Unemployment Deepens the Loss from Hurricane Sandy





In the Rockaways, none of the 450 employees of the Madelaine Chocolate Company will receive a paycheck this week. Until a few days ago, the floor of the company’s 200,000-square-foot complex was a muddy, sludgy, chocolaty mess, and its factory has temporarily closed. Outside, foiled Santas and candy roses lay victim to the hurricane.




Not far away, the cash register at Fast Break, a local deli, is silent, its employees out of work. Next door, Browns Hardware will be shut until at least February.


The story is much the same throughout the region, where residents who lost their jobs as a result of Hurricane Sandy are streaming into career centers in New York and New Jersey, desperate for a paycheck.


“Here, it’s like anyone who didn’t lose his home lost his job,” said Juan Colon, 57, who worked at Madelaine for 26 years.


The devastating storm, which destroyed many businesses, left tens of thousands of New York and New Jersey residents unemployed. How long they will remain jobless is uncertain. In some cases, they may be able to resume their old jobs as their employers get back on their feet, assuming those businesses reopen.


The latest jobs reports from New York and New Jersey, for November, suggested the toll the storm took on the local labor force — New York State lost 29,100 private jobs, while New Jersey lost 8,100.


In the same month, New Jersey processed an unprecedented number of first-time claims for unemployment insurance: 138,661, surpassing the previous record of 83,518 established in December 2009, which came at the height of the recession. And in New York, 158,204 individuals filed initial claims for unemployment, nearing the record set in January 2009, also at the height of the recession.


The unemployment problem has eased a bit as “Grand Reopening” signs have popped up at mattress stores, gas stations and other businesses. And the number of people filing for unemployment for the first time has slowed significantly in recent weeks.


But there are still many people struggling to pay their bills, finding themselves out of a job at a time when the overall unemployment picture remains bleak.


“We were spared the storm, but not the repercussions,” said Hector Valle, 57, who lives on Staten Island. The hurricane left Mr. Valle’s home untouched, but dealt his family a mighty blow: His wife worked at Bellevue Hospital Center as a nurse’s assistant for the last 25 years. When the hurricane shuttered Bellevue, she was transferred to Woodhull Medical Center — a move that caused her to lose her overtime work, as well as part of her night differential pay.


The couple’s income fell to $1,400 a month from $2,200 a month.


“There’s nobody coming to my house to help,” said Mr. Valle, who has been unemployed for three years, “because they’re like, ‘You’re fine.’ We’re not fine.”


Those most affected are the people who already have trouble finding jobs: older workers, single parents with child-care concerns and immigrants who speak little English.


And the storm has further handicapped many of those looking for new work: Interview outfits lie moldy in Dumpsters; computers have been destroyed, résumé files gone forever. Many lack access to transportation. “There are a lot of barriers to employment, from no phone to no home,” said Thomas Munday, director of a city-run Workforce 1 Career Center on Staten Island.


When they do get jobs, many residents will face new, longer commutes, and fewer benefits.


At the Madelaine chocolate company this month, Jorge Farber, the president and chief executive, shuffled past ribbons of ruined Reese’s foil, wearing yellow rubber shoe covers slicked with slime. He intends to reopen, but could not estimate a date.


The company is the largest employer in the Rockaways, and normally pumps out 100,000 pounds of chocolate a day. It was started 64 years ago by two men fleeing the Holocaust, and about a quarter of its employees are Haitian immigrants. Many had family members who died in the 2010 Haitian earthquake.


Some of the laid-off employees have packaged chocolate here for decades. For them, Mr. Farber said, the company is a good provider: Line workers, many of whom do not speak English, make about $15 an hour, plus benefits. It would be difficult for them to find new jobs with the same salary and benefits.


Over nearly three decades, Mr. Colon rose to a supervisor position, earning about $900 a week.


When the storm left him without a job, he signed up for unemployment benefits. But he is getting only $325 a week, he said.


“I don’t know what I will do,” said Mr. Colon, who lives in a fourth-floor apartment in Far Rockaway with his wife, 22-year-old daughter and a grandchild. “Nobody can survive on $300.”


There is no telling when the company will be able to bring him back.


Some may find work related to hurricane recovery. New York State qualified for a federal grant that will allow it to hire 5,000 temporary cleanup workers for jobs that last about six months and pay $11 to $15 an hour. The city has already hired 788 people to fill some of those temporary jobs, according to Angie Kamath, deputy commissioner of work force development for the city’s Department of Small Business Services. And it will hire 400 more in the coming weeks, she said.


“We hope and expect that that number will continue to grow,” Ms. Kamath said. “The state has every intention to go after additional funding.”


The storm’s aftermath has also created private jobs. Areas hit by hurricanes almost always see a temporary boost in employment because of rebuilding activities, said Allison Plyer, chief demographer at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which tracked employment after Hurricane Katrina. “There will be no doubt billions of dollars of private and flood insurance to rebuild homes and businesses,” she said.


But few of those jobs will last. Many will go to out-of-state contractors. And not everyone who is out of work can fill labor-intensive cleanup positions.


Ms. Plyer also cautioned against using the experience of Hurricane Katrina to predict what will happen after Hurricane Sandy.


After Hurricane Katrina, residential areas were destroyed, while New Orleans’s business district remained relatively intact. Businesses bounced back, but the housing stock and the area’s population did not, leaving employers seeking workers. “Unemployment rates sunk to their lowest level,” Ms. Plyer said, continuing: “All the McDonald’s were offering signing bonuses. You couldn’t find anyone to work for them.”


“Katrina entailed a massive population displacement that basically emptied out the city,” she added.


On Staten Island, unemployed residents inundated a city-operated career center in St. George after the storm. About 500 people showed up during two days to apply for 240 storm cleanup jobs. (Normally 350 individuals will seek employment assistance during a five-day week.)


Mr. Valle, who once worked as a customer service representative, waited outside the center hoping to land one of those cleanup jobs. He left when all the positions had been filled.


“That was like an audition for ‘American Idol,’ ” he said. “I have never been in line with 500, 600 people for a job in my life.”


His wife, he said, had been their support for the last three years. “Sandy just yanked that from under us,” he said.


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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center


Chang W. Lee/The New York Times


Senator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center.







NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients.




While the medical center had been treating many outpatients, it had farmed out surgery to other hospitals, which created scheduling problems that forced many patients to have their operations on nights and weekends, when staffing is traditionally low. Some patients and doctors had to postpone not just elective but also necessary operations for lack of space at other hospitals.


The medical center’s Tisch Hospital, its major hospital for inpatient services, between 30th and 34th Streets on First Avenue, had been closed since the hurricane knocked out power and forced the evacuation of more than 300 patients, some on sleds brought down darkened flights of stairs.


“I think it’s a little bit of a miracle on 34th Street that this happened so quickly,” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said Thursday.


Mr. Schumer credited the medical center’s leadership and esprit de corps, and also a tour of the damaged hospital on Nov. 9 by the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, W. Craig Fugate, whom he and others escorted through watery basement hallways.


“Every time I talk to Fugate there are a lot of questions, but one is, ‘How are you doing at NYU?’ ” the senator said.


The reopening of Tisch to surgery patients and associated services, like intensive care, some types of radiology and recovery room anesthesia, was part of a phased restoration that will continue. Besides providing an essential service, surgery is among the more lucrative of hospital services.


The hospital’s emergency department is expected to delay its reopening for about 11 months, in part to accommodate an expansion in capacity to 65,000 patient visits a year, from 43,000, said Dr. Andrew W. Brotman, its senior vice president and vice dean for clinical affairs and strategy.


In the meantime, NYU Langone is setting up an urgent care center with 31 bays and an observation unit, which will be able to treat some emergency patients. It will initially not accept ambulances, but might be able to later, Dr. Brotman said. Nearby Bellevue Hospital Center, which was also evacuated, opened its emergency department to noncritical injuries on Monday.


Labor and delivery, the cancer floor, epilepsy treatment and pediatrics and neurology beyond surgery are expected to open in mid-January, Langone officials said. While some radiology equipment, which was in the basement, has been restored, other equipment — including a Gamma Knife, a device using radiation to treat brain tumors — is not back.


The flooded basement is still being worked on, and electrical gear has temporarily been moved upstairs. Mr. Schumer, a Democrat, said that a $60 billion bill to pay for hurricane losses and recovery in New York and New Jersey was nearing a vote, and that he was optimistic it would pass in the Senate with bipartisan support. But the measure’s fate in the Republican-controlled House is far less certain.


The bill includes $1.2 billion for damage and lost revenue at NYU Langone, including some money from the National Institutes of Health to restore research projects. It would also cover Long Beach Medical Center in Nassau County, Bellevue, Coney Island Hospital and the Veterans Affairs hospital in Manhattan.


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Libraries Try to Update the Bookstore Model


Tyler Bissmeyer for The New York Times


Vicki Culler shops for discounted books at the Friends of the Public Library in Cincinnati.







At the bustling public library in Arlington Heights, Ill., requests by three patrons to place any title on hold prompt a savvy computer tracking system to order an additional copy of the coveted item. That policy was intended to eliminate the frustration of long waits to check out best sellers and other popular books. But it has had some unintended consequences, too: the library’s shelves are now stocked with 36 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”




Of course, librarians acknowledge that when patrons’ passion for the sexy series lacking in literary merit cools in a year or two, the majority of volumes in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy will probably be plucked from the shelves and sold at the Friends of the Library’s used-book sales, alongside other poorly circulated, donated and out-of-date materials.


“A library has limited shelf space, so you almost have to think of it as a store, and stock it with the things that people want,” said Jason Kuhl, the executive director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Renovations will turn part of the library’s first floor into an area resembling a bookshop that officials are calling the Marketplace, with cozy seating, vending machines and, above all, an abundance of best sellers.


As librarians across the nation struggle with the task of redefining their roles and responsibilities in a digital age, many public libraries are seeing an opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of traditional bookstores. They are increasingly adapting their collections and services based on the demands of library patrons, whom they now call customers.


Today’s libraries are reinventing themselves as vibrant town squares, showcasing the latest best sellers, lending Kindles loaded with e-books, and offering grass-roots technology training centers. Faced with the need to compete for shrinking municipal finances, libraries are determined to prove they can respond as quickly to the needs of the taxpayers as the police and fire department can.


“I think public libraries used to seem intimidating to many people, but today, they are becoming much more user-friendly, and are no longer these big, impersonal mausoleums,” said Jeannette Woodward, a former librarian and author of “Creating the Customer-Driven Library: Building on the Bookstore Model.”


“Public libraries tread a fine line,” Ms. Woodward said. “They want to make people happy, and get them in the habit of coming into the library for popular best sellers, even if some of it might be considered junk. But libraries also understand the need for providing good information, which often can only be found at the library.”


Cheryl Hurley, the president of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher in New York “dedicated to preserving America’s best and most significant writing,” said the trend of libraries that cater to the public’s demand for best sellers is not surprising, especially given the ravages of the recession on public budgets.


Still, Ms. Hurley remains confident that libraries will never relinquish their responsibility to also provide patrons with the opportunity to discover literary works of merit, be it the classics, or more recent fiction from novelists like Philip Roth, whose work is both critically acclaimed and immensely popular.


“The political ramifications for libraries today can result in driving the collection more and more from what the people want, rather than libraries shaping the tastes of the readers,” Ms. Hurley said. “But one of the joys of visiting the public library is the serendipity of discovering another book, even though you were actually looking for that best seller that you thought you wanted.”


“It’s all about balancing the library’s mission and its marketing, and that is always a tricky dance,” she added.


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Reid Says a Deal Is Unlikely Before the Fiscal Deadline





WASHINGTON — Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, warned Thursday morning that there was scant time to put together a Congressional deal to avert the impending fiscal crisis and that no resolution was in sight.




“I have to be very honest,” Mr. Reid said as the Senate convened Thursday in an unusual session between Christmas and New Year’s Day. “I don’t know time-wise how it can happen now.”


Mr. Reid offered his pessimistic assessment shortly before President Obama, cutting his vacation short, arrived back in Washington on Air Force One. White House officials said that before leaving Hawaii, Mr. Obama had spoken separately by phone with each of the four Congressional leaders about the status of negotiations, but they gave no details of the discussion.


On the Senate floor, Mr. Reid excoriated House Republicans for failing to consider a Senate-passed measure that would extend lower tax rates on household income up to $250,000. He urged House members, who remained away from Washington, to return to the Capitol to put together at least a modest deal to avoid the more than half-a-trillion dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to begin in January.


“The American people are waiting for the ball to drop,” Mr. Reid said, “but it’s not going to be a good drop.”


House Republicans planned a midafternoon conference call among members to discuss, among other things, their possible return this weekend; members were told they would be given 48 hours’ notice before any impending return. Republican senators were also planning to convene at the Capitol — normally somnolent during Christmas week — to strategize.


A spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, confirmed that he had spoken with the president, and said that Mr. McConnell was “happy to review what the president has in mind.” But the spokesman, Don Stewart, said Senate Democrats had not come ahead with a plan.


“When they do, members on both sides of the aisle will review the legislation and make decisions on how best to proceed,” Mr. Stewart said.


Mr. Reid said that absent a move from Republicans, the Senate would move forward this week on the national security measure concerning espionage, as well as a bill to help states that have suffered hurricane damage, with multiple votes possible.


“We are here in Washington working,” Mr. Reid said, “while the members of the House of Representatives are out watching movies and watching their kids play soccer and basketball and doing all kinds of things. They should be here.”


Senators, frustrated, pessimistic and in some cases downright miserable, returned to Washington with no clear fiscal agenda. Senator Ben Nelson, a retiring Democrat of Nebraska, arrived shortly after midnight on Thursday on a flight that was delayed more than four hours. As he walked through the airport, he lamented the deteriorating political comity that he has observed during two terms in the Senate and two terms as a Democratic governor of a conservative state.


“There are folks who are elected who have come here with an agenda to do nothing and want to stop everything,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview. “It may be the new norm – blocking everything.”


For Mr. Nelson, who decided against seeking a third term, the looming fiscal crisis would be the final legislative act of a political career built around a bipartisan voting record. He said he was not confident that a real deal could be reached that would be acceptable to both sides, considering that Congress is filled with many people “who didn’t accept the 2008 presidential election and haven’t accepted the 2012 election either.”


Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.



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Home Tech: Devices to Monitor Physical Activity and Food Intake


STEP LIVELY Fitbit One pedometer clips onto your belt or pocket to record activity.







WHEN I received the results of a routine cholesterol test this summer, I was certain there had been some kind of mistake. I’m young, unstressed and healthy, or so I imagined. I work out, too, and most impartial observers — and some partial ones — would describe me as lean. Plus, I eat a nutritious diet, I swear. So why did my LDL levels surpass my I.Q. — or, for that matter, Einstein’s?




The facts were stark: My genes predisposed me to metabolic syndrome, my doctor told me. Like my forebears, I was on a fast path to heart disease and diabetes. My doctor ordered me to reduce my carbs and come up with a more stringent exercise plan. I’ve rarely monitored what I eat and how much exercise I get. I had no idea how to go about the logistics of it. How would I count my carbs? How would I track my fitness routine?


Of course, there are apps for that. I set out to scour the market for devices and programs to help me and any family member who wished to join me in my low-carb adventure improve our health. I found two kinds of technologies: fitness trackers to monitor physical activity, and P.C. and smartphone apps to track diet. I spent weeks testing several of them. And while I found a few to be quite helpful, they were all just short of fantastic.


I tried four high-end fitness gadgets: Nike’s FuelBand ($149), the Fitbit One ($99.95), Jawbone’s Up ($129.99) and the BodyMedia FIT wireless armband ($149). I also threw in a plain-Jane pedometer, the Omron HJ-720ITC, which I found for $31 at many stores online.


All of these devices work in a similar way. You attach them to your person (the FuelBand and Up fit around your wrist, the FIT goes around your upper arm, and the Fitbit and Omron pedometer can be placed in a pocket or clipped to your belt). Then, as you move, the devices measure your activity.


Unfortunately each device had major drawbacks. Even though I had gotten the proper size, I found that the Up and the FuelBand did not fit well around my wrist. They tapped against my desk while I typed, and they slid about uncomfortably when I washed the dishes. (They are both water-resistant.) BodyMedia’s FIT, meanwhile, is about the size of a man’s large wristwatch. Positioned directly against the skin around the upper arm, it is ungainly — I found it distracting when I was in a short-sleeve workout shirt, and strange-looking under a nice button-down shirt.


The pedometer and the Fitbit were easier to handle; I hardly noticed them crammed with my keys and phone in my pocket. On the other hand, because they are not wearable, I often forgot them on my bedside table, where they did no good.


Still, among these vast offerings, I found the Fitbit and the cheap Omron to be best. The Fitbit is an unobtrusive slab of plastic about the size of a U.S.B. thumb drive. Its software — which is available for Macs and Windows P.C.’s, as well as iOS and Android devices — is simple to learn and offers plenty of graphs and stats to track your progress. The most useful is a graph of your activity over the course of the day: you can see how many calories you burned while at work and alter your behavior accordingly. Maybe go for a brief walk after lunch?


(I was a big fan of Jawbone’s Up software, too, but I ultimately found it too limited: It works only on Apple’s iOS devices; the company has not yet made versions for P.C.’s or Android devices.)


The best thing about the Fitbit is its wireless syncing capability. It comes with a tiny receiver that plugs into your computer’s U.S.B. port; whenever your Fitbit is near your machine, it sends its data over the air, no physical docking required. It also syncs directly to your phone over Bluetooth. (You do have to plug your Fitbit in to charge it, but only rarely — you can go more than a week between charges.)


The Omron, by comparison, does not do wireless syncing, and its optional P.C. software is pretty basic. But paucity is its beauty. No setup is required. Just turn it on and leave it in your pocket. At the end of the day, peek at its screen — in large, readable type, it shows a single stat: how many steps you have walked that day. The Omron does not promise the world, but it delivers enough information to keep you healthy.


Read More..

Home Tech: Devices to Monitor Physical Activity and Food Intake


STEP LIVELY Fitbit One pedometer clips onto your belt or pocket to record activity.







WHEN I received the results of a routine cholesterol test this summer, I was certain there had been some kind of mistake. I’m young, unstressed and healthy, or so I imagined. I work out, too, and most impartial observers — and some partial ones — would describe me as lean. Plus, I eat a nutritious diet, I swear. So why did my LDL levels surpass my I.Q. — or, for that matter, Einstein’s?




The facts were stark: My genes predisposed me to metabolic syndrome, my doctor told me. Like my forebears, I was on a fast path to heart disease and diabetes. My doctor ordered me to reduce my carbs and come up with a more stringent exercise plan. I’ve rarely monitored what I eat and how much exercise I get. I had no idea how to go about the logistics of it. How would I count my carbs? How would I track my fitness routine?


Of course, there are apps for that. I set out to scour the market for devices and programs to help me and any family member who wished to join me in my low-carb adventure improve our health. I found two kinds of technologies: fitness trackers to monitor physical activity, and P.C. and smartphone apps to track diet. I spent weeks testing several of them. And while I found a few to be quite helpful, they were all just short of fantastic.


I tried four high-end fitness gadgets: Nike’s FuelBand ($149), the Fitbit One ($99.95), Jawbone’s Up ($129.99) and the BodyMedia FIT wireless armband ($149). I also threw in a plain-Jane pedometer, the Omron HJ-720ITC, which I found for $31 at many stores online.


All of these devices work in a similar way. You attach them to your person (the FuelBand and Up fit around your wrist, the FIT goes around your upper arm, and the Fitbit and Omron pedometer can be placed in a pocket or clipped to your belt). Then, as you move, the devices measure your activity.


Unfortunately each device had major drawbacks. Even though I had gotten the proper size, I found that the Up and the FuelBand did not fit well around my wrist. They tapped against my desk while I typed, and they slid about uncomfortably when I washed the dishes. (They are both water-resistant.) BodyMedia’s FIT, meanwhile, is about the size of a man’s large wristwatch. Positioned directly against the skin around the upper arm, it is ungainly — I found it distracting when I was in a short-sleeve workout shirt, and strange-looking under a nice button-down shirt.


The pedometer and the Fitbit were easier to handle; I hardly noticed them crammed with my keys and phone in my pocket. On the other hand, because they are not wearable, I often forgot them on my bedside table, where they did no good.


Still, among these vast offerings, I found the Fitbit and the cheap Omron to be best. The Fitbit is an unobtrusive slab of plastic about the size of a U.S.B. thumb drive. Its software — which is available for Macs and Windows P.C.’s, as well as iOS and Android devices — is simple to learn and offers plenty of graphs and stats to track your progress. The most useful is a graph of your activity over the course of the day: you can see how many calories you burned while at work and alter your behavior accordingly. Maybe go for a brief walk after lunch?


(I was a big fan of Jawbone’s Up software, too, but I ultimately found it too limited: It works only on Apple’s iOS devices; the company has not yet made versions for P.C.’s or Android devices.)


The best thing about the Fitbit is its wireless syncing capability. It comes with a tiny receiver that plugs into your computer’s U.S.B. port; whenever your Fitbit is near your machine, it sends its data over the air, no physical docking required. It also syncs directly to your phone over Bluetooth. (You do have to plug your Fitbit in to charge it, but only rarely — you can go more than a week between charges.)


The Omron, by comparison, does not do wireless syncing, and its optional P.C. software is pretty basic. But paucity is its beauty. No setup is required. Just turn it on and leave it in your pocket. At the end of the day, peek at its screen — in large, readable type, it shows a single stat: how many steps you have walked that day. The Omron does not promise the world, but it delivers enough information to keep you healthy.


Read More..

Japan Might Revise Apology on Wartime Sex Slaves





TOKYO — A top official hinted on Thursday that Japan’s newly installed conservative government might seek to revise a two-decade-old official apology to women forced into sexual slavery during World War II, a move that would most likely outrage South Korea and possibly other former victims of Japanese militarism.




Speaking a day after the new cabinet was named, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, who serves as the government’s top spokesman, refused to say clearly whether the new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, would uphold the 1993 apology, which was issued by the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yohei Kono.


Mr. Suga said at a news conference, however, that it would be “desirable for experts and historians to study” the statement, which acknowledged the Imperial Army’s involvement in forcing thousands of Asian and Dutch women to provide sex for Japanese soldiers.


Mr. Suga seemed to keep his comments intentionally vague, adding only that the matter “should not be made into a political or diplomatic issue.” He also said the Abe government would uphold a broader apology, issued in 1995 to observe the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, to all victims of Japan’s colonialism and aggression.


The sex slaves issue remains highly emotional in South Korea, a former Japanese colony. On Thursday, the South Korean Foreign Ministry responded to Mr. Suga’s comments by calling on Japan not to forget its militaristic past.


The Kono Statement has long been a sore point for Japanese rightists, who deny either that the women had been coerced or that the military had a hand in forcing them to become what many Japanese euphemistically call “comfort women.” These critics include Mr. Abe, an outspoken nationalist who has repeatedly called for revising the statement, most recently during an internal Liberal Democratic Party election in September.


The issue does not resonate broadly, however, among the general public, which would rather avoid confrontation with other Asian countries. During the national parliamentary elections this month that swept his Liberal Democrats back into power, Mr. Abe avoided talking about the matter, apparently so as not to be seen as too far to the right of mainstream voters.


His position has also caused concern in Washington, where the United States government has urged Japan and South Korea, its two closest Asian allies, to increase cooperation against security threats like North Korea.


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Jobs Compete With College in Montana Oil Country


Matthew Staver for The New York Times


Shay Findlay is 19 and earns $40,000 a year at his second job since graduating from high school.







SIDNEY, Mont. — For most high school seniors, a college degree is the surest path to a decent job and a stable future. But here in oil country, some teenagers are choosing the oil fields over universities, forgoing higher education for jobs with salaries that can start at $50,000 a year.








Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Today’s headlong race for oil and gas is reshaping communities in the northern Plains, bringing floods of cash and job prospects.






It is a lucrative but risky decision for any 18-year-old to make, one that could foreclose on his future if the frenzied pace of oil and gas drilling from here to North Dakota to Texas falters and work dries up. But with unemployment at more than 12 percent nationwide for young adults and college tuition soaring, students here on the snow-glazed plains of eastern Montana said they were ready to take their chances.


“I just figured, the oil field is here and I’d make the money while I could,” said Tegan Sivertson, 19, who monitors pipelines for a gas company, sometimes working 15-hour days. “I didn’t want to waste the money and go to school when I could make just as much.”


Less than a year after proms and homecoming games, teenagers like Mr. Sivertson now wake at 4 a.m. to make the three-hour trek to remote oil rigs. They fish busted machinery out of two-mile-deep hydraulic fracturing wells and repair safety devices that keep the wells from rupturing, often working alongside men old enough to be their fathers. Some live at home; others drive back on weekends to eat their mothers’ food, do loads of laundry and go to high school basketball games, still straddling the blurred border between childhood and adulthood.


Just as gold rushes and silver booms once brought opera houses and armies of prospectors to rugged corners of the West, today’s headlong race for oil and gas is reshaping staid communities in the northern Plains, bringing once untold floods of cash and job prospects, but also deep anxieties about crime, growth and a future newly vulnerable to cycles of boom and bust.


Even gas stations are enticing students away from college. Katorina Pippenger, a high school senior in the tiny town of Bainville, Mont., said she makes $24 an hour as a cashier in nearby Williston, N.D., the epicenter of the boom. Her plan is to work for a few years after she graduates this spring, save up and flee. She likes the look of Denver. “I just want to make money and get out,” she said.


The shift appears to be localized around centers of oil production like Sidney. School counselors in western Montana, far from the boom, said that few of their students were abandoning college for energy jobs. And even here, a majority of graduates are still choosing universities and community colleges.


But school officials in eastern Montana said more and more students were interested in working for at least a year after graduation and getting technical training instead of a four-year degree.


Last year, one-third of the graduating seniors at Sidney High School headed off to work instead of going to college or joining the military, a record percentage. Some found work making deliveries to oil rigs, doing construction and repairing machinery. Others decided to first seek training as welders or diesel mechanics, which pay more than entry-level jobs.


Meanwhile, enrollment at Dawson Community College in Glendive, about an hour from Sidney, has fallen to 225 students from 446 just a few years ago, as fewer local students pursue two-year degrees.


“It’s the allure of the money,” said Thom Barnhart, a guidance counselor at Sidney High.


As more families arrive from Florida and Michigan and throughout Montana, seeking a new start after bankruptcies and layoffs, schools in places like Sidney are buckling. School enrollment leapt to 863 students from 723 in three years. The district is scrambling to hire good teachers who can get by on a $32,000 yearly salary in a town where apartments can rent for $1,500 a month. Freshmen are sharing lockers, and the district reopened a school that had been shuttered for years.


But every year, hundreds of those new students depart within a few weeks, tugged along by parents heading off to another job in another town.


“It’s a revolving door,” said Daniel Farr, the district’s superintendent.


At the end of a gravel highway in northeastern Montana, graduating seniors in Bainville are asking similar questions about their future. Should they get an education and pursue their interests? Or should they stick close to home and surf a wave of cash and jobs that will only grow as companies begin to build a new industrial rail terminal and worker camps, forever transforming this quiet farm town where residents say the population has doubled since the 2010 census found 300.


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Op-Ed Contributor: Our Failed Approach to Schizophrenia



TOO many pendulums have swung in the wrong directions in the United States. I am not referring only to the bizarre all-or-nothing rhetoric around gun control, but to the swing in mental health care over the past 50 years: too little institutionalizing of teenagers and young adults (particularly men, generally more prone to violence) who have had a recent onset of schizophrenia; too little education about the public health impact of untreated mental illness; too few psychiatrists to talk about and treat severe mental disorders — even though the medications available in the past 15 to 20 years can be remarkably effective.


Instead we have too much concern about privacy, labeling and stereotyping, about the civil liberties of people who have horrifically distorted thinking. In our concern for the rights of people with mental illness, we have come to neglect the rights of ordinary Americans to be safe from the fear of being shot — at home and at schools, in movie theaters, houses of worship and shopping malls.


“Psychosis” — a loss of touch with reality — is an umbrella term, not unlike “fever.” As with fevers, there are many causes, from drugs and alcohol to head injuries and dementias. The most common source of severe psychosis in young adults is schizophrenia, a badly named disorder that, in the original Greek, means “split mind.” In fact, schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personality, a disorder that is usually caused by major repeated traumas in childhood. Schizophrenia is a physiological disorder caused by changes in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is essential for language, abstract thinking and appropriate social behavior. This highly evolved brain area is weakened by stress, as often occurs in adolescence.


Psychiatrists and neurobiologists have observed biochemical changes and alterations in brain connections in patients with schizophrenia. For example, miscommunications between the prefrontal cortex and the language area in the temporal cortex may result in auditory hallucinations, as well as disorganized thoughts. When the voices become commands, all bets are off. The commands might insist, for example, that a person jump out of a window, even if he has no intention of dying, or grab a set of guns and kill people, without any sense that he is wreaking havoc. Additional symptoms include other distorted thinking, like the notion that something — even a spaceship, or a comic book character — is controlling one’s thoughts and actions.


Schizophrenia generally rears its head between the ages of 15 and 24, with a slightly later age for females. Early signs may include being a quirky loner — often mistaken for Asperger’s syndrome — but acute signs and symptoms do not appear until adolescence or young adulthood.


People with schizophrenia are unaware of how strange their thinking is and do not seek out treatment. At Virginia Tech, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a rampage shooting in 2007, professors knew something was terribly wrong, but he was not hospitalized for long enough to get well. The parents and community-college classmates of Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and shot and injured 13 others (including a member of Congress) in 2011, did not know where to turn. We may never know with certainty what demons tormented Adam Lanza, who slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, though his acts strongly suggest undiagnosed schizophrenia.


I write this despite the so-called Goldwater Rule, an ethical standard the American Psychiatric Association adopted in the 1970s that directs psychiatrists not to comment on someone’s mental state if they have not examined him and gotten permission to discuss his case. It has had a chilling effect. After mass murders, our airwaves are filled with unfounded speculations about video games, our culture of hedonism and our loss of religious faith, while psychiatrists, the ones who know the most about severe mental illness, are largely marginalized.


Severely ill people like Mr. Lanza fall through the cracks, in part because school counselors are more familiar with anxiety and depression than with psychosis. Hospitalizations for acute onset of schizophrenia have been shortened to the point of absurdity. Insurance companies and families try to get patients out of hospitals as quickly as possible because of the prohibitively high cost of care.


As documented by writers like the law professor Elyn R. Saks, author of the memoir “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness,” medication and treatment work. The vast majority of people with schizophrenia, treated or untreated, are not violent, though they are more likely than others to commit violent crimes. When treated with medication after a rampage, many perpetrators who have shown signs of schizophrenia — including John Lennon’s killer and Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin — have recognized the heinousness of their actions and expressed deep remorse.


It takes a village to stop a rampage. We need reasonable controls on semiautomatic weapons; criminal penalties for those who sell weapons to people with clear signs of psychosis; greater insurance coverage and capacity at private and public hospitals for lengthier care for patients with schizophrenia; intense public education about how to deal with schizophrenia; greater willingness to seek involuntary commitment of those who pose a threat to themselves or others; and greater incentives for psychiatrists (and other mental health professionals) to treat the disorder, rather than less dangerous conditions.


Too many people with acute schizophrenia have gone untreated. There have been too many Glocks, too many kids and adults cut down in their prime. Enough already.


Paul Steinberg is a psychiatrist in private practice.



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Op-Ed Contributor: Our Failed Approach to Schizophrenia



TOO many pendulums have swung in the wrong directions in the United States. I am not referring only to the bizarre all-or-nothing rhetoric around gun control, but to the swing in mental health care over the past 50 years: too little institutionalizing of teenagers and young adults (particularly men, generally more prone to violence) who have had a recent onset of schizophrenia; too little education about the public health impact of untreated mental illness; too few psychiatrists to talk about and treat severe mental disorders — even though the medications available in the past 15 to 20 years can be remarkably effective.


Instead we have too much concern about privacy, labeling and stereotyping, about the civil liberties of people who have horrifically distorted thinking. In our concern for the rights of people with mental illness, we have come to neglect the rights of ordinary Americans to be safe from the fear of being shot — at home and at schools, in movie theaters, houses of worship and shopping malls.


“Psychosis” — a loss of touch with reality — is an umbrella term, not unlike “fever.” As with fevers, there are many causes, from drugs and alcohol to head injuries and dementias. The most common source of severe psychosis in young adults is schizophrenia, a badly named disorder that, in the original Greek, means “split mind.” In fact, schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personality, a disorder that is usually caused by major repeated traumas in childhood. Schizophrenia is a physiological disorder caused by changes in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is essential for language, abstract thinking and appropriate social behavior. This highly evolved brain area is weakened by stress, as often occurs in adolescence.


Psychiatrists and neurobiologists have observed biochemical changes and alterations in brain connections in patients with schizophrenia. For example, miscommunications between the prefrontal cortex and the language area in the temporal cortex may result in auditory hallucinations, as well as disorganized thoughts. When the voices become commands, all bets are off. The commands might insist, for example, that a person jump out of a window, even if he has no intention of dying, or grab a set of guns and kill people, without any sense that he is wreaking havoc. Additional symptoms include other distorted thinking, like the notion that something — even a spaceship, or a comic book character — is controlling one’s thoughts and actions.


Schizophrenia generally rears its head between the ages of 15 and 24, with a slightly later age for females. Early signs may include being a quirky loner — often mistaken for Asperger’s syndrome — but acute signs and symptoms do not appear until adolescence or young adulthood.


People with schizophrenia are unaware of how strange their thinking is and do not seek out treatment. At Virginia Tech, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a rampage shooting in 2007, professors knew something was terribly wrong, but he was not hospitalized for long enough to get well. The parents and community-college classmates of Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and shot and injured 13 others (including a member of Congress) in 2011, did not know where to turn. We may never know with certainty what demons tormented Adam Lanza, who slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, though his acts strongly suggest undiagnosed schizophrenia.


I write this despite the so-called Goldwater Rule, an ethical standard the American Psychiatric Association adopted in the 1970s that directs psychiatrists not to comment on someone’s mental state if they have not examined him and gotten permission to discuss his case. It has had a chilling effect. After mass murders, our airwaves are filled with unfounded speculations about video games, our culture of hedonism and our loss of religious faith, while psychiatrists, the ones who know the most about severe mental illness, are largely marginalized.


Severely ill people like Mr. Lanza fall through the cracks, in part because school counselors are more familiar with anxiety and depression than with psychosis. Hospitalizations for acute onset of schizophrenia have been shortened to the point of absurdity. Insurance companies and families try to get patients out of hospitals as quickly as possible because of the prohibitively high cost of care.


As documented by writers like the law professor Elyn R. Saks, author of the memoir “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness,” medication and treatment work. The vast majority of people with schizophrenia, treated or untreated, are not violent, though they are more likely than others to commit violent crimes. When treated with medication after a rampage, many perpetrators who have shown signs of schizophrenia — including John Lennon’s killer and Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin — have recognized the heinousness of their actions and expressed deep remorse.


It takes a village to stop a rampage. We need reasonable controls on semiautomatic weapons; criminal penalties for those who sell weapons to people with clear signs of psychosis; greater insurance coverage and capacity at private and public hospitals for lengthier care for patients with schizophrenia; intense public education about how to deal with schizophrenia; greater willingness to seek involuntary commitment of those who pose a threat to themselves or others; and greater incentives for psychiatrists (and other mental health professionals) to treat the disorder, rather than less dangerous conditions.


Too many people with acute schizophrenia have gone untreated. There have been too many Glocks, too many kids and adults cut down in their prime. Enough already.


Paul Steinberg is a psychiatrist in private practice.



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The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview With Nick J. Romito





Mr. Romito, 30, is the founder and chief executive of View the Space, a new real estate technology business that creates online video tours, primarily of office space, and provides data-tracking services to commercial real estate companies, among them SL Green Realty, Vornado Realty Trust and Silverstein Properties.




Before starting the business last year, Mr. Romito worked as a commercial broker and tenant and landlord representative.


Q. How has business been so far?


A. Business is good. We launched the beta version of the Web site about a year ago, and this April was when we took the beta logo off and decided that we were at a point where we could start charging for the product. We’ve grown extraordinarily fast, but that’s a good thing.


Q. Are you profitable yet?


A. We had profitability in May, then like most start-up companies we scaled up. We hit profitability again in October.


I put in all my life savings, which was roughly $50,000 to $100,000, with my wife’s help. As we were going into the market and trying to get people to believe in our dream it gets rough. But we actually got really lucky and found some great partners — a syndicate of hedge fund professionals who knew commercial real estate and invest in start-ups — who liked our idea. We raised about $650,000.


Q. Let’s talk about the services you provide.


A. As you probably know, commercial real estate is an antiquated business, more or less reluctant to embrace technology. We thought we were a crazy enough bunch to change that. We decided we could improve the process by taking it online from start to finish. So for us that means video. We’ve created a style of shooting video for office space that’s really never existed. Ours is the closest thing to actually being there, where you fly through the space and you actually feel like you’re in it. You just can’t touch the walls.


On the landlord side, we allow you to track how a person is interacting with the tour. So you get to see 1) the prospect who’s looking at it; 2) how many times they’ve watched it; and 3) how engaged are they with it. You’ll actually be able to tell whether a specific firm has taken the tour 10 times — that’s a very, very high level of engagement — and they’re a serious prospect so I’m going to follow up with them.


Q. What kind of analytics software accomplishes this?


A. We had to build a pretty serious back end of data that’s taken us awhile. You’ve got I.P. addresses all over the place, so we had to build a library of those, which we can identify for the most part which companies are viewing your space.


Q. And how do the clients see this information?


A. They can see it in real time whenever they want — from their dashboard. And if they’re not online we’ll e-mail it to them.


Q. Has this service helped to sell property faster?


A. Yeah. We’re at about 1.5 million square feet leased on View the Space since December 2011.


Q. How many clients do you have right now?


A. Over 50. We’ve got most of the larger commercial real estate institutions both on the public and private side.


It’s funny, when we first started, our thesis was that we would get all of the smaller landlords on board first because we have more access to them. But because we worked so tightly with the brokerage community to build this, SL Green caught wind of what we were doing very quickly and they ended up being our first big client.


So it’s kind of like a domino effect where you get the SL Greens of the world soon enough the Silversteins and all the other players want to find out what you’re doing.


Q. Where do you hope to see your business in, say, the next five to 10 years?


A. We think that technology is here to stay in commercial real estate. And we see us growing, hopefully, in every major market. We’re actively in 10 markets right now.


New York right now is probably 60 percent of the activity that we have.


Q. You don’t have a technology background, do you?


A. I don’t. During the first year of development I was still a broker. I tried to outsource the first part of this to India, which was a very painful process. You’ve got to start your day at 4 a.m., because of the time difference, and the language barrier was very difficult. Not only was I trying to learn Hindi, but also the language of technology.


Q. So when you’re not learning new languages, what do you do for fun?


A. I surf. That was more or less my life growing up on the Jersey Shore. In Toms River.


Q. Were you or your family affected by Hurricane Sandy?


A. My mom lost her house. She got a couple of feet of water, and now they’ll have to demo the house.


But as long as everyone is O.K., it’s just stuff. I think everybody down there is so resilient, and this is like when everybody really comes together.


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Changing of the Guard: Corrupt Chinese Officials Draw Unusual Publicity





BEIJING — The Chinese have become largely inured to tales of voracious officials stockpiling luxury apartments, $30,000 Swiss watches or enough stolen cash to buy their mistress a Porsche.







Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

“Something has shifted,” Zhu Ruifeng, a Beijing journalist who has exposed more than a hundred cases of alleged corruption, said of how quickly officials are now responding to scandals.







But when images of a bulbous-faced Communist Party functionary in southwest China having sex with an 18-year-old girl spread on the Internet late last month, even the most jaded citizens took note — as did the local party watchdogs who ordered his dismissal.


These have been especially nerve-racking times for Chinese officials who cheat, steal and bribe. Since the local bureaucrat, Lei Zhengfu, became an unwilling celebrity here, a succession of others have been publicly exposed. And despite the usual cries of innocence, most have been removed from office while party investigators sort through their bedrooms and bank accounts.


In the weeks since the Communist Party elevated a new slate of top leaders, the state media, often fed by freelance vigilantes, have been serving up a head-spinning collection of scandals.


Highlights include a deputy district official in Shanxi Province who fathered 10 children with four wives; a prefecture chief from Yunnan with an opium habit who managed to accumulate 23 homes, including 6 in Australia; and a Hunan bureaucrat with $19 million in unexplained assets who once gave his young daughter $32,000 in cash for her birthday.


“The anticorruption storm has begun,” People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, wrote on its Web site this month.


The flurry of revelations suggests that members of China’s new leadership may be more serious than their predecessors about trying to tame the cronyism, bribery and debauchery that afflict state-run companies and local governments, right down to the outwardly dowdy neighborhood committees that oversee sanitation. Efforts began just days after Xi Jinping, the newly appointed Communist Party chief and China’s incoming president, warned that failing to curb corruption could put the party’s grip on power at risk.


“Something has shifted,” said Zhu Ruifeng, a Beijing journalist who has exposed more than a hundred cases of alleged corruption on his Web site, including the lurid exertions of Mr. Lei. “In the past, it might take 10 days for an official involved in a sex scandal to lose his job. This time he was gone in 66 hours.”


The licentiousness of Qi Fang, the public security chief of a small city in the far west, probably deserves a prize for originality. This month, an Internet sleuth revealed that Mr. Qi was maintaining two young sisters as mistresses. The sisters, as luck would have it, had also landed police department jobs and shared an apartment bankrolled by the city.


Mr. Qi lost his post, but not before denying any mischief and correcting one detail of the story: the sisters, contrary to earlier reports, are not twins.


Still, for all the salaciousness associated with the latest scandals, analysts say it is too soon to know whether Mr. Xi and other senior leaders have the stomach to wage a no-holds-barred war on the party’s pervasive corruption.


They point out that most of the recent scandals were uncovered by journalists, anonymous citizens or disgruntled colleagues who posted photographs and other damning allegations on the Internet, forcing the authorities to respond. Also significant is that most of those ousted were relatively minor officials.


The manager of a major Chinese Internet company said the party was effectively abetting the anticorruption free-for-all by declining to pull the plug on the online denunciations. But he said there was an implicit understanding that high-ranking officials were off limits.


“For now it’s spontaneous,” said the manager, who asked that the name of his company be withheld because of the political sensitivities involved. “But we also understand the parameters.”


This month, Luo Changping, deputy managing editor at the enterprising newsmagazine Caijing, published accusations on his microblog about improper business dealings by Liu Tienan, the director of China’s National Energy Administration. The postings, which also included charges that Mr. Liu had fabricated his academic qualifications and had threatened to kill his mistress, have caused something of an earthquake, given that they targeted such a high-level official. Just as astonishing, many say, is that Mr. Luo’s claims remain undeleted by censors despite Mr. Liu’s denials of wrongdoing.


Patrick Zuo contributed research.



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Chinese Driver Runs Down Students





HONG KONG — A man angry over a court ruling in the case of his daughter’s murder used his car to run down a group of  high school students in northern China, causing 13 to be hospitalized with injuries, the local government and the state news media reported on Tuesday. It was the second major attack on students in China in less than two weeks.




The man, Yin Tiejun, 48, ran down 23 students at the school in Fengning County, in Hebei Province, during their lunch break on Monday, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported. He then tried to set fire to his car by igniting a container of diesel fuel. Xinhua quoted the police as saying he was upset that the court had not sentenced all of his daughter’s killers to death. Mr. Yin was detained on charges of endangering public safety.  


One of the hospitalized students suffered a serious head injury, while another had two broken ankles and a third had a concussion, the local government said.


The Beijing Times said the driver made no apparent effort to slow down before hitting the students and did not stop until he hit a taxi soon after.


As with the previous attack, in which a man with a meat cleaver injured 23 students in adjacent Henan Province on Dec. 14, the episode received limited attention from the state news media. The Chinese media have given heavy coverage instead to the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and the shootings on Monday of four firefighters, two of whom died, in Webster, N.Y.


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Gun Makers Based in Connecticut Form a Potent Lobby





Gun owners packed a hearing room in the Connecticut capital, vowing to oppose a bill that would require new markers on guns so that they are easier to trace.




One after another, they testified that the technology, called microstamping, was flawed and would increase the cost of guns.


But the witness who commanded the most attention in Hartford that day in 2009 was a representative of one of Connecticut’s major employers: the Colt Manufacturing Company, the gun maker.


The Colt executive, Carlton S. Chen, said the company would seriously consider leaving the state if the bill became law. “You would think that the Connecticut government would be in support of our industry,” Mr. Chen said.


Soon, Connecticut lawmakers shelved the bill; they have declined to take it up since. Now, in the aftermath of the school massacre in Newtown, the lawmakers are formulating new gun-control measures, saying the state must serve as a national model.


But the failed effort to enact the microstamping measure shows how difficult the climate has been for gun control in state capitals. The firearm companies have played an important role in defeating these measures by repeatedly warning that they will close factories and move jobs if new state regulations are approved.


The companies have issued such threats in several states, especially in the Northeast, where gun control is more popular. But their views have particular resonance in Connecticut, a cradle of the American gun industry.


Like manufacturing in Connecticut over all, the state’s gun industry is not as robust as it once was. Still, Connecticut remains the seventh-largest producer of firearms in the country, according to federal data.


Colt, based in Connecticut since the 1800s, employs roughly 900 people in the state. Two other major gun companies, Sturm, Ruger & Company and Mossberg & Sons, are also based in the state. In all, the industry employs about 2,000 people in Connecticut, company officials said.


Gun-control advocates have long viewed Hartford, the capital, as hospitable terrain, because Connecticut is a relatively liberal state and already has more gun restrictions than most. Democrats control both houses of the legislature.


Yet lawmakers in Hartford did more than shelve the microstamping bill in 2009. They also declined to push a bill last year that would have banned high-capacity ammunition magazines — the very accessory used by Adam Lanza to kill 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.


In several states, the gun companies have enlisted unions that represent gun workers, mindful that Democratic lawmakers who might otherwise back gun control also have close ties to labor.


In Connecticut, the United Automobile Workers, which represents Colt workers, has testified against restrictions. The union’s arguments were bolstered last year when Marlin Firearms, a leading manufacturer of rifles, closed a factory in Connecticut that employed more than 200 people. Marlin cited economic pressures, not gun regulation, for the decision, but representatives of the gun industry have said the combination of the two factors could spur others to move.


State law significantly restricts the ability of corporations to make political donations in Connecticut. Employees of Connecticut gun companies have contributed several thousand dollars in total in recent years to state candidates, mostly Republicans, according to an analysis of state records.


Financially, the gun companies and their employees in Connecticut have exerted influence by donating to national groups, especially the National Rifle Association, which have in turn helped Connecticut gun rights groups, according to interviews and financial records.


But it appears that in Hartford, the companies are relying largely on economic arguments.


Their strategy has been led by the industry’s trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which happens to have its national headquarters in Newtown, a few miles from the site of the shootings.


When Connecticut lawmakers held a hearing in 2011 on the measure to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines, the director of government regulations for the foundation, Jake McGuigan, opened his testimony with some statistics.


Mr. McGuigan told lawmakers that the state’s gun companies contributed $1.3 billion to the Connecticut economy, through their own operations and those of their suppliers.


“Each year, they get courted by other firearm-friendly states, like Idaho, Virginia, North Carolina,” Mr. McGuigan said. He later added, “It’s not an idle threat.”


The federation and Colt have declined to comment on gun-control legislation since the school killings.


“Our hearts go out to our fellow Connecticut residents who have suffered such unimaginable loss,” Colt said in a statement. “We do not believe it is appropriate to make further public statements at this very emotional time.”


Gun-control advocates in Hartford said the gun companies’ strategy was shrewd because it allowed Democratic lawmakers to oppose new regulations while proclaiming that they had not bowed to the National Rifle Association.


Michael Moss and Griff Palmer contributed reporting.



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News Analysis: Scientists to Seek Clues to Violence in Genome of Gunman in Newtown, Conn.





In a move likely to renew a longstanding ethical controversy, geneticists are quietly making plans to study the DNA of Adam Lanza, 20, who killed 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Conn. Their work will be an effort to discover biological clues to extreme violence.




The researchers, at the University of Connecticut, confirmed their plans through a spokeswoman but declined to provide details. But other experts speculated that the geneticists might look for mutations that might be associated with mental illnesses and ones that might also increase the risk for violence.


They could look at all of Mr. Lanza’s genes, searching for something unusual like gene duplications or deletions or unexpected mutations, or they might determine the sequence of his entire genome, the genes and the vast regions of DNA that are not genes, in an extended search for aberrations that could determine which genes are active and how active they are.


But whatever they do, this apparently is the first time researchers will attempt a detailed study of the DNA of a mass killer.


Some researchers, like Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them.


“We can’t afford not to do this research,” Dr. Beaudet said.


Other scientists are not so sure. They worry that this research could eventually stigmatize people who have never committed a crime but who turn out to have a genetic aberration also found in a mass murder.


Everything known about mental illness, these skeptics say, argues that there are likely to be hundreds of genes involved in extreme violent behavior, not to mention a variety of environmental influences, and that all of these factors can interact in complex and unpredictable ways.


“It is almost inconceivable that there is a common genetic factor” to be found in mass murders, said Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist and neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “I think it says more about us that we wish there was something like this. We wish there was an explanation.”


Scientists are well aware of the fraught history behind the questions of biology and violence.


In the early 20th century, claims that criminal behavior was inherited arose during the eugenics movement and led to sterilizations of mental patients and felons.


On Christmas Day in 1965, two researchers published a paper saying men with an extra Y chromosome, the chromosome that confers maleness, were “super males” and born criminals. The hypothesis was helped along by the fact that these men “fit the classic Hollywood criminal — big, awkward, thuglike and with low I.Q.’s,” said Dr. Philip Reilly, a lawyer and clinical geneticist who has studied this history.


The idea persisted for about 15 years, Dr. Reilly said, but eventually the epidemiological evidence convinced scientists that it was wrong — that these men were no more violent than men without an extra Y chromosome.


In 1993, in a paper published in the journal Science, researchers reported that a mutation leading to a lack of the enzyme monoamine oxidase caused violence in a Dutch family. Every family member who inherited the mutation was a violent criminal; those without it had no criminal behaviors.


“It was a stunning piece of work,” said James Blair, the chief of the unit on affective cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health. But, he added, it turned out not to be generalizable. For the most part, “it was just this family,” he said.


The National Institutes of Health was embroiled in controversy about 20 years ago simply for proposing to study the biological underpinnings of violence. Critics accused researchers of racism and singling out minorities, especially black men.


Shortly after, the N.I.H. took back financing for a conference at the University of Maryland to examine genetics and criminal behavior. The conference was canceled.


But genetics has come of age in recent years with new and powerful methods to determine DNA sequences and analyze the results. Studies of people at the far end of a bell curve can be especially informative, because the genetic roots of their conditions can be stark and easy to spot, noted J. H. Pate Skene, a Duke University neurobiologist.


“I think doing research on outliers, people at an end of a spectrum on something of concern like violent behavior, is certainly a good idea,” he said, but he advised tempering expectations.


“I would call it a caution, not about whether to do this research but about what to expect,” he added.


Perhaps it will be fruitless to search for one or a few major gene mutations that always lead to extreme violence, Dr. Beaudet said. But what if a significant fraction of the shootings were linked to gene variants? What if scientists were to discover genes that were risk factors, increasing a person’s chance of violent behavior but not foreordaining it?


“If we know someone has a 2 percent chance or a 10 percent chance or a 20 percent chance of violent behavior, what would you do with that person?” Dr. Skene said. “They have not been convicted of anything — have not done anything wrong.”


But a genetic profile might play a role if someone were convicted of violent offenses, Dr. Beaudet countered. Criminals are routinely denied parole based solely on psychiatric evaluations. Perhaps a genetic test could add to the certainty of the decision, he said.


Ultimately, understanding the genetics of violence might enable researchers to find ways to intervene before a person commits a horrific crime. But that goal would be difficult to achieve, and the pursuit of it risks jeopardizing personal liberties. Some scientists shudder at the thought of labeling people potential violent criminals.


“The idea of screening with a view of preventing those kinds of incidents is basically unthinkable,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. “You would fail. You would stigmatize.”


Some day, he added, it might be important to know the phenotypes — the characteristics — of violent killers and have their DNA, but not for the reasons many think.


“I am always happy to store DNA and phenotype information and freeze cells, thinking that one day we would have usable clues,” Dr. Hyman added. “But that would be biology, not prevention.”


Read More..

News Analysis: Scientists to Seek Clues to Violence in Genome of Gunman in Newtown, Conn.





In a move likely to renew a longstanding ethical controversy, geneticists are quietly making plans to study the DNA of Adam Lanza, 20, who killed 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Conn. Their work will be an effort to discover biological clues to extreme violence.




The researchers, at the University of Connecticut, confirmed their plans through a spokeswoman but declined to provide details. But other experts speculated that the geneticists might look for mutations that might be associated with mental illnesses and ones that might also increase the risk for violence.


They could look at all of Mr. Lanza’s genes, searching for something unusual like gene duplications or deletions or unexpected mutations, or they might determine the sequence of his entire genome, the genes and the vast regions of DNA that are not genes, in an extended search for aberrations that could determine which genes are active and how active they are.


But whatever they do, this apparently is the first time researchers will attempt a detailed study of the DNA of a mass killer.


Some researchers, like Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them.


“We can’t afford not to do this research,” Dr. Beaudet said.


Other scientists are not so sure. They worry that this research could eventually stigmatize people who have never committed a crime but who turn out to have a genetic aberration also found in a mass murder.


Everything known about mental illness, these skeptics say, argues that there are likely to be hundreds of genes involved in extreme violent behavior, not to mention a variety of environmental influences, and that all of these factors can interact in complex and unpredictable ways.


“It is almost inconceivable that there is a common genetic factor” to be found in mass murders, said Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist and neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “I think it says more about us that we wish there was something like this. We wish there was an explanation.”


Scientists are well aware of the fraught history behind the questions of biology and violence.


In the early 20th century, claims that criminal behavior was inherited arose during the eugenics movement and led to sterilizations of mental patients and felons.


On Christmas Day in 1965, two researchers published a paper saying men with an extra Y chromosome, the chromosome that confers maleness, were “super males” and born criminals. The hypothesis was helped along by the fact that these men “fit the classic Hollywood criminal — big, awkward, thuglike and with low I.Q.’s,” said Dr. Philip Reilly, a lawyer and clinical geneticist who has studied this history.


The idea persisted for about 15 years, Dr. Reilly said, but eventually the epidemiological evidence convinced scientists that it was wrong — that these men were no more violent than men without an extra Y chromosome.


In 1993, in a paper published in the journal Science, researchers reported that a mutation leading to a lack of the enzyme monoamine oxidase caused violence in a Dutch family. Every family member who inherited the mutation was a violent criminal; those without it had no criminal behaviors.


“It was a stunning piece of work,” said James Blair, the chief of the unit on affective cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health. But, he added, it turned out not to be generalizable. For the most part, “it was just this family,” he said.


The National Institutes of Health was embroiled in controversy about 20 years ago simply for proposing to study the biological underpinnings of violence. Critics accused researchers of racism and singling out minorities, especially black men.


Shortly after, the N.I.H. took back financing for a conference at the University of Maryland to examine genetics and criminal behavior. The conference was canceled.


But genetics has come of age in recent years with new and powerful methods to determine DNA sequences and analyze the results. Studies of people at the far end of a bell curve can be especially informative, because the genetic roots of their conditions can be stark and easy to spot, noted J. H. Pate Skene, a Duke University neurobiologist.


“I think doing research on outliers, people at an end of a spectrum on something of concern like violent behavior, is certainly a good idea,” he said, but he advised tempering expectations.


“I would call it a caution, not about whether to do this research but about what to expect,” he added.


Perhaps it will be fruitless to search for one or a few major gene mutations that always lead to extreme violence, Dr. Beaudet said. But what if a significant fraction of the shootings were linked to gene variants? What if scientists were to discover genes that were risk factors, increasing a person’s chance of violent behavior but not foreordaining it?


“If we know someone has a 2 percent chance or a 10 percent chance or a 20 percent chance of violent behavior, what would you do with that person?” Dr. Skene said. “They have not been convicted of anything — have not done anything wrong.”


But a genetic profile might play a role if someone were convicted of violent offenses, Dr. Beaudet countered. Criminals are routinely denied parole based solely on psychiatric evaluations. Perhaps a genetic test could add to the certainty of the decision, he said.


Ultimately, understanding the genetics of violence might enable researchers to find ways to intervene before a person commits a horrific crime. But that goal would be difficult to achieve, and the pursuit of it risks jeopardizing personal liberties. Some scientists shudder at the thought of labeling people potential violent criminals.


“The idea of screening with a view of preventing those kinds of incidents is basically unthinkable,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. “You would fail. You would stigmatize.”


Some day, he added, it might be important to know the phenotypes — the characteristics — of violent killers and have their DNA, but not for the reasons many think.


“I am always happy to store DNA and phenotype information and freeze cells, thinking that one day we would have usable clues,” Dr. Hyman added. “But that would be biology, not prevention.”


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