Study Finds Greater Income Inequality in Nation’s Thriving Cities

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DealBook: An Aggressive Fed Finds Critics on Wall Street

China’s Economic Surge Has Roots Before Deng, Book Finds

The official position of the Chinese Communist Party is that the answer is easy: Mao Zedong. But as evidence has accumulated in recent years about the extent of the killings, torture and chronic economic mismanagement through much of Mao’s rule, academic assessments outside China and sometimes even inside have been increasingly damning about Mao’s legacy.

That has produced a search for who should be given the credit for China’s re-emergence as an economic juggernaut with growing military and political heft. Jung Chang, the author of one of the most scathing biographies of Mao, as well as the best-seller “Wild Swans,” has suggested an alternative in a new book: Cixi, the empress dowager who for practical purposes was the ruler of China for most of the years from 1861 until her death in 1908.

Using extensive access to imperial court archives in Beijing that have not been available to biographers outside China, Ms. Chang presents her subject as neither the cruel despot nor the easily manipulated ruler whom the Communist Party and other critics have long portrayed. Her book, “Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China,” presents Cixi (pronounced tsuh-shee) as a powerful, strong-willed woman responsible for most of the modernizing programs undertaken during her rule, only to be thwarted on many occasions by men who were sometimes in the pay of foreign powers.

Ms. Chang gives Cixi credit for building China’s first rail artery from Beijing to Wuhan, although she initially opposed it, as well as for strenuously resisting Japan and other foreign powers, protecting freedom of the press and even seeking in her last days to give millions of Chinese men the right to vote.

Some historians have criticized the book as painting too rosy a picture of its subject.

John Delury, an assistant professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, who specializes in the Qing dynasty, said that, with most of the chapters ending with strong praise of Cixi, he was concerned about whether the archival material had been objectively assessed. “As a reader, you don’t know what to trust, because everything is the best possible” interpretation of her actions, he said. “Really what we need is a post-revisionist biography that is very scholarly and very careful.”

Speaking in Hong Kong last week, Ms. Chang defended her work as fair while acknowledging that she “did develop sympathy” for Cixi.

“I documented every single one of Cixi’s killings, some of which have not even been put out by the official propaganda,” she said. “What I did was to provide the context and why Cixi did it.”

Ms. Chang said: “It is a biographer’s job to enter the head of your subject. I mean that is my job — I felt I entered Mao’s head, and I felt I entered Cixi’s head.”

A few other authors have also begun offering somewhat favorable interpretations of Cixi, notably Sterling Seagrave in his 1992 book, “Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China.” Chinese historians, too, have offered more sympathetic interpretations of Cixi and other Qing court figures who resisted more radical calls for change in the late 19th century. But Ms. Chang said the Beijing archival material to which she unexpectedly gained access after the international success of her biography of Mao showed that Cixi had played an even more central role and been even more important to modernization than previously believed.

Although Ms. Chang’s books are banned in mainland China, Ms. Chang said the government had continued to let her travel to China each year to visit her aged mother, but with restrictions.

“I’ve made a commitment not to speak at public gatherings, not to talk to the press and not even to see my friends — I just restrict my visits to my mother and very close, old friends who have nothing to do with politics,” as well as a few Chinese scholars, she said. “I just hope that I can still go back to China and see my mother.”

DealBook: Banks Fall Short of Planning for the Worst, Fed Finds

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European Regulator Finds Little Risk in Diabetes Drugs

Regulators in Europe have concluded that there was little evidence that widely used drugs to treat Type 2 diabetes could cause pancreatic inflammation or pancreatic cancer, a finding that might reassure patients while also removing a potential sales threat for Merck and some other drug companies.

“Presently available data do not confirm recent concerns over an increased risk of pancreatic adverse events with these medicines,” the European Medicines Agency said in a news release on Friday.

Both the European agency and its American counterpart, the Food and Drug Administration, have been reviewing the safety of a big class of drugs that includes Merck’s Januvia and the drugs Byetta, Bydureon and Onglyza, which are sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca.

The F.D.A. has not yet released its conclusions.

The concerns have been raised over the last few years mainly by Dr. Peter Butler, the chief of endocrinology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Butler has been hailed by some drug safety watchdogs as a hero for standing up to the drug companies but criticized by many diabetes experts as a zealot.

In his latest study, the one that triggered the reviews, Dr. Butler and colleagues examined the pancreases from 34 organ donors, some with diabetes and some without, who had died from causes other than diabetes. They found that the pancreases of the people who had used Januvia or Byetta tended to have more signs of inflammation and precancerous cellular changes than the pancreases from diabetics who had not taken those drugs and those from nondiabetics.

But the European Medicines Agency said Friday that the study had “a number of methodological limitations and potential sources of bias.” The donors who had taken Januvia or Byetta were older and had diabetes for far longer than the diabetics who had not taken the drugs, making it difficult to draw conclusions on the possible effects of the drugs.

The agency said the prescribing information for the drugs already contained warnings about pancreatic inflammation, known as pancreatitis. It said clinical trials had shown no increased risk of pancreatic cancer, though that the trials were too small to draw firm conclusions. It said “some uncertainties remain’’ regarding the long-term effects of the drugs, but much larger trials are under way to answer those questions.

The drugs involved, which the F.D.A. calls incretin mimetics and the European agency calls GLP-1-based therapies, effectively increase the body’s levels of a hormone called glucagon-, like peptide-1, which helps control blood sugar levels. Some of the drugs, known as GLP-1 agonists, mimic the effect of the hormone, while others, known as DPP-4 inhibitors, slow the breakdown of the body’s own hormone.

Collectively, the drugs had more than $9 billion in global sales last year, led by Merck’s Januvia and a related drug, Janumet, which together had sales of $5.7 billion. Other drugs include Victoza from Novo Nordisk and Tradjenta from Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim.

ANA Finds Damaged Battery Wires on Boeing Locator Beacons

TOKYO — Japan’s ANA Holdings Inc, which operates the world’s biggest fleet of Boeing Co Dreamliners, said it found damage to the battery wiring on two 787 locator beacons during checks after the devices were identified as the likely cause of a fire on another aircraft in London this month.

The damage was slight, but the beacons have been sent to the manufacturer, Honeywell International Inc, for inspection and the airline has informed local aviation regulators, an ANA spokesman, Ryousei Nomura, said.

British investigators probing the fire aboard an Ethiopian Airlines Dreamliner at Heathrow airport are focusing a possible pinched wire on an emergency beacon and on condensation in the plane, which has higher humidity levels than other aircraft.

ANA has taken the built-in locator beacons out of its eight domestically operated Dreamliners with the permission of local regulators and has inspected and put back those on its 12 787s that fly international routes.

The beacons are designed to guide rescuers to downed aircraft, although in most cases close radar tracking and eyewitness reports allow air traffic controllers to pinpoint crash sites.

Also Friday, Qatar Airways said that it had taken one of its Dreamliners out of service following what it described as a minor technical issue, as pressure mounted on the plane maker over possible new electrical problems with the advanced jet.

The airline and Boeing declined to give further details.

According to Web-tracking service Flightaware, the Qatar Airways aircraft, registered as A7-BCB, has not flown since Sunday, an unusually long downtime for a long-haul jet designed to save on fuel bills.

Qatar Airways confirmed an aircraft had been taken out of service, but said no flights had been canceled as a result.

Report Finds Legal Fees Out of Control in Local Governments

A report released Tuesday by the state comptroller found local governments are failing to control excessive and improper payments for legal services.

DealBook: Ratings Service Moody’s Finds Pension Shortfall

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Outside Review of Clinical Data Finds a Spinal Treatment’s Benefit Overstated

The evidence, published on Monday in a medical journal, is the first fruit of a movement aimed at helping doctors and patients make better treatment choices. Its goal is to have companies make clinical data about a drug or a medical device available to a wide range of researchers, not just a few handpicked ones.

The development is the latest step in an evolving, decade-long push by patient advocates to make the practice of medicine more transparent. As a result of that effort, companies have recently started disclosing their payments to doctors and medical journals now require researchers to reveal any financial ties to a study’s sponsor.

By getting companies to release study data, advocates say, outside experts can vet whether reports in medical journal about the tests are accurate and complete. The concern is that the reports, which doctors rely on to learn about a treatment, can be shaped not only by financial factors but also by the personal agendas of the researchers involved.

“To improve the care of patients, clinical trial data, protocols and results need to be made more widely available and shared for public benefit,” according to an editorial in Annals of Internal Medicine, which published the Medtronic-related reports.

Medtronic’s decision to release data about spinal treatment followed charges in 2011 in a medical journal that company-sponsored studies about the product had overstated its benefit and played down its risks. Other producers are weighing the impact of adverse publicity if they decide not to follow suit against the possible impact on sales if they do.

Such decisions by companies are likely to unfold slowly rather than in a rush. In October, the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline said that it would release the data from all clinical trials of a drug after one is approved or abandoned. In April, Roche, faced by growing demands, said it would soon release all data collected during studies of its popular influenza drug, Tamiflu.

The Medtronic product at issue, which was first sold in 2002, is a bioengineered bone growth protein called Infuse that is used in spinal fusion, a common procedure performed to reduce back pain. Starting about a decade ago, some studies, including those sponsored by Medtronic, reported in medical journals that Infuse produced superior patient outcomes than the traditional material used in the procedure, a bone graft, and posed little if any risk.

One 2003 report, for example, concluded that Infuse produced “statistically superior outcomes with regard to length of surgery, blood loss, hospital stay, reoperation rate, median time to return to work and fusion rates.”

Many of the Infuse reports were written by researchers who received millions of dollars over the years in consulting fees and other payments from Medtronic, including Dr. Thomas A. Zdeblick of the University of Wisconsin and Dr. J. Kenneth Burkus, a spine surgeon in Georgia. The early reports led to the widespread use of Infuse for the specific type of spinal fusion for which the Food and Drug Administration had given approval and by surgeons as an “off-label” treatment in other types of fusion procedures. By 2011, Infuse was used in about a quarter of the estimated 432,000 spinal fusions performed in this country each year, but by then it had become controversial because of its cost and growing safety complaints.

In 2008, for example, the F.D.A. warned that it had received reports of life-threatening complications when Infuse was used off-label to fuse together vertebrae in the upper, or cervical, portion of the spine.

The controversy reached a climax in 2011, when a medical publication, The Spine Journal, devoted an issue to reports that repudiated the Medtronic-sponsored research, calling it misleading and biased. The journal’s move was significant because it is published by the nation’s biggest group of spine surgeons, the North American Spine Society.

Monitor Finds Mortgage Lenders Still Falling Short of Settlement’s Terms

The nation’s five biggest mortgage lenders have largely satisfied their financial obligations under last year’s $25 billion settlement over mortgage abuses, helping hundreds of thousands of families keep their homes. But four of the five have yet to meet their commitment to end the maze of frustrations that borrowers must navigate to modify their loans, according to a report on Wednesday by the settlement’s independent monitor.

The most common failure involved a requirement that borrowers be notified in a timely manner of any documents missing from their applications. Banks also failed to meet strict timelines for approving applications. The settlement requires that borrowers be notified of missing documents within five days and given 30 days to supply the missing paperwork and that decisions be rendered at most 30 days after an application is completed.

“I think what you see is there’s still a communication problem,” said Joseph A. Smith Jr., the monitor. “If there’s a unifying feature, it’s that the servicers who failed these things are not yet communicating effectively.”

The mortgage settlement came after the housing crash led to a wave of foreclosures across the country and after widespread improprieties in mortgage lending and in the foreclosure process were uncovered.

The banks report their own performance on 29 loan servicing criteria, and their findings are then tested in a random sampling by outside consultants overseen by the monitor.

Citibank failed three metrics, two of which involve notifying borrowers of missing documents in a timely fashion and one that requires that a letter containing accurate information be sent to a homeowner before foreclosure.

Bank of America failed two metrics, one regarding missing documents and the other regarding the pre-foreclosure letter. Wells Fargo also flunked on the missing documents.

JPMorgan Chase failed to adhere to the prescribed timeline for reviewing loan modification requests and notifying customers of its decision. It also failed to remove home insurance policies, known as forced-place insurance, within two weeks of a homeowner’s submitting proof that he or she had insurance.

The fifth lender, ResCap, formerly the mortgage subsidiary of Ally Financial, whose mortgage servicing is now handled by other companies, was not found to have failed on any of the metrics.

The banks are required to submit a corrective action plan and compensate affected borrowers. Chase, for example, has already refunded insurance premiums charged to 2,000 borrowers. “We quickly fixed the issue,” said Amy Bonitatibus, a spokeswoman for Chase, adding that the timeline problem had been remedied as well.

Wells Fargo said that its internal reviews showed that it had already fixed its problem. Citi said it had fixed one of its issues and was working on the other two.

Dan Frahm, a spokesman for Bank of America, which is responsible for about 60 percent of the total financial obligation under the settlement, said, “While neither area of noncompliance resulted in inaccurate foreclosures or improper loan modification denials, we took immediate action and resolved one area and will soon return to compliance in the other.”

The servicers also submitted to the monitor almost 60,000 complaints received from elected officials on behalf of their constituents. The most common complaints, the monitor’s report said, were related to the bank’s obligation to provide a single point of contact to borrowers seeking modification of their loans. There were also complaints about “dual tracking,” in which the foreclosure process is begun before a borrower’s request for a loan modification is resolved.

Despite the volume of complaints, none of the banks failed the requirement to provide a single point of contact, leading Mr. Smith to conclude that he needed to add more criteria in that area. He said at least three new metrics measuring the efficacy of the single point of contact would be added.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 19, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to a lender that was not found to have failed on any of the metrics. It is ResCap, the mortgage subsidiary of Ally Financial, not Ally Financial itself.

Former Harleysville GC Finds New Home at Blank Rome

Robert Kauffman spent the past year helping transition his former company, Harleysville Insurance, after its acquisition by Nationwide Insurance, all the while knowing he would soon be looking for another job.

Bucks Blog: Banks Rake In Overdraft Fees, Report Finds

Overdraft penalties represent well over half of banks’ fees from consumer checking accounts, a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finds.

The report, based in part on confidential data provided by some of the nation’s larger banks, estimated that 61 percent of bank fees from consumer accounts were for overdrafts and insufficient funds, penalties charged when customers spent more than their accounts had available. Based on that finding, the bureau said it estimated conservatively that the banking industry earned $12.6 billion in such fees from consumers in 2011.

The report represents preliminary findings of a bureau inquiry into bank overdraft practices announced early last year. The bureau is not making any policy recommendations yet, but says it will conduct further reviews of account-level data.

The report found that overdraft protection can be very expensive for consumers and varies widely from bank to bank. Overdraft protection is a service in which the bank pays the amount in question, even though the account lacks the necessary funds, but then charges the customer a fee for doing so. The average customer overdrawing an account paid $225 in charges per year, the study found. And more than a quarter (27 percent) of checking accounts paid at least one overdraft charge in 2011.

The bureau did not identify the banks included in the report or even specify how many were included in the analysis, which also incorporated comments submitted by the public, consumer advocates and industry groups. The bureau said, however, that the banks in the study represented more than half of all deposit accounts. The bureau has supervisory authority over banks with more than $10 billion in assets, or more than 100 institutions.

Since the middle of 2010, the Federal Reserve has barred banks from charging overdraft fees for A.T.M. withdrawals or most debit card transactions unless a customer actively  chooses the service. The report found that customers who accept the coverage were more likely to end up paying higher fees and were more likely to end up having their account involuntarily closed than those who did not.

“What is marketed as overdraft protection can, in some instances, put consumers at greater risk of harm,” said Richard Cordray, the bureau’s director, in prepared remarks.

Opt-in rates vary widely among banks, suggesting that bank marketing of the service plays a role. At some banks in 2011, more than 40 percent of new customers opted in, while fewer than 10 percent did so at other banks.

Mr. Cordray said the findings did not indicate that banks should not charge overdraft fees. “Nonetheless,” he said, “our findings raise concerns about the number of consumers who are incurring heavy overdraft fees or account closures, and the wide variations across institutions indicate that certain practices and procedures merit further analysis.”

Have you paid overdraft fees? Do you think new rules are necessary to regulate banks’ use of them?

Study Finds Health Care Use Rises With Expanded Medicaid

New results from a landmark study, released on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, go a long way toward answering those questions. The study, called the Oregon Health Study, compares thousands of low-income people in Oregon who received access to Medicaid with an identical population that did not.

It found that those who gained Medicaid coverage spent more on health care, making more visits to doctors and trips to the hospital. But the study suggests that Medicaid coverage did not make those adults much healthier, at least within the two-year time frame of the research, judging by their blood pressure, blood sugar and other measures. It did, however, substantially reduce the incidence of depression, and it made them vastly more financially secure.

“There was this view that Medicaid coverage would not do much for the low-income uninsured, either because they had access to charity care or because Medicaid is not good insurance,” said Amy Finkelstein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This rejects that notion entirely.” Her work on the Oregon study contributed to her receipt last year of the John Bates Clark Medal, a laurel for younger economists considered second only to the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for those in the profession.

Currently about 50 million Americans, nearly all them poor, receive health care coverage under Medicaid, a federal program administered by the states. But most states do not provide Medicaid coverage to adults without disabilities or dependent children, no matter how poor they are.

Health economists anticipate that new enrollees to the Medicaid program will swell the country’s health spending costs by hundreds of billions of dollars over time. In 2014, at least 18 states and the District of Columbia will provide coverage to all adults with incomes below 133 percent of the federal poverty line. That currently would translate to coverage for all individuals with incomes below about $15,000 and for households of four people receiving less than about $31,000.

Many more states might join in the expansion in the coming months or years. The Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health care law, has the federal government pay for a large majority of the increased Medicaid costs in perpetuity, making the financial burden on states much smaller.

The unique Oregon study came about when the state found itself with enough money to provide additional Medicaid coverage to about 10,000 low-income adults. Many times that number qualified.

Rather than deny coverage to all Oregonians, the state established a lottery, to distribute coverage randomly. That gave economists and other social scientists a once-in-a-lifetime chance to perform a randomized control experiment — the gold standard in medical and scientific research, but a rarity in much of social science — isolating the effect that coverage had on health and broader well-being.

An earlier round of results from the Oregon Health Study analyzed assessments of health and well-being reported by study participants, as well as data from hospitals and credit agencies. This second major set of results stems from biometric data collected at in-person visits with participants. A huge team of researchers collected blood samples, blood pressure readings and weight measurements from thousands of Oregonians; about half of them had won access to Medicaid in a lottery and half had not.

The researchers found that Medicaid coverage did not significantly affect the prevalence or diagnosis of hypertension or high cholesterol, or the use of drugs used to treat those conditions. It significantly increased the probability that a person would receive a diagnosis of diabetes and be treated, though it did not reduce blood sugar levels noticeably.

Where Medicaid seemed to have the strongest measured impact was on depression. Getting Medicaid coverage reduced the probability of a positive screening by more than 30 percent.

“The authors are almost tilting the spin on the story to be a little more pessimistic than I would have been,” said John Holahan of the Urban Institute, responding to the new findings.

“There are some positive effects on health,” he said, calling the effect on depression “especially strong.”

Confirming previous findings released by the researchers, the new round of results found that adults covered by Medicaid increased their use of a broad number of health services, like mammograms and cholesterol tests. That increased their medical spending by about 35 percent, compared to adults who did not win Medicaid coverage in the lottery.

Some researchers had theorized that getting Medicaid coverage would lead to a spike in use of medical services by low-income adults. Once covered, they might visit the doctor, have conditions checked out and treated, then stop using medical services as much.

But the second set of results from the Oregon study shows that is not the case. There is no spike in use of health services, nor is there any decline later on. Rather, use of the health system increased, and that increase persisted between the first year and the second year of the study.

“They go to the doctor more often, they visit the hospital more often, they use more prescription drugs, they are more likely to use preventive care,” said Katherine Baicker, a Harvard professor, co-author of the study and former economic adviser to President George W. Bush. “There is no evidence of a spike of utilization from pent-up demand.”

With E.C.B. in Spotlight, Bundesbank Finds Itself in the Shadows

Built 45 years ago, the modernist building is hardly old by European standards, yet it is a temple to tradition, embodying the ethos of this most conservative of institutions. “We are trying to keep it just the way it is,” said Reiner Bruckhaus, head of the bank’s centralized construction management division.

That starts with the granite floors, the Barcelona chairs in the lobby (designed by the Bauhaus great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and the grand, white Carrara marble by the elevators, and goes all the way up to the wood grid ceilings on the top floor. “You will find not even the slightest changes,” Mr. Bruckhaus said.

When the building was erected in 1967, the Bundesbank’s dominance in European monetary policy went unchallenged. But in the hazy distance of the Frankfurt skyline, significant change is evident in the outline of two towers and three cranes, the new headquarters of the European Central Bank — a visible reminder of the institution that has supplanted the Bundesbank, just as the euro replaced the German mark.

European leaders established the European Central Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt as a symbol of its status as heir to the Bundesbank. But the danger posed by Europe’s continuing debt crisis demanded improvisations at odds with the Bundesbank’s conservative teachings.

Over the summer the E.C.B.’s president, Mario Draghi, pursued an expansive policy that was anathema to the old guard, whose cause was championed by the Bundesbank’s youthful president, Jens Weidmann. He and his supporters base their views not, they say, on rigid orthodoxy but on experience gleaned from the disaster of hyperinflation and the success of adhering to a hard-money path.

In an increasingly uncomfortable pairing, the Bundesbank functions as the largest piece of the E.C.B. puzzle. With more than 9,500 full-time workers, the Bundesbank dwarfs the 1,600-strong central bank. Because of that limited staff, the E.C.B. depends on the Bundesbank to handle many of the back-office functions of the common currency.

But the European Central Bank’s influence continues to grow. Euro-zone finance ministers agreed to a deal Thursday to put 100 to 200 of their largest banks under its direct supervision.

The arranged marriage between the two banks will take enormous effort and flexibility. As its massive headquarters suggests, the Bundesbank is capable of enormous and sustained effort, but flexibility may be inimical to its nature.

Founded in 1957, the Bundesbank quickly grew into one of Germany’s most respected institutions. The rank-and-file behind Mr. Weidmann, 44, represent an unusually tight-knit group, almost like a monastic order, and they are steeped in the bank’s secular religion — often at the bank’s own school, a kind of Hogwarts for its future financial wizards, in a hilltop 12th-century castle in the town of Hachenburg.

“You hear it in the first lecture,” said Silke Frühklug, 32, a graduate and Bundesbank employee. “You hear it in the last lecture and every day in between: price stability.”

Ms. Frühklug married a classmate and in her free time plays on the central bank’s badminton team, which on a recent evening practiced in a gymnasium on the Bundesbank campus right after the handball team. The bank also has a theater society and “hobby artists” club, which exhibits in the lobby of the headquarters. It owns apartments for workers in tight real-estate markets like Munich and here in Frankfurt. Retired employees still lunch at the cafeteria, helping to nurture the all-important continuity.

“People feel connected with the goals of the bank,” said Matthias Endres, 43, editor of the Bundesbank’s internal magazine. Like Ms. Frühklug, he married a fellow graduate from the school in Hachenburg. He has vacationed with his wife and their three children at all three of the Bundesbank getaways, on the North Sea, in the Black Forest and on a lake in Bavaria.

Mr. Endres’s wife, Simone, works part-time in the headquarters’ Money Museum, which houses some 350,000 objects, of which roughly 1,300 are on display, including the worthless bills in denominations of millions and billions from the hyperinflation of the Weimar-era and examples of commodity money, like a gold bar, a tea brick and even a preserved cow standing near the entrance, a silent bovine greeter.

Jack Ewing contributed reporting.

Former Rodeo Queen Finds Time in the Saddle Helps Her Work as Assistant DA

There are a lot of similarities between lawyering and rodeoing, says Katie Woods, an assistant district attorney in Tarrant County, Texas.

"You're always sizing up your competition. … You want to know what you're up against to be successful in what you're doing," says Woods, who says her rodeo background also helps her in voir dire because she knows how to make a jury like her -- "[m]uch like you want a horse to trust you and follow you wherever you want to go," she says.

At the height of her rodeo career, Woods traveled frequently to amateur and professional-level rodeos and won big purses in barrel races -- riding a horse in a clover pattern around three barrels in an arena.

She became a local rodeo queen. She later was the third runner-up in a statewide rodeo queen competition hosted by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in California, where she grew up.

Then in 2004, Woods became Miss Rodeo USA for the International Professional Rodeo Association by winning a weeklong competition in the areas of etiquette, public speaking and horsemanship, among other things.

When her third year of law school at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law rolled around, Woods stopped traveling to rodeos and focused on school. She earned her law degree in 2010 and later that year she joined the Tarrant County DA's office, where she prosecutes misdemeanors in Tarrant County Court-at-Law No. 6.

But Woods will never give up rodeoing. She's on a team that competes in ranch rodeos, which focus on techniques like roping, tying and sorting cattle. In the near future, she hopes to resume barrel racing at smaller rodeos in Texas.

"It's my one getaway from the rest of life. When I'm horseback, I don't think about anything else going on in my life," Woods says.

This article first appeared on Texas Lawyer's Tex Parte blog.

Diversity Is Still a Challenge for N.Y. Firms, Study Finds

By Christine Simmons All Articles 

New York Law Journal

November 21, 2012

Despite law firms' efforts to promote diversity, results of a new survey of women and minorities at New York firms "paint a picture of stagnation," according to the New York City Bar's sixth Diversity Benchmarking Report. The study, which reported data for 2011, is based on the responses of 74 law firms that were signatories to a city bar statement of diversity principles.

"While new hires across levels are more diverse than attorneys at signatory firms, elevated turnover for women and minorities continues to erode the gains," the report said, noting there are higher turnover rates at every level for women lawyers compared to men and higher turnover for minority attorneys compared with whites. "Elevated turnover rates contribute to the creation of a 'leaky faucet' of talent for diverse attorneys."

Women continue to improve their representation at the partner level, reaching a new high of 18.3 percent in the 2011 results, while simultaneously declining among associate ranks. The study found that firms with more women on their management committees are generally more diverse firm-wide.

Minority attorney representation at the firms rose slightly in 2011, to 17.2 percent from 16.6 percent in 2010, but failed to reach the 2009 high of 18.1 percent, the report said. In particular, the percent of Hispanic and Asian attorneys increased in 2011 after declining from 2010. Meanwhile, the representation of black attorneys declined last year.

"The numbers presented in this report demonstrate a slow rate of change and indicate that many firms may need to reassess how they go about creating a workforce that better reflects our society," Carey Dunne, the city bar's president and a partner at Davis, Polk & Wardwell, said in a statement.

NBC Finds Itself in Unfamiliar Territory: On Top

Numerous unexpected factors have played a role in this surprising turnaround, some of which are not likely to last, but the numbers are clear. Among the viewers prized by most advertisers — 18- to 49-year-olds — NBC has beaten its network rivals every week of the new television season.

That’s three weeks, and NBC is in contention to post a fourth victory when the Nielsen accounting is official on Tuesday. (CBS, as it has for years, remains well ahead in terms of the total number of viewers.)

NBC’s ascent is the most striking development of the season, but it goes hand in hand with a wider story of network performance that, NBC aside, has ranged from disappointing to alarming.

While NBC has managed to increase its 18-49 number an impressive 15 percent, ABC is down 12 percent, Fox is down 19 percent and CBS — which had a huge start last fall because of curiosity surrounding the departure of Charlie Sheen from “Two and a Half Men” — is down 24 percent from the three-week period a year earlier.

The two developments are linked: NBC has been able to ascend at least in part because its competitors have descended so sharply.

Even at NBC, few people expected this performance. “We didn’t dare dream we’d win the first three weeks of the season,” said Stephen B. Burke, the NBC chief executive. “We were pretty sure we would do better, and had laid the groundwork and had the strategy to do better.”

Robert Greenblatt, in his second season heading NBC’s entertainment division, said, “I was hoping we’d be out of fourth place and comfortably in third. But we’re comfortably in first.”

NBC came into the season with a limited strategic objective. “Our big goal was to build one night a year,” Mr. Burke said.

With National Football League games making Sunday night an all-but-guaranteed win, the idea was, “O.K., we’d like to try to win Monday night,” Mr. Burke said. “And we’ll try to be competitive on Tuesday.”

Thus far, NBC has won every Monday and Tuesday to go along with its football-fueled Sunday.

The crucial decision was adding a second edition of the hit singing competition, “The Voice,” on Monday to complement the version that ran in the spring. “There were people saying we brought it back too soon,” Mr. Greenblatt said.

The outcome of that move has yet to be determined.

“This is the first time a singing competition is going to have two arcs in the same season,” said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research for the media-buying agency Horizon Media. Fox’s “American Idol” has always stuck to one edition a season.

But “The Voice” has continued to be a potent draw, easily eclipsing Fox’s fall-season singing show, “The X Factor.”

The other essential ingredient in NBC’s early success has been the addition of the season’s only breakout hit, “Revolution.” That drama, about a postapocalyptic world without electrical power, has not only dominated its 10 p.m. Monday time period, it has added more than 50 percent in the 18-49 audience when delayed viewing is included.

Mr. Greenblatt said that having two hours of “The Voice” on Monday would not have been enough to turn the night around if NBC had not developed a show that could take advantage of that big lead-in audience. “You have to have a show that the audience truly wants to watch,” he said.

At this point last season, NBC’s Monday consisted of two hours of “The Sing-Off” and a new drama, “The Playboy Club.” That lineup averaged 4.4 million viewers and a 1.6 rating in the 18-49 audience. This year’s lineup has averaged 11.3 million viewers and a 4.2 rating.

Attorney Finds Rhythm and Focus in Climbing and Sculpting

Jim Ewing, at right, stands at the summit of Russia's Mount Elbrus in 2004 with Atlanta trial lawyers Ken Canfield, left, and Dave Schaeffer.
Photo courtesy of Jim Ewing

Jim Ewing works with a small file called a riffler on the face of a heart sculpted from Carrera marble.
Photo courtesy of Jim Ewing

After graduating in 1973 from the U.S. Naval Academy with an aerospace engineering degree, serving five years in the U.S. naval fleet service and earning a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1981, Jim Ewing has done a few things:

- established an intellectual property practice;

- climbed an 18,000-foot mountain; and

- created a gargoyle.

He's now working on another gargoyle, chipping away at a piece of Tate marble.

Ewing, who calls himself a "lifer" at Kilpatrick Townsend, spends most of his time these days in the firm's office in Menlo Park, Calif., working with the firm's Silicon Valley IP lawyers in the medical devices field.

His last big mountain climb was in 2004, the same year he took up sculpting. Mountain climbing, he says, is "a dormant passion" -- he's too busy in Silicon Valley to be traipsing around the world in hiking boots.

But through all these peaks and valleys he still has time for making beautiful things out of pieces of stone. And one day, he says, he will climb again.