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The Obama administration is creating new protections for Americans saving and investing for retirement, but industry groups say the new rules could hurt the very people the president says he wants to help

Reining In Financial Advisers May Help — But Americans Still Aren't Saving

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Obama Wants Rules That Force Brokers To Put Clients' Interests First

If you're building a retirement nest egg, big fees are the dangerous predators looking to feast on it. The White House says too many financial advisers get hidden kickbacks or sales incentives to steer responsible Americans toward bad retirement investments with low returns and high fees.

"If your business model rests on taking advantage of bilking hard-working Americans out of their retirement money, then you shouldn't be in business," Obama said Monday. "That's pretty straightforward."

The White House is directing the U.S. Department of Labor to craft new rules that require retirement advisers to put consumers' best interests ahead of their financial gain. But some industry groups are sounding the alarm.

"A sledgehammer is not needed where a regular hammer would fix the problem," the Financial Services Roundtable said in a statement.

Tim Pawlenty, the group's president and CEO, has another metaphor at the ready.

"There's always a few bad apples," says Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor. "We would encourage focusing on bad apples and removing them, instead of tipping over and smashing the whole apple cart."

"We don't want to get to a point where the red tape and bureaucracy and cost freezes lower income people from being able to take advantage of financial planning advice."

- Tim Pawlenty, Financial Services Roundtable

Pawlenty says that he hasn't seen details of the new rules yet, but that if the rules create burdensome regulation, financial planners might decide it's not worth working with people of modest means.

"We don't want to get to a point where the red tape and bureaucracy and cost freezes lower-income people from being able to take advantage of financial planning advice," he says.

But not all industry groups are so worried.

"There's a lot of overheated rhetoric," says Kevin Keller, the CEO of the Certified Financial Planner Board, a voluntary standards group that certifies financial planners.

He says he supports what the White House is trying to do. The new rules would create what's called a "fiduciary standard," which is a requirement to act in a clients' best interest.

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Some industry groups claim that the fiduciary standard will reduce the availability of financial advice for middle-class Americans, but Keller says that's not true. Still, everything depends on the actual language in the rules.

Kent Smetters, a Wharton School economist who served in the George W. Bush administration, says he supports the move by the White House. But he's also frustrated by existing regulations.

For example, he says, stock brokers already are held to a fiduciary standard, but have found loopholes, so brokers can still get commissions for steering people into bad investments with high fees.

"Literally, this is legal," Smetters says. "I could say to you, 'Chris, I have your best interests in mind, I think you should invest in this fund x, y, z.'

"That first half of the sentence, I really had your best interests in mind," he adds. "The second half of the sentence, I take off my fiduciary hat, and you don't know any better because after all you're going there for is advice. You don't have a clue. It's just screwing over middle-class households."

consumer protection

financial regulation

retirement

investing

Scientists have learned a lot about our distant ancestors from DNA that's thousands of years old. Like the fact that we've inherited some Neanderthal DNA, so apparently our ancestors mated with them. Now there's new research from DNA that moves on from paleo-mating to paleo-eating.

About 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in the Near East figured out how to grow cereal crops like wheat. The farming culture spread, and wherever it went, people traded in their spears for plows.

That's the conventional view. Apparently, it was more complicated than that.

Evidence comes from archaeologists who've been digging into Bouldnor Cliff, a submerged prehistoric site off the coast of the Isle of Wight, in the south of Great Britain. They found tools, burned nut shells, animal remains and worked wood.

"We sort of got the lunch spot of this boat-building workshop 8,000 years ago," says Robin Allaby, a molecular archaeologist at the University of Warwick in England.

He says even though the locals could build boats, they were still hunter-gatherers. Agriculture didn't take off in Britain for another 2,000 years.

And yet, he found DNA from cultivated wheat along with the lunchtime paraphernalia. He didn't find any wheat pollen at all, so it wasn't grown there. In fact, there's never been evidence that wheat was cultivated in Britain earlier than about 6,000 years ago.

i

Divers recover items from Bouldnor Cliff, a submerged, prehistoric settlement site off the coast of the Isle of Wight, U.K. Along with lunchtime paraphernalia, divers also found ancient DNA from cultivated wheat. Courtesy of Roland Brookes hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Roland Brookes

Divers recover items from Bouldnor Cliff, a submerged, prehistoric settlement site off the coast of the Isle of Wight, U.K. Along with lunchtime paraphernalia, divers also found ancient DNA from cultivated wheat.

Courtesy of Roland Brookes

Which meant the Brits must have been getting wheat from someone else, grown somewhere else.

Writing in the journal Science, Allaby says apparently, Stone Age Britons weren't isolated on their little island. It seems they were getting their wheat from Europe, where agriculture had already established itself.

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"They were perfectly happy with using the products of agriculture," he says, "but they didn't actually start farming themselves. They were interacting with the farmers some ways away, contributing to this process (of creating a Neolithic agricultural society), which is not the conventional view."

He suspects that farmers from what is now France established a regular wheat trade across the English Channel, which was narrower and shallower at the time. Which meant that the Stone Age Brits could have their cake and eat it, too.

archaeology

farming

agriculture

Not too many years ago, nearly half of the kids diagnosed with cancer in Guatemala wouldn't come in for treatment. There wasn't much chemotherapy to be had, and parents didn't think treatments worked. Most children with curable cancers died.

The situation is similar in many poor countries. There's little money for cancer care throughout the developing world. So whether or not you survive cancer depends on the country you live in, one recent study showed.

Two doctors — on opposite sides of the world — are working to change that. Dr. Chite Asirwa of Kenya and Dr. Federico Antillon of Guatemala are part of a growing number of health workers who believe it's time to stop accepting cancer as a death sentence in poor countries. At the end of January, Asirwa and Antillon were in Seattle to share what they've learned with the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

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Asirwa has picked an unlikely weapon against childhood cancers: a yellow tent hanging between a hospital and a cinderblock wall.

His route to that tent was a winding path that started during the early days of the HIV epidemic. He was training at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya. He remembers wheeling nearly a dozen patients to the morgue when he was on weekend duty. "I said what kind of profession was I getting into if I was just presiding over the dead?"

But then HIV became treatable. And people with HIV-associated cancers such as Kaposi's sarcoma and cervical cancer started getting treatment in the AIDS unit.

"It dawned on me that cancer can also be conquered," Asirwa says.

So over the past three years, Asirwa figured how to treat cancers at Moi Hospital. He joined AMPATH-Kenya, a partnership between Indiana University and Moi Hospital originally set up to treat HIV but has expanded to treat cancer. AMPATH is training health professionals in Kenya. Several pharmaceutical companies are donating drugs to treat cancer.

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"The moment [people] knew there was some form of cancer care at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, they started coming in truckloads," Asirwa says.

But the hospital didn't have a place for chairs for patients to sit in while getting treated, or for the IV poles used to dispense chemotherapy. So Asirwa took the unit outdoors: "We built a small tent just outside our clinical space," he says.

The tent may not be needed much longer. The project has been so successful that the Ruth Lilly Philanthropic Foundation and Indiana University have given $5 million for a new cancer treatment center at Moi Hospital, which will include 60 beds and two radiation units. It's scheduled to open in April.

But the chemotherapy tent won't go to waste. Asirwa says it might be a good place for blood transfusions.

Across the Atlantic Ocean in Guatemala, the key to cancer care was fried chicken, and the first stop was Memphis, Tennessee.

Federico Antilln spent three years there studying hematology and oncology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. When he returned to Guatemala, he had little access to cancer therapies. And other doctors at his hospital weren't interested in treating children with cancer.

"When a patient with cancer got sick and had to go to the ICU, they wouldn't accept the patient," he remembers. "They said, 'He has cancer, he's not going to live, why should we spend resources on someone who is not going to make it?' "

A few years earlier, Antillon and others had found that about 40 percent of the children diagnosed with cancer at two public hospitals in Guatemala abandoned treatment. Their families couldn't afford it, or they didn't think treatment worked. And many parents didn't even bring their children in for diagnosis until it was too late.

When he was at St. Jude's, Antillon had seen the good that chemo could do. And St. Jude's was interested in seeing what could be done about cancer in developing countries.

So St. Jude's gave Antillon seed money to train doctors, buy equipment and pay for nurses and others at the National Pediatric Oncology Unit in Guatemala City. The unit is part of the Universidad Francisco Marroquin.

Then Antillon went looking for more money. He began with the head of Pollo Campero, a fried chicken franchise with outlets in 12 countries, including the U.S. Then money came in from Pepsi, a Guatemalan bank and several other places. Finally, Antillon had enough to start a foundation called "Ayudame a Vivir" ("Help Me To Live").

The National Pediatric Oncology Unit now has a specialized cancer unit, with 60 beds and its own ICU, educated nurses, a pain care program, psychological support and more. It also pays transportation for patients and parents and for lodging in the city, and provides — for the poorest families — a food basket so parents don't have to worry if they have to miss work to help their children.

Antillon's big challenge now is getting children into the hospital early in their cancers. Late diagnoses make curable childhood cancers incurable.

He wants more, of course. "The hospital is already saturated," he says. "The beds are filled." On his dream list is a top of the line 21st-century facility.

"It should happen in every country," Antillon says — only not necessarily with a tent or fried chicken funding.

childhood cancer

Global Health

Cancer

Small was considered an erotic romance writer before the genre existed, and, despite her occasionally controversial plot choices, she remained a beloved and celebrated figure in the romance community, giving generously of her time and experience as a mentor and friend of the industry. She was fierce in her love of romance, and completely unapologetic about her bold sexual storytelling; authors across the globe are tweeting and posting Facebook tributes to Small, but I found this one from Teresa Medeiros especially poignant and illuminating.

"I had the pleasure of knowing Bertrice personally and I'm proud to say she was a true 'broad' in the very best tradition of the term," Medeiros writes. "She had a 'take-no-prisoners' attitude toward publishing and writing and a lusty laugh and appreciation for life that made you feel more alive whenever you were around her. Her kind will not come again."

The Romance Writers of America gave Small their highest honor in 2014, the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, and New York Times bestselling author Eloisa James presented it. You can see her introduction here, a witty and elegant overview of Small's extraordinary career.

James ended her speech with the words Bob Cratchit uses in A Christmas Carol, toasting Ebenezer Scrooge as "the founder of our feast." "Bertrice's trailblazing, sensual, historical novels blazed a trail that has helped many of us — myself included — bring home the bacon," she said. "In many, many real ways, Bertrice is the founder of our feast."

Bobbi Dumas is a freelance writer based in Madison, Wis. She writes, blogs and reviews for Kirkus Media, and celebrates romance and women's fiction on her website ReadARomanceMonth.com