L.A. County Sheriff's Department intends to fire seven deputies

Seven Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies have been notified that the department intends to fire them for belonging to a secret law enforcement clique that allegedly celebrated shootings and branded its members with matching tattoos, officials said.

The Times reported last year about the existence of the clique, dubbed the Jump Out Boys, and the discovery of a pamphlet that described the group's creed, which required aggressive policing and awarded tattoo modifications for police shootings.

The seven worked on an elite gang-enforcement team that patrols neighborhoods where violence is high. The team makes a priority of taking guns off the street, officials said.

The Sheriff's Department has a long history of secret cliques with members of the groups having reached high-ranking positions within the agency. Sheriff officials have sought to crack down on the groups, fearing that they tarnished the department's reputation and encouraged unethical conduct.

In the case of the Jump Out Boys, sheriff's investigators did not uncover any criminal behavior. But, sources said, the group clashed with department policies and image.

Their tattoos, for instance, depicted an oversize skull with a wide, toothy grimace and glowing red eyes. A bandanna with the unit's acronym is wrapped around the skull. A bony hand clasps a revolver. Smoke would be tattooed over the gun's barrel for members who were involved in at least one shooting, officials said.

One member, who spoke to The Times and requested anonymity, said the group promoted only hard work and bravery. He dismissed concerns about the group's tattoo, noting that deputies throughout the department get matching tattoos. He said there was nothing sinister about their creed or conduct. The deputy, who was notified of the department's intent to terminate him, read The Times several passages from the pamphlet, which he said supported proactive policing.

"We are alpha dogs who think and act like the wolf, but never become the wolf," one passage stated, comparing criminals to wolves. Another passage stated, "We are not afraid to get our hands dirty without any disgrace, dishonor or hesitation... sometimes (members) need to do the things they don't want to in order to get where they want to be."

Department spokesman Steve Whitmore said starting the termination process shows that Sheriff Lee Baca "does not take any of this lightly and will move forward with the appropriate action."

Investigators were less concerned about the tattoos, and more focused on the suspected admiration they showed for officer-involved shootings, which are expected to be events of last resort. The deputy told The Times, however, that investigators reviewed their shootings and arrests and found nothing unlawful.

"We get called a gang within the badge? It's unfair," he said. "People want to say you have a tattoo. So do fraternities. Go to Yale. Are they a gang?.... Boy Scouts have patches and they have mission statements, and so do we."

"We do not glorify shootings," he continued. "What we do is commend and honor the shootings. I have to remember them because it can happen any time, any day. I don't want to forget them because I'm glad I'm alive."

If the firings are upheld, it would be one of the largest terminations over one incident in the department's history. In 2011, the department fired about half a dozen deputies who were also said to have formed a clique. Those deputies worked on the third floor of Men's Central Jail and allegedly threw gang-like three-finger hand signs. They were fired after they fought two fellow deputies at an employee Christmas party and allegedly punched a female deputy in the face.

As part of the widening federal investigation of the Sheriff's Department, a criminal grand jury recently subpoenaed the agency for materials relating to deputy cliques, specifically citing several of the groups including the "3000 boys" and the Jump Out Boys.

When the pamphlet revealing the existence of the Jump Out Boys was initially found, officials didn't know if the group was real. But eventually, one member came forward and named the others, according to an official who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The seven deputies can fight the department's decision to fire them.

robert.faturechi@latimes.com

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Psychiatric Hospitals Alter Rules on Patient Smoking

MANDEVILLE, La. — Annelle S., 64, who has paranoid schizophrenia, took an urgent drag on a cigarette at a supervised outdoor smoke break at Southeast Louisiana Hospital.

“It’s mandatory to smoke,” she explained. “It’s a mental institution, and we have to smoke by law.”

That was 18 months ago, and Annelle’s confusion was understandable. Until recently, Louisiana law required psychiatric hospitals to accommodate smokers — unlike rules banning smoking at most other health facilities. The law was changed last year, and by March 30, smoking is supposed to end at Louisiana’s two remaining state psychiatric hospitals.

After decades in which smoking by people with mental illness was supported and even encouraged — a legacy that experts say is causing patients to die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses — Louisiana’s move reflects a growing effort by federal, state and other health officials to reverse course.

But these efforts are hardly simple given the longstanding obstacles.

Hospitals often used cigarettes as incentives or rewards for taking medicine, following rules or attending therapy. Some programs still do. And smoking was endorsed by advocates for people with mental illness and family members, who sometimes sued to preserve smoking rights, considering cigarettes one of the few pleasures patients were allowed.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the nearly 46 million adults with mental illness have a smoking rate 70 percent higher than those without mental illness, and consume about a third of the cigarettes in the country, though they make up one-fifth of the adult population.

People with psychiatric disorders are often “smoking heavier, their puffs are longer and they’re smoking it down to the end of the cigarette,” said William Riley, chief of the Science of Research and Technology Branch at the National Cancer Institute. With some diagnoses, like schizophrenia, rates are especially high.

A report by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors said data suggested that people with the most serious mental illnesses die on average 25 years earlier than the general population, with many from smoking-exacerbated conditions like heart or lung disease.

Now more treatment facilities are banning smoking, with some finding it easier than expected. Others still allow it, usually outside on their grounds during scheduled times. About a fifth of state hospitals are not smoke-free, a survey issued in 2012 by the State Mental Health Program Directors association found. Occasionally, hospitals that banned smoking have reinstated it to avoid losing patients.

Moreover, smoking is so deeply ingrained that smoke-free hospitals can only dent the problem; many patients are now hospitalized only for short stints and resume smoking later.

New research suggests scientific underpinnings for some of the affinity, said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Nicotine has antidepressant effects and, for people with schizophrenia, helps dampen extraneous thoughts and voices, she and other experts said.

Other chemicals in cigarette smoke set off a perilous cycle, causing some medications to be metabolized faster, making them less effective and allowing symptoms to return. Because patients feel sicker, they may seek even more comfort from nicotine. “You may think, ‘Well, I need to smoke more,’ ” said Dr. Steven Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco.

Then, as smoking increases, “blood levels of their medication go down, and they end up back in the hospital,” said Judith Prochaska, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center.

Socially, smoking provides “cover rituals for patients having psychiatric symptoms,” said Dr. Rona Hu, medical director of the acute psychiatric inpatient unit at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. “You tamp the box, you kind of play with the lighter, you can exhale and look into the middle distance and not look like you’re hallucinating.”

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., said hospitals had historically resisted going smoke-free, fearing it would interfere with treatment. “In my very first job as an aide in a psychiatric hospital,” he said, “if patients behaved better they got additional cigarettes.”

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DealBook: R.B.S. to Pay $612 Million Over Rate Rigging

A campaign to root out financial fraud secured a victory on Wednesday, as authorities took aim at the Royal Bank of Scotland for its role in an interest rate manipulation scheme that has emboldened prosecutors and consumed the banking industry.

American and British authorities struck a combined $612 million settlement with the bank, the latest case to emerge from the global investigation into rate-rigging. The Justice Department dealt another blow to the bank, forcing its Japanese unit to plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing.

The penalty for the subsidiary, a hub of rate manipulation, underscores a recent shift in the way federal authorities punish financial wrongdoing. The R.B.S. case echoed an earlier action taken against a UBS subsidiary, which similarly pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud as part of a larger settlement. These cases represent the first units of a big bank to agree to criminal charges in more than a decade.

“I want financial institutions to know that this department will absolutely hold them to account,” Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in an interview Wednesday.

Some of the world’s largest financial institutions remain caught in the cross hairs of the rate manipulation case, an investigation that could drag on for years. Authorities suspect that more than a dozen banks falsified reports to influence benchmarks like the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, which underpins the costs for trillions of dollars in financial products like mortgages and credit cards.

A person involved in the investigation indicated that the first banks to settle were among the worst actors in the rate case. But they also received a “discount” for their eager cooperation, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

That approach raises the prospect that remaining banks could face high-priced settlements.

Deutsche Bank, which set aside an undisclosed amount to cover potential penalties and suspended five employees tied to the case, is expected to settle with authorities in late 2013, several people briefed on the matter said. But the timetable could shift. The bank is not in formal settlement talks and is not prepared to resolve the case, the people said.

While foreign banks have borne the brunt of the scrutiny, an American institution could be among the next to settle. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are under investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the American regulator leading the case, though actions are not imminent.

The R.B.S. action concluded a first phase of rate-rigging investigations for authorities, who are now planning to take a brief hiatus from filing cases. The next case is not expected until spring at the earliest, two of the people briefed on the matter said.

Some bank executives, fearful that fallout from the case will stain their firms, are pushing for a broad deal encompassing multiple institutions. But authorities are balking at a “global settlement,” people involved in the case say, arguing that investigations are proceeding at different stages and involve widely varying fact patterns.

As regulators continue to pursue actions, prosecutors are planning charges against traders involved in the scheme. The first charges came last year when the Justice Department filed actions against two former UBS traders.

“Our investigation is far from finished,” Mr. Breuer said.

The rate-rigging case has centered on how much banks charge each other for loans. Such figures form the basis of Libor and other rates. But banks corrupted the process. Government complaints filed over the last year outlined a scheme in which banks reported false rates to lift trading profits.

Authorities announced the first Libor case in June, extracting a $450 million settlement with the British bank Barclays. In December, UBS agreed to a record $1.5 billion settlement with authorities. The Justice Department also secured the guilty plea from one of the bank’s subsidiaries.

Royal Bank of Scotland, based in Edinburgh, had aimed to avert the guilty plea for its Japanese subsidiary, people involved in the case said. But the Justice Department’s criminal division declined to back down, and the bank had little leverage to push back. It decided not to formally appeal its case to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., another person said.

With fines coming from multiple authorities, the $612 million case amounted to the second-largest penalty levied in the multiyear investigation into rate manipulation. “The settlement with R.B.S. is much more than a slap on the wrist,” argued Bart Chilton, a member of the trading commission who is critical of soft fines on big banks.

The settlement represents the latest setback for Royal Bank of Scotland, which has struggled to shake the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. The British firm, which is majority-owned by the government after a bailout, already has put aside $2.7 billion to compensate customers who were inappropriately sold loan insurance in recent years.

Since the financial crisis, the bank has shaken up its management team and refocused its operations, as part of an effort to repair its bruised image. On Wednesday, it announced plans to claw back bonuses to help pay for the latest settlement.

At a news conference in London on Wednesday, Stephen Hester, the bank’s chief executive, admitted that the rate-rigging episode significantly strained the bank. “It is one of the most difficult moments over the entire period,” he said.

As authorities stitched together the R.B.S. case, they seized on a series of colorful e-mails that highlighted an effort to influence the rate-setting process, a plot that spanned multiple currencies and countries from 2006 to 2010. One Royal Bank of Scotland trader mused in a 2007 message how the process was becoming a “cartel,” adding “its just amazing how libor fixing can make you that much money.”

The wrongdoing spread broadly, authorities say, noting that Royal Bank of Scotland “aided and abetted” UBS and other firms. A senior official at the Justice Department’s antitrust unit, Scott D. Hammond, contends that the bank “secretly rigged” interest rates.

A UBS trader, the department said, once asked a co-worker to “have a word with” another bank about Libor submissions. The UBS trader, Thomas Hayes, who was recently charged by the Justice Department with fraud, indicated that he had already approached R.B.S. for help.

The government complaints also portray a permissive culture that allowed rate-rigging to persist for four years. David Meister, the enforcement director of the trading commission, declared that “the environment was ripe for manipulation at R.B.S.”

The bank’s own records captured the scheme in striking detail, revealing how traders pressured other employees to submit certain rates. Submitters and traders sat in earshot of each other in London, forming what authorities termed a “cozy ring.” The bank eventually separated the employees, who then moved to make additional requests via instant messages.

To persuade employees who submitted Libor rates, some traders promised affection. Others offered steak and sushi. One trader resorted to begging, invoking a plea of “pretty please.” Another trader, after pressuring a colleague to submit a certain rate, offered a reward of sorts: “I would come over there and make love to you.”

When authorities began scrutinizing the bank, the traders adopted a more covert approach. In 2010, a Libor submitter rebuffed an instant message request to influence rates. But then the submitter called the trader to explain “we’re not allowed to have those conversations” over instant message.

The employees laughed, according to a transcript of the call, and the submitter reassured the trader that he would fulfill the request: “Leave it with me, and uh, it won’t be a problem.”

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Child porn suspect indicted by federal grand jury

A North Hills woman whom authorities allege plied a young girl with crack cocaine and photographed her having sex with an older man was indicted Tuesday on federal charges of producing child pornography and sex trafficking.

Letha Montemayor Tucker was named Tuesday in a four-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury. If convicted of all the charges, Tucker would face a mandatory minimum federal sentence of 10 years and could get up to life in prison, authorities said.

The charges come a month after authorities sought the public's help in the investigation by releasing photographs of a man and woman depicted in a set of widely circulated child pornography photos.

Tips started pouring in immediately after the photos were released, investigators said.

Tucker, who goes by the name Butterfly, was located about 10 hours after the release of the photos and taken into custody, said Claude Arnold, special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles, a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The alleged victim, who was about 12 when the photos were taken, was found within a week of the case going public, Arnold said. She is an adult now and is cooperating with authorities, he said.

In addition to photographing the girl having sex with the man, authorities said, Tucker also committed sex acts with the alleged victim.

The photos were part of a child pornography collection known as the "Jen Series."

The 40-plus photos were first discovered by investigators in the Chicago area in 2007. Investigators said images in the series have been reported about 300 times and have been found on computers across the country.

The victim "didn't even know these images were out there," Arnold said.

"The horror of child pornography is it's for life, the victimization," Arnold said. "Once the photos are there in cyberspace, they're there forever."

The girl, identified in court records only by the initials J.M.M., lived in the same Los Angeles County residential hotel as Tucker, who worked as a prostitute, authorities said.

Around 2000 or 2001, the girl stopped attending school regularly and spent more and more time in Tucker's room, smoking crack cocaine Tucker provided, according to the indictment.

The girl was present when Tucker engaged in prostitution with clients and was usually high when this happened, authorities allege. Tucker instructed the child to take off her clothes in front of the clients, prosecutors alleged in court papers.

The faces of Tucker and the girl are "clearly visible" in the photos, according to the indictment. Tucker had an eyebrow piercing and a tattoo of a sleeping cat behind her shoulder, which made her easier to identify, authorities said.

The face of the man, however, is blacked out in the photographs. Authorities are still trying to identify the man, Arnold said.

"Obviously, we want him also to answer for his crimes," Arnold said.

Arnold said the alleged victim is "going to be dealing with this for a long time."

Now that she has been identified, she will receive a victim notification every time one of the images turns up in an investigation, he said.

Tucker is being held without bond and is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court on Feb. 13. Her attorney could not be reached for comment.

hailey.branson@latimes.com

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Meryl Streep, Jean Dujardin returning to the Oscars

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep will likely get to induct Daniel Day-Lewis into that triple-Oscar club on February 24 at the Dolby Theatre, while “The Sound of Music” star Christopher Plummer will probably hand the Best Supporting Actress award to a new screen-musical star, Anne Hathaway.

Those are two conclusions to be drawn from the Academy’s Tuesday announcement that last year’s acting winners, Streep, Plummer, Jean Dujardin and Octavia Spencer, will return to serve as presenters on this year’s Oscar telecast.

Streep won her third Oscar for “The Iron Lady,” while Dujardin, Spencer and Plummer won their first for “The Artist,” “The Help” and “Beginners,” respectively.

The previous year’s Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor winners typically present the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress awards, and vice versa. And the immediate past winners are traditionally the first Oscar presenters to be announced.

So far, Oscar show producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron have announced a number of musical participants, including Barbra Streisand, Norah Jones and a tribute to musicals of the past 10 years.

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Question Mark: Women’s Eggs Diminish With Age

Baby girls enter the world with enough of them to populate perhaps 40 small cities. A dozen or so years later, the first will make a debut of its own. And in the months and years to come, others will appear regularly, sometimes greeted with relief, other times with disappointment, perhaps most often with a touch of annoyance.

Abdullah Pope/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Not women's eggs, obviously.

Now, for women in the baby boom generation, they may be coming more sporadically, or not at all, signaling unmistakably that one time of life is over, and another begun. But what happened to all those eggs?

When girls are born, they have about two million eggs in their ovaries, nestled in fluid-filled cavities called follicles. That may sound like a lot, but consider that months earlier, when they were still in utero, they may have had as many as six or seven million eggs. Those eggs are still immature, and the proper name for them, by the way, is oocytes (rhymes with: nothing).

The first eggs to bite the dust were those in the fetus, which waste away. And by the time a girl reaches puberty, most of her remaining eggs have also deteriorated and been reabsorbed. If that sounds ominously like something from a “Star Trek” episode about the Borg, imagine if all those eggs had to take the customary path out of the body.

Even with the Great Egg Disappearance, girls enter puberty with many more than they will use, 300,000 or more. Each month, the body produces a hormone, FSH, which stimulates the follicles to prepare an egg for maturation and release.

With eggs backed up like bowling balls on a busy Saturday night at the lanes, the ovaries can afford to be a little wasteful, and as many as several dozen follicles are called into action. Then a single mature egg — usually, anyway — gets the tap on the shoulder and begins its travels to the uterus.

As for the maturing eggs that didn’t make the grade, there is no second chance. But they do not go out on their own. “Each month you probably lose a thousand or so,” said Dr. James T. Breeden, president of the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “There’s just a natural death of them.”

For all the eggs a woman begins with, in the end only about 400 will go through ovulation. While men produce sperm throughout their lives, over time the number of eggs declines, and they disappear with increasing frequency the decade or so before menopause. Those that remain may decline in quality. “When you have a thousand or less within the ovaries, you’re thought to have undergone menopause,” said Dr. Mitchell Rosen, the director of the Fertility Preservation Center at the University of California, San Francisco.

It’s true that women make far more eggs than they end up using, but men should not pass judgment. “They produce millions of sperm, millions,” Dr. Rosen said. “The whole process is not the most efficient in the world.”

Questions about aging? E-mail boomerwhy@nytimes.com

Booming: Living Through the Middle Ages offers news and commentary about baby boomers, anchored by Michael Winerip. You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming. You can reach us by e-mail at booming@nytimes.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described estrogen levels at the time of ovulation. They rise, rather than fall.

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DealBook: E-Mails Show Alarm at S.&P. as Mortgage Crisis Exploded

10:17 p.m. | Updated

The executive at Standard & Poor’s was clear: “This market is a wildly spinning top which is going to end badly.”

That sober assessment of certain mortgage-related investments, delivered to colleagues in a confidential memo in December 2006, is now part of a trove of internal e-mails and documents that have come to light in a federal suit against S.& P., the nation’s largest credit ratings agency.

The correspondence, made public in court documents late Monday, provide a glimpse at the inner workings of an institution that the Justice Department says fraudulently inflated credit ratings, with dire consequences for the entire economy. In a series of e-mails, tensions appeared to be escalating inside the firm’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan as it publicly professed that its ratings were valid, even as the home loans bundled into mortgage-backed securities, or M.B.S., were failing at accelerating rates.

One comes from an S.& P. analyst in March 2007 borrowing from the Talking Heads song “Burning Down the House,” creating new lyrics: “Subprime is boi-ling o-ver. Bringing down the house.” S.& P. said prosecutors cherry-picked e-mails and that it would vigorously defend itself from “these unwarranted claims.”

In another 2007 e-mail, an analyst responds to a question about his new job: “Job’s going great. Aside from the fact that the M.B.S. world is crashing, investors and the media hate us and we’re all running around to save face … no complaints.”

Together, the documents show a portrait of some executives pushing to water down the firm’s rating models in the hope of preserving market share and profits, while others expressed deep concerns about the poor performance of the securities and what they saw as a lowering of standards.

The United States attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., joined by attorneys general from 16 states, unveiled the case on Tuesday in Washington, accusing S.& P. and its parent, the McGraw-Hill Companies, of intentionally propping up ratings of shaky mortgage investments and setting them up for a crash when the financial crisis struck.

The government is seeking $5 billion in penalties to cover losses to investors like state pension funds and federally insured banks and credit unions. The amount would be more than five times what S.& P. made in 2011.

“The action we announce today marks an important step forward in the administration’s ongoing effort to investigate — and punish — the conduct that is believed to have continued to the worst economic crisis in recent history,” Mr. Holder said.

The government, by bringing the civil fraud charges under a 1989 law created after the savings and loan crisis, faces a lower burden of proof when the victims are federally insured banks. But prosecutors could still face a high bar in convincing a jury by a preponderance of evidence that S.& P. knew that its ratings were faulty and that it intended to deceive investors.

“If the facts prove out, it certainly seems like Standard & Poor’s intentionally cooked its models in order to make the ratings higher than they otherwise thought they should be, in violation of the firm’s own policies and standards,” said Neil Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor who served as the special inspector general for the United States Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program from 2008 to 2011.

“What we don’t know yet is, what’s the other stuff that could be out there?” he added, noting that the vast body of internal documents might also contain exculpatory material for S.& P.

The ratings agency said in a statement: “Claims that we deliberately kept ratings high when we knew they should be lower are simply not true.”

The company said that it had always been committed to “providing independent opinions on creditworthiness based on available information,” and that its actions reflected its best judgments about the investments at the heart of the suit — about 40 collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, an exotic type of security made up of bundles of residential mortgage-backed securities, which in turn were composed of individual home loans. Those securities were packaged by banks, rated by S.& P. and sold to investors in 2007.

“Unfortunately,” the company’s statement said, “S.& P., like everyone else, did not predict the speed and severity of the coming crisis and how credit quality would ultimately be affected.”

Remarks that S.& P. employees made in internal memos and electronic communications show that as early as spring 2004, certain executives wanted to change the firm’s rating methodology, but only after polling “an appropriate number of issuers and investment bankers” as to the “rating implications.”

The idea of asking bankers what they thought about a change in the firm’s methods shocked some S.& P. analysts and executives, including one who fired back, “What does ‘rating implication’ have to do with the search for truth? Are you implying that we might actually reject or stifle ‘superior analytics’ for market considerations?”

In May 2004, an analyst warned that S.&. P. had just lost to its competitor Moody’s Investors Service the chance to rate a very large deal by being too hard-nosed about the amount of collateral that would be required to get a good rating. More collateral would mean less profit for Mizuho, the bank putting that deal together.

“We must address this now,” she said — otherwise the firm would lose more deals.

The complaint describes a debate in 2004 and 2005 about whether S.& P. should change its model for rating C.D.O.’s and what effect the proposed changes might have on its business. The change was scheduled for July 2005, but before it could happen, an analyst sent an e-mail saying that according to the investment bank Bear Stearns, the older model “had been the ‘best’ ” at rating weaker pools of mortgages, compared with Moody’s and Fitch.

As the housing market deteriorated in early 2007, the gallows humor in the e-mails intensified. Banks that had created mortgage-backed securities were unloading them quickly, to avoid being stuck with any duds.

“That means the market will crash,” one analyst told another in an instant message. “Deals will rush in before they take further loss.”

“Yes,” said the analyst’s colleague. “We should not push criteria,” continued the first, “but we give in anyway. Ahahhahaha.”

About a month later, another S.& P. employee wrote in another instant message, reproduced in the complaint: “We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”

In its statement Tuesday, S.& P. said that the cow e-mail “had nothing to do with R.M.B.S. or C.D.O. ratings or any S.& P. model, and the analyst had her concerns addressed with the issuer before S.& P. issued any rating.”

S.& P. said that there was a robust internal debate about how a rapidly deteriorating housing market might affect the C.D.O.’s, “and we applied the collective judgment of our committee-based system in good faith,” adding, “The e-mail excerpts cherry-picked by D.O.J. have been taken out of context, are contradicted by other evidence, and do not reflect our culture, integrity or how we do business.”

It was unclear whether the Justice Department was looking at the other two major ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch. Tony West, the acting associate attorney general, said he would not discuss actions against other ratings agencies.

Settlement talks between S.& P. and the Justice Department broke down in the last two weeks after prosecutors sought a penalty in excess of $1 billion and insisted that the company admit wrongdoing, several people with knowledge of the talks said. S.& P. had proposed a settlement of about $100 million, while the government pressed for an admission of guilt to at least one count of fraud, said the people.

McGraw-Hill shares fell nearly 11 percent on Tuesday. Moody’s shares fell about 9 percent, to $45.09.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, Michael J. de la Merced and Floyd Norris contributed reporting.

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Scientists identify remains as those of King Richard III

LONDON -- More than 500 years after his death in battle, scientists announced Monday that they had definitively identified a skeleton unearthed in central England last summer as that of Richard III, the medieval king portrayed by William Shakespeare as a homicidal tyrant who killed his two young nephews in order to ascend the throne.

DNA from the bones, found beneath the ruins of an old church, matches that of a living descendant of the monarch's sister, researchers said.

"Rarely have the conclusions of academic research been so eagerly awaited," Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the excavation, told a phalanx of reporters Monday morning. "Beyond reasonable doubt, the individual exhumed ... is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England."

PHOTOS: Remains of King Richard III

The dramatic announcement capped a brief hunt for Richard's remains, the progress of which has been closely charted by international media and whose success has been barely short of miraculous.

Working from old maps of Leicester, about 100 miles northwest of London, archaeologists from the local university had less than a month to dig in a small municipal parking lot -- one of the few spaces not built over in the crowded city center. The team stumbled on the ruins of the medieval priory where records say Richard was buried, then found the bones a few days later last September.

"It was an extraordinary discovery that stunned all of us," Buckley said.

The nearly intact skeleton bore obvious traces of trauma to the skull and of scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that matched contemporary descriptions of Richard's appearance. The feet were missing, almost certainly the result of later disturbance, and the hands were crossed at the wrist, which suggests that they may have been tied.

Scientists at the University of Leicester, which pioneered the practice of DNA fingerprinting, were able to extract samples from the bones and compare them to a man descended from Richard III's sister Anne. The match through the maternal line was virtually perfect.

"The DNA evidence points to these being the remains of Richard III," said Turi King, the project’s geneticist.

Richard reigned from 1483 to 1485, and occupies a unique place in England's long line of colorful rulers. He was the last English king to be killed in combat, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, by his successor, Henry VII. His death ended the Plantagenet dynasty and ushered in the long era of the Tudors, including Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

Jo Appleby, an osteologist at the university, said the skeleton belonged to an adult male in his late 20s to late 30s; Richard III was 32 when he died. The man would have stood 5-foot-8 at full height, but the curved spine would have made him appear shorter.

The skull was riddled with wounds strongly indicative of death in battle, including two blows from bladed weapons, either of which would have been fatal, Appleby said.

Richard III is one of England's most controversial monarchs, reviled by some as a bloodthirsty despot who stopped at nothing to gain power, but revered by others who insist that he has been unfairly maligned. His supporters note that the repugnant portrait of Richard in today's popular imagination is based almost entirely on accounts from the time of the usurping Tudors, especially Shakespeare's indelible characterization of him as a "deform'd, unfinish'd" man without scruples.

Fans say Richard III was an enlightened, capable ruler whose important social reforms included the presumption of innocence for defendants and the granting of bail, which remain pillars of the legal system in Britain and the U.S.

However, what happened to Richard's two nephews, who were his rivals for the throne and who were locked up in the Tower of London as young boys, never to be seen again, remains a mystery.

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Robert De Niro cements place in Hollywood movies

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Double Oscar winner Robert De Niro cemented his place in acting history on Monday by placing his hands and feet in concrete in front of Hollywood‘s historic Chinese Theatre.

De Niro, 69, gave a short thank you speech with a few punchlines of his own.

“(Actor) Joe Pesci always said I’d end up with my feet in cement. I don’t think this is what he had in mind,” said De Niro, referring to the many gangster movies he has filmed over his 40-year career.

“They say everyone in the film industry has three homes – the home where they live, the home where their first wife lives, and Hollywood. I love New York, and I’m proud to be a citizen of Hollywood. Thank you for this honor and thank you for making me feel at home here,” he said.

De Niro, who founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 in a bid to revive lower Manhattan after the September 11, 2001, attacks, is in the running for a third Oscar this month for his supporting role in comedy “Silver Linings Playbook.”

Billy Crystal, who played therapist to De Niro‘s insecure mob boss in the 1999 film “Analyze This,” praised the New York actor for his ability to bridge comedies like “Meet the Parents” and dramas such as “GoodFellas” and “Taxi Driver.”

“Even in his darkest performances, even in ‘Raging Bull‘ … he could make you laugh, and that he did in spades in ‘Analyze This.’ … I’m not used to playing straight for anybody, but it was a thrill of a lifetime to be on the opposite side of that genius,” Crystal said.

“Silver Linings Playbook” director David O. Russell praised De Niro‘s sensitivity in taking on the role of the father of a bipolar son in the movie.

“When we first read the script together he cried because he has known people who struggled with PTSD or bipolar disorder. … Many families are no stranger to these challenges and they have to find the magic and the love that Bob brought in his soul, and he did bring his soul to this movie,” Russell said.

De Niro won Oscars for his lead role in “Raging Bull” and his supporting turn in “The Godfather: Part II.”

His handprints and footprints in the courtyard of the Chinese Theatre are near those of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Xavier Briand)

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Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid
It would change me.
It did.
Something dissolved inside me.
Tears began a slow drip;
I cried at the news story
Of a lost boy found in the woods …
At the surprising beauty
Of a bright leaf falling
Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Potvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks
For miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine
As my boys’ chant did
The summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push.”
Urging me to wind my sore feet
Winch-like on a rented bike
To inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly
let it fling
let it flip like a pancake in the air
let it sing: what is the song
of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me
Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,
Wondering if you can hear them.
Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.
Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.
Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.
Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

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Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

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