George H.W. Bush hospitalized for bronchitis

Former President George H.W. Bush has been hospitalized with bronchitis in Houston for six days, his spokesman said. (Tom Pennington / Getty Images / March 29, 2012)

By Joe Serna

November 29, 2012, 10:10 a.m.

Former President George H.W. Bush is being treated for bronchitis in Houston’s Methodist Hospital, officials there confirmed Thursday.

Bush, 88, has been in and out of the Texas Medical Center for treatment and is scheduled to be released within the next 72 hours, his representatives said in a statement. The 41st president is listed in stable condition.

The Houston Chronicle reported Bush has been in the hospital for about a week.

The former director of the CIA has been known for his vitality in spite of his advanced age. He celebrated his 75th, 80th, and 85th birthdays by going skydiving and joined President Clinton on a humanitarian trip overseas after the 2004 tsunami and visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Bush suffers from vascular Parkinson’s disease and missed his first Republican National Convention in decades earlier this year.

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New Camera Snaps All-Sky Auroras in Full Color

Capturing a multicolored, all-sky image of the auroras that decorate Earth’s polar skies is now possible.

Normally, studying these shimmering phenomena means taking multiple images of an aurora, using different filters that block or image different wavelengths. Now, a camera with tunable liquid crystal filters can capture many colors at once, a team of space-weather researchers reports Nov. 29 in Optics Express.

Called NORUSCA II, the camera also takes pictures of the entire sky. Scientists are hoping that such precision aurora-imaging will help them better understand and classify the celestial light shows.

The team tested the sky-gazing camera at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory in Svalbard, Norway, during the auroral season of 2011 and 2012. On Jan. 24, 2012, an enormous solar flare flung a blob of charged particles in Earth’s direction. The skies over Svalbard lit up as the particles struck Earth’s atmosphere, producing a bright green aurora and intense geomagnetic storm.

Charged particles colliding with different gases in Earth’s atmosphere produce the multicolored auroras. For example, oxygen atoms can glow green or red, depending on their altitude. Hydrogen and helium high in the ionosphere can produce shimmering blue or purple. Nitrogen? Red, violet, or blue.

The new camera captured these swirling lights using many different wavelength channels; individual frames from the Jan. 24 event have been stitched together in the video above. And the camera is sensitive enough to see daytime auroras, like the reddish lights flickering across the sky on Dec. 29, 2011 (video below).

Videos: Optics Express, Vol. 20, Issue 25.

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“Homeland” in, “Boardwalk Empire” out in PGA TV nominations

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Emmy-winning dramas “Homeland”, “Mad Men” and British period piece “Downton Abbey” will compete for the annual Producers Guild Awards for the top shows on U.S. television, organizers announced on Wednesday.

But last year’s winner – HBO’s lavish Prohibition-era gangster drama “Boardwalk Empire” – failed to make the cut this year with the Producers Guild of America, one of the leading professional guilds in Hollywood.

Instead, the producers of popular fantasy drama “Game of Thrones” and drug underworld show “Breaking Bad” round out the nominees for the top PGA prize in television.

The PGA also nominated the producers of comedies “Modern Family”, “The Big Bang Theory”, “Louie”, “30 Rock” and Larry David’s wry “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as contenders for its 2013 awards on the small screen.

In the reality genre, singing contest “The Voice” will go head to head with fashion show “Project Runway”, “Top Chef”, “Dancing with the Stars” and Emmy darling “The Amazing Race”.

Hollywood‘s guilds represent professionals in their respective industries, and recognition by peers can go a long way toward boosting a producer’s career.

The PGA will announce nominees in its closely watched movie category in early January, and hand out its awards for film and television at a ceremony in Hollywood on January 26.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Dale Hudson)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders

For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.

Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.

This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.

Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.

But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.

The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all.

Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: “All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn’t make it the easiest.”

The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field’s most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?

Habits of Thought

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.

Personality problems aren’t exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues’ gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.

Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.

Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of “confounded identities” that are now considered personality disorders.

Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.

“These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired,” said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether.”

Several prototypes soon began to emerge. “A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character,” wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, “Character Analysis,” a groundbreaking text. “In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern.”

Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.

In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association’s third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.

These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.

Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.

This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. “Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a catchall label meaning little more than “this person has problems” became the most common of the diagnoses.

It’s a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn’t have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.

Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.

“The diagnoses simply weren’t being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible,” Dr. Lenzenweger said.

Resisting Simplification 

It was easier said than done.

The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.

A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.

The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to “develop a coherent sense of self or identity.” Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.

Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of traits included in the proposed criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.   The final proposal relies on two personality traits, not four.

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Chamber Competes to Be Heard in Fiscal Debate

WASHINGTON — After months of sparring with President Obama in the heat of the campaign season, Chamber of Commerce executives came to the White House this week with a far more conciliatory tone, offering up suggestions to avert large budget cuts without having to raise taxes.

Jim Young/Reuters

Tom Donahue, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, with President Obama last year. The two have been involved in a showdown on the federal budget deficit.

But Mr. Obama’s top advisers were not budging. There would be no deal on the federal budget deficit, they told chamber executives, without higher taxes, participants said. If there were doubts about the White House’s resolve, Mr. Obama met the chamber’s chief executive afterward for an unscheduled Oval Office chat about the showdown.

For the United States Chamber of Commerce, long the leading business voice in Washington, this month’s negotiations over the nation’s debt will be a key test of whether it can retain its influence and swagger in the capital even after a string of bruising political losses.

Many business leaders are looking to the chamber as a bulwark against the White House’s push for higher taxes, but it is unclear if the century-old association has the clout it once did. Other business groups seen as more open to tax increases have become players in the negotiations, exposing rifts in the private sector.

The Chamber of Commerce, in the biggest voter mobilization effort in its history, spent tens of millions of dollars in support of pro-business candidates, usually Republicans, in the Nov. 6 elections. But the results were disastrous: out of 48 House and Senate candidates that it spent money to try to either elect or defeat, the outcome went the chamber’s way only seven times, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group that tracks political spending.

If the chamber was an 800-pound gorilla before the elections, “now they’re a wounded 500-pound gorilla,” said Cyrus Mehri, a Washington lawyer for U.S. Chamber Watch, a union-backed group that is critical of the chamber’s political practices.

“But they’re still a major force to be reckoned with,” he added.

As the White House looks to work out a deal with Congress to avert hundreds of billions of dollars in automatic budget cuts at the end of the year, Mr. Obama and his top economic advisers have been meeting through the week with business leaders to push their plan for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Obama met Wednesday with chief executives from Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, Yahoo and other prominent firms, and he met a day earlier with small-business representatives.

The president’s advisers also met with officials from the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a centrist group that has become influential in pushing for a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. It is led by Erskine B. Bowles, a former Clinton administration official, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming.

When Mr. Obama met two weeks ago with a dozen corporate leaders but did not invite the Chamber of Commerce, it was widely seen as a snub of the group over its political attacks during the presidential campaign. But the chamber got its turn Monday.

Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, and other senior economic advisers listened as chamber executives, including Thomas J. Donohue, the group’s president, and Bruce Josten, its top lobbyist, laid out their ideas for raising significant revenue without necessarily raising taxes by expanding energy development.

“They wrote it down, but where that goes, I don’t know,” Mr. Josten said in an interview.

But Mr. Josten said that the White House advisers stressed that any debt deal would have to include increased taxes at the highest brackets and that if an agreement could not be reached, they were willing to risk the automatic spending cuts — the so-called fiscal cliff option — at the end of the year.

“They reiterated that they want the higher rates, and they’ll go over the cliff if they need to,” Mr. Josten said.

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Anthem Blue Cross seeks to raise individual policyholders' rates

California's largest for-profit health insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, is seeking to raise rates an average of 18% for more than 630,000 individual policyholders, drawing scrutiny from regulators and the ire of consumers already struggling with soaring premiums.

Some Anthem customers may see rates rise as much as 25% in February under the company's proposal at a time when medical inflation is running at historic lows nationwide.

The increases are among several others proposed by California insurers, including Aetna Inc. and Health Net Inc. California insurance regulators will take the next month to review whether these rate increases are warranted, but state officials don't have the authority to reject them for being unreasonable.

Quiz: Test your healthcare knowledge

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said insurers can expect a thorough review by his agency.

"It's fair to say policyholders are dismayed time and time again at these rate increases they are forced to pay," he said.

Anthem customer Ellie Podway, 55, of Pasadena said she and her husband received a letter the day before Thanksgiving informing them of a 14% rate increase to $881 a month, effective in February. Since 2010, Anthem has boosted the couple's monthly premium 81%, she said.

"This is out of control," Podway said. "You feel like you're being sucker punched over and over."

Anthem, a unit of Indianapolis insurance giant WellPoint Inc., isn't alone in levying double-digit rate hikes.

Aetna, the nation's third-largest health insurer, wants to boost premiums 19%, on average, for nearly 70,000 individual customers in California, effective in April. Woodland Hills insurer Health Net raised rates last month 14%, on average, for more than 30,000 individual policyholders and their dependents statewide. Blue Shield of California is expected to file for rate increases for individual customers next week.

Industrywide, health insurers have been helped by historically low increases in medical costs the last few years as consumers postponed doctor's visits and other care to avoid out-of-pocket expenses in a sluggish economy. U.S. healthcare spending has grown less than 4% annually the last three years, according to government figures, the lowest rates in more than 50 years.

In its rate request, Anthem said its medical costs for this segment of the business are increasing nearly 11% and what it actually pays is rising 13.5% after adjusting for its portion after customer deductibles.

With those cost pressures, Anthem said that the profit margin on its individual insurance business in California is less than 1% this year and that it expects to lose money next year even with these proposed rate increases.

In addition to the 18% rate increase for about 630,000 customers, Anthem is seeking a separate rate hike of 15%, on average, for an additional 100,000 policyholders whose plans are regulated by the California Department of Managed Health Care. An agency spokeswoman said it is reviewing Anthem's proposed rate increase and those of other companies.

"We share our members' concerns over the rising cost of healthcare," Anthem spokesman Darrel Ng said. "The economic downturn continues to lead many healthy individuals to avoid purchasing coverage or to drop coverage altogether, leaving an insured pool that utilizes significantly more services."

Overall as a company, WellPoint has earned $2.2 billion in profit in the first nine months of this year and $2.6 billion in 2011. WellPoint runs Blue Cross plans in California and 13 other states.

In recent years, the rising cost of medical care and rate hikes for health insurance have been a major political issue that prompted congressional approval of President Obama's Affordable Care Act, much of which takes effect in January 2014, and calls in California for tougher state regulation of health premiums.

Anthem tried to raise rates up to 39% in 2010, sparking national outrage and helping Obama win support for his healthcare law. Anthem was forced to back down and accepted maximum rate increases of 20%. This year Anthem raised premiums 8% to 14%, on average, for about 700,000 individual policyholders and their family members.

The state's largest nonprofit health plan, Kaiser Permanente, is seeking an average increase of 8% for 220,422 customers, effective in January, according to state records. UnitedHealth Group Inc., the nation's largest health insurer, said it is trying to raise premiums 10% for about 5,500 individual policyholders in January.

These increases would affect many of the 2 million Californians who buy individual policies, but not the majority of Californians who are insured through employer group plans.

California employers said their health benefit costs rose 5.5% in 2012, according to a survey by benefits consultant Mercer.

A ballot measure scheduled for November 2014 would give the California insurance commissioner the same authority to approve or reject health insurance rate increases that the department now has over property and auto policies. Consumer Watchdog, the Santa Monica group that in 1988 championed Proposition 103 — which enacted rate controls on those other types of insurance — had tried to get the health insurance measure on this year's ballot.

Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, said the ballot initiative would enable the insurance commissioner to order refunds retroactive to November 2012 if health insurance rates are deemed excessive.

"Two years from now, the insurance companies might be writing big checks to consumers," Court said.

chad.terhune@latimes.com

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Andrew W.K. Nixed as Cultural Ambassador to Bahrain, Vows to Continue Partying

It’s hard to tell what’s funnier: That the State Department considered sending “positive partying” performer Andrew W.K. as an a cultural ambassador to the Kingdom of Bahrain, or that the effusive entertainer is actually surprised that it didn’t happen.

Earlier this week, Andrew W.K. announced that he had been invited to the U.S. embassy in Bahrain, an offer he says was recently rescinded only days before the planned Dec. 2 trip. A State Department representative told DCist that the decision to invite the musician to Bahrain was “a mistake” and that the embassy had determined he was “not the best choice and didn’t meet our standards.” But judging by an official statement released yesterday, Andrew W.K., known to the IRS as Andrew Fetterly Wilkes-Krier, is evidently having none of it.

“For a Department of State representative to say Andrew W.K. ‘doesn’t meet their standards’ after they invited me and planned my trip for a year … well, that doesn’t meet my standards either,” W.K. said on his website, perhaps with a straight face. “I would’ve done a great job and represented our nation with dignity and pride. Despite all these challenges, I still would love to go and I vow to continue partying, and working everyday to to unite our human race through the power of positive partying.”

Wired reached out to both Andrew W.K. and Amnesty International for comment on the existential hilarity of taking the philosophy of positive partying to a nation that has forbidden public gatherings, but as of this writing has not received a response. Maybe the hangover is just too heavy.

Scott Thill covers pop, culture, tech, politics, econ, the environment and more for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and others. You can sample his collected spiels at his site, Morphizm.

Read more by Scott Thill

Follow @morphizm on Twitter.

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Former boxing champ Mike Tyson to take one-man show on the road

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson plans to take his one-man theater show on the road across the United States early next year.

Tyson, 45, made the announcement on ABC’s late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Tuesday.

“Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth” is an autobiographical monologue performed by Tyson in which he reflects upon his tough childhood in Brooklyn, the absence of his father and his self-described “reckless and destructive” behavior. It premiered in Las Vegas in April and had a run on Broadway.

Tyson, whose reputation was boosted by a cameo in the 2009 hit comedy “The Hangover,” told Kimmel that his inspiration for the show came from a one-man performance of “A Bronx Tale” in Las Vegas.

The 23-date tour, which features the Broadway show directed by Spike Lee, is scheduled to begin on February 12 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the city where Tyson was convicted in 1992 of raping then 18-year-old beauty queen Desiree Washington.

Tyson, who at the age of 20 became the youngest world heavyweight champion, served three years in prison before restarting his boxing career in 1995.

He later became better known for his erratic behavior than for his prowess in the ring. Tyson notoriously bit off portions of opponent Evander Holyfield’s ears in a 1997 bout and publicly said he wanted to eat British champion Lennox Lewis’ children.

Tyson retired from boxing in 2006.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey; Editing by Patrica Reaney)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Weight Loss Surgery May Not Combat Diabetes Long-Term

Weight loss surgery, which in recent years has been seen as an increasingly attractive option for treating Type 2 diabetes, may not be as effective against the disease as it was initially thought to be, according to a new report. The study found that many obese Type 2 diabetics who undergo gastric bypass surgery do not experience a remission of their disease, and of those that do, about a third redevelop diabetes within five years of their operation.

The findings contrast with the growing perception that surgery is essentially a cure for Type II diabetes. Earlier this year, two widely publicized studies reported that surgery worked better than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of Type 2 diabetes in overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control, leading some experts to call for greater use of surgery in treating the disease. But the studies were small and relatively short, lasting under two years.

The latest study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, tracked thousands of diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery for more than a decade. It found that many people whose diabetes at first went away were likely to have it return. While weight regain is a common problem among those who undergo bariatric surgery, regaining lost weight did not appear to be the cause of diabetes relapse. Instead, the study found that people whose diabetes was most severe or in its later stages when they had surgery were more likely to have a relapse, regardless of whether they regained weight.

“Some people are under the impression that you have surgery and you’re cured,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, the president for medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, who was not involved in the study. “There have been a lot of claims about how wonderful surgery is for diabetes, and I think this offers a more realistic picture.”

The findings suggest that weight loss surgery may be most effective for treating diabetes in those whose disease is not very advanced. “What we’re learning is that not all diabetic patients do as well as others,” said Dr. David E. Arterburn, the lead author of the study and an associate investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle. “Those who are early in diabetes seem to do the best, which makes a case for potentially earlier intervention.”

One of the strengths of the new study was that it involved thousands of patients enrolled in three large health plans in California and Minnesota, allowing detailed tracking over many years. All told, 4,434 adult diabetics were followed between 1995 and 2008. All were obese, and all underwent Roux-en-Y operations, the most popular type of gastric bypass procedure.

After surgery, about 68 percent of patients experienced a complete remission of their diabetes. But within five years, 35 percent of those patients had it return. Taken together, that means that most of the subjects in the study, about 56 percent — a figure that includes those whose disease never remitted — had no long-lasting remission of diabetes after surgery.

The researchers found that three factors were particularly good predictors of who was likely to have a relapse of diabetes. If patients, before surgery, had a relatively long duration of diabetes, had poor control of their blood sugar, or were taking insulin, then they were least likely to benefit from gastric bypass. A patient’s weight, either before or after surgery, was not correlated with their likelihood of remission or relapse.

In Type 2 diabetes, the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas tend to wear out as the disease progresses, which may explain why some people benefit less from surgery. “If someone is too far advanced in their diabetes, where their pancreas is frankly toward the latter stages of being able to produce insulin, then even after losing a bunch of weight their body may not be able to produce enough insulin to control their blood sugar,” Dr. Arterburn said.

Nonetheless, he said it might be the case that obese diabetics, even those whose disease is advanced, can still benefit from gastric surgery, at least as far as their quality of life and their risk factors for heart disease and other complications are concerned.

“It’s not a surefire cure for everyone,” he said. “But almost universally, patients lose weight after weight loss surgery, and that in and of itself may have so many health benefits.”

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United Is Struggling Two Years After Its Merger With Continental

Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

A United 787 Dreamliner at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. United lost $103 million through the third quarter of 2012.

CHICAGO — It was supposed to be a moment for celebration: United Airlines observing the delivery of its second Boeing 787 Dreamliner with a flight from Seattle to Chicago earlier this month for a select group of employees, while senior officers, including Jeffery A. Smisek, United’s hard-charging chief executive, served Champagne and took lunch orders.

Jad Mouawad/The New York Times

Jeff Smisek, the chief of United Airlines, served champagne on a flight to celebrate delivery of a Boeing 787 on Nov. 15.

But before the flight took off that morning, a computer glitch in one of the airline’s computer systems delayed 250 flights around the world for two hours.

So it goes at United these days. The world’s biggest airline, created after United merged with Continental Airlines in 2010, promised an unparalleled global network, with eight major hubs and 5,500 daily flights serving nearly 400 destinations. As an added benefit, the new airline would be led by Mr. Smisek of Continental, which was known for its attention to customer service.

But two years on, United still grapples with a myriad problems in integrating the two airlines. The result has been hobbled operations, angry passengers and soured relations with employees.

The list of United’s troubles this year has been long. Its reservation system failed twice, shutting its Web site, disabling airport kiosks and stranding passengers as flights were delayed or canceled. The day of the 787 flight, another system, which records the aircraft’s weight once passengers and bags are loaded, shut down because of a programming error.

United has the worst operational record among the nation’s top 15 airlines. Its on-time arrival rate in the 12 months through September was just 77.5 percent — six percentage points below the industry average and 10 percentage points lower than Delta Air Lines. It had the highest rate of regularly delayed flights this summer, and generated more customer complaints than all other airlines combined in July, according to the Transportation Department.

The airline even angered the mayor of Houston, Continental’s longtime home and still the carrier’s biggest hub, when it unsuccessfully sought to block Southwest Airlines’ bid to bring international flights to the city’s smaller airport, Hobby. 

The United-Continental merger is weighing on the company’s finances. It took a $60 million charge in the third quarter for merger-related expenses, including repainting planes. It also took a $454 million charge to cover a future cash payment to pilots under a tentative deal reached in August.

While most large airlines reported profits this year, United has lost $103 million in the first three quarters of 2012, with revenue up just 1 percent to $28.5 billion. Its shares are up 7 percent this year compared with a 12 percent gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and a 24 percent gain for Delta.

“United remains at a challenging point,” analysts from Barclays wrote last month, and they forecast that the carrier would not begin to see the benefits of its merger until late in 2013 and into 2014. Still, while airlines initially struggle, mergers increase revenue eventually, as the example of Delta’s acquisition of Northwest Airlines demonstrated two years ago.

Mr. Smisek, taking a break from serving coffee halfway through the maiden 787 flight, acknowledged that things were not going as fast as expected, particularly given the aggressive targets he set two years ago. Back then, Mr. Smisek said the merger would be wrapped up in 12 to 18 months. He has since learned to be patient, he said.

“It is still a work in progress,” he said. “The integration of two airlines takes years. It’s very complex. If you look at where we were two years ago, we’ve come a long way.”

Admittedly, the process is complicated. Airline mergers mean combining different technologies, often old computer systems, as well as thousands of procedures used by pilots and flight dispatchers, gate agents, flight attendants and ground crew.

Setbacks are common. Like United, US Airways experienced a breakdown in its booking technology after its combination with America West in 2005. Delta’s on-time performance fell sharply in the year after its purchase of Northwest.

But today, Delta is a leader among big airlines in on-time performance. US Airways had a record third-quarter profit even though it still lacks common work rules for its pilots seven years after its merger.

United has completed many of its merger tasks, particularly as far as passengers are concerned. It has received its single operating certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration, allowing it to run a combined fleet. Despite all the problems this summer, it claims to have finally merged the reservation and technology systems.

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Alleged WikiLeaks source says he was illegally punished in jail

A key pretrial hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of giving classified material to the website WikiLeaks, which then made it public, began Tuesday in a case that highlights the government’s resolve to keep war and diplomatic material secret.

Manning, who has been charged on 22 counts, faces life in prison if convicted of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge. His court-martial is scheduled for February.

A former intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010, Manning is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of logs about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

The hearing at a military court at Ft. Meade outside Baltimore is scheduled to run through Sunday. Manning is expected to testify at some point. It would be the first time he has spoken publicly about the case and the conditions of his detainment since his arrest in 2010.

The defense will argue that all charges should be dismissed because Manning was subjected to “unlawful pretrial punishment,” according to a post on the website of his supporters, the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Manning will get a chance to testify about his treatment. His lawyers argue that he was illegally punished by being put alone in a cell for nine months at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. Military judges can dismiss all charges if pretrial punishment is particularly egregious, but that rarely happens, though the time in incarceration can be credited toward the sentencing.

“At this extremely important hearing, Bradley’s lawyer David Coombs ... will present evidence that brig psychiatrists opposed the decision to hold Bradley in solitary, and that brig commanders misled the public when they said that Bradley’s treatment was for ‘Prevention of Injury,' " his supporters said.

Manning has offered to take responsibility by pleading guilty to reduced charges. The military has not ruled on that offer.

Manning was in the brig from July 2010 to April 2011. The military argues the treatment there was proper since he classified as a maximum-security detainee. He was later moved to Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., where he was reevaluated and given a medium-security classification.

A United Nations investigator called the conditions of Manning's imprisonment cruel, inhuman and degrading, but stopped short of calling it torture.

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Microsoft Says It Has Sold 40 Million Windows 8 Licenses

Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the month since it launched, suggesting that the operating system is selling faster, and in larger numbers, than Windows 7.

Microsoft executive Tami Reller announced the milestone at the Credit Suisse 2012 Annual Technology Conference, and the company reiterated it Tuesday in a blog post that said, “Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades.”

This is the first sales figure Microsoft has shared since CEO Steve Ballmer said the company had gotten 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in four days, and it must be taken with a big spoonful of salt. Microsoft did not specify how Windows 8 devices are selling in comparison to past launch devices. Nor did it say whether Windows 8 is selling below expectations, as recent reports have suggested. The catch in all of this is that 40 million figure includes all of the licenses Microsoft has sold, including to manufacturers building Windows 8 hardware. That means many of those 40 million copies of Windows 8 haven’t actually made their way into consumers’ hands.

Microsoft also emphasized that its Windows Store is growing in conjunction with Windows 8 growth. A report from app analytics company Distimo suggests the same thing and notes that millions of people who have upgraded to Windows 8 are downloading Windows Store apps at a healthy rate. The top 300 apps in the Windows Store have an average of 200,000 downloads per day. The top 300 apps in the Mac App Store see around 80,000 daily downloads, the firm said.

The Windows Store had grown to 21,183 apps by Nov. 22, according to Distimo’s data. That puts the Windows Store at more than twice the size it was at launch on Oct. 26 and more robust than the Mac App Store, which has around 13,000 apps. Still, it’s significantly lower than the 600,000-plus apps available in the Apple App Store and Google Play. Since the Windows Store covers both desktop computers and tablets and the Windows Phone Store offers apps for smartphones, it’s somewhat difficult to compare the various available app stores across platforms.

Missing from Distimo’s report, however, is the total download rate for both stores. Distimo does mention that when it comes to paid apps, the Mac App Store is still performing much better than the Windows Store, with five times as many downloads. While Windows 8 users are downloading plenty of apps, they aren’t necessarily paying much, or anything, for them.

Microsoft’s Windows Store has significantly fewer paid apps than its competitors. Paid apps make up only 14 percent of the Windows Store, compared to the 35 percent in Google Play and 84 percent in Apple’s App Store. Microsoft did not specify how much revenue the Windows Store has made, but noted “a number of apps in the Windows Store have crossed the $25,000 revenue mark and the developer keeps 80 percent of the revenue they make off downloads for the life of their app.” Download rates of paid apps, however, are much lower than download rates of free apps.

More notable is that Windows 8 users are actually active on the Windows Store, which will likely convince developers who have been hesitant to build for the nascent platform.

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Turkish PM fumes over steamy Ottoman soap opera

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – A hit TV show about the Ottoman Empire‘s longest-reigning Sultan has raised a political storm in Turkey, with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan urging legal action over historical inaccuracies and the opposition accusing him of artistic tyranny.

Erdogan tore into the weekly soap opera “Magnificent Century”, which attracts an audience of up to 150 million people in Turkey as well as parts of the Balkans and Middle East, in response to criticism of his government’s foreign policy.

The lavish television production, which grips audiences with tales of power struggles and palace intrigue, is set during the 16th century reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, when Ottoman rulers held sway over an empire straddling three continents.

Bristling at suggestions that Turkey was meddling too much in its neighbors’ affairs, Erdogan recalled Turkey’s heritage, and said Suleiman had been a proud conqueror rather than the indulgent harem-lover portrayed in the show.

“(Critics) ask why are we dealing with the affairs of Iraq, Syria and Gaza,” Erdogan said at the opening of an airport in western Turkey on Sunday.

“They know our fathers and ancestors through ‘Magnificent Century’, but we don’t know such a Suleiman. He spent 30 years on horseback, not in the palace, not what you see in that series.”

Scenes that showed Suleiman with women in the harem have prompted calls from viewers in the mostly Muslim and largely conservative country for the broadcasting regulator (RTUK) to ban the series. But it tops the viewing charts each week.

Erdogan said the director of the series, which has been on air since January 2011, and the owner of the channel that broadcasts it had been warned, but also said he expected the judiciary to act, without elaborating.

Erdogan’s opponents accused him of authoritarianism.

“The prime minister must be jealous of the series’ popularity. He thinks there’s no need for another sultan when he’s in power,” said Muharrem Ince, the deputy chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

“Erdogan wants to be the only sultan.”

Elected a decade ago with the strongest majority seen in years, Erdogan has overseen a period of unprecedented prosperity in Turkey. But concerns are growing about his increasingly authoritarian rule.

Hundreds of politicians, academics and journalists are in jail on charges of plotting against the government, while more than 300 army officers were given prison terms in September for conspiring to topple him not long after he swept to power.

Turkey has been increasingly assertive in regional politics, most notably over the crisis in neighboring Syria, where it has led calls for international action and scrambled war planes in a warning to Damascus not to violate its territory.

“I think the prime minister’s aim here is to change the agenda. I can’t think of any other reason to discuss an imaginary television series when there are so many problems in a country,” Nebahat Cehre, who played Suleiman’s mother during the first two seasons, told Turkey’s Birgun newspaper.

(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Jon Hemming)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Global Update: Investing in Eyeglasses for Poor Would Boost International Economy

BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

Eliminating the worldwide shortage of eyeglasses could cost up to $28 billion, but would add more than $200 billion to the global economy, according to a study published last month in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

The $28 billion would cover the cost of training 65,000 optometrists and equipping clinics where they could prescribe eyeglasses, which can now be mass-produced for as little as $2 a pair. The study was done by scientists from Australia and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The authors assumed that 703 million people worldwide have uncorrected nearsightedness or farsightedness severe enough to impair their work, and that 80 percent of them could be helped with off-the-rack glasses, which would need to be replaced every five years.

The biggest productivity savings from better vision would not be in very poor regions like Africa but in moderately poor countries where more people have factory jobs or trades like driving or running a sewing machine.

Without the equivalent of reading glasses, “lots of skilled crafts become very difficult after age 40 or 45,” said Kevin Frick, a Johns Hopkins health policy economist and study co-author. “You don’t want to be swinging a hammer if you can’t see the nail.”

If millions of schoolchildren who need glasses got them, the return on investment could be even greater, he said, but that would be in the future and was not calculated in this study.

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Jeffrey Zucker Expected to Be Next President of CNN

In the days to come, when Time Warner appoints a new leader of CNN Worldwide for the first time in a decade, he or she will face an identity crisis unlike any other in corporate America.

Though CNN over all is on track to have its most profitable year ever, its flagship channel in the United States is seemingly rudderless, run by layers of producers and executives — many with competing visions. The channel’s low prime-time ratings are the stuff of punch lines and a journalism school case study in the damage wrought by the digital age.

Then again, the channel also has tremendous potential, an enviably popular Web site and countless people rooting for it to succeed.

Throughout a four-month search process for the person to succeed Jim Walton, the departing president, attention has centered on Jeffrey Zucker, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, who was replaced when Comcast took over the company last year. Mr. Zucker currently produces Katie Couric’s daytime talk show.

Several news executives close to Mr. Zucker said this week that they believed he had been chosen to run CNN and expected the appointment to be announced soon. People close to the Time Warner chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, also identified Mr. Zucker. A Time Warner spokesman declined to comment.

In considering candidates to run one of the world’s best-known, but beleaguered, news organizations, Mr. Bewkes and his deputy Phil Kent have also been considering their own legacies. They are cautious about not undermining CNN’s journalistic heart and soul, even as they strive to resuscitate the channel’s prime-time lineup, according to people who have met with them about the search. That means the channel’s programming will remain nonpartisan in nature.

“They want someone who has programming and management and cable expertise; someone who can be credible to the staff and to the business community,” said one of these people. “They know that this is a pretty tall order.”

Mr. Zucker could check off all those boxes. As a young NBC News producer, he helped start what became a 16-year winning streak for the “Today” show. He had mixed results as he moved up the rungs of NBC, but he can point to cable programming successes even as the NBC broadcast network struggled. He did not respond to requests for comment, and people with knowledge of the search insisted on anonymity to preserve friendships and business relationships.

But many others in and around CNN spoke on the record about the challenges ahead. Getting the top-heavy 4,000-person company — spread among New York, Washington, Atlanta and bureaus around the world — to row in the same direction will be one of the toughest tasks, many said.

The company’s many channels and sites net roughly $600 million in annual profits, through advertising revenue and subscriber fees. But the channel is leaving ad dollars on the table, as one executive put it, because its prime-time ratings are lagging, and it’s putting future fee increases at risk by appearing irrelevant in the eyes of some cable subscribers.

One problem dates back to CNN’s creation in 1980: when there is a lack of news, there is a lack of viewers. Kiran Chetry, a CNN morning anchor from 2007 to 2011, said her time there was like being on a news treadmill: “We were running, sweating, doing the work, but never getting anywhere ratings-wise,” she said. This stemmed, she said, from uncertainty about “what we were, who our audience was and how we best served them.”

As Fox News and, later, MSNBC put on confrontational political programs with partisan points of view, CNN sold itself as proudly nonpartisan, but fell from first to second to third place in the cable news wars along the way. This should have been an “up” year for the channel, thanks to the presidential election; but through mid-November the channel had drawn 412,000 viewers at any given time, down 16 percent from the previous 12 months.

Bill Carter contributed reporting.

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Congress returns as 'fiscal cliff' talks slow

WASHINGTON – Congress returned in a lame duck session with no signs of quick compromise to prevent a tax hike for most Americans early next year.

Talks between the White House and Republican leaders in the House continued behind closed doors. Current tax rates expire Dec. 31.

Emboldened by his re-election, President Obama took his case for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to the public on Monday. He warned that the threat of higher taxes on middle-class Americans could dampen the Christmas shopping season.

"The President has called on Congress to take action and stop holding the middle class and our economy hostage over a disagreement on tax cuts for households with incomes over $250,000 per year," the White House said in a statement.

Quiz: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff?

The White House got a boost from billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who said the wealthy – himself included – should pay more. Noting the nation’s growing gap in income disparity, Buffett dismissed the Republican argument that tax hikes would hamper investments.

“In recent years, my gang has been leaving the middle class in the dust,” Buffett said. “So let’s forget about the rich and ultrarich going on strike and stuffing their ample funds under their mattresses if — gasp — capital gains rates and ordinary income rates are increased.”

Key Republicans, including House Speaker John A. Boehner, have signaled they are willing to put new tax revenues on the table, creating the outlines of a possible deal. Several Republican lawmakers used the Sunday talk shows to distance themselves from their party’s anti-tax pledge, publicly breaking with conservative stalwart Grover Norquist, although they insisted any agreement must include spending cuts.

A so-called grand bargain of tax hikes and spending cuts has eluded Washington in the past, but both political parties are wary of rattling the financial markets and sparking a crisis in consumer spending. Wall Street has signaled a bold deficit-reduction plan is needed to prevent a credit downgrade.

PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities

No talks between the president and congressional leaders have been scheduled. The parties had agreed to meet this week to put the framework of a two-part deal on the table.

If Republicans continue to fight higher tax rates for the wealthy, Boehner will face pressure to propose an alternative way to raise new revenue – either by closing individual loopholes or capping deductions in a way that produces new money.

“Congressional and White House staff continue to work to find common ground that is consistent with the ‘balanced approach’ the White House says it wants – with significant spending cuts, and without job-killing small business tax hikes,” said a senior House leadership aide.

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Lisa.Mascaro@latimes.com

CParsons@latimes.com

Twitter: @LisaMascaroinDC

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Apple Patent War Targets Six More Samsung Devices

Apple hopes to take more prisoners in its patent war against arch rival Samsung, asking a judge to add six of the Korean company’s flagship phones and tablets to the list of gadgets infringing upon its patents.

Apple contends it has “good cause” to add the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, Galaxy Tab 8.9 WiFi, Rugby Pro and Galaxy III Mini to its lawsuit against Samsung.

“Apple has acted quickly and diligently to determine that these newly-released products do infringe many of the same claims already asserted by Apple, and in the same way that the already-accused devices infringe,” Apple claimed in the filing. It adds that granting the motion would “promote judicial economy and efficiency.”

“If Apple were not allowed to supplement now, Apple would be required to bring an entirely separate suit against the new products, involving exactly the same patents, patent claims, and legal theories,” Apple wrote.

This is the latest salvo in an ongoing smartphone patent war. Last week, Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, allowed both Apple and Samsung to add devices like the Galaxy Note and iPhone 5 to the case, which is set to go to trial in March 2014. Adding devices to the case means the litigation will take longer to resolve and cost more for everyone involved but could prevent future separate lawsuits in the future.

The two companies are neck-deep in lawsuits and trials across the globe. It began in April 2011, when Apple sued for patent infringement, saying Samsung blatantly copied the look and feel of the iPhone and iPad as well as key user interface elements. Samsung counter-sued, arguing Apple infringed on its 3G standards-related patents. The latest case in the U.S. covers more recent products but addresses similar complaints.

In the case filed in April 2011, Samsung recently requested an opportunity to check out the confidential licensing agreement between Apple and HTC. The agreement ended an intellectual property battle the two companies had fought for nearly three years.

According to Samsung’s legal team, that settlement undermines Apple’s claim that an injunction (a product sales ban) is a more appropriate solution to the situation than monetary damages in the form of licensing fees. If Apple could broker a deal with HTC, the reasoning goes, it can broker one with Samsung and settle the matter.

“In general, open licensing information increases the chance of settlement,” Robin Feldman, a law professor at UC Hastings and author of Rethinking Patent Rights, told Wired via e-mail. “If you know what the other party is willing to take, there is less room for posturing and you know what to offer.”

Apple said it would give Samsung a copy of the settlement agreement — then provided a redacted version that did not include the terms of the licensing arrangement. It seems HTC didn’t want the financial terms of the agreement disclosed, but Grewal would have none of this.

“Many third parties to this case have had their licensing agreements disclosed -– without any redaction of financial terms,” the judge wrote in the order filed Nov. 21. “HTC is not entitled to special treatment.”

Thus, Samsung’s request to get access to an unredacted version of the settlement agreement was granted.

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Actor: CBS comedy ‘Two and a Half Men’ is ‘filth’

NEW YORK (AP) — The teenage actor who plays the half in the hit CBS comedy “Two and a Half Men” says it’s “filth” and through a video posted by a Christian church has urged viewers not to watch it.

Nineteen-year-old Angus T. Jones has been on the show since he was 10 but says he doesn’t want to be on it. He says, “Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth.”

The video was posted by the Forerunner Christian Church in California, where Jones says he went to meet his spiritual needs.

Show producer Warner Bros. Television has no comment. CBS hasn’t responded to a request for comment left Monday.

The show stars Jon Cryer as Jones’ uptight dad and originally featured Charlie Sheen as his hedonistic philandering uncle, but Sheen was replaced by Ashton Kutcher.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Amid Hurricane Sandy, a Race to Get a Liver Transplant

It was the best possible news, at the worst possible time.

The phone call from the hospital brought the message that Dolores and Vin Dreeland had long hoped for, ever since their daughter Natalia, 4, had been put on the waiting list for a liver transplant. The time had come.

They bundled her into the car for the 50-mile trip from their home in Long Valley, N.J., to NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Manhattan. But it soon seemed that this chance to save Natalia’s life might be just out of reach.

The date was Sunday, Oct. 28, and Hurricane Sandy, the worst storm to hit the East Coast in decades, was bearing down on New York. Airports and bridges would soon close, but the donated organ was in Nevada, five hours away. The time window in which a plane carrying the liver would be able to land in the region was rapidly closing.

In a hospital room, Natalia watched cartoons. Her parents watched the clock, and the weather. “Our anxiety was through the roof,” Mrs. Dreeland said. “It just made your stomach into knots.”

The Dreelands, who are in their 60s, became Natalia’s foster parents in 2008 when she was 7 months old, and adopted her just before she turned 2. They have another adopted daughter, Dorothy Jane, who is 17.

Natalia is a “smart little cookie” who loves school and dressing up Alice, her favorite doll, her mother said. At age 3, Natalia used the word “discombobulated” correctly, Mr. Dreeland said.

Natalia’s health problems date back several years. Her gallbladder was taken out in 2010, and about half her liver was removed in 2011. The underlying problem was a rare disease, Langerhans cell histiocytosis. It causes a tremendous overgrowth of a type of cell in the immune system and can damage organs. Drugs can sometimes keep it in check, but they did not work for Natalia.

In her case, the disease struck the bile ducts, which led to progressive liver damage. “She would have eventually gone into liver failure,” said Dr. Nadia Ovchinsky, a pediatric liver transplant specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian. “And she demonstrated some signs of early liver failure.”

The only hope was a transplant.

Dr. Tomoaki Kato, Natalia’s surgeon, knew that the liver in Nevada was a perfect match for Natalia in the two criteria that matter most: blood type and size. The deceased donor was 2 years old, and though Natalia is nearly 5, she is small for her age. Scar tissue from her previous operations would have made it very difficult to fit a larger organ into her abdomen.

Though Dr. Kato had considered transplanting part of an adult liver into Natalia, a complete organ from a child would be far better for her. But healthy organs from small children do not often become available, Dr. Kato said. This was a rare opportunity, and he was determined to seize it.

But as the day wore on, the odds for Natalia grew slimmer. The operation in Nevada to remove the liver was delayed several times.

At many hospitals, surgery to remove donor organs is done at the end of the day, after all regularly scheduled operations. The Nevada hospital had a busy surgical schedule that day, made worse by a trauma case that took priority.

At the hospital in New York, Tod Brown, an organ procurement coordinator, had alerted a charter air carrier that a flight from Nevada might be needed. That company in turn contacted West Coast carriers to pick up the donated liver and fly it to New York.

Initially, two carriers agreed, but then backed out. Several other charter companies also declined.

Mr. Brown told Dr. Kato that they might have to decline the organ. Dr. Kato, soft-spoken but relentless, said, “Find somebody who can fly.”

Dr. Kato used to work in Miami, where pilots found ways to bypass hurricanes to deliver organs. Even during Hurricane Katrina, his hospital performed transplants.

“I asked the transplant coordinators to just keep pushing,” he said.

Mr. Brown said, “Dr. Kato knew he was going to get that organ, one way or another.”

As the trajectory of the storm became clearer, one of the West Coast charter companies agreed to attempt the flight. The plan was to land at the airport in Teterboro, N.J. The backup was Newark airport, and the second backup was Albany, from where an ambulance would finish the trip.

The timing was critical: organs deteriorate outside the body, and ideally a liver should be transplanted within 12 hours of being removed.

Early Monday, as the storm whirled offshore, the plane landed at Teterboro. Soon a nurse rushed to tell the Dreelands that she had just seen an ambulance with lights and sirens screech up to the hospital. Someone had jumped out carrying a container.

At about 5 a.m., the couple kissed Natalia and saw her wheeled off to the operating room.

Three weeks later, she is back home, on the mend. The complicated regimen of drugs that transplant patients need is tough on a child, but she is getting through it, her father said.

Recently, Mr. Dreeland said, he found himself weeping uncontrollably during a church service for the family of the child who had died. “Their child gave my child life,” he said.

Though only time will tell, because the histiocytosis appeared limited to Natalia’s bile ducts and had not affected other organs, her doctors say there is a good chance that the transplant has cured her.

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DealBook: Lehman Estate to Sell Archstone for $6.5 Billion

The deal that helped sink Lehman Brothers is now playing an important role in paying off the failed investment bank’s creditors.

The Lehman estate agreed on Monday to sell Archstone, the sprawling apartment complex company, to Equity Residential and AvalonBay Communities for about $6.5 billion in cash and stock.

Under the terms of the deal, the Lehman estate will receive $2.685 billion in cash, as well as shares in Equity Residential and AvalonBay worth about $3.8 billion. The two apartment companies will also assume Archstone’s roughly $9.5 billion in debt.

By selling Archstone, the Lehman estate will dispose of its biggest asset, as it continues its efforts to wind itself down and pay off the firm’s legions of creditors. And it will signal the latest twist for a property that has played an important role in Lehman’s demise.

Lehman bought Archstone in 2007, paying more than $22 billion at the height of the housing boom. That leveraged buyout piled even more debt onto an already overburdened firm, significantly contributing to its demise in the fall of 2008.

Since then, however, Archstone has become regarded as one of the crown jewels in the Lehman estate’s pile of assets. And as the estate has sold off a number of its other properties, including the asset manager Neuberger Berman and other real estate holdings, the apartment company was held out as the best opportunity for a major payday.

Such was the Lehman estate’s zealousness that it bought out its partners in Archstone, Bank of America and Barclays, earlier this year, spending a total of $2.88 billion. The goal then was to prevent the firms from selling their holdings to Equity Residential too cheaply.

The stock component of the transaction announced on Monday will give make the Lehman estate the single biggest investor in Equity Residential, with a 9.8 percent stake, and in AvalonBay, with a 13.2 percent stake.

The purchase price represents a roughly 17 percent premium to what the Lehman estate had valued the apartment complex operator.

“The sale of Archstone to Equity Residential and AvalonBay is a very positive outcome for our creditors,” Owen Thomas, the chairman of Lehman’s board of directors, said in a statement.

Equity Residential, which is run by the billionaire Samuel Zell, will own about 60 percent of Archstone’s assets and liabilities. AvalonBay will own the remainder.

Lehman was advised by Gleacher & Company, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Equity Residential received advice from Morgan Stanley and the law firms Hogan Lovells and Morrison & Foerster. AvalonBay was advised by Greenhill & Company and the law firm Goodwin Procter.

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Graham, King depart from Norquist's anti-tax pledge

Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist explains his anti-tax pledge.

By Morgan Little

November 25, 2012, 12:24 p.m.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday joined the ranks of Republican lawmakers stepping away from Grover Norquist’s famous anti-tax pledge, offering to cut his support for the pledge – with a catch.

“I will violate the pledge for the good of the country only if Democrats will do entitlement reform,” he said on ABC’s “This Week,” adding that “the only pledge we should be making to each other is to avoid being Greece.”

Graham specified that although he agrees with Norquist's stand against raising tax rates and not raising taxes for wealthy Americans, he disagrees with him on deduction caps and buying down debt.

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Graham was accompanied by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who said that “the world has changed,” and sticking to the pledge was a non-starter.

PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities

“If I were in Congress in 1941, I would have signed a declaration of war against Japan. I’m not going to attack Japan today,” he said, asserting that pledges should apply only to the era in which they are signed.

Nonetheless, King remained confident that House Speaker John A. Boehner would do “everything he can to avoid raising tax rates” during negotiations with Democrats.

Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” has been a calling card for Republicans, and a sticking point for Democrats, since its inception in 1986. It calls for the signer to oppose “any and all efforts” to increase tax rates, and to oppose the reduction or elimination of deductions or credits, unless those reductions are met with tax-rate cutbacks.

Graham and King joined Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who said Wednesday that “I care more about my country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge.”

Chambliss, speaking with Georgia television station WMAZ-TV Channel 13, said he’s ready to “let the political consequences take care of themselves,” setting the stage for Graham and King’s remarks Sunday.

Norquist responded to Chambliss, stating that “his promise is to the people of Georgia."

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

Norquist also brought attention to a letter Chambliss signed in 2011, promising not to vote for tax increases.

“If he plans to vote for higher taxes to pay for Obama-sized government, he should address the people of Georgia and let them know that he plans to break his promise to them,” Norquist said in a statement, the principles of which also apply to Graham's and King’s comments.

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