Big Storm and Its Disruptions Descend on the Northeast

Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

Pedestrians made their way to work in New York on Friday morning.

As heavy, wet snow started to blanket much of the Northeast on Friday morning, people rushed to stores to stock up on supplies, drivers lined up at gas stations to fill their tanks and local authorities from New York City to Maine started working to battle what forecasters said could be the biggest blizzard for some cities in a century.

Throughout the night and into the morning airlines announced the suspension of thousands of flights out of New York and Boston airports, as workers in towns and cities across the region readied their plows, checked their stocks of salt and braced for what will most likely be a cold and busy weekend. Amtrak announced that beginning early Friday afternoon it would suspend northbound service out of Pennsylvania Station in New York and southbound service out of Boston.

Schools across New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island announced that they would close, or dismiss students early on Friday.

On Long Island, the power company, which has received heavy criticism for its response to Hurricane Sandy, promised customers that it was prepared.

The city of Boston, where snow started to fall around 9:30 a.m. and forecasts called for more than two feet of snow to fall by Saturday, announced that it would close all schools on Friday and that mass transit in the city would be suspended starting at 3:30 p.m., joining other localities in trying to get ahead of the storm and keep people off the roads.

While officials warned people to stay home from work if possible on Friday, many kept to their usual morning commute, anticipating that they could get home before the worst of the storm was expected to hit. The latest forecasts said that blizzardlike conditions would start in New York City after dark. To help commuters beat the snow, transit officials announced increased bus and train service in the afternoon.

At 11 a.m. on Friday, forecasters expressed increasing confidence in the strength of the storm.

In New York City, where there is a mix of rain, snow and sleet, a rush of cold air is expected to filter back into the region by 4 p.m., at which point the rain will transition back to snow, said Tim Morrin, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service based in Long Island.

“From then things go downhill pretty quickly,” he said. The winds will pick up, and snow will start coming down heavily.

In New England, the storm will intensify at about the same time, but because the area has not had rain, the total snowfalls will be greater.

“The worst conditions will be after dark and overnight,” Mr. Morrin said. “We don’t want to have folks get complacent seeing the rain and the just wet streets.”

By Saturday, the total expected snowfall in New York City is expected to be between 10 and 14 inches. In Long Island, the snow totals will range from 14 to 18 inches, with the highest amounts at the east end.

In New London, Conn., there will most likely be more than 24 inches of snow and even more in Boston, which could break modern records by topping 28 inches.

The severe weather is the result of two weather systems colliding, producing a powerful force. One system is coming from the north, carried along by the arctic jet stream, which will drop down from Canada and intersect with another system propelled by the polar jet stream, which usually travels through the lower 48 states.

“The storm should reach its peak intensity early Saturday morning just east of Cape Cod,” the National Weather Service said in a statement. With hurricane-force winds, the Weather Service predicted "dangerous blizzard conditions" for many parts of Northeast. Officials also expect flooding along the Atlantic coast affecting up to 8 million people.

The storm could rival the blizzard of 1978 in New England, when more than 27 inches of snow fell in Boston and surrounding cities. That storm, which occurred on a weekday 35 years ago, resulted in dozens of deaths and crippled the region for days.

Officials expect to be better prepared this time.

In the predawn hours, 300 road crews in Massachusetts started spreading salt and brine.

Jess Bidgood and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

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Uggs? Ugh. NY Fashion Week battles the elements

NEW YORK (AP) — Mother Nature is clearly not a fashionista.

An impending blizzard forced Michael Kors to arrive at New York Fashion Week's Project Runway show on Friday in — gasp — Uggs.

"I came in looking like Pam Anderson," he joked backstage, where the offending boots had been traded for tasteful black leather.

Marc Jacobs postponed his Monday night show until Thursday, citing delivery problems, but for the most part Fashion Week went on with the show. IMG Fashion said organizers remained in contact with city officials including the Mayor's office about potential weather problems, but that they had planned for an extra layer of tenting for the venue and more heat at Lincoln Center along with crews to help with snow and ice.

Zac Posen said he would present his collection as usual on Sunday but he worried that out-of-town editors and retailers might not be able to make it. Other designers were considering plan B — perhaps an internet stream — in case crowds are snowed out.

Still, plenty of fashion fans wouldn't let a little snow get in the way. Baltimore college student Carmen Green arrived in a red cocktail dress and black high-heel booties.

"In this outfit, the blizzard did not deter me," she said. She did allow that she had only had to cross the street from her hotel and would change into combat boots for the train ride home.

The celebrity stylist Phillip Bloch even offered a blizzard pro tip.

"You either come in warm and comfortable clothes and boots or you come in neon — or sequins would be a good one — so they see you in the drift," he said.

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The New Old Age: The Executor's Assistant

I’m serving as executor for my father’s estate, a role few of us are prepared for until we’re playing it, so I was grateful when the mail brought “The American Bar Association Guide to Wills and Estates” — the fourth edition of a handbook the A.B.A. began publishing in 1995.

This is a legal universe, I’m learning, in which every step — even with a small, simple estate that owes no taxes and includes no real estate or trusts — turns out to be at least 30 percent more complicated than expected.

If my dad had been wealthy or owned a business, or if we faced a challenge to his will, I would have turned the whole matter over to an estate lawyer by now. But even then, it would be helpful to know what the lawyer was talking about. The A.B.A. guide would help.

Written with surprising clarity (hey, they’re lawyers), it maps out all kinds of questions and decisions to consider and explains the many ways to leave property to one’s heirs. Updated from the third edition in 2009, the guide not only talks taxes and trusts, but also offers counsel for same-sex couples and unconventional families.

If you want to permit your second husband to live in the family home until he dies, but then guarantee that the house reverts to the children of your first marriage, the guide tells you how a “life estate” works. It explains what is taxable and what isn’t, and discusses how to choose executors and trustees. It lists lots of resources and concludes with an estate-planning checklist.

In general, the A.B.A. intends its guide for the person trying to put his or her affairs in order, more than for family members trying to figure out how to proceed after someone has died. But many of us will play both these parts at some point (and if you are already an executor, or have been, please tell us how that has gone, and mention your state). We’ll need this information.

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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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DealBook: Helping Start-Ups With Local Support and National Networks

When Will Fuentes planned an extended business trip to Seattle last year, he tapped into the local chapter of a national networking group there. Within hours, Mr. Fuentes, who founded the Arlington, Va., software company Lemur Retail, had secured a work space, introductions and even restaurant recommendations via the group, the Startup America Partnership.“Before I flew out there, I already had five or six meetings set up with potential clients and other key contacts, as well as one potential acquirer,” Mr. Fuentes said.

A couple of years ago, entrepreneurs would have needed several trips to make similar connections outside their own cities. Even in this era of social networks and venture conferences, start-ups are still surprisingly disconnected on a national level.

“Each region has its ties, but in many cases, entrepreneurs are operating in silos,” said Carolynn Duncan, the chief executive of Portland Ten, a mentoring program for early-stage companies, mainly in Oregon. “An entrepreneur in Oregon doesn’t have an easy way to network with entrepreneurs in Washington D.C.”

Startup America, a nonprofit organization with an all-star cast of deep-pocketed backers, is trying to bridge the gap. The organization, which was started in January 2011 as the brainchild of AOL’s co-founder, Steve Case, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, wanted to bring a private-sector support to start-ups — without financial strings attached.

“Supporting start-ups throughout the country is the only way to make sure the American economy is firing on all cylinders,” said Mr. Case, who is the chairman of the partnership.

Start-ups are a crucial driver for job creation in the United States. From March 1994 to March 2010, businesses less than one year old created 3.9 million jobs a year on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though that number has declined during the recent economic weakness.

The Small Business Administration and United States Chamber of Commerce have long been a resource for start-ups, but these government agencies have a broad mandate. There is a “growing recognition,” said Mr. Case, that high-growth start-ups — those with the potential to be national or international companies — have different needs and requirements than traditional small businesses.

Startup America’s initial focus was to provide support to start-ups through deals on goods and services, like 40 percent off FedEx shipping and free flights on American Airlines. But the group quickly realized that start-ups needed more practical help, like sharing best practices and networking.

Soon after the partnership’s start, entrepreneurs around the country starting contacting Startup America, asking how they could create their own networks and reach out to counterparts in other states. “Most of these regions were already coming up with their own initiatives or thinking about them,” said the organization’s chief executive, Scott Case, a founder and former chief technology officer of Priceline.com (and no relation to Steve Case). “We’re helping to stitch together all these parts.”

Taking cues from the entrepreneurs, Startup America has turned its attention to building such a network. Nearly 12,000 members are now affiliated with local Startup America initiatives in 30 states. The partnership expects to add another 10 states this year.

Each Startup America region is spearheaded by local “champions” who come together several times a year at national conferences, communicate via Google groups and have access to an online “idea center” where they can brainstorm about, say, bringing in outside capital or hosting a start-up conference. These envoys are all “founder types” at different stages of their careers, Scott Case said. “Some have exited companies and are looking to continue to feed that creative drive. Others understand that if they can strengthen their community, they can strengthen their own company.”

Brooks Bell, founder of an eponymous 22-employee digital consulting business based in Raleigh, N.C., became involved with the partnership in 2011 after realizing that many potential clients considered her area a backwater. “I realized that was impacting my company’s brand, too,” she said.

Mrs. Bell pointed out that other national groups, like Entrepreneurs’ Organizations, offer resources for high-growth companies. Yet, their emphasis is typically on supporting individuals rather than elevating the region and networking nationally. “They also tend to focus on early-stage companies,” she said. Until Startup America, she added, “there weren’t a lot of opportunities for early-stage companies to interact with funded companies.”

Though Startup America regions work off the same blueprint, each takes a slightly different approach. In Maryland, the staff and champions volunteer virtually. Startup Tennessee partnered with the Entrepreneur Center in Nashville, which runs a nonprofit incubator program. Startup Colorado works out of Silicon Flatirons, a center for law, technology and entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Law School, and finds partners to finance specific projects.

Although the regional chapters operate independently, they benefit from the credibility of a national organization. “It’s helping elevate our start-ups nationally and get them in front of audiences we never would have,” said Andy Stoll, an entrepreneur in the Iowa City, Iowa, area, where rebuilding from the floods in 2008 has helped generate a boom in start-up activity.

“To have the opportunity to sit in a room with their board and have Steve Case ask me, ‘What are the three things that those of us at this table can do to really help support the Indiana community?’ is amazing and a humbling experience,” said Michael Coffey, a partner at DeveloperTown, an Indianapolis design and development firm that works with companies of all sizes.

In the end, it’s all about business.

Aaron Schwartz, a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Modify Watches, initially joined Startup America for the discounts. Now, he’s also tapping into the partnership to network, including finding corporate clients who order custom watches and vendors. “I now have a contact in Tennessee who has offered to look into manufacturing our watches there,” he said

Mr. Fuentes of Lemur Retail found two potential clients, both national chains, through his connections in Seattle last year; he’s currently in talks with those companies. He’s also helping his Northwest counterparts make inroads in the Washington area. He likens the experience to a fraternity or alumni organization of entrepreneurs.

“When people contact me from my high school or college, I pick up the phone,” he said. “This is no different.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/08/2013, on page B5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Helping Start-Ups With Local Support and National Networks.

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DealBook: E-Mails Show Flaws in JPMorgan's Mortgage Securities

When an outside analysis uncovered serious flaws with thousands of home loans, JPMorgan Chase executives found an easy fix.

Rather than disclosing the full extent of problems like fraudulent home appraisals and overextended borrowers, the bank adjusted the critical reviews, according to documents filed early Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. As a result, the mortgages, which JPMorgan bundled into complex securities, appeared healthier, making the deals more appealing to investors.

The trove of internal e-mails and employee interviews, filed as part of a lawsuit by one of the investors in the securities, offers a fresh glimpse into Wall Street’s mortgage machine, which churned out billions of dollars of securities that later imploded. The documents reveal that JPMorgan, as well as two firms the bank acquired during the credit crisis, Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, flouted quality controls and ignored problems, sometimes hiding them entirely, in a quest for profit.

The lawsuit, which was filed by Dexia, a Belgian-French bank, is being closely watched on Wall Street. After suffering significant losses, Dexia sued JPMorgan and its affiliates in 2012, claiming it had been duped into buying $1.6 billion of troubled mortgage-backed securities. The latest documents could provide a window into a $200 billion case that looms over the entire industry. In that lawsuit, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has accused 17 banks of selling dubious mortgage securities to the two housing giants. At least 20 of the securities are also highlighted in the Dexia case, according to an analysis of court records.

In court filings, JPMorgan has strongly denied wrongdoing and is contesting both cases in federal court. The bank declined to comment.

Dexia’s lawsuit is part of a broad assault on Wall Street for its role in the 2008 financial crisis, as prosecutors, regulators and private investors take aim at mortgage-related securities. New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, sued JPMorgan last year over investments created by Bear Stearns between 2005 and 2007.

Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, has criticized prosecutors for attacking JPMorgan because of what Bear Stearns did. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in October, Mr. Dimon said the bank did the federal government “a favor” by rescuing the flailing firm in 2008.

The legal onslaught has been costly. In November, JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, agreed to pay $296.9 million to settle claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bear Stearns had misled mortgage investors by hiding some delinquent loans. JPMorgan did not admit or deny wrongdoing.

“The true price tag for the ongoing costs of the litigation is terrifying,” said Christopher Whalen, a senior managing director at Tangent Capital Partners.

The Dexia lawsuit centers on complex securities created by JPMorgan, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the housing boom. As profits soared, the Wall Street firms scrambled to pump out more investments, even as questions emerged about their quality.

With a seemingly insatiable appetite, JPMorgan scooped up mortgages from lenders with troubled records, according to the court documents. In an internal “due diligence scorecard,” JPMorgan ranked large mortgage originators, assigning Washington Mutual and American Home Mortgage the lowest grade of “poor” for their documentation, the court filings show.

The loans were quickly sold to investors. Describing the investment assembly line, an executive at Bear Stearns told employees “we are a moving company not a storage company,” according to the court documents.

As they raced to produce mortgage-backed securities, Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns also scaled back their quality controls, the documents indicate.

In an initiative called Project Scarlett, Washington Mutual slashed its due diligence staff by 25 percent as part of an effort to bolster profit. Such steps “tore the heart out” of quality controls, according to a November 2007 e-mail from a Washington Mutual executive. Executives who pushed back endured “harassment” when they tried to “keep our discipline and controls in place,” the e-mail said.

Even when flaws were flagged, JPMorgan and the other firms sometimes overlooked the warnings.

JPMorgan routinely hired Clayton Holdings and other third-party firms to examine home loans before they were packed into investments. Combing through the mortgages, the firms searched for problems like borrowers who had vastly overstated their incomes or appraisals that inflated property values.

According to the court documents, an analysis for JPMorgan in September 2006 found that “nearly half of the sample pool” — or 214 loans — were “defective,” meaning they did not meet the underwriting standards. The borrowers’ incomes, the firms found, were dangerously low relative to the size of their mortgages. Another troubling report in 2006 discovered that thousands of borrowers had already fallen behind on their payments.

But JPMorgan at times dismissed the critical assessments or altered them, the documents show. Certain JPMorgan employees, including the bankers who assembled the mortgages and the due diligence managers, had the power to ignore or veto bad reviews.

In some instances, JPMorgan executives reduced the number of loans considered delinquent, the documents show. In others, the executives altered the assessments so that a smaller number of loans were considered “defective.”

In a 2007 e-mail, titled “Banking overrides,” a JPMorgan due diligence manager asks a banker: “How do you want to handle these loans?” At times, they whitewashed the findings, the documents indicate. In 2006, for example, a review of mortgages found that at least 1,154 loans were more than 30 days delinquent. The offering documents sent to investors showed only 25 loans as delinquent.

A person familiar with the bank’s portfolios said JPMorgan had reviewed the loans separately and determined that the number of delinquent loans was far less than the outside analysis had found.

At Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, employees also had the power to sanitize bad assessments. Employees at Bear Stearns were told that they were responsible for “purging all of the older reports” that showed flaws, “leaving only the final reports,” according to the court documents.

Such actions were designed to bolster profit. In a deposition, a Washington Mutual employee said revealing loan defects would undermine the lucrative business, and that the bank would suffer “a couple-point hit in price.”

Ratings agencies also did not necessarily get a complete picture of the investments, according to the court filings. An assessment of the loans in one security revealed that 24 percent of the sample was “materially defective,” the filings show. After exercising override power, a JPMorgan employee sent a report in May 2006 to a ratings agency that showed only 5.3 percent of the mortgages were defective.

Such investments eventually collapsed, spreading losses across the financial system.

Dexia, which has been bailed out twice since the financial crisis, lost $774 million on mortgage-backed securities, according to court records.

Mr. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, said that overall losses from flawed mortgage-backed securities from 2005 and 2007 were $22.5 billion.

In a statement shortly after he sued JPMorgan Chase, Mr. Schneiderman said the lawsuit was a template “for future actions against issuers of residential mortgage-backed securities that defrauded investors and cost millions of Americans their homes.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/07/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: E-Mails Imply JPMorgan Knew Some Mortgage Deals Were Bad.

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Morrissey rules as The Governor in 'Walking Dead'

NEW YORK (AP) — "Brother against brother," says The Governor fiercely. "Winner goes free. Fight to the death."

Is this any way to run a town?

AMC's zombie drama "The Walking Dead" ended the first half of this season with a wrenching faceoff: roughneck brothers Merle and Daryl were pitted in a bloody test of loyalty to The Governor as he rallied his flock — the residents of Woodbury, Ga. — to goad them on.

That was last December.

Things haven't settled down as the hit horror serial returns for another eight episodes Sunday at 9 p.m. EST. The death match continues. The Governor, played by David Morrissey, is increasingly oppressive, even deranged.

"With Woodbury, he has built a sanctuary, a place of safety where humanity can start again," says Morrissey. "But the negative side of power is like a wobbly tooth for him. He just can't stop sticking his tongue in there. There's something gloriously painful about it, and he likes that."

He seems to be losing his marbles as he sees threats both within and beyond the town walls. This has placed on his enemies list not only the zombies — with their ploddingly persistent appetite for human flesh — but also mortals, who are far less predictable. These include the ragtag refugees led by Sheriff Rick Grimes hiding out in an abandoned prison nearby.

"You can adapt to the zombie threat, and that's part of what Woodbury is about," says Morrissey. "But the new problem that has emerged in Season 3 is human beings. What you have now is two communities of humans in conflict. That's much more complicated."

In other words: What's scarier than the undead? The living!

In the past, The Governor exhibited a softer side. His most touching moments showed his desperate attempts to stay connected with Penny, his undead little girl. Removing her from the cell in his apartment where he kept her chained, he lovingly combed her wiry zombie hair in one memorable scene, while she snarled and snapped ferociously.

Strange as it was, the scene made perfect sense to Morrissey.

"You have a sick child and you're trying to do normal things that just aren't normal anymore," he says. "There's great certainty and comfort in the past, and he was trying to re-create that."

But in December's finale, Penny was stabbed by Michonne, an intruder out to kill The Governor.

"He loses the one thing he lives for," says Morrissey, adding with a bit of understatement, "Now he's full of anger."

The 48-year-old actor gravitates toward complex, off-kilter roles. He is celebrated for the 2003 British miniseries "State of Play," where he played an upright Member of Parliament who may have been involved in a string of killings. The same year, "The Deal" was a British TV film that starred Morrissey as MP (and future prime minister) Gordon Brown.

A few years earlier, he played a jazz musician with underworld connections in the British series "Finney." In the 2000 film "Some Voices," he was the long-suffering brother of schizophrenic Daniel Craig.

Morrissey approached the role of The Governor with his typical concern that the character display many facets and steadily develop.

"I wanted to be sure he didn't just become a cartoon buddy," Morrissey says.

Meanwhile, he began mastering the obligatory Southern accent.

Describing his happy, working-class childhood in Liverpool, England — "it was a tough environment, but tough in the right way" — Morrissey speaks in the singsongy lilt reminiscent of the Liverpudlian lads who formed the world's greatest rock band (and might pronounce "band" something like "bah-yind.")

He says he worked with the same accent coach assigned to series star Andrew Lincoln (who plays Rick Grimes), a fellow Brit. And he trained hard. "My children got very bored with me reading them bedtime stories in a Georgia accent," he says with a laugh.

The Woodbury scenes were shot in the town of Senoia, Ga., 40 miles south of Atlanta. Months of filming took Morrissey away from his family — sons 17 and 8 years old, and a daughter, 15, as well as his wife, novelist Esther Freud (who happens to be the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud).

"The people who live there are great," says Morrissey, "because we do disrupt their lives." Shooting for the season wrapped in November, "and I had a lovely time there."

But will The Governor be back to rule over the ultimate gated community? Not surprisingly, Morrissey is cagey when replying to that question: "Contractually, I'm there for five years. But that's not to say that I don't die at the end of this season, Or whenever."

Whether or not he's back on "The Walking Dead," Morrissey means to keep taking risks with his roles.

"I want to go into a job feeling a bit of frisson, thinking things MAY not work," he explains before offering "Blackpool" as a prime example.

Retitled "Viva Blackpool" for its U.S. telecast in 2005, this was a quirky British miniseries in which he costarred with David Tennant, whose credits include The Doctor in "Dr. Who." Morrissey played the thuggish owner of an arcade in the seaside town of Blackpool, England, who becomes swallowed up in a murder probe.

What truly set apart the series was the penchant of its characters for bursting into a song-and-dance number at the drop of a hat. Think Tony Soprano channeling Elvis. Clearly, THIS was risky for all concerned!

"I remember halfway through the shoot they showed us a bit of the dailies," says Morrissey, laughing at the memory. "Then me and David Tennant walked away and got in the lift and the doors closed. And we went, 'We're NEVER gonna work again!'"

As it happened, "Blackpool" charmed viewers and won awards. And its stars did work again.

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Online:

http://www.amctv.com

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Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier

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Well: Think Like a Doctor: A Confused and Terrified Patient

The Challenge: Can you solve the mystery of a middle-aged man recovering from a serious illness who suddenly becomes frightened and confused?

Every month the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to sift through a difficult case and solve a diagnostic riddle. Below you will find a summary of a case involving a 55-year-old man well on his way to recovering from a series of illnesses when he suddenly becomes confused and paranoid. I will provide you with the main medical notes, labs and imaging results available to the doctor who made the diagnosis.

The first reader to figure out this case will get a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” along with the satisfaction of knowing you solved a case of Sherlockian complexity. Good luck.

The Presenting Problem:

A 55-year-old man who is recovering from a devastating injury in a rehabilitation facility suddenly becomes confused, frightened and paranoid.

The Patient’s Story:

The patient, who was recovering from a terrible injury and was too weak to walk, had been found on the floor of his room at the extended care facility, raving that there were people out to get him. He was taken to the emergency room at the Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut, where he was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection and admitted to the hospital for treatment. Doctors thought his delirium was caused by the infection, but after 24 hours, despite receiving the appropriate antibiotics, the patient remained disoriented and frightened.

A Sister’s Visit:

The man’s sister came to visit him on his second day in the hospital. As she walked into the room she was immediately struck by her brother’s distress.

“Get me out of here!” the man shouted from his hospital bed. “They are coming to get me. I gotta get out of here!”

His brown eyes darted from side to side as if searching for his would-be attackers. His arms and legs shook with fear. He looked terrified.

For the past few months, the man had been in and out of the hospital, but he had been getting better — at least he had been improving the last time his sister saw him, the week before. She hurried into the bustling hallway and found a nurse. “What the hell is going on with my brother?” she demanded.

A Long Series of Illnesses:

Three months earlier, the patient had been admitted to that same hospital with delirium tremens. After years of alcohol abuse, he had suddenly stopped drinking a couple of days before, and his body was wracked by the sudden loss of the chemical he had become addicted to. He’d spent an entire week in the hospital but finally recovered. He was sent home, but he didn’t stay there for long.

The following week, when his sister hadn’t heard from him for a couple of days, she forced her way into his home. There she found him, unconscious, in the basement, at the bottom of his staircase. He had fallen, and it looked as if he may have been there for two, possibly three, days. He was close to death. Indeed, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, his heart had stopped. Rapid action by the E.M.T.’s brought his heart back to life, and he made it to the hospital.

There the extent of the damage became clear. The man’s kidneys had stopped working, and his body chemistry was completely out of whack. He had a severe concussion. And he’d had a heart attack.

He remained in the intensive care unit for nearly three weeks, and in the hospital another two weeks. Even after these weeks of care and recovery, the toll of his injury was terrible. His kidneys were not working, so he required dialysis three times a week. He had needed a machine to help him breathe for so long that he now had to get oxygen through a hole that had been cut into his throat. His arms and legs were so weak that he could not even lift them, and because he was unable even to swallow, he had to be fed through a tube that went directly into his stomach.

Finally, after five weeks in the hospital, he was well enough to be moved to a short-term rehabilitation hospital to complete the long road to recovery. But he was still far from healthy. The laughing, swaggering, Harley-riding man his sister had known until that terrible fall seemed a distant memory, though she saw that he was slowly getting better. He had even started to smile and make jokes. He was confident, he had told her, that with a lot of hard work he could get back to normal. So was she; she knew he was tough.

Back to the Hospital:

The patient had been at the rehab facility for just over two weeks when the staff noticed a sudden change in him. He had stopped smiling and was no longer making jokes. Instead, he talked about people that no one else could see. And he was worried that they wanted to harm him. When he remained confused for a second day, they sent him to the emergency room.

You can see the records from that E.R. visit here.

The man told the E.R. doctor that he knew he was having hallucinations. He thought they had started when he had begun taking a pill to help him sleep a couple of days earlier. It seemed a reasonable explanation, since the medication was known to cause delirium in some people. The hospital psychiatrist took him off that medication and sent him back to rehab that evening with a different sleeping pill.

Back to the Hospital, Again:

Two days later, the patient was back in the emergency room. He was still seeing things that weren’t there, but now he was quite confused as well. He knew his name but couldn’t remember what day or month it was, or even what year. And he had no idea where he was, or where he had just come from.

When the medical team saw the patient after he had been admitted, he was unable to provide any useful medical history. His medical records outlined his earlier hospitalizations, and records from the nursing home filled in additional details. The patient had a history of high blood pressure, depression and alcoholism. He was on a long list of medications. And he had been confused for the past several days.

On examination, he had no fever, although a couple of hours earlier his temperature had been 100.0 degrees. His heart was racing, and his blood pressure was sky high. His arms and legs were weak and swollen. His legs were shaking, and his reflexes were very brisk. Indeed, when his ankle was flexed suddenly, it continued to jerk back and forth on its own three or four times before stopping, a phenomenon known as clonus.

His labs were unchanged from the previous visit except for his urine, which showed signs of a serious infection. A CT scan of the brain was unremarkable, as was a chest X-ray. He was started on an intravenous antibiotic to treat the infection. The thinking was that perhaps the infection was causing the patient’s confusion.

You can see the notes from that second hospital visit here.

His sister had come to visit him the next day, when he was as confused as he had ever been. He was now trembling all over and looked scared to death, terrified. He was certain he was being pursued.

That is when she confronted the nurse, demanding to know what was going on with her brother. The nurse didn’t know. No one did. His urinary tract infection was being treated with antibiotics, but he continued to have a rapid heart rate and elevated blood pressure, along with terrifying hallucinations.

Solving the Mystery:

Can you figure out why this man was so confused and tremulous? I have provided you with all the data available to the doctor who made the diagnosis. The case is not easy — that is why it is here. I’ll post the answer on Friday.

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Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the comments section below.. The correct answer will appear Friday on Well. The winner will be contacted. Reader comments may also appear in a coming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

Correction: The patient’s eyes were brown, not blue.

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DealBook: K.K.R.'s Earnings Rise 22% on Investment Gains

Improving markets lifted the fortunes of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in the fourth quarter, as the investment firm reported a 22 percent rise in profit.

K.K.R. said on Thursday that it earned $347.7 million for the quarter, as all of its businesses showed strong gains. For the year, the firm reported earning $2.1 billion.

The fourth-quarter profit, reported as economic net income and which includes unrealized gains from investments, comes out to 48 cents a share. That is more than double the 20-cents-a-share average of analyst estimates compiled by Capital IQ.

Private equity firms have benefited from an improvement in the markets, which have bolstered the value of their own holdings. Last week, the Blackstone Group reported a 43 percent increase in fourth-quarter earnings.

K.K.R. said the value of its investments rose 4 percent for the quarter and 24 percent for the year.

The strongest performers among the firm’s investments included Alliance Boots, a British pharmacy chain; HCA, the giant hospital operator that went public last year; and the Nielsen Company, the media measurement company.

The improved market conditions also make selling portfolio companies a more attractive prospect, letting the firms harvest tangible returns from their investments. That was reflected in K.K.R.’s results, as it reported a nearly fourfold increase in distributable earnings for the quarter, to $546.3 million. That metric tracks how much a firm actually pays to its limited partners.

And K.K.R.’s assets under management rose 13.9 percent from the third quarter, to $75.5 billion.

The firm’s co-founders and co-chairmen, Henry R. Kravis and George R. Roberts, said in a statement that the growth of their private equity portfolio outpaced the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index by about 7 percent last year.

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Boy Scouts Postpone Decision on Gays

IRVING, Tex. — The Boy Scouts of America, which reconfirmed last summer its policy banning openly gay people from participation, then said last week it was reconsidering the ban, said on Wednesday that it would postpone until May their decision, as talk of gays in the ranks has roiled a storied organization that carries deep emotional connection and nostalgia for millions of Americans.

An end to the national ban on gays, which the United States Supreme Court said in 2000 was legal free speech by a private organization, would create a huge new moment of risk, experimentation and change by people on both sides of the issue said. The proposal floated last week would allow local scouting councils to decide membership rules for themselves.

The proposed change create multiple fracture lines. Some supporters of the ban said they feared a wave of departures by conservative church-sponsored troops, while supporters of the change said that scouting, with fewer boys every year donning the forest green uniform to work for merit badges, would be revitalized. Scout leaders who favored a complete about-face on gays — prohibiting discrimination everywhere in the organization — said the compromise position by the Executive Board would still leave scouting open to charges of homophobia by its critics, since discrimination on the basis of gender orientation would still be allowed locally.

Other Scout leaders and parents said a fracture between conservative scout councils and liberal ones could create walls — troops still banning gays disdaining gay-led troops, and vice versa — or could open the door to a new dialogue about difference and diversity.

The debate over the issue, according to scout leaders and parents, was shaped by two great historic forces that have defined scouting for decades: The huge role played by churches in sponsoring scout troops, and the tradition of local control that scout chapters, or councils, have had in shaping the flavor of scouting, which can differ greatly from urban downtowns to rural farm country, and from roughing-it-in-the-woods to environmental cleanup on the beach.

Maintaining local control became a crossroads of the debate. Although many of the church sponsors — almost 70 percent of local scout units are backed by a religious-based group — are culturally conservative, and might in some cases be opposed to open acceptance of gays in society, they also hugely cherish the right to make scouting a cultural adjunct of their respective belief systems. In Mormon-led scout troops, a Mormon prayer usually opens and closes a troop’s meeting, while in a Catholic group, it might be the Lord’s Prayer.

“In a free society, organizations fail or flourish according to the private choices of innumerable families,” the Boy Scouts said in a brief to the United States Supreme Court in 2000 — a case won by the Boy Scouts in a decision that held the ban on gays to be a protected statement of free speech. “A society in which each and every organization must be equally diverse is a society which has destroyed diversity,” the Boy Scouts argued.

Jay L. Lenrow, who grew up in scouting as a Jewish boy in New Jersey, and stayed involved as an adult scout volunteer in Baltimore, where he works as a lawyer, said he thought that religious diversity was a huge strength in scouting’s past. He said he hopes that acceptance of opposing views about gay leaders — troops and families and churches choosing different paths, to allow gay volunteers or not — will become an enriching element of the scouting experience going forward.

“As a youth in scouting, I sat in tents during the night after lights out with my Catholic friends and my Protestant friends, and kids who were Armenian Orthodox or Greek Orthodox, and we would tell each other what it meant to us to be a member of our religious grouping and what the principles were and what we were taught,” he said. “What that led to is, first of all, an understanding of what made my friends tick and, second of all, an appreciation for their feelings and their religious beliefs.”

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AP NewsBreak: Timothy Geithner planning book

NEW YORK (AP) — Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will write a book focusing on his response to the financial crisis, The Associated Press has learned.

Geithner, 51, will be represented by Washington-based attorney Robert Barnett, who confirmed Wednesday that Geithner would be meeting with publishers, but otherwise declined comment. Barnett has negotiated deals for President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and many others. Clinton said recently that she hoped to write a book.

Few treasury secretaries have attracted as much attention as Geithner, who has been praised for helping to prevent a second Great Depression, but criticized for being too sympathetic to Wall Street.

Geithner, who stepped down Jan. 25, was the last remaining original economic adviser to Obama. In an Associated Press interview given shortly before he left office, he defended such controversial actions as bailing out large banks, saying, "It is very hard to convince people or make credible to people the risks that we were living with at that time. That we could have had a much deeper collapse of not just the U.S. economy but the global economy."

Geithner has not started writing the book and no timetable has been set for a deal, but an official with knowledge of his plans says the goal is for publication in 2014. The official asked not to be identified, saying that no formal announcement would be made until an agreement is reached with a publisher.

Also Wednesday, the Council on Foreign Relations announced that Geithner will become a distinguished fellow with the organization. Geithner had previously been a senior fellow with the council in 2001 after he stepped down as Treasury undersecretary for international affairs in the administration of President Bill Clinton.

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