The New Old Age Blog: In the Middle: Why Elderly Couples Fight

George and Gracie (let’s call them that because using their real names would make them even unhappier than they already appear to be) are in their 80s and married for more than 65 years. Until recently they seemed to ride the waves that are inevitable in any marriage that spans nearly seven decades; through good and bad, they were partners and best friends.

But lately — ever since her hospitalization and his fall — they have been arguing more bitterly than usual (“Do you have to make such a mess in the kitchen?”), criticizing each other (“Why haven’t you dealt with the insurance company yet?”), withdrawing from each other, and generally making each other more miserable, more often than ever before.

This kind of degenerative relationship is not uncommon among the elderly in even the happiest marriages, marriage therapists and geriatricians said. But that is small comfort to either the couple in the middle of the maelstrom, or the children who care for them, as evidenced by a number postings on caregiver blogs. As some of the children have wondered there: “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Therapists and others who work with the elderly said the first step to addressing the problem is understanding where it came from.

“A key question is whether the marital bickering is part of a lifelong marital style or a change,” said Dr. Linda Waite, director of the Center on Aging at NORC/University of Chicago. Is it new behavior – or just new to the grown children who are suddenly so deeply enmeshed in their parents’ lives that they are only now noticing that something is amiss?

How much of the problem is really just the marriage style? “Some couples like to fight and argue – it keeps their adrenaline going,” said Dr. Nancy K. Schlossberg, professor emerita of counseling psychology at the University of Maryland and author of “Overwhelmed: Coping with Life’s Ups and Downs.”

Sometimes the best judges of whether there is a problem are outsiders, said Dr. William Dale, chief of geriatrics at the University of Chicago Geriatrics Medicine. Pay attention if someone says, “‘Gee, Mom seems more argumentative or withdrawn than the last time I saw her,’” Dr. Dale advised.

If the tone or severity of the marital tensions seem new, then it is important to find out why. The causes could be mental or physical, doctors say.

On the mental front, increased anger and fighting could be one of the first signs of mild cognitive impairment, a precursor of dementia or Alzheimer’s, in one or both of the spouses, said Dr. Lisa Gwyther, director of the Duke Center for Aging Family Support Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Dr. Dale concurs: “There is good evidence that the earliest signs of cognitive impairment are often emotional changes” — anger, anxiety, depression — “rather than cognitive ones” — memory, abstract thought.

But these early signs of cognitive decline can be so subtle that neither the spouses themselves, or their grown children, recognize them for what they are, Dr. Gwyther said. So husband and wife blame each other for the changes and allow feelings of hurt and resentment to grow.

Withdrawing from activities that used to give them pleasure can be a telltale sign of mild cognitive impairment – and can trigger anger and arguments.

“In one couple, the husband just didn’t want to participate in the holidays — the wife got angry and said he was being lazy and stubborn,” said Dr. Gwyther. But the truth was that his cognitive decline made all the activity overwhelming, and he didn’t want anyone to know that he was anxious about not remembering everyone’s names and embarrassing himself.

Suspicion and paranoia can also accompany mild cognitive decline and precipitate distrust and hurtful accusations. Dr. Gwyther recalled another woman who “called her daughter frantic because she said her husband dropped her at her chemo appointment, went to park the car, and didn’t return to get her.” The woman couldn’t imagine that her husband could possibly have lost his sense of time and direction, Dr. Gwyther added. She took it personally, complaining to her daughter that “your father doesn’t seem to care any more.”

Dr. Dale told of a spouse who accused her mate of infidelity because “she was convinced that when he was out grocery shopping he was really having an affair.”

Hoarding, an early symptom of mild cognitive impairment, can also create tension in a marriage. (For new treatments, see this recent post by my colleague Paula Span.)

When one couple came to a counseling session with Dr. Norman Abeles, emeritus professor of psychology and former director of psychological clinic at Michigan State University, the hoarding spouse finally said, “she did it because she thought that they would run out of money, even though there was enough money to go around.” Dr. Abeles said that incident led to her diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment.

Adding to the confusion, mild cognitive impairment (M.C.I.) comes and goes. “There are good days and bad days, good hours and bad hours,” said Dr. Gwyther. “Alzheimer’s and dementia don’t start on Tuesday — it’s a slow insidious onset.” But the diagnosis is becoming more common: The Institute for Dementia Research and Prevention predicts that 1 in 6 women, and 1 in 10 men, who live past the age of 55 will develop dementia in their lifetime.

“Spouses find it difficult to know when their partner with M.C.I. is acting differently (usually badly) due to the advancing illness or due to ‘willful’ personality issues,” said Dr. Dale, citing a 2007 study in the journal Family Relations exploring the problems this can create for couples.

Blaming is often easier than understanding. Another of Dr. Gwyther’s patients was furious at her husband for not filing their taxes. “He’s a C.P.A.,” she said. “How could we owe back taxes?” It did not occur to her that he might be unable to handle that task — and was too frightened about his deteriorating mental focus to let her know.

But as harmful as mental decline can be for a marriage, it is just part of the equation. Physical ailments – even those that seem completely unrelated to marital relations – “can upset the equilibrium of the marriage,” according to a study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“Most men get angry at what’s happened to them when they get ill, women get angry and scared when he’s not what he used to be — so they fight,” said Dr. Schlossberg.

Chronic illnesses, like diabetes, arthritis and heart disease, can have a strong negative effect on mood, said Dr. Waite, who will soon be publishing a study on the subject. Diabetes is so often accompanied by depression that, Dr. Waite said, “one of my colleagues argues that that it is even part of the disease.”

And ailments can have an effect on a couple’s sex life — which can compound the marital problems, doctors said.

“Diabetes brings on neuropathy,” said Dr. Waite. “That means touching and feeling in sex is not as rewarding.” Without the pleasures of affectionate touching — whether a passing hug at the sink, or more — tensions can build. That’s why, if a couple is having problems with sex, they are more likely to have problems in the relationship — and vice versa, according to a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study of sex and health among older adults.

Other changes in circumstances — retirement, shifting roles, the loss of autonomy, disparities in health and abilities — can wreak havoc. Losing independence can feel like losing oneself — and if you don’t know who you are any more, how can you know how to relate to your spouse?

“Fighting may come from a misguided notion that you can regain power by asserting it over your spouse,” said Dr. Schlossberg, whose observations are echoed in a 1984 study in the Canadian Journal of Medicine. “It doesn’t work, it’s false power – but they’ll try anything.”

The sheer exhaustion that can come from being the caregiving spouse is also bound to “make them stressed and angry,” said Dr. Waite. Not to mention guilty and resentful — never a prescription for happy marital relations.

“Part of the trap for the caregiver is the idea that you have to do it all, and the guilt you feel when you cannot live up to it,” said Dr. Gordon Herz, a psychologist in private practice in Madison, Wisc. Not surprisingly, resentment can soon follow, Dr. Herz added, because it’s hard to admit to anyone that, “‘this is too much for me.’”

What can outside caregivers — children or other loved ones — do about these golden marriages on the rocks? Should they intervene — or butt out? And can marital therapy help — or is it too late to change?

Share your thoughts and experiences — and tomorrow we’ll try to provide some advice from experts.

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In Spain, Having a Job No Longer Guarantees a Paycheck

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

Raul, a truck driver in Castellón, Spain, hoped last month to be paid from a government fund. Courts are jammed with requests.

VALENCIA, Spain — Over the past two years, Ana María Molina Cuevas, 36, has worked five shifts a week in a ceramics factory on the outskirts of this city, hand-rolling paint onto tiles. But at the end of the month, she often went unpaid.

Still, she kept showing up, trying to keep her frustration under control. If she quit, she reasoned, she might never get her money. And besides, where was she going to find another job? Last month, she was down to about $130 in her bank account with a mortgage payment due.

“On the days you get paid,” she said at home with her disabled husband and young daughter, “it is like the sun has risen three times. It is a day of joy.”

Mrs. Molina, who is owed about $13,000 by the factory, is hardly alone. Being paid for the work you do is no longer something that can be counted on in Spain, as this country struggles through its fourth year of an economic crisis.

With the regional and municipal governments deeply in debt, even workers like bus drivers and health care attendants, dependent on government financing for their salaries, are not always paid.

But few workers in this situation believe they have any choice but to stick it out, and none wanted to name their employers, to protect both the companies and their jobs. They try to manage their lives with occasional checks and partial payments on random dates — never sure whether they will get what they are owed in the end. Spain’s unemployment rate is the highest in the euro zone at more than 25 percent, and despite the government’s labor reforms, the rate has continued to rise month after month.

“Before the crisis, a worker might let one month go by, and then move on to another job,” said José Francisco Perez, a lawyer who represents unpaid workers in the Valencia area. “Now that just isn’t an option. People now have nowhere to go, and they are scared. They are afraid even to complain.”

No one is keeping track of workers like Mrs. Molina. But one indication of their number can be seen in the courts, which have become jammed with people trying to get back pay from a government insurance fund, aimed at giving workers something when a company does not pay them.

In Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, the unemployment rate is 28.1 percent and the courts are so overwhelmed that processing claims, which used to take three to six months, now takes three to four years.

Since the start of the crisis in 2008, the insurance fund has paid nearly a million workers nationally back pay or severance. In 2007, it paid 70,000 workers. It is on track to pay more than 250,000 this year, and experts say the figures would be much higher if not for the logjam in the courts.

Often the unpaid workers, like Mrs. Molina, whose company is now in bankruptcy proceedings, hope their labor will keep a struggling operation afloat over the long run. Unemployment benefits last only two years, they point out, and they wonder what they would do after that. But in the meantime, they cannot even claim unemployment benefits. And no amount of budgeting can cover no payment at all.

Beatriz Morales García, 31, said she could not remember the last time she went shopping for herself. A few years ago, she and her husband, Daniel Chiva, 34, thought that they had settled into a comfortable life, he as a bus driver and she as a therapist in a rehabilitation center for people with mental disabilities. His job is financed by the City of Valencia, and hers by the regional government of Valencia.

They never expected any big money. But it seemed reasonable to expect a reliable salary, to take on a mortgage and think about children. In the past year, however, both of them have had trouble being paid. She is owed 6,000 euros, nearly $8,000. They have cut back on everything they can think of. They have given up their landline and their Internet connection. They no long park their car in a garage or pay for extra health insurance coverage. Mr. Chiva even forgoes the coffee he used to drink in a cafe before his night shifts. Still, the anxiety is constant.

“There are nights when we cannot sleep,” he said. “Moments when you talk out loud to yourself in the street. It has been terrible, terrible.”

Mrs. Morales said it was particularly hard to watch other mothers in the park with their children while she must leave her own toddler to go to work, unsure she will ever get paid.

“We are working eight hours, and we’re suffering more than people who are not working,” she said.

The couple’s pay has been so irregular that they are having a hard time even keeping track of how much they are owed, because small payments show up sporadically in their account.

Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.

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In Connecticut, a mother coped silently with a troubled son

NEWTOWN, Conn. — On the outside, Nancy Lanza was the picture of contented motherhood: volunteering at her sons' school, gardening, keeping a picture-perfect home so well-ordered a neighbor described it as pristine.

Outside public view, say some who knew her, she had a struggle on her hands, and that was her son Adam: a brilliant but sometimes difficult boy.

Lanza battled with the school district over Adam and eventually quit her job, pulled him out of school and educated him at home, said her sister-in-law, Marsha Lanza.

"I know she had issues with the school. … In what capacity, I'm not 100% certain if it was behavior, if it was learning disabilities, I really don't know," Marsha Lanza told reporters. The investigation widened Saturday into the still-baffling shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., with police releasing the identities of the 26 students and teachers they say Adam Lanza shot before turning the gun on himself.

His mother, police said, was shot at the family home before her son set out on his deadly rampage through the school.

"Adam, he was … definitely the challenge to the family in that house," Marsha Lanza said. "Every family has one. I have one. They have one. … But he was a very bright boy, he was smart."

Jim Leff, who knew Nancy Lanza casually through a friend, said he had been put off by an impression that she was high-strung, until he came to understand what she was trying to cope with as Adam's mother.

"Now that I've been filled in by friends about how difficult her troubled son … was making things for her, I understand that it wasn't that Nancy was overwrought about the trivialities of everyday life, but that she was handling a very difficult situation with uncommon grace," he wrote in a testimonial to her on his blog.

Neighbors said the Lanzas moved several years ago into the hilly neighborhood of graceful houses and pastoral views and immediately fit into the social scene, attending the picnic after the annual Labor Day parade and a rotating ladies' night at several homes.

By the accounts of some who knew her, Nancy Lanza, who grew up in rural New Hampshire, was comfortable using guns and kept several in the house.

Landscaper Dan Holmes said Lanza often talked about her gun collection, and about taking her sons target practicing. "One thing I will note is that she was a big, big gun fan," Leff wrote on his blog.

Police have said the three weapons found near Adam Lanza's body inside the school were legally purchased and registered to his mother.

Yet it appears that Adam may have tried to buy a weapon of his own before Friday's shootings. Just days before, two federal law enforcement officials say, the 20-year-old attempted to purchase a single "long gun" rifle from a Dick's Sporting Goods store in Canton, Conn., but was turned away because he did not want to wait for a required background check.

"He didn't want to wait the 14 days," said one source, declining to be identified because the case was still under review. "The sale did not take place."

Marsha Lanza, whose husband is the brother of Adam's father, Peter Lanza, said the entire family was trying to understand what happened. She said her sister-in-law never talked of being threatened by her son, or about any violence he had committed.

"And if he did, I know she wouldn't tolerate it," she said. "If he needed help, I know they would have gotten it for him.

"Because they were the type of parents — when they were married, as well as being separated — if the kids had a need, they would definitely fulfill it."

She said Nancy Lanza divorced in 2009 and was awarded the house and enough money — up to $12,450 a month in alimony, according to local news outlets that reviewed the divorce files — that she didn't have to work.

A law enforcement source said the couple were ordered to undergo parental counseling as a condition of their divorce, but another source familiar with the case said that is a standard condition of divorces in Connecticut involving a minor child.

Other Lanza family members emerged from seclusion Saturday, and, like Marsha Lanza, expressed disbelief.

"The family of Nancy Lanza shares the grief of a community and nation as we struggle to … comprehend the loss that we all share. ... On behalf of Nancy's mother and siblings, we reach out to the community… and express our heartfelt sorrow for their incomprehensible tragedy and loss of innocence that has affected so many," the family said in a statement.

It was read at a news conference by the sheriff of Rockingham County, N.H., where Nancy Lanza's brother is employed as a law enforcement officer.

Adam Lanza's father, Peter, also issued a statement.

"Our family is grieving along with all those who have been affected by this enormous tragedy. No words can truly express how heartbroken we are," it said. "We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why."

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

kim.murphy@latimes.com

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Hennessy-Fiske reported from Newtown, Murphy from Seattle and Serrano from Washington, D.C.

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Tumblr Users Flock to Mashable Comment Thread

Tumblr Is Down

When Tumblr went down Wednesday evening, users flocked to Mashable to express their rage and disbelief.

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: Mysterious Package Addressed to Indiana Jones Arrives at UChicago]

Where were you the day that Tumblr went down? Whether you were at home, at work or on the move, it’s possible that you somehow ended up on Mashable. That was the case for thousands of Tumblr users, who, desperate for their GIF fix after a Tumblr outage on Wednesday, found themselves commenting on a Mashable story about the glitch.

Frustrated Tumblr frequenters left without a blogging platform transformed the comment thread on Mashable’s story into a makeshift Tumblr dashboard. Users gathered to commiserate, voice their anger and post GIFs to express their feelings. The micro-community that sprung up in the post made these the top comments on Mashable this week.

[More from Mashable: The Top Comments on Mashable This Week]

We recently renovated our commenting system to allow readers to embed video and images, a feature Wednesday’s commenters took full advantage of. By the time Tumblr was again functional, the story had accrued over 4,000 comments. Users traded domain names, discussed their blogs and, above all, bemoaned a lack of access to the site. YouTube user moviepimpdj posted a video of the rapidly moving comment thread.

This week we also saw major changes to Facebook’s privacy settings, with our readers feeling mixed emotions about the shift. The community mused on what 2013 might hold with respect to responsive design.

What were your favorite comments from the Mashable community this week? Get involved with the discussion by signing up for Mashable Follow. You could see your voice in our next weekly roundup!

Image courtesy of Flickr, kurichan+

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Greta Garbo’s dresses, caps fetch high prices at auction

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An auction of film legend Greta Garbo‘s belongings got off to a roaring start on Friday, with her clothing, jewelry and other memorabilia fetching more than ten times pre-sale estimates in many cases.

Bidding was brisk and high as more than 800 items belonging to the reclusive Swedish actress, including the bed she slept in, went up for sale over two days at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills.

A 1930s black velvet evening dress with an estimated value of about $ 1,200 sold on Friday for $ 13,750. The winning bid for three leather driving caps worn by Garbo in a 1924 car advertisement was $ 15,000, compared with an estimate of $ 200.

Her U.S. passport issued in 1964, which carried an estimate of $ 3,000-$ 5,000, fetched $ 15,000.

All the items come from the estate of Greta Garbo, who died in 1990 in New York at the age of 84 after retiring from movies and public life in 1941.

Her great-nephew Derek Reisfield told Reuters when the auction was announced in August that the family had kept her belongings in storage before deciding to sell them.

The collection includes vintage and designer dresses, shoes, furniture and photos from Garbo’s Hollywood heyday, as well as the platform bed she designed using antique Swedish carvings to reflect her Scandinavian heritage. The bed, due to be sold later in the auction, carries an estimate of $ 800-$ 1,200.

Among other early items sold on Friday was a single page Swedish summary bank statement from 1956 that fetched $ 1,125, a Swedish military jacket ($ 4,062), and a 1960s silk brocade evening coat ($ 12,800).

The buyers for the various items were not immediately known.

Garbo started her Hollywood career in silent movies such as 1927′s “Flesh and the Devil” and was among the few actors to successfully transition to talkies, becoming iconic not only for her beauty, but for her brains and the streak of independence she displayed on film and in her personal life.

She earned four Academy Award nominations, her first for 1929′s “Anna Christie,” and was finally given an honorary award for unforgettable performances by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1954.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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As Gold Is Spirited Out of Afghanistan, Officials Wonder Why

Zalmai for The New York Times

A Kabul jewelry shop. Officials are concerned about gold being flown out of Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the country.

Most of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments. One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.

The gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials and gold dealers.

But gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here, and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials. The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much appears to be heading for Dubai.

“We are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to be drawing to a close.

Figuring out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan officials.

As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial networks.

There is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.

Last year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.

But given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s economy.

There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.

Yahya, a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China, where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.

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Apple takes investors on a wild ride

SAN FRANCISCO — With only modest expectations, Robert Leitao of Santa Clarita made a decision in 1994 that would change his life. He bought Apple stock.

This was several years before Steve Jobs returned to resurrect Apple, long before the iPod, the iPhone or the iPads that would make Apple the most valuable company in the world. A $1 investment in Apple at the start of 1994 is now worth about $70.

"Even with the recent sell-off, I'm still doing very well with the stock," said Leitao, who works as director of operations at a Catholic church in Burbank. "Apple provided for a down payment on our home for our blended family of four kids."

Leitao is one of the countless people whose lives have been touched by Apple's stock, which has become a global economic force. It is now one of the most widely held stocks, and the most valuable. Even as Apple Inc.'s market value fell to $480 billion on Friday, it was still larger than the gross domestic product of Norway or Argentina, and more than the combined value of Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Yet that astonishing size and economic influence is also what, many analysts believe, contributes to the extraordinary volatility that can make owning Apple's stock a hair-raising experience.

It was inevitable, analysts say, that after Apple's stock rose 74% in the first nine months of this year, a huge wave of selling would occur as fund managers locked in their profits. And yet, in recent years, these huge dips have been followed by even bigger run-ups that led to new record highs, a dynamic that one trader refers to as the "Apple slingshot."

That pattern has some analysts betting Apple will soar above $1,000 a share in 2013, a scenario almost guaranteed to drive the global obsession with the company's stock into an even greater frenzy.

"The impact on shareholders and on the economy is incredible," said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices. "We've not seen anything like this in the modern trading era. Ever."

Even after the remarkable decade of Apple's revival, the company's stock managed to reach new milestones this year. Early in 2012, Apple became the sixth company ever to surpass $500 billion in market value. In August, it became the only company in history with a market value topping $622 billion.

That performance affects just about anyone who has a 401(k) account or a pension. According to FactSet, a research firm that tracks investment funds, 2,555 institutional investors — mutual funds, hedge funds and pension funds, among others — owned stock in Apple, just behind the 2,590 that held Microsoft stock, as of Sept. 30, the most recent date funds had to disclose their holdings. However, the value of that Apple stock held by institutional investors on that day was $427 billion, compared with $172 billion for Microsoft, according to FactSet.

Silverblatt said the only company that has come close to having such a strong influence on the broader stock markets since World War II is IBM in the early 1980s, when the PC revolution was just getting started. But not only is the value of Apple's stock remarkable, so is its volatility. Such large stocks rarely have such big, quick swings.

Apple shares peaked at $702.10 on Sept. 19, up from $401.44 at the start of the year, a run that astonished analysts. But just as remarkable has been its collapse, falling as low as $505.75 in intra-day trading Nov. 16.

"It's just amazing because it's such a large company," said Brian Colello, a senior research analyst at Morningstar. "The company lost about $35 billion in market cap in one day. That's the size of some large-cap stocks."

Yet such swings have become commonplace for Apple stock. Before its latest swoon of 23.4% since its September high, Apple had experienced three previous corrections of more than 10% over the last two years.

The value of Apple's stock and its extreme swings have made researching it and trading it almost a full-time job for some people. Jason Schwarz of Marina del Rey edits EconomicTiming.com, which sends out up to five newsletters each week to its 1,000 clients that focus in large measure on Apple. He also helps run Lone Peak Asset Management, which has about $500 million in assets.

Schwarz says that what he calls the "Apple slingshot" is actually a virtue of the shares.

"The extraordinary volatility is the result of Apple's strength," Schwarz said. "People try to blame the volatility on Apple's weaknesses."

Schwarz and many other Apple believers argue that people are making a big mistake when they try to understand the stock's behavior by focusing on various bits of bad news such as an executive shake-up, the Maps controversy or questions about market share or competition. They have almost nothing to do with the regular hits taken by Apple shares, the argument goes.

Instead, folks like Schwarz say more technical factors are at work, such as the fact that the fiscal year for many stock funds ends Oct. 31. When the stock peaked in September, many fund managers rushed to sell to lock in profits for the year. Apple stock makes so much money for so many people, then plummets when shareholders pause to reap their profits, Schwarz says.

The volatility has continued in recent weeks, the argument goes, because fears of higher taxes next year have many fund managers trying to take advantage of short-term swings to make bigger profits. That volatility offers tantalizing windows for huge, short-term profits for investors willing to take the risk.

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5 YouTube Videos to Help Winterize Your Home

1. Caulk Talk

Westlake Ace Hardware gives a few basic steps, including caulking windows before the cold hits.

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: Origami Self-Closing Stroller Is a Slick Gift for Techie Moms]

If you’re lucky, you’ll only feel a slight draft through a window crack. Maybe a gust of wind under the door. Either way, that Father Winter is one mean S.O.B.

Thankfully, there are easy steps you can take to make sure your home is ready for the winter season. Check out the gallery above to watch five YouTube videos with the most practical and cheapest tips for winterizing your house.

[More from Mashable: 12 Holiday Gift Ideas for Your Girlfriend]

Of course, those of you in warmer climates can ignore this advice. But for the folks gearing up for a snowy, wind-chilled couple of months ahead, we’ve got your back. And so does YouTube.

Any big tips we missed? Let us know below.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Jason Persse

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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School shooting postpones Cruise premiere in Pa.

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. premiere of the Tom Cruise action movie “Jack Reacher” is being postponed following the deadly Connecticut school shooting.

Paramount Pictures says “out of honor and respect for the families of the victims” the premiere won’t take place Saturday in Pittsburgh, where “Jack Reacher” was filmed.

The premiere would’ve been Cruise’s first U.S. media appearance since his split from Katie Holmes over the summer. It was to be more contained with select outlets covering and a location away from Hollywood or New York.

A proclamation ceremony for Cruise had been planned with Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.

No new date for the premiere has been set. The movie opens Dec. 21.

Friday’s massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school killed 20 children and several adults.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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