Article:

Exploiting Reader’s Digest’s iconic brand is the latest strategy for its private equity owners, who put the 91-year-old publisher into bankruptcy to shed $465 million in debt as consumers shift to electronic media.

 Like recently bankrupt Hostess Brands Inc., maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, and bankrupt Eastman Kodak Co., inventor of Kodachrome film and Instamatic cameras, Reader’s Digest has a potentially valuable name.

 Reader’s Digest, founded by DeWitt and Lila Wallace, went public in 1990. An investor group led by private-equity firm Ripplewood Holdings LLC bought it in 2007 for $1.6 billion and the assumption of about $800 million in debt. The company filed for bankruptcy for the first time in August 2009, citing a drop in advertising and the debt incurred in its acquisition.

 “The brand will carry on, and that name has value,” Van Conway, chief executive officer of turnaround management firm Conway MacKenzie Inc., said in a telephone interview. He said also that a company burdened by debt must “be nimble enough” to deal with the changing world of electronic readers.

 RDA Holding Co. listed assets and debt of more than $1 billion each in Chapter 11 documents filed Feb. 17 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York.

 Company officials “have embarked on an ambitious but necessary set of initiatives to transform the debtors’ core businesses around their iconic brands,” said Robert Guth, Reader’s Digest’s chief executive officer, in court papers.

 Buffeted by Downturns

 After the earlier bankruptcy, the company in 2010 “continued to be buffeted by economic downturns, domestically and internationally, and the accelerated shift from traditional print media and marketing to digital media and marketing, severely hampered the debtors’ ability to thrive,” Guth wrote.

 Under a restructuring agreement supported by Wells Fargo & Co., $465 million of remaining senior notes will all convert to equity. The company expects to have about $100 million in debt when it exits Chapter 11, about an 80 percent reduction.

 The Hostess bankruptcy was different in that its problems involved labor unions, while with Reader’s Digest, “there’s too much debt,” Conway said. “That doesn’t mean you couldn’t come out and be profitable” after bankruptcy, he said.

 Among the company’s largest unsecured creditors listed in court papers were Luxor Capital Group of New York, listed as administrative agent for a $10 million loan, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, with an $8 million claim.

 Ab Circle Pro

 In 2010, the FTC started an investigation into the marketing of the Ab Circle Pro fitness product, sold by a Reader’s Digest subsidiary. As part of a 2012 settlement, the company agreed to pay as much as $23.8 million, with Reader’s Digest agreeing to be responsible for amounts due.

 During restructuring, “We have had an ongoing process to simplify and rationalize our international business by licensing our local markets to third parties, to other publishers, to other investors and that has been a big part of our effort to streamline the company and bring in proceeds to bring down debt,” Guth said in an interview on Feb. 17.

 The company’s flagship print magazine is read by more than 25 million people, according to its website. The company publishes 75 magazines globally including 49 editions of Reader’s Digest, Taste of Home, the Family Handyman and Birds & Blooms. Reader’s Digest “sold more digital editions in December than we did newsstand editions,” Guth said.

 Meredith Sale

 The company had some success in the sale of Allrecipes.com “but frankly haven’t had enough success on that front,” Guth said. Last year, Reader’s Digest sold Allrecipes for $175 million and Every Day with Rachel Ray for an undisclosed amount to Meredith Corp.

 “The key message here is that we have a lot of confidence in the future of the business based upon the success of the ongoing operational transformation, but we haven’t had as much success with the balance sheet side of it and we need this process to help accelerate that,” Guth said.

 “The much more modest debt level puts us in a position to continue to really execute these plans and push these brands forward well into the future, so it’s a very good new lease on life,” he said.

 The company said it reached a pre-petition accord with its secured lender and more than 70 percent of its secured note holders. The bankruptcy was filed to implement the pre-arranged restructuring.

 Reader’s Digest plans to borrow as much as $45 million in new financing from a group of secured note holders to help fund operations as it restructures, according to court papers. The financing is part of a $105 million facility and is open to note holders who agree to support the restructuring, according to a company statement. The company said its business won’t be interrupted and obligations to customers will be fulfilled.

 North America

 “The Chapter 11 process, which will facilitate a significant debt reduction, will enable us to continue to redefine our business by focusing our resources on our strong North American publishing brands, which have shown a new vitality as a result of our transformation efforts, particularly in the digital arena,” Guth said in the statement.

 Hostess, previously known as Interstate Bakeries Corp., left an earlier bankruptcy in 2009 under the control of Ripplewood and lenders. The company, based in Irving, Texas, entered bankruptcy again in January 2012 after changes in American diets curbed sales as ingredient costs and labor expenses climbed.

 Kodak, based in Rochester, New York, filed for bankruptcy in January 2012, and CEO Antonio Perez has been selling businesses to shrink the company and fund its shift into commercial printing and packaging.

 International Operations

 RDA’s international operations, including Canada, are not part of the filing.

 “We aren’t the typical iconic American brand that’s challenged by conversion to digital,” Guth said. “We just had a complicated company that had to be simplified so that those iconic brands and those great customer relationships could thrive with continued emphasis on new formats and new audiences but with the same brand and the same products.”

 The case is In RDA Holding Co. Inc., 13-22233, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York (White Plains). The previous bankruptcy case is In Re Reader’s Digest Association Inc., 09-23529, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York (White Plains).

 To contact the reporter on this story: Dawn McCarty in Wilmington at dmccarty@bloomberg.net

 To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Pickering at jpickering@bloomberg.net ||||| Reader's Digest Association and six affiliates filed for Chapter 11 protection late Sunday night, the publisher's second bankruptcy filing in 3½ years and another example of the pressures on media companies still relying on their print publications.

 Closely held Reader's Digest listed more than $1.1 billion in assets and about $1.2 billion in liabilities on its bankruptcy petition, filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, N.Y.

 ... |||||
What is a summary?

– Bogged down by some $465 million in debt, Reader's Digest publisher RDA Holdings has filed for bankruptcy—again. Last night's Chapter 11 filing was the publisher's second in 3 ½ years, the Wall Street Journal reports. The company says this second bankruptcy will only make it stronger, allowing it to focus on its North American business and cut its debt to $100 million. "It’s a very good new lease on life," CEO Bob Guth tells Bloomberg. Guth is the company's third CEO since its last bankruptcy, which, of course, was also supposed to give it a new lease on life; the bankruptcy judge at the time declared that the company would emerge "on a very healthy and viable basis." Instead, the pressures facing the print industry have weighed on the company—its most recent earnings showed revenue down 26% on the year.


– "Next to my wife of 32 years, there is no one on this planet that I trust more than [Alfonso] Costa," Ben Carson said at a 2008 sentencing hearing for the man he calls his best friend. "We discovered that we were so much alike and shared the same values and principles that govern our lives." Carson may have to elaborate on those shared values and his loyalty to Costa, a former dentist convicted of charging for never-performed procedures, the AP reports. Records examined by the AP show the men have been entwined for some time, including Costa's ongoing involvement with Carson's children's charity and his son's role in Carson's election campaign. Most notable, though, is the money Carson has made with commercial real-estate investments via Costa, earning Carson and his wife between $200,000 and $2 million a year, per candidacy financial records. The AP notes Costa's ongoing links to Carson—who's always sworn the case against Costa was bogus, notes Mother Jones—are in the spotlight because Carson came out in 2013 with harsh words for those convicted of health care fraud, saying such convicts should go to prison for at least a decade and have to give up "all of one's personal possessions"—what the AP notes he called the "Saudi Arabian solution" in his 2011 book America the Beautiful. Carson's campaign spokesman told the AP Wednesday that he couldn't give any details on specific questions, but he did confirm that Carson and Costa "are best friends and ... do hold business investments together." And where Carson spent his most recent vacation to Italy in September? At Costa's luxury villa on the Amalfi coast, per Mother Jones. Read the full AP report.

Expand this summary.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential contender Ben Carson has maintained a business relationship with a close friend convicted of defrauding insurance companies and testified on his behalf, even as the candidate has called for such crimes to be punished harshly.

 This Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015 photo shows the office building, owned by BenCan LLC, and INBS LLC, in Mount Lebanon, Pa. Republican presidential contender Ben Carson has maintained a business relationship... (Associated Press)

 In this photo taken Dec. 1, 2005, Dr. Ben Carson, center, flanked by Dr. Al Costa, right, and then Pittsburgh Steelers running back, Jerome Bettis pose at the The Pittsburgh Carson Scholars Fund 2nd Annual... (Associated Press)

 Pittsburgh dentist Alfonso A. Costa pleaded guilty to a felony count of health care fraud after an FBI probe into his oral surgery practice found he had charged for procedures he never performed, according to court records.

 Though the crime carries a potential sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison, Costa was able to avoid prison time after Carson helped petition a federal judge for leniency.

 That's different from the position Carson took in 2013 as he prepared to launch his presidential campaign, saying those convicted of health care fraud should go to prison for at least a decade and be forced to forfeit "all of one's personal possessions."

 At Costa's 2008 sentencing hearing, Carson described the dentist as "one my closest, if not my very closest friend."

 "We became friends about a decade ago because we discovered that we were so much alike and shared the same values and principles that govern our lives," Carson told the judge, adding that their families vacationed together and that they were involved in "joint projects."

 "Next to my wife of 32 years, there is no one on this planet that I trust more than Al Costa," Carson said.

 Costa has served on the board of Carson's charity, the Carson Scholars Fund, and continues to lead the charity's fundraising efforts in the Pittsburgh area to provide $1,000 college scholarships to children in need.

 Before his criminal conviction and the revocation of his license to practice dentistry, Costa built a multimillion-dollar fortune through commercial real estate. Investments Carson and his wife made through Costa earn the couple between $200,000 and $2 million a year, according to financial records that Carson was required to file when he declared his candidacy.

 Costa also continues to promote his involvement with Carson's charity as part of his real estate business, prominently featuring the logo of the Carson Scholars Fund on the company's website. His son has worked with Carson's presidential campaign and a political committee founded by the retired neurosurgeon.

 Doug Watts, the campaign's spokesman, said Wednesday he was unable to immediately respond to specific questions about land deals involving Carson and Costa. The AP contacted Watts on Tuesday and again Wednesday.

 "I will confirm they are best friends and that they do hold business investments together," Watts said.

 Costa did not respond to messages seeking comment.

 The breadth of the two men's business ties has not been previously reported, partly because details can be obscured in property and incorporation records. Costa's company and its affiliates own properties in at least five states and overseas.

 In 2007, a few months before Costa was charged, records show that a pair of corporations was established in Pennsylvania called BenCan LLC, and INBS LLC. Carson and his wife are listed as the sole members of the companies. Though the Carsons live outside Baltimore, the mailing address on the incorporation forms was Costa's home address in Pittsburgh.

 BenCan and INBS then paid more than $3 million to purchase an office building in suburban Pittsburgh. The mailing address for the corporations listed on the deed matches the office of Costa's real estate firm, Costa Land Co.

 That September, federal prosecutors charged Costa, accusing him of fraud committed over a nearly five-year period, according to court records. Investigators determined that Costa's dental practice charged more than 50 patients for procedures that had not been performed, resulting in a loss of more than $40,000 to insurance companies.

 After Costa pleaded guilty, 40 of his family members, friends and dental patients wrote letters to the judge as character witnesses. Carson was one of three people who also testified at Costa's 2008 sentencing hearing, stressing his friend's charitable works and vouching for his personal integrity. Also testifying on Costa's behalf was Jerome Bettis, a beloved former Pittsburgh Stealers running back who had helped bring home a Super Bowl trophy to the city two years earlier.

 The government urged the judge to make an example of Costa.

 "Reduction of a sentence based on good works by a wealthy person can create the appearance that a defendant's financial resources and prominent connections can skew the justice system in ways not available to persons of lesser means," a prosecutor told the judge.

 In the end, Costa got no prison time. He was sentenced to one year of house arrest and 100 hours of community service, and ordered to pay more than $294,000 in fines and restitution. Costa later got 12 months shaved off his three-year probation.

 Though Costa was assigned to serve his sentence in his 8,300-square-foot mansion in nearby Fox Chapel, his lawyers repeatedly returned to court to seek permission for him to travel. A few months after starting his sentence, Costa asked to travel to the White House as one of 10 invited guests at a June 2008 ceremony where President George W. Bush presented Carson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 The judge denied that request, though Costa was later allowed to take a month-long trip to the Italian coast while on probation to handle what his lawyer described as urgent business at a resort he owns.

 Carson's appeal for leniency toward Costa contradicts the draconian criminal penalties he called for in his 2013 political treatise, "America the Beautiful." In his book, Carson wrote that anyone found guilty of health care fraud should face what he called the "Saudi Arabian Solution."

 "Why don't people steal very often in Saudi Arabia?" Carson asked. "Obviously because the punishment is the amputation of one or more fingers. I would not advocate chopping off people's limbs, but there would be some very stiff penalties for this kind of fraud, such as loss of one's medical license for life, no less than 10 years in prison, and loss of all of one's personal possessions."

 Despite the tough-on-crime message, Carson and his wife kept their investment with Costa in the years since his conviction. Tax bills for the Pittsburgh office building owned by the couple are mailed to Costa Land Co. A recent lease for a portion of the property was signed on the Carsons' behalf by the president of Costa's company.

 ___

 Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur in Washington contributed to this report.

 ___

 Follow Biesecker at http://Twitter.com/mbieseck ||||| Dr. Ben Carson made quite a splash at the National Prayer Breakfast the other day. Elsewhere I discuss the moral vision he provides in his book, America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great. But here I want to look at his recommendations for health reform.

 Most people who saw the speech were thrilled (or appalled) that he called for universal Health Savings Accounts beginning at birth. This is a fascinating idea that would merit some deeper analysis. Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention it in his book, even though he devotes a chapter to health care.

 Instead, his writing offers up some off-the-cuff emotional reactions to problems he has experienced. They are not well thought through and I expect he would write something very different if he had an opportunity to dig a little deeper. Let me start that rethinking here.

 He begins by writing about what drew him to medicine as a boy, and then to neurosurgery as a medical student. (If you aren’t familiar with Carson’s upbringing I urge you to buy the video version of his autobiography, Gifted Hands).

 He then describes one of the problems of providing free health care — poor attitudes on the part of patients. He says their sense of entitlement turns them hostile, and even abusive, toward providers:

 Contrary to popular belief, one of the reasons many physicians refuse to see indigent patients is not that they cannot pay, but because of the poor treatment they receive from such patients.

 He goes on to complain about the complexity of dealing with many insurers:

 Unfortunately, our healthcare insurance system has become so complex that virtually all medical offices and larger practices need billing specialists just to navigate its intricacies. All of this variation and complexity produces mountains of paperwork and requires armies of people to push it around.

 He thinks this is all done to prevent fraud. But he says a better remedy would be to impose very stiff penalties on those few providers who engage in fraud, “such as loss of one’s medical license for life, no less than ten years in prison, and loss of all of one’s personal possessions.”

 Yikes! The family members of such a doctor would not be very happy about this. But, more importantly, what is called “fraud” is often nothing more than a billing dispute. Indeed, just a few pages later, Dr. Carson relates the story of a physician friend who wanted to get into real estate development, so he sold his oral surgery practice to a colleague. Medicare decided the colleague was engaged in fraud, but he didn’t have many resources, so they went after Carson’s friend as well:

 They meticulously examined fifteen years of his practice records for evidence of fraud and were only able to uncover two questionable bills, amounting to a total of $180…He was told that they would take him to trial as a co-defendant with the buyer of the practice and would convince jurors that he had knowledge or turned a “blind eye” to the other doctor’s activity. And that eventually he would end up in federal prison if he did not plead guilty to a federal offense in connection with the $180 discrepancy…He accepted their deal and was sentenced to a one-year house arrest and a $300,000 fine.

 This is how Medicare often operates. It chooses not to do simple claims adjudication before paying bills, so every five years or so, it makes a big public relations splash of criminally prosecuting providers who never should have been paid in the first place.

 Also, to reduce paperwork Carson would have all payers pay all providers the exact same rate, regardless of their skills or underlying expenses. And he would require all insurers to “become non-profit service organizations with standardized, regulated profit margins.”

 He would also “remove from the insurance companies the responsibility for catastrophic healthcare coverage, making it a government responsibility.” He thinks this would make coverage more affordable, because “if we did not regulate utilities, few people would be able to afford their water or electricity.” He would confine insurers to “a 15 percent annual profit, 5 percent of which would go to the government’s national catastrophic healthcare fund.”

 Readers of this blog know that I am no great fan of health insurance companies and would like to see their role in health care greatly reduced. They are far too intrusive into the patient/physician relationship and have indeed piled on vast amounts of administrative costs to the entire system. The idea of universal HSAs Dr. Carson presented during his speech might help remedy all this but the ideas presented in the book are poorly informed:

 Insurers don’t currently make anywhere near 15 percent profits, more like 4 percent.

 Five percent of claims wouldn’t come anywhere close to funding catastrophic expenses.

 Not-for-profit insurance companies are no more efficient, accountable or affordable than for-profit ones.

 Utilities make a whole lot more money by selling services to the masses than they could by raising prices so that only a few could afford it.

 The reason utilities are regulated is because they are state-sanctioned monopolies not subject to the discipline of competition.

 Using criminal fraud to deter false claims is already being done in Medicare, with poor results.

 After his prayer breakfast talk, some people thought Dr. Carson should run for president. That is a terrible idea. We don’t need more politicians, but we could use a great moral leader like Billy Graham or Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. Carson’s gifts would be wasted by descending into the weeds of public policy and practical politics. |||||


News article:

* Fungus-infected tree saved from felling in 2007

 * Tree misses Anne Frank House, no injuries reported

 * Pieces of the tree offered for sale on Internet

 (Adds support group comments)

 By Aaron Gray-Block

 AMSTERDAM, Aug 23 (Reuters) - A giant chestnut tree that comforted Dutch diarist Anne Frank as she hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic during World War Two collapsed in heavy wind and rain on Monday.

 No one was hurt and the 150-year old tree fell across a fence, missing the Anne Frank House, which has been turned into a museum and was full of tourists.

 "It broke off like a match. It broke off completely about one metre off the ground," a spokesman for the house said.

 The tree was one of the few signs of nature visible to the Jewish teenager from the concealed attic she hid in for over two years during World War Two and it is mentioned in the diary which became a worldwide best-seller after her death in a concentration camp in 1945.

 "Our chestnut tree is in full blossom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year," she wrote in May 1944, not long before she was betrayed to the Nazis.

 The tree had developed fungus and was set to be felled in 2007 due to concerns for the safety of the 1 million people who visit Anne Frank’s house each year.

 But officials and conservationists later agreed to secure it with a steel frame to prolong its life and saplings from the tree were planted last year in an Amsterdam park and other cities around the world.

 A Dutch tree foundation, which fought to keep the tree alive with another support group, said horticulturalists had estimated the tree could still have lived for dozens of years.

 Arnold Heertje, a member of the Support Anne Frank Tree group said there were no plans to plant a sapling on the site or preserve the tree’s remains.

 "You have to bow your head to the facts. The tree has fallen and will be cut into pieces and disappear. The intention was not to keep this tree alive forever. It has lived for 150 years and now it’s over and we’re not going to extend it," he said.

 Parts of the tree, located on a residential property adjacent to the Anne Frank House, were later being offered for sale on Dutch auction website marktplaats.nl. The highest offer was 10 million euros ($12.72 million). (Additional reporting by Ben Berkowitz; editing by Noah Barkin and Nina Chestney)

  ||||| FILE - In this Nov. 14, 2007 file photo a view on the chestnut tree is seen which comforted Anne Frank while she hid from the Nazis during World War II, and the attic window in the secret annex at the... (Associated Press)

 The monumental chestnut tree that cheered Anne Frank while she was in hiding from the Nazis was toppled by wind and heavy rain on Monday.

 The once mighty tree, now diseased and rotted through the trunk, snapped about 3 feet (1 meter) above ground and crashed across several gardens. It damaged a brick wall and several sheds, but nearby buildings _ including the Anne Frank House museum _ escaped unscathed. No one was injured, a museum spokeswoman said.

 "Someone yelled, 'It's falling. The tree is falling,' and then you heard it go down," said museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostart. "Luckily no one was hurt."

 A global campaign to save the chestnut, widely known as The Anne Frank Tree, was launched in 2007 after city officials deemed it a safety hazard and ordered it felled. The tree was granted a last-minute reprieve after a battle in court.

 The 150-year-old tree suffered from fungus and moths that had caused more than half its trunk to rot.

 Two years ago city workmen encased the trunk in a steel support system to prevent it from falling, but that failed under windy weather Monday.

 The Netherlands' Trees Institute, one of the most prominent supporters of the preservation project, said it was "unpleasantly surprised" by the news of the tree's fall early Monday afternoon.

 "On the advice of experts in tree care, it had been calculated that the tree could live several more decades" with the support structure, the institute said in a statement.

 "Alas, in the event it seems that nature is stronger."

 The institute said it didn't know why the support structure had failed.

 Many clones of the tree have been taken, including 11 planted at sites around the United States and 150 at a park in Amsterdam. It is not clear whether a new tree will replace the original one on the same spot, since it rests on property belonging to a neighbor.

 The Jewish teenager made several references to the tree in the diary that she kept during the 25 months she remained indoors until her family was arrested in August 1944.

 "Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs," she wrote on Feb. 23, 1944. "From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind."

 She also wrote: "As long as this exists, ... and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies _ while this lasts I cannot be unhappy."

 Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945. Her diary was recovered and published after her death. It has become the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust. |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– A tree beloved by Anne Frank is gone, toppled by a storm today in Amsterdam. The chestnut tree stood outside the window of the attic where Frank hid, and she often wrote about it in her diaries. In the years since her death, the 150-year-old “Anne Frank Tree” became rotted and diseased; city officials ordered it felled, but a 2007 campaign managed to save it. Its trunk was encased in a steep support system, but even that failed to protect it from today’s strong winds, the AP reports. No one was hurt, and the nearby Anne Frank House museum was unharmed. The tree lives on through more than 160 clones planted in Amsterdam and the US. “From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind,” Frank wrote in 1944. Pieces of the tree are now for sale on a Dutch auction site, Reuters adds.


Write a summary based on this article:

The details of her plea arrangement will be revealed at the hearing, and in a statement her mother said: "Given the time and circumstances and the nature of the Espionage charge I believe that this was the only way that she could receive a fair sentence. I still disagree strongly with the use of the Espionage charge against citizens like Reality... I know that she will accept full responsibility for any wrongdoing and that she is ready and willing to face the consequences. I ask for continued support for her, She will need your continued support and belief in her as she continues this battle."

 She will be the second person pleading guilty under a push by the Trump administration to root out leakers, following an FBI agent who pleaded guilty in April for leaking to The Intercept. He has not yet been sentenced. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a list showing the results of several leak investigations by the Obama administration, which it said usually ended in pleas to minor offenses, for people like John Kiriakou and David Petraeus. ||||| While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

 The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

 Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.

 This NSA summary judgment is sharply at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial last week that Russia had interfered in foreign elections: “We never engaged in that on a state level, and have no intention of doing so.” Putin, who had previously issued blanket denials that any such Russian meddling occurred, for the first time floated the possibility that freelance Russian hackers with “patriotic leanings” may have been responsible. The NSA report, on the contrary, displays no doubt that the cyber assault was carried out by the GRU.

 Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.

 The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document:

 The NSA analysis does not draw conclusions about whether the interference had any effect on the election’s outcome and concedes that much remains unknown about the extent of the hackers’ accomplishments. However, the report raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results.

 The NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were both contacted for this article. Officials requested that we not publish or report on the top secret document and declined to comment on it. When informed that we intended to go ahead with this story, the NSA requested a number of redactions. The Intercept agreed to some of the redaction requests after determining that the disclosure of that material was not clearly in the public interest.

 The report adds significant new detail to the picture that emerged from the unclassified intelligence assessment about Russian election meddling released by the Obama administration in January. The January assessment presented the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions but omitted many specifics, citing concerns about disclosing sensitive sources and methods. The assessment concluded with high confidence that the Kremlin ordered an extensive, multi-pronged propaganda effort “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

 That review did not attempt to assess what effect the Russian efforts had on the election, despite the fact that “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.” According to the Department of Homeland Security, the assessment reported reassuringly, “the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.”

 The NSA has now learned, however, that Russian government hackers, part of a team with a “cyber espionage mandate specifically directed at U.S. and foreign elections,” focused on parts of the system directly connected to the voter registration process, including a private sector manufacturer of devices that maintain and verify the voter rolls. Some of the company’s devices are advertised as having wireless internet and Bluetooth connectivity, which could have provided an ideal staging point for further malicious actions.

 Attached to the secret NSA report is an overview chart detailing the Russian government’s spear-phishing operation, apparently missing a second page that was not provided to The Intercept. Graphic: NSA

 The Spear-Phishing Attack

 As described by the classified NSA report, the Russian plan was simple: pose as an e-voting vendor and trick local government employees into opening Microsoft Word documents invisibly tainted with potent malware that could give hackers full control over the infected computers.

 But in order to dupe the local officials, the hackers needed access to an election software vendor’s internal systems to put together a convincing disguise. So on August 24, 2016, the Russian hackers sent spoofed emails purporting to be from Google to employees of an unnamed U.S. election software company, according to the NSA report. Although the document does not directly identify the company in question, it contains references to a product made by VR Systems, a Florida-based vendor of electronic voting services and equipment whose products are used in eight states.

 The spear-phishing email contained a link directing the employees to a malicious, faux-Google website that would request their login credentials and then hand them over to the hackers. The NSA identified seven “potential victims” at the company. While malicious emails targeting three of the potential victims were rejected by an email server, at least one of the employee accounts was likely compromised, the agency concluded. The NSA notes in its report that it is “unknown whether the aforementioned spear-phishing deployment successfully compromised all the intended victims, and what potential data from the victim could have been exfiltrated.”

 VR Systems declined to respond to a request for comment on the specific hacking operation outlined in the NSA document. Chief Operating Officer Ben Martin replied by email to The Intercept’s request for comment with the following statement:

 Phishing and spear-phishing are not uncommon in our industry. We regularly participate in cyber alliances with state officials and members of the law enforcement community in an effort to address these types of threats. We have policies and procedures in effect to protect our customers and our company.

 Although the NSA report indicates that VR Systems was targeted only with login-stealing trickery, rather than computer-controlling malware, this isn’t necessarily a reassuring sign. Jake Williams, founder of computer security firm Rendition Infosec and formerly of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking team, said stolen logins can be even more dangerous than an infected computer. “I’ll take credentials most days over malware,” he said, since an employee’s login information can be used to penetrate “corporate VPNs, email, or cloud services,” allowing access to internal corporate data. The risk is particularly heightened given how common it is to use the same password for multiple services. Phishing, as the name implies, doesn’t require everyone to take the bait in order to be a success — though Williams stressed that hackers “never want just one” set of stolen credentials.

 Image: NSA

 In any event, the hackers apparently got what they needed. Two months later, on October 27, they set up an “operational” Gmail account designed to appear as if it belonged to an employee at VR Systems, and used documents obtained from the previous operation to launch a second spear-phishing operation “targeting U.S. local government organizations.” These emails contained a Microsoft Word document that had been “trojanized” so that when it was opened it would send out a beacon to the “malicious infrastructure” set up by the hackers.

 The NSA assessed that this phase of the spear-fishing operation was likely launched on either October 31 or November 1 and sent spear-fishing emails to 122 email addresses “associated with named local government organizations,” probably to officials “involved in the management of voter registration systems.” The emails contained Microsoft Word attachments purporting to be benign documentation for VR Systems’ EViD voter database product line, but which were in reality maliciously embedded with automated software commands that are triggered instantly and invisibly when the user opens the document. These particular weaponized files used PowerShell, a Microsoft scripting language designed for system administrators and installed by default on Windows computers, allowing vast control over a system’s settings and functions. If opened, the files “very likely” would have instructed the infected computer to begin downloading in the background a second package of malware from a remote server also controlled by the hackers, which the secret report says could have provided attackers with “persistent access” to the computer or the ability to “survey the victims for items of interest.” Essentially, the weaponized Word document quietly unlocks and opens a target’s back door, allowing virtually any cocktail of malware to be subsequently delivered automatically.

 According to Williams, if this type of attack were successful, the perpetrator would possess “unlimited” capacity for siphoning away items of interest. “Once the user opens up that email [attachment],” Williams explained, “the attacker has all the same capabilities that the user does.” Vikram Thakur, a senior research manager at Symantec’s Security Response Team, told The Intercept that in cases like this the “quantity of exfiltrated data is only limited by the controls put in place by network administrators.” Data theft of this variety is typically encrypted, meaning anyone observing an infected network wouldn’t be able to see what exactly was being removed but should certainly be able to tell something was afoot, Williams added. Overall, the method is one of “medium sophistication,” Williams said, one that “practically any hacker can pull off.”

 The NSA, however, is uncertain about the results of the attack, according to the report. “It is unknown,” the NSA notes, “whether the aforementioned spear-phishing deployment successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed by the cyber actor.”

 The FBI would not comment about whether it is pursuing a criminal investigation into the cyber attack on VR Systems.

 At a December press conference, President Obama said that he told Russian President Vladimir Putin in September not to hack the U.S. election infrastructure. “What I was concerned about in particular was making sure [the DNC hack] wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself,” Obama said. “So in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact we did not see further tampering of the election process.”

 Yet the NSA has now found that the tampering continued. “The fact that this is occurring in October is troubling,” said one senior law enforcement official with significant cyber expertise. “In August 2016 warnings went out from the FBI and DHS to those agencies. This was not a surprise. This was not hard to defend against. But you needed a commitment of budget and attention.”

 The NSA document briefly describes two other election-related Russian hacking operations. In one, Russian military hackers created an email account pretending to be another U.S. election company, referred to in the document as U.S. company 2, from which they sent fake test emails offering “election-related products and services.” The agency was unable to determine whether there was any targeting using this account.

 In a third Russian operation, the same group of hackers sent test emails to addresses at the American Samoa Election Office, presumably to determine whether those accounts existed before launching another phishing attack. It is unclear what the effort achieved, but the NSA assessed that the Russians appeared intent on “mimicking a legitimate absentee ballot-related service provider.” The report does not indicate why the Russians targeted the tiny Pacific islands, a U.S. territory with no electoral votes to contribute to the election.

 A voter casts her ballot on Nov. 8, 2016 in Ohio. Photo: Ty Wright/Getty Images

 An Alluring Target

 Getting attention and a budget commitment to election security requires solving a political riddle. “The problem we have is that voting security doesn’t matter until something happens, and then after something happens, there’s a group of people who don’t want the security, because whatever happened, happened in their favor,” said Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert at Harvard’s Berkman Center who has written frequently about the security vulnerabilities of U.S. election systems. “That makes it a very hard security problem, unlike your bank account.”

 Schneier said the attack, as described by the NSA, is standard hacking procedure. “Credential-stealing, spear-phishing — this is how it’s done,” he said. “Once you get a beachhead, then you try to figure out how to go elsewhere.”

 All of this means that it is critical to understand just how integral VR Systems is to our election system, and what exactly the implications of this breach are for the integrity of the result.

 VR Systems doesn’t sell the actual touchscreen machines used to cast a vote, but rather the software and devices that verify and catalogue who’s permitted to vote when they show up on Election Day or for early voting. Companies like VR are “very important” because “a functioning registration system is central to American elections,” explained Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. Vendors like VR are also particularly sensitive, according to Norden, because local election offices “are often unlikely to have many or even any IT staff,” meaning “a vendor like this will also provide most of the IT assistance, including the work related to programming and cyber security”—not the kind of people you want unwittingly compromised by a hostile nation state.

 According to its website, VR Systems has contracts in eight states: California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.

 Pamela Smith, president of election integrity watchdog Verified Voting, agreed that even if VR Systems doesn’t facilitate the actual casting of votes, it could make an alluring target for anyone hoping to disrupt the vote.

 “If someone has access to a state voter database, they can take malicious action by modifying or removing information,” she said. “This could affect whether someone has the ability to cast a regular ballot, or be required to cast a ‘provisional’ ballot — which would mean it has to be checked for their eligibility before it is included in the vote, and it may mean the voter has to jump through certain hoops such as proving their information to the election official before their eligibility is affirmed.”

 Mark Graff, a digital security consultant and former chief cybersecurity officer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, described such a hypothetical tactic as “effectively a denial of service attack” against would-be voters. But a more worrying prospect, according to Graff, is that hackers would target a company like VR Systems to get closer to the actual tabulation of the vote. An attempt to directly break into or alter the actual voting machines would be more conspicuous and considerably riskier than compromising an adjacent, less visible part of the voting system, like voter registration databases, in the hope that one is networked to the other. Sure enough, VR Systems advertises the fact that its EViD computer polling station equipment line is connected to the internet, and that on Election Day “a voter’s voting history is transmitted immediately to the county database” on a continuous basis. A computer attack can thus spread quickly and invisibly through networked components of a system like germs through a handshake.

 According to Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society and an electronic voting expert, one of the main concerns in the scenario described by the NSA document is the likelihood that the officials setting up the electronic poll books are the same people doing the pre-programming of the voting machines. The actual voting machines aren’t going to be networked to something like VR Systems’ EViD, but they do receive manual updates and configuration from people at the local or state level who could be responsible for both. If those were the people targeted by the GRU malware, the implications are troubling.

 “Usually at the county level there’s going to be some company that does the pre-election programming of the voting machines,” Halderman told The Intercept. “I would worry about whether an attacker who could compromise the poll book vendor might be able to use software updates that the vendor distributes to also infect the election management system that programs the voting machines themselves,” he added. “Once you do that, you can cause the voting machine to create fraudulent counts.”

 According to Schneier, a major prize in breaching VR Systems would be the ability to gather enough information to effectively execute spoof attacks against election officials themselves. Coming with the imprimatur of the election board’s main contractor, a fake email looks that much more authentic.

 Image: NSA

 Such a breach could also serve as its own base from which to launch disruptions. One U.S. intelligence official conceded that the Russian operation outlined by the NSA — targeting voter registration software — could potentially have disrupted voting in the locations where VR Systems’ products were being used. And a compromised election poll book system can do more than cause chaos on Election Day, said Halderman. “You could even do that preferentially in areas for voters that are likely to vote for a certain candidate and thereby have a partisan effect.”

 Using this method to target a U.S. presidential election, the Russian approach faces a challenge in the decentralized federal election system, where processes differ not merely state to state but often county to county. And meanwhile, the Electoral College makes it difficult to predict where efforts should be concentrated.

 “Hacking an election is hard, not because of technology — that’s surprisingly easy — but it’s hard to know what’s going to be effective,” said Schneier. “If you look at the last few elections, 2000 was decided in Florida, 2004 in Ohio, the most recent election in a couple counties in Michigan and Pennsylvania, so deciding exactly where to hack is really hard to know.”

 But the system’s decentralization is also a vulnerability. There is no strong central government oversight of the election process or the acquisition of voting hardware or software. Likewise, voter registration, maintenance of voter rolls, and vote counting lack any effective national oversight. There is no single authority with the responsibility for safeguarding elections. Christian Hilland, a spokesperson for the FEC, told The Intercept that “the Federal Election Commission does not have jurisdiction over voting matters as well as software and hardware in connection with casting votes. You may want to check with the Election Assistance Commission.”

 Checking with the EAC is also less than confidence inspiring. The commission was created in 2002 as the congressional reaction to the vote-counting debacle of 2000. The EAC notes online that it “is charged with serving as a national clearinghouse of information on election administration. EAC also accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems,” but it is a backwater commission with no real authority. Click on the link about certifying voting systems and it leads you to a dead page.

 If there were a central U.S. election authority, it might have launched an investigation into what happened in Durham, North Carolina, on Election Day. The registration system malfunctioned at a number of polling locations, causing chaos and long lines, which triggered election officials to switch to paper ballots and extend voting later into the evening.

 Durham’s voter rolls were run by VR Systems — the same firm that was compromised by the Russian hack, according to the NSA document.

 Local officials said that a hack was not the cause of the disruption. “The N.C. State Board of Elections did not experience any suspicious activity during the 2016 election outside of what this agency experiences at other times. Any potential risks or vulnerabilities are being monitored, and this agency works with the Department of Homeland Security and the N.C. Department of Information Technology to help mitigate any potential risks,” said Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the North Carolina board of elections.

 George McCue, deputy director of the Durham County board of elections, also said that VR Systems’ software was not the issue. “There was some investigation there, essentially no evidence came out of it indicating there was any problem with the product,” he said. “It appears to be user errors at different points in the process, between the setup of the computers and the poll workers using them.”

 All of this taken together ratchets up the stakes of the ongoing investigations into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, which promises to soak up more national attention this week as fired FBI Director James Comey appears before Congress to testify. If collusion can ultimately be demonstrated — a big if at this point — then the assistance on Russia’s part went beyond allegedly hacking email to serve a propaganda campaign, and bled into an attack on U.S. election infrastructure itself.

 Whatever the investigation into the Trump campaign concludes, however, it pales in comparison to the threat posed to the legitimacy of U.S. elections if the infrastructure itself can’t be secured. The NSA conclusion “demonstrates that countries are looking at specific tactics for election manipulation, and we need to be vigilant in defense,” said Schneier. “Elections do two things: one choose the winner, and two, they convince the loser. To the extent the elections are vulnerable to hacking, we risk the legitimacy of the voting process, even if there is no actual hacking at the time.”

 Throughout history, the transfer of power has been the moment of greatest weakness for societies, leading to untold bloodshed. The peaceful transfer of power is one of the greatest innovations of democracy.

 “It’s not just that [an election] has to be fair, it has to be demonstrably fair, so that the loser says, ‘Yep, I lost fair and square.’ If you can’t do that, you’re screwed,” said Schneier. “They’ll tear themselves apart if they’re convinced it’s not accurate.” ||||| After a year of duking it out in federal court over allegations that she leaked top-secret government intelligence, former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner has agreed to a plea deal.

 “I do know that she has always been ready and willing to accept responsibility for any wrongdoing, and that she will accept the consequences,” her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, told The Atlanta-Journal Constitution on Thursday.

 Documents show the agreement was received by the court on Thursday after an 18-minute conference call on Wednesday with U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps.

 ONLY IN THE AJC: Former cellmate describes Reality Winner’s life behind bars

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 The hunt for answers in Reality Winner’s tiny Texas hometown

 Winner-Davis, who has maintained a social media presence highlighting her daughter’s case, said she has spoken only briefly to Reality’s attorneys about the change in plea, and only in guarded terms. She said she did not know what charges her daughter would plead to or what the negotiated punishment would be.

 Reality Winner will accept responsibility for any wrongdoing & is ready to accept the consequences. We will continue to support her. She is a true patriot & hero.

 Reality Winner Reaches Plea Deal With Government Over Leaked Document https://t.co/E23gQI2hEz via @DailyReport — Billie J. Winner-Davis (@bjwinnerdavis) June 21, 2018

 Charged under the federal Espionage Act, Winner faced 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. Her trial had been scheduled for Oct. 15.

 Winner, a 26-year-old former U.S. Air Force linguist who grew up in rural Texas, is accused of leaking a top-secret government report about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. At the time, she worked as an NSA contractor at Fort Gordon, near Augusta. The Intercept, the online news outlet that allegedly received the document, has since admitted some fault in its handling of the leaked report, which court records say led investigators to Winner’s door.

 Winner’s case has attracted international attention, garnering impassioned support from the left and rebuke from the right. Since her arrest, her family and an assortment of support groups have waged a protracted battle in the court of public opinion, speaking out to news reporters, penning articles in The Intercept, and operating the site StandWithReality.org.

 Earlier this month, the federal judge who would have presided in her case admonished attorneys not to speak publicly about the case after a billboard went up in the Augusta suburbs portraying Winner as an imprisoned hero and the federal government as her oppressor.

 Winner-Davis speculated that the Espionage Act — which takes only the underlying act of leaking into account, not motive or mitigating circumstances — was too difficult to fight. Her daughter’s legal team suffered one defeat after another in rulings handed down by the judge, and Epps declined to release Winner from jail while her charges were pending.

 “I’m not happy about it,” Winner-Davis said of the plea deal. “I still feel like the espionage charge is wrong. I feel like it’s harsh. I feel like it doesn’t allow a defendant to defend themselves.”

 Whatever happens in court next week, she said she will continue to fight to clear her daughter’s name: “Regardless of what she’s been charged with, she’s not a traitor to this country.”

 One of Winner’s attorneys, Titus Nichols, declined to comment other than to confirm a change of plea hearing is scheduled for Tuesday. A federal prosecutor also declined to comment.

 This will mark the second guilty plea in Trump’s anti-leak drive. In April, former FBI Special Agent Terry Albury pleaded guilty to one count of making an unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and one count of unlawful retention of national defense information. He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison per count.

 Under President Barack Obama’s administration, leak cases often ended with pleas to minor offenses. A former NSA official in 2011 pleaded guilty in Maryland to one misdemeanor count of exceeding his authorized use of an NSA computer. The Justice Department agreed to drop 10 more serious previous criminal charges against Thomas Drake, who was sentenced to probation. He was accused of discussing classified information with a Baltimore Sun newspaper reporter. That reporter wrote stories about problems with NSA’s secret surveillance programs.

 In 2012, former CIA officer/counter-terrorism official John Kiriakou pleaded guilty to a single charge of disclosing classified information to a journalist. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison after being accused of identifying an undercover operative involved in the use of waterboarding during the Bush administration. He says he was sent to prison for revealing torture.

 In 2015, retired Gen. and former CIA director David H. Petraeus pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified materials and was sentenced to 2 years of probation and a $100,000 fine. He admitted giving handwritten journals with classified information to his mistress and then lying about it to the FBI. He had been charged with felonies but refused to plead guilty.

 In 2016, Gen. James E. Cartwright, who was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his discussions with reporters about Iran’s nuclear program. Obama pardoned him in January 2017, just before Trump took office. |||||

– More than a year after her arrest, Reality Leigh Winner is pleading guilty. The former NSA contractor—who allegedly supplied the media with secret intel on Russians hacking US voting systems—planned to enter her plea agreement Friday in federal court, Engadget reports. "I do know that she has always been ready and willing to accept responsibility for any wrongdoing, and that she will accept the consequences," her mother Billie Winnie Davis says in a statement. The 26-year-old Air Force veteran was denied bail and spent a year in jail after the Intercept ran a bombshell NSA report detailing Russian hacking of a voting equipment vendor and attempts to hack 122 local election officials. Emails obtained through FOIA requests show that local officials didn't know about the hack until it leaked to the press. But as Winner became a political lightning rod, she lost several court battles and faced 10 years behind bars and a $250,000 fine for espionage, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reports. Now comes her guilty plea, which remains under wraps. "I still disagree strongly with the use of the Espionage charge against citizens" like Reality, her mother says. "The use of the Espionage charge prevents a person from defending themselves or explaining their actions to a jury, thus making it difficult for them to receive a fair trial and treatment in the court system." (Per one report, 39 states saw Russians intrude on US elections.)


Article:

Evidence for carbon cycling or biologic activity can be derived from carbon isotopes, because a high 12 C/ 13 C ratio is characteristic of biogenic carbon due to the large isotopic fractionation associated with enzymatic carbon fixation. The earliest materials measured for carbon isotopes at 3.8 Ga are isotopically light, and thus potentially biogenic. Because Earth’s known rock record extends only to ∼4 Ga, earlier periods of history are accessible only through mineral grains deposited in later sediments. We report 12 C/ 13 C of graphite preserved in 4.1-Ga zircon. Its complete encasement in crack-free, undisturbed zircon demonstrates that it is not contamination from more recent geologic processes. Its 12 C-rich isotopic signature may be evidence for the origin of life on Earth by 4.1 Ga.

 Abstract ||||| Oct 19 An ancient zircon crystal unearthed in Western Australia may hold evidence that life appeared on the planet 4.1 billion years ago, or about 300 million years earlier than previously thought, according to a team of U.S. researchers.

 Scientists from Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles said they recently collected some 10,000 multibillion year-old zircons in Jack Hills, Australia, including one believed to contain a carbon deposit that is 4.1 billion years old, give or take 10 million years.

 "Its complete encasement in crack-free, undisturbed zircon demonstrates that it is not contamination from more recent geologic processes ... (and) may be evidence for the origin of life on Earth by 4.1 (billion years ago)," according to a paper published by the team in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

 Scientists have used the fossil record to assert that the history of life on Earth began about 3.8 billion years ago, in the form of single-celled creatures. Humans are believed to have first appeared on Earth only about 200,000 years ago.

 The study was authored by Elizabeth Bell, Patrick Boehnke, and T. Mark Harrison of the University of California, Los Angeles along with Wendy Lao of Stanford. (Reporting by Richard Valdmanis in Boston; Editing by Eric Beech) ||||| UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago — 300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago.

 The research is published today in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 “Twenty years ago, this would have been heretical; finding evidence of life 3.8 billion years ago was shocking,” said Mark Harrison, co-author of the research and a professor of geochemistry at UCLA.

 Reed Hutchinson/UCLA. Mark Harrison at UCLA.

 “Life on Earth may have started almost instantaneously,” added Harrison, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. “With the right ingredients, life seems to form very quickly.”

 The new research suggests that life existed prior to the massive bombardment of the inner solar system that formed the moon’s large craters 3.9 billion years ago.

 “If all life on Earth died during this bombardment, which some scientists have argued, then life must have restarted quickly,” said Patrick Boehnke, a co-author of the research and a graduate student in Harrison’s laboratory.

 Scientists had long believed the Earth was dry and desolate during that time period. Harrison’s research — including a 2008 study in Nature he co-authored with Craig Manning, a professor of geology and geochemistry at UCLA, and former UCLA graduate student Michelle Hopkins — is proving otherwise.

 “The early Earth certainly wasn’t a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that,” Harrison said. “The planet was probably much more like it is today than previously thought.”

 The researchers, led by Elizabeth Bell — a postdoctoral scholar in Harrison’s laboratory — studied more than 10,000 zircons originally formed from molten rocks, or magmas, from Western Australia. Zircons are heavy, durable minerals related to the synthetic cubic zirconium used for imitation diamonds. They capture and preserve their immediate environment, meaning they can serve as time capsules.

 The scientists identified 656 zircons containing dark specks that could be revealing and closely analyzed 79 of them with Raman spectroscopy, a technique that shows the molecular and chemical structure of ancient microorganisms in three dimensions.

 Bell and Boehnke, who have pioneered chemical and mineralogical tests to determine the condition of ancient zircons, were searching for carbon, the key component for life.

 One of the 79 zircons contained graphite — pure carbon — in two locations.

 “The first time that the graphite ever got exposed in the last 4.1 billion years is when Beth Ann and Patrick made the measurements this year,” Harrison said.

 How confident are they that their zircon represents 4.1 billion-year-old graphite?

 “Very confident,” Harrison said. “There is no better case of a primary inclusion in a mineral ever documented, and nobody has offered a plausible alternative explanation for graphite of non-biological origin into a zircon.”

 The graphite is older than the zircon containing it, the researchers said. They know the zircon is 4.1 billion years old, based on its ratio of uranium to lead; they don’t know how much older the graphite is.

 The research suggests life in the universe could be abundant, Harrison said. On Earth, simple life appears to have formed quickly, but it likely took many millions of years for very simple life to evolve the ability to photosynthesize.

 The carbon contained in the zircon has a characteristic signature — a specific ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 — that indicates the presence of photosynthetic life.

 “We need to think differently about the early Earth,” Bell said.

 Wendy Mao, an associate professor of geological sciences and photon science at Stanford University, is the other co-author of the research.

 The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a Simons Collaboration on the Origin of Life Postdoctoral Fellowship granted to Bell. ||||| Did life have hellish origins? Carbon with an organic-like signature has been discovered sealed within a crystal that formed during an interval of Earth’s history named after Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology. The find predates other evidence of life by 300 million years.

 Our planet formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s anyone’s guess exactly when life first appeared. The oldest reliable fossils are about 3.43 billion years old. Chemical signatures in even older rocks suggest life might have been present 3.8 billion years ago.

 All of these early fossil signatures belong to the Archaean, which began 4 billion years ago. It is generally thought that conditions on Earth before then were so extreme that life wouldn’t have stood a chance of survival – which is why the pre-Archaean stage of Earth’s history has been dubbed the Hadean.

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 Signs of life

 But Elizabeth Bell and Mark Harrison at the University of California, Los Angeles, and their colleagues think life might have existed in the Hadean after all.

 They analysed more than 10,000 zircon crystals smaller than a millimetre in length that date from the Archaean and Hadean. In one Hadean crystal they found tiny flecks, or inclusions, of graphite, which must have been incorporated into the zircon crystal when it formed some 4.1 billion years ago.

 The researchers analysed the carbon isotopes in two of the graphite flecks, and found both graphite flecks had a high carbon-12 to carbon-13 isotope ratio, a characteristic feature of organic origins as life preferentially absorbs carbon-12.

 It’s not the first time that people have claimed the discovery of potentially organic carbon in Hadean zircons – but the carbon in those earlier claims turned out to be an artefact of the preparation techniques used to study the zircons, says Harrison. “I think there will be little dispute regarding the primary nature of the inclusions,” he says.

 What will be up for discussion is whether the isotopic signature is evidence for the presence of life, says Bell. The general chemical make-up of the zircon crystals suggests that the magma they cooled from was generated by the melting of a mud-rich sediment, which is the sort of environment in which organic remains might accumulate.

 Lifeless reactions

 But the team points out there are also inorganic ways that isotopically light carbon could have accumulated in Hadean environments, for instance, through some of the Fischer-Tropsch chemical reactions that can turn carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbons.

 Ultimately, carbon isotope data on its own is too ambiguous to decide whether Hadean carbon is evidence of Hadean life, says Thomas McCollom at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “I know a lot of people want to use such data as evidence of life, but this is governed more by what they want the outcome to be rather than scientific principles,” he says.

 It’s always going to be tough to convince everyone to accept that Hadean zircons carry proof of life. “Proof is a realm better suited to mathematics than the natural sciences,” says Steve Mojzsis also at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

 Even so, he thinks the new study is important. “Harrison and his team have challenged us now to think deeply about just how ancient the biosphere could be and to find new ways to explore for a cryptic record of it.”

 Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1517557112

 Read more: “First life: The search for the first replicator”

 Image credit: Richard Bizley/SPL

 Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that it is the ratio of different carbon isotopes, not just the presence of those isotopes, that is characteristic of organic origin. |||||
What is a summary?

– Life of one kind or another has been around on this planet for 300 million years longer than thought, according to US researchers who took a close look at some incredibly ancient crystals unearthed in Australia. The scientists say that the zircon crystals from 4.1 billion years ago contain a telltale carbon deposit that appears to have come from something organic, Reuters reports. That's getting closer to the origin of the planet itself, roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Before now, the earliest hint of life was found in rocks 3.8 billion years old. There's no chance the carbon deposit could be any younger than the zircon because the crystal is crack-free and undisturbed, the researchers write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The zircon crystals were formed during a geological era known as the Hadean, after Hades, because conditions were thought to be so hellish that no life could have existed, the New Scientist notes. The UCLA and Stanford researchers now dispute that, saying life on Earth may have formed "almost instantaneously"—and restarted quickly if it were wiped out at some point. "The early Earth certainly wasn't a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that," study co-author Mark Harrison says in a UCLA press release. "The planet was probably much more like it is today than previously thought.” (Earth's first big predator may have been an enormous sea scorpion.)


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If “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory were a guest on his own show, he knows the kinds of questions he’d be asked.

 Why have your ratings been falling? Is the show in trouble? Is your job in trouble?

 “I get it,” says Gregory, the face of the longest-running TV program in American history (founded: 1947). “Do I want to be number one in the ratings? Every week I want to be number one, and we fight like hell to get there. And it’s tough right now. It’s a fight.”

 He adds, “I’m not just trying to sell you — well, I am trying to sell you — but I’m not going to B.S. you, either. Yeah, it’s hard. I see what our challenges are. But we’re going to fix our problems.”

 The main problem: The great-granddaddy of Sunday-morning Beltway blabfests isn’t just not No. 1. It’s No. 3 and in the midst of a three-year slide. During the first three months of this year, the NBC program finished behind perennial rivals “Face the Nation” on CBS and “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, despite being helped by two weeks of Winter Olympics hoopla. In the final quarter of last year, viewing among people ages 25 to 54, the preferred group for TV news advertisers, fell to its lowest level ever.

 Bad enough. But fairly or not, Gregory’s “Meet the Press” still gets measured against the lofty peaks scaled by Tim Russert, his predecessor. Russert, the folksy inquisitor, ruled the ratings for more than a decade until his death in June 2008. He often attracted an audience 40 percent larger than his rivals, an unheard-of margin in television.

 But now — to paraphrase Russert’s famous sign-off — if it’s Sunday, it’s not necessarily “Meet the Press” that Americans are watching.

 These days, the leader is “Face the Nation,” hosted by Bob Schieffer, the grandfatherly 77-year-old newsman. Schieffer not only attracts the largest overall audience (a weekly average of 3.35 million during the first three months of 2014, 5 percent more than “This Week,” 8 percent more than “MTP” and 61 percent more than “Fox News Sunday”) but the largest audience among the coveted 25-to-54 set, too. (Schieffer’s competitors are quick to point out that comparisons aren’t quite fair since “FTN’s” ratings are based on its first half-hour, not the standard full hour; the program’s second half-hour isn’t broadcast by CBS stations in many cities).

 The Sunday shows — which comprise what Schieffer calls “the smartest morning on TV” — are more than just prestige projects for the networks; the relatively large and affluent audiences they attract make them magnets for corporate image advertisers that pay premium prices for airtime. Russert’s dominating position helped NBC earn a reported $60 million from “Meet the Press” in 2007.

 Thus, “MTP’s” meltdown has sounded alarm bells inside NBC News and attracted the attention of its new president, Deborah Turness, who arrived from Britain’s ITV News in August. Gregory’s job does not appear to be in any immediate jeopardy, but there are plenty of signs of concern.

 Last year, the network undertook an unusual assessment of the 43-year-old journalist, commissioning a psychological consultant to interview his friends and even his wife. The idea, according to a network spokeswoman, Meghan Pianta, was “to get perspective and insight from people who know him best.” But the research project struck some at NBC as odd, given that Gregory has been employed there for nearly 20 years.

 Around the same time, the network appointed a new executive producer at “MTP,” Rob Yarin, a veteran media consultant. Yarin, who had worked with Gregory on an MSNBC show, “Race for the White House,” during the 2008 campaign, succeeded Betsy Fischer Martin, who reigned over “MTP” for 11 years. Fischer Martin had helped Russert soar to glory, but had disagreed with Gregory over matters of style and substance (she was promoted to oversee all of NBC’s political coverage).

 In interviews, Yarin and Gregory say they are tinkering with the show to keep it abreast of a changing media environment. They’ve made the program’s pacing faster, with shorter interview segments. The range of topics and interview subjects has been opened up, too. Last month, for example, Gregory interviewed NCAA President Mark Emmert about proposals to unionize student-athletes — stealing a little thunder, he notes, from CBS, which was televising the NCAA basketball tournament at the time.

 The overall effect is that the program now bears only a vague resemblance to the one over which Russert presided. Whereas Russert would spend multiple segments grilling a single newsmaker, Gregory now barely goes more than six or seven minutes on any interview or topic.

 The changes were readily apparent on Sunday’s program, recorded at NBC’s studios in Northwest Washington. After opening with Gregory’s taped interview with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the host moved swiftly to live dual-screen chats with Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). Then it was on to the journalists’ roundtable discussion, followed by an interview with Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) about health care and the midterm elections.

 Then, still more segments: A new recorded feature called “Meeting America” in which reporter Kevin Tibbles looks at something happening outside Washington (in this case, a debate in Kentucky over the building of a Biblical theme park using tax subsidies); more roundtable discussion; and a photos-of-the-week feature called “Images to Remember.” The program closed with a short interview with New York Times reporter Jo Becker about her new book about gay marriage, “Forcing the Spring.”

 Gregory says the new look “delivers on the core of what ‘Meet the Press’ is” but “widens the aperture . . . I’m dedicated to building something that says we’re not just thinking about politics. We’re thinking about who the real influencers are in this country.”

 “This Week,” which is anchored irregularly by Stephanopoulos (he also hosts the daily “Good Morning America”), says it’s shaking things up, too.

 The ABC program has a new executive producer, Jonathan Greenberger, a 30-year-old Stephanopoulos protege. Greenberger started at ABC News out of college at 22, and climbed so fast that the network waited for him to finish Stanford Law School before handing him the executive producer job at “This Week” last year.

 Greenberger describes a program that is more ensemble in nature and more of a magazine than a traditional newsmaker-interview show. On a recent program, Stephanopoulos chatted with an ABC reporter in Ukraine about the latest news, then segued to a discussion with correspondent (and sometime fill-in host) Martha Raddatz about the unfolding diplomacy, followed by an interview with Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

 “A few years ago, we wouldn’t have moved so fast to integrate all of those elements into the program,” says Greenberger. “We’d have the vice chairman and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee on to have a debate.”

 Like “Meet the Press,” “This Week” has to be wary of changing too much. The ABC program is still recovering from its attempt to build itself around former CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, whose strength is foreign affairs, not domestic politics. Amanpour lasted about 18 months as host before going back to CNN in 2011.

 Schieffer, meanwhile, says “Face the Nation” isn’t planning to change. “There’s no bells and whistles here,” says the host, who’s been “Face’s” face since 1991. “We just try to move the stories of the week forward.”

 The good news for all three shows is that they remain among the most durable on TV, if perhaps less influential than they once were. Even as everything else on TV has lost viewers over time, the Big Three have held steady and even gained viewers. Collectively, about 9.6 million people watched them each week during the first three months of this year, about the same number that watched Russert in 2005. This doesn’t count the audience for innumerable Sunday-morning competitors, from Fox News Sunday (hosted by former “Meet the Press” moderator Chris Wallace) to “Al Punto” on Univision.

 The shows can occasionally make news, too, if the interview subject is big enough. Conservatives are still raising questions about then-United Nations ambassador Susan Rice’s comments on the Sunday shows in 2012 about the attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead. Gregory, meanwhile, mentions his “Meet the Press” interview with Vice President Biden in 2012, in which Biden expressed support for same-sex marriage, prompting President Obama to become the first sitting president to declare his support a few days later (in an interview with ABC).

 Gregory himself has sparked controversy for what he’s said and done on the air. Conservatives called for the moderator’s prosecution after he held up a high-capacity ammunition magazine in an interview with National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre in late 2012 (possession of such armaments is illegal in the District; Gregory wasn’t charged). Last June, the Twittersphere exploded with outrage when Gregory asked journalist Glenn Greenwald about having “aided and abetted” NSA secrets leaker Edward Snowden, insinuating that Greenwald was complicit in espionage.

 The impossible burden for Gregory, of course, has been to follow the beloved Russert. As one NBC colleague describes it, Russert is a “ghost” who still haunts Gregory’s tenure at “MTP” six years into his run.

 “I am fully aware that there are a lot of people who believe Tim Russert will never be replaced, and I’ve never tried to replace Tim Russert," he says. “I have nothing but respect and admiration for Tim and his legacy. And I’m doing my own thing, just like Tim did.”

 But he also adds, a little more defensively, “I’ve covered the White House, I’ve covered 9/11, the road to war, constitutional crises, and honestly, I wouldn’t be able to focus on this job if I was going to let that stuff get to me. I knew it would be there going in and I’m just focused on being David Gregory and taking the show to the next level.”

 Some Gregory supporters think he has the best hand to play over the long haul. Stephanopoulos has already pulled back from moderating “This Week” and may be in line to succeed 68-year-old Diane Sawyer as the anchor of “ABC World News Tonight” some day. Although Schieffer says he hasn’t set his retirement date, it may be not be very far way — “another year or so,” as he put it.

 Which means both CBS and ABC would have to retool their Sunday-morning shows with new moderators.

 “Time is on David’s side,” says Bloomberg View columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, a semi-regular “MTP” panelist. “It’s semi-inevitable. He just has to keep doing what he’s doing, and continue to break new ground on the big stories of the week. In five to 10 years, we’ll be talking about him as the grand old man of Sunday morning.” ||||| NBC News last year hired a "psychological consultant" to interview David Gregory's friends and family, part of an effort to get greater insight into the "Meet the Press" host's personality, according to a new report.

 The point of hiring the consultant, NBC spokeswoman Meghan Pianta said, was to "to get perspective and insight from people who know him best."

 That nugget is part of a new report from The Washington Post's Paul Farhi looking at the problems that have bedeviled "Meet the Press" in recent years. The show, which recently spent 15 years in first place, is now in third and suffering a three-year decline.

 "Gregory’s job does not appear to be in any immediate jeopardy, but there are plenty of signs of concern,” Farhi wrote.

 The Sunday show ratings race has been fiercely competitive since 2013, when CBS ended NBC's run as the undisputed king of Sunday morning. In 2014, "Meet" has finished first in total viewers only twice.

 Despite the failing ratings, Gregory renewed his contract in 2013 and network executives said as recently as March that they are committed to improving the show with him as host.

 UPDATE (11:17 a.m.): In an email, Pianta challenged Farhi's reporting, saying that the network brought in a "brand consultant" not a psychological one as Farhi reported:

 Last year Meet the Press brought in a brand consultant — not, as reported, a psychological one — to better understand how its anchor connects. This is certainly not unusual for any television program, especially one that’s driven so heavily by one person.

 UPDATE (11:25 a.m.): Farhi said he checked with NBC twice on Sunday about the term "psychological" and that they had no objections at the time.

 "I checked it twice with them yesterday. No objections then," he wrote in an email.

 UPDATE (1:05p.m.): The company that did the consulting for NBC was Elastic Strategy out of New York, Pianta said.

 Read more about: NBC, Meet The Press, David Gregory ||||| NBC News has issued a statement, which it emailed to Poynter, about a report in The Washington Post that it hired a “psychological consultant” to talk to David Gregory’s friends and family about the declining ratings of “Meet the Press,” which he hosts.

 “Last year Meet the Press brought in a brand consultant—not, as reported, a psychological one—to better understand how its anchor connects,” NBC News says. “This is certainly not unusual for any television program, especially one that’s driven so heavily by one person.”

 Politico’s Hadas Gold writes Paul Farhi, who wrote the Post story, told her he “checked with NBC twice on Sunday about the term ‘psychological’ and that they had no objections at the time.” Reached by email, Farhi tells Poynter those conversations were via telephone. |||||

– A long Washington Post article on David Gregory and the troubles he faces as moderator of NBC's Meet the Press has quite a few people wondering what's going on at the show. As the Post explains, the longest-running television program has been declining in the ratings for three years, and is currently the No. 3 Sunday talk show. Last year, the network brought in a psychological consultant to talk to friends and family members of Gregory, who took over the gig after Tim Russert's death in 2008. As the Post puts it, that seems "odd" to some, considering Gregory has been at NBC almost two decades. Multiple blogs picked up on that tidbit, and NBC quickly gave Poynter a statement insisting it actually hired "a brand consultant," not a psychological one, "to better understand how its anchor connects." The network also says the move is "not unusual." But the article's writer tells Politico he checked the term "psychological" with the network twice, and it had "no objections then"—and it remains in the Post story as of this writing. As for Gregory's job, Post reporter Paul Farhi writes that it "does not appear to be in any immediate jeopardy, but there are plenty of signs of concern."