Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers





SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.







The New York Times published an article in October about the wealth of the family of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in both English and Chinese.







After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.


The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.


Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.


“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.


The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.


The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.


Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.


No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.


Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”


The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.


Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”


Signs of a Campaign


The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that the United States and Israel were said to have started a cyberattack that caused damage at Iran’s main nuclear enrichment plant, and the article misstated the specific type of attack. The attack was a computer worm, not a virus, and it started around 2008, not 2012.



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Letter from India: A Paradise for Those Who Take Offense







JAIPUR, INDIA — One of India’s favorite spectator sports is “taking offense.” People go about their lives, brushing their teeth, ironing their shirts, waiting for the bus. Then some man somewhere says something ordinary and a community erupts in what looks like joy even though they say they are offended. They go in a carnival procession to some place to announce that they are offended, often laughing and waving to the television cameras. Politicians express their deep hurt at what the man has said and demand swift action from other politicians. The police file criminal charges against the offender, and the offender then begins to say he has been misquoted, possibly by himself.




But the carnival does not wish to die down early. That was what the crowd outside the Jaipur Literature Festival was about last Saturday evening. Men were cheering, laughing and screaming as a television journalist was reporting their claim that they had been insulted by a speaker at the festival.


A few hours before, an amiable billionaire stood on the fringes of a huge audience and listened to a serious debate on the topic “Freedom of Speech and Expression.” A hilarious thought must have crossed his mind, for he chuckled, fell silent, and then said to me: “What freedom of speech? Now a masked man should rise from the audience, and tearing his mask he must reveal himself as Salman Rushdie. This debate will end right now, and everybody can go home.”


Last year, Mr. Rushdie, whose novel “The Satanic Verses” was met with protests and death threats from those who said it insulted the Prophet Muhammad, was forced to cancel his appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival after some Muslim groups said they would be offended by his presence and the government of Rajasthan, the state whose capital is Jaipur, said it could not guarantee his safety.


But what the amiable billionaire and I did not realize was that a festival session that morning had already set in motion a chain of events that would remind everyone, once again, that India encourages discussions of free speech but not free speech itself.


In a session titled “Republic of Ideas,” one of the panel members, the sociologist Ashis Nandy, said something that only fellow Indians would immediately understand.


“It will be an undignified and vulgar statement, but the fact is that most of the corrupt come from the O.B.C., the S.C.’s and now increasingly S.T.’s,” he said, referring to “other backward classes,” “scheduled castes” and “scheduled tribes.” “As long as this is the case,” he said, “the Indian republic will survive.”


What he meant was that most of India’s corrupt are from the historically disadvantaged groups officially called the backward castes. From a purely statistical point of view, this is an unremarkable statement given that the castes he had mentioned together constitute a majority of the Indian population. So it should not come as a surprise that “most of the corrupt” would hail from most of the nation.


But then most of India’s heart surgeons do not hail from the backward castes, and that is where the substance of Mr. Nandy’s message emerged: In an unequal society, corruption provides opportunity for those who do not have the means to progress easily otherwise.


Politicians from the backward castes wasted no time in calling for Mr. Nandy’s arrest. Among the first was Mayawati, the first female Dalit to serve as a chief minister in India, who is currently facing serious corruption charges. If there were canned laughter in real life, this country would resound with deafening guffaws.


Meanwhile, Mr. Nandy’s face soon assumed the look of a man who knew he was in serious trouble. In a courtyard outside the authors’ lounge, he gave several interviews to television cameras, often telling anchors who were grilling him from studios in New Delhi that he had been researching and writing about the backward castes “before you were even born.” Since then, the police have invoked the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against him as well as a charge of criminal intimidation.


Among those who expressed shock at Mr. Nandy’s comment were liberals attending the festival, whose conversations hinged on the evident distinction between upper-caste corruption, which involves the talent to open Swiss bank accounts and perform sophisticated forms of brokering, and backward-caste corruption, which is amateurish and carries a greater risk of being exposed. A popular young writer who did not wish to be identified told me, “I know a Dalit politician in Chennai who asks people to donate gold to him — along with the receipts.”


Even as Mr. Nandy was struggling to put out fires, the release of a Tamil-language film starring one of India’s most popular stars was blocked in the southern state of Tamil Nadu and elsewhere by Muslim groups whose members had not seen the film but claimed that it hurt their religious feelings.


India is a paradise for those who take offense because the first reaction of the state is to appease those who claim to have been offended. The law itself favors those who claim to be offended. And the police, who are so often reluctant to press charges against politicians accused of murder or men accused of rape are quick to arrive at the doorsteps of intellectuals, movie stars and other public figures who have allegedly offended people by words, actions or photographs. The fact is that India’s intellectual elite is one of the few oppressed castes left in the country today.


Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”


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Canon Forecast Falls Short of Expectations


TOKYO — Canon expects a 26.6 percent increase in operating profit this year as it cuts costs and increases revenue — but the projection Wednesday still fell short of analysts’ expectations.


Canon, a camera and printer maker considered a leader in profitability in corporate Japan with its aggressive cost-cutting, is angling for a foothold in the growing market for mirrorless cameras with interchangeable lenses, where it faces stiff competition from Sony, Olympus and Nikon.


Canon’s operating profit for the three months that ended Dec. 31 fell 17.9 percent, to ¥77.7 billion, or $853 million, below the average estimate of ¥100.9 billion among seven analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.


“Both its full-year earnings and forecast are below market consensus, so the results were seen as negative,” said Makoto Kikuchi, the chief executive of Myojo Asset Management. “Investors have bought Canon on overly high expectations that a weaker yen will lift its bottom line, but such excitement should recede.”


Demand for compact cameras is shrinking as consumers shift to smartphones, while stretched budgets among customers in Europe have eroded sales of Canon’s office printers. And the company, which derives 80 percent of its revenue from overseas, was badly hit by the firmness of the Japanese currency last year. Canon officials said Wednesday that economic recovery in India and China, as well as aggressive economic stimulus policies in Japan, were likely to support the company’s earnings.


The company set its exchange rate assumptions for the business year ending in December at ¥85 to the dollar and ¥115 to the euro, weaker than the average last year of ¥79.96 per dollar and ¥102.8 per euro.


As one of the first blue-chip Japanese companies to report quarterly results, Canon is often seen as a barometer for technology sector earnings.


The company forecast a full-year operating profit of ¥410 billion for the current year through December, compared with the average expectation of a ¥443.3 billion profit among 21 analysts, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine.


Canon’s shares have fallen about 1 percent since the start of last year, underperforming the Nikkei average’s gain of 31 percent. The shares slipped to a three-year low in July, when Canon cut its outlook on fears of shrinking demand in China.


The stock ended nearly 3 percent higher Wednesday before the earnings announcement.


Xerox, with which Canon competes for a share of the global printer market, overshot expectations with its quarterly earnings and maintained its full-year targets as it restructures parts of its business and commits to further cost cuts.


Nikon is due to report its results next Wednesday, with Sony following the next day.


 


 


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The New Old Age Blog: For Some Caregivers, the Trauma Lingers

Recently, I spoke at length to a physician who seems to have suffered a form of post-traumatic stress after her mother’s final illness.

There is little research on this topic, which suggests that it is overlooked or discounted. But several experts acknowledge that psychological trauma of this sort does exist.

Barry Jacobs, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Survival Guide for Caregivers” (The Guilford Press, 2006), often sees caregivers who struggle with intrusive thoughts and memories months and even years after a loved one has died.

“Many people find themselves unable to stop thinking about the suffering they witnessed, which is so powerfully seared into their brains that they cannot push it away,” Dr. Jacobs said.

Flashbacks are a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, along with feelings of numbness, anxiety, guilt, dread, depression, irritability, apathy, tension and more. Though one symptom or several do not prove that such a condition exists — that’s up to an expert to determine — these issues are a “very common problem for caregivers,” Dr. Jacobs said.

Dolores Gallagher-Thompson, a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine who treats many caregivers, said there was little evidence that caregiving on its own caused post-traumatic stress. But if someone is vulnerable for another reason — perhaps a tragedy experienced earlier in life — this kind of response might be activated.

“When something happens that the individual perceives and reacts to as a tremendous stressor, that can intensify and bring back to the forefront of consciousness memories that were traumatic,” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said. “It’s more an exacerbation of an already existing vulnerability.”

Dr. Judy Stone, the physician who was willing to share her mother’s end-of-life experience and her powerful reaction to it, fits that definition in spades.

Both of Dr. Stone’s Hungarian parents were Holocaust survivors: her mother, Magdus, called Maggie by family and friends, had been sent to Auschwitz; her father, Miki, to Dachau. The two married before World War II, after Maggie left her small village, moved to the city and became a corset maker in Miki’s shop.

Death cast a long shadow over the family. During the war, Maggie’s first baby died of exposure while she was confined for a time to the Debrecen ghetto. After the war, the family moved to the United States, where they worked to recover a sense of normalcy and Miki worked as a maker of orthopedic appliances. Then he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 50.

“None of us recovered from that,” said Dr. Stone, who traces her interest in medicine and her lifelong interest in fighting for social justice to her parents and trips she made with her father to visit his clients.

Decades passed, as Dr. Stone operated an infectious disease practice in Cumberland, Md., and raised her own family.

In her old age, Maggie, who her daughter describes as “tough, stubborn, strong,” developed macular degeneration, bad arthritis and emphysema — a result of a smoking habit she started just after the war and never gave up. Still, she lived alone, accepting no help until she reached the age of 92.

Then, in late 2007, respiratory failure set in, causing the old woman to be admitted to the hospital, then rehabilitation, then assisted living, then another hospital. Maggie had made her preferences absolutely clear to her daughter, who had medical power of attorney: doctors were to pursue every intervention needed to keep her alive.

Yet one doctor sent her from a rehabilitation center to the hospital during respiratory crisis with instructions that she was not to be resuscitated — despite her express wishes. Fortunately, the hospital called Dr. Stone and the order was reversed.

“You have to be ever vigilant,” Dr. Stone said when asked what advice she would give to families. “You can’t assume that anything, be it a D.N.R. or allergies or medication orders, have been communicated correctly.”

Other mistakes were made in various settings: There were times that Dr. Stone’s mother had not received necessary oxygen, was without an inhaler she needed for respiratory distress, was denied water or ice chips to moisten her mouth, or received an antibiotic that can cause hallucinations in older people, despite Dr. Stone’s request that this not happen. “People didn’t listen,” she said. “The lack of communication was horrible.”

It was a daily fight to protect her mother and make sure she got what she needed, and “frankly, if I hadn’t been a doctor, I think I would have been thrown out of there,” she said.

In the end, when it became clear that death was inevitable, Maggie finally agreed to be taken off a respirator. But rather than immediately arrange for palliative measures, doctors arranged for a brief trial to see if she could breathe on her own.

“They didn’t give her enough morphine to suppress her agony,” Dr. Stone recalled.

Five years have passed since her mother died, and “I still have nightmares about her being tortured,” the doctor said. “I’ve never been able to overcome the feeling that I failed her — I let her down. It wasn’t her dying that is so upsetting, it was how she died and the unnecessary suffering at the end.”

Dr. Stone had specialized in treating infectious diseases and often saw patients who were critically ill in intensive care. But after her mother died, “I just could not do it,” she said. “I couldn’t see people die. I couldn’t step foot in the I.C.U. for a long, long time.”

Today, she works part time seeing patients with infectious diseases on an as-needed basis in various places — a job she calls “rent a doc” — and blogs for Scientific American about medical ethics. “I tilt at windmills,” she said, describing her current occupations.

Most important to her is trying to change problems in the health system that failed her mother and failed her as well. But Dr. Stone has a sense of despair about that: it is too big an issue, too hard to tackle.

I’m grateful to her for sharing her story so that other caregivers who may have experienced overwhelming emotional reactions that feel like post-traumatic stress realize they are not alone.

It is important to note that both Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Gallagher-Thompson report successfully treating caregivers beset by overwhelming stress. It is hard work and it takes time, but they say recovery is possible. I’ll give a sense of treatment options they and others recommend in another post.

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: For Some Caregivers, the Trauma Lingers

Recently, I spoke at length to a physician who seems to have suffered a form of post-traumatic stress after her mother’s final illness.

There is little research on this topic, which suggests that it is overlooked or discounted. But several experts acknowledge that psychological trauma of this sort does exist.

Barry Jacobs, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Survival Guide for Caregivers” (The Guilford Press, 2006), often sees caregivers who struggle with intrusive thoughts and memories months and even years after a loved one has died.

“Many people find themselves unable to stop thinking about the suffering they witnessed, which is so powerfully seared into their brains that they cannot push it away,” Dr. Jacobs said.

Flashbacks are a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, along with feelings of numbness, anxiety, guilt, dread, depression, irritability, apathy, tension and more. Though one symptom or several do not prove that such a condition exists — that’s up to an expert to determine — these issues are a “very common problem for caregivers,” Dr. Jacobs said.

Dolores Gallagher-Thompson, a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine who treats many caregivers, said there was little evidence that caregiving on its own caused post-traumatic stress. But if someone is vulnerable for another reason — perhaps a tragedy experienced earlier in life — this kind of response might be activated.

“When something happens that the individual perceives and reacts to as a tremendous stressor, that can intensify and bring back to the forefront of consciousness memories that were traumatic,” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said. “It’s more an exacerbation of an already existing vulnerability.”

Dr. Judy Stone, the physician who was willing to share her mother’s end-of-life experience and her powerful reaction to it, fits that definition in spades.

Both of Dr. Stone’s Hungarian parents were Holocaust survivors: her mother, Magdus, called Maggie by family and friends, had been sent to Auschwitz; her father, Miki, to Dachau. The two married before World War II, after Maggie left her small village, moved to the city and became a corset maker in Miki’s shop.

Death cast a long shadow over the family. During the war, Maggie’s first baby died of exposure while she was confined for a time to the Debrecen ghetto. After the war, the family moved to the United States, where they worked to recover a sense of normalcy and Miki worked as a maker of orthopedic appliances. Then he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 50.

“None of us recovered from that,” said Dr. Stone, who traces her interest in medicine and her lifelong interest in fighting for social justice to her parents and trips she made with her father to visit his clients.

Decades passed, as Dr. Stone operated an infectious disease practice in Cumberland, Md., and raised her own family.

In her old age, Maggie, who her daughter describes as “tough, stubborn, strong,” developed macular degeneration, bad arthritis and emphysema — a result of a smoking habit she started just after the war and never gave up. Still, she lived alone, accepting no help until she reached the age of 92.

Then, in late 2007, respiratory failure set in, causing the old woman to be admitted to the hospital, then rehabilitation, then assisted living, then another hospital. Maggie had made her preferences absolutely clear to her daughter, who had medical power of attorney: doctors were to pursue every intervention needed to keep her alive.

Yet one doctor sent her from a rehabilitation center to the hospital during respiratory crisis with instructions that she was not to be resuscitated — despite her express wishes. Fortunately, the hospital called Dr. Stone and the order was reversed.

“You have to be ever vigilant,” Dr. Stone said when asked what advice she would give to families. “You can’t assume that anything, be it a D.N.R. or allergies or medication orders, have been communicated correctly.”

Other mistakes were made in various settings: There were times that Dr. Stone’s mother had not received necessary oxygen, was without an inhaler she needed for respiratory distress, was denied water or ice chips to moisten her mouth, or received an antibiotic that can cause hallucinations in older people, despite Dr. Stone’s request that this not happen. “People didn’t listen,” she said. “The lack of communication was horrible.”

It was a daily fight to protect her mother and make sure she got what she needed, and “frankly, if I hadn’t been a doctor, I think I would have been thrown out of there,” she said.

In the end, when it became clear that death was inevitable, Maggie finally agreed to be taken off a respirator. But rather than immediately arrange for palliative measures, doctors arranged for a brief trial to see if she could breathe on her own.

“They didn’t give her enough morphine to suppress her agony,” Dr. Stone recalled.

Five years have passed since her mother died, and “I still have nightmares about her being tortured,” the doctor said. “I’ve never been able to overcome the feeling that I failed her — I let her down. It wasn’t her dying that is so upsetting, it was how she died and the unnecessary suffering at the end.”

Dr. Stone had specialized in treating infectious diseases and often saw patients who were critically ill in intensive care. But after her mother died, “I just could not do it,” she said. “I couldn’t see people die. I couldn’t step foot in the I.C.U. for a long, long time.”

Today, she works part time seeing patients with infectious diseases on an as-needed basis in various places — a job she calls “rent a doc” — and blogs for Scientific American about medical ethics. “I tilt at windmills,” she said, describing her current occupations.

Most important to her is trying to change problems in the health system that failed her mother and failed her as well. But Dr. Stone has a sense of despair about that: it is too big an issue, too hard to tackle.

I’m grateful to her for sharing her story so that other caregivers who may have experienced overwhelming emotional reactions that feel like post-traumatic stress realize they are not alone.

It is important to note that both Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Gallagher-Thompson report successfully treating caregivers beset by overwhelming stress. It is hard work and it takes time, but they say recovery is possible. I’ll give a sense of treatment options they and others recommend in another post.

Read More..

Nintendo Warns of Weak Wii U Sales







TOKYO — Nintendo expects to sell far fewer units of its Wii U game console than it expected, the Japanese video game maker said Wednesday, slashing its sales outlook for its flagship device just two months after its release.




Nintendo has a lot riding on the Wii U, the successor to the Wii, which revolutionized the gaming industry six years ago with a casual approach that brought video games to new audiences. Nintendo is banking on the Wii U to revive its fortunes after the disappointing launch in 2011 of its handheld gaming machine, the 3DS, which forced the company to slash prices to stoke demand.


Nintendo executives had also said the Wii U would prove that dedicated game systems still have a future in a world now teeming with cheaper, more convenient mobile games played on smartphones and tablets.


The latest numbers from Nintendo are not promising. The company said it had sold 3.06 million Wii Us, and said it expected sales to hit just 4 million units through March, almost 30 percent less than a previous projection of 5.5 million.


Nintendo also downgraded its 3DS sales expectations, saying it would sell 15 million units through March, short of its previous forecast of 17.5 million units, and said it expected to sell less gaming software.


Still, the yen weakened in 2012, which lowers costs and bolsters earnings of Japanese exporters. That helped Nintendo return to the black for the first nine months of its business year. Net profit from April to December came to ¥14.55 billion, or $160 million, compared with a ¥48.35 billion loss in the same period last year, the company said in an earnings announcement that painted a mixed picture of its prospects.


The company raised its profit forecast for the business year through March to ¥14 billion, from ¥6 billion. Nintendo does not break out quarterly results.


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The Female Factor: Chinese Courts Turn a Blind Eye to Abuse







BEIJING — Before they married in 2009, Tan Yong admitted to Li Yan that he had beaten his three previous wives. He promised to change.




The promises didn’t last, said Li Dehuai, Ms. Li’s brother. Soon after the wedding, Mr. Tan began abusing his wife.


“He stubbed out cigarettes on her face and legs. He would take her hair and hit her head against the wall. He locked her on the balcony for hours in the winter,” said Mr. Li, speaking by telephone from Chongqing in southwestern China. The abuse went on for more than a year.


Today, Mr. Tan is dead, beaten to death by Ms. Li with the barrel of his air gun during an argument in November 2010, and Mr. Li is trying to save his sister’s life as she sits in a jail in Sichuan Province awaiting execution for murder. The case has caused an outcry among Chinese legal experts and feminists, who say it underscores the severe sentences often imposed on women who fight back, injuring or killing abusive husbands.


“Li Yan’s case tells people that extreme tragedy will happen if an abused woman cannot get effective help from the neighborhood committee, the women’s federation, the police,” said Feng Yuan, of the Anti-Domestic Violence Network, based in Beijing.


“When power cannot deliver justice, abused women will find their own way of achieving justice, sadly and wrongly,” Ms. Feng said.


Chinese law requires that a history of domestic abuse be considered in such cases. Ms. Li’s was especially gruesome: After killing her husband (which she confessed to early, asking a neighbor to call the police), she cut him up and boiled some of the parts. If that is hard to excuse, consider this, said Ms. Feng: She wasn’t in her right mind.


“There’s something called abused women’s syndrome, and she had it. A woman like that may lose her reason and lose control,” said Ms. Feng, one of hundreds of people petitioning the courts to retry Ms. Li, this time taking the abuse into proper consideration. This was not done the first time, making Ms. Li’s case a miscarriage of justice, they say.


Others who have joined the appeal include lawyers, deputies to the National People’s Congress and Amnesty International, which last week issued an urgent action call for the Chinese authorities not to execute Ms. Li. The sentence could be carried out any day now, activists say, probably before the Lunar New Year’s Eve on Feb. 9.


Women’s jails are filled with women who have injured or killed abusive husbands, according to the Anti-Domestic Violence Network, citing studies by local women’s federations and scholars. They account for 60 percent of inmates in one jail in Anshan, in Liaoning Province, and 80 percent of women serving heavy sentences in a jail in Fuzhou, in Fujian Province.


In a study by Xing Hongmei of China Women’s University, of 121 female inmates in a Sichuan jail who were serving time for attacking or killing abusive partners, 71 were originally sentenced to life in prison or to death (sometimes commuted, delayed or overturned on appeal), and 28 more were sentenced to at least 10 years. This means more than 80 percent received the heaviest possible sentences for murder or bodily harm, the study said.


For months before she killed Mr. Tan, Ms. Li sought help from the authorities in Anyue County, in Sichuan Province, where they lived, her brother said.


“She telephoned the police in, I think, May 2010, after a beating, but they said it was an affair between married people and hung up,” he said.


She went to her neighborhood committee. “They told her to go to the women’s association. The women’s association told her to go to the police. The police told her to go to the neighborhood committee,” and so it continued, he said. “She was sent from place to place and didn’t know what to do.”


Officials at the local justice department whom she asked about divorce told her that unless Mr. Tan agreed, she could be left destitute. She was better off tolerating the abuse, they advised.


There was some documentation of the abuse, including police photographs of injuries and a medical report after hospital treatment, said Mr. Li. But both the Sichuan court that sentenced her and the Supreme Court in Beijing, which reviews all death sentences — Mr. Li and activists say it upheld his sister’s sentence last week — failed to take this into account when sentencing her, Mr. Li said.


“We all hoped the court would recognize the torture she’d suffered in those years,” he said. “But it didn’t.”


“I know what my sister did was wrong, but since this happened, I have studied many cases of domestic abuse, and I know her situation is not uncommon,” he said.


He has not yet been able to tell their mother, or Ms. Li’s 18-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, that Ms. Li faces imminent execution.


“I think my niece knows, somehow,” he said. “But my mother couldn’t take it.”


Their father, who died last year, had worked in the same silk factory as Ms. Li and Mr. Tan, and had disliked the man from the start, Mr. Li said.


“He was so depressed at her situation,” he said. “I think he died of grief.”


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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: How to Set Up Twitter Lists

Is there a way to filter my Twitter feed to see all of the sports-related people and sites I follow into one group?

Twitter lets you create “lists” of the people and sites that you follow, and you can organize these lists by topic — like sports, weather, humor, news and so on. When you select a list you have made, you just see tweets from the people you specifically added to it, and not from everybody on your main Twitter feed.

To set up a list, log into your Twitter account on the Web. On the left side of your profile page, click Lists and then click the Create List button. Give your list a name and save it.

To add users you already follow, click the Following link to see the full list of accounts you have added to your Twitter feed. Click the drop-down menu next to a username and select “Add or remove from lists.” In the box that appears, turn on the checkbox next to the name of the list you just created and then close the box.

When you have finished adding all the accounts you want on a list, you can see the finished collection by clicking the Lists button on your Twitter page and selecting the name of the list. Standalone Twitter programs for the computer usually have a List button in the toolbar or menus for viewing your user compilations. On the Twitter app for Android or iOS, tap the Me icon, flick down the screen and tap Lists to see your groupings.

Lists can be private (meaning only you can see them) or public so that others can share and subscribe to them. Twitter has detailed instructions for using lists on its site.

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Rescuer Appears for New York Downtown Hospital





Manhattan’s only remaining hospital south of 14th Street, New York Downtown, has found a white knight willing to take over its debt and return it to good health, hospital officials said Monday.




NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of New York City’s largest academic medical centers, has proposed to take over New York Downtown in a “certificate of need” filed with the State Health Department. The three-page proposal argues that though New York Downtown is projected to have a significant operating loss in 2013, it is vital to Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, especially since the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital after it declared bankruptcy in 2010.


The rescue proposal, which would need the Health Department’s approval, comes at a precarious time for hospitals in the city. Long Island College Hospital, just across the river in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been threatened with closing after a failed merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and several other Brooklyn hospitals are considering mergers to stem losses.


New York Downtown has been affiliated with the NewYork-Presbyterian health care system while maintaining separate operations.


“We are looking forward to having them become a sixth campus so the people in that community can continue to have a community hospital that continues to serve them,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, said.


Fred Winters, a spokesman for New York Downtown, declined to comment.


Presbyterian’s proposal emphasized that it would acquire New York Downtown’s debt at no cost to the state, a critical point at a time when the state has shown little interest in bailing out failing hospitals.


The proposal said that if New York Downtown were to close, it would leave more than 300,000 residents of Lower Manhattan, including the financial district, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, without a community hospital. In addition, it said, 750,000 people work and visit in the area every day, a number that is expected to grow with the construction of 1 World Trade Center and related buildings.


The proposal argues that New York Downtown is essential partly because of its long history of responding to disasters in the city. One of its predecessors was founded as a direct result of the 1920 terrorist bombing outside the J. P. Morgan Building, and the hospital has responded to the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern, the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and, this month, the crash of a commuter ferry from New Jersey.


Like other fragile hospitals in the city, New York Downtown has shrunk, going to 180 beds, down from the 254 beds it was certified for in 2006, partly because the more affluent residents of Lower Manhattan often go to bigger hospitals for elective care.


The proposal says that half of the emergency department patients at New York Downtown either are on Medicaid, the program for the poor, or are uninsured.


NewYork-Presbyterian would absorb the cost of the hospital’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units, which have been expanding because of demand, but have been operating at a deficit of more than $1 million a year, the proposal said.


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Rescuer Appears for New York Downtown Hospital





Manhattan’s only remaining hospital south of 14th Street, New York Downtown, has found a white knight willing to take over its debt and return it to good health, hospital officials said Monday.




NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of New York City’s largest academic medical centers, has proposed to take over New York Downtown in a “certificate of need” filed with the State Health Department. The three-page proposal argues that though New York Downtown is projected to have a significant operating loss in 2013, it is vital to Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, especially since the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital after it declared bankruptcy in 2010.


The rescue proposal, which would need the Health Department’s approval, comes at a precarious time for hospitals in the city. Long Island College Hospital, just across the river in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been threatened with closing after a failed merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and several other Brooklyn hospitals are considering mergers to stem losses.


New York Downtown has been affiliated with the NewYork-Presbyterian health care system while maintaining separate operations.


“We are looking forward to having them become a sixth campus so the people in that community can continue to have a community hospital that continues to serve them,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, said.


Fred Winters, a spokesman for New York Downtown, declined to comment.


Presbyterian’s proposal emphasized that it would acquire New York Downtown’s debt at no cost to the state, a critical point at a time when the state has shown little interest in bailing out failing hospitals.


The proposal said that if New York Downtown were to close, it would leave more than 300,000 residents of Lower Manhattan, including the financial district, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, without a community hospital. In addition, it said, 750,000 people work and visit in the area every day, a number that is expected to grow with the construction of 1 World Trade Center and related buildings.


The proposal argues that New York Downtown is essential partly because of its long history of responding to disasters in the city. One of its predecessors was founded as a direct result of the 1920 terrorist bombing outside the J. P. Morgan Building, and the hospital has responded to the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern, the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and, this month, the crash of a commuter ferry from New Jersey.


Like other fragile hospitals in the city, New York Downtown has shrunk, going to 180 beds, down from the 254 beds it was certified for in 2006, partly because the more affluent residents of Lower Manhattan often go to bigger hospitals for elective care.


The proposal says that half of the emergency department patients at New York Downtown either are on Medicaid, the program for the poor, or are uninsured.


NewYork-Presbyterian would absorb the cost of the hospital’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units, which have been expanding because of demand, but have been operating at a deficit of more than $1 million a year, the proposal said.


Read More..