Signaling that it was pleased with changes in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Germany announced Thursday that it would reinstate the annual pledge of 200 million euros (about $267 million) it had made since the fund’s early days. In 2011, Germany temporarily held back half its contribution and threatened to hold back future funds in protest against inefficiencies, thefts by some grantee countries and infighting among the fund’s top executives. Other contributions dried up, forcing the fund to cancel a planned round of grants. Since then, both the fund’s executive director and inspector general have departed, and it was run for one year by a Brazilian banker; he devised an overhaul of the grant-making process that is to take effect next month. In November, Dr. Mark Dybul, the Bush administration’s global AIDS czar, became the new executive director. The fund recently announced that it cut its operating expenses by 5 percent in 2012 while still making 26 percent more in grants than it did in 2011. Of the grants that had been audited, Dr. Dybul said, only 0.5 percent had been lost to fraud. The fund plans a new fund-raising round for later this year. The United States is the fund’s largest supporter, providing roughly a third of its budget.
Europe: Germany: Funds for Global Health Fund Reinstated
Labels: HealthPictures from the Week in Business
Labels: BusinessSt. Gallen Journal: Swiss City Fears for Cultural Legacy in Wake of a Bank’s Fall
Labels: World
Daniel Auf der Mauer for The New York Times
Bach concerts sponsored by the bank Wegelin were sometimes held at the St. Laurentius church in St. Gallen.
ST. GALLEN, Switzerland — Given the modest size of its offices, a trim neo-Classical building off the marketplace, it is easy to underestimate the imprint of the bank once called Wegelin on this compact Swiss city.
It is not just that it was the oldest bank in Switzerland, founded by local textile merchants in 1741. Its senior managing partner, Konrad Hummler, was the son of a former mayor, chairman of the board of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Zurich daily that is the country’s leading newspaper, and the prolific author of columns in which he often denounced the business practices of bigger Swiss banks, like UBS.
But most important, Wegelin, which closed its doors this month, was a significant sponsor of cultural institutions in the area. Among its projects, in 2006 Mr. Hummler, a passionate music lover and amateur violinist, established the Johann Sebastian Bach Foundation, with the goal of financing the performance and recording of the entire vocal works of the German composer, more than 200 cantatas, a task expected to last more than 20 years.
Moreover, the bank was dedicated to preserving the architectural substance of the town. In 2007, Wegelin paid almost $2 million for a significant part of the late Gothic convent of St. Catherine, a former nunnery with a soaring chapel and vaulted cloister that was in considerable disrepair. It then underwrote a painstaking restoration of the chapel with its 19th-century organ, and other portions of the buildings. The idea was to use them eventually for performances of Bach’s works and other music.
The bank and Mr. Hummler also had close ties to the local business school, and at any given time several dozen students might be employed in its training programs.
Now, all this is jeopardized. Last year, Wegelin was charged in the United States with illegally helping American citizens avoid taxes. Under the shock of these charges, Wegelin was split up and its valuable assets placed with another local bank, Raiffeisen. Its bad assets remained with Wegelin, though its name was changed to Notenstein Privatbank, for a medieval guild in St. Gallen.
Wegelin executives eventually pleaded guilty before a court in New York to helping Americans avoid taxes on $1.2 billion of assets between 2002 and 2010, and agreed to pay restitution and fines of almost $60 million. Entering the plea, one of Mr. Hummler’s closest associates, Otto Bruderer, told the court that Wegelin had always believed it was in compliance with Swiss law, adding that “such conduct was common in the Swiss banking industry.”
The news shook St. Gallen. “It was extremely surprising,” said Leonie Schwendimann, who runs a small bookshop across from St. Laurentius, the Protestant church where Bach concerts sponsored by the bank are occasionally held.
Ms. Schwendimann, who often attended the concerts and was a friend of Rudolf Lutz, the baroque specialist who directed the series, voiced concern for their future. “It would be a great loss,” she said. Of the bank’s disappearance, she added, “You have to take care of your business.”
It seemed only coincidental that posters around town advertised the latest piece at the town theater, a sharp critique of the financial world by the Swiss playwright Urs Widmer titled “The End of Money,” featuring a full-length photograph of a banker with donkey’s ears.
Madeleine Herzog, responsible for culture in the city government, called the bank’s restoration of St. Catherine’s convent “exemplary.” But she was concerned about the future without Wegelin. “It was planned for the buildings to be used for cultural events, but that lies now in the responsibility of the bank’s new owners,” she said. “What their concrete plans are, what the future of the Bach cycle is,” she said, “that is not known.”
AT&T Fourth-Quarter Earnings Hurt by Pensions and Storm
Labels: Technology
Over the holiday season, AT&T sold a record number of smartphones. But its quarterly earnings took a hit from pension costs and Hurricane Sandy.
Despite the setbacks, AT&T’s business had a strong fourth quarter. It sold more smartphones than its main competitor, Verizon Wireless. It also added many new contract subscribers and increased the revenue that it gets from mobile data, the fees that people pay to use the Internet on its network.
“We had an excellent 2012,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive, in a statement. “Looking ahead,” he added, “our key growth platforms — mobile data, U-verse and strategic business services — all have good momentum with a lot of headroom.”
On Thursday, AT&T reported a loss in the fourth quarter of $3.9 billion, or 68 cents a share, up from a loss of $6.7 billion, or $1.12 a share, from the same quarter a year earlier.
The company said revenue was essentially flat at $32.6 billion.
Its adjusted per-share earnings were 44 cents a share, excluding pension costs, the impact of Hurricane Sandy and the sale of its advertising units. Wall Street analysts had expected 45 cents a share on earnings of $32.2 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
The company, based in Dallas, said that it sold 10.2 million smartphones over the quarter, the most ever sold by any American carrier. A majority of those smartphones were iPhones: AT&T sold 8.6 million iPhones, in contrast to Verizon Wireless’s 6.2 million iPhones.
AT&T did not, however, beat Verizon in an important metric for carriers: the number of new contract subscribers, who are the most valuable type of customer. AT&T gained 780,000 new contract subscribers over the quarter, compared with Verizon’s 2.1 million. In the wireless industry, subscription growth is crucial as carriers joust for the few remaining people who do not already own cellphones.
The iPhone, the most popular smartphone in the world, has been an important weapon for carriers to get new subscribers. Although AT&T still leads as the nation’s top seller of iPhones, Verizon has been increasing its iPhone sales every quarter, and it is getting close to catching up, said Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst.
“There’s always been this attachment in consumers’ minds that AT&T is the brand for iPhone,” Mr. Sharma said. “I think that’s starting to even out in the marketplace.”
Similar to Verizon, AT&T last summer started offering shared data plans, which allow customers to share a single pool of data across multiple devices, including smartphones, tablets and computers. It said on the earnings call that it already had 6.6 million subscribers on these plans, about a quarter of whom are opting for plans with at least 10 gigabytes. Thanks in part to these new shared data plans, revenue from mobile data grew 14.7 percent over the quarter, to $6.8 billion, up from $5.9 billion last year.
AT&T’s success with shared data plans is good news for the company, because they help to pry customers off flat-rate, unlimited data plans so that they eventually pay more for data, said Jan Dawson, an analyst with Ovum, a research firm. Indeed, AT&T said more than 15 percent of shared data plan customers were switching from unlimited data plans.
AT&T also saw a rise in customers for U-verse, its digital phone, television and high-speed Internet service for households. It added 609,000 U-verse customers over the quarter, bringing the total number of subscribers to about 7.7 million.
The carrier has big plans this year to attract more customers. It is in the process of a major wireless network expansion. It said late last year that it would invest an extra $14 billion to expand its wireless and broadband services through 2015. It expects that its fourth-generation network technology, called LTE, will cover 300 million people by the end of next year.
Beyond making upgrades to its wireless network, AT&T has plans to offer new services that might create new revenue streams. In March, it will begin selling its new wireless home security system, Digital Life, which will allow people to use tablets or phones to monitor their homes from afar. If a burglar trips a motion sensor in the house, for example, a user can receive a text message, then call the police. Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T Mobility, has said that he believes home security will be a big opportunity to increase revenue, because only 20 percent of American homes have security systems, leaving millions of homeowners as potential buyers.
AT&T’s Mr. Stephenson said he was excited about the “vibrant options” for phones set to arrive in the coming year, including devices with Research in Motion’s new BlackBerry 10 system.
“I’m very optimistic about BlackBerry 10,” Mr. Stephenson said. “I hope that it’s as good as it appears to be.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 24, 2013
An earlier version of this article published online misstated the expectation of Wall Street analysts for AT&T’s quarterly per-share earnings. It was 45 cents, not 48 cents.
The New Old Age Blog: Grief Over New Depression Diagnosis
Labels: LifestyleWhen the American Psychiatric Association unveils a proposed new version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, it expects controversy. Illnesses get added or deleted, acquire new definitions or lists of symptoms. Everyone from advocacy groups to insurance companies to litigators — all have an interest in what’s defined as mental illness — pays close attention. Invariably, complaints ensue.
“We asked for commentary,” said David Kupfer, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who has spent six years as chairman of the task force that is updating the handbook. He sounded unruffled. “We asked for it and we got it. This was not going to be done in a dark room somewhere.”
But the D.S.M. 5, to be published in May, has generated an unusual amount of heat. Two changes, in particular, could have considerable impact on older people and their families.
First, the new volume revises some of the criteria for major depressive disorder. The D.S.M. IV (among other changes, the new manual swaps Roman numerals for Arabic ones) set out a list of symptoms that over a two-week period would trigger a diagnosis of major depression: either feelings of sadness or emptiness, or a loss of interest or pleasure in most daily activities, plus sleep disturbances, weight loss, fatigue, distraction or other problems, to the extent that they impair someone’s functioning.
Traditionally, depression has been underdiagnosed in older adults. When people’s health suffers and they lose friends and loved ones, the sentiment went, why wouldn’t they be depressed? A few decades back, Dr. Kupfer said, “what was striking to me was the lack of anyone getting a depression diagnosis, because that was ‘normal aging.’” We don’t find depression in old age normal any longer.
But critics of the D.S.M. 5 now argue that depression may become overdiagnosed, because this version removes the so-called “bereavement exclusion.” That was a paragraph that cautioned against diagnosing depression in someone for at least two months after loss of a loved one, unless that patient had severe symptoms like suicidal thoughts.
Without that exception, you could be diagnosed with this disorder if you are feeling empty, listless or distracted, a month after your parent or spouse dies.
“D.S.M. 5 is medicalizing the expected and probably necessary process of mourning that people go through,” said Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force and has denounced several of the changes in the new edition. “Most people get better with time and natural healing and resilience.”
If they are diagnosed with major depression before that can happen, he fears, they will be given antidepressants they may not need. “It gives the drug companies the right to peddle pills for grief,” he said.
An advisory committee to the Association for Death Education and Counseling also argued that bereaved people “will receive antidepressant medication because it is cheaper and ‘easier’ to medicate than to be involved therapeutically,” and noted that antidepressants, like all medications, have side effects.
“I can’t help but see this as a broad overreach by the APA,” Eric Widera, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on the GeriPal blog. “Grief is not a disorder and should be considered normal even if it is accompanied by some of the same symptoms seen in depression.”
But Dr. Kupfer said the panel worried that with the exclusion, too many cases of depression could be overlooked and go untreated. “If these things go on and get worse over time and begin to impair someone’s day to day function, we don’t want to use the excuse, ‘It’s bereavement — they’ll get over it,’” he said.
The new entry for major depressive disorder will include a note — the wording isn’t final — pointing out that while grief may be “understandable or appropriate” after a loss, professionals should also consider the possibility of a major depressive episode. Making that distinction, Dr. Kupfer said, will require “good solid clinical judgment.”
Initial field trials testing the reliability of D.S.M. 5 diagnoses, recently published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, don’t bolster confidence, however. An editorial remarked that “the end results are mixed, with both positive and disappointing findings.” Major depressive disorder, for instance, showed “questionable reliability.”
In an upcoming post, I’ll talk more about how patients might respond to the D.S.M. 5, and to a new diagnosis that might also affect a lot of older people — mild neurocognitive disorder.
Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 24, 2013
An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force. He is Allen Frances, not Francis.
The New Old Age Blog: Grief Over New Depression Diagnosis
Labels: HealthWhen the American Psychiatric Association unveils a proposed new version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, it expects controversy. Illnesses get added or deleted, acquire new definitions or lists of symptoms. Everyone from advocacy groups to insurance companies to litigators — all have an interest in what’s defined as mental illness — pays close attention. Invariably, complaints ensue.
“We asked for commentary,” said David Kupfer, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who has spent six years as chairman of the task force that is updating the handbook. He sounded unruffled. “We asked for it and we got it. This was not going to be done in a dark room somewhere.”
But the D.S.M. 5, to be published in May, has generated an unusual amount of heat. Two changes, in particular, could have considerable impact on older people and their families.
First, the new volume revises some of the criteria for major depressive disorder. The D.S.M. IV (among other changes, the new manual swaps Roman numerals for Arabic ones) set out a list of symptoms that over a two-week period would trigger a diagnosis of major depression: either feelings of sadness or emptiness, or a loss of interest or pleasure in most daily activities, plus sleep disturbances, weight loss, fatigue, distraction or other problems, to the extent that they impair someone’s functioning.
Traditionally, depression has been underdiagnosed in older adults. When people’s health suffers and they lose friends and loved ones, the sentiment went, why wouldn’t they be depressed? A few decades back, Dr. Kupfer said, “what was striking to me was the lack of anyone getting a depression diagnosis, because that was ‘normal aging.’” We don’t find depression in old age normal any longer.
But critics of the D.S.M. 5 now argue that depression may become overdiagnosed, because this version removes the so-called “bereavement exclusion.” That was a paragraph that cautioned against diagnosing depression in someone for at least two months after loss of a loved one, unless that patient had severe symptoms like suicidal thoughts.
Without that exception, you could be diagnosed with this disorder if you are feeling empty, listless or distracted, a month after your parent or spouse dies.
“D.S.M. 5 is medicalizing the expected and probably necessary process of mourning that people go through,” said Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force and has denounced several of the changes in the new edition. “Most people get better with time and natural healing and resilience.”
If they are diagnosed with major depression before that can happen, he fears, they will be given antidepressants they may not need. “It gives the drug companies the right to peddle pills for grief,” he said.
An advisory committee to the Association for Death Education and Counseling also argued that bereaved people “will receive antidepressant medication because it is cheaper and ‘easier’ to medicate than to be involved therapeutically,” and noted that antidepressants, like all medications, have side effects.
“I can’t help but see this as a broad overreach by the APA,” Eric Widera, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on the GeriPal blog. “Grief is not a disorder and should be considered normal even if it is accompanied by some of the same symptoms seen in depression.”
But Dr. Kupfer said the panel worried that with the exclusion, too many cases of depression could be overlooked and go untreated. “If these things go on and get worse over time and begin to impair someone’s day to day function, we don’t want to use the excuse, ‘It’s bereavement — they’ll get over it,’” he said.
The new entry for major depressive disorder will include a note — the wording isn’t final — pointing out that while grief may be “understandable or appropriate” after a loss, professionals should also consider the possibility of a major depressive episode. Making that distinction, Dr. Kupfer said, will require “good solid clinical judgment.”
Initial field trials testing the reliability of D.S.M. 5 diagnoses, recently published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, don’t bolster confidence, however. An editorial remarked that “the end results are mixed, with both positive and disappointing findings.” Major depressive disorder, for instance, showed “questionable reliability.”
In an upcoming post, I’ll talk more about how patients might respond to the D.S.M. 5, and to a new diagnosis that might also affect a lot of older people — mild neurocognitive disorder.
Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 24, 2013
An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force. He is Allen Frances, not Francis.
Starbucks Earnings Increased 13% in Latest Quarter
Labels: Business
The company’s results were helped by a 6 percent increase in global sales at cafes open at least a year.
The performance reflects the turnaround Starbucks has made since its struggles during the recession. After bringing back its founder, Howard Schultz, as chief executive in 2008, the company embarked on a reorganization that included closing underperforming stores in the United States.
Mr. Schultz has said that the company has the ability to keep growing even through a turbulent economy because most people see Starbucks as an “affordable luxury.”
Starbucks said it earned $432.2 million, or 57 cents a share, in the quarter, up from $382.1 million, or 50 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue in the period ending Dec. 30, the first quarter of Starbucks’s fiscal year, rose 11 percent, to $3.8 billion. Analysts had expected a profit of 57 cents a share and revenue of $3.85 billion, according to FactSet.
Shares rose 11 cents on Thursday, to $54.57 a share.
The Making of Yair Lapid, Israel’s New Power Broker
Labels: World
Oliver Weiken/European Pressphoto Agency
Yair Lapid spoke to reporters in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, a day after his centrist party became the second-largest faction in Parliament.
TEL AVIV — They pitched tents along Rothschild Boulevard and took to the streets in unprecedented numbers, hundreds of thousands demonstrating against the rising costs of gas, apartments, even cottage cheese.
Back on the genteel boulevard on Wednesday, many of those middle-class protesters from 2011 said they had taken their grievances to the ballot box the day before, helping to catapult Yair Lapid, a suave, handsome journalist-turned-populist-politician, into Israel’s newest power broker.
“He spoke out the strongest about how everything in this country is upside down,” said Elad Shoshan, 28, who works with computers and rents an apartment on a cheaper street off the boulevard.
Echoing his candidate’s mantra, Roni Klein, 52, an accountant, said, “My wife and I work, and still it is very hard for us to finish the month.”
Mr. Lapid’s new, centrist Yesh Atid party shocked the political establishment by winning 19 of Parliament’s 120 seats, becoming Israel’s second-largest faction and a crucial partner for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose relatively poor showing left him scrambling to form a stable coalition.
While Mr. Netanyahu remains all but assured of serving a third term — Mr. Lapid said Wednesday that he would not unite with Arab lawmakers to stop him — Yesh Atid’s ascendance promises to shift the government’s focus to pocketbook concerns despite the pressing foreign policy issues Israel faces.
Mr. Lapid’s campaign hardly challenged Mr. Netanyahu’s policies on the Iranian nuclear threat, the tumult in the Arab world or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was the first election in memory in which such existential security issues were not emphasized, as a growing majority of Israelis see them as too tough to tackle. Even Mr. Netanyahu barely spoke about Iran, his raison d’être.
Instead, voters and analysts alike said Mr. Lapid had captured the hearts of Israel’s silent majority with his personal charm and a positive, inclusive message that harnessed the everyday frustrations that fueled the huge social justice protests in 2011.
One pollster found that about 40 percent of Mr. Lapid’s supporters defined themselves as right-leaning, and in Israel’s coalition system, many saw his success as a tactical move by voters not to oust Mr. Netanyahu but to nudge him to broaden the agenda.
On Wednesday, the prime minister embraced Mr. Lapid’s platform, promising a government “as broad as possible” that would bring change on three fronts: affordable housing, government reform and forcing ultra-Orthodox Jews to “share the burden” of military service and taxes.
Some saw the results as a victory for secular Jews at a time of conflict with the ultra-Orthodox over resources and religious pluralism. Mr. Lapid’s stronghold was here in coastal Tel Aviv and its bourgeois suburbs, where he won about 1 in 4 votes cast, and Modiin, a fast-growing bedroom community halfway between here and Jerusalem.
Tamar Hermann, a political scientist and vice president of Israel’s Open University, called Mr. Lapid “the epitome of the Israeli dream” and described his voters as “the mainstream of the mainstream.”
“This is the kind of voting you can take your kids to and teach them a lesson in civic fulfillment without taking any risks,” Professor Hermann said. “They are complaining, but this is a kind of the zeitgeist, not real agony, not real suffering, not real dissatisfaction with the basic cornerstone of the system. It’s just polishing here and there.”
The election results were widely seen as a rebuke to the status quo, but not necessarily a call for change in approach to contentious questions like what to do about the Palestinians. While Mr. Lapid has called for a return to negotiations, he shares Mr. Netanyahu’s skepticism about the lack of a partner, saying this week, “I don’t think the Arabs want peace.” He opposes division of Jerusalem and made his foreign policy speech in Ariel, a sprawling Jewish settlement 12 miles into the West Bank that the Palestinians see as problematic for the viability of their state.
“The majority of Israelis came to the conclusion that there will be no new Middle East,” Mr. Lapid said over cappuccino here last month. “What we want is not a happy marriage, but a decent divorce.”
Instead, the change voters were seeking was more about the nature of politics itself.
Apple’s Profits Are Flat, and Stock Drops
Labels: Technology
Apple on Wednesday reported the kind of quarter most big companies would envy, posting a profit of $13.1 billion and selling 28 percent more iPhones and 48 percent more iPads, its two biggest products.
Its stock quickly sank 11 percent.
What is going on? Because of its great success in recent years, many investors have come to expect nothing short of perfection from Apple. And while it is still widely considered the most innovative company in the technology world, a maker of products that its devoted customers cannot live without, Apple is facing a range of challenges.
It is dealing with increased competition from big rivals like Samsung and Google, and with so many people already using smartphones, the market is not quite as untapped as it once was. Apple is forging into cheaper product categories, meaning lower profit margins. And given that Apple has grown so big, with sales of more than $160 billion in the last 12 months, keeping up its heady growth rate is becoming harder and harder.
Once-euphoric investors, who pushed Apple’s stock to a record high of $702.10 last September, have become nervous, and in after-hours trading on Wednesday, the stock traded at $461.30, down 34 percent from its peak.
Apple has reinvented itself several times over the last decade with groundbreaking new products, and could do so again. Television and electronic payments are among the markets where analysts believe the company could make a serious push, leading it to new heights.
“Apple has really been able to invent whole new markets,” said John Gallaugher, an associate professor at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. “That’s where it differs from companies like Microsoft. I don’t think the mojo of this team has evaporated.”
In a conference call with analysts, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said the company’s pipeline of new products was “chock-full.”
“We feel great about what we have in store,” he said, without adding details.
In the meantime, though, the love affair that investors once had with Apple is clearly waning.
“There’s nothing that can help the stock from sliding now,” said Mark Moskowitz, an analyst at J. P. Morgan Securities, who said Apple’s holiday sales met his own forecasts, even though they missed others’ predictions.
For years, Apple has offered an unusual alchemy: it was not only a large, highly profitable tech company, but one with the rapid growth rate of a start-up. It pulled this off under the leadership of Steven P. Jobs, its former chief executive who died in late 2011. He had a startling knack for finding new multibillion-dollar opportunities for Apple with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, but his death has accentuated concerns about the company’s prospects.
A big part of Apple’s challenge is that it is now so large that it seems unrealistic, mathematically, for the company to continue finding new pots of gold big enough to maintain its growth. In a recent research report, A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, calculated that were Apple to grow for the next five years at the same rate as the last five years, its revenue would be $1.2 trillion, or about the size of Australia’s gross domestic product.
Mr. Sacconaghi said in an interview that technology companies often enter a phase of “growth purgatory” as they shift to a slower lane. Their stocks can tumble by 25 percent or more.
“This transition is often very messy,” he said.
On Wednesday, Apple did not appear to provide a strong enough reason for investors to warm to it again. It said its profits were flat because of higher manufacturing costs, even as revenue rose 18 percent.
Apple’s net income for its fiscal first quarter ending Dec. 29 was $13.1 billion, or $13.81 a share, compared with $13.1 billion, or $13.87 a share, in the same period a year earlier. Revenue was $54.5 billion, up from $46.33 billion a year ago. Those results compared to the average estimates of $13.44 a share earnings and revenue of $54.73 billion from analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.
Apple’s growth in the quarter looked positively anemic compared with the huge numbers it used to deliver. For the holiday quarter of 2011, in contrast, its revenue jumped 73 percent and its profit soared 118 percent.
In its financial forecasts for the current quarter, Apple provided numbers that suggest a decline of roughly 20 percent in earnings a share, according to Mr. Sacconaghi’s calculations.
A number of analysts say they still believe the company’s good times are not over. “Sentiment has turned super-pessimistic on Apple, where they’ve gone from being able to do no wrong to suddenly being able to do no right,” said Rob Cihra, an analyst at Evercore Partners. “I tend to think the company’s momentum is a heck of a lot more solid than people are concerned about.”
Mr. Cihra said Apple’s iPhone and iPad sales missed some of the most optimistic forecasts, but “all in, it was a pretty darned good quarter.”
One factor that hurt comparisons between Apple’s most recent holiday quarter and the previous one was that its 2012 quarter was a week shorter.
Headed into the holiday quarter, analysts were especially worried about Apple’s profit margins, which the company had warned would decline as a result of a near total overhaul of the company’s product line.
While new products are routine for a company like Apple, it said the sheer number of devices it released around the holidays, including the iPhone 5, iPad Mini and new Mac computers, was unusual.
But negative sentiment has further hardened amid reports that Apple had cut orders for components with a supplier, potentially suggesting weak demand for the iPhone.
Mr. Cook cautioned that investors shouldn’t place too much significance on such reports because Apple often gets its parts from multiple sources.
“I would suggest that it’s good to question the accuracy of any rumor about our build plans,” he said.
Well: Long Term Effects on Life Expectancy From Smoking
Labels: LifestyleIt is often said that smoking takes years off your life, and now a new study shows just how many: Longtime smokers can expect to lose about 10 years of life expectancy.
But amid those grim findings was some good news for former smokers. Those who quit before they turn 35 can gain most if not all of that decade back, and even those who wait until middle age to kick the habit can add about five years back to their life expectancies.
“There’s the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you,” said Dr. Tim McAfee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off — and that’s just on average.”
The findings were part of research, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, that looked at government data on more than 200,000 Americans who were followed starting in 1997. Similar studies that were done in the 1980s and the decades prior had allowed scientists to predict the impact of smoking on mortality. But since then many population trends have changed, and it was unclear whether smokers today fared differently from smokers decades ago.
Since the 1960s, the prevalence of smoking over all has declined, falling from about 40 percent to 20 percent. Today more than half of people that ever smoked have quit, allowing researchers to compare the effects of stopping at various ages.
Modern cigarettes contain less tar and medical advances have cut the rates of death from vascular disease drastically. But have smokers benefited from these advances?
Women in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s had lower rates of mortality from smoking than men. But it was largely unknown whether this was a biological difference or merely a matter of different habits: earlier generations of women smoked fewer cigarettes and tended to take up smoking at a later age than men.
Now that smoking habits among women today are similar to those of men, would mortality rates be the same as well?
“There was a big gap in our knowledge,” said Dr. McAfee, an author of the study and the director of the C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Public Health.
The new research showed that in fact women are no more protected from the consequences of smoking than men. The female smokers in the study represented the first generation of American women that generally began smoking early in life and continued the habit for decades, and the impact on life span was clear. The risk of death from smoking for these women was 50 percent higher than the risk reported for women in similar studies carried out in the 1980s.
“This sort of puts the nail in the coffin around the idea that women might somehow be different or that they suffer fewer effects of smoking,” Dr. McAfee said.
It also showed that differences between smokers and the population in general are becoming more and more stark. Over the last 20 years, advances in medicine and public health have improved life expectancy for the general public, but smokers have not benefited in the same way.
“If anything, this is accentuating the difference between being a smoker and a nonsmoker,” Dr. McAfee said.
The researchers had information about the participants’ smoking histories and other details about their health and backgrounds, including diet, alcohol consumption, education levels and weight and body fat. Using records from the National Death Index, they calculated their mortality rates over time.
People who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes were not classified as smokers. Those who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes but had not had one within five years of the time the data was collected were classified as former smokers.
Not surprisingly, the study showed that the earlier a person quit smoking, the greater the impact. People who quit between 25 and 34 years of age gained about 10 years of life compared to those who continued to smoke. But there were benefits at many ages. People who quit between 35 and 44 gained about nine years, and those who stopped between 45 and 59 gained about four to six years of life expectancy.
From a public health perspective, those numbers are striking, particularly when juxtaposed with preventive measures like blood pressure screenings, colorectal screenings and mammography, the effects of which on life expectancy are more often viewed in terms of days or months, Dr. McAfee said.
“These things are very important, but the size of the benefit pales in comparison to what you can get from stopping smoking,” he said. “The notion that you could add 10 years to your life by something as straightforward as quitting smoking is just mind boggling.”
Copyright © Sugar News. All rights reserved.
Design 
