Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction

Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.

VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.

Matt Eich for The New York Times

MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.

It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”

It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.

The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.

Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.

Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.

Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”

Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.

“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”

“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”

Dr. Waldo M. Ellison

Richard Fee initial evaluation

Feb. 5, 2010

Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.

Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.

“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 3, 2013

An earlier version of a quote appearing with the home page presentation of this article misspelled the name of a medication. It is Adderall, not Aderall.

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Iceland, Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with small-time criminals, “clearly knows that he crossed the line” and generally sees “the difference between right and wrong.”

Today, the burly, 48-year-old former policeman is struggling with a very different sort of suspect. Reassigned to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, to lead what has become one of the world’s most sweeping investigation into the bankers whose actions contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Hauksson now faces suspects who “are not aware of when they crossed the line” and “defend their actions every step of the way.”

With the global economy still struggling to recover from the financial maelstrom five years ago, governments around the world have been criticized for largely failing to punish the bankers who were responsible for the calamity. But even here in Iceland, a country of just 320,000 that has gone after financiers with far more vigor than the United States and other countries hit by the crisis, obtaining criminal convictions has proved devilishly difficult.

Public hostility toward bankers is so strong in Iceland that “it is easier to say you are dealing drugs than to say you’re a banker,” said Thorvaldur Sigurjonsson, the former head of trading for Kaupthing, a once high-flying bank that crumbled. He has been called in for questioning by Mr. Hauksson’s office but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Yet, in the four years since the Icelandic Parliament passed a law ordering the appointment of an unnamed special prosecutor to investigate those blamed for the country’s spectacular meltdown in 2008, only a handful of bankers have been convicted.

Ministers in a left-leaning coalition government elected after the crash agree that the wheels of justice have ground slowly, but they call for patience, explaining that the process must follow the law, not vengeful passions.

“We are not going after people just to satisfy public anger,” said Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, Iceland’s minister of industry, a former finance minister and leader of the Left-Green Movement that is part of the governing coalition.

Hordur Torfa, a popular singer-songwriter who helped organize protests that forced the previous conservative government to resign, acknowledged that “people are getting impatient” but said they needed to accept that “this is not the French Revolution. I don’t believe in taking bankers out and hanging them or shooting them.”

Others are less patient. “The whole process is far too slow,” said Thorarinn Einarsson, a left-wing activist. “It only shows that ‘banksters’ can get away with doing whatever they want.”

Mr. Hauksson, the special prosecutor, said he was frustrated by the slow pace but thought it vital that his office scrupulously follow legal procedure. “Revenge is not something we want as our main driver in this process. Our work must be proper today and be seen as proper in the future,” he said.

Part of the difficulty in prosecuting bankers, he said, is that the law is often unclear on what constitutes a criminal offense in high finance. “Greed is not a crime,” he noted. “But the question is: where does greed lead?”

Mr. Hauksson said it was often easy to show that bankers violated their own internal rules for lending and other activities, but “as in all cases involving theft or fraud, the most difficult thing is proving intent.”

And there are the bankers themselves. Those who have been brought in for questioning often bristle at being asked to account for their actions. “They are not used to being questioned. These people are not used to finding themselves in this situation,” Mr. Hauksson said. They also hire expensive lawyers.

The special prosecutor’s office initially had only five staff members but now has more than 100 investigators, lawyers and financial experts, and it has relocated to a big new office. It has opened about 100 cases, with more than 120 people now under investigation for possible crimes relating to an Icelandic financial sector that grew so big it dwarfed the rest of the economy.

To help ease Mr. Hauksson’s task, legislators amended the law to allow investigators easy access to confidential bank information, something that previously required a court order.

Parliament also voted to put the country’s prime minister at the time of the banking debacle on trial for negligence before a special tribunal. (A proposal to try his cabinet failed.) Mr. Hauksson was not involved in the case against the former leader, Geir H. Haarde, who last year was found guilty of failing to keep ministers properly informed about the 2008 crisis but was acquitted on more serious charges that could have resulted in a prison sentence.

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The Lede Blog: New Photographs Stir Doubts About Bashar's Baby and Iran's Space Monkey

Last Updated, Saturday, 12:37 p.m. Bad news, readers: new images appear to cast doubt on the accuracy of two of the week’s most widely-reported stories — the rumored pregnancy of Syria’s first lady, and the pioneering space flight of an Iranian monkey.

As the Washington Post correspondent Liz Sly reported, President Bashar al-Assad’s office posted five new photographs of his wife, Asma, on Facebook, as part of an effort to disprove a curious aside in a Lebanese newspaper report that she is pregnant. In each of the photographs, said to have been taken last week in Damascus, a very slender Mrs. Assad was pictured congratulating the winners of this year’s Syrian Science Olympiad.

As my colleague Rick Gladstone explained, “rumors that Mrs. Assad had conceived in June,” were first reported in November by Al Bawaba, an Amman-based news Web site. Since the British-born first lady has been out of public view for most of the past year, as her husband’s government struggled to regain control of the country, the rumors about her spread despite an absence of visual confirmation.

The photographs were released a day after Mr. Assad’s office issued an indignant statement taking exception to a Washington Post blogger’s reading of the Lebanese newspaper’s story. The statement said the blogger, Max Fisher, “based his analysis on false allegations that led him to wrong results which are far from reality.”

Since Syria’s Science Olympiad takes place every year, the president’s office could have recycled images of the first lady that were taken a year or more earlier, but that would require the cooperation of all of the students pictured with her in the photographs. At least one of the students pictured with Mrs. Assad in the new photographs, a girl with curly hair wearing brightly-patterned sneakers, does appear in another image of the winners posted on the Olympiad’s Facebook page.

While this set of images appears to back the official story coming out of Damascus, recently released photographs and video of the monkey that Iran says it sent into space seem to undermine Tehran’s claims.

Video broadcast on Iranian television this week showed what officials said were images of a monkey before and after a space flight.

As journalists at the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle pointed out on its Persian language site on Thursday, the first reports on the space mission published in Iran’s state-run media showed an anxious-looking monkey prepared for blast-off with a prominent mole above his right eye.

When Iran got around to releasing photographs and video of the monkey’s capsule being retrieved post-flight, there was no trace of a mole on his brow in the close-ups of him waiving to reporters or smiling for the cameras at a subsequent public appearance.

That led to speculation that Iran might have attempted to cover up a failed space mission by displaying a different monkey than the one that actually made a 150-mile round trip into the thermosphere and back. Or that the newly famous monkey had fallen prey to the Iranian penchant for cosmetic surgery.

DW: Iranian Astro Monkey went to space with a mole on his face, came back without it. Plastic surgery? #iran http://t.co/iN4jxecP

— negin shiraghaei (@neginsh) 31 Jan 13

The missing mole is not exactly hard evidence that Iranians had a spare monkey waiting in the wings to pretend he’d just got back from space, but Iran does have a track record of fictionalizing its achievements in the field of rocket-science. Last July, however, the Iranian Students’ News Agency — which released photographs of the monkey with and without the mole this week — did report that the space agency in Tehran had five monkeys in training for the mission.

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Washington Post Joins List of News Media Hacked by the Chinese

SAN FRANCISCO — The question is no longer who has been hacked. It’s who hasn’t?

The Washington Post can be added to the growing list of American news organizations whose computers have been penetrated by Chinese hackers.

After The New York Times reported on Wednesday that its computers as well as those of Bloomberg News had been attacked by Chinese hackers, The Wall Street Journal said on Thursday that it too had been a victim of Chinese cyberattacks.

According to people with knowledge of an investigation at The Washington Post, its computer systems were also attacked by Chinese hackers in 2012. A former Post employee said there had been hacking attempts at the Washington Post for at least four years, but none targeted the company’s newsroom. Then, last year, newsroom computers were found to be communicating with Web servers that were traced back to China, according to people with knowledge of the Post investigation who declined to speak on the record.

Jennifer Lee, a spokeswoman for the Post Company, said that the “company did not have anything to share at this time.”

Security experts said that in 2008, Chinese hackers began targeting American news organizations as part of an effort to monitor coverage of Chinese issues.

In a report for clients in December, Mandiant, a computer security company, said that over the course of several investigations it found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen e-mails, contacts and files from more than 30 journalists and executives at Western news organizations, and had maintained a “short list” of journalists for repeated attacks.

Among those targeted were journalists who had written about Chinese leaders, political and legal issues in China and the telecom giants Huawei and ZTE.

The Times reported on Wednesday that Bloomberg L.P. was also attacked by Chinese hackers after its Bloomberg News unit published an article last June about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March.

The secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said on Thursday that a global effort was needed to establish rules for cyberactivity. In her final meeting with reporters, Mrs. Clinton addressed a question about China’s efforts to infiltrate computer systems at The New York Times. “We have seen over the last years an increase in not only the hacking attempts on government institutions but also nongovernmental ones,” she said, adding that the Chinese “are not the only people who are hacking us.”

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

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Media Decoder Blog: In Wake of Restructuring, NBC News President Quits

8:30 p.m. | Updated

The longest-serving president of any of the three network news divisions, Steve Capus of NBC News, stepped down from his position on Friday, six months after Comcast restructured its news units in a way that diminished his authority.

Pat Fili-Krushel, chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, said in a brief telephone interview on Friday that she would “cast a wide net” while searching for a successor to Mr. Capus. In the interim, the leaders of the news division will report directly to her.

Ms. Fili-Krushel became Mr. Capus’s boss last July when Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, consolidated all of NBC’s news units — NBC News, the cable news channels MSNBC and CNBC, and its stake in the Weather Channel — under a new umbrella, the NBCUniversal News Group. Mr. Burke asked Ms. Fili-Krushel, one of his most trusted lieutenants, to run it, while keeping Mr. Capus and the heads of the other units in place.

Ms. Fili-Krushel worked early in her career at HBO and Lifetime. A veteran of the Walt Disney Company, where she helped program ABC, and  Time Warner, where she was an administrator, she is by her own admission not a journalist.  But now she is, by default, the highest-ranking woman in the American television news industry — not just at the moment, but in the history of the medium. The heads of the news divisions at ABC and CBS are men, as are the heads of the Fox News Channel, CNN, and Bloomberg.

Ms. Fili-Krushel has kept a low public profile, but has been a forceful presence behind the scenes, recently moving from her office on the 51st floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, near Mr. Burke’s, to a new one on the third floor, where NBC News is based. On Friday, she said she had spent her first six months “learning, listening and getting to know the players here.” She called the News Group an “unbelievably strong organization.”

Though Mr. Capus’s exit saddened many at NBC News on Friday, it came as little surprise. He had previously reported directly to Mr. Burke, but after the restructuring he reported to Ms. Fili-Krushel, and he made no secret of his unhappiness with the change. His contract had a clause that allowed him to leave in the event that he no longer reported to Mr. Burke, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement at NBC, and he decided to exercise that right after months of contemplation. The people insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized by the network to speak publicly.

Mr. Capus told Ms. Fili-Krushel of his intent to leave last Friday. It is likely that he would have left sooner, but a series of major news stories kept him busy late last year — including Hurricane Sandy, the presidential election and the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. Mr. Capus also oversaw the network’s response to the kidnapping of Richard Engel and an NBC News crew in Syria last month.

“It has been a privilege to have spent two decades here, but it is now time to head in a new direction,” he wrote in an e-mail to staff members on Friday afternoon.

Mr. Capus guided NBC through a revolutionary time in news-gathering and distribution. He maintained the news division’s profitability, managed tensions between NBC News and its increasingly liberal cable channel MSNBC, and fostered new business ventures like an in-house production company and an annual education summit. Last year, he unwound an old deal with Microsoft to give the news division complete control over its Web site, now named NBCNews.com, for the first time.

Ms. Fili-Krushel wrote in a separate e-mail to staff members that “NBC News is America’s leading source of television news and Steve has been a big part of that success.”

NBC News is the producer of the most popular evening newscast in the country. But its single biggest source of profits, the morning show “Today,” fell to second place last year, behind ABC’s “Good Morning America,” for the first time since the 1990s. The decline caused widespread anxiety inside the news division and speculation that Mr. Capus would be relieved of his duties.

Inside NBC, both Mr. Capus and the executive producer of “Today,” Jim Bell, received much of the blame for the botched removal of Ann Curry from “Today” last June, which worsened the show’s already tenuous position in the ratings. Ms. Fili-Krushel was put in charge just a few weeks later.

Mr. Bell was replaced at “Today” last fall and is now the executive producer for NBC Olympics. Savannah Guthrie is now the co-host of “Today,” and Ms. Curry is a national and international correspondent for the network, but is rarely seen. Mr. Capus’s exit was seen by some at the network as the last shoe that had to drop.

In his e-mail to staff members, Mr. Capus called it an “extremely difficult decision to walk away,” noting that he started at NBC as a producer 20 years ago this month. He did not make any mention of what he would do next. “Journalism is, indeed, a noble calling, and I have much I hope to accomplish in the next phase of my career,” he wrote.

“Today” continues to lose to ABC’s “Good Morning America” among total viewers, but lately it has won a few weeks in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet.

“NBC Nightly News” has more successfully fended off ABC’s “World News,” despite an aggressive push by ABC. Mr. Capus said, “NBC News has grown in all key metrics — from ratings and reputation to profitability.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/02/2013, on page B2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: In Wake of Restructuring, NBC News President Quits.

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The Lede Blog: Video Shows Aftermath of U.S. Embassy Bombing in Turkey

Associated Press video showing the damage to the perimeter of the United States Embassy in Turkey after a suicide bombing in Ankara on Friday.

As my colleagues Sebnem Arsu and Rick Gladstone report, a suicide bomber attacked the American Embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara on Friday, in a blast that officials said killed at least one Turkish citizen and wounded another at a side entrance to the compound.

A cameraman for the Turkish news agency Ihlas Haber Ajansı rushed to the scene, capturing raw video of the damage to the embassy’s perimeter and a brief glimpse of what appeared to be human flesh on the pavement. Some of that I.H.A. footage was used in a video report broadcast on Turkish television, showing a wounded person being loaded into an ambulance as police officers tried to cordon off the area.

Video broadcast on Turkish television on Friday showed the aftermath of a bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. (Via Telegraph TV)

As the blogger Serhatcan Yurdam reports, a woman named EsmaDinmezer posted a collection of photographs uploaded to Facebook showing first responders, officials and reporters outside the embassy later.

Photos from US Embassy after the explosion… http://t.co/hc5YvoDZ

— Serhatcan Yurdam (@syurdam) 1 Feb 13

Another Turkish channel, TRT Haber, broadcast remarks by the United States ambassador, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., as he stood in front of the building beside Alaattin Yuksel, the governor of Ankara. (Readers can click ahead to about the 1:30 mark of the TRT report to hear the ambassador’s remarks, in Turkish and English.)

Speaking after the governor, the American ambassador thanked the authorities for their prompt response, expressed sorrow at the death of a Turkish security guard and said his prayers were with the Turkish employee who was being treated for his wounds.

In his remarks, the Turkish official told reporters the explosion “happened inside the American Embassy.”

Tulin Daloglu, a Turkish columnist for the news site Al Monitor, reported on Twitter and Vine that a large number of reporters and officers were still gathered outside the embassy hours after the bombing.

Hours after the suicide bombing at #US Embassy #Ankara, the scene is packed by police…Chilling day in Ankara!

— Turkey Pulse (@TurkeyPulse) 1 Feb 13

[VIDEO] Tulin Daloglu on the scene at the US Embassy in #Ankara RT @TurkeyPulse http://t.co/xxSflDr6

— cale salih (@callysally) 1 Feb 13

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Making Web Sites Completely Addictive

Looking for a real estate agent who loves dogs? You’ll find 314 results for “dog lover” on Corcoran’s redesigned Web site.

Want to know how locals rate the suburb you’re considering moving to? What if during Sunday brunch you get the sudden urge to go apartment hunting? Warburgrealty.com now offers an app that offers up nearby listings based on your current location.

Recognizing that it’s no longer enough just to present real estate listings based on price, location and the number of bedrooms, many New York brokerage firms are redesigning their Web sites as glossy one-stop shops with new tools to help guide buyers and sellers through the deal.

Uncluttered pages with eye-catching full-screen photos that translate well to iPads and other mobile devices are now de rigueur. And on many sites, video walk-throughs of apartments are on the way out. They have made way for tours of neighborhoods and advice pieces on everything from timing the sale of a home to deciding whether it’s better to buy or rent.

Sites are also providing more comprehensive searches that make it easier for buyers to sort through new offerings and connect with agents through social media.

The idea is to give potential clients a reason to cleave to a particular site rather than shop the competition. After all, with apartment data made ubiquitous by sites like Trulia, Zillow, NYTimes.com and more, brokerage firms can no longer rely on listings alone. And while agents are still featured prominently on most sites, they have generally been recast as neighborhood specialists as opposed to the listing gatekeepers they once were.

Online consultants say that what is happening to online brokerage firms is not unlike what happened to brick-and-mortar travel agencies.

“Once all flights were made available on Expedia, Travelocity and Kayak, what’s the travel agent’s unique value proposition?” said Marc Davison, a founder of 1000Watt Design, a creative digital agency for real estate in Portland, Ore., that worked with Houlihan Lawrence on its recent redesign. “Real estate brokers are grappling with that same problem. What compels you to come to my site, what else can I offer?”

Corcoran.com is betting that less is more. In November it unveiled a new site with streamlined searches designed to uncover a smaller but more relevant number of listings based on what the consumer is looking for.

Visitors to the site still select a neighborhood, a price range and a number of bedrooms and baths. But there is less of the clicking back and forth and redoing of searches that the site previously required. It now offers all results on one page and has turned its agent search into something of a matchmaking service, allowing customers to look up agents not just by the properties they represent, but by the languages they speak, hobbies or other interests. Signing in with Facebook or LinkedIn will turn up a list of agents who may be known to your friends or contacts.

Consumers can also use keywords to search apartment listings and agents. Want a view of the Chrysler building? A recent search produced more than 300 listings. You could even search for the word “sexy,” just to make sure all your expectations were met. Such a search turned up 75 results, mostly listings in the Hamptons and links to related articles.

Corcoran also has a nifty feature that shows the number of listings meeting your criteria and ticks down as your search narrows. For example, the site offered a total of 1,262 available listings in New York early last week. A search for two-bedrooms in Brooklyn brought the count to 69 “matching homes.” That number dropped to just 24 when the search was limited to two-bedrooms with two baths.

Clicking on a listing produces full-screen photos and a neighborhood map showing restaurants, grocery stores, shopping and schools. Want more recommendations? Click a link to tips and data compiled from Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Foodspotting and Foursquare, the location-based social networking site.

Instead of “just putting forth hundreds of search results,” said Christina Lowris Panos, the chief marketing officer of the Corcoran Group, “we’re the curator of the information. We’re not just giving you volume.”

HoulihanLawrence.com, which revamped its Web site about the same time as Corcoran, has taken a similar approach. It also allows customers to search by keyword and offers more robust information on neighborhoods, including “community videos” of local historians, residents and small-business owners discussing favorite aspects of a given town.

A new “community conversations” section, powered by StreetAdvisor, invites residents to review their neighborhoods. For example, a snapshot of the stately Westchester town of Bedford, N.Y., ranks it 7.8 out of 10, noting who lives there (“country lovers, families with kids, professionals, retirees, gay & lesbian”), positive aspects (“peace & quiet,” “safe & sound,” schools) and what it is “not great for” (night life, public transport, cost of living, shopping and medical facilities).

You can pose a question to the forum, read answers to popular questions like “where is the closest mall?” or peruse reviews by residents.

“When looking for a home on a real estate Web site,” said Chris Meyers, the chief operating officer of Houlihan Lawrence, “very often people are shopping for a community more than an individual home. Where do I want to live that feels right for me? How do I understand that, in a market I haven’t been in before?”

Halstead Property, which is refreshing Halstead.com, already offers video tours of 23 neighborhoods in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The site also taps into New York Magazine’s best restaurants, shopping, night life and salons.

Other firms are not making the neighborhood a focus. Stribling & Associates, for example, has pared down its site to offer a cleaner presentation.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect web address for a real estate brokerage. It is Warburgrealty.com, not Warburg.com.

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Science and Health News

Michael Probst/Associated Press

Baby hedgehogs in Germany.

Friday in science, clues to owls’ backwardness, fresh dangers to the seas and the launch of a giant kite. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

Phil Marino for The New York Times

Physicists monitored data from heavy ion collisions in the control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory particle collider in 2007.

Felix Ordonez/Reuters

A snowy owl.

Hedgehog Bacteria: Sonic the Hedgehog may have a dark side. The Associated Press reports that in the last year, 20 people in the United States were infected, and 1 person died, from “a rare but dangerous” type of salmonella bacteria. All the cases, health officials said, were linked to hedgehogs that were kept as pets.

More Bad News for the Seas: National Geographic reports that buried beneath the waves are rich deposits of “gold, copper, zinc, and other valuable minerals,” and that is attracting the attention of the humans on the land above. Mining the minerals is not easy, but one company has already obtained an extraction contract for the waters off Papua, New Guinea, the magazine says.

Less Money for Science: Lean days are ahead for recipients of federal government contracts, and that knowledge is having an impact on physics research. Scientific American reports that a federal advisory panel has recommended closing a particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

Spinning Heads: Owls are able to do something that parents only dream about: swivel their heads completely around to see what is going on behind them. An illustrator and a physician at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine discovered that they can do so without severing their arteries or preventing blood from reaching their brains because of holes in their neck bones, which may hold air sacks that cushion the movement of the head, and because the vertebral artery is able to expand and hold reservoirs of blood for the brain, a LiveScience video explains.

Setting Sail in Space: A new solar sail, the largest yet, will be launched by NASA in 2014. Looking very much like a gigantic kite, it will eventually reach 2 million miles from Earth (that’s a lot of string!), Popular Science reports. And besides blazing the way for further research of this type, the mission has another purpose: “Sunjammer will be carrying the cremated remains of various individuals, including the creator of Star Trek,Gene Roddenberry, and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry. It is not exactly the Enterprise, but Sunjammer will be boldly going where no solar sailing spacecraft has gone before,” Popular Science says.

Video by NASAMarshallTV

Solar Sail Readies for Early Warning Mission

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