Retail sales rise a weak 1.6% in November

Despite robust sales on Black Friday, the nation's retailers reported weak sales in November, raising concerns about whether merchants can make up enough ground in the coming weeks of the crucial holiday season.

Hit hard by Superstorm Sandy and its aftermath, major retailers such as Macy's Inc., Kohl's Corp. and Target Corp. reported sales declines. Luxury retailers saw troubles as well. Tiffany & Co. said Thursday that its third-quarter profit plunged 30%, and department store chain Nordstrom Inc. saw sales drop 1.1% in November.

At the Target store in West Hollywood, some shoppers said that despite improvements in the economy, they had learned to rein in Christmas spending over the last few years and had no plans to change.

"Lots of people are getting hugs," said Brooke Seguin, 31, of Los Feliz, who recently spent $40 on a knife set and two necklaces for herself and friends. "I'm going to make some gifts this year."

Quiz: Do you know your premium jeans?

The theater producer said there was no longer pressure among friends to give everyone presents that cost a certain amount. Therefore she planned to spend "way below" what was once her typical holiday budget of $1,000.

Although Black Friday set records for sales and shopper traffic, analysts said that doesn't necessarily guarantee a great holiday season, when retailers can rake in as much as 40% of their annual sales. There were signs that shoppers who splurged over the Thanksgiving weekend went for the best bargains, industry watchers said, and now may be done with their Christmas spending.

"A lot of retailers are using Sandy as a very convenient excuse to dismiss their poor sales performance. Not all these retailers have all their stores situated in just the Northeast," said Britt Beemer, a retail expert at America's Research Group. "A lot of retailers are going to have to admit that Black Friday, as incredible as it was," favored merchants offering enormous discounts.

Thursday's tally of 17 retailers showed that major chains posted a 1.6% increase in retail sales in November compared with the same month a year earlier, according to Thomson Reuters. That was below analyst expectations of a 3.3% rise.

There was a broad mix of stores among the month's top performers. Discount retailer Costco Wholesale Corp. reported a 6% jump in sales. Limited Brands Inc., the parent company of Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, said sales rose 5%. And Gap Inc., which has been showing signs of a turnaround, posted a 3% gain.

Other retailers posted weak results. Kohl's saw sales decline 5.6%. Struggling teen clothier Wet Seal Inc., which recently went through a board shake-up after more than a year of falling sales, reported that its sales slipped 5.4%.

Macy's, which reported a 0.7% decline, blamed Sandy for its poor performance. The retailer had previously said it was forced to close about 200 of its stores during and after the storm.

"We were not able to overcome the weak start to the month," Chief Executive Terry J. Lundgren said in a statement, adding that Macy's remained "on track to deliver a very strong sales performance in the fourth quarter."

Tiffany, which does not report monthly sales figures, said Thursday that its third-quarter revenue rose 4%. However, its profit dropped nearly 30% because of high material costs and greater-than-expected taxes. Shares of the jewelry company fell $3.93, or 6.2%, to $59.80.

Results in the Thomson Reuters survey are based on sales at stores open at least a year, known as same-store sales. These are considered an important measure of a retailer's health because they exclude the effect of store openings and closings.

Some industry watchers were optimistic about the remaining holiday season, pointing to rising home prices and a rallying stock market as reasons that shoppers would open their wallets in the coming weeks. The Conference Board reported this week that consumer confidence jumped to its highest level in almost five years.

"We had a month that was not typical given Sandy and how it impacted quite an extreme part of our country," said Matthew Rahn, a principal in the retail practice at A.T. Kearney. "But overall, given what we saw over the holiday weekend, it's going to be quite a positive holiday season this year."

Analysts also noted that the November results failed to show the effect of Cyber Monday, the first workday after Thanksgiving weekend, when online merchants offer a variety of bargains and saw record sales.

Robust sales on Cyber Monday will give December a boost instead, said Michael Niemira, chief economist at the International Council of Shopping Centers. He also said purchases made through layaway, which is available at many retailers this holiday season, will be included in the December tally.

Retailers may get a boost from shoppers like Early Cursell, 35, who said she is ready to splurge this Christmas because her husband, who works as a security guard, has been getting a lot of overtime lately. Browsing at the West Hollywood Target, the homemaker said she planned to spend $2,000, double last year's budget, on gifts for her children and extended family.

"I'm just feeling more confident about our finances," said Cursell, a Los Angeles resident. "With four kids — you want to get them nice things for the holidays."

shan.li@latimes.com

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Thousands touched by photograph of New York cop helping shoeless man

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A photograph of a New York City police officer crouching by a shoeless panhandler to give him a new pair of boots on a cold night in Times Square has drawn a deluge of praise after it was published on the police department‘s Facebook page this week.

By Thursday afternoon, nearly 394,000 people had clicked a button on the department’s Facebook page to indicate that they “liked” the photograph. Tens of thousands left comments, most praising Officer Lawrence DePrimo for his charitable deed.

The photograph was snapped by Jennifer Foster, an employee of the Pinal County Sheriff‘s Office in Florence, Arizona, during a trip to New York this month, according to police.

She took the picture shortly after she noticed the man asking passersby for money.

“Right when I was about to approach, one of your officers came up behind him,” Foster wrote in an email to the New York Police Department accompanying the snapshot, according to the picture caption on the department’s Facebook page. She said she was some distance away, and the officer did not know he was being photographed.

“The officer said, ‘I have these size 12 boots for you, they are all-weather. Let’s put them on and take care of you.’ The officer squatted down on the ground and proceeded to put socks and the new boots on this man.”

DePrimo and Foster could not be reached for comment on Thursday, and the police department did not respond to queries about the photograph.

DePrimo, 25, joined the force in 2010 and lives with his parents on Long Island, according to The New York Times. He paid $ 75 for the boots from a nearby Skechers store after an employee there gave him a 25 percent discount upon learning they were to be donated to a man in need.

“I wish more cops were like this guy,” one person wrote on the department’s Facebook page. Others suggested there were plenty of good-hearted police officers about, even if their good deeds were not photographed or touted on Facebook.

(Editing by Paul Thomasch and Stacey Joyce)

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Actor who apparently killed landlady not on drugs

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An autopsy report shows no drugs were detected in the body of a former “Sons of Anarchy” actor who police say killed his landlady and then fell to his death.

Toxicology results on Johnny Lewis found no traces of cocaine, alcohol, marijuana or any other types of drugs in the actor’s system. Officials checked for anti-psychotic drugs as well as psychedelic drugs.

Lewis was found dead in September in the driveway of a Los Angeles residence, and police found his landlady and a cat dead inside the home. Officials believe Lewis fell while trying to flee the home after killing 81-year-old Catherine Davis.

The killing occurred just days after Lewis was released from jail. Records show he had pleaded no contest to assault with a deadly weapon and attempted burglary in separate cases.

Authorities expressed concern about his mental health in court hearings before his release.

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Medicare Is Faulted in Electronic Medical Records Conversion

The conversion to electronic medical records — a critical piece of the Obama administration’s plan for health care reform — is “vulnerable” to fraud and abuse because of the failure of Medicare officials to develop appropriate safeguards, according to a sharply critical report to be issued Thursday by federal investigators.

Mike Spencer/Wilmington Star-News, via Associated Press

Celeste Stephens, a nurse, leads a session on electronic records at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Marilyn Tavenner, acting administrator for Medicare.

The use of electronic medical records has been central to the aim of overhauling health care in America. Advocates contend that electronic records systems will improve patient care and lower costs through better coordination of medical services, and the Obama administration is spending billions of dollars to encourage doctors and hospitals to switch to electronic records to track patient care.

But the report says Medicare, which is charged with managing the incentive program that encourages the adoption of electronic records, has failed to put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that information being provided by hospitals and doctors about their electronic records systems is accurate. To qualify for the incentive payments, doctors and hospitals must demonstrate that the systems lead to better patient care, meeting a so-called meaningful use standard by, for example, checking for harmful drug interactions.

Medicare “faces obstacles” in overseeing the electronic records incentive program “that leave the program vulnerable to paying incentives to professionals and hospitals that do not fully meet the meaningful use requirements,” the investigators concluded. The report was prepared by the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare.

The investigators contrasted the looser management of the incentive program with the agency’s pledge to more closely monitor Medicare payments of medical claims. Medicare officials have indicated that the agency intends to move away from a “pay and chase” model, in which it tried to get back any money it has paid in error, to one in which it focuses on trying to avoid making unjustified payments in the first place.

Late Wednesday, a Medicare spokesman said in a statement: “Protecting taxpayer dollars is our top priority and we have implemented aggressive procedures to hold providers accountable. Making a false claim is a serious offense with serious consequences and we believe the overwhelming majority of doctors and hospitals take seriously their responsibility to honestly report their performance.”

The government’s investment in electronic records was authorized under the broader stimulus package passed in 2009. Medicare expects to spend nearly $7 billion over five years as a way of inducing doctors and hospitals to adopt and use electronic records. So far, the report said, the agency has paid 74, 317 health professionals and 1,333 hospitals. By attesting that they meet the criteria established under the program, a doctor can receive as much as $44,000 for adopting electronic records, while a hospital could be paid as much as $2 million in the first year of its adoption. The inspector general’s report follows earlier concerns among regulators and others over whether doctors and hospitals are using electronic records inappropriately to charge more for services, as reported by The New York Times last September, and is likely to fuel the debate over the government’s efforts to promote electronic records. Critics say the push for electronic records may be resulting in higher Medicare spending with little in the way of improvement in patients’ health. Thursday’s report did not address patient care.

Even those within the industry say the speed with which systems are being developed and adopted by hospitals and doctors has led to a lack of clarity over how the records should be used and concerns about their overall accuracy.

“We’ve gone from the horse and buggy to the Model T, and we don’t know the rules of the road. Now we’ve had a big car pileup,” said Lynne Thomas Gordon, the chief executive of the American Health Information Management Association, a trade group in Chicago. The association, which contends more study is needed to determine whether hospitals and doctors actually are abusing electronic records to increase their payments, says it supports more clarity.

Although there is little disagreement over the potential benefits of electronic records in reducing duplicative tests and avoiding medical errors, critics increasingly argue that the federal government has not devoted enough time or resources to making certain the money it is investing is being well spent.

House Republicans echoed these concerns in early October in a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services. Citing the Times article, they called for suspending the incentive program until concerns about standardization had been resolved. “The top House policy makers on health care are concerned that H.H.S. is squandering taxpayer dollars by asking little of providers in return for incentive payments,” said a statement issued at the same time by the Republicans, who are likely to seize on the latest inspector general report as further evidence of lax oversight. Republicans have said they will continue to monitor the program.

In her letter in response, which has not been made public, Ms. Sebelius dismissed the idea of suspending the incentive program, arguing that it “would be profoundly unfair to the hospitals and eligible professionals that have invested billions of dollars and devoted countless hours of work to purchase and install systems and educate staff.” She said Medicare was trying to determine whether electronic records had been used in any fraudulent billing but she insisted that the current efforts to certify the systems and address the concerns raised by the Republicans and others were adequate.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 30, 2012

An article on Thursday about a federal report critical of Medicare’s performance in assuring accuracy as doctors and hospitals switch to electronic medical records misstated, in some copies, the timing of a statement from a Medicare spokesman in response to the report. The statement was released late Wednesday, not late Thursday.

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DealBook: Vinod Khosla Keeps Long-Term Bet on Clean Technology

Vinod Khosla crowed about the clean energy industry last year. Three of the biofuel start-ups in his venture capital portfolio had just gone public, and the stocks had risen considerably after their debuts. “I challenge anybody to claim that clean tech done right is a disaster,” Mr. Khosla said at a conference, rebuffing recent criticism. “We’ve generated more profits there than anybody has.”

Since then, Mr. Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, has watched much of those paper gains evaporate. As the clean energy industry broadly has taken a hit, shares of the biofuel companies — Amyris, Gevo and KiOR — have slumped 70 percent to 90 percent from their peaks. His stakes, once worth as much as $1.3 billion, are now valued at roughly $378 million.

The billionaire investor has been caught in the cyclical downdraft.

The public stocks of solar, wind and biofuel companies are suffering amid industrywide pressures. The price of natural gas remains low. Europe has pulled back on incentives. American subsidies are in question after the bankruptcy of the solar panel maker Solyndra. And China is providing formidable low-cost competition.

“The whole clean tech sector has been out of favor,” said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates, a brokerage firm. “I’d be hard pressed to name one trading above its I.P.O. price.”

Despite the crosscurrents, Mr. Khosla seems unwavering in his commitment. He is pouring money into start-ups. Khosla Ventures recently invested more in LightSail Energy, a three-year-old start-up working to develop low-cost energy storage. He is also sticking with his public companies. His firm, for example, still owns 54 percent of KiOR.

“He’s a visionary who likes to make big bets on ideas that can really change the world,” said Andy Bechtolsheim, who co-founded Sun Microsystems with Mr. Khosla 30 years ago and shares a house with him at Big Sur on the California coast. “I would think he’s made a larger personal bet on green tech than anybody else.”

While the public markets are raising short-term doubts, the long-term investment thinking remains unchanged. Governments around the globe are pushing to find alternative sources of energy in an effort to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels that may hurt the environment. In a television interview in 2007, Mr. Khosla said “mainstream solutions” could replace up to 80 percent of oil-based power. Without them, he said, “this planet is history the way we know it today.” After Hurricane Sandy, the subject of global warming — and changing climate conditions — has again come to the forefront.

In a recent blog post on the Forbes Web site, Mr. Khosla acknowledged the shift in market sentiment. “Clean tech went through a time when it was in vogue and now it is not,” he wrote. “The financing environment for clean tech companies is tough today,” he added. But he said he still expected “to do better than industry averages by keeping our losing companies to a minority.”

Since founding his venture capital firm in 2004, Mr. Khosla has become one of the most vocal advocates for clean tech innovation, buying stakes in about 60 industry start-ups. Ausra, a solar thermal start-up that had drawn $130 million in venture backing, was sold in 2010 to the French nuclear plant builder Areva for about $250 million, according to one industry estimate. And SeaMicro, a low-power server maker, was bought this year by Advanced Micro Devices for $334 million, more than five times the amount invested by its venture backers, according to a SeaMicro co-founder, Andrew Feldman.

It’s unclear how the broader clean tech portfolio has performed at Khosla Ventures. Mr. Khosla declined to disclose the firm’s returns or to comment for the article.

But one of his funds, which raised $1 billion to invest in clean tech and other start-ups, shows gain of 30 percent since its inception in 2009, according to filings by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest state pension fund. In his Forbes blog post, Mr. Khosla said a recent fund, which raised $1.05 billion in October 2011, was oversubscribed, and his firm’s broader performance since 2006 had “well exceeded typical venture funds.” In that period, venture funds over all have returned 7.25 percent annually after fees, according to industry data.

Mr. Khosla’s commitment is an outgrowth of his three decades at the cutting edge of technology.

A native of India, Mr. Khosla, 57, earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an M.B.A. from Stanford in 1980. After starting the design automation company Daisy Systems in 1982, he co-founded Sun Microsystems, then a growing technology company.

At Sun, he supplied drive and vision. But Mr. Khosla, who is known for his blunt talk and intense manner, was replaced as chief executive two years later and left the company shortly thereafter.

In 1986, he joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Over the next two decades, Mr. Khosla scored sizable returns betting on the growth of fiber optic networks. Two companies, Cerent and Siara Systems, were sold for a combined $15 billion-plus at the height of the late-1990s dot-com bubble.

Mr. Khosla was looking into alternative fuel technologies at Kleiner Perkins when a business plan for an ethanol start-up crossed his desk in 2003. The plan “sat on a corner of my desk for nearly 18 months while I read everything I could about petroleum and its alternatives,” he wrote in an article for Wired magazine in 2006.

When he branched out on his own in 2004, Mr. Khosla invested millions in the ethanol start-up, Celunol. He soon established himself as a top venture capitalist in clean tech, attracting prominent outside investors like Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain joined the firm as a senior adviser.

Over the years, Mr. Khosla has experienced his share of blowups.

In September 2011, Khosla-backed Range Fuels, a wood-chips-to-ethanol company, went bankrupt after receiving a $44 million grant from the Department of Energy and $33 million under a Department of Agriculture loan guarantee. When The Wall Street Journal editorial page criticized Range Fuels as an “exercise in corporate welfare,” Mr. Khosla lashed back, saying the authors inhabited an “ivory tower” that was “full of people who don’t understand technology.”

Sometimes, Mr. Khosla’s companies had to pivot from their original plans and focus on new markets. For example, Calera was founded in 2007 with plans to use power plant exhaust to make cement. Mr. Khosla called its technology “game changing” in 2008.

But the company encountered some setbacks. It postponed plans for commercial-scale production in 2010 pending further research and later cut its 145-employee work force by two-thirds. Since then, Calera has broadened its focus, developing other products like fillers for paper and plastics.

Like many venture capital investors, Mr. Khosla will risk a few strikeouts for the chance to hit home runs. “My willingness to fail is what gives me the ability to succeed,” the investor has said frequently.

The odds can be especially brutal in clean technology. The projects are often capital-intensive — like $200 million or more for a biofuels plant — and they can take years to pay out, said Sam Shelton, a research engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology. By comparison, social media start-ups often require little upfront money and few employees. “The economics are totally different,” Mr. Shelton said.

In part, Mr. Khosla aims to take stakes when the companies are still getting off the ground, rather than waiting until they’re more mature and more expensive. He first bought a stake in KiOR, which aims to convert wood chips to gas and diesel fuel, in 2007. The company is now completing the first of five planned plants in Mississippi with the help of a $75 million interest-free loan from the state.

Mr. Khosla is “always thinking at a very high level about the potential of an idea,” KiOR’s chief executive, Fred Cannon, said. “He has a very good feel for when to step on the gas.”

After jumping in early, Mr. Khosla appears willing to ride out the swings, in both directions. Over the years, public filings indicate he has plowed roughly $80 million into KiOR, amassing a 54 percent stake in the company. Although the stock is off its peak levels and I.P.O. investors are still underwater, his holdings are worth $356 million — a threefold gain.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 30, 2012

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Mr. Khosla's return on his investment in KiOR. He invested roughly $80 million and his holdings are worth $356 million — a threefold gain, not a fourfold gain.

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Iran blogger's death in prison sets off blame game

BEIRUT — The mysterious death of a dissident blogger while in Iranian police custody this month has generated a rare torrent of criticism from officials apparently embarrassed by a case that has drawn international condemnation and again shined a spotlight on the nation's poor human rights record.

Iranian authorities have echoed calls from such human rights groups as Amnesty International for a thorough investigation of the death of Sattar Beheshti, 35, who died Nov. 3 under still-hazy circumstances after being arrested by Iran's cyber police, according to various accounts.

The case has sparked an unusually public and vitriolic bout of blame-dispensing among various powerful factions in the Islamic Republic.

The late blogger — a working-class high-school dropout virtually unknown to the dissident community until his death became a cause celebre — frequently assailed the lack of freedom in Iran. An online photograph said to be of Beheshti shows a man with a shaved head and a slender chain around his neck, wearing a dark T-shirt.

The few details of the case that have emerged offer a glimpse of the largely hidden world of Iranian bloggers and Web activists working in near-anonymity, though clearly on the radar of the nation's diligent cyber police.

On Monday, Mehdi Davatgari, a parliament member, charged that the cyber police — known as FATA — had held the blogger illegally overnight without a court order. He called for the "resignation or dismissal of the cyber police chief," reported Press TV, the government's English-language broadcast service.

Also this week, the public prosecutor's office said the most likely cause of Beheshti's death was "shock," either from psychological pressure while under interrogation or from beatings received while in custody. Those findings seemed to contradict an earlier assessment by Tehran's chief coroner, Ahmad Shojaei, that Beheshti probably died of natural causes, possibly a heart attack, even though his family reportedly said Beheshti had no history of heart problems.

The coroner, in comments to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency, acknowledged signs of bruising on five parts of the dead man's body — from his hands to his feet — indicating that Beheshti had been beaten. But he said that the blogger suffered no broken bones and that the physical evidence did not indicate any brutality that could have been fatal.

Toxicology and other tests are pending.

The case has provided fuel for the bitter political rivalry between loyalists to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and hard-line critics of the two-term president, who is to step down next year because of term limits.

"Officials are blaming each other and want to shrug off responsibility to others," said journalist Farshad Ghorbanpour, who says he spent eight months in jail for his writings on Iranian opposition websites and news outlets abroad.

Presidential surrogates have hinted that responsibility lies with Iran's judiciary, whose chief is an Ahmadinejad adversary appointed by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The judiciary has nominal responsibility for the nation's detention system.

"The death of a worker writing a blog is very agonizing for me and, as a writer, I feel ashamed of myself," wrote editor Mohammad Reza Naghavifard in an editorial in Khorshid, a daily newspaper that supports Ahmadinejad. "It is more than a shame."

But Ahmadinejad's rivals have suggested that the fault lies with the cyber police and the internal security apparatus, which fall under the president's purview.

Ali Motahari, a conservative Iranian lawmaker and political rival of Ahmadinejad, recently voiced his outrage and warned against meddling.

"Sometimes we as supporters think that it is all right to do all sorts of things to preserve the system," Motahari told Etemad, a widely read daily considered to be anti-Ahmadinejad. "We are following up.... We will not budge, and we will not permit this case to be covered up."

Human rights organizations have long accused Iran of jailing dissidents, suppressing free speech and not thoroughly investigating deaths that occur in custody.

According to Amnesty International, authorities have acknowledged that at least three detainees at the Kahrizak prison, where Beheshti was reportedly held for a period, died as a result of torture or other ill treatment after their arrests in the tumultuous aftermath of the nation's disputed 2009 presidential election.

Many details of the blogger's case — including where he died — remain opaque.

What is known is that Iranian cyber police arrested Beheshti at his home Oct. 30 and accused him of "actions against national security on social networks and Facebook," according to a summary by Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based freedom-of-information advocacy group.

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“Anger Management,” “Justified” return dates set by FX

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – FX released its early 2013 premiere schedule Wednesday, including dates for the second season of Charlie Sheen‘s sitcom “Anger Management” and the fourth season of the Timothy Olyphant lawman drama “Justified.”

The premiere schedule kicks off with “Justified” on Tuesday, January 8 at 10 p.m. The season will find Olyphant’s character, U.S. Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens, picking up a 30-year-old cold case, unraveling a riddle that echoes all the way back to his boyhood and his criminal father’s bad dealings.

The premieres go into high gear on January 17, with the return of “Anger Management,” “Archer” and “Totally Biased W. Kamau Bell,” as well as the series premiere of the new offering “Legit.”

“Anger Management,” which received a 90-episode order after the success of its first season, will premiere with consecutive episodes at 9 and 9:30 p.m., with the animated series “Archer” premiering its fourth season at 10 p.m.

The new series “Legit,” which stars Jim Jeffries as a foul-mouthed Australian comedian struggling to legitimize his life and career in Los Angeles, will begin its 13-episode maiden season at 10 p.m., while “Totally Biased W. Kamau Bell,” which features comedian Bell riffing on politics, culture and other topics, will start a new cycle of episodes at 11 p.m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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United Is Struggling Two Years After Its Merger With Continental

Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

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

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

Jad Mouawad/The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Top Democrat urges progressives to deal on 'fiscal cliff'

WASHINGTON – A top Democrat pressured fellow progressives Tuesday to support – rather than fight – a far-reaching budget deal that includes cuts to entitlement programs after resolving  the upcoming fiscal cliff.

“We can't be so naive to believe that just taxing the rich will solve our problems,” said Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. “Put everything on the table. Repeat. Everything on the table.”

The assistant majority leader’s speech at the influential Center for American Progress comes at a pivotal moment in budget talks between the White House and Congress. Progressive and labor groups have warned President Obama against cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs and to instead focus on raising tax revenue in the administration’s negotiations with congressional Republicans.

The White House and Capitol Hill are working to prevent the combination of automatic tax hikes and deep spending cuts coming at year’s end – what economists have warned would be a $500-billion hit to the economy that could spark another recession.

QUIZ: How much do you know about the 'fiscal cliff'?

Durbin, a top progressive, has long angled for a broad deficit-reduction deal after having served on the White House’s nonpartisan fiscal commission that devised $4 trillion in new taxes and spending cuts to curb the nation’s debt load. Experts say such a large package is needed to stop record deficits and improve the nation’s fiscal outlook.

In remarks that strayed from his prepared comments, Durbin told the story of a labor leader who questioned his interest in serving on that 2010 panel, asking, “What is a nice progressive like you doing in a place like that?”

Durbin responded by saying it was better to have a seat at the table, a position he reiterated as he tried to prevent a schism among Democrats’ traditional allies while talks continue toward the year-end deadline.

“Progressives cannot afford to stand on the sidelines in this fiscal debate and deny the obvious,” Durbin said.

Already, a coalition of liberal groups is running ads warning Obama against striking a deal with Republicans that would slash social safety net programs while allowing tax breaks for wealthier households to continue.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday that negotiations over Social Security should occur separately from deficit negotiations.

"We should address the drivers of the deficit," he told reporters, "and Social Security is not currently a driver of the deficit."

[For the Record, 6:02 p.m. PST  Nov. 27: This post has been updated to include the latest reaction from the White House. In addition, the lead has been corrected to make clear that Durbin wants the entitlement negotiations separate from a deal on the fiscal cliff.]

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lisa.mascaro@latimes.com

Twitter: @LisaMascaroinDC

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