Fair Game: Don’t Blink, or You’ll Miss Another Bank Bailout

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MANY people became rightfully upset about bailouts given to big banks during the mortgage crisis. But it turns out that they are still going on, if more quietly, through the back door.




The existence of one such secret deal, struck in July between the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Bank of America, came to light just last week in court filings.


That the New York Fed would shower favors on a big financial institution may not surprise. It has long shielded large banks from assertive regulation and increased capital requirements.


Still, last week’s details of the undisclosed settlement between the New York Fed and Bank of America are remarkable. Not only do the filings show the New York Fed helping to thwart another institution’s fraud case against the bank, they also reveal that the New York Fed agreed to give away what may be billions of dollars in potential legal claims.


Here’s the skinny: Late last Wednesday, the New York Fed said in a court filing that in July it had released Bank of America from all legal claims arising from losses in some mortgage-backed securities the Fed received when the government bailed out the American International Group in 2008. One surprise in the filing, which was part of a case brought by A.I.G., was that the New York Fed let Bank of America off the hook even as A.I.G. was seeking to recover $7 billion in losses on those very mortgage securities.


It gets better.


What did the New York Fed get from Bank of America in this settlement? Some $43 million, it seems, from a small dispute the New York Fed had with the bank on two of the mortgage securities. At the same time, and for no compensation, it released Bank of America from all other legal claims.


When I asked the Fed to discuss this gift to the bank, it declined. To understand how the settlement happened, we must go back to the dark days of September 2008. With the giant insurer A.I.G. teetering, the government stepped in. As part of the rescue, A.I.G. sold mortgage securities to an investment vehicle called Maiden Lane II overseen by the New York Fed. A.I.G. was bleeding from its toxic mortgage holdings, many of which were issued by Bank of America, and it received $20.8 billion for securities with a face value of $39.2 billion.


In 2011, aiming to recover some of that $18 billion loss, the insurer sued Bank of America for fraud. The case, filed in New York state court, sought $10 billion in damages from the bank, $7 billion of that related to securities that A.I.G. sold to Maiden Lane II. Bank of America, for its part, argued that A.I.G. had no standing to sue for fraud on the Maiden Lane securities. With the sale, Bank of America contended, the right to bring a legal claim against the bank for fraud passed to Maiden Lane II. That entity, controlled by the New York Fed, never brought fraud claims against the bank.


Not so fast, said A.I.G. Under New York law, which governs Maiden Lane II, an entity has to explicitly transfer the right to sue for fraud, it said. The original agreement between the New York Fed and A.I.G. never specified such a transfer, the insurer contended.


To settle this question, A.I.G. filed a separate lawsuit against Maiden Lane II in a New York court last month.


A.I.G.’s $10 billion fraud case against Bank of America, meanwhile, was moved to federal court. For pretrial purposes, the bank asked that Mariana R. Pfaelzer, a federal judge in the central district of California, oversee aspects of the case involving the bank’s Countrywide unit, which was in California. Its request was granted. On Jan. 30, Judge Pfaelzer said she would rule on the issue of who owns the legal claims.


Initially, in an October 2011 letter to A.I.G., the New York Fed agreed that the insurer had the right to seek damages under securities laws on instruments it sold to Maiden Lane II.


But more recently, the New York Fed began helping Bank of America battle A.I.G. In late December, the New York Fed provided two declarations to the bank. One stated that Maiden Lane II had “intended” to receive all litigation claims relating to the mortgage securities, meaning that it alone would have had the right to sue. Another said that the October letter was not an interpretation of the Maiden Lane agreement.


But Jon Diat, an A.I.G. spokesman, said in a statement that “A.I.G. and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York never discussed or agreed on any transfer of A.I.G.’s residential mortgage-backed securities fraud claims to Maiden Lane II.” He added that A.I.G. believes “it is the rightful owner of these claims and remains committed to holding Bank of America and other counterparties responsible for the harm caused.” 


LAST week, the New York Fed opposed A.I.G.’s efforts to have the question of who owns the legal rights decided in New York, whose law governs the Maiden Lane II agreement, rather than in California. It was in this filing that the New York Fed disclosed its confidential July 2012 deal with Bank of America, releasing it of any liability arising from fraud in the Maiden Lane II securities.


Let’s recap: For zero compensation, the New York Fed released Bank of America from what may be sizable legal claims, knowing that A.I.G. was trying to recover on those claims.


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Livestrong Tattoos as Reminder of Personal Connections, Not Tarnished Brand

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




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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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Bits Blog: Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers

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Facebook admitted that it was breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks, two weeks after Twitter made a similar admission. Both Facebook and Twitter were breached through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.

In a blog post late Friday afternoon, Facebook said it was attacked when a handful of its employees visited a compromised site for mobile developers. Simply by visiting the site, their computers were infected with malware. The company said that as soon as it discovered the malware, it cleaned up the infected machines and tipped off law enforcement.

“We have found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised,” Facebook said.

On Feb. 1, Twitter said hackers had breached its systems and potentially accessed the data of 250,000 Twitter users. The company suggested at that time that it was one of several companies and organizations to be have been similarly attacked.

Facebook has known about its own breach for at least a month, according to people close to the investigation, but it was unclear why the company waited this long to announce it. Fred Wolens, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment.

Like Twitter, Facebook said it believed that it was one of several organizations that were targeted by the same group of attackers.

“Facebook was not alone in this attack,” the company said in its blog post. “It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well.”

The attacks add to the mounting evidence that hackers were able to use the security hole in Oracle’s Java software to steal information from a broad range of companies. Java, a widely used programming language, is installed on more than three billion devices. It has long been hounded by security problems.

Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, the Department of Homeland Security issued a rare alert that warned users to disable Java on their computers. The vulnerability was particularly disconcerting because it let attackers download a malicious program onto its victims’ machines without any prompting. Users did not even have to click on a malicious link for their computers to be infected. The program simply downloaded itself.

After Oracle initially patched the security hole in January, the Department of Homeland Security said that the fix was not sufficient and recommended that, unless “absolutely necessary”, users should disable it on their computers completely. Oracle did not issue another fix until Feb. 1.

Social networks are a prime target for hackers, who look to use people’s personal data and social connections in what are known as “spearphishing” attacks. In this type of attack, a target is sent an e-mail, ostensibly from a connection, containing a malicious link or attachment. Once the link is clicked or attachment opened, attackers take control of a user’s computer. If the infected computer is inside a company’s system, the attackers are able to gain a foothold. In many cases, they then extract passwords and gain access to sensitive data.

Facebook said in its blog post that the updated patch addressed the vulnerability that allowed hackers to access its employees’ computers.

Hackers have been attacking organizations inside the United States at an alarming rate. The number of attacks reported by government agencies last year topped 48,500 — a ninefold jump from the 5,500 attacks reported in 2006, according to the Government Accountability Office.

In the last month alone, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post all confirmed that they were targets of sophisticated hackers. But security experts say that these attacks are just the tip of the iceberg.

A common saying among security experts is that there are now only two types of American companies: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked.

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DealBook: The Icahn Effect on Herbalife Shares

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1:43 p.m. | Updated

Investors in Herbalife initially cheered the disclosure that Carl C. Icahn had taken a big stake in the company, sending the stock price higher on Friday morning.

But that enthusiasm appeared to fade a bit once Mr. Icahn had an opportunity to explain his reasons for investing in the nutritional supplements company.

The stock gave up some gains at midday on Friday, falling below $40 a share after initially rising as high as $45. It was trading around $41 in the afternoon, up about 7 percent from the previous closing price. Trading volume surged during the time that Mr. Icahn was being interviewed at midday Friday on CNBC.

Mr. Icahn on Thursday disclosed a stake in Herbalife of 12.98 percent. While the investment may very well be a bet on vitamins and protein shakes, it also puts Mr. Icahn squarely in opposition to a longtime rival, the hedge fund manager William A. Ackman, who revealed in December a big wager that Herbalife shares would fall.

The animosity between the two financial titans has its roots in a decade-old dispute.

“I’m not going to lie to you and say that if Ackman gets squeezed I’ll feel very sorry and cry and do penance,” Mr. Icahn said on CNBC on Friday. “But that’s not the reason I’m doing this.”

“This is not an ad hominem thing. It is really not a personal thing,” Mr. Icahn insisted. But he added: “The fact that I don’t like Ackman you could say is the strawberry on top of the ice cream.”

Mr. Icahn described Herbalife as a strong company that had growth potential, calling it “a quintessential example of a company that should be taken private.”
He added that he believed Herbalife sold high-quality products.

Mr. Ackman, the head of Pershing Square Capital Management, contends that Herbalife is an abusive pyramid scheme, an argument that he first outlined when he revealed his large short-selling position in December. That position hasn’t changed.

“Our conclusions are unaffected by who is on the other side of the investment,” Mr. Ackman said in a statement on Friday. “Our goal was to shine a spotlight on Herbalife. To the extent that Mr. Icahn is helping achieve this objective, we welcome his involvement.”

Mr. Icahn, who said he recently met with Herbalife’s chief executive, alluded to some possible plans for the company in a regulatory filing. These “strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value” could include a “recapitalization or a going-private transaction,” the filing said.

Friday’s CNBC segment followed a drama-filled half-hour in late January, when Mr. Icahn and Mr. Ackman had a heated argument on the channel. Mr. Icahn owned a stake in Herbalife at that point, he revealed on Thursday, but he ramped up his purchases in the following weeks.

That investment appeared to be intended, at least in part, as a way to squeeze Mr. Ackman, the CNBC host suggested. Mr. Ichan denied that, but he didn’t disguise his distaste for his rival.

“If somebody wants to live by the sword,” Mr. Icahn said, “you die by the sword.”

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Well: Winter Fruit Desert Recipes

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Whether you are looking for an extra dose of vitamins or just love the flavors of fruit, winter is a time of abundance at the fruit stand. Martha Rose Shulman writes:

When I lived in Europe I got hooked on blood oranges, small oranges with dark ruby red pulp and mottled orange-red skins. Their flavor is deep and multidimensional, with nuances of berries and cherries. And like berries, cherries and other highly nutritious dark red, blue and purple fruits and vegetables, blood oranges have high levels of antioxidant-rich anthocyanins.

The same farmer I bought blood oranges from at my farmers’ market was selling over-ripe fuyu persimmons at a bargain price. I bought a few pounds for pureé, some of which I used for a sweet persimmon spice bread and some of which I froze. Persimmons are another fruit rich in phytonutrients like lutein and lycopene, zeaxanthin and cryptoxanthi, which are all reported to be rich in antioxidants.

Pears are also abundant. It is difficult to find pears that are ready to eat, even at farmers’ markets, so buy them a few days, or even a week, before you plan on making this week’s sorbet. The riper and juicier the pear, the better.

Here are five new ways to create dishes with winter fruits.

Blood Orange Compote: A delicious dessert, but it is also great at breakfast.

Lemon and Blood Orange Gelée Parfaits: A beautiful, layered gelatin dessert.

Pear Vanilla Sorbet: For maximum flavor, wait until the pears are nice and ripe before making this sorbet.

Tangerine Sorbet: A light, refreshing sorbet that can be made with a number of different fruits.

Persimmon Spice Bread: A dense, sweet bread that can be home to over-ripe persimmons.

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Well: Winter Fruit Desert Recipes

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Whether you are looking for an extra dose of vitamins or just love the flavors of fruit, winter is a time of abundance at the fruit stand. Martha Rose Shulman writes:

When I lived in Europe I got hooked on blood oranges, small oranges with dark ruby red pulp and mottled orange-red skins. Their flavor is deep and multidimensional, with nuances of berries and cherries. And like berries, cherries and other highly nutritious dark red, blue and purple fruits and vegetables, blood oranges have high levels of antioxidant-rich anthocyanins.

The same farmer I bought blood oranges from at my farmers’ market was selling over-ripe fuyu persimmons at a bargain price. I bought a few pounds for pureé, some of which I used for a sweet persimmon spice bread and some of which I froze. Persimmons are another fruit rich in phytonutrients like lutein and lycopene, zeaxanthin and cryptoxanthi, which are all reported to be rich in antioxidants.

Pears are also abundant. It is difficult to find pears that are ready to eat, even at farmers’ markets, so buy them a few days, or even a week, before you plan on making this week’s sorbet. The riper and juicier the pear, the better.

Here are five new ways to create dishes with winter fruits.

Blood Orange Compote: A delicious dessert, but it is also great at breakfast.

Lemon and Blood Orange Gelée Parfaits: A beautiful, layered gelatin dessert.

Pear Vanilla Sorbet: For maximum flavor, wait until the pears are nice and ripe before making this sorbet.

Tangerine Sorbet: A light, refreshing sorbet that can be made with a number of different fruits.

Persimmon Spice Bread: A dense, sweet bread that can be home to over-ripe persimmons.

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Bits Blog: Former BlackBerry C.E.O. Sold All Company Shares

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Jim Balsillie, the former co-chief executive and co-chairman of BlackBerry, has sold all of his shares in the struggling company, a regulatory filing indicated on Thursday.

Mr. Balsillie’s arrival at what was then called Research in Motion in 1992 and his personal investment of $125,000 saved the company in its early days. But Mr. Balsillie’s latest investment move means that he will not gain if the new line of BlackBerry 10 phones revive the company’s fortunes.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated Thursday, showed that Mr. Balsillie held no shares in the company as of the end of December. Mr. Balsillie owned up to 33 percent of the company, now called BlackBerry, before it became publicly traded and he reported holding 5.1 percent of its shares in a previous filing.

When asked about Mr. Balsillie’s pullout, Kris Thompson, a longtime BlackBerry analyst at National Bank Financial, replied: “Who cares?” BlackBerry’s shares initially slipped 7.5 percent to $12.94 in Nasdaq trading Thursday, but had recovered later in the morning.

Following a protracted and severe decline in BlackBerry’s stock price and American market share, Mr. Balsillie stepped down as both co-chief executive and co-chairman along with Mike Lazaridis in January 2012. While Mr. Lazaridis remains on the BlackBerry board as the company’s vice chairman, Mr. Balsillie resigned as a director in March.

A separate securities filing issued on Thursday indicated that Mr. Lazaridis, who co-founded the company, still holds 5.7 percent of BlackBerry’s stock.

Mr. Balsillie could not immediately be reached for comment. Adam Emery, a spokesman for BlackBerry, said the company does not “comment on holdings of individual shareholders.”

Earlier this week Mr. Thompson, the analyst, issued a report that praised many of the features on the new BlackBerry 10 phones but concluded that they will not significantly rebuild the company’s market share. He cited an impending wave of new products from larger competitors and the general lack of desirable and high quality apps for BlackBerry 10.

While Mr. Lazaridis handled the technology side of the company, Mr. Balsillie, an accountant, is widely credited with putting BlackBerry on the stable financial footing that ultimately allowed it to develop the BlackBerry device. He also played a pivotal role in convincing skeptical wireless carriers to carry the company’s first wireless e-mail devices on their networks.

Both men, however, were widely criticized for not responding more effectively and swiftly to the arrival of Apple’s iPhone and phones using Google’s Android operating system. Those smartphones now overwhelmingly dominate a market that BlackBerry created and was once leading.

At various times, Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis have sold substantial stakes in BlackBerry to fund educational institutions in Waterloo, Ontario, the company’s hometown.

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The Lede: Answering Readers’ Questions About the Meteorite Strike in Russia

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You asked us great meteor questions, readers, ones that went beyond the mere fact of the seriously cool video coming from all over Russia. But we wanted to give you a deeper look at the science behind bombardments from space, so we called in a respected source to help.

Clark R. Chapman is a senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and a pioneer in the field of asteroid threat assessment. He is co-author of the 1989 book, “Cosmic Catastrophes,” with David Morrison, a senior scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

This is an unusual strike. It will take a while for analysis of the videos, and presumably of the seismic records of the explosion, before we can estimate the size of the projectile. I’m guessing it’s a once-in-a-decade kind of event.

Why unusual?

It’s unusual in the sense that it’s rare. It’s not the kind of event that happens very often. Also, they’re talking about maybe 1,000 people injured and some in the hospital. I’m not aware of a strike that has caused that much injury. That’s because it hit in a somewhat populated part of Russia, instead of the ocean or the desert or the middle of Siberia where relatively few people would have got hurt.

These things happen continually. This one was probably a few meters in diameter but they’re flying by the Earth all the time. And they hit – ones this big – maybe once in a decade. Things that would really devastate a city if they hit would occur maybe once every few centuries. It happens on a scale (of meteors small and large). Anyone living out in the countryside or a rural area, if the skies are clear, can look up at night and see apple-seed-size meteors hitting every few minutes, or at least every few hours.

Conceivably it could be part of a swarm, but it’s not associated with DA14 [the big asteroid that is to fly close by the Earth on Friday]. They’re on totally different trajectories. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but their orbits are totally different. They both intersect the Earth, more or less, but the asteroid is moving maybe south to north and the Russian meteorite west to east. They’d have to be coming in the same direction to be part of a swarm. It’s a remarkable coincidence that what may be the most damaging meteor strike in modern history would happen on the same day as the closest passage of an asteroid as big as DA14.

How big is DA14?

It’s about 100 feet across.

Should we be scared? What can we do?

The estimated danger from a large impact has dropped in recent decades because of telescopic observations and sky surveys. We should continue to monitor the skies for undiscovered large asteroids and for very much smaller ones that could still be quite dangerous, depending on where they hit. We should continue to look.

No space telescope now searches for such threats. Would such a device help?

That kind of project wouldn’t find what hit Russia (as the asteroid was too small) but it would find ones that are much more dangerous. And once they were detected, we could warn people. We could say, “It’s going to hit such an area at a certain time on a certain day and you should stay away from the windows.” You could provide warning of impacts that could be dangerous.

Could we divert a planetary threat?

If it’s found early enough – quite a few years in advance of its hitting – then NASA and the European Space Agency and other space agencies have the technology to divert the asteroid so it would miss the Earth.

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Judge Clears Transocean Plea in Gulf Spill

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HOUSTON – A federal judge in New Orleans approved on Thursday Transocean’s agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and pay $400 million in criminal penalties for its role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout that left 11 workers dead and resulted in a yearlong moratorium on deepwater drilling.




The Switzerland-based owner and operator of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon oil rig was charged with negligently discharging oil into the gulf.


“I believe the plea agreement is reasonable and is accepted,” said United States District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo. No witnesses came to court to object to the agreement, and Judge Milazzo said she received no letters of opposition.


Transocean’s criminal fine is the second highest assessed for an environmental disaster, but it pales in comparison with the $1.26 billion in criminal fines that BP was assessed for the same accident that spewed millions of barrels of crude oil into the gulf, soiling hundreds of miles of beaches in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.


Various government and independent reports have concluded that Transocean’s crew was negligent in interpreting pressure tests that might otherwise have made certain that the well casing and cement would not have leaked oil and gas. In court filings, the government reiterated its contention that BP supervisors had ultimate responsibility for supervising the testing.


In a statement made when the agreement was reached last month, Transocean said it represented a “a positive step forward” and company lawyers in a filing said Transocean “accepts responsibility” for criminal conduct.


The company has also agreed to pay $1 billion in civil penalties, and will be on probation for five years. Much of the money Transocean has agreed to pay will go toward research for oil spill prevention and response and to restoration of coastal natural habitat including the restitution of barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana.


Now, the long legal process surrounding the 2010 accident will focus again on BP.


BP, which has already pleaded guilty to 11 counts of felony manslaughter and other charges and agreed to pay a total of $4.5 billion in fines and penalties, is scheduled to return to court again on Feb. 25. Unless it reaches a settlement before then with the Justice Department, it faces as much as $21 billion in civil fines for what the government claims was gross negligence for the discharge of an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil over 87 days.


BP has so far strongly contested the claim that it was grossly negligent and it maintains that the government’s estimates for the amount of oil spilled has been exaggerated. BP executives have publicly and privately said they do not expect to settle out of court, and government rhetoric describing the company’s responsibilities has become more heated in recent months.


BP is also facing potential damages of more than $30 billion from claims made by the gulf states and local governments for property and economic damages. The company has already been forced to divest roughly $38 billion of assets to survive its long legal saga.


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U.S. Approves First Method to Give the Blind Limited Vision

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The F.D.A. Approves a Bionic Eye:
The Argus II allows Barbara Campbell, who lost her sight 20 years ago, to see the world through patterns of light. Scientists hope it is the beginning of even more treatments.







The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first treatment to give limited vision to people who are blind, involving a technology called the “artificial retina.”




With it, people with certain types of blindness can detect crosswalks on the street, burners on a stove, the presence of people or cars, and sometimes even oversized numbers or letters.


The artificial retina is a sheet of electrodes surgically implanted in the eye. The patient is also outfitted with a pair of glasses with an attached camera and a portable video processor. These elements together allow visual signals to bypass the damaged portion of the retina and be transmitted to the brain. The F.D.A. approval covers this integrated system, which the manufacturer calls Argus II.


The approval marks the first milestone in a new frontier in vision research, a field in which scientists are making strides with gene therapy, optogenetics, stem cells and other strategies.


“This is just the beginning,” said Grace Shen, director of the retinal diseases program at the National Eye Institute, which helped finance the artificial retina research and is supporting many other blindness therapy projects. “We have a lot of exciting things sitting in the wings, multiple approaches being developed now to address this.”


With the artificial retina or retinal prosthesis, a blind person cannot see in the conventional sense, but can identify outlines and boundaries of objects, especially when there is contrast between light and dark — fireworks against a night sky or black socks mixed with white ones in the laundry.


“Without the system, I wouldn’t be able to see anything at all, and if you were in front of me and you moved left and right, I’m not going to realize any of this,” said Elias Konstantopolous, 74, a retired electrician in Baltimore, one of about 50 Americans and Europeans who have been using the device in clinical trials for several years. He said it helps him differentiate curbs from asphalt roads, and detect contours, but not details, of cars, trees and people. “When you don’t have nothing, this is something. It’s a lot.”


The F.D.A. approved Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products, to treat people with severe retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited diseases in which photoreceptor cells, which take in light, deteriorate.


The first version of the implant had a sheet of 16 electrodes, but the current version has 60. A tiny camera mounted on eyeglasses captures images, and the video processor, worn on a belt, translates those images into pixelized patterns of light and dark. The processor transmits those signals to the electrodes, which send them along the optic nerve to the brain.


About 100,000 Americans have retinitis pigmentosa, but initially between 10,000 and 15,000 will likely qualify for the Argus II, according to the company. The F.D.A. says that up to 4,000 people a year can be treated with the device. That number represents people who are older than 25, who once had useful vision, have evidence of an intact inner retinal layer, have at best very limited light perception in the retina, and are so visually impaired that the device would prove an improvement. Second Sight will begin making Argus II available later this year.


But experts said the technology holds promise for other people who are blind, especially those with advanced age-related macular degeneration, the major cause of vision loss in older people, affecting about two million Americans. About 50,000 of them are currently severely impaired enough that the artificial retina would be helpful, said Dr. Robert Greenberg, Second Sight’s president and chief executive.


In Europe, Argus II received approval in 2011 to treat a broader group of people, those with severe blindness caused by any type of outer retinal degeneration, not just retinitis pigmentosa, although it is currently only marketed in Europe for that condition. In the U.S., additional clinical trials need to be completed before the company can seek broader FDA approval.


Eventually, Dr. Greenberg said, the plan is to implant electrodes not in the eye, but directly into the brain’s visual cortex. “That would allow us to address blindness from all causes,” he said.


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