CDC: Abortions fall 5%, largest drop in a decade

By Michael Muskal

November 21, 2012, 1:41 p.m.

The rate of abortions in the United States fell by 5%, the largest single-year decrease in a decade, researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

The decline is outlined in the annual abortion surveillance data for the year 2009, the latest available. It was published on Wednesday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

About 18% of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion, the CDC noted. Factors from the availability of abortion providers, state laws, the general economy and access to health services including contraception, can all influence the abortion rate, according to the CDC. An important way to reduce abortions is to eliminate unwanted pregnancies.

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“Despite these multiple influences, given that unintended pregnancy precedes nearly all abortions, efforts to reduce the incidence of abortion need to focus on helping women avoid pregnancies that they do not desire,” the survey states. “Providing women and men with the knowledge and resources necessary to make decisions about their sexual behavior and use of contraception can help them avoid unintended pregnancies.”

The CDC has been reporting annually on the number and rate of abortions since 1969. The annual numbers are based on voluntary reports from states and some other municipalities. A few states, such as California, which is the most populous, do not report. That explains why the CDC said there were about 785,000 abortions in 2009, while other estimates put the number at more than 1 million.

To make comparisons possible, the CDC said it used the data from 43 states and two cities that have been reporting the numbers each year for 10 years. Those areas account for 772,630 abortions in 2009, or about 98.5% of the total reported to the federal agency.

The abortion rate for 2009 was 15.1 abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing years, defined as 15 to 44 years old. The abortion ratio was 227 abortions per 1,000 live births. Those numbers represent a 5% decrease in the total number and rate of abortions from 2008 and  the largest single-year drop during the decade that began in 2000. There was a 2% drop in one year in the abortion ratio, the CDC said.

From 2000 to 2009, the total number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions decreased 6%, 7%, and 8%, respectively, to the lowest levels at the end of the decade, it said.

Mississippi had the lowest abortion rate, at 4 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age. The state also had only a couple of abortion providers and has the nation's highest teen birthrate. New York, second to California in number of abortion providers, had the highest abortion rate, about eight times that of Mississippi.

White women had the lowest abortion rate, at about 8.5 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, while the rate for African American women was four times larger. Latinas’ abortion rate was about 19 per 1,000 women of child-bearing years.

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Video: Watch the World's Oldest Digital Computer Get a Reboot

It runs using gas-filled tubes, mechanical relays, and paper tape. It’s a giant, and it’s slow. But it runs, dammit.

On Tuesday, volunteers at Britain’s National Museum of Computing rebooted the Harwell Dekatron — a 2.5-metric-ton monster from the early 1950s — making it the oldest working digital computer in existence.

It took about half an hour to warm the machine up. Then the volunteers — who’d spent the past two-and-a-half years rebuilding the machine — fed in a program via paper tape. Gas-powered tubes lit up. There was some clicking and clunking. Lights flashed. And then the 61-year-old printer typed out the answer to a simple multiplication problem — its first job since the 1970s.

Two of the Dekatron’s original designers and a few of its former operators were on-hand yesterday at the National Museum of Computing’s Bletchley Park home to catch the reboot. “The machine worked perfectly,” says Kevin Murrell, who’s led the restoration effort.

The machine was built in 1951, and it served for six years as a number-cruncher for the U.K.’s main atomic research facility at Harwell. “This was used in the very early days of modeling atomic power plants,” Murrell says. It could do complex equations flawlessly, at about the speed of two mathematicians armed with mechanical calculators.

In 1957, the giant computer was shipped of to the nearby Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College, where it served as a comp-sci teaching tool for a couple of more decades. That’s where it picked up the name the WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell). Then, in 1973, the Guinness Book of World Records proclaimed it the world’s most durable computer. It was eventually mothballed in a museum.

About three years ago, Kevin Murrell was looking through photos of computer components the National Museum of Computing had in storage. Something popped out. “In the corner of one picture was a little control panel,” he remembers. “I looked at this an thought I know this control panel. That’s the machine I remembered from all those years ago.”

Amazingly, about 95 percent of the machine was still in the collection. So after a few years of cleaning the machine’s 4,000 connectors, and 828 Dekatron tubes, rewiring and repairing power supplies, the historic computer was good to go.

It uses gas-filled Dekatron counting tubes instead of the transistors you’d find in modern computers. As the six-person restoration team discovered, these tubes held up amazingly well after more than 60 years.

The clear tubes store values in one of 10 cathodes, grouped in a circle around a central node, so you can actually see what’s in memory. This combined with the Dekatron’s plodding pace, makes it a remarkable computer teaching tool, Murrell says.

“You can look at the memory location and say, ‘Yes, that contains the number three.’”

Watch the Harwell Dekatron in action here:

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Tom Hanks, Will Farrell offer custom recordings

NEW YORK (AP) — Imagine having William Shatner supply your outgoing voicemail message. Or maybe you’d prefer Morgan Freeman coolly telling callers to wait for the beep. Or perhaps having Betty White joke around is more your speed.

All it takes is $ 299 and some luck.

The advocacy group Autism Speaks is offering custom-recorded messages from those celebrities as well as Will Ferrell, Carrie Fisher, Tom Hanks, Derek Jeter, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart and Ed Asner.

From Dec. 3 to Dec. 9, a limited number of 20-second long MP3 messages will be recorded by each celebrity on a first-come, first-served basis for fans to do with as they wish. All requests must be of the PG variety.

Asner, the curmudgeonly Emmy Award winner of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant,” dreamed up the unusual fundraiser with his son Matt, who works for Autism Speaks.

“I think people will get a charge out of it,” says Asner, who is currently on Broadway in the play “Grace.” ”I’ll probably say, ‘What are you wearing?’ Or, ‘Take it off.’ Something like that.”

All proceeds will support autism research and advocacy efforts.

If he could get a message from one of the other stars participating, which would Asner want?

“I’m awfully stuck on Will Ferrell, having been subjected to him in ‘Elf,’” Asner says. “But they’re all such standouts — Patrick Stewart, Leonard Nimoy, Shatner. The list doesn’t stop. Even Betty White,” he adds about his “MTM” co-star. “She’s still got some good left in her.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ecstasy Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Shows Promise

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is financing research into the drug Ecstasy.

Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it.

The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes.

“I feel survivor’s guilt, both for coming back from Iraq alive and now for having had a chance to do this therapy,” said Anthony, a 25-year-old living near Charleston, S.C., who asked that his last name not be used because of the stigma of taking the drug. “I’m a different person because of it.”

In a paper posted online Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, the husband-and-wife team offering the treatment — which combines psychotherapy with a dose of MDMA — write that they found 15 of 21 people who recovered from severe post-traumatic stress in the therapy in the early 2000s reported minor to virtually no symptoms today. Many said they have received other kinds of therapy since then, but not with MDMA.

The Mithoefers — he is a psychiatrist and she is a nurse — collaborated on the study with researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The patients in this group included mostly rape victims, and experts familiar with the work cautioned that it was preliminary, based on small numbers, and its applicability to war trauma entirely unknown. A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense said the military was not involved in any research of MDMA.

But given the scarcity of good treatments for post-traumatic stress, “there is a tremendous need to study novel medications,” including MDMA, said Dr. John H. Krystal, chairman of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

The study is the first long-term test to suggest that psychiatrists’ tentative interest in hallucinogens and other recreational drugs — which have been taboo since the 1960s — could pay off. And news that the Mithoefers are beginning to test the drug in veterans is out, in the military press and on veterans’ blogs. “We’ve had more than 250 vets call us,” Dr. Mithoefer said. “There’s a long waiting list, we wish we could enroll them all.”

The couple, working with other researchers, will treat no more than 24 veterans with the therapy, following Food and Drug Administration protocols for testing an experimental drug; MDMA is not approved for any medical uses.

A handful of similar experiments using MDMA, LSD or marijuana are now in the works in Switzerland, Israel and Britain, as well as in this country. Both military and civilian researchers are watching closely. So far, the research has been largely supported by nonprofit groups.

“When it comes to the health and well-being of those who serve, we should leave our politics at the door and not be afraid to follow the data,” said Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist who recently retired from the Army. “There’s now an evidence base for this MDMA therapy and a plausible story about what may be going on in the brain to account for the effects.”

In interviews, two people who have had the therapy — one, Anthony, currently in the veterans study, and another who received the therapy independently — said that MDMA produced a mental sweet spot that allowed them to feel and talk about their trauma without being overwhelmed by it.

“It changed my perspective on the entire experience of working at ground zero,” said Patrick, a 46-year-old living in San Francisco, who worked long hours in the rubble after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks searching in vain for survivors, as desperate family members of the victims looked on, pleading for information. “At times I had this beautiful, peaceful feeling down in the pit, that I had a purpose, that I was doing what I needed to be doing. And I began in therapy to identify with that,” rather than the guilt and sadness.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 21, 2012

An article on Tuesday about using MDMA, or Ecstasy, in combination with psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress described incorrectly the office arrangement that a husband-and-wife team use to conduct therapy sessions using MDMA. The couple, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, hold the sessions in an office in a converted house; they do not conduct the sessions in their home office. And because of an editing error, an accompanying picture carried an incorrect credit. The photograph of the Mithoefers was taken by Hunter McRae, not by Gretchen Ertl.

Read More..

A Retailer, Eileen Fisher, Shakes Off Storm’s Impact to Reopen

Richard Perry/The New York Times

For Eileen Fisher, the storm was the biggest blow to her company's operations since she opened it in 1984.

IRVINGTON, N.Y. — Eileen Fisher had no time to spare. For her clothing stores to be up and running for Thanksgiving weekend, and her many retail clients stocked for the holiday rush, her company’s response to Hurricane Sandy would need to be close to flawless.

Eileen Fisher

The flooding from Hurricane Sandy decimated an Eileen Fisher store in Irvington, N.Y., and forced the company to close its headquarters there.

And it was.

All but one of the company’s 58 stores are open, and retailers like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s have Ms. Fisher’s latest designs on their racks. On a recent afternoon, aside from its cramped quarters, there was no sign of the storm on the second floor of the Eileen Fisher headquarters here, 20 miles north of Manhattan. Phones were ringing, online orders were being processed and Ms. Fisher was at her desk.

But step downstairs, where work crews were sawing off the bottom part of walls, removing mold-ridden desks and pulling up drenched carpet, and the magnitude of the last month’s miracle was hard to dismiss.

“It was a mess,” Ms. Fisher said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Hurricane Sandy hurt retailers large and small. It closed airports, ports and roads, jamming merchandise at critical shipping times. More than a third of stores in the Northeast closed for at least a day, according to the research firm RetailNext. Macy’s has said that the storm delayed sales. Target said November started off choppily, and a Kohl’s store in Brooklyn will be closed at least through January.

For Eileen Fisher, started by Ms. Fisher in 1984, the storm was the biggest blow to operations ever. It decimated a store here and closed her headquarters, her Manhattan design center and her warehouse in Secaucus, N.J. For smaller retailers — Eileen Fisher expects about $350 million in revenue this year — a week or two of closed offices, stores and warehouses in early November could be ruinous.

Recovery was both an urgent and daunting task. A broad insurance policy helped a lot. So did some planning and a good amount of luck. As did an almost out-of-body detachment on executives’ parts to see past the emotion of sewage-soaked shirts and stained rolls of fabric to the prize of reopening a ravaged business.

Even the cash in the register at the Irvington store had to be taken home and blown dry. Almost $1.5 million, 12 Dumpsters and eight moving-truck-size mobile storage units of damaged goods later, Eileen Fisher was — for the most part — back.

“It was just stuff,” Ms. Fisher said.

Perils of a New Location

Ms. Fisher moved her headquarters to Irvington 20 years ago, choosing a brick building that was just a couple of yards from the Hudson River. It reminded her of the TriBeCa location where she had started the business, she said, and who doesn’t get inspiration from water?

Now that inspiration had become a liability. On a recent sunny day, the Hudson seemed calm and threatless, a cool gray-brown river about 10 feet below its banks. But on the night of the storm, the river rose over a barrier and stampeded north, churning through buildings “like a washing machine,” said Peter Joslin, the company’s facilities manager.

Mr. Joslin is from the Midwest, and he’s seen his fair share of river flooding, including last year, when a corner of the building took on water during Hurricane Irene. In the week before Sandy hit on Monday, Oct. 29, he was watching the weather forecasts, but, as he says, “we’re pretty laid back down here.”

Then, on the Friday before the storm, he received an e-mail from his predecessor in the job. It contained just four words: “Get out them sandbags.”

“That started to freak me out,” Mr. Joslin said.

He called the owner of a remediation company that had done work for Eileen Fisher in the past and obtained a promise that if anything went wrong, the company would be on site within two hours. He then called a moving company to see if it could remove some important files and other valuables, like $20,000 copiers. The moving company was already booked.

Employees worked through the weekend, piling sandbags three high along the building, encasing the second floor of headquarters in plastic in case the roof leaked and caulking windows. The storm struck Monday night.

Assessing the Damage

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Feds charge former hedge fund manager in big insider-trading case

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged a former hedge fund portfolio manager with securities fraud in connection with what they said was the most lucrative insider-trading case ever prosecuted.

In complaints filed in New York, authorities said investment advisors and hedge funds made more than $276 million in illegal profits or avoided losses by trading before the announcement in 2008 of negative results from clinical trials for an Alzheimer's disease drug being developed by Elan Corp. and Wyeth.

Prosecutors charged Mathew Martoma, a former portfolio manager at CR Intrinsic, an unregistered investment adviser, with securities fraud for allegedly illegally using information about the clinical trial results that he obtained from a neurologist at a hospital involved in the testing.

The criminal complaint did not name the neurologist, which it said was a cooperating witness in the case.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a a related civil suit Tuesday against Martoma, CR Intrinsic and Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. The SEC suit said Gilman was chairman of the safety monitoring committee overseeing the clinical trials of the Alzheimer's drug.

Martoma met Gilman some time between 2006 and 2008 through paid consultations, the SEC complaint says. "During these consultations, Gilman provided Martoma with material, nonpublic information about the ongoing trial," the SEC complaint said.

In mid-July 2008, "Gilman provided Martoma with the actual, detailed results of the clinical trial" before an official announcement on July 29, 2008, the SEC said.

The FBI, SEC and U.S. attorney's office in New York scheduled a 12:30 p.m. EST news conference to discuss the case.

"The charges unsealed today describe cheating coming and going – specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side, on a scale that has no historical precedent," said Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for Manhattan.  "As alleged, by cultivating and corrupting a doctor with access to secret drug data, Mathew Martoma and his hedge fund benefited from what might be the most lucrative inside tip of all time."

Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.

Also:

Senate moves insider trading bill to Obama's desk.

Baseball star Eddie Murray settles insider-trading investigation.

Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta guilty of insider trading.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/17/business/la-fi-sec-murray-20120818

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Hacker Found Guilty of Breaching AT&T Site to Obtain iPad Customer Data

A hacker charged with federal crimes for obtaining the personal data of more than 100,000 iPad owners from AT&T’s website was found guilty on Tuesday.

Andrew Auernheimer, 26, of Fayetteville, Arkansas, was found guilty in federal court in New Jersey of one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.

Auernheimer and Daniel Spitler, 26, of San Francisco, California, were charged last year after the two discovered a hole in AT&T’s web site in 2010 that allowed anyone to obtain the e-mail address and ICC-ID of iPad users. The ICC-ID is a unique identifier that’s used to authenticate the SIM card in a customer’s iPad to AT&T’s network.

The iPad was released by Apple in April 2010. AT&T provided internet access for some iPad owners through its 3G wireless network, but customers had to provide AT&T with personal data when opening their accounts, including their e-mail address. AT&T linked the user’s email address to the ICC-ID, and each time the user accessed the AT&T web site, the site recognized the ICC-ID and displayed the user’s email address.

Aurnheimer and Spitler discovered that the site would leak email addresses to anyone who provided it with a ICC-ID. So the two wrote a script – which they dubbed the “iPad 3G Account Slurper” — to mimic the behavior of numerous iPads contacting the web site in order to harvest the email addresses of iPad users.

According to authorities, they obtained the ICC-ID and email address for about 120,000 iPad users, including dozens of elite iPad early adopters such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, anchorwoman Diane Sawyer of ABC News, New York Times CEO Janet Robinson and Col. William Eldredge, commander of the 28th Operations Group at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, as well as dozens of people at NASA, the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other government offices.

The two contacted the Gawker web site to report the hole, a practice often followed by security researchers to call public attention to security holes that affect the public, and provided the web site with harvested data as proof of the vulnerability. Gawker reported at the time that the vulnerability was discovered by a group calling itself Goatse Security.

AT&T maintained that the two did not contact it directly about the vulnerability and learned about the problem only from a “business customer.”

Auernheimer later sent an e-mail to the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey, blaming AT&T for exposing customer data, authorities say.

“AT&T needs to be held accountable for their insecure infrastructure as a public utility and we must defend the rights of consumers, over the rights of shareholders,” he wrote, according to prosecutors. ”I advise you to discuss this matter with your family, your friends, victims of crimes you have prosecuted, and your teachers for they are the people who would have been harmed had AT&T been allowed to silently bury their negligent endangerment of United States infrastructure.”

But prosecutors say his interest went beyond concern about the security of customer data.

According to the criminal complaint, a confidential informant helped federal authorities make their case against the two defendants by providing them with 150 pages of chat logs from an IRC channel where, prosecutors said, Spitler and Auernheimer admitted conducting the breach to tarnish AT&T’s reputation and promote themselves and Goatse Security.

Spitler: I just harvested 197 email addresses of iPad 3G subscribers there should be many more … weev: did you see my new project?

Auernheimer: no

Spitler: I’m stepping through iPad SIM ICCIDs to harvest email addresses if you use someones ICCID on the ipad service site it gives you their address

Auernheimer: loooool thats hilarious HILARIOUS oh man now this is big media news … is it scriptable? arent there SIM that spoof iccid?

Spitler: I wrote a script to generate valid iccids and it loads the site and pulls an email

Auernheimer: this could be like, a future massive phishing operation serious like this is valuable data we have a list a potential complete list of AT&T iphone subscriber emails

…

Spitler: I hit fucking oil

Auernheimer: loooool nice

Spitler: If I can get a couple thousand out of this set where can we drop this for max lols?

Auernheimer: dunno i would collect as much data as possible the minute its dropped, itll be fixed BUT valleywag i have all the gawker media people on my facecrook friends after goin to a gawker party

At one point the two discussed the legal risks of what they were doing:

Spitler: sry dunno how legal this is or if they could sue for damages

Auernheimer: absolutely may be legal risk yeah, mostly civil you absolutely could get sued to fuck

At the same time, others on the IRC chat allegedly discussed the possibility of shorting AT&T’s stock.

Pynchon: hey, just an idea delay this outing for a couple days tommorrow short some at&t stock then out them on tuesday then fill your short and profit

Rucas: LOL

Auernheimer: well i will say this it would be against the law … for ME to short the att stock but if you want to do it go nuts

Spitler: I dont have any money to invest in ATT

…

Auernheimer: if you short ATT dont let me know about it

Spitler: IM TAKIN YOU ALL DOWN WITH ME SNITCH HIGH EVERYDAY

In the wake of news stories about the breach, they allegedly discussed their failure to report the vulnerability to a “full disclosure” mailing list, as well as the opportunity to push their Goetse Security business as a result of the breach:

Nstyr: you should’ve uploaded the list to full disclosure maybe you still can

Auernheimer: no no that is potentially criminal at this point we won

Nstyr: ah

Auernheimer: we dropepd the stock price

Auernheimer: lets not like do anything else we fucking win and i get to like spin us as a legitimate security organization

Spitler pleaded guilty to the charges last year.

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“Secret Disco Revolution” Gets U.S. Release

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Screen Media Films has acquired U.S. theatrical rights to the documentary “Secret Disco Revolution,” featuring interviews with many 70′s music icons, including Gloria Gaynor, The Village People, and Kool and the Gang.

ScreenMedia plans a June 2013 U.S. theatrical run of the documentary, the company announced Monday.

Written, directed, and produced by Kastner, the film looks into the disco movement and many of its key figures.

“For anyone that grew up with disco this film will transport you back in time while filling in the blanks to what you didn’t even realize was happening around you,” said Suzanne Blech, president of Screen Media Films.

“If you weren’t around at the time to get caught up in the disco craze, the music and the moves will make you want to get up and dance,” Blech said.

Entertainment One Films International (eOne) has also sold the film to a number of other territories, including Japan (Kadokawa), Italy (Sky Arts) and Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France, all through ZDF Arte.

The Screen Media deal was negotiated by Blech and Charlotte Mickie from eOne, along with Andrew Herwitz from The Film Sales Company, on behalf of the filmmakers.

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ecstasy Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Shows Promise

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is financing research into the drug Ecstasy.

Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it.

The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes.

“I feel survivor’s guilt, both for coming back from Iraq alive and now for having had a chance to do this therapy,” said Anthony, a 25-year-old living near Charleston, S.C., who asked that his last name not be used because of the stigma of taking the drug. “I’m a different person because of it.”

In a paper posted online Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, the husband-and-wife team offering the treatment — which combines psychotherapy with a dose of MDMA — write that they found 15 of 21 people who recovered from severe post-traumatic stress in the therapy in the early 2000s reported minor to virtually no symptoms today. Many said they have received other kinds of therapy since then, but not with MDMA.

The Mithoefers — he is a psychiatrist and she is a nurse — collaborated on the study with researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The patients in this group included mostly rape victims, and experts familiar with the work cautioned that it was preliminary, based on small numbers, and its applicability to war trauma entirely unknown. A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense said the military was not involved in any research of MDMA.

But given the scarcity of good treatments for post-traumatic stress, “there is a tremendous need to study novel medications,” including MDMA, said Dr. John H. Krystal, chairman of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

The study is the first long-term test to suggest that psychiatrists’ tentative interest in hallucinogens and other recreational drugs — which have been taboo since the 1960s — could pay off. And news that the Mithoefers are beginning to test the drug in veterans is out, in the military press and on veterans’ blogs. “We’ve had more than 250 vets call us,” Dr. Mithoefer said. “There’s a long waiting list, we wish we could enroll them all.”

The couple, working with other researchers, will treat no more than 24 veterans with the therapy, following Food and Drug Administration protocols for testing an experimental drug; MDMA is not approved for any medical uses.

A handful of similar experiments using MDMA, LSD or marijuana are now in the works in Switzerland, Israel and Britain, as well as in this country. Both military and civilian researchers are watching closely. So far, the research has been largely supported by nonprofit groups.

“When it comes to the health and well-being of those who serve, we should leave our politics at the door and not be afraid to follow the data,” said Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist who recently retired from the Army. “There’s now an evidence base for this MDMA therapy and a plausible story about what may be going on in the brain to account for the effects.”

In interviews, two people who have had the therapy — one, Anthony, currently in the veterans study, and another who received the therapy independently — said that MDMA produced a mental sweet spot that allowed them to feel and talk about their trauma without being overwhelmed by it.

“It changed my perspective on the entire experience of working at ground zero,” said Patrick, a 46-year-old living in San Francisco, who worked long hours in the rubble after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks searching in vain for survivors, as desperate family members of the victims looked on, pleading for information. “At times I had this beautiful, peaceful feeling down in the pit, that I had a purpose, that I was doing what I needed to be doing. And I began in therapy to identify with that,” rather than the guilt and sadness.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article described incorrectly the office arrangement the Mithoefers use to conduct therapy sessions using MDMA. They hold the sessions in an office in a converted house, but they do not conduct the sessions in their home office.

Read More..

DealBook: Latest Slip for H.P. Forces a New Write-Down

Hewlett-Packard‘s already troubled history with deal-making just got worse.

The technology giant said on Tuesday that it had taken an $8.8 billion accounting charge, in part related to accounting problems at Autonomy, the British software company it bought for $10 billion last year. The announcement comes just one quarter after another large write-down by H.P. in relation to Electronic Data Systems, which itself follows a string of deal-making missteps by the company.

“I’m speechless,” said Brian Marshall, an analyst at the ISI Group, which downgraded H.P. to “neutral” from “buy” following the news on Tuesday.

The charge contributed to a quarterly loss of $6.9 billion for H.P., compared with a $200 million profit in the quarter a year earlier. H.P. said it had discovered “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” at Automony that took place prior to the acquisition.

The company’s shares fell more than 11 percent on Tuesday to around $11.74.

The latest setback comes as H.P. has struggled to revive its business. For years, H.P. has turned to deal-making to help it grow, buying of E.D.S., Palm and Compaq. Since 2001, the company has spent at least $67 billion on acquisitions, according to Robert W. Baird & Company. That’s more than H.P.’s current market capitalization of about $23.4 billion.

“If you think about the companies they’ve acquired over the last several years,” Mr. Marshall said, “it’s just unbelievable how much value has been destroyed.”

In August, H.P. said it would take an $8 billion charge related to E.D.S., which it acquired for $13.9 billion four years earlier. The business, which provides consulting services to enterprise clients, had been losing ground to rivals.

Last year, H.P. announced a $1.7 billion charge when it said it would close its webOS device business — just a year after picking up the handset maker Palm for $1.2 billion.

The deal-making engine, however, has recently slowed as its cash pile has dwindle. The company reported about $11.3 billion of cash in the recent quarter. While that an improvement over the quarter last year, it is lower than the $13 billion of cash in 2009.

The takeover of Autonomy was criticized as too expensive when it was announced in the summer of 2011. Léo Apotheker, the chief executive at the time, soon resigned. He was replaced by Meg Whitman, a former head of eBay.

Ms. Whitman said on Tuesday that the company was “starting to see progress in key areas.” The company said in a statement that it remained “100 percent committed” to Autonomy, despite being “extremely disappointed” by its findings.

Some analysts had been skeptical of Autonomy before Tuesday’s announcement. But the size of the write-down was largely unexpected. And the language H.P. used — “improprieties” and “misrepresentations” — came as a surprise.

“That’s not something I expected to hear,” said Jayson Noland, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Company.

The ISI analyst, Mr. Marshall, described the company as being in “free fall.”

“There has been perhaps irreparable damage to the franchise,” Mr. Marshall said. “A lot of people in the tech industry are pretty sad about that.”

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