Yoda statue among features of new N. Calif. park

SAN ANSELMO, Calif. (AP) — A Northern California city has approved a new downtown park to be built on land donated by filmmaker George Lucas that will feature statues of Indiana Jones and Yoda, two of his most popular characters.

The Marin Independent Journal reports (http://bit.ly/Ws4CcS ) that the San Anselmo Planning Commission voted unanimously Monday to approve the park, which could be completed as soon as June 1.

Lucas donated land for the 8,700-square-foot park. A commercial building on the site will be demolished at Lucas' expense, and an historic fresco relocated.

A fund is being established by a community foundation to pay for ongoing maintenance and care of the park.

The park's Yoda fountain will be similar to the one located at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco.

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Information from: Marin Independent Journal, http://www.marinij.com

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Economic Scene: Health Care and Pursuit of Profit Make a Poor Mix

Thirty years ago, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered an interesting pattern in the use of sedatives at nursing homes in the south of the state.

Patients entering church-affiliated nonprofit homes were prescribed drugs roughly as often as those entering profit-making “proprietary” institutions. But patients in proprietary homes received, on average, more than four times the dose of patients at nonprofits.

Writing about his colleagues’ research in his 1988 book “The Nonprofit Economy,” the economist Burton Weisbrod provided a straightforward explanation: “differences in the pursuit of profit.” Sedatives are cheap, Mr. Weisbrod noted. “Less expensive than, say, giving special attention to more active patients who need to be kept busy.”

This behavior was hardly surprising. Hospitals run for profit are also less likely than nonprofit and government-run institutions to offer services like home health care and psychiatric emergency care, which are not as profitable as open-heart surgery.

A shareholder might even applaud the creativity with which profit-seeking institutions go about seeking profit. But the consequences of this pursuit might not be so great for other stakeholders in the system — patients, for instance. One study found that patients’ mortality rates spiked when nonprofit hospitals switched to become profit-making, and their staff levels declined.

These profit-maximizing tactics point to a troubling conflict of interest that goes beyond the private delivery of health care. They raise a broader, more important question: How much should we rely on the private sector to satisfy broad social needs?

From health to pensions to education, the United States relies on private enterprise more than pretty much every other advanced, industrial nation to provide essential social services. The government pays Medicare Advantage plans to deliver health care to aging Americans. It provides a tax break to encourage employers to cover workers under 65.

Businesses devote almost 6 percent of the nation’s economic output to pay for health insurance for their employees. This amounts to nine times similar private spending on health benefits across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, on average. Private plans cover more than a third of pension benefits. The average for 30 countries in the O.E.C.D. is just over one-fifth.

We let the private sector handle tasks other countries would never dream of moving outside the government’s purview. Consider bail bondsmen and their rugged sidekicks, the bounty hunters.

American TV audiences may reminisce fondly about Lee Majors in “The Fall Guy” chasing bad guys in a souped-up GMC truck — a cheap way to get felons to court. People in most other nations see them as an undue commercial intrusion into the criminal justice system that discriminates against the poor.

Our reliance on private enterprise to provide the most essential services stems, in part, from a more narrow understanding of our collective responsibility to provide social goods. Private American health care has stood out for decades among industrial nations, where public universal coverage has long been considered a right of citizenship. But our faith in private solutions also draws on an ingrained belief that big government serves too many disparate objectives and must cater to too many conflicting interests to deliver services fairly and effectively.

Our trust appears undeserved, however. Our track record suggests that handing over responsibility for social goals to private enterprise is providing us with social goods of lower quality, distributed more inequitably and at a higher cost than if government delivered or paid for them directly.

The government’s most expensive housing support program — it will cost about $140 billion this year — is a tax break for individuals to buy homes on the private market.

According to the Tax Policy Center, this break will benefit only 20 percent of mostly well-to-do taxpayers, and most economists agree that it does nothing to further its purported goal of increasing homeownership. Tax breaks for private pensions also mostly benefit the wealthy. And 401(k) plans are riskier and costlier to administer than Social Security.

From the high administrative costs incurred by health insurers to screen out sick patients to the array of expensive treatments prescribed by doctors who earn more money for every treatment they provide, our private health care industry provides perhaps the clearest illustration of how the profit motive can send incentives astray.

By many objective measures, the mostly private American system delivers worse value for money than every other in the developed world. We spend nearly 18 percent of the nation’s economic output on health care and still manage to leave tens of millions of Americans without adequate access to care.

Britain gets universal coverage for 10 percent of gross domestic product. Germany and France for 12 percent. What’s more, our free market for health services produces no better health than the public health care systems in other advanced nations. On some measures — infant mortality, for instance — it does much worse.

In a way, private delivery of health care misleads Americans about the financial burdens they must bear to lead an adequate existence. If they were to consider the additional private spending on health care as a form of tax — an indispensable cost to live a healthy life — the nation’s tax bill would rise to about 31 percent from 25 percent of the nation’s G.D.P. — much closer to the 34 percent average across the O.E.C.D.

A quarter of a century ago, a belief swept across America that we could reduce the ballooning costs of the government’s health care entitlements just by handing over their management to the private sector. Private companies would have a strong incentive to identify and wipe out wasteful treatment. They could encourage healthy lifestyles among beneficiaries, lowering use of costly care. Competition for government contracts would keep the overall price down.

We now know this didn’t work as advertised. Competition wasn’t as robust as hoped. Health maintenance organizations didn’t keep costs in check, and they spent heavily on administration and screening to enroll only the healthiest, most profitable beneficiaries.

One study of Medicare spending found that the program saved no money by relying on H.M.O.’s. Another found that moving Medicaid recipients into H.M.O.’s increased the average cost per beneficiary by 12 percent with no improvement in the quality of care for the poor. Two years ago, President Obama’s health care law cut almost $150 billion from Medicare simply by reducing payments to private plans that provide similar care to plain vanilla Medicare at a higher cost.

Today, again, entitlements are at the center of the national debate. Our elected officials are consumed by slashing a budget deficit that is expected to balloon over coming decades. With both Democrats and Republicans unwilling to raise taxes on the middle class, the discussion is quickly boiling down to how deeply entitlements must be cut.

We may want to broaden the debate. The relevant question is how best we can serve our social needs at the lowest possible cost. One answer is that we have a lot of room to do better. Improving the delivery of social services like health care and pensions may be possible without increasing the burden on American families, simply by removing the profit motive from the equation.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @portereduardo

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DealBook: S.E.C. Enforcement Chief, Robert Khuzami, Steps Down

Robert Khuzami, a former terrorism prosecutor who revamped the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement unit, is stepping down from the agency after an aggressive four-tenure.

His departure signals the end of an important chapter in the history of the agency, which has been praised for taking significant actions against some of Wall Street’s largest banks after the financial crisis but also scrutinized for not suing top bank executives at those firms.

After joining the S.E.C. in 2009, Mr. Khuzami reinvigorated the enforcement team, which was maligned for missing the warning signs of the financial crisis and Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Mr. Khuzami, an imposing presence with a piercing stare, reorganized the management ranks, fashioning specialized units to track complex corners of Wall Street, and applied aggressive prosecutorial tactics to civil cases. In recent years, the enforcement division notched a record number of actions, many against banks at the center of the crisis.

“They know we’re out there, and we’re smarter and can cover more ground,” Mr. Khuzami said in an interview. He announced his departure to staff in an e-mail on Wednesday and is set to depart in about two weeks.

Mr. Khuzami’s successor, who has not been named, faces challenges. The enforcement unit must contend with the increasingly influential rapid-fire trading firms that, by some accounts, have introduced instability to the stock market.

The unit also faces lingering questions about its negotiating tactics. Some consumer advocates complain that the agency’s headline-grabbing settlements let Wall Street off the hook. Mr. Khuzami’s unit notably butted heads with a prominent federal judge in New York, Jed S. Rakoff, who in 2010 called the agency’s $150 million settlement with Bank of America over lax public disclosures “half-baked justice at best.”

Mr. Khuzami’s departure, part of a broader exodus from the S.E.C. following the resignation of its chairwoman, Mary L. Schapiro, raises further questions about the future of the unit. The move, at the very least, adds to the gap in the S.E.C.’s roster.

The agency has witnessed a wave of turnover in recent weeks, with the head of trading and markets and the director of corporation finance both leaving. Elisse B. Walter, Ms. Schapiro’s replacement, named interim replacements for those spots.

But the enforcement division, officials say, could struggle under a provisional leader. The enforcement chief, they note, sets the tone for Wall Street oversight.

Ms. Walter is weighing a short list of candidates to replace Mr. Khuzami, according to people briefed on the matter. The list includes Mr. Khuzami’s current deputy, George Canellos, and the enforcement division’s chief litigation counsel, Matthew Martens.

With Mr. Khuzami gone, the field of contenders to replace Ms. Schapiro is also shifting. President Obama awarded the job to Ms. Walter, a Democrat who became an S.E.C. commissioner in 2008, but her term expires at the end of 2013.

Mr. Khuzami, a political independent described as alternately harsh and playful with his employees, built a loyal following among some enforcement division officials who hoped he would win the chairman post. He opted instead to position himself for a lucrative spot at a white-shoe law firm.

“I don’t know what I’m doing next, but I loved the last four years and I’m sad it’s ending,” he said in the interview.

Mr. Khuzami, a Rochester native with a bohemian upbringing, followed an unlikely path to the S.E.C. His parents were ballroom dancers; his sister a muralist. They jokingly refer to Mr. Khuzami as “the white sheep” of the family.

He put himself through school with odd jobs, as a dishwasher, bartender, overnight dockworker. After graduating from Boston University law school, he was hired as a junior lawyer at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York.

Mr. Khuzami tried out for the United States attorney’s office under Rudy Giuliani, but missed the cut. When the office eventually hired him in the early 1990s, he was assigned to terrorism prosecutions. The move led to a career-defining case — the conviction of the so-called “Blind Sheik,” a Muslim leader tied the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He later ran a securities task force.

But after more than a decade as a prosecutor, he departed for Deutsche Bank, where he eventually became general counsel of the firm’s American arm.

In 2009, he landed on Ms. Schapiro’s radar screen. She was searching for an aggressive personality to shake up the enforcement team, a demoralized group criticized for missing the warning signs of the crisis.

“It had to be someone who was a great prosecutor,” Ms. Schapiro said in an interview.

Their relationship began with an awkward meeting. Mr. Khuzami, having dressed in the dark to catch a predawn plane to Washington, wore mismatched shoes of different colors. And at the end of the interview, without an explicit offer, he was unsure whether he won the position. Finally, after days of silence, Ms. Schapiro phoned him to ask: “Are you taking the job or not?”

Mr. Khuzami soon hatched a game plan for overhauling — some officials called it “dismantling” — the division.

He arrived in Washington with strategies imported from the United States attorney’s office. Mr. Khuzami pushed the S.E.C. to offer leniency for cooperating witnesses and to strike deferred-prosecution agreements to companies that promised to behave. The tools, he said, are “game changers” for unearthing fraud.

He also poached former prosecutors for his staff, including Lorin L. Reisner, Mr. Khuzami’s friend from the United States attorney’s office, who joined as the top deputy. Mr. Khuzami plucked other new hires from Wall Street, including traders and compliance officers. Adam Storch, then a 29-year-old Goldman Sachs vice president, became the unit’s first chief operating officer.

Under the new regime, the enforcement team eliminated a layer of management, moving senior lawyers onto the front lines of investigations. Mr. Khuzami mandated, for the first time, that all enforcement employees carry a BlackBerry, holding them accountable beyond the 9-5 workday.

Mr. Khuzami also built specialties among his staff, a strategy he picked up at Deutsche Bank. He created an Office of Market Intelligence to analyze and triage tips and complaints from investors. He then opened five units that tracked some of the darkest corners of finance, focusing on structured products like derivatives, market abuse like insider trading and the secretive world of hedge fund returns.

“The changes were necessary and dramatic,” Ms. Schapiro said.

Mr. Khuzami introduced the broad outlines of reform in May 2009 at a retreat in Solomons Island, Md., an annual gathering of senior enforcement officials. “It’s time to get serious about change,” he said, according to attendees.

But the message provoked concerns among enforcement lawyers, who lined up at microphones to question the nuances of new procedures and complain about potential violations of their contracts. A few top officials, some who were widely respected, were about to be left at the sidelines under his regime.

“Everyone in the office was scared, but we also started working harder,” said Thomas Sporkin, who ran the Office of Market Intelligence until last year, when he departed the agency.

The group faced some growing pains, as it adjusted to Mr. Khuzami’s management style. He had a harsh streak and a knack for aggressively grilling lawyers about the nuances of enforcement cases, according to staff members. But they also recalled a softer side. He invited employees to his family Christmas party, they say, and went to motorcycle safety school with Mr. Canellos.

As a motivational tool, he would often publicly perform for his staff. At a swearing-in ceremony for new members, he quoted poetry from Gwendolyn Brooks. Mr. Khuzami also once donned a red wig to sing a version of the “Annie” theme song “Tomorrow,” with lyrics twisted to fit the S.E.C., at an annual awards ceremony.

“Even though he scares the hell out of people,” one employee said, “you like him because he’s genuine.”

Mr. Khuzami’s tactics appeared to bear fruit. Under his tenure, the unit leveled more charges than in any comparable four-year period, including a record number of enforcement actions in 2011. They also mounted 150 actions against people and firms tied to the crisis.

Mr. Khuzami emphasized that the unit was tracking bigger game. The agency has taken aim at billionaire hedge fund managers, including Philip Falcone, and filed complex cases involving collateralized debt obligations, a crackdown that ensnared some of the biggest names on Wall Street. At the urging of Mr. Khuzami and Mr. Reisner, the S.E.C. brought a landmark fraud case against Goldman Sachs, netting a record settlement in excess of $500 million.

“He’s really broadened the net,” said Mary Jo White, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at Debevoise who was Mr. Khuzami’s boss when she was the United States attorney in Manhattan.

Some consumer advocates say the enforcement unit remains too timid. They complain that it opted not to charge Lehman Brothers executives and went soft on firms like Bank of America and Citigroup. Judge Rakoff refused to bless the $285 million Citigroup deal, calling the penalty “pocket change.”

Critics also question why the S.E.C. sued only a handful of top executives who ran companies at the center of the credit crisis.

“If you’re rich and connected on Wall Street, then don’t worry about the S.E.C,” said Dennis M. Kelleher, the head of Better Markets, a nonprofit advocacy group critical of the financial industry.

Mr. Khuzami dismissed the grumbling, saying, “The critics ought to take comfort in that we’re not reluctant to charge high-ranking individuals.” The agency, he noted, sued 65 senior executives involved in the crisis, including the leaders of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and most major mortgage companies that caused the housing bubble. The cases involving big banks, he said, lacked sufficient evidence implicating chief executives.

And despite their differences, even Judge Rakoff credits Mr. Khuzami with a rapid turnaround of the enforcement division.

“Although, from our different perspectives, Rob Khuzami and I sharply disagree about some matters, overall I think he has done a terrific job,” Judge Rakoff said. “Most important, he has restored a sense of pride and purpose to the S.E.C. enforcement division, and we are all the better for it.”

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An Appraisal: Ada Louise Huxtable, Appraisal of an Architecture Critic

Gene Maggio/The New York Times

The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable died on Monday at 91.

The great architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who died on Monday at 91, started writing for The New York Times in 1963 and just a few weeks ago was still making the most of her bully pulpit for The Wall Street Journal, railing against proposed changes to the New York Public Library building at 42nd Street.

She cared about public standards, social equity, the whole city. When I wrote some months back about branch libraries in Queens and elsewhere that have opened lately, thanks to the city’s Design Excellence Program, she shot me an e-mail: “These projects are clear, visual demonstrations, which people need in order to understand how a high standard of architectural design and the refusal to go with hack work can have very real and sometimes unanticipated social, human, environmental and neighborhood consequences, often in parts of the city that need it so badly and that we hear so little about.”

Nearly half a century earlier Ms. Huxtable celebrated a stretch of lower Broadway where a Noguchi sculpture had arrived in the plaza of a new tower, “one of the handsomest in the city,” she briefly noted in The Times before providing a 360-degree view in fine-grained prose. (“Look to your left,” she wrote, “and you will see the small turn-of-the-century French pastry in creamy, classically detailed stone that houses the neighboring Chamber of Commerce.”)

The architecture of the new building was inextricably bound up with the spot on which it had risen, and what mattered to her critical sensibility as much as the quality of its curtain wall (“the taut, shiny-dark sleekness of matte black aluminum and gleaming bronze glass”) was its impact at street level. Writing about architecture meant writing about life down to the corner and the curb — buildings are lived in, after all, not just sculptures or monuments on a skyline.

“Instead of a public architecture, or an architecture integrated into life and use,” Ms. Huxtable lamented in The New York Review of Books 20 years ago, “we have ‘trophy’ buildings by ‘signature’ architects, like designer clothes.” She identified the ingenuity of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, but also the debased, money-driven culture, with its desire for “an iconic look-alike by a tiresomely familiar name” that had come in its wake.

“I have never joined architectural groupies of any persuasion,” she wrote in the preface to “On Architecture,” a 2008 collection of her writings. That was true. “As an architectural historian, I have not bought into anyone’s belief systems, including modernism’s most admirable and often faulty illusions. I have a built-in skepticism of dogma.”

This allowed Ms. Huxtable to weather shifting fashions without having to say she was sorry. Her tastes didn’t waver over the decades, nor did her standards. She liked Boston’s City Hall when it opened in 1962, although most people didn’t, and she liked it a half-century later, when a young generation of architects was coming around to its Brutalism, but much of the public still wanted to tear it down. The building was “uncompromising,” she wrote.

Like her.

Patrician, old-school, crusty and softhearted, she never wrote as if she owed anything to anyone except her readers, treating her beat as a mix of aesthetics and public policy, art and advocacy, technology and politics, because to write about architecture as anything less would be to shortchange its complexity and significance.

I gather that Ms. Huxtable’s first publication in The Times was a letter to the editor in 1957, complaining about an art review of photographs of architecture in Caracas, Venezuela, that ignored the deleterious effects of those photogenic but authoritarian buildings on the fabric of the city and its people. Like many others who grew up reading her, I gained a sense of the central role of architecture and urbanism in civic life and culture from the urgency of her writing, which came down to meditations on how we live and what kind of legacy we wish to leave behind.

She emerged during the era of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, with whom she belongs in the pantheon, but as the first full-time critic writing on architecture for an American newspaper, she also had that rare journalistic opportunity to pioneer something of her own, to fill a yawning gap in the public discourse, to carve a path with moral dimensions, “to celebrate the pleasures of this remarkable art,” as she put it.

Years later Ms. Huxtable wrote in The New York Review of Books:

“When so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.”

Dignity and delight.

“The consistent theme is pleasure,” Ms. Huxtable wrote in 1978. “There is so much more to see, to experience, to understand, to enjoy.”

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Target to match some rivals’ online prices year-round

(Reuters) – Target Corp said on Tuesday it will match on a year-round basis the prices found on the websites of key rivals Amazon.com Inc, Best Buy Co Inc, Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Toys R Us, its latest tactic to hold onto shoppers focused on price.

The move extends an online price-matching program that Target introduced over the holiday season and which was supposed to last only from November 1 to December 16. It also comes after Target last week reported flat sales growth in December at stores open at least a year.

In November Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel said the retailer was not seeing a lot of price-match activity in its stores.

While shopping online has grown rapidly in recent years, it still represents a small fraction of overall shopping in the United States. Target’s policy of matching online prices differs from policies at several chains, which match only printed advertised prices for items sold at stores.

Target said that throughout the year it will match the price when a customer buys an eligible item at one of its stores and finds the same item at a lower price in the following week’s Target circular or in a local competitor’s printed ad. It will also match the price if the customer finds the same item at a lower price within a week on Target’s website or the websites of Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and Toys R Us.

Amazon says it offers competitive prices and does not offer price matching when an item’s price drops after a customer buys it, with the exception of televisions. Walmart matches the prices of print ads from competitors. Walmart also says it checks the prices of 30,000 items at competing chains each week to make sure it has the lowest prices.

Best Buy matches the price from a local competitor’s store, a local Best Buy store or its own web site. Toys R Us matches in-store prices and certain online prices.

(Reporting By Jessica Wohl in Chicago and Phil Wahba in New York; Editing by Alden Bentley and John Wallace)

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Spielberg earns 11th Directors Guild nomination

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Steven Spielberg has extended his domination at the Directors Guild of America Awards, earning a nomination Tuesday for his Civil War epic "Lincoln" to pad the record he already held to 11 film nominations from the guild.

Also nominated were past winners Kathryn Bigelow for her Osama bin Laden thriller "Zero Dark Thirty"; Tom Hooper for his musical "Les Miserables"; and Ang Lee for his lost-at-sea story "Life of Pi."

Rounding out the Directors Guild lineup is first-time nominee Ben Affleck for his Iran hostage-crisis tale "Argo."

The Directors Guild field is one of Hollywood's most-accurate forecasts for who will be in the running at the Academy Awards, whose nominations come out Thursday. The winner at the Directors Guild almost always goes on to win the directing prize at the Oscars, too. Only six times in the 64-year history of the guild awards has the winner there failed to follow up with an Oscar.

Besides the record number of feature-film nominations, Spielberg also has won the Directors Guild prize a record three times, for "The Color Purple," ''Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan," along with directing Oscars for the latter two. He received the guild's lifetime-achievement award in 2000.

Bigelow became the first woman ever to win the guild honor and the directing Oscar three years ago for "The Hurt Locker." Hooper won the same prizes a year later for "The King's Speech," while Lee is a two-time guild winner for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Brokeback Mountain," the latter also earning him the directing Oscar.

Affleck, who also stars in "Argo," follows such actors-turned-filmmakers as Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson to earn a Directors Guild nomination.

Overlooked by the guild were past nominees Quentin Tarantino for his slave-revenge tale "Django Unchained" and David O. Russell for his oddball romance "Silver Linings Playbook."

The film that receives the Directing Guild prize typically also goes on to win the best-picture Oscar, a prize Spielberg has earned only once, for "Schindler's List." No clear front-runner has emerged yet for the Feb. 24 Oscars, with "Lincoln," ''Zero Dark Thirty" and "Les Miserables" all considered strong prospects to take home Hollywood's highest honor.

Sunday's Golden Globes will help sort out the Oscar picture, as will the various guild prizes that will be handed out in late January and February on the run-up to the Academy Awards.

Winners for the 65th annual Directors Guild awards will be announced at a Hollywood dinner Feb. 2, with Kelsey Grammer as host for the second year in a row.

Milos Forman, director of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Amadeus," will receive the guild's lifetime-achievement award.

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Online:

http://www.dga.org

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Oil Sand Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level

Todd Korol/Reuters

An oil sands mine Fort McMurray, Alberta.

OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”

The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.

Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.

“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.

The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.

Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.

The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.

“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.

He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he had not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.

Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”

He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-pit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.

Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.

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DealBook: JPMorgan's Staley to Join BlueMountain Capital

James E. Staley, a longtime JPMorgan Chase executive who served as the firm’s head of investment banking until this summer, is leaving the bank to join BlueMountain Capital Management as a managing partner, the hedge fund said on Tuesday.

The firm he is joining, a nine-year-old hedge fund with $12 billion in assets, profited from betting against JPMorgan by taking the other side of a bet on corporate debt that eventually cost the bank billions of dollars in May. The hedge fund then helped the Wall Street firm clear out its positions through another series of trades.

Mr. Staley’s departure from JPMorgan ends a 34-year career at the bank, which stretched back to the original J.P. Morgan & Company. He worked in a wide variety of roles, from the Brazilian office to the head of the equity capital markets and syndicate divisions to the head of wealth management.

Mr. Staley, an avid sailor known to most as Jes, became the chief executive of investment banking in fall 2009, presiding over the division’s expansion in the wake of the financial crisis.

But several months after the disclosure of the trading loss, JPMorgan shook up its management team. It gave Mr. Staley the new title of head of corporate and investment banking. To some inside the bank, the move effectively sidelined him in a position that was more symbolic than substantive.

At BlueMountain, Mr. Staley will be the firm’s ninth managing partner and will join the management, risk and investment committees. He will also buy an undisclosed stake in the firm.

“I’m very excited to be joining BlueMountain at a time when sea changes in the financial industry, combined with the firm’s unique strengths, open up enormous possibilities to deliver value to clients,” Mr. Staley said in a statement. “I want to thank all my colleagues at JPMorgan, my home for the last 34 years, and I look forward to working with them in the future.”

JPMorgan Chase’s chief, Jamie Dimon, sent a memo to employees on Tuesday morning:

To: All Senior Managers
From: Jamie Dimon
Subject: Jes Staley

This morning it was announced that our colleague, Jes Staley, will be leaving JPMorgan Chase to join BlueMountain Capital Management as a Managing Partner and Member of its Management Committee. Attached is BlueMountain’s press release.

Jes has been an extraordinary leader and a valued partner for many of us at JPMorgan over the years. He joined our company more than 34 years ago, and during this time he served in many critical management roles, including head of our Investment Bank, Asset Management group, Private Bank, and as one of the founders of our equities business. He has served our firm with distinction as a member of our firmwide Operating Committee, and he has been a trusted mentor to many people at our company.

While Jes is leaving JPMorgan Chase, he is joining a respected private investment firm, BlueMountain Capital. BlueMountain is an important client of ours, and we look forward to working with Jes in the future. Please join me in thanking Jes for his decades of dedicated service to JPMorgan, and in wishing him and his family all the best in the future.

Jamie

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At Hearing, Officer Tells of Suspect’s Calm After Colorado Massacre

CENTENNIAL, Colo. — A police officer testified at a preliminary hearing here on Monday that when he responded to emergency calls about a mass shooting at a crowded movie theater this summer that he found the suspected gunman standing calmly outside his car in a parking lot just moments after he had opened fire inside, the authorities say, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others.

“He was very relaxed,” said the police officer, Jason Oviatt. “It was like there weren’t normal emotional responses to anything. He seemed very detached.”

Officer Oviatt said that because the suspect, James E. Holmes, had been swathed in so many layers of body armor and equipped with a helmet and a gas mask, that he had first thought that Mr. Holmes was a fellow police officer.

Mr. Holmes eventually told arresting officers that he had booby-trapped his apartment.

Police officers were among the first people to testify at a weeklong court hearing that will determine whether there is sufficient evidence to move the case against Mr. Holmes to trial, a decision that will be made by William Sylvester, a district judge in Arapahoe County.

But for victims and their families, the hearing may offer the best, and perhaps only, opportunity to understand how the July 20 shooting unfolded, and to get a glimpse into Mr. Holmes’s actions and mind-set in the weeks before the attack. A criminal trial — if one ever convenes — remains months away, probably at the end of a long series of legal arguments, including over Mr. Holmes’s mental fitness to stand trial.

It has been more than five months since Mr. Holmes, a neuroscience graduate student, was accused of striding into a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” at a movie theater in an Aurora shopping mall and opening fire.

He faces more than 160 counts of first-degree murder and attempted murder.

Lawyers for Mr. Holmes, 25, have signaled that they might call witnesses this week to discuss his mental state in the hope of rebuting the prosecution’s evidence that Mr. Holmes spent months methodically buying 6,000 rounds of ammunition, handguns, a shotgun and an assault rifle.

Minutes after the shooting, he was arrested outside the theater, still encased in black body armor, his shaggy hair dyed neon orange.

The fact that Mr. Holmes did not kill himself, unlike gunmen at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Columbine High School or Virginia Tech, has transformed the aftermath of the tragedy into a trying and costly legal case.

Although Mr. Holmes has not yet filed a plea, his lawyers have said several times that he is mentally ill. Mr. Holmes had seen a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he had been a graduate student, and had so alarmed his doctor that she contacted the campus police about him.

Less than a month before the shooting, after he had dropped out of his neuroscience program, Mr. Holmes sent a text message to a classmate that suggested he believed that he suffered from dysphoric mania, a bipolar condition that combines manic behavior and dark, depressive tendencies. Mr. Holmes warned the classmate to stay away from him “because I am bad news,” the classmate has said.

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Kuwait sentences second man to jail for insulting emir: lawyer

DUBAI (Reuters) – A Kuwaiti court sentenced a man to two years in prison on Monday for insulting the country’s ruler on Twitter, his lawyer said, the second to be jailed for the offence in as many days.

The U.S.-allied Gulf Arab state has clamped down in recent months on political activists who have been using social media websites to criticize the government and the ruling family.

Kuwait has seen a series of protests, including one on Sunday night, organized by the opposition since the ruling emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, used emergency powers in October to change the voting system.

The court sentenced Ayyad al-Harbi, who has more than 13,000 followers on Twitter, to the prison term two months after his arrest and release on bail.

Harbi used his Twitter account to criticize the Kuwait government and the emir. He tweeted on Sunday: “Tomorrow morning is my trial’s verdict on charges of slander against the emir, spreading of false news.”

His lawyer, Mohammed al-Humidi, said Harbi would appeal against the verdict. “We’ve been taken by surprise because Kuwait has always been known internationally and in the Arab world as a democracy-loving country,” Humidi told Reuters by telephone. “People are used to democracy, but suddenly we see the constitution being undermined.”

On Sunday, Rashid Saleh al-Anzi was given two years in prison over a tweet that “stabbed the rights and powers of the emir”, according to the online newspaper Alaan. Anzi, who has 5,700 Twitter followers, was expected to appeal.

Kuwait, a U.S. ally and major oil producer, has been taking a firmer line on politically sensitive comments aired on the Internet.

In June 2012, a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he was convicted of endangering state security by insulting the Prophet Mohammad and the Sunni Muslim rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on social media.

Two months later, authorities detained Sheikh Meshaal al-Malik Al-Sabah, a member of the ruling family, over remarks on Twitter in which he accused authorities of corruption and called for political reform, a rights activist said.

Public demonstrations about local issues are common in a state that allows the most dissent in the Gulf, and Kuwait has avoided Arab Spring-style mass unrest that has ousted four veteran Arab dictators in the past two years.

But tensions have risen between Kuwait’s hand-picked government, in which ruling family members hold the top posts, and the elected parliament and opposition groups.

(Reporting by Mahmoud Habboush; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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