3:12 p.m. | Updated
On Tuesday, “Frontline” investigated why the leaders of Wall Street had escaped prosecution for their role in the country’s financial crisis.
Peter Eavis of DealBook moderating a conversation with the show’s producer, Martin Smith. Watch the show above and review the Q. and A. below.
A Taliban spokesman said on Tuesday that Prince Harry must have “mental problems,” following the broadcast of remarks by the royal in which he said that killing militants from an Apache helicopter was similar to playing video games.
As soon as Britain’s Ministry of Defense announced on Monday that Prince Harry had left Afghanistan, ending his four-month deployment there, the British news media rushed to broadcast video of the royal officer at war, which was recorded with his cooperation on the condition that it not be released until his tour was over.
Britain’s Channel 4 News broke into its bulletin on Monday night just minutes after the announcement to broadcast its edit of the footage, which was shot last month at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province by the British Press Association.
A video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News shot during Prince Harry’s recent deployment to Afghanistan.
The Channel 4 News report drew attention to the frequency with which the prince, whose mother was being chased by photographers when she died in a car accident, mentioned his distaste for the British press.
At one stage in the interview, Prince Harry said that he was not troubled by killing militants. “Take a life to save a life,” he said. “If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game.”
In another edit of the footage, posted online by The Guardian, Prince Harry, who is known as Captain Wales in the army, explained that he was glad to have been “pushed forward to the front seat,” the one reserved for the attack helicopter’s gunner. That was, he said, “a joy for me because I’m one of those people that loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful — if you ask the guys I thrash them at FIFA the whole time,” referring to a popular video game series.
“This is a serious war, a historic war, resistance for us, for our people,” a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, told Agence France-Presse in response, “and now this prince comes and compares this war with his games, PlayStation or whatever he calls it.”
But the spokesman added, “We don’t take his comments very seriously, as we have all seen and heard that many foreign soldiers, occupiers who come to Afghanistan, develop some kind of mental problems on their way out.”
In another part of the interview, posted online by The Telegraph, Prince Harry said that his brother, Prince William, was jealous of him. “He’d love to be out here and, to be honest with you, I don’t see why he couldn’t,” Harry said. “No one knows who’s in the cockpit. Yes you get shot at, but, you know, if the guys who are doing the same job as us are being shot at on the ground, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with us being shot at as well. Yeah, people back home might have issues with that, but we’re not special.”
Video of remarks by Prince Harry about how much his brother would like to serve in Afghanistan.
I was tallying my spending of the last year, and much to my surprise, I spent $2,403 in one category. No, that wasn’t on clothes. It wasn’t on my most recent vacation, either. And it wasn’t the total of all my parking tickets (though that did feel as if it came close).
The $2,403 is what I spent on digital media.
But wait, people are spending money online? On media? Didn’t music industry executives declare, “People won’t pay for things online!”? Yes, as did movie industry executives. TV, radio, book, newspaper and magazine bigwigs, too, have all made similar claims over the last decade.
Well, those apocalyptic predictions turn out to be wrong.
I am spending more on digital media than I used to spend on the physical stuff. (The federal government says the average American family spent $2,572 on all entertainment, not just digital, in 2011.) And I know why I am spending more on digital media.
Digital media, unlike its slow cousin, is immediate. In the past, if friends mentioned a good book they had just finished, people made a note (mental or on a scrap of paper) to pick it up during their next visit to the bookstore or library. The same went for other items like CDs, DVDs or magazines.
Now, when someone does that at dinner — “Oh, I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s latest book, you’d love it!” — we pull out our smartphones, hop into a wormhole to Amazon or iTunes and buy it on the spot. No notes; no forgetting the book’s name; no driving to a store. The book or song is just transported to our pockets.
With one-click shopping and smartphones, buying media online becomes an impulse purchase, like the candy or gum by the cash register.
And it all adds up, quickly. Last year, I bought 47 e-books. That’s $475 on digital books alone. In the past, I probably bought 20 physical books a year, at most, and given that half of those were from used bookstores, my annual literary budget rarely passed $200.
I’m paying less but buying more.
I also spent $359 on music subscription services last year, including Rdio and Spotify. Then I frittered away $318 on other music downloads. I paid $95 for a Netflix subscription ($8 a month adds up); $25 for Flickr; $396 on apps and games; $60 on an Xbox Live subscription; $316 on movies and TV shows; $239 for subscription or one-offs of several digital magazines, including The New Yorker, Wired, The Economist and Popular Photography. (As an employee of The New York Times, I have free access to its digital offerings, otherwise I’d gladly pay for that, too.)
I’ve had to pay $120 a year for online storage to back up all my media purchases. And these numbers don’t include the money I spent on the Internet — almost $100 a month for my iPhone, iPad and home connection — or the purchases of Kindles, iPads and headphones. Granted, $2,403 might seem high for a bunch of zeros and ones. That could be, in part, because I live in Silicon Valley, where people slurp up digital content with the same frequency that rock stars would inhale drugs in the ’80s. Out here, we all tend to live a few years in the future. If it’s happening here now, it will usually happen elsewhere several years later.
“This is the same thing we saw with e-commerce five years ago, where people said it was just going to be across a small segment of the Valley,” said D. J. Patil, a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners, a prominent venture capital company based in Menlo Park, Calif. “Now we are seeing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in online transactions.”
So where am I spending less? On traditional media. I rarely go to the movies anymore, where I have to sign over the mortgage for my home for a bottle of water and bag of popcorn. I don’t pay for cable TV either.
Like the media moguls who once predicted that digital media would be the demise of their industries, I’m willing to make a forecast: that digital spending number will continue to grow, and it’s all thanks to the ease of digital media.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 20, 2013
An earlier version of this blog post misstated the amount spent on the Internet. It is $100 a month, not $100 a year.
Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor house cat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.
Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach.
“Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”
But Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her.
“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”
There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.
Scientists say it is more common, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves’ ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way.
Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, Dr. Bradshaw said.
Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Bateson said.
Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if Holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”
But, he said, “nobody’s going to do an experiment and take a bunch of cats in different directions and see which ones get home.”
The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany in which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.
New research by the National Geographic and University of Georgia’s Kitty Cams Project, using video footage from 55 pet cats wearing video cameras on their collars, suggests cat behavior is exceedingly complex.
For example, the Kitty Cams study found that four of the cats were two-timing their owners, visiting other homes for food and affection. Not every cat, it seems, shares Holly’s loyalty.
KittyCams also showed most of the cats engaging in risky behavior, including crossing roads and “eating and drinking substances away from home,” risks Holly undoubtedly experienced and seems lucky to have survived.
But there have been other cats who made unexpected comebacks.
“It’s actually happened to me,” said Jackson Galaxy, a cat behaviorist who hosts “My Cat From Hell” on Animal Planet. While living in Boulder, Colo., he moved across town, whereupon his indoor cat, Rabbi, fled and appeared 10 days later at the previous house, “walking five miles through an area he had never been before,” Mr. Galaxy said.
Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.
Professor Tabor also said a Siamese in the English village of Black Notley repeatedly hopped a train, disembarked at White Notley, and walked several miles back to Black Notley.
Still, explaining such journeys is not black and white.
In the Florida case, one glimpse through the factual fog comes on the little cat’s feet. While Dr. Bradshaw speculated Holly might have gotten a lift, perhaps sneaking under the hood of a truck heading down I-95, her paws suggest she was not driven all the way, nor did Holly go lightly.
“Her pads on her feet were bleeding,” Ms. Richter said. “Her claws are worn weird. The front ones are really sharp, the back ones worn down to nothing.”
Scientists say that is consistent with a long walk, since back feet provide propulsion, while front claws engage in activities like tearing. The Richters also said Holly had gone from 13.5 to 7 pounds.
Holly hardly seemed an adventurous wanderer, though her background might have given her a genetic advantage. Her mother was a feral cat roaming the Richters’ mobile home park, and Holly was born inside somebody’s air-conditioner, Ms. Richter said. When, at about six weeks old, Holly padded into their carport and jumped into the lap of Mr. Richter’s mother, there were “scars on her belly from when the air conditioner was turned on,” Ms. Richter said.
Scientists say that such early experience was too brief to explain how Holly might have been comfortable in the wild — after all, she spent most of her life as an indoor cat, except for occasionally running outside to chase lizards. But it might imply innate personality traits like nimbleness or toughness.
“You’ve got these real variations in temperament,” Dr. Bekoff said. “Fish can be shy or bold; there seem to be shy and bold spiders. This cat, it could be she has the personality of a survivor.”
He said being an indoor cat would not extinguish survivalist behaviors, like hunting mice or being aware of the sun’s orientation.
The Richters — Bonnie, 63, a retired nurse, and Jacob, 70, a retired airline mechanics’ supervisor and accomplished bowler — began traveling with Holly only last year, and she easily tolerated a hotel, a cabin or the R.V.
But during the Good Sam R.V. Rally in Daytona, when they were camping near the speedway with 3,000 other motor homes, Holly bolted when Ms. Richter’s mother opened the door one night. Fireworks the next day may have further spooked her, and, after searching for days, alerting animal agencies and posting fliers, the Richters returned home catless.
Two weeks later, an animal rescue worker called the Richters to say a cat resembling Holly had been spotted eating behind the Daytona franchise of Hooters, where employees put out food for feral cats.
Then, on New Year’s Eve, Barb Mazzola, a 52-year-old university executive assistant, noticed a cat “barely standing” in her backyard in West Palm Beach, struggling even to meow. Over six days, Ms. Mazzola and her children cared for the cat, putting out food, including special milk for cats, and eventually the cat came inside.
They named her Cosette after the orphan in Les Misérables, and took her to a veterinarian, Dr. Sara Beg at Paws2Help. Dr. Beg said the cat was underweight and dehydrated, had “back claws and nail beds worn down, probably from all that walking on pavement,” but was “bright and alert” and had no parasites, heartworm or viruses. “She was hesitant and scared around people she didn’t know, so I don’t think she went up to people and got a lift,” Dr. Beg said. “I think she made the journey on her own.”
At Paws2Help, Ms. Mazzola said, “I almost didn’t want to ask, because I wanted to keep her, but I said, ‘Just check and make sure she doesn’t have a microchip.’” When told the cat did, “I just cried.”
The Richters cried, too upon seeing Holly, who instantly relaxed when placed on Mr. Richter’s shoulder. Re-entry is proceeding well, but the mystery persists.
“We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”
Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor house cat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.
Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach.
“Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”
But Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her.
“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”
There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.
Scientists say it is more common, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves’ ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way.
Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, Dr. Bradshaw said.
Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Bateson said.
Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if Holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”
But, he said, “nobody’s going to do an experiment and take a bunch of cats in different directions and see which ones get home.”
The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany in which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.
New research by the National Geographic and University of Georgia’s Kitty Cams Project, using video footage from 55 pet cats wearing video cameras on their collars, suggests cat behavior is exceedingly complex.
For example, the Kitty Cams study found that four of the cats were two-timing their owners, visiting other homes for food and affection. Not every cat, it seems, shares Holly’s loyalty.
KittyCams also showed most of the cats engaging in risky behavior, including crossing roads and “eating and drinking substances away from home,” risks Holly undoubtedly experienced and seems lucky to have survived.
But there have been other cats who made unexpected comebacks.
“It’s actually happened to me,” said Jackson Galaxy, a cat behaviorist who hosts “My Cat From Hell” on Animal Planet. While living in Boulder, Colo., he moved across town, whereupon his indoor cat, Rabbi, fled and appeared 10 days later at the previous house, “walking five miles through an area he had never been before,” Mr. Galaxy said.
Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.
Professor Tabor also said a Siamese in the English village of Black Notley repeatedly hopped a train, disembarked at White Notley, and walked several miles back to Black Notley.
Still, explaining such journeys is not black and white.
In the Florida case, one glimpse through the factual fog comes on the little cat’s feet. While Dr. Bradshaw speculated Holly might have gotten a lift, perhaps sneaking under the hood of a truck heading down I-95, her paws suggest she was not driven all the way, nor did Holly go lightly.
“Her pads on her feet were bleeding,” Ms. Richter said. “Her claws are worn weird. The front ones are really sharp, the back ones worn down to nothing.”
Scientists say that is consistent with a long walk, since back feet provide propulsion, while front claws engage in activities like tearing. The Richters also said Holly had gone from 13.5 to 7 pounds.
Holly hardly seemed an adventurous wanderer, though her background might have given her a genetic advantage. Her mother was a feral cat roaming the Richters’ mobile home park, and Holly was born inside somebody’s air-conditioner, Ms. Richter said. When, at about six weeks old, Holly padded into their carport and jumped into the lap of Mr. Richter’s mother, there were “scars on her belly from when the air conditioner was turned on,” Ms. Richter said.
Scientists say that such early experience was too brief to explain how Holly might have been comfortable in the wild — after all, she spent most of her life as an indoor cat, except for occasionally running outside to chase lizards. But it might imply innate personality traits like nimbleness or toughness.
“You’ve got these real variations in temperament,” Dr. Bekoff said. “Fish can be shy or bold; there seem to be shy and bold spiders. This cat, it could be she has the personality of a survivor.”
He said being an indoor cat would not extinguish survivalist behaviors, like hunting mice or being aware of the sun’s orientation.
The Richters — Bonnie, 63, a retired nurse, and Jacob, 70, a retired airline mechanics’ supervisor and accomplished bowler — began traveling with Holly only last year, and she easily tolerated a hotel, a cabin or the R.V.
But during the Good Sam R.V. Rally in Daytona, when they were camping near the speedway with 3,000 other motor homes, Holly bolted when Ms. Richter’s mother opened the door one night. Fireworks the next day may have further spooked her, and, after searching for days, alerting animal agencies and posting fliers, the Richters returned home catless.
Two weeks later, an animal rescue worker called the Richters to say a cat resembling Holly had been spotted eating behind the Daytona franchise of Hooters, where employees put out food for feral cats.
Then, on New Year’s Eve, Barb Mazzola, a 52-year-old university executive assistant, noticed a cat “barely standing” in her backyard in West Palm Beach, struggling even to meow. Over six days, Ms. Mazzola and her children cared for the cat, putting out food, including special milk for cats, and eventually the cat came inside.
They named her Cosette after the orphan in Les Misérables, and took her to a veterinarian, Dr. Sara Beg at Paws2Help. Dr. Beg said the cat was underweight and dehydrated, had “back claws and nail beds worn down, probably from all that walking on pavement,” but was “bright and alert” and had no parasites, heartworm or viruses. “She was hesitant and scared around people she didn’t know, so I don’t think she went up to people and got a lift,” Dr. Beg said. “I think she made the journey on her own.”
At Paws2Help, Ms. Mazzola said, “I almost didn’t want to ask, because I wanted to keep her, but I said, ‘Just check and make sure she doesn’t have a microchip.’” When told the cat did, “I just cried.”
The Richters cried, too upon seeing Holly, who instantly relaxed when placed on Mr. Richter’s shoulder. Re-entry is proceeding well, but the mystery persists.
“We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”
BRUSSELS — A hotly contested tax on financial trades took a major step forward on Tuesday when European Union finance ministers allowed a vanguard of member states to proceed with the plan.
The so-called Robin Hood tax would apply a levy to trading in stocks, bonds and derivatives, complex financial products tied to underlying assets like oil prices or interest rates. Although the tax would probably be small — one-tenth of a percentage point or less on the value of a trade — it could earn billions of euros for cash-strapped European governments.
Algirdas Semeta, the European commissioner in charge of tax policy, called the decision “a major milestone in tax history” and said the levy could be imposed from next year. But deep concerns about how the initiative would work in practice still could mean delays.
The European Commission, the Union’s policy-making arm, will still need to draft the final legislation and the states in favor of the law will have to give their unanimous approval before it becomes law in the eleven countries that have agreed to send the proposal forward — two more than the minimum required for legislation to be drafted.
A significant complication is stiff opposition to the tax by Britain, which has the largest trading hub in Europe in the City of London. But because Britain has decided to stay outside the group of states applying the tax, its resistance probably would not stop the plan from moving ahead.
The session Tuesday was the second day of a meeting that began here Monday with a session by the Eurogroup of ministers from the 17 members of the euro zone. On Monday evening, in a nearly unanimous vote, the Eurogroup elected Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, to be its new president.
Mr. Dijsselbloem, 46, a social democrat, has been finance minister of the Netherlands for only three months. In the Eurogroup, he succeeded Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, who had held the post since 2005 and announced his intention to step down last year.
The only formal opposition came from Luis de Guindos, the Spanish finance minister, who said his country and others with comparatively vulnerable economies — compared with those like Germany and the Netherlands — did not hold enough top jobs in the Union’s institutions.
At a news conference late Monday, Mr. Dijsselbloem emphasized the need to ease mistrust between Southern and Northern European countries over austerity policies, which many experts say have worsened economic pain in countries like Spain but have done too little to resolve the euro zone’s problems.
As for the proposed tax on financial transactions, among the 27 members of the full European Union it has firm backing from Germany, France and nine other countries. Others might still eventually support the proposal, which is an idea closely associated with James Tobin, a U.S. economist and Nobel laureate who suggested a version of it in the 1970s.
Britain, as well as Malta, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, abstained from the vote on Tuesday.
Although Britain would not be required to assess the tax because of a special European procedure allowing it to opt-out, the law still could have an effect on its financial sector by raising the costs of transactions that also involve institutions based inside the tax zone.
The decision to move forward with the tax was “regrettable and likely to serve as another brake on economic growth,” Richard Middleton, a managing director at the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, an industry group based in London, said on Tuesday.
Backers of the tax originally expected the proceeds to go to humanitarian and environmental causes. But the debt crisis that exploded three years ago and the meltdown in the banking sector have adjusted priorities. Nowadays governments are keener to use the revenue to help prop up shaky banks and help finance the budget for running the Union.
The initiative could generate about €57 billion annually, or about 0.5 percent of E.U. output, if it were applied across the entire bloc, according to the European Commission. But that amount is likely to be significantly less without Britain’s participation.
The next stage is for Mr. Semeta, the European tax commissioner, to propose legislation. He has already suggested a levy of 0.1 percent of the value of stocks and bonds traded, and of 0.01 percent of the value of derivatives trades.
One challenge is formulating the law so it does not prompt traders to move to non-taxed jurisdictions.
Another is deciding who pays the tax when traders in cities like Frankfurt and Paris, where the tax would apply, conduct business with traders in cities like London or New York, where it would not.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria once again failed to form a transitional government in exile on Monday, deciding instead to postpone the step while new proposals are drawn up. The development at a conference in Istanbul was apparently a setback to the opposition’s plans to fill the power vacuum created by nearly two years of ever bloodier civil war.
The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main exile opposition group, gathered in Istanbul on Saturday specifically to try to assemble a transitional government. The organization has won recognition by a number of foreign countries as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people, but it has not yet solidified support among rebels fighting on the ground, nor has it begun planning for a post-Assad future.
The Western and Arab nations that pressed Mr. Assad’s adversaries into a reorganization last year have been urging the coalition to select a prime minister, but no candidate has won a consensus.
A statement by the National Coalition on Monday said that it had formed a five-member committee to “lead consultations” with rebel commanders, foreign backers and others seeking Mr. Assad’s ouster, and to draw up proposals for a transitional government within 10 days. After the coalition tried and failed to form a government at a meeting in Cairo last month, it made a similar announcement about creating a committee to work on the idea.
The conflict continued to rage in Syria on Monday, where the government accused rebels of attacking an important power line, blacking out Damascus, the capital, as well as areas to the north and a swath of territory reaching south to the Jordanian border. Power failures have been frequent reminders of the conflict that has engulfed Syria, but the latest one appeared to be the first to affect the entire capital, where Mr. Assad’s forces are still largely in control. The Associated Press reported that power was restored in parts of Damascus on Monday.
The talks over a transitional government were bogged down by a heated debate over a provision in the coalition’s bylaws banning its members from assuming ministerial posts in any future interim government, in an effort to protect the coalition from accusations that its members are merely seeking personal power. Some opposition leaders want to scrap that provision, arguing that it will deny the interim government the benefit of including experienced and respected senior figures, but they met with strong resistance.
“The idea faced an immediate storm of objections and criticism,” said Samir Nachar, a member of the Syrian National Coalition. “We saw that during the meeting, and decided not to change anything.”
Mr. Nachar said the main reason the opposition has failed to shape a transitional government so far is that it is not sure such a government would receive the international recognition and support it would need to function.
“Falling into the trap of forming a paralyzed government will not just be useless, it will be a huge disappointment to Syrians,” he said. “The coalition was promised a lot when it was formed, and none of that materialized.”
Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Alan Cowell from London. Hala Droubi contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The computer empire of Michael S. Dell spreads across a campus of low-slung buildings in Round Rock, Tex.
But his financial empire — estimated at $16 billion — occupies the 21st floor of a dark glass skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
It is there that MSD Capital, started by Mr. Dell 15 years ago to manage his fortune, has quietly built a reputation as one of the smartest investors on Wall Street. By amassing a prodigious portfolio of stocks, companies, real estate and timberland, Mr. Dell has reduced his exposure to the volatile technology sector and branched out into businesses as diverse as dentistry and landscaping.
Now, Mr. Dell is on the verge of making one of the biggest investments of his life. The 47-year-old billionaire and his private equity backers are locked in talks to acquire Dell, the company he started with $1,000 as a teenager three decades ago, in a leveraged buyout worth more than $20 billion. MSD could play a role in the Dell takeover, according to people briefed on the deal.
That money is managed by MSD, among the more prominent so-called family offices that are set up to handle the personal investments of the wealthy. Others with large family offices include Bill Gates, whose Microsoft wealth financed the firm Cascade Investment, and New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who set up his firm, Willett Advisors, in 2010 to manage his personal and philanthropic assets.
“Some of these family offices are among the world’s most sophisticated investors and have the capital and talent to compete with the largest private equity firms and hedge funds,” said John P. Rompon, managing partner of McNally Capital, which helps structure private equity deals for family offices.
A spokesman for MSD declined to comment for this article. The buyout talks could still fall apart.
In 1998, Mr. Dell, then just 33 years old — and his company’s stock worth three times what it is today — decided to diversify his wealth and set up MSD. He staked the firm with $400 million of his own money, effectively starting his own personal money-management business.
To head the operation, Mr. Dell hired Glenn R. Fuhrman, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and John C. Phelan, a principal at ESL Investments, the hedge fund run by Edward S. Lampert. He knew both men from his previous dealings with Wall Street. Mr. Fuhrman led a group at Goldman that marketed specialized investments like private equity and real estate to wealthy families like the Dells. And Mr. Dell was an early investor in Mr. Lampert’s fund.
Mr. Fuhrman and Mr. Phelan still run MSD and preside over a staff of more than 100 overseeing Mr. Dell’s billions and the assets in his family foundation. MSD investments include a stock portfolio, with positions in the apparel company PVH, owner of the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, and DineEquity, the parent of IHOP and Applebee’s.
Among its real estate holdings are the Four Seasons Resort Maui in Hawaii and a stake in the New York-based developer Related Companies.
MSD also has investments in several private businesses, including ValleyCrest, which bills itself as the country’s largest landscape design company, and DentalOne Partners, a collection of dental practices.
Perhaps MSD’s most prominent deal came in 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, when it joined a consortium that acquired the assets of the collapsed mortgage lender IndyMac Bank from the federal government for about $13.9 billion and renamed it OneWest Bank.
The OneWest purchase has been wildly successful. Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman executive who led the OneWest deal, has said that the bank is expected to consider an initial public offering this year. An I.P.O. would generate big profits for Mr. Dell and his co-investors, according to people briefed on the deal.
Another arm of MSD makes select investments in outside hedge funds. Mr. Dell invested in the first fund raised by Silver Lake, the technology-focused private equity firm that might now become his partner in taking Dell private.
MSD’s principals have already made tidy fortunes. In 2009, Mr. Fuhrman, 47, paid $26 million for the Park Avenue apartment of the former Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard S. Fuld. Mr. Phelan, 48, and his wife, Amy, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, also live in a Park Avenue co-op and built a home in Aspen, Colo.
Both are influential players on the contemporary art scene, with ARTNews magazine last year naming each of them among the world’s top 200 collectors. MSD, too, has dabbled in the visual arts. In 2010, MSD bought an archive of vintage photos from Magnum, including portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mahatma Gandhi, and has put the collection on display at the University of Texas, Mr. Dell’s alma mater.
Just as the investment firms Rockefeller & Company (the Rockefellers, diversifying their oil fortune) and Bessemer Trust (the Phippses, using the name of the steelmaking process that formed the basis of their wealth) started out as investment vehicles for a single family, MSD has recently shown signs of morphing into a traditional money management business with clients beside Mr. Dell.
Last year, for the fourth time, an MSD affiliate raised money from outside investors when it collected about $1 billion for a stock-focused hedge fund, MSD Torchlight Partners. A 2010 fund investing in distressed European assets also manages about $1 billion. The Dell family is the anchor investor in each of the funds, according to people briefed on the investments.
MSD has largely remained below the radar, though its name emerged a decade ago in the criminal trial of the technology banker Frank Quattrone on obstruction of justice charges. Prosecutors introduced an e-mail that Mr. Fuhrman sent to Mr. Quattrone during the peak of the dot-com boom in which he pleaded for a large allotment of a popular Internet initial public offering.
“We know this is a tough one, but we wanted to ask for a little help with our Corvis allocation,” Mr. Fuhrman wrote. “We are looking forward to making you our ‘go to’ banker.”
The e-mail, which was not illegal, was meant to show the quid pro quo deals that were believed to have been struck between Mr. Quattrone and corporate chieftains like Mr. Dell — the bankers would give executives hot I.P.O.’s and the executives, in exchange, would hold out the possibility of giving business to the bankers. (Mr. Quattrone’s conviction was reversed on appeal.)
The MSD team has also shown itself to be loyal to its patron in other ways.
On the MSD Web site, in the frequently asked questions section, the firm asks and answers queries like “how many employees do you have” and “what kind of investments do you make.”
In the last question on the list, MSD asks itself, “Do you use Dell computer equipment?” The answer: “Exclusively!”
Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 19, 2013
An article on Friday about MSD Capital, an investment firm started by Michael S. Dell to manage his fortune, misstated, in some editions, the year its energy hedge fund raised $1 billion from outside investors. It was in 2011, not earlier this year. (Another of the firm's hedge funds, the MSD Torchlight Partners fund, raised $1 billion in 2012).
Anahad O’Connor tackles health myths.
THE FACTS
For many children, flu season means an increased risk of ear infections as well.
Although many people do not realize it, the middle ear has a direct link to the upper respiratory tract: the auditory, or Eustachian, tube. Infections in the nose or sinus cavities thus can spread to the ear.
Ear infections are a common scourge of childhood. Most children under the age of 8 will have at least one, and over a quarter will experience them chronically.
Although ear infections can strike at any time, they do show some seasonal variation. In a large study published in December, researchers looked at more than 270,000 cases of acute ear infections. They found that ear infections increased along with the flu and illnesses caused by two other respiratory viruses (though not the common cold).
So does that mean that vaccinating against the flu might prevent ear infections in children? Some researchers think so.
In a report published in 2011, scientists pooled data from eight randomized studies of 24,000 children between the ages of 6 months and 7 years. They found that those who received the FluMist vaccine, a nasal spray made with live but weakened flu virus, had a significantly lower risk of acute ear infections compared with children who received a placebo. Among children who ultimately got the flu, those who had been vaccinated had a 40 percent reduction in ear infections compared with children who were given a placebo.
A study published last year also found that the flu vaccine reduced the incidence of acute ear infections in children. FluMist appears to be more effective than the shot, but scientists say more research is needed.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The flu vaccine appears to reduce the likelihood of ear infections in children.
Anahad O’Connor tackles health myths.
THE FACTS
For many children, flu season means an increased risk of ear infections as well.
Although many people do not realize it, the middle ear has a direct link to the upper respiratory tract: the auditory, or Eustachian, tube. Infections in the nose or sinus cavities thus can spread to the ear.
Ear infections are a common scourge of childhood. Most children under the age of 8 will have at least one, and over a quarter will experience them chronically.
Although ear infections can strike at any time, they do show some seasonal variation. In a large study published in December, researchers looked at more than 270,000 cases of acute ear infections. They found that ear infections increased along with the flu and illnesses caused by two other respiratory viruses (though not the common cold).
So does that mean that vaccinating against the flu might prevent ear infections in children? Some researchers think so.
In a report published in 2011, scientists pooled data from eight randomized studies of 24,000 children between the ages of 6 months and 7 years. They found that those who received the FluMist vaccine, a nasal spray made with live but weakened flu virus, had a significantly lower risk of acute ear infections compared with children who received a placebo. Among children who ultimately got the flu, those who had been vaccinated had a 40 percent reduction in ear infections compared with children who were given a placebo.
A study published last year also found that the flu vaccine reduced the incidence of acute ear infections in children. FluMist appears to be more effective than the shot, but scientists say more research is needed.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The flu vaccine appears to reduce the likelihood of ear infections in children.
Copyright © News shirt. All rights reserved.
Design 
And Business Directories
