Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

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Midge Turk Richardson, Ex-Nun Who Edited Seventeen Magazine, Dies at 82

Midge Turk Richardson, who spent 18 years as a nun before spending 18 years as the editor of Seventeen magazine, a redoubt of worldly concerns like clothes, makeup and dating, died last weekend at her home in Manhattan. She was 82.

Mrs. Richardson, whose body was found by family members on Monday, apparently died in her sleep sometime during the weekend, her stepson Kevin Richardson said.

A former Roman Catholic nun, Mrs. Richardson left her order in 1966, a journey she recounted in a memoir, “The Buried Life,” published in 1971. In secular life, she became a member of New York’s social set, and was married for three decades to Ham Richardson, a tennis star who later ran his own investment concern, with homes on Park Avenue and in Bridgehampton, on Long Island.

At Seventeen, which she edited from 1975 until her retirement in 1993, Mrs. Richardson was known for introducing frank discussions of delicate subjects — including sex, anorexia and suicide — from which the magazine, aimed at teenage girls and long considered a bastion of wholesomeness, had traditionally shied away.

Under Mrs. Richardson’s stewardship, certain aspects of the magazine remained comfortably familiar. “Secrets of Staying Thin,” promised one cover, from 1980; “Those Dreamy Summer Romances,” proclaimed another that year.

But other cover lines betrayed her resolve to address modern readers’ concerns: “Teen Suicide: The Danger Signals,” “What You Must Know About Herpes.”

In 1982, Mrs. Richardson instituted a regular column, “Sex and Your Body,” which explored subjects like gynecological health, sexual relations and birth control.

“We’ve been talking about it for years and trying to figure out how to go at it in a tasteful manner,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1983. “We don’t want to be frightening to a young girl, or permissive. But the demands of the time finally brought us around to it.”

All this was a far cry from her life as Sister Agnes Marie, and from the quiet routine of her days in the convent, where she had lived from the ages of 18 to 36.

Agnes Theresa Turk, known as Midge because of her petite stature, was born in Los Angeles on March 26, 1930, the youngest daughter of a Roman Catholic family. As a girl, she worked as an extra in more than a hundred Hollywood films, sometimes appearing opposite Shirley Temple.

At 18, wanting a life of service, she forsook her lively home, her active social life and her boyfriend to enter the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a teaching order with a motherhouse in the Hollywood hills.

Sister Agnes Marie, as she was known in religion, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Immaculate Heart College, run by her order. She embarked on a career as an educator, teaching English, French and drama in local parochial schools and later becoming the principal of a Catholic high school in a blighted, largely Latino section of Los Angeles.

She loved the life, but by the mid-1960s she had become depressed and exhausted — frustrated, she wrote, by what she saw as the failure of diocesan hierarchy to meet the needs of the impoverished community she served. She suffered two bouts of temporary blindness, brought on, her doctors told her, by strain.

In 1966, after much soul-searching, Sister Agnes Marie asked to be released from her vows. (In 1970, Anita Caspary, the mother superior of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, led an exodus of 300 nuns from the order in response to what they described as the failure of the diocese to lift outmoded restrictions on nuns’ lives.)

At 36, Agnes Turk found herself on her own for the first time. Carrying a single suitcase, she made for New York: it was one place, she reasoned, that offered career opportunities for women. She found a job as an assistant to a dean at New York University, sleeping on the floor of her tiny Greenwich Village apartment because she could not afford furniture.

She learned to navigate an alien social world. Once, preparing for a date, she washed her hair only to realize she did not own a hair dryer. She stuck her head pragmatically in the oven, emerging with singed hair.

After working as the college editor of Glamour magazine and at Scholastic Publications, she joined Seventeen as executive editor, becoming editor in chief in 1985.

Mrs. Richardson’s husband, whom she married in 1974, died in 2006. The No. 1-ranked tennis player in the United States in 1956 and 1958, he won 17 national titles and played on seven Davis Cup teams.

Besides her stepson Kevin, survivors include another stepson, Ken Richardson; a stepdaughter, Kit Sawers; two sisters, Gwendolyn Tighe and Marie Smith; and five step-grandchildren.

Mrs. Richardson was also the author of a children’s biography of a friend, the photographer Gordon Parks.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1970, she described the forces that led her first to take the veil and later to relinquish it:

“I entered the convent not so much because I believed in the church as that I believed in helping people,” she said. “I’d never had any great thing about dressing up in those clothes and jangling my rosary beads.”

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The Saturday Profile: In Cindy From Marzahn, an Offbeat Comedian of the People

WHEN a career counselor in the East German town of Luckenwalde asked Ilka Bessin what she wanted to be when she grew up, the teenager answered that she had always wanted to be a clown. “Cook” was also a creative job, the counselor suggested, and a lot more realistic.

It was still a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Ms. Bessin (pronounced bess-EEN) ended up an apprentice chef at a state-owned enterprise, preparing breakfast and lunch every day for more than 1,000 workers. She never could have guessed that two decades later she would be a comedy superstar in a reunified Germany, making millions of her compatriots laugh in clubs and theaters across the land, with television stations fighting over her appearances.

Audiences know Ms. Bessin, 41, as Cindy from Marzahn, her louder, ruder and more profane alter ego. With her curly peroxide wig and swathes of hot-pink eye shadow, Cindy hails from the notorious East Berlin neighborhood of Marzahn, synonymous with the enormous Communist high-rise housing estates.

An overweight 6-foot-2-inch Valkyrie of a woman in a pink velour sweatsuit, Cindy plays up the worst stereotypes of Germany’s contemporary version of the welfare queen. She wakes up at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and begins drinking. Her dream man, Enrico, stands 4-foot-10, weighs 375 pounds and works as a bouncer.

“No neck, no hair and no brain,” she says approvingly.

IN October, Ms. Bessin was named Germany’s female comedian of the year for the fourth time in a row. The daily newspaper Tagesspiegel recently called her “a phenomenon,” under the headline “Princess of the Plattenbau,” the prefabricated housing blocs built in the former East. She hosts her own television series and recently began appearing on “Wetten Dass,” the long-running variety show whose name translates loosely as “Wanna Bet?”

Yet when asked in a recent interview how it felt to be an established star, Ms. Bessin quickly replied, “As far as I’m concerned, I’m really not there yet.” Quieter than Cindy and extremely considerate, Ms. Bessin is hardly recognizable out of costume, just one of the facts that helps keep her grounded.

“I drink absolutely no Champagne, and I don’t fit in Jean Paul Gaultier’s clothes,” she said, with a toned-down version of the self-deprecation she shares with Cindy.

Germany may have more money than its neighbors on the whole, but the middle class is shrinking and much of its recent gains in economic competitiveness came from labor-market changes that cut jobless benefits and pressured people to work, sometimes for as little as an additional $1.30 an hour. Cindy brought the low-paying jobs and the secondhand stores onstage, with songs as well as monologues.

It was a language Ms. Bessin spoke fluently, having herself lived on Hartz IV welfare payments for several years. “You sleep a lot, because you don’t see the point in getting up, and you eat what’s around you,” Ms. Bessin recalled. “You go to the employment office because you have appointments, but generally you go home even more demoralized.”

Out of the crucible of humiliation emerged Cindy, crass and cagey, driven by appetites. She hides a bratwurst in a banana peel and asks the audience for chocolate, then eats what they throw onstage. “I have Alzheimer’s bulimia,” Cindy likes to say, stomach bulging under her pink sweatshirt, tiara perched atop her wig. “I eat everything in sight and then forget to throw up.”

Critics call her act offensive, lowbrow and worse, mixing high-minded attacks on her with patronizing depictions of her supposedly benighted fans. Those fans answer by buying her concert videos and turning out to her shows in droves, where they scream and applaud like mad, many wearing their own tiaras and pink sweatshirts emblazoned with the words “Alzheimer’s bulimia” on the front.

Cindy regales them with tales of her time as a member of the Socialist Children’s Television Ballet or her efforts to get adopted by Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. Her performances are marathons with musical numbers. Fans often bring her presents and handmade cards. She is a star but also a hero, one of them, one who made it.

“I win,” Cindy sings in one of her songs, “although I’m not a winner.”

Ms. Bessin said in the interview that her act was not about East and West, which are outdated concepts in her view. Cindy happened to come from the East because Ms. Bessin did too. Her memory of the end of Communism was typically understated. “My mother was in the living room. I was in the kitchen washing dishes. She said, ‘The Wall fell,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, O.K.,’ and went back to washing dishes.”

Over the next decade she worked a dozen jobs at hotels and restaurants, including Planet Hollywood Berlin, and even did a stint on a cruise ship. She was working as a restaurant manager in 2001 and went on sick leave. When she came back she had been fired and her job had been given to someone else.

A long, demoralizing stretch on welfare followed. Between her hundreds of job applications Ms. Bessin said she ate, lay in bed and watched television, gaining weight and losing motivation. She was slowly sliding into a growing German underclass best known to the rest of the country from talk shows about paternity tests and plastic surgery. Unbeknown to Ms. Bessin, she was researching a character that had not yet found her outlet. Ms. Bessin’s break was not just lucky, it was accidental. In 2004, she called up the Quatsch Comedy Club in Berlin looking for a job as a waitress. After listening to her for a while the man on the other end of the line announced that he was not the person responsible for hiring service personnel. He was in charge of booking the acts.

“Do you have any interest in doing stand-up?” she recalled him asking. He told her about a talent competition the club was hosting. She agreed and began writing a few minutes of material. When she read through her jokes at rehearsal, people told her there was no way her act was going to work.

She decided she had nothing to lose; the wig and the costume were like a disguise and a suit of armor all at once. “No one is going to recognize me anyway, I thought,” Ms. Bessin said. On stage during the actual performance, the crowd responded immediately. Ms. Bessin talks about the similarities between her stage persona and herself, saying Cindy is “80 percent me,” but she talks about the character in the third person. Donning the costume unlocks something impish and ferocious in Ms. Bessin. She won the grueling competition, and eventually earned an appearance on the popular late-night show “TV total” in March 2006.

More offers to perform quickly followed. In 2007, Ms. Bessin won the German Comedy Prize for newcomer of the year. She has a comedy showcase, “Cindy and the Young Wild Ones,” on the private television network RTL.

The set for her first comedy special, “Schizophrenic: I Wanted to Be a Princess,” was a Communist housing bloc. The second, “Not Every Prince Comes on Horseback,” was a pink fairy castle, a home fit for Barbie.

The former welfare queen stood onstage, soaking up the audience’s applause, surrounded by men with guts, a few of them bald, but all wearing skimpy shorts and shaking pink and black pom-poms. Maybe none of them was Enrico, but it was certainly a dream come true.

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Red Hat shares up on acquisition and 3Q results

Red Hat Inc.‘s shares jumped Friday on the software company‘s solid third-quarter results and plans to acquire cloud-based software company ManageIQ.

THE SPARK: Red Hat said late Thursday that it would buy privately held ManageIQ for $ 104 million in cash.

The Raleigh, N.C., company also reported that it earned 29 cents per share for its fiscal third quarter on an adjusted basis, up a penny from the prior year and in line with analyst expectations. Its revenue for the period increased 18 percent to $ 343.6 million, which beats the $ 338 million that analysts polled by FactSet had forecast.

THE BIG PICTURE: ManageIQ’s software helps businesses deploy and manage private clouds. Red Hat said the deal will expand the reach of its public-private cloud setups for its customers. The acquisition is expected to have no material impact to Red Hat’s revenue for its fiscal year ending in February.

THE ANALYSIS: Stifel Nicolaus analyst Brad R. Reback said that the company has been able to maintain momentum even in a difficult environment and he thinks the latest deal offers an interesting longer-term angle for its business. He thinks the company is well positioned to generate at least 15 to 20 percent billings growth in the future. He reiterated a “Buy” rating and a $ 65 price target on its shares.

SHARE ACTION: Shares gained $ 2.25, or more than 4 percent, to $ 54.86 in afternoon trading. Shares have traded between $ 39.19 and $ 62.75 in the past 52 weeks.

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Ashton Kutcher files for divorce from Demi Moore

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ashton Kutcher filed court papers Friday to end his seven-year marriage to actress Demi Moore.

The actor's divorce petition cites irreconcilable differences and does not list a date that the couple separated. Moore announced last year that she was ending her marriage to the actor 15 years her junior, but she never filed a petition.

Kutcher's filing does not indicate that the couple has a prenuptial agreement. The filing states Kutcher signed the document Friday, hours before it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Kutcher and Moore married in September 2005 and until recently kept their relationship very public, communicating with each other and fans on the social networking site Twitter. After their breakup, Moore changed her name on the site from (at)mrskutcher to (at)justdemi.

Kutcher currently stars on CBS' "Two and a Half Men."

Messages sent to Kutcher's and Moore's publicists were not immediately returned Friday.

Moore, 50, and Kutcher, 34, created the DNA Foundation, also known as the Demi and Ashton Foundation, in 2010 to combat the organized sexual exploitation of girls around the globe. They later lent their support to the United Nations' efforts to fight human trafficking, a scourge the international organization estimates affects about 2.5 million people worldwide.

Moore was previously married to actor Bruce Willis for 13 years. They had three daughters together — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle — before divorcing in 2000. Willis later married model-actress Emma Heming in an intimate 2009 ceremony at his home in Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands that attended by their children, as well as Moore and Kutcher.

Kutcher has been dating former "That '70s Show" co-star Mila Kunis.

The divorce filing was first reported Friday by People magazine.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP.

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Alabama to End Isolation of Inmates With H.I.V.

Jamie Martin/Associated Press

The H.I.V. ward of an Alabama women's prison in 2008. The state was ordered to stop segregating inmates with the virus.

A federal judge on Friday ordered Alabama to stop isolating prisoners with H.I.V.

Alabama is one of two states, along with South Carolina, where H.I.V.-positive inmates are housed in separate prisons, away from other inmates, in an attempt to reduce medical costs and stop the spread of the virus, which causes AIDS.

Judge Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama ruled in favor of a group of inmates who argued in a class-action lawsuit that they had been stigmatized and denied equal access to educational programs. The judge called the state’s policy “an unnecessary tool for preventing the transmission of H.I.V.” but “an effective one for humiliating and isolating prisoners living with the disease.”

After the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, many states, including New York, quarantined H.I.V.-positive prisoners to prevent the virus from spreading through sexual contact or through blood when inmates tattooed one another. But most states ended the practice voluntarily as powerful antiretroviral drugs reduced the risk of transmission.

In Alabama, inmates are tested for H.I.V. when they enter prison. About 250 of the state’s 26,400 inmates have tested positive. They are housed in special dormitories at two prisons: one for men and one for women. No inmates have developed AIDS, the state says.

H.I.V.-positive inmates are treated differently from those with other viruses like hepatitis B and C, which are far more infectious, according to the World Health Organization. Inmates with H.I.V. are barred from eating in the cafeteria, working around food, enrolling in certain educational programs or transferring to prisons near their families.

Prisoners have been trying to overturn the policy for more than two decades. In 1995, a federal court upheld Alabama’s policy. Inmates filed the latest lawsuit last year.

“Today’s decision is historic,” said Margaret Winter, the associate director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the inmates. “It spells an end to a segregation policy that has inflicted needless misery on Alabama prisoners with H.I.V. and their families.”

Brian Corbett, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections, said the state is “not prejudiced against H.I.V.-positive inmates” and has “worked hard over the years to improve their health care, living conditions and their activities.”

“We will continue our review of the court’s opinion and determine our next course of action in a timely manner,” he wrote.

During a monthlong trial in September, lawyers for the department argued that the policy improved the treatment of H.I.V.-positive inmates. Fewer doctors are needed if specialists in H.I.V. focus on 2 of the 29 state’s prisons.

The state spends an average of $22,000 per year on treating individual H.I.V.-positive inmates. The total is more than the cost of medicine for all other inmates, said Bill Lunsford, a lawyer for the Corrections Department.

South Carolina has also faced legal scrutiny. In 2010, the Justice Department notified the state that it was investigating the policy and might sue to overturn it.

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Boehner Tax Plan in House Is Pulled, Lacking Votes

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio leaving a meeting Thursday with fellow House Republicans on talks over the “fiscal cliff.”

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner’s effort to pass fallback legislation to avert a fiscal crisis in less than two weeks collapsed Thursday night in an embarrassing defeat after conservative Republicans refused to support legislation that would allow taxes to rise on the most affluent households in the country.

House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the bill after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m. Within minutes, dejected Republicans filed out of the basement meeting room and declared there would be no votes to avert the “fiscal cliff” until after Christmas. With his “Plan B” all but dead, the speaker was left with the choice to find a new Republican way forward or to try to get a broad deficit reduction deal with President Obama that could win passage with Republican and Democratic votes.

What he could not do was blame Democrats for failing to take up legislation he could not even get through his own membership in the House.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement that said responsibility for a solution now fell to the White House and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

The stunning turn of events in the House left the status of negotiations to head off a combination of automatic tax increases and significant federal spending cuts in disarray with little time before the start of the new year.

At the White House, the press secretary, Jay Carney, said the defeat should press Mr. Boehner back into talks with Mr. Obama.

“The president will work with Congress to get this done, and we are hopeful that we will be able to find a bipartisan solution quickly that protects the middle class and our economy,” he said.

The refusal of a band of House Republicans to allow income tax rates to rise on incomes over $1 million came after Mr. Obama scored a decisive re-election victory campaigning for higher taxes on incomes over $250,000. Since the November election, the president’s approval ratings have risen, and opinion polls have shown a strong majority not only favoring his tax position, but saying they will blame Republicans for a failure to reach a deficit deal.

With a series of votes on Thursday, the speaker, who faces election for his post in the new Congress next month, had hoped to assemble a Republican path away from the cliff. With a show of Republican unity, he also sought to strengthen his own hand in negotiations with Mr. Obama. The House did narrowly pass legislation to cancel automatic, across-the-board military cuts set to begin next month, and shift them to domestic programs.

But the main component of “Plan B,” a bill to extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts for everyone with incomes under $1 million, could not win enough Republican support to overcome united Democratic opposition. Democrats questioned Mr. Boehner’s ability to deliver any agreement.

“I think this demonstrates that Speaker Boehner has a real challenge,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat. “He hasn’t been able to cut any deal, make any agreement that’s balanced. Even if it’s his own compromise.”

Representative Rick Larsen of Washington accused Republicans of shirking their responsibility by leaving the capital. “The Republicans just picked up their toys and went home,” he said.

Futures contracts on indexes of United States stock listings and shares in Asia fell sharply after Mr. Boehner conceded that his bill lacked the votes to pass.

The point of the Boehner effort was to secure passage of a Republican plan, then demand that the president and the Senate to take up that measure and pass it, putting off the major fights until early next year when Republicans would conceivably have more leverage because of the need to increase the federal debt limit. It would also allow Republicans to claim it was Democrats who had caused taxes to rise after the first of the year had no agreement been reached.

That strategy lay in tatters after the Republican implosion.“Some people don’t know how to take yea for an answer,” said Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a Republican who supported the measure and was open about his disappointment with his colleagues.

Opponents said they were not about to bend their uncompromising principles on taxes just because Mr. Boehner asked.

“The speaker should be meeting with us to get our views on things rather than just presenting his,” said Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently lost a committee post for routinely crossing the leadership.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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Insiders steal a march in leak prone Asian markets

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – When South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Co announced last month it had overstated the fuel efficiency levels on around one million of its cars in the United States and Canada some investors were left fuming more than others.

Some had already sold their shares before the announcement on November 2. The stock fell 4 percent on November 1 with about 2.2 million shares changing hands, the highest trading volume of the year at that point.

“This smells pretty bad,” said Robert Boxwell, director of consulting firm Opera Advisors in Kuala Lumpur who has studied insider dealing patterns.

“It would have fallen into our suspect trading category,” he added.

Boxwell spots suspect trading by looking at how much the volume diverges from the average level in the days before a market moving announcement. In the Hyundai instance, the volume was more than five standard deviations, a measure of variation, away from the daily average of 598,741 shares over the past year.

A Hyundai spokeswoman declined to comment.

Research from the Capital Markets Co-operative Research Centre (CMCRC), an academic centre in Sydney that studies financial market efficiency, found that 26 percent of price-sensitive announcements in Asia Pacific markets showed signs of leakage in the first quarter of this year, the most recent period for which data was available.

That compared with 13 percent in North American markets.

The CMCRC says it looks for suspected information leaks by examining abnormal price moves and trading volumes ahead of price-sensitive announcements.

Investors say one reason for leaks in Asia has been low enforcement rates for insider trading and breaches of disclosure rules. Enforcement in some markets is virtually non-existent.

There are also misconceptions about whether trading on non-public information is a crime.

“The idea that insider trading is wrong rather than smart is only being ingrained in the current generation of Asian players, not the older generation who are often still in the driving seat,” said Peter Douglas, founder of GFIA, a hedge fund consultancy in Singapore.

LOSS OF CONFIDENCE

Japan’s largest investment bank Nomura Holdings was embarrassed this year after regulatory investigations found it leaked information to clients ahead of three public share offerings.

Nomura has acknowledged that its employees leaked information on three share issues it underwrote in 2010. In June, it published the results of an internal investigation that found breaches of basic investment banking safeguards against leaking confidential information and announced a raft of measures to prevent recurrence.

The bank was also fined 200 million yen ($ 2.37 million) by the Tokyo Stock Exchange and 300 million yen by the Japan Securities Dealers Association.

Such leaks hurt companies’ share prices in the long run because investors put in less money if they feel they are not on a level playing field.

“It is very damaging. You may not know how much money you’ve lost but if there is not confidence that the regulators are prosecuting and enforcing the rules on this then it undermines investor confidence and liquidity,” said Jamie Allen, secretary general of the Asian Corporate Governance Association.

The issue isn’t being ignored. Many Asian markets such as Hong Kong and China have tightened their rules on insider trading over the past decade.

Indeed some investors feel that while leaks and insider dealing are unfair, regulators in the region have more serious issues they should be tackling.

“I would like to see the regulators spend more resources on investigating and prosecuting fraud against listed companies, which severely damages shareholder value,” said David Webb, a corporate governance activist in Hong Kong, arguing insider dealing as less of an impact on a company’s long-term share price.

HTC AND APPLE

A week after Hyundai’s announcement about its problems in the United States, there was an unexpected move on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

Shares in smartphone maker HTC Corp jumped almost seven percent on Friday, November 9, hitting the daily upper trading limit. On Sunday came the surprise announcement that the company was ending its long-running patent dispute with Apple Inc , a move seen as a positive for the stock.

The Taiwan bourse announced it was investigating the trading patterns to see if there was a possible leak.

When asked for comment, HTC referred back to a November 13 statement in which the company said it had kept the Apple settlement process confidential and has strict controls on insider trading.

Michael Lin, a spokesman for the Taiwan Exchange, told Reuters on Friday that the bourse is still working with the regulator on the case.

‘ENORMOUS LOSSES’

Michael Aitken, who oversees research at the CMCRC, said many other Asian markets lack tough enough rules to force information to be released as efficiently and timely as possible, a primary reason for the prevalence of leaks.

“Poor regulation hampers enforcement efforts,” he said pointing out that few markets have the “continuous disclosure” rules used in Australia which require listed companies to release material information as soon as possible.

In Korea, when Hyundai shares started to fall, rumours began swirling that news about a problem with some of its cars was on its way, but investors say it took the company too long to disclose what exactly was happening.

“Hyundai at that time did not confirm the rumours. We suffered enormous losses because of this,” said one fund manager, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

An official from Korea Exchange declined to comment on whether it was investigating this case, saying only that the exchange looks carefully into possible cases of insider trading.

Across Asia, regulators concede that many company executives and insiders still do not appreciate that leaking or trading on material, non-public information is an offence.

“People don’t even know they are engaging in insider trading, for example if their friends are talking about it on the golf course,” said Tong Daochi director-general for international affairs at the China Securities Regulatory Commission, during a regulation conference last month.

“We try to tell society, what are the criminal issues, what are the insider trading issues? For example we have held 27 press conferences to tell the public what kind of activities are involved in insider trading and to let people know that this is an active crime.” ($ 1 = 84.2600 Japanese yen) ($ 1 = 0.6147 British pounds)

(Reporting by Rachel Armstrong; additional reporting by Nishant Kumar in HONG KONG and Hyunjoo Jin in SEOUL; Editing by Emily Kaiser)

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: Insiders steal a march in leak prone Asian markets
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Marilyn Monroe subway grate photo on view in NYC

NEW YORK (AP) — A famous image of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt billowing atop a New York City subway grate is on display in a picture-perfect spot: outside the Times Square subway station.

The supersized version of Sam Shaw's well-known picture is part of an exhibit. The exhibit also features eight of Shaw's other Monroe pictures, on view inside the 42nd Street-Bryant Park station on the B, D, F, M and 7 lines.

The show opened Thursday. It'll be up for a year.

Shaw shot the subway grate photo for the 1955 film "The Seven Year Itch." He took the other pictures in 1957.

The exhibit is part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Arts for Transit program. Manager Lester Burg says matching a mass transit setting with a popular figure from mass culture seemed a good fit.

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Recipes for Health: Marinated Olives

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Marinated olives.

These are inspired by Patricia Wells’ “Chanteduc Rainbow Olive Collection” in her wonderful book “The Provence Cookbook.” It is best to use olives that have not been pitted.

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

5 bay leaves

2 large garlic cloves, peeled, green shoots removed, thinly sliced

Strips of rind from 1 lemon (preferably organic)

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary

1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds

2 cups imported olives (black, green or a mix) (about 3/4 pound)

 

1. Combine the olive oil, vinegar, bay leaves and garlic in a small saucepan and heat just until warm over low heat. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon rind, thyme, rosemary and fennel seeds.

2. Place the olives in a wide mouthed jar and pour in the olive oil mixture. Shake the jar to coat the olives. Refrigerate for two hours or for up to two weeks. Shake the jar a few times a day to redistribute the seasonings.

Yield: 2 cups, serving 12

Advance preparation: These will keep for about two weeks in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per ounce (does not include marinade): 43 calories; 4 grams fat; 0 grams saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 grams dietary fiber; 468 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 0 grams protein

 

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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