New Taxes to Take Effect to Fund Health Care Law

WASHINGTON — For more than a year, politicians have been fighting over whether to raise taxes on high-income people. They rarely mention that affluent Americans will soon be hit with new taxes adopted as part of the 2010 health care law.

The new levies, which take effect in January, include an increase in the payroll tax on wages and a tax on investment income, including interest, dividends and capital gains. The Obama administration proposed rules to enforce both last week.

Affluent people are much more likely than low-income people to have health insurance, and now they will, in effect, help pay for coverage for many lower-income families. Among the most affluent fifth of households, those affected will see tax increases averaging $6,000 next year, economists estimate.

To help finance Medicare, employees and employers each now pay a hospital insurance tax equal to 1.45 percent on all wages. Starting in January, the health care law will require workers to pay an additional tax equal to 0.9 percent of any wages over $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.

The new taxes on wages and investment income are expected to raise $318 billion over 10 years, or about half of all the new revenue collected under the health care law.

Ruth M. Wimer, a tax lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery, said the taxes came with “a shockingly inequitable marriage penalty.” If a single man and a single woman each earn $200,000, she said, neither would owe any additional Medicare payroll tax. But, she said, if they are married, they would owe $1,350. The extra tax is 0.9 percent of their earnings over the $250,000 threshold.

Since the creation of Social Security in the 1930s, payroll taxes have been levied on the wages of each worker as an individual. The new Medicare payroll is different. It will be imposed on the combined earnings of a married couple.

Employers are required to withhold Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes from wages paid to employees. But employers do not necessarily know how much a worker’s spouse earns and may not withhold enough to cover a couple’s Medicare tax liability. Indeed, the new rules say employers may disregard a spouse’s earnings in calculating how much to withhold.

Workers may thus owe more than the amounts withheld by their employers and may have to make up the difference when they file tax returns in April 2014. If they expect to owe additional tax, the government says, they should make estimated tax payments, starting in April 2013, or ask their employers to increase the amount withheld from each paycheck.

In the Affordable Care Act, the new tax on investment income is called an “unearned income Medicare contribution.” However, the law does not provide for the money to be deposited in a specific trust fund. It is added to the government’s general tax revenues and can be used for education, law enforcement, farm subsidies or other purposes.

Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, said the burden of this tax would be borne by the most affluent taxpayers, with about 85 percent of the revenue coming from 1 percent of taxpayers. By contrast, the biggest potential beneficiaries of the law include people with modest incomes who will receive Medicaid coverage or federal subsidies to buy private insurance.

Wealthy people and their tax advisers are already looking for ways to minimize the impact of the investment tax — for example, by selling stocks and bonds this year to avoid the higher tax rates in 2013.

The new 3.8 percent tax applies to the net investment income of certain high-income taxpayers, those with modified adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for couples filing jointly.

David J. Kautter, the director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University, offered this example. In 2013, John earns $160,000, and his wife, Jane, earns $200,000. They have some investments, earn $5,000 in dividends and sell some long-held stock for a gain of $40,000, so their investment income is $45,000. They owe 3.8 percent of that amount, or $1,710, in the new investment tax. And they owe $990 in additional payroll tax.

The new tax on unearned income would come on top of other tax increases that might occur automatically next year if President Obama and Congress cannot reach an agreement in talks on the federal deficit and debt. If Congress does nothing, the tax rate on long-term capital gains, now 15 percent, will rise to 20 percent in January. Dividends will be treated as ordinary income and taxed at a maximum rate of 39.6 percent, up from the current 15 percent rate for most dividends.

Under another provision of the health care law, consumers may find it more difficult to obtain a tax break for medical expenses.

Taxpayers now can take an itemized deduction for unreimbursed medical expenses, to the extent that they exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income. The health care law will increase the threshold for most taxpayers to 10 percent next year. The increase is delayed to 2017 for people 65 and older.

In addition, workers face a new $2,500 limit on the amount they can contribute to flexible spending accounts used to pay medical expenses. Such accounts can benefit workers by allowing them to pay out-of-pocket expenses with pretax money.

Taken together, this provision and the change in the medical expense deduction are expected to raise more than $40 billion of revenue over 10 years.

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Arithmetic on Taxes Shows Top Rate Is Just a Starting Point

WASHINGTON — Despite hints in recent days that President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner might compromise on the tax rate to be paid by top earners, a host of other knotty tax questions could still derail a deal to avert a fiscal crisis in January.

The math shows why. Even if Republicans were to agree to Mr. Obama’s core demand — that the top marginal income rates return to the Clinton-era levels of 36 percent and 39.6 percent after Dec. 31, rather than stay at the Bush-era rates of 33 percent and 35 percent — the additional revenue would be only about a quarter of the $1.6 trillion that Mr. Obama wants to collect over 10 years. That would be about half of the $800 billion that Republicans have said they would be willing to raise.

That calculation alone suggests the scope of the other major tax issues to be negotiated beyond tax rates. And that is why many people in both parties remain unsure that a deal will come together before Jan. 1. Without agreement, more than $500 billion in automatic tax increases on all Americans and cuts in domestic and military programs will take hold, which could cause a recession if left in place for months, economists say.

“The question is making sure that we hit a revenue target that’s required for a truly balanced deficit-reduction plan,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee. “And when the president and all of us say this is a question of math, we mean it. It’s very hard to make the numbers work without the top rates going back to the full Clinton-era levels.”

The top tax rates are taking center stage right now because Mr. Obama believes he won a mandate after campaigning relentlessly on the idea of extending Mr. Bush’s tax cuts only for households with annual income below $250,000. But the two parties also have ideological differences on taxes affecting savings, investment and inheritance, which have flared in battles going back to the Reagan years. To get a deal in the coming weeks, those differences must be addressed at least in broad terms, even if the details are left to a battle over revamping the tax code next year.

The argument over rates is far from settled. Although the two sides seem close enough on the percentages for easy compromise, principle and politics loom large: Republicans oppose raising rates as a matter of ideology, saying that it kills jobs, and the president insists that he will not keep the Bush-era rates on income above roughly $250,000 after two campaigns in which he vowed to return them to the levels of the Clinton years.

“Just to be clear, I’m not going to sign any package that somehow prevents the top rate from going up for folks at the top 2 percent,” he said Thursday.

In recent days, comments from some Republicans, including Mr. Boehner, their chief negotiator, have hinted that the party — recognizing its weak hand — might be moving toward a concession on tax rates. Seldom mentioned is that Mr. Obama’s revenue total also reflects four other changes from Bush-era tax cuts: higher tax rates on investment income from capital gains and dividends, and the restoration of two other Clinton-era provisions limiting deductions and tax exemptions for affluent individuals.

Together those changes would raise $407.4 billion over a decade — nearly as much as the president’s proposal on higher rates, which would raise $441.6 billion by 2023, for a total of $849 billion. Another $119 billion would come from higher estate taxes, opposed by Republicans and some Democrats.

And both the president and Republicans are committed to raising hundreds of billions of dollars by overhauling the tax code to further limit or end the tax breaks that high-income taxpayers can claim, though they differ in how to do that.

Republicans want to raise all $800 billion from overhauling the tax code, erasing tax breaks for high-income households and using the new revenues both to reduce deficits and to lower everyone’s tax rates. But they have not proposed how to do that, and the president insists it cannot be done without hitting middle-income taxpayers.

Mr. Obama has proposed to keep existing tax breaks but to limit the rate of those breaks for people in higher tax brackets to 28 percent, which would raise $584 billion in a decade. He has proposed variations of that proposal for four years, only to be ignored by both parties because of opposition from charitable groups, the housing industry, insurers and others to curbing deductions for charitable giving, mortgage insurance and other purposes.

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Lebanese men 'lost' to Syria deepen the divide in Tripoli

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Late that evening, Abdel Hakim Ibrahim finally confirmed his father's worst fear: He had left for Syria.

"I've crossed the border: Please forgive me," he said in a text message as midnight approached. "God be with you."

That was the last his family heard from Ibrahim, 19, a student described as introverted and pious.

Ibrahim is among Lebanon's lost young men — 21 who reportedly disappeared into neighboring Syria one evening late last month and walked straight into a Syrian army ambush. He and the others are believed to have been killed, though there has been no official confirmation of their fate.

The incident has sparked a new spasm of sectarian bloodletting in this deeply divided northern Lebanese city, where the war in Syria has revived smoldering animosities. Some in the Sunni Muslim majority view the slayings as cold-blooded murder — many suspect the men were betrayed — and blame the city's Alawite minority, members of the same sect as Syrian President Bashar Assad.

All of the victims were Sunni. Alawite leaders have disavowed any responsibility.

On Dec. 2, Syrian state television aired video of blood-streaked bodies described as those of some of the 21 Lebanese "terrorists" who, the report said, had infiltrated Syria and been cut down. They intended to join the multitudes of foreign militants seeking to overthrow Assad, according to the official Syrian account.

But some families of the missing here insist that their sons were on a humanitarian mission, not a militant one. The men were unarmed when they were killed, say the distraught relatives. Some have recognized their sons in the official Syrian video and other images that have emerged of the dead.

"Abdel Hakim didn't know anything about fighting," Henad Hassan Ali, the mother of Ibrahim, said in an interview Friday at her home in Tripoli's hillside Mankoubin district, where five of the missing men resided. "He had no training. He didn't know about weapons. He hated even to get a bloody nose."

Tripoli, Lebanon's second city, has taken on the appearance of a war zone, a kind of mirror image of strife-torn Syria. Lebanese army tanks rumble down streets, and checkpoints block intersections. Sniper rounds and grenade explosions sound in the distance. A trip to Mankoubin involves multiple detours to avoid sniper fire.

At least 13 people have been reported killed and scores wounded this week in the latest outbreak of violence between rival neighborhoods in Tripoli that are on different sides of the Syrian conflict. Sunni gunmen have been exchanging fire with their counterparts in Jabal Mohsen, an Alawite bastion.

Lebanese and Syrian authorities are negotiating the return of the young men's bodies to Lebanon. The first remains may be repatriated Saturday, beginning what is likely to be a series of incendiary funerals.

"Tripoli is boiling," said one veteran of this city's seemingly endless sectarian conflicts.

It is no secret that Lebanese and other fighters have, for more than a year, been slipping into Syria from northern Lebanon, joining Sunni-dominated rebel units. Sympathy for the rebel cause is prevalent in Sunni communities here; the red, green, and black rebel tricolor is hoisted from homes and scrawled on walls. Weapons have headed north, and a steady flow of wounded and exhausted rebel fighters has come south for medical treatment and rest.

In April, one of Lebanon's most wanted men — Abdel Ghani Jawhar, a master bomb maker who headed the Al Qaeda-inspired Fatah Islam group — was reported killed in Syria in clashes with Syrian troops.

The smuggling routes between the two nations are well-established and heavily used. How, then, did the young men wander into an ambush? Family members suspect that the whole operation was a setup, or that the men were betrayed.

"The Syrians should have surrounded them and arrested them, interrogated them," said Ibrahim's mother, who added that she still holds out faint hope her son may be alive. "There was no need to kill them."

Her son's image has not been seen among the photos of the dead.

Some families have called for revenge. Ibrahim's father said he had no doubt what he would do were his son's killers to be brought to him. "I would kill them," he said.

His wife disagreed. "Only God has the right to take a life," said the mother of 10, speaking as her other children watched and listened in the family's simple home, where there has been no running water or electricity for 10 days — part of a general pattern of government abandonment, according to residents. "God did not tell us to kill Christians or Alawites or Muslims."

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Exclusive: Google to replace M&A chief

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc is replacing the head of its in-house mergers and acquisitions group, David Lawee, with one of its top lawyers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Don Harrison, a high-ranking lawyer at Google, will replace Lawee as head of the Internet search company‘s corporate development group, which oversees mergers and acquisitions, said the source, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Google is also planning to create a new late-stage investment group that Lawee will oversee, the source said.

Google declined to comment. Lawee and Harrison could not immediately be reached for comment.

One of the Internet industry’s most prolific acquirers, Google has struck more than 160 deals to acquire companies and assets since 2010, according to regulatory filings. Many of Google’s most popular products, including its online maps and Android mobile software, were created by companies or are based on technology that Google acquired.

Harrison, Google’s deputy general counsel, will head up the M&A group at a time when the company is still in the process of integrating its largest acquisition, the $ 12.5 billion purchase of smartphone maker Motorola Mobility, which closed in May.

And he takes over at a time when the Internet search giant faces heightened regulatory scrutiny, with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission conducting antitrust investigations into Google’s business practices. Several recent Google acquisitions have undergone months of regulatory review before receiving approval.

As deputy general counsel, Harrison has been deeply involved in the company’s regulatory issues and many of its acquisitions. He joined Google more than five years ago and has completed more than 70 deals at the company, according to biographical information on the Google Ventures website.

Harrison is an adviser to Google Ventures, the company’s nearly four-year old venture division which provides funding for start-up companies.

While most of Google’s acquisitions are small and mid-sized deals that do not meet the threshold for disclosure of financial terms, Google has a massive war chest of $ 45.7 billion in cash and marketable securities to fund acquisitions.

Lawee, who took over the M&A group in 2008, has had hits and misses during his tenure. Google shut down social media company Slide one year after acquiring it for $ 179 million, for example.

The planned late-stage investment group has not been finalized, the source said. The fund might operate separately from Google Ventures, according to the source.

“Think of it as a private equity fund inside of Google,” the source said.

The company recently said it would increase the cash it allocates to Google Ventures to $ 300 million a year, up from $ 200 million, potentially helping it invest in later-stage financing rounds.

Google finished Friday’s regular trading session down 1 percent, or $ 6.92, at $ 684.21.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Carol Bishopric and Jim Loney)

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Billionaire Aldi heir dies aged 58

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German billionaire Berthold Albrecht, heir to the Aldi supermarket chain and one of Germany‘s richest men, has died aged 58, his family announced on Friday.

Together with his brother Theo Jr, Albrecht’s fortune was estimated at $ 17.8 billion, according to Forbes. That placed them at 32 in the list of Forbes billionaires and second for Germany.

“Berthold was a fighter, and full of hope to the end,” his wife, Babette, wrote in a full-page notice published in several German newspapers.

The notice from the notoriously reclusive family said that the funeral had taken place in November, but it did not give further details of the circumstances of his death.

Berthold was the son of Aldi co-founder Theo Albrecht, who died at the age of 88 in July 2010.

After the Second World War, Theo and his brother Karl turned the small grocery store their mother operated in Essen into one of the nation’s largest food retail chains, with a focus on a limited range of goods at bargain prices.

Aldi was split into two divisions covering north and south Germany in 1960. Theo took the north and Karl the south. Karl, aged 92, is classified by Forbes as the richest man in Germany with a fortune of $ 25.4 billion.

The Aldi empire, which has estimated worldwide annual turnover of about 50 billion euros ($ 65 billion), also owns the Trader Joe’s grocery chain in the United States. In Europe it competes with the likes of Tesco, Carrefour and Metro.

Berthold worked on the board of directors at Aldi North. ($ 1 = 0.7700 euros)

(Reporting by Victoria Bryan; Editing by David Goodman)

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The New Old Age Blog: A Son Lost, a Mother Found

My friend Yvonne was already at the front door when I woke, so at first I didn’t realize that my mother was missing.

It was less than a week after my son Spencer died. Since that day, a constant stream of friends had been coming and going, bringing casseroles and soup, love, support and chatter. Mom hated it.

My 94-year-old mother, who has vascular dementia, has been living in my home in upstate New York for the past few years. Like many with dementia, mom is courteous but, underneath, irascible. Pride defines her, especially pride in her Phi Beta Kappa intellect. She hates to be confronted with how she has become, as she calls it, “stupid.”

The parade of strangers confused her. She had to be polite, field solicitous questions, endure mundane comments. She could not remember what was going on or why people were there. It must have been stressful and annoying.

That night, like every night since the state troopers brought the news, I woke hourly, tumbling in panic. As if it were not too late to save my son. Mom knew something was wrong, but she could not remember what. As I overslept that morning, she must have decided enough was enough. She was going home.

In a cold sky, the sun blazed over tall pines. As I opened the door, the dogs raced out to greet Yvonne and her two housecleaners. Yvonne often brags about her cleaning duo. They were her gift to me. They were going to clean my house before the funeral reception, which was scheduled for later that week. This was a very big gift because, like my mother before me, I am a very bad housekeeper.

Mom’s door was shut. I cautioned the housecleaners to avoid her room as I showed them around. Yvonne went to the kitchen to listen to the 37 unheard messages on my answering machine; the housecleaners went out to their van to get their instruments of dirt removal.

I ducked into Mom’s room to warn her about the upcoming noise. The bed was unmade; the floor was littered with crumpled tissues; the room was empty.

Normally, I would have freaked out right then. I knew Mom was not in the house, because I had just shown the whole house to the cleaners. Although Mom doesn’t wander like some dementia patients, she does on occasion run away. But I could not muster a shred of anxiety.

“Yvonne,” I called, “did you see my mother outside?”

Yvonne popped her head into the living room, eyebrows raised.“Outside? No!” She was alarmed. “Is she missing?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily, “I’ll look.” I stepped out onto the front porch, tightening the belt of my bathrobe and turning up the collar. Maybe she had walked off into the woods. The dogs danced around my legs, wanting breakfast.

I had no space left in my body to care. Either we would find her, or we would not. Either she was alive, or she was not. My child was gone. How could I care about anything ever again?

Then I saw my car was missing. My mouth fell open and my eyeballs rolled up to the right, gazing blindly at the abandoned bird’s nest on top of the porch light: What had I done with the keys?

Mom likes to run away in the car when she is angry. She used to do it a lot when my father was still alive — every time they fought. Since Mom took off in my car almost a year ago, after we had had a fight, I’d kept the keys hidden. Except for this week; this week, I had forgotten.

I was reverting to old habits. I had left the doors unlocked and the keys in the cupholder next to the driver’s seat. Exactly like Mom used to do.

“Uh-oh,” I said aloud. Mom was still capable of driving, even though she did not know where she was going. I just really, really hoped that she didn’t hurt anybody on the road. I pulled out my cellphone, about to call the police.

“Celia!” Yvonne shouted from the kitchen. She hurried up behind me, excited. “They found your mother. There are two messages on your machine.”

At that very moment, Mom was holed up at the College Diner in New Paltz, a 20-minute drive over the mountain, through the fields, left over the Wallkill River and away down Main Street.

Yvonne called the diner. They promised to keep the car keys until someone arrived. By that time, Yvonne had to go to work. She drove my friend Elizabeth to the diner, and Elizabeth drove Mom home in my car.

Half an hour later, they walked in the front door. Mom’s cheeks were rouged by the chill air and her eyes sparkled, her white hair riffing with static electricity. “Hello, hello,” she sang out. “Here we are.” She was wearing the flannel nightgown and robe I had dressed her in the night before. It was covered by her oversized purple parka, and her bare feet were shoved into sneakers.

I started laughing as soon as I saw her. I couldn’t help it. Elizabeth and Mom started laughing too. “You had a big adventure,” I said, hugging them both. “How are you?”

“I’m just marvelous,” said my mother. Mom always feels great after doing something rakish. We settled her on the sofa with her feet on the ottoman. By the time I got her blanket tucked in around her shoulders, she had fallen asleep.

Elizabeth couldn’t stop laughing as she described the scene. “Your mother was holding court in this big booth. She was sitting there in her nightgown and her parka, talking to everybody, with this plate of toast and coffee and, like, three of the staff hovering around her.”

The waitress said Mom seemed “a little disoriented” when she got there. Mom said she was meeting a friend for breakfast, but since she was wearing a nightgown and didn’t know whom she was meeting or where she lived, the staff thought there might be a problem. They convinced Mom to let them look in the glove compartment of the car, where they found my name and number.

It was then that I realized I was laughing – something I’d thought I would never be able to do again. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I’m laughing,” I said.

“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Elizabeth, holding her belly.

“Ha, ha, ha,” I laughed, rolling on the floor.

And she who gave me life, who had suffered the death of my child and the extinction of her own intellect, snoozed on: oblivious, jubilant, still herself, still mine.

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Suspect in Northridge killings had violated probation

The man accused of killing four people at a Northridge home over the weekend violated his probation two months before the mass killing but managed to avoid being sent back to prison, interviews and records show.

Los Angeles County probation officials recommended at a September sentencing hearing that the man serve prison time after he was arrested on a drug possession charge.

Instead, Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Jessica Silvers ordered Ka Pasasouk to attend a drug treatment program and be released to the oversight of the Probation Department, according to court records and law enforcement officials.

But the Probation Department argued that Pasasouk's extensive criminal record — including convictions for assault and robbery — warranted prison time.

"The defendant is an ineligible and unsuitable candidate for continued community supervision," the probation report stated. "It is recommended that probation be denied and the defendant be sentenced to state prison."

In an interview Thursday, Reaver Bingham, Los Angeles County deputy chief of adult field services, said his department's recommendation was also based on the fact that Pasasouk did not report to his probation officer in one instance before the September hearing. He missed a second appointment in November, Bingham said.

At the time of the slayings, probation officials were preparing a warrant for his arrest.

Court spokesman Mary Hearn said Thursday that all judges are forbidden by law to comment on pending cases and that Silvers would not discuss the case.

Pasasouk is accused of fatally shooting four people early Sunday outside a home in the 17400 block of Devonshire Street in Northridge. Three of the victims were wearing hooded sweat shirts and were about two feet apart with at least one bullet wound each to the head.

The fourth victim was farther away and appeared as if he was trying to run to the backyard when he was shot. He had at least one gunshot wound, according to the source.

Los Angeles County coroner's officials identified the dead as Amanda Ghossein, 24, of Monterey Park; Jennifer Kim, 26, of Montebello; Robert Calabia, 34, of Los Angeles; and Teofilo Navales, 49, of Castaic.

Coroner's spokesman Ed Winter said Los Angeles police had placed a security hold on any additional information about the deaths, and police have not commented on a motive.

But law enforcement sources told The Times that the killings appeared to stem from a dispute over personal property, including a computer. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing, said detectives were surprised that the dispute would have led to multiple deaths.

The suspects — Pasasouk, 31, of Los Angeles; Howard Alcantara, 30, of Glendale; Donna Rabulan, 30, of Los Angeles; and Christina Neal, 33, of Los Angeles — appeared before Judge Joe M. Bonaventure in Las Vegas on Thursday and waived their extradition rights.

It was not clear when the suspects would be moved. Los Angeles prosecutors have yet to file charges in the case.

Court records show that Pasasouk has an extensive criminal record. Last year, he pleaded no contest to unlawful taking of a vehicle and was sentenced to state prison (he was on probation for that offense at the time of the killings). In 2006, he pleaded guilty to second-degree robbery and assault likely to produce great bodily injury and sentenced to state prison. In 2004, he pleaded guilty and no contest in separate cases again involving unlawful taking of a vehicle.

At the September court hearing, Pasasouk pleaded no contest to the drug possession charge. At a follow-up hearing in November, Pasasouk admitted that he had failed to complete required drug treatment program. Another progress report was scheduled for January. Details of the hearings were first reported by the Los Angeles Daily News.

In late November, Pasasouk failed to appear for a meeting with his probation officer. Bingham said at that point, his department began looking for him and processing an arrest warrant.

He added that the department was now "looking at every aspect of this case relative to our supervision with a view toward determining if there is anything that needs to be done differently."

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

frank.shyong@latimes.com

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George Zimmerman sues NBC and reporters

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — George Zimmerman sued NBC on Thursday, claiming he was defamed when the network edited his 911 call to police after the shooting of Trayvon Martin to make it sound like he was racist.

The former neighborhood watch volunteer filed the lawsuit seeking an undisclosed amount of money in Seminole County, outside Orlando. Also named in the complaint were three reporters covering the story for NBC or an NBC-owned television station.

The complaint said the airing of the edited call has inflicted emotional distress on Zimmerman, making him fear for his life and causing him to suffer nausea, insomnia and anxiety.

The lawsuit claims NBC edited his phone call to a dispatcher in February. In the call, Zimmerman describes following Martin in the gated community where he lived, just moments before he fatally shot the 17-year-old teen during a confrontation.

“NBC saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so set about to create a myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain,” the lawsuit claims.

NBC spokeswoman Kathy Kelly-Brown said the network strongly disagreed with the accusations made in the complaint.

“There was no intent to portray Mr. Zimmerman unfairly,” she said. “We intend to vigorously defend our position in court.”

Three employees of the network or its Miami affiliate lost their jobs because of the changes.

Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder but has pleaded not guilty, claiming self-defense under Florida’s “stand your ground law.”

The call viewers heard was trimmed to suggest that Zimmerman volunteered to police, with no prompting, that Martin was black: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

But the portion of the tape that was deleted had the 911 dispatcher asking Zimmerman if the person who had raised his suspicion was “black, white or Hispanic,” to which Zimmerman responded, “He looks black.”

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Drug Makers Challenge Pill Disposal Law in California

Brand name drug makers and their generic counterparts rarely find themselves on the same side of an issue, but now they are making an exception. They have teamed up to fight a local law in California, the first in the nation, that makes them responsible for running — and paying for — a program that would allow consumers to turn in unused medicines for proper disposal.

Such so-called drug take-back programs are gaining in popularity because of a growing realization that those leftover pills in your medicine cabinet are a potential threat to public health and the environment.

Small children might accidentally swallow them and teenagers will experiment with them, advocates of the laws say. Prescription drug abusers can, and are, breaking into homes in search of them. Unused pills are sometimes flushed down the toilet, so pharmaceuticals are now polluting waterways and even drinking water. One study found the antidepressant Prozac in the brains of fish.

Most such take-back programs are run by local or other government agencies. But increasingly there are calls to make the pharmaceutical industry pay.

“We feel the industry that profits from the sales of these products should have the financial responsibility for proper management and disposal,” said Miriam Gordon, California director of Clean Water Action, an advocacy group.

In July, Alameda County, Calif., which includes Oakland and Berkeley, became the first locality to enact such a requirement. Drug companies have to submit plans for accomplishing it by July 1, 2013.

But the industry plans to file a lawsuit in United States District Court in Oakland on Friday, hoping to have the law struck down. The suit is being filed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, which represents brand-name drug companies, the Generic Pharmaceutical Association and the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

James M. Spears, general counsel of PhRMA, said the Alameda ordinance violated the Constitution in that a local government was interfering with interstate commerce, a right reserved for Congress.

“They are telling a company in New Jersey that you have to come in and design and implement and pay for a municipal service in California,” he said in an interview.

“This program is one where the cost is shifted to companies and individuals who are not located in Alameda County and who won’t be served by it.”

Mr. Spears, who is known as Mit, said that the program would cost millions of dollars a year to run and that pharmaceutical companies were “not in the waste disposal business.” He said it would be best left to sanitation departments and law enforcement agencies, which must be involved if narcotics, like pain pills, were to be transported.

Nathan A. Miley, the president of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and the champion of the legislation, said late Thursday, “It’s just unfortunate that PhRMA would fight this because it would be pennies for them.”

“We will win legally and will win in the court of public opinion as well,” Mr. Miley said.

The battle in Alameda could set the direction for other states and localities. Legislators in seven states have introduced bills to require drug companies to pay for take-back programs in the last few years, said Scott Cassel, founder and chief executive of the Product Stewardship Institute, a nonprofit group that advocates such programs. But none of the bills have passed.

Mr. Cassel said about 70 similar “extended producer responsibility” laws have been enacted in 32 states for other products, like electronic devices, mercury-containing thermometers, fluorescent lamps, paint and batteries. He said he was not aware that any had been struck down on constitutional grounds.

The pharmaceutical industry already pays for take-back programs in some other countries. The law in Alameda is modeled partly on the system in British Columbia and two other Canadian provinces. There, the industry formed the Post-Consumer Pharmaceutical Stewardship Association, which runs the programs.

Consumers can take unused drugs back to pharmacies, from which they are periodically collected. Drug companies pay for the program in proportion to their market share, said Ginette Vanasse, executive director of the association. The program for British Columbia, with a population over four million, costs about $500,000 a year, she said.

The extent of the problem of unused pills and how best to handle them are matters of debate.

The United States Geological Survey has found various drugs, including antidepressants, antibiotics, heart medicines and hormones, in waterways it has sampled. Sewage treatment plants and drinking water treatment plants are not meant to remove pharmaceuticals.

Still, it is not known what effect the chemicals might have. “It’s a hard-to-pin-down problem,” said Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst at the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group. It is thought that trace amounts in drinking water are probably not harmful. But larger amounts found in wastewater could be having an impact on wildlife.

It is also unclear whether take-back programs will help. Experts generally agree that the bigger source of pollution is urine and feces containing the remnants of drugs that are ingested, not the unused pills flushed down the toilet.

PhRMA also argues that take-back programs will not help much with the problem of drug abuse either. Mr. Spears said that it was better to have consumers tie up unused pills in a plastic bag and throw them in the trash. That is more effective, he said, because people would not have to travel to a collection point. Such collection points could become targets for thieves and drug abusers.

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The Human Price: Bangladesh Fire Exposes Safety Gap in Supply Chain

Andrew Biraj/Reuters

DEATHTRAP  A worker at the burned factory in Ashulia. Fire safety preparations were woefully inadequate, and violations were cited before the fire. More Photos »

ASHULIA, Bangladesh — The fire alarm shattered the monotony of the Tazreen Fashions factory. Hundreds of seamstresses looked up from their machines, startled. On the third floor, Shima Akhter Pakhi had been stitching hoods onto fleece jackets. Now she ran to a staircase.

But two managers were blocking the way. Ignore the alarm, they ordered. It was just a test. Back to work. A few women laughed nervously. Ms. Pakhi and other workers returned to their sewing tables. She could stitch a hood to a jacket in about 90 seconds. She arranged the fabric under her machine. Ninety seconds. Again. Ninety more seconds. She sewed six pieces, maybe seven.

Then she looked up.

Smoke was filtering up through the three staircases. Screams rose from below. The two managers had vanished. Power suddenly went out throughout the eight-story building. There was nowhere to escape. The staircases led down into the fire. Iron grilles blocked the windows. A man cowering in a fifth-floor bathroom called his mother to tell her he was about to die.

“We all panicked,” Ms. Pakhi said. “It spread so quickly. And there was no electricity. It was totally dark.”

Tazreen Fashions Ltd. operated at the beginning of the global supply chain that delivers clothes made in Bangladesh to stores in Europe and the United States. By any measure, the factory was not a safe place to work. Fire safety preparations were woefully inadequate. The building itself was under construction — even as sewing work continued inside — and mounds of flammable yarn and fabric were illegally stored on the ground floor near electrical generators.

Yet Tazreen was making clothing destined for some of the world’s top retailers. On the third floor, where firefighters later recovered 69 bodies, Ms. Pakhi was stitching sweater jackets for C&A, a European chain. On the fifth floor, workers were making Faded Glory shorts for Walmart. Ten bodies were recovered there. On the sixth floor, a man named Hashinur Rahman put down his work making True Desire lingerie for Sears and eventually helped save scores of others. Inside one factory office, labor activists found order forms and drawings for a licensee of the United States Marine Corps that makes commercial apparel with the Marines’ logo.

In all, 112 workers were killed in a blaze last month that has exposed a glaring disconnect among global clothing brands, the monitoring system used to protect workers and the factories actually filling the orders. After the fire, Walmart, Sears and other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.

But who, then, is ultimately responsible when things go so wrong?

The global apparel industry aspires to operate with accountability that extends from distant factories to retail stores. Big brands demand that factories be inspected by accredited auditing firms so that the brands can control quality and understand how, where and by whom their goods are made. If a factory does not pass muster, it is not supposed to get orders from Western customers.

Tazreen Fashions was one of many clothing factories that exist on the margins of this system. Factory bosses had been faulted for violations during inspections conducted on behalf of Walmart and at the behest of the Business Social Compliance Initiative, a European organization.

Yet Tazreen Fashions received orders anyway, slipping through the gaps in the system by delivering the low costs and quick turnarounds that buyers — and consumers — demand. C&A, the European retailer, has confirmed ordering 220,000 sweaters from the factory. But much of the factory’s business came through opaque networks of subcontracts with suppliers or local buying houses. Labor activists, combing the site of the disaster, found labels, order forms, design drawings and articles of clothing from many global brands.

Walmart and Sears have since said they fired the suppliers that subcontracted work to Tazreen Fashions. Yet some critics have questioned how a company like Walmart, one of the two biggest buyers in Bangladesh and renowned for its sophisticated global supply system, could have been unaware of the connection.

Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Ashulia, and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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