Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

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Another Japan Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner encounters a problem

Another Boeing 787 Dreamliner operated by Japan Airlines encountered a problem at Boston's Logan International Airport, just one day after a fire erupted on a different Dreamliner parked at a gate.

About 12:25 p.m. EST Tuesday, a Japan Airlines Dreamliner headed to Tokyo was taxiing to the runway for takeoff when a fuel leak forced it to return to the terminal.

Japan Airlines, or JAL, did not immediately provide any information on the incident. A person on the scene said the leak dumped about 40 gallons of fuel on the taxiway.

"Facilities personnel responded to clean the area," said airport spokesman Richard Walsh, who could not confirm the quantity of fuel leaked.

Boeing Co. spokeswoman Julie O'Donnell said, "We are aware of the incident and are working with our customer."

2012 Quiz: The year in business

The news pushed the Chicago company's stock lower Tuesday. Boeing shares fell $2, or 2.6%, to $74.13 after dropping 2% on Monday.

The plane was the first JAL jet to attempt to return to Tokyo since another JAL Dreamliner caught fire Monday, not long after landing at Logan. The fire broke out less than a half-hour after 183 passengers and crew members had disembarked from a 12-hour transpacific flight from Tokyo. A maintenance crew mechanic noticed smoke in the cabin.

The cause of the fire is being investigated by Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB on Tuesday said it found "severe fire damage" in a rack of lithium-ion batteries in the jet's electronics bay.

Using high-capacity lithium-ion batteries is part of Boeing's new design for the 787's electrical system, which consumes more power than other jets.

The identification of the lithium-ion batteries as the potential source of the fire will heighten concern over the use of these types of batteries on airplanes.

In 2007 the Federal Aviation Administration, noting that the Dreamliner's use of high-capacity, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries differs significantly from the nickel-cadmium or lead acid batteries used on other jets, attached special safety conditions governing the design and maintenance of the 787 batteries.

The FAA said commercial aviation has "limited experience" with the use of such batteries, but noted that in other applications "lithium-ion batteries are significantly more susceptible to internal failures that can result in self-sustaining increases in temperature than their nickel-cadmium or lead-acid counterparts."

Overcharging of lithium-ion batteries can generate high temperatures. "The metallic lithium can ignite, resulting in a self-sustaining fire or explosion," the FAA said.

The agency therefore added requirements that the 787's design and maintenance procedures for the jet's batteries must specifically preclude any heat buildup and include monitoring and warning systems in case of any failures.

It is suspected that two fiery crashes of Boeing 747 cargo planes that killed four pilots — a UPS jet in 2010 and an Asiana Airlines jet in 2011 — may have been caused by fires in their cargo bays, which contained large shipments of lithium-ion batteries used in laptops and cellphones.

Those accidents have prompted stricter standards for the packaging and shipping of large quantities of such batteries.

The NTSB has three safety investigators examining the cause of the fire as well as the emergency response to the incident.

The agency's statement said the group would look at the jet's "airworthiness," but NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss later described the use of this term as a bureaucratic classification and said that "we are in no way looking at the airworthiness of the 787."

The FAA issues an aircraft's "airworthiness certificate," a designation that is required for any airplane to fly.

The FAA and Boeing are also taking part in the Logan fire investigation. In addition, the Japan Transport Safety Board has sent a representative and Japan Airlines will assist.

Gates writes for the Seattle Times/McClatchy.

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Wendy Greuel walks tightrope in mayor's race

One big advantage for a Los Angeles city controller aspiring to higher office is the ability to make news with a steady flow of audits exposing wasteful spending at City Hall.

So while stuck in Hollywood Freeway traffic on a recent morning, Wendy Greuel, controller and candidate for mayor, picked up her phone for a radio interview about one of those reports, accusing the city of squandering $325,000 on improper mileage reimbursements.

"That was really just the tip of the iceberg," she told listeners, recycling a line she's used to publicize previous audits finding lavish travel spending at the Housing Authority and credit card abuses at the Coliseum.

In a city beset by chronic budget shortfalls, Greuel is campaigning in the March 5th election primary as a fiscal conservative. She's uniquely qualified, she argues, not just because of her record as a city official, but as a result of her work at DreamWorks and her family's ownership of a building supply business in North Hollywood.

"I have inside knowledge and an outside perspective," she said in an interview.

But Greuel's record, her opponents contend, doesn't match the image she's crafting. They question what she's accomplished with her audits and portray her Hollywood experience — in government relations — as emblematic of a career as a political insider.

"This whole notion that she's some kind of outsider who has an ounce of political courage, it's frankly a bunch of hooey," said Eric Hacopian, chief strategist for mayoral candidate and City Councilwoman Jan Perry. Greuel's audits, he said, amount to "constant headline grabbing" and "a whole bunch of sound and fury that signifies nothing."

With three rivals jostling to cut into her presumed and potentially decisive base of support in the San Fernando Valley, Greuel's prospects for succeeding Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa depend largely on how effectively she can repel that line of attack.

"It's a tightrope act," said Steven P. Erie, a political science professor at UC San Diego, noting that Greuel, in particular, needs to secure support from groups whose priorities may diverge.

"She doesn't want to turn labor off," he said. Indeed, she has courted unions by promising to fight harder than her opponents to protect the city workforce.

At the same time, Erie said, Greuel has to "appeal to a more fiscally moderate-to-conservative base out in the Valley."

A former Valley area City Council member who was elected controller in 2009, Greuel takes credit for identifying $160 million in potential city savings through her audits. But stopping that waste, she says, is up to the council and the mayor under the city's charter.

"I've been the one that has been looking at fiscal responsibility," she said.

Greuel's effort to cast herself as a champion of fiscal restraint is likely to face other tests, among them her support — during seven years on the council — for a rapid rise in spending that worsened the city's budget crisis.

Like her top competitors in the race, Perry and Councilman Eric Garcetti, Greuel now expresses regret for backing generous raises for 22,000 city workers in 2007 — despite a $243-million budget shortfall. The deficit quickly swelled when the economy spiraled downward.

She also has joined calls to abolish the city's business tax, which brings in $439 million a year. The revenue loss would exacerbate budget shortfalls projected to range from $216 million to $327 million in each of the next four years, analysts have warned.

Greuel and Garcetti say getting rid of the tax would spur economic growth. Perry and another candidate, entertainment lawyer Kevin James, say the city can't afford to abolish the tax.

Greuel, who grew up in Granada Hills, said her family's business, Frontier Building Supply, taught her to appreciate the burden of city taxes. "I did everything from cleaning the bathrooms to sweeping the warehouse to doing the accounting to answering the phone to driving the forklift and driving a truck," she said. Now, she co-owns the company with her brother, who runs it.

Greuel, 51, a UCLA graduate, started her career as an aide to Mayor Tom Bradley, working on such issues as homelessness, child care and services for the elderly. A Republican until 1992, when she registered as a Democrat, Greuel was part of a group of Bradley aides who moved to Washington to take jobs in the Clinton administration.

She recalled leafing with colleagues through the "plum book" directory of federal political appointments — named for its "plum" government jobs — as the end of Bradley's tenure approached. Mark Fabiani, a top Bradley aide who became special counsel to President Clinton, passed Greuel's resume to Andrew Cuomo, then Clinton's assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

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Live blog: Samsung’s new gear at CES 2013

yep thats how apple works now, but can you stream network flash players thru your i pad via apple tv , answer = no , same with google tv. hook the comp directly to the comp get a wireless keayboard and an air mouse , and fyi windows media player can be streamed wirelessly from any pc all you need is a 50 dollar blue ray player , if you want to stream media from a hard drive wirelessly it just has to be one built to the standard like any wd home drive , but dont go usb get one that connects via gigabit

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'Mary Poppins' to close on Broadway in the spring

NEW YORK (AP) — "Mary Poppins" is closing up its big umbrella on Broadway.

An official close to the show's producers said Monday that the 6-year-old musical will end performances in March at the New Amsterdam Theatre and eventually be replaced by a musical adapted from the film "Aladdin."

The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak before the official announcement. The New York Post first reported the news, citing an anonymous source. A Disney representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Mary Poppins," co-produced by Disney and Cameron Mackintosh, is based both on the children's books by P.L. Travers and the 1964 movie starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. It tells the story of the world's most practically perfect nanny in Edwardian London.

With a big cast, lavish sets and stunts that include Mary flying with her umbrella and Bert the chimney sweep tap dancing upside-down, the show was a hit after opening in 2006, two years after debuting in London.

The show is part of Disney Theatrical Productions' five big Broadway hits from seven attempts since 1994 — a profitable list that includes "The Lion King" and the more recent "Newsies." That's way above the 3-in-10 average recoupment of most Broadway shows. "Mary Poppins" routinely grosses over $1 million every week despite the presence of touring versions.

When it closes, it will have been performed 2,619 times and have been seen by more than 4 million people. It recouped its initial Broadway investment within a year, and has gone on to be among the top 10 grossing shows for the past six years and top five for attendance. It will rank as the 22nd longest-running show in Broadway history.

Its soon-to-be vacant home at the New Amsterdam Theatre will be taken by the musical "Aladdin," which has melodies by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice — the same team who created the animated film version that starred Robin Williams. The musical, with a book by Chad Beguelin, had its premiere in Seattle in summer 2011.

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Oil Sand Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level

Todd Korol/Reuters

An oil sands mine Fort McMurray, Alberta.

OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”

The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.

Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.

“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.

The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.

Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.

The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.

“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.

He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he had not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.

Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”

He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-bit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.

Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.

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Banks shortchanging consumers in mortgage settlement

A mortgage is a contract. You agree to pay a certain amount of money to the bank each month, and the bank, in turn, agrees to finance your purchase, play fair and not jeopardize your ability to keep a roof over your head.

Ten big banks said Monday that they'll shell out $8.5 billion to settle federal complaints that they wrongfully foreclosed on hundreds of thousands of homeowners who should have been allowed to stay in their homes.

They got off cheap.

The average compensation for each homeowner who faced foreclosure in 2009 and 2010 will run about $2,000.

That's a couple thousand bucks for having been deceived and pushed around — and possibly thrown out onto the street — by a bank that was knowingly breaking regulatory procedures in handling distressed properties.

That's a couple thousand bucks for having your life turned upside-down and dealing with a take-no-prisoners financial system that refused to acknowledge, at least at first, that it was behaving duplicitously.

Alys Cohen, a staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center, called Monday's settlement "wholly inadequate in light of the scale of the harm."

By ponying up a few billion dollars, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank and a half-dozen smaller banks will close the books on a federal investigation into accusations that they mishandled people's paperwork and skipped required steps in the foreclosure process.

Among the banks' abuses: They routinely assigned employees to approve foreclosures without giving homeowners' documents a thorough going-over. In some cases, according to investigators, they signed foreclosure papers without even reading them.

Some bank workers admitted signing more than 10,000 foreclosure affidavits a month. That's about four per minute for any bank staffer working a 40-hour week.

Think of that: As millions of families were grappling with job losses and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, banks were devoting all of 15 seconds to deciding the fate of people's homes.

And this followed months of requiring homeowners to file reams of documents to make their case for why they should be given just a little leeway on their obligations.

Michael Adams, 56, of Sun Valley told me Monday about his experience with Wells Fargo. He lost his job as a dairy plant supervisor in July 2011 and immediately reached out to the bank to share his concern about making his mortgage payments.

"They told me to call them back when I actually couldn't pay," Adams said. "That happened in July 2012 when I missed my first payment. Wells said they'd try to work something out."

It took nearly half a year, but the bank at last got back to Adams with what it characterized as a helping hand during his time of need.

Wells reduced Adams' interest from 4.37% to 4.25% — an eighth of a percentage point. The current average for a 30-year mortgage is 3.34%. The average for a 15-year loan is 2.64%.

Adams knows he can consider himself lucky. He's among the relative few to receive a loan modification from a bank. But he wonders how serious Wells is about helping him get through his current hard times.

"An eighth of a point is no help at all," Adams said. "It seems like they'd be just as happy if I lost the house."

Federal officials reached a similar conclusion. They decided that banks simply weren't providing enough relief to homeowners even after earlier agreeing to spend billions atoning for their mortgage sins.

Before Monday's settlement, the banks had paid about $1.5 billion to private consultants to help them deal with the mess, officials found, while making little effort to assist mortgage holders.

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Syria President Bashar Assad makes clear he won't step down

BEIRUT — Ignoring mounting casualties and dwindling support, Syrian President Bashar Assad made clear to the world Sunday in his first public address in half a year that he has no intention of relinquishing power and that he, not anyone else, would dictate the end for Syria's 21-month-old civil war.

Assad unveiled his own peace plan, with cosmetic similarities to a settlement proposal championed by internationally sponsored peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, but he declared he had no partner for negotiations in the Syrian opposition, whom he continued to brand as killers and terrorists.

Assad's dismissive attitude and strict terms for settlement offered little hope for a diplomatic breakthrough. It was a reminder of how intractable the conflict has become, with the U.N. estimating last week that more than 60,000 people had died.

Syria's cities are scenes of carnage, with rebels and government security forces battling across provinces and major cities from Aleppo to Idlib to Damascus, the capital. Opposition forces, which the West has not agreed to arm, have not proved strong enough to exhaust Assad, but neither has the autocratic 12-year leader been able to stamp them out.

Assad, like Brahimi, called for a new cease-fire, reconciliation talks and some form of transitional government. But Assad sketched out a far more complicated vision, beginning with a dialogue with the opposition leading to a new national charter, approved by a referendum. That would be followed by an expanded government, including those in the talks, that would oversee the drafting of a constitution. The charter would also be approved by a national referendum, and then national elections would be held.

And where Brahimi has pushed for meaningful compromise between the rebels and the president, Assad continued to insist that all groups play according to his terms.

He put the onus on rebels for an end to fighting, announcing that his troops would honor a cease-fire only after the opposition stopped fighting and foreign countries stopped funding them, in what amounted to a swipe at Persian Gulf countries, Turkey and Western nations. His plan also appeared to go against the grain of Brahimi's call for both sides to put down their arms. By Sunday evening, Brahimi's office had no comment on Assad's address.

The international community, including Russia, the United States and regional players like Turkey, has endorsed the Brahimi plan's broad contours. But Russia and the West have clashed over Assad's future. Washington has insisted Assad must go, while Moscow has not, at least at this point, abandoned him, a stance also held by Iran, Syria's closest regional ally.

Assad, speaking at Damascus' Opera House, dismissed the opposition as "slaves" to the West, playing on the image of a deeply dysfunctional group including exiles with little influence in Syria and Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-affiliated organization that has become the most feared and valued fighting force among the rebels and their umbrella Free Syrian Army.

The speech was similar to his past promises of reform that have proved jarringly empty. In February, in the midst of the civil conflict, Assad called for and won passage of a new constitution, which he said enshrined freedom of speech and multiparty elections. Months earlier, he had repealed a decades-old emergency law. But in real time, his security forces continued to detain opponents, shell neighborhoods and besiege cities.

On Sunday, standing somberly in front of a photo collage of people who reportedly have been killed in the civil warfare, Assad presented himself as a Syrian patriot, the only one capable of holding the nation together. Supporters packing the theater pumped their fists and yelled, "God, Bashar and our army." He basked in the adulation and at times waved to the crowd.

Even with the death toll soaring and the territory under his control plummeting, Assad appeared to cling to the hope that those Syrians who have grown weary of the unrelenting conflict and the rise of radical Islamists would turn to him.

"We chose the political option from the beginning through its primary way, dialogue. We chose this to move Syria forward. But with whom are we talking? With extremists who only believe in the language of killing and terrorism?" Assad said.

Assad also papered over his government's hard-nosed tactics of airstrikes, artillery shelling and detention of opposition suspects, calling them a necessity for the nation's defense.

"They call it a revolution when it has no relationship to a revolution. A revolution needs intellectuals and is based on thought. Where is the thinker?" Assad said. "The revolution is usually that of the people, not of those who are imported to revolt against the people. It is a revolution against the interests of the people, so by God, are these revolutionaries?"

Opposition leaders swiftly slammed Assad's proposals. "For us as people on the ground, the situation hasn't changed, and during his speech 20 people died," activist Amer Shami said from Damascus by Skype.

But Assad's speech appeared aimed at a terrified Syrian population no longer certain of whom it should support and fearful their country could splinter. The days of spring 2011, when peaceful protesters called for government reform was long ago eclipsed by an armed insurgency, and Assad appears to bet even some in the opposition could be persuaded to return to his fold.

"Roughly speaking about 30% of Syrians want to hang Assad, another 30% support him, and then there are another 30% who long for peace and security and want to get on with their lives and are increasingly worried with how the rebels are behaving," said Syria expert Patrick Seale, author of the definitive biography of the current leader's father and predecessor as president, Hafez Assad.

"A good slice of the opposition will hate his speech and say they need to continue fighting, but it may plant doubt in the minds of some, that they will have to go to negotiations with Assad," Seale said.

One Syrian activist said the rebel movement has veered so far into Islamist ideology that by contrast Assad sounds almost moderate. "Assad's speech sounds more like the national voice, the one worried about the country from intervention and Islamization. For any neutral listener, his speech will sound 'right' compared to the opposition," said the activist, who goes by the name Nadja, in a Skype interview.

"He is talking about fighting against Islamists, Afghanis and Chechens and Libyans and so on," Nadja said. "I wouldn't want him to make peace with terrorists because I don't want the country to fall in their hands. But I don't want him to stay in power either. He killed so many people."

Even if Assad does seek to carry out his peace plan, it is hard to believe he is capable of success. He has consistently failed to follow through on his reform efforts, and at times has seemed beholden to the different interests in his government, from the security apparatus to family, who have lacked any enthusiasm for reform.

"Assad is only the front man for the institutions of the country, the security apparatus, the [Baath] party and minorities," Seale said. "It is not a one-man show."

ned.parker@latimes.com

Special correspondents Nabih Bulos and Alaa Hassan in Beirut contributed to this report.

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Analysts predicting slow start for ‘ultra-HD’ TVs

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Ultra high definition TVs are set to be the talk of International CES, the gadget show kicking off this week, but they aren’t likely to account for much of the market even four years down the road.

That is the conclusion of analysts of the show’s host, a day before TV makers such as Samsung, LG and Sony attempt to wow conference attendees with their latest models.

Ultra-HD TVs, with four times as many pixels as HD TVs, are expected to account for only 1.4 million units sold in the U.S. in 2016, or about 5 percent of the entire market. Sales in the rest of the world are expected to be smaller.

The analysts blamed high prices and low availability for the slow start.

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NBC execs say it's not a 'shoot-'em-up' network

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — NBC executives said Sunday they are conscious about the amount of violence they air in the wake of real-life tragedies like the Connecticut school shooting, but have made no changes in what has gone on the air or what is planned.

NBC isn't a "shoot-'em-up" network, said network entertainment President Jennifer Salke.

The level of violence on television, in movies and video games has been looked at as a contributing factor — along with the availability of guns and a lack of mental health services — in incidents such as the Dec. 14 attack in a Newtown, Conn., school where 20 first-graders and six educators were killed.

Like many in Hollywood, NBC questioned a link between what is put on the air and what is happening in society.

"It weighs on all of us," said NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt. "Most of the people at this network have children and really care about the shows that we're putting out there. It's always something that's been on our mind but this brought it to the forefront."

NBC hasn't needed to take any tangible steps like minimizing violence in its programming or deemphasizing guns, Salke said, because NBC didn't have much violence on the air. It might be different "if we were the 'shoot-'em-up' network, she said.

She didn't name such a network, but said violence might be an issue on a network that airs many crime procedural shows. That's a staple of CBS' lineup. Greenblatt, who was head of Showtime when the "Dexter" series about a serial killer was developed, said CBS' "Criminal Minds" is "worse than 'Dexter' ever was."

Within an hour after both executives spoke, NBC showed reporters at a news conference highlights of its show "Revolution" that included a swordfight, a standoff between two men with guns, a bloodied man, a building blown up with a flying body and a gunfight.

Later clips of the upcoming series "Deception" featured several shots of a bloodied, dead body.

NBC also is developing a drama, "Hannibal," based on one of fiction's most indelible serial killers, Hannibal Lecter. An airtime for the show hasn't been scheduled, but it could come this spring or summer.

Salke said there is more violence in Fox's upcoming drama "The Following," also about a serial killer, than there will be in "Hannibal." Much of the violence in the upcoming NBC show, created by former "Heroes" producer Bryan Fuller, is implied and not gratuitous.

"We respect the talent and like what he is doing, so we are standing behind him," Salke said. She said there's been a spate of programs about creepy killers because they've been such indelible characters.

Greenblatt said he wasn't trying to be glib, but one of the best tonics for people upset about real-life violence is to watch an episode of NBC's "Parenthood." He said it's a great example of a family that loves each other and grapples with many issues.

"Ultimately, I think you feel good at the end of the day," he said.

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