Iceland, Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with small-time criminals, “clearly knows that he crossed the line” and generally sees “the difference between right and wrong.”

Today, the burly, 48-year-old former policeman is struggling with a very different sort of suspect. Reassigned to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, to lead what has become one of the world’s most sweeping investigation into the bankers whose actions contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Hauksson now faces suspects who “are not aware of when they crossed the line” and “defend their actions every step of the way.”

With the global economy still struggling to recover from the financial maelstrom five years ago, governments around the world have been criticized for largely failing to punish the bankers who were responsible for the calamity. But even here in Iceland, a country of just 320,000 that has gone after financiers with far more vigor than the United States and other countries hit by the crisis, obtaining criminal convictions has proved devilishly difficult.

Public hostility toward bankers is so strong in Iceland that “it is easier to say you are dealing drugs than to say you’re a banker,” said Thorvaldur Sigurjonsson, the former head of trading for Kaupthing, a once high-flying bank that crumbled. He has been called in for questioning by Mr. Hauksson’s office but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Yet, in the four years since the Icelandic Parliament passed a law ordering the appointment of an unnamed special prosecutor to investigate those blamed for the country’s spectacular meltdown in 2008, only a handful of bankers have been convicted.

Ministers in a left-leaning coalition government elected after the crash agree that the wheels of justice have ground slowly, but they call for patience, explaining that the process must follow the law, not vengeful passions.

“We are not going after people just to satisfy public anger,” said Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, Iceland’s minister of industry, a former finance minister and leader of the Left-Green Movement that is part of the governing coalition.

Hordur Torfa, a popular singer-songwriter who helped organize protests that forced the previous conservative government to resign, acknowledged that “people are getting impatient” but said they needed to accept that “this is not the French Revolution. I don’t believe in taking bankers out and hanging them or shooting them.”

Others are less patient. “The whole process is far too slow,” said Thorarinn Einarsson, a left-wing activist. “It only shows that ‘banksters’ can get away with doing whatever they want.”

Mr. Hauksson, the special prosecutor, said he was frustrated by the slow pace but thought it vital that his office scrupulously follow legal procedure. “Revenge is not something we want as our main driver in this process. Our work must be proper today and be seen as proper in the future,” he said.

Part of the difficulty in prosecuting bankers, he said, is that the law is often unclear on what constitutes a criminal offense in high finance. “Greed is not a crime,” he noted. “But the question is: where does greed lead?”

Mr. Hauksson said it was often easy to show that bankers violated their own internal rules for lending and other activities, but “as in all cases involving theft or fraud, the most difficult thing is proving intent.”

And there are the bankers themselves. Those who have been brought in for questioning often bristle at being asked to account for their actions. “They are not used to being questioned. These people are not used to finding themselves in this situation,” Mr. Hauksson said. They also hire expensive lawyers.

The special prosecutor’s office initially had only five staff members but now has more than 100 investigators, lawyers and financial experts, and it has relocated to a big new office. It has opened about 100 cases, with more than 120 people now under investigation for possible crimes relating to an Icelandic financial sector that grew so big it dwarfed the rest of the economy.

To help ease Mr. Hauksson’s task, legislators amended the law to allow investigators easy access to confidential bank information, something that previously required a court order.

Parliament also voted to put the country’s prime minister at the time of the banking debacle on trial for negligence before a special tribunal. (A proposal to try his cabinet failed.) Mr. Hauksson was not involved in the case against the former leader, Geir H. Haarde, who last year was found guilty of failing to keep ministers properly informed about the 2008 crisis but was acquitted on more serious charges that could have resulted in a prison sentence.

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Assessing Obama’s Claims on Skeet Shooting

WASHINGTON — President Obama has taken on N.B.A. stars on the White House basketball court, golfed at the air base that houses Air Force One and even tried to polish his legendarily woeful bowling at the presidential lanes.

But now it turns out that he has picked up a new hobby: skeet shooting at Camp David.

At least that is the way he tells it. In an interview published last week, Mr. Obama said that he and his guests shot clay pigeons “all the time” at the retreat in the Maryland mountains, a revelation that surprised many and drew a fair bit of skepticism. And then on Saturday, the White House released a photo of Mr. Obama skeet shooting at Camp David in August.

The notion of the president taking aim at targets flung into the air captivated some in the political and social media worlds at a time when he is pushing Congress to enact sweeping restrictions on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Conservatives scoffed, comics mocked, a congresswoman challenged him to a skeet-shooting contest, a fake picture of an armed Mr. Obama circulated on the Internet, and the White House tried to make the whole matter go away.

“It was a surprise to a lot of people in the industry when we saw that and heard that,” said Michael Hampton Jr., the executive director of the National Skeet Shooting Association, whose 35,000-member rolls do not include the president. “But officially we have no idea whether he does participate or not. Only him or his people would know that.”

Mr. Obama is hardly the first politician to draw scorn for boasting of experience with guns. In 2007, during his first presidential campaign, former Gov. Mitt Romneyof Massachusetts was ridiculed when he said, “I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter — small varmints, if you will.” In 2004,John Kerry, then a presidential candidate and now secretary of state, was lampooned for showing up in camouflage to go hunting less than two weeks before the election.

The latest commotion has its origins in the interview Mr. Obama gave to The New Republic, now owned by Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder and former Obama campaign aide. During the interview, Franklin Foer, the magazine’s editor, referred to the fight over gun control and asked the president if he had ever fired a gun.

“Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” Mr. Obama said.

“The whole family?” Mr. Foer asked.

“Not the girls,” he said, “but oftentimes guests of mine go up there. And I have a profound respect for the traditions of hunting that trace back in this country for generations. And I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake.”

Mr. Obama went on to say that the reality of guns in urban areas differs from that in rural areas. “So it’s trying to bridge those gaps that I think is going to be part of the biggest task over the next several months,” he said. “And that means that advocates of gun control have to do a little more listening than they do sometimes.”

The skeet-shooting comment caught many off guard because it is not something the president has talked about. While other presidents have used the skeet shooting range at Camp David, database searches of Mr. Obama’s speeches and interviews turned up no prior mention of participating. No friend or guest has come forward in recent days to publicly describe shooting with the president.

“I would refer you simply to his comments,"Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters who asked how often the president shoots. “I don’t know how often. He does go to Camp David with some regularity, but I’m not sure how often he’s done that.”

Asked why no one had seen a picture or heard about it before, Mr. Carney said, “Because when he goes to Camp David, he goes to spend time with his family and friends and relax, not to produce photographs.”

That did not satisfy the skeptics. The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column cast doubt on the claim, while Fox News quoted an unnamed person saying Mr. Obama had participated once during a Marine competition at Camp David but not “all the time.” Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, went on CNN to question the assertion.

“I tell you what I do think,” Ms. Blackburn said. “I think he should invite me to Camp David, and I’ll go skeet shooting with him and I bet I’ll beat him.”

Gun rights supporters said the president was evidently trying to reach out to gun owners to assuage their concerns about his legislative proposals.

“He clearly doesn’t get it,” said Chris Cox, the chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association. “But in his effort to pursue a political agenda, he apparently is willing to convince gun owners that he’s one of us, that he’s a Second Amendment supporter.” Mr. Cox said no one was fooled. “Skeet shooting, whether you’ve done it or not, doesn’t make you a defender of the Second Amendment.”

While White House officials privately dismissed skeptics by comparing them to “truthers” who doubted Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, even some liberals found the skeet-shooting comment hard to believe.

Jon Stewart, the “Daily Show” host, made fun of Mr. Obama’s statement as well as those who doubted it. He essentially agreed with Mr. Cox that it was pointless for the president to try to reach out to gun rights supporters who do not believe him.

“The point is, Mr. President, what are you doing? Why try?” Mr. Stewart asked. “As far as most of your opponents go, no measure of detente, true or disingenuous, will ingratiate you to your opponents. It’s a fool’s errand.”

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Sony Teases ‘The Future’ of PlayStation in Short #PlayStation2013 Video

Sony‘s CEO, Kazuo Hirai, said he would let Microsoft “make the first move” when it came to releasing a next-generation game console, according to IGN’s Daniel Krupa. But now the official PlayStation blog is teasing viewers with a video entitled “See the Future,” with the #PlayStation2013 Twitter hashtag.

Whatever the future is, it’s apparently got something to do with Feb. 20, the date mentioned in the video. But when it gets here, what will it be like?

PlayStation2013 probably isn’t the actual name

Previous rumors have suggested the next PlayStation console won’t be called the PlayStation 4, because the number 4 is associated with death in Japanese culture. If Sony’s willing to break with its numbering scheme because of tradition, it may be unlikely to tag the actual new PlayStation console itself with the number 13, which is regarded as unlucky in the United States.

Much more powerful hardware

This one’s a given. Unlike in the PC and tablet gaming world, where hardware is regularly updated and improvements tend to be incremental, video game consoles tend to wait years to update before leaping ahead — if you don’t count the two smaller redesigns the PS3 has had over the years while keeping the same performance, anyway, or the introduction of the PlayStation Move controller.

The PlayStation 3‘s big performance draw was its ability to play games on an HDTV, with an upgrade to graphics realism to match. A report by Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett last year suggests that the new PlayStation console may be able to play 3D games (on a 3D HDTV, that is) in 1080p resolution, or regular games in 4096×2160. The latter would basically require a TV as sharp as Apple’s Retina Display.

Far fewer games?

The same report, however, suggests that — as Sony eventually did with the PlayStation 3 — the “PlayStation 4″ may not be able to play any games from the previous generation of consoles.

The PlayStation 3 debuted with the ability to run PlayStation 2 games, but this required it to have both of the PS2′s processor chips inside it. This console-within-a-console design helped push the PS3′s launch price up to $ 599, and Sony soon dropped one of the chips before abandoning them completely. Today’s PlayStation 3 consoles can only play the handful of PS2 games that have been re-released digitally (and are bought separately) on the PlayStation Network.

No place like Home

If the new PlayStation console can’t run PS3 games, that may mean the end of PlayStation Home, Sony’s virtual world and social gaming platform in the style of Second Life (but with Facebook-style games). IGN’s Andrew Goldfarb notes that Sony recently filed a trademark on “BigFest,” however, which it describes as an “online player networking” service in similar terms as PlayStation Home.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Washington wins 3 trophies at NAACP Image Awards

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Kerry Washington was a triple threat at the NAACP Image Awards.

The star of ABC's "Scandal" picked up a trio of trophies at the 44th annual ceremony: outstanding actress in a drama series for "Scandal," supporting actress in a motion picture for "Django Unchained" and the President's Award, which is given in recognition of special achievement and exceptional public service.

"This award does not belong to me," said Washington, who plays a slave separated from her husband in "Django Unchained," as she picked up her first trophy of the evening for her role in the film directed by Quentin Tarantino. "It belongs to our ancestors. We shot this film on a slave plantation, and they were with us along every step of the way."

Washington, who plays crisis management consultant Olivia Pope on "Scandal," serves on President Barack Obama's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Don Cheedle was awarded the outstanding actor in a comedy series trophy for his role as a slick management consultant in Showtime's "House of Lies."

"This doesn't belong just to me, but I am taking it home tonight," joked Cheedle.

A few winners weren't present at the Shrine Auditorium to pick up their trophies, including Denzel Washington for outstanding actor in a motion picture for "Flight," Viola Davis for outstanding actress in a motion picture for "Won't Back Down" and Omar Epps for supporting actor in a drama series for Fox's "House."

"Red Tails," the drama about the Tuskegee Airmen, was honored as outstanding motion picture.

"Look! I beat Quentin Tarantino," beamed "Red Tails" executive producer George Lucas as he accepted the award.

LL Cool J, who was honored as outstanding actor in a drama series for CBS' "NCIS: Los Angeles," dedicated his trophy to fellow nominee Michael Clarke Duncan, "The Green Mile" and "The Finder" actor who died last year.

"I wish his family well," said LL. "Let's give it up for him."

Gladys Knight sang during the in memoriam segment, but the beginning of her performance wasn't heard on the live NBC broadcast because of a technical glitch.

Sidney Poitier presented Harry Belafonte with the Spingarn Award, which honors outstanding achievement by an African American. His honor was followed by a serenade from Wyclef Jean and Common.

Other winners at the ceremony hosted by talk show host Steve Harvey included Loretta Devine as supporting actress in a drama series for "Grey's Anatomy," Cassi Davis as outstanding actress in a comedy series and Lance Gross as outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series for TBS' "Tyler Perry's House of Payne."

The Image Awards are presented annually by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the group's members select the winners.

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Online:

http://www.naacpimageawards.net

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

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Media Decoder Blog: In Wake of Restructuring, NBC News President Quits

8:30 p.m. | Updated

The longest-serving president of any of the three network news divisions, Steve Capus of NBC News, stepped down from his position on Friday, six months after Comcast restructured its news units in a way that diminished his authority.

Pat Fili-Krushel, chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, said in a brief telephone interview on Friday that she would “cast a wide net” while searching for a successor to Mr. Capus. In the interim, the leaders of the news division will report directly to her.

Ms. Fili-Krushel became Mr. Capus’s boss last July when Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, consolidated all of NBC’s news units — NBC News, the cable news channels MSNBC and CNBC, and its stake in the Weather Channel — under a new umbrella, the NBCUniversal News Group. Mr. Burke asked Ms. Fili-Krushel, one of his most trusted lieutenants, to run it, while keeping Mr. Capus and the heads of the other units in place.

Ms. Fili-Krushel worked early in her career at HBO and Lifetime. A veteran of the Walt Disney Company, where she helped program ABC, and  Time Warner, where she was an administrator, she is by her own admission not a journalist.  But now she is, by default, the highest-ranking woman in the American television news industry — not just at the moment, but in the history of the medium. The heads of the news divisions at ABC and CBS are men, as are the heads of the Fox News Channel, CNN, and Bloomberg.

Ms. Fili-Krushel has kept a low public profile, but has been a forceful presence behind the scenes, recently moving from her office on the 51st floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, near Mr. Burke’s, to a new one on the third floor, where NBC News is based. On Friday, she said she had spent her first six months “learning, listening and getting to know the players here.” She called the News Group an “unbelievably strong organization.”

Though Mr. Capus’s exit saddened many at NBC News on Friday, it came as little surprise. He had previously reported directly to Mr. Burke, but after the restructuring he reported to Ms. Fili-Krushel, and he made no secret of his unhappiness with the change. His contract had a clause that allowed him to leave in the event that he no longer reported to Mr. Burke, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement at NBC, and he decided to exercise that right after months of contemplation. The people insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized by the network to speak publicly.

Mr. Capus told Ms. Fili-Krushel of his intent to leave last Friday. It is likely that he would have left sooner, but a series of major news stories kept him busy late last year — including Hurricane Sandy, the presidential election and the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. Mr. Capus also oversaw the network’s response to the kidnapping of Richard Engel and an NBC News crew in Syria last month.

“It has been a privilege to have spent two decades here, but it is now time to head in a new direction,” he wrote in an e-mail to staff members on Friday afternoon.

Mr. Capus guided NBC through a revolutionary time in news-gathering and distribution. He maintained the news division’s profitability, managed tensions between NBC News and its increasingly liberal cable channel MSNBC, and fostered new business ventures like an in-house production company and an annual education summit. Last year, he unwound an old deal with Microsoft to give the news division complete control over its Web site, now named NBCNews.com, for the first time.

Ms. Fili-Krushel wrote in a separate e-mail to staff members that “NBC News is America’s leading source of television news and Steve has been a big part of that success.”

NBC News is the producer of the most popular evening newscast in the country. But its single biggest source of profits, the morning show “Today,” fell to second place last year, behind ABC’s “Good Morning America,” for the first time since the 1990s. The decline caused widespread anxiety inside the news division and speculation that Mr. Capus would be relieved of his duties.

Inside NBC, both Mr. Capus and the executive producer of “Today,” Jim Bell, received much of the blame for the botched removal of Ann Curry from “Today” last June, which worsened the show’s already tenuous position in the ratings. Ms. Fili-Krushel was put in charge just a few weeks later.

Mr. Bell was replaced at “Today” last fall and is now the executive producer for NBC Olympics. Savannah Guthrie is now the co-host of “Today,” and Ms. Curry is a national and international correspondent for the network, but is rarely seen. Mr. Capus’s exit was seen by some at the network as the last shoe that had to drop.

In his e-mail to staff members, Mr. Capus called it an “extremely difficult decision to walk away,” noting that he started at NBC as a producer 20 years ago this month. He did not make any mention of what he would do next. “Journalism is, indeed, a noble calling, and I have much I hope to accomplish in the next phase of my career,” he wrote.

“Today” continues to lose to ABC’s “Good Morning America” among total viewers, but lately it has won a few weeks in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet.

“NBC Nightly News” has more successfully fended off ABC’s “World News,” despite an aggressive push by ABC. Mr. Capus said, “NBC News has grown in all key metrics — from ratings and reputation to profitability.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/02/2013, on page B2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: In Wake of Restructuring, NBC News President Quits.

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Suicide Bomber Attacks Mosque in Pakistan

Abdul Basit/Associated Press

People gathered at the scene of the explosion in a market in northwestern Pakistan on Friday.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — An explosion in a market in northwestern Pakistan on Friday killed at least 21 people and wounded 33 in what police described as a suicide bombing.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Hangu, about 70 miles west of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Abu Omar, a Taliban commander in the neighboring tribal region of North Waziristan, said in a telephone interview that the attack was in revenge for the killing on Thursday of a Sunni cleric.

The cleric, Mufti Abdul Majeed Deenpuri, 60, was shot in the southern port city of Karachi, setting off fears of reprisals against Shiites.

Mr. Deenpuri was a senior teacher at Jamia Binoria, one of the largest seminaries in Pakistan. A gunman opened fire on a vehicle carrying the cleric and a colleague at a busy intersection and then fled.

While the security situation is precarious across Pakistan, Rehman Malik, the interior minister, had warned of the potential for an attack in Karachi, a sprawling, violence-prone port city. Cellphone service was suspended there from noon to 3 p.m. during Friday Prayer.

Sectarian violence has also occurred in Hangu in the past, often forcing the authorities to impose a curfew. The town borders the Orakzai tribal region, where the army and paramilitary forces are fighting Taliban militants.

Friday’s explosion occurred just after Friday Prayer as worshipers filed out of a Sunni mosque and a nearby Shiite place of worship, police officials said. “People were coming out of the mosque when the explosion occurred,” said one officer in Hangu, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Another police official in Hangu said a suicide bomber had detonated his explosives. While Shiites were the likely target, the dead included people from both Islamic sects, he said. “There are Sunnis and Shias killed.”

Separately, a Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said 30 mortar shells fired from Afghanistan on Friday morning killed six residents of Angoor Adda, a border village in South Waziristan. However, there was no official comment from the Pakistani military. 

In recent years, Pakistan and Afghanistan have traded barbs over allegations of cross border rocket and artillery fire. The 1,510 mile long craggy border between the two countries has long posed a problem for both sides, each accusing the other of not manning the border effectively. Both sides maintain that insurgents easily cross over the porous border, but plans to fence the border have been shot down as impractical.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released its World Report 2013, which sharply criticized the Pakistani government and its military and intelligence agencies for failing to reduce human rights abuses.

“Pakistan’s human rights crisis worsened markedly in 2012 with religious minorities bearing the brunt of killings and repression,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, the director in Pakistan for Human Rights Watch. “While the military continued to perpetrate abuses with impunity in Baluchistan and beyond, Sunni extremists killed hundreds of Shia Muslims and the Taliban attacked schools, students, and teachers.”

Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting from Islamabad.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. It is Peshawar, not Hangu.

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Appeals judges: Anti-paparazzi law appears legal

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An appeals panel says California's anti-paparazzi statute appears to be constitutional based on a brief filed by prosecutors.

A preliminary statement by three judges in Los Angeles requires a judge who dismissed charges aimed at a paparazzo who authorities say was driving recklessly to review his order. The judge may stick to his ruling, which would trigger a full appeal, or he could schedule further arguments on the case against freelance photographer Paul Raef.

Raef was the first person charged under the new law after a high-speed chase involving Justin Bieber last year.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Rubinson dismissed two charges in November, ruling the law is too broad and is unconstitutional.

Raef's attorney David S. Kestenbaum says he is asking Rubinson to stand by his ruling and allow a full appeal.

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The New Old Age Blog: Caregiving, Laced With Humor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DealBook: Ex-Peregrine Chief Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison

8:33 p.m. | Updated

A prominent futures-industry executive was sentenced to 50 years in prison on Thursday for embezzling from clients and misleading banks for two decades.

Russell Wasendorf Sr., the chief executive of the now-defunct brokerage firm the Peregrine Financial Group, stole more than $215 million, money that a judge said is likely never to be recovered.

Dressed in orange prison garb, his wrists and ankles shackled, Mr. Wasendorf sat expressionless as Judge Linda Reade of the United States District Court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, handed down the maximum sentence recommended by the government.

“The lengthy prison sentence imposed today is just punishment for a con man who built a business on smoke and mirrors,” said Sean Berry, acting United States attorney in Cedar Rapids.

Mr. Wasendorf’s penalty is the latest in a string of stiff sentences handed down by judges for financial crimes. Bernard L. Madoff received 150 years for perpetrating the largest Ponzi scheme ever uncovered. Allen Stanford is serving a 110-year term after being convicted of swindling investors of nearly a $7 billion. Thomas J. Petters got a 50-year sentence for defrauding investors of nearly $4 billion.

Given the extremely lengthy sentences and advanced age of some of the defendants, many of these terms are largely symbolic, intended to reflect the gravity of the crimes and the need for retribution.

The fraud carried out by Mr. Wasendorf, 64, took place more than 1,000 miles from Wall Street, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Federal regulators discovered the crime last summer after local police found Mr. Wasendorf unconscious in his car in Peregrine’s parking lot, a hose running from the exhaust pipe into the passenger compartment. He left a detailed suicide note explaining his crimes.

Mr. Wasendorf stole millions of dollars from his customers at Peregrine, which also did business as PFGBest, by using laser printers and software like Photoshop and Excel to make near-perfect replicas of account statements from US Bank. He duped regulators by supplying them with a false post-office box address for sending forms to the bank, which he would then intercept and send back on forged US Bank letterhead.

Mr. Wasendorf said that he acted alone, keeping his scheme from his approximately 240 employees by being the only Peregrine employee with access to customers’ accounts. No one else, including his son, Russell Wasendorf Jr., who worked at the firm, has been charged in the case.

“With careful concealment and blunt authority, I was able to hide my fraud from others at P.F.G.,” he wrote in his suicide note.

Mr. Wasendorf’s fraud shocked the financial world, coming just months after the implosion of MF Global, a commodities and futures brokerage firm where about $1 billion in client money disappeared. The scandal raised questions about oversight failures in the futures industry. Futures brokerage firms like Peregrine match buyers and sellers of contracts for commodities, charging a small commission for the service.

Peregrine’s clients — and Mr. Wasendorf’s 13,000 victims — including speculators betting on the price of orange juice and farmers who use such contracts to protect themselves from large price fluctuations.

The case also stunned Cedar Falls, a town of 40,000 perhaps best known as the home of the University of Northern Iowa, the college where Mr. Wasendorf, an Iowa native, earned his degree. He started his business there in the late 1960s before moving it to Chicago, the epicenter of the futures industry. (Cedar Falls is about 60 miles north of Cedar Rapids, where Mr. Wasendorf was sentenced.)

In 2009, Mr. Wasendorf returned to Cedar Falls, spending $20 million to build a gleaming headquarters on the outskirts of town. A delegation of Iowa lawmakers, including Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, attended the office’s grand opening.

He became a local hero, creating jobs, sponsoring numerous charitable causes and opening two restaurants in town. His Italian eatery, myVerona, became a Cedar Falls hot spot and a coveted place to land a job. In 2010, Mr. Wasendorf paid for the entire staff to travel to Italy — visiting Milan, Parma and Modena — to hone their culinary skills and sample the authentic cuisine.

“How can I expect them to prepare and cook north Italian food if they haven’t experienced it?” Mr. Wasendorf told The Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier.

His estate, a compound carved out of Iowa farmland, featured a 1,000-bottle wine cellar and a U-shaped indoor swimming pool with a retractable glass-paneled roof. He owned a private jet — nicknamed Air Wasendorf — that he flew out of nearby Waterloo, traveling frequently to Chicago for meetings.

Judge Reade rejected any leniency for Mr. Wasendorf because of his contributions to the community. “It is easy to be generous with other people’s money,” she said.

Iowa newspapers nicknamed Mr. Wasendorf “the Madoff of the Midwest.” Though Mr. Wasendorf’s criminal proceeds were a tiny fraction of Mr. Madoff’s, the two men suggested similar reasons for why they turned to a life of crime.

Mr. Madoff has said in interviews that he began his fraud after his investment performance soured and he couldn’t admit defeat. Similarly, Mr. Wasendorf, in his confession, said he began to steal from his clients when his business slumped and he began to run out of money.

“I guess my ego was too big to admit failure,” wrote Mr. Wasendorf. “So I cheated.”

On Thursday, Mr. Wasendorf, gaunt and diminished, expressed deep remorse.

“I feel I fully deserve whatever sentence I’m given,” he said. “The punishment I’ve caused myself is worse than anything you can impose.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/01/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Ex-Peregrine Chief Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison.

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