CARACAS, Venezuela — The nerves of Venezuelans are sure to be tested in the coming week as the country seeks answers not only to the mystery of President Hugo Chavez's medical condition and prognosis but also to the debate over constitutional requirements should he be unable to take the oath of office Thursday to start a fourth term.
On Saturday, Chavez confidant and former army comrade Diosdado Cabello was reelected as National Assembly president, a key position that would make him the leader in any process to call a new election to replace Chavez if the fiery socialist dies or is deemed "permanently incapacitated."
Chavez has not been seen or heard from since he left Venezuela in early December for Cuba, where he underwent his fourth surgery to treat pelvic cancer. In sporadic and thinly detailed medical updates, officials have said he has encountered postoperative problems, including "respiratory insufficiency," that have dimmed his chances of being present for his inauguration.
After being reelected to his assembly post by his fellow lawmakers, Cabello said Chavez did not need to be sworn in Thursday to retain his presidential powers because he has permission from the National Assembly to be absent from the country.
"If Chavez isn't here by Jan. 10, the constitution establishes that he can be sworn in before the Supreme Court, although it doesn't specify how or when," Cabello said. "The president received unanimous permission from the assembly to be absent, and that is still in effect."
Constitutional law expert Carlos Ayala agreed that Chavez can be granted two oath-taking postponements for a total of 180 days in the event he is "temporarily incapacitated." But he said Venezuelans are entitled to proof that Chavez is alive, is tending to his duties and has a positive prognosis.
"The citizenry has a legitimate right to know the facts surrounding the mental and physical condition of the head of state," said Ayala, a professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas. "If he cannot exercise his duties and obligations under the constitution, then that leads to constitutional consequences."
If Chavez is so ill that he cannot competently carry out his duties, then he could be declared "permanently incapacitated." That would trigger a constitutional requirement for the National Assembly president to call a new presidential election within 30 days, Ayala said.
On Friday, Vice President Nicolas Maduro — whom Chavez has designated as his political heir and preferred successor — said the 58-year-old president was "resting and recuperating" and emerging from what he previously said was a "delicate postoperative phase."
But other pronouncements have been less positive. Communications and Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said last week that Chavez was experiencing "respiratory insufficiency," raising the possibility that Chavez is on a respirator or even comatose.
Luis Salamanca, a constitutional law expert at Central University of Venezuela, said "reading between the lines" of official announcements "verifies that things are getting worse."
Political consultant and commentator Ricardo Sucre said the Chavez government seems to be trying to frame the oath-taking as a "mere formality." If that interpretation is accepted, it would enable the government to defer the constitutional requirement to clarify the president's condition and, in a worst-case scenario, to avoid starting the wheels turning for a new presidential election.
Some opposition figures are openly questioning why the Chavez government has not decided to seek a postponement of the swearing-in under a "temporary incapacitation" provision if, in fact, Chavez's prognosis is one of recovery and not imminent death.
If Chavez is deathly ill, his successors will try to "draw out the process as long as possible to consolidate their power and take advantage of Chavez's image to better appropriate it for themselves," Sucre said.
Although Chavez won reelection in October in convincing fashion against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, the chances of success in another election against Capriles are much less certain for any Chavez successor, including Maduro or Cabello.
Miguel Tinker Salas, a professor at Pomona College, said opposition politicians should be careful not to create the impression that they are trying to gain power "on the possible disability or death of the leader they were unable to defeat in life."
"There is no harm in letting the process unfold and waiting to see if Chavez regains his health or not," Tinker Salas said. "The people of Venezuela freely elected Chavez in October 2012, and their decision on this matter should be respected."
Special correspondents Kraul reported from Bogota, Colombia, and Mogollon from Caracas.
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.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
PASADENA, California (Reuters) – Michael Douglas takes on larger-than-life entertainer Liberace as he plays the singer in an HBO film about a secret love affair in the 1970s that Douglas on Friday called “a great love story.”
Director Steven Soderbergh said he chose to tell Liberace’s story through the lens of his romance with Scott Thorson – a young man who walked into the singer’s Las Vegas dressing room in the summer of 1977 – in part to expand public perception beyond his outsized personality and lavish lifestyle.
“I was very anxious that we not make a caricature of either of their characters or the relationship,” Soderbergh told reporters at a meeting of the Television Critics Association.
“The discussions they’re having are discussions every couple has. We take the relationship very seriously,” he said.
The film called “Beyond the Candelabra” debuts this spring on Time Warner Inc-owned HBO. It is based on Thorson’s book of the same name about their relationship, which ended in a bitter breakup. Matt Damon plays Thorson.
The idea for the film was budding 12 years ago, when Soderbergh and the “Wall Street” actor were working on the 2000 movie “Traffic.” Soderbergh randomly asked Douglas if he had ever thought of playing Liberace.
Douglas said he thought “is this guy messing with me?,” but launched into an impersonation that stuck with Soderbergh years later when he began envisioning the Liberace film.
The movie depicts “a great love story,” Douglas said.
“This is a couple that felt for each other. There’s a lot of joyful moments; there is humor to it,” until their emotional split, he said.
Liberace tried to keep his relationship with Thorson from the public. When Thorson sued Liberace for palimony after their breakup, the entertainer denied that he was gay or that the two had been lovers.
“It’s unfortunate to see the movie through a contemporary lens and know they were not allowed to be as open back then as people are today,” Soderbergh said.
Liberace died in 1987 at age 67.
The filmmakers used locations and props directly from Liberace’s life. Scenes were filmed at the musician’s Los Angeles penthouse and on the stage at the Las Vegas Hilton where Liberace performed. The filmmakers also reunited his trademark, matching “Dueling Pianos.”
The movie’s costume designers worked to recreate his elaborate costumes. In one of the star’s dramatic entrances, the real-life Liberace wore a $ 300,000 white virgin fox coat, lined with $ 100,000 worth of Austrian crystals, that weighed 100 lbs (45 kg). In the film, Douglas wears a replica made of fake fur that weighs much less.
Damon also got to wear his share of flashy outfits. While he said he normally doesn’t pay too much attention to wardrobe fittings, he said he embraced the glamorous costumes in the Liberace film.
“I probably spent more time in wardrobe fittings in this thing than I have in the previous 15 projects,” he said. “I really enjoyed it.”
(Reporting by Lisa Richwine, editing by Jill Serjeant and Lisa Shumaker)
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One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.
So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”
And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.
But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.
Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.
His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.
So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.
On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.
When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.
But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.
All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.
Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.
His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.
At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.
“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”
Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.
These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.
I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.
He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.
He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.
As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.
In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.
The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.
We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.
We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.
Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”
TOKYO — Tokyo’s main fish market ushered in the new year with an auction on Saturday that resulted in the highest price paid here, and probably anywhere, for a tuna.
A Tokyo-based sushi restaurant chain owner paid 155.4 million yen, or about $1.76 million, for a 488-pound bluefin, or about $3,600 per pound.
The record price was offered at the year’s first auction at the Tsukiji fish market, which provides Tokyo with much of its fresh fish. Restaurant owners from Japan and elsewhere in Asia compete annually for the prestige of buying the year’s first tuna, whose meat is prized by sushi fans. Conservationists warn that bluefin has been severely overfished.
The winning bidder was Kiyoshi Kimura, president of the company that runs the Sushi Zanmai chain. The bluefin was caught by a fisherman from Oma, a town renowned in Japan as the source of the most delicious tuna.
The International Consumer Electronics Show next week may be facing questions about its relevance in an Internet world that makes new things seem old in minutes, but it is still the foremost gathering for all things gadgety and geeky.
The annual trade show in Las Vegas has a rich past showcasing such groundbreaking devices as the VCR, the CD player, the camcorder, high-definition television and the Blu-ray disc.
"It was the singular most important technology event of the year," said Zack Zalon, a longtime show attendee and managing partner at the digital product design firm Wilshire Axon in Westwood.
The nature of the glitzy show has shifted in recent years from a focus on new products to one on deal-making and industry schmoozing. Still, the show draws enormous crowds and global publicity — even though the convention isn't open to the public.
When it kicks off Tuesday, more than 3,200 exhibitors are expected to occupy 1.9 million square feet of
exhibition space at the convention center for four days of news conferences, product demonstrations, parties and celebrity appearances. Roughly 150,000 people, about the same as last year, are expected to attend, temporarily swelling the city's population by about 25%.
These days, attendees and exhibitors say they see the show as a time to survey the overall personal electronics landscape and to connect in person with developers, retailers and the media.
Executives at the Beats by Dr. Dre line of high-end headphones, for instance, will be in Las Vegas but plan to hold their meetings and product demonstrations in exclusive suites on the Strip instead of vying for attention in the cavernous exhibit halls of the convention center.
"The brand experience that we want our customers and partners to have with Beats is very personal and it takes a real dialogue," Beats President Luke Wood said. "I want to do that in an atmosphere that is personal and not rushed."
New products will still be launched, preserving a bit of the show's famous wow factor. Show producers say they expect 20,000 new products to be unveiled, including Samsung Electronics Co.'s 85-inch ultra-high-definition TV and LG Electronics' newest organic-LED sets.
But groundbreaking products are rarely launched at the show anymore because of the 24-hour news cycle of the Internet, which makes it easy for companies to promote whatever they want, whenever they want.
Tech behemoths now accustomed to holding their own media events throughout the year don't want to share the limelight with their rivals. Case in point: Microsoft Corp., which unveiled its Xbox video game console at the trade show in 2001, will not host a booth at the show this year nor give its usual keynote address.
Apple Inc., Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. don't officially participate in the show, though they typically send executives and other employees to scope out the competition and meet quietly with developers and the media.
Part of the problem with the show is it's "so huge that's it's tough for any announcement to gain any kind of traction," said Zalon of Wilshire Axon.
"I don't think anyone is going to CES under the illusion that they're going to be dramatically educated on the innovations of the near future," he said. "I think most people now go for face time and to hope to pick up on some trends that indicate where things are heading."
Exhibitors are expected to focus on improvements to already-established technologies, emphasizing the fast-growing markets for tablets and smartphones and related products.
Many of the devices and technologies featured at the show will begin appearing on store shelves in the weeks following the event.
With the television industry in a slump and projected to have a flat sales year in 2013, TV manufacturers will be out in force at the show. Many will be touting larger screen sizes as consumers increasingly adopt a bigger-is-better approach when buying TVs.
Samsung will have one of the largest booth spaces at the show, where it will display the 85-inch ultra-HDTV, one of the largest commercially available "4K" sets to hit the market this year. The so-called 4K TVs cram four times as much picture information onto the screen as current high-definition models do.
Samsung also will demonstrate a smart TV camera with features such as gesture control and face recognition, as well as an improved Smart Hub platform for Internet-connected televisions.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s planned trip to North Korea promises few returns for the company’s shareholders. But for the world’s most locked-down country, where only a few thousand citizens have internet access at all, his visit could offer the strongest hint yet of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s tortured longing for openness.
To be sure, the gulf between Google and North Korea couldn’t seem wider.
“The face of probably the most important facilitator of borderless information in the world is going into the hyperstate for the control of information,” says Victor Cha, a director of Asian affairs for the National Security Council during the second Bush administration and now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The past quarter-century has seen ex-presidents, diplomats, and the world’s most powerful nations try and fail to crack open North Korea’s totalitarian regime. During the visit reportedly planned for later this month, Schmidt will join former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson for what Richardson described as a “private humanitarian visit” to free a detained U.S. citizen over the State Department’s objections.
Richardson told CBS that Schmidt’s presence on the trip had nothing to do with Google.
“I invited Eric. He is going as a private citizen,” Richardson said. “This is not a Google trip.”
Perhaps. “We do not comment on personal travel,” a Google spokeswoman said in response to questions.
But since stepping down as Google’s CEO in 2011, Schmidt has continued to serve as the search giant’s most visible public face. The significance of showing that face in Pyongyang isn’t lost on North Korea, Cha says.
“I don’t know if it’s a good opportunity for Google. But it’s a good opportunity for the North Korean leadership to signal to the world that they’re serious about going forward,” he says.
Cha accompanied Richardson to North Korea in 2007 as part of a team seeking the return of the remains of U.S. soldiers killed during the Korean War. He says about 4,000 North Koreans have internet access out of a population of 25 million. Even then, that access is tightly controlled and only granted in the interest of ensuring that at least some members of the ruling class are conversant in 21st century technology.
It’s also hard to imagine that 29-year-old Kim Jong-un, who was educated in the West, can resist the same tech that defines the lives of twentysomethings around the world. “He’s got to be interested in this stuff,” Cha says. But the risks are great: “As soon as he allows open access to it, he can kiss his leadership goodbye.”
Cha believes that piercing the information bubble could accomplish more than any diplomacy in bringing change to North Korea, which could soon face further sanctions over its successful launch of a long-range rocket last month.
But whether Google could provide the necessary needle also depends on what Google could get out of the deal. In a country where starvation is common and home computers aren’t, the company would seem to have little to gain.
“Google depends on making money from people who have money, and North Koreans don’t have a lot of it,” says Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land and a longtime Google watcher.
At the same time, a successful trip could cement Schmidt in the role of Google’s ambassador to the world. Google may have escaped its recent scrape with the FTC with nothing more than a hand slap, but it still has European regulators to contend with. As the company’s reach extends further around the world, having an international man of mystery with a jet at his disposal could come in very handy going forward. Already a fixture among the Davos set, with this trip Schmidt seems more ready than ever to embrace that role.
“He seems to be doing an exceptional job at government relations — note that Google has avoided antitrust problems, at least in the U.S.,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Pfeffer says that while not common in the U.S., it’s typical in other parts of the world for CEOs to stick to their companies’ internal affairs while the chairmen interact with the outside world: “By all indications, this is working stunningly well for Google.”
(Reuters) – Octogenarian Playboy founder Hugh Hefner briefly swapped his iconic silk pajamas for a tuxedo to marry Crystal Harris, the one-time “runaway bride” who followed through this time at a New Year’s Eve wedding.
“Happy New Year from Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Hefner!” the Playboy magazine publisher tweeted early on Tuesday.
The message accompanied a photograph of Hefner, 86, wearing what appeared to be purple silk pajamas under a black bathrobe and snuggling his bride, 26, still wearing her pale pink wedding dress. He also wore his trademark captain’s hat.
An hour earlier, Hefner posted a picture of himself in a tuxedo with his bride under an arch of pink and white flowers at the wedding ceremony in the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills, California.
“Crystal & I married on New Year’s Eve in the Mansion with Keith as my Best Man. Love that girl!” Hefner wrote on Twitter with the picture, referring to his brother Keith Hefner, a songwriter.
The couple tied the knot more than a year after their planned 2011 wedding was scuttled when Harris got cold feet.
The blonde Playboy Playmate of the Month for December 2009 jettisoned the adult entertainment mogul in what was called a “change of heart” five days before a lavish June 2011 wedding before 300 guests.
Harris, who appeared on the July 2011 cover of the adult magazine with a “runaway bride” sticker covering her bottom half, tweeted on Monday that she was ready to commit and changed her name to “Crystal Hefner” on the micro-blogging site.
“Today is the day I become Mrs. Hugh Hefner,” Harris, who has a psychology degree, wrote on Twitter after writing “Feeling very happy, lucky, and blessed.”
The San Diego native, whose parents are British, said she asked for Christmas ornaments rather than lingerie at her pre-Christmas bridal shower to help decorate Hefner’s famed mansion.
Hefner, founder of the Playboy adult entertainment empire, has been married twice before. He and his second wife Kimberley Conrad, also a former Playmate, divorced in 2010 after a lengthy separation. His first marriage to Mildred Williams ended in divorce in 1959. He has two children from each marriage.
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey and Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Paul Simao)
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The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
A new rule imposed by the F.D.A. would establish different standards for ensuring the purity of water that touches fruits and vegetables.
The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.
Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.
New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.
Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.
A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”
Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.
“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.
One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.
Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.
But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.
Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.
The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.
An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”
The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.
FOR many of the wealthy, the American Taxpayer Relief Act, passed this week by Congress, is aptly named.
For estate and gift taxes in particular, all but the richest of the rich will probably be able to protect their holdings from taxes, now that Congress has permanently set the estate and gift tax exemptions at $5 million (a level that will rise with inflation).
“You could say this eliminates the estate tax for 99 percent of the population, though I’ve seen figures that say 99.7 or 99.8,” said Richard A. Behrendt, director of estate planning at the financial services firm Baird and a former inspector for the Internal Revenue Service. “From a policy point of view, the estate tax is not there for raising revenue. It’s there for a check on the massive concentration of wealth in a few hands, and it will still accomplish that.”
And while Congress also agreed to increase tax rates on dividends and capital gains to 20 percent from 15 percent for top earners — in addition to the 3.8 percent Medicare surcharge on such earnings — the rates are still far lower than those on their ordinary income. For the earners at the very top, whose income comes mostly from their portfolios of investments, and not a paycheck like most of the rest of us, this is a good deal.
The estate tax, once an arcane assessment, has been in flux and attracting significant attention since 2001. That was when the exemption per person for the estate tax began to rise gradually from $675,000, with a 55 percent tax for anything above that amount, to $3.5 million in 2009 with a 45 percent tax rate for estates larger than that. Estate plans were written to account for the predictable increases in exemptions.
Then in 2010, contrary to what every accountant and tax lawyer I spoke to at the time believed would happen, the estate tax disappeared. Congress and President Obama could not reach an agreement on the tax. So that year, for the first time since 1916, Americans who died were not subject to a federal estate tax. (Their estates still paid state estate taxes, where they existed, and other taxes, including capital gains, on the value of the assets transferred.)
At the end of 2010, President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner reached an agreement that was just as unlikely as the estate tax expiring in the first place: the new exemption was $5 million, indexed to inflation, with a 35 percent tax rate on any amount over that, and it would last for two years. The taxes and exemptions for gifts made during someone’s lifetime to children and grandchildren were also raised to the same level, from $1 million and a 55 percent tax above that.
As I have written many times, this was a far better rate and exemption than anyone expected. It also created a deadline of Dec. 31, 2012, for people who could make a major gift up to the exemption level or above the amount and pay the low gift tax.
Using the gift exemption was enticing because it meant those assets would appreciate outside of the estate of the person making the gift. Even paying the tax became attractive to the very rich because of how estate and gift taxes are levied. Take, for example, someone who has used up his exemption and wants to give an heir $1 million. The amount it would take to accomplish this differs depending on when it is given. In life, it would cost $1.4 million because the 40 percent gift tax is paid like a sales tax. If it was given after death, the estate would have to set aside about $1.65 million after the 40 percent estate tax was deducted. But this presented a conundrum: while it may make perfect sense to give away a lot of money during your lifetime and save on estate taxes, it means ceding control of cash, securities or shares now. What if you end up needing them? It wasn’t an easy decision, and it led to a fourth-quarter rush.
As of this week, this is no longer an issue. The estate and gift tax exemptions are permanently set at the same $5 million level, indexed for inflation, and the tax rate above that exemption is 40 percent, up from 35 percent. With indexing, the exemption is already about $5.25 million per person — double for a couple — and it will rise at a rate that means most Americans will continue to avoid paying any federal estate tax.
