Son of Nick Van Exel sentenced to 60 years on murder conviction

Nick Van Exel was taken 37th overall by the Lakers in the 1993 draft. (Vince Compagnone / Los Angeles Times / February 2, 2013)

By Eric Pincus

February 2, 2013, 7:06 a.m.

Sad news for a former Lakers All-Star. Nickey Maxwell Van Exel, the son of Nick Van Exel, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for murder in Texas on Friday.

The 22-year-old was found guilty Thursday of shooting Bradley Bassey Eyo in 2010.

Nick Van Exel was selected by the Lakers with the 37th overall pick in the 1993 NBA draft.

Before the arrival of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant in 1996, Van Exel was the team's leader and go-to player.

Van Exel played with the Lakers until 1998, then was traded after an All-Star season for Tony Battie and the draft rights to Tyronn Lue.

He is currently on staff with the Atlanta Hawks in player development.

ALSO:

Lakers top Minnesota for first road win of 2013

Dwight Howard flying home for nonsurgical PRP procedure

Short list of players who fit within Lakers disabled player exception

Email Eric Pincus at eric.pincus@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @EricPincus.

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The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization

It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.

The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly interactive visualization that avoids distracting the viewer while still imparting a great amount of information.

Meanwhile, a selection of tweets are projected, along with latest hashtags and mentions, all while tracking total tweets, words, and characters. The length of the two gray lines on the display represent the number of characters and words in each tweet.

Though it’s one of the most beautiful, Tweetping is far from the first to display geotagged tweet information; coders have built sites to display election tweets, adjustable parameter maps, and even 3-D visualizations.

Tweetping even represents Antarctica, but not the ISS. And there’s no pause button; like Twitter itself, Tweetping’s data accrues incessantly; there’s no off switch but the back button.

Nathan Hurst is learning how to make some things, knows how to fix some others, and is already pretty good at breaking everything else. He has written for Outside and Wired, traveled in Africa, and tweets as @NathanBHurst.

Read more by Nathan Hurst

Follow @NathanBHurst on Twitter.

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Amazon unveils exclusive ‘Downton Abbey’ deal with PBS

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc said on Friday that it struck an exclusive deal to distribute seasons of the hit TV show “Downton Abbey” to members of its subscription-based video streaming service.

Beginning June 18, Amazon‘s Prime Instant Video service will be the exclusive subscription service for streaming Season 3 of “Downton Abbey,” as part of a new content licensing agreement with PBS Distribution, a unit of The Public Broadcasting Service.

The online retailer said that later this year, no digital subscription service other than Prime Instant Video will offer any seasons of “Downton Abbey.”

The phenomenally successful British period drama, now in its third season, has become both a critical success and a cult favorite among its many U.S. fans.

Written by Oscar-winning scriptwriter Julian Fellowes, the series follows the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants at an impressive country estate in the early 1900s.

Prime Instant Video will continue to be the exclusive subscription home through Season 4 and, if produced, Season 5 of the show, the company added.

The deal is the latest effort by Amazon, the world’s largest Internet retailer, to expand in digital content and take on Netflix Inc, the leading online video subscription service in the United States.

Amazon is spending heavily on licensing deals for movies and TV shows to attract more viewers to Prime Instant Video. The service is offered free to subscribers of Amazon Prime, the company’s broader online shopping subscription program, which costs $ 79 a year for two-day shipping in the United States.

Netflix and rival Hulu Plus, owned by Comcast Corp, News Corp and Walt Disney Co, currently offer some seasons of “Downton Abbey.”

As of July 1, no “Downton Abbey” seasons will be available on Netflix, according to a person familiar with the agreement between Amazon and PBS.

By obtaining exclusive rights later this year to stream “Downton Abbey” on Prime Instant Video, Amazon is hoping more people will sign up for its broader Prime service. When that happens, shoppers often spend more on Amazon.com, analysts say.

Amazon’s choice of “Downton Abbey” was likely driven by an analysis of buying behavior by existing customers, a strength of Amazon’s.

The company noted that Seasons 1 and 2 of the series are the most-watched TV seasons of all time on the Prime Instant Video service already.

“Our Prime customers have spoken,” Brad Beale, director of digital video content acquisition for Amazon, said in a statement. “The series is consistently in our top most watched TV shows each week.”

(Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

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Letters: Seeing Lincoln as a C.E.O.

To the Editor:

Re “Lincoln’s School of Management” (Jan. 27), which described the decision-making strategy for the Emancipation Proclamation as a model for today’s executives: 

The article’s description of how “Americans reacted strongly to the proclamation” said nothing of how enslaved African-Americans reacted. Instead, it focused only on big political players, who might be considered the other C.E.O.’s in the game: abolitionists, Republican leaders, Union Democrats, Jefferson Davis, and The New York World.

Nor does it mention the major oversight of Lincoln’s management team: its failure to make supportive provisions for the many slaves who predictably embraced the emancipation promise and fled their masters, only to face equally predictable starvation and disease. Perhaps this case study should be rewritten to encourage business leaders to think a little bit less about how much they’re like Lincoln, and a little bit more about how their business decisions affect ordinary people in the real world.

MARK PETERSON

Berkeley, Calif., Jan. 27

The writer is a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Edward Koch dies at 88; outspoken mayor led New York City comeback

Edward I. Koch, a Greenwich Village lawyer who became mayor of New York in the late 1970s and led the city out of one of its worst financial crises by stabilizing the budget and restoring its swagger, has died. He was 88.

Koch died early Friday of congestive heart failure in a Manhattan hospital, his friend and spokesman, George Arzt said. Koch had been hospitalized Monday, a day before a documentary about him, "Koch," premiered in New York City. He had complained of trouble breathing and other ailments, and it was the latest of several hospitalizations for the former mayor in recent months.

For most of his adult life, Koch had lived alone in an apartment off Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. It's where he departed the morning he rode a public bus to City Hall to be sworn in as the 105th mayor and where he returned 12 years later, at age 65, after a disastrous fourth run to keep the job he clearly relished and worked hard at. Voters had finally tired of his infatuation with himself and his racially divisive rhetoric; but far from retiring, Koch spent the rest of his life out of public office but never out of public view.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2013

He juggled almost a dozen jobs including law partner, columnist, author, radio show host, playwright, movie reviewer, public speaker and appeared relentlessly in the media, a shtick-artist with one of the most recognizable New York accents in the world. When he wasn't bellowing at opponents on political round tables, he was hawking everything from diet aids to soft drinks in advertisements and popping up in screen cameos playing always himself, the quintessential New Yorker, alongside Carrie and the girls in episodes of "Sex in the City" or with Big Bird in "The Muppets Take Manhattan."

He was pivotal in a September 2011 upset that put a Republican into the heavily Democratic congressional district that had been held by Rep. Anthony Weiner, who had been forced to resign in a "sexting" scandal. Koch helped catapult Republican Bob Turner to an unlikely victory in the special election to replace Weiner after he endorsed Turner to show his anger with President Obama's Middle East policy. "Ed Koch was enough to turn this around," Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said after Turner's win.

For his 86th birthday, New York's current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, renamed the Queensboro Bridge linking Manhattan to Koch's home borough of Queens after him, saying the bridge – now officially known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge -- was like Koch: "a resilient, hard-working New York City icon."

"He was a great mayor, a great man, and a great friend," Bloomberg said in a statement Friday after Koch's death. "In elected office and as a private citizen, he was our most tireless, fearless, and guileless civic crusader. Through his tough, determined leadership and responsible fiscal stewardship, Ed helped lift the city out of its darkest days and set it on course for an incredible comeback."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo echoed the sentiment. "No New Yorker has -- or likely ever will -- voice their love for New York City in such a passionate and outspoken manner than Ed Koch," said Cuomo. "New York City would not be the place it is today without Ed Koch's leadership over three terms at City Hall."

City flags were ordered flown at half-staff.

"He was the epitome of New York--loud, funny, opinionated, smart," said Arzt, a former reporter who became Koch's spokesman in City Hall and had lunch with him every Saturday after he left, along with 10 other alumni of the administration. "Ed was very much a straight shooter, a champion of the middle class, a moderate Democrat akin to a Harry Truman. He defied categories."

In fact, Koch loved to enrage liberals by doing and saying the unthinkable--endorsing Republican politicians (John Lindsay, Rudolph Giuliani, George W. Bush) and their beliefs (the death penalty). But Koch also held fast to many liberal values. A civil libertarian, Koch made one of his first executive orders when he became mayor to add sexual preference to a citywide ban on job discrimination.

He not only never shied away from controversy, he invited it; unlike successors Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, he enjoyed confrontation. He once wrestled an egg-throwing heckler to the floor before the police could move in.

Altogether Koch wrote (mostly co-authored) 15 books, including eight autobiographies, two children's books and multiple mystery novels starring himself as the detective. He also regularly reviewed movies and restaurants, and at last count had more than 6,200 followers on Twitter (@mayoredkoch).

Really, Koch would opine to whomever, whenever, never mincing words: Movie tickets were too expensive; the United Nations, after an anti-Israel vote, was "made up of gangsters, cutthroats and piranhas"; a Puerto Rican mayoral rival was a "poverty pimp"; Sarah Palin was likable "but she scares the hell out of me." He never lost interest in his absolutely favorite subject—himself. "How'm I doin'?" was his trademark question.

The only topics that remained off limits were his heroic service as an infantryman in World War II—he was awarded two battle stars—and his sexuality. A lifelong bachelor, Koch refused to delve into rumors of his homosexuality. "I ran in a total of 24 elections and won 21," he once told the New York Times. "I will not be a coward and say I am straight or I'm gay, because it's no one's business. I got where I am today not because of sexuality or gender but because people thought I was the best at what I did...."

In recent years, though Koch appeared to mellow, seeking reconciliation with many of his former rivals, he refused to yield when it came to standards for public service. As recently as the summer of 2010, at age 85, he ginned up a campaign called "New York Uprising" to reform state government. Despite a history of heart disease that left him with two pacemakers and a degenerative spinal disorder that caused the once-strapping 6-foot-1 former mayor to be stooped in old age, he embarked in a rented Jeep on a campaign-style press tour around upstate New York to shame reluctant legislators in their home districts to signing a pledge to "clean up Albany."

"I didn't willingly take this on," he told reporters. "I was waiting for someone else to do it.... It's only after six months or a year of going to every breakfast, lunch and dinner, where all they talked about is the dysfunctional Legislature ... I'm thinking somebody is going to stand up and challenge this in some form. But nobody did. So I said to myself, 'Well, if nobody will, I will.' "

This was shortly after Koch, ever the showman, revealed he'd finalized plans for his funeral and penned his gravestone epitaph about his love of his religion, Judaism, his city and his country.

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Video: Fish Neurons Fire in Real-Time as It Stalks Prey

By Carrie Arnold, ScienceNOW

Studying the links between brain and behavior may have just gotten easier. For the first time, neuroscientists have found a way to watch neurons fire in an independently moving animal. Though the study was done in fish, it may hold clues to how the human brain works.

“This technique will really help us understand how we make sense of the world and why we behave the way we do,” says Martin Meyer, a neuroscientist at King’s College London who was not involved in the work.

The study was carried out in zebrafish, a popular animal model because they’re small and easy to breed. More important, zebrafish larvae are transparent, which gives scientists an advantage in identifying the neural circuits that make them tick. Yet, under a typical optical microscope, neurons that are active and firing look much the same as their quieter counterparts. To see what neurons are active and when, neuroscientists have therefore developed a variety of indicators and dyes. For example, when a neuron fires, it is flooded with calcium ions, which can cause some of the dyes to light up.

Still, the approach has limitations. Traditionally, Meyer explains, researchers would immobilize the head or entire body of a zebrafish larvae so that they could get a clearer picture of what was happening inside the brain. Even so, it was difficult to interpret neural activity for just a few neurons and over a short period of time. Researchers needed a better way to study the zebrafish brain in real time.

Enter Junichi Nakai of Saitama University’s Brain Science Institute in Japan. He and colleagues selected a glowing marker known as green fluorescent protein (GFP) and linked it to a compound that would light up in the presence of large amounts of calcium. The researchers then inserted the DNA that codes for this marker into the zebrafish genome, tying it to a specific protein only found in neurons. This means that only actively firing neurons would fluoresce, and scientists could track neural activity without applying dye. Because the signal was stronger and clearer, researchers didn’t have to immobilize the larvae.

To test the setup, Nakai and colleagues sent the genetically engineered zebrafish larvae hunting for food. When the larvae see a swimming single-celled animal called a paramecium, they engage in what animal behaviorists call a prey capture response: They turn their heads toward the paramecium, swim at it, and finally eat it.

Using their newly developed imaging system, Nakai and colleagues associated the sight of moving paramecium and prey capture behavior with the activation of a group of neurons in the optic tectum, the visual center of the zebrafish brain. The neurons pulsed in tandem with the movements of the paramecium—a sudden dart of the one-celled organism caused a bright flash of neural activity in the zebrafish tectum (see videos). The tectum went silent if the paramecium stilled. Only moving prey interested the larvae, the team reports today in Current Biology. These particular neurons, Nakai proposes, are part of a specific visual-motor pathway that links the sight of moving prey with swimming behavior.

“It’s a good proof of principle study,” Meyer says. “The most important thing is that they showed [the technique worked] on freely behaving fish.”

All animals, from zebrafish to humans, contain an optic tectum, which coordinates eye movement and the organism’s response to objects in their visual field. In humans, for example, the tectum helps us track a buzzing mosquito so that we can take a swat at it. This means that the tectal activity in these transparent larvae could have direct correlates in the brains of humans and other mammals, Nakai says. Scientists can also watch these responses over time and compare brain activity with different stimuli.

The neurons in the larvae continuously make new GFP, which allows ongoing detection of neural activity. “It means we can take the same measurements today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow,” Nakai says. “This technique makes long-term measurement possible.” He hopes the approach will allow scientists to associate a variety of specific behavior patterns with specific neural circuits. That, in turn, could improve the development of psychiatric drugs, as scientists will more easily be able to tell if a particular drug has the desired effects on the brain.

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

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Geraldo Rivera ”Truly Contemplating” New Jersey Senate Run

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Geraldo Rivera said Thursday he is “truly contemplating” running for one of New Jersey‘s U.S. senate seats as a Republican.

The Fox News host said on his radio show that he would run against incumbent Democrat Frank Lautenberg or Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a likely candidate for the seat if the 89-year-old Lautenberg steps down.

“I mention this only briefly, fasten your seatbelt,” Rivera said. “I mentioned this only briefly to my wife … but I am and I’ve been in touch with some people in the Republican Party in New Jersey. I am truly contemplating running for Senate against Frank Lautenberg or Cory Booker.”

The Republican Party of New Jersey did not immediately reply to requests from TheWrap for confirmation.

Lautenberg, currently the oldest sitting senator, has not yet announced whether he will run for another term in 2014. But Booker has said he plans to make a bid for the seat.

Rivera said he is “having a great time” working in media but the 69-year-old said he has reached an age where he must contemplate other moves.

“I’m not going to drill this out, because obviously I’ve got commitments to Fox and to here at the radio program and I’m really having a great time,” Rivera said. “But I figure at my age, if I’m going to do it I’ve got to do it. And there doesn’t seem to be any Republicans ready to work against or run against Corey Booker, the popular Newark mayor.”

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Science and Health News

Michael Probst/Associated Press

Baby hedgehogs in Germany.

Friday in science, clues to owls’ backwardness, fresh dangers to the seas and the launch of a giant kite. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

Phil Marino for The New York Times

Physicists monitored data from heavy ion collisions in the control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory particle collider in 2007.

Felix Ordonez/Reuters

A snowy owl.

Hedgehog Bacteria: Sonic the Hedgehog may have a dark side. The Associated Press reports that in the last year, 20 people in the United States were infected, and 1 person died, from “a rare but dangerous” type of salmonella bacteria. All the cases, health officials said, were linked to hedgehogs that were kept as pets.

More Bad News for the Seas: National Geographic reports that buried beneath the waves are rich deposits of “gold, copper, zinc, and other valuable minerals,” and that is attracting the attention of the humans on the land above. Mining the minerals is not easy, but one company has already obtained an extraction contract for the waters off Papua, New Guinea, the magazine says.

Less Money for Science: Lean days are ahead for recipients of federal government contracts, and that knowledge is having an impact on physics research. Scientific American reports that a federal advisory panel has recommended closing a particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

Spinning Heads: Owls are able to do something that parents only dream about: swivel their heads completely around to see what is going on behind them. An illustrator and a physician at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine discovered that they can do so without severing their arteries or preventing blood from reaching their brains because of holes in their neck bones, which may hold air sacks that cushion the movement of the head, and because the vertebral artery is able to expand and hold reservoirs of blood for the brain, a LiveScience video explains.

Setting Sail in Space: A new solar sail, the largest yet, will be launched by NASA in 2014. Looking very much like a gigantic kite, it will eventually reach 2 million miles from Earth (that’s a lot of string!), Popular Science reports. And besides blazing the way for further research of this type, the mission has another purpose: “Sunjammer will be carrying the cremated remains of various individuals, including the creator of Star Trek,Gene Roddenberry, and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry. It is not exactly the Enterprise, but Sunjammer will be boldly going where no solar sailing spacecraft has gone before,” Popular Science says.

Video by NASAMarshallTV

Solar Sail Readies for Early Warning Mission

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Off the Charts: For Markets, a Strong January Is a Good Sign

AS January goes, so goes the year.

That maxim of the American stock market would seem to bode well for the market this year. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index’s gain of 5 percent made the month the 12th best January since 1950, and the 19th opening month in that period when the index rose more than 4 percent.

“If history repeats, we would expect a double-digit percentage increase in the upcoming 11 months,” said Richard Peterson, an analyst at S&P Capital IQ.

Only once since 1950 has the market fallen in the last 11 months of a year when it rose 4 percent or more in January. That was in 1987, which began with the best January in the history of the index — up 13.2 percent — and ended including the worst single day ever for the index, a 20 percent plunge on Oct. 19.

On average since 1950, January gains of at least 4 percent have been followed by rises of 15.1 percent in the remainder of the year. Gains were lower when January gains were smaller, and on average the market has made no headway in years after prices fell in January.

There is, of course, no guarantee that history will repeat. In fact, during the Great Depression the opposite pattern existed. The market rose sharply during the first month of 1929, 1930, 1931 and 1934, only to plunge the rest of each year. Prices fell in the first month of 1935, which turned out to be an excellent year.

The January gains this year reflected generally strong markets around the world. As can be seen in the accompanying charts, all but two of the 20 largest stock markets in the world rose in January, and six of them — Japan, China, Britain, Switzerland, Sweden and Italy — rose more rapidly than the American market did. The two that showed losses were Brazil and South Korea.

The ranking of markets is based on World Bank calculations of total market capitalization of each market in 2011. More than half the capitalization of those 20 markets is in just the top three, the United States, Japan and China. The top five — Britain and Canada in addition to the other three — have two-thirds of the value.

The United States market is one of 10 that have more than doubled from their credit crisis lows set in 2008 or 2009, the others being Brazil, Germany, India, South Korea, Hong Kong, South Africa, Russia, Sweden and Mexico.

The only three countries in the group that are not at least 50 percent higher than their lows are all in the euro zone, where economies have been stumbling. They are France, Spain and Italy.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

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California's population to grow 39% by 2060, report says

By Chris Megerian

January 31, 2013, 10:48 a.m.

California's population will reach nearly 52.7 million by 2060, according to a new state report. 

The projection, released by Gov. Jerry Brown's Department of Finance, said the state will cross the 50 million threshold by 2049.

The report showed 39% growth in the state's population. By comparison, if there was a state made only from the difference between the California's current population and its projected population in 2060, it would be the fifth-largest state in the nation. 

California's demographics are also in for a major shift, according to the report: For the first time since California became a state, Latinos will be a plurality in early 2014. By 2060, they will be nearly half of the state's population. 

Although the state's Asian population is also growing, it will only be a little more than 13% of the state's population, the report said.

Comments are filtered for language and registration is required. The Times makes no guarantee of comments' factual accuracy. Readers may report inappropriate comments by clicking the Report Abuse link next to a comment. Here are the full legal terms you agree to by using this comment form.

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/* Here we construct the Tweet URL using an array, with values passed to the function */
var tweetConstruct = [
'http://twitter.com/share?url=', link, '&text=', message, '&via=', settings.twitter_account
],
/* Then join the array into one chunk of HTML */
tweetURL = tweetConstruct.join(''),

/* Same story for Facebook */
fbConstruct = [
'http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=', link, '&src=sp'
],

fbURL = fbConstruct.join(''),

newHTML = [
''
],
shareHTML = newHTML.join('');
/* Load in our new HTML */
shareTip.innerHTML = shareHTML;
};

/* Since the shareTip will automatically fade out when the user mouses out of an element */
/* we have to specifically tell the shareTip we want it to stay put when the user mouses over it */
/* This effectively gives the user a 500 ms (or whatever) window to mouse */
/* from the element to the shareTip to prevent it from popping out */
$shareTip.hover(function(){
$shareTip.stop(true, true);
$shareTip.show();
checkOpacity();
}, function(){
$(this).fadeOut(settings.speed);
});

/* This function handles the hover action */
$(this).hover(function(){
/* remove the old links, so someone doesn't accidentally click on them */
removeLinks();

/* If there's already an animation running on the shareTip, stop it */
$shareTip.stop(true, true);

var eso = $(this),
message,
/* Store the width and height of the shareTip and the offset of the element for our calculations */
height = eso.height(),
width = eso.width(),
offset = eso.offset(),
link;


link = eso.children('a').attr('href');
message = escape( eso.find('img').attr('alt') ) || eso.attr(settings.message_attr);

if (link.search('http://') === -1){
link = 'http://www.latimes.com' + link;
}
link = encodeURIComponent(link);

/* If it's at the top of the page, the shareTip will pop under the element */
if (offset.top

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Best Science and Engineering Visualizations of 2012

Beautiful, ominous, and surprising, these are the winners of the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. For 10 years, the competition -- sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science -- has celebrated the creators of visually striking, informative, and original art. The 2012 winners were announced today. From glowing corals to spiky seeds to neural networks on a chip, these images speak more clearly -- and louder -- than any report ever could.

Above:

First Place and People's Choice (Video)

This visceral, 3-d simulation of a beating heart grabbed first place in its category. A team at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center produced the contracting digital organ using a combination of data from magnetic resonance images, observations of cardiac muscle contractions and electrical signals, and input from physicians and bioengineers. Reproducing a single heartbeat takes 100 minutes of computing time, so the team distributed calculations among the facility's 10,000 processors. The result is a beautifully simulated, seemingly tangible, spasming organ.

Credit: Guillermo Marin, Fernando Cucchietti, Mariano Vazquez, Carlos Tripiana; Barcelona
Supercomputing Center

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ABC orders drama pilots from Martin Campbell, Maria Maggenti

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Casino Royale” director Martin Campbell is taking on another intrigue-filled project, this time with ABC.

The network has ordered a pilot for the drama “Reckless,” which Campbell, left, will executive produce.

The pilot involves David, a resourceful problem-solver whose wife is unjustly imprisoned during a political uprising overseas. Desperately to rescue her, he tries every legal option, but after being stymied by the U.S. government in the name of diplomacy, David moves outside of the law — and enters “a world of political intrigue, dangerous alliances and high emotional stakes.”

Chris Black (“Star Trek: Enterprise”) is writing the ABC Studios project.

ABC has also ordered a pilot for the dramedy “Murder in Manhattan.” Written by Maria Maggenti (“Monte Carlo”), the hour-long project follows a mother and daughter who team up as amateur sleuths in New York City.

ABC Studios and DarkFire TV are producing.

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During Trial, New Details Emerge on DuPuy Hip

When Johnson & Johnson announced the appointment in 2011 of an executive to head the troubled orthopedics division whose badly flawed artificial hip had been recalled, the company billed the move as a fresh start.

But that same executive, it turns out, had supervised the implant’s introduction in the United States and had been told by a top company consultant three years before the device was recalled that it was faulty.

In addition, the executive also held a senior marketing position at a time when Johnson & Johnson decided not to tell officials outside the United States that American regulators had refused to allow sale of a version of the artificial hip in this country.

The details about the involvement of the executive, Andrew Ekdahl, with the all-metal hip implant emerged Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court during the trial of a patient lawsuit against the DePuy Orthopaedics division of Johnson & Johnson. More than 10,000 lawsuits have been filed against DePuy in connection with the device — the Articular Surface Replacement, or A.S.R. — and the Los Angeles case is the first to go to trial.

The information about the depth of Mr. Ekdahl’s involvement with the implant may raise questions about DePuy’s ability to put the A.S.R. episode behind it.

Asked in an e-mail why the company had promoted Mr. Ekdahl, a DePuy spokeswoman, Lorie Gawreluk, said the company “seeks the most accomplished and competent people for the job.”

On Wednesday, portions of Mr. Ekdahl’s videotaped testimony were shown to jurors in the Los Angeles case. Other top DePuy marketing executives who played roles in the A.S.R. development are expected to testify in coming days. Mr. Ekdahl, when pressed in the taped questioning on whether DePuy had recalled the A.S.R. because it was unsafe, repeatedly responded that the company had recalled it “because it did not meet the clinical standards we wanted in the marketplace.”

Before the device’s recall in mid-2010, Mr. Ekdahl and those executives all publicly asserted that the device was performing extremely well. But internal documents that have become public as a result of litigation conflict with such statements.

In late 2008, for example, a surgeon who served as one of DePuy’s top consultants told Mr. Ekdahl and two other DePuy marketing officials that he was concerned about the cup component of the A.S.R. and believed it should be “redesigned.” At the time, DePuy was aggressively promoting the device in the United States as a breakthrough and it was being implanted into thousands of patients.

“My thoughts would be that DePuy should at least de-emphasize the A.S.R. cup while the clinical results are studied,” that consultant, Dr. William Griffin, wrote.

A spokesman for Dr. Griffin said he was not available for comment.

The A.S.R., whose cup and ball components were both made of metal, was first sold by DePuy in 2003 outside the United States for use in an alternative hip replacement procedure called resurfacing. Two years later, DePuy started selling another version of the A.S.R. for use here in standard hip replacement that used the same cup component as the resurfacing device. Only the standard A.S.R. was sold in the United States; both versions were sold outside the country.

Before the device recall in mid-2010, about 93,000 patients worldwide received an A.S.R., about a third of them in this country. Internal DePuy projections estimate that it will fail in 40 percent of those patients within five years; a rate eight times higher than for many other hip devices.

Mr. Ekdahl testified via tape Wednesday that he had been placed in charge of the 2005 introduction of the standard version of the A.S.R. in this country. Within three years, he and other DePuy executives were receiving reports that the device was failing prematurely at higher than expected rates, apparently because of problems related to the cup’s design, documents disclosed during the trial indicate.

Along with other DePuy executives, he also participated in a meeting that resulted in a proposal to redesign the A.S.R. cup. But that plan was dropped, apparently because sales of the implant had not justified the expense, DePuy documents indicate.

In the face of growing complaints from surgeons about the A.S.R., DePuy officials maintained that the problems were related to how surgeons were implanting the cup, not from any design flaw. But in early 2009, a DePuy executive wrote to Mr. Ekdahl and other marketing officials that the early failures of the A.S.R. resurfacing device and the A.S.R. traditional implant, known as the XL, were most likely design-related.

“The issue seen with A.S.R. and XL today, over five years post-launch, are most likely linked to the inherent design of the product and that is something we should recognize,” that executive, Raphael Pascaud wrote in March 2009.

Last year, The New York Times reported that DePuy executives decided in 2009 to phase out the A.S.R. and sell existing inventories weeks after the Food and Drug Administration asked the company for more safety data about the implant.

The F.D.A. also told the company at that time that it was rejecting its efforts to sell the resurfacing version of the device in the United States because of concerns about “high concentration of metal ions” in the blood of patients who received it.

DePuy never disclosed the F.D.A. ruling to regulators in other countries where it was still marketing the resurfacing version of the implant.

During a part of that period, Mr. Ekdahl was overseeing sales in Europe and other regions for DePuy. When The Times article appeared last year, he issued a statement, saying that any implication that the F.D.A. had determined there were safety issues with the A.S.R. was “simply untrue.” “This was purely a business decision,” Mr. Ekdahl stated at that time.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

A capsule summary of an earlier version of this article described the start of the DePuy trial incorrectly. It began last week, not this week.

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Media Decoder Blog: Ratings Shortfall at Nickelodeon Hurts Viacom Revenue

1:34 p.m. | Updated Hampered by ratings shortfalls at Nickelodeon and an unfavorable film release schedule, Viacom on Thursday reported a 16 percent decrease in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2012, a somewhat steeper drop than analysts anticipated.

But the company’s profits came in slightly ahead of expectations, and the chief executive, Philippe Dauman, pleased Wall Street with positive news about progress at Nickelodeon and Viacom’s other cable networks.

Mr. Dauman said the company was making an “unprecedented investment in content” that was paying off for Nickelodeon. The dramatic ratings declines that began to be visible in late 2011 are moderating, and new shows are premiering. Mr. Dauman said the ratings momentum “confirms our view that our significant and sustained investment in fresh, original content is working, and will continue to drive future ratings growth and revenue improvement.”

Viacom reported revenue in the fourth quarter of 2012, its fiscal first quarter, of $3.3 billion, down from $3.95 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Analysts had forecast $3.48 billion in revenue.

Profits rose to $470 million, or 92 cents a share, compared with $212 million, or 38 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago. But the year-ago quarter was hurt by a settlement with the original shareholders of Harmonix Music Systems, the makers of the “Rock Band” video game series. After adjustments, Viacom earned 91 cents a share in the quarter, a penny higher than analysts had predicted, from $1.06 in the same quarter a year ago.

The damage done by Nickelodeon’s ratings drop was evident in the total revenues for Viacom’s cable networks, by far the biggest part of its business. Revenue dipped 2 percent at the networks overall, largely because advertising revenue decreased 6 percent, even as affiliate fees paid by cable and satellite distributors grew.

Mr. Dauman said on a conference call with analysts that the “lingering effects of the ratings softness” at Nickelodeon masked growth elsewhere at the cable networks. Excluding its children’s channels, Viacom’s networks group “returned to positive ad growth in the quarter,” he said.

David Bank, a media analyst for RBC Capital Markets, said Nickelodeon’s ratings for the last few months were showing recovery after a rocky 2012. “All they need to do is continue to deliver the audience they are already delivering — without growth — and the year-over-year comparisons virtually assure growth,” he said.

Nickelodeon will pitch a slate of new animated and live-action series to advertisers at a presentation in late February. One of the areas of focus is preschool programming — the idea being that very young viewers will stick with Nickelodeon throughout their childhood.

Mr. Dauman says Viacom has found that its viewers of all ages want more new shows, and they want more episodes of those shows on “faster cycles,” so it has sped up the development and production processes at Nickelodeon and elsewhere.

Mr. Dauman spent some time on Thursday’s earnings call praising MTV, another one of its flagship networks, which he said had started to answer the question “What comes after ‘Jersey Shore?’” That infamous reality show had its series finale earlier this winter.

“‘Jersey Shore’ was a game-changing hit,” he said, “but it also precipitated an overemphasis on one night,” which was Thursday. MTV is trying to spread its new shows — “Catfish,” “Washington Heights,” “Buckwild” — across the weekly schedule.

Viacom’s film studio, Paramount, saw revenue drop 37 percent in the quarter, to $975 million. The company attributed this to the fact that its films in the quarter weren’t as successful as year-ago hits like “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” and “Puss in Boots.” The company also had one fewer release in the home video marketplace this time around.

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Retired barber charged in fatal shooting of Newport Beach doctor

By Nicole Santa Cruz

January 30, 2013, 10:43 a.m.

Prosecutors have filed charges against a 75-year-old man who is accused of murdering his urologist during an appointment in Newport Beach.

Stanwood Fred Elkus of Lake Elsinore has been charged with one felony count of special circumstances murder by lying in wait and a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a firearm causing death, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors say Elkus, a retired barber, arrived for an appointment at his doctor’s office Monday afternoon and waited in an exam room until Ronald Gilbert entered.

Elkus is accused of shooting Gilbert several times in the upper body, according to prosecutors and police.

Other doctors heard the shots and attempted to revive Gilbert, prosecutors said. Elkus gave his gun to a staff member in the office and was arrested without incident, they said.

Elkus, who is being held at the Orange County jail on no bail, was expected in court Wednesday.

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Next Pentagon Chief Doesn't Want to Get Sucked Into France's Mali War

Should Chuck Hagel become the next U.S. secretary of defense, one of his priorities will be ensuring France’s 3-week-old campaign in Mali doesn’t become the next American shadow war.

In prepared questions to the Senate Armed Services Committee ahead of his Thursday morning confirmation hearing, the former Nebraska Republican senator said he’d back the French campaign against Islamist forces in the Malian north “without deploying U.S. combat forces on the ground.” Hagel backs training a United Nations-authorized African force to take over from the French, but the U.S. military is staying out of that effort, currently overseen by the State Department.

Outside of propping up the African forces, Hagel told the panel he supports “assisting the movement of French and African forces [and] providing intelligence and planning support” to the French. Midair refueling, something the French have sought and which a U.S. KC-135 tanker began providing on Sunday, wasn’t part of Hagel’s list.

Hagel also sounded a more sanguine note about the threat to the U.S. posed by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the al-Qaida affiliate in north Africa and the Sahel, than some in the Obama administration and the military have been willing to go. While he told the panel AQIM poses a “growing threat” to U.S. interests in the region and wants to deny the group a safe haven in Mali, “My understanding is that at this time, there is no credible evidence that AQIM is a direct threat to the U.S. homeland,” Hagel said. (.pdf)

That’s a position supported by some who follow AQIM and the region closely. AQIM appears flush with cash from its drug-smuggling and kidnapping operations. And defense observers have wondered if AQIM has a bull’s-eye on its back in the U.S.’ proliferating campaign of drone-and-commando-heavy shadow wars.

But unlike al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the group’s branch in Yemen, AQIM has not prioritized the U.S. as a target. “I see no evidence they have the expeditionary capabilities to stage attacks on the United States or have ever tried to develop that capability,” says Andrew Lebovich, a politics and security researcher with the Open Society Institute in Senegal.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rudy Atallah, the Pentagon’s former top Africa counterterrorism officer, adds that while AQIM has been willing to hit U.S. targets of opportunity in north Africa — as with its suspected role in the Algerian oil field attack earlier this month — it cares more about spreading extremist Islam and attacking the Algerian and French governments than it does assaulting U.S. interests. “The short answer is they are regionally focused for now,” Atallah says.

Asked about the threat from AQIM to the U.S. homeland at a Tuesday Pentagon briefing, spokesman George Little said, “I’m unaware of any specific or credible information at this time that points to an AQIM threat against the homeland, but, again, I’m not ruling it out.”

France itself is trying to scale back its Mali commitment, for fear of getting sucked into a quagmire. And while Hagel is no peacenik, his reluctance to draw the U.S. deeper in Mali matches his broader advocacy of “think[ing] very carefully before we commit our Armed Forces to battlefields abroad,” which he cited to the panel as a principle lesson of the Iraq war. Hagel says he doubts “providing lethal support to the armed opposition at this time will alleviate the horrible situation we see in Syria,” and committed himself to “steady” troop reductions from Afghanistan.

Hagel’s comments about Iran and Israel are going to get all the attention during the Thursday hearing. But he said nothing controversial in his advanced questions on either subject: “all options are on the table” against the Iranian nuclear program, and pledged to “maintain our unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.” Hagel appears more willing to halt the post-9/11 drift to military intervention on the margins of U.S. national security.

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Barbra Streisand to sing at Oscars for first time in decades

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Actress, singer and director Barbra Streisand may be a familiar figure at Hollywood‘s Oscars, but she has only sung on the annual awards show once.

Streisand will perform again at the Academy Awards on February 24, producers said on Wednesday, without providing details about how her appearance would fit into the show or what she might sing.

Streisand, 70, has won two Oscars, one for best actress in “Funny Girl” and another for best original song, “Evergreen” from her 1976 vehicle “A Star Is Born.” Her performance of the song at the 1977 Oscars show was her only previous onstage stint at Hollywood’s biggest night.

“In an evening that celebrates the artistry of movies and music, how could the telecast be complete without Barbra Streisand?” producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron said in a statement. “We are honored that she has agreed to do a very special performance on this year’s Oscars.”

Streisand has also been nominated for several Oscars, including for best actress in “The Way We Were” and as producer for best picture nominee “The Prince of Tides.”

Most recently she co-starred with Seth Rogen in “The Guilt Trip,” a Christmas 2012 release.

Earlier this month, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced that Streisand would be this year’s recipient of its annual Chaplin Award, a prestigious honor recognizing achievement in film.

The Oscars will be presented at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, hosted by Seth MacFarlane and broadcast live on ABC as well as in more than 225 countries worldwide.

(Editing by Chris Michaud and Lisa Von Ahn)

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The Consumer: The Drug-Dose Gender Gap

Most sleeping pills are designed to knock you out for eight hours. When the Food and Drug Administration was evaluating a new short-acting pill for people to take when they wake up in the middle of the night, agency scientists wanted to know how much of the drug would still be in users’ systems come morning.

Blood tests uncovered a gender gap: Men metabolized the drug, Intermezzo, faster than women. Ultimately the F.D.A. approved a 3.5 milligram pill for men, and a 1.75 milligram pill for women.

The active ingredient in Intermezzo, zolpidem, is used in many other sleeping aids, including Ambien. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that the F.D.A. reduced doses of Ambien for women by half.

Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects.

“This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.”

Until 1993, women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from trials of new drugs. When the F.D.A. lifted the ban that year, agency researchers noted that because landmark studies on aspirin in heart disease and stroke had not included women, the scientific community was left “with doubts about whether aspirin was, in fact, effective in women for these indications.”

Because so many drugs were tested mostly or exclusively in men, scientists may know little of their effects on women until they reach the market. A Government Accountability Office study found that 8 of 10 drugs removed from the market from 1997 through 2000 posed greater health risks to women.

For example, Seldane, an antihistamine, and the gastrointestinal drug Propulsid both triggered a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia more often in women than in men. Many drugs still on the market cause this arrhythmia more often in women, including antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-malarial drugs and cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Clayton said. Women also tend to use more medications than men.

The sex differences cut both ways. Some drugs, like the high blood pressure drug Verapamil and the antibiotic erythromycin, appear to be more effective in women. On the other hand, women tend to wake up from anesthesia faster than men and are more likely to experience side effects from anesthetic drugs, according to the Society for Women’s Health Research.

Women also react differently to alcohol, tobacco and cocaine, studies have found.

It’s not just because women tend to be smaller than men. Women metabolize drugs differently because they have a higher percentage of body fat and experience hormonal fluctuations and the monthly menstrual cycle. “Some drugs are more water-based and like to hang out in the blood, and some like to hang out in the fat tissue,” said Wesley Lindsey, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Auburn University, who is a co-author of a paper on sex-based differences in drug activity.

“If the drug is lipophilic” — attracted to fat cells — “it will move into those tissues and hang around for longer,” Dr. Lindsey added. “The body won’t clear it as quickly, and you’ll see effects longer.”

There are also sex differences in liver metabolism, kidney function and certain gastric enzymes. Oral contraceptives, menopause and post-menopausal hormone treatment further complicate the picture. Some studies suggest, for example, that when estrogen levels are low, women may need higher doses of drugs called angiotensin receptor blockers to lower blood pressure, because they have higher levels of proteins that cause the blood vessels to constrict, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown.

Many researchers say data on these sex differences must be gathered at the very beginning of a drug’s development — even before trials on human subjects begin.

“The path to a new drug starts with the basic science — you study an animal model of the disease, and that’s where you discover a drug target,” Dr. Sandberg said. “But 90 percent of researchers are still studying male animal models of the disease.”

There have been improvements. In an interview, Dr. Robert Temple, with the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said the agency’s new guidelines in 1993 called for studies of sex differences at the earliest stages of drug development, as well as for analysis of clinical trial data by sex.

He said early research on an irritable bowel syndrome drug, alosetron (Lotronex), suggested it would not be effective in men. As a result, only women were included in clinical trials, and it was approved only for women. (Its use is restricted now because of serious side effects.)

But some scientists say drug metabolism studies with only 10 or 15 subjects are too small to pick up sex differences. Even though more women participate in clinical trials than in the past, they are still underrepresented in trials for heart and kidney disease, according to one recent analysis, and even in cancer trials.

“The big problem is we’re not quite sure how much difference this makes,” Dr. Lindsey said. “We just don’t have a good handle on it.”

---

Readers may submit comments or questions for The Consumer by e-mail to consumer@nytimes.com.

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DealBook: Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Will Resign

1:42 p.m. | Updated with formal announcement

Lanny A. Breuer, the federal prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s response to corporate crime in the wake of the financial crisis, announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down after nearly four years in the post.

As head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, one of the most senior roles at the agency, Mr. Breuer tackled corporate bribery and public corruption. But it was his focus on Wall Street that received the most attention, from supporters and critics alike.

While he has come under fire for a dearth of prosecutions on Wall Street in response to the crisis, Mr. Breuer also oversaw an aggressive crackdown on money-laundering and interest-rate manipulation at some of the world’s biggest banks. In two weeks last month, he joined a nearly $2 billion case against HSBC for money-laundering and a $1.5 billion settlement with UBS for rate-rigging. Next week, he is expected to take a similar rate-rigging action against the Royal Bank of Scotland.

“I think the criminal division is a fundamentally different place than it was four years ago,” Mr. Breuer said in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s the highlight of my professional career.”

His departure, effective March 1, was widely expected. Mr. Breuer had told friends for weeks that he was ready to leave the public sector. While he has not announced his next step, it is expected that he will return to private practice. He was previously a partner at Covington & Burling, a white-shoe law firm.

By virtue of his perch at the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Breuer became the face of Wall Street prosecutions in the aftermath of the financial crisis. But when few such cases materialized, critics like the Occupy Wall Street protesters turned on him, portraying him as an apologist for banks at the center of the mortgage mess.

In contrast, he drew praise for the sweeping crackdown on rate-rigging in the banking industry, which has largely involved international benchmark rates.

In a rate manipulation case last month, Mr. Breuer’s team secured a major payout from UBS and a guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese unit, making UBS the first big global bank in more than two decades to have a subsidiary plead guilty to fraud. Mr. Breuer, who announced the action after rejecting a last-minute plea from the bank’s chairman, also filed criminal charges against two former employees at the bank.

The deal sent a strong signal that the authorities wanted to hold banks responsible for their wrongdoing.

Following the UBS model, the Justice Department is now pursuing a guilty plea from a Royal Bank of Scotland subsidiary in Asia over its role in the interest rate manipulation scandal, people briefed on the matter said. That settlement, which could come as soon as next week, is likely to include more than $650 million in fines imposed by American and British authorities, two other people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

In an interview, Mr. Breuer said the rate-rigging case amounted to “egregious criminal conduct.” He struck a similar tone about two other major financial cases — the convictions of executives from Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, a now-defunct mortgage lender, and the 110-year prison term imposed on R. Allen Stanford for his Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Breuer has also focused on money-laundering, creating a task force in 2010 that has levied more than $3 billion in fines from banks, including the record fine against HSBC. He stopped short of indicting HSBC after some regulators warned that doing so could destabilize the global financial system.

Mr. Breuer argued that the charges he did not bring — for example, against Goldman Sachs and other banks suspected of fraud after selling toxic mortgage securities to investors — could not have been proved. It was not for a lack of trying, he said, noting that United States attorneys across the country, after reviewing the same evidence he did, also declined to act.

“It’s important for me to hold the financial institutions accountable,” he said. “There’s never been a time that a prosecutor said we should bring a securitization case and I said no.”

Under Mr. Breuer, the division has also increasingly used a 1977 law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, to prosecute corporate bribery.

He also helped run the Justice Department’s investigation of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in the company paying $4.5 billion in fines and other penalties and pleading guilty to 14 criminal charges related to the rig explosion in 2010.

In a statement, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. praised Mr. Breuer. “Lanny has led one of the most successful and aggressive criminal divisions in the history of the Department of Justice,” he said.

Mr. Holder stood behind Mr. Breuer when questions arose about his involvement in the botched gun-trafficking case known as Operation Fast and Furious. The pair, who were both largely cleared after an inspector general investigation, worked together at Covington.

For years, Mr. Breuer moved in and out of government. The son of Holocaust survivors who fled Europe and settled in Queens, he landed at the Manhattan district attorney’s office after graduating from Columbia Law School. In between stints at Covington, he worked as a White House special counsel, defending President Bill Clinton amid federal investigations and impeachment proceedings.

In the interview on Tuesday, Mr. Breuer reflected on his unusual path to the Justice Department.

“The fact that I got to go from Elmhurst, Queens, to the criminal division is remarkable,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/30/2013, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Will Resign.

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