OneVietnam nonprofit connects donors with people in need

When the nonprofit OneVietnam first revved up its outreach efforts with a $5,000 grant, it did something that left supporters stunned.

Charity representatives bought iPods and distributed the then-trendy devices to disabled people in remote villages in Vietnam, urging them to share their stories, their hardships, their views on life in a country that many people had fled during wartime.

"Everyone told us, 'If you give them an iPod, they will sell it to ease their burdens,' " said Uyen Nguyen, a former economic consultant and a co-founder of OneVietnam.

Instead, recipients seemed to understand that it was their moment to let fellow Vietnamese scattered around the globe know that they need their help. Through the iStories, OneVietnam connected donors with the disabled and the desperate, leveraging fundraising through social media.

The San Francisco-based group, started by a trio of friends, re-launched this fall with a network of about 30 groups. It won a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and created its iPod story-sharing effort with $5,000 from Yahoo. The charity also gained a vote of confidence from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who invited the group to do a demo at a conference focusing on immigrant populations

"We saw others like Kickstarter.org or Kiva.org emerge and do really well. And they're fantastic, but I see their main focus is on one project at a time," Nguyen said. "Everything now is powered by sustainability."

Participants log onto OneVietnam.org and scroll through a menu of organizations, from the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Assn. in Santa Ana to Boat People SOS. Would-be donors can connect directly with a person who needs help, whether a refugee still struggling to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina or a person in Vietnam largely out of touch with technology.

By providing a one-click portal for both donor and recipient, OneVietnam seeks to make giving, and receiving, easy.

"Unlike other platforms, this is specific to one community," said donor Erin O'Brien of Los Angeles, who teaches Asian American studies at UC Irvine and the Claremont Colleges. "It's very difficult to donate to people in Vietnam because electronic banking isn't the norm, and online money transfers aren't common. They make it more accessible through their website."

Since September, OneVietnam has collected more than $75,000 for nonprofits through its portal, according to organizers.

While people of Vietnamese descent once had only a vague idea of what their peers were doing in Los Angeles or Sydney or Montreal, OneVietnam allowed them to connect and share social service efforts. Vietnam Talking Points, the news arm of OneVietnam, mixed in news and features about the diaspora's different generations.

"There's a silent majority out there who care about Vietnam, who understand the historical implication of what happened in the past, the plight, the migration," said Paul Pham, another co-founder who studied computer science at UC Santa Cruz.

"But they want to move forward," he said. "They no longer associate it with war but with people — people who need our attention and help to continue with their lives."

Pham, who once engineered Hotmail's bulk mail delivery system, volunteered for years in Vietnam's outlying provinces, crafting huts destroyed by seasonal flooding. He met Nguyen and James Bao, both UC Berkeley graduates, when they came to him in 2009 with the OneVietnam concept.

Diep Vuong, president of the Pacific Links Foundation, working to fight human trafficking along Vietnam's borders, describes OneVietnam as "one more tool" to aid nonprofits in their constant and sometimes desperate search for dollars.

"It's the direction of the times to operate online," she said, "but I worry that the generation who are well-connected on the Internet may not have enough money to give regularly versus some of the older people who have set aside the money to give."

David Teece, who heads the Institute for Business Innovation at UC Berkeley and serves on OneVietnam's board of directors, said he's confident the group will evolve into "something stronger."

"They're really pioneering, with an emphasis on philanthropy and development. Sharing news, sharing events, keeping people in touch with what's going on back home and here is not relevant just to Vietnam," he said. "It's a concept that can be applied to the Philippines, or Indonesia. It's 90% inspiration, 10% best practices, again all for sharing."

anh.do@latimes.com

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Thieves stole more than $1 million worth of Apple products during a New Years Eve heist

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his ‘runaway bride’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner is celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his “runaway bride,” Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year’s Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old “Playmate of the Month” in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year’s Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner’s been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

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Ground Zero Volunteers Face Obstacles to Compensation

On the day the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, the Wu-Tang Clan canceled its meeting with a record mixer named Richard Oliver, so Mr. Oliver rushed downtown from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment to help out.

He said he spent three sleepless days at ground zero, tossing body bags. “Then I went home, ate, crashed, woke up,” he said. He had left his Dr. Martens boots on the landing outside his apartment, where he said they “had rotted away.”

“That was kind of frightening,” he continued. “I was breathing that stuff.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, nothing symbolized the city’s rallying around like many New Yorkers who helped at ground zero for days, weeks, months, without being asked. Now Mr. Oliver, suffering from back pain and a chronic sinus infection, is among scores of volunteers who have begun filing claims for compensation from a $2.8 billion fund that Congress created in 2010.

But proving they were there and eligible for the money is turning out to be its own forbidding task.

The other large classes of people who qualify — firefighters, police officers, contractors, city workers, residents and students — have it relatively simple, since they are more likely to have official work orders, attendance records and leases to back them up. But more than a decade later, many volunteers have only the sketchiest proof that they are eligible for the fund, which is expected to make its first awards early this year. (A separate $1.5 billion treatment fund also was created.)

They are volunteers like Terry Graves, now ill with lung cancer, who kept a few business cards of people she worked with until 2007, then threw them away. Or Jaime Hazan, a former Web designer with gastric reflux, chronically inflamed sinuses and asthma, who managed to dig up a photograph of himself at ground zero — taken from behind.

Or Mr. Oliver, who has a terse two-sentence thank-you note on American Red Cross letterhead, dated 2004, which does not meet the requirement that it be witnessed or sworn.

“For some people, there’s great records,” said Noah H. Kushlefsky, whose law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, is representing volunteers and others who expect to make claims. “But in some respects, it was a little bit of a free-for-all. Other people went down there and joined the bucket brigade, talked their way in. It’s going to be harder for those people, and we do have clients like that.”

As documentation, the fund requires volunteers to have orders, instructions or confirmation of tasks they performed, or medical records created during the time they were in what is being called the exposure zone, including the area south of Canal Street, and areas where debris was being taken.

Failing that, it will be enough to submit two sworn statements — meaning the writer swears to its truth, under penalty of perjury — from witnesses describing when the volunteers were there and what they were doing.

Proving presence at the site might actually be harder than proving the illness is related to Sept. 11, since the rules now allow a host of ailments to be covered, including 50 kinds of cancer, despite an absence of evidence linking cancer to ground zero.

A study by the New York City health department, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no clear association between cancer and Sept. 11, though the researchers noted that some cancers take many years to develop.

Unlike the original compensation fund, administered by Kenneth Feinberg, which dealt mainly with people who were killed or maimed in the attack, “This one is dealing with injuries that are very common,” said Sheila L. Birnbaum, a former mediator and personal injury defense lawyer, who is in charge of the new fund. “So it’s sort of a very hard process from the fund’s point of view to make the right call, and it requires some evidence that people were actually there.”

Asked how closely the fund would scrutinize documents like sworn statements, Ms. Birnbaum said she understood how hard it was to recreate records after a decade, and was going on the basic assumption that people would be honest.

In his career as a record mixer, Mr. Oliver, 56, has been associated with 7 platinum and 11 gold records, and 2 Grammy credits, which now line the walls of his condominium in College Point, Queens. He said he first got wind of the Sept. 11 attacks from a client, the Wu-Tang Clan. “One of the main guys called me: ‘Did you see what’s on TV? Because our meeting ain’t going to happen,’ ” he recalled.

Having taken a hazmat course after high school, he called the Red Cross and was told they needed people like him. “I left my soon-to-be-ex-wife and 1-year-old son and went down,” he said. “I came back three days later,” after surviving on his own adrenaline, Little Debbie cakes handed out to volunteers and bottled water. After working for three days setting up a morgue, he was willing to go back, he said, but “they said we have trained people now, thank you very much for your service.”

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Commercial Real Estate Web Sites Increase in Popularity

In terms of marketing tone, the commercial real estate industry has long played the quiet cousin to the brasher residential business. While apartments are routinely sold using splashy, multifaceted ad campaigns, commercial brokers and developers have favored lower-key, brochure-based approaches.

But the two branches of the family may be growing closer. In recent months, the marketing teams for some New York office buildings have decided to get the word out by deploying the type of stylish Web sites once used only by luxury condominiums.

Unlike the Web sites of office buildings past, which tended to be bare-bones and buried deep within a landlord’s corporate home page, this new crop stands alone and crackles with animation, exuberant language and videos.

And by publicizing details like where telecom cables enter the building, these sites add transparency to a business that can seem clubby and secretive.

“Lunches with brokers is an old-school way of getting your message out,” said Grant Greenspan, a broker and principal at the Kaufman Organization, a landlord that has set up Web sites for two of its buildings, 100-104 Fifth Avenue and 550 Seventh Avenue. But, he added, “it’s only as good as the group of brokers who you perceive to have the clients.”

By introducing buildings to the public online to generate demand, Mr. Greenspan said, “you get clients going to their brokers and saying, ‘Why aren’t you showing me this building?’ ”

The site for 100-104 Fifth Avenue, a pair of joined, early-20th-century buildings near Union Square that Kaufman co-owns with Invesco Real Estate, was also useful in chronicling the $15 million renovation that occurred after the development team bought the property out of bankruptcy in 2010 for $94 million.

The renovation, which took two years, included adding a fire safety system and six elevators and redesigning a pair of lobbies. All of this is described in a colorful, animated timeline on the Web site, 100-104fifth.com, as are the specifics about those telecom cables.

The Kaufman Organization credited the site with helping to fill the 270,000-square-foot building quickly. It is at 98 percent occupancy today, up from 60 percent when the landlord bought it.

According to Mr. Greenspan, all six tenants signed there since 2010 said the site had played a major role in piquing their interest. Those tenants include Yelp, the online review business; Apple’s iAd, an advertising network; and Net-a-Porter, a women’s apparel retailer. They pay rents ranging from $45 to $60 per square foot, Kaufman said.

Similarly, at 550 Seventh Avenue, which Kaufman recently began managing for Adler Group, a new Web site is being used to rebrand the 12-story building in the garment district, where fashion tenants have historically held sway.

The Web site, 550seventhave.com, may surprise property owners who tend to be tight-lipped about their tenants. It shows the directory in the building’s lobby, revealing that Lilly Pulitzer, Donna Karan International and Oscar de la Renta have offices inside.

The site, introduced in October, is already paying off. An 11,000-square-foot space on the 10th floor is expected to be leased this month to a software company, Mr. Greenspan said, adding that the $30,000 cost of making both sites, plus the hours logged by a full-time worker, had been worth every penny.

If Web sites “facilitate renting the spaces 60 or 90 days sooner, they make all the sense in the world,” he said.

Some major New York landlords, like the Chetrit Group, have no online presence. And even when Web sites do exist, they can be a bit stolid, offering little more than the year the building was completed, its architect and its total square footage, as with the General Motors Building, owned by Boston Properties. Brokers say that when a high-rise has existed for years and is one of Manhattan’s prized addresses as well, it may not have to promote itself online.

A new office building must do more, especially when it hasn’t even come out of the ground yet. In those cases, a Web site is essential to allow tenants to visualize their future home, said Christopher V. Albanese, president of the Albanese Organization, a Long Island-based developer. These sites tend to be extremely eye-catching and could easily be mistaken for ones intended to sell multimillion-dollar condos.

In November, the Albanese Organization unveiled 510w22.com, for 510 West 22nd Street, a planned 170,000-square-foot office building in West Chelsea. The centerpiece of the artful Web site is a four-minute video narrated by the architect Rick Cook, which brims with dramatic music and soaring shots of the adjacent High Line.

Creating such a Hollywood-caliber product, which includes renderings that normally would not have been commissioned, doubled the building’s marketing budget — “but without it, tenants might think that this was just some ordinary building, and it really isn’t,” Mr. Albanese said.

Also, financing for the $150 million project cannot be secured until the building is 30 percent leased, he said, making a dynamic marketing tool all the more important.

Though online videos for commercial real estate are not widespread, they are gaining in popularity.

The Web site for 7 Bryant Park, a 28-story office building that Hines is developing on Avenue of the Americas, features a two-minute video. A piano tinkles; the camera swoops.

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Lunar New Year celebrants get no rest after Western holidays

At her store in Chinatown, Tracy Tieu replaces red and green Christmas trinkets with red and gold Lunar New Year decorations as she greets shoppers fresh from Las Vegas.

A mother strokes a jade dragon leaping from a dark wood emblem. A man and his wife unfurl scrolls bearing symbols of wealth. A student buys assorted little Buddhas, lining them up by belly size.

Inside the shop, Wing Ha Hing Gifts & Arts, Asian travelers this past weekend talk about how many aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents they expect to host at noisy family gatherings.

One new year celebration may have ended — but for many Southern Californians the bustle of preparing for the Lunar New Year continues full force, with no time for holiday fatigue.

"We can't afford it," Tieu says. "We go with the season.... I order supplies six months in advance."

At crowded shopping plazas in Los Angeles' Chinatown and Koreatown, the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County's Little Saigon, seasonal foods line bakery shelves, holiday music plays on open-air speakers and Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese consumers are spending big — yet again — on their most important annual celebration.

The Year of the Snake begins Feb. 10. Those born under this sign are believed to have a good temper and strong passion, but can be suspicious.

The Lunar New Year is a time when debts are paid, arguments are laid to rest, hair is cut and homes are painted and polished and rituals are followed to sweep away ill fortune and welcome good luck. Doors and windows are decorated with themed images of happiness, prosperity and longevity, and incense is lighted in temples to pay respect to ancestors.

In the narrow, colorful shop her father opened in 1990, Tieu is surrounded by flowers, feng shui diaries, floating lotus candles and other traditional gifts.

Regina Gomez, a Chinese American from Nevada, was one of those hunting for bargains along Chinatown's main drag Sunday. She stopped at Tieu's store to prepare for the coming festivities. "When we buy for entertainment, it's better to buy for it here. It's less," she says, browsing with her kids, Shelby and Brittany. "I came to L.A. for Christmas and knew I should take a look before going home."

On the first morning of the new year, as everyone exchanges gifts and good wishes, Tieu plans to pass out crisp dollar bills in lucky red envelopes to some 20 nieces and nephews. "I have to give each of them at least $20 – anything smaller just isn't acceptable."

"It doesn't matter what we do or how much we gave for the previous holidays," adds Angie Tieu, her younger sister. "We have to remember the Lunar New Year, it's tradition, and we must spend."

On top of the financial costs, the extended holiday season carries health costs, said Calvin Ho, founder of the Plaid Bag Connection, a blog exploring the links between Asian groups outside their ethnic homeland. "We've been eating since the Moon Festival" in September "to Halloween, to Thanksgiving to Christmas and forward. Everyone overindulges because it's impossible not to."

Ho, who doesn't eat fried foods, says "with the holidays it's really hard to avoid it."

"Everything involves family," he said. "And when you are making multiple visits to different members of family day after day, you must sit down and share a meal. I get all my cravings in and it'll last until next fall."

Visiting Chinatown with her husband on Sunday, Elisa Aquino, who is half-Chinese, said she intends to serve dim sum dishes when she invites friends and relatives to her Carson home. "We go for a bang. High impact, lots of songs, lots of jokes.... I'm not cooking. We order," she adds.

Stephanie Yuan, working a souvenir kiosk nearby, said sales are brisk post-Christmas. "We are sold out of snake lucky charms," she says proudly, noting that the item features the animal highlighted in the 2013 Chinese zodiac.

"Here, you buy this one," she tells passing tourists, pointing to an Asian version of the Cheshire cat, complete with battery-operated paw, happy face and money pouch. On its white ceramic body is the Chinese character for $1 million. "It will lead you to a good way."

Merchants like Yuan and Thanh Ly, of neighboring Tambaba Fashion, can't take Lunar New Year off. "It's the day to sell," Ly says, folding traditional dresses made in Vietnam and Hong Kong. "We would like to have a vacation but we think about our living first. Some people buy last-minute."

Kevin Vong of Fresno isn't one of those. Outside Lien Hoa BBQ, he loads his truck with a whole roast pig, costing $195, carting it to a gathering to pray for the souls of his ancestors. He does this at the end of the Western new year, then again at the Lunar New Year. "I do not forget," he says. "I want someone doing that for me later. Years later."

anh.do@latimes.com

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Zynga carries out planned games shutdown, including “Petville”

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Social games publisher Zynga Inc confirmed on Monday that it has carried out 11 of the planned shutdowns of 13 game titles, with “Petville” being the latest game on which it pulled the plug.

Zynga in October said it would shut down 13 underperforming titles after warning that its revenues were slowing as gamers fled from its once-popular titles published on the Facebook platform in large numbers and sharply revised its full-year outlook.

The San Francisco-based company announced the “Petville” shutdown two weeks ago on its Facebook page. All the 11 shutdowns occurred in December.

The 11 titles shut down or closed to new players include role-playing game “Mafia Wars 2,” “Vampire Wars,” “ForestVille” and “FishVille.”

“In place of ‘PetVille,’ we encourage you to play other Zynga games like ‘Castleville,’ ‘Chefville,’ ‘Farmville 2,’ ‘Mafia Wars’ and ‘Yoville,’” the company told players on its ‘PetVille’ Facebook page. “PetVille” players were offered a one-time, complimentary bonus package for virtual goods in those games.

“Petville,” which lets users adopt virtual pets, has 7.5 million likes on Facebook but only 60,000 daily active users, according to AppData. About 1,260 users commented on the game’s Facebook page, some lamenting the game’s shutdown.

Zynga has said it is shifting focus to capture growth in mobile games. It also applied this month for a preliminary application to run real-money gambling games in Nevada.

Zynga is hoping that a lucrative real-money market could make up for declining revenue from games like “FarmVille” and other fading titles that still generate the bulk of its sales.

Zynga shares were up 1 percent at $ 2.36 in afternoon trade on Monday on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting By Malathi Nayak; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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Is Tom Cruise still a go-to action hero? Hollywood, “Jack Reacher” say yes

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Given his age and the tough year he’s had in the tabloids, is Tom Cruise still a go-to guy when Hollywood is looking for an action hero?

The answer is yes, based on the performance of his current movie, Paramount‘s “Jack Reacher.” It’s taken in $ 45 million in the 10 days since opening with $ 15.6 million in a very crowded and competitive holiday market. Its second week was a solid $ 14 million, and it’s added $ 22 million from overseas.

Holiday movies tend to have legs and “Reacher” has yet to roll out in the majority of major foreign territories, so both of those numbers, particularly the international, will be growing. All signs point to it surpassing $ 200 million at the worldwide box office. That’s not a blockbuster figure, and Paramount is staying mum on a sequel, but with a $ 60 million budget, “Jack Reacher” will make money for Paramount.

There were questions coming in. With his divorce from Katie Holmes and subsequent custody battle, Cruise is carrying plenty of public relations baggage. His foray earlier this year into musicals with “Rock of Ages” was critically applauded but proved a box-office dud. That’s on top of his well-known support for Scientology.

He’s 50 now, which might be the new 40 in the real world, but is starting to get on in years in the realm of action heroes. Daniel Craig is 44. Jeremy Renner is 41. We are a long way from “Top Gun” – that was 1986 – so it probably won’t be too, too long until “The Expendables” franchise comes calling for Cruise.

But in the meantime, “Reacher” is going to be profitable for Paramount and Cruise’s portrayal of the tough, ex-military drifter has drawn critical kudos, so there’s a bit of momentum now. And it’s clear from his upcoming schedule that Hollywood is still convinced he can carry an action film.

Next for Cruise will be two sci-fi movies: Universal’s “Oblivion” is due in April and “All You Need is Kill” is set for March 2014 from Warner Bros. After that, there’s a potential “Van Helsing” remake at Universal and “Mission: Impossible 5″ is on Paramount‘s 2015 slate.

His recent track record at the box office, particularly when you look at his performance in the action genre, suggests the studios are making a pretty good bet.

“Rock of Ages” may have crumpled, but “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” was a huge hit for Paramount, taking in nearly $ 700 million worldwide in 2011. “Knight & Day,” from Fox in 2010, and “Valkyrie,” from United Artists in 2008, both made over $ 200 million worldwide.

Supporting roles in “Tropic Thunder” and “Lions for Lambs” preceded those, but those came on the heels of two Paramount movies: “Mission Impossible 3,” which made nearly $ 400 million worldwide in 2006, and “War of the Worlds,” which did $ 592 million in the previous year.

The bottom line: Hollywood is still convinced you can still take Tom Cruise, movie action hero, to the bank.

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F.D.A. Approves Sirturo, a New Tuberculosis Drug

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Monday that it had approved a new treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis that can be used as an alternative when other drugs fail.

The drug, to be called Sirturo, was discovered by scientists at Janssen, the pharmaceuticals unit of Johnson & Johnson, and is the first in a new class of drugs that aims to treat the drug-resistant strain of the disease.

Tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease that is transmitted through the air and usually affects the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body, including the brain and kidneys. It is considered one of the world’s most serious public health threats. Although rare in the United States, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a growing problem elsewhere in the world, especially in poorer countries. About 12 million people worldwide had tuberculosis in 2011, according to Johnson & Johnson, and about 630,000 had multidrug-resistant TB.

A study in September in The Lancet found that almost 44 percent of patients with tuberculosis in countries like Russia, Peru and Thailand showed resistance to at least one second-line drug, or a medicine used after another drug had already failed.

Treating drug-resistant tuberculosis can take years and can cost 200 times as much as treating the ordinary form of the disease

“This is quite a milestone in the story of therapy for TB,” Dr. Paul Stoffels, the chief scientific officer at Johnson & Johnson, said in an interview. He said the approval was the first time in 40 years that the agency had approved a drug that attacked tuberculosis in a different way from the current treatments on the market. Sirturo works by inhibiting an enzyme needed by the tuberculosis bacteria to replicate and spread throughout the body.

Sirturo, also known as bedaquiline, would be used on top of the standard treatment, which is a combination of several drugs. Patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis often must be treated for 18 to 24 months.

Even as it announced the approval, however, the F.D.A. also issued some words of caution.

“Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis poses a serious health threat throughout the world, and Sirturo provides much-needed treatment for patients who have don’t have other therapeutic options available,” Edward Cox, director of the office of antimicrobial products in the F.D.A.’s center for drug evaluation and research, said in a statement. “However, because the drug also carries some significant risks, doctors should make sure they use it appropriately and only in patients who don’t have other treatment options.”

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen opposed approval in a letter to the F.D.A. in mid-December, saying that the results of a limited clinical trial showed that patients using bedaquiline were five times as likely to die than those on the standard drug regimen to treat the disease.

“Given that bedaquiline belongs to an entirely new class of drugs, it is entirely feasible that death in some cases was due to some unmeasured toxicity of the drug,” the letter said.

Sirturo carries a so-called black box warning for patients and health care professionals that the drug can affect the heart’s electrical activity, which could lead to an abnormal and potentially fatal heart rhythm. The warning also notes deaths in patients treated with Sirturo. Nine patients who received Sirturo died compared with two patients who received a placebo. Five of the deaths in the Sirturo group and all of the deaths in the placebo arm seemed to be related to tuberculosis, but no consistent reason for the deaths in the remaining Sirturo-treated patients could be identified.

Doctors Without Borders and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, both active in the fight against tuberculosis and other global diseases, applauded the F.D.A.’s decision.

Jan Gheuens, interim director of the TB Program for the Gates Foundation, called it a “long-awaited event” and said the fight against TB had not benefited from new drugs in the way H.I.V. had. Beyond the benefits of the drug itself, he said the quick approval process could be a model for other drugs sorely needed in the developing world.

He also suggested, however, that more trials should be conducted to get a better understanding of the side effects that led to the black box warning.

The F.D.A. approved bedaquiline under an accelerated program that allows the agency to conditionally approve drugs that are viewed as filling unmet medical needs with less than the usual evidence that they work. The drug’s approval was based on studies that showed it killed bacteria more quickly than a control group taking the standard regimen, but it did not measure whether in the end patients actually fared better on bedaquiline. Johnson & Johnson will conduct larger clinical trials to investigate whether the drug performs as predicted.

In a statement responding to Public Citizen’s letter, a spokeswoman for Johnson & Johnson said the company was committed to supporting appropriate use of Sirturo and would “work to ensure Sirturo is used only where treatment alternatives are not available.”

Dr. Stoffels said the hope was that other new tuberculosis drugs would also be approved that, when used in combination with bedaquiline, could shorten and simplify the current standard of treatment. “That is still a long time away,” he acknowledged, but “this is a first step in a new regimen for TB.”

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Hillary Clinton hospitalized with blood clot after concussion

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was hospitalized in New York on Sunday after doctors discovered a blood clot stemming from her concussion, the State Department said.

Clinton, 65, has been out of the public eye for the better part of December, at first because of what the State Department said was a stomach virus and later because of the concussion, which she suffered after fainting at her Washington home.

According to a spokesman, the clot was discovered in the course of a follow-up exam for the concussion at New York Presbyterian Hospital. She is being treated with anticoagulants and will remain at the hospital for the next 48 hours so doctors can monitor her response to the medication.

“Her doctors will continue to assess her condition, including other issues associated with her concussion,” Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines said in a statement. “They will determine if any further action is required.”

The State Department had said earlier that Clinton was set to resume her normal office schedule this week.

Earlier this month, the former first lady and New York senator had cited her concussion in canceling her scheduled appearance before a congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including the ambassador.

A separate high-level investigative panel issued a scathing report blaming the State Department for security lapses. Clinton took responsibility, writing to the congressional committee that she  accepted "every one" of the Accountability Review Board's 29 recommendations.

She also praised the board, saying it had offered "a clear-eyed look at serious, systematic challenges that we have already begun to fix." 

Some conservatives had accused her of faking her illness to avoid testifying before the committee -- an accusation that the State Department strenuously denied. 

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