Bare-Bones Photo Tour of London Squat Proves Content Is King

While flashy animations and interactions are fun to play with on the web, photographers don’t always need to think big-budget to tell their story online. With just a little bit of HTML and jQuery, photographer Adrian Nettleship has churned out a timely and purpose-built web experience that lets users explore a London squat and meet its inhabitants.

Nettleship’s photos and audio are combined into a simple choose-your-own-adventure walk-through of the squat that lacks gloss, but is nonetheless captivating.

“I’ve sometimes found the medium of photography slightly frustrating, almost limiting, in its ability to show the relation of one image to another,” he says. “I’ve never liked to use captions to [solely] explain context.”

Occupy and Explore is a response to new amendments to U.K. law that re-categorize squatting as a criminal offense, punishable by a six-month jail term and fines up to £5,000 ($8,000). The new laws increase the power of property owners in legal dispute with squatters, who according to the U.K. government number 20,000. Squatting groups say the real number is more. 

Pro-squatter campaign group Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes (SQUASH) says there are an estimated 650,000 empty properties, that it is society’s most vulnerable who squat and that the new laws will lead to increased homelessness. Furthermore, SQUASH says the new laws will, over five years, cost $790 million to enforce and that mass evictions and prosecution of peaceful squatters will burden the police, courts and charities for years to come.

In the U.K., squatters’ lifestyles have long divided opinion, but Nettleship feels some sections of the British media leading up to the law change demonized squatters.

“There was a huge amount of misinformation about the subject, such as tabloid stories about eastern European home invaders seizing houses while their owners were away for the weekend,” says Nettleship. “It has always been illegal to invade someone else’s home, but this was being omitted from the discussion. I wanted to counter the stereotype, to show how squatters can be thoughtful people who maintain and improve abandoned buildings.”

Nettleship’s use of software tools is as resourceful as his subjects’ use and reuse of spaces and materials. Over a number of weeks, he taught himself to use Dreamweaver and jQuery to complement his basic HTML knowledge. For those photographers balking at tackling an interactive project, Occupy is an example of basic navigation enriching a simple story — a success due in no small part to the way it addresses the context of the issue. It’s more difficult to unfairly lambast a population in the abstract after meeting its individual people.

The project also comes at a time of larger political shifts. Since coming to power, the coalition Conservative/Liberal Democrat government has steadily lost public support. Repeated austerity measures and service cuts have hit some communities hard and not since the ’80s has talk of class division been so prevalent.

“There’s so much to say at the moment,” says Nettleship. “The balance of power between government, people and large organizations is undergoing adjustment, as is the United Kingdom’s role in world affairs. We need to be clear on what values are important to us, and defend them. As with the changes of the Thatcher years, the effects will be felt for many years to come.”

Nettleship admits that he was only able to make it through the early years of his photography career by living with his parents and eating their food. From looking at the lives of his friends, he says his longish route to self reliance was not — and increasingly is not — unusual.

“Divisions [between the haves and have-nots] seem to lie along who your parents were, and most importantly how much they accumulated during the prosperous years of North Sea oil and property growth,” says Nettleship. “It’s not uncommon for people to live at home into their 30s enabling them to study or work an unpaid internship in order to get the job they want. My friends who didn’t take or didn’t have those opportunities are finding it much harder. People are starting to buy houses, but I know very few who have done it without a helping hand on the deposit. The baby-boomer generation are soaking up the impact of austerity on their children. The middle classes won’t feel the full impact until a generation down the line, when the money runs out.”

Nettleship is exhibiting a physical adaptation of Occupy and Explore, whereby his photographs will be sectioned out in space and joined by colored string to show paths through the squat.

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David Bowie breaks long silence with new music release

LONDON (Reuters) – British singer David Bowie released his first new song in nearly a decade on Tuesday in a surprise launch coinciding with his 66th birthday.

“Where Are We Now?”, produced by his long-term collaborator Tony Visconti, is a mournful look back to the time he spent in Berlin in the 1970s with an accompanying video featuring black-and-white footage of the city when it was still divided.

The song, available on iTunes and free to view on his re-launched website, was recorded in New York and will be followed by his first studio album since 2003, “The Next Day”, due to hit shelves in March.

Bowie’s label Columbia Records said the new song was a “treasure” that appeared “as if out of nowhere”, underlining the element of surprise from a release that ends years of speculation among fans over whether he would record again.

“Throwing shadows and avoiding the industry treadmill is very David Bowie despite his extraordinary track record that includes album sales in excess of 130 million not to mention his massive contributions in the area of art, fashion, style, sexual exploration and social commentary,” the label said.

The album will consist of 14 songs, and a deluxe edition will feature three bonus tracks.

The glam-rock star shot to fame with “Space Oddity” in 1969, and later with his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, before establishing himself as a chart-topping force in the early 1980s.

Known for his constant desire to re-invent and experiment with different musical genres, Bowie is considered one of the most influential, and unusual stars of the pop era.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

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The New Old Age Blog: Who Should Receive Organ Transplants?

Joe Gammalo had been contending with pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lungs, for more than a decade when he came to the Cleveland Clinic in 2008 seeking a lung transplant.

“It had gotten to the point where I was on oxygen all the time and in a wheelchair,” he told me in an interview. “I didn’t expect to live.”

Lung transplants are a dicey proposition, involving a huge surgical procedure, arduous follow-up, the lifelong use of potent immunosuppressive drugs and high rates of serious side effects. “It’s not like taking out an appendix,” said Dr. Marie Budev, the medical director of the clinic’s lung transplant program.

Only 50 to 57 percent of all recipients live for five years, she noted, and they will still die of their disease. But there’s no other treatment for pulmonary fibrosis.

Some medical centers would have turned Mr. Gammalo away. Because survival rates are even lower for older patients, guidelines from the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation caution against lung transplants for those over 65, though they set no age limit.

But “we are known as an aggressive, high-risk center,” said Dr. Budev. So Mr. Gammalo was 66 when he received a lung; his newly found buddy, Clyde Conn, who received the other lung from the same donor, was 69.

You can’t mistake the trend: A graying population and revised policies determining who gets priority for donated organs, have led to a rising proportion of older adults receiving transplants.

My colleague Judith Graham has reported on the increase in heart transplants, but the pattern extends to other organs, too.

The number of kidney transplants performed annually on adults over 65 tripled between 1998 and last year, according to data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. In 2001, 7.4 percent of liver transplant recipients were over 65; last year, that rose to 13 percent.

The rise in elderly lung transplant candidates is particularly dramatic because, since 2005, a “lung allocation score” puts those at the highest mortality risk, rather than those who’ve waited longest, at the top of the list.

In 2001, about 3 percent of those on the wait list and of those transplanted were over 65; last year, older patients represented almost 18 percent of wait-listed candidates and more than a quarter of transplant recipients. (Medicare pays for the surgery, though patients face co-pays and considerable out-of-pocket costs, including for drugs and travel.)

The debate has grown, too: When the number of adults awaiting transplants keeps growing, but organ donations stay flat, is it desirable or even ethical that an increasing proportion of recipients are elderly?

Dr. Budev, who estimated that a third of her program’s patients are over 65, votes yes. As long as a program selects candidates carefully, “how can you deny them a therapy?” she asked. So the Cleveland Clinic has no age limit. “We feel that everyone should have a chance.”

At the University of Michigan, by contrast, the age limit remains 65, though Dr. Kevin Chan, the transplant program’s medical director, acknowledged that some fit older patients get transplanted.

“You can talk about this all day — it’s a tough one,” Dr. Chan said. Younger recipients have greater physiologic reserve to aid in the arduous recovery; older ones face higher risk of subsequent kidney failure, stroke, diabetes and other diseases, and, of course, their lifespans are shorter to begin with.

Donated lungs, fragile and prone to injury, are a particularly scarce commodity. Last year, surgeons performed 16,055 kidney transplants, 5,805 liver transplants and 1,949 heart transplants. Only1,830 patients received lung transplants.

“What if there’s a 35-year-old on a ventilator who needs the lung just as much?” Dr. Chan said. “Why should a 72-year-old possibly take away a lung from a 35-year-old?” Yet, he acknowledged, “it’s easy to look at the statistics and say, ‘Give the lungs to younger patients.’ At the bedside, when you meet this patient and family, it’s a lot different.”

These questions about who deserves scarce resources — those most likely to die without them? or those most likely to live longer with them? — will persist as the population ages. They’re also likely to arise when the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation begins working towards revised guidelines this spring. (I’d also like to hear your take, below.)

Lots of 65- and 75-year-olds are very healthy. Yet transplants themselves can cause harm and there’s no backup, like dialysis. Without the transplant, they die. But when the transplant goes wrong, they also die.

More than four years post-transplant, the Cleveland Clinic’s “lung brothers” are success stories. Mr. Conn, who lives near Dayton, Ohio, can’t walk very far or lift more than 10 pounds, but he works part time as a real-estate appraiser and enjoys cruises with his wife.

Mr. Gammalo, a onetime musician, has developed diabetes, like nearly half of all lung recipients. But he went onstage a few weeks back to sing “Don’t Be Cruel” with his son’s rock band, “a highlight of both our lives,” he said.

Yet when I asked Mr. Conn, now 73, how he felt about having priority over a younger but healthier person, he paused. “It’s a good question,” he said, to which he had no answer.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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DealBook: Easing of Rules for Banks Acknowledges Reality

When a global committee of regulators and central bankers agreed to a new set of rules for the banking system a year and a half ago, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, told The Financial Times, “I’m very close to thinking the United States shouldn’t be in Basel anymore. I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American.”

Over the last weekend, Mr. Dimon finally got what he had wanted: a form of deregulation of sorts. The new international capital requirements for banks, known as Basel III — apologies if your eyes are glazing over — were significantly relaxed by regulators.

Instead of requiring banks to maintain, by 2015, a certain amount of assets that can quickly be turned into cash, the most stringent deadline was pushed to 2019. Perhaps more important, the type of assets that could be counted in a bank’s liquidity requirement was changed to be more flexible, including securities backed by mortgages, for example, instead of simply sovereign debt.

This sounds boring, but it is important stuff. Increasing bank capital and liquidity requirements — think of it as the size of a bank’s rainy day fund — is arguably more significant than all of the new laws in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The more capital a bank is required to hold, the lower the chance it could suffer a run on the bank like Lehman Brothers did in 2008.

Given memories of the financial crisis, the idea that regulators would loosen rules even a smidgen is considered a huge giveaway. The conventional wisdom is that the banks are the big winners and the regulators are, once again, patsies, capitulating under pressure to the all-powerful financial industry. The headlines tell the story: “Banks Win 4-Year Delay as Basel Liquidity Rule Loosened,” Bloomberg declared. The Financial Times splashed, “ ‘Massive Softening’ of Basel Rules.” “Bank Regulators Retreat,” the Huffington Post said. Reuters described the new regulations as a “light touch.”

Mayra Rodríguez Valladares, a managing principal at MRV Associates, a regulatory consulting firm, put it this way, “With every part of Basel III that is gutted, we are increasingly back where we were at the eve of the crisis.” She went on to say, “In today’s financial world, regulators pretend to supervise while banks pretend to be liquid.”

But this is a knee-jerk response.

While there is no question that the original rules would do a better job preventing the next 100-year flood in the banking system, their quick adoption most likely would have created their own drag on the economy because bank lending would most likely have been curtailed.

“If Basel had been implemented this year as written, it almost certainly would have thrown the U.S. and other economies into a recession more than going over the fiscal cliff ever would have,” John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a research organization promoting free markets, wrote. Mr. Berlau, who may have a penchant for hyperbole, had been calling the deadline the Basel cliff. He added, “Basel III has been delayed, and for Main Street growth and financial stability, that is all to the good.”

Mr. Berlau is right. In truth, the reason that regulators ultimately chose to relax the rules was simple practicality: many banks in Europe and some in the United States would have never been able to meet the requirements without significantly reducing the amount of credit they were to extend to Main Street over the next two years, according to people involved in the Basel decision process.

That’s the other side of the regulatory coin that Main Street often forgets about. At the time that the original rules were written in 2010, the consensus among economists was that the global economy would be in much better shape today than it is.

“Nobody set out to make it stronger or weaker, but to make it more realistic,” Mervyn A. King, governor of the Bank of England, explained.

Let’s be clear: high capital requirements are a good thing to do to reduce risk in the system. And there is no question that the banks, especially in the United States, are in a much stronger position than they were. Let’s also stipulate that the Basel committee did a horrible job before the financial crisis in setting and enforcing proper standards. Basel’s loosening of rules before the crisis that worsened the pain of the global banking system.

But the push for stricter rules just as the global economy is trying to nurse itself back to health, simply to satisfy the public, rather to find a solution that balances the risks to the economy and the banking system, would have been a mistake. The chances of a leverage-induced crisis from Wall Street banks right now is quite low.

The challenge for regulators is making sure their memories aren’t so short that they seek to scale back the rules again.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 8, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the affiliation of John Berlau. He is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, not the Bastiat Institute.

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'Zero Dark Thirty' renews pressure on CIA over torture claims

WASHINGTON — Nearly a decade after the last Al Qaeda detainee was waterboarded, Americans still know little about what the CIA did to its prisoners, or whether it worked.

President Obama decided against an investigation to hold accountable George W. Bush administration and CIA officials who conceived and carried out what he and others believed were acts of torture. And a criminal investigation ended last year with no charges and no public report.

But now, a Hollywood movie has put renewed pressure on CIA officials to reveal whether simulated drowning and other harsh techniques elicited valuable intelligence, as the agency has long contended.

"Zero Dark Thirty," made by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal after extensive consultation with CIA officers, is sparking a new quest for answers, in part because it suggests that torture by CIA officers was instrumental in pinpointing Osama bin Laden's hide-out in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

A senior CIA official on the short list to be the agency's next head, acting Director Michael Morell, has been caught in the maelstrom in a way that could complicate his bid for the job.

On Thursday, senators on the Intelligence Committee sent Morell a sharply worded letter demanding he explain his assertion in a Dec. 21 message to CIA employees that "some information" leading to the Al Qaeda chief "came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques."

Democrats on the committee, who produced their own 6,000-page, still-secret report on the CIA interrogation program, contend the agency's records don't support that conclusion.

CIA officials and Washington politicians care so deeply about the movie's depiction because "Zero Dark Thirty" will influence how people understand the Bin Laden operation, said Tricia Jenkins, an assistant professor at Texas Christian University and author of "The CIA in Hollywood," an examination of the agency's role in shaping its image through film.

"The CIA has long said that most people in the general public get their information about the CIA and its activities from film and television," she said. "The film will be a key shaper of public opinion and historical memory about this event."

Both critics and defenders with knowledge of the CIA program say the movie's torture scenes are grossly inaccurate — a cartoonish depiction that bears little resemblance to reality.

But defenders endorse the film's suggestion that harsh techniques, such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and slapping, yielded clues that helped the CIA find Bin Laden. They say detainees subject to duress offered information that helped the CIA track down Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the Al Qaeda courier who was helping hide Bin Laden.

Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats, however, contend that no significant information about the courier came from detainees after they were subject to coercive techniques.

Morell was among several senior agency officials who consulted closely with Boal, the screenwriter, as he researched the project. He met with Boal for 40 minutes at CIA headquarters, records show. One email from a CIA public affairs officer says Boal "agreed to share scripts and details about the movie with us so we're absolutely comfortable with what he will be showing."

Yet CIA officials were troubled by some scenes in the movie, prompting Morell's message to employees that the film "takes significant artistic license." In the message, Morell repeated what has been the CIA line since Bin Laden was killed in May 2011 — that "enhanced interrogations" weren't key to finding the terrorist leader. But he also said the CIA learned about the courier in part from detainees who were roughed up.

In their letter, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) demand that Morell explain exactly what he meant. But Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the panel's ranking Republican, said in a statement that he was perplexed by his colleagues' concerns. "It is entertainment, not a documentary," he said. "What's next — a Senate inquiry of the Bourne trilogy or '24'?"

If Morell wants to be CIA director, however, he will need the support of the Intelligence Committee — particularly Feinstein. "This could really hurt his nomination process," said a congressional aide familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified to talk about internal discussions.

Morell is in a tough spot. He does not want to repudiate coercive interrogations entirely, because "it's a tool that you might want to use and you don't want to give it away," a former CIA officer said. And he doesn't want to impugn CIA employees who were involved.

Republicans on the committee believe coercive interrogations worked, a GOP aide said, and Morell might lose their support should he say otherwise.

What's not much in dispute is that, despite the aspirations of "Zero Dark Thirty" to accuracy, it gets the interrogation scenes wrong. Boal has responded that the film is not a documentary.

The film shows CIA officers in a Hollywood idea of a tough interrogation, beating a detainee in a decrepit building, making him wear a dog collar and, on the spur of the moment, deciding to waterboard him.

According to a 2004 CIA inspector general report and other sources, the program was more methodical, which is not to say any less brutal. Each harsh technique was approved by Justice Department lawyers and briefed at the highest levels of President Bush's White House.

Three detainees were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003. They were strapped to gurneys and their medical conditions monitored. No dog collars were used, former officers say.

The movie also errs when it shows a detainee who had been waterboarded giving information about Al-Kuwaiti. One of the three waterboarded, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, discussed the courier, U.S. officials have said. He denied Al-Kuwaiti was an Al Qaeda member. CIA officers found this telling because other detainees said he had an important role.

Feinstein, McCain and Levin say the detainee who provided crucial information about the courier in 2004, identified by U.S. officials as Hassan Ghul, did so before he was subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. He was never waterboarded, officials have said.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, suggested one way to get at the truth would be for Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats to release their report.

"False claims about the interrogation program are dangerous," he said, "in large part because there is a vacuum where there ought to be a public record."

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

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The Games We're Dying to Play in 2013

Hey, 2012 is over and that whole apocalypse whatever thing didn't happen, am I right? Phew. Anyway, now that we're safely into 2013 we can look forward to a bright future full of videogames. Wired contributors Bo Moore, Ryan Rigney, John Mix Meyer, Andrew Groen and Daniel Feit join me below to discuss the games we're most hot for in the next 12 months.

As you read this list, notice some things. First, a great many of these games actually appeared in our Most Anticipated of 2012 list from a year ago. Welcome to freaking videogames, pal. Also, note that we are doing a little bit of wishful thinking when it comes to release dates, but if a game's not slated for 2013 specifically, we'll just mark it "TBD." We've also bent the rules this year to include English versions of games that are already available in Japan.

Also note the fact that as of right now it seems like nothing much is coming out in the back half of 2013. We would not be shocked if this is the year of new game consoles, meaning that our best-of list in 12 months might have a lot of games that we don't know about yet. With that in mind, here's what we do know now about the next year in gaming.

Above:

I've long wished for a game combining Dragon Quest's expansive world and exploration with the beautiful animation and sense of wonder in Hayao Miyazaki's animated feature films. This Japanese role-playing game for PlayStation 3 is just that. Ni no Kuni's visuals are designed by world-famous animation house Studio Ghibli. Early praise for the Japanese release indicates that Ni no Kuni's battle system harkens back to old-school Super Nintendo RPGs like Chrono Trigger and EarthBound yet also maintains the quality-of-life improvements modern RPGs have introduced. -- John Mix Meyer

Release date: January 22, 2013

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”Life of Pi” edges ”Hobbit” at overseas box office

LOS ANGELES, (TheWrap.com) – Fox’s “Life of Pi” was king at the overseas box office this weekend, taking in $ 60.1 million from 65 foreign markets to raises its international gross to nearly $ 302 million.

The big weekend narrowly beat out “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” which added another $ 57 million overseas, and raised its worldwide box office haul to nearly $ 825 million since opening on December 12.

Director Ang Lee‘s “Pi” opened No. 1 in seven of eight markets in which it debuted. Russia, at $ 14.1 million, was the weekend leader, followed by Australia ($ 8.2 million) and South Korea ($ 5.4 million). China, where “Pi has completed its run, is its top market with more than $ 90 million.

With the big weekend, Warner Bros.‘ and MGM’s “The Hobbit” has passed “Twilight” Breaking Dawn 2″ at the global box office. The “Twilight” finale has brought in $ 813 million since opening on November 16.

The overseas total came from 65 markets, and was run up with roughly 5.6 million admissions from almost 13,500 screens. That’s a 43 percent drop from the previous week.

Overall, “The Hobbit” has taken in more than $ 560 million overseas. Germany remains the strongest foreign territory, having brought in $ 74 million. The U.K. ($ 72 million), France ($ 39.6 million), Russia ($ 36 million) and Spain ($ 32 million) are next. Its North American total, after adding $ 17.5 million this weekend, is $ 263 million.

Paramount’s “Jack Reacher” was third for the weekend with $ 22.3 million from 16 territories and Universal’s “Les Miserables” was No. 4 with $ 14.5 million from 18 markets.

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Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

Mark Holm for The New York Times

Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.

ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.

Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.

“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”

For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.

At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.

Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.

In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.

Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.

Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.

“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”

Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.

Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.

The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.

Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.

“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.

“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.

Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.

Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.

While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”

In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.

Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.

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Bill Richardson and Eric Schmidt of Google Visit North Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, led a private delegation including Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, to North Korea on Monday, a controversial trip to a country that is among the most hostile to the Internet.

Mr. Richardson, who has visited North Korea several times, called his four-day trip a private humanitarian mission during which he said he would try to meet Kenneth Bae, a South Korea-born American citizen who was arrested on charges of "hostile acts" against North Korea after entering the country as a tourist in early November.

"I heard from his son who lives in Washington State, who asked me to bring him back," Mr. Richardson said in Beijing before boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang. "I doubt we can do it on this trip."

In a one-sentence dispatch, the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed the American group's arrival in Pyongyang, calling it "a Google delegation."

Mr. Richardson said his delegation planned to meet with North Korean political, economic and military leaders and visit universities.

Mr. Schmidt and Google have kept mum on why he joined the trip, which the State Department called "unhelpful." Mr. Richardson said on Monday that Mr. Schmidt was "interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect," but did not elaborate. Mr. Schmidt is a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness.

Except for a tiny portion of its elite, North Korea’s population is blocked from the Internet. Under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the country has emphasized science and technology but has also vowed to intensify its war against outside information infiltrating the isolated country — and potentially undermining its totalitarian grip on power.

Although it is engaged in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons and missile programs and habitually criticizes American foreign policy as "imperial," North Korea welcomes high-profile American visits to Pyongyang, billing them as signs of respect for its leadership. It runs a special museum for gifts foreign dignitaries have brought for its leaders.

Washington has never established diplomatic ties with North Korea and the two countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.

But Mr. Richardson’s trip comes at a particularly delicate time for Washington. In the past weeks, it has been trying to muster international support to penalize North Korea for its launch last month of a long-range rocket, which the United States condemned as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning the country from tests of intercontinental ballistic missile technology.

North Korea has often required the visits by such high-profile Americans as former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton before releasing American citizens held there on criminal charges. Mr. Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Pyongyang in 1996 to negotiate the release of Evan Hunziker, who was held for three months on charges of spying after swimming across the river border between China and North Korea.

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Reality shows may put crews too close to cutting edge

Monica Martino had filmed tornadoes in the Midwest, ship collisions in the Antarctic and crab fishermen in Alaska's Bering Sea. But those experiences didn't prepare her for a terrifying nighttime boat ride in the Amazon jungle.

In February, the 41-year-old co-executive producer was thrown into a murky river after getting footage for "Bamazon," a series for the History cable channel about out-of-work Alabama construction workers mining for gold in the rain forest of Guyana.

Martino says the captain was blind in one eye and sailing too fast without a proper light. He lost control of the boat while making a hard turn, sending the crew into the river, where Martino was knocked out by the impact of hitting the water at high speed.

Pulled back into the boat, Martino regained consciousness. But on the journey back to base camp, the vessel struck a tree, slamming Martino into the deck. Although she sustained a concussion, bruised ribs and a badly torn shoulder, Martino said, she had to wait 19 hours to receive medical care at a clinic in Venezuela because the production company had no viable medical evacuation plan for the crew.

History and the production company, Red Line Films, declined to comment.

"It was a whole cascade of negligence," said Martino, who lives in Santa Monica. "We were put in a situation far beyond what any production crew should be expected to handle."

As reality TV has boomed over the last decade, action-adventure shows have become a lucrative niche in a medium hungry for high ratings. But the growth has also stirred concerns that some reality TV programs are cutting corners on safety, exposing cast and crew members to hazardous conditions.

A combination of tight budgets, lack of trained safety personnel and pressure to capture dramatic footage has caused serious and in some cases fatal incidents, according to interviews with television producers, safety consultants and labor advocates.

Even the companies that provide insurance to Hollywood films and TV shows are reluctant to write policies for some of the edgier programs.

"These reality shows are getting riskier to get more ratings,'' said Wendy Diaz, senior underwriting director for the entertainment division of Fireman's Fund Insurance, one of the leading insurance carriers that serve the entertainment industry.

Records from OSHA and the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health show fewer than a dozen citations and accidents involving reality TV sets in the last five years, including a fatality that occurred this summer in Colorado during production of a proposed Discovery Channel series. But union officials, safety consultants and producers say those numbers don't begin to reveal the true extent of the problem.

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Many incidents go unreported because crew members sign non-disclosure agreements and fear being blacklisted if they file lawsuits. Record-keeping is further muddled by the fact that many of the shows are nonunion, and workers are often classified as independent contractors. OSHA typically tracks only serious accidents involving employees and has no jurisdiction if the incident occurs in a foreign country such as Guyana.

"Reality has a lot of near-misses and things that happen that you never hear about," said Vanessa Holtgrewe, an industry veteran and former camera operator on "The Biggest Loser" and "The X Factor" who now works as an organizer for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. "On a lot of these shows, you're completely on your own. There is no one you can call if … you feel you're in a dangerous situation."

State and federal OSHA officials declined to comment specifically on incidents involving the reality TV sector.

Fireman's Fund estimated that it would underwrite 160 action-adventure reality shows in 2012, a 25% increase over the previous year. But it passed on about 50 other reality TV programs because they were deemed too risky, Diaz said.

"We had people who wanted to go to Mexico to follow the drug cartels around," Diaz said. "We had one show where they were going to blow up a mine. We told them we wouldn't insure the show."

Reality series — which cover everything from "Survivor" to "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" — have provided a huge revenue stream for cable and broadcast networks. The shows have lower production costs than scripted entertainment and tend to attract the younger viewers favored by advertisers.

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