Away from Egypt's protests, the worries mount

CAIRO — Amid thimbles, pins and strands of silver thread, the tailor twitched his pencil-perfect mustache in disgust and said the country where he learned to sew and raised six children was edging into darkness.

"I'm worried," said Sayed Abdelwahab, leaning on a worn counter in a shop where he has mended suits for decades. "I have employees with three and four kids. I'm responsible for them. My customers are mostly foreigners, but they're leaving the country. My business is down 50%. Did you see what happened to the stock market?"

"It's Morsi," said his friend Awad Abdelhafez, a porter, referring to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. "He's taken all the power.... Who's responsible for those dying in this violence?"

Such was the talk Thursday on a shaded street in a Cairo neighborhood far from the protest banners in Tahrir Square and the political intrigue over a new constitution. After nearly two years marked by endless clashes and skies tinged with tear gas, the true Egypt is slipping deeper into its worries.

The ragged semblance of democracy that emerged from the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak is dominated by Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood. The opposition can fill the streets with demonstrators and slogans but so far lacks the momentum to unseat Islamists in the fight for the nation's character.

But on this street, where butcher knives flash quick and women sell dusty oranges stacked in pyramids, such thoughts seem strange abstractions. But then, so does the recent revelation by Morsi to Time magazine that he found the movie "Planet of the Apes" to be politically instructive. Heads shake in weary unison.

"I'm so worried and depressed I can't follow things anymore," said Dina Mohamed, a call center operator. "Morsi's been ruling us for four months but he's mixing the wrong ingredients. I'm scared we're facing a hunger revolution. The poor will rise up for bread, not politics or culture, but for their own lives."

This in a nation where the average annual income is reported to be about $4,000. More than 40% of the population lives on $2 a day. The revolution has not improved these statistics, and to many Egyptians, that is its central failing. All the promises that have echoed from mosques, political rallies and television studios have drifted past them like smoke.

The deeper worry is about prolonged civil strife between Islamists and secularists over how deeply Islam will be embedded in public life. This is the fierce debate that the country knew for generations had to come. But now that it has suddenly arrived, the sides have hardened to the point where even Mubarak loyalists have joined their onetime foes, the leftists, to take on Morsi and other Islamists.

"I respect Morsi very much," said Mahmoud Hashem, stepping out from behind the counter of a juice shop. He wears a beard and, as is customary for conservative Muslims, does not look an unveiled woman in the eye. "We elected him. He needs to make decisions as a president, and whether they're right or wrong we have to stand by him. We chose him for four years. He must be given a chance."

But then, step into the tailor's shop, a box of a place with mannequins in the window wearing half-finished jackets, pins in shoulders, strips of fabric whirling on the floor. Abdelwahab has been here since 1966. He started in the trade even before that, when he was 13, after his parents died and he quit school "because I had to look after myself."

That was a few years after Gamal Abdel Nasser, a charismatic army officer, led the 1952 revolution that won Egypt its independence, eventually leading to President Anwar Sadat's peace treaty with Israel, the rise of Mubarak and, Abdelwahab scoffed, the era of Morsi.

"It was good under Nasser and Sadat," he said. "It was good under Mubarak for the first 20 years, but the last 10, when he gave his son more power and started privatization, things started going bad."

Now?

"Worst time of all," he said. "The country is falling apart. We're going to hell."

Abdelhafez, the porter, nodded.

A man sewing upstairs, yelled down, "Half of us are slaves!"

"The people in Tahrir Square will never be slaves," said Abdelwahab. "They are fighting."

The men talked, voices rising and falling in an afternoon cool with the coming winter. Would the military step in again like it did immediately after Mubarak's fall? Would the stock market rebound? Would those killing the protesters be prosecuted? Why is it that every time U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visits Cairo, as she did last week to help seal a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, something bad happens shortly after? (The porter's eyebrows danced at the question.) Why isn't the Muslim Brotherhood open to different views, different ways of seeing things?

So many discussions. But there was work to do, even if many of Abdelwahab's clients had left the country and there were only a few bags of ruffled shirts needing a needle and thread, a steam and a pressing.

This weekend, the Brotherhood has promised a huge rally in Cairo to support Morsi and pressure the protesters in Tahrir.

The porter and the tailor glanced at each other.

"We are entering a dangerous weekend," said Abdelhafez, who left his friend's shop and crossed the street, passing a man yelling into his cellphone. "The Islamists want to pass this constitution!" the man said. "They want to make this country their own!"

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Special correspondent Reem Abdellatif contributed to this report.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 30

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Attorneys say Halle Berry, ex settle dispute

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Attorneys for Halle Berry and her ex-boyfriend have settled court issues that arose after a Thanksgiving Day fight at the actress’ home.

The fisticuffs involved Berry’s ex-boyfriend Gabriel Aubry and her fiance, actor Olivier Martinez. Aubry was arrested after the fight, which left him with a black eye, a broken rib and other injuries.

Aubry obtained a temporary restraining order against Martinez. The model and Berry have been battling over custody of their 4-year-old daughter for months and have appeared twice in a family law court since the fight.

Blair Berk, an attorney for Berry, and Shawn Holley, who represents Aubry, released a statement after Thursday’s hearing that said the two sides had reached an amicable agreement.

No details were released, and the attorneys declined to answer questions.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Medicare Is Faulted in Electronic Medical Records Conversion

The conversion to electronic medical records — a critical piece of the Obama administration’s plan for health care reform — is “vulnerable” to fraud and abuse because of the failure of Medicare officials to develop appropriate safeguards, according to a sharply critical report to be issued Thursday by federal investigators.

Mike Spencer/Wilmington Star-News, via Associated Press

Celeste Stephens, a nurse, leads a session on electronic records at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Marilyn Tavenner, acting administrator for Medicare.

The use of electronic medical records has been central to the aim of overhauling health care in America. Advocates contend that electronic records systems will improve patient care and lower costs through better coordination of medical services, and the Obama administration is spending billions of dollars to encourage doctors and hospitals to switch to electronic records to track patient care.

But the report says Medicare, which is charged with managing the incentive program that encourages the adoption of electronic records, has failed to put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that information being provided by hospitals and doctors about their electronic records systems is accurate. To qualify for the incentive payments, doctors and hospitals must demonstrate that the systems lead to better patient care, meeting a so-called meaningful use standard by, for example, checking for harmful drug interactions.

Medicare “faces obstacles” in overseeing the electronic records incentive program “that leave the program vulnerable to paying incentives to professionals and hospitals that do not fully meet the meaningful use requirements,” the investigators concluded. The report was prepared by the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare.

The investigators contrasted the looser management of the incentive program with the agency’s pledge to more closely monitor Medicare payments of medical claims. Medicare officials have indicated that the agency intends to move away from a “pay and chase” model, in which it tried to get back any money it has paid in error, to one in which it focuses on trying to avoid making unjustified payments in the first place.

Late Wednesday, a Medicare spokesman said in a statement: “Protecting taxpayer dollars is our top priority and we have implemented aggressive procedures to hold providers accountable. Making a false claim is a serious offense with serious consequences and we believe the overwhelming majority of doctors and hospitals take seriously their responsibility to honestly report their performance.”

The government’s investment in electronic records was authorized under the broader stimulus package passed in 2009. Medicare expects to spend nearly $7 billion over five years as a way of inducing doctors and hospitals to adopt and use electronic records. So far, the report said, the agency has paid 74, 317 health professionals and 1,333 hospitals. By attesting that they meet the criteria established under the program, a doctor can receive as much as $44,000 for adopting electronic records, while a hospital could be paid as much as $2 million in the first year of its adoption. The inspector general’s report follows earlier concerns among regulators and others over whether doctors and hospitals are using electronic records inappropriately to charge more for services, as reported by The New York Times last September, and is likely to fuel the debate over the government’s efforts to promote electronic records. Critics say the push for electronic records may be resulting in higher Medicare spending with little in the way of improvement in patients’ health. Thursday’s report did not address patient care.

Even those within the industry say the speed with which systems are being developed and adopted by hospitals and doctors has led to a lack of clarity over how the records should be used and concerns about their overall accuracy.

“We’ve gone from the horse and buggy to the Model T, and we don’t know the rules of the road. Now we’ve had a big car pileup,” said Lynne Thomas Gordon, the chief executive of the American Health Information Management Association, a trade group in Chicago. The association, which contends more study is needed to determine whether hospitals and doctors actually are abusing electronic records to increase their payments, says it supports more clarity.

Although there is little disagreement over the potential benefits of electronic records in reducing duplicative tests and avoiding medical errors, critics increasingly argue that the federal government has not devoted enough time or resources to making certain the money it is investing is being well spent.

House Republicans echoed these concerns in early October in a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services. Citing the Times article, they called for suspending the incentive program until concerns about standardization had been resolved. “The top House policy makers on health care are concerned that H.H.S. is squandering taxpayer dollars by asking little of providers in return for incentive payments,” said a statement issued at the same time by the Republicans, who are likely to seize on the latest inspector general report as further evidence of lax oversight. Republicans have said they will continue to monitor the program.

In her letter in response, which has not been made public, Ms. Sebelius dismissed the idea of suspending the incentive program, arguing that it “would be profoundly unfair to the hospitals and eligible professionals that have invested billions of dollars and devoted countless hours of work to purchase and install systems and educate staff.” She said Medicare was trying to determine whether electronic records had been used in any fraudulent billing but she insisted that the current efforts to certify the systems and address the concerns raised by the Republicans and others were adequate.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 30, 2012

An article on Thursday about a federal report critical of Medicare’s performance in assuring accuracy as doctors and hospitals switch to electronic medical records misstated, in some copies, the timing of a statement from a Medicare spokesman in response to the report. The statement was released late Wednesday, not late Thursday.

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Most Americans Face Lower Tax Burden Than in the 80s

What Is Fair?:
Taxes are still a hot topic after the presidential election. But as a country that spends more than it collects in taxes, are we asking the right taxpayers to pay the right amounts?

BELLEVILLE, Ill. — Alan Hicks divides long days between the insurance business he started in the late 1970s and the barbecue restaurant he opened with his sons three years ago. He earned more than $250,000 last year and said taxes took more than 40 percent. What’s worse, in his view, is that others — the wealthy, hiding in loopholes; the poor, living on government benefits — are not paying their fair share.

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

"I don't have the answer of where to pull back. I want the state parks to stay open. I want, I want, I want. I want Big Bird, I think it's beautiful. What don't I want? I don't know," said Anita Thole, a safety supervisor for a utility contractor.

“It feels like the harder we work, the more they take from us,” said Mr. Hicks, 55, as he waited for a meat truck one recent afternoon. “And it seems like there’s an awful lot of people in the United States who don’t pay any taxes.”

These are common sentiments in the eastern suburbs of St. Louis, a region of fading factory towns fringed by new subdivisions. Here, as across the country, people like Mr. Hicks are pained by the conviction that they are paying ever more to finance the expansion of government.

But in fact, most Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes — federal, state and local — than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980.

Households earning more than $200,000 benefited from the largest percentage declines in total taxation as a share of income. Middle-income households benefited, too. More than 85 percent of households with earnings above $25,000 paid less in total taxes than comparable households in 1980.

Lower-income households, however, saved little or nothing. Many pay no federal income taxes, but they do pay a range of other levies, like federal payroll taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. Only about half of taxpaying households with incomes below $25,000 paid less in 2010.

The uneven decline is a result of two trends. Congress cut federal taxation at every income level over the last 30 years. State and local taxes, meanwhile, increased for most Americans. Those taxes generally take a larger share of income from those who make less, so the increases offset more and more of the federal savings at lower levels of income.

In a half-dozen states, including Connecticut, Florida and New Jersey, the increases were large enough to offset the federal savings for most households, not just the poorer ones.

Now an era of tax cuts may be reaching its end. The federal government depends increasingly on borrowed money to pay its bills, and many state and local governments are similarly confronting the reality that they are spending more money than they collect. In Washington, debates about tax cuts have yielded to debates about who should pay more.

President Obama campaigned for re-election on a promise to take a larger share of taxable income above roughly $250,000 a year. The White House is now negotiating with Congressional Republicans, who instead want to raise some money by reducing tax deductions. Federal spending cuts also are at issue.

If a deal is not struck by year’s end, a wide range of federal tax cuts passed since 2000 will expire and taxes will rise for roughly 90 percent of Americans, according to the independent Tax Policy Center. For lower-income households, taxation would spike well above 1980 levels. Upper-income households would lose some but not all of the benefits of tax cuts over the last three decades.

Public debate over taxes has typically focused on the federal income tax, but that now accounts for less than a third of the total tax revenues collected by federal, state and local governments. To analyze the total burden, The Times created a model, in consultation with experts, which estimated total tax bills for each taxpayer in each year from 1980, when the election of President Ronald Reagan opened an era of tax cutting, up to 2010, the most recent year for which relevant data is available.

The analysis shows that the overall burden of taxation declined as a share of income in the 1980s, rose to a new peak in the 1990s and fell again in the 2000s. Tax rates at most income levels were lower in 2010 than at any point during the 1980s.

Governments still collected the same share of total income in 2010 as in 1980 — 31 cents from every dollar — because people with higher incomes pay taxes at higher rates, and household incomes rose over the last three decades, particularly at the top.

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Powerball's $580-million-plus jackpot inspires wishes, dreamers

Don't bother telling Wednesday night's Powerball winners -- if there are any -- that a lottery is just a tax on those who flunked math. With a winning ticket in hand, or even just the dream of one, who cares if the odds against them exceeded 175 million to 1? 

Last-minute ticket-buying pushed the jackpot to nearly $580 million, which is how much a single winner would get if he or she took the money in annual payments over 30 years.  

The winning numbers: 5-16-22-23-29, and the Powerball:  06

Officials couldn't say immediately after the 8 p.m. drawing whether there were any winning tickets. But beforehand, officials had said there was a 75% chance that someone would win Wednesday night. 

No one had won since Oct. 6, causing the jackpot to roll over 16 times. It  grows at least $10 million every time no one wins, lottery officials said. 

To play Powerball, one must pick five unique numbers from 1 through 59, and a Powerball number from 1 through 35. The odds of winning are 1 in 175,223,510. 

Powerball tickets aren't sold in California, but some feverish residents reportedly drove or flew to one of 42 participating states  to buy a chance at a fortune. The District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands also participate. 

Maybe the next time the jackpot soars, out-of-state travel won't be necessary. On Thursday, the California State Lottery Commission is expected to adopt regulations to join the Powerball lottery. If so, California retailers could start selling the $2 tickets in April.

[Updated, 9:53 p.m., Nov. 28: An earlier version of this post said the jackpot would exceed $550 million.  Late Wednesday, the Associated Press reported, Powerball officials said it would be nearly $580 million.]

 ALSO:

Zig Ziglar dies at 86; motivational speaker inspired millions

Nanny, in hospital, pleads not guilty to murder of 2 children

Texas moves to seize polygamist Warren Jeffs' ranch compound 

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 29

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Cate Blanchett in negotiations for evil stepmother in Disney’s Cinderella film

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Cate Blanchett is in negotiations to play the evil stepmother in Disney‘s re-imagining of the classic fairytale Cinderella, the “Untitled Cinderella Story,” an individual with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap.

Blanchett would be the first to be cast in the live-action film. It is being directed by Mark Romanek for the studio based on a script by Chris Weitz.

The film is being produced by Simon Kinberg, who is best-known for the “X-Men” series.

The feature was first set up at Disney in May 2010 based on a pitch by Aline Brosh McKenna (“Devil Wear Prada.”), who wrote the initial draft.

Disney set the project up in the wake of its success with “Alice in Wonderland,” an adaptation of the Lewis C. Carroll book that starred Johnny Depp.

Disney representatives could not be reached for comment.

Blanchett can next be seen on screen in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” on December 14. She was recently confirmed for George Clooney’s upcoming film “The Monuments Men.” She will also be seen in “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” and “The Hobbit: There and Back Again.”

Cinderella has been adapted for the big screen dozens of times. In Andy Tennant’s 1998 version “Ever After: A Cinderella Story,” Angelica Houston played the evil stepmother. In the TV movie “Cinderella” in 1997, the role was played by Bernadette Peters. Sigourney Weaver voiced the character in “Happily N’Ever After” in 2006. Disney‘s 1950 version featured Eleanor Audley in the voice role of Lady Tremaine, the wicked stepmother.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Phys Ed: Keeping Your Eye on the Ball

Recently, researchers in England set out to determine whether weekend golfers could improve their game through one of two approaches. Some were coached on individual swing technique, while others were instructed to gaze fixedly at the ball before putting. The researchers hoped to learn not only whether looking at the ball affects performance, but also whether where we look changes how we think and feel while in action.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Back in elementary school gym class, virtually all of us were taught to keep our eyes on the ball during sports. But a growing body of research suggests that, as adults, most of us have forgotten how to do this. When scientists in recent years have attached sophisticated, miniature gaze-tracking devices to the heads of golfers, soccer players, basketball free throw shooters, tennis players and even competitive sharpshooters, they have found that a majority are not actually looking where they believe they are looking or for as long as they think.

It has been less clear, though, whether a slightly wandering gaze really matters that much to those of us who are decidedly recreational athletes.

Which is in part why the British researchers had half of their group of 40 duffers practice putting technique, while the other half received instruction in a gaze-focusing technique known as “Quiet Eye” training.

Quiet Eye training, as the name suggests, is an attempt to get people to stop flicking their focus around so much. But “Quiet Eye training is not just about looking at the ball,” says Mark Wilson, who led the study, published in Psychophysiology, and is a senior lecturer in human movement science at the University of Exeter in England. “It is about looking at the ball for long enough to process aiming information.” It involves reminding players to first briefly sight toward the exact spot where they wish to send the ball, and then settle their eyes onto the ball and hold them there.

This tight focus on the ball, Dr. Wilson says, blunts distracting mental chatter and allows the brain “to process the aiming information you just gathered” and direct the body in the proper motions to get the ball where you wish it to go.

A quiet, focused eye, in other words, seems to encourage a quiet, focused mind, which then makes for more accurate putting.

And in fact, after Dr. Wilson had his golfing volunteers practice for hours on either specific aspects of stroke technique or on focusing their gaze and not worrying about technique, those who had worked on their gaze were more accurate than those who had fine-tuned their technique. Those trained to focus also had lower heart rates and less muscle twitchiness, indicating less performance anxiety.

Similar results have been reported among soccer penalty kickers, who, like golfers, need to precisely place a ball but have the added distraction of a peripatetic, obstructive goalie. Many players tend to glance at the goalie as they prepare to shoot. Their eyes are not quiet, and their aim is affected.

But in a study published last year in the journal Cognitive Processing, collegiate players who were instructed to look briefly toward one of the upper, far corners of the goal and then immediately back to the ball, ignoring the goalie, significantly improved their shooting accuracy and reduced by 50 percent the number of times the goalie blocked their try, compared to teammates who didn’t quiet their gaze.

It did not seem to matter, says Greg Wood, also of the University of Exeter, who led the study, that kickers were glancing briefly toward where they planned to shoot, potentially telegraphing their intentions to the goalie. “An accurate shot kicked with typical speed will reach the goal in approximately 400 milliseconds, leaving the goalie with insufficient processing and response time,” he says. Players needn’t disguise intent if their aim is true.

Of course, merely keeping your eye on the ball won’t induce it to roll or rise to the desired location if you employ miserable technique. No amount of laser-eyed focus will get one of my putts to land. But what is interesting about Quiet Eye-style training, Dr. Wilson says, is that it can allow recreational and novice athletes with rudimentary skills to progress rapidly.

Specifically, Dr. Wilson says, after having extensively studied just how the best golfers look, he now teaches novice golfers at his lab to “keep their gaze on the back of the ball, which is the contact point for the putter, for a brief period before starting the putting action” — long enough to, for instance, “say ‘back of the cup’ to themselves,” he says. The golfers are told to hold that position throughout the putting stroke and, he says, “importantly, after contact for a split second. I often ask golfers to rate the quality of their contact on the ball from 1 to 10, before they look up to see where the ball went.”

Inexperienced putters who followed these instructions improved much more rapidly, he says, than those who merely practiced putts repeatedly.

“It seems so obvious,” Dr. Wilson says. “It is almost too simple. People assume that they are doing all of this already. ‘You mean I should look at the ball?’ Duh!”

But, he concludes, “the fact is that many people do not look at the right place at the right time.”

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The Next War: In Federal Budget Cutting, F-35 Fighter Jet Is at Risk

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Vice Adm. David Venlet was named to lead the Joint Strike Fighter program in 2010 after problems had left it behind schedule and over budget.

LEXINGTON PARK, Md. — The Marine version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, already more than a decade in the making, was facing a crucial question: Could the jet, which can soar well past the speed of sound, land at sea like a helicopter?

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

An F-35B, the Marine Corps version of the Joint Strike Fighter.

On an October day last year, with Lt. Col. Fred Schenk at the controls, the plane glided toward a ship off the Atlantic coast and then, its engine rotating straight down, descended gently to the deck at seven feet a second.

There were cheers from the ship’s crew members, who “were all shaking my hands and smiling,” Colonel Schenk recalled.

The smooth landing helped save that model and breathed new life into the huge F-35 program, the most expensive weapons system in military history. But while Pentagon officials now say that the program is making progress, it begins its 12th year in development years behind schedule, troubled with technological flaws and facing concerns about its relatively short flight range as possible threats grow from Asia.

With a record price tag — potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars — the jet is likely to become a target for budget cutters. Reining in military spending is on the table as President Obama and Republican leaders in Congress look for ways to avert a fiscal crisis. But no matter what kind of deal is reached in the next few weeks, military analysts expect the Pentagon budget to decline in the next decade as the war in Afghanistan ends and the military is required to do its part to reduce the federal debt.

Behind the scenes, the Pentagon and the F-35’s main contractor, Lockheed Martin, are engaged in a conflict of their own over the costs. The relationship “is the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in some bad ones,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Bogdan of the Air Force, a top program official, said in September. “I guarantee you: we will not succeed on this if we do not get past that.”

In a battle that is being fought on other military programs as well, the Pentagon has been pushing Lockheed to cut costs much faster while the company is fighting to hold onto a profit. “Lockheed has seemed to be focused on short-term business goals,” Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said this month. “And we’d like to see them focus more on execution of the program and successful delivery of the product.”

The F-35 was conceived as the Pentagon’s silver bullet in the sky — a state-of-the art aircraft that could be adapted to three branches of the military, with advances that would easily overcome the defenses of most foes. The radar-evading jets would not only dodge sophisticated antiaircraft missiles, but they would also give pilots a better picture of enemy threats while enabling allies, who want the planes, too, to fight more closely with American forces.

But the ambitious aircraft instead illustrates how the Pentagon can let huge and complex programs veer out of control and then have a hard time reining them in. The program nearly doubled in cost as Lockheed and the military’s own bureaucracy failed to deliver on the most basic promise of a three-in-one jet that would save taxpayers money and be served up speedily.

Lockheed has delivered 41 planes so far for testing and initial training, and Pentagon leaders are slowing purchases of the F-35 to fix the latest technical problems and reduce the immediate costs. A helmet for pilots that projects targeting data onto its visor is too jittery to count on. The tail-hook on the Navy jet has had trouble catching the arresting cable, meaning that version cannot yet land on carriers. And writing and testing the millions of lines of software needed by the jets is so daunting that General Bogdan said, “It scares the heck out of me.”

With all the delays — full production is not expected until 2019 — the military has spent billions to extend the lives of older fighters and buy more of them to fill the gap. At the same time, the cost to build each F-35 has risen to an average of $137 million from $69 million in 2001.

The jets would cost taxpayers $396 billion, including research and development, if the Pentagon sticks to its plan to build 2,443 by the late 2030s. That would be nearly four times as much as any other weapons system and two-thirds of the $589 billion the United States has spent on the war in Afghanistan. The military is also desperately trying to figure out how to reduce the long-term costs of operating the planes, now projected at $1.1 trillion.

“The plane is unaffordable,” said Winslow T. Wheeler, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington.

Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research group in Washington, said Pentagon officials had little choice but to push ahead, especially after already spending $65 billion on the fighter. “It is simultaneously too big to fail and too big to succeed,” he said. “The bottom line here is that they’ve crammed too much into the program. They were asking one fighter to do three different jobs, and they basically ended up with three different fighters.”

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Regents OK raise for new UC Berkeley chief

Despite strong opposition from Gov. Jerry Brown, the UC Board of Regents on Tuesday gave the incoming chancellor of UC Berkeley a $50,000 — or 11.4% — pay raise over the current campus head. The extra money will come from private donations, not state funds, the regents said.

Nicholas B. Dirks will be paid $486,000, which officials said is $14,000 less than his current salary as a high-ranking administrator at Columbia University.

Brown, who is a regent, described Dirks as an excellent choice but said he would not vote for the salary given the austerities that the state and the 10-campus UC system still face. The university must look for more efficient ways to teach and operate and "the leaders have to demonstrate that they are also sacrificing," Brown said.

The $50,000 increase, even though it won't come from public coffers, "does not fit within the spirit of servant leadership that I think will be required over the next few years," the governor said.

Brown also cited voters' recent approval of his Proposition 30 tax increase, which spared UC from deep budget cuts. During the campaign for the measure, the governor said, he promised voters that he would "use their funds judiciously and with prudence."

Brown, who rarely attended regents meetings before the election, has since become a dramatic presence and voice against UC status quo. Since last summer, he has criticized raises for Cal State executives and suggested that all public colleges promote less expensive insiders instead of shopping for high-priced "hired guns" from across the country.

Besides noting that Dirks will take a pay cut from being Columbia's executive vice president and dean of its arts and sciences faculty, UC leaders said his UC Berkeley salary will be much lower than that of leaders at many other prestigious public and private universities.

"I try to get the very best person I can in this job to navigate the university through some very complicated times," UC system President Mark G. Yudof said.

Yudof said he and Brown do not see "exactly eye to eye" on Dirks' pay, but Yudof said he and the governor agree on nearly all other issues, including efforts to keep tuition from rising.

The regents first debated the issue privately Tuesday in a telephone conference call linking those in Oakland, Sacramento and Los Angeles. After the call went public, three regents voted against the pay increase — Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Charlene Zettel — and 11 others voted for it. All 14 voted to appoint Dirks.

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), a frequent UC critic, issued a statement suggesting that Dirks follow the example of Timothy P. White, who recently asked for a 10% pay cut from the salary paid his Cal State predecessor. Yee said he would reintroduce legislation to limit executive pay raises in public higher education.

When he starts at the 36,000-student UC Berkeley on June 1, Dirks will receive free campus housing, along with $121,700 in relocation fees paid out in installments over four years and other benefits.

An anthropologist and historian who is an expert on India and its British colonial era, he will succeed Robert J. Birgeneau, who has been Berkeley chancellor for eight years. Dirks' wife, Columbia history professor Janaki Bakhle, is expected to receive a faculty job at UC Berkeley, but officials said her hiring and any possible salary must be reviewed by faculty panels.

After his confirmation, Dirks, who is the son of a former UC Santa Cruz administrator, said he was grateful to lead "one of the greatest universities in the world" and said he would work to boost student financial aid and encourage interdisciplinary research and studies.

He thanked Brown and California voters for passing Proposition 30, which raises the state sales tax a quarter-cent over four years and the income tax on high earners over seven years. Dirks, 61, promised that he would carefully "steward the tax dollars that are being paid by the citizens of this great state."

The regents unanimously approved an annual $245,600 salary and housing for Jane Close Conoley, who will become acting chancellor at UC Riverside next month until a permanent one is hired. That salary is below the $325,000 pay of the current Riverside campus chief, White, who is leaving to become chancellor of the Cal State system. Conoley is now dean of UC Santa Barbara's Gervitz Graduate School of Education.

larry.gordon@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 28

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Robbie Williams aims to seal solo legacy with tour

LONDON (Reuters) – Still famous as the in-again/out-again member of chart-topping boyband Take That, British singer Robbie Williams says it is time to get serious as a solo artist and prove his place at the top of the pop pile.

Williams told reporters on Monday he planned a 15-date European stadium tour kicking off in Manchester on June 19, 2013 and concluding in Tallinn, Estonia on August 20.

“I’m buzzing. I’m ready to go. I haven’t done a tour of this size since 2006,” he said in London.

“I think it’s legacy time, because I’m venturing into getting my handicap down at golf and all that business.

“I’m nearly 40, that’s what I’m trying to say. I want to go and seal my place in pop history and go off and deliver a tour of great magnitude while I still can.”

The 38-year-old in fact enjoyed major success after leaving Take That in 1995, producing a string of hit albums and singles including “Angels” and “Millennium” and signing a contract with EMI in 2002 reportedly worth tens of millions.

But by the time his 2006 album “Rudebox” came out followed by “Reality Killed the Video Star” in 2009, he was seen as a dwindling force in British pop who had failed to break the key U.S. market.

Williams rejoined Take That in 2010 and they recorded the hit album “Progress” before touring together in 2011, and the singer said the experience had helped give him confidence to tour large venues again as a solo artist.

“I just ran out of ideas and ran out of a bit of creativity and ran out of energy and did the textbook ‘burnt out’,” he said of the late 2000s.

“But I’ve been working really hard and I needed to do something else, and fortunately it came in the shape of my old band. A lot of demons were vanquished from the past. A lot of wrongs were put to rights.

“That tour last summer was just absolutely incredible. It kick-started my professional career.”

Earlier this month, Williams returned to the top of the album charts with “Take the Crown”.

Asked whether he would consider rejoining Take That again, he replied: “I haven’t officially left … What I do know is that … if we all remain healthy then I will definitely be a part of Take That at some point. It’s joyful being around them.”

Williams conceded it may be too early to talk about his legacy at 38, but added he wanted to “put my stamp down.

“The fact that 40 is looming plays on my mind more than it does on anybody else’s mind. Pop stars cease to be pop stars at 40 and start being old people singing, don’t they?

“There is a forum for a male solo star to get up there in stadiums and own the place and I want that to be me, so I’ve kind of been lethargic for the last couple of albums.”

Williams recently became a father, and said his daughter would accompany him on tour. Olly Murs, who rose to fame on “The X Factor” reality TV show, will support Williams on his tour.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Personal Health: Aiding the Doctor Who Feels Cancer's Toll

The woman was terminally ill with advanced cancer, and the oncologist who had been treating her for three years thought the next step might be to deliver chemotherapy directly to her brain. It was a risky treatment that he knew would not, could not, help her.

When Dr. Diane E. Meier asked what he thought the futile therapy would accomplish, the oncologist replied, “I don’t want Judy to think I’m abandoning her.”

In a recent interview, Dr. Meier said, “Most physicians have no other strategies, no other arrows in their quiver beyond administering tests and treatments.”

“To avoid feeling that they’ve abandoned their patients, doctors throw procedures at them,” she said.

Dr. Meier, a renowned expert on palliative care at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, was the keynote speaker this month at the Buddhist Contemplative Care Symposium, organized by the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and the Garrison Institute. She described contemplative care as “the discipline of being present, of listening before acting.”

“Counter to how the American medical system is structured, which pays for what gets done,” she said, “its approach is, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ ”

But the idea is not to do just that. Rather, she said, the goal is to “restore the patient to the center of the enterprise.”

Under the Affordable Care Act, she said, unnecessary procedures may decline as more doctors are reimbursed for doing what is best for their patients over time, not just for administering tests and treatments. But more could be done if physicians were able to step away from the misperception that everything that can be done should be done.

Dr. Meier’s question prompted Judy’s oncologist to realize that what his patient needed most at the end of her life was not more chemotherapy, but for him to sit down with her, to promise to do his best to keep her comfortable and to be there for the rest of her days.

Occupational Distress

Patients and families may not realize it, but doctors who care for people with incurable illness, and especially the terminally ill, often suffer with their patients. Unable to cope with their own feelings of frustration, failure and helplessness, doctors may react with anger, abruptness and avoidance.

Visits may be reduced to a quick review of the medical chart, and phone calls may not be returned. Even though their doctors are still there, incurably ill patients may feel neglected and depressed, which can exacerbate illness and pain and even hasten death. Dr. Michael K. Kearney, a palliative care physician at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, told the Contemplative Care conference that doctors, especially those who care for terminally ill patients, are subject to two serious forms of occupational stress: burnout and compassion fatigue.

He described burnout as “the end stage of stresses between the individual and the work environment” that can result in emotional and physical exhaustion, a sense of detachment and a feeling of never being able to achieve one’s professional goals.

He likened compassion fatigue to “secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, or vicarious traumatization — trauma suffered when someone close to you is suffering.”

A doctor with compassion fatigue may avoid thoughts and feelings associated with a patient’s misery, become irritable and easily angered, and face physical and emotional distress when reminded of work with the dying. Compassion fatigue can lead to burnout.

In one study of 18 oncologists, published in 2008 in The Journal of Palliative Medicine, those who saw their role as both biomedical and psychosocial found end-of-life care very satisfying. But those “who described a primarily biomedical role reported a more distant relationship with the patient, a sense of failure at not being able to alter the course of the disease and an absence of collegial support,” the authors noted.

Healing the Healer

For doctors at risk of becoming overwhelmed by the stresses of their jobs, Dr. Kearney recommends adopting the time-honored Buddhist practice of “mindfulness meditation,” which involves cultivating mental techniques for stress reduction that are native to all of us but practiced by too few. He likened meditation to “learning to breathe underwater, or finding sources of renewal within work itself.”

To achieve it, a person sits quietly, paying attention to one’s breathing and whenever a distracting thought intrudes, turning one’s attention back to the sensation of breathing. This can help calm the mind and prepare it for a clearer perspective.

Dr. Kearney said this practice could help doctors “really pay attention and be tuned into their patients and what the patients are experiencing.”

“Patients, in turn,” he said, “experience a doctor who’s not just focused on a medical agenda but who really listens to them.”

He said mindfulness meditation helps doctors become more self-aware, empathetic and patient-focused, and to make fewer medical errors. It enables doctors to notice what is going on within themselves and to consider rational options instead of just reacting.

“It’s like pressing an internal pause button,” Dr. Kearney said. “The doctor is able to recognize he’s being stressed, and it prevents him from invoking the survival defense mechanisms of fight (‘Let’s do another course of chemotherapy’), flight (‘There’s nothing more I can do for you — I’ll go get the chaplain’) and freeze (the doctor goes blank and does nothing).” Such reactions can be highly distressing to a dying patient.

When a patient asks for the impossible, like “Promise me I’m not going to die,” the mindful doctor is more likely to step back and say, “I can promise you I’ll do everything I can to help you. I’m going to continue to care for you and support you as best as I can. I’ll be back to see you later today and again tomorrow,” Dr. Kearney said.

Although Dr. Kearney does mindfulness meditation for 30 minutes every morning, he said as little as 8 to 10 minutes a day has been shown helpful to practicing physicians.

In addition, doctors can factor moments of meditation into the course of the workday — say, while washing their hands, having a snack or coffee or pausing before entering the next patient room to focus on breathing.

To deal with the emotional flood that can come after a traumatic event, he suggested taking a brief timeout or calling on a friend or colleague to go for a walk.

This is the second of two columns about communication and cancer. Read the first: “When Treating Cancer Is Not an Option”

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Facebook Gift Store Urges Users to Shop While They Share

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is already privy to its users’ e-mail addresses, wedding pictures and political beliefs. Now the company is nudging them to share a bit more: credit card numbers and offline addresses.

James Best Jr./The New York Times

Facebook Gifts is a service that prompts users to buy things for friends on the social network.

Sharing Even More

What do you think about Facebook’s plan to have users buy gifts for their friends through the site using their credit cards?

A screenshot of Facebook Gifts.

The nudge comes from a new Facebook service called Gifts. It allows Facebook users — only in the United States for now — to buy presents for their friends on the social network. On offer are items as varied as spices from Dean & DeLuca, pajamas from BabyGap and subscriptions to Hulu Plus, the video service. This week Facebook added iTunes gift cards.

The gift service is part of an aggressive moneymaking push aimed at pleasing Facebook’s investors after the company’s dismal stock market debut. Facebook has stepped up mobile advertising and is starting to customize the marketing messages it shows to users based on their Web browsing outside Facebook.

Those efforts seem to have brought some relief to Wall Street. Analysts issued more bullish projections for the company in recent days, and the stock was up 49 percent from its lowest point, closing Tuesday at $26.15, although that is still well below the initial offering price of $38. The share price has been buoyed in part by the fact that a wave of insider lockup periods expired without a flood of shares hitting the market.

To power the Gifts service, Facebook rented a warehouse in South Dakota and created its own software to track inventory and shipping. It will not say how much it earns from each purchase made through Gifts, though merchants that have a similar arrangement with Amazon.com give it a roughly 15 percent cut of sales.

If it catches on, the service would give Facebook a toehold in the more than $200 billion e-commerce market. Much more important, it would let the company accumulate a new stream of valuable personal data and use it to refine targeted advertisements, its bread and butter. The company said it did not now use data collected through Gifts for advertising purposes, but could not rule it out in the future.

“The hard part for Facebook was aggregating a billion users. Now it’s more about how to monetize those users without scaring them away,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird.

He added: “Gifts should also contribute more to Facebook’s treasure trove of user data, which has the benefit of a virtuous cycle, driving more personalization of the site, leading to better and more targeted ads, which improves overall monetization.”

Facebook already collects credit card information from users who play social games on its site. But they are a limited constituency, and a wider audience may be persuaded to buy a gift when Facebook reminds them that a friend is expecting a baby or a cousin is approaching her 40th birthday.

The Gifts service, which grew out of Facebook’s acquisition of a mobile application called Karma, was introduced in September and expanded earlier this month on the eve of the holiday shopping season.

Magnolia Bakery, based in New York, was among Facebook’s early partners for Gifts. Its vice president for public relations, Sara Gramling, said the company had sold roughly 200 packages of treats since then. She counted it as a marketing success. The bakery, which gained fame thanks to “Sex and the City,” had only recently begun shipping its goods. “It was a great opportunity to expand our network,” she said.

Magnolia Bakery isn’t exactly catering to the masses. A half-dozen cupcakes cost $35, plus about $12 for shipping. Facebook, Ms. Gramling said, takes care of the billing. The bakery is eyeing Facebook’s global reach, too, as it opens outlets internationally, especially in the Middle East.

One of the appeals of Facebook Gifts is the ease of making a purchase. Facebook users are nudged to buy a gift (a gift-box icon pops up) for Facebook friends on their birthdays. They are offered a vast menu to choose from: beer glasses, cake pops, quilts, marshmallows, magazine subscriptions and donations to charity. They are asked to choose a greeting card. Then they are asked for credit card details. Facebook says it stores that credit card information, unless users remove it after making a purchase.

Facebook has declined to say how many users have bought gifts, only that among those who have, the average purchase is $25.

David Streitfeld contributed reporting.

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Egypt president meets judges, fails to 'contain crisis'

CAIRO — President Mohamed Morsi suggested Monday that he would scale back broad powers he assumed last week but failed to appease Egypt's judiciary, which would still lack oversight of some institutions including the Islamist-led assembly drafting a new constitution.

Morsi and senior judges met for nearly five hours to discuss differences resulting from the president's declaration that his office was free from judicial review. Morsi told judges that the decree was meant to be temporary, and mainly aimed at shielding the long-troubled constitutional assembly from any judicial attempt to disband it.

Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said after the meeting that Morsi's decree was not designed to "infringe" on the judiciary, suggesting not all of the president's actions would be immune from court review. The Supreme Judicial Council on Saturday condemned Morsi's expanded powers as an "unprecedented attack" on the courts. And Monday's talks did not seem to soften the sentiment of some council members.

"Our meeting with the president has failed to contain the crisis," Abdelrahman Bahloul, a member of the judicial council, told the newspaper Al Masry al Youm. "The statement issued by the presidency is frail and does not represent the members of the council."

The Judges Club, a separate legal organization, also was not satisfied that Morsi had scaled back enough of his authority. It called on its members to continue a partial strike in Alexandria and other cities. Ziad Akl, a political analyst, said Morsi's negotiations with the judges were a move to show the public he's not a dictator, "but, in reality, his declaration has not changed."

The talks in the presidential palace did not stop anti-Morsi demonstrations in Tahrir Square on Monday. But in a sign tensions may be easing, the Muslim Brotherhood, which Morsi helped lead until his inauguration in June, announced it was canceling a scheduled demonstration Tuesday to avoid bloodshed and possible clashes with Morsi opponents.

The consequences of the nation's restiveness played out as Morsi and the judges met Monday, with mourners turning out to bury two boys from opposite political sides who were killed in recent clashes: a 16-year-old antigovernment protester reportedly shot with a rubber bullet near Tahrir Square and a 15-year-old struck by a stone when a crowd attacked an office of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party in the Nile Delta.

"The presidency mourns two of the nation's finest young men," Morsi said in a statement.

But the images of two funerals made it clear that Morsi and the Brotherhood, although still Egypt's dominant political forces, miscalculated the depth of public anger that has bristled since last year's overthrow of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak and subsequent government setbacks, including judicial action disbanding the Islamist-led parliament.

Last month, Morsi, who for months has held wide executive and legislative powers, attempted to fire Prosecutor-General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, only to retreat after a backlash from judges. His most recent decree to hold his office above judicial oversight struck many as another ill-conceived bid to consolidate his authority and advance an Islamist agenda.

Morsi contended that his intent was to prevent Mubarak-era judges from disrupting the country's political transition. Many Egyptians, including opposition figures, are suspicious of the courts, Mahmoud in particular. But Morsi's unilateral decree echoed the strongman tactics of his predecessor.

One of the president's biggest challenges is to protect the assembly drafting the constitution, which will open the way for new parliamentary elections. In June, the Supreme Constitutional Court, made up mostly of Mubarak-appointed judges, dissolved parliament. The court has since been deciding the fate of the Islamist-led assembly, which Morsi feared would also be disbanded.

Activists, liberals, women and non-Muslims have boycotted the assembly, saying that it is too focused on sharia, or Islamic law, which could limit civil rights. Protesters in Tahrir Square said they will continue their demonstrations until Morsi retracts more of his power.

Jaber Nassar, a legal expert quoted on state TV, said Morsi's meeting with the judges showed that he remains adamant on keeping broad authority. He called Morsi's announcement Monday "simply a political statement meant to curb protests against" his decree.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Abdellatif is a special correspondent.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 27

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Man accused of stealing Tim Allen’s Chevy Impala

DENVER (AP) — A man suspected of stealing one of Tim Allen‘s custom cars says the comedian left the keys so he could drive it to Denver.

Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said Monday that 34-year-old Faustino Ibarra is being held without bond while awaiting extradition to California after his arrest on Saturday.

In a jailhouse interview with KDVR-TV (http://bit.ly/TpJirK ), Ibarra claimed Allen adopted him years ago. Jackson said there is no evidence of any adoption.

Ibarra said Allen had left the door to his garage open along with the keys.

Police confirmed that the customized 1996 Chevrolet Impala SS belonged to the “Home Improvement” star but said it hadn’t yet been reported stolen when it turned up in Denver.

Allen’s publicist Marleah (mar-LEE-uh) Leslie said she wouldn’t comment because it’s a police matter.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Books: Woe Is Syphilis, and Other Afflictions of Famous Writers

The old Irishman was a swollen, wheezing mess, blood pressure wildly out of control, kidneys failing, heart fibrillating. “What we have here,” said his new Spanish doctor, “is an antique cardiorenal sclerotic of advanced years.”

In fact, what the doctor had there was William Butler Yeats: the poet had a long list of chronic medical problems and experienced one of his regular cardiac crises while wintering in Spain. He still had three poetically productive years ahead of him before he died of heart failure in 1939, at age 73.

What makes antique case histories like Yeats’s so compelling to research, so interesting to read? Admittedly, they have educational value — medicine moves forward by looking back — but their major attraction is undoubtedly the operatic vigor of their emotional punch. As we contemplate the poor health of historic notables, we can sigh gustily at the immense suffering our ancestors considered routine, wince at the lunatic treatments they so innocently underwent, and marvel over and over again that the body, the brain and the mind can take such divergent paths.

These pleasures are present in abundance in the newest addition to the genre of medical biography, “Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough.” Dr. John J. Ross, a Harvard physician, writes that he stumbled into the field by accident while trying to enliven a lecture on syphilis with a few literary references. The discovery that Shakespeare was apparently obsessed with syphilis (and suspiciously familiar with its symptoms) hooked Dr. Ross.

The resulting collection of 10 medico-literary biographical sketches ranges from the tubercular Brontës, whose every moist cough is familiar to their fans, to figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose medical stories are considerably less familiar.

Dr. Ross’s discussion of Shakespeare is unique in the collection for its paucity of relevant data: so few details are known of the playwright’s life, let alone his health, that all commentary is necessarily supposition. Dr. Ross is not the first to note that references to syphilis are “more abundant, intrusive and clinically exact” in Shakespeare’s works than those of his contemporaries. This observation, along with the apparent deterioration of Shakespeare’s handwriting in his last years, leads to the hypothesis that Shakespeare had syphilis repeatedly as a young man, and wound up suffering more from treatment than disease.

The Elizabethans dosed syphilis with a combination of hot baths (treating the disease by raising body temperature endured into the 20th century), cathartics and lavish quantities of mercury. The drooling that accompanies mercury poisoning was considered a sign of excellent therapeutic progress, Dr. Ross writes: “Savvy physicians adjusted the mercury dose to produce three pints of saliva a day for two weeks.”

And so, when Shakespeare signed his will a month before he died with a shaky hand, was his tremor not possibly a sign of residual nerve damage from the mercury doses of his sybaritic youth? No amount of scholarship is likely to confirm this theory, but details of the argument are gripping and instructive nonetheless.

The story of the blind poet John Milton runs for a while along similar lines. Much is known about the long deterioration of Milton’s vision and other particulars of his delicate health, but Dr. Ross observes that many of his problems seem to have cleared up once he actually became blind. Was he vigorously medicating himself with lead-based nostrums in hopes of forestalling what Dr. Ross argues was probably progressive retinal detachment, then recovering from lead poisoning once his vision was irretrievably gone? Another intriguing if unanswerable question.

Just as the competing injuries of disease and treatment battered the luminaries of English and American literature, so did pervasive mental illness.

Jonathan Swift was a classic obsessive-compulsive long before he succumbed to frontotemporal dementia (Pick’s disease). Poor Hawthorne, so forceful on the page, was in person a tortured shrinking violet, the embodiment of social phobia and depression. Emily Brontë’s behavior was strongly suggestive of Asperger syndrome; Herman Melville was clearly bipolar; Ezra Pound was just nuts.

Yet they all wrote on, despite continual psychic and physical torments. Perhaps the thickest medical chart of all belongs to Jack London, who survived several dramatic episodes of scurvy while prospecting in the Klondike (he was treated with raw potatoes, a can of tomatoes and a single lemon), then accumulated a long list of other medical problems before killing himself (inadvertently, Dr. Ross argues) with an overdose of morphine from his personal and very capacious medicine chest.

Dr. Ross has not written a perfect book. The fictionalized scenes he creates between some of his subjects and their medical providers should all have been excised by a kindly editorial hand, which might also have addressed more than a few grammatical errors. Frequent leaps from descriptive to didactic mode as Dr. Ross updates the reader on various medical conditions can be jarring, like PowerPoint slides suddenly deployed in a poetry reading. True literary scholars might dismiss the book as lit crit lite, a hodgepodge of known facts culled from the usual secondary sources.

But all these caveats fade into the background when Dr. Ross hits his narrative stride, as he does in chapter after chapter. Then the stories of the wounded storytellers unfold smoothly on the page, as mesmerizing as any they themselves might have told, those squinting, wheezing, arthritic, infected, demented, defective yet superlative examples of the human condition.

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Survey finds lots of unused vacation time

As an information technology supervisor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Dennis Crowley had so much work to do last year that he finished 2011 without using nearly five days of paid vacation.

"And to be frank, I was too busy to even realize I was losing time," he said.

Crowley's situation is not unusual. A survey by Harris Interactive Inc. found that by the end of 2012, Americans will leave an average of 9.2 days of vacation unused, up from the average of 6.2 days in 2011.

Nearly 90% of those questioned said they would take more leisure trips on their vacation if they had the time and money to do so, according to the survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults that was commissioned by travel website Hotwire.

Hotwire has a selfish reason for pointing out the survey results: The travel website says vacationers can save lots of money by traveling between Thanksgiving and Christmas. During the holiday gap, hotel rates drop 33% in Boston, 28% in San Francisco and 26% in Seattle, compared with the peak summer travel season, according to the website.

Crowley has learned his lesson. He said he is keeping closer tabs on his vacation time this year. But instead of using his accrued vacation time to travel, he said is spending more time with his children.

Airline food getting more healthful

On the nation's airlines, the days of free lunch are long over. That also goes for breakfast, dinner and snacks. Once complimentary, most airline food now comes with a price tag.

But there is some good news about what you get to eat on commercial airlines: It is getting more healthful.

That's the assessment of Charles Platkin, a professor of nutrition at the City University of New York's Hunter College who has tested and ranked airline foods off and on since 2000. With few exceptions, Platkin said most airlines now offer at least one healthful meal alternative on their menu.

"It's actually moving in a good direction," he said. "It's been an ebb and flow, but the overall trend is positive."

Platkin gave the top ranking this year to Virgin America, noting that the airline based in California offers low-calorie options such as roasted pear and arugula salad, a "protein plate" with hummus and whole wheat pita bread, plus oatmeal for breakfast. He gave the airline 41/4 stars out of a maximum of five stars.

At the bottom of the list was Allegiant Air, with a rating of only one and a half stars. Platkin said the Las Vegas airline "made it clear that their foods were not healthy. It shows."

The airline's snacks include M&Ms, Oreo Brownies and Pringles chips.

Air Canada and Alaska Airlines came in second and third, respectively, in Platkin's ranking. The other big airlines — including United, American, Delta and US Airways — ranked in the middle of the list.

Platkin does not eat the food on every airline. "I don't have that kind of time," he said. "I have classes to teach."

Instead, he collects and reviews lists of food items, including the ingredients and calorie numbers, from the airlines.

TSA defends stopping traveler over watch

A traveler was stopped by federal security officers at the Oakland International Airport this month because of an unusual wristwatch he was wearing.

When word got out about the incident, critics of the Transportation Security Administration blasted the agency, saying it was another example of the TSA overreacting.

In hopes of stifling the uproar, the TSA released a photo of the watch last week. This is no ordinary timepiece. It includes a toggle switch, wires and what look like tiny fuses attached to the wristband.

A TSA explosives detection team determined that the watch was not an explosive device. Still, the Alameda County sheriff's deputies, who were called by the TSA to investigate, arrested the watch owner, Geoffrey McGann, a teacher and artist from Rancho Palos Verdes. He was jailed on suspicion of possession of components to make a destructive device, according to news reports.

The Alameda County district attorney's office declined last week to file charges against McGann.

McGann's attorney accused the TSA of being "hyper-vigilant."

The TSA responded in its blog last week, saying, "Terrorists take everyday items and attempt to manipulate them to make improvised explosive devices. Our officers are trained to look for anomalies such as this one."

hugo.martin@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 26

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

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Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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“Rise of the Guardians” Barrier-Breaker: The First African-American to Direct a CG Animation Film

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Peter Ramsey didn’t just have the pressure of making his feature directing debut on an $ 145 million tentpole film, he also had to deal with the expectations that came with being a barrier-breaker.

By sliding behind the camera on DreamWorks Animation‘s “Rise of the Guardians” Ramsey made history as the first African-American to helm a major CG animated film.

“Rise of the Guardians,” a sort of “Avengers” for the fairy-tale set, opened Wednesday. It tells the story of a group of mythological heroes like Santa Claus (voiced by Alec Baldwin), Jack Frost (Chris Pine) and the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman) who team up to prevent the Nightmare King (Jude Law) from plunging children around the world into a state of despair and hopelessness. The film is an adaptation of a popular series of children’s books by William Joyce.

Ramsey talked with TheWrap about the responsibility of being a role model, the need to inject a little darkness into children’s entertainment and the possibility of a “Guardians” sequel.

What does it mean to be the first African American to direct a CG movie on this scale?

I really wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I’m a pioneer” when I first got the project. It wasn’t until my mom and dad saw an article that mentioned that fact – and I saw that my dad had tears in his eyes – that it really snapped back to me and I realized this is kind of a big deal. That’s the way it is any time some hurdle falls away.

I grew up in South-Central L.A. at a time before there was Spike Lee or John Singleton, so there was really no conception that I could make films. It’s super fulfilling that kids growing up like I did can now have it permanently in mind that it’s a possibility for them.

What films inspired your approach to the film?

I always knew that I wanted to make a fun, action-packed, big, epic fantasy movie rather than a quaint little fairy tale. So I thought of “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter,” where there were big ensemble casts. But stylistically I also thought of Michael Powell’s “Black Narcissus.” I really wanted Santa’s world to have the same dreamlike feel with bold, striking visuals.

There are some really dark elements in the film. Were you worried about it becoming too scary?

It’s important that we acknowledge the existence of some darkness in the world. Part of the point of the film is to say that these characters are real because kids believe in them, that kids know fear, too. We didn’t want to present a world that was free of the shadow that the Guardians fight, because they are using imagination to combat fear and hopelessness.

What drew you to the material?

For me, it was just hearing about Bill Joyce’s notion that all these characters are real and knew each other and had a common purpose.

It seemed like it had this epic fantasy, “Lord of the Rings” potential.

And when I started looking at what Bill had done, I was blown away. The mythologies are so wild and ornate. It’s an entirely new universe, and our movie just scratches the surface. We just started to go down the rabbit hole.

I’m beginning to smell “franchise.” Would you want to direct the sequels?

Yeah, I would love to. I’ve fallen in love with the characters. I feel like there’s plenty of fertile ground for more good stories. There’s more opportunities to push it further. I almost wish I could do the first feature again, to do it more justice.

You are self-taught, no? You came into this industry not as a director, but as a storyboard artist, is that correct?

Yeah, I am. It’s the old thing about how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. I’ve been drawing ever since I was 3. But I wanted to be a comic-book artist, and it was not until quite a bit later that I realized I could work in the movie business.

I stumbled into story boarding through a lucky confluence of things. I realized the work I was doing for comics was similar to helping directors visualize a story. I took maybe a couple of film history classes in college, but I couldn’t afford to make films in film school. I needed to get in on the fringes of the industry to get the on the job training I needed to become a director.

Did you have a favorite Guardian?

If I had to say one, it would be North. It was great to give him a real presence, and casting Alec did a lot to help that. It was slightly unexpected, but it feels so right. I would just love to hang out with that guy and it helps that he reminds me of Guillermo del Toro.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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