Living With Cancer: Arrivals and Departures

After being nursed and handed over, the baby’s wails rise to a tremolo, but I am determined to give my exhausted daughter and son-in-law a respite on this wintry evening. Commiserating with the little guy’s discomfort — gas, indigestion, colic, ontological insecurity — I swaddle, burp, bink, then cradle him in my arms. I begin walking around the house, swinging and swaying while cooing in soothing cadences: “Yes, darling boy, another one bites the dust, another one bites the dust.”

I kid you not! How could such grim phrases spring from my lips into the newborn’s ears? Where did they come from?

I blame his mother and her best friend. They sang along as this song was played repeatedly at the skating rink to which I took them every other Saturday in their tweens. Why would an infatuated grandma croon a mordant lullaby, even if the adorable one happily can’t understand a single word? He’s still whimpering, twisting away from me, and understandably so.

Previously that day, I had called a woman in my cancer support group. I believe that she is dying. I do not know her very well. She has attended only two or three of our get-togethers where she described herself as a widow and a Christian.

On the phone, I did not want to violate the sanctity of her end time, but I did want her to know that she need not be alone, that I and other members of our group can “be there” for her. Her dying seems a rehearsal of my own. We have the same disease.

“How are you doing, Kim?” I asked.

“I’m tired. I sleep all the time,” she sighed, “and I can’t keep anything down.”

“Can you drink … water?” I asked.

“A little, but I tried a smoothie and it wouldn’t set right,” she said.

“I hope you are not in pain.”

“Oh no, but I’m sleeping all the time. And I can’t keep anything down.”

“Would you like a visit? Is there something I can do or bring?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think so, no thanks.”

“Well,” I paused before saying goodbye, “be well.”

Be well? I didn’t even add something like, “Be as well as you can be.” I was tongue-tied. This was the failure that troubles me tonight.

Why couldn’t I say that we will miss her, that I am sorry she is dying, that she has coped so well for so long, and that I hope she will now find peace? I could inform an infant in my arms of our inexorable mortality, but I could not speak or even intimate the “D” word to someone on her deathbed.

Although I have tried to communicate to my family how I feel about end-of-life care, can we always know what we will want? Perhaps at the end of my life I will not welcome visitors, either. For departing may require as much concentration as arriving. As I look down at the vulnerable bundle I am holding, I marvel that each and every one of us has managed to come in and will also have to manage to go out. The baby nestles, pursing his mouth around the pacifier. He gazes intently at my face with a sly gaze that drifts toward a lamp, turning speculative before lids lower in tremulous increments.

Slowing my jiggling to his faint sucking, I think that the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s meditation on death pertains to birth as well. Each of these events “names the very irreplaceability of absolute singularity.” Just as “no one can die in my place or in the place of the other,” no one can be born in this particular infant’s place. He embodies his irreplaceable and absolute singularity.

Perhaps we should gestate during endings, as we do during beginnings. Like hatchings, the dispatchings caused by cancer give people like Kim and me a final trimester, more or less, in which we can labor to forgive and be forgiven, to speak and hear vows of devotion from our intimates, to visit or not be visited by acquaintances.

Maybe we need a doula for dying, I reflect as melodious words surface, telling me what I have to do with the life left to be lived: “To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

“Oh little baby,” I then whisper: “Though I cannot tell who you will become and where I will be — you, dear heart, deliver me.”

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Susan Gubar is a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University and the author of “Memoir of a Debulked Woman,” which explores her experience with ovarian cancer.

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Via Video, a Front-Row Seat to a Fashion Show

As the Belstaff runway show began in New York City last week, buyers, designers and bloggers crowded into their seats, jotted notes and took smartphone photos as the models strutted by.

But it was another crowd, outside the tents, that Belstaff executives were particularly interested in this season. For the second time, it was live streaming its fashion show. And the Web viewers were not just potential fans, they were data sources to help Belstaff predict which of the runway items might be hits in stores this summer.

“If you can have a bit of information that helps you beat the market and pick more winners,” said Damian Mould, Belstaff’s chief marketing officer, “you’d be stupid not to take it.”

Fashion Week, which wrapped up last week in New York and moved on to London and Milan this week, used to be an insular industry event. Buyers and editors attended and made calls as to what their customers would want months from now.

But that has changed. Fashion houses in recent years started to sidestep the middleman by giving the public a front-row seat via webcam video. While that was more of a marketing tool at first, live streaming — and other ways to give consumers digital access to runway fashion — is now being seen as a research opportunity.

As more brands offer live videos of the shows, regular viewers see exactly what the buyers and editors are seeing, and influence what will be made by pausing on an outfit or posting Twitter messages about a particular style.

On retail fashion Web sites like Lyst and Moda Operandi, designers are allowed to track consumers’ early orders to gauge demand before they make clothes. And a handful of brands, like Burberry, are allowing regular customers to order runway clothes as the shows are live streamed.

Increasingly, the public is weighing in on fashion — and designers are listening. “It’s creating a commercial opportunity around an event that was previously an industry event,” said Aslaug Magnusdottir, the chief executive of Moda Operandi.

Mass-market apparel has long embraced the Web, but high fashion brands were wary of even having e-commerce sites a few years ago, fearing that would cheapen their brands. Now, the embrace of the Twitter-using public is causing some tension in the high-fashion world, where buyers’ tastes used to reign supreme.

“Of course the buyer knows their customer,” said Mortimer Singer, chief executive of the retail consulting firm Marvin Traub Associates, “but I think it’s hard to ignore when someone turns around to you and says, by the way, we got 50 preorders of this style.”

Live streams are an important way of measuring customer interest. They became popular a few years ago and are now regularly syndicated on fashion blogs and style sites.

“It’s not only what consumers are watching, but the devices they’re on, the geographies that they’re in, the engagement — what part of the video stream was of most interest, where did they abandon the video,” said Jay Fulcher, chief executive of Ooyala, which makes a video player that streamed Fashion Week shows, including those for DKNY, Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta, Belstaff and Tory Burch.

According to B Productions, which produced the video for those shows, brands’ live-stream viewership has grown by about 20 to 40 percent every year, and the data is becoming more precise.

“It’s not just that they stopped watching five minutes in,” said Russell Quy, president of BLive by B Productions, “but we’re able to attach that to an actual outfit.”

Belstaff, a British brand known for its outerwear, gathered data via the live stream of its recent women’s show in a few ways. It syndicated the live streams on a number of fashion sites.

By looking at Twitter mentions timed to the live stream, the company saw that the first five looks — new twists on classic jackets — drew enthusiastic responses.

“I’ve informed the buying team of that interest, so I know they’re going to buy big and deep in that category when the product comes in,” Mr. Mould said.

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Boiko Borisov, Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Submits Resignation

Prime Minister Boiko Borisov of Bulgaria submitted his government’s resignation on Wednesday after a tumultuous week of public anger over rising electricity prices, corruption and worsening living standards that ignited mass protests nationwide and led to bloody clashes with the police on Tuesday night.

“The people gave us power, and today we are returning it,” Mr. Borisov said on Wednesday morning in Parliament, according to local news reports.

The speaker of Parliament, Tsetska Tsacheva, said the resignation of the prime minister and his cabinet would not be effective until Parliament put it to a vote on Thursday. Since Mr. Borisov controls Parliament, acceptance would seem sure.

The protests — the biggest in at least 15 years — were triggered by electricity price increases and corruption scandals, including one over the nominee to head the state electricity regulatory commission, which sets rates. She was accused of selling cigarettes illegally online and her nomination was later withdrawn.

Tempers were inflamed further when Bulgaria’s finance minister Simeon Djankov, the architect of painful fiscal probity, stepped down on Monday. Rather than allaying anger, analysts said the resignation was greeted by the public as an admission that the government’s economic policies, had not worked.

Tens of thousands of Bulgarians took to the streets across the country to protest. Some yelled “Mafia!” Others burned their utility bills.

While the country’s fiscal prudence has helped it to avoid having to seek an international bailout like Hungary or Romania, analysts said that rising unemployment and weak growth, coupled with wage and pension freezes and tax increases, had mobilized the country’s increasingly disgruntled middle class, who felt themselves squeezed during the financial crisis.

Opposition political parties had been trying to exploit public anger over the government’s austerity measures as general elections planned for July approached. Elections are now expected in April or May, and analysts said the opposition Socialist party was expected to benefit from the turmoil.

Daniel Smilov, program director at the Center for Liberal Strategies, a political research organization, in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, said that Bulgarians were disillusioned that the overthrow of Communism in 1989 and the country’s subsequent democratization had not delivered the expected prosperity.

Bulgaria has struggled to shed a reputation for lawlessness and corruption. It remains poor, with an average monthly wage of just $480, the lowest in the European Union.

“What we are seeing is the result of a general distrust in government and the political system,” Mr. Smilov said, noting than protests had engulfed wealthy as well as poorer regions of the country. “These are not the bottom layers of society, but people in the middle strata who been hit hardest by the financial crisis. They fear they are losing their status, and they might become poor very fast.”

Trying to appease the protesters, the prime minister said on Tuesday that the license of the Czech utility CEZ, which provides power to many residential customers in Bulgaria, would be withdrawn. Mr. Borisov cited beatings of protesters Tuesday by the police as one reason.

“Every drop of blood for us is a stain,” he said. “I can’t look at a Parliament surrounded by barricades, that’s not our goal, neither our approach, if we have to protect ourselves from the people.”

Mr. Smilov said that after the Parliament accepted the government’s resignation, President Rosen Plevneliev would then appoint a caretaker government. Mr. Borisov said his party would not participate in an interim government.

Mr. Borisov’s resignation could signal the political demise of one of the country’s most colorful political figures. A former karate instructor, bodyguard, fireman and mayor of Sofia with a shaved head and a talk-tough approach, Mr. Borisov was once viewed as being so invincible that Bulgarians called him “Batman.”

As the owner of a private security company, he provided security services for Todor Zhivkov, the former Communist leader of Bulgaria. Mr. Borisov was then the personal bodyguard for Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the child czar who returned to be elected prime minister in 2001.

Mr. Borisov rose to oversee the police at the Interior Ministry, before being elected mayor of Sofia and then becoming prime minister in 2009.

“Mr. Borisov is a typical populist leader who came to power promising to take revenge against the transition on behalf of the poor,” says Andrei Raichev, a political analyst at Gallup International in Sofia. “Now the people realize that they were lied to.”

Mr. Raichev said that no one could predict how the public will react to the resignation. “We could even reach the absurd situation that the protests continue against no one,” he said. “Which means that they are against everyone.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article and an accompanying photo caption misspelled the given name of Bulgaria’s prime minister. He is Boiko Borisov, not Boyko.

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Armstrong won't interview with USADA

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Lance Armstrong won't do a tell-all interview under oath with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to reveal everything he knows about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in cycling.

USADA officials had told Armstrong he must speak with them if he wanted to reduce his lifetime ban from sports. Under their offer, Wednesday was the deadline for him to agree to the interview.

Armstrong attorney Tim Herman said that, after two months of negotiations, the cyclist refused participate in a process designed "only to demonize selected individuals."

Armstrong said previously he is willing to participate in an international effort to clean up a sport that is based mostly in Europe.

USADA chief executive Travis Tygart said the agency had expected Armstrong would agree to talk and would be "moving on" without him.

"Over the last few weeks he has led us to believe that he wanted to come in and assist USADA, but was worried of potential criminal and civil liability if he did so," Tygart said. "Today we learned from the media that Mr. Armstrong is choosing not to come in and be truthful and that he will not take the opportunity to work toward righting his wrongs in sport."

For more than a decade, Armstrong denied using performance-enhancing drugs. But last year, USADA released a report that detailed extensive doping on his seven Tour de France-winning teams and stripped him of those titles. Armstrong then admitted last month in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that he doped to win those races.

He still faces several legal challenges.

Armstrong was the subject of a two-year federal grand jury investigation that was dropped a year ago without an indictment, but the Department of Justice is still considering whether to join a federal whistle-blower lawsuit filed by former Armstrong teammate Floyd Landis.

Armstrong also has been sued by a Dallas-based SCA Promotions to recover more than $12 million in bonuses. And he has been sued by The Sunday Times in London to recover a libel judgment that Armstrong won against the paper.

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Global Update: New Polio Strains That Protect Vaccine Factory Workers

Scientists have created new strains of polio intended to protect workers in factories that make polio vaccine. The new strains have the same ability to invoke an immune reaction as the live viruses now used to make vaccine do, but there is virtually no risk anyone will get polio if one of the new strains somehow escapes.

The research team, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is led by Eckard A. F. Wimmer, a molecular geneticist who made headlines in 1991 when he synthesized polio virus in the lab from its chemical components, the first time a virus had been made outside of living cells.

The world is very close to eliminating polio, which is now endemic to only three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. But to be sure the disease is gone, children will have to be vaccinated for several years after the last detected case.

Currently, factories making the injectable Salk vaccine used in the United States and Europe start with the dangerous wild-type viruses known as Types 1, 2 and 3. After growing a large batch, vaccine makers “kill” the virus with formaldehyde and prepare it for syringes. The finished product is safe, but if the growing live viruses ever escaped “because of a leak, an explosion, an earthquake, a tsunami, a flood,” Dr. Wimmer said, “the spill could spread like wildfire.”

Right now, polio eradication depends on large sweeps by volunteers putting drops of the oral Sabin vaccine into children’s mouths. It is easy to give, and it produces better immunity because it reaches the intestines, which are lined with receptors for the virus.

The Sabin vaccine has drawbacks, however: it contains a still-live virus that was mutated long ago so that it is usually too weak to produce disease. In rare cases, it can mutate back into a dangerous form that paralyzes or kills. And the vaccine is risky in children with immune-system problems. For those reasons, the World Health Organization plans to eventually phase it out.

Once that happens, factories around the world will have to make millions more doses of the injectable version, so five years ago, the W.H.O. began looking for safer seed strains of virus.

Dr. Wimmer and colleagues took a part of the virus’s RNA that is crucial for growth, mutated it to weaken it, and inserted it in another stretch of RNA that controls how virulent the virus is. That renders the virus less lethal. “If it were to get into the brain, it doesn’t do any harm,” he said.

And, he explained, even if the virus evolved to defeat that virulence-lowering mutation, it would simultaneously cripple its own ability to reproduce.

Now Dr. Wimmer’s team is working with the Crucell vaccine company to prove that the safer strains grow well in Crucell’s proprietary human cell line. Ideally, he said, the new vaccine will eventually be mixed with others like those for measles and diphtheria, and all will be delivered together in one painless shot by a jet injector.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a university. It is in Stony Brook, not Stonybrook.

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DealBook: A Revolving Door in Washington That Gets Less Notice

Obsess all you’d like about President Obama’s nomination of Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Who heads the agency is vital, but important fights in Washington are happening in quiet rooms, away from the media gaze.

After a widely praised stint as a tough United States attorney, Ms. White spent the last decade serving so many large banks and investment houses that by the time she finishes recusing herself from regulatory matters, she may be down to overseeing First Wauwatosa Securities.

Ms. White maintains she can run the S.E.C. without fear or favor. But the focus shouldn’t be limited to whether she can be effective. For lobbyists, the real targets are regulators and staff members for lawmakers.

Ms. White, at least, will have to sit for Congressional testimony, answer occasional questions from the media and fill out disclosure forms. Staff members, however, work in untroubled anonymity for the most part. So, while everyone knows there’s a revolving door — so naïve to even bring it up! — few realize just how fluidly it spins.

Take what happened late last month as Washington geared up for more fights about the taxing, spending and the deficit. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, decided to bolster his staff’s expertise on taxes.

So on Jan. 25, Mr. Reid’s office announced that he had appointed Cathy Koch as chief adviser to the majority leader for tax and economic policy. The news release lists Ms. Koch’s admirable and formidable experience in the public sector. “Prior to joining Senator Reid’s office,” the release says, “Koch served as tax chief at the Senate Finance Committee.”

It’s funny, though. The notice left something out. Because immediately before joining Mr. Reid’s office, Ms. Koch wasn’t in government. She was working for a large corporation.

Not just any corporation, but quite possibly the most influential company in America, and one that arguably stands to lose the most if there were any serious tax reform that closed corporate loopholes. Ms. Koch arrives at the senator’s office by way of General Electric.

Yes, General Electric, the company that paid almost no taxes in 2010. Just as the tax reform debate is heating up, Mr. Reid has put in place a person who is extraordinarily positioned to torpedo any tax reform that might draw a dollar out of G.E. — and, by extension, any big corporation.

Omitting her last job from the announcement must have merely been an oversight. By the way, no rules prevent Ms. Koch from meeting with G.E. or working on issues that would affect the company.

The senator’s office, which declined to make Ms. Koch available for an interview, says that she will support the majority leader in his efforts to close corporate tax loopholes. His office said in a statement that the senator considered her knowledge of the private sector to be an asset and that she complied with “all relevant Senate ethics rules and disclosures.”

In a statement, the senator’s spokesman said, “The impulse in some quarters to reflexively cast suspicion on private sector experience is part of what makes qualified individuals reluctant to enter public service.”

Over in bank regulatory land, meanwhile, January was playing out like a Beltway remake of “Freaky Friday.”

Julie Williams, chief counsel for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and a major friend of the banks for years, had been recently shown the door by Thomas J. Curry, the new head of the regulator. Banking reform advocates took that to be an omen that a new era might be dawning at the agency, which has often been a handmaiden to large banks.

Ms. Williams, of course, landed on her feet. She’s now at the Promontory Financial Group, a classic Washington creature that is a private sector mirror image of a regulatory body. Promontory is the Shadow O.C.C. The firm was founded by a former head of the agency, Eugene A. Ludwig, and if you were to walk down the halls swinging a copy of the Volcker Rule, you would be sure to hit a former O.C.C. official. Promontory says only about 5 percent of its employees comes from the O.C.C., but concedes that more than a quarter are former regulators.

Promontory, as the firm explains on its Web site, “excels at helping financial companies grapple with and resolve critical issues, particularly those with a regulatory dimension.” But it plays for the other team, too, by helping the O.C.C. put into effect regulatory reviews. The dreary normality of this is a Washington scandal in the Michael Kinsley sense: a perfectly legal one.

Promontory, which demurred on a request to talk with Ms. Williams, has a different view. The firm doesn’t lobby or help in litigation. It argues that after banks stop fighting regulators and lobbying against rules, then they come to Promontory to figure out how to fix their problems and comply.

“We are known in the industry as the tough-love doctors,” said Mr. Ludwig, the chief executive of Promontory. “I am deeply committed to financial stability, and the only way to have stability is to do the right thing in both the spirit and letter of the law.”

Hmm. Remember the Independent Foreclosure Review, the program that the O.C.C. and other federal bank regulators trumpeted as the largest effort to compensate victims of big banks’ foreclosure abuses? As my colleague at ProPublica, Paul Kiel, detailed last year, that review involved consultants like Promontory essentially letting banks decide who was victimized. How well did that work? So well that the regulators had to scuttle the program because it hadn’t given one red cent to homeowners but somehow, I don’t know how, managed to send more than $1.5 billion to consultants — including Promontory.

Promontory maintains that it complied with the conditions set out by the O.C.C. And the review was replaced by a settlement, which the regulators say will compensate victims — though the average payout is small beer.

Who, exactly, makes the rules at the O.C.C.? I mentioned “Freaky Friday.” That’s because at the agency, Ms. Williams is being replaced by Amy Friend. And where is Ms. Friend coming from? Wait for it … Promontory. In March, maybe they’ll do the switcheroo back.

The O.C.C. didn’t make Ms. Friend available but said that her “talent, integrity and commitment to public service are beyond reproach” and would be subject to the rule requiring her to recuse herself for a year on matters specifically relating to her former employer.

I spoke with people who said she was a smart and dedicated public servant, an expert on the Dodd-Frank Act who can help complete the scandalously long list of unfinished rules and expedite its adoption.

“Amy Friend is absolutely rowing in the right direction,” said a Senate staff member who worked on efforts to push for stronger financial regulation.

Let’s hope so.

But people also described Ms. Friend as pragmatic. In Washington, that’s the ultimate compliment. Sadly, that has come to mean someone who seeks compromise and never pushes for an overhaul when a quarter-measure will do.

Washington today resembles something like the end of “Animal Farm.” People move from one side of the table to the other and up and down the Acela corridor with ease. An outsider looking at a negotiating table would glance from lobbyist to staff member, from colleague to former colleague, from pig to man and from man to pig and find it impossible to say which is which.

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Maoists Block Deal to Break Nepal’s Long Political Deadlock

NEW DELHI — Nepal’s major political parties failed on Tuesday to complete an expected agreement to settle a years-long political standoff, after Maoists insisted that the accord include amnesty for past crimes.

The amnesty issue derailed a tentative deal reached on Monday to appoint as interim prime minister the chief justice of the country’s supreme court, Khil Raj Regmi, to lead the country until elections in June. Now it appears that the wrangling will continue indefinitely, worsening the paralysis of the country’s civic functions.

Nepal has been trying to establish a working representative democracy since 2008, when a constituent assembly was elected to replace the former monarchy. But the assembly has been unable to draw up a constitution or settle on when or how to hold further elections. Maoists, who fought a long civil war against the monarchy, now control the most important government posts, but the ethnic, caste, religious, ideological and regional differences that permeate Nepalese society have made even the most basic political agreements impossible.

Meanwhile, the country’s judiciary has been arresting former Maoist fighters from the bitter civil war, which cost at least 13,000 lives, prompting the Maoist party to call for amnesty and for a less punitive reconciliation process, such as a parliamentary committee that the party could influence.

“Amnesty is still under consideration,” said Devendra Poudel, adviser to the present Maoist prime minister, Baburam Bhattarai. “Instead of addressing one or two issues separately, why not deal with them all in the same package?”

But the country’s other political parties and civil-society organizations have insisted on a process in which war criminals are jailed.

“The Maoists are very much afraid of the regular judiciary of this country,” said Rajendra Dahal, a spokesman for President Ram Baran Yadav, a leader of the centrist Nepalese Congress party. “But until there is an agreement, they will control the government,” he said of the Maoists. “So they benefit from the standoff.”

Mr. Dahal said that the president had welcomed the tentative deal to put the chief justice in charge temporarily. “The president’s single mission is to have elections,” he said early Tuesday. “Any way the parties get some consensus in the goal of having elections, the president will support.”

By late Tuesday evening, however, the optimism surrounding the tentative agreement had faded.

Kanak Mani Dixit, a civil rights activist and commentator, said he was worried that the Maoists supported the deal in hopes of discrediting the Supreme Court, which he said is the last civic institution in Nepal with any credibility.

“The Maoists agreed because they have already destroyed every other important institution of the state,” Mr. Dixit said.

Mr. Regmi was expected to be appointed to a three-month term as prime minister, following which he would return to the court. If Mr. Regmi had been unable to oversee elections in that time, a new agreement would have had to be reached.

The Maoist leader, Mr. Bhattarai, rejected all previous proposals to replace him, and other political parties have refused to allow elections while Mr. Bhattarai and his allies hold the crucial levers of government, saying that his oversight would make the elections unfair.

In the meantime, basic civil functions in Nepal have begun to fail one after another, and the country’s economy, never robust, has stalled. As a result, Nepalese have been emigrating to neighboring countries in large numbers, to the exasperation particularly of India, where many of the migrants settle.

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Pistorius' girlfriend cremated in private ceremony

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Reeva Steenkamp's coffin was draped in a white cloth and carried by six pallbearers at a private funeral Tuesday, just a few hours before Oscar Pistorius said in a court affidavit that he mistakenly killed his girlfriend by shooting her through a bathroom door.

Reeva's uncle, Mike Steenkamp, broke down in tears after the cremation ceremony under gray skies in the family's hometown of Port Elizabeth on South Africa's southern coast, saying between sobs: "We are here as a family and there's only one thing missing and that's Reeva."

"We've got together but we miss one," her uncle said as he composed himself.

Family and friends gathered inside the white crematorium, which had a "Strictly Private" sign outside, to pay tribute to the law graduate, model and budding reality TV star who died at Pistorius' house in the early hours of Valentine's Day last week after being shot three times behind a locked door to the toilet.

Pistorius said in an affidavit, which was read out by his senior defense lawyer in court in Pretoria, that he loved her deeply and shot her in a tragic error because he thought she was a dangerous intruder in his house.

Prosecutors argue he intended to kill her after a fight and he was charged with premeditated murder.

Reeva's parents, Barry and June Steenkamp, hugged mourners after the ceremony, which was closed to the media and the public on the wishes of the family. Singing could be heard from inside the building as reporters waited a short distance away outside the gate of the Victoria Park Crematorium.

Earlier, the 29-year-old Steenkamp's wooden coffin, which had shining gold handles, the white cloth and white flowers on top, was taken out of a hearse and carried into the crematorium by funeral home staff wearing pink shirts and black jackets.

After the service, Mike and Adam Steenkamp, Reeva's brother, walked away from the small group of mourners — which included South African international rugby player Francois Hougaard — to offer a statement to television cameras near the entrance to the driveway to the crematorium.

"I won't say very much," brother Adam, who wore jeans, a white shirt and a black suit jacket, said. "There's a space missing inside all the people she knew that can't be filled again. We're going to keep all the positive things that we remember and know about my sister.

"And we will try and continue with the things that she tried to make better. We will miss her. And that's it."

Steenkamp campaigned actively against domestic violence and had written on Twitter that she planned to join a "Black Friday" protest by wearing black in honor of a 17-year-old girl who was gang-raped and killed in South Africa two weeks ago.

What "she stood for, and the abuse against women, unfortunately it's gone right around and I think the Lord knows that statement is more powerful now," Mike Steenkamp said.

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Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell contributed to this report.

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Ask Well: Coaxing Parents to Take Better Care of Themselves

Dear Reader,

Your dilemma of wanting to get your parents to change their ways to eat better and exercise reminds me of an old joke:

How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.

Sounds like your parents may be about as motivated as the light bulb right now. Still, there are things you can do to encourage them to move in a healthier direction. But the first step should not be to hand them a book. Unless you lay some prior groundwork, that gesture may seem almost as patronizing as an impatient tone of voice – and probably as likely to backfire.

Instead, start a conversation in a caring, nonjudgmental way. Ask, don’t tell. “Say, ‘You know, I might not know what I am talking about, but I am really concerned about you,” suggested Kevin Leman, a psychologist in Tucson, Ariz., and author of 42 books on changing behavior in families and relationships. Ask simply if there is anything you can do to help.

Leading by example is also more effective than lecturing. “The son can role-model health by inviting his parents to dinner and serving healthful items that he is fairly certain they will find acceptable, or ask them if they are interested in going out dancing with him and his wife,” suggested Ann Constance, director of the Upper Peninsula Diabetes Outreach Network in Michigan.

Pleasure is a better motivator for change than pain or threats. Use the grandchildren as bait. Ask if they want to take the grandchildren to the zoo or a park that would require a good bit of walking around for everyone. Or the grandchildren could ask them to come along on one of those 2K fund-raiser-walks that many schools hold. After all, a day with the grandchildren is always a pleasure in itself. (O.K., usually a pleasure.)

Tempted to give them the gift of a health club membership? “Save your money,” Dr. Leman said. Try a more indirect (and cheaper) approach. Create a mixed-tape of up-tempo music from their era. (“Songs they listened to from the ages of 12-to-17, which is what we all listen to for the rest of our lives,” said Dr. Leman) They will enjoy it any time — maybe even while walking.

If you really want someone you love to make a change, the key is to ask them to do something small and easy first because that increases the chances they will do something larger later. Psychologists call that “the foot in the door technique,” said Adam Davey, associate professor of public health at Temple University in Philadelphia, referring to a classic 1966 experiment called “Compliance Without Pressure.” In the study, which has been duplicated by others in many forms, researchers asked people to sign a petition or place a small card in a window in their home or car about keeping California beautiful or supporting safe driving. About two weeks later, the same people were asked to put a huge sign that practically covered their entire front lawn advocating the same cause.

“A surprisingly large number of those who agreed to the small sign agreed to the billboard,” because agreeing to the first small task built a bond between asker and askee “that increases the likelihood of complying with a subsequent larger request,” Dr. Davey explained.

Any plan for behavioral change is most likely to succeed if it is very specific, measurable and achievable, according to Ms.Constance.

And the new behavior should also be integrated into daily life — and repeated until it becomes a habit. For example, if you want to walk more, start with a 10-minute walk after dinner on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Ms. Constance suggested. The next week, bump it up to 12 minutes.

Don’t give up, even if you meet initial resistance — it is never too late for your parents or you or any of us to change. “Taking up an exercise program into one’s 80s and 90s to build strength and flexibility can result in very tangible and enduring benefits in a surprisingly short time,” insisted Dr Davey.

As for instructive reading, Dr. Leman is partial to one of his own books, “Have a New You by Friday,” and Dr. Davey recommends “Biomarkers: The 10 Keys to Prolonging Vitality,” by William Evans. Ms. Constance recommends the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site on physical activity and exercise tips for the elderly, as well as the National Institute of Health’s site on the DASH diet.

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DealBook: Morgan Stanley Strives to Coordinate 2 Departments Often at Odds

Several hundred Morgan Stanley retail branch managers descended on the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes resort in Florida early this month for a retreat. They were greeted by an unlikely colleague, Colm Kelleher, who runs the company’s sales and trading and investment banking departments.

Traditionally, traders and investment bankers think of themselves as the elite of Wall Street and look down on the retail business, seeing it as pedestrian. Yet Mr. Kelleher had a message for the branch managers: His group can work with retail brokers to increase profits at Morgan Stanley.

That message evokes the strategic emphasis that followed the 1997 merger of Morgan Stanley with Dean Witter, Discover & Company. The rationale for that deal was to create a financial supermarket where the retail brokerage and the investment banking businesses could complement each other.

But the company’s swaggering traders wanted little to do with the financial advisers, creating tension and turmoil that would lead to upheaval at the top.

The company over the years has set up revenue sharing agreements between bankers and traders. But that, too, created strife, with bankers and traders accusing each other of deliberating misstating revenue to avoid splitting fees, which some traders called the investment banker tax.

“Morgan Stanley has a horrible history of getting these groups to work together,” said Richard Bove, an analyst with Rafferty Capital Markets.

Yet since Morgan Stanley moved to acquire control of the Smith Barney brokerage business from Citigroup in 2009, the balance of power has shifted to wealth management, which now accounts for almost 52 percent of the company’s revenue, up from roughly 16 percent in 2006.

Gregory J. Fleming, the chief of the brokerage business, and Mr. Kelleher have been under pressure from shareholders to coax greater profits from the low-margin brokerage business by finding ways for retail and investment banking to work better together. The two men are said to have a good working relationship, leading to renewed optimism that the company can finally find synergies among its various divisions.

That is a change from a few months ago, when cooperation was difficult, according to employees at the company, because of personality conflicts between Mr. Kelleher and the investment banker Paul Taubman, who were the two co-heads of the institutional securities business. The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the policy against speaking to the news media without permission.

Mr. Taubman departed recently after a power struggle, leaving Mr. Kelleher solely in charge of sales and trading, and investment banking.

In recent months, the company has made changes intended to improve communication among divisions. Last fall, Morgan Stanley transferred Eric Benedict, an ally of Mr. Kelleher, to wealth management to run its capital markets operation. Previously Mr. Benedict worked for Mr. Kelleher on the equity syndicate desk.

A few months after Mr. Benedict moved to wealth management, the company created a bond, or fixed income, sales group to focus on middle-market clients. The company then transferred some of its smaller banking clients into wealth management to give them more attention. The fixed-income division will share revenue from this middle-market unit with wealth management.

James P. Gorman, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, is hoping that its sales and trading unit will work more closely with wealth management to increase lending, better tailor structured products for retail clients and improve collaboration on events like public offerings, company insiders said.

For instance, Morgan Stanley may take a company public and the executives at that company may need advice managing their personal wealth. In such an instance, the bankers would alert wealth management, which could dispatch a broker to assess the situation.

In January, on a call with investors to discuss the company’s fourth-quarter results, Mr. Gorman said 35 projects were under way to encourage collaboration between these businesses. One focus is how to increase lending to the firm’s corporate and individual clients.

A lot is riding on Mr. Gorman’s strategy. Morgan Stanley, which for years was best known for its high-flying trading operations and investment bank, was badly bruised in the financial crisis. Since then regulators have established rules that require banks to post more capital against riskier operations, compelling Morgan Stanley to scale back or get out of certain businesses. Morgan Stanley has shrunk its fixed income department, where most of its risk taking was embedded.

But, if Mr. Gorman can make it work, Mr. Bove predicted the chief could return Morgan Stanley to its former glory, “albeit in a different form.” Mr. Bove has a buy rating on Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley emerged from the financial crisis safer, but less profitable. In 2012 it posted a return on equity (excluding a charge related to its debt) of 5 percent. Return on equity is an important measure of how effectively shareholder money is being deployed. Goldman posted a return on equity for the same period of 10.7 percent. To simply cover its debt expenses and other capital costs, Morgan Stanley must achieve a return on equity closer to 10 percent.

Investors also focused on another number, from Morgan Stanley’s wealth management unit. That division posted a pretax profit margin of 17 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, exceeding most analysts’ expectations.

The number was higher than expected, according to people briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak on the record, because the company deferred from the fourth quarter some major costs like compensation for certain executives.

As a result, some analysts and rivals are wondering how sustainable that level is. Morgan Stanley insiders say while some one-time items did help increase that number, it wasn’t significant and they expect Mr. Fleming to produce a lower but still high pretax profit margin for the current quarter.

“Although the first-quarter margin is seasonally lower, we believe that we can drive margins to the high teens and above over time even with only with modest revenue growth and a low interest rate environment,” said Ruth Porat, chief financial officer at Morgan Stanley, on a conference call last week with fixed-income investors.

For that number to rise significantly, Mr. Fleming must make some of recent initiatives work, analysts say.

“Everyone is watching that number,” said an executive at a rival firm who was not authorized to speak on the record. “If they can increase, it will be a sign Gorman’s strategy is working, but so far not everyone is convinced.”

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2013

An earlier version of the article incorrectly stated that wealth management now accounts for almost 52 percent of the company’s profit. Wealth management now accounts for almost 52 percent of the company's revenues.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/19/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Morgan Strives To Coordinate 2 Departments Often at Odds.

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