Air Force defends handling of sex scandal

Top Air Force brass told a congressional panel Wednesday that they had made progress in addressing the underlying problems of culture and discipline that led to repeated cases of sexual misconduct at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, calling sexual assault in the ranks "a cancer."

The generals' accounts were challenged by victims, who called sexual assaults in the military "epidemic" and insisted that alleged perpetrators be independently investigated and prosecuted outside the military chain of command.

The hearing before the House Armed Services Committee in Washington started with testimony by the Air Force's top commander, Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, and Gen. Edward D. Rice Jr., head of the training command at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph. Lackland is part of the San Antonio-Randolph complex.

As of this week, 32 basic training instructors at Lackland have been under investigation and 59 possible victims of sexual misconduct have been identified by the base. A report in mid-November said that a faulty command culture and "leadership gap" at Lackland helped fuel the widening scandal.

Rice noted that "the vast majority of our instructors served with distinction in a very demanding duty assignment." However, he added, "We clearly failed in our responsibility to establish order and discipline among our instructors."

Six basic training instructors at Lackland have been convicted of sexual misconduct dating to 2008, two were given a nonjudicial punishment, and nine trials are pending. Next week, Staff Sgt. Eddy C. Soto faces a possible life sentence in the alleged rape of a female airman.

Initially, Rice said, trainers at Lackland believed the assaults were the actions of "a few bad apples."

"They've had to recognize they have a significant part to play in addressing the problem," he said.

Rice said that there had been cases at Lackland in which a commander decided "a court-martial was not the appropriate venue" for discipline and instead "used some of the other tools available to them uniquely in the military justice system," including nonjudicial punishment. But he said that did not mean the accused had escaped justice.

He noted that the length of time trainers serve had been reduced from four years to a maximum of three years, limiting their exposure to recruits at the Air Force's main site for basic training, where about 500 trainers churn out about 35,000 new airmen annually.

Of 46 recommended improvements submitted by Chief of Air Force Safety Maj. Gen. Margaret H. Woodward as part of her investigative report on Lackland last year, Rice said the Air Force had completed half and expected to have most of the rest done by the end of the year.

The Air Force has created "special victim teams" of two dozen military investigators trained to handle sexual assault cases; they go to work later this month. Sixty additional military lawyers have been trained as "special victims counsel," and the Air Force plans to hire and assign a victim advocate to every installation by October.

"The evidence indicates that our efforts are making a difference," Rice said in the televised hearing, noting that there had not been any reports of sexual misconduct in the last seven months.

However, reported sexual assaults in the Air Force increased nearly 30% last fiscal year to 796, according to testimony the generals submitted to the committee.

Welsh, who called sexual assaults a cancer, said victims needed to be better encouraged to come forward to pursue charges against their assailants, and that the military needed to do a better job of screening trainers.

The hearing did not include testimony from the alleged sexual assault victims at Lackland, nor from those charged or convicted in connection with the investigation. But two Air Force veterans who said they were sexually assaulted years ago did testify.

"It breaks my heart to see the same problems today that existed when I joined 16 years ago," said retired Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jennifer Norris, who said she was assaulted four times while serving, the first time as a 24-year-old recruit at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.

Norris, 40, appeared on behalf of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group based in Burlingame, Calif. Norris, a member of the group's board, said she had talked to another alleged victim from the Air Force just this week and that many more were still afraid to speak up.

"If you want a career, you don't want to say anything because you get retaliated against; you get beat up and thrown out. We need to remove the chain of command from the reporting process — it's absolutely detrimental," she said, adding that as a military sexual assault victim, "You almost become a leper." She testified that two of her attackers pleaded guilty, but others were never charged.

Retired Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Cindy McNally told the committee that she was assaulted during her training in the 1970s at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois and at a later post. She said the solution was not just to promote more women into military leadership.

"Doing what's right is genderless," said McNally, who was representing the Service Women's Action Network, a New York-based advocacy group. McNally said she reported the first incident but it was never pursued; she didn't bother to report the subsequent assault.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), who visited Lackland with a congressional delegation last year and has proposed legislation to remove such cases from the military chain of command, noted that after Britain experienced a similar military sex scandal in 2006, it created a separate unit within the military to prosecute sexual assaults. A year later, she said, the effort was deemed a success.

Rep. Susan A. Davis (D-San Diego), also part of the delegation to Lackland, said she had been disappointed in the military response to the scandal, but was "reluctant to take this out of the chain of command" because "to pull this out in some way says we don't believe our officers are capable of dealing with this issue."

"We are doing a better job of training prosecutors" to handle military sexual assaults, she said, "but it is still a big problem."

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

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Google Tells Cops to Get Warrants for User E-Mail, Cloud Data

Google demands probable-cause, court-issued warrants to divulge the contents of Gmail and other cloud-stored documents to authorities in the United States — a startling revelation Wednesday that runs counter to federal law that does not always demand warrants.

The development surfaced as Google publicly announced that more than two-thirds of the user data Google forwards to government agencies across the United States is handed over without a probable-cause warrant.

A Google spokesman told Wired that the media giant demands that government agencies — from the locals to the feds — get a probable-cause warrant for content on its e-mail, Google Drive cloud storage and other platforms — despite the Electronic Communications Privacy Act allowing the government to access such customer data without a warrant if it’s stored on Google’s servers for more than 180 days.

“Google requires an ECPA search warrant for contents of Gmail and other services based on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prevents unreasonable search and seizure,” Chris Gaither, a Google spokesman, said.

Some of the customer data doled out without a warrant include names listed when creating Gmail accounts, the IP address from where the account was created, and where and what time a user signs in and out of an account. What’s more, Google hands over without warrants the IP address associated with a particular e-mail sent from a Gmail account or used to change the account password, in addition to the non-content portion of e-mail headers such as the “from,” “to” and “date” fields.

It was not immediately known whether other ISPs are traveling Google’s path when it comes to demanding probable-cause warrants for all stored content. But Google can seemingly grant more privacy than the four corners of the law allows because there’s been a string of conflicting court opinions on whether warrants are required for data stored on third-party servers longer than 180 days. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on the topic — and the authorities are seemingly abiding by Google’s rules to avoid a high court showdown.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, the relevant law in question, was adopted at a time when e-mail wasn’t stored on servers for a long time, but instead was held there briefly on its way to the recipient’s inbox. In the 1980s, e-mail more than 6 months old was assumed abandoned, and therefore ripe for the taking without a probable-cause warrant.

That law is still on the books today, even as the advancement of technology has undermined its original theory.

But clearly, changing the law to comport with Google’s interpretation has been met with unreceptive members of Congress.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a measure last year mirroring Google’s interpretation, but the bill died a quiet death. Moves to change the law have been scuttled over and again.

For now, under the letter of the ECPA law, the government only needs to show that it has “reasonable grounds to believe” e-mail and other documents stored in the cloud for more than 180 days would be useful to an investigation.

Gaither, the Google spokesman, did not know when Google began demanding warrants. But there were two federal appellate decisions on the topic rendered 2010, one requiring a warrant for content and another saying federal judges had the discretion to demand one.

Meantime, Google released Wednesday its so-called “Transparency Report” shedding light on government requests for data. Globally, the United States again ranked No. 1 in terms of demands for Google customer data. India, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Brazil were trailing in that order.

The figures for the first time provide a brief outline on whether data was handed over with or without a court warrant — a praiseworthy move we’ve been agitating for at Threat Level following the report’s inception. Google first began releasing its Transparency Report in 2009.

Google offers e-mail, cloud storage, a blogging platform, a phone and texting platform, web search and other services.

The data Google is coughing up to the authorities includes e-mail and text-messaging communications, cloud-stored documents and, among other things, browsing activity, and even IP addresses used to create an account.

In all, agencies across the United States demanded 8,438 times that Google fork over data on some 14,791 accounts for the six-month period ending December 2012. Probable-cause search warrants were issued in 1,896 of the cases. Subpoenas, which require the government to assert that the data is relevant to an investigation, were issued 5,784 times. Google could not quantify the remaining 758.

Google’s transparency data is limited as it does not include requests under the Patriot Act, which can include National Security Letters with gag orders attached. Nor do the data include anti-terrorism eavesdropping court orders known as FISA orders or any dragnet surveillance programs legalized in 2008, as those are secret, too. In all those instances, probable-cause warrants generally are not required, even for customer content stored in Google’s servers.

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Adele to perform Bond theme song “Skyfall” live at Oscars

LONDON (Reuters) – British singer Adele will return to the stage next month after a year absence to perform her Oscar-nominated song “Skyfall” at the 85th Academy Awards, the show’s producers said on Wednesday.

The theme tune to the latest James Bond movie was written by Adele and Paul Epworth. It is the first Bond theme to be nominated for the original song award at the Oscars since “For Your Eyes Only” in 1981.

The February 24 show will be Adele’s first live performance since the Grammy Awards last April and the first time she will perform “Skyfall” live, as she has kept a low profile since giving birth to a son last October.

“It’s an honor to be nominated and terrifyingly wonderful to be singing in front of people who have captured my imagination over and over again,” Adele, 24, said in a statement.

“It’s something I’ve never experienced and probably only ever will once!”

She was in Hollywood last month to pick up the Golden Globe for the best original song prize for “Skyfall”.

Adele’s album “21″ scored the rare feat in December of topping all U.S. album sales for the second straight year. She records on the indie record label XL.

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith; editing by Patricia Reaney)

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Well: Long Term Effects on Life Expectancy From Smoking

It is often said that smoking takes years off your life, and now a new study shows just how many: Longtime smokers can expect to lose about 10 years of life expectancy.

But amid those grim findings was some good news for former smokers. Those who quit before they turn 35 can gain most if not all of that decade back, and even those who wait until middle age to kick the habit can add about five years back to their life expectancies.

“There’s the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you,” said Dr. Tim McAfee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off — and that’s just on average.”

The findings were part of research, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, that looked at government data on more than 200,000 Americans who were followed starting in 1997. Similar studies that were done in the 1980s and the decades prior had allowed scientists to predict the impact of smoking on mortality. But since then many population trends have changed, and it was unclear whether smokers today fared differently from smokers decades ago.

Since the 1960s, the prevalence of smoking over all has declined, falling from about 40 percent to 20 percent. Today more than half of people that ever smoked have quit, allowing researchers to compare the effects of stopping at various ages.

Modern cigarettes contain less tar and medical advances have cut the rates of death from vascular disease drastically. But have smokers benefited from these advances?

Women in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s had lower rates of mortality from smoking than men. But it was largely unknown whether this was a biological difference or merely a matter of different habits: earlier generations of women smoked fewer cigarettes and tended to take up smoking at a later age than men.

Now that smoking habits among women today are similar to those of men, would mortality rates be the same as well?

“There was a big gap in our knowledge,” said Dr. McAfee, an author of the study and the director of the C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Public Health.

The new research showed that in fact women are no more protected from the consequences of smoking than men. The female smokers in the study represented the first generation of American women that generally began smoking early in life and continued the habit for decades, and the impact on life span was clear. The risk of death from smoking for these women was 50 percent higher than the risk reported for women in similar studies carried out in the 1980s.

“This sort of puts the nail in the coffin around the idea that women might somehow be different or that they suffer fewer effects of smoking,” Dr. McAfee said.

It also showed that differences between smokers and the population in general are becoming more and more stark. Over the last 20 years, advances in medicine and public health have improved life expectancy for the general public, but smokers have not benefited in the same way.

“If anything, this is accentuating the difference between being a smoker and a nonsmoker,” Dr. McAfee said.

The researchers had information about the participants’ smoking histories and other details about their health and backgrounds, including diet, alcohol consumption, education levels and weight and body fat. Using records from the National Death Index, they calculated their mortality rates over time.

People who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes were not classified as smokers. Those who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes but had not had one within five years of the time the data was collected were classified as former smokers.

Not surprisingly, the study showed that the earlier a person quit smoking, the greater the impact. People who quit between 25 and 34 years of age gained about 10 years of life compared to those who continued to smoke. But there were benefits at many ages. People who quit between 35 and 44 gained about nine years, and those who stopped between 45 and 59 gained about four to six years of life expectancy.

From a public health perspective, those numbers are striking, particularly when juxtaposed with preventive measures like blood pressure screenings, colorectal screenings and mammography, the effects of which on life expectancy are more often viewed in terms of days or months, Dr. McAfee said.

“These things are very important, but the size of the benefit pales in comparison to what you can get from stopping smoking,” he said. “The notion that you could add 10 years to your life by something as straightforward as quitting smoking is just mind boggling.”

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DealBook | The Trade: An Asset So Toxic They Called It ‘Nuclear Holocaust’

On March 16, 2007, Morgan Stanley employees working on one of the toxic assets that helped blow up the world economy discussed what to name it. Among the team members’ suggestions: “Subprime Meltdown,” “Hitman,” “Nuclear Holocaust” and “Mike Tyson’s Punchout,” as well a simple yet direct reference to a bag of excrement.

Ha ha. Those hilarious investment bankers.

Then they gave it its real name and sold it to a Chinese bank.

We are never going to have a full understanding of what bad behavior bankers engaged in in the years leading up to the financial crisis. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have failed to hold big wrongdoers to account.

We are left with what scraps we can get from those private lawsuits lucky enough to get over the high hurdles for document discovery. A case brought in a New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan against Morgan Stanley by a Taiwanese bank, which bought a piece of the same deal the Chinese bank did, has cleared that bar.

The results are explosive. Hundreds of pages of internal Morgan Stanley documents, released publicly last week, shed much new light on what bankers knew at the height of the housing bubble and what they did with that secret knowledge.

The lawsuit concerns a $500 million collateralized debt obligation called Stack 2006-1, created in the first half of 2006. Collections of mortgage-backed securities, C.D.O.’s were at the heart of the financial crisis.

But the documents suggest a pattern of behavior larger than this one deal: people across the bank understood that the American housing market was in trouble. They took advantage of that knowledge to create and then bet against securities and then also to unload garbage investments on unsuspecting buyers.

Morgan Stanley doesn’t see the narrative as the plaintiffs do. The firm is fighting the lawsuit, contending that the buyers were sophisticated clients and could have known what was going on in the subprime market. The C.D.O. documents disclosed, albeit obliquely, that Morgan Stanley might bet against the securities, a strategy known as shorting. The firm did not pick the assets going into the deal (though it was able to veto any assets). And any shorting of the deal was part of a larger array of trades, both long and short. Indeed, Morgan Stanley owned a big piece of Stack, in addition to its short bet.

Regarding the profane naming contest, Morgan Stanley said in a statement: “While the e-mail in question contains inappropriate language and reflects a poor attempt at humor, the Morgan Stanley employee who wrote it was responsible for documenting transactions. It was not his job or within his skill set to assess the state of the market or the credit quality of the transaction being discussed.”

Philip Blumberg, the Morgan Stanley lawyer who composed most of the names, meet the underside of a bus, courtesy of your employer.

Another Morgan Stanley employee sent an e-mail that same morning, suggesting that the deal be called “Hitman.” This might have been an attempt to manage up, because “Hitman” was the nickname of his boss, Jonathan Horowitz, who helped head the part of the group that oversaw mortgage-backed C.D.O.’s. Mr. Horowitz replied, “I like it.”

Both Mr. Blumberg and Mr. Horowitz, now at JPMorgan, declined to comment through representatives at their banks.

In February 2006, Morgan Stanley began putting together the Stack C.D.O. According to an internal presentation, Stack “represents attractive business for Morgan Stanley.”

Why? In addition to fees, another bullet point listed: “Ability to short up to $325MM of credits into the C.D.O.” In other words, Morgan Stanley could — and did — sell assets to the Stack C.D.O., intending to profit if the securities backed by those assets declined. The bank put on a $170 million bet against Stack, even as it was selling it.

In the end, of the $500 million of assets backing the deal, $415 million ended up worthless.

“While investors and taxpayers all over the world continue to choke on Wall Street’s toxic subprime products, to this day not a single major Wall Street executive has been held accountable for misconduct relating to those products,” said Jason C. Davis, a lawyer at Robbins Geller who is representing the plaintiff in the lawsuit. “They are generally untouchable, but we are pleased that the court in this case is ordering Morgan Stanley to turn over damning evidence, so that the jury will get to see what Morgan Stanley really knew about the troubled nature of its supposedly ‘higher-than-AAA’ quality product.”

Why might Morgan Stanley have bet against the deal? Did its traders develop a brilliant thesis by assessing the fundamentals of the housing market through careful analysis of the public data? The documents suggest something more troubling: bankers found out that the housing market was diseased from their colleagues down the hall.

Bankers were getting information from fellow employees conducting and receiving private assessments of the quality of the mortgages that the bank would purchase to back securities. These reports weren’t available to the public. It would be crucial information for trading in securities backed by those kinds of mortgages.

In one e-mail from Oct. 21, 2005, a Morgan Stanley employee warned a banker that the mortgages Morgan Stanley was buying from loan originators were troubled. “The real issue is that the loan requests do not make sense,” he wrote. As an example, he cited “a borrower that makes $12K a month as an operation manger (sic) of an unknown company — after research on my part I reveal it is a tarot reading house. Compound these issues with the fact that we are seeing what I would call a lot of this type of profile.”

In another e-mail from March 17, 2006, another Morgan Stanley employee wrote about a “deteriorating appraisal quality that is very flagrant.”

Two of the employees who received those e-mails joined an internal hedge fund, headed by Howard Hubler, that was formed only the next month, in April 2006. As recounted in Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short,” Mr. Hubler infamously bet against the subprime market on Morgan Stanley’s behalf, a fact that Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer conceded in late 2007. Mr. Hubler’s group was supposed to be separate from the rest of Morgan Stanley, but the two bankers continued to receive similar information about the underlying market, according to a person briefed on the matter.

At no point did they receive material, nonpublic information, a Morgan Stanley spokesman says.

I struggle to see how the private assessments that the subprime market was imploding were immaterial.

Another of Morgan Stanley’s main defenses is that it couldn’t have thought the investment it sold to the Taiwanese was terrible because it, too, lost money on securities backed by subprime mortgages. As the Morgan Stanley spokesman put it, “This deal must be viewed in the context of a significant write-down for Morgan Stanley in 2007, when the firm recorded huge losses in its public securities filings related to other subprime C.D.O. positions.”

This is a common refrain offered by big banks like Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns to absolve them of any responsibility.

But does losing money wipe away sin?

Yes, Mr. Hubler made his bets in what turned out to be a deeply disastrous way. As part of a complex array of trades, he bet against the middle slices of subprime mortgage C.D.O.’s. He bought the supposedly safe top parts. The income from the top slices helped offset the cost of betting against the middle slices. But when the market collapsed, the top slices — called “super senior” because they were supposedly safer than Triple A — didn’t hold their value, losing billions for Mr. Hubler and Morgan Stanley. Mr. Hubler did not respond to requests for comment.

So Morgan Stanley lost a great deal of money.

But let’s review what the documents suggest is the big picture.

In the fall of 2005, bank employees shared nonpublic assessments of how the subprime market was a house of tarot cards.

In February 2006, the bank began creating Stack in part so that it could bet against it.

In April 2006, the bank created its own internal hedge fund, led by Mr. Hubler, who shorted the subprime market. Among the traders in this internal shop were people who helped create Stack and other deals like it, and at least two employees who had access to the private due diligence reports.

Mr. Hubler’s group had no investment position in Stack, according to the person briefed on the matter, but it sure looks as if the bank saw what was coming and tried to position itself for a subprime market collapse.

Finally, by early 2007, the bank appeared to realize that the subprime market was faring even worse than it expected. Even the supposedly safe pieces of C.D.O.’s that it owned, including its piece of Stack, were facing losses. So Morgan Stanley bankers set to scouring the world to peddle as a safe and sound investment what its own employees were internally deriding.

Morgan Stanley declined to comment on whether it made money on its Stack investments over all. But it looks to have turned out well for the bank. In Stack, it managed to fob off a nuclear bomb to the Taiwanese bank.

Unfortunately for Morgan Stanley, it had so many other pieces of C.D.O.’s, so many nuclear warheads, that it couldn’t find nearly enough suckers around the world to buy them all.

And so when the real collapse came, Morgan Stanley was left with billions of dollars in losses.

That hardly seems exculpatory.

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Even with record sales, Apple's earnings report may disappoint

If all goes according to plan Wednesday, Apple Inc. will report record revenue. The company will reveal that it sold more iPhones than in any previous quarter. And it will confirm that it hauled in another boatload of cash to swell its overflowing coffers.

In other words, Apple's earnings have all the makings of a colossal disaster.

That's because no matter how mind-blowing its performance, there is growing concern among investors that Apple's remarkable run of smartphone dominance is coming to an end. Although analysts' estimates for the company are all over the map, there is general agreement that Apple will not grow at nearly the same pace as it has over the last five years.

But after months of speculation and countless rumors that has helped drive the company's stock down 28% from its September peak, there is still widespread disagreement about how much that growth will slow and whether investors should be alarmed.

With observers desperate to finally hear what Apple executives have to say, the company's earnings report scheduled after the market closes Wednesday has become one of its most pivotal and highly anticipated in years.

Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Barclays, sent a recent note about Apple's earnings to clients under the title "Preparing for the Most Important Conference Call in Years."

Quiz: What set the Internet on fire in 2012?

"We believe that investor sentiment is quite negative right now for Apple, with significant concerns around demand trends for the iPhone 5," he wrote.

How investors adjust to that reality of slower growth is hard to predict. Will it be interpreted as a sign of weakness? Or just the reality that as a company gets bigger its pace of growth will inevitably slow?

First, the numbers. In October, Apple told Wall Street analysts that for its first quarter, which ended in December, investors should expect the company to report $52 billion in revenue and earnings of $11.75 a share.

But Apple tends to be notoriously conservative in its own guidance. For the same quarter a year earlier, Apple beat revenue estimates by more than 25% and earnings forecasts by nearly 50%. The surprising quarterly performance sent its stock into the stratosphere over the next nine months, eventually hitting an all-time high of $702.10 in September.

Such a huge surprise seems unlikely this time around. The consensus among Wall Street analysts is that Apple will report $54.7 billion in revenue and $13.41 a share in earnings. If the latter figure proves correct, that would represent a decline from the $13.87 a share in earnings that Apple reported for the same quarter last year. Not only would it be the first drop in a decade, but it also could confirm fears that Apple's new mix of products, including the iPad Mini, are hurting the company's historically high profit margins.

Making this all the more complicated is a quirk in the calendar. Last year, the same quarter had 14 weeks. This year, it has only 13 weeks. That means once the numbers are released, analysts and investors will have to do some fast calculations to make comparisons that are truly apples to apples.

In addition to worries about profit margins, investors have been fretting over rumors that the iPhone 5 has not been selling as well as expected, that rival Samsung Electronics Co. is widening its lead in smartphone sales, and that Apple's product upgrades don't dazzle like they once did. Of course, much of this is conjecture. But it has muddled projections, with analysts predicting that Apple could report earnings from as low as $11.53 a share to as much as $15.50 a share.

That kind of uncertainty has made investors even more eager than usual to hear any news about Apple's performance. Even more important than the numbers, however, is what Apple executives say about the future.

Since last summer, analysts have been growing more pessimistic about the current fiscal year, which ends in September, lowering their earnings projections to $48.86 a share from $54.87 a share in July. Should Apple lower that outlook further in the conference call Wednesday, it could trigger panic among Apple's investors.

"I think the concerns being reflected in the stock today have more to do with the next quarter than this one," said Walter Piecyk, a research analyst at BTIG.

To some analysts, the gloom over Apple's prospect is simply absurd. The value of the stock, trading at about 11 times earnings, is low by historical standards. Its price-to-earnings ratio hasn't been this low in more than five years, a period in which it has hovered between 15 and 20 times earnings.

And according to research firm Bespoke Investment Group, Apple is currently trading further below the consensus target ($728.36) than any of the other 100 largest stocks in the S&P 500. Apple on Tuesday closed up $4.77, or 1%, to $504.77‎.

In this view, the world's most valuable company is trading at bargain basement prices.

"There's nothing wrong with their business," said Colin Gillis, director of research at BGC Financial. "It's just a question of whether growth is going to slow. That had to happen eventually."

chris.obrien@latimes.com

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Google Ad Bleeding Slows as Larry Page Dismisses Mobile Fears

Investors like what they’re hearing from Google, despite a sickly-sounding Larry Page. The Google CEO argued on Tuesday’s earnings call that mobile won’t hinder his company’s core ad business because distinctions between devices are becoming moot.

After-hours traders sent Google shares up more than 5 percent late Tuesday afternoon after the company beat Wall Street expectations for the quarter.

Money poured into Google’s core advertising business as holiday shoppers hunted for gifts. Google Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said Google’s top 25 advertisers are spending an average of $150 million per year. Election spending on Google quintupled in 2012 compared to four years earlier, Arora said during the call, adding that in 9 of 11 “top Senate races … the candidate who spent more with Google was elected.” He also said that Psy, whose “Gagnam Style” video topped 1 billion views on YouTube, made $8 million on YouTube advertising alone.

But the most important number for the quarter may be the slowing decline in the “cost-per-click” for ads served on Google and on sites on its ad network. Cost-per-click rates fell by double-digit percentages each of the first three quarters of Google’s 2012 fiscal year. This past quarter, the drop shrank to a six-percent decline compared to the same period last year, while the cost-per-click actually rose by 2 percent since the last quarter.

Analysts have blamed the steep plunge in the value of Google’s ads, paradoxically, on the company’s success at driving the smartphone revolution. Mobile ads simply aren’t worth as much on smartphones, since users just don’t respond to them as much. Android, the world’s most popular smartphone operating system, puts Google’s ad-supported ecosystem into more hands, but at the same time that spread is diluting those ads’ value.

Arora said on the call that Google has implemented a new policy to reduce the number of ads displayed. He and Page said the decision was driven by a desire to improve the user experience by cutting back on too many ads. But the move would also seem to have the effect of cutting back on ad inventory, which could help shore up the value of individual ads even as more ads are served overall.

As for Page, he said he believes that dollars for mobile ads could as likely as not top the spending on desktop. He pointed to handsets like Google’s own Nexus 4 and other “modern” smartphones that he said render the distinctions among platforms and form factors irrelevant.

“We should be designing for the kind of mobile phones that we have right now that are state of the art,” Page said. “Those experiences should work on all devices pretty well.”

If that comes to pass, then the logical conclusion to draw would be that users would respond to ads in a similar way, regardless of what device they’re using. But Page also wasn’t willing to stake too much on predicting the future, calling the spread of mobile technology the most rapid period of technological change since the dawn of the personal computer.

“We live in uncharted territory,” he said.

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Justin Bieber tops Lady Gaga to rule Twitter

(Reuters) – Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber with his hordes of fans known of Beliebers became the King of Twitter on Tuesday, topping fellow pop star Lady Gaga as the user with the most followers.

Data from TwitterCounter.com showed that the 18-year-old Canadian singer jumped into the lead with 33.33 million followers, topping Lady Gaga’s 33.32 million and ending her two-and-a-half year rule of the microblogging site.

A spokesman from TwitterCounter.com said Lady Gaga has held the top slot on Twitter since August 2010 when she overtook U.S. pop star Britney Spears.

Bieber rose to fame as a baby-faced pop star singing love songs such as “Baby” after being discovered on YouTube in 2008. He has released two No. 1 albums in the past 18 months – the holiday-themed “Under the Mistletoe” and “Believe.”

Bieber was named by Forbes magazine in 2012 as the third-most powerful celebrity in the world and his huge following on Twitter was cited as a reason why marketers need to take notice of the 140-character micro-blogging site.

Lady Gaga has dropped to second in Twitter followed by singer Katy Perry in third with 31.49 million followers then Rihanna and Barack Obama with 26.17 million followers. Britney Spears has slipped to sixth place.

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith; editing by Patricia Reaney)

(You can see the Twitter top 100 list http://twittercounter.com/pages/100)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The Well Column: Facing Cancer, a Stark Choice

In the 1970s, women’s health advocates were highly suspicious of mastectomies. They argued that surgeons — in those days, pretty much an all-male club — were far too quick to remove a breast after a diagnosis of cancer, with disfiguring results.

But today, the pendulum has swung the other way. A new generation of women want doctors to take a more aggressive approach, and more and more are asking that even healthy breasts be removed to ward off cancer before it can strike.

Researchers estimate that as many as 15 percent of women with breast cancer — 30,000 a year — opt to have both breasts removed, up from less than 3 percent in the late 1990s. Notably, it appears that the vast majority of these women have never received genetic testing or counseling and are basing the decision on exaggerated fears about their risk of recurrence.

In addition, doctors say an increasing number of women who have never had a cancer diagnosis are demanding mastectomies based on genetic risk. (Cancer databases don’t track these women, so their numbers are unknown.)

“We are confronting almost an epidemic of prophylactic mastectomy,” said Dr. Isabelle Bedrosian, a surgical oncologist at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “I think the medical community has taken notice. We don’t have data that say oncologically this is a necessity, so why are women making this choice?”

One reason may be the never-ending awareness campaigns that have left many women in perpetual fear of the disease. Improvements in breast reconstruction may also be driving the trend, along with celebrities who go public with their decision to undergo preventive mastectomy.

This month Allyn Rose, a 24-year-old Miss America contestant from Washington, D.C., made headlines when she announced plans to have both her healthy breasts removed after the pageant; both her mother and her grandmother died from breast cancer. The television personality Giuliana Rancic, 37, and the actress Christina Applegate, 41, also talked publicly about having double mastectomies after diagnoses of early-stage breast cancer.

“You’re not going to find other organs that people cut out of their bodies because they’re worried about disease,” said the medical historian Dr. Barron H. Lerner, author of “The Breast Cancer Wars” (2001). “Because breast cancer is a disease that is so emotionally charged and gets so much attention, I think at times women feel almost obligated to be as proactive as possible — that’s the culture of breast cancer.”

Most of the data on prophylactic mastectomy come from the University of Minnesota, where researchers tracked contralateral mastectomy trends (removing a healthy breast alongside one with cancer) from 1998 to 2006. Dr. Todd M. Tuttle, chief of surgical oncology, said double mastectomy rates more than doubled during that period and the rise showed no signs of slowing.

From those trends as well as anecdotal reports, Dr. Tuttle estimates that at least 15 percent of women who receive a breast cancer diagnosis will have the second, healthy breast removed. “It’s younger women who are doing it,” he said.

The risk that a woman with breast cancer will develop cancer in the other breast is about 5 percent over 10 years, Dr. Tuttle said. Yet a University of Minnesota study found that women estimated their risk to be more than 30 percent.

“I think there are women who markedly overestimate their risk of getting cancer,” he said.

Most experts agree that double mastectomy is a reasonable option for women who have a strong genetic risk and have tested positive for a breast cancer gene. That was the case with Allison Gilbert, 42, a writer in Westchester County who discovered her genetic risk after her grandmother died of breast cancer and her mother died of ovarian cancer.

Even so, she delayed the decision to get prophylactic mastectomy until her aunt died from an aggressive breast cancer. In August, she had a double mastectomy. (She had her ovaries removed earlier.)

“I feel the women in my family didn’t have a way to avoid their fate,” said Ms. Gilbert, author of the 2011 book “Parentless Parents,” about how losing a parent influences one’s own style of parenting. “Here I was given an incredible opportunity to know what I have and to do something about it and, God willing, be around for my kids longer.”

Even so, she said her decisions were not made lightly. The double mastectomy and reconstruction required an initial 11 1/2-hour surgery and an “intense” recovery. She got genetic counseling, joined support groups and researched her options.

But doctors say many women are not making such informed decisions. Last month, University of Michigan researchers reported on a study of more than 1,446 women who had breast cancer. Four years after their diagnosis, 35 percent were considering removing their healthy breast and 7 percent had already done so.

Notably, most of the women who had a double mastectomy were not at high risk for a cancer recurrence. In fact, studies suggest that most women who have double mastectomies never seek genetic testing or counseling.

“Breast cancer becomes very emotional for people, and they view a breast differently than an arm or a required body part that you use every day,” said Sarah T. Hawley, an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan. “Women feel like it’s a body part over which they totally have a choice, and they say, ‘I want to put this behind me — I don’t want to worry about it anymore.’ ”

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Square Feet: Pittsburgh Seeks to Expand Riverfront Access to the Public

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh exists for three reasons: the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio.

In the 20th century, the banks of those rivers were controlled by industrial behemoths. They largely lost that identity after the waning of the steel industry in the 1980s. Over the last two decades, however, the city’s progress in clearing and cleaning its waterfront has created 12 miles of recreational trails, three professional sports stadiums, several boat landings and an influx of nearly 2,000 new downtown residents.

The city has managed to leverage a $124 million investment in publicly accessible riverfront into $4 billion in corporate, public, nonprofit and entertainment development downtown.

That success has renewed a debate that would have been unthinkable in Pittsburgh’s polluted industrial heyday: how best to expand public access to the shorelines of the three rivers. Projects proposed for two of the largest tracts left to be developed on the downtown fringe illustrate the opportunities and limits of public-private partnerships.

This month, the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority approved preliminary plans for an $80 million to $90 million investment in new roads, streets and utilities on a 178-acre former industrial site that is the biggest remaining waterfront property in the city. The developers will use a tool called tax increment financing, which earmarks a portion of a site’s future property taxes to build its infrastructure. Such financing, approved by both the authority and the City Council on a case-by-case basis, has galvanized redevelopment on Pittsburgh’s complex industrial sites.

The latest project, which uses the acronym Almono for the city’s three rivers, is a case in point. It envisions a $900 million office, industrial and residential development on a former steel and coke manufacturing site on the Monongahela River that closed in 1997.

In 2002, an alliance of four philanthropies bought the property for $10 million to protect it for postindustrial development. “It was a once-in-a-century opportunity to develop the riverfront, and we thought foundations, as nonprofit owners, could supply patient money,” said William P. Getty, president of the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation.

The current Almono partnership comprises the Heinz Endowments, the Benedum Foundation and an affiliate of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. It is managed by the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern Pennsylvania, a nonprofit economic development group.

The former industrial site occupies a strategic location between downtown and two rapidly expanding research institutions, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. Both universities lease space in the adjacent Pittsburgh Technology Park. Carnegie Mellon also conducts robotics field testing at the Almono site.

Donald F. Smith Jr., president of the development corporation, says the partnership is talking with both universities about their futures at the site. “The universities are important players,” he noted. “They will have space needs for their tech transfer efforts.”

Private developers will be asked to submit proposals for four interconnected zones on the Monongahela River that will include two million square feet of office space, research and clean manufacturing, and 1,200 residential units. The master plan developed by the Rothschild Doyno Collaborative, an architecture and urban design firm, calls for alternative technologies for energy generation and storm and wastewater management, along with 25 acres of parks, trails and river access. The design also suggests new uses for a few historic structures, like a rail yard roundhouse and a 1,300-foot-long steel mill.

“Riverfront access, beautification and redevelopment of the entire neighborhood is important,” said Jim Richter, executive director of the Hazelwood Initiative, a community development organization.

While plans include continued traffic on a CSX rail line through the site, a proposed highway has been suspended because of its $4 billion price tag and community opposition.

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