German Activists Punch Out Big Brother's Eyes

It’s being called Grand Theft Auto for the surveillance generation, only instead of being played out in the digital world, it’s played out in the real world. And the object of the game isn’t to steal cars or pull off other underworld pranks but to take out Big Brother’s eyes by destroying CCTV surveillance cameras spread across the city.

That’s the new game being played in Berlin and other German cities under the rules of Camover [note: the website keeps changing addresses so link may not work], an activist sport for those who hate surveillance cameras, according to The Guardian.

Teams of players are charged with taking out as many cameras as possible — by ripping them out of mounts, cutting cables or covering the lenses with black paint using Super Soaker squirt guns — and videotaping the vandalism in the process.

Points are awarded for the number of cameras destroyed — with bonus points granted for the most inventive methods.

“We thought it would motivate inactive people out there if we made a video-invitation to this reality-game,” the creator of told the Guardian. “Although we call it a game, we are quite serious about it: our aim is to destroy as many cameras as possible and to have an influence on video surveillance in our cities.”

The competition was launched as a protest against the European Police Congress being held in Berlin on February 19. There’s no real prize for the game. The winner gets front place in a protest that will take place three days before the congress begins.

The organizers of Camover explained their motivations on their web site:

“The gaze of the cameras does not fall equally on all users of the street but on those who are stereotypical predefined as potentially deviant, or through appearance and demeanour, are singled out by operators as unrespectable,” they write. “In this way youth, particularly those already socially and economically marginal, may be subject to even greater levels of authoritative intervention and official stigmatisation, and rather than contributing to social justice through the reduction of victimisation, CCTV will merely become a tool of injustice through the amplification of differential and discriminatory policing.”

Home Page Photo: Kanaka Menehune / Flickr

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A Minute With: Rapper T.I. dips into comedy in “Identity Thief”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Rapper Tip “T.I.” Harris has seen and done it all – three Grammy Awards, a novel, time in jail, a fashion line, TV reality show, businessman and several movies.

Now the Atlanta-based singer is dipping into comedy, appearing in the film “Identity Thief” as an armed enforcer on the trail of a character played by Melissa McCarthy who is on the run from many of those she’s swindled.

T.I., 32, sat down with Reuters ahead of the movie’s February 8 release to talk about the film, what’s left on his to-do list, and his personal views on gun control.

Q: How did you wind up in a comedic film?

A: “I met with (director) Seth (Gordon) and learned he was the director of one of my favorite comedies, ‘Horrible Bosses.’ I asked him how would this movie compare to ‘Horrible Bosses’ and he said it’s going to be better. I said, ‘I’m in.’”

Q: Were you OK taking a supporting role rather than a lead?

A: “I actually enjoyed the fact that all of the heavy lifting was not on my shoulders. It was Jason (Bateman) and Melissa’s show, so the stage was set for me to not screw it up, you know what I mean?”

Q: Last year you appeared on television’s “Hawaii Five-O” and “Boss.” Do you have role models of hip-hop stars who have successfully crossed over to acting?

A: “Will Smith and Ice Cube. Looking at the roles Cube has been able to acquire, he created those opportunities for himself. So I think I could take that approach.”

Q: Is there a certain perception of you out there that might hinder you from being taken seriously as an actor?

A: “I think people might wonder whether or not T.I. can be anything other than T.I., so it’s constantly having to reassure people that I’m able to do what I already know I can do.”

Q: For some, T.I. is a successful recording artist and for others he’s someone who had several stints in jail on drugs and weapons charges. Can you confidently say that the past is the past?

A: “I’m not gonna say anything. It’s day by day, you know what I’m saying? I’m saying today this is how I am, this is where I am. And tomorrow hopefully will be better than today.”

Q: In 2011 after your last prison term, you showed a softer side by starring in the VH1 reality series “T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle,” with your wife and six kids. Was that an attempt to right your past transgressions?

A: “Nah. I think it’s a showcasing of who I am today. I don’t think that it any way diminishes the mistakes of yesterday. It just makes a correction if people assume that the mistakes of yesterday are ever-present today. It gives people a stage of truth and knowledge to judge from. So if you must judge, at least you can judge from fact.”

Q: You’ve just released your eighth album, “Trouble Man II: He Who Wears the Crown.” You also have a your own urban fashion line, A.K.O.O. What else do you need to check off your to-do list?

A: “Just to remain relevant and meaningful to the cool young consumer of today. The cool kids are out there being admired by others in their peer group, so you want to find ways to continue to put yourself on their minds.”

Q: How do you do that?

A: “(Social media) is a big aspect for those kids. … So with Instagram, if you take pictures it has to be a picture worthy of showing. If you say something on Twitter, it has to be something that’s worthy of listening to.”

Q: With gun control being a hot-button topic today, and with your own experiences with firearms, what are your thoughts on gun ownership?

A: “I can’t possess a firearm (due to previous convictions), so whether they make them illegal or not is gonna be the same thing for me. But I see a need for them. I’ve been in circumstances where I’ve had them every day and nothing happened. I’ve been in circumstances where I didn’t have them, and I needed them. In certain areas of society, having a firearm is just as common as having bottled water.”

Q: In what way?

A: “If you’re a shopkeeper, a barbershop owner, a convenience store owner and you handle cash in and out of this area, if everyone knows that you don’t have a firearm, then you are basically prey. In these areas, bullets are just as common as sticks of gum, you know what I’m saying? So I think I speak for those people.”

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Will Dunham)

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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U.P.S. Posts a Loss and Forecasts Lower Profit

U.P.S. followed a stream of other big companies like Rockwell Automation and Northrop Grumman that were also weighed down by pension-related charges. A prolonged period of low interest rates is driving up companies’ pension costs.

Even factoring out the $3 billion noncash pension charge, U.P.S., the world’s largest package-delivery company, reported a fourth-quarter profit that still missed Wall Street’s expectations.

U.P.S. said it faced a $225 million rise in pension costs this year.

“This will be a significant drag in 2013,” the chief financial officer, Kurt Kuehn, told investors in a conference call.

The company expects earnings to rise 6 to 12 percent in 2013, from $4.80 to $5.06 a share, below the average Wall Street target of $5.11.

“It’s going to come down to worldwide economic growth,” said Helane Becker, a Dahlman Rose analyst.

U.P.S. posted a fourth-quarter net loss of $1.75 billion, or $1.83 a share, after the pension charge, in contrast to a net profit of $725 million, or 74 cents a share, in the period a year earlier.

Revenue rose 2.9 percent, to $14.57 billion from $14.17 billion. U.P.S. said costs related to Hurricane Sandy, which pounded the New York metropolitan area in late October, sliced profit by 5 cents a share in the quarter.

Factoring out one-time, noncash items, profit came to $1.32 a share, below the analysts’ average estimate of $1.38, according to Thomson Reuters.

“We remain in a cycle of mixed growth and mixed signals,” the chief executive, D. Scott Davis, told investors in the conference call. “Fiscal uncertainty continues to erode business confidence and growth prospects.”

A Morningstar analyst, Keith Schoonmaker, said one good sign in the quarter was the 7.7 percent rise in next-day air shipments in the United States.

“We need to cut through the pension clutter and look at economic results,” Mr. Schoonmaker said. “This is a company that has tremendous operating capability, so when you feed them a little bit more volume into their system, this company is able to make hay with that.”

U.P.S.’s largest American rival, FedEx, has been struggling with falling profits as customers increasingly send goods by ground, which is less costly and less profitable than by air.

Because of the huge volume of packages they handle each day, U.P.S. and FedEx are viewed as barometers of economic activity.

Shares of U.P.S. closed down $1.94, or 2.39 percent, at $79.29.

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Patty Andrews dies at 94; Andrews Sisters' last surviving member

They were the swinging, sassy voice of the homefront for U.S. service personnel overseas during World War II, singing catchy hit tunes such as "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "Rum and Coca Cola" that delighted Americans and catapulted the Andrews Sisters to the very top of the pop charts.

One of the most successful female recording groups in pop history, the sisters — LaVerne, Maxene and Patty Andrews — became a beloved American institution, lifting the nation's spirits during a conflict whose outcome seemed often in doubt.

When the war ended in 1945, it was even the Andrews Sisters who announced it, to 5,000 GI's during a USO concert in Italy as the men were heading for duty in the Pacific. The troops' commanding officer had interrupted the show, handing the women a note that was read aloud by the youngest, Patty Andrews.

"At first there was dead silence," her sister Maxene told The Times years later. "Then Patty repeated the message. 'This is really true,' she told them, and then she started to cry. Suddenly there was a roar. They knew they would be going home, and they did."

Patty Andrews, the group's lead singer and its last surviving member, died Wednesday of natural causes at her longtime home in Northridge, according to her attorney, Richard Rosenthal. She was 94. Maxene, the middle Andrews sister, died in 1995 and LaVerne, the eldest, in 1967.

The Andrews Sisters began singing professionally in 1932, when Patty was just 14, and scored their first major success in 1938 with an English version of the Yiddish song "Bei Mir Bist du Schon" (or "To me, you're grand," as the sisters put it.) The song zoomed to No. 1 and made them overnight stars.

Known for their close, three-part harmonies, full-throated delivery and humor on stage, they churned out hit after hit, including "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," "Beer Barrel Polka," "Hold Tight, Hold Tight," "Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar," "Rhumboogie," "Shoo-Shoo Baby," "Strip Polka," and "I Can Dream, Can't I?"

Two of their biggest wartime singles were the Caribbean-influenced "Rum and Coca Cola" and "I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time," one of their rare ballads.

From 1938 to 1951, they had 19 gold records, dozens of top 10 singles and record sales of nearly 100 million. They performed and recorded with the biggest stars of their day, among them Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Danny Kaye, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Carmen Miranda.

They appeared as themselves in more than a dozen movies, including the Abbott and Costello comedies "Buck Privates" and "In the Navy," both released in 1941, and the Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour film "Road to Rio" in 1947.

They appeared at war bond rallies at home and entertained the troops overseas, becoming synonymous with the war effort.

"Looking back nostalgically at the war years, three memories come immediately to mind: Eagles, flags and the Andrews Sisters," journalist Rex Reed told the Toronto Star in 1992. "LaVerne sang low, Maxene sang high, and Patty was the bouncy blond in the middle, singing and swaying to the melody."

In 1973, long after their music had faded from the scene, the Andrews Sisters enjoyed a remarkable resurgence with the release of Bette Midler's version of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," which brought them to the attention of a new generation of fans.

The following year, the two surviving Andrews sisters were a hit all over again, starring on Broadway in the nostalgic World War II musical "Over Here." It ran for a year.

Patricia Marie Andrews was born in Mound, Minn., near Minneapolis, on Feb. 16, 1918, to Olga, a Norwegian American, and Peter Andrews, a Greek immigrant. She and her sisters were junior high dropouts who went on the road in the early 1930s when their father's business foundered, playing in the roadhouses and on the vaudeville stages of the Midwest to help support their family.

They eventually made their way to New York, where an executive at Decca Records offered them a contract to make four singles at $50 apiece. One of the four was "Nice Work If You Can Get It," which went nowhere. But on the flip side was "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen," which launched them to stardom.

But the sisters' close musical harmonies belied a private relationship that was often troubled, culminating in a falling out between Patty and Maxene that lasted more than 20 years. Music industry insiders blamed it on a dispute between Maxene and Patty's husband, Walter Weschler, the group's conductor and arranger, who died in 2010.

Although the sisters lived near each other in the San Fernando Valley, according to published reports, they spoke rarely and saw each other just twice from 1974 to Maxene's death in 1995: when Patty paid a bedside visit to her sister in 1982 after Maxene suffered a heart attack, and in 1987, when they were together at the public dedication of their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

That year, the two spoke of the feud in separate interviews with The Times.

Maxene Andrews said it may simply have been the result of too many years of working so closely together. "There was really no breathing room ... ," she said. "We ate together, slept together, went out socially together. If we were going someplace, we got in the car together.... You can see how glued we were. There had to be a breaking point."

Patty Andrews was less willing to speak about the issue, but said her sister was just jealous. "Ever since I was born, Maxene has been a problem, and that problem hasn't stopped," she said, but declined to discuss the matter further.

"I'm not going to do anything or say anything to destroy that image that the people love," she said. "I hear that from the people that they love the Andrews Sisters and it's a joy to them. Who am I to take that away?"

Patty Andrews' first marriage, to agent Martin Melcher, ended in divorce in 1950 after he left her for Doris Day. She married Weschler in 1951 and they remained married until his death. She had no immediate survivors.

rebecca.trounson@latimes.com

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Disney's Innovative Animated Hybrid <em>Paperman</em> Debuts Online

For those who didn’t catch it in theaters when it accompanied Wreck-It Ralph at the tail end of last year, Disney Animation’s Paperman has debuted online, giving everyone a chance to look at the Oscar-nominated animated short that blends hand-drawn and computer-generated imagery in a beautiful, innovative way that might just look like the future of animation as a whole.

The first thing you notice about Paperman is how different it seems from most modern cartoons, not just because of the limited color palette and retro styling of the characters and the world they live in, but because it doesn’t look like the generic, quasi-photo-realistic CGI animation of everything from Pixar’s Brave to, well, Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. It actually looks as if real people have created it, not machines, and that’s something we haven’t really seen in feature animation for years.

That’s intentional, according to the man behind the short. Director John Kahrs told Cartoon Brew that the origin of Paperman “really came out of working so much with Glen [Keane] on Tangled.” After looking at the work of Keane — a classic Disney animator who worked on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast and Aladdin, among many other projects – Kahrs found himself with a new appreciation for traditional animation and drawing techniques. “I thought, Why do we have to leave these drawings behind? Why can’t we bring them back up to the front of the image again? Is there a way that CG can kinda carry along the hand drawn line in a way that we haven’t done before?”

The answer was yes. It just required a technology that no one had actually created yet.

Paperman‘s seemingly seamless way of blending the personality of hand-drawn animation with CGI in the physical space of the story is the result of new in-house software called Meander, a vector-based drawing program that allows for manipulation of the line after the fact — something that Kahrs described as “just like painting on the surface of the CG.”

In practice, it successfully blends the best of both forms of animation together in way they’ve never been seen before. Depicting George and Meg as flat, drawn characters keeps them safely out of the uncanny valley that even the best CGI sometimes can’t avoid and somehow makes them seem more real; other sequences, like the multiple paper airplanes zooming through the air, would be far less convincing and far more time-consuming if rendered without the help of computer generated imagery.

Paperman is up for the Best Animated Short Film award at this year’s Academy Awards. It easily deserves to win; as good as the other nominees are, nothing manages to be quite as touching, quite as impressive, or quite as aware of the legacy of the past of animation while pointing towards the future of the medium, as this is. If we’re lucky, perhaps more films will make use of Meander in future, and bring some visual variety back to our animated fare. And if they could manage to be as charming as this short, I don’t think anyone would find themselves complaining too loudly.

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Lindsay Lohan could face jail after March trial in California

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Actress Lindsay Lohan will stand trial on March 18 on charges she lied to California police about a June car crash and violated probation, raising the possibility she could be sent back to jail.

A judge in Los Angeles on Wednesday set the trial date on charges related to the car crash and said the court will hold a hearing at the same time on whether Lohan in the incident violated probation from a 2011 jewelry theft.

The star of the movie “Mean Girls,” who has been in and out of rehab and jail since 2007, wore a black sleeveless dress and looked tired at the brief court hearing. She arrived in Los Angeles late Tuesday from New York and has abandoned her longtime lawyer in favor of new attorney Mark Heller.

Lohan has pleaded not guilty to three misdemeanor charges of reckless driving, lying to police and obstructing police when she said she was not behind the wheel of her sports car, which smashed into a truck in Santa Monica, California in June.

Lohan, 26, left court without speaking to the media.

The former “Parent Trap” child star has been in and out of trouble since a 2007 arrest for drunk driving and cocaine possession.

Sautner warned Lohan that she could be found in violation of probation even if she is acquitted on charges connected to the car crash because the standard of proof is lower.

Lohan was ordered to appear at Wednesday’s hearing because she decided to switch lawyers, firing longtime attorney Shawn Holley this month.

She was arrested in New York on a misdemeanor assault charge on the same day in November that the Santa Monica car crash charges were filed. The Manhattan district attorney‘s office has not filed a criminal complaint in the assault case.

Lohan’s appearance in Los Angeles had been in doubt after Heller wrote to the court earlier this week saying was suffering from an upper respiratory infection and could not appear.

“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” Judge Stephanie Sautner told Lohan at the hearing.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Cynthia Osterman)

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Well: Myths of Weight Loss Are Plentiful, Researcher Says

If schools reinstated physical education classes, a lot of fat children would lose weight  And they might never have gotten fat in the first place if their mothers had just breast fed them when they were babies. But be warned: obese people should definitely steer clear of crash diets. And they can lose more than 50 pounds in five years simply by walking a mile a day.

Those are among the myths and unproven assumptions about obesity and weight loss that have been repeated so often and with such conviction that even scientists like David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have fallen for some of them.

Now, he is trying to set the record straight. In an article published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine, he and his colleagues lay out seven myths and six unsubstantiated presumptions about obesity. They also list nine facts that, unfortunately, promise little in the way of quick fixes for the weight-obsessed. Example: “Trying to go on a diet or recommending that someone go on a diet does not generally work well in the long term.”

Obesity experts applauded this plain-spoken effort to dispell widespread confusion about obesity. The field, they say, has become something of a quagmire.

“In my view,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, a Rockefeller University obesity researcher, “there is more misinformation pretending to be fact in this field than in any other I can think of.”

Others agreed, saying it was about time someone tried to set the record straight.

“I feel like cheering,” said Madelyn Fernstrom, founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Weight Management Center. When it comes to obesity beliefs, she said, “We are spinning out of control.”

Steven N. Blair, an exercise and obesity researcher at the University of South Carolina said his own students believe many of the myths. “I like to challenge my students. Can you show me the data? Too often that doesn’t come into it.”

Dr. Allison sought to establish what is known to be unequivocally true about obesity and weight loss.

His first thought was that, of course, weighing oneself daily helped control weight. He checked for the conclusive studies he knew must exist. They did not.

“My goodness, after 50-plus years of studying obesity in earnest and all the public wringing of hands, why don’t we know this answer?” Dr. Allison asked. “What’s striking is how easy it would be to check. Take a couple of thousand people and randomly assign them to weigh themselves every day or not.”

Yet it has not been done.

Instead, people often rely on weak studies that get repeated ad infinitum. It is commonly thought, for example, that people who eat breakfast are thinner. But that notion is based on studies of people who happened to eat breakfast. Researchers then asked if they were fatter or thinner than people who happened not to eat breakfast — and found an association between eating breakfast and being thinner. But such studies can be misleading because the two groups might be different in other ways that cause the breakfast eaters to be thinner. But no one has randomly assigned people to eat breakfast or not, which could cinch the argument.

So, Dr. Allison asks, why do yet another study of the association between thinness and breakfast? “Yet, I can tell you that in the last two weeks I saw an association study of breakfast eating in Islamabad and another in Inner Mongolia and another in a country I never heard of.”

“Why are we doing these?” Dr. Allison asked. “All that time and effort is essentially wasted. The question is: ‘Is it a causal association?’” To get the answer, he added, “Do the clinical trial.”

He decided to do it himself, with university research funds. A few hundred people will be recruited and will be randomly assigned to one of three groups. Some will be told to eat breakfast every day, others to skip breakfast, and the third group will be given vague advice about whether to eat it or not.

As he delved into the obesity literature, Dr. Allison began to ask himself why some myths and misconceptions are so commonplace. Often, he decided, the beliefs reflected a “reasonableness bias.” The advice sounds so reasonable it must be true. For example, the idea that people do the best on weight-loss programs if they set reasonable goals sounds so sensible.

“We all want to be reasonable,” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, when he examined weight-loss studies he found no consistent association between the ambitiousness of the goal and how much weight was lost and how long it had stayed off. This myth, though, illustrates the tricky ground weight-loss programs have to navigate when advising dieters. The problem is that on average people do not lose much – 10 percent of their weight is typical – but setting 10 percent as a goal is not necessarily the best strategy. A very few lose a lot more and some people may be inspired by the thought of a really life-changing weight loss.

“If a patient says, ‘Do you think it is reasonable for me to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ the honest answer is, ‘No. Not without surgery,’” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, “If a patient says, ‘My goal is to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ I would say, ‘Go for it.’”

Yet all this negativism bothers people, Dr. Allison conceded. When he talks about his findings to scientists, they often say, “O.K., you’ve convinced us. But what can we do? We’ve got to do something.” He replies that scientists have an ethical duty to make clear what is established and what is speculation. And while it is fine to recommend things like bike paths or weighing yourself daily, scientists must make sure they preface their advice with the caveat that these things seem sensible but have not been proven.

Among the best established methods is weight-loss surgery, which, of course, is not right for most people. But surgeons have done careful studies to show that on average people lose substanial amounts of weight and their health improves, Dr. Allison said. For dieters, the best results occur with structured programs, like ones that supply complete meals or meal replacements.

In the meantime, Dr. Allison said, it is incumbent upon scientists to change their ways. “We need to do rigorous studies,” he said. “We need to stop doing association studies after an association has clearly been demonstrated.”

“I never said we have to wait for perfect knowledge,” Dr. Allison said. But, as John Lennon said, “Just give me some truth.”

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DealBook: Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Resigns

1:42 p.m. | Updated with formal announcement

Lanny A. Breuer, the federal prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s response to corporate crime in the wake of the financial crisis, announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down after nearly four years in the post.

As head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, one of the most senior roles at the agency, Mr. Breuer tackled corporate bribery and public corruption. But it was his focus on Wall Street that received the most attention, from supporters and critics alike.

While he has come under fire for a dearth of prosecutions on Wall Street in response to the crisis, Mr. Breuer also oversaw an aggressive crackdown on money-laundering and interest-rate manipulation at some of the world’s biggest banks. In two weeks last month, he joined a nearly $2 billion case against HSBC for money-laundering and a $1.5 billion settlement with UBS for rate-rigging. Next week, he is expected to take a similar rate-rigging action against the Royal Bank of Scotland.

“I think the criminal division is a fundamentally different place than it was four years ago,” Mr. Breuer said in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s the highlight of my professional career.”

His departure, effective March 1, was widely expected. Mr. Breuer had told friends for weeks that he was ready to leave the public sector. While he has not announced his next step, it is expected that he will return to private practice. He was previously a partner at Covington & Burling, a white-shoe law firm.

By virtue of his perch at the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Breuer became the face of Wall Street prosecutions in the aftermath of the financial crisis. But when few such cases materialized, critics like the Occupy Wall Street protesters turned on him, portraying him as an apologist for banks at the center of the mortgage mess.

In contrast, he drew praise for the sweeping crackdown on rate-rigging in the banking industry, which has largely involved international benchmark rates.

In a rate manipulation case last month, Mr. Breuer’s team secured a major payout from UBS and a guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese unit, making UBS the first big global bank in more than two decades to have a subsidiary plead guilty to fraud. Mr. Breuer, who announced the action after rejecting a last-minute plea from the bank’s chairman, also filed criminal charges against two former employees at the bank.

The deal sent a strong signal that the authorities wanted to hold banks responsible for their wrongdoing.

Following the UBS model, the Justice Department is now pursuing a guilty plea from a Royal Bank of Scotland subsidiary in Asia over its role in the interest rate manipulation scandal, people briefed on the matter said. That settlement, which could come as soon as next week, is likely to include more than $650 million in fines imposed by American and British authorities, two other people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

In an interview, Mr. Breuer said the rate-rigging case amounted to “egregious criminal conduct.” He struck a similar tone about two other major financial cases — the convictions of executives from Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, a now-defunct mortgage lender, and the 110-year prison term imposed on R. Allen Stanford for his Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Breuer has also focused on money-laundering, creating a task force in 2010 that has levied more than $3 billion in fines from banks, including the record fine against HSBC. He stopped short of indicting HSBC after some regulators warned that doing so could destabilize the global financial system.

Mr. Breuer argued that the charges he did not bring — for example, against Goldman Sachs and other banks suspected of fraud after selling toxic mortgage securities to investors — could not have been proved. It was not for a lack of trying, he said, noting that United States attorneys across the country, after reviewing the same evidence he did, also declined to act.

“It’s important for me to hold the financial institutions accountable,” he said. “There’s never been a time that a prosecutor said we should bring a securitization case and I said no.”

Under Mr. Breuer, the division has also increasingly used a 1977 law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, to prosecute corporate bribery.

He also helped run the Justice Department’s investigation of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in the company paying $4.5 billion in fines and other penalties and pleading guilty to 14 criminal charges related to the rig explosion in 2010.

In a statement, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. praised Mr. Breuer. “Lanny has led one of the most successful and aggressive criminal divisions in the history of the Department of Justice,” he said.

Mr. Holder stood behind Mr. Breuer when questions arose about his involvement in the botched gun-trafficking case known as Operation Fast and Furious. The pair, who were both largely cleared after an inspector general investigation, worked together at Covington.

For years, Mr. Breuer moved in and out of government. The son of Holocaust survivors who fled Europe and settled in Queens, he landed at the Manhattan district attorney’s office after graduating from Columbia Law School. In between stints at Covington, he worked as a White House special counsel, defending President Bill Clinton amid federal investigations and impeachment proceedings.

In the interview on Tuesday, Mr. Breuer reflected on his unusual path to the Justice Department.

“The fact that I got to go from Elmhurst, Queens, to the criminal division is remarkable,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/30/2013, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Will Resign.

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Senate overwhelmingly approves John Kerry for secretary of State

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to confirm Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) as the next secretary of State, filling a crucial national security spot in President Obama’s second-term Cabinet.

The 94-3 vote clears the way for Kerry to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton after she steps down Friday.

Kerry, who will become America’s 68th top diplomat, failed to win only three Republican votes — Sens. John Cornyn and Rafael “Ted” Cruz, both of Texas, and Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma. 

A spokesman for Cornyn said Kerry supported liberal positions that most Texans oppose. Cruz has criticized Kerry, who fought in the Vietnam War, as anti-military.

Earlier Wednesday, Kerry received the unanimous endorsement of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a voice vote. He served on the committee for 28 years and chaired it for the last four.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the ranking Republican on the committee, praised Kerry as a “realist” on foreign affairs issues, and said he was always “open to discussion” with colleagues of the opposite party.

Corker, noting that Kerry’s father was a foreign service officer, said he knew of no one “who’s lived a life that’s been ultimately more oriented toward being secretary of State.”

Leading Republican senators had promoted Kerry as an alternative to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, for the job. Rice withdrew her name from consideration after Republicans criticized her for statements she made on TV talk shows after the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

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mike.memoli@latimes.com

Twitter: @mikememoli

paul.richter@latimes.com

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