A Volatile Week Ends With Modest Gains

Stocks advanced modestly on Friday, leaving the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index with slight gains after a volatile week, as strong economic data overshadowed growth concerns in China and Europe and let investors discount the impact of federal spending cuts.

Data reported early in the day showed that Asian factories were slowing and European output was falling, setting off a sharp drop at the beginning of trading in New York. But most of the losses evaporated after a report showed that United States manufacturing activity had expanded in February at the fastest pace in 20 months. Consumer sentiment also rose in February as Americans turned more optimistic about the job market.

As $85 billion in government budget cuts took effect on Friday, President Obama blamed Republicans for the lack of a compromise to avert the so-called sequester. But the stock market appeared to have already priced in legislators’ failure to reach an agreement.

“We were able to dig out of that hole, but not make any great strides on it either,” said Peter M. Jankovskis, co-chief investment officer at OakBrook Investments in Lisle, Ill. “We will probably be in a holding pattern pending some big development on a broader budget deal.”

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 35.17 points, or 0.25 percent, to 14,089.66. The S.& P. 500 rose 3.52 points, or 0.23 percent, to 1,518.20. The Nasdaq composite index advanced 9.55 points, or 0.3 percent, to 3,169.74.

For the week, the Dow rose 0.64 percent, the S.& P. 500 edged up 0.17 percent and the Nasdaq gained 0.25 percent.

It was a bumpy road to the week’s slight gains. The markets slid on Monday after inconclusive elections in Italy revived concerns about the euro zone, only to rebound in the next two sessions after the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, defended the central bank’s stimulus measures.

The low interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy have helped equities continue to attract investors. The Dow is less than 1 percent away from its nominal intraday record of 14,198.10. Declines have been shallow and short-lived, with investors jumping in to buy when the market dips.

Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the New York Stock Exchange by a ratio of about 17 to 13, while on the Nasdaq, about seven stocks rose for every five that fell.

Shares of Intuitive Surgical jumped 8.5 percent on Friday, to $553.40, after a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst, Jeremy Feffer, upgraded the stock, saying a slide of more than 11 percent on Thursday had been a gross overreaction to a news report.

Groupon shares surged 12.6 percent, to $5.10, a day after the company fired its chief executive in response to weak quarterly results.

Gap stock rose 2.9 percent, to $33.87, after the company reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat expectations and raised its dividend by 20 percent. Salesforce.com posted sales that beat forecasts, driving its stock up 7.6 percent, to $182.

Chesapeake Energy shares fell 2.4 percent, to $19.67, after the Securities and Exchange Commission escalated its investigation of the company and its chief executive, Aubrey McClendon, over a perk that granted him a share in each of the natural gas producer’s wells.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose 10/32, to 101 13/32, and its yield fell to 1.85 percent from 1.88 percent late on Thursday.

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Jury in Bell corruption trial may be deadlocked

A court spokeswoman said Thursday the jury in the Bell corruption case appears to be deadlocked.

“The jurors may be at an impasse,” said Patricia Kelly, a spokeswoman for L.A. County Superior Court.

Jurors sent a note to the judge Thursday morning, and all the attorneys in the case were called in.

Six former Bell City Council members are accused of stealing public money by paying themselves extraordinary salaries in one of Los Angeles County’s poorest cities.

Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal are accused of misappropriation of public funds, felony counts that could bring prison terms.

They were arrested in September 2010 and have been free on bail.

The nearly $100,000 salaries drawn by most of the former elected officials are part of a much larger municipal corruption case in the southeast Los Angeles County city in which prosecutors allege that money from the city’s modest general fund flowed freely to top officials.

The three defendants who testified painted a picture of a city as a place led by a controlling, manipulative administrator who handed out enormous salaries, loaned city money and padded future pensions. Robert Rizzo, the former adminstrator, and ex-assistant city manager Angela Spaccia are also awaiting trial.

The four-week trial of the former council members turned on extremes.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Miller said the council members were little more than common thieves who were consumed with fattening their paychecks at the expense of the city’s largely immigrant, working-poor residents.

Miller said the accused represented the “one-percenters" of Bell who had “apparently forgotten who they are and where they live."

Defense attorneys said the former city leaders -- one a pastor, another a mom-and-pop grocery store owner, another a funeral director -- were dedicated public servants who put in long hours and tirelessly responded to the needs of their constituents.

Jacobo testified that Rizzo informed her she could quit her job as a real estate agent and receive a full-time salary as a council member. She said she asked City Attorney Edward Lee if that was possible and he nodded his head.

"I thought I was doing a very good job to be able to earn that, yes," Jacobo said.

Cole said Rizzo was so intimidating that the former councilman voted for a 12% annual pay raise out of fear the city programs he established would be gutted by Rizzo in retaliation if he opposed the pay hikes.

The defense argued that the prosecution failed to prove criminal negligence -- that their clients knew what they were doing was wrong or that a reasonable person would know it was wrong.

The attorney for Hernandez, the city’s mayor at the time of the arrests, said his client had only a grade-school education, was known more for his heart than his intellect and was, perhaps, not overly “scholarly.”

Prosecutors argued that the council members pushed up their salaries by serving on city boards that rarely met and, in one case, existed only as a means for paying them even more money.

Jurors were also left to deal with the question of whether council members were protected by a City Charter that was approved in a special election that drew fewer than 400 voters.

Defense attorneys say the charter allowed council members to be paid for serving on the authorities.

But the prosecutor argued that the charter -- a quasi-constitution for a city -- set salaries at what councils in similar-sized cities were receiving under state law: $8,076 a year. Because council members automatically serve on boards and commissions, the district attorney said the total compensation for all of each council member's work was included in that figure.

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Doctor and Patient: Why Failing Med Students Don’t Get Failing Grades

Tall and dark-haired, the third-year medical student always seemed to be the first to arrive at the hospital and the last to leave, her white coat perpetually weighed down by the books and notes she jammed into the pockets. She appeared totally absorbed by her work, even exhausted at times, and said little to anyone around her.

Except when she got frustrated.

I first noticed her when I overheard her quarreling with a nurse. A few months later I heard her accuse another student of sabotaging her work. And then one morning, I saw her storm off the wards after a senior doctor corrected a presentation she had just given. “The patient never told me that!” she cried. The nurses and I stood agape as we watched her stamp her foot and walk away.

“Why don’t you just fail her?” one of the nurses asked the doctor.

“I can’t,” she sighed, explaining that the student did extremely well on all her tests and worked harder than almost anyone in her class. “The problem,” she said, “is that we have no multiple choice exams when it comes to things like clinical intuition, communication skills and bedside manner.”

Medical educators have long understood that good doctoring, like ducks, elephants and obscenity, is easy to recognize but difficult to quantify. And nowhere is the need to catalog those qualities more explicit, and charged, than in the third year of medical school, when students leave the lecture halls and begin to work with patients and other clinicians in specialty-based courses referred to as “clerkships.” In these clerkships, students are evaluated by senior doctors and ranked on their nascent doctoring skills, with the highest-ranking students going on to the most competitive training programs and jobs.

A student’s performance at this early stage, the traditional thinking went, would be predictive of how good a doctor she or he would eventually become.

But in the mid-1990s, a group of researchers decided to examine grading criteria and asked directors of internal medicine clerkship courses across the country how accurate and consistent they believed their grading to be. Nearly half of the course directors believed that some form of grade inflation existed, even within their own courses. Many said they had increasing difficulty distinguishing students who could not achieve a “minimum standard,” whatever that might be. And over 40 percent admitted they had passed students who should have failed their course.

The study inspired a series of reforms aimed at improving how medical educators evaluated students at this critical juncture in their education. Some schools began instituting nifty mnemonics like RIME, or Reporter-Interpreter-Manager-Educator, for assessing progressive levels of student performance; others began to call regular meetings to discuss grades; still others compiled detailed evaluation forms that left little to the subjective imagination.

Now a new study published last month in the journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine looks at the effects of these many efforts on the grading process. And while the good news is that the rate of grade inflation in medical schools is slower than in colleges and universities, the not-so-good news is that little has changed. A majority of clerkship directors still believe that grade inflation is an issue even within their own courses; and over a third believe that students have passed their course who probably should have failed.

“Grades don’t have a lot of meaning,” said Dr. Sara B. Fazio, lead author of the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who leads the internal medicine clerkship at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “‘Satisfactory’ is like the kiss of death.”

About a quarter of the course directors surveyed believed that grade inflation occurred because senior doctors were loath to deal with students who could become angry, upset or even turn litigious over grades. Some confessed to feeling pressure to help students get into more selective internships and training programs.

But for many of these educators, the real issue was not flunking the flagrantly unprofessional student, but rather evaluating and helping the student who only needed a little extra help in transitioning from classroom problem sets to real world patients. Most faculty received little or no training or support in evaluating students, few came from institutions that had remediation programs to which they could direct students, and all worked under grading systems that were subjective and not standardized.

Despite the disheartening findings, Dr. Fazio and her co-investigators believe that several continuing initiatives may address the evaluation issues. For example, residency training programs across the country will soon be assessing all doctors-in-training with a national standards list, a series of defined skills, or “competencies,” in areas like interpersonal communication, professional behavior and specialty-specific procedures. Over the next few years, medical schools will likely be adopting a similar system for medical students, creating a national standard for all institutions.

“There have to be unified, transparent and objective criteria,” Dr. Fazio said. “Everyone should know what it means when we talk about educating and training ‘good doctors.’”

“We will all be patients one day,” she added. “We have to think about what kind of doctors we want to have now and in the future.”

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Advertising: A Shared History in Detroit Is an Ad Inspiration

THE Chrysler Group is bringing to life the advertising theme for its Chrysler brand, “Imported from Detroit,” through an innovative partnership with a coming Broadway show that bears the Detroit-inspired name of one of the most famous brands in music.

The partnership unites Chrysler and “Motown: the Musical,” about the musical legacy of Berry Gordy and Motown, the record label he founded that is now owned by the Universal Music Group. The musical, scheduled to open on April 14 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is the beneficiary of an elaborate promotional initiative by the Chrysler brand that supplements the show’s own efforts to encourage ticket sales.

The centerpiece of the Chrysler brand’s support is a television commercial that has been running nationally since December, featuring Mr. Gordy riding in a Motown Edition of a Chrysler 300C sedan as the seminal Motown song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” plays on the soundtrack.

The commercial, created by a Chrysler Group agency, GlobalHue in Southfield, Mich., begins with Mr. Gordy at the original “Hitsville U.S.A.” Motown headquarters building in Detroit and ends with him arriving at the Lunt-Fontanne and declaring: “We are Motown. And this is what we do.” As Mr. Gordy enters the theater, the Chrysler slogan appears, altered to read “Imported from Motown.”

The words “ ‘Motown: the Musical’ on Broadway March 2013” appear, referring to the start of previews on March 11, and the address of the show’s Web site, motownthemusical.com, along with the Chrysler brand Web address, chrysler.com.

The commercial is believed to be the first time that a Broadway show has had such paid national television exposure as it prepares to open in New York. The commercial is in addition to a commercial that the producers of “Motown: the Musical” are running on stations in the New York market; the local commercial was created by SpotCo in New York, part of Reach4entertainment Enterprises.

The Chrysler brand will also buttress the show’s marketing with colorful signs to go up in coming days in Penn Station and Times Square. The signs display a Chrysler 300 Motown Edition, the Chrysler logo, the logo of “Motown: the Musical” and photographs of cast members of the show like Brandon Victor Dixon, who portrays Mr. Gordy.

The Chrysler Group is spending an estimated $6 million to $8 million to promote “Motown: the Musical.” The budget for the ads from the show’s producers, Mr. Gordy, Kevin McCollum and Doug Morris, is estimated at $2 million.

The automaker’s efforts extend beyond the product placement and sponsorship agreements that have become increasingly prevalent on Broadway as theater enters the realm of so-called entertainment marketing with television, movies and video games. Unlike the provisions of many of those deals, the Chrysler name is not being added to a lyric of a Motown song, nor are there plans to park a car in the lobby of the Lunt-Fontanne.

Rather, the partnership is about “merging both journeys, the journey of the Chrysler brand and the journey of Mr. Gordy and his music,” said Olivier François, chief marketing officer at the Chrysler Group.

“Motown is the most exported from Detroit of any music and, in this case, imported to New York,” Mr. François said. “It’s putting together the sound and the drive of Detroit. We were meant to meet.”

That thought is expressed in the national commercial, in which a narrator proclaims, “Because if cars are our city’s heart, music is its soul.”

That the partnership is centered on music is no coincidence. Mr. François, a producer of pop music in his native France in the 1980s, described the Motown catalog as “part of the American patrimony” that “will live forever.”

“And so is Chrysler,” he said hopefully. “Regardless of my passion for the Motown music and my respect for Mr. Gordy, I would not have pushed to tie a brand to Motown if there wasn’t this new Chrysler story,” Mr. François said, referring to “Imported from Detroit,” which was introduced in 2011 with a Super Bowl commercial featuring another famous Detroit music figure, Eminem.

“The Motown name has a huge value,” he added. “Does it have a huge value for any car? Maybe not.”

Mr. McCollum, whose Broadway credits include “Avenue Q” and “Rent,” invoked another musical to explain how the show and the Chrysler Group came together: “Kismet.”

“About a year ago, we flew to Detroit and sat down with Olivier and his team, and they pitched the idea,” Mr. McCollum said. “It’s about a collaboration between these two great American industries that came out of one place.”

Besides, he added, Mr. Gordy was “highly influenced by his early days working in an auto plant, learning that you have to put something out there people want.”

Mr. McCollum said he was glad to join Mr. François and Mr. Gordy in “celebrating Detroit when you’d think it’s contrarian thinking” to do so because Motown, Chrysler and “Motown: the Musical” are all about “the power of the American dream.”

The SpotCo campaign for the show — and a public relations effort by Boneau/Bryan-Brown in New York — play that up. The local commercial, for instance, extols Motown’s songs as “the soundtrack that changed America, the beat of a generation, the soul of a nation.”

The goal is “less transactional,” said Ilene Rosen, associate chief operating officer at SpotCo, and “more about synergizing the Motown and Chrysler brands to elevate both.”

As much as other Broadway producers would probably welcome a deep-pocketed partner like the Chrysler Group, the unique circumstances that produced the partnership may make it difficult to emulate, she added.

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Race for L.A. city controller heats up

A previously low-profile race for Los Angeles city controller has begun to heat up as opponents of City Councilman Dennis Zine accuse him of "double dipping" the city's payroll and question why he is considering lucrative tax breaks for a Warner Center developer.

Zine, who for 12 years has represented a district in the southeast San Fernando Valley, is the better known of the major candidates competing to replace outgoing Controller Wendy Greuel.

The others are Cary Brazeman, a marketing executive, and lawyer Ron Galperin. Zine has raised $766,000 for his campaign, more than double that of Galperin, the next-highest fundraiser, and has the backing of several of the city's powerful labor unions.

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He also has been endorsed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and several of his council colleagues. Galperin is backed by the Service Employees International Union, one the city's largest labor groups, and Brazeman is supported by retired Rep. Diane Watson and several neighborhood council representatives.

With the primary ballot less than a week away, Brazeman and Galperin have turned up the heat on Zine, hoping to push the race beyond the March 5 vote. If no one wins more than 50% of the ballots cast, the top two vote-getters will face a runoff in the May general election.

In a recent debate, Zine's opponents criticized him for receiving a $100,000 annual pension for his 33 years with the Los Angeles Police Department and a nearly $180,000 council salary. Brazeman and Galperin called it an example of "double dipping" that should be eliminated.

That brought a forceful response from Zine, who shot back that he gives a big portion of his police pension check to charities.

"I am so tired of hearing 'double dipping,' " he said. "I worked 33 years on the streets of Los Angeles. I have given over $300,000 to nonprofits that need it.... That's what's happened with that pension."

In the same debate, Brazeman accused Zine of cozying up to a Warner Center developer by pushing for tax breaks on a project that already has been approved. The nearly 30-acre Village at Westfield Topanga project would add 1 million square feet of new shops, restaurants, office space and a hotel to a faded commercial district on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

"The councilman proposed to give developers at Warner Center tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks even though it's a highly successful project," he said. "He wants to give it away."

City records show that less than a month after the development was approved in February 2012, Zine asked the council for a study looking at possible "economic development incentives" that could be given to Westfield in return for speeding up street and landscaping enhancements to the project's exterior.

The motion's language notes that similar tax breaks have been awarded to large projects in the Hollywood and downtown areas, and that "similar public investment in the Valley has been lacking." Westfield is paying for the $200,000 study.

Zine defended his decision before the debate audience, saying if the study finds that the city will not benefit, no tax breaks will be awarded. "If there's nothing there, then they get nothing," Zine said.

The controller serves as a public watchdog over the city's $7.3-billion annual operation, auditing the general fund, 500 special fund accounts and the performance of city departments. Those audits often produce recommendations for reducing waste, fraud and abuse.

But the mayor and the council are not obligated to adopt those recommendations, and as a result the job is part accountant, part scolder in chief. All the candidates say they will use their elective position not only to perform audits but also to turn them into action.

Their challenge during the campaign has been explaining how they will do that.

Zine, 65, says his City Hall experience has taught him how to get things done by working with his colleagues. He won't be afraid to publicly criticize department managers, he said, but thinks collaboration works better than being combative.

"You can rant and rave and people won't work with you," he said. "Or you can sit down and talk it out, and you can accomplish things."

Galperin, 49, considers himself a policy wonk who relishes digging into the details to come up with ways to become more efficient with limited dollars and to find ways to raise revenue using the city's sprawling assets. For instance, the city owns two asphalt plants that could expand production and sell some of its material to raise money to fix potholes, he said.

He's served on two city commissions, including one that found millions of dollars in savings by detailing ways to be more efficient. Zine is positioning himself as a "tough guy for tough times," but the controller should be more than that, Galperin said.

"What we really need is some thoughtfulness and some smarts and some effectiveness," he said. "Just getting up there and saying we need to be tough is not going to accomplish what needs to be done."

Brazeman, 46, started his own marketing and public relations firm in West Los Angeles a decade ago and became active in city politics over his discontent with a development project near his home. He has pushed the council to change several initiatives over the last five years, including changes to the financing of the Farmers Field stadium proposal that will save taxpayer dollars, he said.

As controller, he would pick and choose his battles, and, Brazeman said, be "the right combination of constructive, abrasive and assertive."

catherine.saillant@latimes.com

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Global Health: After Measles Success, Rwanda to Get Rubella Vaccine

Rwanda has been so successful at fighting measles that next month it will be the first country to get donor support to move to the next stage — fighting rubella too.

On March 11, it will hold a nationwide three-day vaccination campaign with a combined measles-rubella vaccine, hoping to reach nearly five million children up to age 14. It will then integrate the dual vaccine into its national health service.

Rwanda can do so “because they’ve done such a good job on measles,” said Christine McNab, a spokeswoman for the Measles and Rubella Initiative. M.R.I. helped pay for previous vaccination campaigns in the country and the GAVI Alliance is helping to finance the upcoming one.

Rubella, also called German measles, causes a rash that is very similar to the measles rash, making it hard for health workers to tell the difference.

Rubella is generally mild, even in children, but in pregnant women, it can kill the fetus or cause serious birth defects, including blindness, deafness, mental retardation and chronic heart damage.

Ms. McNab said that Rwanda had proved that it can suppress measles and identify rubella, and it would benefit from the newer, more expensive vaccine.

The dual vaccine costs twice as much — 52 cents a dose at Unicef prices, compared with 24 cents for measles alone. (The MMR vaccine that American children get, which also contains a vaccine against mumps, costs Unicef $1.)

More than 90 percent of Rwandan children now are vaccinated twice against measles, and cases have been near zero since 2007.

The tiny country, which was convulsed by Hutu-Tutsi genocide in 1994, is now leading the way in Africa in delivering medical care to its citizens, Ms. McNab said. Three years ago, it was the first African country to introduce shots against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which causes cervical cancer.

In wealthy countries, measles kills a small number of children — usually those whose parents decline vaccination. But in poor countries, measles is a major killer of malnourished infants. Around the world, the initiative estimates, about 158,000 children die of it each year, or about 430 a day.

Every year, an estimated 112,000 children, mostly in Africa, South Asia and the Pacific islands, are born with handicaps caused by their mothers’ rubella infection.

Thanks in part to the initiative — which until last year was known just as the Measles Initiative — measles deaths among children have declined 71 percent since 2000. The initiative is a partnership of many health agencies, vaccine companies, donors and others, but is led by the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Unicef and the World Health Organization.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the source of the vaccine and some financing for the campaign. The vaccine and financing is being provided by the GAVI Alliance, not the Measles and Rubella Initiative.

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Groupon Shares Crumple After Dismal Outlook, Take-Rate Cut

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Groupon Inc lost a quarter of its market value on Wednesday after the company revealed it began to take a smaller cut of revenue on daily deals during the holidays, sacrificing revenue and profits to attract and keep merchants.

The cut in its "take rate", which some analysts had said was needed to revive flagging interest among merchants in its Internet offers, was a blow to fourth-quarter results. And a sharper-than-expected post-holiday slowdown in its new e-commerce business contributed to a disappointing first-quarter sales forecast.

The stream of bad numbers, which included a surprise loss in the fourth quarter, drove Groupon's stock down 26 percent to $4.43 in after hours trade. Overall, the company has shed more than three-quarters of its value since debuting at $20 in November of 2011.

"This raises questions about how these guys are going to be able to scale the business," said Tom White, an analyst at Macquarie. "The forecast is underwhelming."

Groupon is among a group of consumer-focused Internet startups that went public to much fanfare in 2011 - before losing massive chunks of market value as investors realized they had over-rated their prospects.

Within a year, Groupon had run into problems dealing with European merchants and sustaining interest among users as deals fever receded. In 2012, analysts speculated that Chief Executive Andrew Mason, known for a quirky sense of humor, may have fallen out of favor with the board.

A company spokesman said Mason remained in charge and the CEO addressed analysts on Wednesday's post-results call.

Groupon reported fourth-quarter revenue rose 30 percent to $638.3 million from $492.2 million in the year-ago period. But it slid into the red with a 1 cent per share loss excluding items, versus expectations for a slim profit of 3 cents a share.

It forecast first-quarter revenue of $560 million to $610 million, sharply below the $650 million average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Chief Financial Officer Jason Child told Reuters that Groupon began sharing more money from its deals with merchants early in the fourth quarter, to persuade them to come onboard and run an offer for the first time, or work on another.

This was done selectively in the United States and in Europe, he added.

Historically, Groupon has kept about 40 percent of the money generated by daily deals. That declined to about 35 percent in the fourth quarter. Groupon then "fine tuned" take rates later in the quarter and Child said the company expects profitability to improve as a result.

"We are focused on driving growth," he said in an interview. "We will make the investments we feel we need to optimize for growth and merchant profitability."

THE GOODS ON EUROPE

Merchants have complained that Groupon takes too large a cut of online offers.

Groupon executives forecast long-term take rates of 30 percent to 40 percent for the daily deals business, during a conference call with analysts. One of the reasons Groupon reduced take rates was to create more daily deals for a new business called Local Marketplace, which launched in November.

Groupon has mostly focused on sending daily emails to customers offering vouchers for activities in their area. Local Marketplace relies instead on people searching for something to do or buy nearby, such as an oil change or a massage. By the end of the third quarter, before the launch, Groupon had amassed an online store of more than 27,000 deals for the new marketplace.

Analysts have said the move has potential because Groupon's deals may be more likely to show up in Google searches. By the end of 2012, Groupon claimed almost 37,000 active deals running in North America, and many were longer-term offers for Local Marketplace.

For now, Groupon Goods, the company's discounted product sales business, generated a lot of the fourth-quarter revenue growth, though it's seasonally volatile and generates lower margins than daily deals.

Groupon's limp outlook revived fears its business model may be in jeopardy. Chief among their concerns have been intensifying competition in e-commerce, and a struggling European division walloped by the recession there.

Executives warned a turnaround effort there would take time, and signaled that cost cuts are coming for the company's International business.

Groupon is trying to fix it by reducing the size of discounts on deals there and testing faster payments to higher-quality merchants. Technology used to automate its U.S. operations and sales efforts is being rolled out in Europe now.

Kal Raman, chief operating officer, said more than the twice the number of people are needed to handle and process an International division deal, than in the United States.

A Groupon spokesman said there are no "definite" plans for International job cuts, but there were staff reductions in the United States when the company automated.

"That is an enormous opportunity to organize Groupon's operations to be both more efficient," Raman told analysts during the conference call.

(Reporting by Alistair Barr; Editing by David Gregorio, Richard Chang and Tim Dobbyn)

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Tribune Co. hires advisors to explore sale of newspaper unit

Tribune Co. has hired investment bankers to advise the media company on the potential sale of its newspaper publishing unit.

The company announced that it has retained JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Evercore Partners to assess whether to sell the division that includes the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and six other daily newspapers.

The bankers will analyze bids from suitors, but their hiring does not necessarily mean that the assets would be sold.

"There is a lot of interest in our newspapers, which we haven't solicited," Gary Weitman, a Tribune spokesman, said in a statement. "Hiring outside financial advisors will help us determine whether that interest is credible, allow us to consider all of our options, and fulfill our fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders and employees."

Tribune hopes to sell the newspaper group intact instead of selling each paper individually, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Chicago company has a healthy balance sheet and doesn't feel financial pressure to sell the properties, according to the person. It's unclear how long the process could take.

There has been widespread speculation that Tribune would attempt to unload the newspaper business to focus on its more promising television operations. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is among the possible bidders for the newspaper assets.

Tribune emerged from its four-year bankruptcy at the end of 2012 and appointed broadcasting veteran Peter Liguori as chief executive in January.

JPMorgan Chase holds an ownership stake in Tribune.

Evercore Partners, a boutique investment bank, also is working for the parent company of the New York Times on its planned divestiture of the Boston Globe.

walter.hamilton@latimes.com

andrew.tangel@latimes.com

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Advanced Breast Cancer May Be Rising Among Young Women, Study Finds

The incidence of advanced breast cancer among younger women, ages 25 to 39, may have increased slightly over the last three decades, according to a study released Tuesday.

But more research is needed to verify the finding, which was based on an analysis of statistics, the study’s authors said. They do not know what may have caused the apparent increase.

Some outside experts questioned whether the increase was real, and expressed concerns that the report would frighten women needlessly.

The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that advanced cases climbed to 2.9 per 100,000 younger women in 2009, from 1.53 per 100,000 women in 1976 — an increase of 1.37 cases per 100,000 women in 34 years. The totals were about 250 such cases per year in the mid-1970s, and more than 800 per year in 2009.

Though small, the increase was statistically significant, and the researchers said it was worrisome because it involved cancer that had already spread to organs like the liver or lungs by the time it was diagnosed, which greatly diminishes the odds of survival.

For now, the only advice the researchers can offer to young women is to see a doctor quickly if they notice lumps, pain or other changes in the breast, and not to assume that they cannot have breast cancer because they are young and healthy, or have no family history of the disease.

“Breast cancer can and does occur in younger women,” said Dr. Rebecca H. Johnson, the first author of the study and medical director of the adolescent and young adult oncology program at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

But Dr. Johnson noted that there is no evidence that screening helps younger women who have an average risk for the disease and no symptoms. “We’re certainly not advocating that young women get mammography at an earlier age than is generally specified,” she said.

Expert groups differ about when screening should begin; some say at age 40, others 50.

Breast cancer is not common in younger women; only 1.8 percent of all cases are diagnosed in women from 20 to 34, and 10 percent in women from 35 to 44. However, when it does occur, the disease tends to be more deadly in younger women than in older ones. Researchers are not sure why.

The researchers analyzed data from SEER, a program run by the National Cancer Institute to collect cancer statistics on 28 percent of the population of the United States. The study also used data from the past when SEER was smaller.

The study is based on information from 936,497 women who had breast cancer from 1976 to 2009. Of those, 53,502 were 25 to 39 years old, including 3,438 who had advanced breast cancer, also called metastatic or distant disease.

Younger women were the only ones in whom metastatic disease seemed to have increased, the researchers found.

Dr. Archie Bleyer, a clinical research professor in radiation medicine at the Knight Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland who helped write the study, said scientists needed to verify the increase in advanced breast cancer in young women in the United States and find out whether it is occurring in other developed Western countries. “This is the first report of this kind,” he said, adding that researchers had already asked colleagues in Canada to analyze data there.

“We need this to be sure ourselves about this potentially concerning, almost alarming trend,” Dr. Bleyer said. “Then and only then are we really worried about what is the cause, because we’ve got to be sure it’s real.”

Dr. Johnson said her own experience led her to look into the statistics on the disease in young women. She had breast cancer when she was 27; she is now 44. Over the years, friends and colleagues often referred young women with the disease to her for advice.

“It just struck me how many of those people there were,” she said.

Dr. Donald A. Berry, an expert on breast cancer data and a professor of biostatistics at the University of Texas’ M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he was dubious about the finding, even though it was statistically significant, because the size of the apparent increase was so small — 1.37 cases per 100,000 women, over the course of 30 years.

More screening and more precise tests to identify the stage of cancer at the time of diagnosis might account for the increase, he said.

“Not many women aged 25 to 39 get screened, but some do, but it only takes a few to account for a notable increase from one in 100,000,” Dr. Berry said.

Dr. Silvia C. Formenti, a breast cancer expert and the chairwoman of radiation oncology at New York University Langone Medical Center, questioned the study in part because although it found an increased incidence of advanced disease, it did not find the accompanying increase in deaths that would be expected.

A spokeswoman for an advocacy group for young women with breast cancer, Young Survival Coalition, said the organization also wondered whether improved diagnostic and staging tests might explain all or part of the increase.

“We’re looking at this data with caution,” said the spokeswoman, Michelle Esser. “We don’t want to invite panic or alarm.”

She said it was important to note that the findings applied only to women who had metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis, and did not imply that women who already had early-stage cancer faced an increased risk of advanced disease.

Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld
, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said he and an epidemiologist for the society thought the increase was real.

“We want to make sure this is not oversold or that people suddenly get very frightened that we have a huge problem,” Dr. Lichtenfeld said. “We don’t. But we are concerned that over time, we might have a more serious problem than we have today.”

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DealBook: Wall Street Pay Rises, for Those Who Still Have a Job

7:39 p.m. | Updated

Wall Street may be shrinking — cutting thousands of jobs over the last year — but for those who remain, the pay is still very lucrative.

The average cash bonus for those employed in the financial industry in New York last year rose roughly 9 percent, to $121,900, Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York State’s comptroller, said on Tuesday.

Cash bonuses in total are forecast to increase by roughly 8 percent, to $20 billion this year.

The total, however, is down from 2010, when it was $22.8 billion. Wall Street’s peak came in 2006, before the financial crisis, with a total $34.3 billion in bonuses. The year-end bonus can account for the bulk of a finance professional’s annual compensation.

The report from the state comptroller’s office gives estimates on the bonuses, based on tax withholding data, data from banks and conversations with industry experts. It came the same day that JPMorgan Chase, one of the country’s biggest banks, announced it was eliminating 17,000 jobs over the next two years through layoffs and attrition, adding its name to a string of large banks that continue to cut jobs to reduce expenses.

Wall Street has regained 30 percent of the 28,300 jobs lost during the financial crisis, Mr. DiNapoli said. And firms are continuing to streamline as they cope with a sluggish economic recovery, difficult markets and a heavier regulatory burden. While financial industry employment in New York City was steady in the first half of 2012, it was down slightly in the second half of the year, the comptroller’s office said.

“Wall Street is still in transition, but it is very slowly adjusting to changes in its economic and regulatory environment,” he said.

In an effort to hold down — albeit temporarily — compensation costs, a number of financial firms have deferred cash payments to employees in recent years. Mr. DiNapoli said on Tuesday that part of the increase in 2012 was cash promised in recent years but actually paid out last year. He said that it was difficult to break out what percentage of the total was deferrals, but he believed that it was still a small part of the total.

The ebbs and flows of Wall Street pay have a major impact on the economy of New York City, where 169,700 are employed in finance. Local businesses like restaurants, luxury goods retailers and the upper end of the real estate market pin their fortunes to the flood of cash from year-end bonuses.

Before the start of the financial crisis, business and personal income tax collections from finance-related activities accounted for up to 20 percent of New York State tax revenue. In 2012, that contribution fell to 14 percent.

Yet finance remains the best paying sector in New York City, Mr. DiNapoli told reporters during a conference call.

All told, the average pay package for securities industry employees in New York was $362,900 in 2011, the last year for which data is available, almost unchanged from 2010.

“Profits and bonuses rebounded in 2012, but the industry is still restructuring,” Mr. DiNapoli said. Despite its smaller size, the securities industry is still a very important part of the New York City and New York State economies.”

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