O.C. shooting suspect identified as college student with no record

Orange County sheriff's officials on Tuesday identified the suspect in series of fatal shootings and carjackings as Ali Syed, a 20-year-old community college student with no criminal record.

Authorities don't have a motive for the shootings, which began with the slaying of a woman at Syed's  south Orange County home, spread north in a series of random and deadly carjackings, and ended with his suicide in the city of Orange.

Syed was described as an unemployed man who was taking a class at Saddleback College. He had no criminal record and was living with his parents on Red Leaf Lane in Ladera Ranch, Amormino said.

PHOTOS: Shootings at multiple locations in O.C.

Deputies were called to their home about 4:45 a.m. after his parents reported a shooting, Amormino said. Responding deputies found a woman dead inside who had been shot multiple times.

The relationship between the woman and Syed was not yet known, Amormino said, although she was not related to the suspect. The woman has not yet been identified.

Family members, including children, were at the home at the time of the shooting, Amormino said, but no other injuries were reported.

MAP: Orange County shootings

Syed fled the area and headed toward Tustin, where Amormino said "multiple incidents" occurred.

The first, authorities said, occurred near Red Hill Avenue and the 5 Freeway, where authorities received a report of a man with a gun about 5:10 a.m. The suspect attempted a carjacking, Tustin police Lt. Paul Garaven said, opened fire and wounded a bystander.

About five minutes later, the suspect stopped the BMW near the 55 Freeway in Santa Ana, officials said.

TIMELINE: Deadliest U.S. mass shootings

Around that time, authorities also received reports about a man shooting at moving vehicles on the 55 Freeway. Officials believe the man fired either while driving or after he stopped and got out of his vehicle. At least three victims have reported minor injuries or damage to their cars, and investigators asked that others who believe they may have been fired upon to contact police.

Shortly after, another shooting and carjacking was reported on Edinger Avenue near the Micro Center computer store in Tustin, Garaven said. One person was killed and another was taken to a hospital.

Co-workers identified the men as plumbers who were working at the under-construction Fairfield Inn on Edinger Avenue.

Officers spotted the suspect in a stolen vehicle, followed him into the city of Orange and initiated a traffic stop near the intersection of East Katella Avenue and North Wanda Road, Garaven said.

The suspect then shot and killed himself, authorities said. A shotgun was recovered, but officials said other weapons might have been involved earlier. 

In Orange, financial planner Kenneth Caplin said he had a clear view of the gruesome drama that unfolded Tuesday on the street outside his office.

Although the street had been blocked, Caplin parked farther away and persuaded an officer to let him walk to his office. He arrived shortly before 7 a.m., about an hour after the shooting.

From a conference room window, Caplin saw the police investigators at work, a white work truck up on a curb, and the suspect lying dead on the ground, with blood streaked across the pavement.

"It's scary.... This just happened right here," Caplin said hours later, as a team in biohazard suits scrubbed away at the street in an afternoon drizzle. "It's ludicrous."

Caplin, 71, said he is a pistol instructor for the NRA. What happened Tuesday only affirmed for him the need to stay armed.

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Frakkin' Awesome Giveaway: Win <cite>Battlestar Galactica</cite> and <cite>Blood & Chrome</cite> Blu-rays

If you never got addicted to Battlestar Galactica, here’s your chance: Wired is giving away a complete Blu-ray box set of the rebooted sci-fi show and its prequel Blood & Chrome.

Set during the first Cylon war, Blood & Chrome introduces William Adama, a rookie space warrior anxious to battle the sentient robots that have turned on their human creators. (This is a younger version of the war-hardened veteran who commanded the Galactica in the Syfy series that turned so many of us into couch-dwelling BSG devotees.)

In the exclusive clip above — taken from the Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome Blu-ray, which went on sale Tuesday — members of the prequel’s visual effects crew tell how they created the show’s look with green screen and tons of CGI.

“Blood & Chrome is unique … in that everything in it is full 3-D backgrounds,” says VFX supervisor Gary Hutzel. “We create a full 3-D environment in CG, and that allows us then — even if the frame isn’t moving — to create depth and create animation in the scene.”

While you can watch Blood & Chrome on YouTube right now in 10-minute chunks, the hour-and-a-half-long version in the Blu-ray combo pack (retail price $34.98) is unrated. The Blu-ray also includes multiple deleted scenes, as well as more “making of” video.

Here’s what we’re giving away: Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series on Blu-ray and a Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome Blu-ray combo pack. To register for the giveaway, hit the comments section below and tell us why you’re dying to see Battlestar Galactica and/or Blood & Chrome, whether as a first-timer or a BSG junkie. Deadline to enter is 12:01 a.m. Pacific on Feb. 26, 2013. One randomly selected winner will be notified by e-mail or Twitter. Winners must live in the United States.

Note: If you do not have an e-mail address or Twitter handle associated with your Disqus login, you must include contact information in your comment to be eligible. Any winner who does not respond to Wired’s notification within 72 hours will forfeit the prize.

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Singer Sande in line for big prize at BRIT awards

LONDON (Reuters) – Scottish singer Emeli Sande is favorite to win the coveted British album of the year honor later on Wednesday when the BRIT Awards are handed out in London.

Sande, whose profile received a major boost when she took part in the opening and closing ceremonies at the London Olympics last year, has been nominated for three prizes on British pop’s biggest night.

She was shortlisted for best British female, which she is expected by bookmakers to win, and best British single for “Next to Me”. Sande also features on another contender for the single prize, Labrinth’s “Beneath Your Beautiful”.

Arguably the biggest category is British album, where Sande’s “Our Version of Events” is up against other acts who each picked up three nominations – Mumford & Sons for “Babel” and Alt-J for “An Awesome Wave”.

Sande, who had Britain’s best-selling album in 2012, has hit back at critics who have questioned whether she had been over-exposed in the last 12 months.

“I feel like it’s a bit unfair,” she told the Sun tabloid. “I actually haven’t done that much, but it’s just what I have done have been huge events.

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I worked so hard to get any exposure at all, so I don’t see that as a negative.”

Adele looks set to add to her groaning trophy cabinet with the best single award for James Bond theme “Skyfall”, while U.S. acts Lana Del Rey and Frank Ocean are bookmaker Ladbrokes’ favorites for best international female and male respectively.

“There’s a nailed on favorite in every category and it’s hard to see any last minute upsets at this stage,” said Ladbrokes spokeswoman Jessica Bridge.

It may be that the big surprises this year at the BRITs, which have a reputation of rewarding commercial success over musical originality, came at the nominations stage.

Last month eyebrows were raised when Amy Winehouse was nominated in the British female solo category some 18 months after her death for a chart-topping album of unreleased songs and demos called “Lioness: Hidden Treasures”.

And veteran rockers the Rolling Stones were shortlisted for best live act after they returned to the stage for a short, sellout tour of London and the United States at the end of 2012 to mark 50 years in the business.

The last time the group was nominated for a BRIT was in 1996, and the Rolling Stones are the only act to be nominated both at this year’s ceremony at the O2 Arena and at the first BRIT Awards staged in 1977.

Performing at the awards ceremony will be Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, Muse, Robbie Williams, Sande, Mumford & Sons, Ben Howard and One Direction.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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DNA Analysis, More Accessible Than Ever, Opens New Doors

Matt Roth for The New York Times

Sam Bosley of Frederick, Md., going shopping with his daughter, Lillian, 13, who has a malformed brain and severe developmental delays, seizures and vision problems. More Photos »

Debra Sukin and her husband were determined to take no chances with her second pregnancy. Their first child, Jacob, who had a serious genetic disorder, did not babble when he was a year old and had severe developmental delays. So the second time around, Ms. Sukin had what was then the most advanced prenatal testing.

The test found no sign of Angelman syndrome, the rare genetic disorder that had struck Jacob. But as months passed, Eli was not crawling or walking or babbling at ages when other babies were.

“Whatever the milestones were, my son was not meeting them,” Ms. Sukin said.

Desperate to find out what is wrong with Eli, now 8, the Sukins, of The Woodlands, Tex., have become pioneers in a new kind of testing that is proving particularly helpful in diagnosing mysterious neurological illnesses in children. Scientists sequence all of a patient’s genes, systematically searching for disease-causing mutations.

A few years ago, this sort of test was so difficult and expensive that it was generally only available to participants in research projects like those sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. But the price has plunged in just a few years from tens of thousands of dollars to around $7,000 to $9,000 for a family. Baylor College of Medicine and a handful of companies are now offering it. Insurers usually pay.

Demand has soared — at Baylor, for example, scientists analyzed 5 to 10 DNA sequences a month when the program started in November 2011. Now they are doing more than 130 analyses a month. At the National Institutes of Health, which handles about 300 cases a year as part of its research program, demand is so great that the program is expected to ultimately take on 800 to 900 a year.

The test is beginning to transform life for patients and families who have often spent years searching for answers. They can now start the grueling process with DNA sequencing, says Dr. Wendy K. Chung, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Columbia University.

“Most people originally thought of using it as a court of last resort,” Dr. Chung said. “Now we can think of it as a first-line test.”

Even if there is no treatment, there is almost always some benefit to diagnosis, geneticists say. It can give patients and their families the certainty of knowing what is wrong and even a prognosis. It can also ease the processing of medical claims, qualifying for special education services, and learning whether subsequent children might be at risk.

“Imagine the people who drive across the whole country looking for that one neurologist who can help, or scrubbing the whole house with Lysol because they think it might be an allergy,” said Richard A. Gibbs, the director of Baylor College of Medicine’s gene sequencing program. “Those kinds of stories are the rule, not the exception.”

Experts caution that gene sequencing is no panacea. It finds a genetic aberration in only about 25 to 30 percent of cases. About 3 percent of patients end up with better management of their disorder. About 1 percent get a treatment and a major benefit.

“People come to us with huge expectations,” said Dr. William A. Gahl, who directs the N.I.H. program. “They think, ‘You will take my DNA and find the causes and give me a treatment.' ”

“We give the impression that we can do these things because we only publish our successes,” Dr. Gahl said, adding that when patients come to him, “we try to make expectations realistic.”

DNA sequencing was not available when Debra and Steven Sukin began trying to find out what was wrong with Eli. When he was 3, they tried microarray analysis, a genetic test that is nowhere near as sensitive as sequencing. It detected no problems.

“My husband and I looked at each other and said, ‘The good news is that everything is fine; the bad news is that everything is not fine,' ” Ms. Sukin said.

In November 2011, when Eli was 6, Ms. Sukin consulted Dr. Arthur L. Beaudet, a medical geneticist at Baylor.

“Is there a protein missing?” she recalled asking him. “Is there something biochemical we could be missing?”

By now, DNA sequencing had come of age. Dr. Beaudet said that Eli was a great candidate, and it turned out that the new procedure held an answer.

A single DNA base was altered in a gene called CASK, resulting in a disorder so rare that there are fewer than 10 cases in all the world’s medical literature.

“It really became definitive for my husband and me,” Ms. Sukin said. “We would need to do lifelong planning for dependent care for the rest of his life.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a medicine taken by two teenagers who have a rare gene mutation. The drug is 5-hydroxytryptophan, not 5-hydroxytryptamine.

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Obama Turns Up Pressure for Deal on Budget Cuts

Seeking to Avoid the Sequester:
The Times’s Michael D. Shear on how President Obama put pressure on Congress to avoid the across-the-board budget cuts.

WASHINGTON — Days away from another fiscal crisis and with Congress on vacation, President Obama began marshaling the powers of the presidency on Tuesday to try to shame Republicans into a compromise that could avoid further self-inflicted job losses and damage to the fragile recovery. But so far, Republicans were declining to engage.

To turn up the pressure on the absent lawmakers, Mr. Obama warned in calamitous terms of the costs to military readiness, domestic investments and vital services if a “meat-cleaver” approach of indiscriminate, across-the-board spending cuts takes effect on March 1. Surrounding him in a White House auditorium were solemn, uniformed emergency responders, invited to illustrate the sort of critical services at risk.

The president plans to keep up the pressure through next week for an alternative deficit-reduction deal that includes both spending cuts and new revenues through closing tax loopholes. He will have daily events underscoring the potential ramifications of the automatic cuts, aides said, and next week will travel outside Washington to take his case to the public, as he did late last year in another fiscal fight on which he prevailed.

In stern tones, Mr. Obama said that the automatic cuts, known in budget terms as a sequester, would “affect our responsibility to respond to threats in unstable parts of the world” and “add thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls.”

He framed the debate in the way that he hopes will force Republicans into accepting some higher tax revenues, something they so far refuse to do.

“Republicans in Congress face a simple choice,” Mr. Obama said. “Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and health care and national security and all the jobs that depend on them, or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations?”

Mr. Obama once again finds himself in a budget showdown with the opposing party, and numerous polls show his position to be more popular than Republican calls for spending cuts only, including cuts in Medicare. Mr. Obama and senior aides hardly disguised their sense of political advantage.

“We are trouncing them,” said one senior administration official about the Republicans.

Still, the president’s leverage might in fact be limited, since by all appearances he seems to want a deal far more than Republicans do. As the leader of the nation, Mr. Obama is eager to see an end to the repeated evidence of Washington dysfunction, or what he referred to again on Tuesday as the cycle of “manufactured crisis.” And with his legacy ultimately at stake, he needs to lift the fiscal uncertainty that since 2011 has held down economic growth.

Despite the risks of an impasse for Republicans, those who control the House have all but forfeited this battle to Mr. Obama and seem poised to let the automatic cuts take effect. Many Republicans, particularly newer members elected with Tea Party support, have pushed party leaders to accept the sequester and lock in the spending cuts rather than compromise. The leaders seem to have decided to wage battle later this spring in the larger fight over the annual federal budget.

Contributing to Republican calculations is the fact that at least in the short term, an impasse over the sequester is not as potentially catastrophic as the threats that loomed in past partisan showdowns, like a full shutdown of government or the nation’s first-ever default on its global debt obligations.

The potential impact is potentially hazardous nonetheless, both economically and politically. As Mr. Obama noted, the prospect of the sequester has already affected military deployments and hiring by military contractors, and threatens layoffs of teachers, air traffic controllers and researchers, among others.

Hours after the president’s remarks, economic forecasters at Macroeconomic Advisers, based in St. Louis, projected that sequestration would reduce the firm’s forecast of growth this year by nearly a quarter, 0.6 percent, and cost roughly 700,000 civilian and military jobs through 2014, with heightened unemployment lingering for several years.

“By far the preferable policy,” the analysis said, “is a credible long-term plan to shrink the deficit more slowly through some combination of revenue increases within broad tax reform” as well as “more carefully considered cuts” in spending programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. That prescription for both long-term spending reductions and revenue increases, as an alternative to immediate deep spending cuts that inhibit job growth, generally tracks Mr. Obama’s approach.

He has proposed $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years and revenue increases that would build on the roughly $2.5 trillion over the decade that he and Congress have agreed to in the past two years. The total, $4 trillion, is the minimum reduction that many economists say is necessary to stabilize the growth of the nation’s debt at a time when the population is aging and health care costs are rising.

That approach mixing spending cuts and increased revenues got another endorsement on Tuesday when the chairmen of Mr. Obama’s 2010 debt-reduction commission — former Senator Alan K. Simpson, a Republican, and Erskine B. Bowles, a Democrat and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton — released a revised fiscal plan that would reduce annual deficits by $2.4 trillion in a decade through spending cuts, including in Medicare and Social Security benefits, and an overhaul of the tax system.

But Republicans say they will not consider additional tax increases since Mr. Obama in January won more than $600 billion over 10 years in higher revenues from the wealthiest taxpayers. “The revenue debate is now closed,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement reacting to the president’s remarks.

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Jerry Buss dies at 80; Lakers owner brought 'Showtime' success to L.A.

Longtime Lakers owner Jerry Buss has died at the age of 80. Last week, it was revealed that he was hospitalized with an undisclosed form of cancer.

When Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979, he wanted to build a championship team. He also wanted to put on a show.

The new owner gave courtside seats to movie stars. He hired pretty women to dance during timeouts. He spent freely on big stars and encouraged a fast-paced, exuberant style of play.

As the Lakers sprinted to one NBA title after another, Buss cut an audacious figure in the stands, an aging playboy in bluejeans, often with a younger woman by his side.

PHOTOS: Jerry Buss through the years

"I really tried to create a Laker image, a distinct identity," he once said. "I think we've been successful. I mean, the Lakers are pretty damn Hollywood."

Buss, 80, died Monday of complications of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Lakers fans will remember Buss for bringing extraordinary success — 10 championships in three-plus decades — but equally important to his legacy was a sense of showmanship that transformed pro basketball from sport to spectacle.

Live discussion at 10:30: The legacy of Jerry Buss

"Jerry Buss helped set the league on the course it is on today," NBA Commissioner David Stern said. "Remember, he showed us it was about 'Showtime,' the notion that an arena can become the focal point for not just basketball, but entertainment. He made it the place to see and be seen."

His teams featured the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal and Dwight Howard. He was also smart enough to hire Hall of Fame-caliber coaches in Pat Riley and Phil Jackson.

"I've worked hard and been lucky," Buss said. "With the combination of the two, I've accomplished everything I ever set out to do."

A Depression-era baby, Jerry Hatten Buss was born in Salt Lake City on Jan. 27, 1933, although some sources cite 1934 as his birth year. His parents, Lydus and Jessie Buss, divorced when he was an infant.

His mother struggled to make ends meet as a waitress in tiny Evanston, Wyo., and Buss remembered standing in food lines in the bitter cold. They moved to Southern California when he was 9, but within a few years she remarried and her second husband took the family back to Wyoming.

His stepfather, Cecil Brown, was, as Buss put it, "very tight-fisted." Brown made his living as a plumber and expected his children (one from a previous marriage, another son and a daughter with Jessie) to help.

TIMELINE: Jerry Buss' path

This work included digging ditches in the cold. Buss preferred bell hopping at a local hotel and running a mail-order stamp-collecting business that he started at age 13.

Leaving high school a year early, he worked on the railroad, pumping a hand-driven car up and down the line to make repairs. The job lasted just three months.

Until then, Buss had never much liked academics. But he returned to school and, with a science teacher's encouragement, did well enough to earn a science scholarship to the University of Wyoming.

Before graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, when he was 19 he married a coed named JoAnn Mueller and they would eventually have four children: John, Jim, Jeanie and Janie.

The couple moved to Southern California in 1953 when USC gave Buss a scholarship for graduate school. He earned a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1957. The degree brought him great pride — Lakers employees always called him "Dr. Buss."

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New Whale Species Unearthed in California Highway Dig

By Carolyn Gramling, ScienceNOW

Chalk yet another fossil find up to roadcut science. Thanks to a highway-widening project in California’s Laguna Canyon, scientists have identified several new species of early toothed baleen whales. Paleontologist Meredith Rivin of the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center in Fullerton, California, presented the finds Feb. 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“In California, you need a paleontologist and an archaeologist on-site” during such projects, Rivin says. That was fortuitous: The Laguna Canyon outcrop, excavated between 2000 and 2005, turned out to be a treasure trove containing hundreds of marine mammals that lived 17 million to 19 million years ago. It included 30 cetacean skulls as well as an abundance of other ocean dwellers such as sharks, says Rivin, who studies the fossil record of toothed baleen whales. Among those finds, she says, were four newly identified species of toothed baleen whale—a type of whale that scientists thought had gone extinct 5 million years earlier.

Whales, the general term for the order Cetacea, comprise two suborders: Odontoceti, or toothed whales, which includes echolocators like dolphins, porpoises, and killer whales; and Mysticeti, or baleen whales, the filter-feeding giants of the deep such as blue whales and humpback whales.The two suborders share a common ancestor.

Mysticeti comes from the Greek for mustache, a reference to the baleen that hangs down from their jaw. But the earliest baleen whales actually had teeth (although they’re still called mysticetes). Those toothy remnants still appear in modern fin whale fetuses, which start to develop teeth in the womb that are later reabsorbed before the enamel actually forms.

The four new toothed baleen whale species were also four huge surprises, Rivin says. The new fossils date to 17 to 19 million years ago, or the early-mid Miocene epoch, making them the youngest known toothed whales. Three of the fossils belong to the genus Morawanocetus, which is familiar to paleontologists studying whale fossils from Japan, but hadn’t been seen before in California. These three, along with the fourth new species, which is of a different genus, represent the last known occurrence of aetiocetes, a family of mysticetes that coexisted with early baleen whales. Thus, they aren’t ancestral to any of the living whales, but they could represent transitional steps on the way tothe toothless mysticetes.

The fourth new species—dubbed “Willy”—has its own surprises, Rivin says. Although modern baleen whales are giants, that’s a fairly recent development (in the last 10 million years). But Willy was considerably bigger than the three Morawanocetus fossils. Its teeth were also surprisingly worn—and based on the pattern of wear as well as the other fossils found in the Laguna Canyon deposit, Rivin says, that may be because Willy’s favorite diet may have been sharks. Modern offshore killer whales, who also enjoy a meal of sharks, tend to have similar patterns of wear in their teeth due to the sharks’ rough skin.

The new fossils are a potentially exciting find, says paleobiologist Nick Pyenson of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Although it’s not yet clear what Rivin’s team has got and what the fossils will reveal about early baleen whale evolution, he says, “I’ll be excited to see what they come up with.” Pyenson himself is no stranger to roadcut science and the rush to preserve fossils on the brink of destruction: In 2011, he managed, within a week, to collect three-dimensional images of numerous whale fossils found by workers widening a highway running through Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Meanwhile, Rivin says her paper describing the fossils is still in preparation, and she hopes to have more data on the three Morawanocetus, at least, published by the end of the year. As for the fourth fossil, she says, it might take a bit longer: There’s still some more work to do to fully free Willy from the rock.

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

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Singer Fergie says she and actor Josh Duhamel expecting baby

(Reuters) – The Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie said on Monday that she and her husband, actor Josh Duhamel, are expecting a baby.

“Josh & Me & BABY makes three!!!,” she tweeted. She also posted photos of herself and her husband as toddlers.

It is the first child for the couple married in 2009.

Duhamel, 40, appeared in the “Transformers” movies and stars this year in the film “Safe Haven.”

Fergie, 37, whose real name is Stacy Ferguson, joined The Black Eyed Peas in 2002 for their third album, “Elephunk,” which proved to be a huge commercial success.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst in New York; Editing by Barbara Goldberg)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Personal Health: Health Effects of Smoking for Women

The title of a recent report on smoking and health might well have paraphrased the popular ad campaign for Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 by Philip Morris and aimed at young professional women: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Today that slogan should include: “. . . toward a shorter life.” Ten years shorter, in fact.

The new report is one of two rather shocking analyses of the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data show that “women who smoke like men die like men who smoke,” Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

That was not always the case. Half a century ago, the risk of death from lung cancer among men who smoked was five times higher than that among women smokers. But by the first decade of this century, that risk had equalized: for both men and women who smoked, the risk of death from lung cancer was 25 times greater than for nonsmokers, Dr. Michael J. Thun of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues reported.

Today, women who smoke are even more likely than men who smoke to die of lung cancer. According to a second study in the same journal, women smokers face a 17.8 times greater risk of dying of lung cancer, than women who do not smoke; men who smoke are at 14.6 times greater risk to die of lung cancer than men who don’t. Women who smoke now face a risk of death from lung cancer that is 50 percent higher than the estimates reported in the 1980s, according to Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and his colleagues.

After controlling for age, body weight, education level and alcohol use, the new analysis found something else: men and women who continue to smoke die on average more than 10 years sooner than those who never smoked.

Dramatic progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of smoking, which has fallen in the United States from 42 percent of adults in 1965 (the year after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health) to 19 percent in 2010. Yet smoking still results in nearly 200,000 deaths a year among people 35 to 69 years old in this country. A quarter of all deaths in this age group would not occur if smokers had the same risk of death as nonsmokers.

The risks are even greater among men 55 to 74 and women 60 to 74. More than two-thirds of all deaths among current smokers in these age groups are related to smoking. Over all, the death rate from all causes combined in these age groups “is now at least three times as high among current smokers as among those who have never smoked,” Dr. Thun’s team found.

While lung cancer is the most infamous hazard linked to smoking, the habit also raises the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary disease and other cancers, including breast cancer.

Furthermore, changes in how cigarettes are manufactured may have increased the dangers of smoking. The use of perforated filters, tobacco blends that are less irritating, and paper that is more porous made it easier to inhale smoke and encouraged deeper inhalation to achieve satisfying blood levels of nicotine.

The result of deeper inhalation, Dr. Thun’s report suggests, has been an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., and a shift in the kind of lung cancer linked to smoking. Among nonsmokers, the risk of death from C.O.P.D. has declined by 45 percent in men and has remained stable in women, but the death rate has more than doubled among smokers.

But there is good news, too: it’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting. The younger you are when you stop smoking, the greater your chances of living a long and healthy life, according to the findings of Dr. Jha’s international team.

The team analyzed smoking and smoking-cessation histories of 113,752 women and 88,496 men 25 and older and linked them to causes of deaths in these groups through 2006.

Those who quit smoking by age 34 lived 10 years longer on average than those who continued to smoke, giving them a life expectancy comparable to people who never smoked. Smokers who quit between ages 35 and 44 lived nine years longer, and those who quit between 45 and 54 lived six years longer. Even quitting smoking between ages 55 and 64 resulted in a four-year gain in life expectancy.

The researchers emphasized, however, that the numbers do not mean it is safe to smoke until age 40 and then stop. Former smokers who quit by 40 still experienced a 20 percent greater risk of death than nonsmokers. About one in six former smokers who died before the age of 80 would not have died so young if he or she had never smoked, they reported.

Dr. Schroeder believes we can do a lot better to reduce the prevalence of smoking with the tools currently in hand if government agencies, medical insurers and the public cooperate.

Unlike the races, ribbons and fund-raisers for breast cancer, “there’s no public face for lung cancer, even though it kills more women than breast cancer does,” Dr. Schroeder said in an interview. Lung cancer is stigmatized as a disease people bring on themselves, even though many older victims were hooked on nicotine in the 1940s and 1950s, when little was known about the hazards of smoking and doctors appeared in ads assuring the public it was safe to smoke.

Raising taxes on cigarettes can help. The states with the highest prevalence of smoking have the lowest tax rates on cigarettes, Dr. Schroeder said. Also helpful would be prohibiting smoking in more public places like parks and beaches. Some states have criminalized smoking in cars when children are present.

More “countermarketing” of cigarettes is needed, he said, including antismoking public service ads on television and dramatic health warnings on cigarette packs, as is now done in Australia. But two American courts have ruled that the proposed label warnings infringed on the tobacco industry’s right to free speech.

Health insurers, both private and government, could broaden their coverage of stop-smoking aids and better publicize telephone quit lines, and doctors “should do more to stimulate quit attempts,” Dr. Schroeder said.

As Nicola Roxon, a former Australian health minister, put it, “We are killing people by not acting.”

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DealBook: Reader's Digest Files for Bankruptcy, Again

Executives at Reader’s Digest must be hoping that the magazine’s second trip to bankruptcy court in under four years will be its last.

The magazine’s parent, RDA Holding, filed for Chapter 11 protection late on Sunday in another effort to cut down the debt that has plagued the pocket-size publication for years. The company is hoping to convert about $465 million of its debt into equity held by its creditors.

In a court filing, Reader’s Digest said it held about $1.1 billion in assets and just under $1.2 billion in debt. It has provisionally lined up about $105 million in financing to keep it afloat during the Chapter 11 case.

This week’s filing is the latest effort by the 91-year-old publisher, whose magazine once resided on many American coffee tables, to fix itself in a difficult economic environment.

“After considering a wide range of alternatives, we believe this course of action will most effectively enable us to maintain our momentum in transforming the business and allow us to capitalize on the growing strength and presence of our outstanding brands and products,” Robert E. Guth, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Reader’s Digest last filed for bankruptcy in 2009, emerging a year later under the control of lenders like JPMorgan Chase.

That reorganization substantially cut the publisher’s debt, and afterward the company worked to further shrink its footprint. It jettisoned nonessential publications in a series of deals, including the $180 million sale of Allrecipes.com and the $4.3 million sale of Every Day With Rachael Ray, both to the Meredith Corporation.

Most of the money from those transactions went to pay down a still significant debt burden. But the company remained pressured by what it described in a court filing as steep declines that still bedevil the media industry. Last year, the publisher began negotiating with its lenders, including Wells Fargo, about amending some of its debt obligations. That process eventually led to a “pre-negotiated agreement” with creditors, which will be put into effect by the bankruptcy filing.

This time, Reader’s Digest is hoping to spend even less time in court. Mr. Guth said in a court filing that the publisher aims to emerge from bankruptcy protection in about four months.

The company’s biggest unsecured creditors include firms represented by Luxor Capital. The Federal Trade Commission also contends that it is owed $8.8 million in a settlement claim.

Reader’s Digest is being advised by Evercore Partners and the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Reader's Digest bankruptcy petition (2013) by

Declaration by Reader's Digest Chief Executive by

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