787 Dreamliner's safety systems failed, NTSB says

After investigating a fire that broke out on Boeing Co.'s 787 Dreamliner passenger jet, the National Transportation Safety Board said that backup protections in the aircraft's lithium-ion batteries and electronics systems failed.

But the safety agency hasn't reached a conclusion on the cause of the fire that occurred in Boston on Jan. 7 and partly led to last week's grounding of Dreamliners worldwide that remains in effect.

Speaking to reporters Thursday from Washington, NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said the agency hadn't determined what happened, but she added that the redundant safety systems installed by Boeing did not work.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the jet Jan. 16 after an emergency landing by All Nippon Airways in Japan because of a second fire believed to involve the plane's onboard lithium-ion batteries. Shortly after the FAA's decision, countries around the world prohibited the new plane from flying.

"These events should not happen," said the safety board's chairwoman. "As far as design of the aircraft, there are multiple systems to protect against a battery event like this. Those systems did not work as intended."

The decision on whether 787s should continue to be grounded in the U.S. belongs to the FAA. The independent safety board is responsible for collecting forensic evidence and conducting tests to determine what happened.

There is no timeline to when tests will be completed, but Hersman said the agency has "all hands on deck" looking into the problem. Investigators around the world are disassembling and scanning the batteries.

In its search for the exact cause of the fires, the NTSB has said it is looking for possible contaminants or manufacturing defects. The agency is also working with officials from Boeing, the FAA and the Navy, as well as investigators in France and Japan.

Japan, where the second fire occurred, is also where Boeing's lithium-ion batteries are made by Kyoto-based GS Yuasa Corp. The Japan Transport Safety Board, the country's version of the FAA, is heading up the investigation into All Nippon's emergency landing and reported fire.

So far, the NTSB's investigators in the Boston fire have found that overheating was caused by short circuits and "thermal runaway," a chain reaction in which heat spreads rapidly from cell to cell, Hersman said. "The significance of these events cannot be understated."

Boeing said in a statement that it is working with its airline customers and the regulatory agencies to get the matter resolved but that it is not permitted to comment directly on the ongoing investigations.

"The company has formed teams consisting of hundreds of engineering and technical experts who are working around the clock with the sole focus of resolving the issue and returning the 787 fleet to flight status," Boeing said. "The safety of passengers and crew members who fly aboard Boeing airplanes is our highest priority."

The 787's battery systems were called into question on Jan. 7 when a smoldering fire was discovered on the underbelly of the plane operated by Japan Airlines after the 183 passengers and 11 crew members had deplaned at the gate.

In the second incident, which involved All Nippon Airways, smoke was seen swirling from the right side of the cockpit after an emergency landing related to the plane's electrical systems. All 137 passengers and crew members were evacuated from the aircraft and slid down the 787's emergency slides. Video of the event was captured by an onboard passenger and has been broadcast worldwide.

No one has been reported hurt or injured. But the recent events have become a public relations nightmare for the Chicago company, which has long heralded the Dreamliner as a representation of 21st century air travel.

Boeing has taken 848 orders for 787s from airlines and aircraft leasing firms around the world. Depending on the version ordered, the price ranges from $206.8 million to $243.6 million per jet.

The company has delivered 50 787s to eight airlines worldwide. Six are owned by Chicago-based United Airlines — the only U.S. carrier that currently has 787s in its fleet.

In an earnings conference call on Thursday, United Continental Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Smisek defended the plane.

"History teaches us that all new aircraft types have issues, and the 787 is no different," Smisek said. "We continue to have confidence in the aircraft and in Boeing's ability to fix the issues, just as they have done on every other new aircraft model they've produced."

In trading Thursday, Boeing's stock closed up more than 1%, or $1.03, to 75.32. But the stock fell in after-hours trading, at one point dropping 30 cents, or 0.4%, to $75.02.

Problems are expected with any new plane — especially one as complicated and sophisticated as the 787. But the last time the FAA grounded a large commercial jet out of safety concerns was almost 34 years ago after a DC-10 crashed at Chicago O'Hare International Airport, killing all 271 aboard.

The 787, a twin-aisle aircraft that can seat 210 to 290 passengers, is the first large commercial jet with more than half its structure made of composite materials (carbon fibers meshed together with epoxy) rather than aluminum sheets. It's also the first large commercial aircraft that extensively uses electrically powered systems involving lithium-ion batteries.

william.hennigan@latimes.com

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J.J. Abrams Will Reportedly Direct the Next <em>Star Wars</em> Movie

Gird your loins Star Wars fans – reports are surfacing that J.J. Abrams has been tapped to direct the next Star Wars.

Disney, which recently acquired Lucasfilm for $4 billion, is currently closing a deal with Abrams to helm the first film in the new Star Wars series, according to reports from The Wrap and Entertainment Weekly. No other major details were released, but back when the Mouse House acquisition was announced, Disney said it planned to release Episode VII in 2015.

“For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next,” George Lucas said in a press release announcing the acquisition last October. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers.”

Abrams, who is set to release his latest directorial effort Star Trek Into Darkness May 17, had previously seemed uninterested in the Star Wars directing gig, telling Entertainment Weekly that he HollywoodLife.com that he believed he would be seeing the film “as a paying moviegoer!”

Representatives for Disney and Abrams had not returned calls seeking comment at press time.

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GLAAD protests Nat Geo’s collaboration with Boy Scouts

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The advocacy group backed a Change.org petition started by Will Oliver, a 20-year-old gay Eagle Scout, that calls on Nat Geo to air a disclaimer clarifying the network’s views before each episode of its new series, “Are You Tougher than a Boy Scout.” It debuts this spring.

“That National Geographic would brush aside countless gay teens suffering at the hands of the BSA, shrugging off injustice as just another ‘point of view,’ is irresponsible,” GLAAD president Herndon Graddick said in a statement. “By airing this program, National Geographic is providing support and publicity to an organization that harms young people simply because of who they are. If the network is truly committed to standing by its non-discrimination practices, it should have no problem airing a disclaimer to that effect.”

Nat Geo did not immediately respond to calls from TheWrap requesting comment.

But in a statement to GLAAD, the network said the show has “nothing to do with this debate” over the Boy Scouts’ LGBT policies.

“As it relates to our upcoming show with the Boy Scouts, we certainly appreciate all points of view on the topic,” Nat Geo said in the statement, “but when people see our show they will realize it has nothing to do with this debate, and is in fact a competition series between individual scouts and civilians.”

GLADD pointed to the Boy Scouts’ October 2012 Progress Report of its National Council Strategic Plan 2011-2015. It cites the Nat Geo series as a “strategic partnership” aimed at promoting the idea that “scouting is ‘cool’ with youth.”

The report states that the Scouts will begin working on marketing plans with National Geographic for “leveraging the show with Scouting audiences and audiences outside of scouting.”

“It’s all too clear that this show is just a marketing ploy, crafted by the BSA to boost dwindling membership and distract Americans from the Scouts’ long history of discrimination,” Graddick said. “National Geographic Channel is the means to that end and must therefore make it clear where the network stands.”

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The New Old Age Blog: Grief Over New Depression Diagnosis

When the American Psychiatric Association unveils a proposed new version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, it expects controversy. Illnesses get added or deleted, acquire new definitions or lists of symptoms. Everyone from advocacy groups to insurance companies to litigators — all have an interest in what’s defined as mental illness — pays close attention. Invariably, complaints ensue.

“We asked for commentary,” said David Kupfer, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who has spent six years as chairman of the task force that is updating the handbook. He sounded unruffled. “We asked for it and we got it. This was not going to be done in a dark room somewhere.”

But the D.S.M. 5, to be published in May, has generated an unusual amount of heat. Two changes, in particular, could have considerable impact on older people and their families.

First, the new volume revises some of the criteria for major depressive disorder. The D.S.M. IV (among other changes, the new manual swaps Roman numerals for Arabic ones) set out a list of symptoms that over a two-week period would trigger a diagnosis of major depression: either feelings of sadness or emptiness, or a loss of interest or pleasure in most daily activities, plus sleep disturbances, weight loss, fatigue, distraction or other problems, to the extent that they impair someone’s functioning.

Traditionally, depression has been underdiagnosed in older adults. When people’s health suffers and they lose friends and loved ones, the sentiment went, why wouldn’t they be depressed? A few decades back, Dr. Kupfer said, “what was striking to me was the lack of anyone getting a depression diagnosis, because that was ‘normal aging.’” We don’t find depression in old age normal any longer.

But critics of the D.S.M. 5 now argue that depression may become overdiagnosed, because this version removes the so-called “bereavement exclusion.” That was a paragraph that cautioned against diagnosing depression in someone for at least two months after loss of a loved one, unless that patient had severe symptoms like suicidal thoughts.

Without that exception, you could be diagnosed with this disorder if you are feeling empty, listless or distracted, a month after your parent or spouse dies.

“D.S.M. 5 is medicalizing the expected and probably necessary process of mourning that people go through,” said Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force and has denounced several of the changes in the new edition. “Most people get better with time and natural healing and resilience.”

If they are diagnosed with major depression before that can happen, he fears, they will be given antidepressants they may not need. “It gives the drug companies the right to peddle pills for grief,” he said.

An advisory committee to the Association for Death Education and Counseling also argued that bereaved people “will receive antidepressant medication because it is cheaper and ‘easier’ to medicate than to be involved therapeutically,” and noted that antidepressants, like all medications, have side effects.

“I can’t help but see this as a broad overreach by the APA,” Eric Widera, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on the GeriPal blog. “Grief is not a disorder and should be considered normal even if it is accompanied by some of the same symptoms seen in depression.”

But Dr. Kupfer said the panel worried that with the exclusion, too many cases of depression could be overlooked and go untreated. “If these things go on and get worse over time and begin to impair someone’s day to day function, we don’t want to use the excuse, ‘It’s bereavement — they’ll get over it,’” he said.

The new entry for major depressive disorder will include a note — the wording isn’t final — pointing out that while grief may be “understandable or appropriate” after a loss, professionals should also consider the possibility of a major depressive episode. Making that distinction, Dr. Kupfer said, will require “good solid clinical judgment.”

Initial field trials testing the reliability of D.S.M. 5 diagnoses, recently published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, don’t bolster confidence, however. An editorial remarked that “the end results are mixed, with both positive and disappointing findings.” Major depressive disorder, for instance, showed “questionable reliability.”

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk more about how patients might respond to the D.S.M. 5, and to a new diagnosis that might also affect a lot of older people — mild neurocognitive disorder.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 24, 2013

An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force. He is Allen Frances, not Francis.

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DealBook: S.E.C. Pick Is Ex-Prosecutor, in Signal to Wall Street

3:30 p.m. | Updated

President Obama announced Thursday his nomination of Mary Jo White, a former federal prosecutor turned white-collar defense lawyer, to be the next chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a short ceremony at the White House, Mr. Obama also said he was renominating Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a post Mr. Cordray has held under a temporary recess appointment without Senate approval for the past year. The president portrayed both selections as a way of preventing a financial crash like the one he inherited four years ago.

“It’s not enough to change the law,” Mr. Obama said. “We also need cops on the beat to enforce the law.”

Mr. Obama noted that Ms. White was a childhood fan of “The Hardy Boys,” just as he was. He added that as the United States attorney in New York in the 1990s she “built a career the Hardy Boys could only dream of.”

He noted that she prosecuted money launderers, mobsters and terrorists. “I’d say that’s a pretty good run,” he said. “You don’t want to mess with Mary Jo. As one former S.E.C. chairman said, Mary Jo does not intimidate easily.”

Mr. Obama likewise pressed the Senate to finally confirm Mr. Cordray to the leadership of the consumer agency created by the Wall Street regulation law passed in 2010. The president installed Mr. Cordray as director last January without Senate approval using his recess appointment power, but his term will expire at the end of the year unless he wins approval from the upper chamber of Congress.

“Financial institutions have plenty of lobbyists looking out for their interests,” Mr. Obama said. “The American people need Richard to keep standing up for them. And there’s absolutely no excuse for the Senate to wait any longer to confirm him.”

Ms. White and Mr. Cordray spoke only briefly. Ms. White said if confirmed she would work “to protect investors and to ensure the strength, efficiency and the transparency of our capital markets.” Mr. Cordray said that during his short tenure he has “been focused on making consumer finance markets work better for the American people” and approached it “with open minds, open ears and great determination.”

Regulatory chiefs are often market experts or academics. But Ms. White spent nearly a decade as the United States attorney in New York, the first woman named to this post. Among her prominent cases, she oversaw the prosecution of the mafia boss John Gotti as well as the people responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She is now working the other side, defending Wall Street firms and executives as a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton.

As the attorney general of Ohio, Mr. Cordray made a name for himself suing Wall Street companies in the wake of the financial crisis. He undertook a series of prominent lawsuits against big names in the finance world, including Bank of America and the American International Group.

The White House expects Ms. White, 65, and Mr. Cordray, 53, to draw on their prosecutorial backgrounds while carrying out a broad regulatory agenda under the Dodd-Frank Act. Congress enacted the law, which mandates a regulatory overhaul, in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Ms. White has “an incredibly impressive resume” and that her appointment along with the renomination of Mr. Cordray sends an important signal.

“The president believes that appointment and the renomination he’s making today demonstrate the commitment he has to carrying out Wall Street reform, making sure we have the rules of the road that are necessary and that are being enforced in a way” to avoid a crisis like that of 2008, Mr. Carney said.

Another White House official added that Ms. White and Mr. Cordray will “serve in top enforcement roles” in part so that “Wall Street is held accountable and middle-class Americans never again are harmed by the abuses of a few.”

Ms. White will succeed Elisse B. Walter, a longtime S.E.C. official, who took over as chairwoman after Mary L. Schapiro stepped down as the agency’s leader in December. Mr. Cordray joined the consumer bureau in 2011 as its enforcement director.

The nominations could face a mixed reception in Congress. Republicans had previously vowed to block any candidate for the consumer bureau, leading to the recess appointment. It is unclear whether the White House and Mr. Cordray will face another standoff the second time around.

Mr. Carney argued that there were no substantive objections to Mr. Cordray’s confirmation, only political ones. “He is absolutely the right person for the job,” Mr. Carney said.

Ms. White is expected to receive broader support on Capitol Hill. Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, declared that Ms. White was a “tough-as-nails prosecutor” who “will not shy away from enforcing the laws to ensure that markets operate fairly.”

But she could face questions about her command of arcane financial minutiae. She was a director of the Nasdaq stock market, but has otherwise built her career on the law-and-order side of the securities industry.

People close to the S.E.C. note, however, that her husband, John W. White, is a veteran of the agency. From 2006 through 2008, he was head of the S.E.C.’s division of corporation finance, which oversees public companies’ disclosures and reporting.

Some Democrats also might question her path through the revolving door, in and out of government. While seen as a strong enforcer as a United States attorney, she went on in private practice to defend some of Wall Street’s biggest names, including Kenneth D. Lewis, a former head of Bank of America. She also represented JPMorgan Chase and the board of Morgan Stanley. Last year, the N.F.L. hired her to investigate allegations that the New Orleans Saints carried out a bounty system for hurting opponents.

Consumer advocates generally praised her appointment on Thursday. “Mary Jo White was a tough, smart, no-nonsense, broadly experienced and highly accomplished prosecutor,” said Dennis Kelleher, head of Better Markets, the nonprofit advocacy group. “She knew who the bad guys were, went after them and put them in prison when they broke the law.”

The appointment comes after the departure of Ms. Schapiro, who announced she would step down from the S.E.C. in late 2012. In a four-year tenure, she overhauled the agency after it was blamed for missing the warning signs of the crisis.

Since her exit, Washington and Wall Street have been abuzz with speculation about the next S.E.C. chief. President Obama quickly named Ms. Walter, then a Democratic commissioner at the agency, but her appointment was seen as a short-term solution. It is unclear if she will shift back to the commissioner role if Ms. White is confirmed.

In the wake of Ms. Schapiro’s exit, several other contenders surfaced, including Sallie L. Krawcheck, a longtime Wall Street executive. Richard G. Ketchum, chairman and chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s internal policing organization, was also briefly mentioned as a long-shot contender.

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

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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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