Russians Seek Clues and Count Blessings After Meteor Blast

CHEBARKUL, Russia —After a brilliant flash illuminated the sky on Friday morning like a second sun, Alyona V. Borchininova and several others in this run-down little town in the rust belt of western Siberian wandered outside, confused and curious.

They followed the light’s path to the town’s lakefront, where they trudged for about a mile over the open ice until they came to a startling sight: a perfectly round hole in the ice, about 20 feet in diameter, its rim glossy with fresh ice that had crusted on top of the snow.

“It was eerie,” Ms. Borchininova, a barmaid, said Saturday. “So we stood there. And then somebody joked, ‘Now the green men will crawl out and say hello.’ ”

Russians are still coming to terms with what NASA scientists say was a 7,000-ton chunk of space rock that came hurtling out of the sky at 40,000 miles an hour, exploding over the Ural Mountains, spraying debris for miles around and, amazingly, killing no one.

As the Russian government pursued the scientific mysteries of Friday’s exploding meteor by sending divers into the inky waters of the hole in Lake Chebarkul on Saturday, residents reacted with a kind of giddy relief and humor over their luck at having survived a cosmic near miss.

NASA estimates that when the meteor entered the atmosphere over Alaska, it weighed 7,000 to 10,000 tons and was at least 50 feet in diameter, a size that strikes the Earth about once every hundred years. They said it had exploded with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT.

The shock wave injured hundreds of people about 54 miles away in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, most from broken glass; collapsed a wall in a zinc factory; set off car alarms; and sent dishes flying in thousands of apartments. Broken windows exposed people and pipes to the Siberian winter; many residents focused Saturday on boarding windows and draining pipes, to preserve heating systems.

If pieces of meteorite reached the surface, as NASA said was likely, they fell largely into the sea of birch and pine trees of Siberia, now blanketed in snow.

Lake Chebarkul is one of four sites the government believes to felt a significant impact, the minister of emergency situations, Vladimir Pushkov, told Interfax.

As the sun rose Saturday, the snow crystals sparkling in the sun like a million tiny mirrors, steam wafted from the site, apparently related to the work of divers, but the lake yielded little to shed light on the mystery.

Mr. Pushkov later said divers found nothing on the lake bed, but did not rule out meteor shrapnel as the cause of the hole.

“Experts are studying all possible places of impact,” he said. “We have no reports of confirmed discoveries.”

The discovery of a confirmed fragment could help scientists better apprehend the composition of the meteor, perhaps shedding light on how close it was to descending further before exploding from the heat, or of hitting the surface, potentially causing vastly more casualties in this region of military and industrial towns, a major nuclear research site and waste repository and other delicate infrastructure.

In Chelyabinsk, the worst hit town, most who had sought medical attention were released from hospitals by Saturday, the Ministry of Health reported. A total of 1,158 people, including 298 children, asked for medical assistance. Of these 52 people were hospitalized. By Saturday afternoon, 12 adults and three children remained in hospitals.

Health officials evacuated to Moscow a woman who broke two vertebrae after falling down a flight of stairs. One man’s finger was cut off by broken glass.

Overshadowing these misfortunes, a fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was being hailed as a hero for saving 44 children from glass cuts by ordering them to crawl under their desks after she saw the flash. Having no idea what it was, she executed a cold war-era duck-and-cover drill, with salutary results.

Ms. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated by glass that severed a tendon in her arm, Interfax reported; not one of her students suffered a cut.

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DealBook: Confidence on Upswing, Mergers Make Comeback

The mega-merger is back.

For the corporate takeover business, the last half-decade was a fallow period. Wall Street deal makers and chief executives, brought low by the global financial crisis, lacked the confidence to strike the audacious multibillion-dollar acquisitions that had defined previous market booms.

Cycles, however, turn, and in the opening weeks of 2013, merger activity has suddenly roared back to life. On Thursday, Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run by Warren E. Buffett, said it had teamed up with Brazilian investors to buy the ketchup maker H. J. Heinz for about $23 billion. And American Airlines and US Airways agreed to merge in a deal valued at $11 billion.

Those transactions come a week after a planned $24 billion buyout of the computer company Dell by its founder, Michael S. Dell, and private equity backers. And Liberty Global, the company controlled by the billionaire media magnate John C. Malone, struck a $16 billion deal to buy the British cable business Virgin Media.

“Since the crisis, one by one, the stars came into alignment, and it was only a matter of time before you had a week like we just had,” said James B. Lee Jr., the vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase.

Still, bankers and lawyers remain circumspect, warning that it is still too early to declare a mergers-and-acquisitions boom like those during the junk bond craze of 1989, the dot-com bubble of 1999 and the leveraged buyout bonanza of 2007. They also say that it is important to pay heed to the excesses that developed during these moments of merger mania, which all ended badly.

A confluence of factors has driven the recent deals. Most visibly, the stock market has been on a tear, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index this week briefly hitting its highest levels since November 2007. Higher share prices have buoyed the confidence of chief executives, who now, instead of retrenching, are looking for ways to expand their businesses.

A number of clouds that hovered over the markets last year have also been removed, eliminating the uncertainty that hampered deal making. Mergers and acquisitions activity in 2012 remained tepid as companies took a wait-and-see approach over the outcome of the presidential election and negotiations over the fiscal cliff. The problems in Europe, which began in earnest in 2011, shut down a lot of potential transactions, but the region has since stabilized.

“When we talk to our corporate clients as well as the bankers, we keep hearing them talk about increased confidence,” said John A. Bick, a partner at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, who advised Heinz on its acquisition by Mr. Buffett and his partners.

Mr. Bick said that mega-mergers had a psychological component, meaning that once transactions start happening, chief executives do not want to be left behind. “In the same way that success breeds success, deals breed more deals,” he said.

A central reason for the return of big transactions is the mountain of cash on corporate balance sheets. After the financial crisis, companies hunkered down, laying off employees and cutting costs. As a result, they generated savings. Today, corporations in the S.& P. 500 are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash. With interest rates near zero, that money is earning very little in bank accounts, so executives are looking to put it to work by acquiring businesses.

The private equity deal-making machine is also revving up again. The world’s largest buyout firms have hundreds of billions of dollars of “dry powder” — money allotted to deals in Wall Street parlance — and they are on the hunt. The proposed leveraged buyout of Dell, led by Mr. Dell and the investment firm Silver Lake Partners, was the largest private equity transaction since July 2007, when the Blackstone Group acquired the hotel chain Hilton Worldwide for $26 billion just as the credit markets were seizing up.

But perhaps the single biggest factor driving the return of corporate takeovers is the banking system’s renewed health. Corporations often rely on bank loans for financing acquisitions, and the ability of private equity firms to strike multibillion-dollar transactions depends on the willingness of banks to lend them money.

For years, banks, saddled by the toxic mortgage assets weighing on their balance sheets, turned off the lending spigot. But with the housing crisis in the rearview mirror and economic conditions slowly improving, banks are again lining up to provide corporate loans at record-low interest rates to finance acquisitions.

The banks, of course, are major beneficiaries of megadeals, earning big fees from both advising on the transactions and lending money to finance them. Mergers and acquisitions in the United States total $158.7 billion so far this year, according to Thomson Reuters data, more than double the amount in the same period last year. JPMorgan, for example, has benefited from the surge, advising on four big deals in recent weeks, including the Dell bid and Comcast’s $16.7 billion offer for the rest of NBCUniversal that it did not already own.

Mr. Buffett, in a television interview last month, declared that the banks had repaired their businesses and no longer posed a threat to the economy. “The capital ratios are huge, the excesses on the asset aside have been largely cleared out,” said Mr. Buffett, whose acquisition of Heinz will be his second-largest acquisition, behind his $35.9 billion purchase of a majority stake in the railroad company Burlington Northern Santa Fe in 2009.

While Wall Street has an air of giddiness over the year’s start, most deal makers temper their comments about the current environment with warnings about undisciplined behavior like overpaying for deals and borrowing too much to pay for them.

Though private equity firms were battered by the financial crisis, they made it through the downturn on relatively solid ground. Many of their megadeals, like Hilton, looked destined for bankruptcy after the markets collapsed, but they have since recovered. The deals have benefited from an improving economy, as well as robust lending markets that allowed companies to push back the large amounts of debt that were to have come due in the next few years.

But there are still plenty of cautionary tales about the consequences of overpriced, overleveraged takeovers. Consider Energy Future Holdings, the biggest private equity deal in history. Struck at the peak of the merger boom in October 2007, the company has suffered from low natural gas prices and too much debt, and could be forced to restructure this year. Its owners, a group led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and TPG, are likely to lose billions.

Even Mr. Buffett made a mistake on Energy Future Holdings, having invested $2 billion in the company’s bonds. He admitted to shareholders last year that the investment was a blunder and would most likely be wiped out.

“In tennis parlance,” Mr. Buffett wrote, “this was a major unforced error.”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/15/2013, on page A1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Confidence on Upswing, Mergers Make Comeback.

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Fat Dad: Baking for Love

Fat Dad

Dawn Lerman writes about growing up with a fat dad.

My grandmother Beauty always told me that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and by the look of pure delight on my dad’s face when he ate a piece of warm, homemade chocolate cake, or bit into a just-baked crispy cookie, I grew to believe this was true. I had no doubt that when the time came, and I liked a boy, that a batch of my gooey, rich, chocolaty brownies would cast him under a magic spell, and we would live happily ever.

But when Hank Thomas walked into Miss Seawall’s ninth grade algebra class on a rainy, September day and smiled at me with his amazing grin, long brown hair, big green eyes and Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, I was completely unprepared for the avalanche of emotions that invaded every fiber of my being. Shivers, a pounding heart, and heat overcame me when he asked if I knew the value of 1,000 to the 25th power. The only answer I could think of, as I fumbled over my words, was “love me, love me,” but I managed to blurt out “1E+75.” I wanted to come across as smart and aloof, but every time he looked at me, I started stuttering and sweating as my face turned bright red. No one had ever looked at me like that: as if he knew me, as if he knew how lost I was and how badly I needed to be loved.

Hank, who was a year older than me, was very popular and accomplished. Unlike other boys who were popular for their looks or athletic skills, Hank was smart and talented. He played piano and guitar, and composed the most beautiful classical and rock concertos that left both teachers and students in awe.

Unlike Hank, I had not quite come into my own yet. I was shy, had raggedy messy hair that I tied back into braids, and my clothes were far from stylish. My mother and sister had been on the road touring for the past year with the Broadway show “Annie.” My sister had been cast as a principal orphan, and I stayed home with my dad to attend high school. My dad was always busy with work and martini dinners that lasted late into the night. I spent most of my evenings at home alone baking and making care packages for my sister instead of coercing my parents to buy me the latest selection of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans — the rich colored bluejeans with the swan stitched on the back pocket that you had to lay on your bed to zip up. It was the icon of cool for the popular and pretty girls. I was neither, but Hank picked me to be his math partner anyway.

With every equation we solved, my love for Hank became more desperate. After several months of exchanging smiles, I decided to make Hank a batch of my homemade chocolate brownies for Valentine’s Day — the brownies that my dad said were like his own personal nirvana. My dad named them “closet” brownies, because when I was a little girl and used to make them for the family, he said that as soon as he smelled them coming out of the oven, he could imagine dashing away with them into the closet and devouring the whole batch.

After debating for hours if I should make the brownies for Hank with walnuts or chips, or fill the centers with peanut butter or caramel, I got to work. I had made brownies hundreds of times before, but this time felt different. With each ingredient I carefully stirred into the bowl, my heart began beating harder. I felt like I was going to burst from excitement. Surely, after Hank tasted these, he would love me as much as I loved him. I was not just making him brownies. I was l showing him who I was, and what mattered to me. After the brownies cooled, I sprinkled them with a touch of powdered sugar and wrapped them with foil and red tissue paper. The next day I placed them in Hank’s locker, with a note saying, “Call me.”

After seven excruciating days with no call, some smiles and the usual small talk in math class, I conjured up the nerve to ask Hank if he liked my brownies.

“The brownies were from you?” he asked. “They were delicious.”

Then Hank invited me to a party at his house the following weekend. Without hesitation, I responded that I would love to come. I pleaded with my friend Sarah to accompany me.

As the day grew closer, I made my grandmother Beauty’s homemade fudge — the chocolate fudge she made for Papa the night before he proposed to her. Stirring the milk, butter and sugar together eased my nerves. I had never been to a high school party before, and I didn’t know what to expect. Sarah advised me to ditch the braids as she styled my hair, used a violet eyeliner and lent me her favorite V-neck sweater and a pair of her best Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

When we walked in the door, fudge in hand, Hank was nowhere to be found. Thinking I had made a mistake for coming and getting ready to leave, I felt a hand on my back. It was Hank’s. He hugged me and told me he was glad I finally arrived. When Hank put his arm around me, nothing else existed. With a little help from Cupid or the magic of Beauty’s recipes, I found love.

---

Fat Dad’s ‘Closet’ Brownies

These brownies are more like fudge than cake and contain a fraction of the flour found in traditional brownie recipes. My father called them “closet” brownies, because when he smelled them coming out of the oven he could imagine hiding in the closet to eat the whole batch. I baked them in the ninth grade for a boy that I had a crush on, and they were more effective than Cupid’s arrow at winning his heart.

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing the pan
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped, or semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs at room temperature, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
Fresh berries or powdered sugar for garnish (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grease an 8-inch square baking dish.

3. In a double boiler, melt chocolate. Then add butter, melt and stir to blend. Remove from heat and pour into a mixing bowl. Stir in sugar, eggs and vanilla and mix well.

4. Add flour. Mix well until very smooth. Add chopped walnuts if desired. Pour batter into greased baking pan.

5. Bake for 35 minutes, or until set and barely firm in the middle. Allow to cool on a rack before removing from pan. Optional: garnish with powdered sugar, or berries, or both.

Yield: 16 brownies

---

Dawn Lerman is a New York-based health and nutrition consultant and founder of Magnificent Mommies, which provides school lectures, cooking classes and workshops. Her series on growing up with a fat father appears occasionally on Well.

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Fat Dad: Baking for Love

Fat Dad

Dawn Lerman writes about growing up with a fat dad.

My grandmother Beauty always told me that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and by the look of pure delight on my dad’s face when he ate a piece of warm, homemade chocolate cake, or bit into a just-baked crispy cookie, I grew to believe this was true. I had no doubt that when the time came, and I liked a boy, that a batch of my gooey, rich, chocolaty brownies would cast him under a magic spell, and we would live happily ever.

But when Hank Thomas walked into Miss Seawall’s ninth grade algebra class on a rainy, September day and smiled at me with his amazing grin, long brown hair, big green eyes and Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, I was completely unprepared for the avalanche of emotions that invaded every fiber of my being. Shivers, a pounding heart, and heat overcame me when he asked if I knew the value of 1,000 to the 25th power. The only answer I could think of, as I fumbled over my words, was “love me, love me,” but I managed to blurt out “1E+75.” I wanted to come across as smart and aloof, but every time he looked at me, I started stuttering and sweating as my face turned bright red. No one had ever looked at me like that: as if he knew me, as if he knew how lost I was and how badly I needed to be loved.

Hank, who was a year older than me, was very popular and accomplished. Unlike other boys who were popular for their looks or athletic skills, Hank was smart and talented. He played piano and guitar, and composed the most beautiful classical and rock concertos that left both teachers and students in awe.

Unlike Hank, I had not quite come into my own yet. I was shy, had raggedy messy hair that I tied back into braids, and my clothes were far from stylish. My mother and sister had been on the road touring for the past year with the Broadway show “Annie.” My sister had been cast as a principal orphan, and I stayed home with my dad to attend high school. My dad was always busy with work and martini dinners that lasted late into the night. I spent most of my evenings at home alone baking and making care packages for my sister instead of coercing my parents to buy me the latest selection of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans — the rich colored bluejeans with the swan stitched on the back pocket that you had to lay on your bed to zip up. It was the icon of cool for the popular and pretty girls. I was neither, but Hank picked me to be his math partner anyway.

With every equation we solved, my love for Hank became more desperate. After several months of exchanging smiles, I decided to make Hank a batch of my homemade chocolate brownies for Valentine’s Day — the brownies that my dad said were like his own personal nirvana. My dad named them “closet” brownies, because when I was a little girl and used to make them for the family, he said that as soon as he smelled them coming out of the oven, he could imagine dashing away with them into the closet and devouring the whole batch.

After debating for hours if I should make the brownies for Hank with walnuts or chips, or fill the centers with peanut butter or caramel, I got to work. I had made brownies hundreds of times before, but this time felt different. With each ingredient I carefully stirred into the bowl, my heart began beating harder. I felt like I was going to burst from excitement. Surely, after Hank tasted these, he would love me as much as I loved him. I was not just making him brownies. I was l showing him who I was, and what mattered to me. After the brownies cooled, I sprinkled them with a touch of powdered sugar and wrapped them with foil and red tissue paper. The next day I placed them in Hank’s locker, with a note saying, “Call me.”

After seven excruciating days with no call, some smiles and the usual small talk in math class, I conjured up the nerve to ask Hank if he liked my brownies.

“The brownies were from you?” he asked. “They were delicious.”

Then Hank invited me to a party at his house the following weekend. Without hesitation, I responded that I would love to come. I pleaded with my friend Sarah to accompany me.

As the day grew closer, I made my grandmother Beauty’s homemade fudge — the chocolate fudge she made for Papa the night before he proposed to her. Stirring the milk, butter and sugar together eased my nerves. I had never been to a high school party before, and I didn’t know what to expect. Sarah advised me to ditch the braids as she styled my hair, used a violet eyeliner and lent me her favorite V-neck sweater and a pair of her best Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

When we walked in the door, fudge in hand, Hank was nowhere to be found. Thinking I had made a mistake for coming and getting ready to leave, I felt a hand on my back. It was Hank’s. He hugged me and told me he was glad I finally arrived. When Hank put his arm around me, nothing else existed. With a little help from Cupid or the magic of Beauty’s recipes, I found love.

---

Fat Dad’s ‘Closet’ Brownies

These brownies are more like fudge than cake and contain a fraction of the flour found in traditional brownie recipes. My father called them “closet” brownies, because when he smelled them coming out of the oven he could imagine hiding in the closet to eat the whole batch. I baked them in the ninth grade for a boy that I had a crush on, and they were more effective than Cupid’s arrow at winning his heart.

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing the pan
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped, or semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs at room temperature, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
Fresh berries or powdered sugar for garnish (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grease an 8-inch square baking dish.

3. In a double boiler, melt chocolate. Then add butter, melt and stir to blend. Remove from heat and pour into a mixing bowl. Stir in sugar, eggs and vanilla and mix well.

4. Add flour. Mix well until very smooth. Add chopped walnuts if desired. Pour batter into greased baking pan.

5. Bake for 35 minutes, or until set and barely firm in the middle. Allow to cool on a rack before removing from pan. Optional: garnish with powdered sugar, or berries, or both.

Yield: 16 brownies

---

Dawn Lerman is a New York-based health and nutrition consultant and founder of Magnificent Mommies, which provides school lectures, cooking classes and workshops. Her series on growing up with a fat father appears occasionally on Well.

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Bits Blog: Former BlackBerry C.E.O. Sold All Company Shares

Jim Balsillie, the former co-chief executive and co-chairman of BlackBerry, has sold all of his shares in the struggling company, a regulatory filing indicated on Thursday.

Mr. Balsillie’s arrival at what was then called Research in Motion in 1992 and his personal investment of $125,000 saved the company in its early days. But Mr. Balsillie’s latest investment move means that he will not gain if the new line of BlackBerry 10 phones revive the company’s fortunes.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated Thursday, showed that Mr. Balsillie held no shares in the company as of the end of December. Mr. Balsillie owned up to 33 percent of the company, now called BlackBerry, before it became publicly traded and he reported holding 5.1 percent of its shares in a previous filing.

When asked about Mr. Balsillie’s pullout, Kris Thompson, a longtime BlackBerry analyst at National Bank Financial, replied: “Who cares?” BlackBerry’s shares initially slipped 7.5 percent to $12.94 in Nasdaq trading Thursday, but had recovered later in the morning.

Following a protracted and severe decline in BlackBerry’s stock price and American market share, Mr. Balsillie stepped down as both co-chief executive and co-chairman along with Mike Lazaridis in January 2012. While Mr. Lazaridis remains on the BlackBerry board as the company’s vice chairman, Mr. Balsillie resigned as a director in March.

A separate securities filing issued on Thursday indicated that Mr. Lazaridis, who co-founded the company, still holds 5.7 percent of BlackBerry’s stock.

Mr. Balsillie could not immediately be reached for comment. Adam Emery, a spokesman for BlackBerry, said the company does not “comment on holdings of individual shareholders.”

Earlier this week Mr. Thompson, the analyst, issued a report that praised many of the features on the new BlackBerry 10 phones but concluded that they will not significantly rebuild the company’s market share. He cited an impending wave of new products from larger competitors and the general lack of desirable and high quality apps for BlackBerry 10.

While Mr. Lazaridis handled the technology side of the company, Mr. Balsillie, an accountant, is widely credited with putting BlackBerry on the stable financial footing that ultimately allowed it to develop the BlackBerry device. He also played a pivotal role in convincing skeptical wireless carriers to carry the company’s first wireless e-mail devices on their networks.

Both men, however, were widely criticized for not responding more effectively and swiftly to the arrival of Apple’s iPhone and phones using Google’s Android operating system. Those smartphones now overwhelmingly dominate a market that BlackBerry created and was once leading.

At various times, Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis have sold substantial stakes in BlackBerry to fund educational institutions in Waterloo, Ontario, the company’s hometown.

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 15

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G.M., Hurt by Europe, Still Increases Profit

DETROIT – General Motors said its profit in the fourth quarter increased slightly as continued losses in Europe offset positive results in North America.

G.M., the nation’s biggest carmaker, said it had net income of $900 million in the quarter, compared to $500 million in the same period a year earlier. Revenue increased to $39.3 billion, up from $38 billion.

The company said strong sales in the surging United States market helped it post a $1.4 billion pretax profit in North America.

But in Europe, General Motors, like many other automakers, is continuing to absorb big losses from the worst sales environment in nearly 20 years. The company said it lost $700 million in the quarter.

The company had modest success in its other international operations, reporting a $500 million profit in Asia and a net income of $100 million in South America.

The fourth quarter capped a transitional 2012 for G.M., its third full year of operations since its bankruptcy and $49.5 billion government bailout in 2009.

While it is struggling to restructure in Europe, the company is in the process of introducing several new models in the United States, including revamped versions of its highly profitable pickup trucks.

G.M. also negotiated a sale of the Treasury Department’s ownership stake in the company.

For the full year, G.M. said it had net income of $4.9 billion compared with $7.6 billion in 2011. Executives said the 2011 profit included $1.2 billion in one-time gains on asset sales.

For the year, revenue grew to $152.3 billion, up from $150.3 billion in 2011.

G.M.'s chief executive, Daniel Akerson, said the company had a solid year in 2012, and said its future performance would depend on growing sales with new models.

“This year our priorities will be executing flawless new vehicle launches, controlling costs and delivering more vehicles to our customers at outstanding value,” Mr. Akerson said in a statement.

G.M.'s big profits in North America will directly benefit its 49,000 hourly workers in the United States, each of whom will receive profit-sharing checks of up to $6,750 for their work in 2012.

G.M. made several accounting changes in the fourth quarter, the largest of which was a one-time, non-cash gain of $34.9 billion to restore valuation allowances for deferred tax assets in the United States and Canada. The gain was balanced by a $26.4 million charge to erase goodwill tied to its North American operations, a $5.2 billlion charge for impairment of European assets and a $2.6 bilion charged related to its salaried pension plans.

The write-down of European assets reflected the troubled state of the company’s business on the Continent.

For 2012, G.M. had a pretax loss of $1.8 billion in Europe, which was more than double the $700 million lost the previous year. By comparison, the North American division earned a pretax profit of $7 billion in 2012, down from $7.2 billion the year before.

G.M. executives were cautious about predicting better overall results this year, particularly in Europe.

Dan Ammann, G.M.'s chief financial officer, said the European market would continue to deteriorate this year. However, the company is sticking with its prediction that it would break even there by mid-decade.

“We feel better and better about the things we can control,” Mr. Ammann said.

Mr. Akerson said that cost cuts will continue in Europe. He said G.M. eliminated about 2,500 jobs there last year and expects the same number of cuts in 2013. He declined to say whether the company might close any more plants beyond the announced shutdown of a factory in Germany by 2016.

“We’re going to be smart about how we cut costs, and not just close plants,” Mr. Akerson said.

G.M.'s profit in the beginning of the year may be thinner than last year because of the marketing and manufacturing costs associated with selling older truck inventory and introducing the new models.

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Life, Interrupted: Crazy, Unsexy Cancer Tips

Life, Interrupted

Suleika Jaouad writes about her experiences as a young adult with cancer.

Every few weeks I host a “girls’ night” at my apartment in Lower Manhattan with a group of friends who are at various stages in their cancer treatments. Everyone brings something to eat and drink, and we sit around my living room talking to one another about subjects both heavy and light, ranging from post-chemo hair styling tips, fears of relapse or funny anecdotes about a recent hospital visit. But one topic that doesn’t come up as often as you might think — particularly at a gathering of women in their early 20s and 30s — is sex.

Actually, I almost didn’t write this column. Time and again, I’ve sat down to write about sex and cancer, but each time I’ve deleted the draft and moved on to a different topic. Writing about cancer is always a challenge for me because it hits so close to home. And this topic felt even more difficult. After my diagnosis at age 22 with leukemia, the second piece of news I learned was that I would likely be infertile as a result of chemotherapy. It was a one-two punch that was my first indication that issues of cancer and sexual health are inextricably tied.

But to my surprise, sex is not at the center of the conversation in the oncology unit — far from it. No one has ever broached the topic of sex and cancer during my diagnosis and treatment. Not doctors, not nurses. On the rare occasions I initiated the conversation myself, talking about sex and cancer felt like a shameful secret. I felt embarrassed about the changes taking place in my body after chemotherapy treatment began — changes that for me included hot flashes, infertility and early menopause. Today, at age 24, when my peers are dating, marrying and having children of their own, my cancer treatments are causing internal and external changes in my body that leave me feeling confused, vulnerable, frustrated — and verifiably unsexy.

When sex has come up in conversations with my cancer friends, it’s hardly the free-flowing, liberating conversation you see on television shows like HBO’s “Girls” or “Sex and the City.” When my group of cancer friends talk about sex — maybe it’s an exaggeration to call it the blind leading the blind — we’re just a group of young women who have received little to no information about the sexual side effects of our disease.

One friend worried that sex had become painful as a result of pelvic radiation treatment. Another described difficulty reaching orgasm and wondered if it was a side effect of chemotherapy. And yet another talked about her oncologist’s visible discomfort when she asked him about safe birth control methods. “I felt like I was having a conversation with my uncle or something,” she told me. As a result, she turned to Google to find out if she could take a morning-after pill. “I felt uncomfortable with him and had nowhere to turn,” she said.

This is where our conversations always run into a wall. Emotional support — we can do that for one another. But we are at a loss when it comes to answering crucial medical questions about sexual health and cancer. Who can we talk to? Are these common side effects? And what treatments or remedies exist, if any, for the sexual side effects associated with cancer?

If mine and my girlfriends’ experiences are indicative of a trend, then the way women with cancer are being educated about their sexual health is not by their health care providers but on their own. I was lucky enough to meet a counselor who specializes in the sexual health of cancer patients at a conference for young adult cancer patients. Sage Bolte, a counselor who works for INOVA Life With Cancer, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization that provides free resources for cancer patients, was the one to finally explain to me that many of the sexual side effects of cancer are both normal and treatable.

“Part of the reason you feel shame and embarrassment about this is because no one out there is saying this is normal. But it is,” Dr. Bolte told me. “Shame on us as health care providers that we have not created an environment that is conducive to talking about sexual health.”

Dr. Bolte said part of the problem is that doctors are so focused on saving a cancer patient’s life that they forget to discuss issues of sexual health. “My sense is that it’s not about physicians or health care providers not caring about your sexual health or thinking that it’s unimportant, but that cancer is the emergency, and everything else seems to fall by the wayside,” she said.

She said that one young woman she was working with had significant graft-versus-host disease, a potential side effect of stem cell transplantation that made her skin painfully sensitive to touch. Her partner would try to hold her hand or touch her stomach, and she would push him away or jump at his touch. It only took two times for him to get the message that “she didn’t want to be touched,” Dr. Bolte said. Unfortunately, by the time they showed up at Dr. Bolte’s office and the young woman’s condition had improved, she thought her boyfriend was no longer attracted to her. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, was afraid to touch her out of fear of causing pain or making an unwanted pass. All that was needed to help them reconnect was a little communication.

Dr. Bolte also referred me to resources like the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists; the Society for Sex Therapy and Research; and the Association of Oncology Social Workers, all professional organizations that can help connect cancer patients to professionals trained in working with sexual health issues and the emotional and physical concerns related to a cancer diagnosis.

I know that my girlfriends and I are not the only women out there who are wondering how to help themselves and their friends answer difficult questions about sex and cancer. Sex can be a squeamish subject even when cancer isn’t part of the picture, so the combination of sex and cancer together can feel impossible to talk about. But women like me and my friends shouldn’t have to suffer in silence.

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Suleika Jaouad (pronounced su-LAKE-uh ja-WAD) is a 24-year-old writer who lives in New York City. Her column, “Life, Interrupted,” chronicling her experiences as a young adult with cancer, appears regularly on Well. Follow @suleikajaouad on Twitter.

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Life, Interrupted: Crazy, Unsexy Cancer Tips

Life, Interrupted

Suleika Jaouad writes about her experiences as a young adult with cancer.

Every few weeks I host a “girls’ night” at my apartment in Lower Manhattan with a group of friends who are at various stages in their cancer treatments. Everyone brings something to eat and drink, and we sit around my living room talking to one another about subjects both heavy and light, ranging from post-chemo hair styling tips, fears of relapse or funny anecdotes about a recent hospital visit. But one topic that doesn’t come up as often as you might think — particularly at a gathering of women in their early 20s and 30s — is sex.

Actually, I almost didn’t write this column. Time and again, I’ve sat down to write about sex and cancer, but each time I’ve deleted the draft and moved on to a different topic. Writing about cancer is always a challenge for me because it hits so close to home. And this topic felt even more difficult. After my diagnosis at age 22 with leukemia, the second piece of news I learned was that I would likely be infertile as a result of chemotherapy. It was a one-two punch that was my first indication that issues of cancer and sexual health are inextricably tied.

But to my surprise, sex is not at the center of the conversation in the oncology unit — far from it. No one has ever broached the topic of sex and cancer during my diagnosis and treatment. Not doctors, not nurses. On the rare occasions I initiated the conversation myself, talking about sex and cancer felt like a shameful secret. I felt embarrassed about the changes taking place in my body after chemotherapy treatment began — changes that for me included hot flashes, infertility and early menopause. Today, at age 24, when my peers are dating, marrying and having children of their own, my cancer treatments are causing internal and external changes in my body that leave me feeling confused, vulnerable, frustrated — and verifiably unsexy.

When sex has come up in conversations with my cancer friends, it’s hardly the free-flowing, liberating conversation you see on television shows like HBO’s “Girls” or “Sex and the City.” When my group of cancer friends talk about sex — maybe it’s an exaggeration to call it the blind leading the blind — we’re just a group of young women who have received little to no information about the sexual side effects of our disease.

One friend worried that sex had become painful as a result of pelvic radiation treatment. Another described difficulty reaching orgasm and wondered if it was a side effect of chemotherapy. And yet another talked about her oncologist’s visible discomfort when she asked him about safe birth control methods. “I felt like I was having a conversation with my uncle or something,” she told me. As a result, she turned to Google to find out if she could take a morning-after pill. “I felt uncomfortable with him and had nowhere to turn,” she said.

This is where our conversations always run into a wall. Emotional support — we can do that for one another. But we are at a loss when it comes to answering crucial medical questions about sexual health and cancer. Who can we talk to? Are these common side effects? And what treatments or remedies exist, if any, for the sexual side effects associated with cancer?

If mine and my girlfriends’ experiences are indicative of a trend, then the way women with cancer are being educated about their sexual health is not by their health care providers but on their own. I was lucky enough to meet a counselor who specializes in the sexual health of cancer patients at a conference for young adult cancer patients. Sage Bolte, a counselor who works for INOVA Life With Cancer, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization that provides free resources for cancer patients, was the one to finally explain to me that many of the sexual side effects of cancer are both normal and treatable.

“Part of the reason you feel shame and embarrassment about this is because no one out there is saying this is normal. But it is,” Dr. Bolte told me. “Shame on us as health care providers that we have not created an environment that is conducive to talking about sexual health.”

Dr. Bolte said part of the problem is that doctors are so focused on saving a cancer patient’s life that they forget to discuss issues of sexual health. “My sense is that it’s not about physicians or health care providers not caring about your sexual health or thinking that it’s unimportant, but that cancer is the emergency, and everything else seems to fall by the wayside,” she said.

She said that one young woman she was working with had significant graft-versus-host disease, a potential side effect of stem cell transplantation that made her skin painfully sensitive to touch. Her partner would try to hold her hand or touch her stomach, and she would push him away or jump at his touch. It only took two times for him to get the message that “she didn’t want to be touched,” Dr. Bolte said. Unfortunately, by the time they showed up at Dr. Bolte’s office and the young woman’s condition had improved, she thought her boyfriend was no longer attracted to her. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, was afraid to touch her out of fear of causing pain or making an unwanted pass. All that was needed to help them reconnect was a little communication.

Dr. Bolte also referred me to resources like the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists; the Society for Sex Therapy and Research; and the Association of Oncology Social Workers, all professional organizations that can help connect cancer patients to professionals trained in working with sexual health issues and the emotional and physical concerns related to a cancer diagnosis.

I know that my girlfriends and I are not the only women out there who are wondering how to help themselves and their friends answer difficult questions about sex and cancer. Sex can be a squeamish subject even when cancer isn’t part of the picture, so the combination of sex and cancer together can feel impossible to talk about. But women like me and my friends shouldn’t have to suffer in silence.

---

Suleika Jaouad (pronounced su-LAKE-uh ja-WAD) is a 24-year-old writer who lives in New York City. Her column, “Life, Interrupted,” chronicling her experiences as a young adult with cancer, appears regularly on Well. Follow @suleikajaouad on Twitter.

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Bits Blog: Apple Chief Hints at Shareholder Rewards to Come

Investors want more cash from Apple.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, wasn’t ready to give it to them on Tuesday. But recent history and Mr. Cook’s tendency to foreshadow events before they occur strongly suggest he will reward them soon.

Speaking for the second consecutive year in at a Goldman Sachs technology investor conference, Mr. Cook said Apple’s management team and board were discussing how to return more of the company’s enormous stockpile of cash to shareholders.

If those words sound familiar, it’s because Mr. Cook said almost the same thing a year ago at the Goldman Sachs conference. A month later, the company announced a plan to return more than $45 billion to shareholders over three years in the form of dividends and share repurchases.

That plan only served to slow the swelling of Apple’s cash hoard, not to reduce it. Last year around this time, Apple had nearly $100 billion in cash. Now it has around $137 billion.

“We do have some cash,” Mr. Cook said at the Goldman conference on Tuesday, in a moment of deliberate understatement that set off chuckles from his audience.

Some investors — like the hedge-fund manager David Einhorn — are cranky that Apple’s cash is sitting around earning so little interest.

Mr. Cook said Apple had looked at making some big acquisitions but never seriously enough to follow through on the deals. With its cash, Apple could afford one Amazon or two Facebooks and still have billions in spare change.

Instead, Apple buys smaller companies, mostly for their talent or intellectual property, Mr. Cook said. He said Apple has averaged about one acquisition every other month for the last three years.

How to send more cash to shareholders is the tricky part. Much of Apple’s cash is generated overseas and can’t be paid out to shareholders without being subject to repatriation taxes. In a recent research note, Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said  Apple could not meaningfully increase its return of cash to shareholders without paying the taxes or issuing debt.

While the latter option sounds nonsensical for a company with as much cash in the bank as Apple, a number of cash-rich technology companies, including Microsoft and Cisco, have issued debt, taking advantage of low interest rates. Mr. Sacconaghi suggested that the most attractive option for Apple shareholders would be for the company to borrow money, perhaps in the range of $50 billion to $100 billion, and use it to buy back stock or increase the dividend. He said increasing the return of cash was critical for Apple to attract a new class of dividend-hungry value investors as the company’s growth slows. Apple’s shares have declined about 33 percent since their high in September.

Mr. Cook called a lawsuit filed against the company by Mr. Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, a “silly sideshow.”

Mr. Einhorn has claimed that a change Apple is proposing to make to its corporate charter would limit the option of returning more cash to shareholders through the issuing of preferred stock. Apple has said that even with the charter change, it could issue preferred stock with shareholder approval.

Mr. Cook danced around the rumors that Apple would create an inexpensive iPhone for emerging markets, where income levels and a lack of subsidies by wireless carriers have put the company’s smartphone out of reach for many consumers. But he noted Apple’s history of coming up with creative new products, like the iPod shuffle and the iPad Mini, that appeal to budget-minded shoppers.

“The only thing we’ll never do is make a crappy product,” he said. “That’s the only religion we have.”

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