American Express to Cut 5,400 Jobs

LOS ANGELES (AP) — American Express Co. said Thursday that it will slash about 5,400 jobs, mainly in its travel business, as it seeks to cut costs and transform its operations as more of its customers shift to online portals for booking travel plans and other needs.

The job cuts will be partly offset by jobs that the company expects to add this year.

American Express said the jobs eliminated will span employee seniority levels and divisions worldwide, but will primarily involve positions that do not directly generate revenue for the company.

All told, the company anticipates that staffing levels will end up between 4 and 6 percent lower this year than in 2012. The company currently has 63,500 employees.

"Against the backdrop of an uneven economic recovery, these restructuring initiatives are designed to make American Express more nimble, more efficient and more effective in using our resources to drive growth," said CEO Kenneth Chenault.

Shares slipped 29 cents to $60.50 in after-hours trading. They ended regular trading up 53 cents at $60.79.

American Express said it will book an after-tax charge of $287 million due to the restructuring. It's also recording $212 million in expenses related to reward points for its cardholders and roughly $95 million in customer reimbursements and other costs.

The combined charges will reduce American Express' fourth-quarter net income by 46 percent from a year earlier.

The company projects net income of $637 million, or 56 cents per share, compared with net income of $1.2 billion, or $1.01 per share, in the same quarter of 2011.

Excluding one-time items, fourth-quarter 2012 earnings amount to $1.2 billion, or $1.09 per share, ahead of analysts' consensus forecast of $1.06 per share, according to FactSet.

Revenue rose 5 percent to $8.1 billion. Analysts expected $8.01 billion.

The company is scheduled to report full results next Thursday.

Overall American Express has done well after the recession, as upscale shoppers have spent freely. That's because Amex cardholders are in general about a third more affluent than other credit card holders.

Through the first nine months of 2012, revenue grew 5 percent, while net income rose 3 percent.

Spending by cardholders jumped 8 percent in the fourth quarter, despite some softening early in the period due to Superstorm Sandy, the company said.

Chenault noted that, since the recession, American Express has been consistently gaining market share.

Despite that success, he said the company must embrace new technologies, become more efficient and position itself to invest in growth opportunities in a marketplace that's increasingly becoming defined by consumers' use of the Internet and mobile technology.

To that end, American Express' restructuring plan calls for overhauling its travel business to cut costs and invest in ways to cater to a growing volume of customers turning to online and automated tools to make their travel arrangements.

"One outcome of this ongoing shift to online is that we can serve a growing customer base with lower staffing levels," Chenault said during a call with analysts.

The company also will reconfigure its cardholder servicing and collections operations to focus more on online and mobile, rather than telephone and mail.

"The overall restructuring program will put us in a better position as we seek to deliver strong results for shareholders and to maintain marketing and promotion investments at about 9 percent of revenues," Chenault said.

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In China, press censorship protests continue

GUANGZHOU, China — Like wedding guests separated across the aisle, the protesters assembled on either side of a gated driveway at the headquarters of the embattled Southern Weekly newspaper. To the right, several dozen supporters of the newspaper staff waved banners calling for an end to censorship of the Chinese press.

"Freedom!" they chanted.

"Democracy!"

"Constitutional rights!"

To the left, beneath fluttering red Chinese flags and hoisted portraits of Mao Tse-tung, a battalion of mostly older men shouted into a microphone, trying to drown out their ideological rivals.

"Long live Chairman Mao!" they chanted.

"We love China!"

"Patriotism!"

Across the divide, the dueling protesters have been engaging in a spirited debate over the Communist Party's grip on the media. The spat erupted over the weekend in the southern city of Guangzhou when journalists threatened to strike over a front-page New Year's editorial that was rewritten by propaganda officials. Although a strike was averted by a last-minute deal Wednesday, the raucous public protests continued outside the newspaper headquarters.

The protests were inspired by rising expectations after the 18th Communist Party congress in November, when the new leadership was installed. Xi Jinping, the new party secretary who will become president in March, has hinted at plans to uphold constitutionally guaranteed rights and fight corruption within the party. What role the media will play in that fight is at the heart of the debate.

One lesson of the Guangzhou protests is that the overarching conflict about the role of the press in a communist society is not likely to be resolved any time soon.

"You can't fight corruption without freedom of the press," said a 46-year-old activist, Xiao Qingshan, who demonstrated from a wheelchair (necessitated by a work injury) that was festooned with pro-democracy slogans. "We're tired of being lied to. We want the same kind of freedoms as in the West."

Protesters poked fingers in each other's chests. They pushed. They shoved. Police who had planted themselves in the middle of the driveway broke up a few incipient fights but otherwise did not intervene.

A 73-year-old retired engineer wearing a Mao pin on his leather jacket hectored a university student who had dared to walk across the divide to debate.

"You young people don't understand what's going on. Who does this newspaper belong to? It belongs to the Communist Party," lectured the older man, who would not give his name. "These journalists are civil servants who are supposed to obey orders, not behave like traitors following the United States."

Indeed, despite a shift toward commercialization, newspaper ownership in China remains deeply lodged with the state. In order to operate, all of China's more than 2,000 newspapers require a Communist Party or government organ to sponsor a publishing license. Inside each newsroom is a Communist Party secretary who makes sure the stories are politically correct.

The restrictive environment makes the journalism at the muckraking Southern Weekly and its sister paper, the Southern Metropolis Daily, all the more remarkable.

The publications belong to the Nanfang Media Group, which is owned by the government of Guangdong, China's richest and most liberal province.

For several years, the Southern Weekly and the Southern Metropolis Daily were able to deliver stories that challenged authority and exposed unchecked power.

That was possible because the newspapers' stewards had long belonged to liberal factions of the party, shielding it from interference, said Cheng Yizhong, who helped launch the Southern Metropolis Daily in 1997.

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Watch Live: Former Doomsday Asteroid Apophis Flies by Earth

Watch as the asteroid 99942 Apophis, once classified as the most likely asteroid to hit the Earth, zooms past our planet during two live shows today from the Slooh Space Camera collaboration. The first show begins at 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET and the second will start at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET.

When it was discovered in 2004, Apophis was calculated to have a 1 in 45 chance of smashing into the Earth in 2029, releasing the energy equivalent of 10 hydrogen bombs and probably making a huge mess. This was the highest probability ever assigned to an asteroid for hitting our planet. Later refinements have ruled out Apophis’ doomsday scenario, though the object will still give our planet a “close” shave in 2029 and again in 2036, possibly making it visible to the naked eye.

During today’s flyby, the asteroid will come within around 9 million miles of the Earth, or about 37 times the distance between our planet and the moon. The passes later this century will bring it much closer, roughly 20,000 miles — within the orbit of geosynchronous satellites.

On Jan. 9, the European Space Agency’s Herschel space telescope released new measurements of Apophis that suggested it is about 1,000 feet in diameter, roughly 20 percent bigger than previously thought. Astronomers are closely watching the asteroid during this latest close approach so they can further refine their estimates of its orbit. Current calculations suggest it has a 1 in 250,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 but new data could alter these odds, hopefully making them lower.

The Slooh shows will discuss the history and characteristics of Apophis. They will feature Slooh president Patrick Paolucci, outreach coordinator Paul Cox, and documentary filmmaker Duncan Copp. Viewers can watch live on their computer or iOS/Android mobile device.

Video: Slooh Space Camera

Adam is a Wired reporter and freelance journalist. He lives in Oakland, Ca near a lake and enjoys space, physics, and other sciency things.

Read more by Adam Mann

Follow @adamspacemann on Twitter.

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Postponed by U.S. violence, “Gangster Squad” opening in theaters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After having its release delayed and scenes reshot because of last summer’s mass movie-theater killing in Aurora, Colorado, crime drama “Gangster Squad” finally hits theaters on Friday.

“Gangster,” set in 1949 Los Angeles, stars Sean Penn as real-life gangster Mickey Cohen, who is ultimately brought down by a band of cops led by Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling.

After the Colorado tragedy, Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros. studio, which is releasing the film, removed the scene in “Gangster” that eerily depicted a similar movie-theater shooting.

It substituted a new sequence, set in Chinatown.

At a press event in December, “Gangster Squad” director Ruben Fleischer said, “We should all respect the tragedy and not draw associations to our film.”

But ironically, after “Gangster’s” initial September 7 release date was pushed back four months – presumably to allow for time after the Colorado rampage – the film will now open less than a month after the massacre of 20 children and six adults by a gunman at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Brolin also cautioned at the December event against linking “Gangster” and other movies with real-world violence and suggested the public look at the “grand scheme of things” including social problems such as drug abuse and unenmployment.

“There’s no one reason” for mass attacks, Brolin told reporters. “There will always be violence in movies. And whether it lends (itself) to the one psychotic that’s out there thinking the worst thoughts you can possibly think is always going to be a mystery.”

Details of the Aurora multiplex shooting that left 12 dead and 58 wounded during a showing of the new Batman film were relived this week at a preliminary hearing of the accused gunman, former grad student James Holmes.

ACTORS RESEARCHED ROLES WITH THEIR CHARACTERS’ FAMILIES

“Gangster,” based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Paul Lieberman, depicts a battle between a small group of Los Angeles cops who secretly take on Cohen and his crew to wrestle away control of the city from Cohen’s mob.

Former Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Will Beall wrote the script to the film, which also stars Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi and Michael Pena.

Rather than dwelling on connections drawn by others to real-life tragedies, Fleischer sought to underscore positive themes.

“I think this movie is about people standing up for their beliefs, doing what’s right,” he said. “It’s a celebration of these cops who rid L.A. of organized crime of vice and corruption.”

And, he added, “It’s to honor the memory of these police officers who stood up for justice and didn’t allow crime to overtake the city.”

Brolin, a seventh-generation Californian who plays a cop based on an actual police sergeant named John O’Mara, said he spoke with O’Mara’s daughter to glean some insights about the man before creating “a composite character.”

His own father, 72-year old actor James Brolin, visited the set and recounted to his son personal stories from his days as a 9-year-old boy in Los Angeles during that era and going to the backdoors of Sunset Strip nightclubs “looking for Mickey Cohen.”

Gosling also had a chance to speak to relatives of his character, Sergeant Jerry Wooters, and learned “a lot of great stories and lot of great details” from Wooters’ children.

“Apparently when he ashed his cigarettes, he would ash in the cuff of his pants, and at the end of the day he would dump out his cuffs and dump out all his ashes,” Gosling said.

Still, no one ever expected the kind of eerie parallels that occurred between the movie’s theater-shooting scene and the real gun violence on July 20, when a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle a shotgun and a pistol walked into midnight screening of the “The Dark Knight Rises” and sprayed the audience with bullets.

In an interview with Reuters TV, Brolin said the scene in question in “Gangster Squad” was “bizarrely similar” to the Aurora event, and praised Warner Bros. for replacing the scene.

“The fact that is was as parallel as it was, I think there was no way to keep it in,” he said.

“The Aurora shooting was an unspeakable tragedy, and out of respect for the families of the victims, we felt it was necessary to reshoot that sequence,” Fleischer said.

“I’m proud of the fact that we did that. I think that we didn’t compromise the film or our intent.”

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Americans Under 50 Fare Poorly on Health Measures, New Report Says

Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction, according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.

Researchers have known for some time that the United States fares poorly in comparison with other rich countries, a trend established in the 1980s. But most studies have focused on older ages, when the majority of people die.

The findings were stark. Deaths before age 50 accounted for about two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the United States and their counterparts in 16 other developed countries, and about one-third of the difference for females. The countries in the analysis included Canada, Japan, Australia, France, Germany and Spain.

The 378-page study by a panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council is the first to systematically compare death rates and health measures for people of all ages, including American youths. It went further than other studies in documenting the full range of causes of death, from diseases to accidents to violence. It was based on a broad review of mortality and health studies and statistics.

The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.

“Something fundamental is going wrong,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the panel. “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”

Car accidents, gun violence and drug overdoses were major contributors to years of life lost by Americans before age 50.

The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.

Sixty-nine percent of all American homicide deaths in 2007 involved firearms, compared with an average of 26 percent in other countries, the study said. “The bottom line is that we are not preventing damaging health behaviors,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was on the panel. “You can blame that on public health officials, or on the health care system. No one understands where responsibility lies.”

Panelists were surprised at just how consistently Americans ended up at the bottom of the rankings. The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. American adults also have the highest diabetes rates.

Youths fared no better. The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among these countries, and its young people have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and deaths from car crashes. Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse than people in any of the other countries.

Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50. The report’s second chapter details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages. Chronic diseases, including heart disease, also played a role for people under 50.

“We expected to see some bad news and some good news,” Dr. Woolf said. “But the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”

There were bright spots. Death rates from cancers that can be detected with tests, like breast cancer, were lower in the United States. Adults had better control over their cholesterol and high blood pressure. And the very oldest Americans — above 75 — tended to outlive their counterparts.

The panel sought to explain the poor performance. It noted the United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population. It has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied.

Education also played a role. Americans who have not graduated from high school die from diabetes at three times the rate of those with some college, Dr. Woolf said. In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty, the report said.

Still, even the people most likely to be healthy, like college-educated Americans and those with high incomes, fare worse on many health indicators.

The report also explored less conventional explanations. Could cultural factors like individualism and dislike of government interference play a role? Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets.    

The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. But the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.

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Solis Stepping Down as Labor Secretary

WASHINGTON – Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis announced on Wednesday that she was stepping down, becoming the latest woman to leave President Obama’s cabinet at a time when his personnel choices are drawing scrutiny for their lack of female candidates.

Ms. Solis, a former congresswoman from California, told colleagues in an e-mail that she had submitted her resignation letter to Mr. Obama Wednesday afternoon.

She said she had decided to step down after consulting family members and friends. Associates of Ms. Solis, who is 55 and was born in Los Angeles, said she was likely to run for a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

In a statement, Mr. Obama said, “Secretary Solis has been a critical member of my economic team as we have worked to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and strengthen the economy for the middle class.”

Ms. Solis was praised by labor unions for working to enforce workplace regulations and occasionally criticized for not being responsive to business interests. Among her biggest campaigns was cracking down on farmers who employ children or underpaid workers.

Ms. Solis, who was never viewed as part of Mr. Obama’s inner core of advisers, prided herself on going to bat for the nation’s recession-battered workers, especially those on the lower end. Many Hispanic workers looked to her as their champion – she focused, for instance, on the high fatality rate for Hispanic workers.

She made the department more aggressive in ferreting out rules violations involving the minimum wage, overtime and other issues. Last year the Labor Department collected more back pay for wage violations than in any previous year, more than $280 million on behalf of 300,000 workers.

Under her, the Labor Department incurred the coal industry’s wrath by focusing on mine safety violations after the Upper Big Branch disaster, a West Virginia coal mine explosion in 2010 that killed 29 workers.

She is one of two Hispanic members of the cabinet, with Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, and was one of a handful of women, along with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security; Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations; and Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who has cabinet status.

Ms. Jackson has announced her resignation, and Mrs. Clinton is to be succeeded by Senator John Kerry.

Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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Ada Louise Huxtable dies at 91; renowned architecture critic

Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic who in two decades of writing for the New York Times became a powerful force in shaping New York City and was better known than many of the architects she was covering and certainly more feared, has died. She was 91.

Huxtable, who in 1970 won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded for criticism, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said her lawyer, Robert N. Shapiro.

The Getty Center announced Monday that it had acquired her papers, along with those of her husband, industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, who died in 1989. The deal – something of a surprise given the critic's close association with New York and the East Coast -- was finalized in December; the archive will be held at the Getty Research Institute. Huxtable also donated the entirety of her estate to the Getty.

Wim de Wit, head of the department of architecture and contemporary art at the Getty Research Institute, said Huxtable's papers were historically significant in part because "she spoke powerfully as a woman in this world of men, the architecture world of the 1960s and '70s."

Huxtable was writing with her familiar fire and verve into her final years. As the architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal, a post she took up in 1997, she frequently blasted the political compromises shaping rebuilding at the World Trade Center site.

Early last month the Journal published her review of plans to restructure the main branch of the New York Public Library.

The library, in working with the British architect Norman Foster, "is about to undertake its own destruction," Huxtable wrote. "This is a plan devised out of a profound ignorance of a willful disregard for not only the library's original concept and design, but also the folly of altering its meaning and mission and compromising its historical and architectural integrity."

Ada Louise Landman was born March 14, 1921, in New York City. Her father, Michael, was a doctor. After earning a degree in art and architectural history from Hunter College and marrying in 1942, she pursued graduate work at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts before taking a job in the Museum of Modern Art's architecture and design department.

A Fulbright fellowship took her to Italy in the early 1950s, and when she returned to New York she turned her research on the Italian architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi into her first book, published in 1960.

She was by then writing for a number of magazines and had begun work on what she imagined would be a six-part history of New York City architecture. While wrapping up the first volume she was recruited by the New York Times. Aline Louchheim had been writing about both architecture and art for the paper, but after she married architect Eero Saarinen, her editors decided it would be a conflict of interest to allow her to continue covering architecture.

"I went in all dressed up, with my clippings," Huxtable told WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate in 2008. "And I remember saying, 'All you've been doing is printing the developers' P.R. releases in your real estate section. You have nobody covering this very important field.'"

Huxtable was not the first architecture critic at an American daily – Allan Temko joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 1961, and long before that Montgomery Schuyler was writing for the New York Tribune – but she quickly established herself as an authoritative voice and a champion for historic preservation. More than a few real-estate developers, she told the Christian Science Monitor, "would be glad to have my head on a platter."

She reserved her most energetic scorn for those architects she saw as declawing or prettying up modern architecture. Edward Durell Stone came in for two of Huxtable's most infamous zingers. After she called his museum on Columbus Circle "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops," it became forever known as "the lollipop building."

She was even more dismissive of Stone's gilded Kennedy Center complex in Washington, D.C., describing it in 1971 as "a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried."

But Huxtable will be remembered for more than barbed prose. From her earliest days at the New York Times, she displayed a talent for writing about both the aesthetics and politics of architecture, a subject she described as "this uneasy, difficult combination of structure and art."

Today there is a seeming divide among architecture critics, with some sticking to the traditional duties of reviewing new buildings by prominent architects while others make a point of writing about everything but buildings: parks, urban planning or the fate of the planet. Huxtable showed that this gulf was easily crossed, writing at length at about a single architect's body of work one week and about preservation, politics or zoning the next.

Before the 1960s were out she had earned a reputation, with Pauline Kael and a few others, as one of the most powerful critics in the country. In 1970 she won a Pulitzer Prize in the newly created category of criticism, and the first collection of her essays, "Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?" was published the same year.

By that time the world of architecture was in wild flux. The modernist architects she had championed were losing influence, their work replaced by an emerging style – what would become post-modernism – that she found by turns refreshing and facile.

"I don't know if critics are allowed to be ambivalent," she wrote in the opening line to a 1971 piece on Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the husband-and-wife team who in their architecture and writing were helping topple modernist orthodoxy.

In 1973, she joined the New York Times' editorial board and Paul Goldberger, just 23, was named the paper's architecture critic. She continued to contribute Sunday essays on architecture, but after having enjoyed years of autonomy she often found it exhausting to bring fellow members of the editorial board around to her way of thinking.

After Huxtable was awarded a sizable MacArthur Fellowship prize in 1981, she jumped at the chance to leave the paper and write books and longer essays on architecture. She didn't return to newspaper criticism until 1997, when she was hired by the Wall Street Journal.

She also joined the jury for the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious award in architecture. Her final books were a short biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, published in 2004, and "On Architecture," a collection of essays spanning her career that appeared in 2008.

In 2009, she figured in the TV drama "Mad Men." In an episode set in 1963, an ad agency executive reads aloud from a piece of hers condemning plans to demolish Pennsylvania Station.

But it was a much earlier appearance in the media that best summed up her influence. In 1968, the New Yorker published a cartoon featuring two construction workers at a building site, with steel rising behind them. One, reading a newspaper, turns to the other and says, "Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn't like it!"

She had no immediate survivors.

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com

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Facebook Has Something Mysterious to Show Everyone

Facebook today invited journalists to “come see what we’re building” a week from today, strongly implying it will unveil a new project, but keeping further details to itself.

The vague press invitation (below) is clearly meant to whip up public interest in the company’s offerings. It remains to be seen whether Facebook will meet expectations generated from its teasing invitation or simply use the inevitable wave of press hype to promote pedestrian, incremental improvements to its website or apps. (A Facebook spokesperson declined to provide further details.)

But the timing of invitation, during the hardware-focused Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, hints at the possibility Facebook will debut some sort of gadget like its long-rumored smartphone, smartphone operating system, or set of tweaks to the Android operating system. Announcing a new product, or hinting at one, during a competing trade show (like CES) is a time-honored battle tactic in the computer world. Such a move co-opts the momentum of the competing event while distracting people from it.

Instead of hardware, Facebook might just unveil some sort of update to its iconic home page design. A new single-column news feed design was spotted this week in New Zealand. That would be a bit of a letdown, but nothing compared to the emotional blows Facebook delivered last year to its shareholders.

As a reporter who will have to fight rush-hour traffic for 42 miles to Facebook HQ, I certainly hope the company unveils a shiny new phone that will titillate readers. As a consumer, though, I already have enough smartphone choices — iPhone, all the Android models, various Windows Phone 8 models, the Ubuntu phones, a rumored Amazon phone, etc. etc. — and enough concerns about the amount of data I’m giving to Facebook. Let’s just get the whole social networking thing nailed first, Facebook, then maybe we can talk about hardware.

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Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already gotten at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled teenagers, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems that include attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and about a third of them had made a suicide attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art, or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author; and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard, and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said that her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006, at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication; we found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts – which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias, or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem – attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger – were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and attempts in people with so-called borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm, among others.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments – talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use – was more effective that regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” Dr. Brent said. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

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Square Feet: Before Building Towers, a Manhattan Market Plans to Add Vendors

The owner of Chelsea Market, a popular food marketplace in West Chelsea, recently ignited a public furor when the city approved plans to add office towers to the squat structure. But before construction on the towers begins, the market now plans to expand by adding eight new spaces for vendors — all without changing the exterior of the neighborhood landmark.

A collection of industrial buildings that once housed the National Biscuit Company, or Nabisco, Chelsea Market will require no new space to house the new tenants, said Michael Phillips, a chief operating officer of Jamestown Properties, an acquisition and management firm based in Cologne, Germany, and Atlanta.

Instead, the space for the new stores was created when Amy’s Bread moved most of its baking operations off-site, leaving thousands of square feet open that, along with the conversion of a loading dock and an office, amounted to about 5,700 square feet of space, he said. Construction on the project has already begun and will not disrupt the approximately 35 current tenants of Chelsea Market.

In November, Jamestown received city approval to add two office towers to Chelsea Marketplace, one of them eight stories and the other seven stories, for a total of 300,000 square feet of space that could bring hundreds of new workers to the area, but construction on that project has not yet begun. The market fills the entire block between Ninth and 10th Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets.

Leases are currently being negotiated for the eight new retail outlets, and though no leases have been signed yet, Mr. Phillips said he expected that the stores would be up and running by mid-February.

“We’re very focused on ethnic food and spices, and the whole beer growler, homemade beers and wine and spirits business, as well as local, New York-produced products,” he said.

Currently, the market carries everything from fine foods and baked goods to prime meats and fresh lobster, along with a smattering of books, flowers and kitchen and home décor goods.

Under the terms negotiated with the city for approval of the office towers, 75 percent of the vendors at Chelsea Market must remain food purveyors. All the tenants in space converted from Amy’s Bread will involve food products, Mr. Phillips said. A map of the project’s floor plan shows a possible bicycle shop and barbershop in the original loading dock and office space.

Amy’s Bread continues to have a presence at Chelsea Market in its reduced space, where it has a cafe, along with a small baking operation behind a glass panel so shoppers can watch baking demonstrations.

The area formerly occupied by Amy’s Bread is being built into small kiosks, much like an existing wing of the market where tenants like The Filling Station, Tuck Shop and Lucy’s Whey operate. In the new wing, however, the emphasis will be on cooking and food preparation. Two spaces will have food counters where people can sit and watch chefs cook while they dine.

“They’re really sort of fitted-out modern versions of a diner food counter with exhibition kitchens,” Mr. Phillips said.

Spaces will lease for about $200 to $400 a square foot, which is substantially more than typical rents in Chelsea, but the spaces are being delivered as almost completely turnkey, he said.

“They include power supply, water supply, hood systems for cooking, kitchen equipment where there’s cooking, so they’re basically plug-and-play spaces,” Mr. Phillips said. “The natural reaction would be, ‘Wow that’s a high rate,’ but when you look at what comes with it, it makes a lot of sense.”

The spaces are being set up to incubate start-up and smaller, less established businesses, Mr. Phillips said, companies that otherwise might find it hard to get a foothold in a neighborhood where retail rents have grown rapidly in recent years.

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