Victorian features tasteful updates

This 1895 country Queen Anne Victorian in West Concord has a lot of its original charm, but has been updated with an expanded kitchen, master bedroom suite and bedroom/office addition.

The four-bedroom house at 1394 Main St. sits on a 16,000-square-foot lot that includes a large backyard and a two-car garage that opens onto a side street. One of the current owners, an interior designer, has restored the home to its Victorian glory while adding a high-end kitchen in a 1998 bumpout addition, turning the master bedroom into a suite and expanding another bedroom with a home office addition in 2004. The house, with new windows and an updated furnace, is on the market for $925,000.

The home's exterior is white clapboard and aluminum with black shutters and an octagonal turret with 
diagonally set windows. A flagstone walk flanked by hedges leads up to a large covered front porch.

The front door opens into a foyer with restored oak floors. To the right of the foyer is a sitting room with crown molding. To the left is a large Victorian living room with five windows, including a three-bay bumpout addition, crown molding and restored oak floors as well as a brick woodburning fireplace with a white wood mantel.

The expanded kitchen off this room features white cabinets, including a large pantry, and two cabinets with leaded-glass fronts and brown granite countertops. There's a wood-topped 
peninsula, a beautiful tin ceiling with recessed lighting and white beadboard backsplashes. High-end stainless steel appliances include a Jenn-Air electric burner/oven, refrigerator and dishwasher as well as a second oven, an Electrolux. There's a large eat-in area in a bumpout addition with a chandelier.

Off the kitchen is a wallpapered half-bath — redone in 1998 — with a white marble floor, beadboard walls and an antique vanity topped with black granite.

On the far right end of the kitchen sits a formal Victorian dining room with a glass chandelier hanging from a plaster medallion and chair rail wainscoting.

At the other end of the kitchen, a mud room leads out to a rear porch and a large backyard. At the end of the yard sits the garage and a driveway that holds three more vehicles.

Back inside, the house's four bedrooms are on the second floor, up a carpeted staircase with a stained-glass window on the landing.

The redone master bedroom suite retains its original wide-pine floors. An en-suite bathroom, added in 2004, has a green granite vanity with double sinks and a glass-enclosed steam shower with white subway tile walls and a green granite bench. There are also two walk-in closets, and right outside the bedroom are original built-in linen closets.

The large second bedroom was expanded with a connected home office with new pine floors and a wall-length built-in desk.

The third and fourth bedrooms are on the small side, but have restored oak floors and good-sized closets.

There is a second full bathroom on this floor, with beige ceramic tile floors, a pedestal sink and an off-white tiled tub and shower.

A stairway to the third floor leads to a heated attic home office. The rest of the attic space is unfinished, providing lots of storage space.

The home's basement holds a laundry room with a full-size Kenmore washer and dryer and a slop sink. The rest of the basement is unfinished with lots of storage space. It also holds the house's water heater and a 10-year-old furnace for an oil heating system fed through original radiators. There are two zones of central air conditioning in the home.

• Address: 1394 Main St., Concord
• Bedrooms: Four
• Bathrooms: Two full, one half
• List price: $925,000
• Square feet: 3,160
• Price per square foot: $293
• Annual taxes: $10,116
• Features: Original woodwork throughout including hardwood floors and moldings; expanded redone kitchen with tin ceiling, high-end appliances and large eat-in area; formal Victorian-style living, dining and sitting rooms; master bedroom turned into suite with granite bathroom in 2004; home office addition with built-in desk added to second bedroom; third-floor home office; updated oil heating and central air systems; basement laundry room; large backyard; two-car garage.
• Location: Three-tenths of a mile from shops and restaurants in West Concord center and the West Concord MBTA commuter rail station.
• Built in: 1895; kitchen expanded and redone in 1998; master bedroom suite and bedroom/office addition done in 2004
• Broker: William Raveis Real Estate agents Marjorie Gold at 617-549-0181 and Shari Jacobson at 617-512-5169.

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Coin mimics your credit cards

I'm not one to pre-order a product before I've seen it in person. But yesterday I took the unusual step of paying $55 for a new form of digital payment technology called Coin that I won't even get my hands on until the summer.

Unlike so many mainstays of the trendy digital payment revolution, Coin (onlycoin.com) doesn't require retailers to do anything. They needn't install a new point-of-sale system, one of those little smartphone scanners or make any investment of time or money at all.

Unfortunately, retailer adoption has been the impediment to digital wallet technology exploding. It's up to consumers alone to make the leap.

And unlike so many newfangled digital payment services and methods, Coin solves a real problem that I actually have: the annoyance of having to carry all those darn pieces of plastic in my wallet. Coin is a card that acts like all of your current credit cards in one, and it's the only one you need to carry around.

No more fumbling through your wallet for the Visa or MasterCard because a particular merchant doesn't take American Express. Simply press a tiny button on the Coin to select which card to use. It's like smart plastic. Setting it up involves swiping your credit cards through a reader that Coin sends you along with the card.

Even cooler: Coin has a little Bluetooth signal that links it to your phone. If you happen to leave it at the store, your phone will notify you that your Coin is out of range.

It was striking to see how the future of digital payment technology played out at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week — the idea apparently being to make this more complex, not less. The conference featured several digital payment startups pitching biometric point-of-sale scanners.

In other words, you'd scan a fingerprint or your iris to confirm your identity when using a credit card, supposedly making data theft less likely. But I'm not sure biometric scans solve the underlying problem: data is vulnerable, whether it's a fingerprint or a credit card number.

Coin doesn't solve the problem of identity theft either. But I'm holding out hope that it will make one small aspect of my life just a bit easier, which is precisely what technology is supposed to do.

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Zucker: GOP being run from Fox News headquarters

PASADENA, Calif. — The chiefs of CNN and Fox News Channel are throwing shots at each other, each suggesting the other's network is essentially out of the news business.

Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes struck first, saying in an interview published this week that it was interesting for CNN "to throw in the towel and announce they're out of the news business." It was a reference to CNN President Jeff Zucker's efforts to expand CNN's offerings beyond breaking news.

"We happen to be in the business, as opposed to some other fair and balanced network," Zucker responded at a news conference on Friday.

He suggested that Ailes' remarks, published in the Hollywood Reporter, were silly and an attempt to deflect attention from "The Loudest Voice in the Room," a book on Ailes and Fox by New York magazine writer Gabriel Sherman that is being published this month.

Zucker said he hadn't read the book, but that from what he heard it confirmed that "the Republican Party is being run out of News Corp. headquarters masquerading as a cable news channel."

A Fox News spokeswoman said that Ailes gave his Hollywood Reporter interview in December, suggesting it had nothing to do with Sherman's book. She had no other comment on what Zucker said during a meeting with journalists who cover television on Friday.

Zucker, in charge at CNN for a year now, has taken note of flat ratings in pushing CNN to diversify. Non-fiction shows with chef Anthony Bourdain and Morgan Spurlock, ordered before Zucker came to CNN, are consistently among the networks' highest-rated shows. CNN has also beefed up its documentary film unit.

The films drew some barbs from Ailes, as well, particularly the successful "Blackfish," about killer whales. "I guess he's going to do whales a lot," Ailes said. "If I were Discovery, I'd be worried."

Zucker said CNN had several other new non-fiction series in the works. In March, CNN will premiere "Death Row Stories," a crime series produced by Robert Redford and Alex Gibney and narrated by Susan Sarandon. CNN is also continuing its concentration on the 1960s with a 10-part series beginning in May. Later this month, CNN will air "The Sixties: The British Invasion" in the days before the 50th anniversary of the Beatles performing on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

Despite such efforts, Zucker said CNN's first priority remains news. A succession of CNN leaders over the past two decades have struggled to figure out how CNN could get a consistent audience during slow news periods. Fox and MSNBC, which appeal heavily to audiences on opposite ends of the political spectrum, have taken viewers away from CNN.

"CNN is not and never will abandon our first and fundamental brand equity, which is news and breaking news," Zucker said.

He also shot down reports that CNN is looking to get into the late-night entertainment business, perhaps by hiring Jay Leno when Jimmy Fallon takes over on NBC's "Tonight" show next month. Zucker was once Leno's boss when he was head of NBC Universal.

"That's really not a priority for us at this time," he said. "We have some other things I'd like to concentrate on first."

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Micro-units perfect fit for young pros

Micro-apartments aren't for everyone, but for young professionals starting out who embrace a leaner and more collegial lifestyle, it doesn't seem that it's that much of a compromise.

A recent tour of Factory 63 on Melcher Street in South Boston's Fort Point neighborhood, which has 23 "innovation micro-apartments," dispelled some misconceptions about a living experiment seen as a way to keep young professional people in the city. Factory 63's units are all rented and there's a waiting list. And, there are hundreds more of these units set to be built in an area dubbed the Innovation District.

"The idea here is to engage the community, especially the artists who live here, in a way that adds value for the residents," said Factory 63 property manager Jessica Ryan, pointing to Fort Point artists' work hanging on the walls and revolving exhibits by Design Museum Boston, which occupies a gallery in the common space. "We want to respect and hold on to what is already here in the neighborhood."

The common space is open to the public during business hours, and there are five artist live/work spaces in the building.

At rents ranging from $1,699 for a 374-square-foot unit to $2,450 for 597 square feet, the market-rate micro-apartments at Factory 63 are expensive, though the rent does include heat and central air conditioning, with only a $30-a-month electric bill. But residents feel the expense is worth it.

When Ross Chanowski moved into his 447-square-foot micro-unit last March, he was working in a big local ad agency that had just moved to the Seaport District. He said he could have rented a regular-sized apartment, but chose the micro-apartment instead because of the character of the building, a former shoe factory, and the focus on integrating living and working.

"I didn't just want an apartment, but a place to live, work, play, innovate and create," the 25-year-old Newton native said. "It's in a great neighborhood near downtown and I've gotten to know most of the people in the building, made friends and business connections. You don't just shut your door."

Phoebe K. Flemming is living in only 337 square feet, with her two dogs, in a unit at Factory 63 she won through a city lottery system, paying about $1,200 a month. She said initially she was skeptical about the smaller space because her Southie apartment had 700 square feet.

"This place has more of a neighborhood feel than I thought it would, and I liked the common space," said Flemming, a 31-year-old dietician consultant and executive director of the nonprofit South Boston Grows.

Developer Gerding Edlen's support of sustainability also appealed to her. The building is LEED Gold certified, with energy-efficient heating and cooling, appliances and fixtures.

"I like the idea of lean and green," Flemming said.

The Wi-Fi-enabled common space on the first floor has free coffee and tea, benches to work on, couches to sit on and long tables, and a conference room to hold business meetings. There is no charge to use the space.

The units at Factory 63 have wood floors and exposed brick, 13-foot wood-beam ceilings and two tall windows, which makes the spaces feel larger and less cramped. The galley kitchens have white Corian counters, a few cabinets and full-size stainless steel appliances. Walls divide the kitchen from the combination living/dining area and bedroom area, which has enough space for a queen-size bed. The bathroom is surprisingly roomy, with a space-saving stacked washer and dryer.

Living in such small quarters requires residents to be neat and orderly.

"You can't have a lot of stuff," Flemming said " I've spent the past few years decluttering my life."

Each resident does get an extra 9-square-foot storage cube on the bottom floor.

Flemming, whose living/bedroom area is smaller than Chanowski's, built a loft bed, which gives her more living space in the main room.

"I have two couches in there and friends come over all the time," Flemming said. "My place is kind of a focal point. But it is small and you have to adapt to that."

Chanowski said he does not feel that his place is too small to live and work in, or have a few people over.

"It's not just that I have to live my life lean here, I want to live my life lean," Chanowski said. "My idea is to live small and think big."

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Briar defends breach delay

The Briar Group is defending a six-week delay in notifying the public that its restaurant customers' credit card data were stolen last fall, saying it took that long to confirm hackers had breached its system.

But security experts say it shouldn't take that long to establish a breach has occurred, noting that the Briar Group had hired the well-regarded firm McGladrey LLP to investigate the matter.

"It doesn't take a month to identify a breach," said Al Pascual, senior analyst of security, risk and fraud at Javelin Strategy & Research in Pleasanton, Calif.

Meanwhile, two weeks after confirming the breach, the Briar Group still doesn't know the number of customer accounts accessed and how, or the exact timeframe in which it occurred.

"Our investigation into the nature and scope of the breach is ongoing," spokeswoman Diana Pisciotta said.

After receiving initial calls from customers about unauthorized credit card transactions on Nov. 15, the Briar Group said it immediately asked McGladrey to investigate. The company notified Attorney General Martha Coakley of the investigation on Nov. 21. The Briar Group, which owns 10 restaurants including Ned Devine's, Harp, Anthem and M.J. O'Connor's, only publicly announced on Dec. 27 that its payment system was compromised, and stated it believed the breach ran from "sometime in October" to early November.

"Investigations into potential security breaches can take a significant amount of time," Pisciotta said. "We notified customers once we were aware that an actual breach had occurred and had enough information to provide reasonable notice, which wasn't until late December."

It was the second security intrusion for the company, which in 2011 paid $110,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by Coakley for its failure to secure customers' information in a 2009 breach.

Coakley spokesman Christopher Loh said in the current case, "Our investigation ... is focused on determining if any violations of state law and the prior consent judgment occurred, as well as the extent of the breach."

A good security team should have identified the breach quickly, but it's not uncommon for probes to take a month or longer, said Chris Morales, research director at NSS Labs, an information security research and advisory firm.

"It's not reasonable or practical, but it's really how long sometimes it takes," he said. "I've been to very large enterprises with very large security teams that are good that also have had similar issues. The whole industry still needs to change the way it does certain things."

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Cambridge company wins NASA job

NASA has awarded Cambridge-based Charles River Analytics a contract to build a system that analyzes satellite imagery to detect major changes, including volcanic eruptions, so scientists can respond more quickly to environmental events.

The $750,000 contract, which follows on an initial $125,000 award in 2012, will be used to develop the system known as DIPSARS for Discovery of Interesting Patterns and Semantic Analysis in Remote Space, said Daniel Stouch, who heads up the project for CRA. It will use CRA's Object Detection Framework, which sifts through the mountains of satellite pictures and detects changes in real-time, Stouch said.

"As we learn more about our world and the physical and social processes in it, it's important to be able to perceive and understand events and phenomena from a global perspective," Stouch said.

CRA said the system will let NASA "process and analyze which data is relevant, important and interesting enough to prompt follow-on action." A NASA spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

The ODF is best suited to quickly detect events such as volcanic eruptions, forest fires and algae blooms, Stouch said.

"It might be something you can see from space, but you might not see from the ground," Stouch said.

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Center Plaza deal good sign for Boston

Shorenstein Properties is the new owner of Boston's landmark Center Plaza in a $307 million deal.

At $400-plus per square foot, the San Francisco real estate investment firm's purchase of the three Government Center buildings at 1-3 Center Plaza, totalling 717,128 square feet, from the Blackstone Group is another bullish sign for Boston's commercial property market.

"The market has significant momentum right now, and these big-ticket office buildings that weren't selling a couple of years ago are moving like hotcakes," said Dan Fasulo, managing director of Real Capital Analytics in New York. "There's more equity funds running around the U.S. looking for properties today than there was at the peak of the market in 2007."

And as a gateway city, Boston is certainly on the top of everyone's list, he said.

"We believe this property is well-positioned to benefit from our ability to add value over time through hands-on management and leasing expertise," Shorenstein CEO Douglas Shorenstein said in a statement.

Beacon Properties developed Center Plaza starting in the late 1960s and merged with Chicago's Equity Office Properties Trust in 1997. New York's Blackstone bought Equity in 2007 and recently has been selling its office buildings.

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Keolis to run commuter rail

The French company that will run Massachusetts' commuter rail system starting July 1 will face much higher penalties than the previous operator if trains don't run on time.

The state Department of Transportation's board of directors yesterday voted unanimously to award Keolis Commuter Services an eight-year, $2.69 billion contract, with the potential for two, two-year extensions that would bring the total to $4.28 billion.

"The new contract sets a 'no excuses' expectation that the operator will run the trains on time," MBTA General Manager Beverly A. Scott told the board. "In a major change, the new commuter rail contract does not include any incentive payments and, if performance standards are not met, imposes financial disincentives."

Keolis will be subject to penalties capped at more than $12 million per year for subpar performance such as late or dirty trains or trains without proper heating or air conditioning.

Under the current contract with the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Co., which has run the rail system since 2003, financial penalties are limited to $3 million per year and are offset by incentive payments.

The MBCR contract also automatically grants the company relief from on-time performance requirements if there is overcrowding on the platforms, disabled freight trains or slippery rail conditions caused by falling leaves.

The contract with Keolis will do away with this list of acceptable excuses for lateness and require the operator to provide supporting documentation if it believes an event is beyond its control, Scott said.

For the first time, 50 percent of the amount of financial disincentives will be tied to elements of customer satisfaction, such as cleanliness, heating and air conditioning, maintenance of staff levels and customer communications, she said.

The contract also will require Keolis to adhere to a strict maintenance schedule, increase daily inspection requirements and allow the MBTA to require the company to implement a remedial action plan if its performance fails to meet expectations, Scott said.

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The Ticker

Internet experts pull out of security conference

At least eight researchers or policy experts have withdrawn from an Internet security conference after the sponsor, Bedford-based RSA Security, reportedly used flawed encryption technology deliberately in commercial software to allow the National Security Agency to spy more easily on computer users.

RSA Security, owned by data storage giant EMC Corp., has disputed claims it intentionally introduced the flawed encryption algorithm, but otherwise has declined to discuss what a published report last month described as a $10 million government contract.

Akamai will stream Winter Games

Cambridge-based Akamai Technologies has been selected to stream the Winter Olympics by NBC, the companies announced yesterday.

All 98 events in the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, next month will be streamed online and on mobile devices for the first time.

Macy's chopping 2,500 jobs

Macy's Inc. is cutting 2,500 jobs as part of a reorganization to sustain its profitability.

Shares rose 5.5 percent in after-hours trading yesterday.

The announcement comes on the heels of a strong holiday shopping season for the department store chain, which also runs the higher-end Bloomingdale's chain.

Macy's said the moves will save it $100 million per year and predicted a profit this year above Wall Street forecasts.

TODAY

 Labor Department releases weekly jobless claims.

 Freddie Mac, the mortgage company, releases weekly mortgage rates.

 Selected chain retailers release December sales comparisons.

TOMORROW

 Labor Department releases employment data for December.

  Commerce Department releases wholesale trade inventories for November.

THE SHUFFLE

H. J. Knight International Insurance Agency has named Chris Petrie, left, of Milton to the position of account executive. Petrie will specialize in commercial property and casualty insurance.

 451 Marketing announced that Melissa Sciorra has joined its search marketing team as SEO account manager. Sciorra will focus on strategy development and execution of SEO accounts for 451 Marketing's growing list of consumer clients.

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Madoff-related fraud to cost JPMorgan $2.5 billion

NEW YORK — For more than 15 years, there were signs something was amiss with what federal prosecutors in Manhattan call the "703 account" at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Money was being transferred back and forth for no reason. The account holder was recording double-digit returns on investments that were too good to be true. The bank itself was worried enough about possible fraud to withdraw its own investments from him.

The name on the account was Bernard Madoff and on Tuesday JPMorgan paid a steep price for keeping quiet about its suspicions.

Federal authorities announced the nation's largest bank will add to its other costly financial woes by forfeiting a record $1.7 billion to settle criminal charges alleging it turned a blind eye to the Madoff fraud, plus pay an additional $543 million to settle civil claims by victims. It also will pay another $350 million civil penalty for what the Treasury Department called "critical and widespread deficiencies" in its programs to prevent money laundering and other suspicious activity.

The bank failed to carry out its legal obligations to guard against money laundering while Madoff "built his massive house of cards," George Venizelos, head of the FBI's New York office, said at a news conference.

Madoff banked at JPMorgan through what court papers referred to as the "703 account." In 2008, the bank's London desk circulated a memo describing JPMorgan's inability to validate his trading activity or custody of assets and his "odd choice" of a one-man accounting firm, the government said.

In late October 2008, it filed a suspicious activity report with British officials. In the weeks that followed, JPMorgan withdrew about $300 million of its own money from Madoff feeder funds. The fraud was revealed when Madoff was arrested in December 2008.

"Despite all these alarm bells, JPMorgan never closed or even seriously questioned Madoff's Ponzi-enabling 703 account," said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. "On the other hand, when it came to its own money, JPMorgan knew how to connect the dots and take action to protect itself against risk."

In a statement, JPMorgan said it recognized it "could have done a better job pulling together various pieces of information and concerns about Madoff from different parts of the bank over time."

It added: "We do not believe that any JPMorgan Chase employee knowingly assisted Madoff's Ponzi scheme."

Prosecutors called the $1.7 billion the largest forfeiture by a U.S. bank and the largest Department of Justice penalty for a Bank Secrecy Act violation.

The settlement includes a so-called deferred prosecution agreement that requires the bank to acknowledge failures in its protections against money laundering but also allows it to avoid criminal charges. No individual executives were accused of wrongdoing.

The agreement resolves two felony violations of the Bank Secrecy Act in connection with the bank's relationship with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the private investment arm of Madoff's former business. The civil penalty was imposed by the Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Criminal charges will be deferred for two years as JPMorgan admits to its conduct, pays the $1.7 billion to a fund established for victims of Madoff's fraud and reforms its anti-money laundering policies, prosecutors said.

A statement of facts included in the agreement describes internal communications at JPMorgan expressing concerns about how Madoff was generating his purported returns. As early as 1998, a JPMorgan fund manager wrote that the returns were "possibly too good to be true" and there were "too many red flags."

In more recent years, executives were disturbed by the fact that Madoff wouldn't let the bank examine his books, the statement of facts says.

"How much do we have in Madoff at the moment?" a bank analyst wrote in a 2008 email. "To be honest, the more I think about it, the more concerned I am."

When Madoff finally revealed to the FBI that his investment advisory business was a Ponzi scheme, fictitious account statements for thousands of clients showed $60 billion in assets. Of the roughly $17.5 billion in principal that was real, most of it was gone.

Since then, a court-appointed trustee has recovered more than $9.78 billion — including a portion of the JPMorgan civil payout — to redistribute to clients that invested directly with Madoff. The $1.7 billion criminal forfeiture and will go to a second victims' pool, already with $2.35 billion, that is processing claims from clients of so-called "feeder funds" that also invested heavily with Madoff.

The JPMorgan settlement is the latest in a series of major deals it has made to resolve its legal troubles. In November, the bank agreed to pay $13 billion over risky mortgage securities it sold before the financial crisis — the largest settlement to date between the Justice Department and a corporation.

The more than $2.5 billion that JPMorgan is paying comes from a company that reported $21.3 billion in net income for 2012. JPMorgan already has set aside $23 billion this year to cover settlement and litigation costs — including the $13 billion.

The settlement of criminal charges "is good, but still inadequate to stop what can only be called a one-bank crime spree," said Dennis Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, a group that advocates strict financial regulation.

"Once again, not a single individual working for JPMorgan Chase has been held accountable. Banks do not commit crimes; bankers do," Kelleher said in a statement. "Until individuals, including executives, are held personally liable, fined and jailed, the crime spree will continue."

Asked why no individual bankers were charged, Bharara said the settlement was the best option under the law.

"Obviously, the statement of facts recites in great detail some of the roles that various individuals played with the overall systemic failure," he said. "But in the interest of justice, you've got to look at every case individually and our view was at this point the obvious charge was against the bank. ... This is a statute directed against institutional failure and institutional deterrence and that's why it was brought the way it was today."

___

AP Business Writer Marcy Gordon in Washington contributed to this report.

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Tainted frozen food sickens hundreds in Japan

TOKYO — Hundreds of people fell sick across Japan after eating frozen food that may have been tainted with a pesticide.

Food maker Maruha Nichiro Holdings used full-page ads in major newspapers Wednesday apologizing and warning consumers not to eat any of the tainted food, including pizza, croquettes and pancakes manufactured at a factory in Gunma Prefecture, north of Tokyo.

The company began recalling 6.4 million packages of various frozen foods on Dec. 29, saying it found some were tainted by high levels of malathion, a pesticide.

Maruha has received hundreds of thousands of calls about the problem.

"The products will have a strong smell and eating them may cause vomiting and stomach pain," it said in the notice, which included 51 color photos of the problem products.

The health ministry said it had confirmed 556 people suffering such symptoms after eating those products as of late Tuesday. In a notice on its website, it ordered Maruha Nichiro to recall all potentially affected products and to be forthright in informing the public about the situation.

Estimates of the number of people affected vary. Kyodo News agency said Wednesday that its tally found 909 people sickened after eating the Maruha products. Earlier, the public broadcaster NHK said information from local governments showed 356 people affected.

Both reports said it was unclear if consumption of the tainted products was directly responsible for the illnesses, suggesting a possibility of some public hysteria. The health ministry said it had not detected malathion in nearly three dozen cases tested.

Tokyo-based Maruha Nichiro says it has retrieved about 1.1 million packages subject to the recall so far.

Last week, it issued a formal apology and appealed to consumers not to eat any of the affected products. Police are investigating how the items were contaminated with malathion, reportedly by up to 2.6 million times the allowable limit.

Malathion is a pesticide used in farming and gardening and also to kill fleas on animals and people. At high enough concentrations, it can cause death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

There have been no reports of life-threatening illnesses from Maruha's products, but the contamination has further shaken public confidence undermined by various food quality scandals.

Late last year a slew of top-notch hotels and department stores apologized after it was found that some of the items they were selling were actually cheaper substitutes.

___

Associated Press writer Yuri Kageyama contributed to this report.

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US Sen. Warren: New mortgage rules will aid buyers

BOSTON — U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is hailing new mortgage rules set to go into effect this week.

Warren said that under the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules, lenders must determine that a borrower has the ability to repay a mortgage before issuing the loan.

The Massachusetts Democrat said the rules will prohibit brokers from being paid by lenders to steer customers into higher-cost loans and strengthen the mortgage market by improving mortgage servicing practices.

In remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday, Warren said the rules — which take effect Friday — will give consumers a better chance to buy and keep homes, and will force mortgage lenders and servicers to compete by offering better rates and customer service, not by "tricking and trapping people."

Warren championed the creation of the bureau after the nation's mortgage-led financial meltdown.

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3 challenges awaiting Yellen as next Fed chairman

Janet Yellen, confirmed Monday evening to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, will confront numerous challenges when she begins the job Feb. 1. Here is a look at three of them.

BOND PURCHASES

The Fed announced in December that the job market had strengthened enough for the central bank to reduce the extraordinary stimulus it's given the economy since the Great Recession. The Fed said it would trim its bond purchases from $85 billion a month to $75 billion starting in January. The bond purchases have been intended to keep long-term borrowing costs low to stimulate borrowing and spending.

Economists expect further modest reductions of around $10 billion a month. The bond purchases could be phased out altogether by year's end if the economy keeps improving.

Despite paring its new purchases, the Fed said in December that it would keep reinvesting its bond holdings. The bond purchases have raised its investment portfolio above $4 trillion — four times its size before the financial crisis.

The Fed will need to be careful in navigating the wind-down of its bond purchases. If it moves too fast, it could spook financial markets, sending stock prices plunging and interest rates rising. If it acts too slowly, it could run the risk of creating asset bubbles in areas of the economy from stocks to real estate.

GUIDANCE ON SHORT-TERM RATES

Investors will carefully watch Yellen for any signal that the Fed is preparing to raise its key short-term interest rate, which affects many consumer loans.

The rate has been near zero since December 2008. Last month, the Fed revised its guidance to say it plans to keep that rate ultra-low "well past" the time when the unemployment rate hits 6.5 percent. The rate reached a five-year low of 7 percent in November.

The Fed foresees unemployment falling as low as 6.3 percent this year. Many economists think the first increase in the Fed's short-term rate won't occur before late 2015. But if unemployment falls faster or more slowly than that, Yellen might feel the need to modify the Fed's guidance.

FED INDEPENDENCE

The Fed's efforts to rescue the U.S. economy from the recession and financial crisis have made it a target for criticism. Some Republicans argue that the central bank isn't accountable enough to Congress.

Jeb Hensarling, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, plans to examine whether changes should be made to the Fed's operations. Fed supporters worry that Congress could end up weakening the Fed's independence. They argue that its independence is critical to assuring markets that the Fed's actions aren't being swayed by political interests.

Last week, Bernanke criticized legislation that would give the Government Accountability Office the power to expand its audits of the Fed to review decisions on interest rates. The GAO, the auditing arm of Congress, can currently conduct audits of the Fed. But it's barred from investigating interest rate decisions.

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Intel says its processors are now 'conflict-free'

LAS VEGAS — Intel Corp., the world's largest maker of computer processors, says its processors are now free of minerals from mines held by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It's the first major U.S. technology company to make such a claim about its products. It's the fruit of four years of work by the company to determine the sources of four crucial metals widely used in electronics manufacturing: tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold.

Eastern Congo is rich in minerals, and economic activity other than mining has been disrupted by nearly two decades of fighting between the government, rogue soldiers and different ethnic groups. There's been widespread concern that foreign purchases of minerals from mines held by armed groups are fueling the conflict, though many experts say the minerals are not the root cause of the fighting.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich made the announcement Monday in a keynote speech ahead of the opening of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

A U.S. law passed in 2010 requires U.S. public companies to report whether their products contain minerals from rebel-held mines in Congo. Compliance is difficult for many electronics manufacturers, since a single product like a cellphone can contain components from hundreds or thousands of suppliers. Intel relies on relatively few suppliers for its chips.

There's been concern that the law has amounted to a de facto embargo on minerals exports from an area with millions of people living at a subsistence level. Carolyn Duran, manager of Intel's "conflict minerals" program said that Intel still buys minerals from the region, as long as it's comfortable the mines are in good hands.

"We are not intending to leave the region behind," Duran said.

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China caution, US data subdue world stocks

Caution about China's economic prospects and upcoming U.S. economic data kept Asian stock markets subdued Tuesday. European markets were also lackluster.

Investors are awaiting economic events in the U.S. with Federal Reserve minutes due Wednesday and a monthly jobs report on Friday.

Japan's Nikkei 225 closed 0.6 percent down to 15, 814.37 while Hong Kong's Hang Seng added 0.1 percent to 22,712.78. China's Shanghai Composite Index gained 0.1 percent to 2,047.32. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 shed 0.2 percent to 5,317.00 and Southeast Asian markets were mixed.

Confidence was weakened by lackluster services industry activity in the U.S., Wall Street's fall Monday and recent signs of renewed weakness in China's manufacturing.

"China is defiantly in play right now," said Chris Weston, chief market strategist at IG in Melbourne, Australia. "We certainly aren't seeing the sort of flows that suggest the Chinese and Hong Kong markets are going to see double-digit appreciation this year."

In early European trading, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares rose 0.1 percent to 6,735.29 while Germany's DAX was nearly flat at 9,431.48. France's CAC-40 was down 0.2 percent at 4,217.19.

Futures in New York pointed to a higher opening on Wall Street. Dow Jones futures rose 0.2 percent to 16,396 and S&P 500 futures were up 0.2 percent to 1,825.10.

On Monday, data showed U.S. service companies grew at a steady but slightly slower pace in December. Sales dipped and new orders dropped to a four-year low, according to a report from the Institute for Supply Management. It suggests growth may remain modest in the coming months.

The most closely watched economic report of the week will come on Friday, when the Labor Department is scheduled to release its jobs survey for December. That's going to influence the Fed's decision on how fast to reduce its bond purchases in the coming months. The Fed has been buying $85 billion worth of bonds each month to keep long-term interest rates low to boost borrowing and spending.

In currencies, the euro dropped to $1.3620 from S1.3634 late Monday in New York. The dollar rose to 104.32 yen from 104.20 yen.

Benchmark oil for February delivery was up 29 cents a barrel to $93.72 in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 53 cents to close at $93.43 on Monday.

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Targeting individual health

In 2014, expect medicine to get personal.

Doctors and researchers around Boston are working to make drugs and health care delivery more individualized than ever. And patients will play a bigger role both in medical research and in their own health care, experts told the Herald.

"With personalized medicine, we're going to know what drugs work on certain people and what drugs don't work on certain people," said Robert Coughlin, president and chief executive of MassBio, the state's biotech industry group.

"I think you're going to see that for all therapies going forward," he said.

At Brigham and Women's Hospital, researchers in the year ahead will hone in on what's known as precision medicine — decoding genes to identify people at risk of developing diseases and treating them before they get sick.

The hospital is expecting an uptick in the number of patients — sick and healthy — who get their genomes decoded to find out their risk levels for a variety of diseases, said Dr. Christine Seidman, director of the Biomedical Research Institute at Brigham and Women's.

Researchers also plan to spend more time simply talking to patients as they work to develop new, life-saving therapies.

"We've really incorporated patients into the mix," Seidman said. "Having patients be involved and saying, 'I can help 
here' is huge."

Patients also will be expected to play a bigger role in tracking their own health with apps that record exercise and blood pressure. "There's an interest now all of a sudden in activity tracking," said Dr. Joseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare. "So many of the chronic illnesses — diabetes, high blood pressure — would all be improved if patients were just a little more active every day."

Changes in health care delivery are rippling down to the labs where medical devices are invented. Device makers must make sure their products fit into a health care industry where everything — including patient records — is going digital.

"Medical device developers are looking at ways to make sure the device is accurate but also can support the health care delivery system by storing data," said Tom Sommer, president of the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council.

Coughlin said 2014 will shape up to be a healthy year for medical research, with as many as a dozen Massachusetts biotech companies going public. "The fact that Wall Street's coming back is only adding more cash when it's needed," he said.

But as some companies mature and thrive, other researchers are suffering from the loss of a crucial source of funding.

The federal government slashed research dollars last year as part of a round of budget cuts called sequestration.

"There's a great fear right now… of research money drying up," said Kevin O'Sullivan,

president and CEO of Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, a biotech incubator in Worcester. "There's such instability in the federal government."

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DPU may generate regs for electric vehicle charging

The state Department of Public Utilities has started investigating the possible regulation of electricity as a motor vehicle fuel.

Though there isn't a huge number of electric vehicles on the road today, the DPU considers their widespread adoption as an integral part of its electric grid modernization efforts. And Gov. Deval Patrick in October signed a multi-state pledge to increase the use of zero-emission vehicles, including electric cars.

"We're driving in that direction in terms of policies," said Ann Berwick, the DPU's chairwoman.

The DPU will look at how electric vehicles get charged — at people's residences, at businesses for a fee, or whether utility companies should be allowed to own charging systems. It also will consider metering policies and rate structures that incentivize off-peak charging for residential customers with electric vehicles.

"If you had a whole lot of electric vehicles charging at once, then you'd have questions about whether the electric grid at the moment can accommodate that," Berwick said. "There are all kinds of questions related to how they charge, when they charge, what they pay for charging and whether they have special rates."

The DPU also will study whether it should regulate a local hotel or mall with a so-called "juice bar," for example, where customers can plug in their electric cars for recharging.

"Should we regulate it differently depending on whether they're charging for the power or not, or whether it's a fee versus a kilowatt-basis charge?" Berwick asked.

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Boeing contract cuts into local labor influence

SEATTLE — A new labor contract that was approved in a close vote by Boeing machinists secures a major airplane contract for the Seattle area, but it also moves workers away from pensions.

National union leaders, the state's governor and the company all hailed Friday contract approval — which defied local union bosses — as a vital boost to the region's economy.

The tight count exposed deep rifts in the once-powerful union, but with plenty of states lining up to give Boeing exactly what it wanted to get work on the 777X, the aerospace giant had a tremendous advantage.

"It shows that even a strong local is vulnerable and has a limited defensibility to slow the tide of concessions that has been going on across the country," said Leon Grunberg, a sociology professor at the University of Puget Sound who co-authored a book, "Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers."

He added Saturday, "This is happening with a company that's doing very well financially."

Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers approved an eight-year contract extension late Friday by 51 percent, a turnaround from November when the same workers voted down a previous offer by 67 percent.

The passing margin was about 600 votes of about 23,900 counted, according to Wilson Ferguson, president of a local unit of District 751.

Ferguson said Saturday that the vote diminished the local union's power since it conceded some hard-fought benefits they won't be getting back.

Foes of the contract opposed the idea of freezing the machinists' pensions and moving workers to a defined-contribution savings plan.

"The very fact that Boeing was making these demands in the first place just has to be seen as discouraging for average workers," said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at the University of Washington who has a forthcoming book "What Unions No Longer Do."

"This is a very strong union, and if you have a strong union, being forced into givebacks of this sort ... then you can just imagine how little leverage other workers have when negotiating," he added.

But Richard Gritta, a finance professor at University of Portland, said Boeing needed to gain these concessions to remain competitive in the "dog-eat-dog industry" that has seen Boeing and Airbus trade dominance.

"It's a very tough industry. To gain these concessions from labor is critical," he said Saturday.

Local union officials had urged their 30,000 members to oppose the deal, arguing that the proposal surrendered too much at a time of company profitability. They had opposed taking a vote at all but were overruled by national leaders in the Machinists union.

A number of political leaders, including Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, praised the vote, which supporters said keeps thousands of well-paying jobs in the state and solidifies Boeing's presence in the Seattle area, where the company built its first airplanes nearly a century ago.

Inslee, a Democrat, said the vote secured Washington state's "future as the aerospace capital of the world."

Some local elected officials had said there was no other choice but to vote "yes."

Grunberg, the University of Puget Sound professor, said, "Everybody was scared about Boeing moving this huge new production out of state, so I think there was tremendous anxiety about losing this production."

More than 20 other states moved recently to bid for work on the 777X, an updated version of Boeing's best-selling 777. Boeing has said the 777X is expected to carry as many as 400 passengers and be more fuel efficient than the 777.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on Friday said the decision wasn't an easy one and workers' concerns about income and retirement security were legitimate. But the Democrat also said the agreement guarantees "thousands of good-paying jobs and billions of dollars in economic growth."

Under the terms of the contract extension, Boeing said the 777X and its composite wing will be built in the Puget Sound area by Boeing employees represented by the Machinists union.

Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO Ray Conner said Friday that "the future of Boeing in the Puget Sound region has never looked brighter."

Lynne Dodson, with the Washington State Labor Council, the largest labor group in the state with 450,000 members, didn't see Friday's vote as an indication of declining union influence. "It's an indication of just how far Boeing will go," she said. "It's more a reflection of corporate greed than of union power."

Ferguson, the local union leader, said Saturday morning: "This was a turning point in the labor movement. Pensions were hard-fought battles to get in the first place. Once they're gone, they're gone."

"Their fear and intimidation worked," he added.

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