California boy to be arraigned in “swatting” prank on actor Kutcher

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Prosecutors charged a 12-year-old boy on Thursday with making a false emergency call that sent police swarming to the home of actor Ashton Kutcher in a “swatting” prank.

The name of the boy, who was arrested by Los Angeles police in December, was withheld due to his age. He was scheduled to be arraigned in a juvenile court in Los Angeles on Friday.

The trend toward placing false emergency calls is known as “swatting” because SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) officers often are sent to the purported crime scenes. Authorities say such situations can be dangerous due to the risk of a misunderstanding between police and occupants of a building.

The boy has been charged with two felony counts each of making false bomb threats and computer intrusion in connection with the October 3 emergency call that drew police to the Hollywood Hills home of Kutcher, star of the sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” and a similar call on October 10 that sent police to a Wells Fargo Bank.

Authorities have accused the boy of having reported men armed with guns and explosives in Kutcher’s home and that several people had been shot. Dozens of emergency personnel were sent to the house. Kutcher was not home at the time.

Swatting calls in recent months have also sent police to the homes of singers Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Bill Trott)

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Peter Hauri, Psychologist Who Focused on Insomnia, Dies at 79

Peter Hauri, a psychologist who was among the first researchers to study the mysterious mechanics of a good night’s sleep, and who established widely used guidelines for avoiding insomnia without drugs, died on Jan. 31 in Rochester, Minn., where he had been director of the Mayo Sleep Disorders Center until he retired in 2000. He was 79.

The cause was complications of a brain injury sustained the day before in a fall, a family spokesman said.

Dr. Hauri’s early work included studies of narcolepsy and sleepwalking. He later studied the use of biofeedback in helping people with insomnia to fall asleep, and he measured the relative depths of so-called rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep and non-REM sleep. Those studies established him as part of the first generation of scientists to recognize sleep as an organized physiological process, not a simple “turning off” of the brain.

He was best known, though, for a 1992 book, “No More Sleepless Nights.” Written with Shirley Linde, it outlined some of the practical strategies he had developed for helping people sleep without taking pills.

The book mainly describes a painstaking process of self-observation and note-taking, followed by behavior modification.

Dr. Hauri said the most important thing he had learned in his research — in sleep lab experiments with volunteers draped in bridal trains of wires and electrodes so he could record the pulsing of their sleeping, or nonsleeping, brains — was that, like snowflakes, every person’s sleeping problem was unique. “There is no one set of rules that can be mimeographed and given to every patient who comes into the office,” he said in a 2010 videotaped interview for the archive of the Sleep Research Society.

Nonetheless, Dr. Hauri devised guidelines that became the standard medical advice of recent decades. Among them was this paradox of insomnia therapy strategies: Never try to sleep. “The more a person tries to sleep, the more aroused he or she gets,” Dr. Hauri said in an interview. Instead, he advised, get out of bed — and leave the bedroom — until sleepiness calls.

Another suggestion: Eliminate the bedroom clock, or turn it to the wall, out of reach. “There is no scientific proof,” Dr. Hauri said in 2010, “but I’m convinced of that one: Getting rid of the alarm clock works.”

Peter Johannes Hauri was born on June 25, 1933, in Sirnach, Switzerland, one of six children of Rudolf and Verena Hauri. After graduating from a teachers college, he taught junior high school students in Switzerland for several years until an opportunity arose to study in the United States. In 1960 he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from North Central College in Naperville, Ill. He studied psychology from 1960 to 1965 at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D.

Survivors include his wife, Cindy, and their son, Matthew. He is also survived by a daughter, Heidi Hauri-Gill; a son, David Courard-Hauri; and four grandchildren from a previous marriage.

In the 2010 archive interview, Dr. Hauri was asked what had begun his interest in sleep.

He replied with an impish smile, “My mother was a very famous insomniac.” And, he added, “I don’t sleep so well myself.”

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New cars at Chicago Auto Show sip gasoline

The 105th Chicago Auto Show, which opens Saturday at McCormick Place, will feature the latest high-tech innovations, screaming muscle cars and drool-worthy exotics.

But the biggest head-turner may be a small black-and-white number affixed to the windows of the impossibly polished vehicles — the estimated miles per gallon. After years of high gas prices, fuel efficiency is becoming as sexy as horsepower for many car buyers, and a priority for manufacturers.

Driven by increased consumer demand and a federal mandate for automakers to dramatically improve fuel efficiency, new cars are averaging an all-time high of 24.5 mpg, up nearly 20 percent since 2008, according to a recent University of Michigan study. Those increases are most evident in a plethora of new high-mileage small cars, a fast-growing segment for the Big Three and beyond. But they are also reflected in everything from sports cars to pickup trucks, many of which are now sipping fuel with noteworthy restraint.

"Fuel economy is the No. 1 consideration for most consumers," said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst with Edmunds.com. "They still may be buying a pickup truck, but they want the best fuel economy."

The once-beleaguered auto industry was on a roll last year, selling 14.5 million new vehicles in the U.S., a 13.4 percent increase from 2011, according to Autodata Corp. Analysts project sales could top prerecession levels by 2014, on the way back to an all-time high of about 17 million units.

Fuel economy should be breaking records every year from now until 2025, when federal standards will require automakers to average 54.5 mpg for all cars and light trucks. The higher-mileage standards have been in the pipeline since 2009 and were finalized in August. The first major milestone is coming in 2016, when vehicles must average 35.5 mpg.

Automakers are further along the road than it may seem. The federal mileage standards, called Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE), use a more lenient methodology that includes laboratory testing, weighted sales and a variety of adjustments and credits to measure a manufacturer's overall fuel efficiency.

Employing a similar methodology, University of Michigan researchers calculated the industry's unadjusted CAFE number for January at 29.8 mpg, meaning the federally adjusted number would be even higher. Getting to 35.5 mpg by 2016 seems well within reach, according to some experts.

Auto analyst Alan Baum said the number of high-mileage vehicles offered by manufacturers has doubled since 2009. The trend goes beyond hybrids and electrics, with diesel and more fuel-efficient gas engines lifting car lines across the board. Baum wasn't afraid to break down the chicken-and-egg question as to what's behind the industry improvement in mileage.

"Without the standards, it wouldn't have occurred," he said. "But they wouldn't be meeting the standards if there wasn't consumer demand."

Those mileage gains were on display at the auto show preview Thursday.

Ford is introducing a 1.0-liter EcoBoost engine to the U.S. this year in its 2014 Fiesta that is projected to top 40 mpg on the highway and will be "the most fuel efficient, nonhybrid vehicle in North America," according to Liz Elser, a Ford spokeswoman.

The current-model Fiesta is priced about $14,000 and has been doing well, Elser said.

"Buyers in this segment, the No. 1 purchase reason is fuel economy, and it's very important to them," she said. "We want to deliver that to our customers in the best way we can. If we're coming in at 40 right now, we want to be able to improve on that."

At the Chrysler display, full-size 300 sedans advertised 31 mpg in large print across the front windshields. But leading the high-mileage roster for the manufacturer is the 2013 Dodge Dart, which began rolling off the assembly line in Belvidere in May. Built on a Fiat platform, it is the first compact offering for Chrysler in nearly a decade, luring new buyers to showrooms with sticker prices less than $20,000 and fuel economy upward of 41 mpg on the highway.

The company sold more than 7,000 Darts in January, its best month to date, and momentum is building, according to Chrysler spokeswoman Kathy Graham.

"We are pleased with the pace of sales," Graham said. "We're not the top seller in the segment — there are others that have been established in the compact car segment that sell more — but we're making progress each month as more and more people become aware that Dodge has an offering in the compact car segment."

A bright red, all-new 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray looked fast even as it spun slowly on a turntable. The next-generation Corvette — the model has been the quintessential American sports car for 60 years — lives up to its legacy, capable of doing 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds. But it also delivers surprisingly good gas mileage, getting upward of 28 mpg on the highway, according to a General Motors spokesman.

While the Corvette lags behind the Chevrolet Cruze Eco, which gets 42 mpg on the highway, it nonetheless achieves improved fuel efficiency without sacrificing performance through the use of lighter materials and a number of design innovations. Cruising on the highway, for example, the Corvette shuts down half its eight cylinders, waiting to kick back in on command.

"When it's rolling along on the highway, it will go from 6.2-liter V-8 to a 3.1-liter four-cylinder," said James Bell, head of consumer affairs for GM. "But when you ask for a little more power, completely imperceptibly, the other cylinders come back to life."

Bell said that even Corvette buyers care about mileage, especially if they use it as a commuter vehicle. But he said the improvements in fuel efficiency are a direct result of the more stringent federal standards coming down the road.

"We've got CAFE regulations that need to be met," he said. "While we'd love to sell a ton of these, it has to contribute to that CAFE. We can't have a car like this that gets 10 miles per gallon."

rchannick@tribune.com

Twitter @RobertChannick

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Postal unions angry, customers unfazed about Saturday cut

Chicago Tribune reporter Rob Manker gathers some reactions to the recent news that the U.S. Postal Service plans to drop Saturday delivery of first-class mail by August. (Posted on: Feb. 6, 2013.)

The U.S. Postal Service's plan to end Saturday first-class delivery in August angered unions that stand to lose jobs and faces an uncertain fate in Congress.

But the decision, which the Postal Service says will save $2 billion a year, barely fazed a number of people interviewed at Chicago-area post offices.

"No one really sends letters anymore," said David Braunschweig, 63, who was at the Arlington Heights post office to mail a gift. "Putting away mail (both Saturday and Sunday), it won't kill anyone."

Hammered by competition that includes the Internet, the Postal Service lost nearly $16 billion last year and said doing away with first-class mail on Saturdays is essential to its recovery plan.

"It's an important part of our return to profitability and financial stability," Postmaster General and CEO Patrick Donahoe said at a news conference Wednesday in Washington. "Our financial condition is urgent."

The agency will continue delivering packages and filling post office boxes six days a week, and all offices that already were operating on Saturdays will continue to do so. Package volume is one bright spot for the Postal Service. It's up 14 percent since 2010, which officials attribute to the growth of online commerce.

The end of Saturday delivery would be the biggest change to mail service since the end of twice-daily delivery in the 1950s. Overall mail volume dropped by more than 25 percent from 2006 to 2011, which could explain the shrugs from several Chicago-area postal customers.

"I was accustomed to getting mail on Saturdays, but we will get accustomed to not getting it as well," Rich Klimczak, 74, said outside the Tinley Park post office. "The only thing I would not like to see is (postal workers) losing their jobs."

The move, which would take effect Aug. 5, aims to reduce the postal workforce by at least 20,000 more employees through reassignment and attrition. It would also significantly reduce overtime payments.

Local union officials estimated that 10,000 postal workers will have their workweek reduced because of the move. On Wednesday afternoon, the Chicago branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers called for Donahoe's resignation.

"USPS executives cannot save the Postal Service by tearing it apart," Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in a statement. "These across-the-board cutbacks will weaken the nation's mail system and put it on a path to privatization."

The National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, which has about 1,500 members in the Chicago suburbs, said the elimination of Saturday service puts the Postal Service in a "death spiral."

Although the Postal Service no longer receives taxpayer money, it remains subject to oversight by Congress, which since 1983 has repeatedly passed measures requiring six-day delivery. Donahoe's announcement appeared to be an effort to force action in Congress after comprehensive postal reform legislation stalled last year.

While many members of Congress insist they would have to approve the cutback, Donahoe told reporters that the agency believes it can move forward unilaterally. The current mandate for six-day delivery is part of a government funding measure that expires in late March.

"There's plenty of time in there so if there is some disagreement" with lawmakers, "we can get that resolved," he said.

The divide among lawmakers on the issue does not break cleanly along party lines. Lawmakers who represent rural areas, who tend to be Republicans, generally have opposed service cutbacks. So have those with strong backing from postal labor unions, mostly Democrats.

Last year, the Senate approved a bill that would have allowed the Postal Service to end Saturday delivery after a two-year period to evaluate the potential effects. Similar legislation in the House never came up for a vote.

The Obama administration had included a proposal for five-day mail delivery in its 2013 budget plan. White House officials, however, had said they supported that change only in concert with other reforms. White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that officials had not yet studied the latest plan.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, expressed concern that the Postal Service's unilateral announcement could complicate his plans for overall reform.

However, he added, "It's hard to condemn the postmaster general for moving aggressively to do what he believes he can and must do to keep the lights on."

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How Ang Lee Took a Tiger by the Tail to Create ‘Life of Pi’

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – It would have been foolish to predict what “Life of Pi” – has become: a box-office phenomenon that has swept one country after another, a game changer in its use of 3D and computer graphics and a critical darling with 11 Oscar nominations including best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography and two for composer Mychael Danna.

“It still comes as a surprise,” director Ang Lee told TheWrap. “But a wonderful surprise. For a long time I felt that it’s a privilege to even make this movie. So we’re very happy.”

Everything about “Life of Pi,” based on the bestselling novel by Yann Martel, represented an uncommon risk. A pensive drama without a single movie star or, for that matter, a face vaguely familiar to American audiences, the project cost $ 130 million, highly unusual in today’s Hollywood. (Even “Les Misérables” cost just $ 60 million.)

Further, the movie takes place almost entirely on the ocean, in 3D and with a CG tiger, factors that required technological machinations not guaranteed to work. Beyond that, given its ponderous price tag, the movie had to appeal to a very broad audience to pay off.

And it has. An uplifting story about the survival of the human spirit and the power of imagination, “Life of Pi” has been embraced across cultures and nations around the globe, with the movie setting new benchmarks in China, sweeping Latin America and taking in $ 450 million worldwide while still in release.

“The pattern of how this movie plays is kind of strange. I’ve never experienced it before,” Lee said of “Pi’s” overwhelming international appeal. “It was made to be a big movie, with lots of commercials everywhere. But it’s a philosophical movie – an Indian boy, a digital tiger, an ambiguous ending. I didn’t know if it would work or not.”

The novel tells the story of a shipwrecked Indian boy, Pi, adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, and adds a twist at the end to make you question everything you’ve read. “Pi’s” journey to the screen took the better part of a decade and began conventionally enough. Producer Gil Netter sent Fox 2000 veteran producer Elizabeth Gabler the book shortly after it was published, and they optioned it for Fox in 2002.

She commissioned a script from Dean Georgaris for director M. Night Shyamalan, but Georgaris never completed it. Director Alfonso Cuaron (“Children of Men”) signed on and then left. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Delicatessen”) picked up the project, then he dropped out, too.

Finally she approached Lee, whom she’d admired for years. “He told me I was crazy,” Gabler said. “I told him he had to do it.”

The problem was, most people considered the story of young Pi to be unmakeable.

You couldn’t film it with real tigers. Could a computer-generated tiger be believable? For Lee, who was revered for such movies as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Sense and Sensibility,” but who had also learned a lot making the tech-heavy but unsuccessful “Hulk,” the impossibility of the challenge was part of the appeal.

“That’s a small part,” he confessed. “That’s ego. But that’s not a good enough reason. Artistically, it’s a philosophical book. The movie has an unfriendly ending. It pulls the rug out from the audience’s feet. Your attention is mandatory.”

And those difficulties, to Lee, were irresistible. “It’s challenging, but it’s a thrill. If you can do it, you can swagger around. When people say, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ there’s a certain amount of satisfaction.” The night before Lee spoke to the TheWrap, he had been at a critics’ award ceremony where he was approached by Steven Spielberg. “He said to me, ‘I tried to figure out how you do that,’ Of course, that’s nice!”

But back to the movie: Lee dove into making the story his own, conducting intensive research on tigers and computer graphics, and investigating the logistics of creating a set where the ocean would seem like a real character. He decided to do the film in 3D. The price continued to rise – and with it the anxiety of then-Fox chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman.

Gabler recalled: “Tom and Jim said, ‘We can’t make this movie. It’s too risky. Give it back to him.’” Lee got on a plane to Los Angeles. At a meeting with the studio chiefs, he showed an animated mock-up of the shipwreck scene, complete with swimming zebras. And he showed them a 12-minute tape of an unknown actor, Suraj Sharma, reciting the monologue from the end of the movie: Pi, in a hospital bed, recounting an alternative, grisly fate that could have befallen the survivors of a shipwreck. “When we saw it, the lights came up, and they said OK,” said Gabler.

So the studio, in Lee’s words, “sweated it out” with him over four years, gambling on the notion that the film just might be the international hit it would have to be to make back Fox’s investment.

The time included three months of rehearsal with the inexperienced Sharma and another seven months shooting. The Taiwanese government gave favorite son Lee an abandoned airport where the filmmakers built a series of soundstages, saving the production millions.

One studio was used to build a massive water tank, where the challenge was to simulate the waves of a vast ocean and not see the water that bounced off the sides of a tank. They built 12 machines to suck in water and shoot it out, creating two-story waves and endless ripples.

The time included three months of rehearsal with the inexperienced Sharma and another seven months shooting. The Taiwanese government gave favorite son Lee an abandoned airport where the filmmakers built a series of soundstages, saving the production millions.

One studio was used to build a massive water tank, where the challenge was to simulate the waves of a vast ocean and not see the water that bounced off the sides of a tank. They built 12 machines to suck in water and shoot it out, creating two-story waves and endless ripples.

As for Sharma, Lee took the 17-year-old novice under his wing, teaching him method acting and guiding him in yoga practice. The two became inseparable, and Sharma watched as Lee increasingly took on the qualities of the character Pi.

“He himself is a very intense person,” Sharma told TheWrap. “Ang moved toward Pi right through the movie. It was really intense. And in many ways I feel like he was a little like Pi; the way he thinks is similar. The aura is similar. He has that similar patience with things but a certain perseverance to it. But nice at the same time – I can’t explain it. It’s the way his back is bent … Ang is a lot like his work. It’s very simple from the outside but it has a lot of complexities on the inside. Kind of like Pi.”

For Lee, the result was one that both exhausted and exhilarated him. The story of Pi, he says, is the story of the essence of filmmaking.

“It’s a project that examines illusion. The power of storytelling. The importance of illusion – is it more real than what we can prove?” he reflected.

“I’m a storyteller. I create illusions. I believe in that more than in things I can touch. And this gets to the bottom of it all.”

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Daniel Doctoroff Enlists Bloomberg in A.L.S. Research

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Daniel L. Doctoroff, second from right, chief executive of Bloomberg L.P., at Columbia University’s Motor Neuron Center.

Daniel L. Doctoroff watched in pain as his father developed a limp one day, was found to have Lou Gehrig’s disease, and died within two years. Then an uncle also developed symptoms of the same disease, and died soon after.

Now Mr. Doctoroff, like many other relatives of Lou Gehrig’s disease victims, worries that he or his children may someday develop the illness.

But unlike many, he is in a position to try to do something about it. At a time when scientists are making rapid gains in the genetic roots of many diseases, Mr. Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor and private equity investor, is working with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and a private equity director, David M. Rubenstein, to put together a $25 million package of donations to support research to try to cure this rare and usually fatal degenerative neurological illness.

“This is a devastating disease,” Mr. Doctoroff said in an interview this week in the glass high-rise on the Upper East Side that houses Bloomberg L.P., the mayor’s media and financial information company, where Mr. Doctoroff is now chief executive. “Up to now, there’s been basically no hope. I have the resources, and I think it’s my obligation to do that.”

The gift is part of a wave of investment based on the booming field of genomic analysis. The money will go to a project called Target A.L.S., a consortium of at least 18 laboratories, including ones at Columbia and at Johns Hopkins, the mayor’s alma mater, working to find biological “targets,” like gene mutations, and the biochemical changes they cause in the spinal cord, that could be used to test potential drug therapies for the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

It comes on top of a previous $15 million gift by Mr. Doctoroff, Bloomberg Philanthropies and other donors. By comparison, the National Institutes of Health, the single largest source of research financing for the disease, expects to give $44 million in 2013.

This is not Mr. Bloomberg’s first time supporting charitable causes that are dear to his close associates. The mayor quietly gave at least $1 million to put the name of his top deputy mayor, Patricia E. Harris, on a new academic center at her alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.

Mr. Doctoroff said the conversation about A.L.S. in which he got Mr. Bloomberg involved “lasted about five seconds.” He declined to say what share of the money each of the three donors was giving.

Mr. Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group, said Wednesday that he had long been fascinated with A.L.S. because of its association with Gehrig, the baseball player who died of it. He wondered why more than 70 years later so little progress had been made in treating it.

He said he jumped at the chance to join in because he thought that A.L.S. research was underfinanced owing to the rarity of the disease, and that even a small amount of money could make a big difference.

In the Bloomberg administration, where he was deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding from 2002 to 2008, Mr. Doctoroff was best known for his dogged — and ultimately dashed — attempt to bring the 2012 Olympics to New York City. (London got the Games.) Now that he has left City Hall, he no longer rides his bike to work — he says the 2.6-mile route from the Upper West Side to his office is too short — but he sometimes runs.

At Bloomberg, he sits in front of a conference room with walls of hot-pink glass, while carp swim in a giant fish tank nearby. He keeps no family photos or other personal mementos on his desk, and talking about his family’s disease history does not seem easy for him.

A.L.S. is rare, with about 2 new cases diagnosed a year per 100,000 people, according to the A.L.S. Association. A vast majority of cases are “sporadic,” in people who have no family history, while only 5 to 10 percent of cases are inherited. There appear to be no racial, ethnic or socioeconomic predispositions.

There is some speculation about environmental factors, like exposure to toxic chemicals and high physical activity that athletes might endure, “but nothing firm,” said Christopher E. Henderson, a researcher at Columbia and the Target A.L.S. project’s scientific director. Some researchers suspect a link between A.L.S. and head trauma suffered by professional football players.

Mr. Doctoroff’s father, Martin, an appeals court judge in Michigan, received the diagnosis in 2000 and died in 2002. One of Martin Doctoroff’s brothers, Michael, was found to have the disease in 2009 and died in 2010.

“When my father contracted the disease and passed away, it was very easy to chalk it up to bad luck,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “When my uncle got it, it obviously had broader implications.”

Given his family history, Mr. Doctoroff estimates that there is a 50-50 chance that he has the gene, C9orf72, that could lead to A.L.S. But he has chosen not to be tested, which would have implications not just for him but for his three children. “It’s very personal, but I’m not sure that I want to know,” he said.

Even when family members develop the disease, it can occur at vastly different ages, so he could still be in suspense even after testing. “Assuming you have the gene, you don’t know when you would actually get the disease,” he said. His uncle was 71. His father was 66. He is now 54.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 6, 2013

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated Daniel L. Doctoroff’s title at Bloomberg L.P. He is the chief executive, not the executive director.

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Penny Pritzker a candidate for Commerce secretary

Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker has been a prominent Barack Obama friend and supporter since his early days in politics and ran his 2008 campaign fundraising operation. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune / April 8, 2011)

By Katherine Skiba and Christi Parsons




Washington bureau

7:30 p.m. CST, February 6, 2013

Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker has emerged as a leading candidate to serve in the administration of President Obama, for whom she has long been a campaign supporter and top fundraiser.

A senior administration official cautioned that no announcement is imminent and that Obama has made no decision. But Pritzker is under consideration to serve as Commerce secretary or perhaps in another senior position involving relations between Obama and business leaders, according to officials close to the process who spoke anonymously to comment on internal deliberations.

Pritzker is a member of the Chicago family behind the Hyatt Hotels Corp. She has been a prominent Obama friend and supporter since his early days in politics and ran his 2008 campaign fundraising operation.

 She is founder and CEO of PSP Capital Partners and the Pritzker Realty Group, as well as chair of the Artemis Real Estate Partners. She is also a member of the Chicago Board of Education and has had two White House appointments, serving on the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Forbes’ annual list of the world’s billionaires last March put Pritzker at No. 719 and said her hotels and investments were worth $1.8 billion.

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3 critically injured in West Side crash

Three people were critically injured in a crash on the city's West Side.

By Ellen Jean-Hirst




Tribune reporter

10:21 p.m. CST, February 5, 2013

Three people were critically injured in a crash on the city's West Side, authorities said.

Firefighters were called to the accident near 31st Street and Western Avenue about 8:30 p.m., according to the department's media office.

Fire officials cut three people out of a red Jeep Ford Cherokee after the car lost control and somehow ended up on it's top just west of Western Avenue on 31st Street, police  said.

Three people had been riding in the car and all were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, police said.

Just before 10 p.m., the radio in the car -- which was flipped on its top -- could still be heard faintly from a distance.

It was a one car rollover and no other vehicles were involved, police said.

"Some of the damage is from the fire department," police said of the doors, which had been cut to free the car's occupants. "But they flipped the car themselves.

Investigators from the department's Major Accidents Investigations Unit arrived at the scene Thursday night to investigate what had happened.

Three people were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, one in "extremely critical" condition, two in critical condtion, according to the fire department.

An auto rolled over, at some point hitting a city light pole, seriously injuring three people, said Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Veejay Zala.

Video from the scene showed a red Jeep flipped over, with its roof crushed, and a person wrapped in black on a stretcher being taken into an ambulance.

The Police Major Accident Investigation unit referred calls to News Affairs.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

Twitter: @ChicagoBreaking

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Meryl Streep, Jean Dujardin returning to the Oscars

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep will likely get to induct Daniel Day-Lewis into that triple-Oscar club on February 24 at the Dolby Theatre, while “The Sound of Music” star Christopher Plummer will probably hand the Best Supporting Actress award to a new screen-musical star, Anne Hathaway.

Those are two conclusions to be drawn from the Academy’s Tuesday announcement that last year’s acting winners, Streep, Plummer, Jean Dujardin and Octavia Spencer, will return to serve as presenters on this year’s Oscar telecast.

Streep won her third Oscar for “The Iron Lady,” while Dujardin, Spencer and Plummer won their first for “The Artist,” “The Help” and “Beginners,” respectively.

The previous year’s Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor winners typically present the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress awards, and vice versa. And the immediate past winners are traditionally the first Oscar presenters to be announced.

So far, Oscar show producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron have announced a number of musical participants, including Barbra Streisand, Norah Jones and a tribute to musicals of the past 10 years.

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Vote This Week May Close Long Island College Hospital

State university trustees will vote this week on whether to close Long Island College Hospital, officials of the Brooklyn hospital said on Tuesday, despite protests from doctors and nurses that northern Brooklyn would lose an essential source of emergency care.

Dr. John Williams, president of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which runs Long Island College Hospital, said on Tuesday that he would formally recommend closing the hospital at a SUNY meeting in Manhattan on Thursday, followed by a public hearing that same day.

An executive committee of the SUNY board will vote on the recommendation on Friday and is expected to approve it, which would clear the way for the state Health Department to make the final decision, based on whether comparable care is available to people now served by the hospital. About 2,000 doctors, nurses and other employees would be in danger of losing their jobs.

Dr. Williams said that after five months on the job, he had concluded that the financial losses at LICH, as the hospital is called, threatened to sink SUNY Downstate, which includes a medical school that he said had trained one out of three doctors practicing in Brooklyn and one out of nine doctors practicing in New York City.

He said it was necessary to sacrifice LICH to save the rest of the enterprise. “I have to put on the big hat when I look at the campus and say what works and what doesn’t work,” Dr. Williams said in an interview on Tuesday. “The last thing I want to do is have people lose their jobs, but LICH could bring down SUNY Downstate and that’s something I’m trying to prevent.”

But doctors — many of whom heard of the plan at a meeting held Monday by Dr. Williams — said that the closing of LICH would leave more than 50,000 emergency room patients a year without a nearby hospital to go to. They accused Dr. Williams of opting to close LICH, which lies in the gentrifying Cobble Hill neighborhood, rather than more antiquated facilities in East Flatbush or Bay Ridge, because it has the most valuable real estate, and the sale could prop up SUNY Downstate’s faltering operations.

Dr. Williams said that he had chosen to close LICH, rather than facilities in lower-income areas, because Downstate’s mission was to take care of poor and underserved patients. He said that it would cost $75 million to $200 million to upgrade LICH’s aging plant. Besides, he said, in recent years, LICH had been largely abandoned by residents of the surrounding neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Red Hook and Boerum Hill, who often worked in Manhattan and preferred to go to hospitals there, forcing the hospital to reduce its beds.

But Julie Semente, a registered nurse in LICH’s intensive care unit, said Tuesday that when it came to emergencies, those patients still went to LICH; Brooklyn ambulances, she said, generally do not go to Manhattan. If LICH closed, she said, they would have to go to hospitals deeper in Brooklyn and farther from their homes and families.

“My patient who was hemorrhaging had to call an ambulance,” Ms. Semente said of one recent patient. “He lives in Brooklyn Heights. The ambulance doesn’t go over the bridge. It came to Long Island College Hospital and his life was saved because he went to the hospital in the neighborhood.”

She said that SUNY Downstate was already “in a mess” financially before acquiring LICH in 2011 from Continuum Health Partners, which also runs St. Luke’s, Roosevelt and Beth Israel hospitals in Manhattan. “LICH is being closed because it is more attractive and it will bring them more money in a sale” than other facilities, she said.

The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said in an audit last month that SUNY Downstate had $117 million in operating losses in 2011, of which $44 million was attributable to the acquisition of LICH. The audit said that LICH had annual operating losses for 17 years going back to 1994. A report in November 2011 by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s panel on Brooklyn hospitals identified LICH as one of six hospitals that “do not have a business model and sufficient margins to remain viable and provide high-quality care to their communities as currently structured.”

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