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.

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Broad Powers Seen for Obama in Cyberstrikes

WASHINGTON — A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review. 

That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack. New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.

The rules will be highly classified, just as those governing drone strikes have been closely held. John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser and his nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, played a central role in developing the administration’s policies regarding both drones and cyberwarfare, the two newest and most politically sensitive weapons in the American arsenal.  

Cyberweaponry is the newest and perhaps most complex arms race under way. The Pentagon has created a new Cyber Command, and computer network warfare is one of the few parts of the military budget that is expected to grow. Officials said that the new cyberpolicies had been guided by a decade of evolution in counterterrorism policy, particularly on the division of authority between the military and the intelligence agencies in deploying cyberweapons. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk on the record.

Under current rules, the military can openly carry out counterterrorism missions in nations where the United States operates under the rules of war, like Afghanistan. But the intelligence agencies have the authority to carry out clandestine drone strikes and commando raids in places like Pakistan and Yemen, which are not declared war zones. The results have provoked wide protests.

Mr. Obama is known to have approved the use of cyberweapons only once, early in his presidency, when he ordered an escalating series of cyberattacks against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. The operation was code-named Olympic Games, and while it began inside the Pentagon under President George W. Bush, it was quickly taken over by the National Security Agency, the largest of the intelligence agencies, under the president’s authority to conduct covert action.

As the process of defining the rules of engagement began more than a year ago, one senior administration official emphasized that the United States had restrained its use of cyberweapons. “There are levels of cyberwarfare that are far more aggressive than anything that has been used or recommended to be done,” the official said. 

The attacks on Iran illustrated that a nation’s infrastructure can be destroyed without bombing it or sending in saboteurs.

While many potential targets are military, a country’s power grids, financial systems and communications networks can also be crippled. Even more complex, nonstate actors, like terrorists or criminal groups, can mount attacks, and it is often difficult to tell who is responsible. Some critics have said the cyberthreat is being exaggerated by contractors and consultants who see billions in potential earnings.

One senior American official said that officials quickly determined that the cyberweapons were so powerful that — like nuclear weapons — they should be unleashed only on the direct orders of the commander in chief. 

A possible exception would be in cases of narrowly targeted tactical strikes by the military, like turning off an air defense system during a conventional strike against an adversary.

“There are very, very few instances in cyberoperations in which the decision will be made at a level below the president,” the official said. That means the administration has ruled out the use of “automatic” retaliation if a cyberattack on America’s infrastructure is detected, even if the virus is traveling at network speeds.

 While the rules have been in development for more than two years, they are coming out at a time of greatly increased cyberattacks on American companies and critical infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security recently announced that an American power station, which it did not name, was crippled for weeks by cyberattacks. The New York Times reported last week that it had been struck, for more than four months, by a cyberattack emanating from China. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have reported similar attacks on their systems.

 “While this is all described in neutral terms — what are we going to do about cyberattacks — the underlying question is, ‘What are we going to do about China?’ ” said Richard Falkenrath, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There’s a lot of signaling going on between the two countries on this subject.”

International law allows any nation to defend itself from threats, and the United States has applied that concept to conduct pre-emptive attacks.

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Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction

Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.

VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.

It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”

It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.

The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.

Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.

Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.

Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”

Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.

“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”

“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”

Dr. Waldo M. Ellison

Richard Fee initial evaluation

Feb. 5, 2010

Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.

Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.

“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”

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Slipstream: Consumer Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart

OVER the years, the United States and Europe have taken different approaches toward protecting people’s personal information. Now the two sides are struggling to bridge that divide.

On this side of the Atlantic, Congress has enacted a patchwork quilt of privacy laws that separately limit the use of Americans’ medical records, credit reports, video rental records and so on. On the other side, the European Union has instituted more of a blanket regulatory system; it has a common directive that gives its citizens certain fundamental rights — like the right to obtain copies of records held about them by companies and institutions — that Americans now lack.

Even so, United States officials maintain that the divergent approaches are equal. “The sum of the parts of U.S. privacy protection is equal to or greater than the single whole of Europe,” says Cameron F. Kerry, general counsel of the Commerce Department. He is overseeing an agency effort to help develop voluntary, enforceable codes of conduct for industry groups, like app developers, whose collection and use of consumer data are now unregulated.

Europe begs to differ.

“Yes, we share the basic idea of privacy,” says Peter Hustinx, Europe’s data protection supervisor. “But there is a huge deficit on the U.S. side.”

Alas, the data-control divide appears to be widening.

A year ago, the European Commission proposed comprehensive reforms to strengthen online privacy rights — changes that could have big repercussions for American technology companies and marketers that operate in the European Union. American officials, trade groups and tech executives have responded by taking frequent treks to Brussels and other cities, where they have urged regulators and legislators to reconsider the one-regulation-fits-all-data approach. What’s at stake, American industry representatives say, is nothing less than a free and commerce-friendly Internet.

“The ecosystem of the Internet is very delicate,” says Kevin Richards, senior vice president of federal government affairs at TechAmerica, a trade group that represents companies like Google and Microsoft. “It’s not wise to have an overly broad, prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach that would hinder or undermine the ability of companies to innovate in a global economy.”

European Union members already have data protection laws in place, based on a directive from 1995 that laid out principles for the collection of personal information. The proposed new rules would strengthen some existing provisions. They would standardize data protections across the 27 member states. They would also provide some new rights, such as “data portability” — the right of consumers to easily transfer their text files, photographs and videos from one social network, or e-mail or cloud storage service, to another. And they would subject companies that violate the rules to penalties of up to 2 percent of their annual global revenue.

Asked for comment, Viviane Reding, the vice president of the European Commission and the architect of the proposed regulation, said in a statement: “The main problem is that our rules predate the digital age and it became increasingly clear in recent years that they needed an update.” She continued: “That is why I have proposed a root-and-branch reform of the E.U.’s data protection rules — currently under discussion in the European Parliament and the Council of the E.U. — that will both protect citizens’ rights and facilitate business in the digital age.”

BUT some provisions seem too rigid to United States officials and trade groups. They argue that the American approach — sector-specific privacy laws, in addition to industry self-regulation and enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission — is more nimble.

“We hope that Europe will move in the direction of those multistakeholder standards, and not standards which are not flexible and don’t move at Internet speed,” says Mr. Kerry, who has taken at least four trips to European cities in the last year to discuss these issues.

From the perspective of some European legislators, however, United States representatives seem more interested in protecting commerce than consumers. The full-court American effort may have backfired, they say, pushing some European officials toward even broader measures. Last month, Jan Philipp Albrecht, a representative of the European Parliament who reviewed the draft regulation, proposed additional rights for citizens — like the right not to be subject to consumer profiling.

“My impression is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Commerce Department are mostly just following the interests of Silicon Valley,” he says. “This leads to heavy pressure on the European regulator, I can say.”

But Mr. Kerry says the United States must make its views known if the systems are to work in concert.

“I know that some people have raised eyebrows at our involvement; I make no apologies,” Mr. Kerry says. “We in the United States and countries and businesses around the world are stakeholders in this process. This has an important impact on the global economy.”

The solution to this trans-Atlantic clash may simply be American ingenuity.

Last year, President Barack Obama proposed a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” that would give Americans many of the same baseline protections that the draft European rule proposes to reinforce. These include the right of access to records that companies hold about them, the right to correct those records and the right to have limits on the personal data that companies collect and keep. Administration officials said they would work with Congress on legislation based on those rights and to extend oversight to industries not currently covered by federal privacy laws.

A coalition of more than a dozen American advocacy groups said it would send a letter on Monday to senior Obama administration officials, seeking a meeting to ensure that American policy makers’ efforts in Europe “are not averse to the views expressed by the president.” The coalition includes the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.

“Does the Obama administration really want to be on the opposite side of the European effort to upgrade and modernize its privacy law which is at its core about the protection of a fundamental freedom?” asks Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

European officials hold out hope that Congress will enact baseline consumer privacy protections for Americans.

“This development — which is much welcomed in Europe — shows that we have much in common,” Ms. Reding of the European Commission said in her statement, speaking of the privacy bill of rights. “Convergence is springing up and synergies are possible.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

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