Postal unions angry, customers unfazed about Saturday cut

Chicago Tribune reporter Rob Manker gathers some reactions to the recent news that the U.S. Postal Service plans to drop Saturday delivery of first-class mail by August. (Posted on: Feb. 6, 2013.)

The U.S. Postal Service's plan to end Saturday first-class delivery in August angered unions that stand to lose jobs and faces an uncertain fate in Congress.

But the decision, which the Postal Service says will save $2 billion a year, barely fazed a number of people interviewed at Chicago-area post offices.

"No one really sends letters anymore," said David Braunschweig, 63, who was at the Arlington Heights post office to mail a gift. "Putting away mail (both Saturday and Sunday), it won't kill anyone."

Hammered by competition that includes the Internet, the Postal Service lost nearly $16 billion last year and said doing away with first-class mail on Saturdays is essential to its recovery plan.

"It's an important part of our return to profitability and financial stability," Postmaster General and CEO Patrick Donahoe said at a news conference Wednesday in Washington. "Our financial condition is urgent."

The agency will continue delivering packages and filling post office boxes six days a week, and all offices that already were operating on Saturdays will continue to do so. Package volume is one bright spot for the Postal Service. It's up 14 percent since 2010, which officials attribute to the growth of online commerce.

The end of Saturday delivery would be the biggest change to mail service since the end of twice-daily delivery in the 1950s. Overall mail volume dropped by more than 25 percent from 2006 to 2011, which could explain the shrugs from several Chicago-area postal customers.

"I was accustomed to getting mail on Saturdays, but we will get accustomed to not getting it as well," Rich Klimczak, 74, said outside the Tinley Park post office. "The only thing I would not like to see is (postal workers) losing their jobs."

The move, which would take effect Aug. 5, aims to reduce the postal workforce by at least 20,000 more employees through reassignment and attrition. It would also significantly reduce overtime payments.

Local union officials estimated that 10,000 postal workers will have their workweek reduced because of the move. On Wednesday afternoon, the Chicago branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers called for Donahoe's resignation.

"USPS executives cannot save the Postal Service by tearing it apart," Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in a statement. "These across-the-board cutbacks will weaken the nation's mail system and put it on a path to privatization."

The National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, which has about 1,500 members in the Chicago suburbs, said the elimination of Saturday service puts the Postal Service in a "death spiral."

Although the Postal Service no longer receives taxpayer money, it remains subject to oversight by Congress, which since 1983 has repeatedly passed measures requiring six-day delivery. Donahoe's announcement appeared to be an effort to force action in Congress after comprehensive postal reform legislation stalled last year.

While many members of Congress insist they would have to approve the cutback, Donahoe told reporters that the agency believes it can move forward unilaterally. The current mandate for six-day delivery is part of a government funding measure that expires in late March.

"There's plenty of time in there so if there is some disagreement" with lawmakers, "we can get that resolved," he said.

The divide among lawmakers on the issue does not break cleanly along party lines. Lawmakers who represent rural areas, who tend to be Republicans, generally have opposed service cutbacks. So have those with strong backing from postal labor unions, mostly Democrats.

Last year, the Senate approved a bill that would have allowed the Postal Service to end Saturday delivery after a two-year period to evaluate the potential effects. Similar legislation in the House never came up for a vote.

The Obama administration had included a proposal for five-day mail delivery in its 2013 budget plan. White House officials, however, had said they supported that change only in concert with other reforms. White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that officials had not yet studied the latest plan.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, expressed concern that the Postal Service's unilateral announcement could complicate his plans for overall reform.

However, he added, "It's hard to condemn the postmaster general for moving aggressively to do what he believes he can and must do to keep the lights on."

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How Ang Lee Took a Tiger by the Tail to Create ‘Life of Pi’

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – It would have been foolish to predict what “Life of Pi” – has become: a box-office phenomenon that has swept one country after another, a game changer in its use of 3D and computer graphics and a critical darling with 11 Oscar nominations including best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography and two for composer Mychael Danna.

“It still comes as a surprise,” director Ang Lee told TheWrap. “But a wonderful surprise. For a long time I felt that it’s a privilege to even make this movie. So we’re very happy.”

Everything about “Life of Pi,” based on the bestselling novel by Yann Martel, represented an uncommon risk. A pensive drama without a single movie star or, for that matter, a face vaguely familiar to American audiences, the project cost $ 130 million, highly unusual in today’s Hollywood. (Even “Les Misérables” cost just $ 60 million.)

Further, the movie takes place almost entirely on the ocean, in 3D and with a CG tiger, factors that required technological machinations not guaranteed to work. Beyond that, given its ponderous price tag, the movie had to appeal to a very broad audience to pay off.

And it has. An uplifting story about the survival of the human spirit and the power of imagination, “Life of Pi” has been embraced across cultures and nations around the globe, with the movie setting new benchmarks in China, sweeping Latin America and taking in $ 450 million worldwide while still in release.

“The pattern of how this movie plays is kind of strange. I’ve never experienced it before,” Lee said of “Pi’s” overwhelming international appeal. “It was made to be a big movie, with lots of commercials everywhere. But it’s a philosophical movie – an Indian boy, a digital tiger, an ambiguous ending. I didn’t know if it would work or not.”

The novel tells the story of a shipwrecked Indian boy, Pi, adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, and adds a twist at the end to make you question everything you’ve read. “Pi’s” journey to the screen took the better part of a decade and began conventionally enough. Producer Gil Netter sent Fox 2000 veteran producer Elizabeth Gabler the book shortly after it was published, and they optioned it for Fox in 2002.

She commissioned a script from Dean Georgaris for director M. Night Shyamalan, but Georgaris never completed it. Director Alfonso Cuaron (“Children of Men”) signed on and then left. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Delicatessen”) picked up the project, then he dropped out, too.

Finally she approached Lee, whom she’d admired for years. “He told me I was crazy,” Gabler said. “I told him he had to do it.”

The problem was, most people considered the story of young Pi to be unmakeable.

You couldn’t film it with real tigers. Could a computer-generated tiger be believable? For Lee, who was revered for such movies as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Sense and Sensibility,” but who had also learned a lot making the tech-heavy but unsuccessful “Hulk,” the impossibility of the challenge was part of the appeal.

“That’s a small part,” he confessed. “That’s ego. But that’s not a good enough reason. Artistically, it’s a philosophical book. The movie has an unfriendly ending. It pulls the rug out from the audience’s feet. Your attention is mandatory.”

And those difficulties, to Lee, were irresistible. “It’s challenging, but it’s a thrill. If you can do it, you can swagger around. When people say, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ there’s a certain amount of satisfaction.” The night before Lee spoke to the TheWrap, he had been at a critics’ award ceremony where he was approached by Steven Spielberg. “He said to me, ‘I tried to figure out how you do that,’ Of course, that’s nice!”

But back to the movie: Lee dove into making the story his own, conducting intensive research on tigers and computer graphics, and investigating the logistics of creating a set where the ocean would seem like a real character. He decided to do the film in 3D. The price continued to rise – and with it the anxiety of then-Fox chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman.

Gabler recalled: “Tom and Jim said, ‘We can’t make this movie. It’s too risky. Give it back to him.’” Lee got on a plane to Los Angeles. At a meeting with the studio chiefs, he showed an animated mock-up of the shipwreck scene, complete with swimming zebras. And he showed them a 12-minute tape of an unknown actor, Suraj Sharma, reciting the monologue from the end of the movie: Pi, in a hospital bed, recounting an alternative, grisly fate that could have befallen the survivors of a shipwreck. “When we saw it, the lights came up, and they said OK,” said Gabler.

So the studio, in Lee’s words, “sweated it out” with him over four years, gambling on the notion that the film just might be the international hit it would have to be to make back Fox’s investment.

The time included three months of rehearsal with the inexperienced Sharma and another seven months shooting. The Taiwanese government gave favorite son Lee an abandoned airport where the filmmakers built a series of soundstages, saving the production millions.

One studio was used to build a massive water tank, where the challenge was to simulate the waves of a vast ocean and not see the water that bounced off the sides of a tank. They built 12 machines to suck in water and shoot it out, creating two-story waves and endless ripples.

The time included three months of rehearsal with the inexperienced Sharma and another seven months shooting. The Taiwanese government gave favorite son Lee an abandoned airport where the filmmakers built a series of soundstages, saving the production millions.

One studio was used to build a massive water tank, where the challenge was to simulate the waves of a vast ocean and not see the water that bounced off the sides of a tank. They built 12 machines to suck in water and shoot it out, creating two-story waves and endless ripples.

As for Sharma, Lee took the 17-year-old novice under his wing, teaching him method acting and guiding him in yoga practice. The two became inseparable, and Sharma watched as Lee increasingly took on the qualities of the character Pi.

“He himself is a very intense person,” Sharma told TheWrap. “Ang moved toward Pi right through the movie. It was really intense. And in many ways I feel like he was a little like Pi; the way he thinks is similar. The aura is similar. He has that similar patience with things but a certain perseverance to it. But nice at the same time – I can’t explain it. It’s the way his back is bent … Ang is a lot like his work. It’s very simple from the outside but it has a lot of complexities on the inside. Kind of like Pi.”

For Lee, the result was one that both exhausted and exhilarated him. The story of Pi, he says, is the story of the essence of filmmaking.

“It’s a project that examines illusion. The power of storytelling. The importance of illusion – is it more real than what we can prove?” he reflected.

“I’m a storyteller. I create illusions. I believe in that more than in things I can touch. And this gets to the bottom of it all.”

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Psychiatric Hospitals Alter Rules on Patient Smoking

MANDEVILLE, La. — Annelle S., 64, who has paranoid schizophrenia, took an urgent drag on a cigarette at a supervised outdoor smoke break at Southeast Louisiana Hospital.

“It’s mandatory to smoke,” she explained. “It’s a mental institution, and we have to smoke by law.”

That was 18 months ago, and Annelle’s confusion was understandable. Until recently, Louisiana law required psychiatric hospitals to accommodate smokers — unlike rules banning smoking at most other health facilities. The law was changed last year, and by March 30, smoking is supposed to end at Louisiana’s two remaining state psychiatric hospitals.

After decades in which smoking by people with mental illness was supported and even encouraged — a legacy that experts say is causing patients to die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses — Louisiana’s move reflects a growing effort by federal, state and other health officials to reverse course.

But these efforts are hardly simple given the longstanding obstacles.

Hospitals often used cigarettes as incentives or rewards for taking medicine, following rules or attending therapy. Some programs still do. And smoking was endorsed by advocates for people with mental illness and family members, who sometimes sued to preserve smoking rights, considering cigarettes one of the few pleasures patients were allowed.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the nearly 46 million adults with mental illness have a smoking rate 70 percent higher than those without mental illness, and consume about a third of the cigarettes in the country, though they make up one-fifth of the adult population.

People with psychiatric disorders are often “smoking heavier, their puffs are longer and they’re smoking it down to the end of the cigarette,” said William Riley, chief of the Science of Research and Technology Branch at the National Cancer Institute. With some diagnoses, like schizophrenia, rates are especially high.

A report by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors said data suggested that people with the most serious mental illnesses die on average 25 years earlier than the general population, with many from smoking-exacerbated conditions like heart or lung disease.

Now more treatment facilities are banning smoking, with some finding it easier than expected. Others still allow it, usually outside on their grounds during scheduled times. About a fifth of state hospitals are not smoke-free, a survey issued in 2012 by the State Mental Health Program Directors association found. Occasionally, hospitals that banned smoking have reinstated it to avoid losing patients.

Moreover, smoking is so deeply ingrained that smoke-free hospitals can only dent the problem; many patients are now hospitalized only for short stints and resume smoking later.

New research suggests scientific underpinnings for some of the affinity, said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Nicotine has antidepressant effects and, for people with schizophrenia, helps dampen extraneous thoughts and voices, she and other experts said.

Other chemicals in cigarette smoke set off a perilous cycle, causing some medications to be metabolized faster, making them less effective and allowing symptoms to return. Because patients feel sicker, they may seek even more comfort from nicotine. “You may think, ‘Well, I need to smoke more,’ ” said Dr. Steven Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco.

Then, as smoking increases, “blood levels of their medication go down, and they end up back in the hospital,” said Judith Prochaska, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center.

Socially, smoking provides “cover rituals for patients having psychiatric symptoms,” said Dr. Rona Hu, medical director of the acute psychiatric inpatient unit at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. “You tamp the box, you kind of play with the lighter, you can exhale and look into the middle distance and not look like you’re hallucinating.”

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., said hospitals had historically resisted going smoke-free, fearing it would interfere with treatment. “In my very first job as an aide in a psychiatric hospital,” he said, “if patients behaved better they got additional cigarettes.”

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Penny Pritzker a candidate for Commerce secretary

Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker has been a prominent Barack Obama friend and supporter since his early days in politics and ran his 2008 campaign fundraising operation. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune / April 8, 2011)

By Katherine Skiba and Christi Parsons




Washington bureau

7:30 p.m. CST, February 6, 2013

Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker has emerged as a leading candidate to serve in the administration of President Obama, for whom she has long been a campaign supporter and top fundraiser.

A senior administration official cautioned that no announcement is imminent and that Obama has made no decision. But Pritzker is under consideration to serve as Commerce secretary or perhaps in another senior position involving relations between Obama and business leaders, according to officials close to the process who spoke anonymously to comment on internal deliberations.

Pritzker is a member of the Chicago family behind the Hyatt Hotels Corp. She has been a prominent Obama friend and supporter since his early days in politics and ran his 2008 campaign fundraising operation.

 She is founder and CEO of PSP Capital Partners and the Pritzker Realty Group, as well as chair of the Artemis Real Estate Partners. She is also a member of the Chicago Board of Education and has had two White House appointments, serving on the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Forbes’ annual list of the world’s billionaires last March put Pritzker at No. 719 and said her hotels and investments were worth $1.8 billion.

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Grieving mom of slaying victim: 'The sight of them disgusts me'

The 4 people accused of killing 2 men in Joliet face a bond judge today. ( WGN - Chicago)

Bobby Jones clenched his fists in his lap as he stared at the four people charged with murdering his son.

He watched from the front row of a courtroom in Joliet on Tuesday morning, getting his first glimpse of the defendants in person.

"I wanted them to see the pain and the anger that they caused our family," Jones said after the arraignment hearing. "I wanted them to know that Eric had loved ones."

Adam Landerman, 19; Alisa Massaro, 18; Bethany McKee, 18; and Joshua Miner, 24, each pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder charges and remain in custody on $10 million bond each. Landerman is the son of a Joliet police officer.

The four are charged with strangling Eric Glover and Terrance Rankins, both 22 and from Joliet. Police said they suspect robbery was the motive for the deaths of the two friends at a Joliet home last month.

Jones, who made eye contact with Landerman and Miner, was in court along with his wife and other family and friends of both victims.

"I only can sum it up in one word — anger," Jones said. "The sight of them disgusts me."

Glover's fiancee, Heather Gossman, echoed his sentiments, saying she felt "sick to her stomach" when she saw the defendants.

Prosecutors remain tight-lipped about what happened in the Joliet home on the 1100 block of North Hickory Street. Acting on a tip, police went to the home Jan. 10 and found three of the defendants — Massaro, Landerman and Miner — along with the bodies of the victims, officials said. Authorities have described the scene as one of the most horrific they have encountered in years. Police said the three defendants were continuing to party even as the victims lay dead in the home.

McKee, who was arrested in another town, had allegedly left the home earlier and called her father to tell him what had happened. William McKee then alerted Shorewood police, who in turn contacted Joliet police.

William McKee watched from the back of the courtroom Tuesday and sat quietly in the hallway as friends and family of the victims discussed the case nearby.

"I wanted to show them respect," he said.

Though he said he understands the anger from the victims' families, he added that family members are still reeling from Bethany McKee's arrest and are trying to find answers themselves. His wife cries daily, and their two teenage children are dealing with threats and comments at school about the case, he said.

"All (my son) hears are stupid comments like his sister is a murderer and he should die with her. … My kids don't know how to deal with this," William McKee said.

"This isn't something that is supposed to happen to any family," he said, adding that no family should have to lose someone to homicide either.

He said that when his daughter called to tell him what had happened, she was "terrified." He said he then called police out of love for her.

William McKee said he had tried to keep his daughter away from Massaro for many years. He said his daughter had made positive changes in her life after her own daughter was born.

"All I can say is I love my daughter," he said.

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Question Mark: Women’s Eggs Diminish With Age

Baby girls enter the world with enough of them to populate perhaps 40 small cities. A dozen or so years later, the first will make a debut of its own. And in the months and years to come, others will appear regularly, sometimes greeted with relief, other times with disappointment, perhaps most often with a touch of annoyance.

Abdullah Pope/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Not women's eggs, obviously.

Now, for women in the baby boom generation, they may be coming more sporadically, or not at all, signaling unmistakably that one time of life is over, and another begun. But what happened to all those eggs?

When girls are born, they have about two million eggs in their ovaries, nestled in fluid-filled cavities called follicles. That may sound like a lot, but consider that months earlier, when they were still in utero, they may have had as many as six or seven million eggs. Those eggs are still immature, and the proper name for them, by the way, is oocytes (rhymes with: nothing).

The first eggs to bite the dust were those in the fetus, which waste away. And by the time a girl reaches puberty, most of her remaining eggs have also deteriorated and been reabsorbed. If that sounds ominously like something from a “Star Trek” episode about the Borg, imagine if all those eggs had to take the customary path out of the body.

Even with the Great Egg Disappearance, girls enter puberty with many more than they will use, 300,000 or more. Each month, the body produces a hormone, FSH, which stimulates the follicles to prepare an egg for maturation and release.

With eggs backed up like bowling balls on a busy Saturday night at the lanes, the ovaries can afford to be a little wasteful, and as many as several dozen follicles are called into action. Then a single mature egg — usually, anyway — gets the tap on the shoulder and begins its travels to the uterus.

As for the maturing eggs that didn’t make the grade, there is no second chance. But they do not go out on their own. “Each month you probably lose a thousand or so,” said Dr. James T. Breeden, president of the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “There’s just a natural death of them.”

For all the eggs a woman begins with, in the end only about 400 will go through ovulation. While men produce sperm throughout their lives, over time the number of eggs declines, and they disappear with increasing frequency the decade or so before menopause. Those that remain may decline in quality. “When you have a thousand or less within the ovaries, you’re thought to have undergone menopause,” said Dr. Mitchell Rosen, the director of the Fertility Preservation Center at the University of California, San Francisco.

It’s true that women make far more eggs than they end up using, but men should not pass judgment. “They produce millions of sperm, millions,” Dr. Rosen said. “The whole process is not the most efficient in the world.”

Questions about aging? E-mail boomerwhy@nytimes.com

Booming: Living Through the Middle Ages offers news and commentary about baby boomers, anchored by Michael Winerip. You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming. You can reach us by e-mail at booming@nytimes.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described estrogen levels at the time of ovulation. They rise, rather than fall.

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Jewel to close 3 stores -- in Chicago, Aurora, Niles

Jewel-Osco plans to close three stores by April 5, the company has confirmed.

According to a company spokeswoman, Jewel has decided not to renew the leases of its stores at at 1270 N. Lake St., Aurora, which will close Feb.15., and at 8203 W. Golf Rd. in Niles, and 3940 E. 106th St., Chicago, which will both close April 5.

Some 300 employees will be affected, but they will have the opportunity to transfer to other locations, the spokeswoman said.

The decision comes weeks after Jewel parent Eden Prairie-based Supervalu said that it will sell the chain and four others including Albertsons to Cerberus Capital Management. The deal is scheduled to close this spring.

In an internal memo obtained by the Tribune, Jewel President Brian Huff told employees that "this decision was necessary to ensure our continued strength in challenging times," and "is not a result of or related to the recent transaction between Cerberus Capital Management and Supervalu."

eyork@tribune.com | Twitter: @emilyyork

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$5 million bail in 'exceptionally brutal' Aurora murder

She was beaten to death with a hammer, then burned beyond recognition. It's the first murder in Aurora in more than a year.

She was a hardworking teenager and loving family member, who wanted to become a police officer, former co-workers and relatives said Monday.

So when Abigail Villalpando didn't show up for her waitressing job Thursday, family members called authorities. They later learned that the West Aurora High School senior had been struck repeatedly with a hammer, her body doused with gasoline and set ablaze in a barrel in the backyard of an Aurora home. Her car was torched and left at another location.

The teen's remains were so badly burned that officials had to use dental records to identify her, authorities said.

Police charged three men in Villalpando's slaying, one for her death and two for concealing her homicide. Police said the victim knew the man charged with her death, but authorities did not disclose a motive in court. It was the first slaying in Aurora in more than a year.

The victim's brother, Ricardo "Ricky" Villalpando, 21, said he and his sister moved into an apartment together in September. Abby, as she liked to be called, wanted to be a police officer because of her love of children, and she planned to go to college after her summer graduation, he said.

"My sister was the most responsible 18-year-old I knew," said Villalpando, the oldest of four. "Everything she had — her car, her insurance, her clothes — she paid for on her own."

Ricky Villalpando described the suspects as his sister's best friends. They met in middle school, Villalpando said.

He said Juan Garnica Jr., the man charged with the slaying, was jealous that she was seeing someone else and was "obsessed with her."

Police have not talked about a motive.

The killing of Villalpando, who worked at Denny's, shocked those who respected her for her work ethic and buoyant personality.

Her sweet demeanor — which kept regulars coming back to the restaurant where she worked after school — made it almost impossible for those who knew her to comprehend her death.

"They can't understand why something like this would happen," said Ben Richter, manager at the restaurant where Villalpando worked for three years and where shocked customers called to express condolences. "She will be missed."

Garnica, 18, of Aurora, was ordered held on $5 million bail for beating Villalpando to death with a hammer Thursday, authorities said.

The two men charged with concealing the homicide are Enrique Prado, 19, and Jose Becerra, 20.

Villalpando was a caring person who had told family members she was trying to make some personal changes, said a friend of the family, Jose Ocampo.

"She was trying to change her life around," he said.

Villalpando transferred in mid-December from East Aurora High School, according to Mike Chapin, community relations director for School District 129.

Students at the high school were alerted of Villalpando's death in a morning announcement.

School officials spent the weekend preparing teachers and a crisis team of social workers and psychologists to help the 3,500-student population to cope, Chapin said.

"As long as any student needs assistance working through this, there will be resources," Chapin said. "It's a horrible thing for the students to even try to comprehend."

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Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid
It would change me.
It did.
Something dissolved inside me.
Tears began a slow drip;
I cried at the news story
Of a lost boy found in the woods …
At the surprising beauty
Of a bright leaf falling
Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Potvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks
For miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine
As my boys’ chant did
The summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push.”
Urging me to wind my sore feet
Winch-like on a rented bike
To inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly
let it fling
let it flip like a pancake in the air
let it sing: what is the song
of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me
Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,
Wondering if you can hear them.
Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.
Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.
Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.
Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

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Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

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Boeing asks FAA to allow Dreamliner test flights

Aerospace giant Boeing Co. has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to let it begin test flights on its grounded 787 Dreamliner passenger jet.

The new plane has been grounded since Jan. 16 by the FAA because of numerous incidents and high-profile fires involving the onboard lithium-ion batteries. Investigators around the world are looking into the matter.

The company disclosed its request for in-flight testing Monday in an email.

“Boeing has submitted an application to conduct test flights, and it is currently under evaluation by the FAA,” said Marc Birtel, a company spokesman, who would not comment further.

The FAA is reportedly looking into Boeing request, but would not comment.

The 787's battery systems were called into question Jan. 7 when a smoldering fire was discovered on the underbelly of a Dreamliner in Boston operated by Japan Airlines after the 183 passengers and 11 crew members had deplaned at the gate.

The National Transportation Safety Board is examining what went wrong. On Friday, the NTSB released its seventh update on the investigation into the lithium-ion battery systems. It said it has begun CT scanning the battery cells to examine their internal condition.

In addition, the NTSB disclosed that a battery expert from the Department of Energy joined the investigative team to lend additional expertise to ongoing testing.

In a separate incident Jan. 16 involving a 787 operated by All Nippon Airways in southwestern Japan, smoke was seen swirling from the right side of the cockpit after an emergency landing related to the plane's electrical systems. All 137 passengers and crew members were evacuated from the aircraft and slid down the 787's emergency slides.

The Japan Transport Safety Board, the country's version of the NTSB, is heading the investigation into All Nippon's emergency landing and reported fire.

No passengers or crew members were reported injured in the incidents. But the recent events have become a public relations nightmare for Boeing, which has long heralded the Dreamliner as a forerunner of 21st century air travel.

The 787, a twin-aisle aircraft that can seat 210 to 290 passengers, is the first large commercial jet with more than half its structure made of composite materials rather than aluminum sheets. It's also the first large commercial aircraft that extensively uses electrically powered systems involving lithium-ion batteries.

Boeing's lithium-ion batteries are made in Japan by Kyoto-based GS Yuasa Corp.

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