Flu outbreak remains high, but waning, CDC says

Claude Flanagan receives a flu shot from Geneva Hill, a licensed vocational nurse, during a free flu vaccine clinic this week in Sacramento. This season's outbreak, though still strong, appears to be waning, the CDC says. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press )

By Michael Muskal

February 1, 2013, 2:03 p.m.

This season’s outbreak of flu continues to be high -- especially among the elderly and the young -- but appears to be waning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday.

Flu-like illnesses appeared to be falling in the East but rising in the Western states. Forty-five children have died, the CDC reported.

This year’s flu season began earlier and appeared harsher than in past years. For the week ending Jan. 26, the CDC said, 42 states reported widespread geographic influenza activity while seven reported regional activity.

During that period, 24 states and New York City reported high levels of flu activity. Those states were Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia were reporting moderate flu activity; four states had low activity and nine states reported minimal activity, the CDC said.

The number of children who have died from the flu increased by eight during the week, the CDC reported. There is no system for reporting adult deaths from flu.

There are currently three main flu strains circulating nationwide, with H3N2 the predominant one.

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Game|Life Podcast Presents the Bad News Bonanza

Oh boy! Nintendo loses more money, Electronic Arts kills off Medal of Honor, Disney kills off Junction Point and a bunch more depressing stuff happened this week. So get ready for the bad news marathon on this week’s Game|Life. Wired senior editor Peter Rubin and I attempt to find silver linings in everything, and sometimes succeed. Sometimes.

Plus we recorded this podcast hours before Sony announced its press event, at which the next PlayStation console will likely debut, so we weren’t even able to talk about that.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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“30 Rock” closes its doors with a sentimental farewell

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Emmy-winning TV comedy “30 Rock” bowed out after seven seasons on Thursday with bittersweet farewells but giving all its zany characters a happy ending.

The satirical show-within-a-show about the inside workings of a fictional television sketch series saw Tina Fey‘s hapless writer Liz Lemon try to round up her unruly cast for a last hurrah.

Along the way, unpredictable sketch star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) causes chaos, self-centered actress Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) attempts to find her true calling on Broadway, and producer Pete Hornberger (Scott Adsit) finally achieves his dream to disappear without a trace.

The show’s simpleton page-turned-janitor Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer) finds himself in his element with his sudden promotion to head of television network NBC.

But under the jokes, the cast showed some real emotion in Thursday’s hour-long series finale.

“There’s a reason people don’t say honest goodbyes. It’s because when stuff is coming to an end, people freak out and they act crazy,” Liz tells Tracy.

Despite small audiences, “30 Rock” became a cult favorite, while Liz has been a hero for single geeky women as she tackled the male-dominated world of network television, with phrases such as “what the what,” “blerg” and “I want to go to there” becoming popular.

The show’s finale comes after perpetual unlucky-in-love Liz finally got her happy ending earlier in the season with her marriage to hot dog vendor Criss Chross (James Marsden) and they adopt two children.

But after grappling with the trials of being a stay-at-home mother, Liz and Criss agree to swap roles and she returns to work.

Liz also finds peace in her dysfunctional relationship with suave, egotistical network executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin).

Thursday’s show also saw the return of guest stars Julianne Moore and Salma Hayek as Jack’s ex-girlfriends, Conan O’Brien as one of Liz’s ex-boyfriends, along with appearances from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” stars Ice-T and Richard Belzer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, as herself.

“30 Rock” was inspired by Fey’s stint as head writer for “Saturday Night Live.” It has won multiple Emmys since its 2006 premiere but has always suffered from low audience ratings.

In the show’s prime in 2008-2009, an average of 7.5 million viewers tuned in each week, but the final season has garnered an average of 4 million viewers per episode.

In honor of the show’s finale, ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s announced a new flavor, the “Liz Lemon Greek Frozen Yogurt,” which will be available this spring.

“30 Rock,” which is aired in more than 20 countries around the world, has skyrocketed Fey’s career, and she has appeared in films including “Baby Mama,” “Date Night” and the upcoming “Admission.”

Both Fey and Baldwin won the best TV comedy actor and actress accolades at the Screen Actor’s Guild awards last Sunday, with Baldwin tweeting, “What a nice note for @nbc30rock to end on.”

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Lisa Shumaker)

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Well: Gluten-Free Muffin Recipes

For people who need to eliminate gluten from their diet, baking becomes a challenge. Beginners often find gluten-free baked goods too dense. Even the Recipes for Health columnist Martha Rose Shulman didn’t like the flavor of a commercial gluten-free flour mix, which left her gluten-free cookies and tart-shells with a strong taste of bean flour. As a result, she created her own gluten-free mix for baking muffins. She writes:

My son Liam still doesn’t know that the muffins he has been devouring all week are gluten-free.

I put together my own gluten-free flour mix, one without bean flour, and turned to America’s favorite Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna James Ahem, for guidance. I was already thinking about making muffins, and I wanted a mix that could replace the whole wheat flour I usually use in conjunction with other grains or flours. Her formula for a whole-grain flour mix is simple – 70 percent ground gluten-free grain like rice flour, millet flour, buckwheat flour or teff (the list on her site is a long one) and 30 percent starch like potato starch, cornstarch or arrowroot.

For this week’s recipes, I used what I had, which was brown rice flour, potato starch and cornstarch – 20 percent potato starch and 10 percent cornstarch — and that’s the basis for the nutritional analyses of this week’s recipes. I used this mix in conjunction with a gluten-free meal or flour, so the amount of pure starch in the batters is much less than 30 percent.

When you bake anything it is much simpler and results are more consistent if you use grams and scale your ingredients. This is especially true with gluten-free baking, since you are working with grain and starch formulas. Digital scales are not expensive and I urge you to switch over to this method if you like to bake. I have given approximate cup measures so the recipes will work both ways, but scaling is more accurate.

Here are five ways to bake gluten-free muffins:

Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins: These dark chocolate muffins taste more extravagant than they are.

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Gluten-Free Cornmeal, Fig and Orange Muffins: A sweet and grainy cornmeal mixture makes for a delicious muffin.

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Gluten-Free Whole Grain Cheese and Mustard Muffins: A savory muffin with a delicious strong flavor.

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Gluten-Free Buckwheat, Poppy Seed and Blueberry Muffins: The buckwheat flour is high-fiber and makes a dark, richly-flavored muffin.

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Gluten-Free Cornmeal Molasses Muffins: Strong molasses provides a good source of iron in an easy-to-make muffin.

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DealBook: Dutch Government Takes Control of SNS Reaal

The Dutch government on Friday nationalized one of the country’s biggest financial institutions, SNS Reaal, after the troubled company failed to find a private sector buyer.

The Dutch finance minister, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said that the government would spend 3.7 billion euros ($5 billion) in taxpayer money to clean up the bank, which has struggled for years with unprofitable real estate loans. Mr. Dijsselbloem said in a statement that the takeover “was made necessary by the extreme situation” of the bank and the “serious and immediate threat posed by that situation to the stability of the financial system.”

Shareholders and subordinated bondholders of SNS Reaal will be wiped out, effective immediately, Mr. Dijsselbloem said. The holders of senior debt will be repaid and depositors will not lose their money.

The move comes as Europe continues to deal with sluggish economies and debt problems. Last year, Spain took over Bankia, a mortgage lender also hurt by property deals.

Problems at SNS Reaal, which is based in Utrecht, had intensified in the last two weeks as depositors began losing faith, fearing talks with potential buyers would fail. The company had been reportedly negotiating possible investments from the private equity firm CVC Capital Partners and other funds in the hope of averting disaster.

Three top executives of SNS Reaal said in a statement that they were stepping down, as “they do not want to and cannot take responsibility for the nationalization scenario.” The three — Ronald R. Latenstein, the bank’s chief executive; Rob Zwartendijk, the chairman; and Ference Lamp, the chief financial officer — said they had done “everything in their power” to avoid a bailout.

“The persons in question do not advocate the chosen solution, but respect the choice of the Ministry of Finance,” according to a statement.

The announcement is the latest in a spate of recent bad news from European banks. On Thursday, Deutsche Bank posted a surprise fourth-quarter loss of $3 billion, and problems continue at Monti dei Paschi di Siena, which received a bailout from the Italian government last year.

The case of SNS Reaal also adds urgency to efforts to set up procedures to identify and wind down troubled banks in a way that does not burden taxpayers. European leaders and regulators agree that they need a way to dispose of bad banks but have not been able to agree on a way to do so. Despite a law last year giving authorities in the Netherlands more power to intervene in troubled banks, Dutch citizens will still wind up picking up the bill for SNS.

In fact, some of the impetus for the Dutch government’s action might have come from the planned transfer of bank supervisory responsibility away from national regulators to the European Central Bank, as well as the pressure of new bank regulations. Regulators and industry executives may have decided that it is best to act now rather than let the central bank dictate their actions.

The move also signaled the transfer of another of the Netherlands’ biggest financial institutions into state hands. The Dutch business of ABN Amro was nationalized in October 2008 after the collapse of Lehman Brothers sent the world financial system into shock.

ABN Amro had been taken over and split up by Royal Bank of Scotland, Fortis and Santander in a 2007 deal that has since come to epitomize the worst excesses of the credit bubble. Both Royal Bank of Scotland and Fortis, once the biggest Belgian financial house, were laid low by the debt burdens they took on for the ABN Amro deal when the credit crisis struck.

The ABN Amro deal also marred SNS Reaal, which needed a bailout in 2008 after it acquired the broken-up lender’s property business. That bailout has not been fully repaid.

As part of the deal announced Friday, the state will forgive 800 million euros of the unpaid bailout loans, inject 2.2 billion euros into SNS and write off 700 million euros from the bank’s property portfolio.

The government will also require the country’s top three banks — ING, ABN Amro and Rabobank — to contribute 1 billion euros next year in a onetime payment. ING estimated that its share of the cost of bailing out SNS Reaal would come to 300 million to 350 million euros, but said the impact on its finances would be limited.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

An earlier version of the article incorrectly spelled the name of the nationalized company. It is SNS Reaal, not SNS Reall.

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Senate Democrats huddle on gun measures

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden met Thursday with Senate Democrats to brief the caucus about the rationale behind the administration’s recommendations on guns, arguing that, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, the nation “will not understand if we don’t act.”

Biden seemed intent to emphasize that the most politically challenging of the initiatives he has  recommended – an assault weapons ban – was still a priority for the administration, mentioning it first in remarks to reporters afterward.

“My message was to lay out for my colleagues what our game plan was, what we thought needed to be done,” Biden said after the more than hourlong meeting. “I made the case for not only assault weapons but for the entire set of recommendations the president laid out.”

Biden said he also asked to sit down with the key parties on Capitol Hill to plot strategy going forward.

All 23 of President Obama's gun policy proposals

A day after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on guns, the vice president said there has been a “sea change” in public opinion since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, calling it the “straw that broke the camel’s back” to get the public behind gun measures for the first time in decades.

“I’m not saying there’s an absolute consensus on all these things,” he said. “But there is a sea change in attitudes of the American people. And I believe that the American people will not understand – and I know everyone in that caucus agrees with me – will not understand if we don’t act.”

Participants in the meeting said the vice president indicated he will continue to travel to make the administration’s case, as will the president. A week ago Biden traveled to Richmond, Va., to focus on the call for universal background checks, which is seen as the most likely of the slate of proposals to pass.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

At that time, Biden did not mention the assault weapons ban in remarks to reporters afterward, though aides said it did come up in the private discussion with officials present.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said Biden told the caucus Thursday that the administration is still behind the ban, a priority of her California colleague, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

“He said this is something that they support. And that the reports that he’s seen have shown that it did make a difference,” Boxer said.

That remains a challenge though, even in the Democratic-controlled Senate because the Democrats must defend 21 seats in 2014.

“Until I see the bills and the language, the only thing I’m going to say is I’m a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment. We’ve got to find a balanced approach, and I will take each amendment and bill as it comes,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who will be seeking reelection next year in a deeply Republican state.

Biden maintained that while there is no way to eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting, “there are things that we can do … that have virtually zero impact on your 2nd Amendment right to own a weapon for both self-defense and recreation that can save some lives.”

“I’ve always been confident we can reach a consensus on a broad cross-section of issues that can reduce some of this violence, even knowing it will be imperfect,” said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

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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.

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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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