For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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Boeing 787 Completes Test Flight

A Boeing 787 test plane flew for more than two hours on Saturday to gather information about the problems with the batteries that led to a worldwide grounding of the new jets more than three weeks ago.

The flight was the first since the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing permission on Thursday to conduct in-flight tests. Federal investigators and the company are trying to determine what caused one of the new lithium-ion batteries to catch fire and how to fix the problems.

The plane took off from Boeing Field in Seattle heading mostly east and then looped around to the south before flying back past the airport to the west. It covered about 900 miles and landed at 2:51 p.m. Pacific time.

Marc R. Birtel, a Boeing spokesman, said the flight was conducted to monitor the performance of the plane’s batteries. He said the crew, which included 13 pilots and test personnel, said the flight was uneventful.

He said special equipment let the crew check status messages involving the batteries and their chargers, as well as data about battery temperature and voltage.

FlightAware, an aviation data provider, said the jet reached 36,000 feet. Its speed ranged from 435 to 626 miles per hour.

All 50 of the 787s delivered so far were grounded after a battery on one of the jets caught fire at a Boston airport on Jan. 7 and another made an emergency landing in Japan with smoke coming from the battery.

The new 787s are the most technically advanced commercial airplanes, and Boeing has a lot riding on their success. Half of the planes’ structural parts are made of lightweight carbon composites to save fuel.

Boeing also decided to switch from conventional nickel cadmium batteries to the lighter lithium-ion ones. But they are more volatile, and federal investigators said Thursday that Boeing had underestimated the risks.

The F.A.A. has set strict operating conditions on the test flights. The flights are expected to resume early this week, Mr. Birtel said.

Battery experts have said it could take weeks for Boeing to fix the problems.

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Dutch Put Electric Cars to the Test

AMSTERDAM — When Patrick Langevoort’s company issued him an electric vehicle two years ago, the first months were filled with misadventure: he found himself far from Amsterdam, with only a 25 percent charge remaining, unable to find the charging point listed on a map. Though the car was supposed to travel 100 miles on a full battery, he discovered that cold weather and fast driving decreased that range.

But electric vehicles have improved, the network of charging stations in the Netherlands has expanded and drivers like Mr. Langevoort are getting used to the particularities of electric driving. “I used to be a real petrol head,” said Mr. Langevoort, who works for a company that manages electricity networks. “Now, I’ve sold my petrol car.”

Although a number of European countries and a few American states are aggressively promoting the use of electric vehicles to reduce planet-warming emissions and pollution, the Netherlands provides perhaps the ultimate feasibility test. If electric vehicles catch on anywhere, it should be here: a small country — about 100 miles east to west — with gas prices of about $8.50 a gallon and a long tradition of environmental activism.

To encourage electric driving, the country is developing a rapidly expanding national grid of charging stations in cities and along highways; and Amsterdam offers owners of electric vehicles free street parking and charging. With hefty tax breaks, promotional leases and cheaper operating costs, the vehicles offer driving costs no more than those of conventional cars, some analysts say.

The number of plug-in electric vehicles in the Netherlands soared eightfold to about 7,500 last year, and charging posts dot the sidewalks. “In a few countries you’re starting to see a number of E.V.’s on the road, especially in capital cities; they’re very visible,” said Peder Jensen, a transportation expert at the European Environment Agency.

And yet, experiments with the cars in the Netherlands and Denmark also underscore the challenges facing this new technology. Sales have been lower than politicians and automakers hoped, representing under 1 percent of new vehicles, even here. “It seems that the industry has not convinced consumers that they can do this,” Mr. Jensen said. “If they fail over the next few years, I think investors will pull out, and that will be a problem.”

Last year 120,000 plug-in electric vehicles were sold globally, according to a recent report by Pike Research, an industry analyst group, which predicts 40 percent annual growth between now and 2020. In 2012, 52,000 were sold in the United States, which now has 12,000 charging stations, according to the automotive consulting firm J. D. Power; but they are dispersed over a large area. Those statistics include pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids, which can run on gas or propane once the battery loses power.

Though many analysts had assigned electric vehicles to the second-car niche, a 2012 survey of Dutch drivers of the cars by the consulting firm Accenture found that most of them ended up being used as a family’s primary vehicle.

Drivers learned to figure out how far they could drive on a charge, overcoming what has been dubbed “range anxiety.” They started off cautiously driving straight from home to the office, knowing they could charge at one or both sites. Over time, they expanded their driving repertoire, learning where to find charging points in garages and along highways — a smartphone app contains them all — much as people learn the locations of convenient A.T.M.’s. That task was made easier by the growing number of chain stores and restaurants offering parking spots with charging outlets, so that customers can refuel while they dine or shop.

Still, a layer of complexity limits acceptance. “There’s still some planning; it’s a bit like a puzzle,” said Maarten Noom, an Accenture consultant who drives an electric vehicle. “It’s not the same ease of mind as with a gas car.”

Mr. Noom, for example, charges at his office and overnight at home, but he switches to a gasoline car when his appointments are scattered around the Netherlands, since he sometimes drives hundreds of miles in a day. Charging at home uses low voltage and takes four to eight hours. New high-voltage rapid charging stations give an 80 percent charge in 20 to 30 minutes, but they are costly to install and still rare.

Mr. Langevoort, the electricity company manager, says he now leaves for work later because his Opel Ampera’s charge goes further as the day warms.

Some electric car leasing programs here provide free or discounted gas vehicles for those who want to take a weeklong driving vacation around Europe.

Many experts say the lack of a uniform business model in the fledgling market is also a hindrance. Contracts for charging are sometimes purchased along with the car and tied to a particular charging network, much as cellphones are linked to a certain carrier. What is more, the penetration of the various networks varies depending on the region, and technology is not always interchangeable.

In Europe, the charging network run by New Motion delivers electricity from pumplike devices. One rival, Better Place, offers swap stations where drivers get a fresh battery in addition to charging points. In the United States, SAE International, an organization of scientists and vehicle engineers, recently adopted a standard charging plug nationwide so that most electric vehicles can use any charging station. But some companies, like Tesla Motors, operate closed networks of high-performance “superchargers.”

“That type of uncertainty is also unsettling to customers,” said Mike Omotoso, a senior manager of forecasting at LMC Automotive, a market research firm. “There’s a Wild West feel, with a lot of companies jumping in. But ultimately there will be a shakeout and consolidation.”

In many European countries there is a good financial case for driving electric. In Denmark, taxes on new luxury cars can be 200 percent of the sticker price, whereas electric vehicles come tax-free. In the Netherlands, gas costs about five times as much as the electricity needed for a similar journey.

While there are some tax breaks for electric vehicle purchases in the United States, the Obama administration has relied more on exhortation to make electric vehicles “as affordable and convenient as gasoline-powered cars in the next 10 years.” Last month, the Energy Department announced its Workplace Charging Challenge, in which Google, Verizon, Eli Lilly, Nissan and other companies pledged to put charging infrastructure in at least one major office.

Mr. Jensen, of the European Environment Agency, said that a big infusion of money could be needed to improve infrastructure in those countries seeking to increase the use of electric vehicles.

When he looked into buying an electric car, the charging system would not fit in his garage, Mr. Jensen said, and few are willing to drive around Europe with a trunk full of adapters. “I think the companies who will win are not necessarily the ones that have the best technology, but the ones that form the best alliances,” he said. “It you have a mobile phone — and even more a car — the most important thing is that you can use it wherever you go.”

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Northeast storm disrupts travel for sports teams

Several professional and college sports teams were forced to rearrange their travel plans as a massive storm swept through the Northeast, dumping a few feet of snow in some areas.

The NBA's New York Knicks were stuck in Minnesota after playing the Timberwolves on Friday night, hoping to try to fly home sometime Saturday. The San Antonio Spurs were also staying overnight in Detroit after seeing their 11-game winning streak fall to the Pistons, awaiting word on when they might be able to fly to New York for their game Sunday night at Brooklyn.

"We can't get there tonight — we know that," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. "So we're going to stay here tonight and try to get there (Saturday). Hopefully, we will be able to get there, but at this point, we don't know."

Airlines canceled more than 5,300 flights through Saturday, and New York City's three major airports and Boston's Logan Airport closed.

The Brooklyn Nets planned to take a train home instead of flying from Washington D.C. after losing to the Wizards on Friday night.

Knicks coach Mike Woodson said before a 100-94 victory that his team initially planned to fly home after the game, but the flight had already been postponed. New York is scheduled to play the Los Angeles Clippers at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

The NHL's Boston Bruins pushed back the start of Saturday's game against the Tampa Bay Lightning by six hours because of the blizzard. The game originally slated for 1 p.m. was rescheduled for 7 p.m., but Boston was expected to be one of the cities hit hardest by the storm.

The storm had dumped more than 2 feet of snow on New England by early Saturday and knocked out power to 650,000 customers. The National Weather Service said up to 3 feet of snow is expected in Boston, threatening the city's 2003 record of 27.6 inches.

The Bruins and Lightning each already had road games scheduled for Sunday night.

The New Jersey Devils were still scheduled to host the Pittsburgh Penguins at 1 p.m., while the New York Islanders were slated to play at home against the Buffalo Sabres at 7 p.m.

Two Ivy League men's college basketball games that were scheduled for Saturday night were moved back to Sunday because of treacherous travel conditions.

Dartmouth will play at Cornell at noon on Sunday in Ithaca, N.Y., and Harvard will visit Columbia at 2 p.m. Sunday in New York. Dartmouth played at Columbia on Friday night, and Harvard played at Cornell. Two other Ivy League games were still scheduled to be played Saturday night, with Yale visiting Princeton and Brown playing at Pennsylvania.

Aqueduct also called off Saturday's card because of the storm. The track and Belmont Park were expected to remain open for wagering on out-of-town races, with racing scheduled to resume Sunday.

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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U.S. Use of Mexican Battery Recyclers Is Faulted

United States companies are sending spent lead batteries to recycling plants in Mexico that do not meet American environmental standards, according to an environmental agency created under the North American Free Trade Agreement, putting Mexican communities at risk.

In a blistering report submitted this week, the agency, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, notes that the United States does not fully follow procedures common among developed nations that treat international battery shipments as hazardous waste. It faults environmental agencies on both sides of the border for lapses in regulation and enforcement. Cross-border trade in lead batteries increased by up to 525 percent from 2004 to 2011, the report said.

The report, which has been circulating in draft form, has been forwarded to the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico, which have 60 days to object to its publication. An estimated 20 percent of lead acid batteries from the United States now go to Mexico for recycling, according to trade statistics.

“There needs to be better coordination between government agencies and better cross-border tracking,” said Evan Lloyd, who was the agency’s executive director until late last year and oversaw the yearlong study.

The report highlighted a number of shortcomings: Customs data on the number of batteries crossing the border did not mesh with counts by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Though the E.P.A. requires notice of batteries leaving the United States, there was no effort to make sure that they had arrived at qualified recyclers in Mexico. The data that battery companies sent to the E.P.A. about exports consisted of “piles of paper,” Mr. Lloyd said, and it was never amassed into an electronic database that would be “useful to regulators.”

Almost all lead acid batteries used in the United States are recycled to extract the lead for reuse because lead is a dangerous pollutant and because it is a valuable commodity. Lead batteries are used in vehicles, cellphone towers and wind turbines.

Since 2008, new United States limits on lead pollution have made domestic recycling complicated and costly. That has helped propel the recycling trade to Mexico, both legally and illegally, environmental groups say, because that country has less stringent limits for lead pollution, and far less vigorous enforcement.

“There’s a pretty consistent pattern suggesting that exports are the direct result of U.S. emissions standards,” said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International, which has led the campaign against lead poisoning internationally. Mr. Gottesfeld noted that a Mexican plant owned by a major American recycler, Johnson Controls Inc., puts out more than 30 times as much lead emissions as its newest plant in the United States.

“What Mexico needs to do is to get its recycling up to U.S. standards, and the U.S. needs to do a much better job of tracking batteries overseas,” he said. In an e-mail, Johnson Controls, based in Milwaukee, said it was “modernizing and reinvesting” in the Mexican facility, acquired in 2005, “to reduce its environmental footprint.”

The report was initiated in response to a report by Occupational Knowledge International and Fronteras Comunes, a Mexican environmental group, as well as to an investigative article in The New York Times, Mr. Lloyd said. Soil collected by The Times in a school playground near a recycling plant outside Mexico City was found to have lead levels five times those allowed in the United States.

Lead poisoning causes high blood pressure, kidney damage and abdominal pain in adults, and serious developmental delays and behavioral problems in young children. When batteries are broken for recycling, the lead is released as dust and, during melting, as lead-laced emissions.

In the United States, recyclers operate in highly mechanized, tightly sealed plants, with smokestack scrubbers and extensive monitors to detect lead release. Plants in Mexico vary greatly in safety standards, and in some, the recycling process is little more than men with hammers smashing batteries and melting down their contents in furnaces.

In recent months, there have been new efforts to curb the flow of batteries south of the border, though many battery makers have fought that. In response to a draft of the report released late last year, Battery Council International, an industry group, said it opposed “the creation of additional burdensome certification programs.”

Last year, the United States General Services Administration, which is responsible for federal vehicles, asked ASTM International, an independent standards agency, to explore a voluntary standard for battery recycling.

But that effort came to naught after the proposal was voted down at an open meeting attended by representatives from industry, government and environmental groups in December. Of the 103 people at the meeting, 49 worked for Johnson Controls.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 9, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of an American recycler cited by Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International, as the owner of a Mexican plant that puts out more than 30 times as much lead emissions as the company’s newest plant in the United States. The American recycling company is Johnson Controls Inc., not Johnson Controls International.

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IHT Rendezvous: 'Downton Abbey' vs. 'Girls': Who's Happier?

BROOKLYN — Can we have too much freedom?

Page Two

Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

That’s the question behind my latest Currents column, where I discuss what “Downton Abbey” and “Girls,” two wildly popular television shows set 100 years apart, have to tell us about ourselves and our society — especially when it comes to personal freedom and its consequences.

What begins on ‘‘Downton’’ as a new liberty to follow your heart, to dare love that others find unwise, has culminated in ‘‘Girls’’ in romantic pursuits that are dully mercenary and often unwise. The daughters of the sexual revolution are depicted without much agency: far from being conquerors, initiators, even equals, the girls of ‘‘Girls’’ are reactors, giving in to an ex who changes his mind, or a gay man wanting to try something, or a financier seeking a threesome that he manages to upgrade to (traditionally twosome) marriage.

I discussed the dangers of today’s freedoms with Rendezvous’s editor, Marcus Mabry, in this video, here and below. (I also argue that today’s India is “Downton.”)

Do you agree with my analysis of the drawbacks of what we call Western-style freedom? Is there a happy medium between the strictures of “Downton Abbey” and the ceaseless longing of “Girls”? In the video, I suggest Latin America is a modern society that, in places, has found the balance between personal freedoms and a collective sense of belonging. What society or country or group would you nominee?

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Illini buzzer-beater upsets No. 1 Hoosiers, 74-72

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — At this rate, no one will want to be No. 1.

Indiana became the fifth straight top-ranked men's college basketball team to lose, falling to unranked Illinois 74-72 on a buzzer-beater by Tyler Griffey on Thursday night.

The senior forward took an inbounds pass with 0.9 seconds to play and made a wide-open layup. And, just like that, the Hoosiers — who moved into the top spot by beating then-No. 1 Michigan just a few days ago — went down.

Indiana coach Tom Crean, whose team has been No. 1 for a total of seven weeks this season after opening there, doesn't know why the top spot is suddenly so hard to hang on to.

"I can't answer that. I'm not sure," Crean said. "I just know that these games are 40-minute games. We played at a high level for most of the game."

The Hoosiers (20-3, 8-2 Big Ten) were in charge until the final 3 1/2 minutes when the Illini (16-8, 3-7 Big Ten) finally put together a run to take and then retake the lead.

"I know this: When we turn the ball over, we're not very good," Crean said. "And the biggest difference tonight was 28 points off turnovers to our 16."

Hoosiers guard Jordan Hulls said flatly that the top rank had nothing to do with Thursday's loss, even for a team that some worried might be looking past unranked, slumping Illinois to a meeting Sunday with No. 10 Ohio State.

"We just didn't execute when we needed to," he said.

If Indiana falls from No. 1 on Monday, No. 2 Florida might not be a candidate to replace the Hoosiers after the Gators' loss this week to Arkansas. That could put No. 3 Michigan back on top if they can make it to Monday without a loss.

For the Hoosiers, nothing could have been worse than the way Thursday's game ended.

With 0.9 seconds, Griffey left defenders Cody Zeller and Christian Watford behind on an inbounds play from the baseline, took the pass from Brandon Paul and delivered the uncontested buzzer-beater.

The shot sent hundreds of students onto the court, though they waited as officials checked the replay to make sure the clock hadn't beaten Griffey. Once the basket was upheld, Paul and fellow guard D.J. Richardson hugged and teared up in relief.

Illinois had endured an awful run since starting 12-0. The Illini had since lost eight of 11 and fallen to 10th in the 12-team Big Ten.

Griffey, who had struggled as bad as any Illini player, seemed surprised at how easily the winning shot came.

"I just made a simple curl cut and left two guys behind me, and Brandon got off a heck of a pass," he said. "Zeller and Watford were both right in front of me and just kind of stayed there."

Crean said the play was a lot like the other breakdowns in the Hoosiers' game that let Illinois climb back from a 12-point halftime deficit.

"We didn't communicate," he said.

Indiana's loss drops them into a three-way tie for first in the Big Ten with Michigan and Michigan State. The win moves the Illini up into a ninth-place tie with Iowa but, more importantly, provides a potential lifeline ahead of a meeting Sunday at No. 18 Minnesota.

"It was good to get back to having that toughness and togetherness and trust that we needed," Illinois coach John Groce said.

Illinois also added a plank to what may be one of the oddest resumes of any team in the country trying to make the NCAA tournament. Illinois has lost to Purdue, Northwestern and twice to Wisconsin. But coming into Thursday night, the Illini had already beaten three teams now in the top 15: No. 6 Gonzaga, No. 10 Ohio State and No. 14 Butler.

Before Thursday, Illinois hadn't beaten a No. 1 team since a win over Wake Forest in 2004.

Richardson had 23 points for Illinois, Paul had 21 and Griffey finished with 14 points and eight rebounds.

Zeller led Indiana with 14 points, while Will Sheehey had 13, Watford 12 and Hulls 11.

Indiana shot 50 percent from the field (25 of 50), 52.9 percent from 3-point range (9 of 17) and 93 percent from the free throw line (13 of 14). The Hoosiers led by an eight- to 10-point margin for most of the second half.

When 6-foot-11 Nnanna Egwu fouled out with just under 5 minutes to play, Indiana appeared in control. Watford made both free throws and, at 69-59, the Illini looked done.

But Richardson went on a one-man run, first burying back-to-back 3-pointers and then hitting a midrange jumper on the run to tie it at 70 with 1:17 to play.

With the clock under 30 seconds and the game tied at 72, Indiana had the ball for what would have been a last shot but Victor Oladipo coughed up the ball. Richardson picked it up and tried a breakaway layup that Oladipo just swatted out of bounds to set up the final play.

Groce credited Richardson for providing a spark.

"I thought he was absolutely terrific on both ends of the floor," Groce said. "He battled, he fought."

Griffey was benched several weeks ago after a blowout loss at Wisconsin. On a team that had lost its shooting touch, the senior forward had especially struggled. And, though one of Illinois' bigger players at 6-9, he wasn't adding much to the inside presence the Illini desperately needed.

Groce said that, even after he benched Griffey, he never gave up on him.

"I just have told him numerous times here I believe in him," the first-year Illinois coach said. "I do."

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The New Old Age: The Executor's Assistant

I’m serving as executor for my father’s estate, a role few of us are prepared for until we’re playing it, so I was grateful when the mail brought “The American Bar Association Guide to Wills and Estates” — the fourth edition of a handbook the A.B.A. began publishing in 1995.

This is a legal universe, I’m learning, in which every step — even with a small, simple estate that owes no taxes and includes no real estate or trusts — turns out to be at least 30 percent more complicated than expected.

If my dad had been wealthy or owned a business, or if we faced a challenge to his will, I would have turned the whole matter over to an estate lawyer by now. But even then, it would be helpful to know what the lawyer was talking about. The A.B.A. guide would help.

Written with surprising clarity (hey, they’re lawyers), it maps out all kinds of questions and decisions to consider and explains the many ways to leave property to one’s heirs. Updated from the third edition in 2009, the guide not only talks taxes and trusts, but also offers counsel for same-sex couples and unconventional families.

If you want to permit your second husband to live in the family home until he dies, but then guarantee that the house reverts to the children of your first marriage, the guide tells you how a “life estate” works. It explains what is taxable and what isn’t, and discusses how to choose executors and trustees. It lists lots of resources and concludes with an estate-planning checklist.

In general, the A.B.A. intends its guide for the person trying to put his or her affairs in order, more than for family members trying to figure out how to proceed after someone has died. But many of us will play both these parts at some point (and if you are already an executor, or have been, please tell us how that has gone, and mention your state). We’ll need this information.

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

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Postal Service Posts Loss of $1.3 Billion in First Quarter

WASHINGTON — Holiday shipping and the 2012 election helped the Postal Service stems its losses, but the agency’s financial woes continued in the first quarter, which ended Dec 31.

The Postal Service posted a $1.3 billion loss in the first quarter, compared with a $3.1 billion loss over the same period last year. The agency said the first quarter has traditionally been one of its strongest periods.

Total mail volume continued to decline, however. Mail volume was 43.5 billion pieces for the quarter, down from 43.6 billion in earlier year, according to agency officials.

Revenue from first-class mail, which provides the bulk of the revenue for the Postal Service, declined $237 million, or 3.1 percent, from the same period last year, with a decrease in volume of 834 million pieces, or 4.5 percent. Revenue from advertising mail increased $141 million, or 3.1 percent, in the first quarter compared with the same period last year on a volume increase of 783 million pieces, or 3.6 percent. The increase is largely attributable to official election mail and political campaign advertising related to the presidential and Congressional elections mailed during the quarter, which began Oct. 31.

The agency’s shipping and packaging business increased by $154 million, or 4.7 percent, over 2012 first-quarter results, fueled by the growth of online shopping and the continuing success of Postal Service marketing campaigns to promote shipping services.

The agency also said that it cut its operating costs to $18.9 billion from $20.9 billion over the same period last year, a decrease of 9.8 percent. The agency attributed the savings to a number of cost-cutting measures it has undertaken, including staff reductions and the consolidation of some of its mail processing centers.

But postal officials said the agency’s actions alone are not enough.

“The encouraging results from our holiday mailing season cannot sustain us as we move deeper into the current fiscal year and face continuing financial challenges,” said Patrick R. Donahoe, the postmaster general. “We urgently need Congress to do its part and pass legislation that allows us to better manage our costs and gives us the commercial flexibility needed to operate more like a business does. This will help ensure the future success of the Postal Service and the mailing industry it supports.”

The agency announced earlier this week that it would seek to move to a new delivery schedule beginning the week of Aug. 5. The post office would stop delivering or picking up mail on Saturdays, ending a practice that goes back to the 1890s. Packages would continue to be delivered Monday through Saturday. The Postal Service said the change would result in an annual cost savings of approximately $2 billion if the new delivery plan is fully implemented.

Members of Congress, postal unions and some businesses strongly oppose the move. But Mr. Donahoe said the Postal Service's dire financial situation calls for drastic measures.

Current projections show the Postal Service will have less than five days of operating cash reserves by the end of the 2013 fiscal year, which the post office said would leave it unable to react to possible economic downturns or other issues.

The Postal Service wants Congress to remove a 2006 requirement that it pay nearly $5.5 billion a year for health benefits to future retirees, a mandate imposed on no other government agency, that officials have said has crippled the post office. The agency defaulted on two payments last year for the first time and said it would not be able to pay them this year. The agency also wants to be able to enter into new areas, like shipping beer and wine through the mail, which is currently prohibited.

Last April, the Senate passed a bill that would have allowed the Postal Service to ship beer and wine, reduced its work force, and allowed the agency to recoup more than $11 billion it overpaid into an employee pension fund. The Senate refused to stop Saturday deliveries. The House has taken no action on its own postal overhaul.

“Our liquidity concerns can only be fully resolved if Congress takes action to address our unsustainable business model, including resolving the overly aggressive payment schedule to prefund retiree health benefits,” said Joseph Corbett, the agency’s chief financial officer. “The Postal Service will continue to prioritize payments to our employees and suppliers ahead of those to the federal government to ensure that we maintain high-quality customer service.”

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