Bulgaria Implicates Hezbollah in Deadly Israeli Bus Blast

Reuters

Bulgaria's Burgas airport on July 18 after an explosion on a bus carrying Israeli tourists outside the airport.

SOFIA, Bulgaria — The Bulgarian government said on Tuesday that two of the people behind a deadly bombing attack that targeted an Israeli tour bus six months ago were believed to be members of the military wing of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The announcement could force the European Union to reconsider whether to designate the group as a terrorist organization and crack down on its extensive fund-raising operations across the continent. That could have wide-reaching repercussions for Europe’s uneasy détente with the group, which is an influential force in Middle East politics, considers Israel an enemy and has extensive links with Iran.

Bulgaria’s interior minister, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, said at a news conference that the investigation into the bombing in Burgas in July 2012 found that a man with an Australian passport and a man with a Canadian passport were two of the three conspirators involved in the attack, which claimed the lives of five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver.

Bulgarian investigators had “a well-founded assumption that they belonged to the military formation of Hezbollah,” Mr. Tsvetanov said.

Bulgarian officials have found themselves under pressure from Israel and the United States, which consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization, to blame it for the bus attack. But the Bulgarians also have been facing pressure from European allies like Germany and France, which regard Hezbollah as a legitimate political organization, to temper any finding on the sensitive issue.

Mr. Tsvetanov spoke to reporters here after briefing top government officials and security personnel about the state of the investigation.

“We have followed their entire activities in Australia and Canada so we have information about financing and their membership in Hezbollah,” he said.

Mr. Tsvetanov did not mention Iran, however, Hezbollah’s ally and chief backer.

Analysts said the bombing was just one chapter in a shadow war pitting Israel against Iran and Hezbollah. Israel is believed to be behind the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists. Operatives of the Iranian Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, were believed to be behind a series of plots against Israeli targets in Thailand, India and Georgia. Israeli officials said the Burgas attack bore the hallmarks of a Hezbollah operation.

The European calculation all along has been that whatever its activities in the Middle East, Hezbollah does not pose a threat on the Continent. Thousands of Hezbollah members and supporters operate in Europe essentially unrestricted, raising money that is funneled back to the group in Lebanon.

Changing the designation to a terrorist entity raises the prospect of unsettling questions for Europe — how to deal with those supporters, for example — and the sort of confrontation governments have sought to avoid.

“There’s the overall fear if we’re too noisy about this, Hezbollah might strike again, and it might not be Israeli tourists this time,” said Sylke Tempel, editor in chief of the German foreign affairs magazine Internationale Politik.

The significance of their determination has put pressure on Bulgarian officials, who would like to maintain strong ties with Israel and the United States, and European allies like France and Germany. Bulgarian officials had maintained a studied silence for more than six months since the attack.

“If you factor in the suspicion that there are political implications beyond Bulgaria’s borders, it’s completely understandable that they’ve been playing for time,” said Dimitar Bechev, head of the Sofia office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Tsvetanov spoke after the meeting of the president’s council for national security, which includes the prime minister, top cabinet members and military and security personnel.

Bulgarian officials are acutely aware of the consequences of their findings even though larger European Union members did not exert blatant pressure on them regarding the Hezbollah question. “It was not a campaign,” said Philipp Missfelder, a leading member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the foreign policy spokesman for the party in Parliament. “Some German officials dropped a few words.”

But Mr. Missfelder said that attitudes toward Hezbollah were gradually shifting. “It’s clear that they are steered from Iran and they are destabilizing the region,” Mr. Missfelder said. “The group that thinks Hezbollah is a stabilizing factor is getting smaller.”

Hezbollah’s dual nature as what Western intelligence agencies call a terrorist organization and a political party with significant social projects, including schools and health clinics, make it more difficult to dismiss. Hezbollah is a significant political actor in Lebanon, and many European officials are particularly wary of upsetting the status quo as the civil war drags on in Syria.

Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

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Vonn hospitalized after crash in super-G at worlds

SCHLADMING, Austria (AP) — Lindsey Vonn crashed during the super-G Tuesday and was taken to a hospital by helicopter after apparently hurting her right knee at the world championships.

The four-time overall World Cup champion lost balance on her right leg while landing after a jump. Her ski came off immediately, and Vonn slid off course and hit a gate before coming to a halt.

She received treatment on the slope for 12 minutes before going to the hospital. Her U.S. team had no immediate information on her condition.

The crash came almost exactly one year before the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Vonn returned to the circuit last month after an almost monthlong break from racing to fully recover from an intestinal illness that put her in a hospital for two days in November.

Vonn trailed race winner Tina Maze of Slovenia by 0.12 seconds shortly before the crash.

The race, which was postponed for 3½ hours because of fog, resumed after another 15-minute delay. Several racers struggled with the conditions.

"It's not a very difficult course, but in some parts you couldn't see anything," Fabienne Suter of Switzerland said.

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Well: Gluten-Free for the Gluten Sensitive

Eat no wheat.

That is the core, draconian commandment of a gluten-free diet, a prohibition that excises wide swaths of American cuisine — cupcakes, pizza, bread and macaroni and cheese, to name a few things.

For the approximately one-in-a-hundred Americans who have a serious condition called celiac disease, that is an indisputably wise medical directive.

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One woman’s story of going gluten-free.

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Now medical experts largely agree that there is a condition related to gluten other than celiac. In 2011 a panel of celiac experts convened in Oslo and settled on a medical term for this malady: non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

What they still do not know: how many people have gluten sensitivity, what its long-term effects are, or even how to reliably identify it. Indeed, they do not really know what the illness is.

The definition is less a diagnosis than a description — someone who does not have celiac, but whose health improves on a gluten-free diet and worsens again if gluten is eaten. It could even be more than one illness.

“We have absolutely no clue at this point,” said Dr. Stefano Guandalini, medical director of the University of Chicago’s Celiac Disease Center.

Kristen Golden Testa could be one of the gluten-sensitive. Although she does not have celiac, she adopted a gluten-free diet last year. She says she has lost weight and her allergies have gone away. “It’s just so marked,” said Ms. Golden Testa, who is health program director in California for the Children’s Partnership, a national nonprofit advocacy group.

She did not consult a doctor before making the change, and she also does not know whether avoiding gluten has helped at all. “This is my speculation,” she said. She also gave up sugar at the same time and made an effort to eat more vegetables and nuts.

Many advocates of gluten-free diets warn that non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a wide, unseen epidemic undermining the health of millions of people. They believe that avoiding gluten — a composite of starch and proteins found in certain grassy grains like wheat, barley and rye — gives them added energy and alleviates chronic ills. Oats, while gluten-free, are also avoided, because they are often contaminated with gluten-containing grains.

Others see the popularity of gluten-free foods as just the latest fad, destined to fade like the Atkins diet and avoidance of carbohydrates a decade ago.

Indeed, Americans are buying billions of dollars of food labeled gluten-free each year. And celebrities like Miley Cyrus, the actress and singer, have urged fans to give up gluten. “The change in your skin, physical and mental health is amazing!” she posted on Twitter in April.

For celiac experts, the anti-gluten zeal is a dramatic turnaround; not many years ago, they were struggling to raise awareness among doctors that bread and pasta can make some people very sick. Now they are voicing caution, tamping down the wilder claims about gluten-free diets.

“It is not a healthier diet for those who don’t need it,” Dr. Guandalini said. These people “are following a fad, essentially.” He added, “And that’s my biased opinion.”

Nonetheless, Dr. Guandalini agrees that some people who do not have celiac receive a genuine health boost from a gluten-free diet. He just cannot say how many.

As with most nutrition controversies, most everyone agrees on the underlying facts. Wheat entered the human diet only about 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture.

“For the previous 250,000 years, man had evolved without having this very strange protein in his gut,” Dr. Guandalini said. “And as a result, this is a really strange, different protein which the human intestine cannot fully digest. Many people did not adapt to these great environmental changes, so some adverse effects related to gluten ingestion developed around that time.”

The primary proteins in wheat gluten are glutenin and gliadin, and gliadin contains repeating patterns of amino acids that the human digestive system cannot break down. (Gluten is the only substance that contains these proteins.) People with celiac have one or two genetic mutations that somehow, when pieces of gliadin course through the gut, cause the immune system to attack the walls of the intestine in a case of mistaken identity. That, in turn, causes fingerlike structures called villi that absorb nutrients on the inside of the intestines to atrophy, and the intestines can become leaky, wreaking havoc. Symptoms, which vary widely among people with the disease, can include vomiting, chronic diarrhea or constipation and diminished growth rates in children.

The vast majority of people who have celiac do not know it. And not everyone who has the genetic mutations develops celiac.

What worries doctors is that the problem seems to be growing. After testing blood samples from a century ago, researchers discovered that the rate of celiac appears to be increasing. Why is another mystery. Some blame the wheat, as some varieties now grown contain higher levels of gluten, because gluten helps provide the springy inside and crusty outside desirable in bread. (Blame the artisanal bakers.)

There are also people who are allergic to wheat (not necessarily gluten), but until recently, most experts had thought that celiac and wheat allergy were the only problems caused by eating the grain.

For 99 out of 100 people who don’t have celiac — and those who don’t have a wheat allergy — the undigested gliadin fragments usually pass harmlessly through the gut, and the possible benefits of a gluten-free diet are nebulous, perhaps nonexistent for most. But not all.

Anecdotally, people like Ms. Golden Testa say that gluten-free diets have improved their health. Some people with diseases like irritable bowel syndrome and arthritis also report alleviation of their symptoms, and others are grasping at gluten as a source of a host of other conditions, though there is no scientific evidence to back most of the claims. Experts have been skeptical. It does not make obvious sense, for example, that someone would lose weight on a gluten-free diet. In fact, the opposite often happens for celiac patients as their malfunctioning intestines recover.

They also worried that people could end up eating less healthfully. A gluten-free muffin generally contains less fiber than a wheat-based one and still offers the same nutritional dangers — fat and sugar. Gluten-free foods are also less likely to be fortified with vitamins.

But those views have changed. Crucial in the evolving understanding of gluten were the findings, published in 2011, in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, of an experiment in Australia. In the double-blind study, people who suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, did not have celiac and were on a gluten-free diet were given bread and muffins to eat for up to six weeks. Some of them were given gluten-free baked goods; the others got muffins and bread with gluten. Thirty-four patients completed the study. Those who ate gluten reported they felt significantly worse.

That influenced many experts to acknowledge that the disease was not just in the heads of patients. “It’s not just a placebo effect,” said Dr. Marios Hadjivassiliou, a neurologist and celiac expert at the University of Sheffield in England.

Even though there was now convincing evidence that gluten sensitivity exists, that has not helped to establish what causes gluten sensitivity. The researchers of the Australian experiment noted, “No clues to the mechanism were elucidated.”

What is known is that gluten sensitivity does not correlate with the genetic mutations of celiac, so it appears to be something distinct from celiac.

How widespread gluten sensitivity may be is another point of controversy.

Dr. Thomas O’Bryan, a chiropractor turned anti-gluten crusader, said that when he tested his patients, 30 percent of them had antibodies targeting gliadin fragments in their blood. “If a person has a choice between eating wheat or not eating wheat,” he said, “then for most people, avoiding wheat would be ideal.”

Dr. O’Bryan has given himself a diagnosis of gluten sensitivity. “I had these blood sugar abnormalities and didn’t have a handle where they were coming from,” he said. He said a blood test showed gliadin antibodies, and he started avoiding gluten. “It took me a number of years to get completely gluten-free,” he said. “I’d still have a piece of pie once in a while. And I’d notice afterwards that I didn’t feel as good the next day or for two days. Subtle, nothing major, but I’d notice that.”

But Suzy Badaracco, president of Culinary Tides, Inc., a consulting firm, said fewer people these days were citing the benefits of gluten-free diets. She said a recent survey of people who bought gluten-free foods found that 35 percent said they thought gluten-free products were generally healthier, down from 46 percent in 2010. She predicted that the use of gluten-free products would decline.

Dr. Guandalini said finding out whether you are gluten sensitive is not as simple as Dr. O’Bryan’s antibody tests, because the tests only indicate the presence of the fragments in the blood, which can occur for a variety of reasons and do not necessarily indicate a chronic illness. For diagnosing gluten sensitivity, “There is no testing of the blood that can be helpful,” he said.

He also doubts that the occurrence of gluten sensitivity is nearly as high as Dr. O’Bryan asserts. “No more than 1 percent,” Dr. Guandalini said, although he agreed that at present all numbers were speculative.

He said his research group was working to identify biological tests that could determine gluten sensitivity. Some of the results are promising, he said, but they are too preliminary to discuss. Celiac experts urge people to not do what Ms. Golden Testa did — self-diagnose. Should they actually have celiac, tests to diagnose it become unreliable if one is not eating gluten. They also recommend visiting a doctor before starting on a gluten-free diet.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 4, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Thomas O'Bryan. It is O'Bryan, not O'Brien.

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You're the Boss Blog: Our Vision: Make Sales to End Sweatshops

There have been a lot of grim stories lately involving the manufacture of clothing.

Over the last few months, there have been factory fires in Bangledesh that have taken the lives of hundreds of men and women who endured depressing sweatshop environments in order to feed their families. These factories were producing products for global brands like Wal-Mart, Disney, and Enyce. And a recent study by Greenpeace International concluded that Calvin Klein, GAP, Zara, Diesel, and other top apparel brands produce clothes that contain high levels of dangerous chemicals.

Does it make sense that these and other brands are allowed to make products that expose people throughout their supply chains — cotton farmers to garment workers to consumers — to cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting agents that can cause birth defects, learning disorders, and even death? If clothing were food, wouldn’t there be a recall?

In most cases, these brands have little to fear in the way of regulation. What they do fear is a loss of sales – and that is where my start-up, Fashioning Change, hopes to play a role. We have built a marketplace that offers stylish, money-saving, safe, sustainable, and sweatshop-free alternatives. Our goal is to support manufacturers that are doing things right – and to leave the big brands no option but to adopt authentic practices that protect health, the Earth, and human rights. That’s our plan, any way.

When we share that plan with venture capitalists, we are often told, “but shoppers won’t pay more for products that are green or socially responsible.” And we don’t think they should have to. That’s why, in addition to showcasing socially responsible brands, we are using our marketplace to demonstrate that shopping “green” doesn’t have to mean spending more or compromising on style and quality.

To prove our point, we built a feature on our Web site that we call Wear This, Not That (see photo above). Here’s how it works: We look for styles that are trending within mainstream brands, and then we review the Fashioning Change catalog for items that are comparable in price and style. When we find a match, we feature a side-by-side comparison of the Fashioning Change alternative to the mainstream product. Every comparison presents the fashion aesthetics and the price and also highlights the brand’s manufacturing process. Here’s an example, Wear This, Not That: Reuse Jeans vs Guess.

We did an analysis comparing more than 100 products from 27 mainstream brands to the Fashioning Change equivalent, and the data showed that shoppers can save an average of 27 percent with our alternatives. From Black Friday through Cyber Monday, we calculated that shoppers buying through Fashioning Change saved $25,509.84 — the difference between our retail price and what these shoppers would have spent on the mainstream option.

All of this may sound simple but making it happen isn’t easy, especially when you don’t have a huge budget to spend on marketing. To help us connect with each member of our growing audience, we built a targeted e-mail system that reviews shared preferences and site behavior to help us understand what e-mail content is relevant for each person. We use that data to share relevant information with each person who signs up for Fashioning Change. Every day, we work to increase our relevancy to each person so that we can make more sales while reducing pollution and the use of sweatshops.

So far, all of the money we make goes back into building Fashioning Change. My co-founder Kevin and I have forgone salaries until we can get Fashioning Change to profitability (something we look forward to in the near future). In order to live without a salary, I gave up my two-bedroom apartment, sold all of my furniture, and moved into my parent’s guest room. I lived there for more than a year on savings while getting the company started. Now I split time between the Fashioning Change house in Santa Monica and my parent’s house in San Diego. (I also gave up health insurance, which I will discuss in my next post.)

We see fashion as just the beginning for us. We have built a Web platform that will eventually allow us to provide access to authentic, great-looking, money-saving, sustainable, and sweatshop-free alternatives to almost everything that goes on (or in) our bodies, in our homes, or into our communities: clothes, food, detergents, cars, bedding, toothpaste, etc. While we could start adding all different types of products, I believe our success will lie in attacking one vertical at a time. We will see how quickly our vision gains momentum.

Some of the older investors we meet seem skeptical that we can create this mix of business and ethics. We’re looking forward to proving them wrong.

Questions? Thoughts? Lets connect, talk shop, and build some original and meaningful start-ups in the process. You can leave a comment below, or e-mail me at adriana@fashioningchange.com. You can also find me on Twitter at @adriana_herrera.

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Investigation Finds Suspected Fixing in 680 Soccer Matches

THE HAGUE — Criminal organizations have infiltrated the highest levels of European and international soccer, threatening the very integrity of the sport, global law enforcement officials said on Monday as they unveiled the results of a 19-month investigation that indicated that hundreds of people had been involved in match-fixing.

At least 425 people from more than 15 countries — including club and match officials, and current and former players — are suspected of conspiring in 680 matches on behalf of Asian criminal syndicates that made millions of dollars in profits by betting on the results, they said.

Those matches included qualifying games for both the World Cup and the European Cup, and two Champions League matches, including one in England.

“This is a sad day for European football, and more evidence of the corrupting influence of organized crime,” said Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, which helped coordinate the investigation among European Union member states, Interpol and non-European nations.

Citing the doping scandal that has undermined public trust and interest in cycling, Mr. Wainwright warned that the problem must be tackled quickly or soccer would lose the trust of the public.

In all, 680 matches have been identified as suspect, officials said, including 300 outside Europe, primarily in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

It was not immediately clear how many of the matches identified were already known to the public or were the result of new discoveries.

Officials declined to identify any of the teams or individuals involved in the investigations, citing the need to guard the confidentiality of police procedures.

The officials, speaking to journalists at Europol headquarters, said that a joint team was created in July 2011 after investigators in several European countries came to realize that there was a major overlap between suspects in separate match-fixing inquiries.

A single criminal group, based in Asia, is behind most of the matches identified in the investigations, Europol and Interpol officials said, and an international arrest warrant has been issued seeking the extradition of the ringleader to Europe to face fraud and bribery charges.

Europol did not publicly identify the ringleader of the gang, but several knowledgeable law enforcement officials later said on the condition of anonymity that it was a Singapore-based man, known as Dan Tan. Mr. Tan has been implicated in match-fixing cases dating back at least to 1999, the officials said.

Asked about the level of international cooperation Europol was getting from other national authorities involved in enforcement of the warrant, Mr. Wainwright said, “I’m satisfied that Interpol is in active dialogue” with the other parties. “It’s important that all international arrest warrants are pursued.”

The officials repeatedly dodged questions from reporters seeking to learn just how many of the suspected match-fixing cases they announced on Monday were new.

German prosecutors, for example, have themselves previously identified dozens of cases and it was not clear how many of those were included in the tally. The country with the most cases identified by Europol was Turkey, with 79. Germany was next with 70, followed by Switzerland, with 41. The agency also reported cases in Belgium, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Canada.

To rig the matches, officials said, the criminals operated a sophisticated organization, employing some people to deal with players and referees, others to handle money and place bets, others to carry out money laundering, on up to a strategic command at the top.

Any one match-rigging operation might have involved as many as 50 people in 10 countries, they said.

The actual business of rigging a match typically involves bribing players or a referee, or possibly both, in an effort to deliver a predetermined result. The Asian crime syndicates typically want to achieve a particular margin of victory, rather a precise outcome, officials said.

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The Future of BlackBerry 10 Sales Looks Hazy

Early sales figures from abroad suggest high demand for one of BlackBerry‘s two big comeback phones… in the struggling Canadian company’s strongest market. As the U.S. market remains on standby for sales and even ads, reports from both analysts and suppliers suggest sold-out new models in the United Kingdom, the first and only place the BlackBerry Z10 is available yet. “We believe Carphone Warehouse is seeing widespread sell-outs, while O2, Vodafone, Orange and EE are seeing robust demand,” Jefferies analyst Peter Misek writes. “We estimate sell-in to be at least several hundred thousand units,” he added. It’s not that these sales aren’t deserved — the gadget reviewers loved the touchscreen Z10, for the most part, and the full-keyboard Q10 model that also works with the new BlackBerry 10 OS isn’t on sale anywhere yet. But if any place would like a touchscreen BlackBerry, it would be the UK. Because the British may not have abandoned the smartphone keyboard, but they fell out of love it with a lot more slowly than Americans did  — BlackBerry held on to 12 percent of its market share there last year, compared to the 2 percent in the U.S. Unfortunately for the company formerly known as Research in Motion, the earliest signs suggest the Z10 may not change that lack of enthusiasm in the states.

RELATED: Everything You Need to Know About BlackBerry 10

The lack of stateside BlackBerry enthusiasm starts with American wireless carriers. U.S. customers can’t even buy the Z10 until sometime in March — we’ll be the last country to get it in this initial wave. The delay stems from a Federal Communications Commission approval process that will take weeks. While that might sound like a regulatory technicality, it may also reflect a lack of excitement to get the phone out there. None of the cellphone companies have started taking pre-sale orders, and all but one failed to provide an executive quote playing up the new BlackBerry, as PC Mag’s Sascha Segan pointed out. Sprint won’t even sell the Z10, opting to push out the more traditional Q10 and its signature keyboard when that phone starts to hit carriers in April. 

RELATED: Blackberry’s New OS Met With Resounding ‘Meh’

The Z10 sales delay could work in BlackBerry’s favor in one peculiar way — it should give consumers enough time to forget about the very weird, very desperate product unveiling. Still, two months is also enough time for initial hype to wear off, as other, newer phones get more and more attention — the much anticipated Samsung Galaxy SIV will supposedly come out around March as well. To keep Americans excited, BlackBerry has spent hundreds of millions on an ad campaign in the U.S., reports The Wall Street Journal. But the company’s new Super Bowl ad, which focused on all the things the new BlackBerry can’t do, has techies baffled:

RELATED: Look How Desperate the BlackBerry 10 Unveiling Event Actually Was

RELATED: RIM Says Sorry to Customers with Free Apps

“It’s just hard to see how you can introduce a new product without covering a single feature,” wrote The Verge’s T.C. Sotteck of the new spot. Lucky for BlackBerry, the ad was a one-time Super Sunday move. Its “Keep Moving” campaign, which focuses on what the phone can do, will debut today. The 60-second preview sampled over at The Verge sounds like it does a better job selling Z10′s features. “[The ad] featured a side-scrolling view of people moving through different variations on work and play: a nod to the company’s enterprise-focused heritage,” Sottech writes.

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Ravens edge 49ers 34-31 in electric Super Bowl

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — For a Super Bowl with so many story lines, this game came up with quite a twist.

Try a blackout that turned a blowout into a shootout — capped by a brilliant defensive stand.

The Baltimore Ravens survived a frenzied comeback by the San Francisco 49ers following a 34-minute delay in the third quarter for a power outage Sunday night, winning their second championship 34-31. Super Bowl MVP Joe Flacco threw three first-half touchdown passes, Jacoby Jones ran back the second-half kickoff a record 108 yards for a score, and star linebacker Ray Lewis' last play fittingly was part of a defensive effort that saved the victory.

"To me, that was one of the most amazing goal-line stands I've ever been a part of in my career," said Lewis, who announced a month ago he would retire when the Ravens were done playing.

They are done now, with another Vince Lombardi Trophy headed for the display case.

"What better way to do it," Lewis said, "than on the Super Bowl stage?"

That stage already was loaded with plots:

—The coaching Harbaughs sibling rivalry, won by older brother John, who said the postgame greeting with Jim was "painful."

—Flacco's emergence as a top-level quarterback, and his impending free agency.

—Colin Kaepernick's rapid rise in the last two months as 49ers QB.

—The big game's return to the Big Easy for the first time in 11 years, and the first time since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005.

—Lewis' self-proclaimed "last ride."

But when the Superdome lost power, well, that wasn't in anyone's scenario.

Flacco and the Ravens (14-6) were turning the game into a rout, leading 28-6 when, without even a flicker of warning, several banks of lights and the scoreboards went dark. Players from both sides stretched and chatted with each other in as bizarre a scene as any Super Bowl has witnessed.

"The bad part was we started talking about it," said safety Ed Reed, who had the game's only interception. "That was mentioned. It was like they were trying to kill our momentum."

After power was restored, the 49ers began playing lights out.

San Francisco (13-5-1), in search of its sixth Lombardi Trophy in as many tries, got back in the game almost immediately.

Michael Crabtree's 31-yard touchdown reception, on which he broke two tackles, made it 28-13. A few minutes later, Frank Gore's 6-yard run followed a 32-yard punt return by Ted Ginn Jr., and the 49ers were within eight.

Ray Rice's fumble at his 24 led to David Akers' 34-yard field goal, but Baltimore woke up for a long drive leading to rookie Justin Tucker's 19-yard field goal.

San Francisco wasn't done challenging, though, and Kaepernick's 15-yard TD run, the longest for a quarterback in a Super Bowl, made it 31-29. A 2-point conversion pass failed when the Ravens blitzed.

Tucker added a 38-yarder with 4:19 remaining, setting up the frantic finish.

Kaepernick couldn't get the 49ers into the end zone on the final three plays. The last was a pass into the right corner of the end zone to Crabtree that involved some incidental bumping. Jim Harbaugh insisted a flag should have been thrown.

"There's no question in my mind that there was a pass interference and then a hold," Jim Harbaugh said.

Ravens punter Sam Koch took a safety for the final score with 4 seconds left. Koch's free kick was returned by Ginn to midfield as time ran out.

"How could it be any other way? It's never pretty. It's never perfect. But it's us," John Harbaugh said of his Ravens. "It was us today."

Barely.

"Yeah, I think that last drive when we got the ball and had time to go down and score a touchdown," Kaepernick said, "we thought it was our game."

But the championship is Baltimore's.

As for the foul-up at America's biggest sporting event, officials revealed that an "abnormality" in the power system triggered an automatic shutdown, forcing backup systems to kick in. But no one was sure what caused the initial problem.

Everything changed after that until Lewis and Co. shut it down. But there were plenty of white-knuckle moments and the Ravens had to make four stops inside their 7 at the end.

"I think it speaks to our resolve, speaks to our determination, speaks to our mental toughness," John Harbaugh said. "That is what wins and loses games."

At 4 hours, 14 minutes, it was the longest Super Bowl ever.

Flacco's arrival as a championship quarterback — he had 11 postseason TD passes, tying a league mark, and no interceptions — coincides with Lewis' retirement. The win capped a sensational four games since Lewis announced he was leaving the game after 17 Hall of Fame-caliber years.

The Ravens will become Flacco's team now, provided he reaches agreement on a new contract.

Flacco's three TD passes in the opening half tied a Super Bowl record. They covered 13 yards to Anquan Boldin, 1 to Dennis Pitta and 56 to Jones.

That start boosted him to the MVP award.

"They have to give it to one guy and I'm not going to complain that I got it," Flacco said.

John Harbaugh had no complaints about getting that other trophy named after that Green Bay coach. But he struggled to balance it with the disappointment his brother was feeling.

"The meeting with Jim in the middle (of the field for the postgame handshake) was probably the most difficult thing I have ever been associated with in my life," the Ravens coach said.

The wild scoring made this the second championship in the NFL's 80-year title game history in which both teams scored at least 30 points. Pittsburgh's 35-31 win over Dallas in 1979 was the other.

The Ravens stumbled into the playoffs with four defeats in its last five regular-season games as Lewis recovered from a torn right triceps and Flacco struggled. Harbaugh even fired his offensive coordinator in December, a stunning move with the postseason so close.

But that — and every other move Harbaugh, Flacco and the Ravens made since — were right on target.

New Orleans native Jones, one of the stars in a double-overtime playoff win at Denver, seemed to put the game away with his record 108-yard sprint with the second-half kickoff.

Soon after, the lights went out — and when they came back on, the Ravens were almost powerless to slow the 49ers.

Until the final moments.

"The final series of Ray Lewis' career was a goal-line stand," Harbaugh said.

Lewis was sprawled on all fours, face-down on the turf, after the end zone incompletion.

"It's no greater way, as a champ, to go out on your last ride with the men that I went out with, with my teammates," Lewis said. "And you looked around this stadium and Baltimore! Baltimore! We coming home, baby! We did it!"

Jim Harbaugh, the coach who turned around the Niners in the last two years and brought them to their first Super Bowl in 18 years, had seen his team make a similarly stunning comeback in the NFC championship at Atlanta, but couldn't finish it off against Baltimore.

"Our guys battled back to get back in," the 49ers coach said. "I thought we battled right to the brink of winning."

The 49ers couldn't have been sloppier in the first half, damaging their chances with penalties — including one on their first play that negated a 20-yard gain — poor tackling and turnovers. Rookie LaMichael James fumbled at the Baltimore 25 to ruin an impressive drive, and the Ravens converted that with Flacco's 1-yard pass to Pitta for a 14-3 lead.

On San Francisco's next offensive play, Kaepernick threw behind Randy Moss and always dependable Reed picked it off. A huge scuffle followed that brought both Harbaughs onto the field and saw both sides penalized 15 yards for unnecessary roughness.

Reed, also a New Orleans native, tied the NFL record for postseason picks with his ninth.

Baltimore didn't pounce on that mistake for points. Instead, Tucker's fake field goal run on fourth-and-9 came up a yard short when Chris Culliver slammed him out of bounds.

The Ravens simply shrugged, forced a three-and-out, and then unleashed Jones deep. Just as he did to Denver, he flashed past the secondary and caught Flacco's fling. He had to wait for the ball, fell to the ground to grab it, but was untouched by a Niner. Up he sprang, cutting left and using his speed to outrun two defenders to the end zone.

Desperate for some points, the 49ers completed four passes and got a 15-yard roughing penalty against Haloti Ngata, who later left with a knee injury. But again they couldn't cross the goal line, Paul Kruger got his second sack of the half on third down, forcing a second field goal by Akers, from 27 yards.

When Jones began the second half by sprinting up the middle virtually untouched — he is the second player with two TDs of 50 yards or more in a Super Bowl, tying Washington's Ricky Sanders in 1988 — the rout was on.

Then it wasn't.

"Everybody had their hand on this game," 49ers All-Pro linebacker Patrick Willis said. "We point the fingers at nobody. We win together and we lose together, and today we lost it."

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The New Old Age Blog: Therapy Plateau No Longer Ends Coverage

Ellen Gorman, 72, a New York psychotherapist, can’t walk very far and gets around the city mainly by taxi, “which is really expensive,” she said. Twice since 2008 her physical therapy was discontinued because she wasn’t progressing. But after a knee replacement last year, she is getting physical therapy again, exercising with her therapist and building up her endurance by walking in the hallway of her Manhattan apartment building.

“Before this, I was getting weaker and weaker, and I just kept caving in,” she said.

Because of an action by Congress and a recent court settlement, Medicare probably won’t cut off Ms. Gorman’s physical therapy again should her progress level off — as long as her doctor says it is medically necessary.

Congress continued for another year a little-known process that allows exceptions to what Medicare pays for physical, occupational and speech therapy. The Medicare limits before the exceptions are $1,900 for physical and speech therapy this year, and $1,900 for occupational therapy.

In addition, the settlement of a class-action lawsuit last month now means that Medicare is prohibited from denying patients coverage for skilled nursing care, home health services or outpatient therapy because they had reached a “plateau,” and their conditions were not improving. That will allow people with Medicare who have chronic health problems and disabilities to get the therapy and other skilled care that they need for as long as they need it, if they meet other coverage criteria.

The settlement is expected to affect thousands, and possibly millions, of Medicare beneficiaries with chronic health problems like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries. It could also help families, as well as the overburdened Medicare budget, delay costly nursing home care by enabling seniors to live longer in their own homes.

“Under this settlement, Medicare policy will be clarified to ensure that claims from providers are reimbursed consistently and appropriately and not denied solely based on a rule-of-thumb determination that a beneficiary’s condition is not improving,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Medicare program.

The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Medicare Advocacy and Vermont Legal Aid on behalf of four Medicare patients and five national organizations, including the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Parkinson’s Action Network and the Alzheimer’s Association. A tentative settlement had been reached in October and on Jan. 24 a federal judge in Vermont approved the deal.

For seniors getting skilled services at home under a doctor’s order, the settlement means Medicare’s home health coverage has no time limit, Margaret Murphy told lawyers attending the annual meeting of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys in Washington, D. C., shortly after the then-tentative settlement was announced.

The coverage “can go on for years and years, if your doctor orders it,” said Ms. Murphy, the center’s associate director, who added that patients must be homebound (though not bedbound) and need intermittent care — every couple of days or weeks – that can only be provided by a physical therapist, nurse or other trained health care professional. When physical therapy is provided as part of Medicare’s home health benefit, the therapy dollar limits may not apply.

The settlement ensures that nursing home residents will also get coverage for skilled care regardless of improvement, but does not change the duration, which is still limited to up to 100 days per “benefit period.” That begins when a patient is admitted as an inpatient to a hospital or a nursing home for skilled care and ends after 60 days without skilled care. The agreement preserves the requirement that they must also have spent at least three days as inpatients in a hospital.

Federal officials say the settlement is not a change in Medicare coverage rules, but that statement may surprise many beneficiaries and providers.

“If someone isn’t making progress, I say, ‘Listen, I’m sorry but Medicare’s not going to cover this so you can come in for a few more sessions but then I have to let you go,’ ” said Greg Babiec, a physical therapist and one of the owners of Evolve, a private therapy practice with offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He had not heard about the settlement.

Beneficiaries also often lose Medicare coverage for outpatient therapy because they hit the payment limit. But under the exceptions process Congress continued for another year, the health care provider can put an additional code on the claim that indicates further treatment above the $1,900 limit is medically necessary. When treatment costs reach $3,700, the provider can submit medical documentation to support a request for another exception to cover 20 more sessions. (A Medicare fact sheet provides some additional details, but has not been updated for 2013.)

In 2011, nearly five million seniors received therapy services at a cost of $5.7 billion, and about one out of every four received an exception to the then-$1,870 limit, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent government agency that advises Congress.

Just a few hours before the settlement was approved, Rachel DeGolia learned that her 87-year-old father in Chicago was going to have to stop therapy because he stopped showing improvement — again.

“Every time he stops going to physical therapy, he starts to backslide in terms of his balance, his strength and his mobility,” said Ms. DeGolia, executive director of the Universal Health Care Action Network, a national advocacy group in Cleveland. His physical therapist did not know Medicare will cover therapy to prevent her father’s condition from getting worse.

Under the settlement, Medicare officials have until next January to straighten things out by notifying health care providers. Beneficiaries are not among those to be contacted, and so far the federal officials have not issued a formal statement on the settlement.

But patients don’t have to wait for their provider to get the official word, said Judith Stein, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs and executive director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy. “This isn’t a clandestine settlement,” she said.

The center’s Web site offers free “self-help” packets explaining how to challenge a denial of coverage that is based on the lack of improvement. Ms. Stein also advises beneficiaries to show a copy of the settlement — also available from the Web site — to your health care provider at your next physical therapy appointment if you are concerned about losing Medicare coverage. (If you follow this advice, let us know what happens.)

The Web site also explains how beneficiaries can request a review of their case if they received skilled nursing or therapy services in a skilled nursing facility, at home or as outpatients and were denied Medicare coverage because of a lack of progress after Jan. 18, 2011, when the lawsuit was filed.

Dean Lerner relied on the settlement last month to ensure that his brother-in-law would continue to receive Medicare physical therapy coverage.

“My brother-in-law in St. Louis suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and has for many years, and my sister is having a devil of a time helping him as his disease progresses,” said Mr. Lerner, a retired lawyer and state health official in Des Moines, who is also a Medicaid consultant.

A physical therapist teaches his brother-in-law to stand, turn and use a walker and maintain what little strength he still has. But because his condition hasn’t improved, the therapist said Medicare would not pay for additional sessions.

“But for my being an attorney, the outcome may well have been very different, and that shouldn’t be,” he said. “Why should you have to fight?”

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Thomas Tull of Legendary Entertainment Faces a Critical Juncture

LOS ANGELES — During the baseball strike of 1995, Thomas Tull, then a 24-year-old laundromat owner, was audacious enough to turn up at a training camp for the Atlanta Braves. They looked at his swing and sent him home.

No matter. Mr. Tull swatted through the entrepreneurial minor leagues, from laundries to tax prep centers to dot-com start-ups, and into Hollywood.

His aggressiveness and aw-shucks charm made him one of the most successful walk-on players in movie history. “The Dark Knight,” “300,” “The Hangover” and “Clash of the Titans” were all made with backing from his company, Legendary Entertainment, a Warner Brothers affiliate, which picked up more than $700 million in new financing last year.

But the coming months will tell if Mr. Tull really is the latest outsider to win an insider’s game.

Legendary is a supplier of six major releases by Warner from March to August, giving it an unusually large portion of the blockbuster season. If they are successful, Mr. Tull, 42, may come to be viewed as a budding Steve Ross, who used the resources of Kinney National Services, which operated parking lots, to build Time Warner: Legendary’s goal is to continue to grow. But failure could tip Legendary in the direction of the original DreamWorks SKG. That company, backed by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, started big and fizzled.

Already, some thorny problems have surfaced. Last month, Mr. Tull became embroiled in two lawsuits over an expensive “Godzilla” remake that is supposed to begin production shortly. Legendary’s forays into China as well as television and comic book publishing have failed or had a shaky start.

The Warner-Legendary relationship oscillates between cool and frosty, with Mr. Tull at times telling cohorts that he is taken for granted and various studio executives vexed by his success and efforts to be seen as a creative force and not just a writer of checks.

Mr. Tull, who declined to comment, is betting hundreds of millions of dollars on his next films. Sequels to “The Hangover” and “300” are almost guaranteed hits. But others are substantial risks. “Jack the Giant Killer,” an embellishment of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” comes on the heels of several fairy tale adaptations that disappointed at the box office.

“Man of Steel” is an expensive attempt to revive a well-worn Superman franchise. The less costly “42” is something Legendary once said it would never make — a drama, in this case the life story of Jackie Robinson.

The biggest gamble is “Pacific Rim.” Directed by Guillermo del Toro, it is a $150 million movie, set to open July 12, about human-piloted robots and alien monsters. Legendary is breaking its pattern of equal partnership with Warner by shouldering 75 percent of the cost, and is hoping the film will jump-start a merchandise business. Mr. Tull is also counting on “Pacific Rim” to convince skeptical industry peers that he has the creative acumen to generate a critical smash without Warner to lean on.

(Mr. del Toro is already a convert. “With Thomas,” he said in a phone interview, “the reactions are the same reactions you would get from another filmmaker.”)

Soon, Legendary must make a crucial decision about its future. Mr. Tull’s deal with Warner expires at the end of this year. So far, no serious talks about a renewal have started, according to both companies, partly because Mr. Tull was waiting for Warner to pick a chief executive to succeed Barry M. Meyer, who is retiring. Kevin Tsujihara was named to the post last Monday.

Warner declined to comment on its relationship with Mr. Tull. The studio would like him to stay, but it would not suffer terribly if he left, according to two high-level executives inside the company who requested anonymity to speak candidly. Warner, for instance, can rely on another financing partner, the newly revitalized Village Roadshow, these people said.

Legendary is equally cool; a person with knowledge of Mr. Tull’s options, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Legendary had interest from other studios, mentioning a bond between Mr. Tull and several senior executives at Universal and Comcast.

This high-powered jockeying occurs a long way from the outskirts of Binghamton, N.Y., where Mr. Tull was raised poor by a single mother, a dental hygienist. Even he seems stunned by his rise in Hollywood, complete with a mansion in suburban Calabasas, Calif. — the nouveau riche nesting place of the Kardashians — and a small ownership stake in the Pittsburgh Steelers. (He made a failed bid for the San Diego Padres last summer.)

“If somebody came in and pitched me as a script, I would say it’s too far-fetched,” Mr. Tull said in a 2010 television interview.

He arrived here about a decade ago as a midlevel venture capitalist, working on technology start-ups with the Convex Group, based in Atlanta. He helped hatch an ill-fated plan to create disposable DVDs that would self-destruct in 48 hours, making for return-free rentals.

In 2004, Mr. Tull and William Fay, a friend and producer, decided to buy a film library from which they could produce effects-driven remakes and sequels. They settled on Orion Pictures, owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A third partner, Scott Mednick, soon joined.

But Sony and others took MGM’s assets off the market, leaving Mr. Tull stuck on Hollywood’s doorstep.

“Let’s just forget about the library,” Mr. Fay recalls Mr. Tull saying. “Let’s just build a film company around the precepts we’ve developed.”

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IHT Rendezvous: Doctors to Prescribe Self-Help Books, Poetry for Mental Health Ills

LONDON — Doctors in England will soon be prescribing books as well as pills to patients suffering from anxiety and depression.

In a government-endorsed initiative supported by medical associations and librarians, physicians will be sending patients to their local libraries for a range of approved self-help titles targeted at those suffering from mild to moderate mental health problems.

Patients are also being encouraged to turn to what The Bookseller magazine described as “uplifting novels and poetry.”

Extolling the potentially curative powers of literature, the Reading Agency charity quoted research that showed reading reduced stress levels by 67 percent.

The charity, which is a partner in the new Books on Prescription program announced this week, quoted the New England Journal of Medicine as saying reading also cut the risk of dementia by more than a third.

The list of 30 approved self-help titles available on prescription from May includes page-turners like “The Feeling Good Handbook,” “How to Stop Worrying” and “Overcoming Anger and Irritability.”

“There’s growing evidence that shows that self-help reading can help people with certain mental health issues get better,” Miranda McKearney, the Reading Agency’s director said.

The sick often rely on the Internet to search for advice on symptoms and cures that can turn out to be unreliable. Doctors will now be able to write a prescription that gives patients immediate membership to their local library and access to recommended titles.

It is the first so-called bibliotherapy initiative to have received such high-level official backing from health authorities and librarians.

Campaigners for public libraries have applauded the program but worry that not enough is being done to protect the libraries themselves. Last year, 200 libraries were closed and another 300 are reportedly facing closure or being handed over to volunteers this year.

The Reading Agency meanwhile has come up with a core list of Mood-boosting Books designed to promote feeling good.

It includes proven classics such as “The Secret Garden,” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, but also upbeat titles from the likes of Bill Bryson, the best-selling U.S. humorist.

Development of the book prescription idea was paid for by the Arts Council England, which distributes public money to arts projects.

The Reading Agency has applied for funding from the government, which it says spends £14 billion, or $22 billion, a year treating mental health.

So, should sufferers of depression or panic attacks be advised to curl up with a good book? Or is this just a new health fad to find an alternative to costly medication and therapy.

The Reading Project is soliciting suggestions for stress-relieving books at the Twitter hashtag #moodboosting.

If you think there might be something in it, send us your own suggestions for therapeutic reading. And, while you’re at it, let us know any titles that are best avoided when we’re feeling low.

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