TIMESCAST: PC Industry Shifts as Dell Goes Private

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February 6, 2013By Fritzie Andrade, Zena Barakat, Emily B. Hager, Erica Berenstein, Krishnan Vasudevan, Kriston Lewis, Abe Sater and Robin Lindsay

TimesCast Media+Tech: The effects of Dell’s landmark deal. | Kit Eaton reviews video editing apps. | The entrepreneur and inventor James Dyson.

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IHT Rendezvous: 'Rigoletto' in Vegas, 'Manon Lescaut' in the Metro

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BRUSSELS—The day after the Metropolitan Opera in New York unveiled a production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” set in Las Vegas during the 1960s, I was in Belgium, where another exercise in operatic updating is underway at the Théâtre royal de la Monnaie. Here, Mariusz Trelinski’s staging of Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” — through Feb. 8 — situates the opera in the waiting room of a subway station.

Opera goers are often incensed by productions like these, yet updating is potentially a relatively mild device. Once the new setting is established, the action can play out coherently and essentially traditionally. This happened with “La Bohème” last summer at the Salzburg Festival, staged by Damiano Michieletto.

One could object to the hovel of the bohemians’ Parisian loft, but there was something touching about seeing Anna Netrebko as Mimì crouched in the snow behind a hotdog truck near the city’s peripheral expressway, as she overheard Rodolfo and Marcello discussing her fragile health.

By contrast, La Scala’s recent “Lohengrin” directed by Claus Guth, which focused on the repressiveness of German society at the time of the opera’s composition and, in Mr. Guth’s fanciful interpretation, its bizarre effects on the psyche of the title character, counts as truly radical.

The Met’s take on “Rigoletto” had a widely acknowledged antecedent in Jonathan Miller’s production of the opera for the English National Opera, which was set in New York’s Little Italy and seen in that city on a 1984 tour. The Met’s new production by Michael Mayer is reportedly less successful. Writing in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini detected “dynamic elements in this colorful, if muddled and ill-defined ‘Rigoletto’” but noted that “there are big holes” in Mr. Mayer’s concept. The criticism is directed not so much at the updating itself but the lack of disciplined follow-through.

The updating of “Manon Lescaut,” which is specified to take place in the 18th century, comes off as inherently misguided. Boris Kudlicka’s chic-looking set is essentially all in black, although city lights are sometimes visible, as if seen from a moving train. A system map is on one wall, pay telephones on another.

The mismatch is apparent from the first measures of Puccini’s sparkling orchestral introduction to Act 1. This is music designed for the outdoors—a public square in Amiens—not a space underground. It announces something special is in the works, not dreary routine. It conveys youthful high spirits, not gloom. Also, the mores of pre-revolutionary France are important in the opera.

Whether Mr. Trelinski’s conception of Manon herself is an outgrowth of his updating, or the other way around, it robs her of her allure. When, early on, the smitten Des Grieux declares his love for her, Manon sits at the end of a bar wearing a red coat and dark glasses and smoking a cigarette—the very image of a prostitute. Manon is a material girl all right, but one with such irresistible femininity she gets what she wants from men without having to market herself. You never sense this here. Further, a demimonde element weighs on the first two acts. Manon’s benefactor, Geronte (the bass Giovanni Furlanetto, in excellent voice), is depicted as a crime figure, and there is some curious activity involving topless girls and golf clubs.

Mr. Trelinski’s approach also intensifies an acknowledged structural weakness of the opera. All the opera’s gaiety is concentrated in the first two acts, whereas Act 3 and 4—in which Manon is deported from France and then dies in the New World—are uniformly gloomy. But here, Acts 1 and 2 are gloomy too.

Mr. Trelinski, who is artistic director of the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw, where the production originated, is a respected director with some notable achievements. I have admired his double bill of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta,” which will be seen at the Met in a future season. His work here has some redeeming aspects, especially in Act 4. Puccini’s setting for this act—a vast desert near the outskirts of New Orleans—is one of opera’s most implausible, so it is no great loss to see it supplanted. Fascinatingly, Mr. Trelinski ensures that Des Grieux suffers here as much as Manon does, as he becomes delusional and, apparently, starts to see double. A second Manon appears, whom Des Grieux cannot seem to distinguish from the first.

Carlo Rizzi presides over a colorful reading of the score and a cast headed by an excellent pair of lovers in Eva-Maria Westbroek and Brandon Jovanovich. When the two sang their big duet in Act 2, you could forget about the production and become wrapped up in Puccini’s drama. Ms. Westbroek’s commanding soprano is a bit large for Manon, whose music can profit from greater tonal delicacy. Still, she offers some splendid singing, apart from some difficulty on top, and gives an especially gripping account of Manon’s final aria, “Solo, perduta, abbandonata.”

In this production Des Grieux emerges as the more emotionally vibrant lover, and Mr. Janovich’s clear, virile singing makes the most of the opportunity. Unfortunately, he was in ill health and departed the performance after Act 2, but the intervention of Hector Sandoval, the alternate Des Grieux, allowed the performance, which was streamed to movie theaters, to continue without a hitch. He sang well and knew intricacies of the staging, flaws and all.

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Braun says he used Fla clinic owner as consultant

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NEW YORK (AP) — Milwaukee Brewers slugger Ryan Braun said the person who ran the Florida clinic being investigated by Major League Baseball was used only as a consultant on his drug suspension appeal last year.


"I have nothing to hide," Braun said in a statement released by his representatives on Tuesday night.


Earlier in the day, Yahoo Sports reported the 2011 NL MVP's name showed up three times in records of the Biogenesis of America LLC clinic. Yahoo said no specific performance-enhancing drugs were listed next to his name.


The Miami New Times recently released clinic documents that purportedly linked Alex Rodriguez, Gio Gonzalez, Melky Cabrera and other players to purchases of banned drugs from the now-closed anti-aging center.


Rodriguez and Cabrera were on the list with Braun that also included New York Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli and Baltimore Orioles infielder Danny Valencia.


Braun said his name was in the Biogenesis records because of an issue over payment to Anthony Bosch, who ran the clinic near Miami.


"There was a dispute over compensation for Bosch's work, which is why my lawyer and I are listed under 'moneys owed' and not on any other list," Braun said.


"I have nothing to hide and have never had any other relationship with Bosch," he said. "I will fully cooperate with any inquiry into this matter."


On Tuesday, MLB officials asked the Miami New Times for the records the alternative newspaper obtained for its story.


Asked specifically about Braun's name in the documents before the five-time All-Star released his statement, MLB spokesman Pat Courtney said: "Aware of report and are in the midst of an active investigation in South Florida."


Braun tested positive during the 2011 postseason for elevated testosterone levels. He maintained his innocence and his 50-game suspension was overturned during spring training last year when arbitrator Shyam Das ruled in favor of Braun due to chain of custody issues involving the sample.


With that, Braun became the first major leaguer to have a drug suspension overturned.


"During the course of preparing for my successful appeal last year, my attorneys, who were previously familiar with Tony Bosch, used him as a consultant. More specifically, he answered questions about T/E ratio and possibilities of tampering with samples," Braun said.


The T/E ratio is a comparison of the levels of testosterone to epitestosterone.


Braun led the NL in homers (41), runs (108) and slugging percentage (.595) last season while batting .319 with 112 RBIs and 30 stolen bases. He finished second to San Francisco catcher Buster Posey in MVP balloting."


Cervelli, who spent nearly all of last season in Triple-A, posted a statement on Twitter later Tuesday night.


"Following my foot injury in March 2011, I consulted with a number of experts, including BioGenesis Clinic, for (cont)," Cervelli posted, "(cont)legal ways to aid my rehab and recovery. I purchased supplements that I am certain were not prohibited by Major League Baseball."


An email sent to Valencia's agent was not returned.


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Well: Getting Into Your Exercise Groove

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Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

This isn’t meant as an insult, but you are physiologically lazy. So am I. So are we all. Using treadmill testing, scientists have definitively established that, like other animals, humans naturally aim to use as little energy as possible during most movement. So when we walk or run, our bodies tend to choose a particular cadence, a combination of step length and step frequency, that allows us to move at any given speed with as little physiological effort as possible.

How we pick that cadence, though, and whether we can or would even want to change it has been unclear. But a series of recent studies involving runners, walkers, metronomes and virtual reality curtains suggests that while the tug of physiological laziness is strong, it can be controlled, or at least tweaked, with some conscious effort — and perhaps your iPhone playlist.

In the first and most revelatory of the studies, physiologists at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia asked adult volunteers to walk on a treadmill at an easy pace. Using motion capture technology, the scientists determined how many steps each person was taking per minute at this speed. A person’s pace depends, of course, on both step length and step frequency. But because the two are inextricably entwined — lengthen your stride and you’ll take fewer steps over a given distance — studying one provides sufficient information about the other, and frequency is easier to enumerate.

After establishing each volunteer’s preferred step frequency, the scientists then sped up or slowed the treadmill, and the researchers measured how quickly people’s legs responded.

The body, remember, wants things to be easy. When you increase or decrease the speed of your walking or running, various physiological changes occur; the amount of oxygen in your blood rises or falls, for instance, because your muscles start requiring more or less of the stuff. Other biochemical changes also occur within muscle cells. Sensing those changes, the body realizes that, at this new speed, your cadence isn’t ideal; you’re taking too few or too many steps to use the least possible amount of energy. Your body adjusts.

But that process takes a little while, at least five seconds or so for the oxygen levels to change and your body to recognize the alteration, says Max Donelan, a professor at Simon Fraser University who was a co-author of the study with his graduate student Mark Snaterse and others.

However, the walkers in the study were adjusting their step frequency within less than two seconds after the treadmill speed changed, Dr. Donelan points out. They then fine-tuned their pacing after that. But the first adjustment came almost instantly.

The same process occurred when the researchers repeated the experiment with runners. If the treadmill speed changed, the runners’ step frequency shifted almost immediately, too fast for internal physiology to have played much of a role.

These intsy adjustments suggest that our brains very likely contain huge libraries of preset paces, Dr. Donelan and his colleagues have concluded, of idealized, “physiologically efficient” step cadences for any given speed and condition. It seems probable, in fact, that over our lifetimes, Dr. Donelan says, our brains develop and store countless templates for most pacing situations. We learn and remember what cadence allows us to use the least energy at that speed, and when we reach that speed, we immediately default to our body’s most efficient pace.

Just how the brain recognizes that we are moving at any particular speed is not completely understood, Dr. Donelan says, but almost surely involves messages from the eyes, feet, ears, nervous system, skin and other bodily systems.

Interestingly, it seems to be quite difficult to fool your brain. When Dr. Donelan and his colleagues draped shower-curtain-like enclosures around the front of a treadmill, projected a virtual reality scene of a hallway onto it and then manipulated people’s sense of the speed with which they were moving through the hallway, they found that people’s step frequency would quickly change to match this supposed new speed. But then they would settle back into their former cadence, even as the virtual hallway continued to move past them at unnatural speed.

Visual cues simply were not strong enough to affect pacing for long.

But the scientists have found one signal that does seem effectively to override the body’s strong pull toward its preferred ways of moving: a strongly rhythmic beat. When Dr. Donelan and his colleagues fitted runners or walkers with headphones tuned to a metronome, they found that they could increase or decrease volunteers’ step frequency, even if that frequency was faster or slower than a person’s preferred step pattern. They would also maintain that pace for as long as the metronomic rhythm continued unaltered. The volunteers aligned their movement to the beat.

In practical terms, this finding suggests that music may be one of the best ways to affect the pace of your running or walking, especially if you are trying to maintain a pace with which you are not familiar or which feels awkward. Want to start jogging faster than you have in the past? Load your iPod with uptempo music, Dr. Donelan suggests (although obviously ease into any changes in training slowly, to lessen the risk of injuries).

Dr. Donelan and his colleagues even have recently launched an iPhone app called Cruise Control that allows people to coordinate their pacing with their playlists. Input your preferred running or walking speed and the app skims your music library (nonjudgmentally; if you like Nickelback, that’s your business) and strings together songs with the requisite beat, even subtly altering the tempo of songs, if needed.

But of course, if you’re comfortable with your pace as it is, stick with it. For me, the most stirring message of these recent experiments is that, left to its own devices, your body will almost always obligingly try to choose the least demanding pace for you, a goal with which I’m happy to fall into step.

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DealBook: As Unit Pleads Guilty, R.B.S. to Pay $612 Million Over Rate Rigging

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LONDON – The Royal Bank of Scotland on Wednesday struck a combined $612 million settlement with American and British authorities over accusations that it manipulated interest rates, the latest case to emerge from a broad international investigation.

In an embarrassing blow to the bank, its Japanese subsidiary also pleaded guilty to criminal wrongdoing in its settlement with the Justice Department. The R.B.S. subsidiary, a hub of rate-rigging activity, agreed to a single count of felony wire fraud to resolve the case.

The settlement reflects the Justice Department’s renewed vigor for punishing banks ensnared in the rate manipulation case. In December, a Japanese subsidiary of UBS pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud as part of a larger settlement, representing the first unit of a big bank to agree to criminal charges in more than a decade.

As authorities built the R.B.S. case, they seized on a series of incriminating yet colorful e-mails that highlighted an effort to influence the rate-setting process, a plot that spanned multiple currencies and countries from 2006 to 2010. One senior trader expressed disbelief at reaping lucrative profits from the scheme, saying “it’s just amazing” how rate “fixing can make you that much money,” according to the government’s complaint. Another trader, after pressuring a colleague to submit a certain rate, offered a reward of sorts: “I would come over there and make love to you.”

In a statement on Wednesday, the American regulator leading the case slammed the bank for manipulating benchmarks like the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, noted that R.B.S. employees “aided and abetted” UBS and other firms in the rate-rigging scheme and continued to run afoul of the law, though more covertly, even after learning of a federal investigation.

“The public is deprived of an honest benchmark interest rate when a group of traders sits around a desk for years falsely spinning their bank’s Libor submissions, trying to manufacture winning trades. That’s what happened at R.B.S.,” David Meister, the enforcement director of the commission, said in the statement.

Libor Explained

The settlement represents the latest setback for Royal Bank of Scotland, which has struggled to shake the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. The British firm already has put aside $2.7 billion to compensate customers who were inappropriately sold loan insurance over recent years. On Jan. 31, British regulators also called on the bank and other local rivals to review the sale of interest-rate hedging products after more than 90 percent of a sample were found to have been sold improperly.

The broader rate-rigging case has centered on how much the Royal Bank of Scotland and a dozen other banks, including Citigroup and HSBC, charge each other for loans. Such benchmarks, including Libor, help determine the borrowing costs for trillions of dollars in financial products like corporate loans, mortgages and credit cards.

But the Royal Bank of Scotland, like many of its competitors, corrupted the process. Government complaints filed over the last year outlined a scheme in which banks reported false rates to lift trading profits and deflect concerns about their health during the crisis.

Authorities filed the first Libor case in June, extracting a $450 million settlement with the British bank Barclays. In December, UBS agreed to a record $1.5 billion settlement with European regulators, the Justice Department and the American regulator that opened the case, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Justice Department’s criminal division, which secured the guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese unit, also filed criminal charges against two former UBS traders.

Some of the world’s largest financial institutions remain caught in the cross hairs of the case. Deutsche Bank has set aside an undisclosed amount to cover potential penalties.

While foreign banks have received the brunt of the scrutiny to date, an American institution could be among the next to settle. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are under investigation.

In the $612 million Royal Bank of Scotland case, authorities levied the second-largest fine in the multiyear investigation into rate manipulation.

The fine included a $325 million penalty from the trading commission and a £87.5 million ($137 million) sanction from the Financial Services Authority, the British regulator, marking one of the largest financial penalties ever from British authorities. The Justice Department, for its part, imposed a $150 million fine as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement with R.B.S. In addition to wire fraud, the Justice Department cited the bank for its role in a “price-fixing conspiracy” that violated anti-trust laws.

R.B.S., based in Edinburgh, had aimed to avert the guilty plea for its Japanese subsidiary. But the Justice Department’s criminal division declined to back down, and the bank had little leverage to push back. If it had balked at a plea deal, the Justice Department could have moved to indict the subsidiary.

“Like with Barclays and UBS, the settlement with R.B.S. is much more than a slap on the wrist,” said Bart Chilton, a member of the trading commission who is critical of soft fines on big banks.

In the wake of the settlement, Royal Bank of Scotland is shaking up its management team as it moves to repair its bruised image. John Hourican, the firm’s investment banking chief, resigned on Wednesday, and agreed to forgo some of his past and current compensation totaling around $14.1 million. While Mr. Hourican was not implicated in the scandal, senior executives said he was taking blame for wrongdoing in his division.

“John is the right senior person to take responsibility for this,” the bank’s chairman, Philip Hampton, told reporters on Wednesday.

Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the government holds an 82 percent stake after providing a $73 billion bailout in 2008, also plans to claw back bonuses and other long-term compensation totaling $471 million to help pay for the rate-rigging penalty. The bank will will primarily use the figure to pay the fines from U.S. authorities, while penalties from the British regulator will be recycled back to the British government.

At a press conference in central London on Wednesday, Stephen Hester, the bank’s chief executive, condemned the illegal behavior of some of the firm’s employees, but acknowledged that Royal Bank of Scotland did not monitor its Libor submissions closely enough to catch the wrongdoing.

Mr. Hester, who has led the bank through a series of scandals and has been dogged by politicians’ demands for reductions in bonuses, admitted that the rate-rigging episode had placed the bank under a lot of strain.

“It is one of the most difficult moments over the entire period,” he said.

Mr. Hester, a former chief executive of the property developer British Land, has focused on paring back the bank’s operations. The C.E.O. has cut more than 30,000 job cuts since 2008, attempted to spin-off of the mergers and acquisitions unit and cut the size of its balance sheet by £600 billion since 2009. Mr. Hester also waved his $1.5 million bonus for 2011 after coming under pressure from British politicians.

In the Libor case, the wrongdoing at R.B.S. occurred on smaller scale than at other banks. The breach, authorities say, was limited to Libor submitters and traders who sought to bolster their bottom line. By comparison, top executives at Barclays knew the bank was lowballing its Libor rates to assuage concerns about its high borrowing costs.

R.B.S., which admitted that 21 of its employees altered the firm’s Libor submissions for financial gain on hundreds of occasions, either disciplined or fired most of the employees. The rest left before they were implicated. In the UBS case, the trading commission cited more than 2,000 instances of illegal acts involving dozens of employees.

Still, the government complaints against R.B.S. portray a permissive culture that allowed rate-rigging to persist for some four years.

The bank’s own records captured the scheme in striking detail, revealing how traders pressured other employees to submit certain Libor figures. Submitters and traders sat in earshot of each other on a trading desk in London, forming what authorities termed a “cozy ring.”

The bank eventually separated the employees, forcing them to communicate over e-mail and phone. A flurry of instant messages ensued, some more vulgar than others.

A trader noted in September 2009 that his requests for rates moved up and down, “like a whores drawers.” Another employee acknowledged that the Libor rate-setting process is “a cartel now.”

To get their way with employees who submitted Libor rates, traders promised “love” and affection. Others merely offered steak and sushi. One trader resorted to begging, invoking a plea of “pretty please.”

When authorities started investigating, the traders adapted. One employee noted that federal authorities “are all over us.”

The concerns prompted a more covert approach. In September 2010, after the trading commission ordered an internal investigation at R.B.S., a derivatives trader urged a colleague who requested a higher Libor rate to send “no emails anymore.”

Two months later, a Libor submitter rebuffed an instant message request to manipulate rates. But then, the submitter spoke with the trader via telephone, explaining “we’re not allowed to have those conversations” over instant message.

Their call was recorded. The employees laughed, according to a transcript, and the submitter reassured the trader that he would fulfill the request: “Leave it with me, and uh, it won’t be a problem.”

The lobbying paid off. When employees submitted bogus rates, government authorities said, Libor was altered.

Lanny Breuer, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, called the actions a “stunning abuse of trust.”

He also warned of coming actions against other big banks. “Our message is clear: no financial institution is above the law.”

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At War Blog: Remembering Chris Kyle, a Deadly American Sniper

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In the fall of 2006, my infantry platoon gathered in a dusty patrol base in Baghdad to watch our own being killed in fuzzy, pixilated video clips. An insurgent sniper named Juba was terrorizing Baghdad with precise and methodical shots at allied troops, and it was all captured on film. A soldier in a turret falls in a puff of smoke. Another soldier standing along a road is shot in the head.

“Don’t let this be you,” our platoon sergeant said, and we headed out for another patrol.

No one knew if Juba was real or a myth. He was a European mercenary or a Syrian jihadist, depending on whom you asked. For American troops, Juba was a terror, but for the insurgents, he must have been a comforting legend.

Chris Kyle, a former Navy SEAL who was killed Saturday along with another man at a gun range in Texas, was our Juba. Mr. Kyle, 38, wasn’t just a legend. He was The Legend, with four tours in Iraq, two Purple Hearts and a hand in every major battle during the conflict.

Mr. Kyle earned the title of America’s deadliest sniper, something not lost on the Iraqi insurgency. They put a bounty on his head and called him Al Shaitan Ramadi: the Devil of Ramadi. Mr. Kyle’s book, “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History,” was published last year.

Snipers have enjoyed a disproportionate amount of influence on the battlefield since colonial sharpshooters began targeting British officers in the Revolutionary War — an act regarded as ungentlemanly at the time. They have bogged down invading forces and shredded morale into ribbons. When the Soviet Union invaded Finland during the Winter War of 1939-40, the Finnish sniper Simo Hayha took on entire units by himself, racking up more than 500 confirmed kills in less than 100 days. The Soviets called him White Death. It seems that only snipers and generals earn nicknames and respect from their enemies.

A vital job of Mr. Kyle’s was to provide overwatch for American soldiers and Marines as they maneuvered during patrols and raids — an angel of sorts for coalition troops. Mr. Kyle took that idea to form Fitco Cares Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps veterans cope with post-traumatic stress disorder. Mr. Kyle often took veterans struggling with PTSD to gun ranges for a therapy of sorts, and in a tragic twist, the former Marine accused of killing Mr. Kyle was a veteran who may have been struggling with the disorder.

Mr. Kyle’s impact on troops and veterans was apparent when news of his death spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter. “In Memory of Chris Kyle, American Hero,” said one image posted to a page for war veterans on Facebook. A tribute page for him was set up within hours of his death, which posted a picture of Mr. Kyle against a black background. “Chris Kyle, 1974-2013, U.S. Navy SEAL, 160 confirmed kills. Gone,” the accompanying text says, “but not forgotten.”

Troops and veterans understand that snipers are not simply precise killers, but watchers of men, on both sides. They spot for artillery and scan for enemy movement. They disrupt enemy snipers, harass enemy troops and haunt the dreams of their generals. For that, they are pursued relentlessly.

But Mr. Kyle’s grim talent of killing the enemy was not a source of guilt for him. What did seem to bother him were the things that he couldn’t do.

“It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don’t regret it,” he told Texas Monthly last year. “My regrets are for the people I couldn’t save: Marines, soldiers, buddies.”

A profound dedication to the safety of fellow troops will always mark snipers generally, and Mr. Kyle in particular, both in and out of war. And for the battle to return home that can last decades, veterans everywhere lost a good man watching over them.

I’m willing to bet Iraqi insurgents had the same debates and fears about the Devil of Ramadi that we did about Juba. Was he even real? Could he ever be killed? For both sides, only one thing was certain: he was more than a man and a rifle.

Thanks for looking out, Chris.

Alex Horton is a public affairs specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where he writes for the department’s blog, Vantage Point. He served for 15 months as an infantryman in Iraq with the Third Stryker Brigade, Second Infantry Division. Follow him on Twitter.


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Vonn hospitalized after crash in super-G at worlds

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SCHLADMING, Austria (AP) — Lindsey Vonn crashed during the super-G Tuesday and was taken to a hospital by helicopter after apparently hurting her right knee at the world championships.


The four-time overall World Cup champion lost balance on her right leg while landing after a jump. Her ski came off immediately, and Vonn slid off course and hit a gate before coming to a halt.


She received treatment on the slope for 12 minutes before going to the hospital. Her U.S. team had no immediate information on her condition.


The crash came almost exactly one year before the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.


Vonn returned to the circuit last month after an almost monthlong break from racing to fully recover from an intestinal illness that put her in a hospital for two days in November.


Vonn trailed race winner Tina Maze of Slovenia by 0.12 seconds shortly before the crash.


The race, which was postponed for 3½ hours because of fog, resumed after another 15-minute delay. Several racers struggled with the conditions.


"It's not a very difficult course, but in some parts you couldn't see anything," Fabienne Suter of Switzerland said.


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The New Old Age Blog: In Blended Families, Responsibility Blurs

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Every year, Fran McDowell waited for the summer week when she would sing in a choral festival in the North Carolina mountains, then spend a few days in a lakeside cabin with close women friends.

That getaway grew more complicated to arrange — but perhaps more necessary — after her husband, Herb Beadle, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They had a “gloriously happy” marriage — her first, his second — for 11 years, and she was more than willing to care for him in sickness as in health. But he could no longer manage alone in their Atlanta home.

For a few years, other family members pitched in to allow Ms. McDowell her cherished vacation. Eventually, though, she had to ask her husband’s daughter, a medical professional in another state, to take him into her home for a week.

She said no, then yes. Then, the day before Ms. McDowell was to drive him there, her stepdaughter again refused, leaving no time for alternate arrangements. If this had been her biological child, “I would have said, ‘Come on, don’t do this to me,’” Ms. McDowell said. Instead, reluctant to make waves, she canceled her trip.

“I think confrontation is riskier for stepparents,” she told me. “I was the compliant one who would bite my tongue rather than say what I thought.”

Ms. McDowell never told her stepdaughter, or anyone in the family, how angry and disappointed she was, or how difficult it was becoming to care for their father, who died three years ago at 86. She told the members of her dementia caregivers support group instead.

It was that group’s leader, Moira Keller, who e-mailed me to suggest this topic. A clinical social worker with the Sixty Plus program at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, she wrote that “one of the biggest challenges I have is blended families in later life.”

Though I’ve written about the way the 1970s’ spike in divorces could complicate caregiving for adult children — more households to sustain, more siblings to either help or hinder — I hadn’t considered the impact on the older people themselves.

But Ms. Keller seems to be onto something. “The generation most likely to have stepchildren” — the boomers — “don’t need much care yet,” said Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist co-editing a coming issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family on stepfamilies in later life. “The crunch will come in 10 or 20 years.”

Initially, many adult children whose divorced or widowed parents remarry seem delighted, Ms. Keller said when we spoke. “They’re thrilled that Mom or Dad isn’t alone,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing — until somebody gets sick.”

Then, she has found, “it gets really blurry. Who’s going to do what?” Grown children don’t have much history with these new spouses; they often feel less responsibility to intervene or help out, and stepparents may be unwilling to ask. Perhaps it’s unclear whether children or new spouses have decision-making authority.

“Older couples in this situation fall through the cracks,” Ms. Keller said.

Research shows that the ties which lead adult children to become caregivers — depending on how much contact they have with parents, how nearby they live, how obligated they feel — are weaker in stepchildren, Dr. Silverstein said. Money sometimes enters the equation too, Ms. Keller added, if biological children resent a parent’s spending their presumed inheritance on care for an ailing stepparent.

Adela Betsill, another of Ms. Keller’s support group members, married her longtime partner five years ago — her second marriage, his third. She has since given up her interior design business to care for Robert who, at 72, has also developed Alzheimer’s disease. His two children have had little involvement — perhaps because she’s just 49 and presumed able to handle everything.

Thus, though Robert’s son works from an office in their home, if Ms. Betsill needed to go out and asked him to remind his father to eat lunch, “he might, or he might not,” she said. “I don’t think he realizes it’s a burden.” So she has not asked.

Would it be different if she were his biological mother and he saw her wearing out under the strain? She thinks so, but it’s hard to know. After all, biological families also experience plenty of conflict and avoidance as elders age.

Still, that sense of reciprocity we often hear from caregivers — she took care of me when I was young, so I need to help out now that she’s old — doesn’t apply in late-life stepfamilies. Ms. Betsill didn’t raise this man, or his half sister.

Older couples who marry or remarry often discuss their finances, Ms. Keller has found. (An elder attorney, Craig Reaves, discussed the legal consequences here.) But illness and dependence may prove even more difficult subjects to broach.

“If I could yell one thing from a mountaintop,” Ms. Keller said, “it’s to talk about this stuff, too. Who’s going to take care of you if you become sick? Talk about that while you’re still healthy.”

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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DealBook: $24 Billion Buyout for Dell, Biggest Since 2007

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9:32 a.m. | Updated

Dell announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to go private in a $24.4 billion deal led by its founder and the investment firm Silver Lake, in the biggest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis.

Under the terms of the deal, the buyers’ consortium, which also includes Microsoft, will pay $13.65 a share in cash. That is roughly 25 percent above where Dell’s stock traded before word emerged of the negotiations of its sale.

Michael S. Dell will contribute his stake of roughly 14 percent toward the transaction, and will contribute additional cash through his private investment firm, MSD Capital. Silver Lake is expected to contribute about $1 billion in cash, while Microsoft will loan an additional $2 billion.

Dell’s board is said to have met on Monday night to vote on the deal. In its statement, the company said Mr. Dell recused himself from any discussions about a transaction and did not vote.

As a newly private company – now more firmly under the control of Mr. Dell – the computer maker will seek to revive itself after years of decline. The takeover represents Mr. Dell’s most drastic effort yet to turn around the company he founded in a college dormitory room in 1984 and expanded into one of the world’s biggest sellers of personal computers.

But the advent of new competition, first from other PC manufacturers and then smartphones and the iPad, severely eroded Dell’s business. Such is the concern about the company’s future that Microsoft agreed to lend some of its considerable financial muscle to shore up one of its most important business partners.

“I believe this transaction will open an exciting new chapter for Dell, our customers and team members,” Mr. Dell said in a statement. “Dell has made solid progress executing this strategy over the past four years, but we recognize that it will still take more time, investment and patience, and I believe our efforts will be better supported by partnering with Silver Lake in our shared vision.”

Still, analysts have expressed concern that even a move away from the unyielding scrutiny of the public markets will not let Mr. Dell accomplish what years of previous turnaround efforts have failed to achieve.

Nevertheless, the transaction represents a watershed moment for the private equity industry, reaching heights unseen over the past five years. It is the biggest leveraged buyout since the Blackstone Group‘s $26 billion takeover of Hilton Hotels in the summer of 2007, and it is supported by more than $15 billion of debt financing raised by no fewer than four banks.

“Michael Dell is a true visionary and one of the pre-eminent leaders of the global technology industry,” Egon Durban, a managing partner at Silver Lake, said in a statement. “Silver Lake is looking forward to partnering with him, the talented management team at Dell and the investor group to innovate, invest in long-term growth initiatives and accelerate the company’s transformation strategy to become an integrated and diversified global I.T. solutions provider.”

Mr. Dell first approached the board about taking the company private in August. That prompted the board to form a special committee, with JPMorgan Chase and the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton as advisers. It was charged with considering alternatives to a management buyout, including other deals or borrowing money to pay out a special dividend.

To help ward off accusations of self-dealing by Mr. Dell, the special committee has hired an independent investment bank, Evercore Partners, specifically to oversee a 45-day “go shop” period in which the company will solicit other potential buyers.

“The special committee and its advisers conducted a disciplined and independent process intended to ensure the best outcome for shareholders,” Alex J. Mandl, the head of the Dell independent committee, said in a statement. “Importantly, the go-shop process provides a real opportunity to determine if there are alternatives superior to the present offer from Mr. Dell and Silver Lake.”

Dell itself was advised by Goldman Sachs and the law firm Hogan Lovells, while Mr. Dell retained Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz as legal counsel. Silver Lake was advised by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse, RBC Capital Markets and the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

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The Lede Blog: Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani Girl Shot by Taliban Militants, Speaks in New Videos

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Last Updated, 12:09 p.m. Speaking on camera for the first time since she survived an assassination attempt by the Pakistani Taliban last year, the young activist Malala Yousafzai began with the words, “Today you can see that I’m alive.” The 15-year-old, who was shot in the head as she left school in the Pakistan’s Swat Valley four months ago, promised that she would continue to be an outspoken advocate of the right for “every girl, every child, to be educated.”

In the brief statement, the young advocate attributed her survival to the prayers of her supporters and urged them to contribute to a fund established in her name to further the cause of education for girls. “Because of these prayers, God has given me this new life,” Ms. Yousafzai said. “And this is a second life; this is a new life. And I want to serve, I want to serve the people.”

A video statement from Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani activist who was shot in the head by Taliban militants.

According BBC News, the English-language statement was recorded before Ms. Yousafzai underwent surgery at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, over the weekend to repair damage to her skull caused by the bullet fired into her head at point-blank range in October.

On Monday, the hospital released more video of the young patient, speaking to one of her doctors after the five-hour operation to reconstruct her skull and implant a device to restore hearing to her left ear.

Video of Malala Yousafzai speaking to a doctor in Birmingham, England after an operation on Saturday.

“I’m feeling alright and I’m happy that the operations, both the operations, were successful,” she told Dr. Mav Manji, a critical care specialist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Asked about the future, she said, “My mission is the same, to help people, and I will do that.” She also expressed her gratitude to the doctors in Pakistan and Britain who cared for her. “God gave me a new life,” she said, “because of the prayers of people and because of the talent of doctors.”

As Fatima Manji of Britain’s Channel 4 News reports, the activist also recorded statements in Urdu and Pashto, languages spoken in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The video statement was produced for the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nongovernmental organization based in Washington “that identifies, trains and empowers emerging women leaders,” which will administer the new “Malala Fund,” in cooperation with the young activist and her family.

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