Assad Facing Setbacks as Syrian Capital Is Besieged

Narciso Contreras/Associated Press

A kitchen in a residence in Aleppo, Syria, damaged Sunday in fighting between Free Syrian Army fighters and government forces.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Fierce fighting on the battlefield and setbacks on the diplomatic front increased pressure on the embattled Syrian government as fresh signs emerged on Tuesday of a sustained battle for control of the capital.

News reports quoted activists as saying fighting was raging in the southern suburbs of Damascus and near the international airport for a fifth straight day as government forces sought to dislodge rebels and reverse their recent gains.

While the government has superior firepower and rebels are reporting heavy losses, loyalist forces have been carrying out a serious counteroffensive in the suburbs without being able to subdue the insurgents.

The latest reports followed developments on Monday when a senior Turkish official said that Russia had agreed to a new diplomatic approach to seek ways to persuade President Bashar al-Assad to relinquish power, a possible weakening in Russia’s steadfast support for the government.

In Damascus, a prominent Foreign Ministry spokesman was said to have left the country amid reports of his defection, and both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued warnings that any use of chemical weapons by a desperate government would be met with a strong international response. The NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, echoed this warning on Tuesday.

“The possible use of chemical weapons would be completely unacceptable to the whole international community,” Mr. Rasmussen said, according to Agence France-Presse.

A Western diplomat confirmed that there were grave concerns in United States intelligence circles that Syrian leaders could resort to the use of the weapons as their position deteriorates.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry, repeating earlier statements, told state television that the government “would not use chemical weapons, if it had them, against its own people under any circumstances.”

The United Nations said it was withdrawing nonessential international staff from Syria, and the European Union said it was reducing activities in Damascus “to a minimum,” as security forces pummeled the suburbs with artillery and airstrikes in a struggle to seal off the city from its restive outskirts and control the airport road. A senior Russian official spoke for the first time in detail about the possibility of evacuating Russian citizens.

The United Nations World Food Program reported on Tuesday that “the recent escalation of violence in Syria is making it more difficult to reach the country’s hardest-hit areas.”

“Food insecurity is on the rise due to bread shortages and higher food prices in many parts of the country. High prices are also affecting neighboring countries hosting Syrian refugees,” the organization said in a statement.

“Road access to and from Damascus has become more dangerous, making it difficult to dispatch food from World Food Program warehouses to some parts of the country, the organization said, adding that there had been increasing indiscriminate attacks on its trucks in different parts of the country.

It also said it would relocate seven nonessential staff members to neighboring Jordan while about “20 international and 100 national W.F.P. staff remain in the country to carry out the emergency operation to feed 1.5 million vulnerable Syrians.” Mr. Assad has held on longer than many had predicted at the start of the 21-month uprising. He still has a strong military advantage and undiminished support from his closest ally, Iran. Military analysts doubt the rebels are capable of taking Damascus by force, and one fighter interviewed on Monday said the government counteroffensive was taking a heavy toll. There were still no firm indications from Russia that it was ready to join Turkey and Western nations in insisting on Mr. Assad’s immediate departure.

But the latest grim developments follow a week of events that suggested the Assad government was being forced to fight harder to keep its grip on power. Rebels threatened its vital control of the skies, using surface-to-air missiles to down a fighter plane and other aircraft. The opposition also gained control of strategic military bases and their arsenals, and forced the government to shut down the Damascus airport periodically. The Internet was off for two days.

A Russian political analyst with contacts at the Foreign Ministry said that “people sent by the Russian leadership” who had contact with Mr. Assad two weeks ago described a man who has lost all hope of victory or escape.

“His mood is that he will be killed anyway,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of a Russian foreign affairs journal and the head of an influential policy group, said in an interview in Moscow, adding that only an “extremely bold” diplomatic proposal could possibly convince Mr. Assad that he could leave power and survive.

“If he will try to go, to leave, to exit, he will be killed by his own people,” Mr. Lukyanov said, speculating that security forces dominated by Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect would not let him depart and leave them to face revenge. “If he stays, he will be killed by his opponents. He is in a trap. It is not about Russia or anybody else. It is about his physical survival.”

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Ellen Barry from Moscow. Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell in London, Sebnem Arsu in Istanbul, Peter Baker in Washington, Hwaida Saad, Neil MacFarquhar and Hania Mourtada in Beirut, and Christine Hauser in New York.

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DealBook: Delta Air Lines Ponders Stake in Virgin Atlantic Airways

Delta Air Lines is in talks to buy Singapore Airlines’ 49 percent stake in Virgin Atlantic Airways, in an effort to bolster its international operations, particularly flights between New York and London, a person briefed on the matter said on Sunday.

Talks are continuing but a deal will not be announced soon, this person said. Singapore Airlines confirmed that it was in discussions about a potential sale of its Virgin stake, but provided no further details.

A transaction would be the latest in a round of mergers that has reshaped the airline industry, as companies in the United States and Europe have looked to consolidation to restore profitability.

With oil prices remaining stubbornly high and the economic outlook uncertain, many airlines have continued to struggle. That may precipitate even more takeovers, analysts say.

A deal would also be Delta’s most significant strategic move since its 2008 merger with Northwest Airlines, which made it the biggest American carrier until the union of United Airlines and Continental Airlines last year.

It would provide more access to London’s Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest, and expand Delta’s North Atlantic business.

It would also bolster its partnership with Air France KLM, Europe’s biggest airline. Both companies are part of the Sky Team global alliance, and also run a joint business in the North Atlantic market, sharing flights, revenues and costs.

“Delta has shown time and time again that it is extremely opportunistic,” said Brett Snyder, an airline expert. “If it sees a good opportunity, nothing is off the table.”

If it proceeded, a transaction would directly challenge the Oneworld global alliance, whose biggest members are American Airlines and British Airways. The two airlines have an international joint venture. Virgin does not belong to any of the three major airline alliances — Star, Oneworld and Sky Team — depriving it of the ability to coordinate flights and cut costs, which has helped many of its competitors. Star’s major carriers are United, US Airways and Lufthansa. The deal would also give Virgin a strong partner as it struggles to compete against rivals with deeper pockets. Founded by Richard Branson in 1984, the company has long embraced an image of fun travel and cheaper fares.

But that has not helped the airline’s financial condition of late. Virgin lost £80 million, or $128 million, in the year that ended in February, compared with a profit of £18.5 million in the previous year.

The company has been under pressure from the likes of British Airways, whose corporate parent, IAG, bought BMI British Midlands earlier this year. Virgin fought against that deal, arguing that it would give British Airways too much of a presence at Heathrow. But the takeover was completed, after IAG complied with a European Commission order to give back 14 slots at the airport.

The deal may also pave the way for an eventual change of control of Virgin. The company’s chief executive, Steve Ridgway, told The Financial Times in an interview in January that Mr. Branson was prepared to sell some of his 51 percent controlling stake in the airline.

“For Virgin, it’s an exit strategy in an environment where they are being marginalized by alliances on the Atlantic,” said Robert W. Mann, an airline analyst based in Port Washington, N.Y.

A Delta spokeswoman declined to comment. A representative for Virgin was not immediately available for comment.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 3, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the date of Delta's merger with Northwest Airlines. It was 2008, not 2010.

A version of this article appeared in print on 12/03/2012, on page B2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Delta, Seeking London Access, Ponders Stake in Virgin.

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Call That Kept Nursing Home Patients in Sandy’s Path

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Workers were shocked that nursing and adult homes in areas like Rockaway Park, Queens, weren’t evacuated.

Hurricane Sandy was swirling northward, four days before landfall, and at the Sea Crest Health Care Center, a nursing home overlooking the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn, workers were gathering medicines and other supplies as they prepared to evacuate.

Then the call came from health officials: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, acting on the advice of his aides and those of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, recommended that nursing homes and adult homes stay put. The 305 residents would ride out the storm.

The same advisory also took administrators by surprise at the Ocean Promenade nursing home, which faces the Atlantic Ocean in Queens. They canceled plans to move 105 residents to safety.

“No one gets why we weren’t evacuated,” said a worker there, Yisroel Tabi. “We wouldn’t have exposed ourselves to dealing with that situation.”

The recommendation that thousands of elderly, disabled and mentally ill residents remain in more than 40 nursing homes and adult homes in flood-prone areas of New York City had calamitous consequences.

At least 29 facilities in Queens and Brooklyn were severely flooded. Generators failed or were absent. Buildings were plunged into a cold, wet darkness, with no access to power, water, heat and food.

While no immediate deaths were reported, it took at least three days for the Fire Department, the National Guard and ambulance crews from around the country to rescue over 4,000 nursing home and 1,500 adult home residents. Without working elevators, many had to be carried down slippery stairwells.

“I was shocked,” said Greg Levow, who works for an ambulance service and helped rescue residents at Queens. “I couldn’t understand why they were there in the first place.”

Many sat for hours in ambulances and buses before being transported to safety through sand drifts and debris-filled floodwaters. They went to crowded shelters and nursing homes as far away as Albany, where for days, they often lacked medical charts and medications. Families struggled to locate relatives.

The decision not to empty the nursing homes and adult homes in the mandatory evacuation area was one of the most questionable by the authorities during Hurricane Sandy. And an investigation by The New York Times found that the impact was worsened by missteps that officials made in not ensuring that these facilities could protect residents.

They did not require that nursing homes maintain backup generators that could withstand flooding. They did not ensure that health care administrators could adequately communicate with government agencies during and after a storm. And they discounted the more severe of the early predictions about Hurricane Sandy’s surge.

The Times’s investigation was based on interviews with officials, health care administrators, doctors, nurses, ambulance medics, residents, family members and disaster experts. It included a review of internal State Health Department status reports. The findings revealed the striking vulnerability of the city’s nursing and adult homes.

On Sunday, Oct. 28, the day before Hurricane Sandy arrived, Mr. Bloomberg ordered a mandatory evacuation in Zone A, the low-lying neighborhoods of the city. But by that point, Mr. Bloomberg, relying on the advice of the city and state health commissioners, had already determined that people in nursing homes and adult homes should not leave, officials said.

The mayor’s recommendations that health care facilities not evacuate startled residents of Surf Manor adult home in Coney Island, said one of them, Norman Bloomfield. He recalled that another resident exclaimed, “What about us! Why’s he telling us to stay?”

The commissioners made the recommendation to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo because they said they believed that the inherent risks of transporting the residents outweighed the potential dangers from the storm.

In interviews, senior Bloomberg and Cuomo aides did not express regret for keeping the residents in place.

“I would defend all the decisions and the actions” by the health authorities involving the storm, said Linda I. Gibbs, a deputy mayor. “I feel like I’m describing something that was a remarkable, lifesaving event.”

Dr. Nirav R. Shah, the state health commissioner, who regulates nursing homes, said: “I’m not even thinking of second-guessing the decisions.”

Still, officials in New Jersey and in Nassau County adopted a different policy, evacuating nursing homes in coastal areas well before the storm.

Contradictory Forecasts

The city’s experience with Tropical Storm Irene last year weighed heavily on state and city health officials and contributed to their underestimating the impact of Hurricane Sandy, according to records and interviews.

Before Tropical Storm Irene, the officials ordered nursing homes and adult homes to evacuate. The storm caused relatively minor damage, but the evacuation led to millions of dollars in health care, transportation, housing and other costs, and took a toll on residents.

As a result, when Hurricane Sandy loomed, the officials were acutely aware that they could come under criticism if they ordered another evacuation that proved unnecessary.

Read More..

Call That Kept Nursing Home Patients in Sandy’s Path

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Workers were shocked that nursing and adult homes in areas like Rockaway Park, Queens, weren’t evacuated.

Hurricane Sandy was swirling northward, four days before landfall, and at the Sea Crest Health Care Center, a nursing home overlooking the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn, workers were gathering medicines and other supplies as they prepared to evacuate.

Then the call came from health officials: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, acting on the advice of his aides and those of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, recommended that nursing homes and adult homes stay put. The 305 residents would ride out the storm.

The same advisory also took administrators by surprise at the Ocean Promenade nursing home, which faces the Atlantic Ocean in Queens. They canceled plans to move 105 residents to safety.

“No one gets why we weren’t evacuated,” said a worker there, Yisroel Tabi. “We wouldn’t have exposed ourselves to dealing with that situation.”

The recommendation that thousands of elderly, disabled and mentally ill residents remain in more than 40 nursing homes and adult homes in flood-prone areas of New York City had calamitous consequences.

At least 29 facilities in Queens and Brooklyn were severely flooded. Generators failed or were absent. Buildings were plunged into a cold, wet darkness, with no access to power, water, heat and food.

While no immediate deaths were reported, it took at least three days for the Fire Department, the National Guard and ambulance crews from around the country to rescue over 4,000 nursing home and 1,500 adult home residents. Without working elevators, many had to be carried down slippery stairwells.

“I was shocked,” said Greg Levow, who works for an ambulance service and helped rescue residents at Queens. “I couldn’t understand why they were there in the first place.”

Many sat for hours in ambulances and buses before being transported to safety through sand drifts and debris-filled floodwaters. They went to crowded shelters and nursing homes as far away as Albany, where for days, they often lacked medical charts and medications. Families struggled to locate relatives.

The decision not to empty the nursing homes and adult homes in the mandatory evacuation area was one of the most questionable by the authorities during Hurricane Sandy. And an investigation by The New York Times found that the impact was worsened by missteps that officials made in not ensuring that these facilities could protect residents.

They did not require that nursing homes maintain backup generators that could withstand flooding. They did not ensure that health care administrators could adequately communicate with government agencies during and after a storm. And they discounted the more severe of the early predictions about Hurricane Sandy’s surge.

The Times’s investigation was based on interviews with officials, health care administrators, doctors, nurses, ambulance medics, residents, family members and disaster experts. It included a review of internal State Health Department status reports. The findings revealed the striking vulnerability of the city’s nursing and adult homes.

On Sunday, Oct. 28, the day before Hurricane Sandy arrived, Mr. Bloomberg ordered a mandatory evacuation in Zone A, the low-lying neighborhoods of the city. But by that point, Mr. Bloomberg, relying on the advice of the city and state health commissioners, had already determined that people in nursing homes and adult homes should not leave, officials said.

The mayor’s recommendations that health care facilities not evacuate startled residents of Surf Manor adult home in Coney Island, said one of them, Norman Bloomfield. He recalled that another resident exclaimed, “What about us! Why’s he telling us to stay?”

The commissioners made the recommendation to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo because they said they believed that the inherent risks of transporting the residents outweighed the potential dangers from the storm.

In interviews, senior Bloomberg and Cuomo aides did not express regret for keeping the residents in place.

“I would defend all the decisions and the actions” by the health authorities involving the storm, said Linda I. Gibbs, a deputy mayor. “I feel like I’m describing something that was a remarkable, lifesaving event.”

Dr. Nirav R. Shah, the state health commissioner, who regulates nursing homes, said: “I’m not even thinking of second-guessing the decisions.”

Still, officials in New Jersey and in Nassau County adopted a different policy, evacuating nursing homes in coastal areas well before the storm.

Contradictory Forecasts

The city’s experience with Tropical Storm Irene last year weighed heavily on state and city health officials and contributed to their underestimating the impact of Hurricane Sandy, according to records and interviews.

Before Tropical Storm Irene, the officials ordered nursing homes and adult homes to evacuate. The storm caused relatively minor damage, but the evacuation led to millions of dollars in health care, transportation, housing and other costs, and took a toll on residents.

As a result, when Hurricane Sandy loomed, the officials were acutely aware that they could come under criticism if they ordered another evacuation that proved unnecessary.

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Opening a New Page in a Browser Tab

Is there a way to make Internet Explorer open a link in a new browser tab, instead of in a whole new window?

Right-clicking the link you want to open on the current page and choosing “Open in New Tab” from the drop-down menu is one way to avoid having a whole new browser window appear. If you want to make the process a little more automatic, though, you can adjust Internet Explorer’s settings.

In Internet Explorer 7 and later, go to the Tools menu (or click the gear icon in later versions of the program) in the browser toolbar and select Internet Options; hold down the ALT key if you do not see a menu bar in the browser window. In the Internet Options box, click the General tab and then click the Settings button; in Internet Explorer 10, click the Tabs button here instead.

In the Settings box, make sure the box to enable tabbed browsing is checked. In the area under “When a popup is encountered,” select “Always open pop-ups in a new tab.” Click the O.K. button until you have closed all the settings and options boxes. Now, when you click on a link that is coded to open in its own new window, the page should open in a new tab within your existing browser window.

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Letter From Europe: British Press Wondering: Now What?

LONDON — As the Leveson inquiry into the behavior of the British press produced its report last week urging laws to underpin new controls, U.S. journalists could feel proud, or at least relieved, that the First Amendment protection of free speech inoculated them against such constraints.

Equally, though, some practitioners of British journalism, which prides itself on being raucous and rambunctious, offered the counterview that the Americans had paid the price of “becoming monumentally dull,” as one columnist here put it, in return for their freedoms.

The competing visions reflected a history of divergent notions of what the press is supposed to do.

U.S. newspapers evolved as the voices of cities like New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Washington. Only a handful emerged to compete for a national audience.

But Britain’s big daily newspapers have long done battle on a national stage, slicing and dicing markets defined most obviously by the class divide of blue-collar tabloids and white-collar broadsheets, but also by political persuasion — liberal for The Guardian, for instance, conservative for The Daily Telegraph.

The scramble spawned a tradition of cutthroat competition — the hunger for the scoop, sometimes ahead of the facts — that propelled the best of British journalism and contributed to its worst failures, lurching beyond reporting into accusations of criminality chronicled in the Leveson report.

The document totaled about 2,000 pages in four volumes — dimensions that almost begged the question of whether it would make waves, or sink without trace in the current maelstrom swirling through Britain’s established media, from newspapers to the BBC.

Weighing the sworn testimony of 337 witnesses during nine months of hearings conducted by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, the report’s central recommendation for stricter self-regulation buttressed by new laws — in addition to the gamut of restrictive legislation already on the statute books — drew howls of predictable outrage.

“Leveson’s remedy is to terminate centuries of bold, brassy, often vulgar and disreputable — but also brave and important — British journalism and dress the press in a tight, clumsy straitjacket of his own manufacture,” the columnist and former editor Max Hastings wrote in The Daily Mail. (Writing in The Financial Times, he also observed that “most modern American journalism is impeccably sober and politically correct but at the price of also becoming monumentally dull.”)

But there were other considerations, largely relating to the rise of the Internet, to elbow aside newspapers as the vehicle of spreading the news in a land where the daily circulation of the printed editions of the main national titles totals some 8.6 million.

That is roughly one million less than one year ago. “There will come a time soon when many newspapers are not on paper,” the columnist Hugo Rifkind wrote in The Times of London. “And I do mean soon. We’re not talking decades. We’re talking years.”

“What matters today is content, not the media that delivers it, and there’s frankly something quite depressing about a nine-month inquiry that fails to figure this out.”

To some analysts, Sir Brian resembled a general using the lessons of a previous campaign to fight on a new and unfamiliar battlefield — or a steward redrawing the catering arrangements on a stricken ocean liner.

Only days before the report was published, a furor involving the BBC’s reporting of a sexual abuse scandal exploded, not simply because of what had been broadcast but by what had been said about the story on Twitter.

Covering the publication of the report, and the divided response to it, it was somehow easy to recall the old Sicilian proverb that everything must change so that nothing changes.

Here were celebrities like the actor Hugh Grant and the author J.K. Rowling — both campaigners for tighter restrictions — sensing that a time was now approaching when, as Mr. Hastings put it, they would be able to close the spigot of personal publicity “whenever they are not promoting a book or movie.”

Here was Prime Minister David Cameron arguing in Parliament that press laws would “cross the Rubicon,” jeopardizing three centuries of freedom from legislative restraint.

Step back a little, and there seemed to be a subplot, as if the titled elite of the British establishment was quietly gathering to cap the myriad crises like so many oil field gushers. In the soul-searching and maneuvering, just about every player — seeking variously to investigate failure, herald a new era, or seek to avert one — bore the title of lord, sir or dame.

In the British honors system, titles often acknowledge achievement earned by providing safe hands in a crisis. This time, that might not be enough.

By early Monday, the signatories to an online petition organized by the pro-regulation Hacked Off advocacy group exceeded 126,000 — not so much safe hands as an angry show of them, demanding changes that the politicians might find difficult to ignore.

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John McAfee Plays Hide-and-Seek in Belize

Photo Illustration by The New York Times

John McAfee, right, a pioneer in computer security who lives in Belize, is a “person of interest” in the murder of his neighbor. More Photos »

DANIEL GUERRERO promised during his campaign for mayor here to clean up San Pedro, the only town on this island, a 20-minute puddle jump from the mainland. But if he ever runs for re-election, don’t expect him to mention that vow.

“I meant clean up the trash, the traffic, that sort of thing,” he says. “I didn’t mean this.”

“This” is a full-blown international media frenzy and the kind of mess that no politician could have seen coming. It started on Nov. 11, the morning that Gregory Faull, a 52-year-old American, was found dead, lying face up in a pool of blood in his home. He had been shot in the head. His laptop and iPhone were missing. A 9-millimeter shell was found nearby.

What happened next turned this from a local crime story to worldwide news: The police announced that a “person of interest” in the investigation was a neighbor, John McAfee, a Silicon Valley legend who years ago earned millions from the computer virus-fighting software company that still bears his name.

A priapic 67-year-old, with an improbable mop of blond-highlighted hair and a rotating group of young girlfriends, Mr. McAfee quickly melted into the island’s lush green forest. Then, for Belizean authorities, the real embarrassment began.

Asserting his innocence, Mr. McAfee became a multiplatform cyberdissident, with a Twitter account, and a blog at whoismcafee.com with audio links, a comments section, photographs and a stream of invective against the government and the police of Belize. He has done interviews on podcasts, like the “Joe Rogan Experience,” and offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of “the person or persons” who killed Mr. Faull. He has turned lamming it into a kind of high-tech performance art.

“I am asking all people of conscience to read this blog, especially the links in the ‘Background’ section,’ and see the ugly truth unfolding here,” he posted on Nov. 18. “Speak out. Write your congressmen. Write the prime minister. Do what you can.”

Before he went underground, Mr. McAfee led a noisy, opulent and increasingly stressful life here. He was known for the retinue of prostitutes who he says moved in and out of his house, and for employing armed guards, some of whom stood watch on the beach abutting his house. He also kept a pack of untethered dogs on his property who barked at and sometimes bit passers-by.

Two days before the murder, someone had poisoned a handful of those dogs. As it happens, Mr. Faull had complained about the animals, as well as the guards and the constant late-night inflow and outflow of taxis on the dirt path that runs behind his and Mr. McAfee’s homes — a path so tiny that it’s supposed to be off-limits to cars.

Mr. Faull had shown up at the town council office a few weeks ago with a letter decrying the din and the dogs, as well as Mr. McAfee’s guns and behavior. Nothing came of it.

“We were planning to meet with John McAfee and hand him the letter,” Mr. Guerrero said. “But it never happened. We were busy doing other work.”

In hindsight, that looks like a blunder. Mr. McAfee has since said on his blog that he had no choice but to flee because police and politicians in Belize are corrupt and eager to kill him. As proof, he has written at length about a late April raid that the country’s Gang Suppression Unit conducted at a property of his on the mainland, in a district called Orange Walk.

Some McAfee watchers have a different theory — namely, that he grew paranoid and perhaps psychotic after months of experimenting with and consuming MDPV, a psychoactive drug. These experiments were described in detail by Mr. McAfee himself, under the pseudonym “Stuffmonger” in a forum on Bluelight, a Web site popular with drug hobbyists.

So, here’s one hypothesis: Rich man doses himself to madness while seeking sexual bliss through pharmacology. Then shoots neighbor in a rage. Case closed, right? Ah, but those Bluelight posts were a ruse, Mr. McAfee would later blog, just one of the many pranks he has perpetrated over the years — part of a bet with a friend to see if he could create Bluelight’s largest-ever thread.

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Opinion: A Health Insurance Detective Story

I’VE had a long career as a business journalist, beginning at Forbes and including eight years as the editor of Money, a personal finance magazine. But I’ve never faced a more confounding reporting challenge than the one I’m engaged in now: What will I pay next year for the pill that controls my blood cancer?

After making more than 70 phone calls to 16 organizations over the past few weeks, I’m still not totally sure what I will owe for my Revlimid, a derivative of thalidomide that is keeping my multiple myeloma in check. The drug is extremely expensive — about $11,000 retail for a four-week supply, $132,000 a year, $524 a pill. Time Warner, my former employer, has covered me for years under its Supplementary Medicare Program, a plan for retirees that included a special Writers Guild benefit capping my out-of-pocket prescription costs at $1,000 a year. That out-of-pocket limit is scheduled to expire on Jan. 1. So what will my Revlimid cost me next year?

The answers I got ranged from $20 a month to $17,000 a year. One of the first people I phoned said that no matter what I heard, I wouldn’t know the cost until I filed a claim in January. Seventy phone calls later, that may still be the most reliable thing anyone has told me.

Like around 47 million other Medicare beneficiaries, I have until this Friday, Dec. 7, when open enrollment ends, to choose my 2013 Medicare coverage, either through traditional Medicare or a private insurer, as well as my drug coverage — or I will risk all sorts of complications and potential late penalties.

But if a seasoned personal-finance journalist can’t get a straight answer to a simple question, what chance do most people have of picking the right health insurance option?

A study published in the journal Health Affairs in October estimated that a mere 5.2 percent of Medicare Part D beneficiaries chose the cheapest coverage that met their needs. All in all, consumers appear to be wasting roughly $11 billion a year on their Part D coverage, partly, I think, because they don’t get reliable answers to straightforward questions.

Here’s a snapshot of my surreal experience:

NOV. 7 A packet from Time Warner informs me that the company’s new 2013 Retiree Health Care Plan has “no out-of-pocket limit on your expenses.” But Erin, the person who answers at the company’s Benefits Service Center, tells me that the new plan will have “no practical effect” on me. What about the $1,000-a-year cap on drug costs? Is that really being eliminated? “Yes,” she says, “there’s no limit on out-of-pocket expenses in 2013.” I tell her I think that could have a major effect on me.

Next I talk to David at CVS/Caremark, Time Warner’s new drug insurance provider. He thinks my out-of-pocket cost for Revlimid next year will be $6,900. He says, “I know I’m scaring you.”

I call back Erin at Time Warner. She mentions something about $10,000 and says she’ll get an estimate for me in two business days.

NOV. 8 I phone Medicare. Jay says that if I switch to Medicare’s Part D prescription coverage, with a new provider, Revlimid’s cost will drive me into Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage.” I’d pay $2,819 the first month, and 5 percent of the cost of the drug thereafter — $563 a month or maybe $561. Anyway, roughly $9,000 for the year. Jay says AARP’s Part D plan may be a good option.

NOV. 9 Erin at Time Warner tells me that the company’s policy bundles United Healthcare medical coverage with CVS/Caremark’s drug coverage. I can’t accept the medical plan and cherry-pick prescription coverage elsewhere. It’s take it or leave it. Then she puts CVS’s Michele on the line to get me a Revlimid quote. Michele says Time Warner hasn’t transferred my insurance information. She can’t give me a quote without it. Erin says she will not call me with an update. I’ll have to call her.

My oncologist’s assistant steers me to Celgene, Revlimid’s manufacturer. Jennifer in “patient support” says premium assistance grants can cut the cost of Revlimid to $20 or $30 a month. She says, “You’re going to be O.K.” If my income is low enough to qualify for assistance.

NOV. 12 I try CVS again. Christine says my insurance records still have not been transferred, but she thinks my Revlimid might cost $17,000 a year.

Adriana at Medicare warns me that AARP and other Part D providers will require “prior authorization” to cover my Revlimid, so it’s probably best to stick with Time Warner no matter what the cost.

But Brooke at AARP insists that I don’t need prior authorization for my Revlimid, and so does her supervisor Brian — until he spots a footnote. Then he assures me that it will be easy to get prior authorization. All I need is a doctor’s note. My out-of-pocket cost for 2013: roughly $7,000.

NOV. 13 Linda at CVS says her company still doesn’t have my file, but from what she can see about Time Warner’s insurance plans my cost will be $60 a month — $720 for the year.

CVS assigns my case to Rebecca. She says she’s “sure all will be fine.” Well, “pretty sure.” She’s excited. She’s been with the company only a few months. This will be her first quote.

NOV. 14 Giddens at Time Warner puts in an “emergency update request” to get my files transferred to CVS.

Frank Lalli is an editorial consultant on retirement issues and a former senior executive editor at Time Warner’s Time Inc.

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Opinion: A Health Insurance Detective Story

I’VE had a long career as a business journalist, beginning at Forbes and including eight years as the editor of Money, a personal finance magazine. But I’ve never faced a more confounding reporting challenge than the one I’m engaged in now: What will I pay next year for the pill that controls my blood cancer?

After making more than 70 phone calls to 16 organizations over the past few weeks, I’m still not totally sure what I will owe for my Revlimid, a derivative of thalidomide that is keeping my multiple myeloma in check. The drug is extremely expensive — about $11,000 retail for a four-week supply, $132,000 a year, $524 a pill. Time Warner, my former employer, has covered me for years under its Supplementary Medicare Program, a plan for retirees that included a special Writers Guild benefit capping my out-of-pocket prescription costs at $1,000 a year. That out-of-pocket limit is scheduled to expire on Jan. 1. So what will my Revlimid cost me next year?

The answers I got ranged from $20 a month to $17,000 a year. One of the first people I phoned said that no matter what I heard, I wouldn’t know the cost until I filed a claim in January. Seventy phone calls later, that may still be the most reliable thing anyone has told me.

Like around 47 million other Medicare beneficiaries, I have until this Friday, Dec. 7, when open enrollment ends, to choose my 2013 Medicare coverage, either through traditional Medicare or a private insurer, as well as my drug coverage — or I will risk all sorts of complications and potential late penalties.

But if a seasoned personal-finance journalist can’t get a straight answer to a simple question, what chance do most people have of picking the right health insurance option?

A study published in the journal Health Affairs in October estimated that a mere 5.2 percent of Medicare Part D beneficiaries chose the cheapest coverage that met their needs. All in all, consumers appear to be wasting roughly $11 billion a year on their Part D coverage, partly, I think, because they don’t get reliable answers to straightforward questions.

Here’s a snapshot of my surreal experience:

NOV. 7 A packet from Time Warner informs me that the company’s new 2013 Retiree Health Care Plan has “no out-of-pocket limit on your expenses.” But Erin, the person who answers at the company’s Benefits Service Center, tells me that the new plan will have “no practical effect” on me. What about the $1,000-a-year cap on drug costs? Is that really being eliminated? “Yes,” she says, “there’s no limit on out-of-pocket expenses in 2013.” I tell her I think that could have a major effect on me.

Next I talk to David at CVS/Caremark, Time Warner’s new drug insurance provider. He thinks my out-of-pocket cost for Revlimid next year will be $6,900. He says, “I know I’m scaring you.”

I call back Erin at Time Warner. She mentions something about $10,000 and says she’ll get an estimate for me in two business days.

NOV. 8 I phone Medicare. Jay says that if I switch to Medicare’s Part D prescription coverage, with a new provider, Revlimid’s cost will drive me into Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage.” I’d pay $2,819 the first month, and 5 percent of the cost of the drug thereafter — $563 a month or maybe $561. Anyway, roughly $9,000 for the year. Jay says AARP’s Part D plan may be a good option.

NOV. 9 Erin at Time Warner tells me that the company’s policy bundles United Healthcare medical coverage with CVS/Caremark’s drug coverage. I can’t accept the medical plan and cherry-pick prescription coverage elsewhere. It’s take it or leave it. Then she puts CVS’s Michele on the line to get me a Revlimid quote. Michele says Time Warner hasn’t transferred my insurance information. She can’t give me a quote without it. Erin says she will not call me with an update. I’ll have to call her.

My oncologist’s assistant steers me to Celgene, Revlimid’s manufacturer. Jennifer in “patient support” says premium assistance grants can cut the cost of Revlimid to $20 or $30 a month. She says, “You’re going to be O.K.” If my income is low enough to qualify for assistance.

NOV. 12 I try CVS again. Christine says my insurance records still have not been transferred, but she thinks my Revlimid might cost $17,000 a year.

Adriana at Medicare warns me that AARP and other Part D providers will require “prior authorization” to cover my Revlimid, so it’s probably best to stick with Time Warner no matter what the cost.

But Brooke at AARP insists that I don’t need prior authorization for my Revlimid, and so does her supervisor Brian — until he spots a footnote. Then he assures me that it will be easy to get prior authorization. All I need is a doctor’s note. My out-of-pocket cost for 2013: roughly $7,000.

NOV. 13 Linda at CVS says her company still doesn’t have my file, but from what she can see about Time Warner’s insurance plans my cost will be $60 a month — $720 for the year.

CVS assigns my case to Rebecca. She says she’s “sure all will be fine.” Well, “pretty sure.” She’s excited. She’s been with the company only a few months. This will be her first quote.

NOV. 14 Giddens at Time Warner puts in an “emergency update request” to get my files transferred to CVS.

Frank Lalli is an editorial consultant on retirement issues and a former senior executive editor at Time Warner’s Time Inc.

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After Death of Sattar Beheshti, Iranian Blogger, Head of Tehran’s Cybercrimes Unit Is Fired

TEHRAN — Iranian’s national police chief fired the commander of Tehran’s cybercrimes police unit on Saturday for negligence in the death of a blogger in prison.

The dismissal of the commander, Gen. Saeed Shokrian, follows investigations by Parliament and Iran’s judiciary into the unexplained death of the blogger, Sattar Beheshti, 35, who died in early November just a few days after being arrested by the cybercrimes police unit, known here as FATA.

“Tehran’s FATA should be held responsible for the death of Sattar Beheshti,” said Iran’s national police chief, Ismael Ahmadi-Moqaddam, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency.

It is unclear whether General Shokrian will also face judicial charges over the blogger’s death.

The public nature of his dismissal suggests that he will bear most of the responsibility for the death. In similar cases in the past, officials have been punished, but it is rare for them to be named and publicly dismissed on the same day.

Mr. Beheshti’s Web site, My Life for My Iran, criticized Iran’s financial contributions to the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. Mr. Beheshti posted pictures of Lebanese youths having parties alongside images of Iranians living in poverty.

The exact cause of Mr. Beheshti’s death remains murky. Mr. Ahmadi-Moqaddam said Tuesday that investigations had ruled out torture as a cause of death, saying it was possible that Mr. Beheshti, who in pictures looks big and strong, died of “psychological shock.”

Iranian activists and bloggers say Mr. Beheshti died of injuries following beatings. Iran’s judiciary spokesman, Gholam Hussein Mohseni-Ejei, recently admitted that Mr. Beheshti — while in prison — had lodged a written complaint against an interrogator, in which he accused the man of having beaten him during his detention in Tehran’s Evin prison.

“I, Sattar Beheshti, was arrested by FATA and beaten and tortured with multiple blows to my head and body,” read the document, published by the opposition Kalame Web site. He added, “If anything happens to me, the police are responsible.”

Mr. Ahmadi-Moqaddam said that Mr. Beheshti was given tranquilizers while in the prison’s clinic, but that when handed over to the cybercrimes unit its officers denied him the same tranquilizers. “This might be regarded as neglect,” he said. “However, there were no signs of beatings on his body.”

Official statements on the cause of death have been contradictory. An influential member of Parliament who earlier denied that Mr. Beheshti had been tortured in any way told the Tabnak Web site that the blogger had been beaten, but died of shock and fear.

“Definitely he was beaten inside the FATA detention center,” the lawmaker, Alaeddin Borujerdi, told the Web site, “but he didn’t die as a result of these beatings.” He also stressed that the cybercrimes unit must change the way it deals with prisoners.

Iranian activists who have been in contact with Mr. Beheshti’s family say his relatives were not allowed to see his body before a hurried funeral on Nov. 6 in his hometown, Robat Karim, 30 miles southwest of the capital, Tehran.

In Mr. Beheshti’s final post, on Oct. 29, a day before his arrest, he said he was being threatened by security officials. “They told me that if I didn’t close my big mouth my mother should prepare to wear black clothes,” for mourning.

The Iranian Parliament’s special investigator into the case, Mehdi Davatgari, said he welcomed the commander’s removal. “This move shows the civil rights of our citizens are our top priority,” he said.

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