IHT Rendezvous: Jihadist Kingpin Suspected in Hostage Seizure

LONDON — Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed smuggler-jihadist said to be behind the seizure of foreign hostages at a gas plant in Algeria, has been a notorious kingpin of the Sahara for more than a decade.

As a successful kidnapper, cigarette smuggler — he is nicknamed “Mr. Marlboro” — and go-between for Al Qaeda, Mr. Belmokhtar has been a wanted man in his native Algeria after returning from training with jihadists in Afghanistan in 1993.

He returned at the height of a bloody decade-long civil war between the Algerian government and Islamist insurgents, acting as a channel between Al Qaeda leaders and local jihadist groups.

Raising money through kidnappings and smuggling, he has been a main supplier of weapons and equipment to insurgent groups and “has become increasingly integrated into the fabric of the Sahara and Sahel,” according to a 2009 Jamestown Foundation study that was based in part on Mr. Belmokhtar’s own account.

His activities led to him being included in a United Nations blacklist of wanted Qaeda associates.

Security agencies in Algeria and beyond might know who “Mr. Marlboro” is. But what is his motive in the operation to seize Western hostages?

In the past, he has staged kidnappings for money, negotiating the freedom of his captives in exchange for millions of dollars in ransom.

This time, the group he leads has linked the operation to events in Mali, where the French military has intervened to prevent an advance by Islamist forces that control the north of the country.

Mr. Belmokhtar, 40, is thought to be based in Mali in the rebel-held town of Gao, which has been attacked by French warplanes. Some believe he is masterminding the hostage operation from there.

The hostage-takers have demanded an end to the intervention and a reversal of Algeria’s decision to allow the French military to fly over its territory on the way to Mali.

Mr. Belmokhtar might also be seeking to reassert his role as a central player in the factionalized Islamist politics of the region after a recent move by the local Qaeda affiliate to push him aside.

He was removed from a military leadership role in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in October, according to French broadcaster RFI, after falling out with the movement’s leaders.

He then announced the creation of his own brigade as part of a rapprochement with Mujao, a jihadist group that has broken with Al Qaeda.

He is also thought to be close to leaders of Mali’s Tuareg tribesmen, possibly through one of his many marriages. The Tuareg’s seizure of northern Mali last year was rapidly taken over by jihadists.

It is as yet unclear whether the Algerian hostage-taking was a rapid response to the French intervention in Mali or whether it was preplanned for other motives.

Mr. Belmokhtar, condemned in his absence to life imprisonment by Algerian courts, was already scheduled to be tried in absentia by the Algiers criminal tribunal next Monday on charges that include supplying weapons for attacks on Algerian soil.

Planned targets were said to include pipelines and oil company installations in southern Mali.

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Bits Blog: Facebook's Other Big Disruption

Facebook just made a potentially game-changing announcement. It got less fanfare than Tuesday’s announcement that it is going into the social search business, but this other announcement may have bigger long-term implications for the technology industry.

Put simply, some of the world’s biggest computing systems just got a little cheaper, and a lot easier to configure. As a consequence, the companies that supply the hardware to these systems may have to scramble to remain as profitable. The reason is a Facebook-led open source project.

In 2011 Facebook began the Open Compute Project, an effort among technology companies to use open-source computer hardware. Tech companies similarly shared intellectual property with Linux software, which lowered costs and spurred innovation. Facebook’s project has attracted many significant participants, including Goldman Sachs, Arista Networks, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

At a user summit on Wednesday Intel, another key member of the Open Compute Project, announced it would release to the group a silicon-based optical system that enables the data and computing elements in a rack of computer servers to communicate at 100 gigabits a second. That is significantly faster than conventional wire-based methods, and uses about half the power.

More important, it means that elements of memory and processing that now must be fixed closely together can be separated within a rack, and used as needed for different kinds of tasks. There is a lot of waste in data centers today simply because, when there is an upgrade in servers, lots of other associated data-processing hardware has to be changed, too.

There were other announcements, like a computer motherboard called Grouphug that allows different manufacturers’ chips to be interchanged without altering other parts of the machine. Before, they were custom made. Put together, such innovations potentially lower the cost and complexity of running big and small data centers to an extent that works for a lot of companies.

“Who wouldn’t want a cheaper, more efficient server?” said Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design at Facebook, and the chairman of Open Compute. “The problem we’re solving is much larger than Facebook’s own challenges. There is a massive amount of data in the world that people expect to have processed quickly.”

To be sure, it’s in Facebook’s interest to attack expensive hardware. The company makes money from a service that requires hundreds of thousands of computer servers distributed in big centers around the world. Google and Amazon.com, which are not members of the project, maintain proprietary systems which they apparently felt gave them a competitive edge.

For Facebook, the difference seems to be more in the software. To the extent hardware costs drop, that’s great for them. Mr. Frankovsky argued that, while “this puts challenges on the incumbents” in hardware, “it also helps them. They have a finite number of engineering resources, and this way they hear from a community about whether there is an interest for a product.” Intel may hope to benefit from its open-source release, since it could see an overall rise in demand for its chips with the move toward cheaper computing.

The real test is whether Facebook can increase the number of potential buyers for Open Compute equipment. “The question is, can they extend this beyond a few Web businesses like Facebook and Rackspace, or a few financial exercises at Goldman, and bring this to industries like oil or aerospace?” said Matt Eastwood, an analyst with IDC, a technology research firm. “That will take it from 20 or 30 companies to hundreds of companies.”

The issue isn’t so much a technical one, he argues, as it is one of getting corporate information technology professionals interested in radical design changes. Mr. Frankovsky is aware of the problem. Recently he and his colleagues led a seminar in Texas for BP, Shell and other oil giants on how they could use Open Compute hardware in their data centers.

This will not change things dramatically this year, and possibly even next, but over the long haul it could remake a lot of businesses. Linux, remember, was around for several years as a minor player, but eventually undid Sun Microsystems and others.

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Well: Life, Interrupted: Brotherly Love

Life, Interrupted

Suleika Jaouad writes about her experiences as a young adult with cancer.

There are a lot of things about having cancer in your 20s that feel absurd. One of those instances was when I found myself calling my brother Adam on Skype while he was studying abroad in Argentina to tell him that I had just been diagnosed with leukemia and that — no pressure — he was my only hope for a cure.

Today, my brother and I share almost identical DNA, the result of a successful bone marrow transplant I had last April using his healthy stem cells. But Adam and I couldn’t be more different. Like a lot of siblings, we got along swimmingly at one moment and were in each other’s hair the next. My younger brother by two years, he said I was a bossy older sister. I, of course, thought I knew best for my little brother and wanted him to see the world how I did. My brother is quieter, more reflective. I’m a chronic social butterfly who is probably a bit too impulsive and self-serious. I dreamed of dancing in the New York City Ballet, and he imagined himself playing in the N.B.A. While the sounds of the rapper Mos Def blared from Adam’s room growing up, I practiced for concerto competitions. Friends joked that one of us had to be adopted. We even look different, some people say. But really, we’re just siblings like any other.

When I was diagnosed with cancer at age 22, I learned just how much cancer affects families when it affects individuals. My doctors informed me that I had a high-risk form of leukemia and that a bone marrow transplant was my only shot at a cure. ‘Did I have any siblings?’ the doctors asked immediately. That would be my best chance to find a bone marrow match. Suddenly, everyone in our family was leaning on the little brother. He was in his last semester of college, and while his friends were applying to jobs and partying the final weeks of the school year away, he was soon shuttling from upstate New York to New York City for appointments with the transplant doctors.

I’d heard of organ transplants before, but what was a bone marrow transplant? The extent of my knowledge about bone marrow came from French cuisine: the fancy dish occasionally served with a side of toasted baguette.

Jokes aside, I learned that cancer patients become quick studies in the human body and how cancer treatment works. The thought of going through a bone marrow transplant, which in my case called for a life-threatening dose of chemotherapy followed by a total replacement of my body’s bone marrow, was scary enough. But then I learned that finding a donor can be the scariest part of all.

It turns out that not all transplants are created equal. Without a match, the path to a cure becomes much less certain, in many cases even impossible. This is particularly true for minorities and people from mixed ethnic backgrounds, groups that are severely underrepresented in bone marrow registries. As a first generation American, the child of a Swiss mother and Tunisian father, I suddenly found myself in a scary place. My doctors worried that a global, harried search for a bone marrow match would delay critical treatment for my fast-moving leukemia.

That meant that my younger brother was my best hope — but my doctors were careful to measure hope with reality. Siblings are the best chance for a match, but a match only happens about 25 percent of the time.

To our relief, results showed that my brother was a perfect match: a 10-out-of-10 on the donor scale. It was only then that it struck me how lucky I had been. Doctors never said it this way, but without a match, my chances of living through the next year were low. I have met many people since who, after dozens of efforts to encourage potential bone marrow donors to sign up, still have not found a match. Adding your name to the bone marrow registry is quick, easy and painless — you can sign up at marrow.org — and it just takes a swab of a Q-tip to get your DNA. For cancer patients around the world, it could mean a cure.

The bone marrow transplant procedure itself can be dangerous, but it is swift, which makes it feel strangely anti-climactic. On “Day Zero,” my brother’s stem cells dripped into my veins from a hanging I.V. bag, and it was all over in minutes. Doctors tell me that the hardest part of the transplant is recovering from it. I’ve found that to be true, and I’ve also recognized that the same is true for Adam. As I slowly grow stronger, my little brother has assumed a caretaker role in my life. I carry his blood cells — the ones keeping me alive — and he is carrying the responsibility, and often fear and anxiety, of the loving onlooker. He tells me I’m still a bossy older sister. But our relationship is now changed forever. I have to look to him for support and guidance more than I ever have. He’ll always be my little brother, but he’s growing up fast.

---

Suleika Jaouad (pronounced su-LAKE-uh ja-WAD) is a 24-year-old writer who lives in New York City. Her column, “Life, Interrupted,” chronicling her experiences as a young adult with cancer, appears regularly on Well. Follow @suleikajaouad on Twitter.

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Well: Life, Interrupted: Brotherly Love

Life, Interrupted

Suleika Jaouad writes about her experiences as a young adult with cancer.

There are a lot of things about having cancer in your 20s that feel absurd. One of those instances was when I found myself calling my brother Adam on Skype while he was studying abroad in Argentina to tell him that I had just been diagnosed with leukemia and that — no pressure — he was my only hope for a cure.

Today, my brother and I share almost identical DNA, the result of a successful bone marrow transplant I had last April using his healthy stem cells. But Adam and I couldn’t be more different. Like a lot of siblings, we got along swimmingly at one moment and were in each other’s hair the next. My younger brother by two years, he said I was a bossy older sister. I, of course, thought I knew best for my little brother and wanted him to see the world how I did. My brother is quieter, more reflective. I’m a chronic social butterfly who is probably a bit too impulsive and self-serious. I dreamed of dancing in the New York City Ballet, and he imagined himself playing in the N.B.A. While the sounds of the rapper Mos Def blared from Adam’s room growing up, I practiced for concerto competitions. Friends joked that one of us had to be adopted. We even look different, some people say. But really, we’re just siblings like any other.

When I was diagnosed with cancer at age 22, I learned just how much cancer affects families when it affects individuals. My doctors informed me that I had a high-risk form of leukemia and that a bone marrow transplant was my only shot at a cure. ‘Did I have any siblings?’ the doctors asked immediately. That would be my best chance to find a bone marrow match. Suddenly, everyone in our family was leaning on the little brother. He was in his last semester of college, and while his friends were applying to jobs and partying the final weeks of the school year away, he was soon shuttling from upstate New York to New York City for appointments with the transplant doctors.

I’d heard of organ transplants before, but what was a bone marrow transplant? The extent of my knowledge about bone marrow came from French cuisine: the fancy dish occasionally served with a side of toasted baguette.

Jokes aside, I learned that cancer patients become quick studies in the human body and how cancer treatment works. The thought of going through a bone marrow transplant, which in my case called for a life-threatening dose of chemotherapy followed by a total replacement of my body’s bone marrow, was scary enough. But then I learned that finding a donor can be the scariest part of all.

It turns out that not all transplants are created equal. Without a match, the path to a cure becomes much less certain, in many cases even impossible. This is particularly true for minorities and people from mixed ethnic backgrounds, groups that are severely underrepresented in bone marrow registries. As a first generation American, the child of a Swiss mother and Tunisian father, I suddenly found myself in a scary place. My doctors worried that a global, harried search for a bone marrow match would delay critical treatment for my fast-moving leukemia.

That meant that my younger brother was my best hope — but my doctors were careful to measure hope with reality. Siblings are the best chance for a match, but a match only happens about 25 percent of the time.

To our relief, results showed that my brother was a perfect match: a 10-out-of-10 on the donor scale. It was only then that it struck me how lucky I had been. Doctors never said it this way, but without a match, my chances of living through the next year were low. I have met many people since who, after dozens of efforts to encourage potential bone marrow donors to sign up, still have not found a match. Adding your name to the bone marrow registry is quick, easy and painless — you can sign up at marrow.org — and it just takes a swab of a Q-tip to get your DNA. For cancer patients around the world, it could mean a cure.

The bone marrow transplant procedure itself can be dangerous, but it is swift, which makes it feel strangely anti-climactic. On “Day Zero,” my brother’s stem cells dripped into my veins from a hanging I.V. bag, and it was all over in minutes. Doctors tell me that the hardest part of the transplant is recovering from it. I’ve found that to be true, and I’ve also recognized that the same is true for Adam. As I slowly grow stronger, my little brother has assumed a caretaker role in my life. I carry his blood cells — the ones keeping me alive — and he is carrying the responsibility, and often fear and anxiety, of the loving onlooker. He tells me I’m still a bossy older sister. But our relationship is now changed forever. I have to look to him for support and guidance more than I ever have. He’ll always be my little brother, but he’s growing up fast.

---

Suleika Jaouad (pronounced su-LAKE-uh ja-WAD) is a 24-year-old writer who lives in New York City. Her column, “Life, Interrupted,” chronicling her experiences as a young adult with cancer, appears regularly on Well. Follow @suleikajaouad on Twitter.

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With Debt to Sell, Troubled Euro Nations Find Willing Buyers

MADRID — January is turning out to be a bumper month for Spain and some of the euro zone economies most in need of debt financing, with governments and companies flooding the market with bonds that have sold at significantly lower interest rates than just a few months ago.

On Thursday, the Spanish Treasury sold €4.5 billion, or $5.9 billion, of debt, including bonds with a maturity of as much as 28 years. The average interest rate paid by Madrid on two-year bonds was 2.71 percent, down from 3.36 percent in December — a level not reached since March of last year.

The interest rate on the benchmark 10-year Spanish bond stood at 5.03 percent Thursday. Last year that rate spiked above 7 percent — a level that many economists believe places an unsustainable burden on governments.

Higher interest rates make it not only more expensive but also more difficult for governments to borrow the money they need. Consistently high borrowing costs helped force Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek international bailouts.

But the renewed sense of optimism in Spain this week led the government to suggest that the country’s economic recession would not be as deep and prolonged as had been feared. When drafting its 2012 budget, the government had expected the economy to contract 1.5 percent, but officials now expect the final figure for last year to be lower.

“The government is adopting the right measures to overcome the crisis, and these efforts are about to bear fruit,” Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo said at an investment conference here Wednesday. “Foreign investors are coming back.”

But some foreign investors in Mr. García-Margallo’s audience gave a much more cautious reading on the recent market rally, as well as warning that it was too early for talk about an economic turnaround.

“Optimism is the flavor of the day, but perhaps people are overoptimistic,” said Birgitte Olsen, fund manager at Bellevue Asset Management in Zurich. “We’ve now seen some car companies shift their production lines to Spain, but a lot more reforms and work need to be done to return to growth and job creation.”

Still, Ms. Olsen said, “it makes sense for any company that has the opportunity to sell bonds to do it right now.”

Indeed, last year’s trickle of Spanish corporate debt issuance has turned this month into a flow. On Wednesday, Banco Santander sold €1 billion of seven-year bonds at an interest rate of 4 percent. In the first two weeks of January, a handful of other Spanish banks, as well as Telefónica and energy companies including Gas Natural and Red Eléctrica, sold bonds totaling over €7 billion, with most sales heavily oversubscribed.

“The results of some of these Spanish bond issues would have been impossible just three months ago, but it’s unclear to me whether what has now opened is really a long-term window,” said Michael Gierse, a fund manager at Union Investment in Frankfurt, which has €180 billion in assets under management.

The next litmus test for investors, Mr. Gierse said, would come at the end of the month, when the Spanish authorities are expected to lift a ban on the short-selling of all stocks trading on the country’s exchanges. The ban, intended to reduce market volatility, was to be lifted at the end of last October but was then extended by three months to help ailing companies like Banco Popular issue debt. Short-selling lets investors sell borrowed shares in the hope that their price will fall and that they could then be repurchased more cheaply, allowing the investors to pocket the difference.

“Once the short-selling ban gets lifted, we will have a much clearer idea of whether this market rally is for real,” Mr. Gierse said. For now, he added, “I don’t think that investors from outside the euro zone are already back in Spain.”

One reason for such wariness is that investors endured a roller-coaster ride last year.

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China Arrests 7 in New Effort to Stop Tibetan Self-Immolations

BEIJING — The authorities in northwest China have detained seven people they claim organized the fatal self-immolation of a Tibetan villager in October, photographed his burning body and then sent the images abroad.

The arrests, announced Tuesday by Xinhua, the official news agency, suggest that the Chinese government is increasing the use of its newest strategy against the politically motivated suicides in Tibetan areas of China: punishing friends and relatives of those who self-immolate.

The Xinhua report blamed a Tibetan advocacy group in India for convincing the villager, Sangye Gyatso, a 27-year-old father of two, that self-immolation was a “heroic deed” and that it would improve his family’s standing.

A spokesman for the group, the Tibetan Youth Congress, rejected the accusations, calling them “ridiculous.”

With the accumulated toll of self-immolations approaching 100, Beijing has been scrambling to find effective deterrents to such acts, which began in 2009 as a desperate attempt to publicize what many Tibetans consider heavy-handed Chinese policies. In the early months of the crisis, officials sought to demonize self-immolators as terrorists or mentally deranged people. The authorities also locked down the most restive towns and monasteries, preventing monks from leaving or foreign journalists from entering.

Such measures appear to have done little to quell the protests, prompting officials to try new tactics. In Tongren County, in Qinghai Province, the authorities recently issued new regulations that permanently revoke public benefits for the families of self-immolators and cancel government-financed projects in their hometowns. If a monk or nun visits the home of a self-immolator, their monastery is to be shut down as punishment, according to the rules.

In recent weeks, more than a dozen people across the region have been charged with inciting self-immolations or accused of spreading information about the incidents via text message or e-mail. Last month, eight people were detained on accusations of trying to publicize a self-immolation near a government office in Luchu County in Gansu Province. Among those arrested, exile groups say, was a relative of the deceased.

In October, four young Tibetans in Sichuan Province were given sentences ranging from 7 to 11 years; two were convicted of encouraging their friend to self-immolate, and the other two for leaking news of the incident to “outside contacts.”

In the most recent case in Gansu Province, Xinhua said one of the seven detained men, a Buddhist monk named Khyi Gyatso, had joined the Tibetan Youth Congress in Dharamsala, India, after escaping in 2000. But the monk, Xinhua said, stayed in touch with his boyhood friend, Sangye Gyatso, and persuaded him through phone calls and e-mails to “contribute to the cause of Tibetans” by setting himself on fire.

Xinhua said Sangye Gyatso — whom it described as a convicted thief, perennially unemployed and a chronic womanizer — fell under the monk’s sway. He later told three friends about the time and place of his self-immolation so they could take photographs and share them with overseas groups, including representatives of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader regarded by China as a subversive. “Shortly thereafter,” Xinhua said, “the Dalai clique launched a high-profile ‘propaganda’ campaign on the well-orchestrated incident, claiming there was a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in China and calling for the international community to interfere.”

Tenzin Norsang, joint secretary of Tibetan of Youth Congress in Dharamsala, said the group had no connection to Sangye Gyatso’s death, adding that the intense government restrictions and monitoring limited communication between Tibetans in China and abroad.

“Those who are self-immolating have been living under Chinese rule for more than 50 years — they don’t need anyone to tell them what to do,” he said. “Instead of blaming outsiders, the Chinese government could end the self-immolations by re-examining and changing their own repressive policies.”

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DealBook: H.P. Said to Field Takeover Inquiries for Autonomy and E.D.S. Units

Hewlett-Packard has received a number of inquiries from would-be buyers for its Autonomy and Electronic Data Systems units in recent weeks, though the technology company isn’t interested in selling at the moment, a person briefed on the matter said on Wednesday.

The volume of calls from potential suitors and bankers picked up after H.P. filed its annual report with regulators on Dec. 28, this person said. In the securities filing, the company said, “We also continue to evaluate the potential disposition of assets and businesses that may no longer help us meet our objectives.”

That is fairly standard legal boilerplate. But H.P. has been struggling with poor performance at both Autonomy and E.D.S., having significantly written down the value of those acquisitions. The company has also claimed to have found accounting and disclosure issues at Autonomy, and has forwarded findings from an internal inquiry to securities regulators in the United States and the division’s home in Britain.

Some of the expressions of interest may also have arisen amid the sudden flurry of news coverage surrounding a potential leveraged buyout of Dell.

Still, H.P.’s management team, led by its chief executive, Meg Whitman, aren’t interested in selling what they consider to be “core” businesses. The company is focused on growing its enterprise business, which sells software and services to corporate clients.

Shares in H.P. were up 3 percent by late afternoon on Wednesday, to $17.03, after The Wall Street Journal reported news of the inquiries. The company’s stock remains down some 35 percent for the past 12 months.

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Ask Well: Help for the Deskbound

One of the problems with office work is that many of us are using chairs that don’t fit our bodies very well or give adequate support to the back, said Jack Dennerlein, a professor at Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences in Boston who specializes in ergonomics and safety. If you are experiencing back pain, you may be able to adjust your chair to increase its lumbar support. A good office chair will have an adjustable seat pan that you can slide back and forth as well as adjustable back and height features. First, sit in the chair so the lumbar region of your back, your lower back, is resting on the back support. At the same time, your feet should be resting comfortably on the ground and the back of your knees should be about three-finger widths from the edge of the chair, said Dr. Dennerlein.

Some high-end chair brands have adjustable seat pans, including the Steelcase Leap chair, which retails for between $800 and $900 and offers an adjustable seat and plenty of lumbar support.

The Steelcase Criterion chair sells anywhere from $350 to $850 online, depending on the model, and boasts seven different adjustments “to offer support through the full range of dynamic seating postures.”

The HumanScale Freedom chair is the winner of several design awards and also has an adjustable seat pan as well as “weight-sensitive recline, synchronously adjustable armrests, and dynamically positioned headrest.” ($400 to $1,400)

The Herman Miller Aeron chair is also popular because it comes in small, medium and large sizes and claims a PostureFit design that “supports the way your pelvis tilts naturally forward, so that your spine stays aligned and you avoid back pain.” ($680 to $850)

If all that sounds really wonderful and really too expensive, there may be a simpler solution to ease your back pain at work. Invest $15 to $30 in a lumbar chair pillow to make sure your back is getting the support it needs even when you are not sitting in a $900 chair.

Read More..

Ask Well: Help for the Deskbound

One of the problems with office work is that many of us are using chairs that don’t fit our bodies very well or give adequate support to the back, said Jack Dennerlein, a professor at Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences in Boston who specializes in ergonomics and safety. If you are experiencing back pain, you may be able to adjust your chair to increase its lumbar support. A good office chair will have an adjustable seat pan that you can slide back and forth as well as adjustable back and height features. First, sit in the chair so the lumbar region of your back, your lower back, is resting on the back support. At the same time, your feet should be resting comfortably on the ground and the back of your knees should be about three-finger widths from the edge of the chair, said Dr. Dennerlein.

Some high-end chair brands have adjustable seat pans, including the Steelcase Leap chair, which retails for between $800 and $900 and offers an adjustable seat and plenty of lumbar support.

The Steelcase Criterion chair sells anywhere from $350 to $850 online, depending on the model, and boasts seven different adjustments “to offer support through the full range of dynamic seating postures.”

The HumanScale Freedom chair is the winner of several design awards and also has an adjustable seat pan as well as “weight-sensitive recline, synchronously adjustable armrests, and dynamically positioned headrest.” ($400 to $1,400)

The Herman Miller Aeron chair is also popular because it comes in small, medium and large sizes and claims a PostureFit design that “supports the way your pelvis tilts naturally forward, so that your spine stays aligned and you avoid back pain.” ($680 to $850)

If all that sounds really wonderful and really too expensive, there may be a simpler solution to ease your back pain at work. Invest $15 to $30 in a lumbar chair pillow to make sure your back is getting the support it needs even when you are not sitting in a $900 chair.

Read More..

DealBook: Goldman Sachs Earnings Soar

9:46 a.m. | Updated

Goldman Sachs on Wednesday reported a fourth-quarter profit of $2.89 billion, or $5.60 a share, a significant jump from the period a year earlier.

The per-share figure is after the company paid preferred dividends, and comes in well ahead of analysts’ expectations of $3.78 a share, according to Thomson Reuters.

Analysts had been anticipating a fairly decent quarter for Goldman, and its results were buoyed by strong trading and investment banking results and lower compensation costs. In the fourth quarter of 2011, the bank earned $1.01 billion, or $1.84 a share.

The bank’s most recent results reflect a continued focus on cutting expenses as well as a number of investing gains, including $485 million from debt and security loans, the company said.

“While economic conditions remained challenging for much of last year, the strengths of our business model and client franchise, coupled with our focus on disciplined management, delivered solid performance for our shareholders,” Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, said in a news release.

The results had an immediate effect on the firm’s stock, sending it up 2.7 percent in early morning trading.

Over all, the firm produced $9.24 billion in revenue in the quarter ended Dec. 31, up 53 percent from the same quarter in 2011. That also beat analysts’ estimates of quarterly revenue of $7.91 billion.

Goldman also revealed how much it had set aside for compensation, paying out $12.9 billion in 2012, an average of $399,506 to each of its 32,400 employees. This represented 37.9 percent of Goldman’s revenue for the year.

Over the last year, Goldman has reduced its payroll by 900 people. In 2011, the bank set aside $12.22 billion, or 42.4 percent, of its 2011 net revenue to pay compensation and benefits for its employees.

Goldman partners, a small group of top managers at the firm, will learn their 2012 compensation packages on Wednesday. The vast majority of employees, however, will be told what their bonuses will be on Thursday in what is known at Goldman as compensation communication day. These bonuses are on top of annual salaries, which can range from roughly $100,000 to $2 million for executives like Mr. Blankfein.

Bonuses on Wall Street — both the size of them and how they are paid — always draw scrutiny. Goldman Sachs decided this week not to delay the payment of bonuses to its staff members in Britain, a move that would have helped investment bankers and other highly paid employees benefit from a lower income tax rate.

Goldman Sachs was already drawing attention in the United States after it distributed $65 million in stock to 10 senior executives in December instead of January, when the firm typically makes such awards. That move helped the executives avoid the higher tax rates that will now be imposed on income of $450,000 or more.

The firm’s annual return on equity was 10.7 percent, up from 2011, when it was 5.8 percent. While this is far below its performance in boom years like 2006, when its return on equity was 41.5 percent, it is an achievement that it has broken above 10 percent.

Banks continue to fight difficult economic conditions at home and abroad, and Goldman’s results are still well below what it was producing before the financial crisis. Those outsize profits, however, were fueled by borrowing on credit and selling mortgage-linked products, and they have dwindled. New regulations aimed at reining in risk-taking have also reduced the profitability of certain businesses.

Revenue from investment banking came in at $1.41 billion, up 64 percent from the year-ago period.

Net revenue in Goldman’s powerful division that trades bonds, currencies and commodities was $2.04 billion, up 50 percent from levels in the quarter a year earlier. The firm said those results reflected an increase in mortgage revenues, which were “significantly higher” when compared with 2011.

The firm’s investing and lending division also had a stronger-than-expected quarter, posting revenue of $1.97 billion, up 126 percent from year-ago levels. The firm said this unit benefited from an increase in equity prices in Asia and Europe and a number of one-time gains. For instance, it logged a gain of $334 million from its investment in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a strategic investment the firm made in 2006. It also had gains from the debt securities and loans it holds.

Goldman is one of a number of banks releasing earnings this week. JPMorgan Chase also Wednesday weighed in with its results, reporting a strong profit of $5.7 billion for the fourth quarter, up 53 percent from the previous year.

These positive results put pressure on Morgan Stanley to post good results when it releases its fourth quarter numbers on Friday. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters are expecting Morgan Stanley to report earnings of 27 cents a share, up from a loss of 14 cents in the year-ago period.

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