Gadgetwise Blog: Q.& A.: Making Smartphones Easier to Read

Is there a way to make the text bigger in the iPhone mail app, and is there a screen magnification feature for apps that don’t zoom in?

The iPhone software does include controls for both making the screen text larger and magnifying the entire screen. To get to these controls in iOS 6, tap the Settings icon on the Home screen. On the Settings screen, tap General and on the next screen, tap Accessibility.

On the screen of Accessibility options, in the Vision area, tap Large Text and select a bigger point size from the samples shown. In this same settings area, you can also turn on the Zoom feature that allows you to magnify the entire screen by double-tapping three fingers on the glass. Apple’s site has more information on its other Accessibility settings.

Many Android smartphones also have accessibility settings for making the screen easier to see, but the steps for adjusting them depends on the phone model, carrier and version of Android. On a Samsung Galaxy SIII running Android 4.0 and later, you can fiddle with the font size by tapping the Menu button and then Settings. Scroll down and tap Display and then tap Font Size, where you can select a larger option.

Some versions of Android also include a screen-magnification feature and other options in the Accessibility area of the Settings menu. For older versions of Android, third-party software like the Big Font app can help make the screen text easier to see.

Accessibility options are built into most major smartphone platforms. Microsoft has information for Windows Phone 8 users here and BlackBerry owners can find out more here.

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Ipswich Journal: Paul Mason Is One-Third the Man He Used to Be

Paul Nixon Photography

Paul Mason in 2012, two years after gastric bypass surgery stripped him of the unofficial title of “the world’s fattest man.”

IPSWICH, England — Who knows what the worst moment was for Paul Mason — there were so many awful milestones, as he grew fatter and fatter — but a good bet might be when he became too vast to leave his room. To get him to the hospital for a hernia operation, the local fire department had to knock down a wall and extricate him with a forklift.

That was nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Mason weighed about 980 pounds, and the spectacle made him the object of fascinated horror, a freak-show exhibit. The British news media, which likes a superlative, appointed him “the world’s fattest man.”

Now the narrative has shifted to one of redemption and second chances. Since a gastric bypass operation in 2010, Mr. Mason, 52 years old and 6-foot-4, has lost nearly two-thirds of his body weight, putting him at about 336 pounds — still obese, but within the realm of plausibility. He is talking about starting a jewelry business.

“My meals are a lot different now than they used to be,” Mr. Mason said during a recent interview in his one-story apartment in a cheerful public housing complex here. For one thing, he no longer eats around the clock. “Food is a necessity, but now I don’t let it control my life anymore,” he said.

But the road to a new life is uphill and paved with sharp objects. When he answered the door, Mr. Mason did not walk; he glided in an electric wheelchair.

And though Mr. Mason looks perfectly normal from the chest up, horrible vestiges of his past stick to him, literally, in the form of a huge mass of loose skin choking him like a straitjacket. Folds and folds of it encircle his torso and sit on his lap, like an unwanted package someone has set there; more folds encase his legs. All told, he reckons, the excess weighs more than 100 pounds.

As he waits to see if anyone will agree to perform the complex operation to remove the skin, Mr. Mason has plenty of time to ponder how he got to where he is. He was born in Ipswich and had a childhood marked by two things, he says: the verbal and physical abuse of his father, a military policeman turned security guard; and three years of sexual abuse, starting when he was 6, by a relative in her 20s who lived in the house and shared his bed. He told no one until decades later.

After he left school, Mr. Mason took a job as a postal worker and became engaged to a woman more than 20 years older than him. “I thought it would be for life, but she just turned around one day and said, ‘No, I don’t want to see you anymore — goodbye,’ ” he said.

His father died, and he returned home to care for his arthritic mother, who was in a wheelchair. “I still had all these things going around in my head from my childhood,” he said. “Food replaced the love I didn’t get from my parents.” When he left the Royal Mail in 1986, he said, he weighed 364 pounds.

Then things spun out of control. Mr. Mason tried to eat himself into oblivion. He spent every available penny of his and his mother’s social security checks on food. He stopped paying the mortgage. The bank repossessed their house, and the council found them a smaller place to live. All the while, he ate the way a locust eats — indiscriminately, voraciously, ingesting perhaps 20,000 calories a day. First he could no longer manage the stairs; then he could no longer get out of his room. He stayed in bed, on and off, for most of the last decade.

Social service workers did everything for him, including changing his incontinence pads. A network of local convenience stores and fast-food restaurants kept the food coming nonstop — burgers, french fries, fish and chips, even about $22 worth of chocolate bars a day.

“They didn’t deliver bags of crisps,” he said of potato chips. “They delivered cartons.”

His life became a cycle: eat, doze, eat, eat, eat. “You didn’t sleep a normal sleep,” he said. “You’d be awake most of the night eating and snacking. You totally forgot about everything else. You lose all your dignity, all your self-respect. It all goes, and all you focus on is getting your next fix.”

He added, “It was quite a lonely time, really.”

He got infections a lot and was transported to the hospital — first in a laundry van, then on the back of a truck and finally on the forklift. For 18 months after a hernia operation in 2003, he lived in the hospital and in an old people’s home — where he was not allowed to leave his room — while the local government found him a house that could accommodate all the special equipment he needed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 6, 2013

The headline on an earlier version of this article misstated Paul Mason’s current weight relative to what he weighed nearly a decade ago. He is now about one-third, not two-thirds, the weight he was then.

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White Collar Watch: Despite Expectations, Corporations Could Face More Cases of Criminal Liability

Mary Jo White, the nominee to be chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has stated that she is not a fan of pursuing cases of criminal liability against corporations. Such views are likely to draw scrutiny during her confirmation process, but it does not necessarily mean companies facing sanctions can expect an easy ride in Washington.

Corporate criminal liability has been a fixture of American law for more than a century, ever since the Supreme Court said a corporation could be charged with a crime in the 1909 decision in New York Central v. United States. Corporations have long complained about their potential liability, especially because the Justice Department has ramped up prosecutions of business crime over the last 20 years.

Ms. White explained in a speech in 2005 as part of a securities law program just how broad the principle of corporate criminal liability is under the New York Central case: “If a single employee, however low down in the corporate hierarchy, commits a crime in the course of his or her employment, even in part to benefit the corporation, the corporate employer is criminally liable for that employee’s crime. It is essentially absolute liability.”

In an interview in 2012 with the law firm career Web site Chambers Associate, Ms. White said she would limit “or abolish corporate criminal liability entirely.” In a 2005 interview with the Corporate Crime Reporter, she said that for publicly traded companies, it “should be the very rare case where an entire entity is subject to a criminal charge.”

Those words might be music to the ears of corporations hoping that Ms. White will cut them a break over violations of the securities laws. The Wall Street Journal quoted Senator Charles E. Grassley as stating that her views were “concerning” because she might “take a more corporate-friendly view of civil laws under the S.E.C.’s jurisdiction.”

But it looks as though the opposite may be true. The S.E.C. does not prosecute criminal charges but only has the power to pursue civil enforcement actions. But corporations do have another regulator to answer to: the Justice Department’s criminal division.

In her Corporate Crime Reporter interview, Ms. White’s took the position that the S.E.C. and other regulatory agencies were better equipped to police corporations than prosecutors by imposing structural changes on organizations to ensure future compliance with the law. She viewed the use of criminal charges as something that should be reserved for egregious cases.

Ms. White’s approach could well signal more vigorous enforcement by the S.E.C. against companies found to have violated the law by requiring extensive changes in their operations in addition to the usual financial penalties.

But a critical issue worth examining during Ms. White’s Senate nomination hearings will involve the S.E.C.’s practice of allowing companies to settle cases without admitting or denying any wrongdoing.

This policy has drawn the ire of some, including a United States District Court judge, Jed S. Rakoff. A case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit involves a settlement that Judge Rakoff rejected between the S.E.C. and Citigroup over the bank’s sale of a faulty security tied to subprime mortgages because the bank was not required to admit any guilt or fault as part of the agreement.

A court ruling involving Judge Rakoff’s case could decide that an admission of wrongdoing is not required, but it would be worth asking Ms. White whether she was open to toughening up the S.E.C.’s settlement policy. This issue is much more important than whether corporations should be charged with a crime, which is not directly in her purview in her new position.

There is also some irony in raising an issue about Ms. White’s views pursuing criminal charges against corporations. A frequent criticism of the S.E.C. and Justice Department in the wake of the financial crisis has been the dearth of prosecutions against individual corporate managers while cases against the companies have been settled by deferred or nonprosecution agreements.

The issue has not been the number of cases filed against corporations, but the seeming ease with which the cases are settled through payment of fines and a promise of future compliance.

In addition, few individuals have been held accountable for corporate misconduct. A recent PBS “Frontline” program called “The Untouchables” raised questions about why the government had not pursued the prosecution of individuals involved in pushing subprime mortgages.

The dearth of such prosecutions and the use of deferred and nonprosecution agreements in cases of corporate misconduct could be a prime topic at the confirmation hearings for the next nominee to lead the Justice Department’s criminal division, now that Lanny A. Breuer has announced his resignation.

The lack of criminal prosecutions has also emerged as a criticism in more recent cases against banks over violations of money laundering laws and manipulation of interest rates. Even the case against UBS — which did involve a rare, corporate guilty plea — was structured so that a foreign subsidiary with no real exposure to the United States was used to limit the potential consequences to the broader organization.

While she was in private practice, Ms. White did ask whether deferred and nonprosecution agreements were being used too easily by prosecutors to resolve cases as a substitute for making the more difficult decision about the appropriateness of filing criminal charges against a company. Such a question would be worth raising again this year, but it is perhaps best directed at the person nominated to take Mr. Breuer’s place at the Justice Department.

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The New Old Age Blog: In Blended Families, Responsibility Blurs

Every year, Fran McDowell waited for the summer week when she would sing in a choral festival in the North Carolina mountains, then spend a few days in a lakeside cabin with close women friends.

That getaway grew more complicated to arrange — but perhaps more necessary — after her husband, Herb Beadle, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They had a “gloriously happy” marriage — her first, his second — for 11 years, and she was more than willing to care for him in sickness as in health. But he could no longer manage alone in their Atlanta home.

For a few years, other family members pitched in to allow Ms. McDowell her cherished vacation. Eventually, though, she had to ask her husband’s daughter, a medical professional in another state, to take him into her home for a week.

She said no, then yes. Then, the day before Ms. McDowell was to drive him there, her stepdaughter again refused, leaving no time for alternate arrangements. If this had been her biological child, “I would have said, ‘Come on, don’t do this to me,’” Ms. McDowell said. Instead, reluctant to make waves, she canceled her trip.

“I think confrontation is riskier for stepparents,” she told me. “I was the compliant one who would bite my tongue rather than say what I thought.”

Ms. McDowell never told her stepdaughter, or anyone in the family, how angry and disappointed she was, or how difficult it was becoming to care for their father, who died three years ago at 86. She told the members of her dementia caregivers support group instead.

It was that group’s leader, Moira Keller, who e-mailed me to suggest this topic. A clinical social worker with the Sixty Plus program at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, she wrote that “one of the biggest challenges I have is blended families in later life.”

Though I’ve written about the way the 1970s’ spike in divorces could complicate caregiving for adult children — more households to sustain, more siblings to either help or hinder — I hadn’t considered the impact on the older people themselves.

But Ms. Keller seems to be onto something. “The generation most likely to have stepchildren” — the boomers — “don’t need much care yet,” said Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist co-editing a coming issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family on stepfamilies in later life. “The crunch will come in 10 or 20 years.”

Initially, many adult children whose divorced or widowed parents remarry seem delighted, Ms. Keller said when we spoke. “They’re thrilled that Mom or Dad isn’t alone,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing — until somebody gets sick.”

Then, she has found, “it gets really blurry. Who’s going to do what?” Grown children don’t have much history with these new spouses; they often feel less responsibility to intervene or help out, and stepparents may be unwilling to ask. Perhaps it’s unclear whether children or new spouses have decision-making authority.

“Older couples in this situation fall through the cracks,” Ms. Keller said.

Research shows that the ties which lead adult children to become caregivers — depending on how much contact they have with parents, how nearby they live, how obligated they feel — are weaker in stepchildren, Dr. Silverstein said. Money sometimes enters the equation too, Ms. Keller added, if biological children resent a parent’s spending their presumed inheritance on care for an ailing stepparent.

Adela Betsill, another of Ms. Keller’s support group members, married her longtime partner five years ago — her second marriage, his third. She has since given up her interior design business to care for Robert who, at 72, has also developed Alzheimer’s disease. His two children have had little involvement — perhaps because she’s just 49 and presumed able to handle everything.

Thus, though Robert’s son works from an office in their home, if Ms. Betsill needed to go out and asked him to remind his father to eat lunch, “he might, or he might not,” she said. “I don’t think he realizes it’s a burden.” So she has not asked.

Would it be different if she were his biological mother and he saw her wearing out under the strain? She thinks so, but it’s hard to know. After all, biological families also experience plenty of conflict and avoidance as elders age.

Still, that sense of reciprocity we often hear from caregivers — she took care of me when I was young, so I need to help out now that she’s old — doesn’t apply in late-life stepfamilies. Ms. Betsill didn’t raise this man, or his half sister.

Older couples who marry or remarry often discuss their finances, Ms. Keller has found. (An elder attorney, Craig Reaves, discussed the legal consequences here.) But illness and dependence may prove even more difficult subjects to broach.

“If I could yell one thing from a mountaintop,” Ms. Keller said, “it’s to talk about this stuff, too. Who’s going to take care of you if you become sick? Talk about that while you’re still healthy.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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The New Old Age Blog: In Blended Families, Responsibility Blurs

Every year, Fran McDowell waited for the summer week when she would sing in a choral festival in the North Carolina mountains, then spend a few days in a lakeside cabin with close women friends.

That getaway grew more complicated to arrange — but perhaps more necessary — after her husband, Herb Beadle, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They had a “gloriously happy” marriage — her first, his second — for 11 years, and she was more than willing to care for him in sickness as in health. But he could no longer manage alone in their Atlanta home.

For a few years, other family members pitched in to allow Ms. McDowell her cherished vacation. Eventually, though, she had to ask her husband’s daughter, a medical professional in another state, to take him into her home for a week.

She said no, then yes. Then, the day before Ms. McDowell was to drive him there, her stepdaughter again refused, leaving no time for alternate arrangements. If this had been her biological child, “I would have said, ‘Come on, don’t do this to me,’” Ms. McDowell said. Instead, reluctant to make waves, she canceled her trip.

“I think confrontation is riskier for stepparents,” she told me. “I was the compliant one who would bite my tongue rather than say what I thought.”

Ms. McDowell never told her stepdaughter, or anyone in the family, how angry and disappointed she was, or how difficult it was becoming to care for their father, who died three years ago at 86. She told the members of her dementia caregivers support group instead.

It was that group’s leader, Moira Keller, who e-mailed me to suggest this topic. A clinical social worker with the Sixty Plus program at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, she wrote that “one of the biggest challenges I have is blended families in later life.”

Though I’ve written about the way the 1970s’ spike in divorces could complicate caregiving for adult children — more households to sustain, more siblings to either help or hinder — I hadn’t considered the impact on the older people themselves.

But Ms. Keller seems to be onto something. “The generation most likely to have stepchildren” — the boomers — “don’t need much care yet,” said Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist co-editing a coming issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family on stepfamilies in later life. “The crunch will come in 10 or 20 years.”

Initially, many adult children whose divorced or widowed parents remarry seem delighted, Ms. Keller said when we spoke. “They’re thrilled that Mom or Dad isn’t alone,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing — until somebody gets sick.”

Then, she has found, “it gets really blurry. Who’s going to do what?” Grown children don’t have much history with these new spouses; they often feel less responsibility to intervene or help out, and stepparents may be unwilling to ask. Perhaps it’s unclear whether children or new spouses have decision-making authority.

“Older couples in this situation fall through the cracks,” Ms. Keller said.

Research shows that the ties which lead adult children to become caregivers — depending on how much contact they have with parents, how nearby they live, how obligated they feel — are weaker in stepchildren, Dr. Silverstein said. Money sometimes enters the equation too, Ms. Keller added, if biological children resent a parent’s spending their presumed inheritance on care for an ailing stepparent.

Adela Betsill, another of Ms. Keller’s support group members, married her longtime partner five years ago — her second marriage, his third. She has since given up her interior design business to care for Robert who, at 72, has also developed Alzheimer’s disease. His two children have had little involvement — perhaps because she’s just 49 and presumed able to handle everything.

Thus, though Robert’s son works from an office in their home, if Ms. Betsill needed to go out and asked him to remind his father to eat lunch, “he might, or he might not,” she said. “I don’t think he realizes it’s a burden.” So she has not asked.

Would it be different if she were his biological mother and he saw her wearing out under the strain? She thinks so, but it’s hard to know. After all, biological families also experience plenty of conflict and avoidance as elders age.

Still, that sense of reciprocity we often hear from caregivers — she took care of me when I was young, so I need to help out now that she’s old — doesn’t apply in late-life stepfamilies. Ms. Betsill didn’t raise this man, or his half sister.

Older couples who marry or remarry often discuss their finances, Ms. Keller has found. (An elder attorney, Craig Reaves, discussed the legal consequences here.) But illness and dependence may prove even more difficult subjects to broach.

“If I could yell one thing from a mountaintop,” Ms. Keller said, “it’s to talk about this stuff, too. Who’s going to take care of you if you become sick? Talk about that while you’re still healthy.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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State of the Art: BlackBerry, Rebuilt, Lives to Fight Another Day

I’m sorry. I was wrong.

This apology is for the bespectacled student at my talk in Cleveland, and the lady in the red dress in Florida, and anyone else who’s recently asked me about the future of the BlackBerry. I told all of them the same thing: that it’s doomed.

That wasn’t an outrageous opinion. Once dominant, the BlackBerry has slipped to a single-digit percentage of the smartphone market. The company’s stock has crashed almost 90 percent from its 2008 peak. In the last two years, the BlackBerry’s maker, Research in Motion, released a disastrous tablet, laid off thousands of employees and lost its C.E.O.’s. The whole operation seemed to be one gnat-sneeze away from total collapse.

The company — which changed its name on Wednesday to simply BlackBerry — kept saying that it had a miraculous new BlackBerry in the wings with a new operating system called BlackBerry 10. But it was delayed and delayed and delayed. Nobody believed anything the company said anymore. Besides — even if there were some great phone, what prayer did BlackBerry have of catching up to the iPhone and Android phones now? Even Microsoft, with its slick, quick Windows Phone, hasn’t managed that trick.

Well, BlackBerry’s Hail Mary pass, its bet-the-farm phone, is finally here. It’s the BlackBerry Z10, and guess what? It’s lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas.

And here’s the shocker — it’s complete. The iPhone, Android and Windows Phone all entered life missing important features. Not this one; BlackBerry couldn’t risk building a lifeboat with leaks. So it’s all here: a well-stocked app store, a music and movie store, Mac and Windows software for loading files, speech recognition, turn-by-turn navigation, parental controls, copy and paste, Find My Phone (with remote-control lock and erase) and on and on.

The hardware is all here, too. The BlackBerry’s 4.2-inch screen is even sharper than the iPhone’s vaunted Retina display (356 pixels per inch versus 326). Both front and back cameras can film in high definition (1080p back, 720p front).

The thin, sleek, black BlackBerry has 16 gigabytes of storage, plus a memory card slot for expansion. Its textured back panel pops off easily so that you can swap batteries. It will be available from all four major carriers — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — and Verizon said it would charge $200 with a two-year contract.

Some of BlackBerry 10’s ideas are truly ingenious. A subtle light blinks above the screen to indicate that something — a text, an e-mail message, voice mail, a Facebook post — is waiting for you. Without even pressing a physical button, you swipe up the screen; the Lock screen lifts like a drape as you slide your thumb, revealing what’s underneath. It’s fast and cool.

There are no individual app icons for Messages or Mail. Instead, all communication channels (including Facebook, Twitter and phone calls) are listed in the Hub — a master in-box list that appears at the left edge when you swipe inward. Each reveals how many new messages await and offers a one-tap jump into the corresponding app. It’s a one-stop command center that makes eminent sense.

The BlackBerry’s big selling point has always been its physical keyboard. The company says it will, in fact, sell a model with physical keys (and a smaller screen) called the Q10.

But you might not need it. On the all-touch-screen model, BlackBerry has come up with a mind-bogglingly clever typing system. Stay with me here:

As you type a word, tiny, complete words appear over certain on-screen keys — guesses as to the word you’re most likely to want. If you’ve typed “made of sil,” for example, the word “silicone” appears over the letter I key, “silver” over the V, and “silk” over the K. You can fling one of these words into your text by flicking upward from the key — or ignore it and keep typing.

How well does it work? In this passage, the only letters I actually had to type are shown in bold. The BlackBerry proposed the rest: “I’m going to have to cancel for tonight. There is a really good episode of Dancing With the Stars on.”

I type 20 characters; it typed 61 for me.

But wait, there’s more. The more you use the BlackBerry, the more it learns your way of writing. When I tried that same passage later, I typed only one letter: the I in “I’m.” Thereafter, the phone predicted each successive word in those sentences, requiring no letter-key presses at all. Freaky and brilliant and very, very fast.

There’s speech recognition, too. Hold in the Play/Pause key to get the Z10’s Siri-like assistant. Siri-like in concept, that is — you can say “send an e-mail to Harvey Smith,” “schedule an appointment” and a few other things — but it’s slower, less accurate and far narrower in scope. You can also speak to type, but the accuracy is so bad, you won’t use it.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this column reported incorrect information on the amount that cellphone carriers would charge for the new BlackBerry Z10. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile said they would announce pricing information in the future; they have not announced they will charge $200 with a two-year contract (as Verizon has).    

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 5, 2013

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about the release of smartphones with the BlackBerry 10 operating system, misstated the circumstances of the departure of the former co-chief executives of the phones’ maker, Research in Motion, now known as BlackBerry. They stepped down; they were not fired.

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India Ink: Muslim Girls Quit Rock Band After National Controversy

The three Muslim teen-age girls, Aneeqa Khalid, Noma Nazir and Farah Deeba, just want to play rock and roll and heavy metal music.

The only female rock band at Srinagar’s national “Battle of the Bands” competition in December, they quickly gained fame in India after placing third there. Their band, Praagaash, which means “from darkness into light,” draws inspiration from Metallica, Green Day, Iron Maiden and Cradle of Filth, doing alternate rock covers and their own compositions.

“It was awesome and overwhelming,” Ms. Khalid, the 15-year-old bass guitarist, recalled during an interview Saturday. “We were getting all this attention and a standing ovation. Then we got other offers to play.”

Fans describe the band as passionate and talented. “They just came into the scene last year and were already considered to be among the top bands,” said Junaid Khan, a 21-year-old fellow rock musician from the Kashmir Valley.

But the national attention quickly turned bittersweet last weekend. Unwillingly, the members of Praagaash have been transformed from plucky amateur female rock musicians, into participants in an ongoing political and religious struggle in conflict-ridden Indian-controlled Kashmir, and, in fact, across India.

First, state and national politicians chimed in. Then a religious leader declared a Fatwa against their band. On Monday night, overwhelmed by the attention, Praagaash disbanded. All three teenage girls quit, posting the news on their band’s Facebook page.

Kashmir Valley, a traditional hub of art and culture, has only recently begun to create its own to rock music. A handful of male bands, including BloodRockz and Tales of Blood, are fusing the Western genre of music with traditional Sufi music. Men face a lot of criticism for playing rock music in the Muslim region, said Adnan Muhammad, the Praagaash band member’s teacher, who is widely regarded as a pioneer of rock music in Kashmir Valley.

“We are used to people seeing this music as being against our religion,” Mr. Muhammad said. “We respect their wishes but still carry on the best we can.”

Teenage girls playing rock music attract a different level of attention altogether. After the December competition, Praagaash was both applauded and derided on Facebook. Strangers ridiculed them for being un-Islamic because they had performed in public before unknown men. Some even suggested they could be raped for their performances. (Many of the abusive comments have been removed. A screenshot of some of them is here.)

The three girls, tenth-grade students who are 15 and 16 years old, recalled being scared by the Facebook messages, but said over the weekend that they were determined to continue to play after the furor died down. After all, said Ms. Nazir, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist, rock and metal music was in her blood. “Whenever I’m angry or sad, it helps me to get out of it,” she said. “It’s kind of a rescue,” she said.

“The first time I heard an acoustic guitar, I thought it sounded so cool,” Ms. Khalid said on Saturday. “I knew then I just had to learn and be part of a band.”

But over the past weekend, the Facebook threats themselves became national news, featured on television channels including NewsX, and in articles in English and Hindi papers. Suddenly, the band became a focal point for long-simmering tensions between India’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority, and within different factions within the Muslim community.

As the media storm grew, Jammu and Kashmir’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah, expressed his support for the girl band, and called for a police investigation into the threats. “I hope these talented young girls will not let a handful of morons silence them,” he said on Twitter on Saturday.

Political leaders jumped into the debate. The influential separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani replied to Mr. Abdullah’s Tweet through a spokesperson, saying that his “dynasty had long disassociated itself from Islamic and ethical values.” Other political players were quick to register their support or condemnation for the band.

On Monday evening, activist Anna Hazare’s “Indians Against Corruption” party took up the cause, telling her more than 235,000 Twitter followers to support the band on Facebook.  On Tuesday, the police in Jammu & Kashmir began to officially investigate the girl’s harassers.

Suddenly, the band’s very existence is being viewed nationally as no less than a weapon against the Taliban. “If regressive elements succeed in stifling music itself, though, civil spaces will suffer, ceding vital ground to elements trying to make Kashmir resemble Talibanized Afghanistan,” the Times of India wrote in an op-ed published Tuesday.

Band members said in interviews during the weekend that they had neither sought any government intervention on their behalf, nor did they think it was necessary. While the Facebook threats were worrying, they weren’t actually dangerous, they said. “These were not threats by criminals but just a case of abuse and bullying by teenagers who were probably jealous,” said Ms. Nazir.

In separate interviews, the teenage girls stressed over the weekend that they just want to play music. They don’t want to be convenient examples for the media, forced to play the stereotypical role of “Muslim girls who break down conservative barriers,” they said.

“I have been so tense about the media hype that I’ve been playing my guitar so hard to get the frustration out,” said Ms. Nazir.

Then on Sunday, Grand Mufti Bashiruddin Ahmad, the top religious leader in Kashmir, issued a fatwa against them for singing in public. Mr. Ahmad advised women to only sing inside their homes before female members of the family.

Band members say their parents to force them to shut down the band, which their families never really embraced in the first place.

The mother of Ms. Deeba, the drummer, said she believes that performing in public is against Islam, but she couldn’t bear to crush her 16-year-old daughter’s dream when she first said she wanted to play.

“In return, my husband made her promise that she would pray five times a day and she did,” Ms. Deeba’s mother said in an interview.

Ms. Khalid’s mother wondered why her daughter’s playing of music was un-Islamic if women performing on television channels were streaming into Kashmiri homes everyday. “But if we live here, then we have to live by the rules,” she said in an interview. “We have no choice.”

The girls said they are aware of the contradictions between their dreams and their conservative surroundings. When national attention of their plight started to build, they first hoped to circumvent critics by giving up live performances, focusing on composing music and releasing an album instead.

As recently as Saturday, a confident Ms. Khalid had talked about the band working on a punk-rock song with both Hindi and English lyrics. “We are not quitting,” she said. “It’s our passion and we can’t help it so if people want to talk then let them talk.”

Sunday’s fatwa was too much to endure, the parents say.

Ms. Khalid’s mother said that she and her husband were even afraid of allowing their daughter to step outside of the house, although she had to go for her tuition lessons. She recalled with fear a recent incident in which acid was thrown on the face of a female teacher in Srinagar.

“Anything bad can happen. We simply can’t take that risk any more,” she said.

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DealBook: New Details Suggest a Defense in SAC Case

At the center of the government’s insider trading case against a former portfolio manager at the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors is a trade that directly involves Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire owner of the fund.

New details about the case have emerged that could cast doubt on the way that trade has been portrayed by the authorities, suggesting a possible line of defense for the portfolio manager and raising questions about whether the government will be able to build a case against Mr. Cohen, who has long been in the cross hairs of an investigation for insider trading on Wall Street.

Federal prosecutors have claimed that SAC dumped millions of shares of two pharmaceutical companies in 2008 after the former employee, Mathew Martoma, received secret information from a doctor about problems with a new Alzheimer’s drug.

In bringing its charges, the government said that SAC not only sold out of its position, but also bet against — or shorted — the drug companies’ stocks before the public announcement of the bad news. The SAC short position, according to prosecutors, allowed it to earn big profits after shares of the companies, Elan and Wyeth, plummeted.

“The fund didn’t merely avoid losses, it greedily schemed to profit further by shorting Elan and Wyeth stock,” said April Brooks, a senior F.B.I. official in New York, during a press conference on Nov. 20, the day Mr. Martoma was arrested.

Internal SAC trading records, according to people directly involved in the case, indicate that the hedge fund did not have a negative bet in place in advance of the announcement of the drug trial’s disappointing results. Instead, the records indicated that SAC, through a series of trades, including a complex transaction known as an equity swap, had virtually no exposure — neither long nor short — heading into the disclosure of the drug data.

A different narrative surrounding the firm’s trading could help Mr. Martoma, who has pleaded not guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy in what the government calls the most lucrative insider trading case ever charged.

The government, however, does have powerful evidence against Mr. Martoma. Prosecutors say the fund avoided losses by selling its roughly $700 million stake in Elan and Wyeth. If, as the government says, Mr. Martoma caused SAC to sell the shares — and then short them — while possessing important, nonpublic information, that would constitute an insider trading crime. And prosecutors have secured the testimony of the doctor who says he leaked the drug trial data to Mr. Martoma.

Still, perhaps more important, the trading records may complicate a government effort to pursue a case against Mr. Cohen. The SAC founder has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and has said he acted appropriately at all times.

In bringing charges against Mr. Martoma, prosecutors appeared to be circling nearer to Mr. Cohen. The criminal complaint against Mr. Martoma noted that Mr. Cohen had spent 20 minutes on the telephone with the portfolio manager the night before SAC began selling its shares. Prosecutors have not claimed that Mr. Cohen knew that Mr. Martoma had confidential information about the drug trials. (Mr. Martoma has refused so far to cooperate in helping the government build a case against his former boss.)

Yet if the 2008 trade is a possible avenue for the government, it is running out of time to bring a case against Mr. Cohen. Under the statute of limitations for insider trading crimes, the government would have to file a criminal case against him by mid-July. That deadline is the five-year anniversary of the trade in question, unless it could prove a conspiracy with Mr. Martoma that continued well past then.

Prosecutors have not sought to reach a “tolling agreement” with Mr. Cohen, which would allow the government additional time to bring a case past the statute of limitations, according to people briefed on the matter. The S.E.C., meanwhile, is weighing whether to file a civil fraud lawsuit against the fund connected to the drug-stock trades.

All this comes as a Feb. 14 cutoff approaches for SAC clients to ask for their money back. The fund has told employees that it expects at least $1 billion in withdrawals from the $14 billion fund amid the intensifying investigation. SAC has a standard quarterly redemption deadline.

Several other factors could make it difficult for the government to implicate Mr. Cohen. SAC is well known for its aggressive, rapid-fire trading style, and several former employees say that there is nothing unusual about the fund’s exiting a large position over just a few days.

“It’s one thing to bring an insider trading charge against a market novice who pours his 401(k) into a stock after hanging up the phone with an insider,” said Morris J. Fodeman, a former prosecutor and now a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. “But it’s far more difficult to make a case against a sophisticated hedge fund that routinely takes large positions and employs complex trading strategies.”

Moreover, both inside and outside SAC, there had been much controversy and debate surrounding the effectiveness of the Alzheimer’s drug, called bapineuzumab, leading up to the July 2008 release of the companies’ clinical results. Mr. Martoma’s colleagues in SAC’s health care group raised specific concerns with Mr. Cohen about the wisdom of holding such a large position in the two companies. And while preliminary data announced by Elan and Wyeth in June offered encouraging news, they also suggested potential problems.

“We believe potentially confounding factors will continue to fuel controversy over bapineuzumab,” wrote Caroline Y. Stewart, a drug stock analyst with Piper Jaffray, reacting to the preliminary results.

On July 11, another Wall Street analyst, Jonathan Aschoff at Brean Murray Carret & Company, raised red flags about a sharp run-up in the price of Elan’s shares heading into the presentation of the data.

“We have numerous concerns with the clinical development of bapineuzumab, and what we viewed to be underwhelming top-line Phase 2 results make us highly doubtful of success,” Mr. Aschoff wrote. “In our opinion, this strategy only serves to increase clinical risk and stoke our pessimism.”

The uncertainty relating to the Alzheimer drug’s clinical results could help explain what led Mr. Cohen to hedge SAC’s position so that it had “neutral exposure,” in Wall Street parlance, heading into disclosure of the trial results.

The short positions that SAC established in Elan and Wyeth were matched almost perfectly to offset an equity swap that effectively provided the fund with exposure to 12 million Wyeth shares, according to the SAC documents. An equity swap mimics ordinary shares and gives investors like hedge funds the benefits of stock ownership without actually owning the shares. Funds often use these complex derivatives to accumulate a large position but not tip off the market.

When government officials announced the case against Mr. Martoma, they made no mention of the swap. Instead, they emphasized how SAC had jettisoned its Elan and Wyeth shares and then brazenly accumulated short positions in both companies.

“The charges unsealed today describe cheating — coming and going,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in opening remarks during the press conference. “Specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side.”

The government noted the swap position in its court papers, but did not factor it into SAC’s overall gains and losses in Elan and Wyeth. Because SAC did not trade the Wyeth swap, instead leaving the position in place, it could not be part of any insider trading charge.

Representatives for the United States attorney’s office and the S.E.C. declined to comment. An SAC spokesman declined to comment, as did Charles A. Stillman, the lawyer for Mr. Martoma.

Prosecutors have built their case against Mr. Martoma by securing the cooperation of Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor who ostensibly leaked to him the confidential data about the drug being jointly developed by Elan and Wyeth. The companies hired Dr. Gilman to oversee the clinical trials. SAC paid Dr. Gilman about $108,000 as a consultant.

The government said that Mr. Cohen’s fund accumulated a roughly $700 million combined stake in Elan and Wyeth based on Mr. Martoma’s recommendation. SAC’s equity swap with respect to Wyeth, however, added $566 million in exposure.

On Thursday, July 17, 2008, as the drug trials neared completion, Dr. Gilman told Mr. Martoma that patients were experiencing serious side effects, the government said. Three days later, on a Sunday, with the markets closed, Mr. Martoma had the 20-minute conversation with Mr. Cohen, according to telephone records cited in the criminal complaint. Prosecutors said that Mr. Martoma told his boss that he was no longer “comfortable” with the investments.

On Monday morning, July 21, at Mr. Cohen’s direction, SAC’s head trader began selling the fund’s 10.5 million shares of Elan and 7.1 million shares of Wyeth. By July 29 — the day that the companies announced the trial results — SAC had not only sold out of its Elan and Wyeth holdings but also established short positions in the stocks. SAC was short about 4.5 million shares of Elan and 3.3 million shares of Wyeth. The fund also purchased a small number of Elan put options, a bet that the company’s shares would decline.

The 12 million-share equity swap position in Wyeth, however, counterbalanced the short exposure. SAC was short 4.5 million shares of Elan but, taking the swap into account, effectively long about 8.7 million shares of Wyeth. On July 30, the first trading day after the companies disclosed the negative trial results, Elan’s stock fell about 42 percent and Wyeth’s stock dropped about 12 percent.

Federal prosecutors said that SAC’s trading ahead of the announcement allowed the fund to avoid $194 million in losses by exiting the Elan and Wyeth positions, and then also earn about $83 million on the short trades. But SAC also had paper losses of about $70 million on its Wyeth swap, almost entirely negating any gains from the short sales.

While such details would seem to contradict how authorities have described the trading, prosecutors could argue that SAC had little choice but to leave the swaps in place, and that was part of the strategy to trade on inside information. That is because selling a swap would be difficult to do without attracting attention in the marketplace. If SAC had sold its swaps, it would have had to notify the Wall Street bank that it entered into the swap transaction with and, in turn, the bank’s trader would have most likely sold the shares on the open market.

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Medicines Co. Licenses Rights to Cholesterol Drug

The drug, known as ALN-PCS, inhibits a protein in the body known as PCSK9. Such drugs might one day be used to treat millions of people who do not achieve sufficient cholesterol-lowering from commonly used statins, such as Lipitor.

The Medicines Company will pay $25 million initially and as much as $180 million later if certain development and sales goals are met, under the deal expected to be formally announced Monday. It will also pay Alnylam, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., double-digit royalties on global sales.

That is small payment for a drug with presumably a huge potential market, probably reflecting that Alnylam is still in the first of three phases of clinical trials, well behind some far bigger competitors.

The team of Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is already entering the third and final stage of trials with their PCSK9 inhibitor, as is Amgen. Pfizer and Roche are in midstage trials.

ALN-PCS is different from the other drugs. It uses a gene-silencing mechanism called RNA interference, aimed at shutting off production of the PCSK9 protein. The other drugs are proteins called monoclonal antibodies that inhibit the action of PCSK9 after it has been formed.

Alnylam and the Medicines Company hope that turning off the faucet, as it were, will be more efficient than mopping the floor, allowing their drug to be given less frequently and in smaller amounts.

But that has yet to be proved. No drug using RNA interference has reached the market.

The Medicines Company, based in Parsippany, N.J., generates almost all of its revenue from one product — Angiomax, an anticlotting drug used when patients receive stents to open clogged arteries.

Dr. Clive A. Meanwell, chief executive of the company, said that PCSK9 inhibitors are likely to be used at first mainly by patients with severe lipid problems under the care of interventional cardiologists, the same doctors who use Angiomax. “It really is quite adjacent to what we do,” he said.

The Medicines Company licensed Angiomax from Biogen Idec, where the drug was invented and initially developed under a team led by Dr. John M. Maraganore, who is now the chief executive of Alnylam.

“It’s a bit like getting the band back together,” Dr. Maraganore said.

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Medicines Co. Licenses Rights to Cholesterol Drug

The drug, known as ALN-PCS, inhibits a protein in the body known as PCSK9. Such drugs might one day be used to treat millions of people who do not achieve sufficient cholesterol-lowering from commonly used statins, such as Lipitor.

The Medicines Company will pay $25 million initially and as much as $180 million later if certain development and sales goals are met, under the deal expected to be formally announced Monday. It will also pay Alnylam, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., double-digit royalties on global sales.

That is small payment for a drug with presumably a huge potential market, probably reflecting that Alnylam is still in the first of three phases of clinical trials, well behind some far bigger competitors.

The team of Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is already entering the third and final stage of trials with their PCSK9 inhibitor, as is Amgen. Pfizer and Roche are in midstage trials.

ALN-PCS is different from the other drugs. It uses a gene-silencing mechanism called RNA interference, aimed at shutting off production of the PCSK9 protein. The other drugs are proteins called monoclonal antibodies that inhibit the action of PCSK9 after it has been formed.

Alnylam and the Medicines Company hope that turning off the faucet, as it were, will be more efficient than mopping the floor, allowing their drug to be given less frequently and in smaller amounts.

But that has yet to be proved. No drug using RNA interference has reached the market.

The Medicines Company, based in Parsippany, N.J., generates almost all of its revenue from one product — Angiomax, an anticlotting drug used when patients receive stents to open clogged arteries.

Dr. Clive A. Meanwell, chief executive of the company, said that PCSK9 inhibitors are likely to be used at first mainly by patients with severe lipid problems under the care of interventional cardiologists, the same doctors who use Angiomax. “It really is quite adjacent to what we do,” he said.

The Medicines Company licensed Angiomax from Biogen Idec, where the drug was invented and initially developed under a team led by Dr. John M. Maraganore, who is now the chief executive of Alnylam.

“It’s a bit like getting the band back together,” Dr. Maraganore said.

Read More..