Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq.

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.

“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported “high operational stress.” Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

“The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance,” she said.

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IHT Rendezvous: North Korea Widens Access to Internet, but Just for Visitors

HONG KONG — North Korea will finally allow people to search the Internet from their mobile devices and laptops within the country’s borders. But if you’re a North Korean, you’re out of luck — only foreigners will be given the privilege.

Cracking the door open ever so slightly to wider Internet use, the government has allowed a company called Koryolink to give foreigners access to 3G mobile Internet service by March 1, The Associated Press reported.

The decision, made public Friday, comes just a month after Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang and prodded officials on allowing Internet access, noting how easy it would be to set up through Koryolink’s expanding 3G network. Presumably, his appeal was directed at giving North Koreans such capability.

“As the world becomes increasingly connected, their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world, their economic growth and so forth,” Mr. Schmidt told reporters after arriving at Beijing International Airport following his visit to North Korea. “We made that alternative very, very clear.”

Foreigners were only recently given access to cellphones while traveling in the country. Previously, they had to surrender their phones with customs agents.

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Oscar animators ready to be taken seriously

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — In the animated feature film category at this year's Oscars, there's a film set in medieval Scotland, another that features old-school video game characters, one that relies heavily on dry British humor, while the other two take inspiration from the supernatural.

It's not exactly kid stuff — and that's how the directors like it.

"I think this year with these films — and so many more — the envelope for animation is being pushed," said "Brave" director Mark Andrews at an Academy Awards event Thursday night honoring the animated feature film nominees. "We keep seeing more risky, deep films that we wouldn't have seen 10 years ago coming out. I wanna be one of those guys pushing it more and more and more because it's not only an awesome medium, but there's so many more stories that we can tell."

The Scotland-set "Brave," a darker fable from Pixar about a rebellious red-headed princess named Merida, will face off against four other animated films at Sunday's 85th annual Academy Awards. The category was first introduced at the 2002 ceremony, with "Shrek" winning the inaugural trophy.

Despite the less lighthearted tone of this year's animated nominees, none cracked the best picture category for a spot alongside the likes of "Argo," ''Lincoln" and "Zero Dark Thirty." (Only three animated films have ever been nominated for best picture at the Oscars: "Beauty and the Beast," ''Up" and "Toy Story 3.")

"Edward Scissorhands" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas" mastermind Tim Burton could take home his first-ever Oscar at the Dolby Theatre ceremony for "Frankenweenie," his black-and-white stop-motion film based on his 1984 live-action short film of the same name.

"Frankenweenie" is among three of the five Oscar nominated films this year that employ stop-motion, the intricate and time consuming animation method that use miniature sculptures and sets. Despite a strong stop-motion presence at this year's Oscars, Burton cited finances, not the omnipresence of computer animation, as the reason that more stop-motion films aren't produced.

"In the case of 'Frankenweenie,' it's not like it was a studio wish-list to-do: 'Let's make black-and-white stop-motion animation,'" said Burton. "You hope it can survive. We all love it."

The other stop-motion nominees are the English seafaring comedy "Pirates! Band of Misfits" from director Peter Lord and the undead tale "ParaNorman" from directors Sam Fell and Chris Butler.

"Wreck-It Ralph" director Rich Moore told the crowd at the motion picture academy's Beverly Hills headquarters that he never envisioned the video game adventure from Disney as a musical, but "Book of Mormon" co-writer Robert Lopez and his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez did create an original song for the film.

"It didn't work, so it's not in the movie," said Moore. "That's our process. We try lots of stuff. We throw it against the wall, and the stuff that sticks stays in the movie. It's a very organic process making films like this."

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang.

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The New Old Age Blog: For Traumatized Caregivers, Therapy Helps

I recently wrote about caregivers who experienced symptoms of traumatic-like stress, and readers responded with heart-rending stories. Many described being haunted by distress long after a relative died.

Especially painful, readers said, was witnessing a loved one’s suffering and feeling helpless to do anything about it.

The therapists I spoke with said they often encountered symptoms among caregivers similar to those shown by people with post-traumatic stress — intrusive thoughts, disabling anxiety, hyper-vigilance, avoidance behaviors and more — even though research documenting this reaction is scarce. Improvement with treatment is possible, they say, although a sense of loss may never disappear completely.

I asked these professionals for stories about patients to illustrate the therapeutic process. Read them below and you’ll notice common themes. Recovery depends on unearthing the source of psychological distress and facing it directly rather than pushing it away. Learning new ways of thinking can change the tenor of caregiving, in real time or in retrospect, and help someone recover a sense of emotional balance.

Barry Jacobs, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Survival Guide for Caregivers” (Guilford Press, 2006), was careful to distinguish normal grief associated with caregiving from a traumatic-style response.

“Nightmares, lingering bereavement or the mild re-experiencing of events that doesn’t send a person into a panic every time is normal” and often resolves with time, he said.

Contrast that with one of his patients, a Greek-American woman who assisted her elderly parents daily until her father, a retired firefighter, went to the hospital for what doctors thought would be a minor procedure and died there of a heart attack in the middle of the night.

Every night afterward, at exactly 3 a.m., this patient awoke in a panic from a dream in which a phone was ringing. Unable to go back to sleep for hours, she agonized about her father dying alone at that hour.

The guilt was so overwhelming, the woman couldn’t bear to see her mother, talk with her sisters or concentrate at work or at home. Sleep deprived and troubled by anxiety, she went to see her doctor, who works in the same clinic as Dr. Jacobs and referred her to therapy.

The first thing Dr. Jacobs did was to “identify what happened to this patient as traumatic, and tell her acute anxiety was an understandable response.” Then he asked her to “grieve her father’s death” by reaching out to her siblings and her mother and openly expressing her sadness.

Dr. Jacobs also suggested that this patient set aside a time every day to think about her father — not just the end of his life, but also all the things she had loved about him and the good times they’d had together as a family.

Don’t expect your night time awakenings to go away immediately, the psychologist told his patient. Instead, plan for how you’re going to respond when these occur.

Seven months later, the patient reported her panic at a “3 or 4” level instead of a “10” (the highest possible number), Dr. Jacobs said.

“She’ll say, ‘oh, there’s the nightmare again,’ and she can now go back to sleep fairly quickly,” he continued. “Research about anxiety tells us that the more we face what we fear, the quicker we are to extinguish our fear response and the better able we are to tolerate it.”

Sara Qualls, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, said it’s natural for caregivers to be disgusted by some of what they have to do — toileting a loved one, for instance — and to be profoundly conflicted when they try to reconcile this feeling with a feeling of devotion. In some circumstances, traumatic-like responses can result.

Her work entails naming the emotion the caregiver is experiencing, letting the person know it’s normal, and trying to identify the trigger.

For instance, an older man may come in saying he’s failed his wife with dementia by not doing enough for her. Addressing this man’s guilt, Dr. Qualls may find that he can’t stand being exposed to urine or feces but has to help his wife go to the bathroom. Instead of facing his true feelings, he’s beating up on himself psychologically — a diversion.

Once a conflict of this kind is identified, Dr. Qualls said she can help a person deal with the trigger by using relaxation exercises and problem-solving techniques, or by arranging for someone else to do a task that he or she simply can’t tolerate.

Asked for an example, Dr. Qualls described a woman who traveled to another state to see her mother, only to find her in a profound disheveled, chaotic state. Her mother said that she didn’t want help, and her brother responded with disbelief. Soon, the woman’s blood pressure rose, and she began having nightmares.

In therapy, Dr. Qualls reassured the patient that her fear for her mother’s safety was reasonable and guided her toward practical solutions. Gradually, she was able to enlist her brother’s help and change her mother’s living situation, and her sense of isolation and helplessness dissipated.

“I think that a piece of the trauma reaction that is so devastating is the intense privacy of it,” Dr. Qualls said. “Our work helps people moderate their emotional reactivity through human contact, sharing and learning strategies to manage their responsiveness.”

Dolores Gallagher-Thompson, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, noted that stress can accumulate during caregiving and reach a tipping point where someone’s ability to cope is overwhelmed.

She tells of a vibrant, active woman in her 60s caring for an older husband who declined rapidly from dementia. “She’d get used to one set of losses, and then a new loss would occur,” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said.

The tipping point came when the husband began running away from home and was picked up by the police several times. The woman dropped everything else and became vigilant, feeling as if she had to watch her husband day and night. Still, he would sneak away and became more and more difficult.

Both husband and wife had come from Jewish families caught up in the Holocaust during World War II, and the feeling of “complete and utter helplessness and hopelessness” that descended on this older woman was intolerable, Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said.

Therapy was targeted toward helping the patient articulate thoughts and feelings that weren’t immediately at the surface of her consciousness, like, for example, her terror at the prospect of abandonment. “I’d ask her ‘what are you afraid of? If you visualize your husband in a nursing home or assisted living, what do you see?’” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said.

Then the conversation would turn to the choices the older woman had. Go and look at some long-term care places and see what you think, her psychologist suggested. You can decide how often you want to visit. “This isn’t an either-or — either you’re miserable 24/7 or you don’t love him,” she advised.

The older man went to assisted living, where he died not long afterward of pneumonia that wasn’t diagnosed right away. The wife fell into a depression, preoccupied with the thought that it was all her fault.

Another six months of therapy convinced her that she had done what she could for her husband. Today she works closely with her local Alzheimer’s Association chapter, “helping other caregivers learn how to deal with these kinds of issues in support groups,” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said.

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Car Bomb in Damascus Kills Dozens, Opposition Says

Sana/European Pressphoto Agency

An injured man was carried near the site of a car bomb explosion in Damascus on Thursday.

In renewed violence reaching the center of the Syrian capital, a car bomb exploded in Damascus on Thursday near the headquarters of President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling party, killing more than two dozen people, mainly civilians and but also including security forces, according to opposition sources.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad group based in Britain that has a network of contacts in Syria, reported that at least 31 people were killed by the bomb in the neighborhood of Mazraa.

Syrian state television said two children were wounded, while Al Ikhbariya, a pro-government television channel, showed footage of two dead bodies and body parts in a park.

The area where the bomb exploded was near the headquarters of Mr. Assad’s ruling Baath Party and the Russian embassy. State television and the Syrian Observatory also said that mortar shells exploded near the Syrian Army General Command in the center of the capital, but there were no reported casualties.

The strikes were the latest to extend to the heart of the Syrian capital.

Reports this week appeared to show that rebel shells have reached new areas in Damascus.

Both state media and opposition activists reported on Wednesday that mortar rounds had hit the Tishreen sports stadium in the downtown neighborhood of Baramkeh. The state news agency, SANA, said the explosion killed an athlete from the Homs-based soccer team Al Wathba as he was practicing.

Government forces hit a rebel command center in a suburb east of the capital on Wednesday, injuring a founder of the Liwaa al-Islam brigade, Sheik Zahran Alloush, the brigade said in a statement.

On Tuesday, activists reported that up to seven mortar rounds had been fired by fighters of the Free Syrian Army toward Mr. Assad’s Tishreen Palace in Damascus.

There were no immediate reports of casualties, and it was not known whether Mr. Assad was there at the time. The palace, surrounded by a park, is in a wealthy area that has largely been insulated from the insurgency and it lies less than a mile from the main presidential palace.

Syrian rebels are entrenched in suburbs south and east of the capital, but they have been unable to push far into the center, although they strike the area with occasional mortars and increasingly frequent car bombs.

Such indiscriminate attacks however risk killing passersby, exposing the rebels to charges that they are careless with civilian life and property. Many Damascus residents are undecided about taking sides and fear their ancient city will be ravaged like Aleppo and other urban centers to the north.

At the same time, the government has decimated pro-rebel suburbs with air strikes and artillery, leaving vast areas depopulated or terrorized.

Fighting continued also for control of the main civilian airport in Aleppo on Wednesday.

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Rapper Ja Rule set to leave NY prison in gun case

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Platinum-selling rapper Ja Rule was set to leave an upstate prison on Thursday after serving most of his two-year sentence for illegal gun possession but head straight into federal custody in a tax case.

The rapper, who had been in protective custody at the Mid-State Correctional Facility because of his celebrity, has some time remaining on a 28-month sentence for tax evasion, correction officials said. His sentences were expected to run concurrently.

Ja Rule may have less than six months left and may be eligible for a halfway house, defense attorney Stacey Richman said. An order to pay $1.1 million in back taxes is one of the main reasons he wants to get back to work, she said.

"Many people are looking forward to experiencing his talent again," Richman said.

Ja Rule scored a Grammy Award nomination in 2002 for the best rap album with "Pain is Love." He also has appeared in movies, including "The Fast and the Furious" in 2001 and "Scary Movie 3" in 2003.

Ja Rule, who went to the prison in Marcy in June 2011, is getting out at his earliest release date, state correction spokeswoman Linda Foglia said. He had two misbehavior reports for unauthorized phone calls in February 2012 and had work assignments on lawn and grounds crews and participated in education programs, she said.

In the gun case, New York City police said they found a loaded .40-caliber semiautomatic gun in a rear door of Ja Rule's $250,000 luxury car after it was stopped for speeding, and he pleaded guilty in 2010.

He admitted in March 2011 in federal court that he failed to pay taxes on more than $3 million he earned between 2004 and 2006 while he lived in Saddle River, N.J.

"I in no way attempted to deceive the government or do anything illegal," he told the judge. "I was a young man who made a lot of money — I'm getting a little choked up — I didn't know how to deal with these finances, and I didn't have people to guide me, so I made mistakes."

Richman said the 36-year-old rapper, whose real name is Jeffrey Atkins, is looking forward to his daughter's graduation.

"He's a devoted father," she said.

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In Reversal, Florida to Take Health Law’s Medicaid Expansion

MIAMI — Gov. Rick Scott of Florida reversed himself on Wednesday and announced that he would expand his state’s Medicaid program to cover the poor, becoming the latest — and, perhaps, most prominent — Republican critic of President Obama’s health care law to decide to put it into effect.

It was an about-face for Mr. Scott, a former businessman who entered politics as a critic of Mr. Obama’s health care proposals. Florida was one of the states that sued to try to block the law. After the Supreme Court ruled last year that though the law was constitutional, states could choose not to expand their Medicaid programs to cover the poor, Mr. Scott said that Florida would not expand its programs.

Mr. Scott said Wednesday that he now supported a three-year expansion of Medicaid, through the period that the federal government has agreed to pay the full cost of the expansion, and before some of the costs are shifted to the states.

“While the federal government is committed to paying 100 percent of the cost, I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians that needed access to health care,” Mr. Scott said at a news conference. “We will support a three-year expansion of the Medicaid program under the new health care law as long as the federal government meets their commitment to pay 100 percent of the cost during that time.”

He said there were “no perfect options” when it came to the Medicaid expansion. “To be clear: our options are either having Floridians pay to fund this program in other states while denying health care to our citizens,” he said, “or using federal funding to help some of the poorest in our state with the Medicaid program as we explore other health care reforms.”

Mr. Scott said the state would not create its own insurance exchange to comply with another provision of the law.

His reversal sent ripples through the nation, especially given the change in tone and substance since the summer, when he said he would not create an exchange or expand Medicaid.

“Floridians are interested in jobs and economic growth, a quality education for their children, and keeping the cost of living low,” Mr. Scott said in a statement at the time. “Neither of these major provisions in Obamacare will achieve those goals, and since Florida is legally allowed to opt out, that’s the right decision for our citizens.”

Mr. Scott now joins the Republican governors of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and Ohio, who have decided to join the Medicaid expansion. Some, like Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, were also staunch opponents of Mr. Obama’s overall health care law.

Shortly before his announcement, the governor received word from the federal government that it planned to grant Florida the final waiver needed to privatize Medicaid, a process the state initially undertook as a pilot project. Mr. Scott, who is running for re-election next year, has heavily lobbied for the waiver, arguing that Florida could not expand Medicaid without it.

Mr. Scott’s support of Medicaid expansion is significant, but is far from the last word. The program requires approval from Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature, which has been averse to expanding Medicaid under the health care law. The Legislature’s two top Republican leaders said that before making a decision they would consider recommendations from a select committee, which has been asked to review the state’s options.

“The Florida Legislature will make the ultimate decision,” Will Weatherford, the state House speaker, said. “I am personally skeptical that this inflexible law will improve the quality of health care in our state and ensure our long-term financial stability.”

Medicaid, which covers three million people in Florida, costs the state $21 billion a year. The expansion would extend coverage to one million more people.

Mr. Scott’s reversal is sure to anger his original conservative supporters.

The governor “was elected because of his principled conservative leadership against Obamacare’s overreach,” said Slade O’Brien, state director for Americans for Prosperity, an influential conservative advocacy organization. “Hopefully our legislative leaders will not follow in Governor Scott’s footsteps, and will reject expansion.”

During his announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Scott said his mother’s recent death and her lifetime struggle to raise five children “with very little money” played a role in his decision.

“Losing someone so close to you puts everything in a new perspective, especially the big decisions,” he said.

Michael Cooper contributed reporting from New York.

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DealBook: Office Supply Rivals' Merger Leaked by a Wayward Report

8:56 p.m. | Updated

It was a paragraph buried on Page 4 of an earnings release, under the heading of “other matters.” Yet what those four sentences revealed sent bankers and lawyers who had been working all night on a deal scrambling early Wednesday morning.

The earnings release, from the office supplies chain Office Depot, appeared shortly after 7 a.m. and inadvertently disclosed the terms of a long-awaited merger between the company and OfficeMax. The announcement disappeared from the company’s Web site quickly, but not before a gaggle of news outlets began running full-fledged reports about the deal.

At that time, bankers and lawyers for the two companies were still negotiating the final language of the merger agreement. The mistaken early publication of the release — since blamed on the data provider Thomson Reuters — prompted Office Depot’s chief executive, Neil R. Austrian, to call up his counterpart at OfficeMax, Ravi K. Saligram, and apologize.

More than two hours later, the companies formally announced their combination.

The episode recalls other times that major company news was published prematurely. Last fall, Google’s third-quarter earnings were published three hours early; the technology giant blamed R. R. Donnelley & Sons, its filings agent, for the mistake.

The chief executives played down the inadvertent disclosure as a harmless mistake, since the announcement was scheduled before the markets opened anyway.

“When two big Fortune 500 companies merge, occasionally mishaps happen,” Mr. Saligram said in an interview.

And Thomson Reuters apologized in a statement, saying it regretted the error and would take steps to prevent such a mistake from happening again.

But people involved in the deal privately bemoaned the unexpectedly bumpy ride, which knocked off kilter a carefully choreographed announcement meant to emphasize what they called a transformative merger of equals.

The union will combine two of the big retailers of staples and notepads, a major effort to combat years of losing sales to bigger, nimbler rivals. Both chief executives said that combining their companies could yield $400 million to $600 million in cost savings. It will probably lead to significant job cuts, as the companies seek to shrink their combined footprint of over 2,500 stores.

Both companies disclosed big drops in their sales for the fourth quarter on Wednesday: Office Depot’s revenue slipped 12 percent from the year-ago period, to $2.6 billion, while OfficeMax’s fell 7.4 percent, to $1.7 billion.

And both have also been under pressure from investors. Office Depot is fending off Starboard Value, an activist hedge fund that holds a 14.8 percent stake and has called for a major change in strategy. And OfficeMax has contended with Neuberger Berman, an investor with a 5 percent stake that has called for bigger payouts to shareholders.

“The whole industry and every analyst thought this made sense,” Mr. Austrian said in an interview. “The timing was right at this point in time.”

Shares of Office Depot fell 16.7 percent on Wednesday, to $4.18, while those of OfficeMax slid 7 percent, to $12.09. The decline wiped out some of the gains both stocks enjoyed after word of the deal talks emerged on Monday.

Negotiations have been held in earnest since at least last summer, people briefed on the matter said.

One important negotiating point that was resolved early on was ensuring that the deal could be presented as a “merger of equals.” Though Office Depot is paying a premium for OfficeMax — it is issuing 2.69 new shares for each share of the target, valuing the smaller retailer at about $1.2 billion as of Tuesday’s closing prices — neither company’s chief has a lock as the leader of the combined company.

Indeed, both Mr. Austrian and Mr. Saligram will remain in place while board members from each company run a search for a new chief executive, which could be either man. Also undecided: the new company’s name and whether it will have its headquarters in Office Depot’s home of Boca Raton, Fla., or OfficeMax’s base in Naperville, Ill.

People involved in the deal said that the compromise, which took about two months to complete, was important in bringing both companies to the negotiating table.

“We both put our egos aside,” Mr. Austrian of Office Depot said. “It’s not a win for one side and a loss for another.”

Both Office Depot and OfficeMax also wanted to emphasize that they would remain competitors until the deal was approved by shareholders and antitrust regulators. That is a nod to the collapse of a proposed merger of Office Depot and Staples more than a decade ago, which was blocked on anticompetitive grounds and left Office Depot reeling for years.

Mr. Saligram of OfficeMax argued on a call with analysts that the regulatory environment has shifted since. Both companies have lost ground not only to Staples, but also to online outlets like Amazon.com and bulk retailers like Target and Wal-Mart Stores.

“This industry has completely changed,” he said.

Should the deal fall apart because of antitrust concerns, neither company will be liable for a termination fee, executives said on the analyst call.

Company executives and advisers also spent significant amounts of time negotiating with BC Partners, an investment firm that owns the equivalent of 22 percent of Office Depot’s stock. Under the terms of Wednesday’s deal, BC Partners will own no more than 5 percent of the combined company’s voting shares and will have no representatives on its board.

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Vladimir Pekhtin Resigns From Russian Parliament

MOSCOW — A senior lawmaker from Russia’s ruling party, who is also the chairman of Parliament’s ethics committee, resigned from the legislature on Wednesday after opposition bloggers revealed that he owned more than $1.3 million worth of luxury real estate in Florida, which he did not list on required disclosure forms.

The lawmaker, Vladimir A. Pekhtin, said that he did not want the scandal to taint his party colleagues in United Russia, and announced his departure at a morning parliamentary session.

He said he had not broken any law, but that “there are very controversial documents that have been made public on the Internet,” and it was necessary to clear up “obvious legal misunderstandings.”

“I will give up my mandate, which I always achieved in honest political battle, and my opponents, my rivals, know this,” he said, in comments broadcast on television. “Nevertheless, I will not cling to it. Because I think that my personal matters are secondary to United Russia. Thank you for many years of work, and for your trust.”

Whether he surrendered his seat voluntarily or under pressure from the Kremlin, Mr. Pekhtin’s departure set a precedent in the Russian government, where high-level corruption and lavish spending overseas have developed into a serious political liability. It represents a victory for opposition activists, who have never achieved such a swift response to an exposé.

Officials, meanwhile, have been given a powerful reminder of their own vulnerability, said Mikhail Y. Vinogradov, chairman of the St. Petersburg Politics Fund. He added that it is not yet clear whether this case represents a one-time occurrence or “a change in the rules of the game.”

“This is a way to show that discussion of a ‘battle against corruption’ leaves the majority of officials without protection,” he said. “Naturally, officials’ anxiety over their property will grow for the time being. There won’t be any attempts to torpedo this campaign — they will simply hope that this is just another campaign that will exhaust itself in three or four months. That’s what the representatives of the elite will count on.”

The blogger Aleksei Navalny, who published documents about Mr. Pekhtin’s extensive real estate holdings last week, was jubilant, remarking that “now he can finally move to Miami and live in peace, without having to listen to any complaints.”

“In fairness, one must acknowledge that Mr. Pekhtin’s actions show that somewhere deep inside him there are remnants of a conscience,” he wrote on the Web site of Ekho Moskvy, a radio station. “Maybe other members of United Russia felt this, and that’s the reason they named him to the ethics committee? Let’s watch how the others who are hiding foreign property behave.”

Mr. Navalny published the property records last Wednesday, a day after Mr. Putin proposed legislation that would bar senior Russian officials from holding bank accounts or owning stock outside the country.

The proposal did not prohibit officials from owning real estate overseas, but signaled a Kremlin crackdown on their lavish spending abroad, so the revelations about Mr. Pekhtin came as an ill-timed embarassment.

The records showed the lawmaker’s name on the deeds of at least three properties in Florida, including a South Beach apartment bought last year for nearly $1.3 million, in a building where Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, also owns a unit.

Late last year, the newspaper Vedomosti published a report on a huge mansion outside St. Petersburg and other properties which Mr. Pekhtin had not disclosed.

Mr. Pekhtin initially shrugged off the reports, telling the newspaper Izvestiya that he had “practically no” real estate holdings outside Russia, though his grown son did. Within a matter of hours, however, he announced that he was temporarily relinquishing his position as chairman of the parliamentary ethics committee until his name was cleared by an investigation.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Pekhtin cast the scandal as a salvo in a larger standoff between social forces in Russia.

“In this case, our opponents are not interested in Pekhtin,” he said, according to  Interfax. “They need to discredit the Parliament, the authorities, which are represented by every person sitting in this hall, and every one of us may turn out to be a target for them. As an honest person, I do not want and cannot make peace with this, and I do not want the shadow of unfounded allegations to fall on our party.”

After Mr. Pekhtin made his announcement, fellow lawmakers gave him a standing ovation and warmly applauded. Many went out of their way to praise his decision. But Sergei Mironov, head of the minority A Just Russia party, said he expected Mr. Pekhtin’s decision marked the beginning of a process, not the end.

“Pandora’s box has been opened,” said Mr. Mironov, in comments broadcast on Channel One. “I don’t doubt that the sixth sitting of the State Duma will have a record number of early terminations of deputies’ authority. For me it is completely obvious that, if there were not some real facts there, the deputy would not have voluntarily given up his authority.”

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Robin Roberts returns to 'Good Morning America'

NEW YORK (AP) — Five months after undergoing a bone marrow transplant, Robin Roberts is back on television in the morning.

Roberts said Wednesday she'd been waiting 174 days "to say this, good morning America."

The morning-show host is recovering from MDS, a blood and bone marrow disease. She looked thin with close-cropped hair but was smiling broadly, back at work on "Good Morning America" at ABC's studio in New York City.

ABC announced Roberts will interview first lady Michelle Obama later this week, to be shown next Tuesday.

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