Woods wins at Torrey Pines for 8th time

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Tiger Woods was so good for so long at Torrey Pines that it didn't matter how bad it looked at the end.

In a finish that was fitting for such a long and exasperating week, Woods built an eight-shot lead with five holes to play on Monday until he lost patience with the slow play and started losing shots that only determined the margin of victory.

Despite two bogeys and a double bogey in the final hour, he closed with an even-par 72 for a four-shot victory in the Farmers Insurance Open.

"I'm excited the way I played all week," Woods said. "I hit the ball well — pretty much did everything well and built myself a nice little cushion. I had some mistakes at the end, but all my good play before that allowed me to afford those mistakes."

He won for the 75th time in his PGA Tour career, seven behind the record held by Sam Snead.

Woods won this tournament for the seventh time, and he set a PGA Tour record by winning at Torrey Pines for the eighth time, including his 2008 U.S. Open. Woods also has won seven times at Bay Hill and at Firestone.

Torrey Pines is a public course that he has turned into his private domain.

"I don't know if anybody would have beaten him this week," said Nick Watney, who got within five shots of Woods when the tournament was still undecided until making three bogeys on his next five holes. "He's definitely on his game."

It was the 23rd time Woods has won by at least four shots on the PGA Tour. Defending champion Brandt Snedeker (69) and Josh Teater (69) tied for the second. Watney had a 71 and tied for fourth with Jimmy Walker.

It was a strong statement for Woods, who was coming off a missed cut last week in Abu Dhabi. This was the second time in his career that Woods won in his next tournament after missing the cut, but this was the first time it happened the following week.

Abu Dhabi is now a distant memory. The question how is what kind of season is shaping up for Woods.

"I think he wanted to send a message," said Hunter Mahan, who shares a swing coach with Woods. "I think deep down he did. You play some games to try to motivate yourself. There's been so much talk about Rory (McIlroy). Rory is now with Nike. That would be my guess."

The last time Woods won at Torrey Pines also was on a Monday, when he beat Rocco Mediate in a playoff to capture the U.S. Open for his 14th major.

Of all his wins on this course along the Pacific, this might have been the most peculiar.

Thick fog cost the tournament an entire day of golf on Saturday, forcing the first Monday finish in tournament history. Woods effectively won the tournament during his 25 holes on Sunday, when he turned a two-shot lead into a six-shot margin with only 11 holes to play. CBS Sports wanted to televise the final day in late afternoon on the East Coast, but it still went long because of the pace of play.

It took Woods about 3 hours, 45 minutes to finish his 11 holes on Monday. His 19-hole win over Mediate lasted 4½ hours.

As much as Woods got off to a good start, equal attention was given to slow play, an increasing problem on the PGA Tour.

"It got a little ugly toward the end," Woods said. "I started losing patience a little bit with the slow play. I lost my concentration a little bit."

He made bogey from the bunker on No. 14. He hooked a tee shot off the eucalyptus trees and into a patch of ice plant on the 15th, leading to double bogey. After another long wait on the 17th tee, he popped up his tee shot and made another bogey. With a four-shot lead on the 18th — Kyle Stanley blew a three-shot lead a year ago — he hit wedge safely behind the hole for a two-putt par.

Woods finished on 14-under 274 for his 14th win in California, and 11th in San Diego County.

"I think a win always makes it special, especially the way I played," Woods said. "To have not won would have been something else because I really played well. Playing the way I did for most of this tournament, until the very end, the last five holes, I felt like I should have won this tournament. I put myself in a position where I had a big enough lead, and that's basically how I felt like I played this week.

"I know I can do that, and it was nice to be able to do it."

Like so many of his big wins, the only drama was for second place.

Brad Fritsch, the rookie from Canada, birdied his last two holes for a 75. That put him into a tie for ninth, however, making him eligible for the Phoenix Open next week. Fritsch had been entered in the Monday qualifier that he had to abandon when the Farmers Insurance Open lost Saturday to a fog delay.

Woods was so far ahead that he would have had to collapse for anyone to have a chance, and that never looked possible.

Even so, the red shirt seemed to put him on edge. It didn't help that as he settled over his tee shot on the par-5 ninth, he backed off when he heard a man behind the ropes take his picture.

Woods rarely hits the fairway after an encounter with a camera shutter, and this was no different — it went so far right that it landed on the other side of a fence enclosing a corporate hospitality area.

Woods took his free drop, punched out below the trees into the fairway and then showed more irritation when his wedge nicked the flag after one hop and spun down the slope 30 feet away instead of stopping next to the hole.

He didn't show much reaction on perhaps his most memorable shot of the day — with his legs near the edge of a bunker some 75 feet to the left of the 11th green, he blasted out to the top shelf and watched the ball take dead aim until it stopped a foot short. A two-putt birdie on the 13th gave him an eight-shot lead, and then it was only a matter of time — a lot of time — until the trophy presentation.

Before anyone projects a monster year for Woods based on one week, especially when that week is at Torrey Pines, remember that no one else in golf — not even McIlroy — is the subject of more snap judgments.

Woods, however, likes the direction he is headed, especially with his short game.

"I'm excited about this year. I'm excited about what I'm doing with Sean (Foley) and some of the things that I've built," he said. "This is a nice way to start the year."

Woods is not likely to return to golf until the Match Play Championship next month.

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Rescuer Appears for New York Downtown Hospital

Manhattan’s only remaining hospital south of 14th Street, New York Downtown, has found a white knight willing to take over its debt and return it to good health, hospital officials said Monday.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of New York City’s largest academic medical centers, has proposed to take over New York Downtown in a “certificate of need” filed with the State Health Department. The three-page proposal argues that though New York Downtown is projected to have a significant operating loss in 2013, it is vital to Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, especially since the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital after it declared bankruptcy in 2010.

The rescue proposal, which would need the Health Department’s approval, comes at a precarious time for hospitals in the city. Long Island College Hospital, just across the river in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been threatened with closing after a failed merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and several other Brooklyn hospitals are considering mergers to stem losses.

New York Downtown has been affiliated with the NewYork-Presbyterian health care system while maintaining separate operations.

“We are looking forward to having them become a sixth campus so the people in that community can continue to have a community hospital that continues to serve them,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, said.

Fred Winters, a spokesman for New York Downtown, declined to comment.

Presbyterian’s proposal emphasized that it would acquire New York Downtown’s debt at no cost to the state, a critical point at a time when the state has shown little interest in bailing out failing hospitals.

The proposal said that if New York Downtown were to close, it would leave more than 300,000 residents of Lower Manhattan, including the financial district, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, without a community hospital. In addition, it said, 750,000 people work and visit in the area every day, a number that is expected to grow with the construction of 1 World Trade Center and related buildings.

The proposal argues that New York Downtown is essential partly because of its long history of responding to disasters in the city. One of its predecessors was founded as a direct result of the 1920 terrorist bombing outside the J. P. Morgan Building, and the hospital has responded to the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern, the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and, this month, the crash of a commuter ferry from New Jersey.

Like other fragile hospitals in the city, New York Downtown has shrunk, going to 180 beds, down from the 254 beds it was certified for in 2006, partly because the more affluent residents of Lower Manhattan often go to bigger hospitals for elective care.

The proposal says that half of the emergency department patients at New York Downtown either are on Medicaid, the program for the poor, or are uninsured.

NewYork-Presbyterian would absorb the cost of the hospital’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units, which have been expanding because of demand, but have been operating at a deficit of more than $1 million a year, the proposal said.

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DealBook Column: Mary Jo White, Nominee for S.E.C.'s 'New Sherrif,' Has Worn Banks' Hat

“You don’t want to mess with Mary Jo.”

That’s what President Obama said about his pick to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Jo White. The nomination of Ms. White, a former prosecutor who took on the terrorists behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Mafia boss John Gotti, was meant to signal that the S.E.C. would be getting tough on Wall Street. CBS called her “Wall Street’s new sheriff.” The Wall Street Journal said she would be “putting a tougher face on an agency still tainted by embarrassing enforcement missteps in the run-up to the financial crisis.” The New York Times said her appointment represented a “renewed resolve to hold Wall Street accountable.”

Hold on.

While Ms. White is a decorated prosecutor, she has spent the last decade vigorously defending — and billing by the hour — Wall Street’s biggest banks, as a rainmaking partner at the white-shoe law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. The average partner at the firm was paid $2.1 million a year, according to American Lawyer; but she was no average partner, very likely being paid at least double that. Her husband, John W. White, is a corporate partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He counts JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse and UBS as clients. The average partner at Cravath makes $3.1 million. He, too, was a former official at the S.E.C. — he left Cravath to run the corporate division of the S.E.C. starting in 2006 just in time for the run-up to the financial crisis. He left in November 2008, a month after the bank bailouts, to return to Cravath.

It seems Mr. and Ms. White have made a fine art of the revolving door between government and private practice.

So how conflicted is Ms. White? Let’s count the ways.

They are well documented: she was JPMorgan Chase’s go-to lawyer for many of the cases brought against it relating to the financial crisis. She was arm-in-arm with Kenneth D. Lewis, Bank of America’s former chief executive, keeping him out of trouble when the New York attorney general accused Mr. Lewis of defrauding investors by not disclosing the losses at Merrill Lynch before completing Bank of America’s acquisition of the firm. (And empirically, Mr. Lewis did keep crucial information about the deal from investors.)

This is what she had to say about Mr. Lewis, in a court filing submitted on his behalf: “Some have looked to assign blame for every aspect of the financial crisis, even where there is no evidence of misconduct. This case is a product of that dynamic and does not withstand either legal or factual scrutiny.” It was a refrain she often made about her clients related to the financial crisis.

And then there was Senator Bill Frist, the Republican from Tennessee, whom she successfully represented when the S.E.C. and the Justice Department started an investigation into whether he was involved in insider trading in shares of HCA, the hospital chain. She persuaded them to shut down the investigation.

She also worked with Siemens, the German industrial giant, when it pleaded guilty to charges of bribery, paying a record $1.6 billion penalty.

And then, of course, there was John Mack. She worked for the board of Morgan Stanley during a now well-publicized 2005 investigation into insider trading that ended soon after she made a phone call to the S.E.C. Using her connections at the top of the agency, she dialed up Linda Thomsen, then the commission’s head of enforcement, to find out whether Mr. Mack, who was being considered for Morgan Stanley’s chief executive position, was being implicated. He ultimately wasn’t. As the Huffington Post pointed out in a recent article about Ms. White, Robert Hanson, an S.E.C. supervisor, later testified, “It is a little out of the ordinary for Mary Jo White to contact Linda Thomsen directly, but that White is very prestigious and it isn’t uncommon for someone prominent to have someone intervene on their behalf.”

All of Ms. White’s previous engagements create not only an “optics” problem, but a practical, on-the-job problem. She will most likely need to recuse herself from just about anything related to her previous work.

“I will not for a period of two years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts,” is the language in an ethics pledge that she will have to agree to follow.

Some appointees, including Mary L. Schapiro, the former chairwoman of the S.E.C., recused themselves from any involvement in work that was related to a previous employer even after the two-year moratorium. Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, recused himself from the investigation into MF Global because of his previous employment at Goldman Sachs, where Jon Corzine was the firm’s head, even though it had been years since the two had worked together.

And then there is the issue of Mr. White’s husband, who will have a continuing role at Cravath, one of the most pre-eminent firms in the country, whose clients include some of the nation’s largest corporations.

“This president has adopted the toughest ethics rules of any administration in history,” said Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, “and this nominee is no exception. As S.E.C. chair, Mary Jo White will be in complete compliance with all ethics rules.”

None of these conflicts gets at another potential problem for Ms. White. The job of chairwoman of S.E.C. isn’t simply about enforcement; she has a deputy for that. The biggest challenge anyone who takes the job will have to confront over the next several years will be executing and enforcing provisions of Dodd-Frank and working to regulate electronic trading — something that even the most sophisticated financial professionals, let alone a lawyer, often have a tough time understanding. She has zero experience in this area.

Of course, there can always be a value to inviting a onetime rival onto the team.

“I believe she is one of those people who will understand that her public role will be very, very different than her role as a defense lawyer,” Dennis M. Kelleher of Better Markets, a watchdog group, told me. “I don’t think she’s going to be like so many others who don’t get that they have a very different role when they hold high public office.

“No question, she’s said some things that are controversial and questionable,” Mr. Kelleher said. “Moreover, I hope and expect that she will be asked publicly about them in the confirmation process and that she will have convincing answers.”

Of course, if she is confirmed, we must all hope that she can put her previous client relationships behind her and work for her new client — us.

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India Ink: Where Science and Religion Coexist

MUNDGOD, India — Religion and science have not always been easy friends, as Galileo could attest.

But over the last week scientists and Buddhist scholars have been working in this small Tibetan enclave in southern India to prove that these two worlds can not only co-exist — but benefit each another.

It is the 26th edition of the Mind & Life Conference and the first held in a monastery, for thousands of Buddhist monks gathered here. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, greeted the scientists last Friday and introduced the week-long dialogue about science and religion.

The examination is rooted in the personal story of the Dalai Lama. During his secluded training as a child in Tibet, he would gaze at the night sky through a telescope on the roof of the Potala Palace. He looked at the moon with such intensity he realized the shadows and asperities on its surface contradicted the Tibetan belief that it was lit from within. He took his findings to his tutors.

“When I told my tutors of my interest in science, they replied that it made sense,” said the Dalai Lama during his welcome speech to the conference. “However, although we have an interest in science, that doesn’t mean we have to devote all our energy to it. I spend the majority of my time in meditation on love, compassion and wisdom, which is the source of my interest in science.”

It is this interest he is trying to spark in all Tibetan monks by adding science to their instruction.

“In the Buddhist investigation of reality we traditionally employ four principles of reasoning: dependence, function, nature and evidence,” said the Dalai Lama. Not a far stretch from the way scientists look for evidence. “Both approaches seem to work in parallel,” he said.

The thousands of monks of the Mundgod monasteries have been asked to follow the discussions — whose topics range from Quantum physics to neuroscience — in the Drepung Loseling Monastery’s assembly hall here. Monks who can’t fit into the hall watch the discussions on overflow screens outside on the monastery grounds.

With a strong emphasis on training the mind through meditation, looking within and constant questioning, the long and arduous teaching young monks have to follow in the monasteries requires the same attention to analysis and logic as any scientific curriculum. One difference? Isolation. In Tibet, before the Chinese invasion, the monks were kept from the outside world, practicing their faith in seclusion.

According to Rato Khen Rinpoche, the abbot of Rato Drepung, another Mundgod monastery, “Monastic vocation used to be cocooned by a geographic isolation.”

Today, things have changed. “Maintaining that tradition is not the way to form the 21st century monk,” he explained during an interview at the monastery.

Rato Khen Rinpoche, the first Westerner appointed abbot of a Tibetan monastery (his given name is Nicholas Vreeland), became a monk at thirty. Before he turned to Buddhism he studied and worked as a photographer.

His worldliness did not deter him from becoming a geshe — the equivalent of a Ph.D. in Buddhism, which requires up to twenty years of study — and now an abbot.

“Bringing science to Buddhist monks does not mean bending the belief system,” he insists, “they are parallel, there is no attempt to harmonize the two.”

For the science conference, Rato Monastery has transformed its prayer hall into a conference hall where 40 monks are getting together to edit a Tibetan science and Buddhist philosophy compendium.

The monks are Tibetan scholars from all monasteries who followed a multiple-year science course and are now asked by the Dalai Lama to compile what they learned into a book for their fellow monks. “These are monks who have spent from early morning to late night memorizing ancient texts, having them explained by wise elders and debating them long into the night,” says Rato’s abbot. “They had to leave behind Tibetan beliefs in place for centuries and apply the same strict discipline they had in their Buddhist studies to modern science.”

This is the strength of mind required of the modern monk, he says: a capacity for knowledge, open mindedness and debate, carried alongside the absolute belief in Buddha’s words.

The book will cover, along with Buddhist philosophy, the history of Science — from Galileo’s discovery of the planets’ movements to Darwin’s theory on evolution — tackling basic physics, biology and chemistry topics. Once the editing is over, the monks will go back to their respective monasteries and become the first Tibetan monks science teachers for their fellow monks and nuns.

But the curiosity goes both ways. Scientists have long been fascinated by the effect of the Buddhist practice of meditation on the brain. Richard Davidson, director of the laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has conducted experiments on a dozen of Tibetan Buddhist monks’ brains.

His findings created a stir in brain science circles by suggesting that after meditating for thousands of hours, monks altered the functioning and structure of their brains.

As part of his ongoing research, Dr. Davidson last year connected French monk Matthieu Ricard to 256 sensors and asked him to meditate on compassion. The scans of his brain showed an extraordinary level of gamma waves (activity linked to consciousness, learning and memory), “levels never reported before in the neuroscience literature”, the scientist said.

The left prefrontal cortex also saw increased activity, proof of a larger capacity for “happiness.”

On Sunday, the topic of discussion between the scientists and the Buddhist scholars was the nature of consciousness. The Dalai Lama asked the scientists where the basis for consciousness lies.

Responses from the scientists differed strongly.

Christof Koch, a University of California neuroscience best know for his work on consciousness, said we could speculate but ultimately we don’t know where it lies beyond the brain, its physical basis. He added that all mammals have consciousness but it is impossible to know where it lies (for example, our immune system can function without it).

Matthieu Ricard, the French monk who was a genetics scientist before taking up the monastic life, turned towards his Buddhist teaching more than his scientific past.

“By honest introspection, by following one line of inquiry which is pure experience,” one can reach an understanding of consciousness, he said.

Ricard then addressed the topic of reincarnation and some individuals’ ability to remember past lives.

Arthur G. Zajonc, a professor emeritus of physics at Amherst College in Massachusetts, doesn’t consider himself a Buddhist he said. Yet, he added, “I meditate and through that, have come to believe in the possibility of reincarnation.”

The benefits of meditation and contemplative practice should not only be reserved to monks, Mr. Zajonc added. He explained that they could contribute to the education of any college undergraduate before quoting Albert Einstein: “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 27, 2013

An earlier version of this post said Arthur G. Zajonc is a professor emeritus of physics at Harvard. He is a professor emeritus of physics at Amherst.

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Team flag waves as 49ers arrive for Super Bowl

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Jim Harbaugh stepped to the podium, smirked a bit, and greeted his first news conference as a Super Bowl coach.

"We're super happy to be here," he said Sunday night as his NFC champion San Francisco 49ers arrived in the Big Easy for the big game.

"I think this team has the best focus on unity and winning I've ever been a part of."

Considering that Harbaugh was an NFL quarterback for 14 seasons and a successful college coach before joining the 49ers, he knows something about winning.

Under Harbaugh, San Francisco has been to two NFC title games and, now, to its first Super Bowl in 18 years. The Niners (13-4-1) will play Baltimore (13-6), coached by Harbaugh's older brother, John, in next Sunday's Super Bowl.

He is certain his team is ready for the task as the 49ers seek their sixth Vince Lombardi Trophy; they are 5-0 in Super Bowls.

"These are uncharted waters for a rookie Super Bowl coach," Harbaugh said. "But that's exciting. It's a great thrill, and we have a desire to be in uncharted waters. We always strive for that kind of challenge."

Earlier in the evening, with a team flag waving from an open window of their chartered plane, the 49ers arrived in a businesslike manner. The players calmly walked off the airplane — no video recorders or cameras, no waves to onlookers.

Most of the team's veteran players disembarked first, including center Jonathan Goodwin, who won a Super Bowl three years ago with the Saints.

"You get to go to the Super Bowl with your childhood team, so that's something special to me," he said. "So hopefully I can find a way to win the Super Bowl with my childhood team."

Quarterback Colin Kaepernick, wearing a red wool cap sporting "49ers" on it, mouthed the words to a song on his headphones as he walked on the tarmac.

He seemed just as relaxed 90 minutes later as he met the media.

"Pressure comes from a lack of preparation," said Kaepernick, who took over as the starter when Alex Smith got a concussion in November and has been sensational in keeping the job. "This is not a pressure situation. It's a matter of going out and performing."

Harbaugh said the 49ers came to New Orleans on Sunday to simulate a normal week. He likened their trip to his strategy the last two seasons when the 49ers spent a week in Youngstown, Ohio, between Eastern games rather than return to the Bay Area.

He liked the way the players and coaches bonded during that experience.

"Same approach," Harbaugh said. "Enjoy the moment and the preparation. I think our team enjoys that the most: the meetings, the preparation and then, especially, the competition."

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Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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Well: Keeping Blood Pressure in Check

Since the start of the 21st century, Americans have made great progress in controlling high blood pressure, though it remains a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.

Now 48 percent of the more than 76 million adults with hypertension have it under control, up from 29 percent in 2000.

But that means more than half, including many receiving treatment, have blood pressure that remains too high to be healthy. (A normal blood pressure is lower than 120 over 80.) With a plethora of drugs available to normalize blood pressure, why are so many people still at increased risk of disease, disability and premature death? Hypertension experts offer a few common, and correctable, reasons:

¶ About 20 percent of affected adults don’t know they have high blood pressure, perhaps because they never or rarely see a doctor who checks their pressure.

¶ Of the 80 percent who are aware of their condition, some don’t appreciate how serious it can be and fail to get treated, even when their doctors say they should.

¶ Some who have been treated develop bothersome side effects, causing them to abandon therapy or to use it haphazardly.

¶ Many others do little to change lifestyle factors, like obesity, lack of exercise and a high-salt diet, that can make hypertension harder to control.

Dr. Samuel J. Mann, a hypertension specialist and professor of clinical medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, adds another factor that may be the most important. Of the 71 percent of people with hypertension who are currently being treated, too many are taking the wrong drugs or the wrong dosages of the right ones.

Dr. Mann, author of “Hypertension and You: Old Drugs, New Drugs, and the Right Drugs for Your High Blood Pressure,” says that doctors should take into account the underlying causes of each patient’s blood pressure problem and the side effects that may prompt patients to abandon therapy. He has found that when treatment is tailored to the individual, nearly all cases of high blood pressure can be brought and kept under control with available drugs.

Plus, he said in an interview, it can be done with minimal, if any, side effects and at a reasonable cost.

“For most people, no new drugs need to be developed,” Dr. Mann said. “What we need, in terms of medication, is already out there. We just need to use it better.”

But many doctors who are generalists do not understand the “intricacies and nuances” of the dozens of available medications to determine which is appropriate to a certain patient.

“Prescribing the same medication to patient after patient just does not cut it,” Dr. Mann wrote in his book.

The trick to prescribing the best treatment for each patient is to first determine which of three mechanisms, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible for a patient’s hypertension, he said.

¶ Salt-sensitive hypertension, more common in older people and African-Americans, responds well to diuretics and calcium channel blockers.

¶ Hypertension driven by the kidney hormone renin responds best to ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers, as well as direct renin inhibitors and beta-blockers.

¶ Neurogenic hypertension is a product of the sympathetic nervous system and is best treated with beta-blockers, alpha-blockers and drugs like clonidine.

According to Dr. Mann, neurogenic hypertension results from repressed emotions. He has found that many patients with it suffered trauma early in life or abuse. They seem calm and content on the surface but continually suppress their distress, he said.

One of Dr. Mann’s patients had had high blood pressure since her late 20s that remained well-controlled by the three drugs her family doctor prescribed. Then in her 40s, periodic checks showed it was often too high. When taking more of the prescribed medication did not result in lasting control, she sought Dr. Mann’s help.

After a thorough work-up, he said she had a textbook case of neurogenic hypertension, was taking too much medication and needed different drugs. Her condition soon became far better managed, with side effects she could easily tolerate, and she no longer feared she would die young of a heart attack or stroke.

But most patients should not have to consult a specialist. They can be well-treated by an internist or family physician who approaches the condition systematically, Dr. Mann said. Patients should be started on low doses of one or more drugs, including a diuretic; the dosage or number of drugs can be slowly increased as needed to achieve a normal pressure.

Specialists, he said, are most useful for treating the 10 percent to 15 percent of patients with so-called resistant hypertension that remains uncontrolled despite treatment with three drugs, including a diuretic, and for those whose treatment is effective but causing distressing side effects.

Hypertension sometimes fails to respond to routine care, he noted, because it results from an underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed.

“Some patients are on a lot of blood pressure drugs — four or five — who probably don’t need so many, and if they do, the question is why,” Dr. Mann said.

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DealBook: Beneath the Calm, SAC Works to Contain Fallout From an Inquiry

At last month’s Hurricane Sandy benefit concert, Steven A. Cohen sat near the Madison Square Garden stage, grooving to performances by Bon Jovi and Billy Joel.

Last week, he flew a private jet to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, rubbing shoulders with world leaders and Fortune 500 chieftains. And on Monday, he will show up at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for one of the year’s biggest hedge fund conferences and, if he can squeeze it in, a round of golf.

For a man who has emerged as the Justice Department’s great white whale in its insider trading investigation — a Wall Street version of Captain Ahab pursuing Moby-Dick — Mr. Cohen, the billionaire owner of the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, does not appear concerned.

But inside the offices of SAC’s Stamford, Conn., headquarters, and at Midtown Manhattan law firms, Mr. Cohen’s employees and lawyers are working hard to contain the fallout from the investigation.

His executives have offered financial incentives to Mr. Cohen’s staff members to stay with SAC. Marketing officers are trying to persuade investors to keep their money at the fund. And defense lawyers are working furiously to persuade federal securities regulators not to file a civil fraud lawsuit against the firm.

“This has always been a stressful place to work,” said an SAC employee who requested anonymity because he was unauthorized to speak publicly about the fund. “Now it’s just more stressful.”

Neither SAC nor Mr. Cohen has been accused of any wrongdoing.

The main question now looming over the firm is whether its clients will stand by the fund, or its legal and regulatory problems will cause investors to head for the exits. Under the firm’s rules, SAC clients have until Feb. 15 to ask for their money back, and then cannot make another so-called redemption request for another three months.

Mr. Cohen’s fund was dealt a blow last week when a Citigroup unit that manages money for wealthy families disclosed that it was withdrawing its $187 million investment. The move by the bank was the most prominent client departure since November, when the multiyear investigation into SAC’s trading practices entered a more serious phase.

Citigroup’s withdrawal represents a tiny percentage of SAC’s $14 billion in assets under management. The fund has said it expects total investor redemptions for the first quarter of up to $1 billion, a number that an SAC spokesman has said will not adversely affect its business.

SAC is largely insulated from the potentially devastating effects that client defections can have on a hedge fund in part because of Mr. Cohen’s extraordinary wealth. Unlike other hedge fund managers who rely almost entirely on outside investors, Mr. Cohen has the comfort of knowing that about $8 billion of SAC’s fund belongs to him and his employees.

Still, the Citigroup decision stung, say people close to SAC’s business, because of the longstanding and lucrative relationship between the bank and the fund. Another concern, said these people, is that the move could influence other large SAC investors currently weighing whether to keep their money at the fund.

For Citigroup, its withdrawal of money from SAC carries substantial business risk. The bank has a vast relationship with SAC, earning revenue by providing the fund with financing and trading services.

SAC could exact retribution on Citigroup by terminating, or at least scaling back, its broader relationship with the bank. An SAC spokesman declined to comment.

Citigroup’s move came two months after federal authorities arrested Mathew Martoma, a former SAC portfolio manager, in what they described as the most lucrative insider trading case ever uncovered. The Martoma indictment represented the first time that the government had brought charges stemming from a trade in which Mr. Cohen had been involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission has warned Mr. Cohen that it might file a civil fraud action against SAC related to the case.

In addition to Mr. Martoma, at least seven former SAC employees have been tied to insider trading while at the fund. Three have pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

Citigroup issued a statement that its decision “should not be construed as a statement on the merits of any outstanding legal proceedings or potential regulatory action.” But the bank specifically cited the Martoma case, explaining that “in the event these legal and regulatory matters are resolved favorably for Mr. Martoma and SAC, Citi Private Bank expects to reconsider admission of SAC’s funds to its hedge fund platform.”

Mr. Martoma has pleaded not guilty and rejected requests by federal agents to cooperate against his former boss. Mr. Cohen has told his employees and clients that he is confident that he has acted appropriately at all times.

Yet the heightened government scrutiny has caused skittishness among SAC’s top ranks, forcing the fund to lavish even richer financial incentives on a group of employees that is already among the most highly compensated in the hedge fund industry.

This month, SAC told its stable of portfolio managers that it would increase year-end bonuses by three percentage points. SAC portfolio managers — the fund’s most senior traders, given the authority to make their own investment decisions and also feed Mr. Cohen their best ideas — are paid, on average, 20 percent of the profits they generate for the fund.

“The program is intended to retain our most valuable resource, our investment professionals,” said Jonathan Gasthalter, the SAC spokesman.

Another valuable resource is SAC’s outside investors, which account for about $6 billion, or 40 percent, of the fund’s assets. That money accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, which SAC uses to finance one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated hedge fund operations, with more than 1,000 employees and 125 teams of traders and analysts. Its operation is also one of the most successful, posting average annualized returns of about 30 percent since 1992.

Those results have in the past kept SAC’s customers satisfied, but the government scrutiny has made many of them uneasy. The firm’s marketing team has reached out to the fund’s investors to address their concerns and reassure them that the insider trading inquiry will not affect its performance.

Despite those efforts, several investors in addition to Citigroup, including Titan Advisors and a unit of Société Générale, have notified SAC that they are withdrawing money. Other clients, like Chapwood Investments and SkyBridge Capital, have said they will continue to invest with the fund.

SAC executives continued the charm offensive with major clients on Sunday, holding an annual golf outing in Palm Beach on the eve of a hedge fund conference at the Breakers sponsored by Morgan Stanley. The conference — a matchmaking event that connects top managers with the world’s richest investors — is considered an important stop on the hedge fund money-raising circuit.

Since Morgan Stanley does not invite the news media to its conference, there is not expected to be the same paparazzi-like reports on Mr. Cohen that emerged last week from Davos. Bloomberg News filed a dispatch that Mr. Cohen sat in on a panel discussion on data security called “The Digital Infrastructure Context.” And Henry Blodget, the editor of the financial Web site Business Insider, wrote a Twitter post on a sighting of Mr. Cohen.

“Steve Cohen was hanging in Davos lounge yesterday,” he wrote. “Didn’t look worried.”

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The Lede Blog: Egypt's Soccer Riots, a View From the Ground

Video posted online appears to show fans of Cairo’s Al Ahly soccer team celebrating a court verdict.

It was one of the world’s deadliest episodes of soccer violence — a clash between fans of the Egyptian team Al Masry, of Port Said, and players and fans from Al Ahly, of Cairo, a year ago that killed 74 and wounded over 1,000.

On Saturday, a court in Cairo handed down death sentences for 21 of those involved in the riots. The violence that the verdict prompted, involving hard-core “ultra” supporters of both teams, killed at least 28 and wounded at least 300, my colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh reported.

Pictures and video from Port Said and Cairo were markedly different. In Cairo, as the video at the top of this post shows, there were widespread celebrations. In Port Said, a city of about 600,000.

Rioters looted and burned a police barracks and set fire to a police station. They attacked members of the news media, damaging television cameras that sought to film the violence and ending their broadcasts. They closed off all roads into Port Said as well as the railroad station, and the Ministry of Electricity and Energy said rioters had attacked a power facility as well.

Video posted online appears to show protesters in Port Said.

In Cairo, Mr. Kirkpatrick and Ms. El Sheikh reported, the families of those killed in the clash last year “held pictures of the victims in the air. Some danced and chanted. A few fainted. And the Cairo ultras celebrated for hours outside their team’s headquarters.”

Video posted online appears to show celebrations in Cairo.

Tara Todras-Whitehill, a photographer in Cairo, posted further pictures of the celebrations on her Twitter account.

Ultras chanting ‘Min of Interior it’s ur turn next’ and calling for execution of Tantawi. Can’t win in #Egypt #PortSaid http://t.co/Up8vK9hv

— T Todras-Whitehill (@taratw) 26 Jan 13

Ultras celebrate in their Zamalek stadium the verdict of 21 in #PortSaid massacre. #Egypt #Cairo http://t.co/bR5BtvHB

— T Todras-Whitehill (@taratw) 26 Jan 13

It was not immediately clear where the following picture also posted on Twitter, by Tom Gara of The Wall Street Journal, came from. But it apparently shows a man playing an accordion in the midst of one riot.

The craziest photo to come out of Egypt for a long time: http://t.co/PmVRM4K3

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) 26 Jan 13

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Facebook founder to host fundraiser for New Jersey Governor Christie

(Reuters) – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, will host a fundraiser for New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie at their California home on February 13, the social networking site said on Thursday.

Zuckerberg and Christie, a potential presidential contender in 2016, have teamed up before, when the tech guru donated $ 100 million to the struggling public schools in Newark, New Jersey, in 2010.

“Mark and Priscilla … admire his leadership on education reform and other issues and look forward to continuing their important work together on behalf of Newark’s school children,” Facebook said in a statement.

The blunt-spoken Christie is seeking re-election in November to a second term as governor. He took office in 2010.

Right now, he doesn’t seem to need much help as his approval rating skyrocketed after Superstorm Sandy hit the state last October. A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday found that three-quarters of New Jersey voters approved of Christie’s performance and nearly seven in 10 say he deserves to be re-elected.

New Jersey Democrats also have not rallied behind a single challenger. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney has said he is considering running, but the poll found that Christie would easily defeat Sweeney.

Christie would also trounce Barbara Buono – who has said she will run against the governor – and possible challenger Richard Codey, the poll found. Both are Democratic state senators.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco and Hilary Russ in New York; Editing by Eric Beech)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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In New Orleans, an unwelcome mat for Goodell

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An effigy of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell dangles from the front porch of a New Orleans home that is otherwise festively decorated with Saints paraphernalia.

With restaurants and bars gearing up for an influx of Super Bowl XLVII visitors, the "Refuse to Serve Roger Goodell" page on Facebook had 107 likes as of Friday.

A portrait of Goodell covers the bull's-eye on the dart board at Parkview Tavern.

And floats in the unabashedly lowbrow Krewe du Vieux parade in the French Quarter last weekend displayed larger-than-life likenesses of Goodell in acts that defy polite description.

New Orleans is celebrating the return of Saints coach Sean Payton after a season of NFL banishment as a result of the "bountygate" scandal — when the team ran a pay-for-hits program. But Goodell, who suspended Payton and other current and former Saints players and coaches last year for their roles in the system, is being ridiculed here with a vehemence usually reserved for the city's scandal-scarred politicians.

"They believe he completely used the Saints as an example of something that was going on league-wide," said Pauline Patterson, co-owner of Finn McCool's, an Irish Bar in the Mid-City neighborhood where the words "Go To Hell Goodell" are visible over the fireplace.

Some of Goodell's critics say the disarray resulting from what they believe were unfair suspensions led to the Saints' 7-9 performance this year — and a missed chance to make history.

"We had a real shot of being the first team in history to host the Super Bowl in our own stadium," Parkview Tavern owner Kathy Anderson said. "He can't give that back to us."

Goodell suspended the coaches and players after an investigation found the Saints had a performance pool offering cash rewards for key plays, including big hits. The player suspensions eventually were overturned, but the coaches served their punishments.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu is among those saying that people in this city, known for its hospitality and history, should mind their manners and remember the not-too-distant past.

"Roger Goodell has been a great friend to New Orleans, and it's a fact that he's one of the people instrumental to making sure that the Saints stayed here after Hurricane Katrina," Landrieu said in a statement. It was a reference to the days after the storm, when 80 percent of the city was underwater and the damaged Superdome became a shelter for thousands of the displaced.

Then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and his second-in-command, Goodell, are credited with working to keep the team from abandoning New Orleans for San Antonio.

"If not for Roger Goodell, we would not have this Super Bowl," Landrieu added. "And we will need him since we want to host another one."

Saints quarterback Drew Brees said the game is validation of everything the city's gone through to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

"There's no question, yeah. And I think people will see that when they come down, as soon as people come down that haven't been there in a while," Brees said Friday while in Hawaii for the Pro Bowl. "The city knows how to entertain, knows how to treat people right. The tourism industry's huge, so we're excited to host this big game. Obviously it's the biggest sporting event in the world, and the city will be ready for it."

But some are in no mood to back off when it comes to Goodell.

Anderson said she understands city leaders' desire to put their best foot forward, but that it also is important for Saints fans to be able to vent.

"Whether I have Roger Goodell's face on my dart board is not going to change anybody's mind about the Super Bowl," Anderson said.

People should not take the barbs too seriously, said Lynda Woolard, a Saints fan who has been tracking some of the barbs on social media. "Nobody's saying there should be violence against the man," Woolard said.

"It's tongue-in-cheek," Patterson agreed.

Still, some diehards are ready to put it all behind them.

Patrick Brower, owner and manager of the Dirty Coast T-shirt shop, said Friday that he's pushing black-and-gold wear at his shop, choosing to unify Saints fans without bashing the commissioner.

"We've got to look forward here," Brower said. "The more time we spend in the past, it's just not beneficial."

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