Four people died at an Aurora, Colo., townhome early Saturday morning, including a gunman who barricaded himself inside for hours, police said.
Around 9 a.m., police said the suspect shot at officers from a second-story window. They returned fire, hitting the man. The suspect was pronounced dead in an upstairs bedroom.
Inside the home, police discovered two other men and one woman dead.
Another woman was able to escape early Saturday morning when she jumped from an upstairs window, and called police around 3 a.m., Aurora Police Sgt. Cassidee Carlson told the Denver Post. The woman, who escaped unharmed, told police she saw three bodies that "appeared lifeless," police said.
Several neighboring homes were evacuated and police sent out emergency notifications to neighbors at 3 a.m., KUSA-TV , an NBC affiliate, reported.
“After we arrived on scene, there were no more shots fired up until he fired at us,” Carlson told the Associated Press. “During this time he was all over the house. He moved furniture. He was throwing things. He was agitated. He was irrational.”
Aurora, a Denver suburb, is where a gunman killed 12 people and injured at least 70 others at a movie theater July 20.
[Updated at 1:41 p.m., Jan. 5: Carlson said in an email to the Los Angeles Times that there was no indication the four people had any connection to the theater shooting.]
Police said they told the suspect by phone and a bullhorn to exit the townhome. Police reached him by phone "intermittently" over several hours and the suspect hung up multiple times on hostage negotiators, police said.
Authorities did not release the name of the victims or suspect.
Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.
In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.
It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”
Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.
Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.
After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.
But fearing that such measures would spread, that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.
The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”
It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.
In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.
There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.
It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
(Reuters) – As political experts assess Republican Mitt Romney‘s failed U.S. presidential bid, an analysis of how his campaign and President Barack Obama‘s winning team used cable TV to target ads at specific groups of voters may offer some valuable tips for the future.
During the final weeks before the November 6 election, with polls showing a tight race, Obama’s campaign exploited cable TV’s diverse lineup to target women on channels such as Food Network and Lifetime and men on networks such as ESPN.
The Obama team used the fragmentation of cable TV’s audience to its fullest advantage to target tailored messages to voters in battleground states.
Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign relied on a more traditional mass saturation of broadcast TV. The Romney camp was entirely dark on cable TV for two of the campaign’s last seven days.
“We don’t know why. This was a week before the election and you’re in the fight for your life,” said Timothy Kay, political director for NCC Media, a cable TV industry consortium.
The race had narrowed to key counties in several battleground states, the kind of isolation ideally suited for cable’s geographical targeting and niche-marketing capabilities.
Republican Party operatives dismayed by Romney’s defeat continue to debate what went wrong in a campaign awash in cash and run by a candidate with a business background. The former Massachusetts governor’s campaign, like Democrat Obama‘s, spent a record-setting amount of cash; in Romney’s case, it was $ 580 million in 20 months.
Obama’s campaign outspent Romney’s campaign on advertising by as much as $ 200 million, according to a Reuters analysis. But when spending by pro-Romney and pro-Obama outside groups is considered, Romney had the edge in overall TV advertising spending.
Republican consultants and advertising experts said Romney had enough money to compete with Obama’s final advertising effort. Yet Obama cruised to a commanding Electoral College victory after a final concentration on a small group of battleground states.
“In market after market, the Obama campaign ended up putting more ads on target than the Romney campaign did,” said Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, a nonpartisan consulting firm that tracked political ads and worked with both campaigns.
Stephanie Kincaid, who managed Romney’s advertising campaign, declined to answer questions and referred inquiries to top Romney campaign officials Stuart Stevens and Russell Schriefer, her bosses at The Stevens and Schriefer Group, a political consulting firm. They did not respond to phone calls.
OBAMA’S ADVANTAGE
Cable television political advertising jumped from $ 136 million in 2006 to $ 650 million in 2012, although broadcast TV still garnered 80 percent of the campaign advertising spending last year.
Even with major broadcast networks and their affiliates, the Obama campaign appeared to out-perform the Romney camp.
A campaign spending review shows the Obama camp frequently spent far less than Romney for ads aired by the same stations during the same shows.
For example, a review of TV station filings with the Federal Communications Commission showed Romney, on the Sunday before Election Day, paid $ 1,100 for an ad aired during CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on WRAL in Raleigh, North Carolina. Obama paid $ 200 for a comparable ad on the same station during the same program.
Part of the reason for the Obama campaign’s pricing advantage is that the president faced no Democratic primary challenge and was able to buy autumn TV time months in advance when the slots – like airline tickets – were discounted. Romney faced a tough battle for the Republican nomination.
The Romney campaign also simply did not have enough bodies to handle the labor-intensive business of planning, negotiating and placing ads on hundreds of TV stations simultaneously, according to several Republican consultants and media analysts who asked not to be identified.
Obama’s campaign had 30 full-time media buyers. The Romney campaign relied heavily on a single person, Kincaid, with help from one or two others from time to time, according to sources close to the campaign. Senior officials with the campaign declined to discuss its advertising staffing.
“It’s the equivalent of having a budget the size of a Coca- Cola commercial campaign and having two people managing it, where a Madison Avenue agency might have 50 people,” said NCC’s Kay. Kincaid and her small staff were overwhelmed, according to numerous political vendors who dealt with them.
Jim Margolis, an Obama campaign senior adviser whose firm GMMB handled its advertising, said the campaign also took advantage of information provided by companies like Rentrak Corp, a Portland, Oregon-based company that monitors the digital boxes attached to TVs in households using satellite dishes.
EXPLOITING FRAGMENTATION
In the past, political advertisers relied on the major networks rather than cable TV in a quest to reach the most television viewers.
But cable TV’s increasing popularity has brought dramatic fragmentation to television viewership. In many markets, cable offers a hundred or more channels, giving advertisers a chance to target specific demographics.
For instance, the Obama campaign identified zip codes surrounding Ohio tire-manufacturing plants and purchased cable ads touting Obama’s efforts to block tire imports from China.
Obama ran 600,000 cable ads to the Romney’s 300,000 around the nation during the campaign, said NCC’s Kay. Obama’s cable TV push started in April. Romney’s began in September.
Obama’s team also mixed and matched its messages to sharpen the appeal in key counties.
“My impression was there was much more examination and analytics done with the Obama campaign,” Kay said. “The Romney campaign had the same rigid schedule in every state.”
(Reporting by Marcus Stern in Washington and Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Editing by Claudia Parsons, Marilyn W. Thompson and Will Dunham)
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One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.
So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”
And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.
But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.
Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.
His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.
So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.
On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.
When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.
But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.
All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.
Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.
His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.
At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.
“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”
Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.
These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.
I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.
He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.
He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.
As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.
In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.
The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.
We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.
We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.
Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”
ONE morning in mid-December, Pope Benedict XVI gazed down on an iPad and composed his first tweet. From a marketing perspective, it was about time. While the pontiff had been issuing his traditional encyclicals online, other world leaders were venturing further, onto Facebook and Twitter. The Dalai Lama, for example, was already spreading his wisdom in 140-character packets to more than five million followers. And as people retweeted his posts, his messages winged through social media, reaching tens of millions. How could the Vatican resist such marketing magic?
Growing legions of marketing consultants are pushing social media as the can’t-miss future. They argue that pitches are more likely to hit home if they come from friends on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Google+. That’s the new word of mouth, long the gold standard in marketing. And the rivers of data that pour into these networks fuel the vision of precision targeting, in which ads are so timely and relevant that you welcome them. The hopes for such a revolution have fueled a market frenzy around social networks — and have also primed them for a fall.
The drama swirls around data. In the “Mad Men” depiction of an advertising firm in the ’60s, the big stars don’t sweat the numbers. They’re gut followers. Don Draper pours himself a finger or two of rye and flops on a couch in his corner office. He thinks. His job is to anticipate the needs and desires of fellow human beings, and to answer them with ideas. What slogan would light up the eyes of the dour airline executive, or the dog food people? Fellow humanists dominate Don Draper’s rarefied world, while the numbers people, two or three of them crammed into dingier offices, pore over Nielsen reports and audience profiles.
In the last decade however, those numbers people have rocketed to the top. They build and operate the search engines. They’re flexing their quantitative muscles at agencies and starting new ones. And the rise of social networks, which stream a global gabfest into their servers, catapults these quants ever higher. Their most powerful pitches aren’t ideas but rather algorithms. This sends many of today’s Don Drapers into early retirement. Others, paradoxically, hunt down new work on social networks like LinkedIn.
Yet this year has brought renewed hope for the humanists — or at least a satisfying burst of schadenfreude. Facebook made its public offering in May at a valuation of $104 billion, only to see the share price tumble as many began to doubt the network’s potential as a medium for paid ads. Corporate advertisers are devoting only a modest 14 percent of their online budgets to social networks. According to comScore, a firm that tracks online activity, e-commerce soared 16 percent from last year, to nearly $39 billion this holiday season. But advertising from social networks appeared to play only a supporting role. I.B.M. researchers found that on the pivotal opening day of the season, Black Friday, a scant 0.68 percent of online purchases came directly from Facebook. The number from Twitter was undetectable. Could it be that folks aren’t in a buying mood when hanging out digitally with their friends?
A more likely answer is this: When big new phenomena arrive on the scene, it’s hard to know what to count. We’ve seen this before. During the dot-com bubble in the late ’90s, investors threw billions at Internet start-ups that promised to deliver targeted ads to millions of viewers, or “eyeballs.” But eyeballs didn’t produce dollars, and the high-flying market crashed. Many naysayers gleefully concluded that the Internet itself had failed.
Yet as these cyberskeptics crowed, a company called Overture Services was pioneering an innovative advertising application for the new medium. When Web surfers carried out searches, it turned out, they welcomed related ads. And if they clicked on one, the advertiser paid the search engine. Google soon implemented this system on a mammoth scale and turned clicks into dollars. Advertisers could calculate their return on investment down to the penny. In this domain, the insights of a Mad Man counted for nothing. Search ran on numbers. The quants rushed in.
While the rise of search battered the humanists, it also laid a trap that the quants are falling into now. It led to the belief that with enough data, all of advertising could turn into quantifiable science. This came with a punishing downside. It banished faith from the advertising equation. For generations, Mad Men had thrived on widespread trust that their jingles and slogans altered consumers’ behavior. Thankfully for them, there was little data to prove them wrong. But in an industry run remorselessly by numbers, the expectations have flipped. Advertising companies now face pressure to deliver statistical evidence of their success. When they come up short, offering anecdotes in place of numbers, the markets punish them. Faith has given way to doubt.
This leads to exasperation, because in a server farm packed with social data, it’s hard to know what to count. What’s the value of a Facebook “like” or a Twitter follower? What do you measure to find out? In this way, marketing resembles other hot spots of data research, including brain science and genomics. In each one, scientists are combing through petabytes of data, trying to discern whether certain genes or groups of neurons cause something or simply correlate with it. It’s not clear, because these are immensely complex systems with millions of variables — much like our social networks. Even as researchers swim in data that previous generations would have swooned over, they struggle to answer crucial questions regarding cause and effect. What action can I take to get the response I want?
Debates rage as quants accuse one another of counting the wrong things. Take I.B.M.’s Black Friday study. While the numbers indicate that few shoppers clicked directly from a social network to buy a laptop or a fridge, some may have seen ads that later led to a purchase. If so, valuable influence went unmeasured. “I.B.M. is looking at a single point in time,” says Dan Neely, the chief executive of Networked Insights, a marketing analytics company. Neely’s team followed Macy’s Black Friday campaign on Twitter, which started weeks before the big day; it generated a viral flurry on the network, he says. Clearly, many big advertisers are still believers: last week, Facebook shares got a boost from reports that Walmart, Samsung and other boldfaced names have recently stepped up social-media advertising.
But gauging the effectiveness of these ads is still a challenge. “It’s hard to measure influence,” says Steve Canepa, I.B.M.’s general manager for media and entertainment.
That, in fact, may be the ultimate lesson to draw from the social media marketing miracle that wasn’t. The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past.
Dave Morgan, a pioneer in Internet advertising and the founder of Simulmedia, an ad network for TV, points to the early years of electricity. In the late 19th century, most people associated the new industry with one extremely valuable service: light. That was what the marketplace understood. Electricity would displace kerosene and candles and become a giant of illumination. What these people missed was that electricity, far beyond light, was a platform for a host of new industries. Over the following years, entrepreneurs would come up with appliances — today we might call them “apps” — for vacuuming, laundry and eventually radio and television. Huge industries grew on the electricity platform. If you think of Apple in this context, it’s a $496 billion company that builds the latest generation of electricity apps.
Social networks, like them or not, are fast laying out a new grid of personal connections. Even if this matrix of humanity sputters in advertising and marketing, it’s bound to spawn new industries in consulting, education, collaborative design, market research, media and loads of products and services yet to be imagined. Maybe, just maybe, it will even be able to sell soap.
Stephen Baker is a technology journalist who blogs at thenumerati.net, and the author of “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything.”
President Obama is expected to nominate Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator and Vietnam veteran, to be defense secretary, officials said, setting up a confirmation battle with lawmakers and interest groups critical of his views on Israel and Iran. White House officials said Friday afternoon that the president hadn’t formally offered the job to Hagel, but others familiar with the process said the announcement could come as soon as Monday.
More soon.
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On this week’s Gadget Lab show, the gang prepares for the madness of CES and runs down what to expect from the show and how we’ll cover it all.
First up, reviews editor Michael Calore and staff writer Roberto Baldwin give an overview of the show. Expect lots of incremental updates to the gadgets we know and love (like tablets and smartphones). Although you don’t see many big-name products unveiled at CES these days, there’s interesting hidden gems to discover.
Next, Michael and Roberto talk about one of the best parts of CES: getting to meet everyone. It’s the biggest tech-focused networking event of the year, and it’s fun to meet folks you haven’t seen since last year’s show. But with all those people, there’s always the chance of catching the year’s CES flu.
Lastly, Gadget Lab will be covering things a little differently this year — we’ll have a running “live blog” of the action in Sin City. We’ll cover everything from glitzy product announcements and keynotes to late nights at the blackjack table. It’ll be like you’re actually there, minus the 90 percent chance of contracting the flu.
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren finally got her wish on Thursday, receiving a star along the Hollywood Walk of Fame right next to dashing fellow Briton Colin Firth.
“I couldn’t be prouder and more happy that I’m actually going to finally lie next to Colin Firth, something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time,” Mirren said wryly.
Mirren, 67, who won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in 2006′s “The Queen,” was honored with the iconic terrazzo and brass star along Hollywood Boulevard in the historical heart of the U.S. film industry.
Mirren’s star, the 2,488th since the Walk of Fame began in 1958, serves as a de facto lifetime achievement award for those in the entertainment industry.
Firth, who received his Walk of Fame star in 2011, won an Oscar as best actor for his portrayal of Britain’s King George VI in 2010′s “The King Speech.”
“Well I’m very pleased and proud and I think it’s very good for the British monarchy that here on Hollywood Boulevard, the King and the Queen are going to actually sleep together, for the rest of history,” said Mirren said at the unveiling.
The actress posed for photographers lying on her side next to her star and blew kisses to the crowd.
Writer and director David Mamet introduced Mirren.
“Helen’s performances reap higher praise than being praised, they’re loved,” Mamet said.
“And by one who’s had the absolute kick of working with her, I want to say as (British poet) Rupert Brooke said, somewhere there will be a little piece of foreign ground that is always a bit of England, and that’s right there,” Mamet said.
Mirren is starring alongside Al Pacino in Mamet’s upcoming TV film about troubled music producer Phil Spector’s murder trial.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame is administered by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
(Reporting by Alan Devall, writing by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Sandra Maler)
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One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.
So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”
And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.
But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.
Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.
His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.
So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.
On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.
When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.
But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.
All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.
Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.
His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.
At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.
“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”
Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.
These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.
I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.
He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.
He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.
As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.
In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.
The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.
We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.
We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.
Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”
FOR many of the wealthy, the American Taxpayer Relief Act, passed this week by Congress, is aptly named.
For estate and gift taxes in particular, all but the richest of the rich will probably be able to protect their holdings from taxes, now that Congress has permanently set the estate and gift tax exemptions at $5 million (a level that will rise with inflation.)
“You could say this eliminates the estate tax for 99 percent of the population, though I’ve seen figures that say 99.7 or 99.8,” said Rich Behrendt, director of estate planning at the financial services firm Baird and a former inspector for the Internal Revenue Service. “From a policy point of view, the estate tax is not there for raising revenue. It’s there for a check on the massive concentration of wealth in a few hands, and it will still accomplish that.”
And while Congress also agreed to increase tax rates on dividends and capital gains to 20 percent from 15 percent for top earners — in addition to the 3.8 percent Medicare surcharge on such earnings — the rates are still far lower than those on their ordinary income. For the earners at the very top, whose income comes mostly from their portfolios of investments, and not a paycheck like most of the rest of us, this is a good deal.
The estate tax, once an arcane assessment, has been in flux and attracting significant attention since 2001. That was when the exemption per person for the estate tax began to rise gradually from $675,000, with a 55 percent tax for anything above that amount, to $3.5 million in 2009 with a 45 percent tax rate for estates larger than that. Estate plans were written to account for the predictable increases in exemptions.
Then in 2010, contrary to what every accountant and tax lawyer I spoke to at the time believed would happen, the estate tax disappeared. Congress and President Obama could not reach an agreement on the tax. So that year, for the first time since 1916, Americans who died were not subject to a federal estate tax. (Their estates still paid state estate taxes, where they existed, and other taxes, including capital gains, on the value of the assets transferred.)
At the end of 2010, President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner reached an agreement that was just as unlikely as the estate tax expiring in the first place: the new exemption was $5 million, indexed to inflation, with a 35 percent tax rate on any amount over that, and it would last for two years. The taxes and exemptions for gifts made during someone’s lifetime to children and grandchildren were also raised to the same level, from $1 million and a 55 percent tax above that.
As I have written many times, this was a far better rate and exemption than anyone expected. It also created a deadline of Dec. 31, 2012, for people who could make a major gift up to the exemption level or above the amount and pay the low gift tax.
Using the gift exemption was enticing because it meant those assets would appreciate outside of the estate of the person making the gift. Even paying the tax became attractive to the very rich because of how estate and gift taxes are levied. Take, for example, someone who has used up his exemption and wants to give an heir $1 million. The amount it would take to accomplish this differs depending on when it is given. In life, it would cost $1.4 million because the 40 percent gift tax is paid like a sales tax. If it was given after death, the estate would have to set aside about $1.65 million after the 40 percent estate tax was deducted. But this presented a conundrum: while it may make perfect sense to give away a lot of money during your lifetime and save on estate taxes, it means ceding control of cash, securities or shares now. What if you end up needing them? It wasn’t an easy decision, and it led to a fourth-quarter rush.
As of this week, this is no longer an issue. The estate and gift tax exemptions are permanently set at the same $5 million level, indexed for inflation, and the tax rate above that exemption is 40 percent, up from 35 percent. With indexing, the exemption is already about $5.25 million per person — double for a couple — and it will rise at a rate that means most Americans will continue to avoid paying any federal estate tax.
Justin Bieber and his collection of exotic cars have been tantalizing targets for celebrity photographers ever since the young singer got his driver's license.
A video captured the paparazzi chasing Bieber through Westside traffic in November. When Bieber's white Ferrari stops at an intersection, the video shows the singer turning to one of the photographers and asking: "How do your parents feel about what you do?"
A few months earlier, he was at the wheel of his Fisker sports car when a California Highway Patrol officer pulled him over for driving at high speeds while trying to outrun a paparazzo.
This pursuit for the perfect shot took a fatal turn Tuesday when a photographer was hit by an SUV on Sepulveda Boulevard after taking photos of Bieber's Ferrari. And the singer now finds himself at the center of the familiar debate about free speech and the aggressive tactics of the paparazzi.
Since Princess Diana's fatal accident in Paris in 1997 while being pursued by photographers, California politicians have tried crafting laws that curb paparazzi behavior. But some of those laws are rarely used, and attorneys have challenged the constitutionality of others.
On Wednesday, Bieber went on the offensive, calling on lawmakers to crack down.
"Hopefully this tragedy will finally inspire meaningful legislation and whatever other necessary steps to protect the lives and safety of celebrities, police officers, innocent public bystanders and the photographers themselves," he said in a statement.
It remained unclear if any legislators would take up his call. But Bieber did get some support from another paparazzi target, singer Miley Cyrus.
She wrote on Twitter that she hoped the accident "brings on some changes in '13 Paparazzi are dangerous!"
Last year, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge threw out charges related to a first-of-its-kind anti-paparazzi law in a case involving Bieber being chased on the 101 Freeway by photographer Paul Raef. Passed in 2010, the law created punishments for paparazzi who drove dangerously to obtain images.
But the judge said the law violated 1st Amendment protections by overreaching and potentially affecting such people as wedding photographers or photographers speeding to a location where a celebrity was present.
The L.A. city attorney's office is now appealing that decision.
Raef's attorney, Dmitry Gorin, said new anti-paparazzi laws are unnecessary.
"There are plenty of other laws on the books to deal with these issues. There is always a rush to create a new paparazzi law every time something happens," he said. "Any new law on the paparazzi is going to run smack into the 1st Amendment. Truth is, most conduct is covered by existing laws. A lot of this is done for publicity."
Coroner's officials have not identified the photographer because they have not reached the next of kin. However, his girlfriend, Frances Merto, and another photographer identified him as Chris Guerra.
The incident took place on Sepulveda Boulevard near Getty Center Drive shortly before 6 p.m. Tuesday. A friend of Bieber was driving the sports car when it was pulled over on the 405 Freeway by the California Highway Patrol. The photographer arrived near the scene on Sepulveda, left his car and crossed the street to take photos. Sources familiar with the investigation said the CHP told him to leave the area. As he was returning to his vehicle, he was hit by the SUV.
Law enforcement sources said Wednesday that it was unlikely charges would be filed against the driver of the SUV that hit the photographer.
Veteran paparazzo Frank Griffin took issue with the criticism being directed at the photographer as well as other paparazzi.
"What's the difference between our guy who got killed under those circumstances and the war photographer who steps on a land mine in Afghanistan and blows himself to pieces because he wanted the photograph on the other side of road?" said Griffin, who co-owns the photo agency Griffin-Bauer.
"The only difference is the subject matter. One is a celebrity and the other is a battle. Both young men have left behind mothers and fathers grieving and there's no greater sadness in this world than parents who have to bury their children."
Others, however, said the death focuses attention on the safety issues involving paparazzi
"The paparazzi are increasingly reckless and dangerous. The greater the demand, the greater the incentive to do whatever it takes to get the image," said Blair Berk, a Los Angeles attorney who has represented numerous celebrities. "The issue here isn't vanity and nuisance, it's safety."
Scientists have identified a never-before-seen type of meteorite from Mars that has 10 times more water and far more oxygen in it than any previous Martian sample.
The meteorite was found in the Sahara Desert in 2011 and has the official name of Northwest Africa 7034. It is a small basaltic rock — nicknamed “Black Beauty” – which means it formed from rapidly cooling lava. The meteorite is about 2.1 billion years old, from a period known as the Martian Amazonian epoch, and provides scientists with their first hands-on glimpse of this era.
Around 110 Martian meteorites have been found on Earth. Most were probably blown off the Red Planet during a large asteroid impact and subsequently crashed on our own world. The majority are relatively young, though the famous Allan Hills 84001, which some scientists believe contains traces of ancient Martian bacteria, is more than 4 billion years old.
Almost all other Mars rocks on Earth fall into a category known as the SNC group (Shergottites, nakhlites, and chassignites). Curiously, most SNC meteorites don’t seem to match up with the current crust composition of Mars, suggesting they came from the deeper interior or somewhere else. The newly discovered meteorite is different in that it has a composition that very closely lines up with the geochemistry seen at Gusev crater by the Spirit rover.
Scientists analyzed the rock through several methods. When the meteorite was heated to high temperature, hydrated minerals inside it released their water. NWA 7034 released an order of magnitude more water than any SNC meteorite, and gave off different isotopes of oxygen, which appeared in a ratio unlike any other Martian rock. One explanation for the oxygen ratio is that Mars once had isolated reservoirs of oxygen in its crust.
In addition to providing information about Mars’ ancient past, NWA 7034 may help scientists better understand the minerals and geology currently being explored by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The findings appeared Jan. 3 in Science.
Image: NASA
Adam is a Wired reporter and freelance journalist. He lives in Oakland, Ca near a lake and enjoys space, physics, and other sciency things.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Country-pop star Taylor Swift‘s “Red” finished 2012 atop the Billboard 200 album chart on Thursday, claiming the No. 1 spot for the fourth consecutive week.
It was the album’s seventh non-consecutive week at No. 1 on the chart as post-holiday digital sales accounted for more than half of its 241,000 units sold, according to figures from Nielsen SoundScan.
Swift, 23, has now topped the Billboard album chart for 24 weeks in her four-album career, tying Adele for the most weeks by a female artist at number one on the chart since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales figures for Billboard in 1991.
The soundtrack to the big screen adaptation of Broadway musical “Les Miserables” jumped 31 spots to number two on the album chart. It sold 136,000 units and was buoyed by a full week on the chart and the release of the film in movie theaters on December 25.
British boy band One Direction placed third with “Take Me Home,” while singer Bruno Mars‘ “Unorthodox Jukebox” and rapper T.I.’s “Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head” round out the top five.
U.S. album sales for last week were up 27 percent compared to the same week in 2011, at 9.77 million units.
The post-Christmas week, in which many cashed in their holiday gift cards, saw a record for digital song downloads in a week as a total of 55.74 million tracks were downloaded, besting the previous record of 47.73 million from the same week in 2008.
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade.
Their rising popularity represents a generational shift in what people drink, and reflects a successful campaign to convince consumers, particularly teenagers, that the drinks provide a mental and physical edge.
The drinks are now under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration after reports of deaths and serious injuries that may be linked to their high caffeine levels. But however that review ends, one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers.
“If you had a cup of coffee you are going to affect metabolism in the same way,” said Dr. Robert W. Pettitt, an associate professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, who has studied the drinks.
Energy drink companies have promoted their products not as caffeine-fueled concoctions but as specially engineered blends that provide something more. For example, producers claim that “Red Bull gives you wings,” that Rockstar Energy is “scientifically formulated” and Monster Energy is a “killer energy brew.” Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, has asked the government to investigate the industry’s marketing claims.
Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.
As with earlier elixirs, a dearth of evidence underlies such claims. Only a few human studies of energy drinks or the ingredients in them have been performed and they point to a similar conclusion, researchers say — that the beverages are mainly about caffeine.
Caffeine is called the world’s most widely used drug. A stimulant, it increases alertness, awareness and, if taken at the right time, improves athletic performance, studies show. Energy drink users feel its kick faster because the beverages are typically swallowed quickly or are sold as concentrates.
“These are caffeine delivery systems,” said Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has studied energy drinks. “They don’t want to say this is equivalent to a NoDoz because that is not a very sexy sales message.”
A scientist at the University of Wisconsin became puzzled as he researched an ingredient used in energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy. The researcher, Dr. Craig A. Goodman, could not find any trials in humans of the additive, a substance with the tongue-twisting name of glucuronolactone that is related to glucose, a sugar. But Dr. Goodman, who had studied other energy drink ingredients, eventually found two 40-year-old studies from Japan that had examined it.
In the experiments, scientists injected large doses of the substance into laboratory rats. Afterward, the rats swam better. “I have no idea what it does in energy drinks,” Dr. Goodman said.
Energy drink manufacturers say it is their proprietary formulas, rather than specific ingredients, that provide users with physical and mental benefits. But that has not prevented them from implying otherwise.
Consider the case of taurine, an additive used in most energy products.
On its Web site, the producer of Red Bull, for example, states that “more than 2,500 reports have been published about taurine and its physiological effects,” including acting as a “detoxifying agent.” In addition, that company, Red Bull of Austria, points to a 2009 safety study by a European regulatory group that gave it a clean bill of health.
But Red Bull’s Web site does not mention reports by that same group, the European Food Safety Authority, which concluded that claims about the benefits in energy drinks lacked scientific support. Based on those findings, the European Commission has refused to approve claims that taurine helps maintain mental function and heart health and reduces muscle fatigue.
Taurine, an amino acidlike substance that got its name because it was first found in the bile of bulls, does play a role in bodily functions, and recent research suggests it might help prevent heart attacks in women with high cholesterol. However, most people get more than adequate amounts from foods like meat, experts said. And researchers added that those with heart problems who may need supplements would find far better sources than energy drinks.
Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo and Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok.
A closely watched experimental drug to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease failed to work in a late-stage clinical trial, the drug’s developer, Biogen Idec, said Thursday. The company said it would discontinue further work on the drug.
Biogen said that the drug was not effective in either slowing the loss of muscular function or prolonging the lives of people with the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S.
There were also no signs that the drug, dexpramipexole, worked in any subgroup of patients, Biogen said.
“As a physician who has treated people with A.L.S., I hoped with all my heart for a different outcome,'’ Dr. Douglas Kerr, director of neurodegeneration clinical research at Biogen, said in a statement.
A.L.S., which attacks the nerves that control muscles, causes gradual paralysis and typically results in death within a few years of diagnosis. There are about 30,000 Americans with the disease.
There is only one drug approved to treat it, Rilutek, made by Sanofi, which doctors say has only modest effectiveness. Many other drugs have failed in clinical trials, in part because scientists do not understand the cause of A.L.S. and therefore do not know how to treat it.
While expectations had not been that high that dexpramipexole would succeed in its phase 3 trial, they were higher than for many previous A.L.S. drugs, given what some doctors viewed as strong results in a smaller, phase 2 trial.
“I’m more excited about this compound than any compound I’ve ever tested in A.L.S.,'’ Dr. Robert Miller, director of A.L.S. research at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, said in April on a call with investors hosted by Deutsche Bank. Patients getting the highest dose had an almost a 50 percent slower decline in muscular function than those receiving a placebo.
Biogen had licensed dexpramipexole from Knopp Biosciences, a privately held company in Pittsburgh. Biogen’s trial included 943 patients in 11 countries. The main measurement of success was a composite that took into account both deaths from the disease and the decline of functionality. Patients in the trial were allowed to take Rilutek.
Dr. Jeffrey D. Rothstein, director of the Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said the results were disappointing but not surprising.
“We really, really need a new drug,'’ Dr. Rothstein, who was not involved in the phase 3 trial, said by e-mail. He said he thought the phase 2 results for dexpramipexole had been only “marginal,'’ so he was not surprised the latest trial did not succeed.
The reaction on Wall Street was somewhat muted because of the modest expectations for the trial to succeed. Biogen’s shares were down about 4 percent.
“We (and most of the Street) had characterized this trial as a high risk trial,'’ Mark Schoenebaum, an analyst at ISI Group, wrote in a research note Thursday.
Other companies are also developing drugs to treat A.L.S. Neuraltus Pharmaceuticals, a privately held company in Palo Alto, Calif., is preparing to enter the final stage of clinical trials for NP001.
The company announced in late October that its phase 2 trial, which involved 136 patients, failed to show a statistically significant benefit compared with a placebo. But the company said that 27 percent of patients getting the high dose of NP001 had no progression of their disease for six months, two and a half times as many as in the placebo group.
Cytokinetics, of South San Francisco, Calif., is in midstage testing of a compound, tirasemtiv, which might make muscles respond more forcefully to nerve signals.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie delivered a spirited condemnation of Republican House leadership for its reluctance to vote on a relief bill for Hurricane Sandy.
WASHINGTON – Enraged over Congress' failure to approve disaster relief for victims of Superstorm Sandy, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey unloaded Wednesday on House Speaker John A. Boehner and Republican lawmakers in Washington for putting "palace intrigue" ahead of their official responsibilities.
Washington politicians "will say whatever they have to say to get through the day," Christie said, adding that, as a governor, he had "actual responsibilities" -- "unlike people in Congress."
Christie, a potential 2016 GOP presidential contender, reserved his most blistering words for the Republican House speaker. He described Boehner, variously, as selfish, duplicitous and gutless for reversing course at the last minute on Tuesday night and refusing to allow a vote on a $60-billion aid package before the current Congress adjourned.
PHOTOS: Scenes from the fiscal cliff
Christie said that as a result of "the speaker’s irresponsible action," there will be further delay in federal disaster aid to New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and other areas hit by the October storm. He pointed out that it had been 66 days since the storm hit and that areas struck by other hurricanes in recent years had received relief packages in far less time.
However, as outrage continued to pour in from elected officials in the affected area, Boehner agreed to hold a vote Friday to direct needed resources to the National Flood Insurance Program. And on Jan. 15, the first full legislative day of the 113th Congress, the House will consider the remaining supplemental request for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.
But that came after Christie dished out his cold outrage on members of his own party.
"Shame on you. Shame on Congress," Christie said at a news conference in Trenton, the state capital. "It's absolutely disgraceful, and I have to tell you, this used to be something that was not political. Disaster relief was something you didn't play games with." But "in this current atmosphere, [it's] a potential piece of bait for the political game. It is why the American people hate Congress."
At another point, he said of Republicans in Congress: "We've got people down there who use the citizens of this country like pawns on a chessboard."
PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities
"My party was responsible for this," Christie said, charging "one set of Republicans was trying to prove something to another set," and that Boehner was trying to "prove something. I hope he accomplished it."
Christie, whose disaster-relief-themed efforts to reach across partisan lines to President Obama in the days leading up to the election angered many Republicans, said he did not think that was a factor in Boehner's decision.
But the governor, who delivered the keynote address at last summer's Republican National Convention and has helped raise money in recent years for fellow members of the party, did not rule out retaliating against his enemies in Washington.
"We'll see. Primaries are an ugly thing," he said.
[For the Record, 1:46 p.m. PST Jan. 2: This post has been updated to include the House's new plan to vote on Sandy aid.]
While Zipcar investors count their cash from today’s half-billion-dollar acquisition by Avis, the rest of us can start counting the days until we can say good riddance to one of the least rewarding aspects of city life: car ownership.
Zipcar said Tuesday that Avis had agreed to purchase the Cambridge, Mass.-based company for $12.25 per share, or about $500 million. The deal brings Avis the most prominent brand name in what Zipcar describes as the $400 million car-sharing market. The question is, will the added muscle of Avis be enough to take car-sharing mainstream?
Though Americans prize individual car ownership as a birthright, the reality is that owning a car in the big city can be more hassle than help. In cities, insurance costs more. Gas and parking tickets cost more. Traffic stinks. New Yorkers pay more for parking spaces than other people pay in rent. The too-short gaps between San Francisco driveways taunt visitors who want to park at all.
A dozen years ago, Zipcar launched in Boston with the idea that many urban dwellers could get by without owning a car. Instead, we could just rent a car by the hour every now and then when we needed it. In the meantime, Zipcar takes care of insurance, maintenance and all the other headaches that accompany ownership.
While that might sound ideal to those of us who like oil changes about as much as root canals, the promise so far hasn’t panned out.
San Francisco, for example, has dozens of Zipcar pickup locations, many with multiple vehicles. But it’s still not enough to make last-minute car booking easy. You need to plan ahead. And most of the cars are stationed downtown, not located around the city’s farther reaches, where driving is more of a necessity.
For many of us, achieving the dream of not owning a car would necessitate near guaranteed access when we did need one. Zipcar, or a service like it, would have to approximate the “magic rental store” described by Kevin Kelly in his essay “Better Than Owning”:
Why own, when you get the same utility from renting, leasing, licensing, sharing? But more importantly why even possess it? Why take charge of it at all if you have instant, constant, durable, full access to it? If you lived inside of the world’s largest rental store, why would you own anything? If you can borrow anything you needed without possessing it, you gain the same benefits with fewer disadvantages. If this was a magic rental store, where most of the gear was stored “downstairs” in a virtual basement, then whenever you summoned an item or service it would appear at your command.
Reaching this point requires a ubiquity that Zipcar’s 10,000-vehicle fleet, spread out across more than 150 cities worldwide, simply doesn’t provide. In its press release announcing the Avis deal, Zipcar says that its new parent company’s bigger fleet will give it more cars to meet demand and, in the company’s words, “accelerate the revolution we began in personal mobility.”
Maybe seeing its rival take such a leap will goad Enterprise and Hertz into bulking up their own tepid offerings in rent-by-the-hour car-sharing. And maybe services like RelayRides that let individuals rent out their own cars by the hour will start to take off. In that scenario, the number of cars available to drive without having to own them grows. The magic rental store becomes less magical and more real.
The only thing better for the car-averse like myself will be the day that a Google-powered car shows up at my door ready to whisk me away to fulfill some minor errand or even better, transport me to some major party. Not only do I not own it, but neither me — nor anyone else — ever has to drive it at all.
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Moviegoers rushing out to catch “Django Unchained” or “The Hobbit” over New Year’s should consider packing an overnight bag.
The average length of a holiday movie has been larded up by nearly 10 minutes since 2011, according to a survey of the running times of the top 10 box office films of the final weekend of the year. They ran well over two hours.
Moreover, the top 10 grossing holiday movies of 2012 were nearly 25 minutes longer than they were just two years ago.
Of the five top earners last weekend, only one film, the family flick “Parental Guidance,” clocks in at under two hours. In contrast, three of those movies, “Django Unchained,” “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and “Les Misérables,” eat up roughly 160 minutes of ticket-buyers’ time.
And that group doesn’t even take into account hits like “Skyfall” (143 minutes), “The Avengers” (143 minutes) and “The Dark Knight Rises” (165 minutes) or limited release films such as “Zero Dark Thirty” (160 minutes), all of which boast the kind of languorous pacing usually reserved for a David Lean epic.
The capacious running times are testing moviegoers’ patience, as well as bladders. In the Los Angeles Times Monday, Steven Zeitchik bemoaned the series of false endings in films like “Lincoln” and “Life of Pi.” He argued that several accomplished filmmakers are piling on the climaxes and prolonging the ending credits in a way that undermines the emotional impact of their word.
“Hollywood films are struggling to find the exit,” Zeitchik wrote. “Stories that seem to end, end again, and then end once more. Climactic scenes wind down, then wind up. Movies that appear headed for a satisfying resolution turn away, then try to stumble back.”
Also crying out for a bloodier approach in the editing suite was Variety’s Josh Dickey. The swollen run times aren’t just artistically necessary, he noted – they actually damage a film’s box-office take.
“It turns out that a long runtime causes no positive or negative reaction during a film’s marketing period,” Dickey wrote. “And for really big event movies, viewers sometimes feel a longer movie gave them their money’s worth (call it the TGI Friday’s portion-size effect). But once a film gets playing, social response suggests long length can stall its word-of-mouth momentum, usually emerging as secondary complaint – but a persistent one.”
It’s certainly true that exhibitors favor shorter running times for films, because it allows them to cram in more showings on a given day. Despite Dickey’s fears, however, the expansive lengths of movies like “Lincoln” (145 minutes) and “Les Misérables” (157 minutes) haven’t scared off moviegoers.
Both movies will likely gross more than $ 100 million domestically.
Overall, the domestic box office is poised to shatter records with $ 10.8 billion in revenue. Attendance will also likely be up 6 percent by the time 2012 wraps up.
Admittedly, surveying the top 10 grossing films of a particular calendar weekend is a small sample size, but it does appear that audiences and critics are noticing that they are checking their watches more frequently as they follow Bilbo’s adventures in Middle-Earth or Jean Valjean’s travails.
It’s not clear, however, that this is a seasonal anomaly. A decade ago, films like “Gangs of New York” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” similarly strained audience’s endurance. The average length of the top 10 films during 2002 was 126.6 minutes, just two minutes shorter than the average this year.
