The New Old Age Blog: Caregiving, Laced With Humor

“My grandmother, she’s not a normal person. She’s like a character when she speaks. Every day she’s playing like she’s an actress.”

These are words of love, and they come from Sacha Goldberger, a French photographer who has turned his grandmother, 93-year-old Frederika Goldberger, into a minor European celebrity.

In the photos, you can see the qualities grandson and grandmother have in common: a wicked sense of humor, an utter lack of pretension and a keen taste for theatricality and the absurd.

This isn’t an ordinary caregiving relationship, not by a long shot. But Sacha, 44 years old and unmarried, is deeply devoted to this spirited older relation who has played the role of Mamika (“my little grandmother,” translated from her native Hungarian) in two of his books and a photography exhibition currently underway in Paris.

As for Frederika, “I like everything that my grandson does,” she said in a recent Skype conversation from her apartment, which also serves as Sacha’s office. “I hate not to do anything. Here, with my grandson, I have the feeling I am doing something.”

Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.

“I was very depressed because I lived for working,” she told me in our Skype conversation.

Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a “Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor” and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man’s relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas?

This Budapest-born baroness, whose family had owned the largest textile factory in Hungary before World War II, was a natural in front of the camera, assuming a straight-faced, imperturbable comic attitude whether donning a motorcycle helmet and goggles, polishing her fingernails with a gherkin, wearing giant flippers on the beach, lighting up a banana, or dressed up as a Christmas tree with a golden star on her head. (All these photos and more appear in “Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother,” published in the United States last year.)

“It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored,” said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. “Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together.”

“He thought it was very funny to put a costume on me,” said Frederika. “And I liked it.”

People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.

His grandmother was a super hero of sorts, because she had helped save 10 people from the Nazis during World War II, said Sacha. He also traced inspiration to Stan Lee, a Jewish artist who created the X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four for Marvel comics. “I wanted to ask what happens to these super heroes when they get old in these photographs with my grandmother.”

Lest this seem a bit trivial to readers of this blog, consider this passage from Sacha’s introduction to “Mamika: My Might Little Grandmother”:

In a society where youth is the supreme value; where wrinkles have to be camouflaged; where old people are hidden as soon as they become cumbersome, where, for lack of time or desire, it is easier to put our elders in hospices rather than take care of them, I wanted to show that happiness in aging was also possible.

In our Skype conversation, Sacha confessed to anxiety about losing his grandmother, and said, “I always was very worried about what would happen if my grandmother disappeared. Because she is exceptional.”

“I am not normal,” Frederika piped up at his side, her face deeply wrinkled, her short hair beautifully coiffed, seemingly very satisfied with herself.

“So, making these pictures to me is the best thing that could happen,” Sacha continued, “because now my grandma is immortal and it seems everyone knows her. I am giving to everybody in the world a bit of my grandma.”

This wonderful expression of caring and creativity has expanded my view of intergenerational relations in this new old age. What about you?

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Wall Street Journal Reports Attack by China Hackers

One day after The New York Times reported that Chinese hackers had infiltrated its computers and stolen passwords for its employees, The Wall Street Journal announced that it too had been hacked.

On Thursday, The Journal reported that it had been attacked by Chinese hackers who were trying to monitor the company’s coverage of China. It said hackers had broken into its network through computers in its Beijing bureau.

In a written statement, the business newspaper owned by News Corporation described the attack as an “ongoing issue” and said it was working closely with authorities and security specialists to clean up its systems. It said that it completed a “network overhaul” on Thursday in an effort to rid its systems of hackers.

China’s Ministry of National Defense has denied any involvement in the cyberattack at The Times or any other American corporations.

But security experts said that in 2008, Chinese hackers began targeting American news organizations as part of an effort to monitor coverage of Chinese issues.

In a report for clients in December, Mandiant, a computer security company, said that over the course of several investigations it found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen e-mails, contacts and files from more than 30 journalists and executives at Western news organizations, and had maintained a “short list” of journalists for repeated attacks. Among those targeted were journalists who had written about Chinese leaders, political and legal issues in China and the telecom giant Huawei.

Bloomberg News, another American news organization, was targeted by Chinese hackers last year, and some computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation. The attack occurred after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, a Chinese official who is expected to become president in March.

Bloomberg has confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

The timing of the attacks on The New York Times coincided with the reporting for an investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks found digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network.

The Associated Press reported Thursday that officials in the Obama administration were considering more assertive action against Beijing to stop Chinese computer espionage campaigns.

The Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said Thursday a global effort was needed o establish “rules of the road” for cyber activity.  In her final meeting with reporters at the State Department, Mrs. Clinton addressed a question about China’s efforts to infiltrate computer systems at The New York Times. 

 “We have seen over the last years an increase in not only the hacking attempts on government institutions but also non-governmental ones,” Mrs. Clinton said.

The Chinese, she said, “are not the only people who are hacking us.” 

 “There is a lot that we are working on that will be deployed in the event that we don’t get some kind of international effort under way,” Mrs. Clinton added without elaborating.

The United States has been increasingly vocal about such efforts against government and private industry. In a November 2011 intelligence report, government officials specifically accused China and Russia of stealing intellectual property for economic gain.

Michael Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.

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India Ink: Women's World Cup Kicks off in Mumbai

Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press Indian cricketer Niranjana Nagarajan (center) celebrates the dismissal of West Indies’ Deandra Dottin during the opening match of the ICC Women’s World Cup cricket in Mumbai, Maharashtra on Thursday.

England will be defending its title in the 10th Women’s Cricket World Cup, which began Thursday in Mumbai with a match between India, the host country, and the West Indies.

Though England is heavily favored, New Zealand, India and Australia are considered strong contenders to knock the defending champion off its perch. The four teams qualified for the Cricket World Cup by finishing in the top four spots in the last World Cup, held in Australia in March 2009.

They are joined by Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa and the West Indies, who made it to the World Cup through the qualifier played in Bangladesh in 2011.

India is playing host to the quadrennial event for the third time, having held the World Cup in 1978 and 1997. All 25 matches, including the final, will be played in Cuttack and Mumbai until Feb. 17. India took the first match, by 105 runs.

India, England, Sri Lanka and the West Indies are in Group A, while Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan and South Africa are in Group B. The top three teams from each group will clash in the Super Six stage.

India’s captain, Mithali Raj, a veteran of 141 One-Day Internationals, in which she has scored 4,490 runs at 48.27 average runs per match, will not only have to lead from the front and make the most of the home conditions and comforts, but also to score runs consistently, being the mainstay of her team’s batting.

Her predecessor, Jhulan Goswami, an experienced medium-paced bowler who has taken 145 wickets at an average of 21.87 runs given per wicket in 126 One-Day Internationals, is expected to spearhead India’s attack.

India has never won the World Cup, and this may be its best chance. “Since the tournament will be held in India, our team is quite familiar with the conditions. The weather is a plus point,” Ms. Raj told The Times of India.

Charlotte Edwards, who has played a record 160 One-Day Internationals, is leading the defending champion England. England is a powerful all-round team, packed with some excellent batswomen and bowlers.

Though they will have to conquer the warmer weather and slower Indian pitches, analysts would not be surprised if the English women retain the title. In wicketkeeper-batswoman Sarah Taylor, who wants to play men’s cricket, they have a formidable player.

New Zealand, who lost to England in the last World Cup, is a very experienced side, with outstanding players like captain Suzie Bates (who is in terrific form, having scored a century and two fifties in her last five One-Day International innings), Nicola Browne, Sophie Devine and Sara McGlashan in its ranks. New Zealand won the World Cup in 2000 but has failed to win on three other occasions despite reaching the final.

Australia, led by Jodie Fields, also prides itself on its overall strength. Also, having already won the World Cup twice and beaten England in the World Twenty20 final last year, the Aussie women can fancy their chances, although the subcontinental conditions might pose a challenge to them.

West Indies, Pakistan, South Africa and Sri Lanka, which were unimpressive in the last World Cup and occupied fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth positions, respectively, at the end of the tournament, still look like the minnows of women’s cricket. They will have to put up an extraordinary performance to look more impressive this time, though it will not be easy, considering the might of the other four teams.

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Hong Kong Still Attracting Retailers Despite Forbidding Costs

HONG KONG — Hong Kong is one of the busiest and most crowded shopping meccas in the world — with sky-high retail rents to match — but that has not stopped retailers from opening yet more stores in the city of seven million, attracted by hordes of visiting consumers.

The latest arrival is Tommy Bahama, a U.S. clothing and lifestyle brand, which joined the fray Wednesday with the opening of a 370-square-meter, or 4,000-square-foot, store in the Wan Chai district, its first outlet in the city.

Amid models and canapés, Tommy Bahama executives were coy about just how much they had to fork over in rent.

But the store, said Terry Pillow, the chief executive officer, is “one of the most expensive locations” the company operates — “in a similar range” as a recently opened, significantly larger, flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York.

That comes as little surprise.

Reports from the real estate services company CBRE last year ranked Hong Kong as the world’s most expensive location for prime real estate and office rents, and ECA International, which advises companies posting employees abroad, published a poll this week showing that Hong Kong was the most expensive place to rent high-end apartments. The cost of buying a home, likewise, has soared, despite repeated efforts by the government to cool the market.

Moreover, even those companies that are prepared to bite the bullet on rent might struggle to find what they need.

It took Mr. Pillow and his colleagues at Tommy Bahama, whose casual wear is in the “affordable luxury” range of the market, four years to find a site they liked, in terms of store size and location.

They considered many of the high-end shopping malls, which are inhabited by all the usual suspects of the fashion world, but in the end, they settled on Wan Chai, a neighborhood that is better known for its bars and nightlife than for high-end shopping. But that fits with Tommy Bahama’s neighborhood-bar-type image, the company’s executives said.

“We were in a hurry to come to Hong Kong, but it was important for us to come to Hong Kong in the right way,” Mr. Pillow said.

So acute is the space-cost situation that analysts have begun to warn that Hong Kong has become too expensive for its own good.

Executives at CBRE in Hong Kong warned last October that the space constraints meant the city’s standing as a key location in Asia was “under threat.” Long waiting lists for spots in schools and high housing costs add to the financial pain and are increasingly causing companies to think twice about deploying expatriate employees or expanding teams in the city.

“Hong Kong has been losing out to Singapore in the past few years because of that,” Lee Quane, regional director for ECA International, said by telephone.

Similarly, in the retail sector, the lack and cost of suitable space has meant that some companies have taken relatively long to come to Hong Kong, industry analysts and real estate experts say.

Gap and American Eagle Outfitters, for example, opened shops in Hong Kong only in 2011. Forever 21, another popular U.S. brand, opened a large store in the bustling shopping district of Causeway Bay early last year, and Abercrombie & Fitch’s flagship store, in the heart of Central, the financial district, opened last August.

The British brand Topshop, which is well established in other parts of Asia — it has eight shops each in Indonesia and Malaysia, six in Singapore and four in Japan — is opening its first store in Hong Kong this year, in May.

However, retail executives clearly believe that the expense of having a presence in Hong Kong is worth it.

After all, Hong Kong’s shopping population is vastly increased by the millions of tourists who flock to the city every month.

Last year, 48.6 million visitors came to Hong Kong, nearly three-quarters of them from mainland China, whose increasingly affluent consumers are eager to capitalize on the lower taxes in Hong Kong and greater certainty that what they are buying is the genuine article.

For retailers like Tommy Bahama, Louis Vuitton and Prada, Hong Kong is a necessary location, and a store in the city means visibility that extends well beyond the city, which is a special administrative region of China, into the vast mainland Chinese market.

“It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there,” said Rob Goldberg, senior vice-president for marketing at Tommy Bahama, referring to Hong Kong’s property and rental costs. “But if you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere.”

Tommy Bahama executives said they were “very happy” with the performance of the Hong Kong store so far (The shop opened quietly two weeks ago but had its official ribbon-cutting event Wednesday.)

The company is looking for more locations in the city, as well as in mainland China.

Riva Hiranand contributed reporting.

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

The New York Times published an article in October about the wealth of the family of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in both English and Chinese.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that the United States and Israel were said to have started a cyber attack that caused damage at Iran’s main nuclear enrichment plant, and the article misstated the specific type of attack. The attack was a computer worm, not a virus, and it started around 2008, not 2012.

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Chinese Court Issues Severe Sentences in Tibetan Self-Immolations

BEIJING – A court in southwest China gave severe prison sentences to two Tibetans who court officials said were guilty of urging eight people to self-immolate, three of whom had died, according to a report on Thursday by Xinhua, the state news agency.

One Tibetan, Lorang Konchok, 40, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, which often means the convict will eventually get a lifetime prison sentence. His nephew, Lorang Tsering, 31, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The Xinhua report said the older Tibetan was also being stripped of his “political rights” for life, while the other man would have his stripped for three years.

The sentencing took place in Aba Prefecture of Sichuan Province, an area at the heart of the recent wave of self-immolations by Tibetans. Nearly 100 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since 2009 to protest Chinese rule in Tibetan regions, which lie in western China but which many Tibetans say should be granted independence or true autonomy.

At least 81 died following their acts, according to International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based in London. Few other nations have been confronted by such a large wave of self-immolations as political protest.

Chinese officials have sentenced Tibetans before to prison sentences for what courts have said were their roles in promoting self-immolations, but the most recent sentences were among the harshest. There now appears to be a concentrated effort to rein in the self-immolations, which gathered pace in late 2012, by criminalizing both the act itself and making it a crime to help or encourage people to commit it.

On Dec. 3, a newspaper in a Tibetan area of Gansu Province published an editorial that said China’s supreme court, prosecution agency and Ministry of Public Security had issued “guidelines” that said “the act of self-immolation by Tibetans is a crime.” The guidelines said that assisting or encouraging self-immolations was considered intentional homicide, and that those who committed self-immolation were also criminals and punishable by law if they “have caused severe damage,” according to the newspaper.

The Xinhua report on Thursay said the two monks “incited and coerced” eight people to self-immolate; three committed the act and died last year, and the others “willfully” abandoned their plans after the police “intervened.”

The Chinese government has blamed the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetans, for encouraging the self-immolations, even though the Dalai Lama has not made any explicit statements in support of the acts. Tibetans have said in interviews that the self-immolations are genuine self-expressions of political anger and frustration at Chinese oppression and are not the result of plots hatched by senior monks or other Tibetan leaders.

The two monks sentenced in Aba, which Tibetans called Ngaba, were detained in August 2012, according to a report last December by Xinhua. Both monks are from Kirti Monastery, which was a site central to the earliest self-immolations.

That Xinhua report said Lorang Konchock became involved in promoting self-immolations after being contacted by a “Tibetan independence organization” tied to the Dalai Lama. Xinhua said the contact took place after February 2009, when a young monk from Kirti named Tapey set fire to himself outside the monastery. Tapey did not die, but the second Tibetan to commit the act, Phuntsog, also from Kirti, killed himself in March 2011.

After Phuntsog’s death, a court sentenced three monks to long prison sentences, in what were the first legal punishments handed out in relation to the self-immolations. Two monks were found guilty of involvement in Phuntsog’s self-immolation and one, an uncle of Phuntsog’s, was found guilty of refusing to turn his body over to the police at the time.

The Tibetans who have self-immolated have come from a variety of backgrounds. They have included men and women, young and old, clergy and laypeople. So far this year, at least three Tibetans have self-immolated, all men. The second one, Tsering, who killed himself in Ngaba Prefecture on Jan. 18, was survived by a wife and two children.

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DealBook: McClendon, Under Fire, to Retire at Chesapeake Energy

9:15 p.m. | Updated

HOUSTON — Aubrey K. McClendon, Chesapeake Energy’s daring and innovative co-founder, will step down as chief executive on April 1 after months of scrutiny over how he mixed his personal finances and those of the corporation.

Mr. McClendon’s retirement, announced by the company on Tuesday, comes as the national boom in natural gas drilling, which he helped set in motion, is fading, diminishing Chesapeake’s prospects.

Over the past decade, Mr. McClendon aggressively explored for gas and outbid competitors in one shale field after another. Not only did his small Oklahoma company become the nation’s second biggest gas producer after Exxon Mobil, but Mr. McClendon also assembled a trophy room of assets that included a piece of the Oklahoma Thunder basketball team, a winery and a $12 million collection of antique maps.

In the end, a downturn in natural gas prices, caused in large part by the industry’s exuberant drilling, dealt a huge blow to the company’s balance sheet and to Mr. McClendon’s personal fortune.

Mr. McClendon borrowed heavily — more than $800 million — to finance his participation in an unusual compensation plan that allowed him to invest alongside his company in every well it drilled, sharing both in profits and expenses. Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an inquiry into Mr. McClendon’s finances, and a shareholder rebellion led to his removal as chairman in June and a reshuffling of the board.

Chesapeake, which borrowed extensively to finance its expansion spree, has been forced to unload $12 billion in valuable oil and gas fields over the last year as it tried to pay off its crushing debts. Last September, the company still had $19 billion in debt, according to Philip Weiss, a senior oil company analyst at Argus.

“He really built this company from nothing and made it into something meaningful,” Mr. Weiss said, “but in the end, I think it’s the right thing for the company and its shareholders” for him to leave. “The company needs a financial guy to bring spending under control.”

Investors appeared to agree, sending Chesapeake’s shares up more than 10 percent in after-hours trading.

The roots of Mr. McClendon’s sudden departure lay partly in a shake-up of Chesapeake’s board last summer, in which the company replaced more than half of its directors. Four of those board members were nominated by two major investors, Southeastern Asset Management and the investor Carl C. Icahn; an independent chairman was also appointed.

In recent weeks, Chesapeake’s board concluded that the company’s stock was suffering from Mr. McClendon’s presence, according to a person briefed on the matter. Shares in the company have fallen 14 percent over the last 12 months.

“Aubrey and the board have agreed that the time has come for the company to select a new leader,” Chesapeake’s chairman, Archie W. Dunham, said in a statement.

The company said the board’s review of Mr. McClendon’s financial dealings “to date has not revealed improper conduct.”

Mr. McClendon, 53, agreed to retire from the company on April 1 and will continue serving as chief executive until a successor is appointed.

“I am extremely proud of what we have built over the last quarter of a century,” he said in a statement. “While I have certain philosophical differences with the new board, I look forward to working collaboratively with the company and the board to provide a smooth transition.”

When gas prices were still high four years ago, Chesapeake’s stock price soared, and Mr. McClendon had a net worth of more than $1 billion. He bought homes in Hawaii, Colorado and Bermuda.

But as the price of gas fell by more than two-thirds over the last few years, Chesapeake lost more than two-thirds of its value as well.

Pressure on Mr. McClendon began last April after news reports revealed that he had obtained personal loans using minority stakes in company-owned wells as collateral. Reuters reported that he had personally borrowed more than $1 billion from EIG Global Energy Partners, a firm that also invested in Chesapeake, raising questions over conflict of interest.

Mr. McClendon was a larger-than-life figure in an industry filled with them. His dealings stretched across the globe as he negotiated partnerships with the Norwegian oil company Statoil, China’s CNOOC and France’s Total, shepherding the foreign oil giants into joint ventures in shale fields around the country.

“It’s an end of an era,” said Fadel Gheit, a senior oil analyst at Oppenheimer. “He was a maverick in the true sense of the word, and he represented both the good and the bad in corporate America. He was the risk-taker, a true visionary, but obviously there were excesses.”

Mr. Icahn, now one of the company’s largest shareholders, was generous in his praise.

“Aubrey has every right to be proud of the company he has built, the world-class team of people at Chesapeake and the collection of assets he has assembled, which in my opinion are the best portfolio of energy assets in the country,” he said.

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The New Old Age Blog: For Some Caregivers, the Trauma Lingers

Recently, I spoke at length to a physician who seems to have suffered a form of post-traumatic stress after her mother’s final illness.

There is little research on this topic, which suggests that it is overlooked or discounted. But several experts acknowledge that psychological trauma of this sort does exist.

Barry Jacobs, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Survival Guide for Caregivers” (The Guilford Press, 2006), often sees caregivers who struggle with intrusive thoughts and memories months and even years after a loved one has died.

“Many people find themselves unable to stop thinking about the suffering they witnessed, which is so powerfully seared into their brains that they cannot push it away,” Dr. Jacobs said.

Flashbacks are a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, along with feelings of numbness, anxiety, guilt, dread, depression, irritability, apathy, tension and more. Though one symptom or several do not prove that such a condition exists — that’s up to an expert to determine — these issues are a “very common problem for caregivers,” Dr. Jacobs said.

Dolores Gallagher-Thompson, a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine who treats many caregivers, said there was little evidence that caregiving on its own caused post-traumatic stress. But if someone is vulnerable for another reason — perhaps a tragedy experienced earlier in life — this kind of response might be activated.

“When something happens that the individual perceives and reacts to as a tremendous stressor, that can intensify and bring back to the forefront of consciousness memories that were traumatic,” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said. “It’s more an exacerbation of an already existing vulnerability.”

Dr. Judy Stone, the physician who was willing to share her mother’s end-of-life experience and her powerful reaction to it, fits that definition in spades.

Both of Dr. Stone’s Hungarian parents were Holocaust survivors: her mother, Magdus, called Maggie by family and friends, had been sent to Auschwitz; her father, Miki, to Dachau. The two married before World War II, after Maggie left her small village, moved to the city and became a corset maker in Miki’s shop.

Death cast a long shadow over the family. During the war, Maggie’s first baby died of exposure while she was confined for a time to the Debrecen ghetto. After the war, the family moved to the United States, where they worked to recover a sense of normalcy and Miki worked as a maker of orthopedic appliances. Then he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 50.

“None of us recovered from that,” said Dr. Stone, who traces her interest in medicine and her lifelong interest in fighting for social justice to her parents and trips she made with her father to visit his clients.

Decades passed, as Dr. Stone operated an infectious disease practice in Cumberland, Md., and raised her own family.

In her old age, Maggie, who her daughter describes as “tough, stubborn, strong,” developed macular degeneration, bad arthritis and emphysema — a result of a smoking habit she started just after the war and never gave up. Still, she lived alone, accepting no help until she reached the age of 92.

Then, in late 2007, respiratory failure set in, causing the old woman to be admitted to the hospital, then rehabilitation, then assisted living, then another hospital. Maggie had made her preferences absolutely clear to her daughter, who had medical power of attorney: doctors were to pursue every intervention needed to keep her alive.

Yet one doctor sent her from a rehabilitation center to the hospital during respiratory crisis with instructions that she was not to be resuscitated — despite her express wishes. Fortunately, the hospital called Dr. Stone and the order was reversed.

“You have to be ever vigilant,” Dr. Stone said when asked what advice she would give to families. “You can’t assume that anything, be it a D.N.R. or allergies or medication orders, have been communicated correctly.”

Other mistakes were made in various settings: There were times that Dr. Stone’s mother had not received necessary oxygen, was without an inhaler she needed for respiratory distress, was denied water or ice chips to moisten her mouth, or received an antibiotic that can cause hallucinations in older people, despite Dr. Stone’s request that this not happen. “People didn’t listen,” she said. “The lack of communication was horrible.”

It was a daily fight to protect her mother and make sure she got what she needed, and “frankly, if I hadn’t been a doctor, I think I would have been thrown out of there,” she said.

In the end, when it became clear that death was inevitable, Maggie finally agreed to be taken off a respirator. But rather than immediately arrange for palliative measures, doctors arranged for a brief trial to see if she could breathe on her own.

“They didn’t give her enough morphine to suppress her agony,” Dr. Stone recalled.

Five years have passed since her mother died, and “I still have nightmares about her being tortured,” the doctor said. “I’ve never been able to overcome the feeling that I failed her — I let her down. It wasn’t her dying that is so upsetting, it was how she died and the unnecessary suffering at the end.”

Dr. Stone had specialized in treating infectious diseases and often saw patients who were critically ill in intensive care. But after her mother died, “I just could not do it,” she said. “I couldn’t see people die. I couldn’t step foot in the I.C.U. for a long, long time.”

Today, she works part time seeing patients with infectious diseases on an as-needed basis in various places — a job she calls “rent a doc” — and blogs for Scientific American about medical ethics. “I tilt at windmills,” she said, describing her current occupations.

Most important to her is trying to change problems in the health system that failed her mother and failed her as well. But Dr. Stone has a sense of despair about that: it is too big an issue, too hard to tackle.

I’m grateful to her for sharing her story so that other caregivers who may have experienced overwhelming emotional reactions that feel like post-traumatic stress realize they are not alone.

It is important to note that both Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Gallagher-Thompson report successfully treating caregivers beset by overwhelming stress. It is hard work and it takes time, but they say recovery is possible. I’ll give a sense of treatment options they and others recommend in another post.

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