Cyber Monday sales best ever, for Amazon’s Kindle too

(Reuters) – Internet sales jumped more than 30 percent on Cyber Monday, making it the biggest online shopping day ever, according to data released on Tuesday.

Walmart.com, the online division of Walmart U.S., had its best sales day in history, a spokeswoman said.

Cyber Monday also was a record day for sales of Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle devices, the online retailer said, without specifying the number sold.

Still, eBay Inc, operator of one of the largest online marketplaces, outperformed its arch rival Amazon.com over the crucial first five days of the holiday shopping season, according to one closely watched measure.

Cyber Monday has been the biggest online shopping day in recent years, as workers return to offices and make holiday purchases on their computers. This year, the boom in smart phone and tablet adoption has added extra fuel to online shopping.

Cyber Monday sales online jumped 30.3 percent from the same day last year, according to International Business Machines Corp, which analyzes transactions from 500 U.S. retailers.

Mobile devices accounted for 18 percent of visits to retailer websites and 13 percent of sales on Cyber Monday. That was up 70 percent and 96 percent, respectively, compared with the same day last year, IBM reported.

To that end, Walmart.com said Cyber Monday online traffic from Walmart’s mobile apps jumped 280 percent versus a year ago.

On Monday, when retailers offered big Cyber Monday online deals, web shopping peaked at 11:25 a.m. EST (1625 GMT), IBM said. That timing suggests shoppers continue to check out online offers while still at work, even though more people have high-speed Internet access at home than in previous years.

AMAZON’S KINDLE DEAL

Amazon.com cut the price of its 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet by $ 30 to $ 129 on Monday, and it was the company’s most successful Cyber Monday deal ever, the retailer said.

Nine of the top 10 best-selling products on Amazon.com have been Kindles, Kindle accessories and digital content since the company unveiled new devices on September 6, it said.

Worldwide sales of Kindle devices more than doubled during the Thanksgiving weekend from the 2011 period, Amazon said.

“Demand for Kindle Fire is stronger than expected,” said Chad Bartley, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. “This suggests Amazon is competing effectively against Apple and Google in the near term, and increased device ownership could drive sales of digital media and physical products over the long term.”

Bartley raised his estimate for fourth-quarter Kindle Fire unit sales to 8 million from 5.5 million and increased his forecast for Amazon’s fourth-quarter revenue to $ 22.75 billion from $ 22.25 billion.

Shares of Amazon closed down almost 0.1 percent at $ 243.40 on Nasdaq. Stock in Wal-Mart Stores Inc shed 0.6 percent to close at $ 69.50.

A FIRST FOR EBAY

Still, eBay sales may have outperformed Amazon during the early part of the holiday shopping season, according to ChannelAdvisor, which helps third-party merchants sell more via websites including eBay.com and Amazon.com.

ChannelAdvisor data excludes sales specifically by Amazon, so the data does not capture Kindle device revenue and many other transactions. About 60 percent of Amazon’s unit sales are generated by the company itself, while 40 percent come from third parties operating on its platform.

ChannelAdvisor said client sales – sales generated by third-party merchants using the company’s service – soared 55.2 percent on eBay.com on Cyber Monday from a year earlier. That was about five times faster than last year’s growth.

For the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, which ChannelAdvisor calls the “Cyber Five,” client sales on eBay.com rose 38.3 percent compared with the same days in 2011.

ChannelAdvisor said client sales on Amazon.com jumped 42.4 percent on Cyber Monday compared with a year earlier. Over the “Cyber Five,” client sales on Amazon.com rose 37.7 percent, the firm said.

This is the first time since at least 2007 that client sales on eBay.com have grown faster than client sales via Amazon.com during the holiday season, according to Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor. The firm started tracking this in 2007, he noted.

EBay shares lost 0.5 percent to close at $ 51.15 on Tuesday. The stock rose almost 5 percent to a new multi-year high on Monday after ChannelAdvisor released its early Cyber Monday results.

EBay’s holiday advertising campaign, which included TV commercials, likely attracted more shoppers to its online marketplace, Wingo said.

EBay was also “aggressive” with holiday promotions and gift guides, and the company’s category-specific websites focused on things like fashion and electronics, were well integrated with the broader holiday promotions, unlike last year, Wingo explained.

However, the main driver may have been mobile shopping, an area in which eBay and its payments division PayPal invested early and heavily, Wingo added.

“With less than 10 percent of commerce coming from mobile devices and far higher levels ahead, we believe this trend will carry eBay Marketplace and PayPal for the next few years,” Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note to investors on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Alistair Barr in San Francisco and Jessica Wohl in Chicago, additional reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Sofina Mirza-Reid, Lisa Von Ahn, Gunna Dickson and David Gregorio)

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Bonds, Clemens, Sosa set to show up on Hall ballot

NEW YORK (AP) — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa are set to show up on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time, and fans will soon find out whether drug allegations block the former stars from reaching baseball's shrine.

The 2013 ballot will be announced Wednesday.

Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza and Curt Schilling are certain to be among the other first-time eligibles. Jack Morris, Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines are the top holdover candidates.

Longtime members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America will vote through next month. The much-awaited results will be announced Jan. 9, with players needing to be listed on 75 percent of the ballots to gain induction.

The upcoming election is certain to fuel the most polarizing Hall debate since career hits leader Pete Rose's betting problems put him on baseball's permanently ineligible list, barring him from the BBWAA ballot.

Bonds, Clemens and Sosa each posted some of the biggest numbers in the game's history, but all were tainted by accusations that they used performance-enhancing drugs.

Bonds is baseball's all-time home runs leader with 762 and won a record seven MVP awards. Clemens ranks ninth in career wins with 354 and took home a record seven Cy Young Awards. Sosa is eighth on the home run chart with 609.

Fans, players and Hall of Fame members have all chimed in about whether stars who supposedly juiced up during the Steroids Era should make it to Cooperstown.

Many of those opposed say drug cheats should never be afforded baseball's highest individual honors. Others on the opposite side claim the use of performance-enhancing drugs was pervasive in the 1980s and 1990s, and shouldn't disqualify candidates.

If recent voting for the Hall is any indication, the odds are solidly stacked against Bonds, Clemens and Sosa.

Mark McGwire is 10th on the career home run list with 583, but has never received even 24 percent in his six tries. Big Mac has admitted using steroids and human growth hormone.

Rafael Palmeiro is among only four players with 500 homers and 3,000 hits, yet has gotten a high of 12.6 percent in his two years on the ballot. Palmeiro drew a 10-day suspension in 2005 after a positive test for performance-enhancing drugs, and said the result was due to a vitamin vial given to him by teammate Miguel Tejada.

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Personal Health: Aiding the Doctor Who Feels Cancer's Toll

The woman was terminally ill with advanced cancer, and the oncologist who had been treating her for three years thought the next step might be to deliver chemotherapy directly to her brain. It was a risky treatment that he knew would not, could not, help her.

When Dr. Diane E. Meier asked what he thought the futile therapy would accomplish, the oncologist replied, “I don’t want Judy to think I’m abandoning her.”

In a recent interview, Dr. Meier said, “Most physicians have no other strategies, no other arrows in their quiver beyond administering tests and treatments.”

“To avoid feeling that they’ve abandoned their patients, doctors throw procedures at them,” she said.

Dr. Meier, a renowned expert on palliative care at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, was the keynote speaker this month at the Buddhist Contemplative Care Symposium, organized by the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and the Garrison Institute. She described contemplative care as “the discipline of being present, of listening before acting.”

“Counter to how the American medical system is structured, which pays for what gets done,” she said, “its approach is, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ ”

But the idea is not to do just that. Rather, she said, the goal is to “restore the patient to the center of the enterprise.”

Under the Affordable Care Act, she said, unnecessary procedures may decline as more doctors are reimbursed for doing what is best for their patients over time, not just for administering tests and treatments. But more could be done if physicians were able to step away from the misperception that everything that can be done should be done.

Dr. Meier’s question prompted Judy’s oncologist to realize that what his patient needed most at the end of her life was not more chemotherapy, but for him to sit down with her, to promise to do his best to keep her comfortable and to be there for the rest of her days.

Occupational Distress

Patients and families may not realize it, but doctors who care for people with incurable illness, and especially the terminally ill, often suffer with their patients. Unable to cope with their own feelings of frustration, failure and helplessness, doctors may react with anger, abruptness and avoidance.

Visits may be reduced to a quick review of the medical chart, and phone calls may not be returned. Even though their doctors are still there, incurably ill patients may feel neglected and depressed, which can exacerbate illness and pain and even hasten death. Dr. Michael K. Kearney, a palliative care physician at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, told the Contemplative Care conference that doctors, especially those who care for terminally ill patients, are subject to two serious forms of occupational stress: burnout and compassion fatigue.

He described burnout as “the end stage of stresses between the individual and the work environment” that can result in emotional and physical exhaustion, a sense of detachment and a feeling of never being able to achieve one’s professional goals.

He likened compassion fatigue to “secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, or vicarious traumatization — trauma suffered when someone close to you is suffering.”

A doctor with compassion fatigue may avoid thoughts and feelings associated with a patient’s misery, become irritable and easily angered, and face physical and emotional distress when reminded of work with the dying. Compassion fatigue can lead to burnout.

In one study of 18 oncologists, published in 2008 in The Journal of Palliative Medicine, those who saw their role as both biomedical and psychosocial found end-of-life care very satisfying. But those “who described a primarily biomedical role reported a more distant relationship with the patient, a sense of failure at not being able to alter the course of the disease and an absence of collegial support,” the authors noted.

Healing the Healer

For doctors at risk of becoming overwhelmed by the stresses of their jobs, Dr. Kearney recommends adopting the time-honored Buddhist practice of “mindfulness meditation,” which involves cultivating mental techniques for stress reduction that are native to all of us but practiced by too few. He likened meditation to “learning to breathe underwater, or finding sources of renewal within work itself.”

To achieve it, a person sits quietly, paying attention to one’s breathing and whenever a distracting thought intrudes, turning one’s attention back to the sensation of breathing. This can help calm the mind and prepare it for a clearer perspective.

Dr. Kearney said this practice could help doctors “really pay attention and be tuned into their patients and what the patients are experiencing.”

“Patients, in turn,” he said, “experience a doctor who’s not just focused on a medical agenda but who really listens to them.”

He said mindfulness meditation helps doctors become more self-aware, empathetic and patient-focused, and to make fewer medical errors. It enables doctors to notice what is going on within themselves and to consider rational options instead of just reacting.

“It’s like pressing an internal pause button,” Dr. Kearney said. “The doctor is able to recognize he’s being stressed, and it prevents him from invoking the survival defense mechanisms of fight (‘Let’s do another course of chemotherapy’), flight (‘There’s nothing more I can do for you — I’ll go get the chaplain’) and freeze (the doctor goes blank and does nothing).” Such reactions can be highly distressing to a dying patient.

When a patient asks for the impossible, like “Promise me I’m not going to die,” the mindful doctor is more likely to step back and say, “I can promise you I’ll do everything I can to help you. I’m going to continue to care for you and support you as best as I can. I’ll be back to see you later today and again tomorrow,” Dr. Kearney said.

Although Dr. Kearney does mindfulness meditation for 30 minutes every morning, he said as little as 8 to 10 minutes a day has been shown helpful to practicing physicians.

In addition, doctors can factor moments of meditation into the course of the workday — say, while washing their hands, having a snack or coffee or pausing before entering the next patient room to focus on breathing.

To deal with the emotional flood that can come after a traumatic event, he suggested taking a brief timeout or calling on a friend or colleague to go for a walk.

This is the second of two columns about communication and cancer. Read the first: “When Treating Cancer Is Not an Option”

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Facebook Gift Store Urges Users to Shop While They Share

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is already privy to its users’ e-mail addresses, wedding pictures and political beliefs. Now the company is nudging them to share a bit more: credit card numbers and offline addresses.

James Best Jr./The New York Times

Facebook Gifts is a service that prompts users to buy things for friends on the social network.

Sharing Even More

What do you think about Facebook’s plan to have users buy gifts for their friends through the site using their credit cards?

A screenshot of Facebook Gifts.

The nudge comes from a new Facebook service called Gifts. It allows Facebook users — only in the United States for now — to buy presents for their friends on the social network. On offer are items as varied as spices from Dean & DeLuca, pajamas from BabyGap and subscriptions to Hulu Plus, the video service. This week Facebook added iTunes gift cards.

The gift service is part of an aggressive moneymaking push aimed at pleasing Facebook’s investors after the company’s dismal stock market debut. Facebook has stepped up mobile advertising and is starting to customize the marketing messages it shows to users based on their Web browsing outside Facebook.

Those efforts seem to have brought some relief to Wall Street. Analysts issued more bullish projections for the company in recent days, and the stock was up 49 percent from its lowest point, closing Tuesday at $26.15, although that is still well below the initial offering price of $38. The share price has been buoyed in part by the fact that a wave of insider lockup periods expired without a flood of shares hitting the market.

To power the Gifts service, Facebook rented a warehouse in South Dakota and created its own software to track inventory and shipping. It will not say how much it earns from each purchase made through Gifts, though merchants that have a similar arrangement with Amazon.com give it a roughly 15 percent cut of sales.

If it catches on, the service would give Facebook a toehold in the more than $200 billion e-commerce market. Much more important, it would let the company accumulate a new stream of valuable personal data and use it to refine targeted advertisements, its bread and butter. The company said it did not now use data collected through Gifts for advertising purposes, but could not rule it out in the future.

“The hard part for Facebook was aggregating a billion users. Now it’s more about how to monetize those users without scaring them away,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird.

He added: “Gifts should also contribute more to Facebook’s treasure trove of user data, which has the benefit of a virtuous cycle, driving more personalization of the site, leading to better and more targeted ads, which improves overall monetization.”

Facebook already collects credit card information from users who play social games on its site. But they are a limited constituency, and a wider audience may be persuaded to buy a gift when Facebook reminds them that a friend is expecting a baby or a cousin is approaching her 40th birthday.

The Gifts service, which grew out of Facebook’s acquisition of a mobile application called Karma, was introduced in September and expanded earlier this month on the eve of the holiday shopping season.

Magnolia Bakery, based in New York, was among Facebook’s early partners for Gifts. Its vice president for public relations, Sara Gramling, said the company had sold roughly 200 packages of treats since then. She counted it as a marketing success. The bakery, which gained fame thanks to “Sex and the City,” had only recently begun shipping its goods. “It was a great opportunity to expand our network,” she said.

Magnolia Bakery isn’t exactly catering to the masses. A half-dozen cupcakes cost $35, plus about $12 for shipping. Facebook, Ms. Gramling said, takes care of the billing. The bakery is eyeing Facebook’s global reach, too, as it opens outlets internationally, especially in the Middle East.

One of the appeals of Facebook Gifts is the ease of making a purchase. Facebook users are nudged to buy a gift (a gift-box icon pops up) for Facebook friends on their birthdays. They are offered a vast menu to choose from: beer glasses, cake pops, quilts, marshmallows, magazine subscriptions and donations to charity. They are asked to choose a greeting card. Then they are asked for credit card details. Facebook says it stores that credit card information, unless users remove it after making a purchase.

Facebook has declined to say how many users have bought gifts, only that among those who have, the average purchase is $25.

David Streitfeld contributed reporting.

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Egypt’s President Said to Limit Scope of Judicial Decree

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians at a burned-out school in Cairo on Monday before the funeral of an activist who was injured in a clash and died Sunday.

CAIRO — With public pressure mounting, President Mohamed Morsi appeared to pull back Monday from his attempt to assert an authority beyond the reach of any court. His allies in the Muslim Brotherhood canceled plans for a large demonstration in his support, signaling a chance to calm an escalating battle that has paralyzed a divided nation.

After Mr. Morsi met for hours with the judges of Egypt’s Supreme Judicial Council, his spokesman read an “explanation” on television that appeared to backtrack from a presidential decree placing Mr. Morsi’s official edicts above judicial scrutiny — even while saying the president had not actually changed a word of the statement.

Though details of the talks remained hazy, and it was not clear whether the opposition or the court would accept his position, Mr. Morsi’s gesture was another demonstration that Egyptians would no longer allow their rulers to operate above the law. But there appeared little chance that the gesture alone would be enough to quell the crisis set off by his perceived power grab.

Protesters remained camped in Tahrir Square, and the opposition was moving ahead with plans for a major demonstration on Tuesday.

The presidential spokesman, Yasser Ali, said for the first time that Mr. Morsi had sought only to assert pre-existing powers already approved by the courts under previous precedents, not to free himself from judicial oversight.

He said that the president meant all along to follow an established Egyptian legal doctrine suspending judicial scrutiny of presidential “acts of sovereignty” that work “to protect the main institutions of the state.” The judicial council had said Sunday that it could bless aspects of the decree deemed to qualify under the doctrine.

Mr. Morsi had maintained from the start that his purpose was to empower himself to prevent judges appointed by former President Hosni Mubarak from dissolving the constituent assembly, which is led by his fellow Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The courts have already dissolved the Islamist-led Parliament and an earlier constituent assembly, and the Supreme Constitutional Court was widely expected to rule against this one next week.

But the text of the original decree had exempted all presidential edicts from judicial review until the ratification of a constitution, not just those edicts related to the assembly or justified as “acts of sovereignty.”

Legal experts said that the spokesman’s explanations of the president’s intentions, if put into effect, would amount to a revision of the decree Mr. Morsi issued last Thursday. But lawyers said that the verbal statements alone carried little legal weight.

How the courts would apply the doctrine remained hard to predict. And Mr. Morsi’s opposition indicated it was holding out for far greater concessions, including the breakup of the whole constituent assembly.

Speaking at a news conference while Mr. Morsi was meeting with the judges, the opposition activist and intellectual Abdel Haleem Qandeil called for “a long-term battle,” declaring that withdrawal of Mr. Morsi’s new powers was only the first step toward the opposition’s goal of “the withdrawal of the legitimacy of Morsi’s presence in the presidential palace.” Completely withdrawing the edict would be “a minimum,” he said.

Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and former presidential candidate, pointed to the growing crowd of protesters camped out in Tahrir Square for a fourth night. “The one who did the action has to take it back,” Mr. Ali said.

Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University, said Mr. Morsi was saving face during a strategic retreat. “He is trying to simply say, ‘I am not a new pharaoh; I am just trying to stabilize the institutions that we already have,’ ” he said. “But for the liberals, this is now their moment, and for sure they are not going to waste it, because he has given them an excellent opportunity to score.”

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Thunder dominate first half, rout Bobcats 114-69

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Russell Westbrook tipped away a pass, got into the open court all by himself and then braced for a big take-off and a signature throwdown dunk. Instead, he meekly flipped the ball into the basket and grinned sheepishly at the Oklahoma City Thunder bench after the miscue.

"I really thought he was going to do something a little better than what he did, but I'll take up for him and say he slipped a little bit," said Kevin Durant, the three-time NBA scoring champion.

"But he made up for it at the end of the half."

Did he ever.

Westbrook powered home a right-handed slam to put an exclamation point on one of the most dominant first halves in NBA history, putting Oklahoma City up by 40 on its way to a 114-69 blowout of the Charlotte Bobcats on Monday night.

The 64-24 advantage was the fifth-biggest halftime lead in NBA's shot clock era and the largest since Golden State set the record with an 88-41 edge on Sacramento on Nov. 2, 1991, according to STATS.

It ended up as the biggest blowout in Bobcats history.

"We struggled to hit shots, we struggled to get good shots, we got beat on the boards. We got beat in all facets of the game," Charlotte center Brendan Haywood said. "In a game like this tonight, you just basically say they beat us in every which way possible and you bounce back and you learn from the film."

Durant scored 18 points and Westbrook had 12 points and 11 assists. The defending Western Conference champions pulled their starters after Durant's 3-pointer from the right wing made it 79-25 less than 5 minutes into the second half.

"We came out and took care of business, regardless of who the opponent is," Westbrook said. "That's a good team. They came in tonight and had won some big games.

"We just took care of business."

Rookie Jeff Taylor scored 10 points to lead Charlotte, which had shown promise with seven early wins — the same number it had last season while going 7-59 and setting an NBA record for futility.

The franchise's worst blowout previously had been a 112-68 defeat against Portland on Feb. 1.

"There hasn't been any kind of damage control to be done on this game," first-year coach Mike Dunlap said. "We kind of know that OKC is a test for us, we failed it miserably but there are other, better days ahead."

The Bobcats opened with their worst offensive quarter of the season, scoring just 12 points while committing seven turnovers on their 20 possessions, and it only got worse.

Oklahoma City broke it open with a 22-3 run, scoring the final 10 points of the first quarter and then 12 of the first 15 to start the second. Eric Maynor and Kevin Martin hit 3-pointers on consecutive possessions, and Durant followed that by setting up back-to-back two-handed dunks by Hasheem Thabeet and Nick Collison to make it 40-15 with 8:23 left before halftime.

The Thunder shot 60 percent from the field in the first half while limiting Charlotte to 22 percent and forcing 11 turnovers. The Bobcats made only 3 of 20 shots in the second quarter while getting outscored 36-12.

The biggest concern for Dunlap, though, was a 28-15 disadvantage on the boards that he said comes down to "nothing more than raw bone effort."

"We're obviously better than last year. That shows," said ex-Thunder center Byron Mullens. "But tonight, they just got our number. I don't know what else to say. They got us tonight."

Dunlap said the Bobcats are "too young to throw the tape away" and just act like the game never happened.

"You have to take it serious. You have to look at it definitely seriously and you have to take it as a learning experience," Haywood said.

The last five players on the Thunder bench played the entire fourth quarter but Charlotte still couldn't avoid the most lopsided loss in the franchise's history, despite pulling within 38 twice in the fourth quarter.

It didn't come close to the NBA record for margin of victory — from Cleveland's 148-80 rout of Miami on Dec. 17, 1991.

"You can overreact in these situations, but we need to react and respond to it, no doubt," Dunlap said.

It still wasn't a Thunder franchise record for a halftime margin. When the team was based in Seattle, the SuperSonics held a 75-31 lead at Boston on Nov. 23, 1967 — the second-largest margin in the shot clock era, which started in the 1954-55 season.

Westbrook playfully dodged giving an explanation of his open-court flub, simply taking credit for it as "two points."

About a minute and a half later he atoned for it with the last of the Thunder's 13 straight points to finish the first half.

"They was sleeping. Everybody's head turned, so I decided to go and take off," Westbrook said.

Asked whether there was any reason he slammed the ball down so hard, he gave a big grin and said: "It's a tendency. I have a tendency of dunking the ball like that. Just natural, I guess."

Notes: Oklahoma City's highest-scoring first half this season came at New Orleans on Nov. 15, when the Thunder took a 66-37 lead. ... Charlotte's Bismack Biyombo missed his second straight game with a left leg contusion. Dunlap had called him a game-time decision. Gerald Henderson (sprained left foot) and Tyrus Thomas (left calf strain) also sat out.

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Books: Woe Is Syphilis, and Other Afflictions of Famous Writers

The old Irishman was a swollen, wheezing mess, blood pressure wildly out of control, kidneys failing, heart fibrillating. “What we have here,” said his new Spanish doctor, “is an antique cardiorenal sclerotic of advanced years.”

In fact, what the doctor had there was William Butler Yeats: the poet had a long list of chronic medical problems and experienced one of his regular cardiac crises while wintering in Spain. He still had three poetically productive years ahead of him before he died of heart failure in 1939, at age 73.

What makes antique case histories like Yeats’s so compelling to research, so interesting to read? Admittedly, they have educational value — medicine moves forward by looking back — but their major attraction is undoubtedly the operatic vigor of their emotional punch. As we contemplate the poor health of historic notables, we can sigh gustily at the immense suffering our ancestors considered routine, wince at the lunatic treatments they so innocently underwent, and marvel over and over again that the body, the brain and the mind can take such divergent paths.

These pleasures are present in abundance in the newest addition to the genre of medical biography, “Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough.” Dr. John J. Ross, a Harvard physician, writes that he stumbled into the field by accident while trying to enliven a lecture on syphilis with a few literary references. The discovery that Shakespeare was apparently obsessed with syphilis (and suspiciously familiar with its symptoms) hooked Dr. Ross.

The resulting collection of 10 medico-literary biographical sketches ranges from the tubercular Brontës, whose every moist cough is familiar to their fans, to figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose medical stories are considerably less familiar.

Dr. Ross’s discussion of Shakespeare is unique in the collection for its paucity of relevant data: so few details are known of the playwright’s life, let alone his health, that all commentary is necessarily supposition. Dr. Ross is not the first to note that references to syphilis are “more abundant, intrusive and clinically exact” in Shakespeare’s works than those of his contemporaries. This observation, along with the apparent deterioration of Shakespeare’s handwriting in his last years, leads to the hypothesis that Shakespeare had syphilis repeatedly as a young man, and wound up suffering more from treatment than disease.

The Elizabethans dosed syphilis with a combination of hot baths (treating the disease by raising body temperature endured into the 20th century), cathartics and lavish quantities of mercury. The drooling that accompanies mercury poisoning was considered a sign of excellent therapeutic progress, Dr. Ross writes: “Savvy physicians adjusted the mercury dose to produce three pints of saliva a day for two weeks.”

And so, when Shakespeare signed his will a month before he died with a shaky hand, was his tremor not possibly a sign of residual nerve damage from the mercury doses of his sybaritic youth? No amount of scholarship is likely to confirm this theory, but details of the argument are gripping and instructive nonetheless.

The story of the blind poet John Milton runs for a while along similar lines. Much is known about the long deterioration of Milton’s vision and other particulars of his delicate health, but Dr. Ross observes that many of his problems seem to have cleared up once he actually became blind. Was he vigorously medicating himself with lead-based nostrums in hopes of forestalling what Dr. Ross argues was probably progressive retinal detachment, then recovering from lead poisoning once his vision was irretrievably gone? Another intriguing if unanswerable question.

Just as the competing injuries of disease and treatment battered the luminaries of English and American literature, so did pervasive mental illness.

Jonathan Swift was a classic obsessive-compulsive long before he succumbed to frontotemporal dementia (Pick’s disease). Poor Hawthorne, so forceful on the page, was in person a tortured shrinking violet, the embodiment of social phobia and depression. Emily Brontë’s behavior was strongly suggestive of Asperger syndrome; Herman Melville was clearly bipolar; Ezra Pound was just nuts.

Yet they all wrote on, despite continual psychic and physical torments. Perhaps the thickest medical chart of all belongs to Jack London, who survived several dramatic episodes of scurvy while prospecting in the Klondike (he was treated with raw potatoes, a can of tomatoes and a single lemon), then accumulated a long list of other medical problems before killing himself (inadvertently, Dr. Ross argues) with an overdose of morphine from his personal and very capacious medicine chest.

Dr. Ross has not written a perfect book. The fictionalized scenes he creates between some of his subjects and their medical providers should all have been excised by a kindly editorial hand, which might also have addressed more than a few grammatical errors. Frequent leaps from descriptive to didactic mode as Dr. Ross updates the reader on various medical conditions can be jarring, like PowerPoint slides suddenly deployed in a poetry reading. True literary scholars might dismiss the book as lit crit lite, a hodgepodge of known facts culled from the usual secondary sources.

But all these caveats fade into the background when Dr. Ross hits his narrative stride, as he does in chapter after chapter. Then the stories of the wounded storytellers unfold smoothly on the page, as mesmerizing as any they themselves might have told, those squinting, wheezing, arthritic, infected, demented, defective yet superlative examples of the human condition.

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Paris Journal: In France, Beer Lovers Chafe at Tax Increase Plans

Stephane Remael for The New York Times

Beer drinkers at Chez Prune in Paris. A half-pint of beer may cost 6 cents to 60 cents more if a tax increase is approved.

PARIS — Simon Thillou likes to think of La Cave à Bulles, his shop here devoted only to beer, as a place where beer lovers can gather to taste new brews and, of course, discuss the state of the world. But this was one controversy he never saw coming, and wishes he never had: a proposed 160 percent increase in the tax on beer.

“The increase is brutal; 160 percent is a lot,” said Mr. Thillou, 36, who prides himself on promoting French microbreweries. On a barrel near the entrance, a pile of fliers that say “+160% taxes on beer: Who is going to pay the price?” shows what he thinks of the government’s latest plan for raising revenue.

It is not just the tax increase — which would raise prices by 25 to 40 cents per bottle — that has him upset. “I am shocked that beer is the only target,” he said. “I am shocked that other alcohol producers aren’t affected.”

Winemakers come in for particular criticism. “Wine growers aren’t behind the nation, but the nation is behind them,” he said.

Complaints about the tax increase are coming not just from customers, but from brewers, the food industry generally and politicians, who know that some voters, at least, like French ales. They say the government’s public health arguments are an excuse to single out beer, instead of spreading the pain across all alcoholic drinks.

“If we want to keep industries and economic sectors, we can’t do any old thing,” said Bernard Gérard, a center-right politician in the National Assembly, Parliament’s lower house. “Increasing excise duties by 160 percent seems completely unreasonable to me.”

Having promised to reduce France’s budget deficit, the new Socialist government has proposed about $30 billion in new taxes. The increase in the beer tax is expected to generate an additional $625 million.

The social security budget, which is in the final stages of the legislative process, also includes heavier taxes on tobacco and new ones on energy drinks.

According to government estimates, the higher tax will increase the price of a half-pint of ordinary beer by approximately 6 cents. (A half-pint of an average beer at a bar costs about 2.60 euros or $3.40.) But brewery and food industry lobbies say the increase will be considerably more because of a multiplier effect as each step of the distribution chain recalculates its profit margins, reaching 25 cents to 60 cents for the final customer.

The lobbyists fear that consumption will drop, pulling down production and threatening jobs and investment, especially for small breweries that do not have the international flexibility of European giants like Heineken or Anheuser-Busch InBev.

The French beer industry represents two billion euros in sales, or about $2.6 billion, and more than 71,000 jobs, according to the Brewers of France, a lobby that represents 80 percent of the industry. It says that 70 percent of the beer consumed in France is brewed domestically.

Laurent Lutse, president of the cafe, bar and nightclub branch of France’s main food and hotel union, said that beer represents 25 percent of sales in 80,000 member companies and worried that a tax increase would accelerate the decline of such establishments. “In France in 1960 there were still 200,000 bistros,” Mr. Lutse said. “There are fewer than 35,000 left, which means there are fewer bistros than there are church towers.”

Despite the complaints, the tax increase is expected to pass in the Socialist-dominated National Assembly.

Many opponents of the bill suggested that wine was exempted because the industry has greater political clout, given that it is one of the country’s top three exporters and employs 250,000 people. Wine is currently taxed around the same rate as beer, per hectoliter, but unlike the rates for beer, its rates do not increase with the degrees of alcohol.

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As Rebels Gain, Congo Again Slips Into Chaos

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The lights are out in most of Goma. There is little water. The prison is an empty, garbage-strewn wasteland with its rusty front gate swinging wide open and a three-foot hole punched through the back wall, letting loose 1,200 killers, rapists, rogue soldiers and other criminals.

Now, rebel fighters are going house to house arresting people, many of whom have not been seen again by their families.

“You say the littlest thing and they disappear you,” said an unemployed man named Luke.

In the past week, the rebels have been unstoppable, steamrolling through one town after another, seizing this provincial capital, and eviscerating a chaotic Congolese Army whose drunken soldiers stumble around with rocket-propelled grenades and whose chief of staff was suspended for selling crates of ammunition to elephant poachers.

Riots are exploding across the country — in Bukavu, Butembo, Bunia, Kisangani and Kinshasa, the capital, a thousand miles away. Mobs are pouring into streets, burning down government buildings and demanding the ouster of Congo’s weak and widely despised president, Joseph Kabila.

Once again, chaos is courting Congo. And one pressing question is, why — after all the billions of dollars spent on peacekeepers, the recent legislation passed on Capitol Hill to cut the link between the illicit mineral trade and insurrection, and all the aid money and diplomatic capital — is this vast nation in the heart of Africa descending to where it was more than 10 years ago when foreign armies and marauding rebels carved it into fiefs?

“We haven’t really touched the root cause,” said Aloys Tegera, a director for the Pole Institute, a research institute in Goma.

He said Congo’s chronic instability is rooted in very local tensions over land, power and identity, especially along the Rwandan and Ugandan borders. “But no one wants to touch this because it’s too complicated,” he added.

The most realistic solution, said another Congo analyst, is not a formal peace process driven by diplomats but “a peace among all the dons, like Don Corleone imposed in New York.”

Congo’s problems have been festering for years, wounds that never quite scabbed over.

But last week there was new urgency after hundreds of rebel fighters, wearing rubber swamp boots and with belt-fed machine guns slung across their backs, marched into Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province and one of the country’s most important cities.

The rebels, called the M23, are a heavily armed paradox. On one hand, they are ruthless. Human rights groups have documented how they have slaughtered civilians, pulling confused villagers out of their huts in the middle of the night and shooting them in the head.

On the other hand, the M23 are able administrators — seemingly far better than the Congolese government, evidenced by a visit in recent days to their stronghold, Rutshuru, a small town about 45 miles from Goma.

In Rutshuru, there are none of those ubiquitous plastic bags twisted in the trees, like in so many other parts of Congo. The gravel roads have been swept clean and the government offices are spotless. Hand-painted signs read: “M23 Stop Corruption.” The rebels even have green thumbs, planting thousands of trees in recent months to fight soil erosion.

“We are not a rebellion,” said Benjamin Mbonimpa, an electrical engineer, a bush fighter and now a top rebel administrator. “We are a revolution.”

Their aims, he said, were to overthrow the government and set up a more equitable, decentralized political system. This is why the rebels have balked at negotiating with Mr. Kabila, though this weekend several rebels said that the pressure was increasing on them to compromise, especially coming from Western countries.

On Sunday, rebel forces and government troops were still squared off, just a few miles apart, down the road from Goma.

The M23 rebels are widely believed to be covertly supported by Rwanda, which has a long history of meddling in Congo, its neighbor blessed with gold, diamonds and other glittering mineral riches. The Rwandan government strenuously denies supplying weapons to the M23 or trying to annex eastern Congo. Rwanda has often denied any clandestine involvement in this country, only to have the denials later exposed as lies.

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Nokia imaging chief to quit

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Nokia‘s long-time imaging chief Damian Dinning has decided to leave the loss-making cellphone maker at the end of this month, the company said in a statement.

The strong imaging capabilities of the new Lumia smartphone models are a key sales argument for the former market leader, which has been burning through cash while losing share in both high-end smartphones and cheaper handsets.

Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop has replaced most of the top management since he joined in late 2010 and Dinnig is the latest of several executives to leave.

Dinning did not want to move to Finland as part of the phonemakers’ effort to concentrate operations and will join Jaguar Land Rover to head innovations in the field of connected cars, he said on Nokia’s imaging fan site PureViewclub.com.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki, editing by William Hardy)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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