Livestrong Tattoos as Reminder of Personal Connections, Not Tarnished Brand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Robo-Signing Fraud Case Is Settled

The mortgage servicing company Lender Processing Services agreed to pay $35 million to resolve a federal criminal investigation into foreclosure fraud, the Justice Department said on Friday.

The settlement resolves allegations over the company’s involvement in what the government called a six-year scheme to prepare and file more than 1 million fraudulently signed and notarized mortgage documents in property recorders’ offices nationwide from 2003 to 2009. The practice became known as robo-signing.

The accord also follows a guilty plea last November by Lorraine Brown, the former chief executive of the company’s now-closed DocX unit, to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud over the scheme.

Prior to DocX’s closure in 2010, Lender Processing Services had handled more than half of the nation’s foreclosures.

The company entered into a two-year non-prosecution agreement that requires it to meet many conditions, including cooperating in federal investigations, and alerting the government to any abuses in mortgage or foreclosure documentation services at the company.

The company said on Friday that it has a $223 million reserve that covers the Justice Department accord and prior settlements.

Foreclosure abuse became notorious in 2010 as borrowers, politicians and regulators accused lenders of pursuing cases that were based on defective or fraudulent documentation.

Many documents were found to have been signed systematically without being read.

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India Ink: Powering an Enclave With Dosas

Brian Harkin for The New York Times

Krish Doshi, left, with his brother Karan Doshi, both 8, at Usha Foods in Floral Park, Queens. More Photos »

After much debate, it was decided: masala dosas all around.

The retirees clustered in front of the counter at Usha Foods, then got down to business: Who was paying? Seven credit cards appeared and seven hands waved them at the cashier, until one gray-haired man succeeded in swatting his friends away. Behind them, a scrum waited to order, chattering above the whir of the microwave and the warble of Bollywood hits. Over it all, a young man behind the counter raised a tray high and shouted: “Mr. Kamal! Two chole bhature!”

Usha Foods was one of the first Indian-owned businesses in Floral Park, Queens. Today, it’s where the city’s newest Little India gathers.

On a recent Saturday, Indira Mathur, 54, presided over the cash register in gold-rimmed glasses and a blazer, ringing up plate lunches, flatbreads and black pepper cashews. Her nephew Vardan, 34, speedily dished out plates of spiced chickpeas and creamy pakora curry while her husband, Anil, 57, ran the kitchen. Her son Abhinav, 28, manned the takeout sweets counter. The family bought the shop in 2001, and have already expanded twice.

Floral Park is perched on the far edge of the city, on the Nassau County line. The main thoroughfare of Hillside Avenue is lined with snack shops and kebab houses, sari boutiques and discount salons. A few months ago, a Hindu temple dedicated to the monkey-faced god Hanuman opened in an old supermarket space. Next door, the accurately named Variety Shop sells colorful statuary of Hindu gods and goddesses as well as luggage and watches. If you’re in need of a carrom board — an Indian game of tabletop billiards — you could stop in Butala Emporium down the block.

Intrepid eaters make the trip from Manhattan to visit restaurants like Mumbai Xpress, New Kerala Kitchen, Madras Woodlands and Southern Spice. But for all the cooking going on in this enclave, Usha Foods is one of the few places that is consistently full.

The shop serves pan-Indian, vegetarian comfort food designed to satisfy all comers, like the South Asian version of a diner. There are southern Indian dosas, saucy Punjabi dishes like baingan bharta and Gujarati snacks like dabeli (spiced potato patties served on hamburger buns). “People call and ask if we are a Punjabi shop or a Gujarati shop,” said Ms. Mathur, who moved from New Delhi to the United States in 1986. “I say we are a Hindustani shop,” using the Hindi word for all of India.

On a recent frigid Sunday afternoon, customers streamed in from the cold, salwar kameez and saris peeking out from puffy jackets. Many lined up for to-go boxes of crunchy snacks for Super Bowl parties; others sat at the simple wooden tables tucking into their orders. Outside, Fawad Taj smoked a postprandial cigarette and chatted with two friends. “The food is pretty close to what our mothers would cook,” Mr. Taj, who was born in Lahore, Pakistan, said. “And we’re having a lazy Sunday.”

After their own meal, Indu and D. P. Singh hugged their son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren goodbye. “Every two weeks we meet them here for lunch,” Ms. Singh said. “They have everything: Punjabi as well as southern cooking.”

Ms. Mathur said she particularly liked to see American-born children come in with their Indian parents: “We thought that when our generation gets old, the kids wouldn’t carry on with our foods. But now we see they follow our traditions — when they have a party, they want this food.”

Sridevi Krishna, 8, seemed to agree: Asked if she liked the sweets her father was carrying out, she offered only a huge, bucktoothed grin.

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Amputee Olympic star Pistorius charged in slaying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

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

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Well: Ask Well: Swimming to Ease Back Pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DealBook: S.E.C. Is Said to Be Investigating Trading Before Heinz Deal

Regulators are scrutinizing unusual trading surrounding the planned $23 billion takeover of the food company H. J. Heinz, raising questions about potential illegal activity in one of the biggest deals in recent memory, a person briefed on the matter said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission opened an insider trading inquiry on Thursday as Berkshire Hathaway and the investment firm 3G Capital agreed to pay $72.50 a share for Heinz, this person said. Regulators first noticed a suspicious spike in trading on Wednesday.

If the S.E.C.’s preliminary inquiry turns into a broader investigation, it could cast a shadow over the deal. As part of the process, authorities would turn their focus toward the limited universe of insiders who could have tipped off traders about the deal.

The agency’s inquiry is expected to be centered on options trading in Heinz, activity that soared this week as news of the deal circulated Wall Street. In what is known as a call option, investors can place a bullish bet on a stock, without actually committing to buy the shares. Instead, investors have the opportunity to buy at a given price and future date.

As recently as Tuesday, there was scant activity in Heinz options. But by Wednesday, as the companies were putting the finishing touches on the deal, options trading jumped, data from Bloomberg shows.

The price of Heinz’s stock soared after the deal was announced. The stock finished up nearly 20 percent on Thursday to close at $72.50, matching the offer price.

The S.E.C. is focusing on the sudden leap in options trading Wednesday, building on a related case it filed last year that also involved 3G, a company with Brazilian roots. In September, the agency obtained an emergency court order to freeze the assets of a Brazilian man suspected of insider trading around 3G Capital’s takeover of Burger King. The trader, a Brazilian citizen who worked at Wells Fargo in Miami, reportedly received the tip from a 3G investor.

Neither the company nor any individual at 3G has been accused of any wrongdoing in that case or in the Heinz inquiry.

While the inquiry is in its early stages, the person briefed on the matter said that regulators could take relatively prompt action. If it is concerned that traders might move the money overseas, the S.E.C. could ask a federal court to freeze the traders’ assets.

The S.E.C. routinely opens inquiries into trading activity after major mergers are announced, but often does not bring charges. The agency, however, has renewed its focus on insider trading, mounting dozens of cases in recent years.

An S.E.C. spokesman declined to comment. Bloomberg News earlier reported that S.E.C. investigators were reviewing the surge in Heinz options trading.

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India Ink: Falling Far Short of the Whole Truth

She had been called to the bar in a formal ceremony at Middle Temple Hall, a grand room where little has changed since 1602, when the first known performance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” was staged there. With her dark hair covered by a barrister’s foppish white wig, she signed the registry of barristers who had stood in the same spot across the centuries, including John Rutledge, a signer of the United States Constitution, and Sir William Blackstone, the 18th-century legal scholar who wrote the seminal legal tome, “Commentaries on the Laws of England.”

She began to handle criminal cases, nearly one a day over three months. In 90 more days, she would become a full-fledged barrister, the apex of a carefully curated career.

And then it all collapsed, undone by the chance discovery of a simple lie, that led to many more. A clerk for the British firm that had accepted Ms. Sengupta stumbled upon her application file, and noticed that she had listed a date of birth that put her age at 29.

“Seriously?” the clerk thought, according to Edmund Blackman, a barrister with the firm, One Inner Temple Lane. “There is no way she’s as young as she’s saying on this form.”

Questions were asked, which Ms. Sengupta, who was, in fact, in her late 40s at the time, declined to answer. Eventually, it became clear that she had not only shaved nearly two decades off her age but that nearly everything about her work and education history was not as she had claimed.

Ms. Sengupta had, in fact, submitted many phony documents. The fraud was so comprehensive that the Bar Standards Board of England and Wales threw out an element of the application process that presumed a certain level of honor among its applicants; the board now requires that college transcripts come directly from the schools in a sealed envelope, without passing through an applicant’s hands.

“The more information I obtained, the less clear the whole thing became,” said Andrea Clerk, the Bar Standards Board official who investigated the case. “It was a very serious matter, indeed.”

Ms. Sengupta, 52, is on trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, where she faces forgery and other charges, the most severe of which carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years. Her boyfriend, Manuel Soares, a former vice president of BNY Mellon, faces the same charges in a coming trial.

Her lawyer has argued the case on technical legal issues, and has not challenged prosecutors’ assertions that Ms. Sengupta forged documents and misrepresented her work history and age.

“We are conceding that some of this conduct, in fact, did occur,” the lawyer, James Kousouros, told Justice Thomas Farber, who will decide the case without a jury.

A few facts about Ms. Sengupta’s life seem certain. She was born in India and grew up mostly in Jersey City, the daughter of an engineer. She did indeed graduate from Georgetown Law School in 1998. And though she overstated other achievements, she had also passed the New York State bar exam and became a licensed lawyer in 2000.

The deceptions described in the criminal case against her began the same year. She applied for a job as a paralegal for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, even though the office does not allow lawyers to work as paralegals. Ms. Sengupta claimed that she had left law school before graduating, and wrote that she was born in 1969, making her eight years younger than she actually was, according to trial testimony.

In the prosecutor’s office, she handled somewhat more challenging work than most paralegals because her supervisor, Melissa Paolella, then an assistant district attorney handling white-collar fraud cases, knew that Ms. Sengupta had taken classes in a law school.

In 2003, Ms. Sengupta was fired from the office after it became known that she was, in fact, a lawyer. She asked Ms. Paolella to write reference letters to help her apply for several staff lawyer positions, including with the American Civil Liberties Union in New Jersey and the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. Ms. Paolella did so, knowing that Ms. Sengupta longed to practice public interest law.

“Absolutely, I knew what her passion as a lawyer was,” she testified.

None of the jobs materialized. In 2004, Ms. Sengupta began doing volunteer work two days a week for the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners’ Rights Project. She did not appear in court or write briefs, her supervisor, Dori Lewis, testified.

But when Ms. Sengupta applied for admission to the British bar, she transformed her work after passing the bar into a remarkable saga of courtroom derring-do.

She claimed that she had been an assistant district attorney and had prosecuted “gang and white-collar fraud cases,” which included working to convict 27 gang members who had controlled a section of East Harlem.

She wrote that as a staff lawyer at the Legal Aid Society she had defended “all felonies including murder and sexual offences,” including handling the defense of a “man charged with commissioning the murder of a judge.”

“I have over six years of advocacy experience in a common law system and I am in court on an almost daily basis,” she wrote in her application to the Bar Standards Board of England and Wales.

She also claimed that she had graduated in the top 1 percent of her class at Georgetown Law, which prosecutors have suggested was not true. She filed a reference letter from Robert F. Drinan, a former United States representative from Massachusetts and Georgetown law professor; it was dated a year after his death.

Other reference letters, purportedly written by Ms. Paolella and Ms. Lewis, called Ms. Sengupta an accomplished trial lawyer. Both testified that the letters had been forged.

Her overstatements went undetected, and she won a highly competitive spot in a one-year training program, known as a pupilage, in which a prospective barrister works with a law firm, or chamber. She was scheduled to start in October 2007, but she repeatedly failed a battery of tests that had to be passed before her pupilage could begin. She hid the failures from the firm, saying she could not begin because she had been injured in a car accident.

“Given that we have over 100 applicants for each place,” Mr. Blackman, of One Inner Temple Lane, said in court, “the likelihood is that had we known that, we would have withdrawn the offer.”

Rather than pass all elements of the test, Ms. Sengupta successfully appealed to the Bar Standards Board to waive one part, which she had failed twice. She began training with barristers in the firm. Halfway through her training, in July 2008, Ms. Sengupta was formally called to the bar by the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court entitled to call members to the Bar of England and Wales.

After six months, Ms. Sengupta began handling cases on her own. She was assigned some 80 criminal cases over three months, defending people accused of minor crimes.

Mr. Blackman testified that his firm grew somewhat reluctant to assign more difficult cases to Ms. Sengupta, but she continued to practice. “In a general manner, her performance would not be what you would expect from someone with the experience she claimed to have,” he said.

But it was Ms. Sengupta’s age, not her job performance, that proved to be her undoing. After the clerk first aroused his suspicion of her, Mr. Blackman found that she had entered different years of birth on several forms.

“In the absence of an explanation as to why she had four different dates of birth, she was done,” Mr. Blackman said during the trial. He added: “We had suffered a financial loss, but more importantly, she had been appearing in court when unqualified to do so.”

His firm suspended her pupilage and reported its concerns to the Bar Standards Board, which opened an investigation. But Ms. Sengupta, aided by Mr. Soares, who had transferred to BNY Mellon’s London office, pushed on.

According to prosecutors, the two obtained a phony Georgetown seal from a Web-based business, rubberstamp.com, and created a fake diploma to match the misstatements on her application, including one that she had earned an undergraduate degree from Georgetown, a falsehood. They e-mailed one another drafts of forgeries, one with “My Masterpiece” written in the subject line. They forged an Indian birth certificate. They created a Web site for a fictional law firm in the name of a fictional former prosecutor, and submitted a reference letter in his name.

They forged a letter, according to prosecutors, from the office of Eliot Spitzer, then the attorney general, attesting to how Ms. Sengupta “exercised rights of audience” in New York, using a term associated with British courts. Ms. Sengupta’s lawyer, Mr. Kousouros, said the document was authentic.

In December 2010, the Manhattan district attorney obtained indictments of Ms. Sengupta and Mr. Soares after learning that their former paralegal had claimed to be a prosecutor for the office, and that the forged documents had passed through Manhattan. Three months later, the two were arrested at Kennedy Airport, where they had flown from London, as they awaited a connecting flight to Puerto Rico.

Citing the criminal trials here and an open disciplinary case in Britain, bar officials in London declined to discuss the matter, or to say whether it has caused other policy changes.

When Mr. Blackman was asked during the trial whether One Inner Temple Lane verified pupilage applicants’ prior employment claims, he answered dryly.

“Stupidly, we did not,” he said. “We do now.”

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Plumlee leads No. 2 Duke past UNC, 73-68

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) — With its star big man on the bench with foul trouble, Duke went small to beat its top rival — and one of its smallest players came up big.

The run that propelled the second-ranked Blue Devils to a 73-68 victory over North Carolina on Wednesday night started when Mason Plumlee sat down and backup guard Tyler Thornton warmed up.

"I think the hero for us this game was Thornton," coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "He would not let us lose."

Plumlee finished with his usual big numbers — 18 points, 11 rebounds — while Quinn Cook scored 18 points and Rasheed Sulaimon finished with 13 for the Blue Devils (22-2, 9-2 Atlantic Coast Conference).

But the contributions of Thornton couldn't be overlooked.

Thornton finished with nine points on three 3-pointers — or, as many points as he had in his previous three games combined — and two of those 3s came during the run midway through the second half that completely flipped the game's momentum.

"It's just the heart and the will to want to win," Thornton said. "Especially coming down the stretch, you've got to go all out and leave it on the floor, and I think we did that."

Duke shot 44 percent — 52 percent after halftime — and erased a slow start with that timely run and win its sixth straight this season and sixth in eight meetings in college basketball's fiercest rivalry.

P.J. Hairston matched a career high with 23 points and Reggie Bullock had 15 points with four 3-pointers for North Carolina (16-8, 6-5), which led for the first 26 minutes but went on to lose its second straight.

The Tar Heels were 13 of 23 from the free-throw line and missed 7 of 10 during a critical late stretch while falling to 1-4 this season against ranked opponents.

"If I knew how to fix the blessed thing, I would have fixed it," coach Roy Williams said of his team's struggles at the line. "The bottom line is, we didn't make free throws today. We're not a good free-throw shooting team in games."

Still, they trailed just 65-61 in the final minute and appeared to have gotten a stop by forcing Thornton to miss a long 3-pointer with the shot clock winding down. But Bullock fouled Sulaimon on the rebound, and the freshman hit both free throws with 37.5 seconds left.

Hairston hit a free throw on North Carolina's next possession to cut it to 67-62, but Plumlee countered with two free throws with 30.3 seconds left to make it a three-possession game.

Seth Curry scored 11 points in his sixth straight double-figure performance against North Carolina.

The win was a nice present for Krzyzewski, who was celebrating his 66th birthday.

And an unorthodox move — putting one of the best big men in the nation on the bench, however briefly — wound up putting Duke ahead for the first time in this one.

Plumlee picked up his third foul 31 seconds into the second half and uncorked an untimely 20-foot jumper a few minutes later, prompting Krzyzewski to burn a timeout. He went to a smaller lineup, sitting Plumlee in favor of two power forwards, Amile Jefferson and Josh Hairston.

"I thought he was playing like he had three fouls," Krzyzewski said. UNC's James Michael "McAdoo was just going at him so that McAdoo was either going to score, or Mason was going to foul him."

The move freed up some space for the Duke guards and immediately led to six quick points to start the 19-7 run that put the Blue Devils ahead to stay.

Duke outscored North Carolina 11-3 during the 4-minute stretch with Plumlee on the bench and took their first lead when Curry swished a 3 from in front of the bench to make it 42-41 with 14 minutes left.

Thornton — who had missed 12 of 14 3-pointers during his previous eight games — hit two of them from the same spot in the right corner, capping the spurt with his second that made it 50-45 with 12½ minutes to go.

Curry eventually stretched the lead to 59-51 with another 3 with 5 minutes left.

"They started knocking down shots in the second half, open 3-pointers," Bullock said. "I think our team played great, we played with better sense of urgency, we played with better effort, we were more involved in the game and what's happening. But they started knocking down shots and they started gaining momentum, and we wasn't connecting when we were open."

Dexter Strickland added 14 points but McAdoo was held to nine on 4-of-12 shooting for North Carolina, which came in as a written-off, double-digit underdog after a 26-point loss at No. 3 Miami that marked its worst loss of the season.

But the Tar Heels were aggressive early and methodically built a double-figure lead, the third straight year they came into Cameron and went up by 10. Bullock's third 3 of the half with about 6:45 left put North Carolina up 28-18.

"The intensity tonight was better than it has been all year long," Williams said.

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To Lower Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns

Larry Mayer for The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Japanese Economy Contracts and Remains in Recession

TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s economy remained mired in recession late last year, shrinking 0.4 percent in annualized terms for the third straight quarter of contraction on feeble demand at home and overseas.

The government reported Thursday that growth for all of 2012 was 1.9 percent, after a 0.6 percent contraction in 2011 and a 4.7 percent increase in 2010 and a 5.5 percent contraction in 2009.

The figures were worse than expected, as many analysts had forecast the economy may have emerged from recession late last year as the Japanese yen weakened against other major currencies, giving a boost to Japanese export manufacturers.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in late December, is championing aggressive spending and monetary stimulus to help get growth back on track. He has lobbied the central bank to set an inflation target of 2 percent, aimed at breaking out of Japan’s long bout of deflation, or falling prices, that he says are inhibiting corporate investment and growth.

But the Bank of Japan was not expected to announce any major new initiatives from a policy meeting on Thursday. The current central bank governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, is due to leave office on March 19, and Mr. Abe is expected to appoint as his successor an expert who favors his more activist approach to monetary policy.

Last year began on an upbeat note with annual growth in the first quarter at 6 percent as strong government spending on reconstruction from the March 2011 tsunami disaster helped spur demand. But the economy contracted in the second quarter and deteriorated further as frictions with China over a territorial dispute hurt exports to one of Japan’s largest overseas markets.

Despite the dismal data for last year, many in Japan expect at least a temporary bump to growth from higher government spending on public works and other programs. An index measuring consumer confidence, released this week, jumped to its highest level since 2007, the biggest increase in a single month.

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