Crazy Alien Weather: Lightning-Filled Rocket Dust Storms of Mars

Scientists have modeled the internal workings of lightning-filled “rocket dust storms” on Mars that rise at speeds 100 times faster than ordinary storms and inject dust high into the Martian atmosphere.

The Red Planet is a very dry and dusty place, with global storms that sometimes obscure the entire surface. Satellites orbiting Mars have seen persistent dust layers reaching very high altitudes, as much as 30 to 50 km above the ground, though scientists are at a loss to explain exactly how the dust got there.

Using a high-resolution model, researchers have shown that a thick blob-like dust pocket inside a storm may become heated by the sun, causing the surrounding atmosphere to warm quickly. Because hot air rises, these areas will shoot skyward super fast, much like a rocket launching into space, hence “rocket dust storms.”

“The vertical transport was so strong we want to come up with a kind of spectacular name, to give an idea of the very powerful rise,” said planetary scientist Aymeric Spiga from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris, France, who is lead author on a paper describing the phenomena in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets on Jan. 14.

These speedily rising dust blobs can soar from near the surface to 30 or 40 km into the atmosphere in a matter of hours at speeds in excess of 10 meters per second (22 mph). This is far faster than the typical convection speeds in a dust storm of 0.1 meters per second (0.2 mph). Since the dust particles rub up against one another and create friction, the rocket dust storms may become charged with electrostatic forces, which could which could trigger fantastic lightning bolts.

Spiga and his team used detailed models of winds and dust on Mars to determine exactly how these rocket dust storms behave. Most previous models of Mars’ climate simulate large-scale global dust storms with fairly coarse resolution and so have not noticed the rocket storms. The team seeded their model with data from a dust storm observed by the OMEGA instrument aboard ESA’s Mars Express orbiting satellite and watched the rise of rocket storms.

Similar dust storms can’t happen on Earth. This is mainly because Mars’ atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than our own, meaning that it gets quickly and efficiently heated when dust particles absorb sunlight and then emit thermal radiation.

But a comparable phenomenon occurs in grey cumulonimbus thunderstorm clouds on Earth. The large accumulations of water particles in such clouds release latent heat, causing strong vertical motions and an extensive tall structure. Spiga’s team has used this Earthly analogy in the rocket dust storm’s more technical name, conio-cumulonimbus, from the Greek conious, which means dust.

“But I prefer to call them rocket dust storms,” Spiga said. “Then everyone knows what I’m talking about.”

Other researchers are impressed with the physical modeling done in the work. “I was a little surprised that such a small dust disturbance could remain intact over such long distances,” said planetary atmospheres scientist Scot Rafkin from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The mechanism could help explain how long-lasting layers of dust climb so high in the Martian atmosphere, he says. 

Because they appear to be relatively rare, it may take a while to track down more rocket dust storms. But Spiga is hopeful they will be found by orbiting satellites, which may even image the lightning flashes inside them.

Video: Spiga, Aymeric, et al. “Rocket dust storms and detached dust layers in the Martian atmosphere,” JGR:Planets, DOI: 10.1002/jgre.20046

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Kutcher takes on tech idol Steve Jobs in ‘jOBS’

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Ashton Kutcher says playing Steve Jobs on screen “was honestly one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever tried to do in my life.”

The 34-year-old actor helped premiere the biopic “jOBS” Friday, which was the closing-night film at the Sundance Film Festival.

Kutcher plays the Apple Inc. founder from the company’s humble origins in the 1970s until the launch of the first iPod in 2001. A digital entrepreneur himself, Kutcher said he considers Jobs a personal hero.

“He’s a guy who failed and got back on the horse,” Kutcher said. “I think we can all sort of relate to that at some point in life.”

Kutcher even embodied the Jobs character as he pursued his own high-tech interests off-screen.

“What was nice was when I was preparing for the character, I could still work on product development for technology companies, and I would sort of stay in character, in the mode of the character,” he said. “But I didn’t feel like I was compromising the work on the film by working on technology stuff because it was pretty much in the same field.”

But playing the real-life tech icon who died in 2011 still felt risky, he said, because “he’s fresh in our minds.”

“It was kind of like throwing myself into this gauntlet of, I know, massive amounts of criticism because somebody’s going to go ‘well, it wasn’t exactly…,’” Kutcher said.

While the filmmakers say they tried to be as historically accurate as possible, there was also a disclaimer at the very end of the credits that said portions of the film might not be completely accurate.

Still, realism was always the focus for Kutcher, who watched “hundreds of hours of footage,” listened to Jobs’ past speeches and interviewed several of his friends to prepare for the role.

The actor even adopted the entrepreneur’s “fruitarian diet,” which he said “can lead to some serious issues.”

“I ended up in the hospital two days before we started shooting the movie,” he said. “I was like doubled over in pain, and my pancreas levels were completely out of whack, which was completely terrifying, considering everything.”

Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer.

Still, Kutcher was up to the challenge of playing Jobs, in part because of his admiration for the man who created the Macintosh computer and the iPod.

“I admire this man so much and what he’s done. I admire the way he built things,” Kutcher said. “This guy created a tool that we use every day in our life, and he believed in it when nobody else did.”

The film also shows Jobs’ less appealing side, withholding stock options from some of the company’s original employees and denying child support to the mother of his eldest child.

Kutcher still found the man inspiring. Jobs had a singular focus, Kutcher said, and felt like anyone could change the world.

“I don’t know if there’s ever been an entrepreneur who’s had more compassion and care for his consumer than Steve Jobs,” Kutcher said. “He wanted to put something in your hand that you could use and you could use it easily… and he really cared about that.”

___

AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/APSandy.

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Religious Groups and Employers Battle Contraception Mandate

Shawn Thew/European Pressphoto Agency

President Obama, with his health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, offering a compromise on the contraception mandate last year.

In a flood of lawsuits, Roman Catholics, evangelicals and Mennonites are challenging a provision in the new health care law that requires employers to cover birth control in employee health plans — a high-stakes clash between religious freedom and health care access that appears headed to the Supreme Court.

In recent months, federal courts have seen dozens of lawsuits brought not only by religious institutions like Catholic dioceses but also by private employers ranging from a pizza mogul to produce transporters who say the government is forcing them to violate core tenets of their faith. Some have been turned away by judges convinced that access to contraception is a vital health need and a compelling state interest. Others have been told that their beliefs appear to outweigh any state interest and that they may hold off complying with the law until their cases have been judged. New suits are filed nearly weekly.

“This is highly likely to end up at the Supreme Court,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia and one of the country’s top scholars on church-state conflicts. “There are so many cases, and we are already getting strong disagreements among the circuit courts.”

President Obama’s health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act, was the most fought-over piece of legislation in his first term and was the focus of a highly contentious Supreme Court decision last year that found it to be constitutional.

But a provision requiring the full coverage of contraception remains a matter of fierce controversy. The law says that companies must fully cover all “contraceptive methods and sterilization procedures” approved by the Food and Drug Administration, including “morning-after pills” and intrauterine devices whose effects some contend are akin to abortion.

As applied by the Health and Human Services Department, the law offers an exemption for “religious employers,” meaning those who meet a four-part test: that their purpose is to inculcate religious values, that they primarily employ and serve people who share their religious tenets, and that they are nonprofit groups under federal tax law.

But many institutions, including religious schools and colleges, do not meet those criteria because they employ and teach members of other religions and have a broader purpose than inculcating religious values.

“We represent a Catholic college founded by Benedictine monks,” said Kyle Duncan, general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has brought a number of the cases to court. “They don’t qualify as a house of worship and don’t turn away people in hiring or as students because they are not Catholic.”

In that case, involving Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina, a federal appeals court panel in Washington told the college last month that it could hold off on complying with the law while the federal government works on a promised exemption for religiously-affiliated institutions. The court told the government that it wanted an update by mid-February.

Defenders of the provision say employers may not be permitted to impose their views on employees, especially when something so central as health care is concerned.

“Ninety-nine percent of women use contraceptives at some time in their lives,” said Judy Waxman, a vice president of the National Women’s Law Center, which filed a brief supporting the government in one of the cases. “There is a strong and legitimate government interest because it affects the health of women and babies.”

She added, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Contraception was declared by the C.D.C. to be one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century.”

Officials at the Justice Department and the Health and Human Services Department declined to comment, saying the cases were pending.

A compromise for religious institutions may be worked out. The government hopes that by placing the burden on insurance companies rather than on the organizations, the objections will be overcome. Even more challenging cases involve private companies run by people who reject all or many forms of contraception.

The Alliance Defending Freedom — like Becket, a conservative group — has brought a case on behalf of Hercules Industries, a company in Denver that makes sheet metal products. It was granted an injunction by a judge in Colorado who said the religious values of the family owners were infringed by the law.

“Two-thirds of the cases have had injunctions against Obamacare, and most are headed to courts of appeals,” said Matt Bowman, senior legal counsel for the alliance. “It is clear that a substantial number of these cases will vindicate religious freedom over Obamacare. But it seems likely that the Supreme Court will ultimately resolve the dispute.”

The timing of these cases remains in flux. Half a dozen will probably be argued by this summer, perhaps in time for inclusion on the Supreme Court’s docket next term. So far, two- and three-judge panels on four federal appeals courts have weighed in, granting some injunctions while denying others.

One of the biggest cases involves Hobby Lobby, which started as a picture framing shop in an Oklahoma City garage with $600 and is now one of the country’s largest arts and crafts retailers, with more than 500 stores in 41 states.

David Green, the company’s founder, is an evangelical Christian who says he runs his company on biblical principles, including closing on Sunday so employees can be with their families, paying nearly double the minimum wage and providing employees with comprehensive health insurance.

Mr. Green does not object to covering contraception but considers morning-after pills to be abortion-inducing and therefore wrong.

“Our family is now being forced to choose between following the laws of the land that we love or maintaining the religious beliefs that have made our business successful and have supported our family and thousands of our employees and their families,” Mr. Green said in a statement. “We simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs to comply with this mandate.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit last month turned down his family’s request for a preliminary injunction, but the company has found a legal way to delay compliance for some months.

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7 Die in Fire At Factory In Bangladesh

A.M. Ahad/Associated Press

Firefighters and volunteers worked to extinguish the fire at a small garment factory in Bangladesh’s capital on Saturday.

DHAKA, Bangladesh — In the latest blow to Bangladesh’s garment industry, seven workers died Saturday after a fire swept through a factory here not long after seamstresses had returned from a lunch break. Workers said supervisors had locked one of the factory exits, forcing some people to jump out of windows to save their lives.

Abir Abdullah/European Pressphoto Agency

Relatives mourned beside the bodies of workers killed in the fire at a hospital in Dhaka.

Reuters

People sifted through the wreckage at the Smart Fashions factory.

The fatal fire comes roughly two months after the blaze at the Tazreen Fashions factory left 112 workers dead and focused global attention on unsafe conditions in Bangladesh’s garment industry. Tazreen Fashions, located just outside Dhaka, the capital, had been making clothing for some of the world’s biggest brands and retailers, including Walmart.

In the aftermath of the Tazreen Fashions fire, political and industrial leaders in Bangladesh pledged to quickly improve fire safety and even conducted high-profile, nationwide inspections of many of the country’s 5,000 clothing factories. And global brands promised they would not buy clothes from unsafe factories.

But Saturday’s fire in a densely populated section of Dhaka is a grim reminder that the problems remain. The blaze erupted about 2 p.m. at Smart Garment Export, a small factory that employed about 300 people, most of them young women who were making sweaters and jackets. All seven of the dead workers were women.

Masudur Rahman Akand, a supervisor in the fire department, said the factory’s workers were returning from lunch when the blaze erupted in a storage area. The factory was located on the second floor of a building, above a bakery, and it lacked proper exits and fire prevention equipment, Mr. Akand said.

“We did not find fire extinguishers,” he said. “We did not find any safety measures.”

With smoke filling the factory floor, workers apparently panicked. Mr. Akand said the seven workers who died either suffocated or were trampled by people trying to escape.

Eight other workers were hospitalized with injuries. Some of them told rescuers that many people could not quickly escape because one of the exits was blocked by a locked steel gate. Witnesses said people began jumping out of windows before the gate was unlocked.

Azizul Hoque, a police supervisor, said the investigation was continuing. “We do not know the reason or the source or the origin of the fire,” he said.

It was unclear whether the Smart Garment factory was making clothing for international brands or retailers. Dhaka’s industrial areas are filled with factories, large and small, that produce clothing for much of the Western world.

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Jim Yardley from New Delhi.

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Deadly protests roil Egypt on anniversary of revolution

CAIRO — At least five people were killed and hundreds were injured Friday as protests swept across Egypt over the Islamist-led government's failure to fix the besieged economy and heal the politically divided nation two years after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.

The anniversary of the revolution that led to Mubarak's downfall was marked more by bloodshed than joy as familiar and troubling scenes played out amid the widening despair. Gunshots echoed through cities, rock-throwing youths lunged at police through clouds of tear gas, and peaceful demonstrators waved banners and shouted epithets against those in power.

Five people, including police officers, were killed by unknown gunmen in the port city of Suez, according to state media. Unconfirmed reports from a private television station said nine people had died throughout the country. Nearly 400 people, including scores of police officers, were injured, with many of the wounded treated in mosques and alleys.

President Mohamed Morsi has been engulfed for months by anger from secularists, who claim he and his Muslim Brotherhood party have turned increasingly authoritarian in a bid to advance an Islamist state at the expense of social justice. The protests were the latest reminder of the volatile politics and persistent mistrust that threaten Egypt's transition.

"Morsi is finished," said Tarik Salama, an activist. "A big part of the population hates him now. It's too late for him to turn around and say, 'Hey guys, I love you.' He's in the same place as Mubarak was two years ago. Morsi's biggest problem is that he failed to unify the country. A lot of people voted for him, but he failed."

One banner raised in Cairo's Tahrir Square read, "Two years since the revolution, and Egypt still needs another revolution." Protest chants that harked back to the 18-day revolt that toppled Mubarak were now directed at Morsi: "Leave, leave."

The days ahead may prove more violent. Many of the youths clashing with police in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities are angry about an economy that offers little hope. They have been joined by hard-core soccer fans, known as Ultras, demanding that police officials be held accountable for the deaths of 74 soccer fans killed last year in a stadium riot.

A court verdict in that case is expected Saturday. In recent days, youths in Cairo have battled police with stones and gasoline bombs around the high concrete barricades that block streets leading from Tahrir Square to parliament and the Interior Ministry.

Young men pulled part of the barrier down but police drove them back, firing steady volleys of tear gas that cloaked the square and drifted over the Nile.

"These young men and kids have no jobs," said Salama. "The young in Egypt feel there is no future for them. This is the big danger."

By dusk Friday, youths with rags and scarves over their faces hurled stones and rushed the barriers, preparing for another night of clashes. The unrest spurred the emergence of an anarchist group, known as the Black Bloc, whose masked and black-clad members threw Molotov cocktails and attempted to overrun the presidential palace and the Shura Council, the upper house of parliament.

Protesters attacked offices of the Muslim Brotherhood and blocked highways and rail lines. To avoid adding to the violence, the Brotherhood ordered its followers to stay away from Tahrir and instead participate in community programs, such as planting trees and handing out food to the poor. A militant arm of the Brotherhood was blamed last month for deadly attacks against anti-Morsi protesters.

The backlash against Morsi intensified in November when he expanded his presidential powers and, sidestepping the courts, pushed through a referendum on an Islamist-backed constitution. The liberal opposition, which has long been disorganized, denounced him for ruining the promise of democracy that inspired the 2011 revolution.

Morsi has said his actions were an effort to root out Mubarak-era loyalists from the government and propel the country toward parliamentary elections in the spring.

But his biggest problem perhaps is Egypt's troubled economy, which has lost more than half its foreign reserves and worsened conditions for the approximately 40% of Egyptians who live on $2 a day.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

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Game|Life Podcast: Nintendo Goes for Broke, THQ and Atari Just Go Broke

Some weeks, there’s not a whole lot to talk about on the ol’ podcast. Not this week! I pretty much sit Wired senior editor Peter Rubin down in the studio, turn the microphones on, pretend he is the internet and start yelling at him for a good hour. He gamely sits through it.

Topics of discussion this week: The THQ and Atari bankruptcies and the aftermath of the THQ auction, Nintendo’s plans for Virtual Console on Wii U, and Nintendo’s massive announcement of Wii U games that some might call vap– ah, I’m not even going to say it again.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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Brooke Shields signs up for a hitch on Lifetime’s “Army Wives”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Brooke Shields has signed up for the Air Force – or at least the Air Force as it’s portrayed on “Army Wives.”

“Pretty Baby” star Shields will join the cast of the Lifetime series for its seventh season, the network said Thursday.

Shields will play Katherine “Kat” Young, a brash, brilliant Air Force colonel and crack C-17 pilot who clashes with Gen. Michael Holden (Brian McNamara) shortly after arriving at Joint Base Marshall Bring.

But after Young and Holden’s Air Force-Army rivalry gets underway, Holden discovers that Young has a tragic past — and more in common with him than he first thought.

The ABC Studios-produced “Army Wives” returns for its seventh season March 10 at 9 p.m. with a drastically revamped cast. In addition to Shields, singer/actress Ashanti, Torrey DeVitto of “Pretty Little Liars,” Bring It On” alum Elle McLemore and singer Jesse McCartney have joined the cast. Meanwhile, Kim Delaney has departed the series, and former series regular Sally Pressman will only appear “in several episodes” of the new 13-episode season.

“We’re all very excited about season seven, in which a new tribe emerges from the shadow of tragedy,” executive producer Jeff Melvoin said of the upcoming season on Wednesday.

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40 Years After Roe v. Wade, Thousands March to Oppose Abortion

Drew Angerer/The New York Times

Pro-life activists made their way down Constitution Avenue toward the Supreme Court during the March for Life in Washington on Friday.

WASHINGTON — Three days after the 40th anniversary of the decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion, tens of thousands of abortion opponents from around the country came to the National Mall on Friday for the annual March for Life rally, which culminated in a demonstration in front of the Supreme Court building.

On a gray morning when the temperature was well below freezing, the crowd pressed in close against the stage to hear more than a dozen speakers, who included Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Representative Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee, who recently introduced legislation to withhold financing from Planned Parenthood, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky; Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley of Boston; and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania and Republican presidential candidate.

Mr. Santorum spoke of his wife’s decision not to have an abortion after they learned that their child — their daughter Bella, now 4 — had a rare genetic disorder called Trisomy 18.

“We all know that death is never better, never better,” Mr. Santorum said. “Bella is better for us, and we are better because of Bella.”

Jeanne Monahan, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said that the march was both somber and hopeful.

“We’ve lost 55 million Americans to abortion,” she said. “At the same time, I think we’re starting to win. We’re winning in the court of public opinion, we’re winning in the states with legislation.”

Though the main event officially started at noon, the day began much earlier for the participants, with groups in matching scarves engaged in excited chatter on the subway and gaggles of schoolchildren wearing name tags around their necks. Arriving on the Mall, attendees were greeted with free signs (“Defund Planned Parenthood” and “Personhood for Everyone”) and a man barking into a megaphone, “Ireland is on the brink of legalizing abortion, which is not good.”

The march came two months after the 2012 campaign season, in which social issues like abortion largely took a back seat to the focus on the economy. But the issue did come up in Congressional races in which Republican candidates made controversial statements about rape or abortion. In Indiana, Richard E. Mourdock, a Republican candidate for the Senate, said in a debate that he believed that pregnancies resulting from rape were something that “God intended,” and in Illinois, Representative Joe Walsh said in a debate that abortion was never necessary to save the life of the mother because of “advances in science and technology.” Both men lost, hurt by a backlash from female voters.

Recent polls show that while a majority of Americans do not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned entirely, many favor some restrictions. In a Gallup poll released this week, 52 percent of those surveyed said that abortions should be legal only under certain circumstances, while 28 percent said they should be legal under all circumstances, and 18 percent said they should be illegal under all circumstances. In a Pew poll this month, 63 percent of respondents said they did not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned completely, and 29 percent said they did — views largely consistent with surveys taken over the past two decades.

“Most Americans want some restrictions on abortion,” Ms. Monahan said. “We see abortion as the human rights abuse of today.”

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, who spoke via a recorded video, called on the protest group, particularly the young people, to make abortion “a relic of the past.”

“Human life is not an economic or political commodity, and no government on earth has the right to treat it that way,” he said.

The crowd was dotted with large banners, many bearing the names of the attendees’ home states and churches and colleges. Gary Storey, 36, stood holding a handmade sign that read “I was adopted. Thanks Mom for my life.” Next to him stood his adoptive mother, Ellen Storey, 66, who held her own handmade sign with a picture of her six children and the words “To the mothers of our four adopted children, ‘Thank You’ for their lives.”

Mr. Storey said he was grateful for the decision by his biological mother to carry through with her pregnancy. “Beats the alternative,” he joked.

Last week, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America started a new Web site, and on Tuesday, its president, Cecile Richards, released a statement supporting abortion rights.

“Planned Parenthood understands that abortion is a deeply personal and often complex decision for a woman to consider, if and when she needs it,” she said. “A woman should have accurate information about all of her options around her pregnancy. To protect her health and the health of her family, a woman must have access to safe, legal abortion without interference from politicians, as protected by the Supreme Court for the last 40 years.”

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Court Rejects Recess Appointments to Labor Board

WASHINGTON — In a ruling that called into question nearly two centuries of presidential “recess” appointments that bypass the Senate confirmation process, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that President Obama violated the Constitution when he installed three officials on the National Labor Relations Board a year ago.

The ruling was a blow to the administration and a victory for Mr. Obama’s Republican critics – and a handful of liberal ones – who had accused Mr. Obama of improperly claiming that he could make the appointments under his executive powers. The administration had argued that the president could decide that senators were really on a lengthy recess even though the Senate considered itself to be meeting in “pro forma” sessions.

But the court went beyond the narrow dispute over pro forma sessions and issued a far more sweeping ruling than expected. Legal specialists said its reasoning would virtually eliminate the recess appointment power for all future presidents when it has become increasingly difficult for presidents to win Senate confirmation for their nominees. In recent years, senators have more frequently balked at consenting to executive appointments. President George W. Bush made about 170 such appointments, including John R. Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations and two appeals court judges, William H. Pryor Jr. and Charles W. Pickering Sr.

“If this opinion stands, I think it will fundamentally alter the balance between the Senate and the president by limiting the president’s ability to keep offices filled,” said John P. Elwood, who handled recess appointment issues for the Justice Department during the Bush administration. “This is certainly a red-letter day in presidential appointment power.”

The ruling, if not overturned, could paralyze the National Labor Relations Board, an independent agency that oversees labor disputes, because it would lack a quorum without the three Obama appointments in January 2012.

The ruling’s immediate impact was to invalidate one action by the board involving a union fight with a Pepsi-Cola bottler in Washington State, but it raises the possibility that all the board’s decisions from the past year could be nullified. The decision also casts a legal cloud over Mr. Obama’s appointment that same day of Richard Cordray as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

A White House spokesman said, “We disagree strongly with the decision” by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, adding that it conflicted with other court rulings and well over a century of government practice. Administration officials did not immediately say whether they would appeal the ruling or wait for other appeals courts to issue decisions in similar lawsuits filed across the country challenging other labor board actions.

The three judges on the appeals court panel, all of them appointed by Republicans, rejected the Justice Department’s argument that Mr. Obama could make the labor board appointments by declaring the Senate’s pro forma sessions during its winter break — in which a single senator came into the empty chamber every three days to bang the gavel — a sham. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives had refused to let the Democratic-controlled Senate adjourn for more than three days.

“An interpretation of ‘the Recess’ that permits the President to decide when the Senate is in recess would demolish the checks and balances inherent in the advice-and-consent requirement, giving the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees at any time he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch, or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction,” wrote Judge David B. Sentelle. “This cannot be the law.”

The panel went on to significantly narrow the definition of “recess,” for purposes of the president’s appointment power. The judges held that presidents may invoke their recess appointment power only between formal sessions of Congress – a brief period that usually arises only once a year – rather than during breaks that arise during a session, like lawmakers’ annual August vacations. Two of the three judges also ruled that the president may also only use that power to fill a vacancy that opens during the same recess.

The ruling also called into question nearly 200 years of previous such appointments by administrations across the political spectrum. The executive branch has been making intrasession appointments since 1867 and has been using recess appointments to fill vacancies that opened before a recess since 1823. Among other things, Mr. Elwood noted, it called into question every ruling made by several federal appeals court judges who were installed by recess power.

“You know there are people sitting in prisons around the country who will become very excited when they learn of this ruling,” he said.

Charlie Savage reported from Washington, and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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Stock sell-off shows an emotional investment in Apple

A friend of mine, a weatherman for a local TV station, always greets me the same way: "Time to sell my Apple stock?"

And I always offer the same response: Do you still like the company?

"Yes."

Then don't sell it.

Investors were wringing their hands Thursday over Apple's prospects, even though the company reported record quarterly profit of $13.1 billion and said it sold 28% more iPhones and 48% more iPads.

Despite what for any other business would be regarded as a stellar performance, Apple's shares fell $63.51, or 12.4%, to $450.50.

This is what happens when our relationship with a company turns emotional. As in all relationships, we try to be understanding and reasonable, but it's hard to mask our disappointment when expectations aren't met.

And, ultimately, investors and consumers can be very fickle.

"A minor chink in your armor and out you go," said Brad Barber, a professor of finance at UC Davis who specializes in investor psychology.

He described the sell-off of Apple's stock as "awfully dramatic" but not surprising, given that people have such a visceral relationship with this company.

"Is this a rational response?" Barber asked. "That's hard to say."

Hard because it's difficult to gauge whether Apple's stock is fairly priced. If the company has more blockbuster products in the pipeline and if its market dominance is secure, then, yes, Apple probably is worth its $423.8-billion market valuation.

But what if, you know, there's someone handsomer or prettier waiting in the wings? Do you really want to tie yourself down?

American consumers generally keep the business world at a healthy distance, understanding that commerce isn't the same as personal commitment. If a company provides a bad experience, we don't hesitate to take our business elsewhere.

But from time to time, exceptional companies rise to a higher level in our esteem. In a 1953 congressional hearing, the former head of General Motors, Charles E. Wilson, made a statement that has long been taken out of context this way: "What's good for General Motors is good for the country."

What he actually said was that "for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."

What's interesting, though, is that the misquoted sentiment went generally unchallenged at the time. GM was America. It was Chevrolet and Buick and Cadillac. As GM said of its 1955 Chevy Bel Air Sport Coupe, it "exuded American optimism."

In more recent years, think of Sony in the 1980s. Was there a more innovative company anywhere? The best VCR was a Betamax, the best TV was the Trinitron. Remember your first reaction to the Walkman, the notion of carrying a stereo in your pocket?

These days, Sony would be lucky to get a passing glance on eHarmony.

Remember when Microsoft unveiled Windows 95? The company spent about $300 million on a global party for its new operating system, and people lined up for hours outside retail shops to get their hands on the software.

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