Three witnesses won’t be charged in Ohio football rape case: documents

(Reuters) – At least three members of a high school football team in Steubenville, Ohio, received word they would not be prosecuted just days before testifying against teammates accused of raping a 16-year-old girl, according to documents obtained by Reuters.

In letters from Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office addressed to each student’s lawyer, the state committed to not prosecuting Evan Westlake, Anthony Craig and Mark Cole, three witnesses for the prosecution.

But DeWine said on Thursday his office had made no deal with any of the witnesses involved in the case.

“We have offered nothing, made no promises to any witness in this case. … No deals have been cut with anybody,” DeWine told WTOV television in comments confirmed by his spokesman.

The case has unsettled Steubenville, a city of 19,000 near the Pennsylvania border where football has a powerful influence.

Community leaders have criticized authorities, voicing suspicion they have avoided charging more players who could have been involved in order to protect the school’s beloved football program.

Days after the letters were sent, all three players testified at a pre-trial hearing against teammates Ma’lik Richmond and Trenton Mays, both 16, who were charged with raping a classmate at a party attended by many teammates last August. Richmond and Mays were set to be tried as juveniles in February.

Although evidence in the criminal case showed each player “may not have conducted himself in a responsible or appropriate manner, his behavior did not rise to the level of any criminal conduct,” all three letters say. “Therefore, we will not prosecute your client for his actions on August 11-12, 2012.”

Walter Madison, an attorney who represents one of the students charged with rape, verified the letters’ authenticity, but declined to comment further.

The letters can protect the players from criminal charges, said John Burkoff, a criminal law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

“If the government says that it won’t prosecute you and then changes its mind, you can argue that it can’t go back on that,” he said. “It’s constitutional estoppel (an impediment).”

The letter to Westlake, dated September 28, was signed by Ohio Associate Attorney General Marianne Hemmeter. The other two letters were signed by Ohio Associate Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Brumby and dated October 9, three days before the trio testified against their teammates. Brumby and Hemmeter conducted the questioning at that hearing.

Attorney General spokesman Dan Tierney said the state decided the students would go uncharged only for the crime of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material.

“We would stand by the attorney general’s previous comments,” he told Reuters on Thursday.

The case shot to national prominence last week when the online activist group Anonymous made public a picture of the purported rape victim being carried by her wrists and ankles by two young men. Anonymous also released a video that showed several other young men joking about an assault.

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Peter Cooney)

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Audrey Hepburn: Remembering the Private Legend

By Elizabeth McNeil

01/10/2013 at 07:35 PM EST

Audrey Hepburn with her son, Luca Dotti, in 1985

Audrey Hepburn Childrens Fund

She captivated the world with her doe-eyed beauty, but behind the Givenchy glamour, there was an Audrey Hepburn few people knew.

She thought her nose too big, her feet too large and her neck too long. She loved to shop for groceries (but not clothes), didn't wear makeup at home, never went to the gym and enjoyed two fingers of Scotch every night. 

"She was not this ethereal creature," says Robert Wolders, 76, the Dutch actor who was her companion for the last 13 years of her life. "She was an earthy woman with a ribald sense of humor."

What Hepburn had, adds Wolders, "was more than beauty. It was this extraordinary mystique."

Hepburn left Hollywood at age 34 at the height of her fame, moving into a 1732 farmhouse in Tolochenaz, a small Swiss village, where she found happiness raising two sons and purpose in her charity work for UNICEF. 

Two decades after her death from abdominal cancer at 63 on Jan. 20, 1993, her children and her last love remember the Audrey they adored. 

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Flu season strikes early and, in some places, hard

NEW YORK (AP) — From the Rocky Mountains to New England, hospitals are swamped with people with flu symptoms. Some medical centers are turning away visitors or making them wear face masks, and one Pennsylvania hospital set up a tent outside its ER to deal with the feverish patients.

Flu season in the U.S. has struck early and, in many places, hard.

While flu normally doesn't blanket the country until late January or February, it is already widespread in more than 40 states, with about 30 of them reporting some major hot spots. On Thursday, health officials blamed the flu for the deaths of 20 children so far.

Whether this will be considered a bad season by the time it has run its course in the spring remains to be seen.

"Those of us with gray hair have seen worse," said Dr. William Schaffner, a flu expert at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

The evidence so far points to a moderate season, Schaffner and others say. It looks bad in part because last year was unusually mild and because the main strain of influenza circulating this year tends to make people sicker and really lay them low.

David Smythe of New York City saw it happen to his 50-year-old girlfriend, who has been knocked out for about two weeks. "She's been in bed. She can't even get up," he said.

Also, the flu's early arrival coincided with spikes in a variety of other viruses, including a childhood malady that mimics flu and a new norovirus that causes vomiting and diarrhea, or what is commonly known as "stomach flu." So what people are calling the flu may, in fact, be something else.

"There may be more of an overlap than we normally see," said Dr. Joseph Bresee, who tracks the flu for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most people don't undergo lab tests to confirm flu, and the symptoms are so similar that it can be hard to distinguish flu from other viruses, or even a cold. Over the holidays, 250 people were sickened at a Mormon missionary training center in Utah, but the culprit turned out to be a norovirus, not the flu.

Flu is a major contributor, though, to what's going on.

"I'd say 75 percent," said Dr. Dan Surdam, head of the emergency department at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, Wyoming's largest hospital. The 17-bed emergency room saw its busiest day ever last week, with 166 visitors.

The early onslaught has resulted in a spike in hospitalizations. To deal with the influx and protect other patients from getting sick, hospitals are restricting visits from children, requiring family members to wear masks and banning anyone with flu symptoms from maternity wards.

One hospital in Allentown, Pa., set up a tent this week for a steady stream of patients with flu symptoms. But so far "what we're seeing is a typical flu season," said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital, Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest.

On Wednesday, Boston declared a public health emergency, with the city's hospitals counting about 1,500 emergency room visits since December by people with flu-like symptoms.

All the flu activity has led some to question whether this year's flu shot is working. While health officials are still analyzing the vaccine, early indications are that it's about 60 percent effective, which is in line with what's been seen in other years.

The vaccine is reformulated each year, based on experts' best guess of which strains of the virus will predominate. This year's vaccine is well-matched to what's going around. The government estimates that between a third and half of Americans have gotten the vaccine.

In New York City, 57-year-old Judith Quinones skipped getting a flu shot this season and suffered her worst case of flu-like illness in years. She was laid up for nearly a month with fever and body aches. "I just couldn't function," she said.

But her daughter got the vaccine. "And she got sick twice," Quinones said.

Europe is also suffering an early flu season, though a milder strain predominates there. Flu reports are up, too, in China, Japan, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Algeria and the Republic of Congo. Britain has seen a surge in cases of norovirus.

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC. That's an estimate — the agency does not keep a running tally of adult flu deaths each year, only for children. Some state health departments do keep count, and they've reported dozens of flu deaths so far.

Flu usually peaks in midwinter. Symptoms can include fever, cough, runny nose, head and body aches and fatigue. Some people also suffer vomiting and diarrhea, and some develop pneumonia or other severe complications.

Most people with flu have a mild illness and can help themselves and protect others by staying home and resting. But people with severe symptoms should see a doctor. They may be given antiviral drugs or other medications to ease symptoms.

Flu vaccinations are recommended for everyone 6 months or older. Of the 20 children killed by the flu this season, only two were fully vaccinated.

___

AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

___

Online:

CDC flu: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/index.htm

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Restored funding for prescription drug-monitoring program urged

California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris on Thursday called on Gov. Jerry Brown to restore funding to a prescription drug-monitoring program that health experts say is key to combating drug abuse and overdose deaths in the state.

Harris' appeal to restore funding to CURES, as it is known, follows an article in The Times last month that reported that the system, once heralded as an invaluable tool, had been severely undermined by budget cuts and was not being used to its full potential.

The CURES database contains detailed information on prescription narcotics, including the names of patients, the doctors prescribing the drugs and the pharmacies that dispense them. The system was designed to help physicians detect "doctor-shopping" patients who dupe multiple physicians into prescribing drugs such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax.

Harris' request followed Brown's unveiling of a proposed $97.7-billion budget, which projects a surplus — a feat that has been accomplished only one time in the last decade. With California's fiscal condition improving, Harris said it was up to the state to make sure the money was "spent wisely."

"This includes smart investments that benefit Californians, such as restoring funding for the state's prescription drug-monitoring program," she said in a statement.

Brown's office had no comment.

The governor's budget does increase Harris' Department of Justice general fund allocation by 4.5% to $174.3 million, but it does not earmark money for CURES. Harris could seek legislative authority to spend some of her budget on the program.

"We are going to have a discussion on the funding and where the money will come from," said Lynda Gledhill, a spokeswoman for Harris.

CURES is the nation's oldest and largest prescription drug-monitoring program and once served as a model for other states. Today, it has fallen behind similar programs elsewhere. CURES data could be used to monitor physicians whose prescribing puts patients at risk. But it is not.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommends that states use such data to keep tabs on doctors, and at least half a dozen states do so.

As part of spending cuts aimed at maintaining the state's solvency amid a deep recession, Brown gutted the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which ran CURES, in 2011, shortly after Harris succeeded him as attorney general. Harris kept the program alive with about $400,000 in revenue from the Medical Board of California and other licensing boards. But it is down to one employee and has no enforcement capacity.

State officials have estimated it would cost about $2.8 million to make CURES more accessible and easier to use, and $1.6 million more per year to keep it running. However, officials say the program — with little or no additional financial resources — could now be used to identify potentially rogue doctors.

Bob Pack, an Internet entrepreneur, has advocated using CURES more vigorously to track reckless physicians and pharmacies as well as doctor-shopping patients. He became active on the issue after a driver high on painkillers and alcohol struck and killed his two young children in the Bay Area suburb of Danville in 2003.

Pack, who helped design an online portal to give physicians and pharmacists immediate access to CURES, said he was happy to see Harris ask Brown to restore funds for the program.

"But that's only a request," he said. "No one knows if that's really going to happen. Meanwhile, doctors are continuing to over-prescribe and thousands of Californians are dying from prescription drug overdoses. I hope this … has some bite to it."

An aide to Harris said restoring the CURES program is a high priority.

"She's committed to fixing the database and making it as strong as possible," said Travis LeBlanc, special assistant attorney general. "When we have limited resources and in a budget crunch, we need to focus our resources and use it in smart, efficient ways, and [CURES] is one of those," he said.

lisa.girion@latimes.com

scott.glover@latimes.com

Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts contributed to this report.

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IHT Rendezvous: Rescuing China's Bears From Bile Farms, One by One

BEIJING — Some had wounded faces and bloodied paws. Some were angry after years of mistreatment.

But six Asiatic black bears now have a chance at a life of dignity after being rescued on Wednesday from a Chinese bile farm by Animals Asia, an animal rights group, and the Chinese government’s State Forestry agency.

The bear rescue will continue for a few days as the animals are settled into their new home at a shelter outside Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, which now houses nearly 150 bears, You can follow it on Animals Asia’s Twitter feed with the hashtag #newyearrescue.

Here’s a latest tweet:

Today’s story is a happy one, though it’s part of the bigger, sadder picture of how thousands of bears are “farmed” for their bile here in China, often in excruciatingly painful conditions. Some are caged as cubs, and grow up crooked; physical injury and emotional trauma is the norm.

Rendezvous readers have debated passionately about bear bile farming before. It’s common in China and Vietnam, where it is illegal. While the Chinese government is taking action against some bear farms, it’s not illegal here if farms have licenses for it. About 10,000 bears are believed to be caged for their bile in China and a couple thousand in Vietnam. It’s a lucrative trade, with bile prized by the Chinese traditional medicine industry for a range of cures. As my former colleague, Mark McDonald, summed it up:

“Bear bile is prized in traditional Chinese medicine for its alleged ability to relieve muscle aches, joint pains, fever, migraines and hangovers, as well as being a curative for impotence, gallstones, cirrhosis, even cancer. Synthetic compounds are just as effective for many of these ailments, but many Asians, especially Chinese and Vietnamese men of a certain age, favor fresh bile.”

Your consensus, readers, was that it’s a horrific practice, despite arguments made by the Chinese traditional medicine industry that bile farming is “humane,” as Fang Shuting, the head of the Chinese Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said: “The process of extracting bear bile is like turning on a tap: natural, easy and without pain,’’ Mr. Fang said. “After they’re done, the bears can even play happily outside. I don’t think there’s anything out of the ordinary! It might even be a very comfortable process!”

As Mark wrote: “Wildlife biologists vehemently disagree, saying the needle sticks, catheterization and repeated draining of the gall bladder creates infections and leakage, which can lead to peritonitis and septicemia. ‘An excruciating death,’’ said one scientist.”

Revulsion is growing among ordinary Chinese, too. “I don’t believe it at all that extracting bile is as easy and comfortable as Fang said. Why doesn’t he extract the bile from his body in the same way to prove it?” one wrote on Sina Weibo, the microblog site, Mark reported.

But today I want to tell you about a spot of light in the night.

Here’s what a journalist who witnessed a bear arriving at the rescue wrote:

“The Asiatic black bear gave a deep growl and struggled in a rusty cage only just bigger than her giant body, as rescue workers from the Animals Asia bear sanctuary fed her fruit to soothe her shattered nerves, and examined her body for signs of sores or bleeding.” (Full disclosure — this reporter is my husband, Clifford Coonan, the Irish Times China correspondent.)

Jill Robinson, the founder of Animals Asia, was there, organizing and watching.

“What we have here are six highly traumatised bears from an illegal bear bile farm here in Sichuan province,” Clifford quoted her as saying. “One of the bears has bile leakage, and others have the stereotypical head injuries from bashing the bars of their cages. But it’s such a relief to have them here.”

Around the world, on Twitter and through video, people were watching, too.

Here’s a tweet from the actor Peter Egan, of “Downton Abbey” and “A Perfect Spy” fame, and an animal rights supporter.

As a member of Animals Asia wrote in an email to Rendezvous: watching the bears arrive “was exciting and sad in equal measure.” Exciting because it was the start of a new life for six; sad, because they need treatment and help, and because there are so many more out there.

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Three top U.S. wireless carriers to embrace BlackBerry 10

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Three of the top U.S. cellphone carriers signaled this week that they would support Research In Motion’s BlackBerry 10 products, the first of which are due to be unveiled Jan 30, offering a hopeful sign for RIM’s comeback effort.

Executives at Verizon Communications , AT&T Inc and T-Mobile USA all said they are looking forward to the devices, which will be crucial for RIM’s chances of regaining lost ground from rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics .

“We’re hopeful its going to be a good device,” Lowell McAdam, chief executive of Verizon Communications, majority owner of the biggest U.S. mobile service Verizon Wireless.

“We’ll carry it,” McAdam said in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

BlackBerry 10 is RIM’s next-generation mobile operating platform and it is preparing to launch new smartphones later this month. Word that major carriers will offer the devices is good news for RIM.

RIM, which once commanded the lead in the smartphone market, has rapidly lost ground to Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s line of Galaxy products, especially in North American and European markets, as customers abandon its aging BlackBerry devices.

It has been testing the new BlackBerry 10 devices with carriers so they can assess their compatibility with networks.

No. 4 U.S. mobile provider T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom , also plans to carry the new BlackBerry 10.

“We’re extremely optimistic that it’s going to be a successful product and our business customers are extremely interested in it,” Chief Executive John Legere said.

AT&T has promised to support the BlackBerry 10 platform, according to Chief Marketing Officer David Christopher, but he would not discuss specific devices.

However, AT&T handset executive Jeff Bradley made it clear that the No. 2 U.S. mobile operator would carry the phone.

“It’s logical to expect our current (BlackBerry) customers will have the best BlackBerry devices to choose from in the future,” Bradley said.

(Reporting By Sinead Carew; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Sandra Bullock Honored at People's Choice Awards for New Orleans Support

By Alison Schwartz

01/09/2013 at 10:45 PM EST

Sandra Bullock at the People's Choice Awards

Jason Merritt/Getty

Sandra Bullock took home big honors for her work in the Big Easy Wednesday night.

The People's Choice Awards crowned the Oscar-winning actress the favorite humanitarian for her career-spanning philanthropic efforts, including her dedication to New Orleans's Warren Easton Charter High School

"I'm not at all being modest when I say I'm not doing anything compared to what they do on a daily basis," Bullock, 48, told the crowd gathered at Los Angeles's Nokia Theatre.

Just six months after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the actress showed her support by adopting the school, which sustained $4 million in damages during the storm. She donated hundreds of thousands of dollars for renovations, telling PEOPLE years later that she "felt such a profound need to do something for them."

Her generosity helped the charter school – the first public high school for boys in Louisiana – afford renovations, new band uniforms, athletic equipment and a new health clinic in a city that's close to her heart. After all, she adopted her son, Louis, from New Orleans in 2010 and also has a home in the Garden District.

She pointed to the tireless dedication of the school's students, teachers and tough principal. "I've seen her," she joked. "Yeah, you don't want to go into that office."

Bullock then gave a shout-out to her son, who was sick as home, she said.

"[The students] compete, but they never cut each other down," she added. "And all that happens not because it's easy, but because they do not allow themselves any other option than to succeed."

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Retooling Pap test to spot more kinds of cancer

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, doctors have lamented that there's no Pap test for deadly ovarian cancer. Wednesday, scientists reported encouraging signs that one day, there might be.

Researchers are trying to retool the Pap, a test for cervical cancer that millions of women get, so that it could spot early signs of other gynecologic cancers, too.

How? It turns out that cells can flake off of tumors in the ovaries or the lining of the uterus, and float down to rest in the cervix, where Pap tests are performed. These cells are too rare to recognize under the microscope. But researchers from Johns Hopkins University used some sophisticated DNA testing on the Pap samples to uncover the evidence — gene mutations that show cancer is present.

In a pilot study, they analyzed Pap smears from 46 women who already were diagnosed with either ovarian or endometrial cancer. The new technique found all the endometrial cancers and 41 percent of the ovarian tumors, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

This is very early-stage research, and women shouldn't expect any change in their routine Paps. It will take years of additional testing to prove if the so-called PapGene technique really could work as a screening tool, used to spot cancer in women who thought they were healthy.

"Now the hard work begins," said Hopkins oncologist Dr. Luis Diaz, whose team is collecting hundreds of additional Pap samples for more study and is exploring ways to enhance the detection of ovarian cancer.

But if it ultimately pans out, "the neat part about this is, the patient won't feel anything different," and the Pap wouldn't be performed differently, Diaz added. The extra work would come in a lab.

The gene-based technique marks a new approach toward cancer screening, and specialists are watching closely.

"This is very encouraging, and it shows great potential," said American Cancer Society genetics expert Michael Melner.

"We are a long way from being able to see any impact on our patients," cautioned Dr. Shannon Westin of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She reviewed the research in an accompanying editorial, and said the ovarian cancer detection would need improvement if the test is to work.

But she noted that ovarian cancer has poor survival rates because it's rarely caught early. "If this screening test could identify ovarian cancer at an early stage, there would be a profound impact on patient outcomes and mortality," Westin said.

More than 22,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and more than 15,000 die. Symptoms such as pain and bloating seldom are obvious until the cancer is more advanced, and numerous attempts at screening tests have failed.

Endometrial cancer affects about 47,000 women a year, and kills about 8,000. There is no screening test for it either, but most women are diagnosed early because of postmenopausal bleeding.

The Hopkins research piggybacks on one of the most successful cancer screening tools, the Pap, and a newer technology used along with it. With a standard Pap, a little brush scrapes off cells from the cervix, which are stored in a vial to examine for signs of cervical cancer. Today, many women's Paps undergo an additional DNA-based test to see if they harbor the HPV virus, which can spur cervical cancer.

So the Hopkins team, funded largely by cancer advocacy groups, decided to look for DNA evidence of other gynecologic tumors. It developed a method to rapidly screen the Pap samples for those mutations using standard genetics equipment that Diaz said wouldn't add much to the cost of a Pap-plus-HPV test. He said the technique could detect both early-stage and more advanced tumors. Importantly, tests of Paps from 14 healthy women turned up no false alarms.

The endometrial cancers may have been easier to find because cells from those tumors don't have as far to travel as ovarian cancer cells, Diaz said. Researchers will study whether inserting the Pap brush deeper, testing during different times of the menstrual cycle, or other factors might improve detection of ovarian cancer.

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.

A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.

"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.

The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.

The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.

The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.

"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."

The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.

But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.

Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.

"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."

The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.

At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."

During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.

And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.

"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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IHT Rendezvous: Macau's Gaming Take: Sign of Chinese Emigration?

BEIJING — Why did gambling boom in Macau in 2012, even as China’s economy slowed? A Hong Kong online magazine that follows the scene closely has a smart take: emigration.

First, the facts. Last year, Macau earned $38 billion from gaming, a 13.5 percent increase from the $33.5 billion in 2011.

“Let’s put some perspective on the record $38 billion in gaming revenues collected by Macau’s casino industry in 2012,” wrote the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Jan. 2.

Macau has long outstripped Las Vegas in terms of revenue, and the 2012 figure “is higher than the $35.64 billion collected by the entire U.S. commercial casino industry in 2011,” the Review-Journal wrote.

“During December, Macau’s 35 casinos collected a single-month record of $3.5 billion in gaming revenues, more than half of what the Strip’s casinos collected in all of 2011,” it wrote.

Pretty astonishing stuff, especially in a year when the growth of the Chinese economy actually fell to a three-year low of 7.4 percent in the third quarter.

Excluding some kind of inverse psychological relationship between growth and gambling, where people might actually enjoy risking their money in a falling economy, the surge in gambling revenue didn’t seem to make sense.

Week in China, a Hong Kong online news magazine, suggests something quite different and fascinating: with so many rich Chinese using the casinos to wash money to finance their emigration to other countries, the gambling take is actually a bellwether of confidence among rich Chinese in their country, the magazine says. In this scenario, the higher the take, the lower the confidence.

As my colleague, Ian Johnson, wrote recently, rich Chinese are emigrating in ever higher numbers

“In 2010, the last year for which complete statistics are available, 508,000 Chinese left for the 34 developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,” Ian wrote. “That is a 45 percent increase over 2000.”

“Individual countries report the trend continuing. In 2011, the United States received 87,000 permanent residents from China, up from 70,000 the year before,” Ian wrote.

Hence the higher spending in Macau, as people move their money from China to overseas, even though the government has forecast something of a recovery and 7.5 percent growth for 2013.

Reasons for emigration vary, but a key one cited by many is that they feel their money isn’t safe in China where the rule of law is weak and where, as one aspiring emigre put it to the immigration lawyer Mikael Charette, “You can be a tiger, but there is always a hunter somewhere,” as I reported in a Letter from China back in 2010.

It all “makes more sense when you realize Macau offers an escape route for ‘smart money’ to leave the country,” Week in China wrote.

“Once this cash reaches the casinos – helped by some financial engineering from the junket operators – it becomes Hong Kong dollars. Much is gambled but plenty also flows into banks offshore,” Week in China wrote.

Junkets?

These are the middlemen who locate wealthy Chinese on the mainland who want to gamble, or, some say, move their money overseas. Aided by a financial commission, they get the money to Macau where the wealthy hit the casinos and, in this scenario, move the rest out in convertible foreign currency.

As Week in China wrote in early 2012: “So if gaming revenues continue to surge this year … it’s a safe bet that corrupt officials and savvy businesspeople are feeling fearful about the future and are getting their money out.”

Surge they did.

Of course, China’s economy is still growing fast and that means quite a lot of people just have more money to play with. But by any standards, Macau’s gambling take in 2012 was extremely high, and came in a year with considerable political uncertainty as China experienced a once-in-a-decade leadership changeover, a major political scandal in the shape of the fall of Bo Xilai, and warnings against corruption by the new leader, Xi Jinping. Sign of a growing economy, or, as Week in China says, a growing loss of confidence?

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