Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

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7 Die in Fire At Factory In Bangladesh

A.M. Ahad/Associated Press

Firefighters and volunteers worked to extinguish the fire at a small garment factory in Bangladesh’s capital on Saturday.

DHAKA, Bangladesh — In the latest blow to Bangladesh’s garment industry, seven workers died Saturday after a fire swept through a factory here not long after seamstresses had returned from a lunch break. Workers said supervisors had locked one of the factory exits, forcing some people to jump out of windows to save their lives.

Abir Abdullah/European Pressphoto Agency

Relatives mourned beside the bodies of workers killed in the fire at a hospital in Dhaka.

Reuters

People sifted through the wreckage at the Smart Fashions factory.

The fatal fire comes roughly two months after the blaze at the Tazreen Fashions factory left 112 workers dead and focused global attention on unsafe conditions in Bangladesh’s garment industry. Tazreen Fashions, located just outside Dhaka, the capital, had been making clothing for some of the world’s biggest brands and retailers, including Walmart.

In the aftermath of the Tazreen Fashions fire, political and industrial leaders in Bangladesh pledged to quickly improve fire safety and even conducted high-profile, nationwide inspections of many of the country’s 5,000 clothing factories. And global brands promised they would not buy clothes from unsafe factories.

But Saturday’s fire in a densely populated section of Dhaka is a grim reminder that the problems remain. The blaze erupted about 2 p.m. at Smart Garment Export, a small factory that employed about 300 people, most of them young women who were making sweaters and jackets. All seven of the dead workers were women.

Masudur Rahman Akand, a supervisor in the fire department, said the factory’s workers were returning from lunch when the blaze erupted in a storage area. The factory was located on the second floor of a building, above a bakery, and it lacked proper exits and fire prevention equipment, Mr. Akand said.

“We did not find fire extinguishers,” he said. “We did not find any safety measures.”

With smoke filling the factory floor, workers apparently panicked. Mr. Akand said the seven workers who died either suffocated or were trampled by people trying to escape.

Eight other workers were hospitalized with injuries. Some of them told rescuers that many people could not quickly escape because one of the exits was blocked by a locked steel gate. Witnesses said people began jumping out of windows before the gate was unlocked.

Azizul Hoque, a police supervisor, said the investigation was continuing. “We do not know the reason or the source or the origin of the fire,” he said.

It was unclear whether the Smart Garment factory was making clothing for international brands or retailers. Dhaka’s industrial areas are filled with factories, large and small, that produce clothing for much of the Western world.

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Jim Yardley from New Delhi.

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Dolours Price, Defiant I.R.A. Bomber, Dies at 61

Press Association, via Associated Press

Dolours Price, left, and her younger sister, Marian, in 1972.

Dolours Price, an unrepentant former member of the Irish Republican Army who went to prison for a 1973 London bombing and who recently shook Northern Ireland’s fragile calm by claiming that her orders had come from Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein party leader and peace negotiator who denies having ever been in the I.R.A., died on Thursday at her home in a suburb of Dublin. She was 61.

The police in Dublin said the cause was not known. An autopsy was scheduled.

Ms. Price, the former wife of the Irish actor Stephen Rea, attracted more public attention than she might have expected in recent years. Since 2011, the police in Northern Ireland police have been fighting in the courts for access to audiotaped interviews that Ms. Price gave to an oral history project at Boston College in which she detailed her I.R.A. career. The United States Supreme Court has been asked to hear the case.

The police learned of the audiotapes from an interview Ms. Price gave to an Irish newspaper in 2010. She told the paper that her testimony for the college’s “Belfast Project” described kidnappings and executions that she said she helped carry out in 1972 on orders from Mr. Adams. She also asserted on the tapes, she said, that Mr. Adams had a role in conceiving the London car bombings and that he ordered her and nine other I.R.A. volunteers, including her sister Marian, to carry them out in 1973.

The explosions, at four landmark sites, including the Old Bailey Courthouse, injured 200 people and left one man dead from a heart attack. It was the I.R.A.’s first attack in London.

Mr. Adams, who has intermittently been a member of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly since a peace agreement was forged in 1998, has repeatedly denied her accusations. On Thursday he said he had “no concerns, because they are not true.”

The Northern Ireland police have said that Mr. Adams is not a target in their seeking the audiotapes. The family of one suspected I.R.A. informer described by Ms. Price as having been executed has called for Mr. Adams’s arrest.

Mr. Adams expressed sorrow this week at the news of Ms. Price’s death.

"She endured great hardship during her time in prison in the 1970s,” he said.

Ms. Price spoke often of the personal toll of her terrorist activities: years of depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Among the suspected informers she drove to their executions, she said, was a longtime family friend. In prison, she staged a 203-day hunger strike in which her jailers force-fed her every day through rubber tubing.

Suffering from tuberculosis and other ailments, Ms. Price was released from prison on humanitarian grounds in 1981 after serving seven years of a life sentence.

Ms. Price told interviewers that she might have spared herself and her victims had she known that the struggle would end with a peace that left Northern Ireland’s Catholic majority, in her view, where it had started: under British rule.

“When we starved together on hunger strike,” she wrote in a 2004 essay in Fortnight, an Irish journal, “it was not to ‘move the process forward,’ it was not for seats in a British government.” It was, she said, “to rid this land of any British interference.”

Ms. Price married Mr. Rea in 1983 and had two children with him. Mr. Rea, who portrayed an I.R.A. hit man in the 1992 film “The Crying Game,” spoke only obliquely about his wife’s past.

“You can’t be born in the north of Ireland and not be political,” he told the British newspaper The Evening Standard in 1992. “The situation there is a pollution of your thinking.”

Dolours Price was born in Belfast on June 21, 1951, into a family steeped in Irish republican politics. Her father, Albert, was an I.R.A. founding member. “My father never saw his firstborn child because she was born and died while he was interned,” she wrote.

An aunt, Bridie Price, lost both hands and her eyesight when a bomb she was assembling accidentally blew up. Her sister Marian, who was among the 10 I.R.A. members involved in the 1973 London bombings, was released from prison in the early ’80s but rearrested several years ago on charges of plotting an attack on the government.

Ms. Price was a recent college graduate and training to be a teacher when she enlisted in the I.R.A. in the early 197os. She was one of the first women assigned to carry out an armed attack and was selected for the London mission in part, she said in an interview, because she was a pretty young woman and had no arrest record.

Ms. Price’s marriage to Mr. Rea ended in divorce in 2003. She is survived by their children, Danny and Oscar; her sister Marian and another sister, Clare; and two brothers, Sean and Dino.

Ms. Price remained defiant to the end. She had no truck, she said, with those whose political views had changed over the years. “I am a republican, born and bred, as were my mother and father before me and theirs before them,” she wrote in a letter to an Irish newspaper last year. “I have no time for people who constantly change their position.”

“They are not republicans,” she wrote.

Douglas Dalby contributed reporting from Dublin.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Upgrading to Microsoft Office 2013

If I buy Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft Office 2013 comes out right afterwards, can I return the older version of the program for the new one?

In general, most stores will only accept software returned for a refund if the box is still sealed and the program has not been installed. Microsoft has an explanation of its own returns and refunds policy on its site.

The new version, Microsoft Office 2013, is expected very soon — possibly by the end of the month. If you need the software and just cannot wait for the newest version to arrive, however, Microsoft has an offer than allows you upgrade to Office 2013 for free even if you buy Office 2010 now.

Microsoft Office 2010 (or Office 2011 for the Mac) software purchased between October 19, 2012, and April 30, 2013, is generally eligible for the upgrade. You can find full details on the Office 2013 offer here.

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Europe: Germany: Funds for Global Health Fund Reinstated

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.

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Europe: Germany: Funds for Global Health Fund Reinstated

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.

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Pictures from the Week in Business

The port of Tokyo. Following the lead of their counterparts in the United States, Japan’s central bankers announced on Tuesday what they called a groundbreaking effort to reinvigorate the country’s long-moribund economy and defeat deflation. With no room left to cut interest rates and previous steps unsuccessful, the Bank of Japan is taking a page from the Federal Reserve’s playbook and will pump trillions more yen into the economy by directly buying government bonds and other assets.

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St. Gallen Journal: Swiss City Fears for Cultural Legacy in Wake of a Bank’s Fall

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.”

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AT&T Fourth-Quarter Earnings Hurt by Pensions and Storm

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.

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