SAN FRANCISCO — Luis Aroche learned about violence at Leonard R. Flynn Elementary School, across from the projects where his friend Carl lived.
He remembers sitting down at his desk and seeing his teacher, Mrs. Foster, in tears. His class had just finished the Pledge of Allegiance.
"Carl was playing on the swings and got shot," Aroche said. "And died. Kindergarten. He got found laying in a pool of blood in the park," Aroche paused. Swallowed. Started up again. "He was my desk buddy. He would go with me to the bathroom. And now, Carl wasn't there.
"That was my first experience of loss. And I didn't understand it. To this day, I don't understand it."
Aroche since has become something of an expert on violence — as victim, perpetrator and now as part of a hoped-for solution. Last year, San Francisco Dist. Atty. George Gascon hired the former gang member to be his office's first "alternative sentencing planner," part of an effort to keep offenders from ending up back behind bars.
The position, criminal justice experts say, has no equivalent in any prosecutor's office in the country.
And Aroche is as singular as his job. An Aztec skull tattoo stretches down his right forearm to his hand, its grimace partly wiped away by laser removal. The day his juvenile record was sealed, he says, was the happiest of his life.
Today, he helps prosecutors figure out who among San Francisco's low-level offenders deserves a jail cell and who deserves a second chance.
He knows a lot about both.
::
If you were Aroche, 12 years old and living in the Mission District in 1990 — when gangs and crack cocaine meant funerals were as commonplace as quinceañeras — you got a tattoo, cut school and drank beer. You thought a stint in Pelican Bay State Prison was like going off to "Stanford or Yale." You practiced how to sit and talk and smoke like the toughest prisoners.
"We would learn how to iron our clothes using a comb, 'cause that's how you iron your pants in prison," Aroche said. "You iron it with the teeth of the comb … and then you put it underneath the mattress."
Aroche's first tattoo was a small cross on his left hand, in the soft web between thumb and forefinger. He got it in an alleyway not far from the studio apartment where he slept on the floor with his five brothers, three sisters, the occasional niece or nephew. His parents got the bed in the corner.
His Salvadoran mother was a chambermaid at a Fisherman's Wharf motel, his Puerto Rican father a security guard in the Navy shipyards.
And his older brothers? They would disappear for years. Aroche didn't know why until his father took him to visit San Quentin State Prison. They were "main men" in a notorious Northern California prison gang. When they were out, they were "the mayors of the Mission."
By the time Aroche was 15, he was drinking so much and incarcerated so often that he gave himself a test every night before he went to sleep. If he put out his hand and felt warm, smooth drywall, he knew he was home. If he felt cold, slick concrete, he was in custody.
One night he ended up in the hospital. He'd been drunk, hanging out in Lucky Alley, when a car drove up and the doors flew open. Aroche saw his friend get sliced with a machete. Gunshots rang out.
"And I remember some guy grabbing me and hitting me with a crowbar and stabbing me in my stomach," he said. "And I could feel the pierce of my stomach, just ripping me open.... And I thought, this is it. This is it. This is my life."
::
At the computer in his spartan office at the Hall of Justice, Aroche is poring over the official tale of another life in the balance: a 28-year-old woman on a downward spiral.
Volunteers from the Planethunters website have identified 15 new habitable planet candidates among data collected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.
One of the 15, a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the solar-type star KIC 12735740, has been officially confirmed as a planet (with 99.9 percent certainty). Named PH2 b, it is the second confirmed planet to be found by Planethunters.org, part of the Oxford University-led Zooniverse citizen science project that turns raw data over to keen amateur researchers. The remaining 14 planet candidates are at least 90 percent likely to be planets.
Launched in March 2007, Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft has been searching for undiscovered exoplanets in the habitable zone of their parent stars using a wavelet-based algorithm called transit planet search, which detects the moment a planet passes in front of its star. While the algorithm will spot the vast majority of planet candidates, a small number will go unnoticed. Since 2010, Planethunters has been searching through the Kepler data NASA released into the public domain, allowing its 200,000-strong army of volunteers to seek out the telltale dip in the brightness of parent stars as planets pass in front of them.
Added to the 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds present exciting possibilities for the discovery of regions that could potentially support life — not only on the planets themselves, but also on their moons.
“There’s an obsession with finding Earth-like planets but what we are discovering, with planets such as PH2 b, is far stranger,” explained Zooniverse lead Chris Lintott of Oxford University in a press release Jan. 7. “Jupiter has several large water-rich moons — imagine dragging that system into the comfortably warm region where the Earth is. If such a planet had Earth size moons, we’d see not Europa and Callisto, but worlds with rivers, lakes and all sorts of habitats — a surprising scenario that might just be common.
“These are planet candidates that slipped through the net, being missed by professional astronomers and rescued by volunteers in front of their web browsers. It’s remarkable to think that absolutely anyone can discover a planet.”
Planethunters lead scientist Debra Fischer of Yale University said in the press release: “We are seeing the emergence of a new era in the Planet Hunters project where our volunteers seem to be at least as efficient as the computer algorithms at finding planets orbiting at habitable zone distances from the host stars. Now, the hunt is not just targeting any old exoplanet — volunteers are homing in on habitable worlds.”
The report of the research submitted to the Astrophysical Journal acknowledges more than 40 volunteers for their contributions to the work, including 71-year-old Roy Jackson, a retired police officer living in Birtley, Gateshead. “It is difficult to put into words the pleasure, wonderment and perhaps even pride that I have in some small way been able to assist in the discovery of a planet,” he said in the press release. “But I would like to say that the discovery makes the time spent on the search well worth the effort.”
LONDON (Reuters) – Actresses dominated the shortlist for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts‘ Rising Star awards on Monday, taking four of the five places.
Juno Temple, who appeared in the 2007 drama “Atonement”, and Andrea Riseborough, best known for her leading role in Madonna‘s biopic of Wallis Simpson “W.E.”, represent British interests on the list.
They are up against U.S. actress Elizabeth Olsen of the acclaimed 2011 drama “Martha Marcy May Marlene“, and Sweden’s Alicia Vikander, who starred in Danish period drama “A Royal Affair” and last year’s adaptation of the novel “Anna Karenina”.
Suraj Sharma is the youngest on the list at 19 and the sole male representative, having been picked from 3,000 hopefuls to star in Ang Lee’s recent 3D picture “Life of Pi” despite no previous acting experience.
The Rising Star Award is handed out on February 10 at the main BAFTA prize ceremony, Britain’s top film accolades. It is the only category voted for by the public, who can cast their votes at ee.co.uk/bafta.
Previous winners of the award aimed at spotting stars of the future include James McAvoy, Eva Green, Shia LaBeouf and Kristen Stewart.
(This story has been refiled to change word in headline to “women” from “females”)
(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
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Alexander Leaf, a versatile physician and research scientist who was an early advocate of diet and exercise to prevent heart disease, and who traveled the world to make important discoveries about increasing human longevity and to help scientifically establish the dangers global warming poses to the human species, died on Dec. 24 in Boston. He was 92.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Barbara Leaf.
Dr. Leaf’s career toggled between pure scientific research and medical practice; unusually for the medical world, he sustained achievement in both realms. He was at different times chairman of medicine and chief of medical services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, one of the nation’s premier hospitals, and led the department of preventive medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was one of the first practicing physicians ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in 1972.
He was probably best known for his work on heart disease, advocating prevention through exercise and diet, particularly foods low in animal fat and sodium.
Dr. Leaf’s research into the cellular biology of heart disease led him to undertake a series of expeditions in the early 1970s to study longevity in parts of the world where heart disease was rare and some people were said to live 140 years or more.
The expeditions, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, were criticized when some of the very old people in the study turned out to have lied or been misinformed about their ages. Dr. Leaf openly disavowed the project. But he never doubted the basic insights he had gleaned from the scores of interviews he conducted with people in the Caucasus Mountains, the Hunza Valley of Pakistan and the foothills of the Andes.
Whether they were 120 or older, as many of the subjects had claimed, or in their late 90s, as was later found, he concluded that people who lived in mountainous places, worked outdoors into their old age and consumed local food high in vegetable content and low in animal fat tended to live very long and healthy lives free of heart disease.
Dr. Leaf made a similar series of trips in the late 1980s, sponsored by the World Health Organization, to study the effects of climate change in Africa. His report on the study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1989, drawing praise from public health experts as one of the first to link longer, hotter summers with outbreaks of infectious diseases like malaria in regions previously untouched by them.
Dr. Arnold S. Relman, a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of The New England Journal, said Dr. Leaf “had a moral sense that science was not just for answering basic questions about the human body, but for dealing with the broader questions of human suffering and human welfare.”
Dr. Leaf was born Alexander Livshiz on April 10, 1920, in Yokohama, Japan, where his Russian-born parents had separately fled during the Russian civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution. His parents, both dentists, changed the family name when they arrived in Seattle in 1922.
He graduated from the University of Washington as a chemistry major, received his medical degree at the University of Michigan and served his internship and residency at Massachusetts General.
Besides Mrs. Leaf, whom he met while both were students at the University of Washington, his survivors include their daughters, Caroline, Rebecca and Tamara Leaf, and two grandchildren.
Dr. Leaf’s early research focused on how sodium and potassium pass through cell walls, a process crucial to cellular health and important in understanding the causes of heart disease. His work on toad bladders was considered seminal in the development of treatments for life-threatening heart arrhythmias.
As chief of medical services at Massachusetts General from 1966 to 1981, he established one of the first programs in the country for primary-care medical residents and set up a network of free clinics in poor neighborhoods around Boston. He was a founding member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was formed in 1961 to oppose nuclear proliferation and later added environmental and social problems to its portfolio. He led Harvard’s department of preventive medicine from 1981 to 1990.
Dr. Leaf continued his research after retiring from teaching, remaining active almost as long as the mountain-dwelling subjects of his 1970s studies.
In his 80s he began studying the effects of fish oil and fatty acids on longevity. In 2005 he was the lead author of a paper published in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, describing the effectiveness of fish oil’s omega-3 fatty acids in reducing heart attacks triggered by ventricular arrhythmias, which are chaotic contractions of the heart muscles.
“There is still some uncertainty about the extent of the benefit,” Dr. Relman said, “but I dare say if you ask most cardiologists, they will tell you that as a result of that article they are taking daily doses of fish oil, myself included.”
BOSTON (Reuters) - A Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner aircraft with no passengers on board caught fire at Boston's Logan International Airport when a battery in its auxiliary electric system exploded, officials said.
A mechanic inspecting the Japan Airlines Co Ltd jet discovered smoke in the cockpit while performing a routine post-flight inspection and reported it to airport authorities at around 10:30 a.m. EST, said Massport Fire Chief Bob Donahue.
A fire crew responded and determined that a battery used to power the plane's electric systems when the engines are not running had exploded, Donahue said. The mechanic was the only person on board the plane when the smoke was discovered and no one was hurt by the blaze, he added.
"Passengers were in no danger as this event had happened at least 15 minutes after they deplaned," Donahue said.
The fire is the latest reported mechanical failure in a string of incidents affecting the Dreamliner, which was also plagued by production problems that delayed initial delivery by 3-1/2 years.
The U.S. jet maker's shares fell more than 2 percent to $76.01 on the news.
Boeing spokesman Marc Birtel said, "We are aware of the event and are working with our customer."
Japan Airlines representatives did not immediately respond to a call for a comment.
Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration are now looking into what caused the fire, Donahue said. The National Transportation Safety Board also announced it was opening an investigation.
The 787 relies heavily on electrical power to drive onboard systems that in other jet models are run by air pressure generated by the engines. It also suffered electrical problems during testing that prompted a redesign.
The aircraft is Boeing's first to be made of carbon composites rather than aluminum, a change that lowers the plane's weight and allows it to burn less fuel.
The Dreamliner has suffered a string of mishaps with electrical systems in recent weeks. On December 4, a United Airlines flight from Houston to Newark, New Jersey, made an emergency landing after it appeared that one of its power generators failed. On December 13, Qatar Airways said it had grounded one of its three 787 jets because of the same problem United had experienced. On December 17, United said that a second 787 in its fleet had developed electrical issues.
Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney last month argued that the 787 has not experienced an unusual number of problems for a new aircraft.
Boeing competes with European jetmaker Airbus.
(Additional reporting by Alwyn Scott in New York; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and M.D. Golan)
LA JOLLA — There's a political stink rising in this seaside community, blown ashore from the rocks of La Jolla Cove, where myriad seabirds and marine mammals roost, rest and leave behind what animals leave behind.
The offal accumulation is offending noses at trendy restaurants, tourist haunts, and expensive condos perched on some of the most pricey real estate in the country. But finding a solution to the olfactory assault has proved elusive.
Environmental regulations have thwarted proposals to cleanse the rocks with a non-toxic, biodegradable solution. Even a low-tech idea to scrub the rocks with brooms may need official approval.
The state-protected cove area falls under the permitting jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission and San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. Since wildlife is involved, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also have authority.
The normally low-key Sherri Lightner, who represents La Jolla on the San Diego City Council, has challenged — some say dared — Gov. Jerry Brown to tour the cove area in high stink season.
"Everybody is pointing fingers, and nobody is doing anything," said a La Jolla resident who strolled the sidewalk along the community's famed corniche on New Year's Day, tissue to her nose to battle the smell.
A San Diego park ranger assigned to the La Jolla beaches takes a more philosophic approach toward the excretory matter. "It's a natural process," said ranger Richard Belesky. "But would I want to buy a multimillion-dollar condo with the stink nearby? I don't think so."
The difficulty of reconciling the habits of sea creatures and the needs of humankind is not new to La Jolla. South of the La Jolla Cove is the Children's Pool where harbor seals lounge on the beach.
For two decades a legal and political dispute has raged between people who say the seals should be removed because they are blocking access to the water and those who say the seals should be allowed to stay, particularly during pupping season. Signs warn bathers that seal excrement has resulted in a high bacteria count that can cause disease.
At the La Jolla Cove, the droppings began to pile up after restrictions were put in place to keep people from climbing down the delicate bluffs to the rocks below. The birds and mammals suddenly had no reason to scatter.
The La Jolla Village Merchants Assn. gathered more than 1,000 signatures demanding an immediate solution. But immediate is not in the governmental lexicon when it comes to issues involving the ocean and wildlife.
To wash down the rocks would require a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. The city, probably the full City Council, would need to endorse a specific wash-down proposal — but that, according to Lightner's staff, would mean submitting the issue to an application process that could take at least two years, given the backlog at the water board.
And even if the water board approved the application, the issue would then proceed to the Coastal Commission, an agency not known for its speed.
In hopes of finding a faster, if more limited, solution, city officials are considering arming Park and Recreation Department employees with brooms to scrub down the rocks. They assure that steps will be taken to ensure that no runoff reaches the ocean and no birds or mammals are hurt.
Talks are planned with regional, state and federal agency staff members to see if such a limited approach could be taken without a full-tilt application process. A radio talk-show host has shown the way, taking his own broom to the cove.
Meanwhile, restaurateurs say the smell continues to discourage patrons. Some tourists complain that it mars their vacations. Shirley Towlson, a bookkeeper who arrived in La Jolla from Phoenix, was shocked at the smell along the promenade and outside her hotel.
"I thought La Jolla meant 'The Jewel,' '' she said. "This smells more like 'The Toilet.' "
Other tourists find the smell but a small downer amid the other joys of La Jolla as a seaside place of visual beauty, fine dining and chic shopping.
"It smells like fish," said Mark Bain, a general contractor from Sacramento, enjoying a New Year's week idyll. "It happens."
He said the smell is not nearly as noxious as when dead fish line the banks of the Sacramento River. "Now, that's really bad," he said.
Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.
In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.
It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”
Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.
Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.
After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.
But fearing that such measures would spread, that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.
The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”
It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.
In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.
There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.
It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.
Which is just another way of say that we never got out of the loony gas building after all.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
MOSCOW (Reuters) – French film star Gerard Depardieu met Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea town of Sochi and obtained his Russian passport, the Kremlin said on Sunday, after he left his homeland to avoid a new tax rate for millionaires.
Putin signed a decree on Thursday granting Russian citizenship to Depardieu, who objected to French Socialist president Francois Hollande‘s plan to impose the 75 percent tax rate. His decision to quit France had prompted accusations of national betrayal.
The Russian president and Depardieu were shown on state-run Channel One shaking hands and hugging each other early on Sunday during what the Kremlin said was a private visit by the actor to Russia.
“A brief meeting between the president and Depardieu took place,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “On the occasion of his visit to Russia, he was handed a Russian passport.”
Peskov did not say whether Putin personally gave Depardieu the passport or if he picked it up through standard procedures. He said the actor also told Putin about his career plans.
Depardieu, star of the movies “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Green Card”, is a popular figure in Russia, where he has appeared in many advertising campaigns, including for ketchup. He also worked there in 2011 on a film about the eccentric Russian monk Grigory Rasputin.
Putin asked Depardieu whether he was pleased with his work in the movie, TV footage of their meeting showed, with the French actor saying he had already sent Putin some excerpts from it.
Depardieu bought a house in Belgium last year to avoid the French income tax increase. French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called Depardieu’s decision to seek Belgian residency “pathetic” and unpatriotic, prompting an angry response from the actor.
Putin said last month that Depardieu would be welcome in Russia, which has a flat income tax rate of 13 percent, compared to the 75 percent on income over 1 million euros ($ 1.30 million) that Hollande wants to levy in France.
He offered Depardieu a Russian passport, saying he had a close, special relationship with France and had developed warm ties with the actor, even though they had rarely met.
Some of Putin’s critics said the passport move was a stunt and pointed out that the president announced last month a campaign to prevent rich Russians keeping their money offshore.
($ 1 = 0.7666 euros)
(Reporting By Alexei Anishchuk; Editing by Pravin Char)
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Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times
Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner, said some insurance companies could raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.
In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.
The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.
Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.
The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.
New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.
The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.
Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.
While Mr. Jones has not yet weighed in on the insurers’ most recent requests, he is pushing for a state law that will give him that authority. Without legislative action, the state can only question the basis for the high rates, sometimes resulting in the insurer withdrawing or modifying the proposed rate increase.
The California insurers say they have no choice but to raise premiums if their underlying medical costs have increased. “We need these rates to even come reasonably close to covering the expenses of this population,” said Tom Epstein, a spokesman for Blue Shield of California. The insurer is requesting a range of increases, which average about 12 percent for 2013.
Although rates paid by employers are more closely tracked than rates for individuals and small businesses, policy experts say the law has probably kept at least some rates lower than they otherwise would have been.
“There’s no question that review of rates makes a difference, that it results in lower rates paid by consumers and small businesses,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimated in an October report that rate review was responsible for lowering premiums for one out of every five filings.
Federal officials say the law has resulted in significant savings. “The health care law includes new tools to hold insurers accountable for premium hikes and give rebates to consumers,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for Medicare, which is helping to oversee the insurance reforms.
“Insurers have already paid $1.1 billion in rebates, and rate review programs have helped save consumers an additional $1 billion in lower premiums,” he said. If insurers collect premiums and do not spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar on care for their customers, the law requires them to refund the excess.
As a result of the review process, federal officials say, rates were reduced, on average, by nearly three percentage points, according to a report issued last September.
Candace Klein, chief of SoMoLend, in Midtown Manhattan. In starting her crowdfunding site, she sought out institutional investors that don’t face the same limits that individual investors do.
RYAN CALDBECK was stumped. A director at a private equity firm, he was taking part in a panel discussion at a consumer goods conference last summer in New York when an entrepreneur raised his hand with a question: Where could a young company with just a few million dollars in sales go for money to grow?
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Zak Normandin expanded his Little Duck Organics food company with financing found through CircleUp.
Mr. Caldbeck and his peers on the panel fumbled for a response. The fact is, most private equity investors and venture capitalists won’t touch a consumer products company until it has surpassed $10 million in sales — anything else is too small to bother with.
The best advice the panel could offer was for the entrepreneur to tap his credit cards.
“The purpose of the panel was to help entrepreneurs raise money, but we had no answers,” Mr. Caldbeck remembers. “That’s when I knew that there is a big issue here.”
That big issue caused Mr. Caldbeck to leave his job to start CircleUp, a company that aims to connect up-and-coming consumer products companies with investors.
Right now, the people allowed to invest through CircleUp must be accredited, meaning they have a high net worth. CircleUp hopes that soon not just the wealthy few, but the general public — whether friends, family members, customers, Facebook friends, or even total strangers — will be able to invest in deserving companies through a hot new area of finance known as crowdfunding.
To its advocates, crowdfunding is a way for capital-starved entrepreneurs to receive financing that neither big investors nor lenders are willing or able to provide. To others, it represents a potential minefield that could help bad businesses get off the ground before they eventually fail, and in some cases could even ensnare unsophisticated investors in outright fraud.
Those fears are partly why the Securities and Exchange Commission has delayed rules allowing crowdfunding that were supposed to take effect this month as part of the JOBS Act (Jump-Start Our Business Start-Ups), signed by President Obama last April. The S.E.C. is wary of loosening investor protections that have been in place since the 1930s.
Despite the uncertainty, the outlines of a new industry are emerging as a few crowdfunding start-ups have found ways to raise money within current rules. They include companies like CircleUp and SoMoLend, which lends money to small, Main Street-type businesses that typically wouldn’t interest private investors.
By themselves, of course, a few start-ups can’t completely democratize finance. But they begin to illuminate what the future of crowdfunding could look like, as the debate continues over a vast widening of the private investor pool.
Mr. Caldbeck formed CircleUp last fall along with Rory Eakin, a former business school classmate who was working for a philanthropic foundation. Through their start-up, the two men seek to finance food, personal care, apparel and pet-related companies, often with an environmental or social bent.
CircleUp considers applications from companies with $1 million to $10 million in revenue. Companies whose applications are accepted make their pitches to investors behind a firewall on the CircleUp Web site, offering equity stakes in return for capital. CircleUp, which helps companies raise up to $3 million, takes a small cut of the money.
Under current federal regulations, CircleUp wouldn’t be able to arrange such deals on its own. But it struck a partnership with W. R. Hambrecht, a registered broker-dealer that can handle investments from accredited, or high-net-worth, individuals whom the S.E.C. considers sophisticated enough to invest in private companies.
“Living here in Silicon Valley, a lot of people don’t understand the need,” Mr. Caldbeck says. “If you’re a tech company with a good idea, you can raise money. But it’s a different story for food, agriculture, retail and other consumer-oriented businesses.”
Mr. Caldbeck sees a big opportunity. Consumer goods companies account for a sizable portion of the nation’s businesses, yet very little capital — from private equity funds or from accredited investors — flows to them, he says.
What’s more, only a tiny percentage of those who qualify as accredited investors actually invest in private companies, he says. (These are people with a net worth of at least $1 million, not including their primary residence, or who have earned more than $200,000 — $300,000 for couples — in each of the last two years.)
Amy Cortese is the author of “Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From It.”
