The Ticker

787 ready for takeoff

Boeing said it sees commercial flights of its grounded 787 jets resuming "within weeks" even though it has not pinpointed the cause of battery overheating.

A Boeing exec said a new design for the lithium-ion battery system has safeguards to prevent overheating and measures to contain malfunctions. The 787 fleet was grounded worldwide after a battery fire in a Dreamliner parked at Boston's Logan International Airport and an overheated battery that led to an emergency landing of another 787 in Japan.

Hedge fund to pay $600M settlement

Hedge fund CR Intrinsic Investors will pay more than $600 million in what federal regulators are calling the largest insider trading settlement ever.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged the firm with insider trading in 2012, alleging that one of its portfolio managers illegally obtained confidential details about an Alzheimer's drug trial from a doctor before the final results went public and traded on that information.

Fenway residential project passes

The Abbey Group expects to start construction of its residential complex at 1282 Boylston St. within months, after a revised plan won approval from the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

The $305 million development, located on the site of a former McDonald's fast-food restaurant, has been increased to nearly 350 apartments and condos, including 38 affordable units.

Unitarian Universalists moving HQ

The Unitarian Universalist Association will sell its longtime Beacon Hill headquarters and move to Boston's Fort Point neighborhood.

Facing costly renovations, the religious group will sell 25 Beacon St. and three nearby properties. It will move into three floors at 24 Farnsworth St. under a lease with an option to buy the six-story brick-and-beam building from owner Davis Cos.

Patriots to expand their Place

The Kraft Group, owner of the New England Patriots, floated plans to expand the shopping center next to Gillette Stadium in Foxboro.

Patriot Place would gain a 125- to 150-room hotel, a 14,500-square-foot retail store and a 4,500-square-foot "quick serve" restaurant.

• Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith announced he's leaving the Cambridge car-sharing company, hours after it was acquired by Avis Budget Group for nearly $500 million. Griffth joined Zipcar in 2003.
• Bullhorn founder and CEO Art Papas has been named to the board of directors of Career Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income adults find and keep jobs with career potential.

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Turbo-boosted Beetle

Sporty, quick and fuel-efficient — that sums up the 2013 VW Beetle TDI.

Based on the popular Golf architecture, the 2.0 liter, 140-horsepower Turbo Diesel offers pleasantly surprising performance. Driven through the upgraded DSG Automatic Transmission, or Direct Shift Gearbox, it can be wrung out for quick, sport-like driving or babied as an economical commuter car.

What's great about this car is watching the digital display counting out at least 35 mpg in mixed driving and a robust 39 on the highway. So even though diesel fuel costs more, the extra 10 mpg gained over gasoline models makes this an intriguing choice.

The flat metal dash and tiny glovebox highlight the throwback interior, which is a bit spartan in places, but the controls are well-placed and intuitive. The rear seat straps also pay homage to the cars of yesteryear, but remain helpful when clambering out of the very tight rear seats. The good news: The trunk has more space now. The rigid and bench-like leatherette front seats are a disappointment. A more supportive seat would make the driving experience better: Go with cloth for more comfort. The squared-off steering wheel with its easy infotainment controls makes you want to run this Bug through a weekend rally.

Thanks for the heated seats, but the car interior eventually warms and then roasts you! As high schoolers we rattled around in a mid-'60s era Bug and had to use an ice scraper on the interior window. Looks like this Bug is plagued by erratic heating, too.

The handling is crisp and sure with just the right amount of feedback to the driver, and the electronic braking distribution system delivers nice, solid stopping power. The electronic stability and independent strut suspension keeps the Bug flat on turns with little body roll. The torquey diesel accelerates quickly with just enough turbo gurgle to let you know that this is not one of the air-cooled bangers from the '60s. This is a good engine, and it produces. Step on it for immediate response, and the Bug scoots swiftly into traffic.

Our tester was the base DSG TDI, so for $24,395 you get a nicely packaged coupe that includes satellite-ready stereo, Bluetooth connectivity, cruise control and 
17-inch wheels. Upgrades will get you navigation, sunroof and the Fender stereo. However, the hands-free phone is miserable. It's difficult to understand and callers had a difficult time hearing me.

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Always sunny in North Andover

This custom Royal Barry Wills Associates home in North Andover is an elongated Cape with three distinct wings that's positioned for maximum exposure to the sun.

Designed in 1985 by Richard Wills, son of the late Melrose-born architect Royal Barry Wills, this hilltop home is in the tradition of the Wills' famous center-chimney Cape designs with custom millwork and quality materials that give it a timeless feel.

The main saltbox-like center of the house has a white-brick front and steep cedar roof. One clapboard side wing holds a master bedroom suite with loft studio above, while a bargeboard-sided family room wing, topped by an eight-foot cupola, has timber ceiling rafters taken from a 17th-century church. All the wings have custom-made black shutters.

The three-bedroom home, which has an updated cedar roof and three oversized brick wood-burning fireplaces, is on the market for $995,000.

The oak-floored central wing of the house has a two-story entry foyer, a formal living room with custom milled crown molding and paneled wainscoting, a brick fireplace and glass doors that open out to a rear granite patio.

An adjoining formal dining room leads into a recessed-lit kitchen with cherry wood cabinets and refinished white Corian counters. A butcher-block topped island has a new five-burner Gaggenau electric cooktop. There's a Sub-Zero refrigerator behind a cabinet, two new Gaggenau wall ovens and a black Fisher Paykel dishwasher. Off to one side is a sunny eat-in area with four curved bay windows and a brick fireplace.

A curving mahogany staircase from the foyer leads up to two carpeted bedrooms on the second floor with built-in bookcases and a quarry-tiled full bathroom with a white Corian-topped vanity.

The oak-floored master bedroom suite is on the first floor in a wing to the right of the foyer. It includes a bedroom with built-in bookshelves and window seat, two walk-in closets, a study area (currently an exercise room) and an en-suite bathroom with a glass-mosaic tile floor, a raised soaking tub and a green-marble lined walk-in shower.

A spiral staircase just off the suite leads up to a skylit loft area currently used as an artist studio.

The family-room wing — set perpendicular to the rest of the house — flows off the kitchen with a peaked chestnut timber ceiling culled from an old church, and the back wall has a cherry wood built-in with a brick fireplace. Three glass doors open into a three-season back sun porch overlooking a fenced-in yard with a heated in-ground pool.

Off the family room is a mud room and laundry area with a full washer/dryer, lots of closets and a half-bath. There's direct access here to an attached two-car garage.

Each of the house's wings has its own Hydro air heat-exchanger and central air-conditioning systems.

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Builders offer $250G to spruce up underpass

The timing couldn't have been worse: A murder victim is found sprawled in the shadows of a viaduct next to an upcoming South End apartment project — one day before a key neighborhood meeting about the development.

Then again, the bad timing has turned into good intentions. The developers heard the community's concerns about the gritty spaces under the elevated Expressway and offered up $250,000 to improve it.

The mitigation money will pay for an "artistic" lighting display designed to "create a sense of warmth and extend the neighborhood," said Justin Krebs, principal at Normandy Real Estate Partners.

Normandy and co-developer Gerding Edlen won approval this week from the Boston Redevelopment Authority to turn a parking lot at 275 Albany St. into a 380-unit apartment complex featuring a 19-story tower with views of downtown Boston.

"That is going to be their doorstep, right under the Expressway, so to make it more inviting is definitely a welcome addition to the project," said state Rep. Aaron Michlewitz (D-Boston), who attended the Feb. 25 meeting, held the day after a body was found amid the gravel, glass and other evidence of drug use and homelessness under the overpass.

Michlewitz said the murder and the $145 million project's advancement have given urgency to the state Department of Transportation's previous plan to overhaul the viaduct area, possibly by converting the dim, "dicey" spaces into well-lit parking lots.

"People are starting to realize that the pathway between there and South Boston is used a lot more than it was before," he said, noting the access to the Broadway MBTA station. "We need to accommodate the pedestrian use and make it a safer environment."

MassDOT spokesman Michael Verseckes said the agency is working on permitting and public bidding to improve three viaduct sections between Herald and Randolph streets.

"There is no immediate time frame on this, but there is wide agreement among interested stakeholders in converting these spaces to productive use," he said.

The adjacent section of Albany Street will see an influx of new residents in a few years. The old Boston Herald site will become the Ink Block, a 471-unit apartment complex anchored by Whole Foods.

Normandy, which scrapped plans for a pair of hotels, expects to break ground at 275 Albany St. in the fall. The project will be surrounded by wide sidewalks and a planting buffer.

Architect ADD Inc. tweaked the design, with input from BRA planners, so that even the loading area will appear more lively.

"We've put windows down there that will be backlit at night," said Tamara Roy, senior associate principal at Boston-based ADD. "So it will just feel like there are eyes on the street there as you walk around."

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LA Times hack: Security breach or harmless prank?

SAN FRANCISCO — Federal prosecutors say Reuters' deputy social media editor conspired with a notorious hacker network to cause an online security breach that should be punished by decades in federal prison.

Fervent online supporters of Matthew Keys say the journalist was just taking part in an online prank that briefly altered the Los Angeles Times' website, and he shouldn't ever have been suspended from his job.

In an age when the line between tech superstardom and outright hacking grows increasingly blurry, the case against Keys, 26, lays bare sharp divisions about what constitutes Internet crime and how far the government should go to stop it.

"Congress wants harsh penalties doled out for these crimes because they don't want people defacing websites, but there has to be a way that we can bring the law into harmony with the realities of how people use technology today," said Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Keys, a well-known figure in the Twitterverse, was charged Thursday with conspiring with the hacking group Anonymous to alter a Times news story in late 2010.

The federal indictment accuses Keys of giving hackers the information they needed to access the computer system of Times' parent company, Tribune Co. Tribune also owns a Sacramento television station Keys had been fired from months earlier.

An attorney for Keys said he is not guilty, and that the government is overreaching in its zeal to prosecute Internet pranks.

"No one was hurt, there were no lasting injuries, no one's identify was stolen, lives weren't ruined," his Ventura-based attorney, Jay Leiderman, said Friday. "Mr. Keys was no different than any other embedded journalist. The story he was going after was inside this chat room, and he went there."

Keys was hired in 2012 as deputy social media editor for the Reuters news service. He didn't return a phone call seeking comment.

"I'm okay," he tweeted Friday in response to a journalism colleague wondering how he was doing.

According to Keys' Facebook profile, he is single and works at Thomson Reuters Corp.'s New York office, where "I get paid to use Twitter and Facebook at work."

He was suspended with pay late Thursday, said Reuters spokesman David Girardin, who did not elaborate. A spokesman for the Chicago-based Tribune Co. declined to comment.

According to the indictment, a hacker identified only as "Sharpie" used information Keys supplied in an Internet chat room and altered a headline on a December 2010 Times story to read "Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337." The reference was to another hacking group credited with defacing the website of video game publisher Eidos in 2011.

Keys is charged with one count each of conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer, as well as transmitting and attempting to transmit that information. If convicted, prosecutors say the Secaucus, N.J., resident faces a combined 25 years prison and a $500,000 fine if sentenced to the maximum for each count.

However, first-time offenders with no criminal history will typically spend much less time in prison than the maximum sentence, said Mary Fan, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in criminal law and procedure at the University of Washington School of Law.

Keys' arraignment is scheduled for April 12 in Sacramento.

His indictment comes after recent hacks into the computer systems of two other U.S. media companies that own The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both newspapers reported in February that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.

Anonymous and its offshoot, Lulz Security, have been linked to a number of high-profile computer attacks and crimes, including many that were meant to embarrass governments, federal agencies and corporate giants. They have been connected to attacks that took data from FBI partner organization InfraGard, and they've jammed websites of the CIA and the Public Broadcasting Service.

Keys' indictment also follows the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet activist who was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment Jan. 11 as a trial loomed in his future.

Family and friends say Swartz killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors. Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.

"In the wake of the Aaron Swartz case, we really thought that Justice would kind of catch their breath and maybe understand that they had erred in pushing these cases forward in such an aggressive manner for what are essentially pranks," Leiderman said.

Keys' Facebook page says he worked as an online news producer for Tribune-owned FOX affiliate KTXL from June 2008 to April 2010.

After that, he worked briefly in San Francisco as the tech industry began its latest ascent. Today, top software companies often sponsor 'hackathons,' weekends of intense work and little sleep, to get free outside programming help to solve problems or advance products.

Sometimes, coding straddles the lines between what's legal and illegal.

The hacking crimes Keys is charged are laid out in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was enacted in the 1980s.

Federal prosecutors use the act to go after a wide range of Internet crimes, but the law may not reflect how our behavior online has changed over the last three decades, Fan said.

"Some might say if you take someone's property or break into a private place without permission, we don't get upset about prosecutions, so why would we be upset about these prosecutions if the trespass happened online?" Fan said. "Others might say is what happened in this case really even a problem? It's kind of a culture clash."

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Follow Garance Burke at http://twitter.com/garanceburke .

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Judge rules secret FBI letters unconstitutional

SAN FRANCISCO — They're called national security letters and the FBI issues thousands of them a year to banks, phone companies and other businesses demanding customer information. They're sent without judicial review and recipients are barred from disclosing them.

On Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco declared the letters unconstitutional, saying the secretive demands for customer data violate the First Amendment.

The government has failed to show that the letters and the blanket non-disclosure policy "serve the compelling need of national security," and the gag order creates "too large a danger that speech is being unnecessarily restricted," U.S. District Judge Susan Illston wrote.

She ordered the FBI to stop issuing the letters, but put that order on hold for 90 days so the U.S. Department of Justice can pursue an appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The DOJ said it is reviewing the decision.

FBI counter-terrorism agents began issuing the letters after Congress passed the USA Patriot Act in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The case arises from a lawsuit that lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed in 2011 on behalf of an unnamed telecommunications company that received an FBI demand for customer information.

"We are very pleased that the court recognized the fatal constitutional shortcomings of the NSL statute," EFF lawyer Matt Zimmerman said. "The government's gags have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools. Our client looks forward to the day when it can publicly discuss its experience."

Illston wrote that she was also troubled by the limited powers judges have to lift the gag orders.

Judges can eliminate the gag order only if they have "no reason to believe that disclosure may endanger the national security of the United States, interfere with a criminal counter-terrorism, or counterintelligence investigation, interfere with diplomatic relations, or endanger the life or physical safety of any person."

That provision also violated the Constitution because it blocks meaningful judicial review.

Illston isn't the first federal judge to find the letters troubling. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York also found the gag order unconstitutional, but allowed the FBI to continue issuing them if it made changes to its system such as notifying recipients they can ask federal judges to review the letters.

Illston ruled Friday that it's up to Congress, and not the courts, to tinker with the letters.

In 2007, the Justice Department's inspector general found widespread violations in the FBI's use of the letters, including demands without proper authorization and information obtained in non-emergency circumstances. The FBI has tightened oversight of the system.

The FBI made 16,511 national security letter requests for information regarding 7,201 people in 2011, the latest data available. The FBI uses the letters to collect unlimited kinds of sensitive, private information like financial and phone records.

The DOJ didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Obama: US should fund research for cleaner cars

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says the U.S. must shift cars and trucks off oil for good so the public can avoid spikes in gasoline prices.

In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama promotes a plan to direct $200 million a year into an energy security trust to fund research for alternatives like electric car batteries and biofuels. He says the trust would use revenues from federal leases on offshore drilling without adding to the deficit.

Obama says investing in clean energy will help create jobs. He's envisioning cars that can one day go coast to coast without using any oil.

In the Republican address, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin says Republicans have a plan to balance the federal budget in 10 years by cutting spending.

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Online:

Obama address: www.whitehouse.gov

GOP address: www.youtube.com/HouseConference

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Number of pigs in and near Shanghai goes to 11,955

BEIJING — The number of dead pigs retrieved from waters in and near China's financial hub of Shanghai has reached nearly 12,000.

The upstream city of Jiaxing — where small hog farms are prevalent — reported Friday night that it had recovered 3,601 dead pigs from its streams, according to state media.

In Shanghai, authorities have retrieved 8,354 swollen and rotting carcasses from Huangpu river, which provides the metropolis with drinking water. The dead pigs are largely believed to be from Jiaxing, but Zhao Shumei, a deputy vice mayor, said it was inconclusive to say all the pigs were from her city.

Both Shanghai, a city of 23 million people, and Jiaxing say there's been no swine epidemic and that tap water remains safe, but local residents remain worried about water contamination.

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Other people who had contact sought in rabies case

Public and military health officials say they're trying to identify people in at least five states who had close contact with an organ donor who died of rabies or with the organ recipients because they might require treatment.

A 20-year-old Air Force recruit from North Carolina who died of rabies in Florida had symptoms of the disease but wasn't tested before his organs were transplanted to four patients, one of whom died of rabies nearly 18 months later, federal health officials said Friday.

The three other organ recipients are getting rabies shots and haven't displayed any symptoms. Doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declined to speculate on their chances for survival.

"This case is so unique and atypical that we cannot make predictions," said Richard Franka, acting leader of the CDC's rabies team.

Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, director of the agency's Office of Blood, Organ, and Other Tissue Safety, said investigators don't know why doctors in Florida didn't test the donor for rabies before offering his kidneys, heart and liver to people in Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Maryland.

The man in Maryland who received the transplant died in late February. The Defense Department said he was an Army veteran who had transplant surgery at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in early September 2011.

A rabies test after a death can take four hours once the tissue reaches a lab in Atlanta, New York or California, Franka said. That's precious time: A donated kidney remains viable for less than 24 hours; other organs last for less than six.

The donor had seizures and encephalitis — a brain inflammation that can be caused by rabies — but those symptoms can also be caused by a variety of bacterial, viral and other more common conditions.

"Rabies is very unusual, and it can look like a lot of different things," Kuehnert said. "I personally can't say I would have been able to make the correct diagnosis had I been there, without knowing what I know now."

Federal rules require organ banks to disclose "any known or suspected" infectious conditions that might be transmitted by the donor organs.

"We don't know exactly what was communicated, but from what I understand of the patient workup, they did not find any evidence of an infection," Kuehnert said.

The donor died in September 2011 at an undisclosed Florida medical facility. Medical workers believed at the time that he died from encephalitis of unknown origin, Florida Department of Health epidemiologist Dr. Carina Blackmore said.

He was a North Carolina resident who was training to become an aviation mechanic in Pensacola, Fla., when he got sick, Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith said.

A rabies expert unconnected to the case, Dr. Rodney Willoughby of Milwaukee, said the three other recipients have a strong chance of surviving because they haven't shown any symptoms.

Their identities haven't been publicly disclosed.

In North Carolina, state health officials recommended vaccine for at least one of the donor's relatives, said Carl Williams, the state's top public health veterinarian. He said fewer than five family members from North Carolina visited the man while he was hospitalized in Florida. Officials are looking for others who might have had contact with the donor or recipients in those states and in Georgia, Illinois and Maryland.

"What generally happens in human rabies patients that are hospitalized is that there is a lot of close contact, not only from health care workers but from close family because the patient is going to die," Williams said. The disease can be transmitted by saliva from a kiss or tears wiped away, he said.

Rabies attacks the nervous system and is transmitted between humans in saliva. In transplant cases, it can be transmitted through transplanted nerves in the organs.

The CDC hasn't determined how the donor got the raccoon rabies virus that killed him and the Maryland man. Investigators found the virus in their brain tissue.

The Illinois transplant was performed at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

The CDC said there has been just one other reported instance of rabies transmission by transplanted solid organs, a 2004 case in which all four recipients died after receiving tissue from an infected donor. There have been at least eight instances of rabies transmission through transplanted corneas, CDC spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds said.

She said rabies is diagnosed as the cause of just one to three deaths per year in the United States.

The Maryland death was announced Tuesday by state health officials. It was the state's first rabies death since 1976. State Public Health Veterinarian Katherine Feldman said doctors suspected before the man died that he had rabies, and they knew about his kidney transplant, but considered a rabies-infected kidney to be a remote possibility.

The raccoon rabies virus has a typical incubation period of one to three months, although there have been other cases of longer incubation periods, the CDC said. In the United States, only one other person is reported to have died from a raccoon-type rabies virus.

After the four deaths in 2004, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services created a committee within the federal Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network to look specifically at disease transmission. Last year, the government published guidelines for evaluating organ donors with central nervous system infections, such as encephalitis. If evidence suggested such an infection, "caution should be considered," the guidelines said.

The Health Resources and Service Administration, which oversees the transplantation network, said Friday that there is no government-approved test to quickly screen organ donors for rabies. Therefore, donation professionals must review the person's medical and social history to assess potential risks.

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Associated Press writers Emery Dalesio in Raleigh, N.C.; Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Fla.; Tammy Webber in Springfield, Ill.; Jeff Martin in Atlanta; Eric Tucker in Washington; and researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.

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Cypriots' president defends bailout deal

NICOSIA, Cyprus — Cyprus' president says a decision to force bank depositors to share the burden of a rescue package was done to save the country from financial ruin.

Nicos Anastasiades said in a statement Saturday that Cyprus had little option but to accept the bailout package from its European partners and the IMF that imposes a levy on the country's bank deposits. Without it, he said, Cyprus' whole banking system would have collapsed on Tuesday.

He said that's when the European Central Bank would have stopped providing emergency funding to Cyprus' troubled banks, leading to their collapse. That in turn would have driven the country to bankruptcy and possibly out of the eurozone.

Anastasiades said the deposit levy rescues banks, keeps the country's debt load manageable, and avoids the risk of deeper pay cuts and tax hikes.

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