Scandal-Scarred BBC Names Opera Chief as Leader

LONDON — The British Broadcasting Corporation sought to overcome its worst crisis in years on Thursday by appointing a former BBC news executive who went on to head the Royal Opera House as its new director general, urging him to rebuild public trust shredded by a scandal over botched reporting of sexual abuse.

The appointee, Tony Hall, 61, will replace George Entwistle who resigned earlier this month and became the most prominent casualty of the affair.

When Lord Hall takes over in March, the BBC said, his principal task will be to restore faith and confidence in the integrity of an organization that is not only a national institution and Britain’s public broadcaster, but also a sprawling bureaucracy financed by a compulsory license fee levied on most television-set owners.

Chris Patten, head of the supervisory BBC Trust which made the appointment, said Lord Hall, a former head of news at the BBC during a 28-year career before he joined the opera 11 years ago, was “the right person to lead the BBC out of its current crisis.”

His experience in journalism would be “invaluable as the BBC looks to rebuild its reputation,” Lord Patten said. According to British news report, Lord Hall was the only candidate the BBC Trust approached about the job.

The appointment won enthusiastic approval from a wide spectrum of politicians, media commentators and current and former BBC staff members. Many noted that Lord Hall had a record of innovation that included overseeing the launch of the BBC Web site, the broadcaster’s 24-hour news channel, and Radio 5 Live, a widely popular, news-and-sport  radio channel.

They pointed, too, to his record for turning around the fortunes of another prized British institution, the Royal Opera House, where he assumed control at a time of artistic and financial disarray and succeeded in stabilizing — as well as popularizing — what has long been seen as one of the world’s top opera houses.

Steve Hewlett, a former editor of “Panorama,” one of the BBC’s leading investigative programs, said Lord Hall had a reputation among BBC program-makers as “straightforward, honest, a man with no side to him” and “no pushover” in handling contentious issues.

“I think he brings to the BBC what is desperately needed, weight,” he said.

Ben Bradshaw, a former culture minister who was previously a BBC reporter, described Lord Hall as “a very good, calm operator,” “a good motivator” and decisive in stressful situations. “He’s a very safe pair of hands, and very decent, fair-minded individual,” Mr. Bradshaw said.

Lord Hall’s predecessor, Mr. Entwistle, resigned on Nov. 10 after disclosures that a flagship BBC current affairs program, “Newsnight,” had wrongly implicated a former Conservative politician in accusations of sexual abuse at a children’s home in North Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.

The error compounded earlier disclosures that the same program had canceled an investigation a year ago into accusations of sexual abuse of minors by the television host Jimmy Savile at a time when other departments at the corporation were planning Christmas tributes to Mr. Savile, who died in October 2011 at age 84.

Mr. Entwistle had been in office at the BBC for less than two months when he quit. He took over from Mark Thompson who became president and chief executive of The New York Times Company on Nov. 12.

In a statement to the BBC staff, Lord Patten said: “The past eight weeks have been very traumatic for the BBC.”

He added: “The key challenge will be re-establishing our reputation with the public.”

The scandals at “Newsnight” pushed the BBC to begin a series of internal inquiries about its culture and practices in the decades of suspected abuse by Mr. Savile and into its specific reasons for canceling the investigation into Mr. Savile last year.

Lord Patten said: “While there are still very serious questions to be answered by the ongoing inquiries, it is in the interests of license fee-payers that the BBC now starts to refocus on its main purpose — making great programs that audiences love and trust.”

John F. Burns reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

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Three anarchists get prison terms in Ohio bridge bomb plot

Three men who pleaded guilty to participating in a failed plot to bomb an Ohio bridge in April were sentenced Tuesday to federal prison.

The case involved a paid confidential informant who provided a dummy bomb and other help to the men as FBI agents listened in on their plans. The plot culminated with a failed detonation attempt on a bridge in Cuyahoga Valley National Park on the eve of leftist May Day protests in Chicago and elsewhere.

In the antigovernment plot outlined by prosecutors, the men had participated in the Occupy movement, but channeled their political frustration into planned violence.

Douglas L. Wright, 27, of Indianapolis, a drifter considered by prosecutors to be the ringleader -- and considered by others as troubled -- was sentenced to 11 1/2 years in federal prison after previously pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, and malicious use of an explosive device to destroy property used in interstate commerce.

Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of Lakewood, Ohio, an alcohol and drug addict who friends defended as compassionate, was sentenced to nine years and nine months. Connor C. Stevens, 20, of Berea, Ohio, a poet who drifted between varying nooks of anarchist ideology before getting involved in the plot, was sentenced to eight years and one month.

All three apologized in court but will appeal sentences that were lengthened by a terrorism enhancement, according to the Associated Press. Once out of prison, they will remain on probation for life.

The case rankled leftists, who worried about law enforcement trying to entrap Occupy Wall Street protesters in phony terrorist plots.

Defense lawyers objected to what they called an overly aggressive confidential informant with a history of check fraud, arguing that the informant had pushed their clients into attempting a bomb plot they never would have tried on their own.

Prosecutors countered that the defendants had chosen the bridge as a target after months-long deliberation over anti-corporate and antigovernment targets. The government lawyers produced wiretap recordings of the defendants considering targets that would produce extensive property damage, occasionally hoping to minimize human loss, occasionally accepting potential deaths as OK.

According to the prosecution, after placing the bomb at the base of the bridge, Baxter asked, “How are we going to make sure there’s no cars on the bridge when it happens?”

“We can’t,” Wright said.

Baxter replied, “OK.”

The men then tried to blow up the bridge remotely from a nearby Applebee's. The bomb was a fake, so it never detonated.

"In a calculated fashion, these three defendants identified a viable target, purchased what they believed to be military-grade explosives, and attached those explosives to that target,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said in a statement. “Not until they were safely miles away enjoying a meal did they casually attempt to remotely detonate the device, believing they were causing significant damage to the bridge, all in the hopes of furthering their ideological views."

Another defendant, Anthony Hayne, 35, had previously pleaded guilty to the plot in exchange for his testimony against his cohorts, and is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday. The fifth defendant, Joshua Stafford, 23, of Cleveland, was being evaluated to see whether he was mentally fit enough to stand trial.

matt.pearce@latimes.com

Twitter: @mattdpearce

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3-D Printing Branches Out With New Wood-Based Filament

Printed plastics? So 2011. And high-end printers have been working with metals and ceramics for some time. But now the 3-D printing community is toying with a material more natural in origin: printed wood.

The new concept has a mysterious start. A Thingiverse member going by the nom de printer ”Kaipa” recently uploaded pictures of 3D-printed parts that weren’t made of extruded plastic, but a wood/plastic mixture he created on his own. The maker wouldn’t share the process for making the material, or even what the ingredients were, but he did offer to send sample spools of his experimental filament to interested hackers.

Forward-thinking French fabricator Jeremie Francois took Kaipa up on the offer and put the filament, called Laywood-D3 through its paces. He found that the material had interesting properties. On his blog he reported that “It actually looks like something between cardboard and a springy MDF. The printed object also really can be painted, much more than with PLA or ABS.”

And then Francois took it a step further. He noted that as the temperature of the extrusion nozzle changed, the color of the wood changed with it. Lower temperatures meant lighter, piney colors; higher temperatures led to darker hues. And the variable temperatures introduced an uneven “grain,” further enhancing the natural appearance.

Keen to keep the crowdsourced innovation going, Francois developed software to allow makers to experiment with the material and its variable temperature performance more easily.

The only problem with this material is that Kaipa can’t seem to make enough.

The one website that carries it is perpetually out of stock, while the only other option is to buy small batches through Germany’s eBay. With no open source sharing, it’s impossible for others in the fledgling community to continue helping its development. Some have expressed interest in trying to re-create the product’s formulation, including Brentwood, California, high school student Logan Dorsey, who has started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise research funds, but that comes with no guarantees.

3-D printing wood might not rival traditional production methods in terms of cost or quality, but it stands alone for its unique aesthetic. And in a world where 3-D printers are printing coral and fixing eagle beaks, it might be just the tool a sustainability-minded engineer needs.

All photos: Jeremie Francois

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The New Old Age Blog: Patience, Consciousness and White Lies

My wife and I are blessed with having three “semi-independent” parents in their mid-80s living within a few blocks of us. Our children grew up knowing their grandparents as integral parts of our nuclear family, within walking distance for most of their childhoods. But now that our nest is empty, we find ourselves reliving many of the parenting issues we faced when our children were little — now in geriatric versions, at close range. As it turns out, parenting was good practice for the issues we face with our own parents.

What exactly does semi-independence mean as applied to elderly parents? Among our three, we have two canes, five walkers, one wheelchair (for long walks), four artificial joints, a pacemaker, four hearing aides and a knee brace. The list of medical conditions is long, and the list of medications even longer, requiring different color pill box organizers for morning, afternoon and evening.

Our parents all live in the same homes they have been in for many years. Keeping them safe and healthy there, as well as when they leave the house, has become a big part of our day-to-day work these days. Therein the yin and yang of parenting has returned — independence versus helicoptering.

Children’s yearning for independence begins in toddlerhood: “I can do it myself!” It escalates through childhood, accelerates with the driver’s license, and crescendos, with pomp and circumstance, at high school graduation.

The urge for independence is seen in all animal species, but relinquishing independence and accepting assistance in old age is unique to humans. For most elderly, it comes with a struggle, reflecting how hardwired our brains are for independence. The thought of getting in-home help is antithetical to our parents’ sense of self worth, exceeded only by the dread of leaving their homes for assisted living facilities. So, as tasks that were once mundane and automatic have become onerous and stressful for them, we attempt to foster autonomy while protecting them from harm, as we did with our children just a few short years ago.

Childproofing – Our home has again become hazardous, as have theirs. Furniture must be rearranged, booster seats placed on chairs to ease standing up, slippery rugs removed, lighting improved, bathrooms accessorized with handles and rails.

Dressing – Body shapes change in childhood and in old age. Our parents’ wardrobes, like those of our children’s before them, need frequent attention to preserve self-esteem. Their unwillingness to part with old clothes turns us into tailors. And, once again, we shop for slip-on sneakers with Velcro ties.

Driving – For our teens, driving was the symbolic liberation from childhood to young adulthood. For our parents, driving is the symbolic resistance to infirmity and old age. Our attempt to wean them from their cars, in precisely the reverse order we used to phase our teens into driving, has been torture for our parents and for us.

Toys – We have filled our parents’ shelves with new toys to help them with everything from opening cartons of milk (I would like a word with whoever designed those plastic pull loops) and zipping their clothes, to opening jars and removing the protective seals from over-the-counter medicines. A “picker-upper” device helps them avoid bending too low, and a key turner gives them leverage to open their door. Large digital clock faces, easy-to-read telephone keypads, and magnifying glasses keep them in touch with the world, and an e-mail printer keeps them in touch with their grandchildren.

Medicating – Filling those plastic pill box organizers with a week’s worth of medicines has become a personal barometer of competence for our parents, yet, as with our children when they were young, we feel compelled to oversee the dosing.

Mobility – Despite numerous falls, it was only with much teeth gnashing (or denture gnashing, as the case may be) that our mothers consented to use canes; more gnashing when canes gave way to walkers. For long walks, we hide the wheelchair half way there and back so the neighbors don’t see.

The more we do for our parents, the more frail and guilty they feel. Our efforts are sometimes resented. Helping them get in and out of the car, or bracing them under the arm as they negotiate a bumpy sidewalk, can be an affront. “I can do it myself!”

Can I ride my bike to tennis practice if I’m really careful crossing Holly Street? Why can’t I take a cab home from the seniors program at the community center? Can I walk to grandma’s by myself this time? Can I take the bus to the supermarket today? Everyone is hanging out at the park after school, can I go? I’ll just walk down the block to the neighbor’s house this afternoon, O.K.?

What wisdom did we gain the first time around to help us now? Patience, consciousness and white lies.

Patience to wait for them to come to the same conclusions we did. Mom, do you think Rosalind would have fallen and broken both wrists if she had been using a walker?

Consciousness about their need for independence as ballast to our need for their well-being. Why don’t you just let us drive you at night for now?

And white lies: I’m going to the supermarket anyway, we can shop together.

The longer we can protect our parents from harm, the more we can share our lives with them and the more joy they can have from their grandchildren. The trick is doing it without hurting them in other ways.

We have been through this before. It was worth it then, and it is worth it now.

Dr. Harley A. Rotbart is professor and vice chairman of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the author of “No Regrets Parenting.”

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Blue Laws Curb Consumerism Where Pilgrims Gave Thanks

Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times

The annual Thanksgiving celebration in Plymouth, Mass., is held the weekend before the holiday, so as not to interfere.

PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Here in the birthplace of Thanksgiving, where the Pilgrims first gave thanks in 1621 for their harvest and their survival, some residents are giving thanks this year for something else: the Colonial-era blue laws that prevent retailers from opening their doors on the fourth Thursday of November.

Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times

Participants in Saturday's town parade.

While shoppers in the rest of the country will skip out on Thanksgiving to go to Walmart or Kmart or other big-box stores, William Wrestling Brewster, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower and participated in that first Thanksgiving, will limit his activities to enjoying a traditional meal here with his extended family at his parents’ house.

“Thanksgiving is supposed to be about giving thanks for all you have,” said Mr. Brewster, 47, who runs a computer repair business. “I cringe to think what society is doing to itself,” he said of the mercantile mania that threatens one of the least commercial holidays.

Some of the nation’s biggest retailers — Sears, Target and Toys “R” Us among them — announced this month that they would be moving up their predawn Black Friday door-buster sales to Thanksgiving Day or moving up their existing Thanksgiving sales even earlier on Thursday. Walmart, which has already been open on Thanksgiving for many years, is advancing its bargain specials to 8 p.m. Thursday from 10 p.m.

But in Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the stores will sit dark until the wee hours of Friday. Even Walmart will not open in Maine until just after midnight Friday or in Massachusetts or Rhode Island until 1 a.m.

New England’s blue laws were put down by early settlers to enforce proper behavior on Sundays. (The origin of the term is unclear. Some have said the laws were printed on blue paper, while others have said the word “blue” was meant to disparage those like the “blue noses” who imposed rigid moral codes on others.)

Over decades, many of those laws — which banned commerce, entertainment and the sale of alcohol, among other things — were tossed aside or ignored, or exemptions were granted. In some cases, the statutes were extended to holidays and barred retailers specifically from operating on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Maine granted an exception to L. L. Bean, whose store in Freeport is open around the clock every day, including Christmas. When the blue laws, which had faded, were revived in the 1950s, the store in Freeport was already operating 24/7, said Carolyn Beem, a spokeswoman. She said that the store, which originally catered to hunters and fishermen who shopped at odd hours, was grandfathered in and allowed to stay open on the holidays.

Nationwide, a protest is developing against Thanksgiving Day sales. Workers at some stores have threatened to strike, saying the holiday openings were disrupting their family time. Online petitions have drawn hundreds of thousands of signatures protesting the move. The stores say that many of their workers have volunteered to work on the holiday, when they will get extra pay, and that consumers wanted to shop early. It is not yet clear what effect the protests might have.

At the same time, this corner of New England is serving as something of a bulwark against the forces of commercialism.

Even the Retailers Association of Massachusetts is treading gently on the notion of Thanksgiving sales.

“There hasn’t been any outcry from our members over the years pushing this,” said Bill Rennie, vice president of the association.

But, as Thanksgiving shopping becomes more common, he said, “it may be time to have a discussion about it.”

Blue laws seem anachronistic when people can shop anytime online, he said.

There is also the case of simple economics. These states are already at risk of losing sales to stores in New Hampshire, which has no sales tax. Now, Mr. Rennie pointed out, they could lose even more in the holiday bargain rush when stores in New Hampshire are open and stores here are closed.

Still, Barry Finegold, a Massachusetts state senator whose district abuts New Hampshire, said that so far, none of the retailers in his district had asked for a change in the law.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated William Wrestling Brewster’s occupation. He runs a computer repair business, not a computer store.

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Family of man shot by sheriff's deputies calls for FBI probe

The family of an Inglewood man gunned down by L.A. County sheriff's deputies this month is requesting an FBI probe of the shooting and subsequent investigation by the Sheriff's Department.

Jose de la Trinidad, 36, was shot and killed by deputies Nov. 10, just minutes after leaving his niece's quinceanera with his older brother.

After police attempted to pull the older brother over for speeding, he sped off. After pleading with his brother to stop, Jose de la Trinidad was let out of the car in the 1900 block of East 122nd Street in Willowbrook, family members said.

There the unarmed man was shot and killed by deputies. But there is some dispute over what happened in those seconds before deputies opened fire.

Sheriff's Department officials said the deputies believed Jose de la Trinidad was reaching for his waistband and, fearing he had a weapon, used necessary force.

The slain man's family, however, said that a 19-year-old woman who witnessed the shooting from her bedroom window reported that she saw De la Trinidad with his hands behind his head before shots were fired.

The family's attorney, Luis Carrillo, said the witness heard the older brother's car screech to a stop and then watched Jose de la Trinidad get out of the vehicle.

"When they told him to stop, his hands went up behind his head and he kept them there," the witness told a private investigator working for Carrillo, according to a transcript of interview notes read to The Times.

Carrillo said the witness, whom he did not identify, was pressured to change her story by sheriff's deputies who were going door-to-door that night looking for information on the shooting.

"It's the classic 'He was reaching for his waistband' defense that is used any time an officer shoots an unarmed man," Carrillo said. "They tried to get her to change her story."

Sheriff's officials sharply reject the accusation and said that, as of Monday, they had yet to speak with any witnesses.

"It's a curious accusation because how can we intimidate people who we have not yet spoken to?" said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman of the Sheriff's Department.

Despite Carrillo's claims that uniformed deputies were going door-to-door seeking witness statements the night of the shooting, Whitmore insisted that no witness interviews were conducted that night.

Sheriff's officials have released few details about the shooting and say the incident will be investigated by multiple agencies, which is standard protocol for deputy-involved shootings.

Officials at the FBI office in Los Angeles said they have not decided wither the accusations merit an investigation.

The driver, who family members believe may have been intoxicated after a night of celebrating, sped off again before crashing his vehicle at the intersection of El Segundo and Avalon boulevards. He ran away but was apprehended by deputies.

On Monday, as more than a dozen family members huddled in a South Pasadena law office, Carrillo and De la Trinidad's widow, Rosie, demanded answers. His mother, Sofia de la Trinidad, seemed overwhelmed by the moment. "Mi hijo, mi hijo," she said, sobbing.

"I just don't know what I'm going to do, I still can't believe this has happened," the widow said. Making plans for a funeral and consoling her two daughters has left little time to process her husband's death, she said.

Family friends have set up a memorial fund in De la Trinidad's name at Wells Fargo Bank. They hope it will cover the costs of a private memorial ceremony planned for this week.

"He was the breadwinner," his wife said, fighting tears. "I don't even know how am I going to bury him."

wesley.lowery@latimes.com

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Mount Doom, Einstein Crater, and Arrakis Plains: Geekiest Place Names in the Solar System

Ancient civilizations gave us the names of planets in our solar system. But as modern scientists have zoomed in on these bodies and their moons, they have needed to find names for ever more features on their surfaces.

Following the tradition of naming planets after Greek and Roman deities, most place names in the solar system are derived from mythology. Thus, mountains, craters, valleys, and other geologic features on Venus come from names for sky goddesses, water goddesses, desert goddesses, war goddesses, or goddesses of love, fate, fortune, and fertility.

But sometimes it seems that astronomers get a little tired of always asking their mythology friends for new pantheons to mine for names. Scientists are, after all, just as geeky as any other nerd subculture and they like to stamp the solar system with lesser-known minutiae from their favorite books or devote a crater to a scientific hero.

For instance, on Nov. 13 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved the name Mount Doom for a peak on Saturn’s moon Titan. According to the Lord of the Rings series, this mountain lies at the heart of Mordor and is the only site where the One Ring can be unmade. Titan is like a geek heaven, with place names coming from both J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythos and Frank Herbert’s Dune series.

To come up with such names, members of an IAU task group agree on a theme — let’s say, naming all the craters on Jupiter’s moon Europa after Celtic gods and heroes – and label any known features. As better maps are made of a planet or moon, other people may suggest a name for newly resolved features. The names are reviewed, objected to, debated, and eventually approved and published online. The process isn’t just for scientists; members of the public can submit suggestions as well. Maybe it’s time to start stamping the solar system with places like Westeros and Oz?

While we can’t visit these features in person, many have been mapped by our robotic probes. Here we take a look at some images of the geekiest places in the solar system.

Above:

The themes for most of Titan’s features follow the standard mythological criterion. Above you can see the enormous Xanadu region, the bright area just below and to the right of center. Xanadu is named after a legendary palace in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. But all mountains on Titan are named for fictional mountains in the Lord of the Rings series, while all plains and labyrinth-like features are named for planets in the Dune series.

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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Responding to Illnesses Manifesting Amid Recovery From Storm

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Dr. Aaron Gardener, center, attended to a patient at an ad hoc medical unit in Long Beach, N.Y. Many people have coughs, rashes and other ailments.

Day and night, victims of Hurricane Sandy have been streaming into ad hoc emergency rooms and relief centers, like the MASH-type medical unit on an athletic field in Long Beach, and the warming tent in the Rockaways the size of a small high school gym.

They complain of rashes, asthma and coughing. They need tetanus shots because — house-proud and armed with survivalist instincts — they have been ripping out waterlogged boards and getting poked by rusty nails. Those with back pain from sifting through debris receive muscle relaxants; those with chest pain from overexertion are hooked up to cardiac monitors.

“I’ve been coughing,” said Gabriel McAuley, 46, who has been working 16-hour days gutting homes and hauling debris in the Rockaways since the storm hit. “I’ve never felt a cough like that before. It’s deeper down.”

It is impossible to say how many people have been sickened by what Hurricane Sandy left behind: mold from damp drywall; spills from oil tanks; sewage from floodwater and unflushable toilets; tons upon tons of debris and dust. But interviews with hurricane victims, recovery workers, health officials and medical experts over the last week reveal that some of the illnesses that they feared would occur, based on the toxic substances unleashed by the storm and the experience of other disasters, notably Hurricane Katrina, have begun to manifest themselves.

Emergency rooms and poison control centers have reported cases of carbon monoxide exposure — and in New Jersey, several deaths have been attributed to it — from the misuse of generators to provide power and stoves to provide heat.

In Livingston, N.J., the Burn Center at St. Barnabas Medical Center had 16 burn cases over about six days, three times as many as usual, from people trying to dispel the cold and darkness with boiling water, gasoline, candles and lighter fluid.

Raw sewage spilled into homes in Baldwin and East Rockaway, in Nassau County, when a sewage plant shut down because of the surge and the system could not handle the backup. Sewage also spilled from a huge plant in Newark. “We tried to limit our presence in the house because the stink was horrible,” said Jennifer Ayres, 34, of Baldwin, who has been staying temporarily in West Hempstead. She said that she felt ill for several days, that her son had a scratchy throat, and that her mother, who lives in the house, had difficulty breathing, all problems she attributed to the two days they spent inside their house cleaning up last week. “I had stomach problems. I felt itchy beyond itchy on my face.”

Coughing — locally known as the Rockaway cough — is a common symptom that health officials said could come from mold, or from the haze of dust and sand kicked up by the storm and demolitions. The air in the Rockaways is so full of particles that the traffic police wear masks — though many recovery workers do not, worrying people who recall the fallout of another disaster.

“It’s just like 9/11,” said Kathy Smilardi, sitting inside the skeleton of her gutted home in Broad Channel, wrapped in a white puffy jacket, her breath visible in the afternoon cold. “Everyone runs in to clean up, and they’re not wearing masks. Are we going to wait 20 years to figure out that people are dying?”

Health officials and experts say the risks are real, but are cautioning against hysteria. Some coughing could be due to cold, damp weather. Lasting health effects from mold, dust and other environmental hazards generally require long-term, continuous exposure, they said. And the short-term effects can be mitigated by taking precautions like wearing masks, gloves and boots and removing mold-infested wallboard. “The reality is that cleaning up both muck and sewage and spills and removing walls and reconstruction and dealing with debris all do in fact pose concerns,” Daniel Kass, New York City’s deputy commissioner for environmental health, said Friday. “Are they vast or uncontrollable? No. But they depend on people doing work correctly and taking basic precautions.”

The Katrina cough was found to be temporary, said Roy J. Rando, a professor at Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Felicia Rabito, an epidemiologist at the school, said that healthy children exposed to mold after Hurricane Katrina showed no lasting respiratory symptoms when they moved back to new or renovated homes.

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, lead levels in New Orleans’s soil dropped after the top layers of dirt, where lead from paint and gasoline can accumulate, were washed away. But in the two years afterward, soil testing found extremely high lead levels, Dr. Rabito said, which she theorized came from renovating old homes. “That’s a cautionary tale,” she said. Lead in soil can be tracked into homes and pose a health hazard to children playing inside or outside.

Though at least one outbreak of norovirus, a contagious gastrointestinal virus, occurred in a Brooklyn high school that was used as a shelter, New York and New Jersey health officials said they had not seen any significant spike in respiratory or gastrointestinal diseases related to the storm.

In Broad Channel, most homes on Noel Road, where Ms. Smilardi lives, have outdoor oil tanks that were overturned by the storm. The innards of many homes, built when asbestos was used, lie spilled among major and minor roads.

Ominous red spots covered both sides of Paul Nowinski’s burly torso. After the storm, Mr. Nowinski, a musician, waded into the basement of his childhood home on Beach 146th Street in the Rockaways to try to salvage records, books and instruments. He was up to his chest in water, which he thinks might have been contaminated with sewage. He said that he did not know the cause of the red marks; and that he had been too busy “schlepping” to go to the doctor.

Angela Macropoulos contributed reporting.

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Tax Talks Raise Bar for Richest Americans

By most measures, the personal finances of Anne Zimmerman, a small-business owner in Cincinnati, have little in common with those of Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison.

Ms. Zimmerman runs an accounting business and a cloud-based Internet service company with combined annual profit of $250,000 to $500,000 in recent years. Mr. Ellison made nearly $15 million in salary, bonuses and perks in 2011, even without the $62 million he received in stock options from Oracle.

In the deficit reduction debate now consuming Washington, however, both Mr. Ellison and Ms. Zimmerman are grouped in the same, sprawling category: wealthy Americans targeted for tax increases.

President Obama has focused efforts on raising revenue from the wealthiest 2 percent of taxpayers — individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and families with adjusted gross incomes above $250,000 — calling them “millionaires and billionaires who can afford to pay a little more.” Republicans have thus far resisted those efforts, countering that the high earners are job creators and that increasing their taxes would discourage hiring.

But for all the broad brush rhetoric of political debate, the rate increases and limits on deductions now being discussed by the president and Congressional Republicans are calibrated to take the biggest bite out of the highest earners. They would lead to a smaller increase for those who earn less than $500,000 a year. The figures are all adjusted gross incomes, and since some deductions would be preserved, a household would probably have more than $250,000 in total income, perhaps $300,000, before it would fall into the wealthy definition used by the president.

If all Mr. Obama’s tax proposals for wealthy Americans were enacted, they would raise $1.6 trillion over the next decade. And an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research firm, found that the increases would be heavily weighted toward the wealthiest. Taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes over $1 million would see average increases of $184,504, the study found, with higher taxes on the ultrawealthy bloating that average. Those with adjusted gross incomes from $200,000 to $500,000 would face a tax increase averaging $4,446, with people toward the lower end having only a modest increase and people on the higher end paying several times more.

A married couple with two children earning $300,000 would see its effective tax rate increase to 21.1 percent from 16.5 percent, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. A married couple with two children earning $2 million would see its effective federal income tax rate rise to 26.8 percent from 21.6 percent.

To Ms. Zimmerman, the Cincinnati businesswoman, that amount sounds reasonable.

“I’m not going to change my business decision-making process based on a few percentage points of tax increases,” she said. “If it helps get the country on a better path, well, we’re all in this together.”

But some conservatives and business advocates warn that the proposed increases could stall the sluggish economic recovery.

“There is a price that comes with these tax increases on the very wealthiest because that is where the capital is concentrated,” said William McBride, chief economist at the Tax Foundation, a conservative research firm. “That price is economic growth and hiring.”

About four million of the 114 million American households face a possible tax increase. And while they are a narrow slice of the overall population, they are nonetheless a swath of well-to-do Americans so varied that they defy easy categorization. Census data indicates that they cut across a broad range of occupations: doctors, auto dealers and dilettantes, professional athletes and financial planners, family farmers, entrepreneurs, two-income couples, corporate executives and hedge fund managers.

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'Life of Pi' a huge gamble for 20th Century Fox

Many people in Hollywood considered "Life of Pi" to be unfilmable. Now that it's about to hit theaters Wednesday, there's a new question: Can it be profitable?

Director Ang Lee's $120-million adaptation of Yann Martel's 2001 book, which has sold 9 million copies worldwide, is precisely the kind of movie that many complain the big studios don't make anymore: an ambitious and highbrow creation that's not a sequel and isn't based on a comic book or theme park ride.

Marketing the movie in no easy task either. A boy's spiritual journey across the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a tiger doesn't easily translate into a 30-second commercial.

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"It's the biggest gamble I've ever taken," said Elizabeth Gabler, the veteran 20th Century Fox executive who oversaw the film.

There's a reason studios prefer to make movies such as "Star Wars" and "Transformers." Eight of the top 10 films at the box office this year have been sequels or adaptations of kid-friendly books such as "The Hunger Games." Last year, all 10 fell into those two categories.

When show business executives dare to invest in sophisticated material, they generally keep budgets low (this past weekend's "Sliver Linings Playbook" cost $21 million) and make sure they have a recognizable star (such as Daniel Day-Lewis in "Lincoln").

"I read the book shortly after it came out and I remember thinking, 'This shouldn't be made into a movie,'" Lee said. "The artistic and the economic sides didn't meet. If you spend too much money, you have to be mainstream. But if you don't spend the money, you are not doing justice to the book."

Although early reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, pre-release surveys have found lukewarm moviegoer interest in "Life of Pi," shot in 3-D. Early estimates suggest the film will do about $20 million over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend. The new James Bond thriller, "Skyfall," by comparison, cost almost $200 million and opened to nearly half that amount.

On Fox's Century City lot, there's still hope of defying the odds. With an Indian actor starring and Taiwanese native Lee directing, studio executives believe the film will do particularly well in Asia. They also hope strong word-of-mouth could keep the movie in theaters through Christmas.

One thing they are not doing is predicting a box office smash.

"It can't always be about the bottom line," said Fox Chairman Jim Gianopulos. "It has to be about the art and the value of cinema that we all got into this business for."

In many ways, the challenges are similar to those facing "Hugo," director Martin Scorsese's 3-D adaptation of a revered children's book that opened Thanksgiving weekend last year. Even with strong reviews, the $156-million production failed to connect with moviegoers and was a financial failure.

"I do think it's a specialized movie," Lee said of "Life of Pi," using the industry jargon for an art-house film. "But I hope it reaches out to the mainstream in some way."

"Life of Pi" features a menagerie of animals, including a Bengal tiger and thousands of flying fish. To replicate Pacific storms, the production crew built a 1.7-million-gallon water tank in Taiwan that generated capsizing waves.

The four animals stranded on the lifeboat with Pi, the only person to survive a cargo ship's sinking, are a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and the tiger. To ensure that lead actor Suraj Sharma wouldn't be ripped to shreds by his costars, the realistic animals are almost entirely computer-animated creations.

But that was the least of the filmmaking challenges. "Life of Pi's" journey to the big screen was nearly as miraculous as the technology behind it.

Gabler's Fox 2000 label acquired the movie rights soon after "Life of Pi" was published in 2001. But one filmmaker after another proved unable to adapt the book, more moving spiritual allegory than compelling page turner.

"Lara Craft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life" and "The Manchurian Candidate" remake screenwriter Dean Georgaris never managed to deliver a script. "The Sixth Sense" writer-director M. Night Shyamalan expressed interest in directing the movie in 2003 but ended up backing out. "Amélie" director Jean-Pierre Jeunet in 2005 pitched his idea to make "Life of Pi" entirely with live animals. Fox estimated he would need some 300 days of filming, about four times as long as typical big-budget productions, and torpedoed his version.

The Oscar-winning Lee, whose diverse resume includes "Brokeback Mountain," "Hulk" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," came onto the project in 2008, drawn by its many challenges.

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