Dismissed as Doomsayers, Advocates for Meteor Detection Feel Vindicated

For decades, scientists have been on the lookout for killer objects from outer space that could devastate the planet. But warnings that they lacked the tools to detect the most serious threats were largely ignored, even as skeptics mocked the worriers as Chicken Littles.

Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Dr. Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and Google executive, has warned about space threats.

No more. The meteor that rattled Siberia on Friday, injuring hundreds of people and traumatizing thousands, has suddenly brought new life to efforts to deploy adequate detection tools, in particular a space telescope that would scan the solar system for dangers.

A group of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who helped build thriving companies like eBay, Google and Facebook has already put millions of dollars into the effort and saw Friday’s shock wave as a turning point in raising hundreds of millions more.

“Wouldn’t it be silly if we got wiped out because we weren’t looking?” said Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and Google executive who leads the detection effort. “This is a wake-up call from space. We’ve got to pay attention to what’s out there.”

Astronomers know of no asteroids or comets that pose a major threat to the planet. But NASA estimates that fewer than 10 percent of the big dangers have been discovered.

Dr. Lu’s group, called the B612 Foundation after the imaginary asteroid on which the Little Prince lived, is one team of several pursuing ways to ward off extraterrestrial threats. NASA is another, and other private groups are emerging, like Planetary Resources, which wants not only to identify asteroids near Earth but also to mine them.

“Our job is to be the first line of defense, and we take that very seriously,” James Green, the director of planetary science at NASA headquarters, said in an interview Friday after the Russian strike. “No one living on this planet has ever before been hurt. That’s historic.”

Dr. Green added that the Russian episode was sure to energize the field and that an even analysis of the meteor’s remains could help reveal clues about future threats.

“Our scientists are excited,” he said. “Russian planetary scientists are already collecting meteorites from this event.”

The slow awakening to the danger began long ago, as scientists found hundreds of rocky scars indicating that cosmic intruders had periodically reshaped the planet.

The discoveries included not just obvious features like Meteor Crater in Arizona, but wide zones of upheaval. A crater more than a hundred miles wide beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico suggested that, 65 million years ago, a speeding rock from outer space had raised enough planetary mayhem to end the reign of the dinosaurs.

Some people remain skeptical of the cosmic threat and are glad for taxpayer money to go toward urgent problems on Earth rather than outer space. But many scientists who have examined the issues have become convinced that better precautions are warranted in much the same way that homeowners buy insurance for unlikely events that can result in severe damage to life and property.

Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, astronomers turned their telescopes on the sky with increasing vigor to look for killer rocks. The rationale was statistical. They knew about a number of near misses and calculated that many other rocky threats whirling about the solar system had gone undetected.

In 1996, with little fanfare, the Air Force also began scanning the skies for speeding rocks, giving credibility to an activity once seen as reserved for doomsday enthusiasts. It was the world’s first known government search.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration took a lead role with what it called the Spaceguard Survey. In 2007, it issued a report estimating that 20,000 asteroids and comets orbited close enough to the planet to deliver blows that could destroy cities or even end all life. Today, with limited financing, NASA supports modest telescopes in the southwestern United States and in Hawaii that make more than 95 percent of the discoveries of the objects coming near the Earth.

Scientists lobbied hard for a space telescope that would get high above the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. It would orbit the Sun, peering across the solar system, and would have a much better chance of finding large space rocks.

But with the nation immersed in two wars and other earthly priorities, the government financing never materialized. Last year, Dr. Lu, who left the NASA astronaut corps in 2007 to work for Google, joined with veterans of the space program and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to accelerate the asteroid hunt.

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Livestrong Tattoos as Reminder of Personal Connections, Not Tarnished Brand

As Jax Mariash went under the tattoo needle to have “Livestrong” emblazoned on her wrist in bold black letters, she did not think about Lance Armstrong or doping allegations, but rather the 10 people affected by cancer she wanted to commemorate in ink. It was Jan. 22, 2010, exactly a year since the disease had taken the life of her stepfather. After years of wearing yellow Livestrong wristbands, she wanted something permanent.

A lifelong runner, Mariash got the tattoo to mark her 10-10-10 goal to run the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 10, 2010, and fund-raising efforts for Livestrong. Less than three years later, antidoping officials laid out their case against Armstrong — a lengthy account of his practice of doping and bullying. He did not contest the charges and was barred for life from competing in Olympic sports.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Mariash, of Wilson, Wyo., said of the antidoping officials’ report, released in October, and Armstrong’s subsequent confession to Oprah Winfrey. “When I look at the tattoo now, I just think of living strong, and it’s more connected to the cancer fight and optimal health than Lance.”

Mariash is among those dealing with the fallout from Armstrong’s descent. She is not alone in having Livestrong permanently emblazoned on her skin.

Now the tattoos are a complicated, internationally recognized symbol of both an epic crusade against cancer and a cyclist who stood defiant in the face of accusations for years but ultimately admitted to lying.

The Internet abounds with epidermal reminders of the power of the Armstrong and Livestrong brands: the iconic yellow bracelet permanently wrapped around a wrist; block letters stretching along a rib cage; a heart on a foot bearing the word Livestrong; a mural on a back depicting Armstrong with the years of his now-stripped seven Tour de France victories and the phrase “ride with pride.”

While history has provided numerous examples of ill-fated tattoos to commemorate lovers, sports teams, gang membership and bands that break up, the Livestrong image is a complex one, said Michael Atkinson, a sociologist at the University of Toronto who has studied tattoos.

“People often regret the pop culture tattoos, the mass commodified tattoos,” said Atkinson, who has a Guns N’ Roses tattoo as a marker of his younger days. “A lot of people can’t divorce the movement from Lance Armstrong, and the Livestrong movement is a social movement. It’s very real and visceral and embodied in narrative survivorship. But we’re still not at a place where we look at a tattoo on the body and say that it’s a meaningful thing to someone.”

Geoff Livingston, a 40-year-old marketing professional in Washington, D.C., said that since Armstrong’s confession to Winfrey, he has received taunts on Twitter and inquiries at the gym regarding the yellow Livestrong armband tattoo that curls around his right bicep.

“People see it and go, ‘Wow,’ ” he said, “But I’m not going to get rid of it, and I’m not going to stop wearing short sleeves because of it. It’s about my family, not Lance Armstrong.”

Livingston got the tattoo in 2010 to commemorate his brother-in-law, who was told he had cancer and embarked on a fund-raising campaign for the charity. If he could raise $5,000, he agreed to get a tattoo. Within four days, the goal was exceeded, and Livingston went to a tattoo parlor to get his seventh tattoo.

“It’s actually grown in emotional significance for me,” Livingston said of the tattoo. “It brought me closer to my sister. It was a big statement of support.”

For Eddie Bonds, co-owner of Rabbit Bicycle in Hill City, S.D., getting a Livestrong tattoo was also a reflection of the growth of the sport of cycling. His wife, Joey, operates a tattoo parlor in front of their store, and in 2006 she designed a yellow Livestrong band that wraps around his right calf, topped off with a series of small cyclists.

“He kept breaking the Livestrong bands,” Joey Bonds said. “So it made more sense to tattoo it on him.”

“It’s about the cancer, not Lance,” Eddie Bonds said.

That was also the case for Jeremy Nienhouse, a 37-year old in Denver, Colo., who used a Livestrong tattoo to commemorate his own triumph over testicular cancer.

Given the diagnosis in 2004, Nienhouse had three rounds of chemotherapy, which ended on March 15, 2005, the date he had tattooed on his left arm the day after his five-year anniversary of being cancer free in 2010. It reads: “3-15-05” and “LIVESTRONG” on the image of a yellow band.

Nienhouse said he had heard about Livestrong and Armstrong’s own battle with the cancer around the time he learned he had cancer, which alerted him to the fact that even though he was young and healthy, he, too, could have cancer.

“On a personal level,” Nienhouse said, “he sounds like kind of a jerk. But if he hadn’t been in the public eye, I don’t know if I would have been diagnosed when I had been.”

Nienhouse said he had no plans to have the tattoo removed.

As for Mariash, she said she read every page of the antidoping officials’ report. She soon donated her Livestrong shirts, shorts and running gear. She watched Armstrong’s confession to Winfrey and wondered if his apology was an effort to reduce his ban from the sport or a genuine appeal to those who showed their support to him and now wear a visible sign of it.

“People called me ‘Miss Livestrong,’ ” Mariash said. “It was part of my identity.”

She also said she did not plan to have her tattoo removed.

“I wanted to show it’s forever,” she said. “Cancer isn’t something that just goes away from people. I wanted to show this is permanent and keep people remembering the fight.”

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The Saturday Profile: Mary Beard, Classics Professor, Battles Internet Attacks

JANUARY was a busy month for Mary Beard, a Cambridge academic who is the closest thing, if it exists, to a celebrity classics professor.

In just a few weeks, Ms. Beard, who has helped popularize the study of antiquity through television and a lively blog, “A Don’s Life,” turned 58; finished a draft of her book on Roman laughter; became an officer of the Order of the British Empire; and attended the funeral of a lifelong friend and editor, Peter Carson.

But little could have prepared her for the furor she faced after she appeared on a weekly BBC debate show last month and, while discussing immigration, expressed the unpopular view that Britain’s social services would not be overburdened when restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian movement around Europe are lifted next year.

Her remarks, made on Jan. 17, unleashed a torrent of vicious, crude and personal online attacks, many targeting her unadorned style and her long, unkempt gray hair. Anonymous attackers also superimposed a picture of her face on a pornographic image. But rather than retire to her fainting couch (it is in her Newnham office, should she need it), or accept what happened as the cost of being a public figure in the Internet age, Ms. Beard decided to fight back.

Adopting what she said was a “high-risk strategy,” Ms. Beard reproduced on her blog some of the most unsavory remarks and the mocked-up image, which she has since removed.

“I wanted people to see how bad it is,” she said in an interview at Cambridge’s Newnham College, which she attended and where she has taught for nearly 30 years. “You never know what it’s like, because no mainstream paper will print it, nobody on the radio will let you say it, and so it came to look as if I was worried that they said I hadn’t done my hair.

“What was said was pornographic, violent, sexist, misogynist and also frightfully silly,” she said.

The comments would prove fatal for “Don’t Start Me Off,” an off-color online forum that became a bulletin board for her worst abusers. The site was eventually shuttered by its moderator, Richard White, who, in an about-face unexpected from an online provocateur, sent Ms. Beard a lengthy apology.

“I am genuinely sorry for any upset I may have caused you,” he wrote her privately. “I say this not because I’ve been ‘rumbled’ or because I think it’ll help my cause, but because it’s the right thing to do.”

Peter Stothard, the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, which publishes Ms. Beard’s blog, said her response was a quintessential case of “Mary being Mary.”

“She dealt with it in an extraordinary way,” Mr. Stothard said. “I don’t think it was necessarily bound to work, but it seems that it did. It’s a rare victory.”

The blog, which usually gets between 20,000 and 25,000 hits a week, drew about 85,000 visitors the week she addressed the controversy.

AT first glance, the professor is an unlikely candidate for such impassioned attention. Her gray hair, which she described as “mad,” hangs around her shoulders, which might be draped in a loose-fitting sweater or dress. She often uses tights to display a hint of her personality: on a recent Friday, they were black and adorned with shining plastic stars.

“I’ve chosen to be this way because that’s how I feel comfortable with myself,” Ms. Beard said. “That’s how I am. It’s about joining up the dots between how you look and how you feel inside, and I think that’s what I’ve done, and I think people do it differently.”

Ms. Beard first grew interested in classics as a precocious teenager with a talent for Latin and Greek and a taste for archaeological digs, where days spent excavating usually ended at the local pub, she said. But she would become a classics star at Cambridge, which was mostly male when she first showed up as a student in 1973. Now one of the university’s most high-profile professors, she extended her reach to a nation when “Meet the Romans with Mary Beard,” a short series, was first shown on BBC 2 last spring.

In three episodes, Ms. Beard appears as the viewer’s excitable and well-read guide to ancient Rome. She bikes around the city, perches atop ruins, pulls Roman artifacts out of storerooms and explains that a strange-looking tomb monument was built to recall a Roman bakery, a description that makes both bakeries and monuments seem fascinating.

“Classics isn’t about the ancient world. It’s partly about the ancient world, but it’s about our conversation. It’s how we try to talk to antiquity,” she said, elaborating on her mission to bring the subject to the masses. “A lot of people will always say, ‘I really know nothing about the ancient world.’ But there’s lots and lots of things people know. Partly they’ve been encouraged to think they’re ignorant about it. In some ways, the job to do is show people that they know much more than they’d like to admit.”

“Meet the Romans” showcased Rome, but it also put Ms. Beard’s appearance on display. When the show first aired, the Sunday Times critic A. A. Gill suggested she “really should be kept away from cameras altogether.” Since then, British columnists have debated whether her style is the result of laziness and inattention or unwillingness to conform to traditional standards of beauty.

NOT easily dissuaded, Ms. Beard is in talks for another Rome-based show. That is in addition to her typical agenda, filled with books to write, classes to teach and lectures to prepare.

Ms. Beard joined The Times Literary Supplement as its classics editor in 1992, eight years after writing her first book. She has since published more than a dozen; the most successful, “The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found,” was published in the United States in 2010. But Ms. Beard admits that the first time anyone ever heard of her was after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when she wrote in The London Review of Books that some felt America “had it coming.”

The remarks drew global criticism. Though she does not regret them, Ms. Beard said she would choose different words now.

“Thinking back to then, what I wanted to say I would still want to say, which is that ghastly acts of terrorism are not unconnected to Western foreign policy,” in Britain as well as the United States, she said. “If I was making that point now, I wouldn’t write in those words; I would say something much more like what I just said.

“What politicians do is they never get the rhetoric wrong, and the price they pay is they don’t speak the truth as they see it,” she said. “Now, I will speak truth as I see it, and sometimes I don’t get the rhetoric right. I think that’s a fair trade-off.”

Ms. Beard is called “wickedly subversive” on her blog. It is a phrase routinely cited when she comes up in British newspapers, but, looking slightly embarrassed, she insists it was an editor’s choice, not hers.

“I’m always keen on understatement, you know?” she said with a laugh. “I’d just put ‘classicist.’”

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Different looks for Heat, Lakers at All-Star break

HOUSTON (AP) — If Kobe Bryant's season seems tough, imagine what Dwyane Wade went through five years ago.

"I came to All-Star weekend one year, I think we had won nine games. Seriously," Wade said Friday. "I was looking for my 10th win at the All-Star game."

Things sure have changed for his Miami Heat.

Back where they first teamed up as All-Stars in 2006, Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh return as NBA champions who will start together for the Eastern Conference on Sunday night.

Now the misery belongs to Bryant, Dwight Howard and the Los Angeles Lakers, whose season has been so disappointing that Bryant was asked Friday if the All-Star weekend was a "retreat" for him.

"I don't know if it's a retreat, it's just more of an opportunity to get some rest, regroup, put the first half of the season behind us and move on," he said.

As Wade knows, the All-Star break can be just that — a break — from a forgettable season.

He arrived for the 2008 All-Star game with a 9-43 record after the Heat lost on Valentine's Day to the Chicago Bulls, on their way to a 15-win debacle just two years after they won the NBA title.

"I put all that aside though, and I came and I enjoyed the weekend, and when I went back to Miami, it was like, 'Oh my God, we're back in it,'" Wade said. "But All-Star weekend, you just enjoy being an All-Star. You enjoy being around the guys. You can kind of forget about that a little bit, unless you have the cameras and the microphones in front of you asking you questions about it, but besides that you try to enjoy it."

This time, the Heat celebrated Valentine's Day in Oklahoma City with a 110-100 victory over the Thunder, the team they beat in five games last summer for the title. They have won seven in a row, James is playing arguably the best basketball of his career, and they can relax and reminisce as they return to Houston.

"It's really indescribable," Bosh said, "just to not only win a championship with great guys, be in a great locker room, and just to have fun doing it, but just to be an All-Star every year, play with great teammates, I mean to play in front of a lot people in arenas every night. I don't take those things for granted."

James, Wade and Bosh were in their third NBA seasons when they were chosen for the 2006 game, which turned out like so many Heat games these days. James was voted MVP after scoring 29 points and leading a huge East comeback that was wrapped up when Wade made the go-ahead basket with 16 seconds left.

Think about that: James was already the best player that night, and he was nowhere near the player he is today.

"I'm a better player. At that point in time, I wasn't a complete basketball player. I couldn't shoot as well as I can now, I never posted up back then," James said. "More games, more playoff games, more knowledge. You continue to learn each and every day, it makes you a better player. That's what you want, to become a better player. That's what I want. I want to be the greatest of all-time. I try to do whatever it takes to get me in that position.

"Seven years, I've tried to improve each and every year."

He's gotten to the point now where he ran off an NBA-record six straight games with at least 30 points and 60 percent shooting from the field, and seems to be distancing himself from anyone else that can take the MVP award he won last year for the third time in four years.

"He's doing well," Bosh said in a Texas-sized understatement. "That's the best way to put it."

Bosh was chosen as a starter Friday by Heat coach Erik Spoelstra, who will lead the East. He replaces Boston guard Rajon Rondo, who pulled out with a torn ACL.

Bryant and Howard are still here, away from a Los Angeles season that's been anything but a Hollywood story.

Considered a title contender after acquiring Howard and Steve Nash in the summer, the Lakers fell to 25-29 after they were blown out Wednesday by the rival Clippers, who opened a 13-game lead over them in the Pacific Division standings.

Smiling as he sat with his daughter, Natalia, Bryant laughed that he wished the All-Star break was a chance for the Lakers to "hit the reset button" on what he's said has been a most difficult season.

"Hopefully there's an easy button like in the commercial when we come back in the second half of the season and things are a little easier for us," he said.

Howard has battled injuries to his back and shoulder and has been nothing like the player who has been the NBA's dominant big man in recent years. He said at times he hasn't been having fun and has tried to ignore all the bad news around the team.

"You just try to stay away from the tube and do as much as I can to rehab my back and my shoulder and my mind, and really just get away from everything when I'm not playing basketball," he said.

If he's looking for a chance to enjoy himself this season, it may get no better than the next few days.

"It's a great weekend, it's an unbelievable weekend for the fans to be able to put all their favorite players together in one venue," James said. "We have a great time with it."

___

Follow Brian Mahoney on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Briancmahoney

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Supreme Court to Hear Monsanto Seed Patent Case

Aaron P. Bernstein for The New York Times

Vernon Hugh Bowman, an Indiana farmer, is challenging Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, over genetically modified crops.

With his mere 300 acres of soybeans, corn and wheat, Vernon Hugh Bowman said, “I’m not even big enough to be called a farmer.”

Yet the 75-year-old farmer from southwestern Indiana will face off Tuesday against the world’s largest seed company, Monsanto, in a Supreme Court case that could have a huge impact on the future of genetically modified crops, and also affect other fields from medical research to software.

At stake in Mr. Bowman’s case is whether patents on seeds — or other things that can self-replicate — extend beyond the first generation of the products.

It is one of two cases before the Supreme Court related to the patenting of living organisms, a practice that has helped give rise to the biotechnology industry but which critics have long considered immoral. The other case, involving a breast cancer risk test from Myriad Genetics, will determine whether human genes can be patented. It is scheduled to be heard April 15.

Monsanto says that a victory for Mr. Bowman would allow farmers to essentially save seeds from one year’s crop to plant the next year, eviscerating patent protection. In Mr. Bowman’s part of Indiana, it says, a single acre of soybeans can produce enough seeds to plant 26 acres the next year.

Such a ruling would “devastate innovation in biotechnology,” the company wrote in its brief. “Investors are unlikely to make such investments if they cannot prevent purchasers of living organisms containing their invention from using them to produce unlimited copies.”

The decision might also apply to live vaccines, cell lines and DNA used for research or medical treatment, and some types of nanotechnology.

Many organizations have filed briefs in support of Monsanto’s position — universities worried about incentives for research, makers of laboratory instruments and some big farmer groups like the American Soybean Association, which say seed patents have spurred crop improvements. The Justice Department is also supporting Monsanto’s argument.

BSA/The Software Alliance, which represents companies like Apple and Microsoft, said in a brief that a decision against Monsanto might “facilitate software piracy on a broad scale” because software can be easily replicated. But it also said that a decision that goes too far the other way could make nuisance software patent infringement lawsuits too easy to file.

Some critics of biotechnology say that a victory for Mr. Bowman could weaken what they see as a stranglehold that Monsanto and some other big biotech companies have over farmers, which they say has led to rising seed prices and the lack of high-yielding varieties that are not genetically engineered.

Patents have “given seed companies enormous power, and it’s come at the detriment of farmers,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, which was an author of a brief on the side of Mr. Bowman. “Seed-saving would act as a much needed restraint on skyrocketing biotech seed prices.”

Farmers who plant seeds with Monsanto’s technology must sign an agreement not to save the seeds, which means they must buy new seeds every year.

Monsanto has a reputation for vigorously protecting its intellectual property.

The Center for Food Safety, which has tracked the cases, said Monsanto had filed more than 140 patent infringement lawsuits involving 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses, and had so far received $23.67 million in recorded judgments. The center says there are many other cases in which farmers settled out of court or before a suit was filed.

Monsanto says it must stop infringers to be fair to the large majority of farmers who do pay to use its technology.

But Monsanto typically exercises no control over soybeans or corn once farmers sell their harvested crops to grain elevators, which in turn sell them for animal feed, food processing or industrial use.

Mr. Bowman said that for his main soybean crop, he honored Monsanto’s agreement, buying new seeds each year containing the Roundup Ready gene, which makes the plants immune to the herbicide Roundup. That technology is hugely popular, used in more than 90 percent of the nation’s soybeans, because it allows farmers to spray fields to kill weeds without hurting the crop.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 15, 2013

An earlier version of the home page summary for this article incorrectly described the crops produced from Monsanto seeds as pesticide-resistant. They are resistant to the herbicide Roundup, not a pesticide.

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Well: Ask Well: Swimming to Ease Back Pain

Many people find that recreational swimming helps ease back pain, and there is research to back that up. But some strokes may be better than others.

An advantage to exercising in a pool is that the buoyancy of the water takes stress off the joints. At the same time, swimming and other aquatic exercises can strengthen back and core muscles.

That said, it does not mean that everyone with a case of back pain should jump in a pool, said Dr. Scott A. Rodeo, a team physician for U.S.A. Olympic Swimming at the last three Olympic Games. Back pain can have a number of potential causes, some that require more caution than others. So the first thing to do is to get a careful evaluation and diagnosis. A doctor might recommend working with a physical therapist and starting off with standing exercises in the pool that involve bands and balls to strengthen the core and lower back muscles.

If you are cleared to swim, and just starting for the first time, pay close attention to your technique. Work with a coach or trainer if necessary. It may also be a good idea to start with the breaststroke, because the butterfly and freestyle strokes involve more trunk rotation. The backstroke is another good option, said Dr. Rodeo, who is co-chief of the sports medicine and shoulder service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.

“With all the other strokes, you have the potential for some spine hyperextension,” Dr. Rodeo said. “With the backstroke, being on your back, you don’t have as much hyperextension.”

Like any activity, begin gradually, swimming perhaps twice a week at first and then progressing slowly over four to six weeks, he said. In one study, Japanese researchers looked at 35 people with low back pain who were enrolled in an aquatic exercise program, which included swimming and walking in a pool. Almost all of the patients showed improvements after six months, but the researchers found that those who participated at least twice weekly showed more significant improvements than those who went only once a week. “The improvement in physical score was independent of the initial ability in swimming,” they wrote.

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Loi Journal: In Vietnam, Some Chose to Be Single Mothers

Justin Mott for the International Herald Tribune

Nguyen Thi Nhan at home with her grandson, Thao, 2. Abandoned by her husband after the war, she asked another man to impregnate her. More Photos »

LOI, Vietnam — They had no plan to break barriers or cause trouble. But 30 years ago in this bucolic village in northern Vietnam, the fierce determination of one group of women to become mothers upended centuries-old gender rules and may have helped open the door for a nation to redefine parenthood.

One recent morning in Loi, as farmers in conical straw hats waded quietly through rice paddies, a small group of women played with their grandchildren near a stream. Their husbands were nowhere to be found, not because they perished in the war, but because the women decided to have children without husbands.

The women’s story began during the American War, as it is called here, when many put the revolution before their families. As peace settled more than a decade later, it became clear that they — like so many of their generation — had sacrificed their marriageable years to the war.

At that time Vietnamese women traditionally married around 16, and those still single at 20 would often be considered “qua lua,” or “past the marriageable age.” When single men who survived the war returned home, they often preferred younger brides, exacerbating the effects of a sex ratio already skewed by male mortality in the war. According to the Vietnam Population and Housing Census of 2009, after reunification in 1979 there were on average only about 88 men for every 100 women between 20 and 44.

Unlike previous generations of unwanted Vietnamese women who dutifully accepted the “so,” or “destiny,” of living a solitary life, a group of women in Loi decided to take motherhood into their own hands. They had endured the war, developed a new strength and were determined not to die alone.

One by one they asked men — whom they would never interact with afterward — to help them conceive a child. The practice became known as “xin con,” or “asking for a child,” and it meant breaking with tradition, facing discrimination and enduring the hardships of raising a child alone.

“It was unusual, and quite remarkable,” said Harriet Phinney, an assistant professor of anthropology at Seattle University who is writing a book on the practice of xin con in Vietnam. Purposely conceiving a child out of wedlock, she said, “was unheard-of” before the revolutionary era.

It was a product of the mothers’ bravery, said Ms. Phinney, but also of a postwar society that acknowledged the unique situation of women across Vietnam, including thousands of widows, who were raising children alone.

Some of the women in Loi were willing to share their stories, though they always kept the names of the fathers a tightly held secret. One of the first women in Loi to ask for a child was Nguyen Thi Nhan, now 58.

Ms. Nhan had led a platoon of women during the war, and though she never saw battle, was awarded a medal for her exemplary leadership. Her husband, with whom she had a daughter, abandoned her after the war. Ms. Nhan moved to the cheapest land she could find, a field near the stream on the outskirts of Loi, where a few refugees from bombing nearby still lived. She then asked for a second child, ending up with the son she wished for.

Her first several years were hard. Despite her best efforts, food and money were scarce. The villagers eventually set aside prejudices and accepted her choice, offering to share the little food they could spare. Eventually, Ms. Nhan was joined by more than a dozen other women. Among them was Nguyen Thi Luu, 63. She had fallen in love with a soldier who was killed in battle in 1972.

“I was 26 when the war ended,” Ms. Luu said. “That was considered too old for marriage, in those times. I did not want to marry a bad, older man, and no single men came to me.”

But Ms. Luu wanted to become a mother, not least so she would have support in her old age. In Vietnam, nursing homes are scarce, and care for the elderly is considered a filial duty.

“I was afraid to die alone,” Ms. Luu said. “I wanted someone to lean on in my old age. I wanted a child of my own.”

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Amputee Olympic star Pistorius charged in slaying

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter dubbed the Blade Runner, was charged Thursday in the Valentine's Day slaying of his girlfriend at his upscale home in South Africa, a shocking twist to one of the feel-good stories of last summer's Olympics.

Pistorius buried his face in the hood of his workout jacket as officers escorted him from a police station after his arrest in the shooting death of Reeva Steenkamp, a 30-year-old model who had spoken out on Twitter against rape and abuse of women.

Police said she was shot four times in the pre-dawn hours at Pistorius' villa in a gated community in the capital, Pretoria. Officers found a 9 mm pistol inside the home and arrested Pistorius on a murder charge.

What sparked the shooting remained unclear, but police said they had received calls in the past about domestic altercations at the home of the 26-year-old athlete, who has spoken publicly about his love of firearms.

A police spokeswoman, Brigadier Denise Beukes, said the incidents included "allegations of a domestic nature."

"I'm not going to elaborate on it, but there have been incidents," Beukes said. She said Pistorius was home at the time of Steenkamp's death and "there is no other suspect involved."

Pistorius made history in the London Games when he became the first double-amputee track athlete to compete in the Olympics. He didn't win a medal but did make the semifinals of the 400 meters and became an international star.

Thursday, companies quickly removed billboards and advertising featuring Pistorius, a national hero in South Africa who also inspired fans worldwide with the image of his high-tech carbon-fiber blades whipping through the air.

Kenny Oldwage, Pistorius' lawyer, told reporters the athlete was "emotional" after his arrest, "but he is keeping up." He said he planned to seek bail for Pistorius at a preliminary hearing Friday.

Pistorius has had troubles in the past in his personal life, which often featured fast cars, cage fighters and women.

In February 2009, he crashed a speedboat on South Africa's Vaal River, breaking his nose, jaw and several ribs and damaging an eye socket. He required 180 stitches to his face. Witnesses said he had been drinking, and officers found alcoholic beverages in the wreckage, though they did not do blood tests.

In November, Pistorius was involved in an altercation over a woman with a local coal mining millionaire, South African media reported. The two men involved the South African Police Service's elite Hawks investigative unit before settling the matter.

Pistorius' father, Henke Pistorius, said Thursday: "We all pray for guidance and strength for Oscar and the lady's parents."

A spokeswoman for Pistorius at Fast Track, an international sports marketing agency in London, said the athlete was assisting with the investigation and there would be no further comment "until matters become clearer."

The sprinter's former coach, Andrea Giannini, said he hoped the shooting was "just a tragic accident."

"No matter how bad the situation was, Oscar always stayed calm and positive," Giannini told The Associated Press in Italy. "Whenever he was tired or nervous, he was still extremely nice to people. I never saw him violent."

Firearms captivated Pistorius, the subject of an online Nike advertisement that featured him with the caption: "I am a bullet in the chamber." In November 2011, he posted a photograph on Twitter of himself at a shooting range, bragging about his score. "Had a 96% headshot over 300m from 50shots! Bam!" he wrote.

Linked to a number of women by the South African media, Pistorius and Steenkamp were first seen together publicly in November. She was named one of the world's 100 Sexiest Women for two years running by the men's magazine FHM.

The leggy blonde with a law degree also appeared in international and South African ads and was a celebrity contestant on "Tropika Island of Treasure," a South African reality show filmed in Jamaica.

While known for her bikini-clad, vamping photo spreads, she tweeted messages urging women to stand up against rape. Her tweets also focused on Pistorius, with one of her last messages noting her excitement over Valentine's Day.

"What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow?" she wrote. "It should be a day of love for everyone."

Police have not publicly named Steenkamp as the victim, saying only that a 30-year-old woman was killed. Steenkamp's publicist, however, confirmed in a statement that the model had died.

"Everyone is simply devastated," the publicist, Sarit Tomlinson, said. "She was the kindest, sweetest human being; an angel on earth and will be sorely missed."

Police arrived at Pistorius' home after 3 a.m., and paramedics tried unsuccessfully to revive Steenkamp, police spokeswoman Lt. Col. Katlego Mogale said.

Officers later took Pistorius to a hospital so doctors could collect samples for DNA testing and check his blood alcohol content.

Pistorius had both legs amputated below the knee before his first birthday because of a congenital condition, and campaigned for years to be allowed to compete against able-bodied athletes.

He was initially banned because of his carbon fiber blades — which critics said gave him an unfair advantage — before being cleared by sport's highest court in 2008.

He was a last-minute selection to South Africa's Olympic team, competing in the 400 meters and the 4x400 relay. He later retained his Paralympic title in the 400 meters.

South Africa's Sports Confederation, its Olympic committee and the International Paralympic Committee all had no comment on the shooting.

Shock rippled across South Africa, a nation of 50 million where nearly 50 people are killed each day, one of the world's highest murder rates. U.N. statistics say South Africa also has the second highest rate of shooting deaths in the world, behind only Colombia.

"The question is: Why does this story make the news? Yes, because they are both celebrities, but this is happening on every single day in South Africa," said Adele Kirsten, a member of Gun Free South Africa.

"We have thousands of people killed annually by gun violence in our country. So the anger is about that it is preventable."

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Gerald Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa. Associated Press writers Michelle Faul and Ed Brown in Johannesburg contributed to this report.

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Jon Gambrell can be reached at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP.

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DealBook: Confidence on Upswing, Mergers Make Comeback

The mega-merger is back.

For the corporate takeover business, the last half-decade was a fallow period. Wall Street deal makers and chief executives, brought low by the global financial crisis, lacked the confidence to strike the audacious multibillion-dollar acquisitions that had defined previous market booms.

Cycles, however, turn, and in the opening weeks of 2013, merger activity has suddenly roared back to life. On Thursday, Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run by Warren E. Buffett, said it had teamed up with Brazilian investors to buy the ketchup maker H. J. Heinz for about $23 billion. And American Airlines and US Airways agreed to merge in a deal valued at $11 billion.

Those transactions come a week after a planned $24 billion buyout of the computer company Dell by its founder, Michael S. Dell, and private equity backers. And Liberty Global, the company controlled by the billionaire media magnate John C. Malone, struck a $16 billion deal to buy the British cable business Virgin Media.

“Since the crisis, one by one, the stars came into alignment, and it was only a matter of time before you had a week like we just had,” said James B. Lee Jr., the vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase.

Still, bankers and lawyers remain circumspect, warning that it is still too early to declare a mergers-and-acquisitions boom like those during the junk bond craze of 1989, the dot-com bubble of 1999 and the leveraged buyout bonanza of 2007. They also say that it is important to pay heed to the excesses that developed during these moments of merger mania, which all ended badly.

A confluence of factors has driven the recent deals. Most visibly, the stock market has been on a tear, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index this week briefly hitting its highest levels since November 2007. Higher share prices have buoyed the confidence of chief executives, who now, instead of retrenching, are looking for ways to expand their businesses.

A number of clouds that hovered over the markets last year have also been removed, eliminating the uncertainty that hampered deal making. Mergers and acquisitions activity in 2012 remained tepid as companies took a wait-and-see approach over the outcome of the presidential election and negotiations over the fiscal cliff. The problems in Europe, which began in earnest in 2011, shut down a lot of potential transactions, but the region has since stabilized.

“When we talk to our corporate clients as well as the bankers, we keep hearing them talk about increased confidence,” said John A. Bick, a partner at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, who advised Heinz on its acquisition by Mr. Buffett and his partners.

Mr. Bick said that mega-mergers had a psychological component, meaning that once transactions start happening, chief executives do not want to be left behind. “In the same way that success breeds success, deals breed more deals,” he said.

A central reason for the return of big transactions is the mountain of cash on corporate balance sheets. After the financial crisis, companies hunkered down, laying off employees and cutting costs. As a result, they generated savings. Today, corporations in the S.& P. 500 are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash. With interest rates near zero, that money is earning very little in bank accounts, so executives are looking to put it to work by acquiring businesses.

The private equity deal-making machine is also revving up again. The world’s largest buyout firms have hundreds of billions of dollars of “dry powder” — money allotted to deals in Wall Street parlance — and they are on the hunt. The proposed leveraged buyout of Dell, led by Mr. Dell and the investment firm Silver Lake Partners, was the largest private equity transaction since July 2007, when the Blackstone Group acquired the hotel chain Hilton Worldwide for $26 billion just as the credit markets were seizing up.

But perhaps the single biggest factor driving the return of corporate takeovers is the banking system’s renewed health. Corporations often rely on bank loans for financing acquisitions, and the ability of private equity firms to strike multibillion-dollar transactions depends on the willingness of banks to lend them money.

For years, banks, saddled by the toxic mortgage assets weighing on their balance sheets, turned off the lending spigot. But with the housing crisis in the rearview mirror and economic conditions slowly improving, banks are again lining up to provide corporate loans at record-low interest rates to finance acquisitions.

The banks, of course, are major beneficiaries of megadeals, earning big fees from both advising on the transactions and lending money to finance them. Mergers and acquisitions in the United States total $158.7 billion so far this year, according to Thomson Reuters data, more than double the amount in the same period last year. JPMorgan, for example, has benefited from the surge, advising on four big deals in recent weeks, including the Dell bid and Comcast’s $16.7 billion offer for the rest of NBCUniversal that it did not already own.

Mr. Buffett, in a television interview last month, declared that the banks had repaired their businesses and no longer posed a threat to the economy. “The capital ratios are huge, the excesses on the asset aside have been largely cleared out,” said Mr. Buffett, whose acquisition of Heinz will be his second-largest acquisition, behind his $35.9 billion purchase of a majority stake in the railroad company Burlington Northern Santa Fe in 2009.

While Wall Street has an air of giddiness over the year’s start, most deal makers temper their comments about the current environment with warnings about undisciplined behavior like overpaying for deals and borrowing too much to pay for them.

Though private equity firms were battered by the financial crisis, they made it through the downturn on relatively solid ground. Many of their megadeals, like Hilton, looked destined for bankruptcy after the markets collapsed, but they have since recovered. The deals have benefited from an improving economy, as well as robust lending markets that allowed companies to push back the large amounts of debt that were to have come due in the next few years.

But there are still plenty of cautionary tales about the consequences of overpriced, overleveraged takeovers. Consider Energy Future Holdings, the biggest private equity deal in history. Struck at the peak of the merger boom in October 2007, the company has suffered from low natural gas prices and too much debt, and could be forced to restructure this year. Its owners, a group led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and TPG, are likely to lose billions.

Even Mr. Buffett made a mistake on Energy Future Holdings, having invested $2 billion in the company’s bonds. He admitted to shareholders last year that the investment was a blunder and would most likely be wiped out.

“In tennis parlance,” Mr. Buffett wrote, “this was a major unforced error.”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

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To Lower Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns

Larry Mayer for The New York Times

Craig and Cara Reichert and their daughter, Kassidy, in Dayton, Wyo. “I will always believe in guns,” Mr. Reichert said. Kameron Reichert killed himself with a family heirloom.

DAYTON, Wyo. — Craig Reichert found his son’s body on a winter morning, lying on the floor as if he were napping with his great-uncle’s pistol under his knee. The 911 dispatcher told him to administer CPR, but Mr. Reichert, who has had emergency training, told her it was too late. His son, Kameron, 17, was already cold to the touch.

Guns are like a grandmother’s diamonds in the Reichert family, heirlooms that carry memory and tradition. They are used on the occasional hunting trip, but most days they are stored, forgotten, under a bed. So when Kameron used one on himself, his parents were as shocked as they were heartbroken.

“I beat myself up quite a bit over not having a gun safe or something to put them in,” Mr. Reichert said. But he said even if he had had one, “There would have been two people in the house with the combination, him and me.”

The gun debate has focused on mass shootings and assault weapons since the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn., but far more Americans die by turning guns on themselves. Nearly 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths from guns in the United States in 2010 were suicides, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national suicide rate has climbed by 12 percent since 2003, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for teenagers.

Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states, according to the Harvard center. The state-level data are too broad to tell whether the deaths were in homes with guns, but a series of individual-level studies since the early 1990s found a direct link. Most researchers say the weight of evidence from multiple studies is that guns in the home increase the risk of suicide.

“The literature suggests that having a gun in your home to protect your family is like bringing a time bomb into your house,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, an epidemiologist who helped establish the C.D.C.’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “Instead of protecting you, it’s more likely to blow up.”

Still, some dispute the link, saying that it does not prove cause and effect, and that other factors, like alcoholism and drug abuse, may be driving the association. Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, contends that gun owners may have qualities that make them more susceptible to suicide. They may be more likely to see the world as a hostile place, or to blame themselves when things go wrong, a dark side of self-reliance.

Health officials in a number of states are trying to persuade families to keep guns away from troubled relatives or to lock the weapons up so teenagers cannot get them. Some of those same officials say the inflamed national gun control debate is actually making progress harder because the politics put gun owners on the defensive.

“You just bump up against that glass wall, and barriers go up and the conversations break down,” said B. J. Ayers, a suicide prevention specialist in southeast Wyoming.

Seeking to lower death rates, health departments in Missouri, Wyoming and North Carolina are giving out gunlocks. In New Hampshire, about half the gun shops put up posters and give out fliers alerting gun owners to the warning signs for suicide and suggesting ways to keep guns from loved ones at risk of harming themselves. A coalition of firearm dealers in Maryland is now planning a similar program.

“This is an issue whose time has come,” said Keith Hotle, state suicide prevention team leader for Wyoming, the state with the highest suicide rate. A state advisory council recently bumped firearms safety to the top priority in a new report to the governor on suicide prevention. But Mr. Hotle cautioned that in Wyoming, where guns are like cars — just about everybody has one — direct arguments against them simply will not work.

“The framing is important,” he said. “It’s not about taking away people’s guns. It’s about how to deal with folks in a temporary crisis.”

Kameron’s crisis was, by all accounts, temporary. He was a popular football player with adoring parents and no history of depression. He worked after school at the only corner grocery store in Dayton, a tiny town in northeastern Wyoming with tidy, tree-lined streets and a park at the base of Bighorn National Forest. He liked to drive students around in his Pontiac Grand Prix, and he always bought multipacks of gum at Costco so he could give out sticks in pretty blue wrappers to girls at school.

“If someone had a hankering for a hamburger, he’d be off,” said his mother, Cara Reichert, an administrator in the local school system.

The event that preceded his death in 2008 seems like the mischievous scrape of a teenage boy. Out one night in the town park, he was caught with a package of cigars by local police officers.

His parents are still tormented over the bad luck that followed. The officers searched him because they were training a new colleague. Then a clerk at the local court told him — incorrectly — that his parents had to be present to pay the fine. His parents punished him by taking away his cellphone, though they left him his car.

“If just one little piece of this story would not have fallen into place,” Mr. Reichert said, his voice breaking.

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