Spec Ops Command Isn't Sweating Osama Shooter's Magazine Profile

The U.S. Special Operations Command is sick and tired of its elite forces talking to the media about their secretive missions. Yet it’s not concerned about an epic Esquire piece that purports to profile the SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden dead.

The command “has no emotions on this article one way or the other,” Col. Tim Nye, the Special Operations Command’s chief spokesman, tells Danger Room.

Nye didn’t know the Esquire piece, released on Monday, was in the works. He wouldn’t comment on “any classification issues” in the piece, but said that on his initial reading, it contained “very little” about the May 2011 raid that killed the al-Qaida leader “that hasn’t already been made public in other forums.”

The SEAL himself remains nameless and faceless: Esquire refers to him only as The Shooter. But the magazine ran photos — that The Shooter provided — of his gear, particularly with the patch he wore on his helmet during the raid; discusses his family life; and otherwise pulls back some of the veil of secrecy surrounding the most famous anonymous SEAL in history. He’s “thick, like a power lifter” and covered in “an audacious set of tattoos.”

This is getting to be a thing with the “quiet professionals” of special operations. Last year, another member of the bin Laden raid team, Matt Bissonnette, wrote a book describing the raid that landed him in deep trouble with the Pentagon, although the Defense Department has yet to follow through on a threat to take legal action against him. Other, retired SEALs made a campaign ad blasting President Obama over the White House’s own leaks to the press about the raid. Adm. William McRaven, one of the driving forces behind the raid and now the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, issued an open letter in August telling current and former elite U.S. troops to shut their mouths about their experiences on sensitive missions — a few months after denying that he helped Kathryn Bigelow make Zero Dark Thirty.

“There is, in my opinion, a distinct line between recounting a story for the purposes of education or entertainment and telling a story that exposes sensitive activities just to garner greater readership and personal profit,” McRaven wrote in August.

The Shooter isn’t profiting: in fact, he’s out of a job and unsure about his next career move, which is a major theme of the piece. While there’s as much self-promotion in the piece as can be expected of a profile of the guy who killed bin Laden — while not revealing his identity — the article devotes much of its focus to the difficulties he and his colleagues have adjusting to civilian life and a tough economy.

According to the Esquire piece, The Shooter struck up a relationship with reporter Phil Bronstein shortly after returning from a four-month Afghanistan tour not long after returning from the bin Laden raid. A Washington dinner party in March 2012 was the first time they met, following “several phone conversations and much checking on my journalism background, especially in war zones.” He’s wary of violating operational security, and won’t even confirm whether Bissonnette was really on the raid. But a more fulsome journalistic relationship with Bronstein develops The Shooter leaves the Navy shortly after his return from Afghanistan, and much of the piece is devoted to relating details of the raid — seemingly nothing classified — from The Shooter’s perspective.

For instance: an early alternative to the raid wasn’t just firing a small missile from a drone at bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound (a “hammer throw,” in The Shooter’s phrase), but “bomb[ing] the piss out of the compound with two-thousand-pound ordnance.” SEALs initially thought they were going to an unrelated war zone like Libya when they were called in to discuss an imminent deployment. McRaven is said to have delayed the raid by a day, citing poor weather to his superiors, to prevent it from happening the day of the White House Correspondents Dinner.

The Shooter is an excitable sort. His favorite word to describe the raid, in retrospect, is “awesome.” He pumped himself up for the raid by listening to the Game and Lil Wayne’s “Red Nation” on the treadmill. Yet The Shooter spends a lot of time reflecting on how the raid seemed doomed. He took to calling his fast-rope team the Martyrs Brigade, as he guessed the house was rigged to explode. If Pakistani troops showed up at the compound, the SEALs’ plan was to surrender, go to jail and wait until Vice President Biden flew to Islamabad to negotiate their release. Not that that reassured The Shooter: “It was either death or a Pakistani prison, where we’d be raped for the rest of our lives.”

Instead, he was part of a three-person team who ran up to the third floor of the compound, and he himself took the kill shot — on instinct. His generic mission training, for years, involved shooting a lot of dummies with bin Laden visages, and so when he saw the al-Qaida leader, using his youngest wife as a human shield, “That’s him, boom, done.” The compound turned up not just bin Laden’s hard drives (and porn), but duffel bags full of opium. He watched Obama’s announcement of the mission in Afghanistan while eating a sausage-egg-and-extra bacon sandwich and thinking: “I wish we could live through this night, because this is amazing. I was still expecting all kinds of funky shit like escape slides or safe rooms.”

Life after the SEALs hasn’t been as amazing. The Shooter wanted to see his kids grow up, so he retired before the 20 years necessary for his full benefits package to kick in. He’s got to buy health insurance on the open market, but he can’t find a job, and he’s out the $60,000 annual salary he earned as a SEAL. (Former Veterans Affairs official and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran Brandon Friedman tweets that the VA covers five years of health care after separation from the military.) Military transition programs to the civilian job market turn out not to be particularly useful. The Shooter doesn’t want to go into private security — “I don’t have a need for excitement anymore,” he says — and job prospects aren’t turning up.

Nye said The Shooter’s transition to civilian life is an issue for the Navy, and not Special Operations Command, to address. But he pointed to several command programs designed to ease the adjustment, like its Care Coaliton that aids physically injured elite troops.

If anything, it’s amazing that The Shooter has stayed nameless and faceless nearly two years after the bin Laden raid. The social pressures for exposure must be enormous, even if special operators wish to remain “quiet professionals.” With his Esquire profile, The Shooter may have figured out a way to balance acclaim and anonymity.

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Personal Health: Getting the Right Addiction Treatment

“Treatment is not a prerequisite to surviving addiction.” This bold statement opens the treatment chapter in a helpful new book, “Now What? An Insider’s Guide to Addiction and Recovery,” by William Cope Moyers, a man who nonetheless needed “four intense treatment experiences over five years” before he broke free of alcohol and drugs.

As the son of Judith and Bill Moyers, successful parents who watched helplessly during a 15-year pursuit of oblivion through alcohol and drugs, William Moyers said his near-fatal battle with addiction demonstrates that this “illness of the mind, body and spirit” has no respect for status or opportunity.

“My parents raised me to become anything I wanted, but when it came to this chronic incurable illness, I couldn’t get on top of it by myself,” he said in an interview.

He finally emerged from his drug-induced nadir when he gave up “trying to do it my way” and instead listened to professional therapists and assumed responsibility for his behavior. For the last “18 years and four months, one day at a time,” he said, he has lived drug-free.

“Treatment is not the end, it’s the beginning,” he said. “My problem was not drinking or drugs. My problem was learning how to live life without drinking or drugs.”

Mr. Moyers acknowledges that treatment is not a magic bullet. Even after a monthlong stay at a highly reputable treatment center like Hazelden in Center City, Minn., where Mr. Moyers is a vice president of public affairs and community relations, the probability of remaining sober and clean a year later is only about 55 percent. (Hazelden also published his book.)

“Be wary of any program that claims a 100 percent success rate,” Mr. Moyers warned. “There is no such thing.”

“Treatment works to make recovery possible. But recovery is also possible without treatment,” Mr. Moyers said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. What I needed and what worked for me isn’t necessarily what you or your loved one require.”

As with many smokers who must make multiple attempts to quit before finally overcoming an addiction to nicotine, people hooked on alcohol or drugs often must try and try again.

Nor does treatment have as good a chance at succeeding if it is forced upon a person who is not ready to recover. “Treatment does work, but only if the person wants it to,” Mr. Moyers said.

Routes to Success

For those who need a structured program, Mr. Moyers described what to consider to maximize the chances of overcoming addiction to alcohol or drugs.

Most important is to get a thorough assessment before deciding where to go for help. Do you or your loved one meet the criteria for substance dependence? Are there “co-occurring mental illnesses, traumatic or physical disabilities, socioeconomic influences, cultural issues, or family dynamics” that may be complicating the addiction and that can sabotage treatment success?

While most reputable treatment centers do a full assessment before admitting someone, it is important to know if the center or clinic provides the services of professionals who can address any underlying issues revealed by the assessment. For example, if needed, is a psychiatrist or other medical doctor available who could provide therapy and prescribe medication?

Is there a social worker on staff to address challenging family, occupational or other living problems? If a recovering addict goes home to the same problems that precipitated the dependence on alcohol or drugs, the chances of remaining sober or drug-free are greatly reduced.

Is there a program for family members who can participate with the addict in learning the essentials of recovery and how to prepare for the return home once treatment ends?

Finally, does the program offer aftercare and follow-up services? Addiction is now recognized to be a chronic illness that lurks indefinitely within an addict in recovery. As with other chronic ailments, like diabetes or hypertension, lasting control requires hard work and diligence. One slip need not result in a return to abuse, and a good program will help addicts who have completed treatment cope effectively with future challenges to their recovery.

How Families Can Help

“Addiction is a family illness,” Mr. Moyers wrote. Families suffer when someone they love descends into the purgatory of addiction. But contrary to the belief that families should cut off contact with addicts and allow them to reach “rock-bottom” before they can begin recovery, Mr. Moyers said that the bottom is sometimes death.

“It is a dangerous, though popular, misconception that a sick addict can only quit using and start to get well when he ‘hits bottom,’ that is, reaches a point at which he is desperate enough to willingly accept help,” Mr. Moyers wrote.

Rather, he urged families to remain engaged, to keep open the lines of communication and regularly remind the addict of their love and willingness to help if and when help is wanted. But, he added, families must also set firm boundaries — no money, no car, nothing that can be quickly converted into the substance of abuse.

Whether or not the addict ever gets well, Mr. Moyers said, “families have to take care of themselves. They can’t let the addict walk over their lives.”

Sometimes families or friends of an addict decide to do an intervention, confronting the addict with what they see happening and urging the person to seek help, often providing possible therapeutic contacts.

“An intervention can be the key that interrupts the process and enables the addict to recognize the extent of their illness and the need to take responsibility for their behavior,”Mr. Moyers said.

But for an intervention to work, Mr. Moyers said, “the sick person should not be belittled or demeaned.” He also cautioned families to “avoid threats.” He noted that the mind of “the desperate, fearful addict” is subsumed by drugs and alcohol that strip it of logic, empathy and understanding. It “can’t process your threat any better than it can a tearful, emotional plea.”

Resource Network

Mr. Moyer’s book lists nearly two dozen sources of help for addicts and their families. Among them:

Alcoholics Anonymous World Services www.aa.org;

Narcotics Anonymous World Services www.na.org;

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration treatment finder www.samhsa.gov/treatment/;

Al-Anon Family Groups www.Al-anon.alateen.org;

Nar-Anon Family Groups www.nar-anon.org;

Co-Dependents Anonymous World Fellowship www.coda.org.

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This is the second of two articles on addiction treatment. The first can be found at “Effective Addiction Treatment.”

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DealBook: R.B.S. Executives Testify in Rate-Rigging Case

LONDON — British politicians took aim at the Royal Bank of Scotland for its role in a rate-rigging scheme, accusing management of fostering a profit-driven culture that encouraged traders to skirt the law.

In nearly four hours of testimony to Parliament’s commission on banking standards, current and former bank executives faced questions over management missteps, deficient controls and the broader environment that prompted employees to report false rates. The senior executives acknowledged that they missed the problems, as they focused on reviving the bank after the financial crisis.

“The behavior was the disgraceful failure of individuals,” Stephen Hester, the bank’s chief executive, said during the hearing. “We were slow to recognize that behavior and catch it.”

The Royal Bank of Scotland is dealing with the fallout from the global investigation into rate manipulation, which has ensnared more than a dozen banks.

Last week, the financial firm agreed to pay a $612 million fine to settle accusations by American and British regulators that traders influenced major benchmark interest rates to bolster profit. As part of the settlement, the Justice Department forced the firm’s Japanese unit to plead guilty to felony wire fraud.

While the settlement follows similar deals with Barclays and UBS, the case against the Royal Bank of Scotland has also proved to be politically sensitive. The bank is 82 percent owned by British taxpayers after receiving a multibillion-dollar bailout during the financial crisis.

“There would be enormous anger if U.K. taxpayers pick up the tab for the individual sins of traders who were trying to rig Libor rates,” said Pat McFadden, a Labour politician who sits on the parliamentary commission.

The case centers on the major benchmark rates like the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. Such rates underpin trillions of dollars of financial products like corporate loans and mortgages.

Libor Explained

In the settlement, British and American authorities detailed an effort to manipulate the rate-setting process, a five-year scheme that involved multiple currencies and countries. They claimed that the bank “aided and abetted” other financial firms, including UBS. According to regulatory filings, the Royal Bank of Scotland failed to monitor the submissions of benchmark rates, and employees continued to report false rates even after authorities began to investigate the wrongdoing.

“It has brought shame against the bank,” Rory Phillips, a lawyer working behalf of the commission, said at the hearing. “There’s been a loss of trust and confidence on behalf of the public.”

Senior executives said in testimony that Libor was not a major focus for the Royal Bank of Scotland, which almost collapsed in 2008 after an ill-advised deal to buy the Dutch financial giant ABN Amro.

“When we took control of the bank, it had had a cardiac arrest,” said John Hourican, the former head of the investment banking division, who resigned last week. “We had to prioritize dealing with the existential threat to the bank.”

After the subsequent bailout by the British government, senior managers focused on reviving the bank by selling off assets, reducing its work force and curbing exposure to risky trading activity. Mr. Hourican indicated that the bank’s operations had become stretched across too many countries and business units.

“The bank was doing too many things in too many countries with too little capital,” Mr. Hourican said.

At the same time, executives said they underestimated the potential for rate-rigging.

“I was not aware that derivatives traders were making these requests,” Peter Nielsen, Mr. Hourican’s deputy, told British politicians. “We had very serious issues. Senior management felt that it was a mathematical impossibility to alter the rates.”

British politicians demanded to know why Mr. Nielsen had not lost his job. When the manipulation occurred, Mr. Nielsen served as the global head of rates. Mr. Nielsen, who is now co-head of firm’s investment banking operations, said he had discussed resigning with Mr. Hourican, but decided to stay on.

Lawmakers repeatedly asked executives why the British bank did not have appropriate controls in place to catch the wrongdoing.

In 2011, the Royal Bank of Scotland told regulators in a letter that systems had been created to monitor Libor submissions. But American and British authorities discovered in their investigations that these controls had not been established, according to the recent settlement. Authorities said the firm did not deliberately mislead regulators.

“At the very least, there was a wholesale failure of systems and controls of the rate process,” said Mr. Phillips, the lawyer. “Somebody in management more senior in the structure should have known what was going on and put a stop to it.”

Facing political scrutiny, the Royal Bank of Scotland has moved to revamp its practices and overhaul its compliance.

The British bank said last week that it would claw bank past, current and future bankers’ bonuses totaling around $470 million to pay the Libor settlement. Mr. Hourican is forgoing past and current bonuses totaling around $14 million in response to the scandal.

A majority of the money will be used to pay the fines levied by American regulators. Because the Royal Bank of Scotland is majority-owned by British taxpayers, the penalty from the Financial Services Authorities, the British regulator, will be recycled back into the government’s coffers.

The bank has also fired six employees for their role in the rate-rigging scheme, while another individual was dismissed for an unrelated matter. Eight other people left the bank before the manipulation was discovered, and six employees have been disciplined but remain at the firm.

The bank “shouldn’t waste my death,” Mr. Hourican told lawmakers, referring to his resignation. “We must send a cultural shudder down our organization’s spine.”

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Ambitious makeover planned for old housing project

Denise Penegar puts a little extra effort into the teenage girls, the ones who've dropped out of high school to care for their firstborns.

Don't be afraid, the outreach worker tells them. Come down to the housing project's community center, get your GED and some job skills. Change your life.

"I was one of those girls," said Penegar, now 51 and still living in Jordan Downs, the Watts housing project where she was born.

Sometimes, she imagines how different her life might have been if someone had knocked on her door when she was 17, caring for her first baby. What would it have meant just to have "someone who is here who can help pick me up"?

Penegar is on the front lines of a bold social experiment underway at Jordan Downs, a project notorious to outsiders for its poverty, blight and violence but seen by many longtime residents, for all its problems, as a close-knit community worth preserving.

In the last year, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles has begun an effort to transform Jordan that could cost more than $600 million. The plan is to turn the complex of 700 aging units into a mixed-income community of up to 1,400 apartments and condominiums, with shops and restaurants and fancy touches such as native plant gardens. The city hopes to draw in hundreds of more-affluent residents willing to pay market rate to live side by side with the city's poorest.

Spurred by changes in federal funding and policy, such "mixed use" developments have sprung up in place of infamous housing projects all over the country. But experts say Jordan is taking an approach that has not been tried on this scale.

Typically, public housing residents are moved out ahead of the bulldozers, scattered to search for new shelter. In Los Angeles, the housing authority has promised that any of the 2,300 Jordan residents "in good standing" can stay in their old units until the day they move into new ones. The project is to be built in phases, beginning with units on 21 acres of adjacent land purchased by the authority in 2008 for $31 million.

To ease the transition, the city has dispatched "community coaches" like Penegar, along with teachers, social workers, therapists — even police officers whose charge is not to make arrests but to coach youth football and triathlon teams.

In essence, officials intend to raze the buildings, not the community — and radically change its character.

It will be an enormous challenge, with success likely to be measured in tiny increments.

Only 47% of adults at Jordan reported any wages to the housing authority last year. As in many urban projects, poverty and social ills have multiplied through the generations, leaving some residents unfamiliar with opportunities and expectations beyond the neighborhood. Some rarely leave the area.

Before inviting in new neighbors with expectations of safety and comfort, the housing authority has begun flooding Jordan Downs with social services. Many of the programs are focused on women, because more than 60% of Jordan Downs' tenants live in households headed by single mothers. But men are targeted too — for job training and lessons in parenting, for instance.

By December, 10 months into the effort, more than 450 families had been surveyed by intake workers and 280 signed up for intensive services.

"Most people would say it's ambitious, but I think it's essential," said Kathryn Icenhower, executive director of Shields for Families, the South Los Angeles nonprofit that is running many of the new programs under a more than $1-million annual contract with the housing authority.

It is unknown, however, how effective the social services will be, how easy it will be to draw in wealthier residents and how many millions of dollars the federal government — a major source of funding — will provide.

Already, the housing authority has picked a development team — the for-profit Michaels Organization and the nonprofit Bridge Housing, both with respectable track records in other cities. But with financing still uncertain, it is unclear exactly how many units will be built or how much various occupants would pay.

Ultimately, a working family could pay hundreds of dollars more in rent than unemployed tenants next door for a nearly identical unit. Officials say they do not expect Watts to draw the same kind of high-income residents as the former Cabrini Green project in Chicago, which sat on prime real estate near downtown. But Jordan is in a convenient location, near the intersection of the 105 and 110 Freeways; and in a high-rent city like Los Angeles, even the steepest rates at Jordan are likely to seem a bargain.

Despite the onslaught of social services and some palpable changes — including a 53% plunge in the violent crime rate at Jordan last year — financial risks abound.

Later this spring, the authority plans to put in an application for $30 million from the federal government's Choice Neighborhoods Program as seed money. Without it, the project could be delayed.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Wings of the Seagull Nebula

This image shows the intricate structure of part of the Seagull Nebula, known more formally as IC 2177. These wisps of gas and dust are known as Sharpless 2-296 (officially Sh 2-296) and form part of the “wings” of the celestial bird. This region of the sky is a fascinating muddle of intriguing astronomical objects — a mix of dark and glowing red clouds, weaving amongst bright stars. This new view was captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Image: ESO [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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Bits Blog: Disruptions: Apple Is Said to Be Developing a Curved-Glass Smart Watch

Dick Tracy had one. As did Inspector Gadget and James Bond. A watch that doubled as a computer, two-way radio, mapping device or television.

Though such a device has been lost to science fiction comics and spy movies of the era before smartphones, the smart watch might soon become a reality, in the form of a curved glass device made by Apple.

In its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is experimenting with wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass, according to people familiar with the company’s explorations, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to publicly discuss unreleased products. Such a watch would operate on Apple’s iOS platform, two people said, and stand apart from competitors based on the company’s understanding of how such glass can curve around the human body.

Apple declined to comment on its plans. But the exploration of such a watch leaves open lots of exciting questions: If the company does release such a product, what would it look like? Would it include Siri, the voice assistant? Would it have a version of Apple’s map software, offering real-time directions to people walking down the street? Could it receive text messages? Could it monitor a user’s health or daily activity? How much will it cost? Could Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, be wearing one right now, whispering sweet nothings to his wrist?

Such a watch could also be used to make mobile payments, with Apple’s Passbook payment software.

Although it would take Dick Tracy to find the answers to those questions, and it’s uncertain when Apple might unveil such a device, it’s clear that Apple has the technology.

Last year, Corning, the maker of the ultra-tough Gorilla Glass that is used in the iPhone, announced that it had solved the difficult engineering challenge of creating bendable glass, called Willow Glass, that can flop as easily as a piece of paper in the wind without breaking.

Pete Bocko, the chief technology officer for Corning Glass Technologies, who worked on Willow Glass, said via telephone that the company had been developing the thin, flexible glass for more than a decade, and that the technology had finally arrived.

“You can certainly make it wrap around a cylindrical object and that could be someone’s wrist,” Mr. Bocko said. “Right now, if I tried to make something that looked like a watch, that could be done using this flexible glass.”

But Mr. Bocko warns that it is still quite an engineering feat to create a foldable device. “The human body moves in unpredictable ways,” he said. “It’s one of the toughest mechanical challenges.”

To add to the excitement of an Apple watch, late last year the Chinese gadget site Tech.163 reported that the company had begun development of a watch featuring Bluetooth and a 1.5-inch display.

“Apple’s certainly made a lot of hiring in that area,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester analyst who specializes in wearable computing and smartphones. “Apple is already in the wearable space through its ecosystem partners that make accessories that connect to the iPhone,” she said, adding: “This makes Apple potentially the biggest player of the wearables market in a sort of invisible way.”

“Over the long term wearable computing is inevitable for Apple; devices are diversifying and the human body is a rich canvas for the computer,” Ms. Epps said. “But I’m not sure how close we are to a new piece of Apple hardware that is worn on the body.”

Investors would most likely embrace an iWatch, with some already saying that wearable computing could replace the smartphone over the next decade.

“We believe technology could progress to a point where consumers have a tablet plus wearable computers, like watches or glasses, that enable simple things like voice calls, texting, quick searches, navigation,” Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said in a report last month. “These devices are likely to be cheaper than an iPhone and could ultimately be Apple’s best answer to addressing emerging markets.”

Mr. Cook is clearly interested in wearables. In the past he has been seen wearing a Nike FuelBand, which tracks a user’s daily exertion. The FuelBand data is shared wirelessly with an iPhone app.

Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior vice president for technologies, who previously ran hardware engineering, has also been particularly interested in wearables, an Apple employee said. Mr. Mansfield is engrossed by devices that connect to the iPhone, through Bluetooth, sharing information back and forth from the human body to the phone, including the Nike FuelBand and Jawbone Up.

If smartphones do become smart watches and smart glasses, Apple seems to have the technology to make standout wearable computers.

Last year the company filed patents for displays that sit over the eye and stream information to the retina. Given that the iPod Nano is about the size of an overfed ant, the company clearly knows how to make small devices, too.

But, maybe there are other devices coming before wearables. Apple has long been rumored to be working on a television-like experience. And, there is the possibility of an Apple car.

In a meeting in his office before he died, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive, told John Markoff of The New York Times that if he had more energy, he would have liked to take on Detroit with an Apple car.

In August, during the company’s patent trial with Samsung, Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, said on the stand that Apple had explored making “crazy stuff” before development of the iPhone and iPad, including a camera or a car. While Apple continues its experiments with wearables, its biggest competitor, Google, is pressing ahead with plans to make wearable computers mainstream.

According to a Google executive who spoke on the condition that he not be named, the company hopes its wearable glasses, with a display that sits above the eye, will account for 3 percent of revenue by 2015. Olympus is also working on wearable computers.

Google is holding private workshops in San Francisco and New York for developers to start building applications for its glasses. At the event in San Francisco last week, Hosain Rahman, chief executive of Jawbone, the maker of the Up, a wrist device that tracks people’s energy and sleep, said that “a decade from now we won’t be able to imagine life without the wearables that we use to access information, unlock our doors, pay for goods and most importantly track our health.”

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A delicate new balancing act in senior healthcare

When Claire Gordon arrived at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, nurses knew she needed extra attention.

She was 96, had heart disease and a history of falls. Now she had pneumonia and the flu. A team of Cedars specialists converged on her case to ensure that a bad situation did not turn worse and that she didn't end up with a lengthy, costly hospital stay.

Frail seniors like Gordon account for a disproportionate share of healthcare expenditures because they are frequently hospitalized and often land in intensive care units or are readmitted soon after being released. Now the federal health reform law is driving sweeping changes in how hospitals treat a rapidly growing number of elderly patients.

The U.S. population is aging quickly: People older than 65 are expected to make up nearly 20% of it by 2030. Linda P. Fried, dean of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, said now is the time to train professionals and test efforts to improve care and lower healthcare costs for elderly patients.

"It's incredibly important that we prepare for being in a society where there are a lot of older people," she said. "We have to do this type of experiment right now."

At Cedars-Sinai, where more than half the patients in the medical and surgical wards are 65 or older, one such effort is dubbed the "frailty project." Within 24 hours, nurses assess elderly patients for their risk of complications such as falls, bed sores and delirium. Then a nurse, social worker, pharmacist and physician assess the most vulnerable patients and make an action plan to help them.

The Cedars project stands out nationally because medical professionals are working together to identify high-risk patients at the front end of their hospitalizations to prevent problems at the back end, said Herb Schultz, regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"For seniors, it is better care, it is high-quality care and it is peace of mind," he said.

The effort and others like it also have the potential to reduce healthcare costs by cutting preventable medical errors and readmissions, Schultz said. The federal law penalizes hospitals for both.

Gordon, an articulate woman with brightly painted fingernails and a sense of humor, arrived at Cedars-Sinai by ambulance on a Monday.

Soon, nurse Jacquelyn Maxton was at her bedside asking a series of questions to check for problems with sleep, diet and confusion. The answers led to Gordon's designation as a frail patient. The next day, the project team huddled down the hall and addressed her risks one by one. Medical staff would treat the flu and pneumonia while at the same time addressing underlying health issues that could extend Gordon's stay and slow her recovery, both in the hospital and after going home.

To reduce the chance of falls, nurses placed a yellow band on her wrist that read "fall risk" and ensured that she didn't get up on her own. To prevent bed sores, they got her up and moving as often as possible. To cut down on confusion, they reminded Gordon frequently where she was and made sure she got uninterrupted sleep. Medical staff also stopped a few unnecessary medications that Gordon had been prescribed before her admission, including a heavy narcotic and a sleeping pill.

"It is really a holistic approach to the patient, not just to the disease that they are in here for," said Glenn D. Braunstein, the hospital's vice president for clinical innovation.

Previously, nurse Ivy Dimalanta said, she and her colleagues provided similar care but on a much more random basis. Under the project, the care has become standardized.

The healthcare system has not been well designed to address the needs of seniors who may have had a lifetime of health problems, said Mary Naylor, gerontology professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. As a result, patients sometimes fall through the cracks and return to hospitals again and again.

"That is not good for them and that is not good for society to be using resources in that way," Naylor said.

Using data from related projects, Cedars began a pilot program in 2011 and expanded it last summer. The research is continuing but early results suggest that the interventions are leading to fewer seniors being admitted to the intensive care unit and to shorter hospital stays, said Jeff Borenstein, researcher and lead clinician on the frailty project. "It definitely seems to be going in the right direction," he said.

The hospital is now working with Naylor and the University of Pennsylvania to design a program to help the patients once they go home.

"People who are frail are very vulnerable when they leave the hospital," said Harriet Udin Aronow, a researcher at Cedars. "We want to promote them being safe at home and continuing to recover."

In Gordon's case, she lives alone with the help of her children and a caregiver. The hospital didn't want her experiencing complications that would lengthen the stay, but they also didn't want to discharge her before she was ready. Under the health reform law, hospitals face penalties if patients come back too soon after being released.

Patients and their families often are unaware of the additional attention. Sitting in a chair in front of a vase of pink flowers, Gordon said she knew she would have to do her part to get out of the hospital quickly. "You have to move," she said. "I know you get bed sores if you stay in bed."

Gordon said she was comfortable at the hospital but she wanted to go back to her house as quickly as she could. "There's no place like home," she said.

Two days later, that's where she was.

anna.gorman@latimes.com

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DC Comics Turns the Occupy Movement Into a Superhero Title

Eighteen months after the phrase first entered the collective public consciousness, the plight of the 99 percent is coming to mainstream superhero comics — via a new series from the second biggest publisher in the American comic industry, which just happens to be a subsidiary of a multi-national corporation that makes around $12 billion a year. Irony, anybody?

In May, DC Comics will launch two new series taking place in their mainstream superhero universe that offer different insights into the class struggle in a world filled with superheroes, alien races and inexplicable events. The Green Team, written by Tiny Titans and Superman Family Adventures creators Art Baltazar and Franco, with art by Ig Guara, revives an obscure 1975 concept about teenage rich kids who try to make the world a better place with their outrageous wealth. In an interview promoting the series, Franco promised that it would address questions like “Can money make you happy?” and “If you had unlimited wealth, could you use that to make the lives of people better?”

Obviously, this is one of the more fanciful series DC will be publishing.

But while DC is promoting The Green Team series as the adventures of the “1%,” its companion title, The Movement, is teased as a chance for us to “Meet the 99%… They were the super-powered disenfranchised — now they’re the voice of the people!”

“It’s a book about power,” explained The Movement writer Gail Simone. “Who owns it, who uses it, who suffers from its abuse. As we increasingly move to an age where information is currency, you get these situations where a single viral video can cost a previously unassailable corporation billions, or can upset the power balance of entire governments. And because the sources of that information are so dispersed and nameless, it’s nearly impossible to shut it all down.”

“The thing I find fascinating and a little bit worrisome is, what happens when a hacktivist group whose politics you find completely repulsive has this same kind of power and influence,” she elaborated in an interview at Big Shiny Robot. “What if a racist or homophobic group rises up and organizes in the same manner?”

While the concept is ambitious, the idea that a comic capable of living up to the book’s populist inspiration could come from DC Entertainment still strikes some as unlikely. Matt Pizzolo, the editor of the Occupy Comics anthology, told Wired that “though DC Comics did help launch Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s seminal anarchist epic V For Vendetta over two decades ago, it’s unlikely they would do so today. Between dismantling Vertigo and frankensteining Watchmen, the past year has demonstrated DC isn’t a safe place for bold creators who want to tell the kinds of stories that would inspire things like Occupy, rather than just cash in on them.”

Still, Simone says that the use of the iconography and language of a real-world populist movement is deliberate, promising that the book will reflect today’s decentralized political world and offer ”a slice of rarity that we’re unlikely to see in most superhero books.”

This wouldn’t the first time that DC has attempted to offer pre-packaged populist rebellion, of course; in addition to the aforementioned publication of the anti-establishment V For Vendetta, the company’s Vertigo imprint also published Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, a series centering around an international organization struggling against forces of authority and repression that included anti-corporate themes.

Only time will tell whether The Movement will live up to the subversive examples of these earlier books, or just end up a well-intentioned piece of topical super heroics that trades on, and commodifies, a real political movement.

The Movement #1 will be available in both print and digital formats on May 1, while The Green Team #1 will be released on May 22.

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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