SAN FRANCISCO — Luis Aroche learned about violence at Leonard R. Flynn Elementary School, across from the projects where his friend Carl lived.
He remembers sitting down at his desk and seeing his teacher, Mrs. Foster, in tears. His class had just finished the Pledge of Allegiance.
"Carl was playing on the swings and got shot," Aroche said. "And died. Kindergarten. He got found laying in a pool of blood in the park," Aroche paused. Swallowed. Started up again. "He was my desk buddy. He would go with me to the bathroom. And now, Carl wasn't there.
"That was my first experience of loss. And I didn't understand it. To this day, I don't understand it."
Aroche since has become something of an expert on violence — as victim, perpetrator and now as part of a hoped-for solution. Last year, San Francisco Dist. Atty. George Gascon hired the former gang member to be his office's first "alternative sentencing planner," part of an effort to keep offenders from ending up back behind bars.
The position, criminal justice experts say, has no equivalent in any prosecutor's office in the country.
And Aroche is as singular as his job. An Aztec skull tattoo stretches down his right forearm to his hand, its grimace partly wiped away by laser removal. The day his juvenile record was sealed, he says, was the happiest of his life.
Today, he helps prosecutors figure out who among San Francisco's low-level offenders deserves a jail cell and who deserves a second chance.
He knows a lot about both.
::
If you were Aroche, 12 years old and living in the Mission District in 1990 — when gangs and crack cocaine meant funerals were as commonplace as quinceañeras — you got a tattoo, cut school and drank beer. You thought a stint in Pelican Bay State Prison was like going off to "Stanford or Yale." You practiced how to sit and talk and smoke like the toughest prisoners.
"We would learn how to iron our clothes using a comb, 'cause that's how you iron your pants in prison," Aroche said. "You iron it with the teeth of the comb … and then you put it underneath the mattress."
Aroche's first tattoo was a small cross on his left hand, in the soft web between thumb and forefinger. He got it in an alleyway not far from the studio apartment where he slept on the floor with his five brothers, three sisters, the occasional niece or nephew. His parents got the bed in the corner.
His Salvadoran mother was a chambermaid at a Fisherman's Wharf motel, his Puerto Rican father a security guard in the Navy shipyards.
And his older brothers? They would disappear for years. Aroche didn't know why until his father took him to visit San Quentin State Prison. They were "main men" in a notorious Northern California prison gang. When they were out, they were "the mayors of the Mission."
By the time Aroche was 15, he was drinking so much and incarcerated so often that he gave himself a test every night before he went to sleep. If he put out his hand and felt warm, smooth drywall, he knew he was home. If he felt cold, slick concrete, he was in custody.
One night he ended up in the hospital. He'd been drunk, hanging out in Lucky Alley, when a car drove up and the doors flew open. Aroche saw his friend get sliced with a machete. Gunshots rang out.
"And I remember some guy grabbing me and hitting me with a crowbar and stabbing me in my stomach," he said. "And I could feel the pierce of my stomach, just ripping me open.... And I thought, this is it. This is it. This is my life."
::
At the computer in his spartan office at the Hall of Justice, Aroche is poring over the official tale of another life in the balance: a 28-year-old woman on a downward spiral.
The Chinese calendar might have it pegged as the year of the black snake, but investors are already calling 2013 the year of the enterprise IPO. Not nearly as catchy as something reptilian, but hopefully a lot more profitable than the newly public consumer companies, Facebook chief among them, that took a beating in the public markets in 2012.
Consistent with the enterprise theme, we already know that data-center networking company Gigamon and solid-state storage business Violin Memory have filed their S-1 forms. Other enterprise plays will follow. And just because the smart money is betting on companies that get paid selling to other companies, doesn’t mean some well-known consumer outfits, including Twitter, Square, and Evernote couldn’t try their luck with an IPO in 2013.
We picked nine private companies with public market potential to watch in 2013. For each we weigh the odds of whether, market conditions permitting, of course, they have a shot or not.
Above:
Odds of an IPO: Looking good, but only if it can close its next round
This startup is the darling of the collaborative consumption movement, allowing anyone to put up their house or apartment for travelers to rent. While it’s been close to 18 months since its taken venture capital, Airbnb is already up to $230 million. Rumor has it that the company is vying for a $100 million third round of funding at a $2 billion valuation, and has plans to go public once it closes a new round.
LONDON (Reuters) – Actresses dominated the shortlist for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts‘ Rising Star awards on Monday, taking four of the five places.
Juno Temple, who appeared in the 2007 drama “Atonement”, and Andrea Riseborough, best known for her leading role in Madonna‘s biopic of Wallis Simpson “W.E.”, represent British interests on the list.
They are up against U.S. actress Elizabeth Olsen of the acclaimed 2011 drama “Martha Marcy May Marlene“, and Sweden’s Alicia Vikander, who starred in Danish period drama “A Royal Affair” and last year’s adaptation of the novel “Anna Karenina”.
Suraj Sharma is the youngest on the list at 19 and the sole male representative, having been picked from 3,000 hopefuls to star in Ang Lee’s recent 3D picture “Life of Pi” despite no previous acting experience.
The Rising Star Award is handed out on February 10 at the main BAFTA prize ceremony, Britain’s top film accolades. It is the only category voted for by the public, who can cast their votes at ee.co.uk/bafta.
Previous winners of the award aimed at spotting stars of the future include James McAvoy, Eva Green, Shia LaBeouf and Kristen Stewart.
(This story has been refiled to change word in headline to “women” from “females”)
(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
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The Beauty Experiment: How I Skipped Lipstick, Ditched Fashion, Faced the World Without Concealer, and Learned to Love the Real Me, by Phoebe Baker Hyde. Da Capo Press. 248 pp. $16.
Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 Recipes to Help You Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health, by William Davis, M.D. Rodale Books. 352 pp. $27.99.
Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick, by Jeremy Dean. Da Capo Press. 256 pp. $26.
OH, those pesky Mayans. It was bad enough that their ancient astro-forecast led many people to quake all year long for fear that the end of the world was not only nigh but specifically nigh — as in, Dec. 21 nigh. But when, on Dec. 22, the human race discovered that doomsday had come and gone without apparent incident, more Mayan mischief kicked in: mankind found itself with only 10 days to come up with New Year’s resolutions, a necessity too many had assumed would be made moot by apocalypse.
Remarkably, three books have emerged since the nonfateful winter solstice that can help everyone become a finer creature in the brave new world of 2013. All of these books — one about self-image, one about diet and one about habits — would seem, on the face of it, to be counterintuitive. That’s an appropriate attribute for a year that never was supposed to exist.
The first thing you might like to know about “The Beauty Experiment,” a memoir by Phoebe Baker Hyde, is the improbable fact that the author’s picture was taken by a 4-year-old. What woman, what writer, would make such a devil-may-care move? Experiment, indeed. Ms. Hyde’s book is a testament to her hard-won conviction that, when it comes to appearance, externals do not matter. In her early 30s, after giving birth to her first child (a daughter), Ms. Hyde “bought thicker makeup and brighter lipstick” and a flashy red velvet dress, hoping to glamorize the “zombie” she saw in the mirror. A photo of herself in the velvet togs showed her that she looked “not sexy, but shaggy; not ‘Red-Hot,’ but hangdog,” and made her cry, “because I was stupid, vain, heartbroken and ashamed of all of it.”
In February 2007, woebegone and “at war with myself,” she decided to shun cosmetics, hair salons and pricey clothes for an entire year to see if she could shore up her self-esteem by making peace with her unadorned raw materials. The antidote to her feelings of inadequacy, she decided, was “to be free of illusions.” Getting a short haircut at her husband’s barbershop, eschewing lipstick and even earrings, she “dragged an oppressive sense of plain Janeness” around for a month, but soon began to feel empowered by her “Momnisexual” look. After having another child (a son), she stuck with a pared-down approach. These days, she writes, when she spots her reflection in a mirror, she no longer sees “wrinkles, anxiety, zits, or exhaustion, although they are all there. Instead, I see a face, a person, a personality, a life.”
Ms. Hyde’s postpartum funk was caused in part by baby weight she could not shed, but childbirth is not the only spur to extra poundage. Dr. William Davis, a preventive cardiologist in Milwaukee, argued in his best-selling 2011 book “Wheat Belly” that wheat — yes, even whole-grain wheat — the ingredient of everyone’s daily bread, is unhealthy. “I recognize that declaring wheat a malicious food is like declaring that Ronald Reagan was a Communist,” he concedes.
Nevertheless, the doctor not only stuck to his guns, but also issued a manifesto expounding his wheatless worldview, in the form of the “Wheat Belly Cookbook,” which he dedicates to “everyone who has come to understand the liberation that emerges with wheatlessness.”
Over the last decade, Dr. Davis put himself and thousands of his patients who were “at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and the myriad destructive effects of obesity” on wheat-free regimens. He says he watched them not only lose 20, 30, 50, even 100 pounds or more, but also recover from chronic diseases like ulcerative colitis and diabetes.
Investigating these results, he learned that a high-yield hybrid “dwarf” strain of wheat had been developed in the United States in the middle of the last century, and adopted not only here but also around the world. This “Frankengrain” as he calls it, thickens waistlines and causes ills from acne, psoriasis, depression and migraines to arthritis, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Worse, the doctor contends, it contains a protein called gliadin that stimulates appetite and dupes gullible neurons into craving food the body does not need. In his cookbook, Dr. Davis says that gliadins tempt people to eat 440 calories more per day than their grandparents did. Gliadins are opiates, he explains, which “generate a need for more ... and more, and more.”
Whether or not you’re persuaded, such arguments have played a part in starting the gluten-free wave that engulfs the country. But the doctor warns against assuming that every glitch is gluten. Though he considers wheat the worst offender, he mistrusts other grains as well, and warns gluten-free converts to read labels closely, because “rice starch, cornstarch, potato starch, and tapioca starch” send blood sugar levels soaring.
In his cookbook, with scores of grain-free recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even dessert — brownies, cupcakes and Key lime pie, made with flour ground from beans, nuts and flaxseed — he points another way forward. Cooking, baking and eating without wheat is a “cataclysmic revelation for most people,” he admits. “It’s unsettling, it’s upsetting, it’s downright inconvenient.” Still, he asks, what is a bit of inconvenience, weighed against the rapture of watching a “protuberant, flop-over-the-belt belly vanish?”
If you were to try to give up wheat for the new year, how long do you think you would be able to stick it out before you crumbled and ordered a bagel? Jeremy Dean, a London psychologist and pop psychology blogger, notes in “Making Habits, Breaking Habits” that conventional wisdom holds that it takes the “magic figure of 21 days” to form a new habit. This reckoning turns out to be faulty, Mr. Dean explains, if the habit is complicated or replaces an existing one. Sixty-six days — a little more than two months — is a more reasonable span, he suggests; but 254 days is not out of the question.
Demonstrating how a person might forge a new pattern of behavior, Mr. Dean describes the notional measure of switching to whole-wheat bread from white over a period of several weeks. “I intended to eat more healthily, and now I am,” he explains. Obviously, Dr. Davis would beg to differ — not that Mr. Dean, who addresses generalities, not gastrointestinal realities, and motivation rather than medicine, would care, in all likelihood. “Why, exactly, do you want to make a new habit?” he asks. “Sometimes, the reasons are obvious and don’t need any further soul-searching, but this isn’t always the case.”
This statement hints that he might suspect that the business of making habits and breaking habits, fraught and chancy as it may sometimes be, is not the end of the world.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 7, 2013
An earlier version of this column misstated in a passing reference the equivalent length of time that Jeremy Dean, the author of “Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick,” believes is reasonable for forming a new habit. As the column stated, Mr. Dean believes it is 66 days. But that is equivalent to a little more than two months, not three.
What’s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week.
The Deal: A Not-So-Grand Bargain
A “fiscal cliff” deal is reached and after all the drama this chart sums up the impact. One provision could head off a doubling of milk prices. Here’s what’s in it for small businesses. Jared Bernstein says the fiscal debate has killed the economic debate. Kevin Drum says we don’t have a spending problem, we have an aging problem. One blogger believes that the biggest beneficiaries of the resolution are puppies. Bruce Bartlett explains when the deficit will be fixed. John Boehner is re-elected House speaker. Hugh Hefner marries. These are the four business gangs that rule the country. Next up: the debt ceiling.
Happy New Year: Small-Business Predictions
This infographic shows what’s in store for small businesses in 2013. The editors at Springwise.com offer 10 business opportunities for the coming year. Here are 12 buzzwords you can expect to hear. Here are 20 quotations you can use to prosper. Here are 21 predictions from social media experts. Both Constant Contact and Marla Tabaka spot marketing trends they think will affect small businesses, including “the rise of MomPopolies.” Here are six e-mail marketing and four hyperlocal trends to watch. Oh, and here are eight major tech predictions and four predictions for your finances. A Pennsylvania psychic counselor predicts an avalanche that “will destroy many lives.” Amanda MacArthur suggests 12 worthwhile small-business resolutions. Here are the top five reasons your employees will quit. This video recaps 2012 in four minutes.
The Economy: Auto Sales Are Strong
Many economic bloggers ended 2012 feeling pessimistic. The Restaurant Performance Index contracted, and SurePayroll’s November small-business scorecard is down. Construction spending also fell, and small-business borrowing slowed. But manufacturing (pdf) picked up in December, and don’t forget that the drilling boom for shale oil is remaking America’s energy picture and has brought net oil imports to a 20-year low. Borrowing rates are as cheap as they have ever been in America, and domestic auto sales were very strong last month. The unemployment rate stays steady, online labor demand (pdf) increased, the private sector added 215,000 jobs, and the Philadelphia Fed’s leading indexes (pdf) projected growth. A physics teacher imparts real life lessons.
Start-Up: A Well-Known Blogger Tries the Start-Up Life
These are 13 promising East Coast start-ups to watch in 2013. A start-up wants to be the Spotify for e-books. Bruno Aziza shares some advice from his start-up adventure: “Unless you are working on something truly different, or have a compelling story to tell, nobody will pay attention. … Unless you can truly add value, nobody cares.” This 15-year-old thinks he can reinvent how we consume news. A well-known blogger plans his own start-up. Jay Patani says interns are the unsung heroes of start-ups. Or maybe baby boomers are more essential?
Marketing: Content on the Cheap
Can you guess the most annoying and hated words and phrases of the year? (Yes, “whatever” made one list, and so did “YOLO” and “fiscal cliff.”) An influential marketing blog picks the most influential marketing books. Andy Sernovitz offers a few suggestions for rescuing unsubscribers. Michael Stelzner explains why stories attract customers. Mathew Donald has five brochure-designing tips, including: “Do not slack off during the proofreading process.” Marcus Sheridan has eight renegade methods to use content marketing to dominate your industry, including, “Reward your competitors”: “Stop pretending your competitors don’t exist. Your customers already know they exist, so find a way to deal with it, to your advantage.” Ryan Derousseau explains how to introduce a content strategy on the cheap.
Your People: Stupid Things Bosses Say
Cullen Roche examines what makes people successful. Jeff Schmitt says there are seven types of employees you should weed out, including the viruses: “You can’t expect them to be slavishly sunny and loyal to you. But you can expect them to be helpful, respectful and protective toward each other.” Jeff Haden says there are eight stupid things bosses say to employees, including: “Sure, I’ll be happy to talk to your brother about a job.” You won’t believe how many people applied to work at Comcast last year.
Management: The War on Fraud
A 16-year-old maker of motorcycles proves that passion trumps experience. In this economist’s guide to year-end charitable giving, Dean Karlan advises not to divide donations among many charities: “If there is one that is doing the most good for the cause you care the most about, then every dollar you give to the one doing the second best work is a dollar not given to the one doing the best work!” Here’s how to beat “the overwhelm” of entrepreneurship. Adrian Swinscoe says the relationships you have with existing customers are your keys to success. Volvo owners have the best credit scores. Daniel Hood files a dispatch from the war on fraud. Here are five ways to stay healthy at work.
Social Media: Twitter Tools
Here’s how to start your social media year off with a bang. Jeff Bullas lists six social media trends you should not ignore, including: “Facebook will continue to strengthen its grip as the dominating and the de facto social network of choice.” A webinar explains how to leverage social media effectively and efficiently. Did you know there are still a few cool things you can do with your blog post after you hit publish? These are the top 20 Web sites every blogger should know and the six top Twitter tools for business. And if your business is not a big user of social media, don’t worry: you’re in good company.
Around the Country: Honk if You Love Someone
Avis buys Zipcar. Polaroid is creating branded retail stores. Texas was the best place for small-business job growth in 2012. Jeff Jordan wonders if American malls are dying (Russian malls certainly are not). One man goes on a quest to make a city smile: “Honk if you love someone.” Entrepreneur magazine’s Growth Conference is this week in Dallas. Constant Contact and the City of Chicago Treasurer’s Office announce a small-business online marketing contest. Meet the “poshest” entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley (even though they will probably be wiped out by climate change in the next 40 years). This week, 150,000 people are expected to converge on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show.
Around the World: What’s Up in Iceland?
Indian manufacturing hits a six-month high. Chinese manufacturing expands. Unemployment falls in Spain. And do you ever wonder what’s really going on in Iceland? This may be the best review of “Les Misérables” ever.
Technology: Michael Arrington Is Bored
Here are 10 objects that prove that 3-D printing will change the world, and Dylan Love lists the best 3-D printers. Michael Arrington is bored: “Yeah, yeah, mobile. I get it. … But really a lot of the mobile stuff out there is just radioactive decay from the iPhone launching in 2007. 2007! Old news! Ancient platforms!” Even so, enormous changes are on the horizon for the smartphone. These are the 15 best gadgets of 2012, and here are 13 technologies you won’t see in 2013. Steve Kovach says Windows phone users have one big problem. A bunch of well-known (and not so well-known) companies want us to go paperless in 2013. A mobile messaging app processed 18 billion messages on the last day of 2012.
Tweet of the Week
@AaronCBaker: I’m hoping they release some sweet beepers at CES this year
The Week’s Bests
Eric Barker says there are 10 things you should do every day to improve your life, including laugh: “People who use humor to cope with stress have better immune systems, reduced risk of heart attack and stroke, experience less pain during dental work and live longer. Laughter should be like a daily vitamin.”
Scott Grannis says the fiscal cliff resolution goes a long way toward explaining why this has been the weakest recovery in history: “The burden of our debt binge is already upon us because we have borrowed trillions of dollars to support consumption, rather than new investment. What matters in the future is how productively we spend the proceeds of future bond sales, not how we pay off the bonds we’ve already sold. We can make progress on the margin if we can reduce federal spending relative to the size of the economy, since that in turn will reduce the amount of the economy’s resources we waste. Allowing the private sector to increasingly decide how to spend the fruits of its labors will likely improve the overall productivity and strength of the economy, because the private sector is most likely smarter about how it spends its own money. We’ve got to get the government out of the way if we are to move forward.”
This Week’s Question: Will the fiscal cliff deal help or hurt your business?
Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.
Hockey is back, and it took nearly four months and one long night to get the game back on the ice.
With the season on the line, the NHL and the players' association agreed on a tentative pact to end a 113-day lockout and save what was left of a fractured schedule.
Commissioner Gary Bettman and union executive director Donald Fehr ceased being adversaries and announced the deal while standing side by side near a wall toward the back of the negotiating room and showing a tinge of weariness.
"I want to thank Don Fehr," Bettman said. "We went through a tough period, but it's good to be at this point."
A marathon negotiating session that lasted more than 16 hours, stretching from Saturday afternoon until just before dawn Sunday, produced a 10-year deal.
"We've got to dot a lot of Is and cross a lot of Ts," Bettman said. "There's still a lot of work to be done, but the basic details of the agreement have been agreed upon."
Even players who turned into negotiators showed the strain of the long, difficult process.
"It was a battle," said Winnipeg Jets defenseman Ron Hainsey, a key member of the union's bargaining team. "Gary said a month ago it was a tough negotiation. That's what it was.
"Players obviously would rather not have been here, but our focus now is to give the fans whatever it is — 48 games, 50 games — the most exciting season we can. The mood has been nervous for a while. You want to be playing. You want to be done with this."
The collective bargaining agreement must be ratified by a majority of the league's 30 owners and the union's membership of approximately 740 players.
"Hopefully within a very few days the fans can get back to watching people who are skating, not the two of us," Fehr said.
All schedule issues, including the length of the season, still need to be worked out. The NHL has models for 50- and 48-game seasons.
The original estimate was regular-season games could begin about eight days after a deal was reached. It is believed that all games will be played within the two respective conferences, but that also hasn't been decided.
The players have been locked out since Sept. 16, the day after the previous agreement expired. That deal came after an extended lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season.
"Any process like this is difficult. It can be long," Fehr said.
Time was clearly a factor, with the sides facing a deadline of Thursday or Friday to reach a deal that would allow for a 48-game season to start a week later. Bettman had said the league could not allow a season of fewer than 48 games per team.
All games through Jan. 14, along with the All-Star game and the New Year's Day Winter Classic had already been canceled, claiming more than 50 percent of the original schedule.
Without an agreement, the NHL faced the embarrassment of losing two seasons due to a labor dispute, something that has never happened in another North American sports league. The 2004-05 season was lost while the sides negotiated hockey's first salary cap.
Under the new CBA, free-agent contracts will have a maximum length of seven years, but clubs can go to eight years to re-sign their own players. Each side can opt out of the deal after eight years.
Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.
In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.
It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”
Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.
Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.
After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.
But fearing that such measures would spread, that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.
The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”
It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.
In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.
There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.
It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.
Which is just another way of say that we never got out of the loony gas building after all.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
MOSCOW (Reuters) – French film star Gerard Depardieu met Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea town of Sochi and obtained his Russian passport, the Kremlin said on Sunday, after he left his homeland to avoid a new tax rate for millionaires.
Putin signed a decree on Thursday granting Russian citizenship to Depardieu, who objected to French Socialist president Francois Hollande‘s plan to impose the 75 percent tax rate. His decision to quit France had prompted accusations of national betrayal.
The Russian president and Depardieu were shown on state-run Channel One shaking hands and hugging each other early on Sunday during what the Kremlin said was a private visit by the actor to Russia.
“A brief meeting between the president and Depardieu took place,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “On the occasion of his visit to Russia, he was handed a Russian passport.”
Peskov did not say whether Putin personally gave Depardieu the passport or if he picked it up through standard procedures. He said the actor also told Putin about his career plans.
Depardieu, star of the movies “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Green Card”, is a popular figure in Russia, where he has appeared in many advertising campaigns, including for ketchup. He also worked there in 2011 on a film about the eccentric Russian monk Grigory Rasputin.
Putin asked Depardieu whether he was pleased with his work in the movie, TV footage of their meeting showed, with the French actor saying he had already sent Putin some excerpts from it.
Depardieu bought a house in Belgium last year to avoid the French income tax increase. French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called Depardieu’s decision to seek Belgian residency “pathetic” and unpatriotic, prompting an angry response from the actor.
Putin said last month that Depardieu would be welcome in Russia, which has a flat income tax rate of 13 percent, compared to the 75 percent on income over 1 million euros ($ 1.30 million) that Hollande wants to levy in France.
He offered Depardieu a Russian passport, saying he had a close, special relationship with France and had developed warm ties with the actor, even though they had rarely met.
Some of Putin’s critics said the passport move was a stunt and pointed out that the president announced last month a campaign to prevent rich Russians keeping their money offshore.
($ 1 = 0.7666 euros)
(Reporting By Alexei Anishchuk; Editing by Pravin Char)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times
Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner, said some insurance companies could raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.
In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.
The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.
Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.
The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.
New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.
The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.
Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.
While Mr. Jones has not yet weighed in on the insurers’ most recent requests, he is pushing for a state law that will give him that authority. Without legislative action, the state can only question the basis for the high rates, sometimes resulting in the insurer withdrawing or modifying the proposed rate increase.
The California insurers say they have no choice but to raise premiums if their underlying medical costs have increased. “We need these rates to even come reasonably close to covering the expenses of this population,” said Tom Epstein, a spokesman for Blue Shield of California. The insurer is requesting a range of increases, which average about 12 percent for 2013.
Although rates paid by employers are more closely tracked than rates for individuals and small businesses, policy experts say the law has probably kept at least some rates lower than they otherwise would have been.
“There’s no question that review of rates makes a difference, that it results in lower rates paid by consumers and small businesses,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimated in an October report that rate review was responsible for lowering premiums for one out of every five filings.
Federal officials say the law has resulted in significant savings. “The health care law includes new tools to hold insurers accountable for premium hikes and give rebates to consumers,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for Medicare, which is helping to oversee the insurance reforms.
“Insurers have already paid $1.1 billion in rebates, and rate review programs have helped save consumers an additional $1 billion in lower premiums,” he said. If insurers collect premiums and do not spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar on care for their customers, the law requires them to refund the excess.
As a result of the review process, federal officials say, rates were reduced, on average, by nearly three percentage points, according to a report issued last September.
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times
Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner, said some insurance companies could raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.
In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.
The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.
Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.
The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.
New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.
The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.
Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.
While Mr. Jones has not yet weighed in on the insurers’ most recent requests, he is pushing for a state law that will give him that authority. Without legislative action, the state can only question the basis for the high rates, sometimes resulting in the insurer withdrawing or modifying the proposed rate increase.
The California insurers say they have no choice but to raise premiums if their underlying medical costs have increased. “We need these rates to even come reasonably close to covering the expenses of this population,” said Tom Epstein, a spokesman for Blue Shield of California. The insurer is requesting a range of increases, which average about 12 percent for 2013.
Although rates paid by employers are more closely tracked than rates for individuals and small businesses, policy experts say the law has probably kept at least some rates lower than they otherwise would have been.
“There’s no question that review of rates makes a difference, that it results in lower rates paid by consumers and small businesses,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimated in an October report that rate review was responsible for lowering premiums for one out of every five filings.
Federal officials say the law has resulted in significant savings. “The health care law includes new tools to hold insurers accountable for premium hikes and give rebates to consumers,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for Medicare, which is helping to oversee the insurance reforms.
“Insurers have already paid $1.1 billion in rebates, and rate review programs have helped save consumers an additional $1 billion in lower premiums,” he said. If insurers collect premiums and do not spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar on care for their customers, the law requires them to refund the excess.
As a result of the review process, federal officials say, rates were reduced, on average, by nearly three percentage points, according to a report issued last September.
