Take-Two delays launch of Grand Theft Auto V video game

(Reuters) – Take-Two Interactive Software Inc said on Thursday it has pushed back the launch of the latest game from its hit “Grand Theft Auto” franchise to September 17 from its previously announced release window of spring 2013.

Shares of Take-Two were down six percent at $ 12.31 in early afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

The delay was to allow Take-Two’s Rockstar Games studio, which develops “Grand Theft Auto” games, additional development time, the video game company said.

“Grand Theft Auto V” will be released worldwide for Microsoft Corp‘s Xbox and Sony Corp‘s PlayStation3 game consoles on September 17, the company said.

The action-adventure game lets players complete criminal missions in urban settings. The franchise’s last title “Grand Theft Auto IV” has sold over 25 million units since its release in 2008.

Grand Theft Auto V is set in a fictional city inspired by present-day Southern California.

The delayed launch pushes earnings from Grand Theft Auto V sales from June to September, Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said. The new title of the massively popular franchise has the potential to rake in close to $ 1 billion in retail sales and sell 15 to 20 million units, according to Bhatia.

“It adds to their development cost and it’s launching closer to what we think is going to be a period where new consoles will be coming out and there will be more competition from other titles,” Bhatia said.

The video game industry has been struggling to cope with flagging sales over the last year. Analysts say consumers are holding back from buying hardware and software as they wait for rumored next-generation versions of Sony Corp’s PlayStation and Microsoft Corp’s Xbox, expected later this year.

The delay could mean Take-Two is possibly creating a “cross-generation” title that could work on current and next-generation consoles, said analyst Mike Hickey of National Alliance Capital Markets.

“Remember, Xbox signed an exclusive deal with Rockstar at the beginning of the prior cycle for episodic content, and Sony provided exclusive resources for the completion of Grand Theft Auto IV,” Hickey said.

(Reporting by Malathi Nayak in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Adler and Alden Bentley)

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Lights out: Power outage stops game at Super Bowl

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Power went out at the Superdome early in the third quarter of the Super Bowl on Sunday with the Baltimore Ravens leading the San Francisco 49ers 28-6.

The majority of the lights failed shortly after Jacoby Jones returned the opening kickoff of the second half for a touchdown. There was 13:22 left in the quarter.

After a few minutes, the public address announcer said the Superdome was experiencing an interruption of electrical service and encouraged fans to stay in their seats.

Some fans did the wave to pass the time. Players milled around on the sidelines, some took a seat on the bench, other on the field. A few of the Ravens threw footballs around.

Officials gathered on the field and appeared to be talking to stadium personnel.

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Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction

Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.

VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.

Matt Eich for The New York Times

MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.

It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”

It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.

The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.

Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.

Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.

Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”

Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.

“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”

“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”

Dr. Waldo M. Ellison

Richard Fee initial evaluation

Feb. 5, 2010

Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.

Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.

“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 3, 2013

An earlier version of a quote appearing with the home page presentation of this article misspelled the name of a medication. It is Adderall, not Aderall.

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Teen Vogue, a Survivor at 10 Years

Robert Caplin for The New York Times

Amy Astley, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue, said her readers are sophisticated young women interested in the fashion world.

After a long day of classes, homework and college preparation, Susannah Davies, a 17-year-old high school junior, takes a break by flipping through her print copy of Teen Vogue, the fashion magazine she has subscribed to since the sixth grade.

According to fourth-quarter data from the Publisher’s Information Bureau, Teen Vogue’s advertising pages rose by 8.3 percent compared with the same period the year before.

She reads articles on topics like how to handle “crazy, poofy” hair, how to pair denim vests with leggings and leather boots, and the stress of applying to college. She enters contests to win clothes and rips out photos of models to make collages to hang in her room and post on Instagram.

“Teen Vogue really hits the spot of what teenagers are concerned about,” Ms. Davies said. “I look to be inspired.”

As Teen Vogue releases its 10th anniversary March issue just in time for Fashion Week, it is celebrating not just a milestone, but readers like Ms. Davies, who have remained loyal during a decade when other, often well-financed teenage magazines largely disappeared.

The few magazines left are trying to draw from a pool of teenage readers who grew up devouring media digitally and whose appetite for celebrity news has shifted their attention away from conventional teenage titles.

Like many magazines, Teen Vogue, published by Condé Nast, has weathered shrinking newsstand sales, which are half what they were when the magazine began. It also remains behind Seventeen, which has double the circulation, and according to the youth research firm TRU, is the most read magazine and most visited Web site for teenagers.

But Teen Vogue has established a following among fashion-conscious teenagers eager to study what brands the Obama daughters are wearing and to collect the magazine’s covers, which feature the likes of the boy band One Direction. These readers are providing the magazine solid profits in an otherwise declining magazine market.

According to fourth-quarter data from the Publisher’s Information Bureau, Teen Vogue’s advertising pages rose by 8.3 percent compared with the same period the year before. Its pages are filled with fashion advertisers as economically diverse as Louis Vuitton and Aeropostale. During the same time, Vogue’s advertising pages rose by only 0.3 percent and magazines over all saw advertising pages decline by 7.2 percent.

Over the last decade, Teen Vogue has outlasted YM, Elle Girl, Teen People, Cosmo Girl! and Teen, which all folded. While Teen Vogue’s total circulation remains down from its peak of 1.5 million in 2005, according to Alliance for Audited Media, it has hovered at slightly over one million for the last five years. Magazine industry experts say that’s notable because its editors are catering to a readership with a narrow age range that outgrows the magazine every few years.

“It’s always been such a volatile market because your audience morphs so rapidly,” said John Harrington, an industry consultant.

Teen Vogue was introduced when many magazine publishers were trying to appeal to the children of baby boomers entering their teen years.

Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, had been inspired by her own teenage daughter’s take on fashion and asked Amy Astley, the magazine’s beauty director at the time, to design some test issues of a teenage version of Vogue.

Ms. Astley, the mother of daughters ages 10 and 13, became the editor in chief of the new magazine, and learned early on that Teen Vogue attracted what she described as “an audience of sophisticated young women who wanted to see fashion presented in a way not seen in other magazines.”

Ms. Astley said she was quickly flooded with questions on what she described as “evergreen issues” — like trying to be perfect, sibling rivalries and critical mothers. She also realized how much her readers wanted to connect with the brand and how much information they wanted about how to break into the fashion industry.

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Egypt’s Government Apologizes After a Beating Is Televised

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

A funeral protest on Saturday in Cairo for Mohammed Hussein Korani, 23, who died Friday night in clashes with the police. More Photos »

CAIRO — Egypt’s interior minister offered a rare apology on Saturday after officers under his command were seen on television beating a naked man two blocks from the presidential palace. But under what his family said was police coercion, the victim, Hamada Saber, said in an interview later that the officers had been helping rather than attacking him.

The spectacle of the beating quickly revived fury at Egypt’s police force, whose record of brutality helped set off the revolt against Hosni Mubarak, the former president, and served as a reminder that nearly two years later, the new president, Mohamed Morsi, had taken few steps to reform the police.

Mr. Morsi’s office issued a statement saying it was “pained by the shocking footage.”

More than 50 people have been killed over the last 10 days in fighting in several Egyptian cities, in some of the worst violence since the fall of Mr. Mubarak in 2011. The beating of Mr. Saber has provoked a different kind of outrage, crystallizing for many the collapse of order and civility that has derailed Egypt’s transition from its authoritarian past.

In the shifting versions of the attack given on Saturday, it was hard to know exactly what happened.

In video images, a group of riot police officers are heard cursing at Mr. Saber on Friday night as they beat him on the ground and drag him across a street to an armored vehicle. A witness, Mai Sirry, said that when she saw Mr. Saber, his pants were around his knees. In its initial statement, the Interior Ministry said it regretted the beating and called it an “individual attack” that did not reflect police doctrine.

Later, though, in a television interview, Mr. Saber gave an account of the beating from his hospital bed in which he said the officers had come to help as he was running from a group of protesters who had stripped and robbed him. They had apparently thought he was an officer, he said, and left him alone after deciding he was “just an old man.”

“I was afraid,” he said, adding that as he ran away from the protesters, officers came to help. He ran from them too, but they pulled him back, he said, telling him he would die if he did not let them help him.

A woman who identified herself as Mr. Saber’s daughter Randa, speaking Saturday on another Egyptian channel, said her father was being prompted to lie during the interview and was “afraid to talk.”

“We were with him” when he was attacked on Friday, she said. “They took his clothes off and started kicking him, beating him,” she said, referring to the police. “They dragged him and put him in the car. All this happened. What he says are lies.”

Speaking to local news media on Saturday, the interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, said that after Mr. Saber was released from the hospital, he would invite him to the ministry’s offices to offer his apologies. He repeated Mr. Saber’s account, though he still acknowledged that the officers’ conduct was “excessive” and said he had ordered an investigation.

The latest violence deepened the sense of crisis in Egypt, and it undermined efforts by the country’s quarreling political forces to settle their differences. After the clashes, supporters and opponents of President Morsi blamed each other.

On Saturday, just days after leaders of a secular-leaning opposition coalition sat down at a rare meeting with representatives of Mr. Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, the opposition group released a statement saying it was “aligned” with those who want “to topple the regime of tyranny, and domination of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In Tahrir Square early on Saturday morning, Mr. Morsi’s prime minister, Hesham Qandil, bore the brunt of the antigovernment anger. He was forced to cut short his visit to protest tents in the square after he was heckled, according to state media. His office said Mr. Qandil left to avoid creating a “pretext” for violence.

In a speech later in the day, the prime minister acknowledged the widespread perception that both the government and opposition were losing control. “Let us admit that the government, all the political forces, all the parties failed in containing the youth,” he said. “This is something that we all have to work on.”

At least one person was killed in the clashes on Friday, which broke up what had been a peaceful afternoon sit-in, when a small group of protesters, some wearing masks, tried to ram the gates of the presidential palace, according to video of the episode.

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.

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FTC issues guidelines for mobile applications

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Federal Trade Commission has issued a wide-reaching set of new guidelines for makers of mobile platforms and developers of applications for mobile telephones and tablets to safeguard users’ privacy.

The non-binding guidelines, published in a report on Friday, include the recommendation that companies should obtain consumers’ consent before including location tracking in software and applications, consider developing icons to depict the transmission of user data, and consider offering a “Do Not Track” mechanism for smartphone users.

The report also recommended that application developers have an easily accessible privacy policy, obtain consent before collecting and sharing sensitive information and consider participating in self-regulatory programs.

The FTC has been heightening its scrutiny of mobile devices, which are now the primary source of communication and Internet access for many users.

Among the companies who could be affected by the report are firms like Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

(Reporting By Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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Peyton Manning's comeback wins AP award

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Peyton Manning's stunning return from four neck surgeries has netted him The Associated Press 2012 NFL Comeback Player of the Year award.

The four-time league MVP guided the Broncos to the AFC's best record, 13-3, in his first season in Denver. Before sitting out 2011, Manning had never missed a start in his first 13 seasons with Indianapolis.

Manning received 31 1-2 votes Saturday from a nationwide panel of 50 media members who regularly cover the league. He easily beat Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, who got 17 1-2 votes after his comeback from major knee surgery. Peterson came within 9 yards of the NFL rushing record and helped Minnesota go from 3-13 to 10-6 and a wild-card berth.

Kansas City RB Jamaal Charles got one vote.

Manning accepted his award Saturday night at the "2nd Annual NFL Honors" show on CBS saluting the NFL's best players, performances and plays from the 2012 season.

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Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the town in which Mr. Sams died. It was Fayetteville, Ga., not Lafayette, Ga.

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Americans Closest to Retirement Were Hardest Hit by Recession

David Maxwell for The New York Times

Susan Zimmerman, 62, has three part-time jobs.

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Arynita Armstrong, 60, at her home in Willis, Tex. She last worked five years ago. “When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” she says.

In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.

These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.

Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”

New research suggests that they may die sooner, because their health, income security and mental well-being were battered by recession at a crucial time in their lives. A recent study by economists at Wellesley College found that people who lost their jobs in the few years before becoming eligible for Social Security lost up to three years from their life expectancy, largely because they no longer had access to affordable health care.

“If I break my wrist, I lose my house,” said Susan Zimmerman, 62, a freelance writer in Cleveland, of the distress that a medical emergency would wreak upon her finances and her quality of life. None of the three part-time jobs she has cobbled together pay benefits, and she says she is counting the days until she becomes eligible for Medicare.

In the meantime, Ms. Zimmerman has fashioned her own regimen of home remedies — including eating blue cheese instead of taking penicillin and consuming plenty of orange juice, red wine, coffee and whatever else the latest longevity studies recommend — to maintain her health, which she must do if she wants to continue paying the bills.

“I will probably be working until I’m 100,” she said.

As common as that sentiment is, the job market has been especially unkind to older workers.

Unemployment rates for Americans nearing retirement are far lower than those for young people, who are recently out of school, with fewer skills and a shorter work history. But once out of a job, older workers have a much harder time finding another one. Over the last year, the average duration of unemployment for older people was 53 weeks, compared with 19 weeks for teenagers, according to the Labor Department’s jobs report released on Friday.

The lengthy process is partly because older workers are more likely to have been laid off from industries that are downsizing, like manufacturing. Compared with the rest of the population, older people are also more likely to own their own homes and be less mobile than renters, who can move to new job markets.

Older workers are more likely to have a disability of some sort, perhaps limiting the range of jobs that offer realistic choices. They may also be less inclined, at least initially, to take jobs that pay far less than their old positions.

Displaced boomers also believe they are victims of age discrimination, because employers can easily find a young, energetic worker who will accept lower pay and who can potentially stick around for decades rather than a few years.

“When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” said Arynita Armstrong, 60, of Willis, Tex. She has been looking for work for five years since losing her job at a mortgage company. “They’re afraid to hire you, because they think you’re a health risk. You know, you might make their premiums go up. They think it’ll cost more money to invest in training you than it’s worth it because you might retire in five years.

“Not that they say any of this to your face,” she added.

When older workers do find re-employment, the compensation is usually not up to the level of their previous jobs, according to data from the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

In a survey by the center of older workers who were laid off during the recession, just one in six had found another job, and half of that group had accepted pay cuts. Fourteen percent of the re-employed said the pay in their new job was less than half what they earned in their previous job.

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Death Toll in Mexico City Explosion at 33

Ginnette Riquelme for The New York Times

Workers surveyed the damage that resulted from an explosion at the headquarters of a state-owned oil company, Pemex, in Mexico City Friday.

MEXICO CITY — Hundreds of rescue workers ended their search for survivors on Friday at the site of an explosion that tore through an office building of Mexico’s state-owned oil company a day earlier, as the death toll rose to 33. The head of the company said early indications about the cause suggested that it was an accident.

“All lines of investigation are open; we are not going to discount anything,” said Emilio Lozoya Austin, chief executive of the oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. “But what it seems like, from what experts can observe, is that it was an accident.”

Mr. Lozoya, at a news conference Friday morning and in interviews throughout the day, emphasized that the investigation was continuing, and that no clear cause had been found. Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, visiting a hospital where many of the 120 people who were injured by the explosion were being treated, asked the public to avoid speculating on the cause.

Nonetheless, in a country with little trust in its institutions, the pressure on the government to provide details is mounting as reporters and Twitter users ask pointed questions about why officials have not said what exploded or why. Rumors of bombs and of censored Twitter accounts of Pemex employees swirled online Friday, leading many to note that the blast revealed once again that when there is a lack of transparency, the void tends to be filled with imagined horrors.

“We are all into conspiracy theories,” said Gabriel Guerrero, a political analyst in Mexico City. While the government seems to have communicated relatively well so far, regularly updating the death toll, he said, “the real test will come over the next few days and weeks.”

Independent explosives experts said it often takes more than 48 hours to identify the cause of a large blast that, in this case, collapsed several floors and shattered windows across a wide area. Jimmie C. Oxley, a chemistry professor and explosives expert at the University of Rhode Island, said by telephone that while some forensic investigators may have an idea by now of what happened, it often takes more time to come to a conclusion with colleagues.

All of this is made more difficult by the amount of rubble at the site, Professor Oxley said, noting that photographs posted online showed a tangle of concrete, wires and collapsed floors.

Typically, she said, explosions at buildings are caused by one of two things: gas that is suddenly ignited, or a bomb. Bombs tend to create craters and cratered metal that point investigators to a specific location. If, for example, a basement garage was affected at the Pemex building, Professor Oxley said, investigators would look for signs of a car bomb.

“It’s hard to imagine a bomb carried by a person being very large,” she said.

Gas explosions, like the one that killed several hundred people in Guadalajara in 1992, can be harder to identify because there is not necessarily a single ignition point. Also, Professor Oxley said, since the explosion on Thursday occurred on the lower floors of a building (an administration building near the Pemex tower), “it’s important to know if you had the heating system of the building there, or how that was arranged.”

Government officials have said the blast happened in an area near the base of the building where workers checked their timecards. Before news of the explosion emerged, company officials said there was an electricity problem there, but Professor Oxley said electricity alone would lead to a fire, not an explosion, though if gas had been leaking, a small spark could have been enough to set off a colossal blast.

Still, not all investigations lead to answers. Recalling the case of an explosion at a mall in the Philippines that she was consulted on, Professor Oxley said she could not confirm that there were explosives present based on samples from the scene. “I don’t know there ever was a conclusion,” she said.

Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.

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