trial hearings, which are scheduled for May, and might appeal the ruling otherwise.

Patent infringement lawsuits have become a big issue in recent years as the pace of innovation and competition speeds up and technology firms increasingly seek to shield their products behind patents. As the number of technology patents filed in the United States has risen rapidly in the last decade, so have patent-related lawsuits. Recent cases have involved Microsoft, Motorola, Research in Motion, Visto, Google and many others.

In August, Apple won a $1 billion infringement judgment against Samsung over iPhone design patents. Since then, the companies have argued over the size of the verdict and how the jury reached its conclusion. Samsung has argued the figure is excessive, while Apple has sought a court injunction to bar Samsung from selling various products that the jury found infringed on its patents.

Since the jury found the infringement by Marvell had been “willful,” meaning the company knew it was using the patented technology, the judge can award up to three times the verdict amount, according to a statement by K&L Gates, the law firm representing Carnegie Mellon.

The case was tried before Judge Nora Barry Fischer of United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Marvell ships more than one billion chips a year to a variety of electronics manufacturers, including Panasonic, Sony and Dell.

After Wednesday’s verdict, Marvell’s share price dropped 10.3 percent, to $7.40 on the Nasdaq, valuing the company at about $4 billion.

The university said the verdict was a victory for academic research and collaboration. “Protection of the discoveries of our faculty and students is very important to us,” the university said in a statement.

“The university’s singular success, particularly over the past 40 years, has been achieved in large measure through collaboration with industry. We value those relationships greatly.”

Carnegie Mellon was represented by Douglas B. Greenswag and Patrick J. McElhinny of K&L Gates.

Marvell was represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

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Putin to Sign Ban on U.S. Adoptions of Russian Children

MOSCOW President Vladimir V. Putin said on Thursday that he would sign into law a bill banning the adoption of Russian children by American citizens, retaliating against an American law that punishes Russians accused of violating human rights and dealing a potentially grave setback to bilateral relations.

Mr. Putin announced his decision at a meeting with senior government officials, including cabinet members and legislative leaders. The adoption ban, included in a broader law aimed at retaliating against the United States, was approved unanimously by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Parliament, on Wednesday.

Mr. Putin also said he would sign a decree calling for improvements in Russia’s deeply troubled child welfare system that the Federation Council also adopted Wednesday. “I intend to sign the law,” Mr. Putin said, “as well as a presidential decree changing the procedure of helping orphaned children, children left without parental care, and especially children who are in a disadvantageous situation due to their health problems.”

United States officials have strongly criticized the measure and have urged the Russian government not to enmesh orphaned children in politics.

“It is misguided to link the fate of children to unrelated political considerations,” a State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, said on Wednesday before Mr. Putin announced his decision.

Internally, however, Obama administration officials have been debating how strongly to respond to the adoption ban, and are trying to assess the potential implications for other aspects of the relationship with Russia. The United States, for example, now relies heavily on overland routes through Russia to ship supplies to military units in Afghanistan, and has enlisted Russia’s help in containing Iran’s nuclear program. The former cold war rivals also have sharp disagreements, notably over the civil war in Syria.

Until Thursday, these larger considerations, along with the possibility that Mr. Putin might veto the adoption bill, seemed to forestall a more forceful response from Washington.

The ban is set to take effect on Tuesday, and some senior officials in Moscow said they expected it to have the immediate effect of blocking the departure of 46 children whose adoptions by American parents were nearly completed. Adoption agency officials in the United States who work regularly with Russian orphanages said they expected the number of families immediately affected by the ban to be far larger, about 200 to 250 who have already identified a child that they planned to adopt.

Since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency in May, Russian officials have used a juggernaut of legislation and executive decisions to curtail the United States’ influence and involvement in Russia, undoing major partnerships that began after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The adoption ban, however, is the first step to take direct aim at the American public and would effectively undo a bilateral agreement on international adoptions that was ratified this year and took effect Nov. 1. That agreement called for heightened oversight in response to several high-profile cases of abuse and deaths of adopted Russian children in the United States.

About 1,000 Russian children were adopted in 2011 by parents from the United States, which leads in adoptions here, and more than 45,000 such children have been adopted by American parents since 1999.

Pavel A. Astakhov, Russia’s child rights commissioner and a major proponent of the ban, said the 46 pending adoptions would be blocked regardless of previous agreements, and he expressed no regrets over the likely emotional turmoil for the families involved.

“The children who have been chosen by foreign American parents — we know of 46 children who were seen, whose paperwork was processed, who came in the sights of American agencies,” Mr. Astakhov said in his statement. “They will not be able to go to America, to those who wanted to see them as their adopted children. There is no need to go out and make a tragedy out of it.”

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Why the S.E.C. Is Likely to Miss Its Deadline to Write Crowdfunding Rules

When the Jobs Act became law in April, supporters proclaimed a new era for small businesses seeking to raise money.

The “game changer,” as President Obama put it in the Rose Garden as he signed the bill, was a provision to allow small companies to “crowdfund” — that is, to sell stock and other securities over the Internet directly to the general public. “For the first time,” the president said, “ordinary Americans will be able to go online and invest in entrepreneurs that they believe in.”

But it now seems that dawn will break late on this new age of democratic investing. The Securities and Exchange Commission appears certain to miss its end-of-year deadline for issuing regulations to put the provision into effect. And with the departure of the S.E.C. chairwoman, Mary L. Schapiro, and three of her top deputies — including two who manage the offices writing the regulations — some in the nascent equity crowdfunding industry worry that it could be 2014 before their line of business becomes legal.

The delay has frustrated many crowdfunding backers. The 270 days that Congress gave the S.E.C. to write the rules “is not a suggested timeline; it is a Congressional mandate,” said Kim Wales, an organizer at Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates, a lobbying group formed in April to represent the new industry, in an e-mailed statement. “The S.E.C. answers to Congress, not the other way around.”

The crowdfunding provision, Title III of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, creates an exception to the general rule that before a company can sell its stock to the public, it must register with the S.E.C., a process of disclosure requiring elaborate and expensive assistance from lawyers, accountants and investment bankers that most small companies cannot afford. Instead, businesses seeking less than $1 million will be able to raise capital online from small investors in a streamlined process.

But the law insists on strong investor protections, and as a result, the S.E.C. must iron out numerous issues concerning how crowdfunding companies, the intermediaries handling the transactions and even investors themselves can operate.

Small businesses, especially start-ups, are notoriously risky; in essence, the S.E.C. is writing rules that will govern a very dangerous game. “It’s actually a significant job to do the regulations in this area, so it was an unrealistic expectation that the S.E.C. would have it completed by now,” said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, which is lobbying the agency on other aspects of the Jobs Act. “I think they have 21 or 22 separate regulations to write.”

S.E.C. employees began accepting comments from and arranging meetings with interested members of the public about crowdfunding shortly after the Jobs Act became law. In those meetings, agency officials “have come in with our white papers fully highlighted, line by line, to discuss it,” said Alon Hillel-Tuch, co-founder and chief financial officer at RocketHub, a crowdfunding site that lets people and businesses raise money through donations or by offering rewards. (Current law allows sites to accept donations or deposits on a product.)

A spokeswoman for Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who largely wrote the crowdfunding measure, said that the S.E.C. was grappling with the more stringent requirements courts had imposed for conducting cost-benefit analyses when writing regulations. This “has slowed down everything from Dodd-Frank to the Jobs Act,” the spokeswoman, Courtney Warner Crowell, said in an e-mail.

With meaningful data for analyzing equity crowdfunding in short supply, the S.E.C. asked RocketHub and Indiegogo, another donation-based crowdfunding service, to provide information about their operating practices and campaigns they had conducted. RocketHub complied, Mr. Hillel-Tuch said. But Indiegogo did not, said Slava Rubin, the company’s chief executive, because it did not want to share trade secrets.

Mr. Hillel-Tuch said S.E.C. officials also requested help from Kickstarter, another leading crowdfunding site. Officials spoke with a Kickstarter executive in July, but neither the agency nor Kickstarter would comment on the meeting.

Under Title III, companies wishing to sell stock to the public will have to provide information to investors and the S.E.C., including financial disclosures that grow more extensive as the size of the offerings increases. They will be allowed to sell stock only through an intermediary: either a broker-dealer or a specialized crowdfunding Web site, or portal. The intermediaries will have to take steps to ensure that small investors are protected, even from themselves. The law sets a cap on how much a person can invest through crowdfunding in a year, depending on income and net worth.

Advocates for both investors and members of the crowdfunding industry have dissected nearly every element of the legislation. “I think there are probably 25 or 30 legitimately important issues,” said Douglas S. Ellenoff, a New York securities lawyer who is advising some in the industry. “But I think they’ve all been hashed out. They have heard issues from a variety of angles, and I think that the draft proposals are fairly advanced.”

High on the list of priorities for the portals is to make sure they face less scrutiny from regulators than broker-dealers do. “What we’re asking for is the funding portals are viewed as sort of a broker-dealer-lite sort of model, where the mandates for broker-dealers are not imposed on a funding portal,” said Ms. Wales, the crowdfunding lobbyist.

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7-Eleven Stores Focus on Healthier Food Options

The chain that is home of the Slurpee, Big Gulp and self-serve nachos with chili and cheese is betting that consumers will stop in for yogurt parfaits, crudité and lean turkey on whole wheat bread.

7-Eleven, the convenience store chain, is restocking its shelves with an eye toward health. Over the last year, the retailer has introduced a line of fresh foods for the calorie conscious and trimmed down its more indulgent fare by creating portion-size items.

The change is as much about consumers’ expanding waistlines as the company’s bottom line. By 2015, the retailer aims to have 20 percent of sales come from fresh foods in its American and Canadian stores, up from about 10 percent currently, according to a company spokesman.

“We’re aspiring to be more of a food and beverage company, and that aligns with what the consumer now wants, which is more tasty, healthy, fresh food choices,” said Joseph M. DePinto, the chief executive of 7-Eleven, a subsidiary of the Japanese company, Seven & i Holdings.

Convenience stores have typically been among the most nimble of retailers. In the 1980s, they added Pac-Man arcade games as a way to keep customers in stores longer and to buy more merchandise. They installed A.T.M.’s a decade later, taking a slice of the transaction fees. More recently, they built refrigerated dairy cases, with milk, eggs, cheese and other staples.

But just as they have taken business from traditional supermarkets, convenience stores have faced increased competition from the likes of Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, which offer a basic menu of fresh foods for consumers on the go.

At the same time, a major profit driver for convenience stores — cigarettes — has been in steady decline over the last decade as the rate of smoking has dropped in the United States.

Fresh foods can help offset some of those losses. The markup on such merchandise can be significant, bolstering a store’s overall profits. It’s also a fast-growing category.

“If you can figure out how to deliver consistent quality and the products consumers want, fresh food is attractive because margins are higher, and it addresses some of the competitive issues you’re facing,” said Richard Meyer, a longtime consultant for the convenience store industry. “But it’s not easy to do.”

7-Eleven has been selling fresh food since the late 1990s. But much of its innovation has been limited to the variety of hot dogs spinning on the roller grill or the breakfast sandwiches languishing beneath a heating lamp.

As 7-Eleven refocuses its lineup, the retail chain has assembled a team of culinary and food science experts to study industry trends and develop new products. Such groups have been around for a while at fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and packaged-goods manufacturers like Kraft. But it’s a relatively new concept for players like 7-Eleven, which have typically relied on their suppliers to provide product innovation.

“We’re working to create a portfolio of fresh foods,” said Anne Readhimer, senior director of fresh food innovation, who joined the company in May from Yum Brands, where she had worked on the KFC and Pizza Hut brands. “Some will be for snacking, some for a quick meal, but we hope everything we offer our guests is convenient and tasty.”

One new menu item just hitting stores is a Bistro Snack Protein Pack, which includes mini pita rounds, cheddar cheese cubes, grapes, celery, baby carrots and hummus. The meal in a box, similar to one carried by Starbucks, is part of a broader menu with healthier items under 400 calories.

The company is also taking existing products and retooling them for single portions. For example, customers can now buy jelly doughnuts and tacos, in mini sizes.

“There are definitely customers who want healthy options, but there are also lots of customers who are excited about the new sandwich options that aren’t low calorie — and minidoughnuts are doing very well,” said Lori Primavera, senior manager of fresh food innovation at 7-Eleven, who previously worked for Food and Drink Resources, a consulting firm for restaurant companies.

Norman Jemal, a franchisee, said sales of the new products are growing steadily in the three 7-Eleven stores that he owns in Manhattan. “At first, people are surprised when they come in here and see a bag of carrots and celery,” Mr. Jemal said. “They say, ‘I came in here for a bag of chips — I can’t believe you have fruit cups or yogurt cups.’ ”

He said the Yoplait Parfait, a cup of vanilla yogurt topped with fresh strawberries or blueberries and granola, is his best-selling fresh food item, while the 7 Smart turkey sandwich is his top sandwich.

The fresh food in Mr. Jemal’s stores and other locations around the country are supplied from a system of 29 commissaries and bakeries that fulfill orders from 7-Eleven. They tailor menu items for specific markets. In the Miami area, they produce a hot Cuban sandwich with ham, cheese, pickles and mustard. The Turkey Gobbler with turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce sells in Northeastern stores around the holidays.

Each store has a data system that allows it to see exactly what is selling, which helps manage waste. Stores can track consumers’ purchase habits over a month, and adjust their orders based on those behaviors.

“In this 28-day cycle, I know I sold 3,563 bananas to customers in this store,” said Tom Ferguson, who owns five 7-Eleven locations in Las Vegas.

Mr. Ferguson has owned 7-Eleven franchises since 1986, and he said the variety of fresh food options in the stores is far better than before. The category already accounts for 20 percent of his sales, and his goal is to reach a quarter of sales volume.

“We used to be a place for people to buy beer, wine, cigarettes, candy and chips, and people would occasionally ask where they could go to get something to eat,” Mr. Ferguson said. “We’re no longer getting that question because now you can get something to eat right here.”

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