Petraeus’s Lower C.I.A. Profile Leaves Benghazi Void

WASHINGTON — In 14 months as C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus has shunned the spotlight he once courted as America’s most famous general. His low-profile style has won the loyalty of the White House, easing old tensions with President Obama, and he has overcome some of the skepticism he faced from the agency’s work force, which is always wary of the military brass.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

The low-profile style of David H. Petraeus, right, has won the loyalty of the White House, easing old tensions with President Obama.

Win Mcnamee/Getty Images

C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, right, appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in Washington in January.

But since an attack killed four Americans seven weeks ago in Benghazi, Libya, his deliberately low profile, and the C.I.A.’s penchant for secrecy, have left a void that has been filled by a news media and Congressional furor over whether it could have been prevented. Rather than acknowledge the C.I.A.’s presence in Benghazi, Mr. Petraeus and other agency officials fought a losing battle to keep it secret, even as the events there became a point of contention in the presidential campaign.

Finally, on Thursday, with Mr. Petraeus away on a visit to the Middle East, pressure from critics prompted intelligence officials to give their own account of the chaotic night when two security officers died along with the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and another diplomat. The officials acknowledged for the first time that the security officers, both former members of the Navy SEALs, worked on contract for the C.I.A., which occupied one of the buildings that were attacked.

The Benghazi crisis is the biggest challenge so far in the first civilian job held by Mr. Petraeus, who retired from the Army and dropped the “General” when he went to the C.I.A. He gets mostly high marks from government colleagues and outside experts for his overall performance. But the transition has meant learning a markedly different culture, at an agency famously resistant to outsiders.

“I think he’s a brilliant man, but he’s also a four-star general,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Four-stars are saluted, not questioned. He’s now running an agency where everything is questioned, whether you’re a four-star or a senator. It’s a culture change.”

Mr. Petraeus, who turns 60 next week, has had to learn that C.I.A. officers will not automatically defer to his judgments, as military subordinates often did. “The attitude at the agency is, ‘You may be the director, but I’m the Thailand analyst,’ ” said one C.I.A. veteran.

Long a media star as the most prominent military leader of his generation, Mr. Petraeus abruptly abandoned that style at the C.I.A. Operating amid widespread complaints about leaks of classified information, he has stopped giving interviews, speaks to Congress in closed sessions and travels the globe to consult with foreign spy services with little news media notice.

“He thinks he has to be very discreet and let others in the government do the talking,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar who is a friend of Mr. Petraeus’s and a member of the C.I.A.’s advisory board.

Mr. Petraeus’s no-news, no-nonsense style stands out especially starkly against that of his effusive predecessor, Leon E. Panetta, who is now the defense secretary.

Mr. Panetta, a gregarious politician by profession, was unusually open with Congress and sometimes with the public — to a fault, some might say, when he spoke candidly after leaving the C.I.A. about a Pakistani doctor’s role in helping hunt for Osama bin Laden, or about the agency’s drone operations.

Mr. Petraeus’s discretion and relentless work ethic have had a positive side for him: old tensions with Mr. Obama, which grew out of differing views on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, appear to be gone. Mr. Petraeus is at the White House several times a week, attending National Security Council sessions and meeting weekly with James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, and Thomas E. Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser. Mr. Donilon said recently that the C.I.A. director “has done an exceptional job,” bringing “deep experience, intellectual rigor and enthusiasm” to his work.

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Bits Blog: Data Shows Twitter Posts That Resonate With Electorate

In Florida, voters responded most when Mitt Romney posted about education and when President Obama did the same about foreign affairs. In Ohio, Mr. Obama’s posted about gay rights, more so than any other topic, held the most traction. For Mr. Romney, it was his posts about the economy.

Twitter introduced an interactive map on Thursday showing which of the candidates’ tweets drove the most engagement — measured by the number of times the tweet was reposted or favorited — on Twitter at the national and state levels.

Nationwide, Mr. Obama’s most popular post was, “No family should have to set aside a college acceptance letter because they don’t have the money.” His second most popular post was actually a quote from Vice President Biden about women’s rights:  “VP Biden: I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people, women, that they can’t control their bodies.” Interestingly, at the state level, that post resonated most with voters in Wyoming, followed by Iowa, South Dakota and West Virginia — states where women’s rights are not considered the pivotal issue.

Mr. Romney’s most popular post was this remark on Sept. 11th: “On this most somber day, America is united under God in its quest for peace and freedom at home and across the world.” Second most popular was a comment about wealth distribution: “I am running for president to get us creating wealth again – not to redistribute it.”

In swing states, Twitter’s map tells an interesting, and sometimes counter intuitive story. According to the latest polls, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado and Florida are still toss-ups.

In the last presidential election, the President won Virginia by seven percentage points. This year, the race is expected to be much closer. There, voters’ response was highest when the candidates posted about issues related to retirement.

The same was true for Wisconsin. Democrats carried the state in the last six presidential elections, but the addition of one of their own, Representative Paul D. Ryan, to Mr. Romney’s ticket has kept the race tight. There, retirement was also the issue that seemed to have the most traction on Twitter.

In Iowa, where six electoral votes are up for grabs, voters were most engaged when Mr. Obama posted about topics related to energy and the environment and when Romney posted about health care.

Nevada voters responded most to Obama’s comments on taxes. Mr. Obama’s most popular post in that state was “1,240,000 middle-class families in Nevada could face a tax increase under Mitt Romney.” Mr. Romney’s posts about education drove the highest level of engagement. “With over 60k jobs lost & the highest unemployment rate in the nation, Nevadans aren’t better off under @BarackObama,” was Mr. Romney’s most popular post.

In Colorado, women’s issues have taken center stage after women proved crucial to two Democratic victories in the 2010 races for Senate and governor. But according to Twitter’s data, Colorado voters responded in the largest numbers when Mr. Obama posted about taxes. For Mr. Romney, it was his remarks about terrorism.

If, as in the 2004 election, the race comes down to Florida, then the candidates may do well to defy conventional wisdom that retirement is all Florida voters care about. Within Florida, Mr. Romney’s posts about retirement did not resonate as well as those about education and foreign affairs. Likewise, Mr. Obama’s posts about topics relevant to retirement had less traction than his those about terrorism and foreign affairs.

Despite the perception that Twitter is just a place for East and West coasters to talk to each other, Twitter’s map shows a surprising level of engagement in states like Wyoming, Utah, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma. The opposite proved true for New Hampshire and Vermont, where Twitter noted it was not able to collect enough data to draw conclusions.

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Second Illness Infects Meningitis Sufferers

Just when they might have thought they were in the clear, people recovering from meningitis in an outbreak caused by a contaminated steroid drug have been struck by a second illness.

The new problem, called an epidural abscess, is an infection near the spine at the site where the drug — contaminated by a fungus — was injected to treat back or neck pain. The abscesses are a localized infection, different from meningitis, which affects the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. But in some cases, an untreated abscess can cause meningitis. The abscesses have formed even while patients were taking powerful antifungal medicines, putting them back in the hospital for more treatment, often with surgery.

The problem has just begun to emerge, so far mostly in Michigan, which has had more people sickened by the drug — 112 out of 404 nationwide — than any other state.

“We’re hearing about it in Michigan and other locations as well,” said Dr. Tom M. Chiller, the deputy chief of the mycotic diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We don’t have a good handle on how many people are coming back.”

He added, “We are just learning about this and trying to assess how best to manage these patients. They’re very complicated.”

In the last few days, about a third of the 53 patients treated for meningitis at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., have returned with abscesses, said Dr. Lakshmi K. Halasyamani, the chief medical officer.

“This is a significant shift in the presentation of this fungal infection, and quite concerning,” she said. “An epidural abscess is very serious. It’s not something we expected.”

She and other experts said they were especially puzzled that the infections could occur even though patients were taking drugs that, at least in tests, appeared to work against the fungus causing the infection, a type of black mold called Exserohilum.

The main symptom is severe pain near the injection site. But the abscesses are internal, with no visible signs on the skin, so it takes an M.R.I. scan to make the diagnosis. Some patients have more than one abscess. In some cases, the infection can be drained or cleaned out by a neurosurgeon.

But sometimes fungal strands and abnormal tissue are wrapped around nerves and cannot be surgically removed, said Dr. Carol A. Kauffman, an expert on fungal diseases at the University of Michigan. In such cases, all doctors can do is give a combination of antifungal drugs and hope for the best. They have very little experience with this type of infection.

Some patients have had epidural abscesses without meningitis; St. Joseph Mercy Hospital has had 34 such cases.

A spokesman for the health department in Tennessee, which has had 78 meningitis cases, said that a few cases of epidural abscess had also occurred there, and that the state was trying to assess the extent of the problem.

Dr. Chiller said doctors were also reporting that some patients exposed to the tainted drug had arachnoiditis, a nerve inflammation near the spine that can cause intense pain, bladder problems and numbness.

“Unfortunately, we know from the rare cases of fungal meningitis that occur, that you can have complicated courses for this disease, and it requires prolonged therapy and can have some devastating consequences,” he said.

The meningitis outbreak, first recognized in late September, is one of the worst public health disasters ever caused by a contaminated drug. So far, 29 people have died, often from strokes caused by the infection. The case count is continuing to rise. The drug was a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. Three contaminated lots of the drug, more than 17,000 vials, were shipped around the country, and about 14,000 people were injected with the drug, mostly for neck and back pain. But some received injections for arthritic joints and have developed joint infections.

Inspections of the compounding center have revealed extensive contamination. It has been shut down, as has another Massachusetts company, Ameridose, with some of the same owners. Both companies have had their products recalled.

Compounding pharmacies, which mix their own drugs, have had little regulation from either states or the federal government, and several others have been shut down recently after inspections found sanitation problems.

Read More..

Second Illness Infects Meningitis Sufferers

Just when they might have thought they were in the clear, people recovering from meningitis in an outbreak caused by a contaminated steroid drug have been struck by a second illness.

The new problem, called an epidural abscess, is an infection near the spine at the site where the drug — contaminated by a fungus — was injected to treat back or neck pain. The abscesses are a localized infection, different from meningitis, which affects the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. But in some cases, an untreated abscess can cause meningitis. The abscesses have formed even while patients were taking powerful antifungal medicines, putting them back in the hospital for more treatment, often with surgery.

The problem has just begun to emerge, so far mostly in Michigan, which has had more people sickened by the drug — 112 out of 404 nationwide — than any other state.

“We’re hearing about it in Michigan and other locations as well,” said Dr. Tom M. Chiller, the deputy chief of the mycotic diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We don’t have a good handle on how many people are coming back.”

He added, “We are just learning about this and trying to assess how best to manage these patients. They’re very complicated.”

In the last few days, about a third of the 53 patients treated for meningitis at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., have returned with abscesses, said Dr. Lakshmi K. Halasyamani, the chief medical officer.

“This is a significant shift in the presentation of this fungal infection, and quite concerning,” she said. “An epidural abscess is very serious. It’s not something we expected.”

She and other experts said they were especially puzzled that the infections could occur even though patients were taking drugs that, at least in tests, appeared to work against the fungus causing the infection, a type of black mold called Exserohilum.

The main symptom is severe pain near the injection site. But the abscesses are internal, with no visible signs on the skin, so it takes an M.R.I. scan to make the diagnosis. Some patients have more than one abscess. In some cases, the infection can be drained or cleaned out by a neurosurgeon.

But sometimes fungal strands and abnormal tissue are wrapped around nerves and cannot be surgically removed, said Dr. Carol A. Kauffman, an expert on fungal diseases at the University of Michigan. In such cases, all doctors can do is give a combination of antifungal drugs and hope for the best. They have very little experience with this type of infection.

Some patients have had epidural abscesses without meningitis; St. Joseph Mercy Hospital has had 34 such cases.

A spokesman for the health department in Tennessee, which has had 78 meningitis cases, said that a few cases of epidural abscess had also occurred there, and that the state was trying to assess the extent of the problem.

Dr. Chiller said doctors were also reporting that some patients exposed to the tainted drug had arachnoiditis, a nerve inflammation near the spine that can cause intense pain, bladder problems and numbness.

“Unfortunately, we know from the rare cases of fungal meningitis that occur, that you can have complicated courses for this disease, and it requires prolonged therapy and can have some devastating consequences,” he said.

The meningitis outbreak, first recognized in late September, is one of the worst public health disasters ever caused by a contaminated drug. So far, 29 people have died, often from strokes caused by the infection. The case count is continuing to rise. The drug was a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. Three contaminated lots of the drug, more than 17,000 vials, were shipped around the country, and about 14,000 people were injected with the drug, mostly for neck and back pain. But some received injections for arthritic joints and have developed joint infections.

Inspections of the compounding center have revealed extensive contamination. It has been shut down, as has another Massachusetts company, Ameridose, with some of the same owners. Both companies have had their products recalled.

Compounding pharmacies, which mix their own drugs, have had little regulation from either states or the federal government, and several others have been shut down recently after inspections found sanitation problems.

Read More..

Guinea-Bissau, After Coup, Is Drug-Trafficking Haven

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Guinea-Bissau soldiers patrolled a street in the capital, Bissau, on Oct. 21 after dissident soldiers raided an army barracks in an apparent attempt to topple the military junta.

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau — When the army ousted the president here just months before his term was to expire, a thirst for power by the officer corps did not fully explain the offensive. But a sizable increase in drug trafficking in this troubled country since the military took over has raised suspicions that the president’s sudden removal was what amounted to a cocaine coup.

The military brass here has long been associated with drug trafficking, but the coup last spring means soldiers now control the drug racket and the country itself, turning Guinea-Bissau in the eyes of some international counternarcotics experts into a nation where illegal drugs are sanctioned at the top.

“They are probably the worst narco-state that’s out there on the continent,” said a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his work in the region. “They are a major problem.”

Since the April 12 coup, more small twin-engine planes than ever are making the 1,600-mile Atlantic crossing from Latin America to the edge of Africa’s western bulge, landing in Guinea-Bissau’s fields, uninhabited islands and remote estuaries. There they unload their cargos of cocaine for transshipment north, experts say.

The fact that the army has put in place a figurehead government and that military officers continue to call the shots behind the scenes only intensifies the problem.

The political instability continued as soldiers attacked an army barracks on Oct. 21, apparently in an attempt to topple the government. A dissident army captain was arrested on an offshore island on Oct. 27 and accused of being the organizer of the countercoup attempt. Two critics of the government were also assaulted and then left outside the capital.

From April to July there were at least 20 landings in Guinea-Bissau of small planes that United Nations officials suspected were drug flights — traffic that could represent more than half the estimated annual cocaine volume for the region. The planes need to carry a one-and-a-half-ton cargo to make the trans-Atlantic trip viable, officials say. Europe, already the destination for about 50 tons of cocaine annually from West Africa, United Nations officials say, could be in for a far greater flood.

Was the military coup itself a diversion for drug trafficking? Some experts point to signs that as the armed forces were seizing the presidency, taking over radio stations and arresting government officials, there was a flurry of drug activity on one of the islands of the Bijagós Archipelago, what amounted to a three-day offloading of suspicious sacks.

That surreptitious activity appears to have been simply a prelude.

“There has clearly been an increase in Guinea-Bissau in the last several months,” said Pierre Lapaque, head of the regional United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for West and Central Africa. “We are seeing more and more drugs regularly arriving in this country.”

Mr. Lapaque called the trafficking in Guinea-Bissau “a major worry” and an “open sore,” and, like others, suggested that it was no coincidence that trafficking had spiked since the coup.

Joaquin Gonzalez-Ducay, the European Union ambassador in Bissau, said: “As a country it is controlled by those who formed the coup d’état. They can do what they want to do. Now they have free rein.”

The senior D.E.A. official said, “People at the highest levels of the military are involved in the facilitation” of trafficking, and added: “In other African countries government officials are part of the problem. In Guinea-Bissau, it is the government itself that is the problem.”

United Nations officials agree. “The coup was perpetrated by people totally embedded in the drugs business,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the political environment here.

The country’s former prosecutor general, Octávio Inocêncio Alves, said, “A lot of the traffickers have direct relationships with the military.”

The civilian government and the military leadership that sits watchfully in its headquarters in an old Portuguese fort at the other end of town reject the United Nations drug accusations.

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Sony, Sharp and Panasonic Report Significant Losses

TOKYO — After years of bets gone wrong and lost opportunities, three of Japan’s consumer electronics giants are showing some signs of faltering.

In the most dire warning, Sharp forecast on Thursday a 450 billion yen ($5.6 billion) full-year loss and warned that it had “material doubts” about its ability to survive.

On the same day, Panasonic’s shares lost a fifth of their value in Tokyo after the company forecast a 765 billion yen ($9.6 billion) annual net loss from write-downs in its solar-power, battery and mobile handset businesses.

And Sony, perhaps the best positioned of the companies, posted a net loss of 15.5 billion yen ($194 million) for the quarter on Thursday and warned of falling sales in almost every product it sells.

“We have a lot of great technology which we want to tap to revive and generate profit, but the company does not have that vitality,” Takashi Okuda, Sharp’s chief executive, told reporters after the company posted a net loss of 249 billion yen ($3.1 billion) for the three months to September. The loss was far larger than expected.

In a statement, the company said it had a “serious negative operating cash flow” which raised “serious doubts” about its ability to continue as a going concern, and said it was taking steps, including pay cuts, voluntary redundancies and asset sales, to generate cash flow.

While Sharp is in the most serious trouble, the three companies’ woes are similar at the core.

All three make good quality, even cutting-edge products — but so do their overseas competitors, usually at lower prices. None of the three have managed to generate the brand pizazz of Apple, or the marketing muscle of Samsung Electronics. In addition, a stubbornly strong yen continues to sap their competitiveness, while Japan’s territorial dispute with China has hurt sales there.

The scale of the losses is the result of specific missteps, from huge investments in the wrong technologies to a reluctance to exit loss-making businesses. A manufacturing bubble here in the mid-2000s — fed partly by an unusually weak currency and Americans flush with cash from rising home prices — masked continued weaknesses in their business models and spurred the companies to take big bets that backfired.

When the global financial crisis brought that boom to an end in 2008, the three were saddled with excess capacity, bloated work forces and investments that they could hardly hope to recoup. And their refusal to make a big enough departure from the ways of their glory years is now making a comeback difficult.

“Many investors are longing for reforms that will let all of the pus out,” Yuji Fujimori, technology analyst at Barclays Capital in Tokyo, said in a recent note to clients.

Sharp’s stumble, in many ways, has been the most humbling. It was the biggest beneficiary of the manufacturing bubble: from 2000 to 2007, its profits jumped 150 percent. Sharp’s high-end Aquos liquid-crystal display televisions — which it manufactured at state-of-the-art factories in Kameyama, in western Japan — were a runaway hit in the nascent flat-panel market. The spinoff Aquos cellphone topped Japanese sales rankings. Sharp’s solar batteries also sold briskly, helped by a bubble in green technologies.

The company’s success during this period seemed to validate Japan’s penchant for manufacturing their most important products in-house. In advertisements, Sharp showed off its cutting-edge factories.

But even before the financial crisis, analysts were warning of an impending crash in prices of flat-panel televisions, which were fast becoming commodities that cheap upstarts could emulate. In 2008, the iPhone made its debut in Japan, the end of an era for Japanese-style cellphones. Chinese upstarts were starting to flood global markets with cheap solar panels and batteries. In consumer electronics, outsourced manufacturing became the norm.

Still, Sharp did not change course. It built a new factory in Sakai, Japan, which could make 6 million large LCD panels a year — more than the size of the global market at the time. Sharp missed the smartphone wave, and its cellphone sales in Japan halved from 2007 to 2012. And in late 2011, the solar bubble burst, driving many solar power companies into bankruptcy and Sharp’s solar batteries business into the red. The unit has not turned a profit since.

Now, the Kameyama factories no longer make televisions but panels for Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Panasonic, for its part, also bet heavily on plasma televisions in 2003, pouring some 600 billion yen into a series of factories in Amagasaki, not far from Sharp’s own plant. It also bet on solar panels and rechargeable batteries, buying Sanyo in 2009.

But with plasma now a fading technology and solar power struggling, Panasonic is saddled with major losses. Last year, it announced that a factory in Amagasaki was closing, less than two years after it opened.

Kazuhiro Tsuga, who took the helm at Panasonic this year, was blunt in describing his company’s predicament. “We are among the losers in consumer electronics," he told a news conference on Wednesday. He now promises to shift the company away from money-losing televisions and gadgets.

Of the three, Sony now seems the most prescient. Its executives have preached the power of networks and content since the 1990s, building up a vast catalog of music and movies to lure users to their devices. Sony has also moved to slash costs and jobs and sell off some unprofitable businesses, refocusing the company on digital cameras and imaging technology, video games and mobile devices. This quarter, the sale of its chemical products business, which made materials for LCDs and optical discs, helped alleviate losses. Sony is now making a push into the medical field with an investment in the endoscope maker Olympus.

Internal squabbling has quashed its efforts to marry its hardware and software, however, and it refuses to abandon one of its biggest money-losers, its television business, which has bled red ink for eight consecutive years.

“We intend to hunker down and build a profitable business,” Masaru Kato, Sony’s chief financial officer, told a news conference Thursday. “And where we can, we will chase new markets.”

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Safety of Monster Energy Drinks Questioned

In the latest action aimed at the energy drink industry, the top lawyer for the city of San Francisco has asked one major producer to provide evidence that supports the advertising and marketing claims it made to adolescents for its highly caffeinated drinks.

In a letter sent late Wednesday to Monster Beverage, the city attorney of San Francisco, Dennis J. Herrera, told the company to substantiate its claim that large daily quantities of Monster Energy were safe for adolescents and adults.

Mr. Herrera also told Monster, a publicly traded company, to produce support for its promotional slogans, like one that claims that consumers of Monster Energy “can never get too much of a good thing!”

In taking the action, Mr. Herrera cited a section of a California state law that makes it illegal for a company to make false or misleading advertising claims that purport to be based on fact or clinical data.

In a statement, Monster Beverage said: “The company can document the legal basis by which its products are properly labeled dietary supplements, and third party scientific documentation substantiates their safety.”

The energy drink industry and Monster Beverage in particular has come under intensifying scrutiny since last week after disclosures that the Food and Drug Administration had received reports that the deaths of five people since 2009 may be linked to Monster Energy drinks.

The company has repeatedly disputed any suggestion that its drinks pose a risk. The F.D.A., which said it was looking into the episodes, added that the receipt of a death or injury filing associated with a product did not mean that it was responsible.

Last week, two Democratic lawmakers, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, sent the latest of several letters to the F.D.A. commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, urging the agency to take action on energy drinks.

The agency has taken the stance that there is insufficient data to take additional action on energy drinks. Both Democratic lawmakers have been critical of that position.

The New York State attorney general is investigating the practices of several producers.

In his letter Wednesday, Mr. Herrera asserted that Monster Beverage, through its advertising and marketing claims, had encouraged “unsafe and irresponsible consumption of its products.”

Monster Energy drinks do not disclose caffeine levels. But product labels advise against drinking more than three of the 16-ounce cans or two of the 24-ounce cans daily, amounts that each contain a total of 480 milligrams of caffeine.

The F.D.A. has suggested that 400 milligrams of caffeine a day from all sources is safe for adults, although many medical experts believe that adults can safely consume more. There is far less data about safe caffeine levels for teenagers.

Read More..

Safety of Monster Energy Drinks Questioned

In the latest action aimed at the energy drink industry, the top lawyer for the city of San Francisco has asked one major producer to provide evidence that supports the advertising and marketing claims it made to adolescents for its highly caffeinated drinks.

In a letter sent late Wednesday to Monster Beverage, the city attorney of San Francisco, Dennis J. Herrera, told the company to substantiate its claim that large daily quantities of Monster Energy were safe for adolescents and adults.

Mr. Herrera also told Monster, a publicly traded company, to produce support for its promotional slogans, like one that claims that consumers of Monster Energy “can never get too much of a good thing!”

In taking the action, Mr. Herrera cited a section of a California state law that makes it illegal for a company to make false or misleading advertising claims that purport to be based on fact or clinical data.

In a statement, Monster Beverage said: “The company can document the legal basis by which its products are properly labeled dietary supplements, and third party scientific documentation substantiates their safety.”

The energy drink industry and Monster Beverage in particular has come under intensifying scrutiny since last week after disclosures that the Food and Drug Administration had received reports that the deaths of five people since 2009 may be linked to Monster Energy drinks.

The company has repeatedly disputed any suggestion that its drinks pose a risk. The F.D.A., which said it was looking into the episodes, added that the receipt of a death or injury filing associated with a product did not mean that it was responsible.

Last week, two Democratic lawmakers, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, sent the latest of several letters to the F.D.A. commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, urging the agency to take action on energy drinks.

The agency has taken the stance that there is insufficient data to take additional action on energy drinks. Both Democratic lawmakers have been critical of that position.

The New York State attorney general is investigating the practices of several producers.

In his letter Wednesday, Mr. Herrera asserted that Monster Beverage, through its advertising and marketing claims, had encouraged “unsafe and irresponsible consumption of its products.”

Monster Energy drinks do not disclose caffeine levels. But product labels advise against drinking more than three of the 16-ounce cans or two of the 24-ounce cans daily, amounts that each contain a total of 480 milligrams of caffeine.

The F.D.A. has suggested that 400 milligrams of caffeine a day from all sources is safe for adults, although many medical experts believe that adults can safely consume more. There is far less data about safe caffeine levels for teenagers.

Read More..

Modest Jobs Growth in Final Report Before Election

The economy may have some more underlying strength than earlier believed, according to the final job market report released before Tuesday’s presidential election.

The nation’s employers added 171,000 positions in October, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and more jobs than initially estimated in both August and September. Hiring was broad-based, with just about every industry except state government adding at least a handful of jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, but for a good reason: more workers joined the labor force and so officially counted as unemployed.

None of this makes for a game-changer in the presidential race, analysts said. But it appeared to provide some relief for President Obama, whose campaign could have been sideswiped by bad news from the volatile monthly jobs report.

With the latest numbers, the economy finally shows a net gain of jobs under his presidency; his record had previously been weighed down by huge layoffs in his first year in office.

The report also allayed widespread suspicion that September’s plunge in the unemployment rate — to below 8 percent for the first time since the month he took office — might have been a one-month statistical fluke.

“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down significantly and rapidly.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement that the jobs report was evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” he said. He also noted that October’s unemployment rate of 7.9 percent was higher than the 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office in January 2009.

Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this year, job growth could speed up further.

“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this year.”

In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said. Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have been shedding jobs most months over the last three years.

One of the lowlights of the report was in hourly wages, which remained flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several months.

“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the wrong sort of jobs.”

A report from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues, found that while the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-income jobs, the majority of the jobs created since then have been lower-wage ones.

There have now been 25 consecutive months of jobs gains in the United States, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb the increase in the population. A queue of about 12 million unemployed people remain waiting for work, about two out of five of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part time but really want full-time jobs.

“I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”

Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal extensions abruptly expire. He said he still had some savings to fall back on, but many workers do not.

Labor advocates and many economists have been urging Congress to renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff” during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended benefits could disrupt what modest forward momentum the economy currently has.

“Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when people thinking about the holiday season — will have a significant impact on not just those individuals and their families but the economy as a whole.”

Friday’s jobs report was unlikely to affect policy from the Federal Reserve, which has pledged open-ended stimulus until the job market improves “substantially.”

“The Fed desires both a substantial and sustainable improvement in labor market conditions and is likely to read recent payroll growth as a positive step in the right direction, but just one step in a longer journey,” said Michael Gapen, director of United States research and global asset allocation at Barclays Capital.

The jobs snapshot for October was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture work disruptions across the East Coast caused by Hurricane Sandy. Economists expect that businesses and employment will resume their normal activity by the next jobs survey, in mid-November, and that some industries are likely to show an increase in hiring because of the storm.

“We had a lot of lost hours worked and production stuff still delayed, but much of that will be offsets by hiring of emergency workers, government workers and construction, to do all that emergency fixing,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial.

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Bloomberg Endorses Obama, Saying Hurricane Sandy Affected Decision

In a surprise announcement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Thursday that Hurricane Sandy had reshaped his thinking about the presidential campaign and that as a result he was endorsing President Obama.

Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent in his third term leading New York City, has been sharply critical of both Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and Mitt Romney, the president’s Republican rival, saying that both men have failed to candidly confront the problems afflicting the nation. But he said he had decided over the past several days that Mr. Obama was the best candidate to tackle the global climate change that the mayor believes contributed to the violent storm, which took the lives of at least 38 New Yorkers and caused billions of dollars in damage.

“The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast — in lost lives, lost homes and lost business — brought the stakes of next Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote in an op-ed article for Bloomberg View.

“Our climate is changing,” he wrote. “And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be — given the devastation it is wreaking — should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s announcement is another indication that Hurricane Sandy has influenced the presidential campaign. The storm, and the destruction it left in its wake, has dominated news coverage, transfixing the nation and prompting the candidates to halt their campaigning briefly.

More than that, it appears to have given a new level of urgency to a central issue in the presidential campaign: the appropriate size and role of government.

As the Federal Emergency Management Agency began undertaking relief efforts across the Northeast, Mr. Romney found himself in the tough position of having to clarify a statement he made last year in which he appeared to back giving the states a larger share of the federal government’s role in disaster response.

But Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement was largely unexpected. For months, the Obama and Romney campaigns have sought the mayor’s endorsement, in large part because they believe he could influence independent voters around the country.

Mr. Bloomberg has steadfastly withheld his support, largely because he had grown frustrated with the tone and substance of the presidential campaign – recently deriding as “gibberish” the answers that Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney gave during a debate to a question about an assault weapons ban. He has expressed disappointment with Mr. Obama’s performance over the past few years, and concern about what he has described as Mr. Romney’s shifts in views over time.

In announcing his endorsement, Mr. Bloomberg listed the various steps Mr. Obama had taken over the last four years to confront the issue of climate change, including pushing regulations that seek to curtail emissions from cars and power plants. But the mayor cited other reasons for endorsing Mr. Obama, including the president’s support for abortion rights and for same-sex couples, two high-priority issues for the mayor.

At the same time, Mr. Bloomberg said he might have endorsed Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, except for the fact that the Republican had abandoned positions he once publicly held.

“In the past he has taken sensible positions on immigration, illegal guns, abortion rights and health care – but he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the very health care model he signed into law in Massachusetts,” the mayor said of Mr. Romney.

Mr. Bloomberg did not endorse a presidential candidate in 2008, when Mr. Obama ran against Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

Even in his endorsement, the mayor continued to express criticism of the president. He said that Mr. Obama had fallen short of his 2008 campaign promise to be a problem-solver and consensus builder, noting that he “devoted little time” to creating a coalition of centrist in Washington who could find common ground on important issues like illegal guns, immigration, tax reform and deficit reduction.

“Rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice,” Mr. Bloomberg said of Mr. Obama, “he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive populist agenda focused more on redistributing income than creating it.”

In a statement, Mr. Obama said he was “honored to have Mayor Bloomberg’s endorsement.” The president acknowledged Mr. Bloomberg’s chief concern, saying climate change was “a threat to our children’s future, and we owe it to them to do something about it.”

“While we may not agree on every issue,” the president added, “Mayor Bloomberg and I agree on the most important issues of our time.”

And, alluding to the damage from the hurricane, Mr. Obama said: “He has my continued commitment that this country will stand by New York in its time of need. And New Yorkers have my word that we will recover, we will rebuild, and we will come back stronger.”

The endorsement is the latest effort by Mr. Bloomberg to affect the national political debate as he nears the twilight of his tenure in City Hall.

Last month, the mayor announced that he was creating his own “super PAC” to support candidates from either party, as well as independents, who he believed are devoted to his brand of nonideological problem solving, and who supported same-sex marriage, tougher gun laws or school reform. A billionaire, Mr. Bloomberg said he would spend from $10 million to $15 million of his money in highly competitive state, local and Congressional races.

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State of the Art: Presenting the Nook HD, iPad Mini and Windows Phone 8 - Review

Hollywood studios try to avoid opening big movies on the same weekend, to avoid diluting the buzz and the press coverage. “Oh, no — we can’t open that day,” one might say. “ ‘Titanic II: The Return’ is opening that weekend.”

That’s usually the way it works with the tech companies, too, especially as the holiday shopping season begins.

This year, though, a barrage of huge tech announcements all landed within about a week. Windows 8. Microsoft Surface. The iPad Mini. Google Chromebook. The Barnes & Noble Nook HD. Windows Phone 8. A 10-inch Samsung tablet and a new Google phone.

All right, tech industry. You want splintered news coverage? You got it. You get to share this column: one-third of a column each for the three big touch-screen headlines of the week. Meet the iPad Mini, Nook HD and Windows Phone 8.

The iPad Mini

The rumors were true: Apple now has a smaller iPad.

The iPad Mini is half the weight of the big iPad (0.7 pounds versus 1.4), thinner (. 28 inches versus .37), shorter (7.9 inches versus 9.5) and narrower (5.3 inches versus 7.3). Those specs add up to one towering meta-change: you can comfortably hold this iPad in one hand. It’s still too wide for a blazer pocket, alas, but it’s certainly purse-size and overcoat pocketable.

It’s available in white-and-silver and black-on-black, both with metal backs, both gorgeous.

Apple’s masterstroke was keeping the screen shape and resolution the same as on the iPad 2 (1,024 by 768 pixels). As a result, the Mini can run all 275,000 existing iPad apps unmodified, plus 500,000 more iPhone apps. The text and graphics are a little smaller, but perfectly usable.

Sadly, the Mini doesn’t gain Apple’s supercrisp Retina display. Nobody’s going to complain about the sharpness — it packs in 163 pixels per inch (ppi) — but it’s not the same jaw-dropping resolution as the big iPad (264 ppi). Gotta hold something back for next year’s model, right?

You pay $330 for the base model (16 gigabytes of storage, Wi-Fi connections). Prices run all the way up to $660 for four times the storage and the option to go online over the cell network.

By pricing the Mini so high, Apple allows the $200 class of seven-inch Android tablets and readers to live (Google Nexus, Kindle Fire HD, Nook HD). Those tablets also, by the way, have high-definition screens (1,280 by 800 pixels), which the Mini doesn’t.

But the iPad Mini is a far classier, more attractive, thinner machine. It has two cameras instead of one. Its fit and finish are far more refined. And above all, it offers that colossal app catalog, which Android tablet owners can only dream about.

Over all, the Mini gives you all the iPad goodness in a more manageable size, and it’s awesome. You could argue that the iPad Mini is what the iPad always wanted to be.

Barnes & Noble Nook HD

The redesign of this $200 e-book reader/video player focuses on the three things that matter most in a hand-held e-book reader: weight, size and screen clarity.

In those ways, the Nook HD trounces its nemeses, Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD and Google’s Nexus 7. The Nook is lighter (11.1 ounces, versus 12 on the Nexus and 13.9 on the Kindle) and noticeably narrower, despite the same-size screen, because it has a far slimmer bezel. You can wrap your hand around its back, even if you’re dainty of hand.

And the screen is much sharper: 1,440 by 900 pixels (versus 1,280 by 800). At 243 dots ppi, the Nook’s screen comes dangerously close to the iPad Retina’s 264 ppi. Wow, is this screen sharp. Movies, books and magazines pop.

Whites are so white on this screen, it could be a Clorox commercial; the Nexus and Kindle screens look yellowish in comparison. (A 9-inch, $270 version, the Nook HD+, is also available.)

The software continues to improve. You can now create up to six accounts, one for each family member, each listing different books and movies. (It doesn’t remember where each person stopped reading a given book, but B&N says that’s coming soon.)

The base-model, $200 Nook comes with only 8 gigabytes of storage — half as much as the Kindle; on the other hand, it has a memory-card slot, so it’s simple and cheap to expand. The Nook includes a wall charger (it can’t charge from a USB jack), which the Kindle doesn’t. And the Nook doesn’t display ads, as the $200 Kindle does.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 30, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this column misstated the number of accounts a user can create on the Barnes & Noble Nook HD. It is six, not five. An earlier version also published in error a picture of the Barnes & Nobel Nook ND+, rather than the Nook HD.

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British Medical Journal to Require Detailed Clinical Trial Data

The British Medical Journal has announced that, beginning in January, it will no longer publish the results of clinical trials unless drug companies and researchers agree to provide detailed study data on request.

The decision by the prominent journal is meant to prod pharmaceutical companies to open up the vast quantities of data they collect in researching new drugs, very little of which is ever made public. Critics say that when results are published in medical journals, they often present a drug in the best possible light and do not permit independent researchers to vet the data.

Dr. Fiona Godlee, editor of The British Medical Journal, said in an interview Wednesday that she hoped other major journals would follow suit.

“We expect that eventually this will become the norm,” Ms. Godlee said.

Peter Doshi, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who has publicly tussled with the drug maker Roche to release more data on the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu, applauded the announcement. “I think that’s a very powerful and important step,” he said.

Dr. Godlee said that the details of the policy were still being determined, but that any author wishing to be published in the journal would have to promise to release patient-level trial data to researchers who made a “reasonable request.” She said the journal would publicize instances in which requests were rejected.

Dr. Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, said there were many ways to address the issue, and he believed that the industry wanted to “get this right.” He pointed to a recent announcement by the drug maker GlaxoSmithKline that it would make detailed data available.

A spokeswoman for The New England Journal of Medicine said the journal did not comment on the policies of other publications.

In a statement, Matthew Bennett, senior vice president of PhRMA, a pharmaceutical industry trade group, said that the industry was committed to transparency and that members already submitted information about all clinical trials to a federal Web site, which includes basic information about the studies but not patient-level data.

He said the group had concerns about releasing such detailed data, saying it “could not only lead to misinterpretation of the risks and benefits of medicines, and potentially interfere with patient confidentiality, but would also deter future medical innovation if would-be competitors could access confidential commercial information.”

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