Palestinians Dispute Israeli Finding on Prisoner’s Death

JERUSALEM — The Israeli Health Ministry said Sunday night that preliminary autopsy findings could not determine the cause of death of a 30-year-old Palestinian prisoner, which Israeli officials had at first attributed to a heart attack. But Palestinian officials said the lack of heart damage coupled with bruising on the man’s chest, back and neck suggested that he was tortured during interrogation.

“The signs that appeared during the autopsy show clearly that he was subjected to severe torture that led immediately to his death,” Issa Qaraka, the Palestinian minister of prisoner affairs, said at an evening news conference in Ramallah, after being briefed by a Palestinian pathologist who attended the autopsy of the prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, who died Saturday.

“I hold Israel fully responsible for killing Arafat Jaradat,” added Mr. Qaraka, who earlier on Sunday called for an international investigation into the death. “The Israeli story was forged and full of lies.”

The 4,500 Palestinians in Israeli jails refused meals on Sunday to protest Mr. Jaradat’s death, and hundreds of Palestinians demonstrated in several cities and villages in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

After days of such demonstrations, which have included violent clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers and settlers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s special envoy, Isaac Molho, sent a message to the Palestinian leadership on Sunday that Israeli officials described as an “unequivocal demand to restore quiet.” Israel also transferred to the Palestinian Authority $100 million in tax revenue it had been withholding.

But a senior Israeli official said the government would not accede to Palestinian requests to release four prisoners who have been on a long-term hunger strike or 123 people who have been detained since before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. “Some of these people are accused of very heinous crimes,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter with the news media. “They’re saying that every Palestinian hunger striker should have a get-out-of-jail-free card. You can’t have a system like that. It’s not sustainable.”

After weeks of intensifying protests in solidarity with the hunger strikers, attention turned Sunday to Mr. Jaradat, who relatives said worked at a gas station, was the father of a 4-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy, and came from a family in which all the men had spent time in Israeli jails. He was arrested last Monday over throwing stones at Israeli cars near a West Bank settlement during November’s conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian officials said that Mr. Jaradat admitted the stone-throwing but denied heaving fire bombs. He also confessed to tossing rocks in a 2006 protest, they said. His detention was extended 12 days at a hearing on Thursday, during which his lawyer said that Mr. Jaradat complained of severe pain in his back and neck that he attributed to his interrogation.

“When he was under interrogation, the interrogator told him, ‘Say goodbye to your kids,’ ” Mr. Jaradat’s uncle, Musa, said at a news conference on Sunday morning.

Mr. Qaraka, the prisoner affairs minister, said Sunday night that the autopsy showed “severe” bruising in multiple areas: the right side of the chest, the upper right part of the back, upper left shoulder and along the spine near the bottom of the neck. The pathologist reported no blood clotting or sign of heart damage, he added, but did see two broken ribs, an injury inside the lower lip and blood around the nostrils.

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, issued a statement expressing “deep sorrow and shock” over Mr. Jaradat’s death, saying there was a “need to promptly disclose the true reasons that led to his martyrdom.”

Few issues resonate more deeply in Palestinian society than the plight of prisoners: about 800,000 have been detained in Israeli jails since 1967, according to Palestinian leaders; Mr. Jaradat was the 203rd to die in that time.

Several leaders and commentators warned Sunday that the death, coming amid a severe financial crisis in the West Bank, could lead to extended protests, with most predicting a largely nonviolent movement of civil disobedience like the one Palestinians undertook from 1987 to 1993 rather than the campaign of suicide bombings that began in 2000.

“I know these guys and I see the signs,” Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a left-leaning member of Israel’s Parliament and a former defense minister, said on Israel Radio.

Alex Fishman, a columnist, wrote on Sunday in the newspaper Yediot Aharanot, “The highway leading to an intifada is wide open,” adding that Mr. Jaradat’s death “is liable to become the opening shot.”

Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian analyst, pointed out that in addition to mounting outrage over the treatment of prisoners and violence by Israeli settlers, the Palestinian Authority’s failure to issue paychecks on time had prompted teachers to call a strike starting Tuesday; health care workers are already in the middle of a two-week walkout.

Nabil A. Shaath, the Palestinian commissioner for international relations, said in an interview that the West Bank leadership was “doing our best to keep calm” and that “violent confrontation absolutely is not our plan.”

“I don’t know how much people can be contained,” Mr. Shaath said of the Jaradat case. “I don’t think anybody is planning an intifada. The question is how much accidents, incidents like this might lead to an anger that can explode.”

Jodi Rudoren reported from Jerusalem, and Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank. Fares Akram contributed reporting from the Gaza Strip.

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Bits: Online Gambling Heats Up

The two big casino states, Nevada and New Jersey, are racing into online gambling as a way of protecting their turf. They will in essence become laboratories for what is and is not feasible in Internet wagering.

Nevada legislators, who previously authorized online poker, hurriedly passed a new bill this week that allows the state to enter into deals with other states to essentially pool their gambling populations. “This is the day we usher Nevada into the next frontier of gaming,” Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s governor, said on Thursday as he signed the bill.

In the year since online poker became a theoretical possibility in Nevada, no company has yet offered it. One problem: It’s too small a market, especially in a state where it is not exactly hard to gamble the old-fashioned way — by plunking your body down in a casino or, for that matter, just about anywhere else.

“We don’t have a universe of players,” Pete Ernaut, a Nevada political consultant, told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “So for us, what we get to offer to a state like California or Texas is that we have the most mature regulatory infrastructure. We have the most mature financial, auditing and collection capabilities, much greater than some of those states, and they have the players.”

Meanwhile, New Jersey is also barreling ahead. Chris Christie, the governor, is likely to sign a revised bill permitting a variety of online gambling as soon as next week. All online ventures will be under the tight control of the Atlantic City casinos. Delaware, the smallest of the three states that are moving ahead with online gambling, also has ambitious plans.

In a harbinger of the new age, gamblers at the Borgata casino in Atlantic City will, as USA Today put it, “be able to lose their shirts without wearing one.” Gamblers staying in one of the casino’s 2,000 rooms can now place their bets right there without venturing onto the casino floor. From there it is only a small step to just staying home and gambling from the hammock.

Internet companies that make online games are watching all this with considerable interest. “Is 2013 going to be a game-changer?” asked Paul Thelen of Big Fish Studios, which began offering a gambling app in Britain last fall. “No. But in 2014, it starts getting interesting.”

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The Texas Tribune: Advocates Seek Mental Health Changes, Including Power to Detain

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

The Sherman grave of Andre Thomas’s victims.

SHERMAN — A worried call from his daughter’s boyfriend sent Paul Boren rushing to her apartment on the morning of March 27, 2004. He drove the eight blocks to her apartment, peering into his neighbors’ yards, searching for Andre Thomas, Laura Boren’s estranged husband.

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

For more articles on mental health and criminal justice in Texas, as well as a timeline of the Andre Thomas case: texastribune.org

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

Laura Boren

He drove past the brightly colored slides, swings and bouncy plastic animals in Fairview Park across the street from the apartment where Ms. Boren, 20, and her two children lived. He pulled into a parking spot below and immediately saw that her door was broken. As his heart raced, Mr. Boren, a white-haired giant of a man, bounded up the stairwell, calling out for his daughter.

He found her on the white carpet, smeared with blood, a gaping hole in her chest. Beside her left leg, a one-dollar bill was folded lengthwise, the radiating eye of the pyramid facing up. Mr. Boren knew she was gone.

In a panic, he rushed past the stuffed animals, dolls and plastic toys strewn along the hallway to the bedroom shared by his two grandchildren. The body of 13-month-old Leyha Hughes lay on the floor next to a blood-spattered doll nearly as big as she was.

Andre Boren, 4, lay on his back in his white children’s bed just above Leyha. He looked as if he could have been sleeping — a moment away from revealing the toothy grin that typically spread from one of his round cheeks to the other — except for the massive chest wound that matched the ones his father, Andre Thomas (the boy was also known as Andre Jr.), had inflicted on his mother and his half-sister as he tried to remove their hearts.

“You just can’t believe that it’s real,” said Sherry Boren, Laura Boren’s mother. “You’re hoping that it’s not, that it’s a dream or something, that you’re going to wake up at any minute.”

Mr. Thomas, who confessed to the murders of his wife, their son and her daughter by another man, was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to death at age 21. While awaiting trial in 2004, he gouged out one of his eyes, and in 2008 on death row, he removed the other and ate it.

At least twice in the three weeks before the crime, Mr. Thomas had sought mental health treatment, babbling illogically and threatening to commit suicide. On two occasions, staff members at the medical facilities were so worried that his psychosis made him a threat to himself or others that they sought emergency detention warrants for him.

Despite talk of suicide and bizarre biblical delusions, he was not detained for treatment. Mr. Thomas later told the police that he was convinced that Ms. Boren was the wicked Jezebel from the Bible, that his own son was the Antichrist and that Leyha was involved in an evil conspiracy with them.

He was on a mission from God, he said, to free their hearts of demons.

Hospitals do not have legal authority to detain people who voluntarily enter their facilities in search of mental health care but then decide to leave. It is one of many holes in the state’s nearly 30-year-old mental health code that advocates, police officers and judges say lawmakers need to fix. In a report last year, Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit advocacy organization, called on lawmakers to replace the existing code with one that reflects contemporary mental health needs.

“It was last fully revised in 1985, and clearly the mental health system has changed drastically since then,” said Susan Stone, a lawyer and psychiatrist who led the two-year Texas Appleseed project to study and recommend reforms to the code. Lawmakers have said that although the code may need to be revamped, it will not happen in this year’s legislative session. Such an undertaking requires legislative studies that have not been conducted. But advocates are urging legislators to make a few critical changes that they say could prevent tragedies, including giving hospitals the right to detain someone who is having a mental health crisis.

From the time Mr. Thomas was 10, he had told friends he heard demons in his head instructing him to do bad things. The cacophony drove him to attempt suicide repeatedly as an adolescent, according to court records. He drank and abused drugs to try to quiet the noise.

bgrissom@texastribune.org

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The Texas Tribune: Advocates Seek Mental Health Changes, Including Power to Detain

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

The Sherman grave of Andre Thomas’s victims.

SHERMAN — A worried call from his daughter’s boyfriend sent Paul Boren rushing to her apartment on the morning of March 27, 2004. He drove the eight blocks to her apartment, peering into his neighbors’ yards, searching for Andre Thomas, Laura Boren’s estranged husband.

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

For more articles on mental health and criminal justice in Texas, as well as a timeline of the Andre Thomas case: texastribune.org

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

Laura Boren

He drove past the brightly colored slides, swings and bouncy plastic animals in Fairview Park across the street from the apartment where Ms. Boren, 20, and her two children lived. He pulled into a parking spot below and immediately saw that her door was broken. As his heart raced, Mr. Boren, a white-haired giant of a man, bounded up the stairwell, calling out for his daughter.

He found her on the white carpet, smeared with blood, a gaping hole in her chest. Beside her left leg, a one-dollar bill was folded lengthwise, the radiating eye of the pyramid facing up. Mr. Boren knew she was gone.

In a panic, he rushed past the stuffed animals, dolls and plastic toys strewn along the hallway to the bedroom shared by his two grandchildren. The body of 13-month-old Leyha Hughes lay on the floor next to a blood-spattered doll nearly as big as she was.

Andre Boren, 4, lay on his back in his white children’s bed just above Leyha. He looked as if he could have been sleeping — a moment away from revealing the toothy grin that typically spread from one of his round cheeks to the other — except for the massive chest wound that matched the ones his father, Andre Thomas (the boy was also known as Andre Jr.), had inflicted on his mother and his half-sister as he tried to remove their hearts.

“You just can’t believe that it’s real,” said Sherry Boren, Laura Boren’s mother. “You’re hoping that it’s not, that it’s a dream or something, that you’re going to wake up at any minute.”

Mr. Thomas, who confessed to the murders of his wife, their son and her daughter by another man, was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to death at age 21. While awaiting trial in 2004, he gouged out one of his eyes, and in 2008 on death row, he removed the other and ate it.

At least twice in the three weeks before the crime, Mr. Thomas had sought mental health treatment, babbling illogically and threatening to commit suicide. On two occasions, staff members at the medical facilities were so worried that his psychosis made him a threat to himself or others that they sought emergency detention warrants for him.

Despite talk of suicide and bizarre biblical delusions, he was not detained for treatment. Mr. Thomas later told the police that he was convinced that Ms. Boren was the wicked Jezebel from the Bible, that his own son was the Antichrist and that Leyha was involved in an evil conspiracy with them.

He was on a mission from God, he said, to free their hearts of demons.

Hospitals do not have legal authority to detain people who voluntarily enter their facilities in search of mental health care but then decide to leave. It is one of many holes in the state’s nearly 30-year-old mental health code that advocates, police officers and judges say lawmakers need to fix. In a report last year, Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit advocacy organization, called on lawmakers to replace the existing code with one that reflects contemporary mental health needs.

“It was last fully revised in 1985, and clearly the mental health system has changed drastically since then,” said Susan Stone, a lawyer and psychiatrist who led the two-year Texas Appleseed project to study and recommend reforms to the code. Lawmakers have said that although the code may need to be revamped, it will not happen in this year’s legislative session. Such an undertaking requires legislative studies that have not been conducted. But advocates are urging legislators to make a few critical changes that they say could prevent tragedies, including giving hospitals the right to detain someone who is having a mental health crisis.

From the time Mr. Thomas was 10, he had told friends he heard demons in his head instructing him to do bad things. The cacophony drove him to attempt suicide repeatedly as an adolescent, according to court records. He drank and abused drugs to try to quiet the noise.

bgrissom@texastribune.org

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Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States

Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent.

With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.

While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals.

“Without the assistance of the banks in processing and sending electronic funds, these lenders simply couldn’t operate,” said Josh Zinner, co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, which works with community groups in New York.

The banking industry says it is simply serving customers who have authorized the lenders to withdraw money from their accounts. “The industry is not in a position to monitor customer accounts to see where their payments are going,” said Virginia O’Neill, senior counsel with the American Bankers Association.

But state and federal officials are taking aim at the banks’ role at a time when authorities are increasing their efforts to clamp down on payday lending and its practice of providing quick money to borrowers who need cash.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are examining banks’ roles in the online loans, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. Benjamin M. Lawsky, who heads New York State’s Department of Financial Services, is investigating how banks enable the online lenders to skirt New York law and make loans to residents of the state, where interest rates are capped at 25 percent.

For the banks, it can be a lucrative partnership. At first blush, processing automatic withdrawals hardly seems like a source of profit. But many customers are already on shaky financial footing. The withdrawals often set off a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts. Roughly 27 percent of payday loan borrowers say that the loans caused them to overdraw their accounts, according to a report released this month by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That fee income is coveted, given that financial regulations limiting fees on debit and credit cards have cost banks billions of dollars.

Some state and federal authorities say the banks’ role in enabling the lenders has frustrated government efforts to shield people from predatory loans — an issue that gained urgency after reckless mortgage lending helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis.

Lawmakers, led by Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, introduced a bill in July aimed at reining in the lenders, in part, by forcing them to abide by the laws of the state where the borrower lives, rather than where the lender is. The legislation, pending in Congress, would also allow borrowers to cancel automatic withdrawals more easily. “Technology has taken a lot of these scams online, and it’s time to crack down,” Mr. Merkley said in a statement when the bill was introduced.

While the loans are simple to obtain — some online lenders promise approval in minutes with no credit check — they are tough to get rid of. Customers who want to repay their loan in full typically must contact the online lender at least three days before the next withdrawal. Otherwise, the lender automatically renews the loans at least monthly and withdraws only the interest owed. Under federal law, customers are allowed to stop authorized withdrawals from their account. Still, some borrowers say their banks do not heed requests to stop the loans.

Ivy Brodsky, 37, thought she had figured out a way to stop six payday lenders from taking money from her account when she visited her Chase branch in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn in March to close it. But Chase kept the account open and between April and May, the six Internet lenders tried to withdraw money from Ms. Brodsky’s account 55 times, according to bank records reviewed by The New York Times. Chase charged her $1,523 in fees — a combination of 44 insufficient fund fees, extended overdraft fees and service fees.

For Subrina Baptiste, 33, an educational assistant in Brooklyn, the overdraft fees levied by Chase cannibalized her child support income. She said she applied for a $400 loan from Loanshoponline.com and a $700 loan from Advancemetoday.com in 2011. The loans, with annual interest rates of 730 percent and 584 percent respectively, skirt New York law.

Ms. Baptiste said she asked Chase to revoke the automatic withdrawals in October 2011, but was told that she had to ask the lenders instead. In one month, her bank records show, the lenders tried to take money from her account at least six times. Chase charged her $812 in fees and deducted over $600 from her child-support payments to cover them.

“I don’t understand why my own bank just wouldn’t listen to me,” Ms. Baptiste said, adding that Chase ultimately closed her account last January, three months after she asked.

A spokeswoman for Bank of America said the bank always honored requests to stop automatic withdrawals. Wells Fargo declined to comment. Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for Chase, said: “We are working with the customers to resolve these cases.” Online lenders say they work to abide by state laws.

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Papal Conclave Accompanied by Reports of Scandals and Intrigue

Osservatore Romano/Reuters

Pope Benedict XVI, right, spoke to cardinals at the Vatican on Saturday.

VATICAN CITY — As cardinals from around the world begin arriving in Rome for a conclave to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, new shadows have fallen over the delicate transition, which the Vatican fears might influence the vote and with it the direction of the Roman Catholic Church.

In recent days, often speculative reports in the Italian news media — some even alleging gay sex scandals in the Vatican, others focusing on particular cardinals stung by the child sex abuse crisis — have dominated headlines, suggesting fierce internal struggles as prelates scramble to consolidate power and attack enemies in the dying days of a troubled papacy.

The reports, which the Vatican has vehemently denied, touch on some of the most vexing issues of Benedict’s reign, including the child sex abuse crisis and international criticisms of the Vatican Bank’s opaque record-keeping. The recent explosion of bad press — which some Vatican experts say is fed by carefully orchestrated leaks meant to weaken some papal contenders — also speak to Benedict’s own difficulties governing, which analysts say he is trying to address, albeit belatedly, with several high-profile personnel changes.

The drumbeat of scandal has reached such a fever pitch that on Saturday, the Vatican Secretariat of State issued a rare pointed rebuke, calling it “deplorable” that ahead of the conclave there was “a widespread distribution of often unverified, unverifiable or completely false news stories, that cause serious damage to persons and institutions.”

The Vatican compared the news reports to past attempts by foreign states to exert pressure on the papal election, saying the latest efforts to skew the choice of the next pope by trying to shape public opinion were “based on judgments that do not typically capture the spiritual aspect of the moment that the Church is living.”

Benedict had hoped to address at least one scandal with the Feb. 15 appointment of a new head of the Vatican Bank. It is less clear why he reassigned a powerful Vatican diplomatic official to a posting outside Rome, though experts say it diminishes the official’s role in helping steer Vatican policy.

On Feb. 11, Benedict made history by announcing that he would step down by month’s end. He said he was worn down by age and was resigning “in full liberty and for the good of the Church.” The volley of news reports since appeared to underscore the backbiting in the Vatican that Benedict was unable to control, and provided a hint of why he might have decided that someone younger and stronger should lead the church.

At the conclusion of the Vatican’s Lenten spiritual retreat, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the director of the Pontifical Council for Culture and a papal contender, spoke darkly of the “divisions, dissent, careerism, jealousies” that he said plagued the Vatican hierarchy.

The recent spate of news reports were linked to an earlier scandal in which the pope’s butler stole confidential documents that was considered one of the gravest security breaches in the modern history of the church.

Last week, largely unsourced articles in the center-left daily La Repubblica and the center-right weekly Panorama reported that three cardinals whom Benedict had asked last summer to investigate the leaking of the documents, known as the “VatiLeaks” scandal, had found evidence of Vatican officials who had been put in compromising positions.

The newspapers reported that, after interviewing dozens of people inside and outside the Vatican, the cardinals produced a hefty dossier. “The report is explicit. Some high prelates are subject to ‘external influence’ — we would call it blackmail — by nonchurch men to whom they are bound by ‘worldly’ ties,” La Repubblica wrote.

Vatican experts speculated that prelates eager to undermine opponents during the conclave were behind the leaks to the news media over the last week.

“The conclave is a mechanism that serves to create a dynasty in a monarchy without children, so it’s a complicated operation,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Center in Bologna and the author of a book on conclaves.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 23, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of a cardinal. His name is Roger M. Mahony, not Roger M. Mahoney.

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The Boss: Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor is an Average Traveler

I WAS born in Hollywood, Calif. — truly a shocking notion if you know how unstruck I am by stars.

Ken Richardson

Stephen Kaufer is the president and C.E.O. of TripAdvisor in Needham, Mass.

AGE 50

FAVORITE QUOTATION 'The harder you practice, the luckier you get' — Gary Player, golfer

PREFERRED MODE OF TRANSPORTATION Tandem bicycle with his wife

My father was a trial lawyer. He taught me the power of articulate persuasion. We’d sit at the dining room table and take sides of a debate. He would argue me into a corner, then at some point say, “Switch,” and I’d have to defend the opposite position. He would then deftly argue himself out of the corner he had just painted me into.

My mother had multiple sclerosis. By the time I was 13 she was in a wheelchair, and she was bedridden when I went to college. She passed away in 1986. A huge responsibility fell to me at an early age as the oldest of three kids. I balanced the household checkbook at 13. I had a special driver’s license at the age of 15 to take my siblings around.

I picked up fencing in high school partly because it attracted the craziest bunch of people. I helped start my high school team, recruiting students with the pitch, “Wouldn’t it be fun if you learned how to stab your friends?” I went to the Junior Olympics when I was 16 or so and lost every one of my bouts. But I got better. When I went to Harvard I made the varsity team, was later elected captain, and in 1983 won a slot on the collegiate All-American team. In fencing, you have to think three moves ahead. It turned out to be good training for corporate life.

I went to Harvard thinking I would major in physics. I liked the pulleys-and-levers part but not the extensive math. Computer science was a bit of a backwater of academia then, but I liked the game of solving programming problems. I’d be pumped at 3 in the morning when I found bugs in programs.

In 1985, after I had graduated from college, I was co-founder of a company called CenterLine Software, which made programming and testing tools that we sold to software developers. In 1998 the other owners and I sold half the assets, and the other half became CenterLine Development Systems, which was headed by my wife, Caroline.

That same year, Caroline and I were planning a vacation in Mexico, and I started looking online for unbiased opinions about a particular hotel. What I got was a thousand sites showcasing exactly the same gorgeous picture and the very same descriptive paragraphs.

It took a lot of time, and some advanced Boolean logic in my search queries, but eventually I found a write-up from a couple who’d stayed at the hotel I had in mind, with pictures that showed rusted chairs and a beach not up to our expectations. I had dodged a bullet.

Later Caroline suggested I build a Web site to help other travelers in similar situations. “Just keep it easy to use and honest,” she said. TripAdvisor and its other Web sites now attract more than 75 million monthly visitors.

Unfortunately, Caroline did not live to see how large we would grow. She passed away from pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer in 2005 at the age of 42. I was left to raise our four children — ages 5, 7, 12 and 13 at the time. It was difficult, to say the least, but today we are a happy and healthy family. In 2012, I married a wonderful friend and an amazing mom with four kids of her own. With eight kids, a dog and a turtle, we take “full house” literally. Through the Stephen and Caroline Kaufer Fund for Neuroendocrine Research, we’ve supported medical research at several leading scientific institutions, as well as through our efforts with a great cancer charity called the Caring for Carcinoid Foundation.

Most people assume I am an avid traveler who would like nothing more than to roam the world for three months. Not true. The company was born of an average traveler’s desire to plan a great trip for a precious week or two of vacation time.

As told to Perry Garfinkel.

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Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq.

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.

“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported “high operational stress.” Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

“The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance,” she said.

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Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq.

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.

“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported “high operational stress.” Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

“The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance,” she said.

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Fundamentally: Investors Rediscover Risk-Taking Abroad

RISK-TAKING may be staging a comeback overseas.

While equities around the world soared last year, the stock market rebound abroad was decidedly different from the one that sent the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index up 16 percent in 2012.

In the United States, the most economically sensitive stocks, like shares of banks and other financial businesses, posted the biggest gains as investors grew confident that an economic recovery was at hand. Overseas, by contrast, it was the defensive-oriented shares like health care and consumer staples stocks that performed the best for most of the year.

What’s more, investors favored stocks in the developed world over riskier but faster-growing emerging markets equities.

This is not all that surprising. “The economic situation abroad in the last 12 to 18 months has either been worse or has slowed more dramatically than in the U.S., creating an even bigger ‘risk off’ mind-set in those markets,” said James W. Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management.

Yet Mr. Paulsen believes that investors’ appetite for risk-taking overseas is likely to improve. In fact, that process may have already begun.

Among the early signs are that economically cyclical sectors, like financial stocks in the MSCI EAFE index of foreign equities, have been outperforming defensive areas like health care and consumer staples since December.

Part of this can be attributed to the growing clarity about the state of the global economy, money managers say. It is not so much that the economy is booming, but that some of the greatest potential dangers seem to have receded.

Most prominently, concerns about a euro zone breakup have abated since Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, declared that the bank would do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. Ever since that announcement, in late July, European equities have been in rally mode.

“In the international markets, you saw the removal of major tail risks last year, particularly in Europe,” said Jason A. White, a portfolio specialist at T. Rowe Price.

Meanwhile, fears over China’s slowdown seemed to subside at the end of last year on signs that the world’s second largest economy was finally beginning to re-accelerate. In November, government data showed that industrial output and retail sales in China grew much faster than expected, bolstering the bullish case for Chinese and emerging-market stocks. Since then, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index has soared nearly 20 percent.

The improving global economy, though, isn’t the only reason risk-taking may be re-emerging.

Money managers note that fear over Europe’s debt crisis has been driving investors into defensive-oriented stocks overseas for several years. This is particularly true for shares of consumer companies that manufacture staples like food and household products that continue to be in demand regardless of the health of the economy.

“In an environment where returns for the equity markets were quite poor, you saw very decent returns in those staples,” said Harry Hartford, president of Causeway Capital Management. As a result, though, “consumer staples outside the U.S. looks pretty fully priced,” he said.

Take Diageo. Shares of the British spirits maker, which has sales in about 180 countries, have climbed more than 26 percent a year for the last three years. That means Diageo shares now trade at a price/earnings ratio of more than 18, based on forecast profits. By comparison, the average P/E for MSCI EAFE stocks is less than 14.

Unilever, the packaged food and household goods company, is another example. In 2008, amid the global financial crisis, the stock was trading at around 11 times earnings. Today, Unilever’s P/E ratio stands at 17 times earnings.

“A lot of the defensive industries had big runs, so valuations got extended,” said W. George Greig, head of international investing for the asset manager William Blair & Company. As a consequence, he said, “some investors are starting to say that the defensive stocks aren’t as defensive as they thought.”

NOT all money managers are convinced that the worst of the economic storm is behind us. “We know that after a financial crisis, it takes a long time to recover,” said Simon Hallett, chief investment officer for the asset manager Harding Loevner. “We think a conservative approach is still appropriate — there are still an awful lot of things that can go wrong.”

Mr. Greig said investors were not seeking economically sensitive stocks out of a newfound sense of euphoria. “This is not a venturesome ‘risk on’ mind-set,” he said. Rather, investors are reluctantly seeking out cyclically oriented stocks because their valuations are so low that they now look compelling, and there may be better values in areas that had been considered riskier.

Paul J. Lim is a senior editor at Money magazine. E-mail: fund@nytimes.com.

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