Phil Jackson meets with Lakers Vice President Jim Buss

The Lakers concluded preliminary talks Saturday with former coach Phil Jackson, a feeling-out process that would continue, The Times has learned.

Team Vice President Jim Buss and Jackson met Saturday morning to explore the prospects of Jackson returning to the team.

The Lakers are unwavering that there’s still a 95% certainty he will be their next coach. It's known that Jackson has already contacted assistant coaches who have worked with him previously about joining the Lakers' staff. It doesn't appear to be a problem for Lakers management.

The desire of Lakers fans and players to have Jackson return has been matched by management's desire to have him back on the bench. There's been speculation since Jackson's departure of a rift between Buss and him. It does not appear to be a deterrent in present discussions.

Until it becomes a certainty that Jackson is ready to return to coaching, the Lakers will continue the search process. It's believed they have an interest in talking to former NBA coaches Mike D'Antoni, Nate McMillan and Mike Dunleavy.

No formal offer was made Saturday, but it’s well understood the job is Jackson’s if he wants it. Sources were unclear whether discussions had advanced to the stage of salary and contract length.

The Lakers appear to be willing to give Jackson all the time necessary to determine if he wants to return to coaching. Interim coach Bernie Bickerstaff will guide the team Sunday against Sacramento at Staples Center.

Jackson’s health is fine, according to people who have spoken to him, but he is hedging a bit because of all the travel done by NBA teams. He has always disliked the routine of 41 regular-season road games — 39 for the Lakers, who play two designated away games against the Clippers at Staples Center.

The Lakers have played only two road games this season, neither of them against the Clippers, meaning a long, steady stream of road trips awaits the team.

As Jackson ponders his immediate future, he’ll consider the late-arriving flights in different time zones, the sometimes unpalatable food, the unfamiliar beds and unpredictable weather that might be ahead of him.

No stronger testimonial for Jackson came than the one from Kobe Bryant, who seemed almost apologetic for sustaining game-changing soreness in his right knee toward the end of the 2010-11 season.

The Lakers were swept by Dallas in the Western Conference semifinals that year, Bryant scoring only 17 points in the last two losses. He went to Germany a month later for an innovative procedure on his ailing right knee.

“The one thing that’s kind of always bothered me is that in his last year I wasn't able to give him my normal self,” Kobe Bryant said Friday night. “I was playing on one leg and that’s kind of always eaten away at me. The last year of his career I wasn't able to give him all I had.”

“He’s too great of a coach to have it go out that way. That’s my personal sentiment. I took it to heart because I couldn’t give it everything I had because I physically couldn’t. My knee was shot. That’s always bothered me.”

Jackson would replace Mike Brown, who was fired Friday amid the Lakers' 1-4 start, their worst since 1993.

Logical choices to join Jackson's staff would be Kurt Rambis, if he can get out of TV analyst commitments, Jim Cleamons and Frank Hamble, all of whom have been assistants under Jackson in the past.

Times staff writer Broderick Turner contributed to this report.

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Review: iPad Mini charms, but screen is a letdown

NEW YORK (AP) — I bet the iPad Mini is going to be on a lot of wish lists this holiday season. I also bet that for a lot of people, it’s not going to be the best choice. It’s beautiful and light, but Apple made a big compromise in the design, one that means that buyers should look closely at the competition before deciding.

Starting at $ 329, the iPad Mini is the cheapest iPad. The screen is a third smaller than the regular iPads, and it sits in an exquisitely machined aluminum body. It weighs just 11 ounces — half as much as a full-size iPad — making it easier to hold in one hand. It’s just under 8 inches long and less than a third of an inch thick, so it fits easily into a handbag.

The issue is the screen quality. Apple has been on the forefront of a move toward sharper, more colorful screens. It calls them “Retina” displays because the pixels — the little light-emitting squares that make up the screen — are so small that they blend together almost seamlessly in our eyes, removing the impression that we’re watching a grid of discrete elements.

The iPad Mini doesn’t have a Retina screen. By the standards of last year, it’s a good screen, with the same number of pixels as the first iPad and the iPad 2. The latest full-size iPad has four times as many pixels, and it really shows. By comparison, the iPad Mini’s screen looks coarse. It looks dull, too, because it doesn’t have the same color-boosting technology that the full-size model has.

This is not an entirely fair comparison, as the full-size iPad starts at $ 499 and weighs twice as much. The real issue is that this year, there are other tablets that are cheaper than the iPad Mini, weigh only slightly more and still have better screens.

Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle Fire HD costs $ 199 and has about the same overall size as the Mini. While the Kindle’s screen is somewhat smaller (leaving a bigger frame around the edges), it is also sharper, with 30 percent more pixels than the Mini. Colors are slightly brighter, too.

Barnes & Noble Inc.’s Nook HD costs $ 229 for a comparable model with 16 gigabytes of storage and has a screen that’s even sharper than the Kindle HD’s. It’s got 65 percent more pixels than the iPad Mini. (There’s a $ 199 model with half the memory, and the storage space can be expanded with inexpensive memory cards.)

Why do tablets from two companies chiefly known as book stores beat Apple’s latest for screen quality?

Sharper screens are darker, requiring a more powerful backlight to appear bright. That, in turn, would have forced an increase in the battery size. That’s the reason the first iPad with a Retina display was thicker and heavier than the iPad 2. So to keep the iPad Mini thin while matching the 10-hour battery life of the bigger iPads, Apple had to compromise on the display.

This can’t last, though. By next year, it will likely be even more obvious that Apple is seriously behind in screen quality on its small tablet, and it will have to upgrade to a Retina display somehow. That means this first-generation iPad Mini will look old pretty fast.

The display causes a few other problems, too. One is that when you run iPhone apps on the Mini, it uses the coarsest version of the graphics for that app — the version designed for iPhones up to the 2009 model, the 3GS. You can blow the app up to fill more of the screen, but it looks pretty ugly. The full-size iPad uses the higher-quality Retina graphics when running iPhone apps, and it looks much better.

Some apps adapted for the iPad screen don’t display that well on the Mini screen, either, because of the smaller size. Buttons can be too small to hit accurately, bringing to mind Steve Jobs’ 2010 comments about smaller tablets. The late Apple founder was of the vociferous opinion that the regular iPad was the smallest size that was also friendly to use.

In some apps, text on the Mini is too small to be comfortably read — the section fronts in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal apps are examples of this.

Of course, in some other respects, the iPad Mini outdoes the Fire and the Nook, so it isn’t just the tablet for the buyer who needs the prettiest and the thinnest. In particular, the Mini is a $ 329 entry ticket to the wonderful world of iPad and iPhone apps. For quality and quantity, it beats all the other app stores. (Oddly, there’s an inverse relationship between screen quality and app availability in this category — the Nook HD has the best screen and the fewest apps, while the second-best Kindle Fire HD has middling access to apps.)

The Mini also has front- and back-facing cameras, for taking still photos and video and for videoconferencing. The Kindle Fire HD only has a front-facing camera for videoconferencing. The Nook HD doesn’t have a camera at all.

In short, the iPad Mini is more versatile than the competition, and I’m sure it will please a lot of people. But take a look at the competition first, and figure that by next year, we’ll see something from Apple that looks a lot better.

___

Peter Svensson can be reached at http://twitter.com/petersvensson

___

About the iPad Mini:

The base model of the iPad Mini costs $ 329 and comes with 16 gigabytes of storage. A 32 GB model goes for $ 429 and 64 GB for $ 529. Soon, you’ll be able to get versions that can connect through cellular networks, not just Wi-Fi. Add $ 130 to the price.

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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How Oscar entry “La Source” launched a campaign for clean water across Haiti

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The documentary “La Source” was originally conceived to be the tale of a single project, the efforts by a Princeton University janitor to bring clean water to a single village in rural Haiti.

Now, the film’s exposure has spawned a soccer field, two schools and 20 more villages with sanitary water.

The Oscar-nominated film, which follows Haiti-born Josue Lajeunesse as he fulfills his dream of bringing bacteria-free water to his native village, launched a regional project by the nonprofit Generosity Water to improve the lives of rural Haitians.

“We’re hoping that we can really continue to build on what this film was about,” producer Jordan Wagner told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at Thursday night showing of “La Source,” which is part of TheWrap’s annual Award Screening Series.

Seated at Los Angeles‘ Landmark Theatre alongside director Patrick Shen, producer Brandon Vedder and Lajeunesse, Wagner, the nonprofit’s director, said his organization has already carved out a spot in the film’s namesake village for a school and soccer field.

“We’re putting a plan together to use the film at screenings to mobilize people,” Wagner said. “We figured out which plot of land we’d buy, we’re going to build a primary school and a secondary school.”

Wagner met Lajeunesse after he was filmed in Shen’s “The Philosopher Kings,” a movie about the stories behind college custodians.

He began raising money after hearing the janitor’s lifelong desire to pipe clean water down from a mountain spring and into his village. Students and faculty at Princeton, where Lajeunesse worked after coming to the United States in 1990, held benefit concerts and donated money to help fund the project.

For Lajeunesse, the plan was decades in the works.

“I was seven or eight years old, but I had in my mind that I have to go to school in order to do something to take the people and the town out of the situation,” Lajeunesse told Landmark Theatre audience. “Day by day, day by day, I save, I save, I save but we didn’t know how we were going to start it.”

Then, in January 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 250,000 people and destroying the impoverished nation’s infrastructure.

“The first time we went was about a month after the earthquake,” Vedder said, adding that the humidity in the Caribbean country nearly destroyed the cinematographers’ cameras. “It was hard to be another camera sticking in these people’s faces, right in their lives.”

The troubles didn’t end there. After the pipeline was built and Lajeunesse and his brother installed the spigots, it was clear how the film would begin and finish, but the meat of the story was harder to pare down.

“We knew where it would end, but the whole kind of middle part of the narrative was what was tricky,” Shen said. “We had to have discussions every night about the strategy for the next day.”

And, with $ 30,000 going toward the actual water project, the filmmakers quickly ran out of cash to support themselves during the months of editing.

“The story was happening whether we decided to make this film or not,” Wagner said. “We were scrambling to make this happen. We have the money for the project and this is happening and now we don’t have money for the film.”

Still, the filmmakers raised enough to keep the film alive after its spring-to-fall shooting schedule in 2010, working through the footage for a year and creating a few different cuts of the film before finding its final shape.

The movie premiered at Washington’s Silverdocs festival – the same festival where Wagner first met Shen at a screening of “The Philosopher Kings,” beginning a relationship that led directly to “La Source.”

The film was also a selection in the International Documentary Association’s annual DocuWeeks showcase, which qualified it for the Academy Awards via week-long engagements in Los Angeles and New York in August.

And though Lajeunesse hasn’t been back to Haiti since July 2010 – his janitorial and taxi jobs, plus four kids, make travel difficult – he said he gets phone calls from his family frequently, updating him on how the town is improving.

“Everyone there is so happy,” he said, drawing applause from the audience. “They have water and they don’t know what to say. All the town, they say, ‘tell everyone thank you for me.’”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: The Emotional Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

Let’s talk about the emotional aftermath of the storm that left tens of thousands of older people on the East Coast without power, bunkered down in their homes, chilled to the bone and out of touch with the outside world.

Let’s name the feelings they may have experienced. Fear. Despair. Hopelessness. Anxiety. Panic.

Linda Leest and her staff at Services Now for Adult Persons in Queens heard this in the voices of the older people they had been calling every day, people who were homebound and at risk because of medical conditions that compromise their physical functioning.

“They’re afraid of being alone,” she said in a telephone interview a few days after the storm. “They’re worried that if anything happens to them, no one is going to know. They feel that they’ve lost their connection with the world.”

What do we know about how older adults fare, emotionally, in a disaster like that devastating storm, which destroyed homes and businesses and isolated older adults in darkened apartment buildings, walk-ups and houses?

Most do well — emotional resilience is an underappreciated characteristic of older age — but those who are dependent on others, with pre-existing physical and mental disabilities, are especially vulnerable.

Most will recover from the disorienting sense that their world has been turned upside down within a few weeks or months. But some will be thrown into a tailspin and will require professional help. The sooner that help is received, the more likely it is to prevent a significant deterioration in their health.

The best overview comes from a November 2008 position paper from the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry that reviewed the effects of Hurricane Katrina and other disasters. After Katrina, “the elderly had the highest mortality rates, health decline and suicide rates of any subgroup,” that document notes. “High rates of psychosomatic problems were seen, with worsening health problems and increased mortality and disability.”

This is an important point: Emotional trauma in older adults often is hard to detect, and looks different from what occurs in younger people. Instead of acknowledging anxiety or depression, for instance, older people may complain of having a headache, a bad stomachache or some other physical ailment.

“This age group doesn’t generally feel comfortable talking about their feelings; likely, they’ll mask those emotions or minimize what they’re experiencing,” said Dr. Mark Nathanson, a geriatric psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center.

Signs that caregivers should watch out for include greater-than-usual confusion in an older relative, a decline in overall functioning and a disregard for “self care such as bathing, eating, dressing properly and taking medication,” Dr. Nathanson said.

As an example, he mentioned an older man who had “been sitting in a cold house for days and decided to stop taking his water pill because he felt it was just too much trouble.” Being distraught or distracted and forgetting or neglecting to take pills for chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease can have immediate harmful effects.

Especially at risk of emotional disturbances are older adults who are frail and advanced in age, those who have cognitive impairments like Alzheimer’s disease, those with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia or major depression, and those with chronic medical conditions or otherwise in poor physical health, according to the geriatric psychiatry association’s position paper.

A common thread in all of the above is the depletion of physical and emotional reserves, which impairs an older person’s ability to adapt to adverse circumstances.

“In geriatrics, we have this idea of the ‘geriatric cascade’ that refers to how a seemingly minor thing can set in motion a functional, cognitive and psychological downward spiral” in vulnerable older adults, said Dr. Mark Lachs, chief of the division of geriatrics at Weill Cornell Medical College. “Well, the storm was a major thing — a very large disequilibrating event — and its impact is an enormous concern.”

Of special concern are older people who may be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia who are living alone. For this group, the maintenance of ordinary routines and the sense of a dependable structure in their lives is particularly important, and “a situation like Sandy, which causes so much disruption, can be a tipping point,” Dr. Lachs said.

Also of concern are older people who may have experienced trauma in the past, and who may suffer a reignition of post-traumatic stress symptoms because of the disaster.

Most painful of all, for many older adults, is the sense of profound isolation that can descend on those without working phones, electricity or relatives who can come by to help.

“That isolation, I can’t tell you how disorienting that can be,” said Bobbie Sackman, director of public policy for the Council of Senior Centers and Services of New York City. “They’re scared, but they won’t tell you because they’re too proud and ashamed to ask for help.”

The best remedy, in the short run, is the human touch.

“Now is the time for people to reach out to their neighbors in high-rises or in areas where seniors are clustered, to knock on doors and ask people how they are doing,” said Dr. Gary Kennedy, director of the division of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

Don’t make it a one-time thing; let the older person know you’ll call or come by again, and set up a specific time so “there’s something for them to look forward to,” Dr. Kennedy said. So-called naturally occurring retirement communities with large concentrations of older people should be organizing from within to contact residents who may not be connected with social services and find out how they’re doing, he recommended.

In conversations with older adults, offer reassurance and ask open-ended questions like “Are you low on pills?” or “Can I run out and get you something?” rather than trying to get them to open up, experts recommended. Focusing on problem-solving can make people feel that their lives are being put back in order and provide comfort.

Although short-term psychotherapy has positive outcomes for older adults who’ve undergone a disaster, it’s often hard to convince a senior to seek out mental health services because of the perceived stigma associated with psychological conditions. Don’t let that deter you: Keep trying to connect them with services that can be of help.

Be mindful of worrisome signs like unusual listlessness, apathy, unresponsiveness, agitation or confusion. These may signal that an older adult has developed delirium, which can be extremely dangerous if not addressed quickly, Dr. Nathanson said. If you suspect that’s the case, call 911 or make sure you take the person to the nearest hospital emergency room.

This is a safe place to talk about all kinds of issues affecting older adults. Would you be willing to share what kinds of mental health issues you or family members are dealing with since the storm so readers can learn from one another?

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Hurricane Sandy and the Disaster-Preparedness Economy

Jeffrey Phelps for The New York Times

An assembly line at a Generac Power Systems plant. Generac makes residential generators, coveted items in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

FOLKS here don’t wish disaster on their fellow Americans. They didn’t pray for Hurricane Sandy to come grinding up the East Coast, tearing lives apart and plunging millions into darkness.

But the fact is, disasters are good business in Waukesha. And, lately, there have been a lot of disasters.

This Milwaukee suburb, once known for its curative spring waters and, more recently, for being a Republican stronghold in a state that President Obama won on Election Day, happens to be the home of one of the largest makers of residential generators in the country. So when the lights go out in New York — or on the storm-savaged Jersey Shore or in tornado-hit Missouri or wherever — the orders come pouring in like a tidal surge.

It’s all part of what you might call the Mad Max Economy, a multibillion-dollar-a-year collection of industries that thrive when things get really, really bad. Weather radios, kerosene heaters, D batteries, candles, industrial fans for drying soggy homes — all are scarce and coveted in the gloomy aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and her ilk.

It didn’t start with the last few hurricanes, either. Modern Mad Max capitalism has been around a while, decades even, growing out of something like old-fashioned self-reliance, political beliefs and post-Apocalyptic visions. The cold war may have been the start, when schoolchildren dove under desks and ordinary citizens dug bomb shelters out back. But economic fears, as well as worries about climate change and an unreliable electronic grid have all fed it.

 Driven of late by freakish storms, this industry is growing fast, well beyond the fringe groups that first embraced it. And by some measures, it’s bigger than ever.

Businesses like Generac Power Systems, one of three companies in Wisconsin turning out generators, are just the start.

The market for gasoline cans, for example, was flat for years. No longer. “Demand for gas cans is phenomenal, to the point where we can’t keep up with demand,” says Phil Monckton, vice president for sales and marketing at Scepter, a manufacturer based in Scarborough, Ontario. “There was inventory built up, but it is long gone.”

Even now, nearly two weeks after the superstorm made landfall in New Jersey, batteries are a hot commodity in the New York area. Win Sakdinan, a spokesman for Duracell, says that when the company gave away D batteries in the Rockaways, a particularly hard-hit area, people “held them in their hands like they were gold.”

Sales of Eton emergency radios and flashlights rose 15 percent in the week before Hurricane Sandy — and 220 percent the week of the storm, says Kiersten Moffatt, a company spokeswoman. “It’s important to note that we not only see lifts in the specific regions affected, we see a lift nationwide,” she wrote in an e-mail. “We’ve seen that mindfulness motivates consumers all over the country to be prepared in the case of a similar event.”

Garo Arabian, director of operations at B-Air, a manufacturer based in Azusa, Calif., says he has sold thousands of industrial fans since the storm. “Our marketing and graphic designer is from Syria, and he says: ‘I don’t understand. In Syria, we open the windows.’ ”

But Mr. Arabian says contractors and many insurers know that mold spores won’t grow if carpeting or drywall can be dried out within 72 hours. “The industry has grown,” he says, “because there is more awareness about this kind of thing.”

Retailers that managed to stay open benefited, too. Steve Rinker, who oversees 11 Lowe’s home improvement stores in New York and New Jersey, says his stores were sometimes among the few open in a sea of retail businesses.

Predictably, emergency supplies like flashlights, lanterns, batteries and sump pumps sold out quickly, even when they were replenished. The one sought-after item that surprised him the most? Holiday candles. “If anyone is looking for holiday candles, they are sold out,” he says. “People bought every holiday candle we have during the storm.”

If the hurricane was a windfall for Lowe’s, its customers didn’t seem to mind. Rather, most appeared exceedingly grateful when Mr. Rinker, working at a store in Paterson, N.J., pointed them toward a space heater, or a gasoline can, that could lessen the misery of another day without power.

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New Yorkers in long lines ask: Where's the gas?

When Mike Williams moved to New York City from Miami four months ago, he expected cold winters and slushy streets. He was not especially worried by the arrival of a Category 1 hurricane named Sandy. They have plenty of hurricanes in Florida. But gas lines, nearly two weeks after the storm’s departure?

“I don’t get it. I’m blown away,” said Williams, asking the question on New Yorkers’ minds as they began gas rationing Friday, the latest downshift from the city’s usual rapid-fire pace and a measure aimed at relieving hours-long – sometimes daylong waits – in gas lines. “Where is the gas? “ Williams asked incredulously.

It’s a question nobody seems able to answer with total certainty, not even Mayor Michael Bloomberg or the city’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, who dropped by the Brooklyn station where Williams had been waiting in his SUV for 2 1/2 hours.  “It’s hard to pin down,” said Kelly, not a man given to uncertainty when asked a question. “We’re still trying to figure out the details of where it is.”

FULL COVERAGE: East Coast battered by storms

Kelly said as far as he understood, part of the bottleneck was at refineries, some of which were knocked out of commission by Sandy. That meant that even after bridges and tunnels linking New York City to New Jersey and suburban Long Island and Westchester County had been reopened -- clearing the way for tankers to resume deliveries -- there was not enough fuel ready for distribution.

Bloomberg seemed similarly confounded by the fact that so few gas stations were operating. He estimated 30% were pumping. 

"There has been a lot of gas coming in, but it has not gotten a lot of gas stations to open,” said Bloomberg, speaking during his usual Friday interview on the John Gambling Show on WOR radio. Several factors appeared to be at work, Bloomberg said, noting that after power came back, some fuel distribution terminals discovered that damage to their facilities was far greater than initially thought.  

PHOTOS: Devastation and recovery after Sandy

He guessed that some station owners were reluctant to open if they feared the terminals were not operating at full speed. “I think part of it, really, is they just don’t think these terminals can fill the trucks anywhere near fast enough and so they wouldn’t get gas. They’d only be open for a couple of hours and maybe have to pay their employees a full day,” he said. “I don’t know.”

By midday Friday, the city, as well as neighboring Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, appeared to be adjusting well to the new system. Because Friday was Nov. 9 – an odd number – only people with license plates ending in odd numbers were permitted to gas up. The restrictions don’t apply to emergency vehicles, commercial vehicles such as rental cars and taxis, or to people not in vehicles. 

“We’ve seen no problems,” said Kelly, as he gamely posed for pictures with the giddy gas station crowd, whose main diversion until the commissioner’s arrival had consisted of watching the occasional dust-up at the cash register.  

Police officers watched the two lines of cars – each with about 40 vehicles – creep pincer-like into the huge station from different access points. About 50 people stood at the one pump set aside for walk-ups like Erika Bowden, who had three containers to fill.

Her vehicle, parked across the road, was at a half-tank, but she has two children to drive to school and a job in the Bronx, so Bowden wasn’t taking any chances. She also didn’t want to spend her weekend in a gas line. Asked why she didn’t take the subway to work, Bowden replied: “It’s three hours, with three trains and two buses. Or 20 minutes to drive. So my choice is this.”

At one point, it seemed Bowden might not reach the pump. A man in a van began arguing with the harried woman working the cash register, insisting he had given her $45 but had received only $25 worth of gas. He waved his receipt at her through the glass window separating her from the clamoring crowd. She insisted she was powerless to overrule the pump. As the standoff continued, one of the police officers keeping watch on the lines threatened to shut down the station unless the problem was resolved. The driver eventually left, with a written promise to be reimbursed.

“It is what it is,” Williams said as he returned to his car and moved a few feet closer to filling up.

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Jimmy Kimmel’s Family Members Are Apparently Fair Game

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

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Watch this video, bookmark it, and watch it the next time you think you’d rather go home than wait in a long line to vote. Seriously, Time‘s look at the Rockaways on the election night hits the matrix where heart-break and optimism meet and it makes you really appreciate a right we shouldn’t take for granted: 

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The best part of Louis C.K.’s SNL appearance was his “Lincoln” skit. Six days later, here we are with a new video: the director’s cut of the Lincoln-Louie parody—it’s funnier, dirtier, and one really awesome look at what NBC think is too offensive for network television. 

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Children, we’ve learned, are not safe from the pranks of Jimmy Kimmel. Neither is Jimmy Kimmel‘s aunt. 

And finally, the weekend is here. We’re talking like one hour away. This baby elephant video is clear evidence of that: 

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Stradivarius dealer gets six years for embezzlement

VIENNA (Reuters) – A dealer in rare Stradivarius violins coveted by the world’s top violinists was sentenced on Friday to six years in prison for embezzlement after his glittering global empire crumbled.

Dietmar Machold, 63, built his Bremen-based family business into a juggernaut with branches in Zurich, Vienna, New York and Chicago to serve elite musicians and collectors of the instruments that can command prices of several million dollars.

But the business collapsed in 2010, triggering claims against him worth tens of millions of euros (dollars) from creditors and clients who say they were bilked.

“I am a failure. I have lost everything,” Machold said in a Vienna court as he was sentenced after being convicted of embezzling client funds and hiding assets from creditors.

“You played for high stakes and you lost a lot, but you understand you have to take the responsibility for this,” Judge Claudia Moravec-Loidolt told him.

Prosecutor Herbert Harammer had traced the career of the fifth-generation violin expert who became one of the world’s most influential dealers in instruments crafted by 18th-century masters like Antonio Stradivari, whose workshop in Cremona, Italy produced some of the finest violins and cellos ever made.

“This ascent was built on sand,” Harammer had told the court, accusing Machold of leading a lifestyle that was a facade for a business that had actually been insolvent since mid-2006.

FIXTURE OF HIGH SOCIETY

A fixture of high society, Machold lived in an Austrian castle, had a fleet of expensive cars and collected watches and cameras. His global network of rare instrument dealerships let him move in the highest circles of music, fame and money.

His former wife and her mother got one-year suspended sentences for helping him hide precious musical instruments and a valuable watch collection as his business imploded.

Machold admitted from the start that he embezzled money made from the sale of instruments entrusted to him by his customers, but denied fraud charges that are being handled separately.

“I did what I did and I am to be punished for it. That is the way it has to be,” the German native told the court before sentencing, his voice calm before he teared up and had to pause.

Machold, who told the court he did not deserve a mild sentence given the magnitude of his misdeeds, had faced a sentence of up to 10 years. His lawyer did not say if he would file an appeal.

Machold said he acted in desperation after losing a lawsuit brought by a construction company which meant his Eichbuechl castle was at risk.

The high-profile dealer had at times given contradictory testimony, at one stage saying he built personal relationships with the instruments in his care that he called “my children”.

But later he said he “simply forgot” one expensive violin that he failed to report to administrators.

($ 1 = 0.7857 euros)

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Malaria Vaccine Candidate Produces Disappointing Results in Clinical Trial

The latest clinical trial of the world’s leading malaria vaccine candidate produced disappointing results on Friday. The infants it was given to had only about a third fewer infections than a control group.

But researchers said they wanted to press on, assuming they keep getting financial support, because the number of children who die of malaria is so great that even an inefficient vaccine can save thousands of lives.

Three shots of the vaccine, known as RTS, S or Mosquirix and produced by GlaxoSmithKline, gave babies fewer than 12 weeks old 31 percent protection against detectable malaria and 37 percent protection against severe malaria, according to an announcement by the company at a vaccines conference in Cape Town.

Last year, in a trial in children up to 17 months old, the same vaccine gave 55 percent protection against detectable malaria and 47 percent against severe malaria.

The new trial “is less than we’d hoped for,” Moncef Slaoui, chairman of research and development at Glaxo, said in a telephone interview. “But if a million babies were vaccinated, we would prevent 260,000 cases of malaria a year. This is a disease that kills 655,000 babies a year — 31 percent of that is a very large number.”

The company, which has already spent more than $300 million on the vaccine, wants to keep forging ahead, Mr. Slaoui said, “but it is not just our decision.”

It also depends on the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which has put more than $200 million of its Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation financing into the vaccine, and on the World Health Organization, which has helped talk seven African countries into allowing the vaccine to be tested on their children.

The Gates Foundation declined to say how much money it was ultimately prepared to spend on an imperfect vaccine; this set of trials is set to go into 2014.

“The efficacy came back lower than we had hoped, but developing a vaccine against a parasite is a very hard thing to do,” Bill Gates said in a prepared statement. “The trial is continuing, and we look forward to getting more data to help determine whether and how to deploy this vaccine.”

All the families in the trial were given insecticide-treated mosquito nets and encouraged to use them; 86 percent did, so the vaccine worked despite other anti-malaria measures.

RTS, S contains a protein found on the parasite’s surface that provokes an immune reaction. It was first identified decades ago by two New York University scientists, Ruth and Victor Nussenzweig. The vaccine was developed by Glaxo in Belgium and initially tested on American volunteers by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

When the Gates Foundation began focusing on global health in the early part of this century, it was one of the first projects the foundation adopted. Different ways to make the vaccine more effective, including adding different boosters and giving more shots, are being experimented with. Other vaccines using different ways to provoke an immune reaction exist, but none are as far along in clinical trials.

Like an H.I.V. vaccine, one against malaria has proved an elusive goal. The parasite morphs several times, exhibiting different surface proteins as it goes from mosquito saliva into blood and then into and out of the liver. Also, even the best natural “vaccine” — catching the disease itself — is not very effective. While one bout of measles immunizes a child for life, it usually takes several bouts of malaria to confer even partial immunity. Pregnancy can cause women to stop being immune, and immunity can fade out if someone moves away from a malarial area — presumably because they no longer get “boosters” from repeated mosquito bites.

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Common Sense: At Martha Stewart Living, Martha May Be the Problem

Among America’s corporate leaders, there are surely few whose interests are more closely aligned with their shareholders’ than the homemaking icon Martha Stewart. She owns 26 million shares and controls nearly 90 percent of the voting rights of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She’s the company’s nonexecutive chairwoman and serves on the board. Martha Stewart, the company, is inseparable from Martha Stewart, the person.

Her net worth is inextricably tied to the value of the shares. That would seem obvious to everyone except, perhaps, Ms. Stewart herself. She continues to collect lavish multimillion-dollar compensation and perks while her company teeters under the weight of huge losses, its shares trading for a fraction of their former value. The paradox is that if the stock had risen even $1 a share in recent years, Martha Stewart would be wealthier now than if she had taken only nominal compensation from the company.

“You’d think there’d be very little need for board oversight because of the strong alignment of the company’s interests with her personal wealth,” Paul Hodgson, a compensation expert and senior research associate at GMI Ratings, told me this week. “Everything should be pushing her to make sure the company succeeds. For some reason, that’s not happening.”

Last week, Ms. Stewart’s company reported a $50.7 million quarterly loss, a staggering amount considering it exceeded total revenue, which was just $43.5 million. That was a 17 percent drop from revenue in the same quarter last year. Although the loss included a $44.3 million noncash write-down related to the shrinking value of two of its magazines, the company until recently has been bleeding cash, which dropped from $38.5 million to just $17.4 million in the quarter. The company said it would lay off about 70 employees, 12 percent of its work force, and discontinue its stand-alone print version of the magazine Everyday Food.

None of this bad news has made much of a dent on Ms. Stewart’s own compensation. Her base annual pay rose from $1.7 million in 2009 to $2 million in 2010 and 2011, and she received a $3 million retention bonus when she signed her new contract in 2009. She gets an additional minimum of $2 million a year under an “intangible assets license agreement,” which gives the company the rights to “Martha Stewart’s lifestyle and the public perception of Martha Stewart’s lifestyle,” including such details as how she arranges her outdoor furniture.

Her corporate perks are well known, and she has long blurred the line between business and personal expenses. She submitted as a business expense the $17,000 cost of her now-infamous holiday trip to the Mexican luxury resort Las Ventanas al Paraiso. She arrived at the resort the day she dumped her shares in the biotechnology company ImClone upon learning, en route, that the company’s chief executive was trying to sell his shares ahead of a negative Food and Drug Administration decision on the company’s principal drug. (She settled charges of insider trading brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission after being convicted of making criminal false statements to cover up the reason for the sale.) Then she had her accountant tell her companion on the trip that she’d have to pay her “fair share” of the costs, according to testimony in her 2004 trial.

The company doesn’t break out Ms. Stewart’s reimbursed expenses, but general and administrative expenses amounted to a lofty $11 million in the last quarter. That number, of course, includes many expenses besides Ms. Stewart’s, like other executives’ salaries.

The company does reveal what it calls other compensation for Ms. Stewart, which in 2011 included a personal trainer and other expenses for personal fitness; a weekend driver; security services; fees for on-air appearances; unspecified personnel costs not otherwise reimbursed by the company; insurance premiums; and an unidentified charitable contribution, which added up to over $1 million.

Ms. Stewart also receives stock options, nearly $1.8 million worth in 2009 through 2011, though she has not received any options so far this year. Still, as Mr. Hodgson put it, “Why is she even getting stock options? Her interests are already thoroughly aligned with the company, given her ownership stake.” Moreover, the intangible license agreement “is very unusual,” Mr. Hodgson said.

All told, Ms. Stewart’s compensation was $9.8 million in 2009, $5.9 million in 2010 and $5.5 million in 2011, or $21.2 million over the last three years, even as the company was in a downward spiral. Just before Ms. Stewart got out of prison in 2005, her shares were trading at over $34 and she was a billionaire. After plunging during the financial crisis, they were above $8 a share in September 2009. They traded this week at about $2.80.

Asked about the issues raised in this column, a spokesman for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia declined to comment and said Ms. Stewart had no comment.

Read More..

Missing at Guantanamo Bay

Army Pvt. Steve Spofford heard the news at a 6 a.m. roll call on the U.S. Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Foraker!" the platoon sergeant called out.

Silence.

"Foraker!"

Standing in formation, Spofford felt his mind racing. It was not at all like Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Foraker to be missing. Where could he be?

No one disappears from Guantanamo, Spofford thought, least of all the soldiers in charge of guarding the captives taken during the war on terrorism. But after a search of the base and the bay that was launched that morning of Sept. 25, 2002, it soon become apparent that Foraker had vanished.

Ten years later, Foraker is still missing, and no one can explain his disappearance. The Army stopped looking for him long ago, and his friends and family hope that one day he will walk back into their lives. As they watch other U.S. troops return home, they are reminded that no one was to be left behind.

Yet Foraker is an unaccounted casualty of the war, neither a victim nor a hero — someone who one night simply slipped away.

After the roll call, Spofford and others scrambled around the compound, checking the tents and the mess halls, combing through the bowling alley, the Tiki Bar and the Windjammer Club. Dogs and search patrols covered the gym, the hospital and the Navy fleet, but no cars or boats were missing.

A tropical storm was brewing offshore, and hurricane alerts were posted. Helicopters, boats and scuba divers canvassed the water as the day turned to night. Blowing wind and drenching rain would eventually halt the efforts.

Pieces of a Haitian raft were found on the beach, caught in the fence line between Cuba and the base. Parts of a body washed up, but were identified as someone else's.

In a crevice in the high bluffs near the prison, the searchers found Foraker's T-shirt and shorts, neatly folded, along with a wallet, $40 and an Army ID. His boots and socks were gone.

In the days that followed, speculation grew.

Spofford wondered if Foraker had slipped from the cliffs and fallen into the sea. Perhaps he had jumped, committing suicide. Maybe he had noticed the cruise ship in the distance that had sent out a distress signal for medical help. Maybe he dove in to help.

But little made sense.

Foraker hated heights. He could barely swim. And in seven weeks, he was to go home to rural Ohio, to his wife and two young daughters.

With no answers, grief and bewilderment descended on the place they called Gitmo, and for the next several days, Spofford and several others continued to scour the bluffs before and after their shifts.

"He was my friend; he was my sergeant," Spofford said. "But the only one who can truly answer what happened out there is him."

No known difficulties

Foraker was by most accounts a well-adjusted 31-year-old career soldier. He first saw war in 1991 in the Persian Gulf. Afterward he joined the Army reserves, and was called back up after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Army sent him from Ft. Dix, N.J., to Guantanamo shortly after the prison opened in January 2002.

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Exclusive: Google Ventures beefs up fund size to $300 million a year

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google will increase the cash it allocates to its venture-capital arm to up to $300 million a year from $200 million, catapulting Google Ventures into the top echelon of corporate venture-capital funds.

Access to that sizeable checkbook means Google Ventures will be able to invest in more later-stage financing rounds, which tend to be in the tens of millions of dollars or more per investor.

It puts the firm on the same footing as more established corporate venture funds such as Intel's Intel Capital, which typically invests $300-$500 million a year.

"It puts a lot more wood behind the arrow if we need it," said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures.

Part of the rationale behind the increase is that Google Ventures is a relatively young firm, founded in 2009. Some of the companies it backed two or three years ago are now at later stages, potentially requiring larger cash infusions to grow further.

Google Ventures has taken an eclectic approach, investing in a broad spectrum of companies ranging from medicine to clean power to coupon companies.

Every year, it typically funds 40-50 "seed-stage" deals where it invests $250,000 or less in a company, and perhaps around 15 deals where it invests up to $10 million, Maris said. It aims to complete one or two deals annually in the $20-$50 million range, Maris said.

LACKING SUPERSTARS

Some of its investments include Nest, a smart-thermostat company; Foundation Medicine, which applies genomic analysis to cancer care; Relay Rides, a carsharing service; and smart-grid company Silver Spring Networks. Last year, its portfolio company HomeAway raised $216 million in an initial public offering.

Still, Google Ventures lacks superstar companies such as microblogging service Twitter or online bulletin-board company Pinterest. The firm's recent hiring of high-profile entrepreneur Kevin Rose as a partner could help attract higher-profile deals.

Soon it could have even more cash to play around with. "Larry has repeatedly asked me: 'What do you think you could do with a billion a year?'" said Maris, referring to Google chief executive Larry Page.

(Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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Final “Spartacus” Season to Enter the Arena January 25

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Starz’s “Spartacus” series will engage in one last round of battle in January, the cable network said Tuesday.

“Spartacus: War of the Damned” will premiere January 25, 2013 at 9 p.m., marking the beginning of the end for the blood-and-sex soaked franchise, whose previous installments included “Spartacus: Vengeance” and “Spartacus: Blood and Sand.”

“Spartacus: War of the Damned” sees Liam McIntyre returning as the titular gladiator, and takes place following the defeat of Roman commander Gaius Claudius Glaber. Following successful battles against the Romans after the Battle of Vesuvius, the ranks of the rebellious slaves have swelled, with Rome trembling at Spartacus’ increased threat to the empire.

This season also sees the addition of new cast members Todd Lasance as Gaius Julius Caesar, Simon Merrells as Marcus Crassus and Anna Hutchison as Laeta.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ask an Expert: Wondering About Alzheimer’s? Ask Here

This week’s Ask the Expert features Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, who will answer questions related to Alzheimer’s disease and memory loss. He is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and an author of “The Alzheimer’s Action Plan.” Dr. Doraiswamy has also served as an adviser to government agencies, advocacy groups and businesses.

About five million Americans today live with Alzheimer’s disease, and a new diagnosis is made about every 70 seconds. Cases are expected to triple over the coming decades as baby boomers age.

Misperceptions and misdiagnoses are common about Alzheimer’s, which ranks second to only cancer among diseases that adults fear the most. Many people do not understand that there are dozens of causes for memory loss besides Alzheimer’s, including many that can be fully reversed if caught early.

Among the questions Dr. Doraiswamy is prepared to answer:

What are the best tests to determine if it is or isn’t Alzheimer’s?

How do you determine your own risk?

What are the family-care options? Medications for memory? Medications for behavior problems? Preventive strategies?

What has been learned from the latest clinical trials?

How can you improve your memory?

Please leave your questions in the comments section. Answers will be posted on Wednesday.

You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming.

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Popular Wrench Fights a Chinese Rival

John Gress for The New York Times

Dan Brown, inventor of the Bionic Wrench, is defending his patent rights against the Max Axess, made in China.

Last Christmas, Sears had a brisk seller in the Bionic Wrench, an award-winning, patented tool with spiffy lime green accents. This holiday season, though, Sears has a special display for its own wrench, in the red and black colors of its house brand, Craftsman.

William P. O'Donnell/The New Yortk Times

The Bionic Wrench is made in America by Penn United Technologies. Sears sells the Max Axess, sourced from China.

One customer who recently spotted the new Craftsman tool, called the Max Axess wrench, thought it was an obvious knockoff, right down to the try-me packaging. “I saw it and I said, ‘This is a Bionic Wrench,’ ” recalled Dana Craig, a retiree and tool enthusiast in Massachusetts who alerted the maker of the Bionic Wrench. “It’s a very distinctive tool,” he added.

The tools have one significant difference, Mr. Craig noted. The Bionic Wrench is made in the United States. The Max Axess wrench is made in China.

The shift at Sears from a tool invented and manufactured in the United States to a very similar one made offshore has already led to a loss of American jobs and a brewing patent battle.

The story of the Bionic Wrench versus Craftsman, which bills itself as “America’s most trusted tool brand,” also raises questions about how much entrepreneurs and innovators, who rely on the country’s intellectual property laws, can protect themselves. For the little guy, court battles are inevitably time-consuming and costly, no matter the outcome.

Still, the inventor of the Bionic Wrench is determined to fight. He is Dan Brown, an industrial designer in Chicago who came up with the wrench after watching his son try to work on a lawn mower. Mr. Brown says he believes that the Max Axess wrench copies his own and he is planning to file suit against Sears, which declined to answer any questions about the wrenches for this article.

The Bionic Wrench is distinguished by its gripping mechanism, a circle of metal prongs that, inspired by the shutter in a single-lens reflex camera, descend evenly to lock onto almost any nut or bolt.

Since Sears has halted new orders, the Pennsylvania company that makes the Bionic Wrench has had to lay off 31 workers, said Keith Hammer, the project manager at the company, Penn United Technologies. “And that’s not to mention our suppliers,” he added.

Mr. Brown sees a broader issue than just the fate of his wrench. “Our situation is an example of why we’re not getting jobs out of innovation,” he said. “When people get the innovation, they go right offshore. What happened to me is what happened to so many people so many times, and we just don’t talk about it.”

Inventors typically spend $10,000 to $50,000 to obtain the type of patent Mr. Brown has on the wrench, said John S. Pratt, a patent expert at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton in Atlanta. Though he said he could not comment on the merits of Mr. Brown’s potential suit, patent infringement cases can be especially difficult in the tool field, where many improvements are incremental, Mr. Pratt explained.

A defendant in such a case would most likely argue that either the tool did not warrant a patent in the first place, or that its own product did not violate the patent.

The fact that Sears made some changes to the wrench’s design, like making the grooves that allow the metal prongs to slide back and forth visible instead of hidden, will make the case more challenging, he said. “It’s hard for me to imagine that Sears isn’t particularly careful about breach of patent, so there’s probably another side to the story,” he said.

After patenting the wrench in 2005, Mr. Brown formed a company, LoggerHead Tools, to bring it to market, making a point of having it made in the United States.

The Bionic Wrench was greeted with enthusiasm at trade shows and in industrial design competitions, and the company survived the downturn in 2008. Mr. Brown resisted overtures from large chain stores that wanted to sell the tool under their proprietary brand, he said, and rejected the lure of cheaper manufacturing in China. “I was raised a different way,” he said.

The tool sold fairly well on its own — LoggerHead has shipped 1.75 million of them — but Mr. Brown, 56, who teaches industrial design at Northwestern University, says LoggerHead operated on a shoestring and he plowed much of the profit back into the company. “You cannot have big offices and fancy cars and everybody with an administrative assistant, because we are competing with China,” he said.

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Gov. Brown finds Prop. 30's path to victory in divided California

Sacramento—

On Tuesday night, a triumphant Gov. Jerry Brown told supporters in Sacramento that his tax-hike measure was a “unifying force.” Californians were coming together, he said, to support schools and patch the state budget.  

But Brown’s victory may not have been possible without the deepening divisions that have characterized American politics. Even as support for his ballot measure slipped, the governor was able to rely on a firewall of hard-core allies that eventually carried Proposition 30 to victory.

The measure will increase the state sales tax by a quarter of a cent for four years and raise income tax rates on the wealthy by 1 to 3 percentage points for seven years. Without the new taxes, Brown said, the state would have had to make nearly $6 billion in budget cuts, mostly to public schools.

In October, while Brown was largely absent from the campaign trail, public opinion polls showed Proposition 30 leading with a shrinking margin, then dropping below 50% support for the first time.

The slide led to a round of hand-wringing among some of the governor’s allies, since Sacramento operatives have long cautioned that it’s very difficult to pass a tax increase with less than 60% support.

But members of Brown’s team said they were not concerned. They said such benchmarks were relics of a time where the political landscape was populated with Reagan Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans -– moderate voters who could swing either way on an issue like taxes.

Ace Smith, the campaign manager, said that “conventional wisdom has become stale.”

Today, ideological schisms have hardened both sides of the political spectrum, and Brown's team said it didn’t need such a wide margin because its base had become more reliable.

Polls showed that voters who were undecided on Brown’s tax plan were more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, and campaign operatives said they eventually lined up behind the governor’s measure.

Brown began a series of rapid-fire campaign events in the final weeks before the election, and Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist for schools, said the strategy paid off.

"People were really doubtful about its ability to pass," he said. "The governor gets incredibly high marks for his political genius, no doubt about it."

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Apple slides to five-month low, uncertainty grows

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Phase 4 Films Acquires “Precious” Producer’s Directorial Debut “Long Time Gone”

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Phase 4 Films has acquired U.S. and Canadian rights to Sarah Siegel-Magness‘ “Long Time Gone,” a drama starring Virginia Madsen, Amanda Crew and Zach Gilford.

Connecticut resident who has a nervous breakdown after discovering her husband is having an affair. Her son tries to comfort her with the help of his older brother (Gilford) and live-in girlfriend (Crew).

Anthony LaPaglia and Eva Longoria also star in the directorial debut of Siegel-Magness, who produced “Precious.”

“We are thrilled to be working with Sarah on her directorial debut after her past success as a producer,” Phase 4 president and CEO Ben Meyerowitz said in a statement. “We cannot wait until audiences see the great performances by Virginia Madsen and the rest of the wonderful cast involved.”

Phase 4 will release the film day-and-date in theaters and across all VOD and digital platforms Spring 2013.

“I am thrilled to have Phase 4 release my directorial debut. From the very start, they understood and appreciated our film and their enthusiasm has us very excited to move forward in the next chapter of our film’s journey,” Siegel-Magness said in a statement. “Their understanding of the ever changing landscape of the marketplace has us feeling confident that our film is in the right hands.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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A Collective Effort to Save Decades of Research at N.Y.U.

The calls started coming in late on Tuesday and early Wednesday: offers of dry ice, freezer space, coolers. By the end of Thursday there were dozens more: A researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College would clear 1,000 tanks to save threatened zebra fish; another, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, promised to replace some genetically altered mice that were lost; and a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia even offered take over entire experiments, to keep them going.

As hurricane-driven waters surged into New York University research buildings in Kips Bay, on the East Side of Manhattan, investigators in New York and around the world jumped on the phone to offer assistance — executing a reverse Noah’s ark operation, to rescue lab animals and other assets from a flooding vessel.

“I’ve had 43 people who have offered to help so far, and some of them are direct competitors,” said Gordon Fishell, associate director of the N.Y.U. Neuroscience Institute, who lost more than 5,000 genetically altered mice when storm waters surged the night of Oct. 30, cutting off power. “It’s just been unbelievable,” he said. “It really buoys my spirits and my lab’s.”

Staff members at N.Y.U. worked around the clock to preserve research materials, running in and out of darkened buildings without elevator service, hauling dry ice and other supplies up anywhere from 2 to more than 15 floors.

The university’s medical center also got instant help, from almost every major research institution in the area.

The response reflects large shifts in the way that science is conducted over the past generation or so. Individual labs always compete to be first, but researchers increasingly share materials that are enormously expensive and time-consuming to reproduce. The loss of a single cell line or genetically altered animal can slow progress for years in some areas of biomedical research.

“We are totally dependent on each other in the life sciences now, for a very large number of cell lines and extracts, research animals and unique chemical tools and antibodies that might not have backup copies anywhere in the world, or in very few places,” said Dr. Steven Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. “Losing any of these tools tears a significant hole in the entire field.”

Danny Reinberg, a professor of biochemistry at N.Y.U.’s medical school, has studied genetics for 30 years, accumulating valuable mice strains and stocks of extracts from cell nuclei that would be extremely difficult to replace. The extracts must be stored at minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dr. Reinberg said he lost all of his mice: nine strains, including more than 1,000 animals that died in the storm surge. But he managed to save all of the cell extracts by moving some containers into freezers at N.Y.U. labs that weren’t affected and others to the Rockefeller, Columbia and Cornell medical centers, each of which cleared space, he said.

“We were able to save many things; it was just phenomenal to get that kind of help,” said Dr. Reinberg, whose house in New Jersey has had no power.

“Later in the week, at a Starbucks, I could finally download all my e-mail, and there were messages from people at the University of Pennsylvania and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, asking how they could help us re-establish the mouse lines we lost,” he said.

Some scientists have become interdependent because their students, who develop a specialty in specific tissues or animals, often move among labs. Research projects sometimes draw on experiments or analyses the students worked on at more than one place.

One researcher working in Dr. Fishell’s lab was formerly a student of Dr. Stewart Anderson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who sent Dr. Fishell a text message on Wednesday to offer help. “I told him that even if it costs money, we’re happy to keep experiments rolling, if we’re able to,” Dr. Anderson said.

By late Thursday, freezer space in minus-112-degree units was extremely tight in the city. So was dry ice.

Susan Zolla-Pazner, director of AIDS research at the Manhattan Veterans Affairs Medical Center, had lost power in her 18th-floor lab in the department’s building at 23rd Street and First Avenue. She finally hired a company to haul her 20 freezers-full of specimens, for safekeeping.

“We spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday hauling 1,300 pounds of dry ice up to the 18th floor, using the stairs, to stabilize the freezers first,” said Dr. Zolla-Pazner, who is also a professor of pathology at N.Y.U. School of Medicine. “And the dry ice people would only take cash. I have about 25 to 30 people working for me, and everyone was out there on 23rd Street, reaching into their pockets to get what we needed. It was a herculean and heroic effort on the part of everyone here, and that is the story that needs to be told.”

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Investors on Wall St. React Nervously

Henny Ray Abrams/Associated Press

A trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. A day after the election, the outlook of continued divided government in Washington and little prospect for compromise unnerved traders.

A one-two punch of worries about the post-election picture in the United States and economic weakness in Europe sent stocks reeling Wednesday, with major indices falling more than 2 percent. Some industry sectors, like finance and managed care, fell substantially more than that over fears they would be hurt by tougher regulations and other adverse policies in President Obama’s second term.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index recorded its worst performance since June, falling 33.86 to 1,394.53, while the Dow Jones industrial average fell 312.95 to 12,932.73. It was the Dow’s first close below the psychologically important 13,000 level since August.

Shares also came under pressure after Barclays sharply reduced its year-end target for the S.&P. 500 to 1,325 from 1,395 — 5 percent below where the broad-based index closed Wednesday.

“Within the equity market in the near term, we believe there will be nowhere to hide,” said Barry Knapp, chief United States equity strategist at Barclays. “In the near term, we generally suggest cutting risk.”

Many market strategists expect that the market will remain volatile between now and mid-January. If Congress and the president cannot come up with a plan to cut the deficit, hundreds of billions in Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the beginning of 2013 while automatic spending cuts will sharply cut the defense budget and other programs.

Known as the fiscal cliff, this simultaneous combination of sweeping reductions in government spending and tax increases could push the economy into recession in 2013, economists fear.

In the wake of President Obama’s re-election, companies in some sectors, like hospitals and technology, will see a short-term pop, said Tobias Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist with Citi. Other areas, like financial services as well as coal and mining, are likely to be hurt, Mr. Levkovich said.

Indeed, coal companies were among the worst hit Wednesday. The coal industry is particularly sensitive to new environmental regulations, while Mr. Obama has pushed in the past for more investments in renewables and alternative energy sources that could reduce coal demand in the long-term.

Shares of Alpha Natural Resources, a coal giant, were down 12.2 percent to $8.45, while Arch Coal was off 12.5 percent to $7.58.

But HCA Holdings, a hospital operator, jumped 9.4 percent, to $33.85 a share. As a result of Mr. Obama’s victory, Goldman Sachs said it upgraded its rating on HCA to buy from neutral, and raised its price target to $39 from $31. It also raised price targets for Tenet Healthcare and Community Health Systems, although both are still rated neutral.

Goldman downgraded shares of Humana, a leading managed care company, to sell, and its shares fell 7.9 percent to $70.16. Goldman warned that Humana and other managed care providers could be hurt as health care reform moves forward, especially new rules for health insurers that become effective in 2014.

Shares of Wall Street firms and big banks were also hard hit. While Mitt Romney favored substantially altering the Dodd-Frank financial regulations passed in the summer of 2010 and easing many regulations, President Obama has supported stricter rules for the financial services industry. In addition, one of the industry’s fiercest critics, Elizabeth Warren, was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts, unseating her Republican opponent, Scott Brown.

Bank of America fell 7.1 percent to $9.23 while Goldman Sachs dropped 6.6 percent to $117.98 and JPMorgan Chase sank 5.6 percent to $40.48.

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