Armstrong admits doping: 'I'm a flawed character'

CHICAGO (AP) — He did it. He finally admitted it. Lance Armstrong doped.

He was light on the details and didn't name names. He mused that he might not have been caught if not for his comeback in 2009. And he was certain his "fate was sealed" when longtime friend, training partner and trusted lieutenant George Hincapie, who was along for the ride on all seven of Armstrong's Tour de France wins from 1999-2005, was forced to give him up to anti-doping authorities.

But right from the start and more than two dozen times during the first of a two-part interview Thursday night with Oprah Winfrey on her OWN network, the disgraced former cycling champion acknowledged what he had lied about repeatedly for years, and what had been one of the worst-kept secrets for the better part of a week: He was the ringleader of an elaborate doping scheme on a U.S. Postal Service team that swept him to the top of the podium at the Tour de France time after time.

"I'm a flawed character," he said.

Did it feel wrong?

"No," Armstrong replied. "Scary."

"Did you feel bad about it?" Winfrey pressed him.

"No," he said. "Even scarier."

"Did you feel in any way that you were cheating?"

"No," Armstrong paused. "Scariest."

"I went and looked up the definition of cheat," he added a moment later. "And the definition is to gain an advantage on a rival or foe. I didn't view it that way. I viewed it as a level playing field."

Wearing a blue blazer and open-neck shirt, Armstrong was direct and matter-of-fact, neither pained nor defensive. He looked straight ahead. There were no tears and very few laughs.

He dodged few questions and refused to implicate anyone else, even as he said it was humanly impossible to win seven straight Tours without doping.

"I'm not comfortable talking about other people," Armstrong said. "I don't want to accuse anybody."

Whether his televised confession will help or hurt Armstrong's bruised reputation and his already-tenuous defense in at least two pending lawsuits, and possibly a third, remains to be seen. Either way, a story that seemed too good to be true — cancer survivor returns to win one of sport's most grueling events seven times in a row — was revealed to be just that.

"This story was so perfect for so long. It's this myth, this perfect story, and it wasn't true," he said.

Winfrey got right to the point when the interview began, asking for yes-or-no answers to five questions.

Did Armstrong take banned substances? "Yes."

Did that include the blood-booster EPO? "Yes."

Did he do blood doping and use transfusions? "Yes."

Did he use testosterone, cortisone and human growth hormone? "Yes."

Did he take banned substances or blood dope in all his Tour wins? "Yes."

In his climb to the top, Armstrong cast aside teammates who questioned his tactics, yet swore he raced clean and tried to silence anyone who said otherwise. Ruthless and rich enough to settle any score, no place seemed beyond his reach — courtrooms, the court of public opinion, even along the roads of his sport's most prestigious race.

That relentless pursuit was one of the things that Armstrong said he regretted most.

"I deserve this," he said twice.

"It's a major flaw, and it's a guy who expected to get whatever he wanted and to control every outcome. And it's inexcusable. And when I say there are people who will hear this and never forgive me, I understand that. I do. ...

"That defiance, that attitude, that arrogance, you cannot deny it."

Armstrong said he started doping in mid-1990s but didn't when he finished third in his comeback attempt.

Anti-doping officials have said nothing short of a confession under oath — "not talking to a talk-show host," is how World Anti-Doping Agency director general David Howman put it — could prompt a reconsideration of Armstrong's lifetime ban from sanctioned events.

He's also had discussions with officials at the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, whose 1,000-page report in October included testimony from nearly a dozen former teammates and led to stripping Armstrong of his Tour titles. Shortly after, he lost nearly all his endorsements, was forced to walk away from the Livestrong cancer charity he founded in 1997, and just this week was stripped of his bronze medal from the 2000 Olympics.

Armstrong could provide information that might get his ban reduced to eight years. By then, he would be 49. He returned to triathlons, where he began his professional career as a teenager, after retiring from cycling in 2011, and has told people he's desperate to get back.

Initial reaction from anti-doping officials ranged from hostile to cool.

WADA president John Fahey derided Armstrong's defense that he doped to create "a level playing field" as "a convenient way of justifying what he did — a fraud."

"He was wrong, he cheated and there was no excuse for what he did," Fahey said by telephone in Australia.

If Armstrong "was looking for redemption," Fahey added, "he didn't succeed in getting that."

USADA chief Travis Tygart, who pursued the case against Armstrong when others had stopped, said the cyclist's confession was just a start.

"Tonight, Lance Armstrong finally acknowledged that his cycling career was built on a powerful combination of doping and deceit," Tygart said. "His admission that he doped throughout his career is a small step in the right direction. But if he is sincere in his desire to correct his past mistakes, he will testify under oath about the full extent of his doping activities."

Livestrong issued a statement that said the charity was "disappointed by the news that Lance Armstrong misled people during and after his cycling career, including us."

"Earlier this week, Lance apologized to our staff and we accepted his apology in order to move on and chart a strong, independent course," it said.

The interview revealed very few details about Armstrong's performance-enhancing regimen that would surprise anti-doping officials.

What he called "my cocktail" contained the steroid testosterone and the blood-booster erythropoetein, or EPO, "but not a lot," Armstrong said. That was on top of blood-doping, which involved removing his own blood and weeks later re-injecting it into his system.

All of it was designed to build strength and endurance, but it became so routine that Armstrong described it as "like saying we have to have air in our tires or water in our bottles."

"That was, in my view, part of the job," he said.

Armstrong was evasive, or begged off entirely, when Winfrey tried to connect his use to others who aided or abetted the performance-enhancing scheme on the USPS team

When she asked him about Italian doctor Michele Ferrari, who was implicated in doping-related scrapes and has also been banned from cycling for life, Armstrong replied, "It's hard to talk about some of these things and not mention names. There are people in this story, they're good people and we've all made mistakes ... they're not monsters, not toxic and not evil, and I viewed Michele Ferrari as a good man and smart man and still do."

But that's nearly all Armstrong would say about the physician that some reports have suggested educated the cyclist about doping and looked after other aspects of his training program.

He was almost as reluctant to discuss claims by former teammates Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis that Armstrong told them, separately, that he tested positive during the 2001 Tour de Suisse and conspired with officials of the International Cycling Union officials to cover it up — in exchange for a donation.

"That story wasn't true. There was no positive test, no paying off of the labs. There was no secret meeting with the lab director," he said.

Winfrey pressed him again, asking if the money he donated wasn't part of a tit-for-tat agreement, "Why make it?"

"Because they asked me to," Armstrong began.

"This is impossible for me to answer and have anybody believe it," he said. "It was not in exchange for any cover-up. ... I have every incentive here to tell you yes."

Finally, he summed up the entire episode this way: "I was retired. ... They needed money."

Ultimately, though, it was Landis who did the most damage to Armstrong's story. Landis was stripped of the 2006 Tour title after testing positive and wound up on the sport's fringes looking for work. Armstrong said his former teammate threatened to release potentially destructive videos if he wasn't given a spot on the team. That was in 2009, when Armstrong returned to the Tour after four years off.

Winfrey asked whether Landis' decision to talk was "the tipping point."

"I'd agree with that. I might back it up a little and talk about the comeback. I think the comeback didn't sit well with Floyd," Armstrong recalled.

"Do you regret now coming back?"

"I do. We wouldn't be sitting here if I didn't come back," he said.

The closest Armstrong came to contrition was when Winfrey asked him about his apologies in recent days, notably to former teammate Frankie Andreu, who struggled to find work in cycling after Armstrong dropped him from the USPS team, as well as his wife, Betsy. Armstrong said she was jealous of his success, and invented stories about his doping as part of a long-running vendetta.

"Have you made peace?" Winfrey asked.

"No," Armstrong replied, "because they've been hurt too badly, and a 40-minute (phone) conversation isn't enough."

He also called London Sunday Times reporter David Walsh as well as Emma O'Reilly, who worked as a masseuse for the USPS team and later provided considerable material for a critical book Walsh wrote about Armstrong and his role in cycling's doping culture.

Armstrong subsequently sued for libel in Britain and won a $500,000 judgment against the newspaper, which is now suing to get the money back. Armstrong was, if anything, even more vicious in the way he went after O'Reilly. He intimated she was let go from the Postal team because she seemed more interested in personal relationships than professional ones.

"What do you want to say about Emma O'Reilly?" Winfrey asked.

"She, she's one of these people that I have to apologize to. She's one of these people that got run over, got bullied."

"You sued her?"

"To be honest, Oprah, we sued so many people I don't even," Armstrong said, then paused, "I'm sure we did."

Near the end of the first interview installment, Winfrey asked about a federal investigation of Armstrong that was dropped by the Justice Department without charges.

"When they dropped the case, did you think: 'Now, finally over, done, victory'?"

Armstrong looked up. He exhaled.

"It's hard to define victory," he said. "But I thought I was out of the woods."

___

AP Sports Writers Jim Vertuno in Austin, Texas, Eddie Pells in Denver and Dennis Passa in Melbourne contributed to this report.

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The Neediest Cases: Medical Bills Crush Brooklyn Man’s Hope of Retiring

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

John Concepcion and his wife, Maria, in their home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. They are awaiting even more medical bills.

Retirement was just about a year away, or so John Concepcion thought, when a sudden health crisis put his plans in doubt.

For the past 100 years, The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. To celebrate the 101st campaign, an article will appear daily through Jan. 25. Each profile will illustrate the difference that even a modest amount of money can make in easing the struggles of the poor.

Last year donors contributed $7,003,854, which was distributed to those in need through seven New York charities.

2012-13 Campaign

Previously recorded:

$6,865,501

Recorded Wed.:

16,711

*Total:

$6,882,212

Last year to date:

$6,118,740

*Includes $1,511,814 contributed to the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

“I get paralyzed, I can’t breathe,” he said of the muscle spasms he now has regularly. “It feels like something’s going to bust out of me.”

Severe abdominal pain is not the only, or even the worst, reminder of the major surgery Mr. Concepcion, 62, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, underwent in June. He and his wife of 36 years, Maria, are now faced with medical bills that are so high, Ms. Concepcion said she felt faint when she saw them.

Mr. Concepcion, who is superintendent of the apartment building where he lives, began having back pain last January that doctors first believed was the result of gallstones. In March, an endoscopy showed that tumors had grown throughout his digestive system. The tumors were not malignant, but an operation was required to remove them, and surgeons had to essentially reroute Mr. Concepcion’s entire digestive tract. They removed his gall bladder, as well as parts of his pancreas, bile ducts, intestines and stomach, he said.

The operation was a success, but then came the bills.

“I told my friend: are you aware that if you have a major operation, you’re going to lose your house?” Ms. Concepcion said.

The couple has since received doctors’ bills of more than $250,000, which does not include the cost of his seven-day stay at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. Mr. Concepcion has worked in the apartment building since 1993 and has been insured through his union.

The couple are in an anxious holding pattern as they wait to find out just what, depending on their policy’s limits, will be covered. Even with financial assistance from Beth Israel, which approved a 70 percent discount for the Concepcions on the hospital charges, the couple has no idea how the doctors’ and surgical fees will be covered.

“My son said, boy he saved your life, Dad, but look at the bill he sent to you,” Ms.  Concepcion said in reference to the surgeon’s statements. “You’ll be dead before you pay it off.”

When the Concepcions first acquired their insurance, they were in good health, but now both have serious medical issues — Ms. Concepcion, 54, has emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Mr. Concepcion has diabetes. They now spend close to $800 a month on prescriptions.

Mr. Concepcion, the family’s primary wage earner, makes $866 a week at his job. The couple had planned for Mr. Concepcion to retire sometime this year, begin collecting a pension and, after getting their finances in order, leave the superintendent’s apartment, as required by the landlord, and try to find a new home. “That’s all out of the question now,” Ms. Concepcion said. Mr. Concepcion said he now planned to continue working indefinitely.

Ms. Concepcion has organized every bill and medical statement into bulging folders, and said she had spent hours on the phone trying to negotiate with providers. She is still awaiting the rest of the bills.

On one of those bills, Ms. Concepcion said, she spotted a telephone number for people seeking help with medical costs. The number was for Community Health Advocates, a health insurance consumer assistance program and a unit of Community Service Society, one of the organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The society drew $2,120 from the fund so the Concepcions could pay some of their medical bills, and the health advocates helped them obtain the discount from the hospital.

Neither one knows what the next step will be, however, and the stress has been eating at them.

“How do we get out of this?” Mr. Concepcion asked. “There is no way out. Here I am trying to save to retire. They’re going to put me in the street.”

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DealBook: Michael Dell’s Empire in a Buyout Spotlight

The computer empire of Michael S. Dell spreads across a campus of low-slung buildings in Round Rock, Tex.

But his financial empire — estimated at $16 billion — occupies the 21st floor of a dark glass skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

It is there that MSD Capital, started by Mr. Dell 15 years ago to manage his fortune, has quietly built a reputation as one of the smartest investors on Wall Street. By amassing a prodigious portfolio of stocks, companies, real estate and timberland, Mr. Dell has reduced his exposure to the volatile technology sector and branched out into businesses as diverse as dentistry and landscaping.

Now, Mr. Dell is on the verge of making one of the biggest investments of his life. The 47-year-old billionaire and his private equity backers are locked in talks to acquire Dell, the company he started with $1,000 as a teenager three decades ago, in a leveraged buyout worth more than $20 billion. MSD could play a role in the Dell takeover, according to people briefed on the deal.

The private equity firm Silver Lake has been in negotiations to join with Mr. Dell on a transaction, along with other potential partners like wealthy Asian investors or foreign funds. Mr. Dell would be expected to roll his nearly 16 percent ownership of the company into the buyout, a stake valued at about $3.5 billion. He could also contribute additional personal money as part of the buyout.

That money is managed by MSD, among the more prominent so-called family offices that are set up to handle the personal investments of the wealthy. Others with large family offices include Bill Gates, whose Microsoft wealth financed the firm Cascade Investment, and New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who set up his firm, Willett Advisors, in 2010 to manage his personal and philanthropic assets.

“Some of these family offices are among the world’s most sophisticated investors and have the capital and talent to compete with the largest private equity firms and hedge funds,” said John P. Rompon, managing partner of McNally Capital, which helps structure private equity deals for family offices.

A spokesman for MSD declined to comment for this article. The buyout talks could still fall apart.

In 1998, Mr. Dell, then just 33 years old — and his company’s stock worth three times what it is today — decided to diversify his wealth and set up MSD. He staked the firm with $400 million of his own money, effectively starting his own personal money-management business.

To head the operation, Mr. Dell hired Glenn R. Fuhrman, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and John C. Phelan, a principal at ESL Investments, the hedge fund run by Edward S. Lampert. He knew both men from his previous dealings with Wall Street. Mr. Fuhrman led a group at Goldman that marketed specialized investments like private equity and real estate to wealthy families like the Dells. And Mr. Dell was an early investor in Mr. Lampert’s fund.

Mr. Fuhrman and Mr. Phelan still run MSD and preside over a staff of more than 100 overseeing Mr. Dell’s billions and the assets in his family foundation. MSD investments include a stock portfolio, with positions in the apparel company PVH, owner of the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, and DineEquity, the parent of IHOP and Applebee’s.

Among its real estate holdings are the Four Seasons Resort Maui in Hawaii and a stake in the New York-based developer Related Companies.

MSD also has investments in several private businesses, including ValleyCrest, which bills itself as the country’s largest landscape design company, and DentalOne Partners, a collection of dental practices.

Perhaps MSD’s most prominent deal came in 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, when it joined a consortium that acquired the assets of the collapsed mortgage lender IndyMac Bank from the federal government for about $13.9 billion and renamed it OneWest Bank.

The OneWest purchase has been wildly successful. Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman executive who led the OneWest deal, has said that the bank is expected to consider an initial public offering this year. An I.P.O. would generate big profits for Mr. Dell and his co-investors, according to people briefed on the deal.

Another arm of MSD makes select investments in outside hedge funds. Mr. Dell invested in the first fund raised by Silver Lake, the technology-focused private equity firm that might now become his partner in taking Dell private.
MSD’s principals have already made tidy fortunes. In 2009, Mr. Fuhrman, 47, paid $26 million for the Park Avenue apartment of the former Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard S. Fuld. Mr. Phelan, 48, and his wife, Amy, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, also live in a Park Avenue co-op and built a home in Aspen, Colo.

Both are influential players on the contemporary art scene, with ARTNews magazine last year naming each of them among the world’s top 200 collectors. MSD, too, has dabbled in the visual arts. In 2010, MSD bought an archive of vintage photos from Magnum, including portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mahatma Gandhi, and has put the collection on display at the University of Texas, Mr. Dell’s alma mater.

Just as the investment firms Rockefeller & Company (the Rockefellers, diversifying their oil fortune) and Bessemer Trust (the Phippses, using the name of the steelmaking process that formed the basis of their wealth) started out as investment vehicles for a single family, MSD has recently shown signs of morphing into a traditional money management business with clients beside Mr. Dell.

Last year, for the fourth time, an MSD affiliate raised money from outside investors when it collected about $1 billion for a stock-focused hedge fund, MSD Torchlight Partners. A 2010 fund investing in distressed European assets also manages about $1 billion. The Dell family is the anchor investor in each of the funds, according to people briefed on the investments.

MSD has largely remained below the radar, though its name emerged a decade ago in the criminal trial of the technology banker Frank Quattrone on obstruction of justice charges. Prosecutors introduced an e-mail that Mr. Fuhrman sent to Mr. Quattrone during the peak of the dot-com boom in which he pleaded for a large allotment of a popular Internet initial public offering.

“We know this is a tough one, but we wanted to ask for a little help with our Corvis allocation,” Mr. Fuhrman wrote. “We are looking forward to making you our ‘go to’ banker.”

The e-mail, which was not illegal, was meant to show the quid pro quo deals that were believed to have been struck between Mr. Quattrone and corporate chieftains like Mr. Dell — the bankers would give executives hot I.P.O.’s and the executives, in exchange, would hold out the possibility of giving business to the bankers. (Mr. Quattrone’s conviction was reversed on appeal.)

The MSD team has also shown itself to be loyal to its patron in other ways.

On the MSD Web site, in the frequently asked questions section, the firm asks and answers queries like “how many employees do you have” and “what kind of investments do you make.”

In the last question on the list, MSD asks itself, “Do you use Dell computer equipment?” The answer: “Exclusively!”

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated when an MSD affiliate raised money from outside investors for a hedge fund. It was last year, not earlier this year. The article also misstated which hedge fund and its focus. It was MSD Torchlight Partners, a stock-focused hedge fund, not MSD Energy Partners, an energy-focused hedge fund.

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Torrential Rains Paralyze Jakarta

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Torrential rains caused flooding that paralyzed much of Jakarta on Thursday, resulting in the deaths of at least four people and forcing the evacuations of tens of thousands of others.

Parts of the capital were under at least six feet of water, and even the presidential palace was not spared as waters rushed into the complex. The central business district saw water levels rise to at least 18 inches.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said Yudi Sukarno, 40, who has lived in the Bendungan Hilir neighborhood since he was a child. “There’s all this asphalt and concrete, so the water doesn’t have anywhere to go.”

Thirteen rivers run through Jakarta, but poor drainage caused by rubbish and a low water table frequently causes them to overflow. The problems have recently been exacerbated by deforestation outside the city.

In central Jakarta on Thursday, muddy torrents filled major thoroughfares as evacuees tramped through waist-deep water in one central neighborhood. A group of men balanced an air mattress with a sick elderly woman on their shoulders in an effort to get her to a hospital.

Flood walls in one neighborhood collapsed, inundating neighborhoods in east Jakarta. Residents in one area there, Kampung Melayu, were forced to the second levels of their homes and some have taken refuge on a highway overpass, while others gathered in mosques, which were filled with people escaping the floods, according to volunteers.

The Indonesian Meteorological Agency said that heavy rains are expected in the Jakarta region for the next three days.

“Because of the rain’s intensity we’ve declared an emergency situation from now until Jan. 27,” Jokowi Widodo, the governor of Jakarta, told reporters.

He also declared a school holiday for children in the most flooded parts of the city and many offices have told their employees to stay at home. The American Embassy issued a message telling people to exercise caution, saying, “Walking and driving in flooded areas can be dangerous and should be avoided if possible.”

Local news broadcasts showed images of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono standing shin deep in water that had flooded into the presidential palace.

“It’s O.K. if the palace is flooded,” Mr. Yudhoyono told reporters. “What is important is that the people are protected.”

The sluice gates upstream from Jakarta have reached record levels, according to officials at the National Disaster Management Agency. Power outages have prevented pumps from being able to drain the water from streets and houses.

Officials at the National Disaster Management Agency have encouraged residents to stay inside to reduce road congestion.

In many areas residents have filled the streets, where vendors were still preparing food and selling fruits and vegetables.

“You can’t go anywhere,” said Sigit Hardisumarjo, who was buying fried bread and hoping his home stayed dry. “It feels like we’re handicapped.”

Despite the lack of movement, Mr. Sigit said flooding was common during the rainy season. Many people in his neighborhood have elevated their houses to prepare for flooding like this.

In 2007, Jakarta saw some of the worst flooding in recent memory, with hundreds of thousands forced to flee.

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Mysterious Samsung smartphone pictured with Verizon branding

Earlier this week, a mysterious Samsung (005930) smartphone appeared on GLBenchmark’s database with the model number SCH-I425. The number fell in line with previous Verizon (VZ) devices, leading us to speculate that it could be the Stratosphere III. New images posted by Engadget on Wednesday confirmed that the handset is real, however it does not feature earlier Stratosphere devices’ signature QWERTY keyboard. The device resembles the Galaxy S III mini, although the smartphone includes four capacitive buttons rather than Samsung’s physical home key. As the benchmarks revealed, the SCH-I425 is also equipped with a 720p display, a 1.4GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 4G LTE and Android 4.1.2. While the actual screen size is unknown, it appears to be in the 4-inch range. A second image of the unannounced phone follows below.

[More from BGR: The true genius of Facebook’s Graph Search]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Manti Te'o girlfriend's death apparently a hoax

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — Not long before Notre Dame played Michigan State last fall, word spread that Fighting Irish linebacker Manti Te'o had lost his grandmother and girlfriend within hours of each other.

Te'o never missed a practice and made a season-high 12 tackles, two pass breakups and a fumble recovery in a 20-3 victory against the Spartans. His inspired play became a stirring story line for the Fighting Irish as they made a run to the national championship game behind their humble, charismatic star.

Te'o's grandmother did indeed die. His girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, never existed.

In a shocking announcement Wednesday night, Notre Dame said Te'o was duped into an online relationship with a woman whose "death" from leukemia was faked by perpetrators of an elaborate hoax. The goal of the scam wasn't clear, though Notre Dame said it used an investigative firm to dig into the details after Te'o disclosed them three weeks ago.

The hoax was disclosed hours after Deadspin.com posted a lengthy story, saying it could find no record that Kekua ever existed. The story suggests a friend of Te'o may have carried out the hoax and that the football player may have been in on it — a stunning claim against a widely admired All-American who led the most famed program in college football back to the championship game for the first time since 1988.

"This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online," Te'o said in a statement. "We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her. "

However, he stopped short of saying he had ever met her in person or correcting reports that said he had, though he did on numerous occasions talk about how special the relationship was to him.

"To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating," he said. "In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious. If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was."

Word of the hoax spread quickly and raised questions about whether the school somehow played a role in pushing the tale.

Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said at a news conference that Te'o told coaches on Dec. 26 that he had received a call from Kekua's phone number while at an awards ceremony during the first week of December.

"When he answered it, it was a person whose voice sounded like the same person he had talked to, who told him that she was, in fact, not dead. Manti was very unnerved by that, as you might imagine," Swarbrick said.

Swarbrick said the school hired investigators and their report indicated those behind the hoax were in contact with each other, discussing what they were doing.

The investigators "were able to discover online chatter among the perpetrators that was certainly the ultimate proof of this, the joy they were taking," Swarbrick said. "The casualness among themselves they were talking about what they accomplished."

Swarbrick said for Te'o "the pain was real."

"The grief was real. The affection was real," he said. "That's the nature of this sad, cruel game."

Swarbrick added: "Nothing about what I have learned has shaken my faith in Manti Te'o one iota."

Swarbrick said Notre Dame did not take the matter to the police, saying that the school left it up to Te'o and his family to do so. He added that Notre Dame did not plan to release the findings of its investigation.

"We had no idea of motive, and that was really significant to us. ... Was somebody trying to create an NCAA violation at the core of this? Was there somebody trying to impact the outcome of football games by manipulating the emotions of a key player? Was there an extortion request coming? When you match the lack of sort of detail we lacked until we got some help investigating it with the risk involved, it was clear to me until we knew more we had to just to continue to work to try to gather the facts," Swarbrick said.

The Deadspin report changed all that.

Friends and relatives of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo told Deadspin they believe he created Kekua. The website said Te'o and Tuiasosopo knew each other. Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Tuiasosopo by telephone were unsuccessful.

As for Kekua, Deadspin said she does not have a death certificate. Stanford, where she reportedly went to school, has no record of anybody by that name, the website said. Deadspin said a record search produced no obituary or funeral announcement. There is no record of her birth in the news.

There are a few Twitter and Instagram accounts registered to Lennay Kekua, but the website reported that photographs identified as Kekua online and in TV news reports are pictures from the social-media accounts of a 22-year-old California woman who is not named Lennay Kekua.

Te'o talked freely about their relationship after her supposed death and how much she meant to him.

In a story that appeared in The South Bend Tribune on Oct. 12, Manti's father, Brian, recounted an anecdote about how his son and Kekua met after Notre Dame had played at Stanford in 2009. Brian Te'o also told the newspaper that Kekua had visited Hawaii and met with his son. Brian Te'o told the AP in an interview in October that he and his wife had never met Manti's girlfriend but they had hoped to at the Wake Forest game in November. The father said he believed the relationship was just beginning to get serious when she died.

The Tribune released a statement saying: "At the Tribune, we are as stunned by these revelations as everyone else. Indeed, this season we reported the story of this fake girlfriend and her death as details were given to us by Te'o, members of his family and his coaches at Notre Dame."

The week before Notre Dame played Michigan State on Sept. 15, coach Brian Kelly told reporters when asked that Te'o's grandmother and a friend had died. He said Kekua had told Te'o not to miss a game if she died. The linebacker turned in one of his best performances of the season and his playing through heartache became a prominent theme during the Irish's undefeated regular season. He finished second in Heisman voting.

"It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother's death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life," Te'o said in his statement.

"I am enormously grateful for the support of my family, friends and Notre Dame fans throughout this year. To think that I shared with them my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been."

Te'o and the Irish lost the title game to Alabama, 42-14 on Jan. 7. He has graduated and was set to begin preparing for the NFL combine and draft at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., this week.

"Fortunately, I have many wonderful things in my life," he said in his statement, "and I'm looking forward to putting this painful experience behind me as I focus on preparing for the NFL draft."

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Some With Autism Diagnosis Can Recover, Study Finds

Doctors have long believed that disabling autistic disorders last a lifetime, but a new study has found that some children who exhibit signature symptoms of the disorder recover completely.

The study, posted online on Wednesday by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, is the largest to date of such extraordinary cases and is likely to alter the way that scientists and parents think and talk about autism, experts said.

Researchers on Wednesday cautioned against false hope. The findings suggest that the so-called autism spectrum contains a small but significant group who make big improvements in behavioral therapy for unknown, perhaps biological reasons, but that most children show much smaller gains. Doctors have no way to predict which children will do well.

Researchers have long known that between 1 and 20 percent of children given an autism diagnosis no longer qualify for one a few years or more later. They have suspected that in most cases the diagnosis was mistaken; the rate of autism diagnosis has ballooned over the past two decades, and some research suggests that it has been loosely applied.

The new study should put some of that skepticism to rest.

“This is the first solid science to address this question of possible recovery, and I think it has big implications,” said Sally Ozonoff of the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. “I know many of us as would rather have had our tooth pulled than use the word ‘recover,’ it was so unscientific. Now we can use it, though I think we need to stress that it’s rare.”

She and other experts said the findings strongly supported the value of early diagnosis and treatment.

In the study, a team led by Deborah Fein of the University of Connecticut at Storrs recruited 34 people who had been diagnosed before the age of 5 and no longer had any symptoms. They ranged in age from 8 to 21 years old and early in their development were in the higher-than-average range of the autism spectrum. The team conducted extensive testing of its own, including interviews with parents in some cases, to gauge current social and communication skills.

The debate over whether recovery is possible has simmered for decades and peaked in 1987, when the pioneering autism researcher O. Ivar Lovaas reported that 47 percent of children with the diagnosis showed full recovery after undergoing a therapy he had devised. This therapy, a behavioral approach in which increments of learned skills garner small rewards, is the basis for the most effective approach used today; still, many were skeptical and questioned his definition of recovery.

Dr. Fein and her team used standardized, widely used measures and found no differences between the group of 34 formerly diagnosed people and a group of 34 matched control subjects who had never had a diagnosis.

“They no longer qualified for the diagnosis,” said Dr. Fein, whose co-authors include researchers from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; the Institute of Living in Hartford; and the Child Mind Institute in New York. “I want to stress to parents that it’s a minority of kids who are able to do this, and no one should think they somehow missed the boat if they don’t get this outcome.”

On measures of social and communication skills, the recovered group scored significantly better than 44 peers who had a diagnosis of high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome.

Dr. Fein emphasized the importance of behavioral therapy. “These people did not just grow out of their autism,” she said. “I have been treating children for 40 years and never seen improvements like this unless therapists and parents put in years of work.”

The team plans further research to learn more about those who are able to recover. No one knows which ingredients or therapies are most effective, if any, or if there are patterns of behavior or biological markers that predict such success.

“Some children who do well become quite independent as adults but have significant anxiety and depression and are sometimes suicidal,” said Dr. Fred Volkmar, the director of the Child Study Center at the Yale University School of Medicine. There are no studies of this group, he said.

That, because of the new study, is about to change.

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State of the Art: Imagining Ho-Hum C.E.S. as an Action Movie - State of the Art

Hi boss! I’m back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. You assigned me to report on what’s new and exciting, but I have some bad news. The answer is: almost nothing.

I mean, think about it: Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook don’t even attend C.E.S.; they’d rather make their product announcements on their own schedules without being locked into this every-January thing. It’s still a big show, bigger than ever this year, with 3,200 exhibits and 150,000 attendees, but I wonder why people bother. Whose product announcement will get any press at all when it’s buried by 3,199 others?

C.E.S.’s organizers publish a daily magazine during the show that profiles new products announced there. Here are some actual examples: “Braven Expands Bluetooth Speaker Line.” “Armpocket Unveils Smartphone Cases.” “Bits Ltd. Expands Line of Surge Protectors.”

So if you want an exciting column from me, the thrills won’t come from the news of new products at C.E.S. I’ll have to spice things up another way. See what you think of this.

As he plummets toward the Nevada desert, two deafening sounds assail Daxton Blackthorne’s eardrums — the wind rushing past his ears at terminal velocity, and a deafening explosion over his head. Fumbling for his parachute cord, he’s blasted by the searing heat from the fireball that, until seconds ago, was his Cessna Citation.

For now, though, his concern isn’t the air-to-air missile that has just dispatched his jet, courtesy of the Bora Boran Mafia on his tail. It isn’t even the fact that Daxton Blackthorne is all that stands between them and the collapse of American democracy.

It’s finding a good place to land.

There! Squinting in the blinding sun, he spots an enormous chain of low-slung buildings, stretching through the bustling downtown like a sleeping cobra: the Las Vegas Convention Center.

He hits the roof of the South Hall hard — too hard. Keeping low, he scuttles across the gravel to a ventilation shaft and emerges, moments later, in a blasting cacophony of color, sound and electronics.

He hears the crash of boots behind him as his pursuers explode from the same shaft. Got to move, Daxton thinks. Detaching his ’chute, he darts among the booths, dodging clumps of buyers, reporters and electronics executives.

He weaves among the exhibits, barely noting their wares. External battery packs for phones. Car chargers for phones. Screen protectors for phones. Cases for phones.

What is this place? he thinks, pulse pounding.

Booth after booth. GPS units. Tablets. Earbuds. Bluetooth speakers. Phone cases. Row after row of Chinese manufacturers he’s never heard of. Like this one, Huwei, selling the world’s largest Android phone — the thin, shiny Ascend Mate, with a 6.1-inch screen. That’d be like talking into a cutting board, he thinks.

He bursts into the Central Hall, and the sensory overload is immediate; he pauses, gasping, to take it in. TV screens. Thousands. Screens bigger than a man. Screens stacked up to the distant ceiling. Screens brighter and louder than explosives in the morning. Sharp, Sony, Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Panasonic. The bombardment is almost as lethal as the one that took down his Cessna.

Here are OLED screens, with incredibly black blacks, vivid colors and razor-thin bodies; this LG model is only 0.16 inches thick. Panasonic and Sony each claim “the world’s largest OLED screen” — 56-inch prototypes.

Footsteps pound behind him. Too late to run. He’ll blend in. He merges into a throng of eager showgoers.

“Three-D may have been a flop,” a rep is saying. “But this year, the industry is back with an irresistible offering: 4K television. Ultra HD, we call it. You thought HDTV was sharp? Now imagine: four times as many pixels. Stunning picture quality, in stunning screen sizes.”

Daxton figures you’d have to sit pretty darned close to see any difference between HDTV and 4KTV. But never mind that — out of the corner of his eye, Daxton spots the black uniforms of his pursuers, fanning through the crowd. Play along, he thinks. “Excuse me,” he shouts in a faux French accent. “What is there to watch in 4K?”

“Unfortunately, 4K video requires too much data for today’s cable, satellite, broadcast, Blu-ray, or Internet streaming,” is the reply. “But at Sony, we’re leading the way! If you buy our 84-inch 4K television for $25,000, we’ll lend you a hard drive with 10 Sony movies on it — in gorgeous 4K.”

Daxton can think of better uses for $25,000; a jetpack would come in handy right about now. He dives into the crowd. Must. Find. Disguise.

A crowd wearing headsets is gathered before a Samsung TV. That’ll do. He grabs one; it covers both his eyes and his ears.

“You’re seeing a prototype of Samsung’s OLED dual-view technology,” the spokesman says. “This TV can display two 3-D video sources simultaneously, or four regular ones. Imagine: Your children can be playing Xbox while you watch the Super Bowl!” Daxton moves the switch on the earpiece; sure enough, the TV’s image changes accordingly, along with the audio from the tiny earpiece speakers.

But angry shouts in Tahitian are closing in. He bolts through an archipelago of audio booths, hawking celebrity headphones bearing the names of the rapper 50 Cent, the heavy-metal band Motorhead, the runner Usain Bolt, the N.F.L. quarterback Tim Tebow and the TV reality star Snooki. When did Snooki become an audiophile? he wonders.

By the time he storms into the North Hall, his lungs are screaming. He stands, panting, in a broader area populated by gleaming, polished automobiles. Here are Ford and General Motors, announcing new developer programs, open platforms for new apps that will run on their cars’ computer screens. Ford’s Sync AppLink bans games and video apps, for safety reasons. Good thinking, Daxton thinks. Wouldn’t want distracted driving.

Here are Audi and Lexus, announcing self-driving cars. Glancing at the video loop, he notes that the Audi prototype can, at this point, drive itself only through specially equipped parking garages, like the one set up at the Mandarin Oriental for a demonstration.

But on the Lexus stage, he spots something much more enticing: a car, festooned with sensors, that can actually drive itself on regular roads, much like Google’s fleet of 12 autonomous cars.

“California and Nevada have both made self-driving cars legal, with certain restrictions,” the executive on stage says. “And this Lexus LS safety-research vehicle is a pioneer. The 360-degree laser on the roof detects objects up to 230 feet away; the front camera knows if the traffic light is red or green. Side cameras, GPS and radar enhance what could someday be a safe, efficient, road-aware vehicle.”

There’s a burst of commotion from Daxton’s near right. It’s them. He vaults onto the stage. “Love the idea of self-driving cars,” Daxton tells the presenter. “But right now, I need a car I can drive myself.”

A saber blade shatters the air next to his ear. With a burst of adrenaline, he dives through the open window of the Lexus. His assailants push through the crowd and clamber after him, but he’s already powered on the car. Huddling low, he guns the engine and shifts into gear.

As a hail of bullets shatters the rear window, the Lexus arcs off the stage, plows through seven rotating shelves of phone cases, and, in a cloud of plaster and twisted beams, erupts through the wall of the convention center.

With a wry smile, Daxton adjusts his rear-view mirror just in time to see the knot of black-suited Bora Borans shaking their fists in the distance.

He brushes some safety glass off his shoulder, slips on sunglasses, and leans back into the leather seat.

“Now that’s what I call an exciting show,” he says, grinning, and he swings onto the open road for home.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 17, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a Chinese technology company. It is Huawei, not Huwei.

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Facing the French, Mali Rebels Dig In and Blend In

Joe Penney/Reuters

As France fortified its ground forces in Mali, French soldiers refueled armored personnel carriers, newly arrived from Ivory Coast, at a Bamako air base on Tuesday.

BAMAKO, Mali — In the face of fierce, all-night bombardment by the French military, Mali’s Islamist insurgents have hunkered down to fight again.

Barging into some of the mud-brick houses in the battle zone and ejecting residents, they have sought to implant themselves in the local population and add to the huge challenges facing the French military campaign to loosen their grip on Mali.

“They are in the town, almost everywhere in the town,” said Bekaye Diarra, who owns the pharmacy in Diabaly, which experienced French bombing on Tuesday but remained under the control of the insurgents. “They are installing themselves.”

Benco Ba, a parliamentary deputy there, described residents in fear of the conflict that had descended on them. “The jihadists are going right into people’s families,” he said. “They have completely occupied the town. They are dispersed. It’s fear.”

Six days into the French military campaign, it was becoming clear that airstrikes alone will probably not be enough to root out these battle-hardened fighters, who know well the harsh grassland and desert terrain of Mali.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, speaking as French ground forces deployed in the north, said on Wednesday that the campaign would be long, Reuters reported.

“We’re in a better position than last week, but the combat continues and it will be long, I imagine,” he said on RTL radio. “Today the ground forces are in the process of deploying,” he said. “Now the French forces are reaching the north,” Reuters said.

Adm. Edouard Guillaud, the French chief of staff, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that ground operations began overnight. “Now we’re on the ground,” Admiral Guillaud said. “We will be in direct combat within hours.”

Containing the rebels’ southern advance toward Bamako, the capital, is proving more challenging than anticipated, French military officials have acknowledged. And with the Malian Army in disarray and no outside African force yet assembled, displacing the rebels from the country altogether appears to be an elusive, long-term challenge.

The jihadists are “dug in” at Diabaly, Mr. Le Drian said Tuesday at a news conference. From that strategic town, they “threaten the south,” he said, adding: “We face a well-armed and determined adversary.”

Mr. Le Drian also acknowledged that the Malian Army had not managed to retake the town of Konna, whose seizure by the rebels a week ago provoked the French intervention. “We will continue the strikes to diminish their potential,” the minister said.

Using advanced attack planes and sophisticated military helicopters, the French campaign has forced the Islamists from important northern towns like Gao and Douentza. But residents there say that while the insurgents suffered losses, many of them had simply gone into the nearby bush.

“Bombing will weaken them, and it will stop their advance,” said Djallil Lounnas, an expert on the region at the University of Montreal who has written widely on Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, one of the main extremist groups in northern Mali. “But as soon as the bombing stops, they’ll come back.”

Since the French started bombing, he said, “the situation has changed slightly, but not fundamentally.”

Other analysts said that while forcing the insurgents from the cities was achievable, eliminating them altogether would require considerable additional effort.

“You can’t launch a war of extermination against a very tenacious and mobile adversary,” said Col. Michel Goya of the French Military Academy’s Strategic Research Institute. “We are in a classic counterinsurrectionary situation. They are well armed, but the weapons are not sophisticated. A couple of thousand men, very mobile.”

And they have been preparing for battle for months.

One resident of Gao who accompanied Islamist fighters to a desert hide-out in recent months described a vast system of underground caves big enough to drive cars into, said Corinne Dufka, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Adam Nossiter reported from Bamako, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Madrid.

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Apple scoops PBS on “Downton Abbey” episodes, but PBS is cool with it

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Apple is making the entire third season of “Downton Abbey” available on iTunes before every episode airs on PBS – and that’s just fine with PBS.

Fans who buy a season pass on iTunes beginning January 29 will get to see three episodes before they air on PBS. The Season 3 finale airs February 17.

But PBS CEO Paula Kerger isn’t worried that viewers will watch the show online, then tune out PBS. In fact, she says, Apple isn’t the only place Americans can see “Downton” before they can see it on her network.

“You can also buy the DVD sets. They’re being shipped at the end of January, and the DVD sets and Apple are going up at the same time,” Kerger told TheWrap. “I think that for people who are really passionate and want to have it, it’s a great thing.”

Kerger says she hopes more viewers will discover “Downton” on whatever format they like best – and then watch it on PBS next season.

“At the end of the day, my interest is just in seeing it get to the widest possible audience, and there are people that would pick it up on Apple that may not pick it up anywhere else,” she said.

The first episode of the third season premiered to a record 7.9 million viewers earlier this month. Many of those viewers, no doubt, caught up on the previous seasons online or through DVD viewing.

“Downton” airs in the U.K. in the fall but on PBS in January, which means PBS viewers must shield themselves from spoilers. That has led to some grumbling from American fans.

But Kerger said airing the show in January allows the show to get more attention domestically than it might otherwise receive in the crowded fall season.

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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