State Supreme Court wants Arizona donors audited

SACRAMENTO — An Arizona group was scrambling late Sunday to keep secret the individuals behind its $11-million donation to a California campaign fund after California's Supreme Court, in a rare and dramatic weekend action, ordered it to turn over records that could identify the donors.

The order followed days of frenzied legal battles between California regulators, who have tried to get documents related to the anonymous contribution before election day, and attorneys for the Arizona nonprofit who have resisted delivering them.

The showdown continued into the night Sunday, with no records produced nearly seven hours after the justices' late-afternoon deadline. Lawyers for the nonprofit said they were trying to comply even as they rushed to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to halt to the audit.

The $11 million went to a committee that is fighting tax increases proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown in Proposition 30 and promoting an initiative that could limit political spending by unions, Proposition 32. The donation has been among the most controversial moves of this election season, with Brown railing against the "shadowy" contributors at campaign appearances.

The case, which has the potential to reshape a growing sector of political giving, has put California at the forefront of a national debate over concealed political donations. Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the state Fair Political Practices Commission, which initially sued the Arizona group, called the California high court's decision historic.

It all began with a complaint from activists at Common Cause, who said the $11-million donation from Americans for Responsible Leadership violated a new California regulation. Federal law allows nonprofits to keep the identities of their donors confidential, but a rule implemented here in May says contributors must be identified if they give to nonprofits with the intention of spending money on state campaigns.

The matter has rocketed from court to court as Ravel's commission fought to obtain the Arizona group's records. The seven justices of the state Supreme Court, based in San Francisco, made the unusual decision to consider the matter over the weekend. On Sunday afternoon, they held a conference call to discuss it.

Shortly after 3 p.m., they ordered Americans for Responsible Leadership to produce — in less than an hour — the records sought by Ravel, a Brown appointee. The justices did not explain their unanimous decision, indicating in their order that they would consider the legal issues in a later, more detailed ruling.

But no records were delivered as a team of auditors and lawyers waited in the commission's Sacramento office, prepared to dig into the nonprofit's emails, text messages, financial statements and meeting minutes. Their task would be to comb the disclosures for any sign that the contribution violated the new California regulation.

If the Arizona group was found to be in violation, the state planned to direct the nonprofit to disclose the donor names and was ready to back up the directive by seeking another court order, if needed, Ravel said.

Lawyers for Americans for Responsible Leadership balked at the California court's order, preferring to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the case before turning over anything. In the early evening, they asked the California jurists for more time — at least until 9 a.m. Monday — to comply.

That would provide enough time, they said, to request an emergency stay from the nation's high court. Attorneys defending the nonprofit group wrote to Washington outlining their case.

"Disclosure in this highly charged political environment and in the face of an unprecedented and vehemently legally contested investigation is impermissible viewpoint discrimination and plainly violative of ARL's First Amendment rights," Thad Davis, a lawyer for the nonprofit, said in his letter to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Anthony Kennedy has authority over Western states and can issue a stay in this case.

Meanwhile, the state court told the Arizona group there would be no extension.

At risk of being in contempt of the state court, lawyers for the nonprofit said they would begin an "attempt to comply with the order."

"While we are working to deliver the records, we still believe the FPPC does not have the authority to take such an action," said Matt Ross, a spokesman for the group's legal team, in a statement Sunday night.

Ravel said she had staff members prepared to work all night to review whatever the Arizona group produced.

A career government lawyer, Ravel is hardly known in Sacramento as a firebrand. But the Arizona group says in its court filings that she is conducting a "one-woman media onslaught, rabblerousing and prejudging, including 'tweeting' her incendiary view."

State authorities are keeping the pressure on as election day looms.

California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, whose office is helping to represent the Fair Political Practices Commission in court, said in an interview that the Arizona group's legal maneuvers are "an effort to obstruct the process and run out the clock."

chris.megerian@latimes.com

maura.dolan@latimes.com

Times staff writer Evan Halper contributed to this report.

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Alt Text: Help Us, Disney, You're Our Only Hope

For those who still care about the Star Wars franchise, Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm is the entertainment equivalent of the Donner Party. Just when it looks like all hope is lost, someone pulls out a frying pan and remarks that old Ironjaw Joe looks a lot more tender now that he’s passed on.

Normally, the proper satirical route would be to imagine the horrors that the Mouse’s manhandling might visit upon the vulnerable continuity of the Star Wars universe, but at this point even a remake of Brother Bear with Chewbacca as the bear sounds better than waiting for whatever idea jumps into George Lucas’ brain at 3 in the morning after a chalupa binge.

(Actually, now that I think of it, a movie where some random dude unexpectedly turns into Chewbacca would be pretty awesome. Sort of a Freaky Friday meets Harry and the Hendersons thing. Get Brendan Fraser in the lead and I’m down for a matinee ticket and a tub of popcorn.)

The thing is, previous Disney acquisitions like Marvel and Pixar have done pretty well toiling under the ears of their corporate overlord. Cars 2 and Iron Man 2 both kinda sucked, but Star Wars Episode II has already been dragged into existence by Lucas himself, so maybe we’re in safe territory now.

And I’ll say it: I liked Muppets From Space. Now that I’ve admitted it in public, not only do I feel like a burden has been lifted from my soul, I can stop sending hush money to some guy in South America calling himself “El Puerco Mullido.”

Truth told, there are a number of rudderless franchises I’d like to see enruddered by the Happiest Unfathomably Huge Multinational Entertainment Corporation on Earth.

Let’s start with Popeye. An entire generation of children is growing up thinking of Popeye as “that fried-chicken guy.” If there’s one thing the world needs, it’s a children’s show about a smoking, muttering, one-eyed sailor with a chronic iron deficiency. Get on it, Disney!

Next up: Dungeons & Dragons. When the best iteration of your brand as an entertainment franchise includes a baby unicorn named “Uni,” you need serious help. Let’s face it, Disney — Harry Potter and Twilight aren’t going up for sale anytime soon, so if you want a piece of that sweet fantasy action, you can probably pick up D&D for pennies on the hit point.

And finally, how about Happy Days? In a word where freaking 21 Jump Street gets a big-screen remake, how come the closest we’ve come to a Happy Days reboot is Arrested Development? Afternoons watching the Fonz in reruns are some of my most prized childhood memories, and I demand that you desecrate them.

And you know, just spitballing here, but if you own both Happy Days and Star Wars, well … Fonzie‘s ability to bend minds to his will (especially female minds), manipulate inanimate objects and maintain a ridiculous hairstyle under difficult circumstances — doesn’t that sound a bit like a Jedi to you? Think it over.

- - -

Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to become a rebel, an imperial and a cockatiel.

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Chelation Therapy Shows Slight Benefit in Heart Disease Clinical Trial

LOS ANGELES — To the surprise of many cardiologists, a controversial alternative therapy proved beneficial to people with heart disease, reducing the rate of death and cardiovascular problems in a clinical trial, researchers said on Sunday.

The benefit of the treatment, known as chelation therapy, barely reached statistical significance, and there were questions about the reliability of the study. Even the investigators in the trial said the results were insufficient by themselves to justify recommending use of the treatment.

Still, the unexpected finding should provide some vindication to the National Institutes of Health for sponsoring the $30 million study, which was plagued by delays and problems.

“There may be a biological effect and that biological effect should be taken seriously,” and “pursued with additional research,” Dr. Gervasio A. Lamas of Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, the lead investigator, said at a news conference here at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Elliott Antman, representing the heart association, applauded the National Institutes of Health for sponsoring the study while also expressing caution. “Intriguing as these results are, they are unexpected and should not be interpreted as an indication to adopt chelation therapy into clinical practice,” said Dr. Antman, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Chelation therapy involves the infusion of agents that remove metals from the bloodstream.

More than 100,000 Americans with heart disease undergo chelation therapy each year, at a cost of about $5,000 per course of treatment, experts here said. The hypothesis is that chelation can remove the calcium that is a contributor to arterial plaques.

But skeptics said there was not enough evidence backing chelation therapy to even begin a clinical trial. Proponents of the study said that since chelation therapy was already widely used, it should be subject to the same rigorous scientific testing used to study conventional pharmaceuticals.

And some skeptics were not persuaded at all. Dr. Steven Nissen, head of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said the study was “fatally flawed,” with many of the doctors involved being on the fringes of medicine and many patients dropping out of the trial. He said if people got the mistaken idea from the study that chelation was beneficial “it would be a public health catastrophe.”

The study, which began enrolling patients in 2003, was plagued by problems from the start. It fell way behind its goal of recruiting nearly 2,400 patients in three years. The trial was also suspended in 2008 for investigations by government agencies, one over conduct at trial sites and the other about whether patients were being adequately informed that chelation can cause death. The study was allowed to resume the next year, after some changes were made.

The trial ended up with 1,708 patients at 134 centers in the United States and Canada. The patients all had had previous heart attacks.

Half the patients received the chelation therapy, a synthetic amino acid called disodium ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid, or EDTA, as well as other substances. These were given by infusion every week for 30 weeks, followed by 10 more infusions at intervals of two to eight weeks. The other half received infusions of placebo.

After a follow-up of 55 months, 26 percent of those who received chelation therapy had died, suffered a heart attack or stroke, had a procedure to reopen a coronary artery or had been hospitalized for angina. That was less than the 30 percent for those who received a placebo, a difference that was barely statistically significant.

Doctors said there were reasons for caution.

Virtually all the of difference between the treatment and the placebo groups occurred in the third of patients who had diabetes. The placebo contained some sugar, which conceivably could have harmed the diabetics. Also, at least within the first two years, the chelation therapy did not improve physical functioning or psychological well being, according to surveys of the patients.

Dr. Mark A. Creager, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who was not involved in the study, said the chelation infusion also contained a high dose of vitamin C and the blood thinner heparin. It could be that one of those ingredients, not the chelation agent, were responsible for any benefit, he said.

Dr. Lamas, the lead investigator, said the chelation treatment was well tolerated. But he said investigators did not yet know why some patients receiving the therapy dropped out of the trial.

Another study presented at the heart meeting on Sunday found coronary bypass surgery superior to the use of stents for patients with diabetes and multiple heart blockages.

The trial involved 1,900 patients followed for five yeas. About 27 percent of those who received stents either died or had a heart attack or stroke, compared with about 19 percent of those undergoing bypass surgery. There was an increase in stroke risk with surgery, but that was outweighed by fewer deaths and heart attacks.

Previous studies had already suggested that surgery was better for diabetic patients with severe coronary disease, and practice guidelines already say it is “reasonable” to choose surgery. But the new study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, shows the same result even using modern drug-covered stents.

About 700,000 Americans undergo artery opening procedures for more than one blood vessel each year, and about 25 percent of them have diabetes, according to the investigators.

The study results were also published online by the New England Journal of Medicine. Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific provided the stents used in the study.

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Fight Growing Over Online Royalties

The debate playing out in Washington has echoes of a presidential race. One side says businesses will suffer unless the government steps in to lower costs. The other accuses jet-set industrialists of a ploy that will cheat the middle class.

These attacks, however, are not between candidates for the White House. They are being made in a battle over the obscure but increasingly vital issue of royalty rates for streaming music online. The issue pits the survival of Pandora Media and other Internet radio services against the diminished paychecks of musicians in the digital age.

This fight has raged on and off for more than a decade, and it was renewed recently with a bill in Congress that would change the way digital royalty rates are set. But with streaming music starting to account for a significant chunk of the music industry’s revenue, and Pandora now a scrutinized public company, the issue has touched a nerve as never before.

“This is not just about our present; it is about our future, our ability to make it in the digital age,” said Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America. “Artists and labels and the entire music community need to earn a fair return on the creative works that are the reason companies like Pandora exist.”

Tim Westergren, the founder and public face of Pandora, has denounced the current system’s “discrimination” and urged the service’s 175 million users to contact their representatives in Washington. Music industry groups and labor unions have also gone public, casting it as a fair-pay issue.

Rates are set by three judges on the federal Copyright Royalty Board, but they apply a different standard to Internet radio services like Pandora than they do to satellite and cable radio outlets like Sirius XM and Music Choice.

Sirius, for example, pays 8 percent of its revenue to record companies and artists. Pandora pays a fraction of a cent each time a song is streamed, which last year amounted to about 54 percent of its revenue, or $149 million.

“The rate being too high dramatically depresses how much music gets played,” Mr. Westergren said in a recent interview. “It has really suffocated the industry.”

The Internet Radio Fairness Act, introduced in September, would move Internet radio companies from their “willing buyer, willing seller” standard — which critics like Pandora say results in an unrealistically high rate — to the one used for satellite and cable radio. To determine a fair rate, that standard directs the judges to consider factors including whether the prices will have a “disruptive impact” on the industry.

Music industry groups also want one standard, but one that keeps rates high. For years they have also been pushing for laws that would require terrestrial stations to pay royalties to labels and artists. (In the United States — and almost nowhere else in the world — radio stations pay royalties only to music publishers.)

Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican of Utah who co-sponsored the bill, said in a phone interview that the bill was meant to encourage growth in the streaming business. But when Mr. Chaffetz, whose campaign committee has received $2,000 from Pandora, was asked to respond to complaints that the changes would hurt musicians, he could not resist taunting a bit.

“The old-school dinosaurs are trying to help, but they’re stuck in the tar,” he said. “They can go talk to the pterodactyls.”

Pandora has been down this road before, and in 2009 reached an agreement for a temporary discount of about 40 percent off the royalty board’s rates; that deal expires in 2015.

This time Pandora is a different beast: a company with a $1.4 billion market capitalization. Each month, 58 million people use it to stream more than 1.1 billion hours of music.

Streaming is now on every horizon in the music industry. SoundExchange, which collects royalties from Internet and satellite radio, recently announced that it had crossed the $1 billion benchmark in payments to labels and artists.

The royalties issue, Mr. Westergren said, has become a question about the wider health of the streaming business, which he believes has been stunted by royalties.

“This is not an argument about going out of business,” he said. “A fix here would be for the whole industry.”

But there is wide anger in the music industry that the bill would enrich technology companies at the expense of musicians. MusicFirst Coalition, which includes the recording industry association, SoundExchange and others, says it believes that if Pandora gets everything it wants, it could cut its royalty bill by up to 85 percent.

For Pandora, the critical question is whether streaming businesses can be successful at all in the current system. Digital music services have proliferated over the years, but just as many have died, and popular arrivals like Spotify have yet to turn a profit.

Clear Channel Communications, the radio giant, has recently moved more aggressively into streaming with its iHeartRadio app. Robert W. Pittman, its chief executive — who has been outspoken on the royalty issue — said in an interview that a change could generate more money for the music industry by allowing streaming businesses to thrive.

“It’s not so much about rates as about how much dollars you spend,” Mr. Pittman said. “The amount of dollars to artists is rate times volume. If the rate suppresses the volume, there’s less money. If it encourages volume, there’s more money.”

Mr. Westergren is revered as a self-made success with real musical bona fides; he is fond of telling stories about his years of scraping by as a touring musician. But the controversy over the Internet Radio Fairness Act threatens to tarnish that image.

The music industry says that if Pandora needs to improve its bottom line, it should sell more ads. When asked to respond, Mr. Westergren makes a gesture of banging his head on a table.

“It’s an easy thing to say,” he said. “But no one has yet explained to us why Internet radio is under a different standard. No one responds to that fundamental premise.”

Advertising sales, which make up almost 90 percent of Pandora’s revenue, doubled in the company’s last fiscal year.

For Mr. Westergren, though, the most difficult aspect of this battle has been the accusation that Pandora wants to take advantage of musicians.

“This adversarial reaction toward Internet radio is counterproductive,” he said. “It’s causing other businesses to sit on the sidelines, and that is hurting musicians. Ultimately, you want to have many boats in the harbor.”

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New Jersey Shore, ravaged by Sandy, might never be the same

Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us; the pier lights our carnival life forever.

— Bruce Springsteen

POINT PLEASANT, N.J. — There were all of 21 homes on the little cul-de-sac. There wasn't much space between them and nobody much cared — after all, Riviera Court was surrounded on three sides by water, and everybody's "yard" was a dock, a boat and a route to the sea, which seemed like such a nice thing just a week ago.

Lori Rebimbas was at home when Hurricane Sandy arrived with sinister clouds, then shrieking wind. It was the water that chased her out, rising to her knees in 10 minutes. As she drove into the darkness, trees tumbled and electrical wires lashed and sparked behind her.

When she made it back, Rebimbas found that the tidal surge from Bay Head Harbor had flooded her neighbors' homes and crashed through her front door. She stepped inside, onto shattered glass that squished in the carpet. Her bobbed hair fell limp around her face. She lighted a candle in what used to be the living room, and wept.

"I just want a home," she said.

Sandy was 1,000 miles wide and blew through 13 states. Within that immense strike zone, there were places that were shaken, places that were inconvenienced, places that sustained damage and death. Then there were places that may never be the same.

The Jersey Shore had seen its share of bad weather. A winter storm in 1846 wrecked nine ships, and is still known as the Day of Terror. In 1962, a nor'easter washed a Navy destroyer up on the beach in Holgate. But nobody ever saw anything like this, and this time, some aren't sure they can come back.

In Seaside Heights, a roller coaster fell into the ocean, where it remained Saturday, half submerged, undulating above the waves like the skeleton of a slain sea serpent. A tiny '57 Chevy was ripped from an old-timey carnival ride and cast far down the beach. Casino Pier, Funtown Pier, Freeman's Carousel — all gone.

"We lost everything. Every single thing," said Peter Smith, whose family ran several businesses on the century-old boardwalk.

No one has yet tallied up the damage along the coast, partly because the crisis is still unfolding because of power outages, fuel leaks and gas shortages. But Sandy did not discriminate; it took mansions in Mantoloking, fishermen's cottages in Union Beach, and part of the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The storm, Smith said, grabbed the Shore's heart, "ripped it out and threw it away."

The world thought it knew this place. There was a reality TV show that caught fire a few years back, leaning into Italian American stereotypes and documenting the "Guidos" and "Guidettes" who tanned and drank and brawled. But "Jersey Shore" was not the Jersey Shore.

The Shore was 127 miles of white-sand nostalgia. For almost 150 years, people went "down the shore," leaving crowded, hot cities in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania for boarding houses, second homes and rentals by the cool ocean.

It was a place of miniature golf and fortune tellers, frozen custard and saltwater taffy. Locals poked fun at the visitors — they called the loud ones "Bennies," an acronym for Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark and New York — but they appreciated the business. And many of the towns boomed, at least in summer.

This was where a lot of people first saw the sea, or shared their first kiss. There were a lot of churches, and a lot of bars. It was by no means perfect: The Shore had its seedy side, with economic stagnation, corruption scandals, racial tension. Being "timeless" can also mean stuck in a rut.

But there was something, or some place, for everyone. Soldiers stationed up north started skinny dipping at Gunnison Beach in the 1960s; it's now the state's only legal nude beach. In Ocean City, officials banned liquor sales in 1879; that never changed either.

The first Miss America was crowned in Atlantic City in 1921 — she was 16 and won $100 — to keep tourists after Labor Day. Nearly half a century later, activists protested the beauty contest by crowning their own pageant winner — a sheep.

The "Jersey Shore sound" paired Italian accordion with Motown lyricism. By the 1970s the sound had a face. Bruce Springsteen grew up in Freehold, and his second album featured "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," which is quoted above and was a valentine to the Shore — and a girl named Sandy. That took on a new meaning last week.

There were beaches for new money, for old money, for no money. The working class owned tiny bungalows built on a grid; the gentry lived in gingerbread Victorians that looked like giant doll houses. No matter your station, nobody looked sideways if you told your "daurghter" to wash the sand off in the "warter."

It wasn't unusual for generations of a family to head to the same stretch of beach, for children to play in the same neon-lighted arcades that once entertained their grandparents.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 4

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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“Breaking Bad” to get the “MythBusters” treatment

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Finally, the world might find out if it’s truly a bad idea to dissolve a body with hydrofluoric acid in a bathtub.

Discovery Channel‘s reality show “MythBusters” – which re-enacts scenarios from movies, TV and urban legend to test their accuracy with scientific methodology – is filming a “Breaking Bad”-themed episode, a spokesman for the cable network told TheWrap on Friday.

“Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan and star Aaron Paul – who plays meth manufacturer Jesse Pinkman on the series — will be on hand as “MythBusters” stars Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage put the logic of the hit AMC drama.

No other details, such as when the episode will air, were available.

Back in June, Gilligan said in an interview that he’d like to do a “Breaking Bad”/”MythBusters” crossover.

“I’d dig seeing those guys prove or disprove some of the crazy stuff we’ve done on ‘Breaking Bad,’” Gilligan enthused.

While they’re at it, perhaps they can get to the bottom of whether that electromagnet episode would have been possible in the real world.

EW.com first reported the news of the “Breaking Bad”/”MythBusters” crossover.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Opinion: Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do

HALLUCINATIONS are very startling and frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell something — something that is not there. Your immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination is convincingly real, produced by the same neural pathways as actual perception, and yet no one else seems to see it. And then you are forced to the conclusion that something — something unprecedented — is happening in your own brain or mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke?

In other cultures, hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but in modern times they seem to carry an ominous significance in the public (and also the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon. The vast majority are benign — and, indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue.

Many of us, as we lie in bed with closed eyes, awaiting sleep, have so-called hypnagogic hallucinations — geometric patterns, or faces, sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may be almost too faint to notice, or they may be very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly changing — people used to compare them to slide shows.

At the other end of sleep are hypnopompic hallucinations, seen with open eyes, upon first waking. These may be ordinary (an intensification of color perhaps, or someone calling your name) or terrifying (especially if combined with sleep paralysis) — a vast spider, a pterodactyl above the bed, poised to strike.

Hallucinations (of sight, sound, smell or other sensations) can be associated with migraine or seizures, with fever or delirium. In chronic disease hospitals, nursing homes, and I.C.U.’s, hallucinations are often a result of too many medications and interactions between them, compounded by illness, anxiety and unfamiliar surroundings.

But hallucinations can have a positive and comforting role, too — this is especially true with bereavement hallucinations, seeing the face or hearing the voice of one’s deceased spouse, siblings, parents or child — and may play an important part in the mourning process. Such bereavement hallucinations frequently occur in the first year or two of bereavement, when they are most “needed.”

Working in old-age homes for many years, I have been struck by how many elderly people with impaired hearing are prone to auditory and, even more commonly, musical hallucinations — involuntary music in their minds that seems so real that at first they may think it is a neighbor’s stereo.

People with impaired sight, similarly, may start to have strange, visual hallucinations, sometimes just of patterns but often more elaborate visions of complex scenes or ranks of people in exotic dress. Perhaps 20 percent of those losing their vision or hearing may have such hallucinations.

I was called in to see one patient, Rosalie, a blind lady in her 90s, when she started to have visual hallucinations; the staff psychiatrist was also summoned. Rosalie was concerned that she might be having a stroke or getting Alzheimer’s or reacting to some medication. But I was able to reassure her that nothing was amiss neurologically. I explained to her that if the visual parts of the brain are deprived of actual input, they are hungry for stimulation and may concoct images of their own. Rosalie was greatly relieved by this, and delighted to know that there was even a name for her condition: Charles Bonnet syndrome. “Tell the nurses,” she said, drawing herself up in her chair, “that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome!”

Rosalie asked me how many people had C.B.S., and I told her hundreds of thousands, perhaps, in the United States alone. I told her that many people were afraid to mention their hallucinations. I described a recent study of elderly blind patients in the Netherlands which found that only a quarter of people with C.B.S. mentioned it to their doctors — the others were too afraid or too ashamed. It is only when physicians gently inquire (often avoiding the word “hallucination”) that people feel free to admit seeing things that are not there — despite their blindness.

Rosalie was indignant at this, and said, “You must write about it — tell my story!” I do tell her story, at length, in my book on hallucinations, along with the stories of many others. Most of these people have been reluctant to admit to their hallucinations. Often, when they do, they are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed — told that it’s nothing, or that their condition has no explanation.

Misdiagnosis is especially common if people admit to “hearing voices.” In a famous 1973 study by the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, eight “pseudopatients” presented themselves at various hospitals across the country, saying that they “heard voices.” All behaved normally otherwise, but were nonetheless determined to be (and treated as) schizophrenic (apart from one, who was given the diagnosis of “manic-depressive psychosis”). In this and follow-up studies, Professor Rosenhan demonstrated convincingly that auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia were synonymous in the medical mind.

WHILE many people with schizophrenia do hear voices at certain times in their lives, the inverse is not true: most people who hear voices (as much as 10 percent of the population) are not mentally ill. For them, hearing voices is a normal mode of experience.

My patients tell me about their hallucinations because I am open to hearing about them, because they know me and trust that I can usually run down the cause of their hallucinations. For the most part, these experiences are unthreatening and, once accommodated, even mildly diverting.

David Stewart, a Charles Bonnet syndrome patient with whom I corresponded, writes of his hallucinations as being “altogether friendly,” and imagines his eyes saying: “Sorry to have let you down. We recognize that blindness is no fun, so we’ve organized this small syndrome, a sort of coda to your sighted life. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can manage.”

Mr. Stewart has been able to take his hallucinations in good humor, since he knows they are not a sign of mental decline or madness. For too many patients, though, the shame, the secrecy, the stigma, persists.

Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “Hallucinations.”

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Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Jeffrey G. Katz, the chief executive of Wize Commerce, seen with employees. He says that about 60 percent of the traffic for the company’s Nextag comparison-shopping site comes from Google.

In a geeky fire drill, engineers and outside consultants at Nextag scrambled to see if the problem was its own fault. Maybe some inadvertent change had prompted Google’s algorithm to demote Nextag when a person typed in shopping-related search terms like “kitchen table” or “lawn mower.”

But no, the engineers determined. And traffic from Google’s search engine continued to decline, by half.

Nextag’s response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months.

The move was costly but necessary to retain shoppers, Mr. Katz says, because an estimated 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic comes from Google, both from free search and paid search ads, which are ads that are related to search results and appear next to them. “We had to do it,” says Mr. Katz, chief executive of Wize Commerce, owner of Nextag. “We’re living in Google’s world.”

Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.

So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.

The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.

The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s.

The staff of the Federal Trade Commission has recommended preparing an antitrust suit against Google, according to people briefed on the inquiry, who spoke on the condition they not be identified. But the commissioners must vote to proceed. Even if they do, the government and Google could settle.

Google has drawn the attention of antitrust officials as it has moved aggressively beyond its dominant product — search and search advertising — into fields like online commerce and local reviews. The antitrust issue is whether Google uses its search engine to favor its offerings like Google Shopping and Google Plus Local over rivals.

For policy makers, Google is a tough call.

“What to do with an attractive monopolist, like Google, is a really challenging issue for antitrust,” says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former senior adviser to the F.T.C. “The goal is to encourage them to stay in power by continuing to innovate instead of excluding competitors.”

SPEAKING at a Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona last month, Larry Page, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said he understood the government scrutiny of his company, given Google’s size and reach. “There’s very many decisions we make that really impact a lot of people,” he acknowledged.

The main reason is that Google is continually adjusting its search algorithm — the smart software that determines the relevance, ranking and presentation of search results, typically links to other Web sites.

Google says it makes the changes to improve its service, and has long maintained that its algorithm weeds out low-quality sites and shows the most useful results, whether or not they link to Google products.

“Our first and highest goal has to be to get the user the information they want as quickly and easily as possible,” says Matt Cutts, leader of the Web spam team at Google.

But Google’s algorithm is secret, and changes can leave Web sites scrambling.

Consider Vote-USA.org, a nonprofit group started in 2003. It provides online information for voters to avoid the frustration of arriving at a polling booth and barely recognizing half the names on the ballot. The site posts free sample ballots for federal, state and local elections with candidates’ pictures, biographies and views on issues.

In the 2004 and 2006 elections, users created tens of thousands of sample ballots. By 2008, traffic had fallen sharply, says Ron Kahlow, who runs Vote-USA.org, because “we dropped off the face of the map on Google.”

As founder of a search-engine optimization company and a recipient of grants that Google gives nonprofits to advertise free, Mr. Kahlow knows a thing or two about how to operate in Google’s world. He pored over Google’s guidelines for Web sites, made changes and e-mailed Google. Yet he received no response.

“I lost all donations to support the operation,” he said. “It was very, very painful.”

A breakthrough came through a personal connection. A friend of Mr. Kahlow knew Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google. Mr. Black made an inquiry on Mr. Kahlow’s behalf, and a Google engineer investigated.

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