Recipes for Health: Skillet Beet and Farro Salad





“Comforting” isn’t a word I usually associate with salads, but this week I put together five grain salads that fit that bill. Over the years I have developed a number of delicious whole grain salads that combine various grains with vegetables, herbs and often nuts, tossed in a tangy dressing. I have also married many a grain and vegetable in a pilaf. I decided to bring both concepts together in hearty salads that I’m calling “skillet salads;” each one is heated through in a skillet just before serving.




You can get ahead on all of these by cooking the grains or noodles ahead. Whole grains freeze well and keep in the refrigerator for three days. Then it’s just a question of preparing vegetables, herbs and dressing. Even if you don’t cook the grains ahead you can prepare the other ingredients while they’re simmering.


I make a meal of these at lunch, and serve smaller portions as sides or starters for dinner. If you want to serve the warm, tangy grains on a bed of salad greens I recommend spinach or sturdy greens like frisée or dandelion greens that will stand up to the heat of the salad and won’t wilt beyond recognition when topped with something warm.


Skillet Beet and Farro Salad


This hearty winter salad can be a meal or a side dish, and warming it in the skillet makes it particularly comforting. Cook your farro until you see that the grains have begun to splay so they won’t be too chewy and can absorb the dressing properly.


For the Salad:


2 medium or 3 small beets, roasted


1 cup farro, soaked for 1 hour in 1 quart water


Salt to taste


1 ounce lightly toasted pistachios (scant 1/4 cup)


1/4 cup chopped fresh herbs, such as parsley, tarragon, marjoram, chives, mint


Freshly ground pepper


For the Dressing:


2 tablespoons sherry vinegar


1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar


Salt to taste


1 small garlic clove, minced or pureéd


1 teaspoon Dijon mustard


1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil


2 tablespoons walnut oil


Crumbled feta for garnish (optional)


1. Roast the beets and meanwhile cook the farro. Place in a medium saucepan with the soaking water and bring to a boil. Add salt to taste, reduce the heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes to an hour, until the grains have begun to splay. Turn off the heat and allow to sit for 15 minutes or longer in the water. Drain through a strainer set over a bowl.


2. While the farro is cooking, make the vinaigrette. Whisk together the vinegars, salt, garlic, and mustard. Whisk in the oils. Pour into a wide frying pan or saucepan and add to the farro, along with a couple of tablespoons of the farro cooking water. Peel and dice the beets and add, along with the herbs and pistachios. Stir over medium heat until heated through and serve, with a little feta sprinkled over the top if you wish.


Yield: Serves 6


Advance preparation: The cooked farro and the roasted beats will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator.


Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 304 calories; 19 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 5 grams polyunsaturated fat; 11 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 27 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 61 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 6 grams protein


Note: If you want to reduce the fat and calories in this dish, substitute buttermilk for some of the oil. Be careful not to allow the dressing to come to a boil when you heat it in the pan or the buttermilk will curdle.


Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”


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Recipes for Health: Skillet Beet and Farro Salad





“Comforting” isn’t a word I usually associate with salads, but this week I put together five grain salads that fit that bill. Over the years I have developed a number of delicious whole grain salads that combine various grains with vegetables, herbs and often nuts, tossed in a tangy dressing. I have also married many a grain and vegetable in a pilaf. I decided to bring both concepts together in hearty salads that I’m calling “skillet salads;” each one is heated through in a skillet just before serving.




You can get ahead on all of these by cooking the grains or noodles ahead. Whole grains freeze well and keep in the refrigerator for three days. Then it’s just a question of preparing vegetables, herbs and dressing. Even if you don’t cook the grains ahead you can prepare the other ingredients while they’re simmering.


I make a meal of these at lunch, and serve smaller portions as sides or starters for dinner. If you want to serve the warm, tangy grains on a bed of salad greens I recommend spinach or sturdy greens like frisée or dandelion greens that will stand up to the heat of the salad and won’t wilt beyond recognition when topped with something warm.


Skillet Beet and Farro Salad


This hearty winter salad can be a meal or a side dish, and warming it in the skillet makes it particularly comforting. Cook your farro until you see that the grains have begun to splay so they won’t be too chewy and can absorb the dressing properly.


For the Salad:


2 medium or 3 small beets, roasted


1 cup farro, soaked for 1 hour in 1 quart water


Salt to taste


1 ounce lightly toasted pistachios (scant 1/4 cup)


1/4 cup chopped fresh herbs, such as parsley, tarragon, marjoram, chives, mint


Freshly ground pepper


For the Dressing:


2 tablespoons sherry vinegar


1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar


Salt to taste


1 small garlic clove, minced or pureéd


1 teaspoon Dijon mustard


1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil


2 tablespoons walnut oil


Crumbled feta for garnish (optional)


1. Roast the beets and meanwhile cook the farro. Place in a medium saucepan with the soaking water and bring to a boil. Add salt to taste, reduce the heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes to an hour, until the grains have begun to splay. Turn off the heat and allow to sit for 15 minutes or longer in the water. Drain through a strainer set over a bowl.


2. While the farro is cooking, make the vinaigrette. Whisk together the vinegars, salt, garlic, and mustard. Whisk in the oils. Pour into a wide frying pan or saucepan and add to the farro, along with a couple of tablespoons of the farro cooking water. Peel and dice the beets and add, along with the herbs and pistachios. Stir over medium heat until heated through and serve, with a little feta sprinkled over the top if you wish.


Yield: Serves 6


Advance preparation: The cooked farro and the roasted beats will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator.


Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 304 calories; 19 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 5 grams polyunsaturated fat; 11 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 27 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 61 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 6 grams protein


Note: If you want to reduce the fat and calories in this dish, substitute buttermilk for some of the oil. Be careful not to allow the dressing to come to a boil when you heat it in the pan or the buttermilk will curdle.


Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”


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Opinionator | The Stone: What is a 'Hacktivist'?

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

The untimely death of the young Internet activist Aaron Swartz, apparently by suicide, has prompted an outpouring of reaction in the digital world. Foremost among the debates being reheated — one which had already grown in the wake of larger and more daring data breaches in the past few years — is whether Swartz’s activities as a “hacktivist” were being unfairly defined as malicious or criminal. In particular, critics (as well as Swartz’s family in a formal statement) have focused on the federal government’s indictment of Swartz for downloading millions of documents from the scholarly database JSTOR, an action which JSTOR itself had declined to prosecute.

I believe the debate itself is far broader than the specifics of this unhappy case, for if there was prosecutorial overreach it raises the question of whether we as a society created the enabling condition for this sort of overreach by letting the demonization of hacktivists go unanswered. Prosecutors do not work in a vacuum, after all; they are more apt to pursue cases where public discourse supports their actions. The debate thus raises an issue that, as philosopher of language, I have spent time considering: the impact of how words and terms are defined in the public sphere.

“Lexical Warfare” is a phrase that I like to use for battles over how a term is to be understood. Our political discourse is full of such battles; it is pretty routine to find discussions of who gets to be called “Republican” (as opposed to RINO – Republican in Name Only), what “freedom” should mean, what legitimately gets to be called “rape” —and the list goes on.

Lexical warfare is important because it can be a device to marginalize individuals within their self-identified political affiliation (for example, branding RINO’s defines them as something other than true Republicans), or it can beguile us into ignoring true threats to freedom (focusing on threats from government while being blind to threats from corporations, religion and custom), and in cases in which the word in question is “rape,” the definition can have far reaching consequences for the rights of women and social policy.

Lexical warfare is not exclusively concerned with changing the definitions of words and terms — it can also work to attach either a negative or positive affect to a term. Ronald Reagan and other conservatives successfully loaded the word “liberal” with negative connotations, while enhancing the positive aura of terms like “patriot” (few today would reject the label “patriotic,” but rather argue for why they are entitled to it).

Over the past few years we’ve watched a lexical warfare battle slowly unfold in the treatment of the term “hacktivism.” There has been an effort to redefine what the word means and what kinds of activities it describes; at the same time there has been an effort to tarnish the hacktivist label so that anyone who chooses to label themselves as such does so at their peril.

In the simplest and broadest sense, a hacktivist is someone who uses technology hacking to effect social change. The conflict now is between those who want to change the meaning of the word to denote immoral, sinister activities and those who want to defend the broader, more inclusive understanding of hacktivist. Let’s start with those who are trying to change the meaning so that it denotes sinister activities.

Over the past year several newspapers and blogs have cited Verizon’s 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, which claimed that 58 percent of all data leaked in 2011 was owing to the actions of “ideologically motivated hacktivists.” An example of the concern was an article in Infosecurity Magazine:

The year 2011 is renowned for being the year that hacktivists out-stole cybercriminals to take top honors according to the Verizon data breach report. Of the 174 million stolen records it tracked in 2011, 100 million were taken by hacktivist groups.

Suddenly, things are looking black and white again. Regardless of political motivation or intent, if there are victims of the attacks they perpetrate, then hacktivism has crossed the line. Not OK.

Meanwhile an article in ThreatPost proclaimed “Anonymous: Hacktivists Steal Most Data in 2011.”

The first thing to note is that both of these media sources are written by and for members of the information security business — it is in their interest to manufacture a threat, for the simple reason that threats mean business for these groups. But is it fair to say that the threat is being “manufactured”? What of the Verizon report that they cite?

The problem is that the headlines and articles, designed to tar hacktivists and make us fear them, did not reflect what the Verizon report actually said. According to page 19 of the report only 3 percent of the data breaches in the survey were by hacktivists — the bulk of them were by routine cybercriminals, disgruntled employees and nation states (83 percent were by organized criminals).

The “most data” claim, while accurate, gives a skewed picture. According to Chris Novak, the Managing Principal of Investigative Response on Verizon’s RISK Team, interviewed in ThreatPost, 2 percent of the 90 actions analyzed in the report accounted for 58 percent of the data released. The interview with Novak suggests that this data loss came from precisely two hacktivist actions — both by spin-offs of the well-known hacktivist group Anonymous — and that these large data dumps stemmed from the actions against the security firm HB Gary Federal, which had publicly announced their efforts to expose Anonymous, and a computer security firm called Stratfor). That means that in 2011 if you were worried about an intrusion into your system it was 33 times more likely that the perpetrator would be a criminal, nation state or disgruntled employee than a hacktivist. If you weren’t picking fights with Anonymous the chances would have dropped to zero — at least according to the cases analyzed in the report.

In effect, these infosecurity media outlets cited two actions by Anonymous spin-offs, implicated that actions like this were a principle project of hacktivism, and thereby implicated a larger, imminent threat of hacktivism. Meanwhile, the meaning of hacktivist was being narrowed from people who use technology in support of social causes to meaning individuals principally concerned with infiltrating and releasing the data of almost anyone.

Now let’s turn to an attempt to maintain the broader understanding of hacktivism. Several months ago I attended a birthday party in Germany for Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who was turning 34. As it happened, Domscheit-Berg had also been the spokesperson for Wikileaks and, after Julian Assange, the group’s most visible person. He had left the organization in 2010, and now he had a new venture, OpenLeaks. The party was also meant to be a coming out party for OpenLeaks.

The party was to be held in the new headquarters and training center for OpenLeaks — a large house in a small town about an hour outside of Berlin. I was half-expecting to find a bunker full of hackers probing Web sites with SQL injections and sifting through State Department cables, but what I found was something else altogether.

When I arrived at the house the first thing I noticed was a large vegetable garden outside. The second thing I noticed was that a tree out front had been fitted out with a colorful knit wool sweater. This was the effort of Daniel’s wife Anke — “knit hacking,” she called it. And around the small town I saw evidence of her guerilla knit hacking. The steel poles of nearby street signs had also been fitted with woolen sweaters. Most impressively, though, a World War II tank, sitting outside a nearby former Nazi concentration camp for women had also been knit-hacked; the entire barrel of the tank’s gun had been fit with a tight colorful wool sweater and adorned with some woolen flowers for good measure. I interpreted these knit-hackings as counteractions to the attempts to define hacktivist as something sinister; they serve as ostensive definitions of what hacktivism is and what hacktivists do.

Of course the birthday party had elements of hackerdom understood more narrowly. There were some members of the Chaos Computer Club (a legendary hacker group), and there was a healthy supply of Club Mate — the energy drink of choice of European hackers, but the main message being delivered was something else: a do-it-yourself aesthetic — planting your own garden, knitting your own sweaters, foraging for mushrooms and counting on a local friend to bag you some venison. What part of this lifestyle was the hacktivism part? Daniel and his friends would like to say that all of it is.

The intention here was clear: an attempt to defend the traditional, less sinister understanding of hacktivism and perhaps broaden it a bit, adding some positive affect to boot; more specifically, that hacking is fundamentally about refusing to be intimidated or cowed into submission by any technology, about understanding the technology and acquiring the power to repurpose it to our individual needs, and for the good of the many. Moreover, they were saying that a true hacktivist doesn’t favor new technology over old — what is critical is that the technologies be in our hands rather than out of our control. This ideal, theoretically, should extend to beyond computer use, to technologies for food production, shelter and clothing, and of course, to all the means we use to communicate with one another. It would also, of course, extend to access to knowledge more generally — a value that was inherent in Aaron Swartz’s hacking of the JSTOR data base.

Our responsibility in this particular episode of lexical warfare is to be critical and aware of the public uses of language, and to be alert to what is at stake — whether the claims made by the infosecurity industry or the government, or the gestures by the hacktivists, are genuine, misleading or correct. We are not passive observers in this dispute. The meaning of words is determined by those of us who use language, and it has consequences. Whether or not Aaron Swartz suffered because of the manipulation of the public discourse surrounding hacking, his case is a reminder that it is important that we be attuned to attempts to change the meanings of words in consequential ways. It is important because we are the ones who will decide who will win.


Peter Ludlow is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. His most recent book is “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.”

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IHT Rendezvous: 2012: The Year of Extreme Weather

The weather reports are in. 2012 was the hottest and the most extreme year on record in many places.

While parts of China are enduring the harshest winter in 30 years, the Antarctic is warming at an alarming rate. In Australia, out of control bushfires are partially the result of record-breaking weather (new colors were added to weather forecast maps, to account for the new kind of heat). In the United States, where Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New Jersey and New York and where extreme drought still lingers in the Midwest, the average temperature in 2012 was more than a whole degree Fahrenheit (or 5/9 of a degree Celsius) higher than average – shattering the record.

On Friday a long-term weather forecast for the United States was released, when the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee published a draft of the third Climate Assessment Report. Like last year’s weather, the assessment does not pull its punches.

“Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including impacts from increased extreme weather events, wildfire, decreased air quality, diseases transmitted by insects, food, and water, and threats to mental health,” write the authors as part of their key findings.

Experts from 13 federal agencies, including NASA, the State Department and the Department of Defense put together the report under the auspices of the United States Global Change Research Program.

While some predictions have been adjusted upward from previous reports, the difference in tone in this newest assessment is striking. The second assessment, published in 2009, predicted of thresholds that will be crossed, while the 2013 draft presents a reality in which some of the changes are already irreversible.

“As a result of past emissions of heat-trapping gases, some amount of additional climate change and related impacts is now unavoidable,” wrote the authors in the executive summary.

Adaptation to climate change is discussed in the new draft, which is open for public comment before it is officially released early in 2014. The authors write:

Planning and managing based on the climate of the last century means that tolerances of some infrastructure and species will be exceeded. For example, building codes and landscaping ordinances will likely need to be updated not only for energy efficiency, but also to conserve water supplies, protect against insects that spread disease, reduce susceptibility to heat stress, and improve protection against extreme events.

The authors predict that within the next several decades, temperatures will go up between 2 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 1 and 2 degrees Celsius. The experts discuss a possible 10 degree Fahrenheit (or more than 5 degrees Celsius) warming by the end of the century, in the case that not enough is done to curb emissions. (The World Bank recently released a report of the dangers of a world warmed by 4 degrees Celsius).

Sea levels could rise up to four feet, or 1.2 meters, within the century, according to the experts.

Though official assessments, predictions and studies like these serve to reinforce what many already fear, they do not necessarily lead to policy change. Andrew Restuccia predicted in a Politico article that the new report would ultimately do little to change the embittered climate-change politics in that country. He wrote:

But don’t hold your breath for serious action on climate change in Congress. Republicans and some moderate Democrats remain opposed to measures to address climate change. The Obama administration, meanwhile, is moving forward with its own efforts on climate change, including beefed-up fuel economy standards and greenhouse gas regulations for new power plants.

Sometimes official assessment reports provide substance for those who question man-made climate change.

My colleague Andrew C. Revkin recently reported on how a revision by Britain’s Weather and Climate Agency on short-term global temperature forecast became fodder for climate change deniers. The fact that the government agency had revised its numbers downward allowed climate change skeptics to argue that the world was not significantly warming after all.

In December, Alec Rawls, a climate-change skeptic, made a name for himself by leaking an unpublished Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one of the major global players in climate change assessment. Mr. Rawls tried to argue that the panel’s language on solar radiation was an admission that much of the warming trends were caused by the sun, not human activity.

As Andrew reported at time, his claims were mostly debunked.

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City Room: Cuomo Declares Public Health Emergency Over Flu Outbreak

With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.

There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.

“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.

Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.

While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.

There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.

In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.

“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”

There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.

In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.

As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.

According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.

Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.

Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.

The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/13/2013, on page A21 of the NewYork edition with the headline: New York Declares Health Emergency.
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City Room: Cuomo Declares Public Health Emergency Over Flu Outbreak

With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.

There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.

“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.

Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.

While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.

There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.

In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.

“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”

There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.

In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.

As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.

According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.

Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.

Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.

The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/13/2013, on page A21 of the NewYork edition with the headline: New York Declares Health Emergency.
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Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, Dies at 26





Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and who later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.




An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently hanged himself, and that a friend of Mr. Swartz’s had discovered the body.


At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.


Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.


“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”


Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew, who had written in the past about battling depression and suicidal thoughts, as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”


The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.


Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.


He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.


But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.


The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.


The government shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”


Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.


The federal government investigated but did not prosecute.


In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.


Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”


Founded in 1995, JSTOR, or Journal Storage, is nonprofit, but institutions can pay tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription that bundles scholarly publications online. JSTOR says it needs the money to collect and to distribute the material and, in some cases, subsidize institutions that cannot afford it. On Wednesday, JSTOR announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis.


Mr. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Swartz’s actions at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never have been considered a criminal activity.”


Mr. Swartz did not talk much about his impending trial, Quinn Norton, a close friend, said on Saturday, but when he did, it was clear that “it pushed him to exhaustion. It pushed him beyond.”


Recent years had been hard for Mr. Swartz, Ms. Norton said, and she characterized him “in turns tough and delicate.” He had “struggled with chronic, painful illness as well as depression,” she said, without specifying the illness, but he was still hopeful “at least about the world.”


Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz on BoingBoing.net, a blog he co-edits. In an e-mail, he called Mr. Swartz “uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.”


 “The world was a better place with him in it,” he said.


Mr. Swartz, he noted, had a habit of turning on those closest to him: “Aaron held the world, his friends, and his mentors to an impossibly high standard — the same standard he set for himself.” Mr. Doctorow added, however, “It’s a testament to his friendship that no one ever seemed to hold it against him (except, maybe, himself).”


In a talk in 2007, Mr. Swartz described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career. He also wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from sadness.


“Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.”


When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.”


Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.



This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the police who arrested Mr. Swartz, and when they did so. The police were from Cambridge, Mass., not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus force, and the arrest occurred two years before Mr. Swartz’s suicide, but not two years to the day.



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India Ink: Woman Raped by Seven Men in Punjab, India, Police Say

NEW DELHI — Police said Sunday that a  29-year-old woman had been raped by a bus driver, a bus conductor and five other men in the north Indian state of Punjab, in an incident that recalls the recent attack in Delhi that has caused widespread outrage.

The woman boarded a bus on Friday bound for Gurdaspur, to visit her in-laws, the police chief of Gurdaspur, Raj Jit Singh, said in a telephone interview. When she got off the bus, the driver offered her a ride on his motorcycle, perhaps to her in-laws village, the police said. Instead, he took her to a nearby village where he and six other men, including the bus conductor, raped her repeatedly through the night.

The next morning, the driver dropped her at her in-laws home, where the woman told her family members of the incident, and then reported it to the police, Mr. Singh said.

Six men, including the bus driver and conductor, have been arrested, he said. All of the men are their twenties.

Gurmesh Singh, the deputy superintendent of police for the  region, said it was unclear how or why the bus driver persuaded the woman to go with him on his motorcycle. She was in a state of distress during the bus ride, Mr. Singh said, and originally refused to get off of the bus when it reached its final destination.

The Press Trust of India reported that the bus driver did not stop at her stop when requested.

The gang-rape of a woman on a moving bus in New Delhi on Dec. 16, and her subsequent death from injuries sustained during the rape, has sparked widespread protests and calls for increased policing and tougher laws against sexual assault in India.

The case against five of the men arrested in that rape is being heard this month in a special fast-track court created just for incidents of sexual assault.

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Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales



The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.


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Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases





A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.




The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.


“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”


Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.


So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.


The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.


However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”


She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”


Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.


If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.


Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.


“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.


A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.


Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.


Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.


“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”


The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.


But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”


“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”


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