Marxist Group Claims Attack on Embassy in Turkey

ISTANBUL — In a statement that called the United States “the murderer of the peoples of the world,” a Marxist group, with a history of political violence in Turkey, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at the American Embassy in Ankara.

The statement, which also denounced American foreign policy, was reportedly released by the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party, and a translation was distributed by the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors the communications of extremist groups. The message, which was released on a Web site that has previously carried statements from the group, condemned Turkey’s policy of supporting Syria’s rebels against the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The statement included details that were similar to those released so far by the Turkish authorities, although the group’s message had a different first name for the bomber than the one given by Turkish officials and reported in the local news media.

The Turkish authorities said Saturday that the man who detonated himself at the American Embassy in Ankara on Friday, killing himself and one other, was a convicted terrorist who had twice attacked government facilities in Istanbul but was released from prison under an amnesty program.

Officials in Ankara said Saturday they were awaiting the results of a DNA test before releasing the bomber’s name, but officials in the Black Sea coastal town of Ordu identified him as Ecevit Sanli, 40, and said he was a registered citizen of their town. Authorities in Ordu said the bomber was identified by relatives through photographs.

The statement by the militant group included two photographs of the bomber (in one, he is holding an assault rifle, and a banner bearing the hammer-and-sickle communist symbol is behind him) that appeared to be the same person seen in photographs published by the news media. The group identified the bomber with the first name “Alisan.”

The attack, coming in the wake of the assault on an American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, by Islamic extremists, raised fears that it was the work of jihadists. That the bomber appears to have ties to a relatively minor Marxist group, which was responsible for political violence in the 1970s, is likely to challenge assumptions about the nature of international terrorism and the risks to American interests abroad. American officials, however, have not confirmed the identity of the attacker, nor a motive, and the United States plans to conduct an investigation.

The statement from officials in Ordu said on Saturday that Mr. Sanli spent four years in prison after being arrested in 1997 for attacking a military hostel and police station in Istanbul. He was then released in 2001 under an amnesty program for inmates with medical conditions, the statement said.

The authorities said Mr. Sanli lobbed a hand grenade during Friday’s attack just before detonating himself, suggesting there were actually two explosions.

As the investigation continues, the authorities are trying to determine whether Mr. Sanli had any collaborators. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Mr. Sanli had fled to Germany after being released from prison, and had returned to Turkey only a few days before the attack.

The group has struck American and western targets in Turkey before, including during the gulf war in the early 1990s, and in its statement Saturday, the group condemned the recent deployment by NATO of Patriot missile batteries in southern Turkey.

In a report published several days before the bombing, Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned that Turkey’s support of Syrian rebels in their fight against the government of Mr. al-Assad, as well as the deployment by NATO of Patriot missile batteries, was rallying Turkey’s extreme left.

“The country’s political landscape still bears vestiges of violent leftist movements from the 1970s, as well as deeply anti-American ultranationalism,” he wrote. Mr. Cagaptay noted that some militant left-wing groups organized protests against the Patriot missile deployment in the southern port city of Iskenderun, where protesters have fired smoke grenades at NATO troops and burned American flags.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated, based on information supplied by the authorities, the year when Ecevit Sanli was released from prison. It was 2001, not 2002.

Read More..

Bits Blog: The Origins of ‘Big Data’: An Etymological Detective Story

Words and phrases are fundamental building blocks of language and culture, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life. And words are how we express ideas, so tracing their origin, development and spread is not merely an academic pursuit but a window into a society’s intellectual evolution.

Digital technology is changing both how words and ideas are created and proliferate, and how they are studied. Just last month, for example, the Library of Congress said its archive of public Twitter messages has reached 170 billion tweets and rising, by about 500 million tweets a day.

The Library of Congress archive, resulting from a deal struck with Twitter in 2010, is not yet open to researchers. But the plan is that it soon will be. In a white paper, the Library said that social media promises to be a rich resource that provides “a fuller picture of today’s cultural norms, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes.”

The new digital forms of communication — Web sites, blog posts, tweets — are often very different from the traditional sources for the study of words, like books, news articles and academic journals.

“It’s almost like oral language instead of edited text,” said Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the “Yale Book of Quotations” and an associate librarian at the Yale Law School. “It’s the way of the future.”

The unruly digital data of the Web is a big ingredient in what is now being called “Big Data.” And as it turns out, the term Big Data seems to be most accurately traced not to references in news or journal archives, but to digital artifacts now posted on technical Web sites, appropriately enough.

To our modest tale of word sleuthing: Last August, I wrote a Sunday column about 2012 being the breakout year for Big Data as an idea, in the marketplace, and as a term.

At the time, I did some reporting on the roots of the term, and I asked Mr. Shapiro of Yale to dig into it. He scoured data bases and came up with several references, including in press releases for product announcements and one intriguing use of the term by a now-famous author (more on that later).

But Mr. Shapiro couldn’t find anything as crisp and definitive as he had done for me years earlier when I asked him to try to find the first reference to the word “software” as a computing term. It was in 1958, in an article in “The American Mathematical Monthly,” written by John Tukey, a Princeton mathematician.

So, without a conclusive answer, I didn’t write about the origins of the term Big Data in that Sunday column. But afterward, I heard from people who had ideas on the subject.

Francis X. Diebold, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, got in touch and even wrote a paper, with the mildly tongue-in-cheek title, “I Coined the Term ‘Big Data’ ” I had not thought of economics as the breeding ground for the term, but it is not unreasonable. Some of the statistical and algorithmic methods now in the Big Data tool kit trace their heritage to economic modeling and Wall Street.

Mr. Diebold staked a claim based on his paper, “Big Data Dynamic Factor Models for Macroeconomic Measurement and Forecasting,” presented in 2000 and published in 2003. The economic-modeling paper was first academic reference found to Big Data, according to research by Marco Pospiech, a Ph. D. candidate at the Technical University of Freiberg in Germany.

By then, I had heard from Douglas Laney, an veteran data analyst at Gartner. His said the father of the term Big Data might well be John Mashey, who was the chief scientist at Silicon Graphics in the 1990s.

I replied to Mr. Diebold that I thought from what I had seen he probably had plenty of competition. And I passed along the e-mail correspondence I had received. Mr. Diebold said thanks much, and added that he had a University of Pennsylvania research librarian looking into it as well.

The term Big Data is so generic that the hunt for its origin was not just an effort to find an early reference to those two words being used together. Instead, the goal was the early use of the term that suggests its present connotation — that is, not just a lot of data, but different types of data handled in new ways.

The credit, it seemed to me, should go to someone who was aware of the computing context. That is why, in my view, a very intriguing reference, discovered by the Yale researcher Mr. Shapiro, does not qualify.

In 1989, Erik Larson, later the author of bestsellers including “The Devil in the White City” and “In The Garden of Beasts,” wrote a piece for Harper’s Magazine, which was reprinted in The Washington Post. The article begins with the author wondering how all that junk mail arrives in his mailbox and moves on to the direct-marketing industry. The article includes these two sentences: “The keepers of big data say they do it for the consumer’s benefit. But data have a way of being used for purposes other than originally intended.”

Prescient indeed. But not, I don’t think, a use of the term that suggests an inkling of the technology we call Big Data today.

Since I first looked at how he used the term, I liked Mr. Mashey as the originator of Big Data. In the 1990s, Silicon Graphics was the giant of computer graphics, used for special-effects in Hollywood and for video surveillance by spy agencies. It was a hot company in the Valley that dealt with new kinds of data, and lots of it.

There are no academic papers to support the attribution to Mr. Mashey. Instead, he gave hundreds of talks to small groups in the middle and late 1990s to explain the concept and, of course, pitch Silicon Graphics products. The case for Mr. Mashey is on the Web sites of technical and professional organizations, like Usenix. There, some of his presentation slides from those talks are posted, including “Big Data and the Next Wave of Infrastress” in 1998.

For me, looking for the origins of Big Data has been a matter of personal curiosity, something to get back to someday and write up on a weekend.

When I called Mr. Mashey recently, he said that Big Data is such a simple term, it’s not much a claim to fame. His role, if any, he said, was to popularize the term within a portion of the high-tech community in the 1990s. “I was using one label for a range of issues, and I wanted the simplest, shortest phrase to convey that the boundaries of computing keep advancing,” said Mr. Mashey, a consultant to tech companies and a trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Diebold kept looking into the subject as well. His follow-up inquiries, he said, proved to be “a journey of increasing humility.” He has written to two papers since the first one.

His most recent paper concludes: “The term Big Data, which spans computer science and statistics/econometrics, probably originated in the lunch-table conversations at Silicon Graphics in the mid-1990s, in which John Mashey figured prominently.”

Tracing the origins of Big Data points to the evolution in the field of etymology, according to Mr. Shapiro. The Yale researcher began his word-hunting nearly 35 years ago, as a student at the Harvard Law School, poring through the library stacks. He was an early user of databases of legal documents, news articles and other documents, in computerized archives.

The Web, Mr. Shapiro said, opens up new linguistic terrain. “What you’re seeing is a marriage of structured databases and novel, less structured materials,” he said. “It can be a powerful tool to see far more.”

Read More..

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.

Read More..

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.

Read More..

The AR-15, the Most Wanted Gun in America

Steve Ruark for The New York Times

At the Pasadena Pawn and Gun Shop in Maryland, customers can join a waiting list to buy an AR-15-style rifle. “It’s kind of fashionable,” Frank Loane Sr., the shop’s proprietor, said of the gun.

THE phone rings again at Pasadena Pawn and Gun, and a familiar question comes down the line: “Got any ARs?”

The answer is no. Pasadena Pawn and Gun, a gun retailer and pawnshop 15 miles south of Baltimore, is pretty much sold out of America’s most wanted gun, the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. Since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., in December, the AR-15, the military-style weapon that the police say was used in the shootings, has been selling fast here and across the nation.

Before Newtown, the rifles sold for about $1,100, on average. Now some retailers charge twice that. At Pasadena Pawn, on the wall behind glass counters of handguns, are three dozen or so AR-15-style rifles. Dangling from nearly every one is a tag that says “Sold.”

“The AR-15, it’s kind of fashionable,” says Frank Loane Sr., the proprietor. His shop has a revolving waiting list for the rifles, and a handful of people are now on it. “The young generation likes them, the assault-looking guns.”

On one level, what is happening here and elsewhere simply reflects supply and demand. The gun industry has spent decades stoking demand for the AR-15 and rifles like it. Now, after the mass killings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, President Obama wants to reduce the supply. He has asked Congress for tougher controls, including a ban on what are commonly called “military-style assault weapons”; the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on gun violence last Wednesday. Many enthusiasts are rushing to buy one of the rifles now, in case the president prevails.

But how did gun makers stir up the demand for these particular guns in the first place? The answer is a story of shrewd advertising, aggressive marketing and savvy manufacturing — a virtual recasting of the place of guns in American life. With speed and skill, firearms manufacturers transformed a niche market for the AR-15 and similar rifles into a fast-growing profit center.

When certain rifles and features were banned under federal law from 1994 to 2004, gun makers tweaked their manufacturing specifications — and introduced more AR-15-style rifles than ever. With ads celebrating the rifle’s military connections, they lured a new and eager audience to weapons that, not long ago, few serious gun enthusiasts would buy.

It might seem remarkable, given the national conversation about gun control, but guns are a relatively small business in the United States. Sales of commercial guns and ammunition — as opposed to those sold to the military and police — amounted to about $5 billion in 2012. That’s less than half of the profits that Apple earned in the final 13 weeks of last year. But despite the headlines, and partly because of them, commercial gun sales are growing. Last year, they were up 16 percent industrywide, according to estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade association. Semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 are responsible for a significant share of that growth.

By now, many Americans probably recognize the AR-15, whether or not they recognize the term. Unlike its military counterpart, the M-16, the civilian AR-15 cannot spray a continuous stream of ammunition with one pull of the trigger. But, as a semiautomatic, it can fire individual bullets as fast as the trigger can be squeezed. By design, it looks and feels like something commandos might carry. That is part of its appeal, and of manufacturers’ pitch.

On one level, marketing military-style weapons to civilians is not so different from pitching professional sports equipment to high-school athletes. Garry James, the senior field editor at Guns & Ammo, says a military pedigree inspires consumer confidence in a gun’s reliability.

“Credibility of performance is what appeals to the firearms enthusiast,” Mr. James wrote in an e-mail.

Yet marketing combat-derived weapons to civilians is a risky business, particularly now. The industry itself has promoted the guns by using battle imagery and words like “assault” and “combat.” Bushmaster Firearms, a leading maker of AR-15-style guns, and whose rifles have been used in several mass shootings, features the Bushmaster ACR, short for adaptive combat rifle, on its Web site. “Forces of opposition, bow down,” part of the site says. All the same, gun makers say customers buy these weapons with peaceable intentions.

The AR-15 isn’t the first military-style weapon to gain a consumer following. After World War II, some people bought surplus German service rifles made by Mauser and repurposed them for hunting and competitive shooting. But the selling of the AR-15 represents the first mass marketing of a military-style semiautomatic rifle made by a number of different gun makers. Its success has led to an increasing militarization of the entire consumer firearms market, says Tom Diaz, a gun industry researcher and gun control advocate.

“It speaks to the fact that there are a lot of young men in the U.S. who will never be in the military but feel that male compulsion to warriorhood,” says Mr. Diaz, the author of “The Last Gun,” a forthcoming book on the industry. “Owning an assault weapon is a passport to that.”

A REMINGTON MODEL 870, a classic pump-action shotgun with an all-steel receiver and walnut stock, sits on a brown gingham tablecloth along with a slice of apple pie, a mug of coffee and an issue of the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

This is how guns were marketed in 1981. That year, the Remington 870 was featured on the back cover of the July issue of Guns & Ammo, in an ad that emphasized quality and durability. “The 870,” the ad read. “Still as American as apple pie.”

The front cover of the same issue showed something very different: a photograph of two gleaming black rifles, with the cover line: “The New Breed of Assault Rifle.”

Read More..

Deadly Firefight on Lebanon’s Border With Syria

BEIRUT, Lebanon — At least three Lebanese Army soldiers were killed on Friday in a shootout as they tried to arrest a resident of a village that has become a hub of refugees and where Syrian rebel fighters often cross the border. Their target was also fatally shot.

There were conflicting reports about the nature of the clash, in which security forces were ambushed as they pursued a wanted man, but the episode played into fears that the accelerating influx of Syrians could spread the conflict into Lebanon.

The village, Aarsel, lies in the eastern Bekaa Valley, a mountainous region bordering Syria, and is a stronghold of support for the rebellion against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Syrian refugees who prefer to avoid areas of the Bekaa closely controlled by Hezbollah, an ally of Mr. Assad, have also crammed into the town.

In a statement, the Lebanese Army said that a captain was among those killed and declared without elaborating, “There will be no compromises on attempts to hide armed militants.”

Some reports, citing unnamed security sources, said that the soldiers were attacked by Syrian rebels, while residents said that villagers chased down and attacked plainclothes security personnel who arrived to arrest a Lebanese suspect without coordinating with local leaders.

The suspect, a resident of Aarsel, was identified as Khaled Hummayed. Lebanon’s national news agency said that he was wanted for involvement in the kidnapping of Estonian tourists in the Bekaa in 2011.

Several Lebanese media outlets said that members of the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit rebel coalition, attacked the soldiers, while Reuters reported that Mr. Hummayed was believed to be a member of a jihadist rebel group that has been active in Syria, Al Nusra Front, who traveled frequently in and out of the country.

The deputy mayor of Aarsel said that Mr. Hummayed was driving a pickup truck when security personnel in civilian cars confronted him, shot him, and left with his body. He said he did not know if Mr. Hummayed was involved with Syrian rebels, but added, “90 percent of Aarsel’s people support the revolution.”

A smuggler from Aarsel, who gave only a nickname, Abu Hussein, said he was on the way to Friday Prayer and witnessed the shootout. He said that Mr. Hummayed’s pickup truck was left behind, smeared with blood, as angry residents pursued the cars. He said that Mr. Hummayed had once draped the flag of the Syrian revolution around his body.

Supporters of the revolution are deeply suspicious of Lebanese security forces, which they see as aiding the Syrian government. Lebanon has officially adopted a policy of “disassociation” from the Syrian conflict.

But in practice, many Lebanese have taken sides, with many Sunni Muslims supporting the rebellion led by Syria’s Sunni majority, while Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim movement that relies on Syria as an arms conduit, has supported the government dominated by Mr. Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiism.

The border area has been tense, with rebels hiding and resting on the Lebanese side, and Syrian troops sometimes shelling Lebanese territory, crossing the border to fight rebels or shooting civilian refugees as they flee.

New pressures are growing as the flow of refugees — there are already more than 200,000 in Lebanon, a country of 4 million — overtaxes Sunni areas that have hosted most of them and pushes refugees into new areas.

More than 2 million people are displaced inside Syria, and on Friday, the United Nations children’s agency said 420,000 people — half of them children — needed urgent help in the province of Homs.

A spokeswoman for Unicef, Marixie Mercado, told reporters in Geneva that 200 of Homs’s 1,500 schools were damaged, with 65 more housing refugees, news agencies reported.

The United Nations refugee agency said it had for the first time reached the town of Azaz, near the Turkish border, to deliver tents with Syrian government permission, and found 45,000 people living in makeshift tents.

Read More..

Google Submits Proposal in Bid to Resolve E.U. Antitrust Case

BRUSSELS — E.U. officials said Friday that Google had submitted proposals aimed at ending a three-year antitrust case focused on its hugely popular online search service, but the offer did not prevent rivals from seeking to prolong its legal entanglements.

After filing a new complaint against Google this past week, Icomp, an industry group backed by Microsoft, urged European regulators on Friday to approach the company’s proposal with caution.

“To be seen as a success, any settlement must include specific measures to restore competition and allow other parties to compete effectively on a level playing field,” David Wood, legal counsel for Icomp, said in a statement.

Michael Weber, chief executive of an online mapping service called hot-map.com, a member of Icomp based in Germany, said he hoped the offer by Google was “enough to restore competition,” but “if not, we will take into account all legal options we have and we won’t hesitate to use them.”

If they remain dissatisfied, critics of Google in Europe can sue the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Such cases can take years to reach a final judgment.

Google managed to reach one settlement Friday. In France, it agreed to pay €60 million, or $82 million, into a fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet, the president’s office said. Publishers in France had been pushing for Google to pay them licensing fees for the headlines and summaries of articles in its search engines.

The new antitrust complaint by Icomp, filed Thursday, claimed the search giant was using exclusive agreements to discourage advertisers and publishers from using competing advertising platforms and search services like Bing and Yahoo.

Neither the company nor European officials were willing Friday to describe the settlement proposals. But it had been expected that Google would offer revisions to the way it conducts its online search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that the company’s activities were unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.

The two parties are still negotiating the terms of the proposed settlement, and a final agreement between Google and the commission is expected in the coming week, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly before an agreement was reached.

The commission has taken a tougher line with Google than the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which decided in January, after a 19-month inquiry into how the company operated its search engine, that Google had not broken antitrust laws.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and top E.U. antitrust official, has been formally investigating Google since November 2010. He has insisted that Google make changes to the most sensitive area of its business, online search.

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts Google’s offer, the company will avoid further investigation that could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of its annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding that could restrict its activities in Europe.

“We continue to work cooperatively with the commission,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said Friday.

Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Mr. Almunia, said at a news conference Friday that Google had sent “a detailed proposal,” which the commission was analyzing before taking further steps.

But there is no formal timeline in European antitrust cases, which means that negotiations could continue.

“I can’t anticipate the timing or the substance of the analysis,” Mr. Colombani said.

Mr. Almunia could still take a far more confrontational stance with Google by sending the company a statement of objections, which is the European equivalent of formal antitrust charges. But that is something Mr. Almunia has been eager to avoid because he favors nonlitigious solutions to antitrust problems, particularly in the fast-moving technology field, to prevent cases from dragging on for years.

Read More..

Well: Gluten-Free Muffin Recipes

For people who need to eliminate gluten from their diet, baking becomes a challenge. Beginners often find gluten-free baked goods too dense. Even the Recipes for Health columnist Martha Rose Shulman didn’t like the flavor of a commercial gluten-free flour mix, which left her gluten-free cookies and tart-shells with a strong taste of bean flour. As a result, she created her own gluten-free mix for baking muffins. She writes:

My son Liam still doesn’t know that the muffins he has been devouring all week are gluten-free.

I put together my own gluten-free flour mix, one without bean flour, and turned to America’s favorite Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna James Ahem, for guidance. I was already thinking about making muffins, and I wanted a mix that could replace the whole wheat flour I usually use in conjunction with other grains or flours. Her formula for a whole-grain flour mix is simple – 70 percent ground gluten-free grain like rice flour, millet flour, buckwheat flour or teff (the list on her site is a long one) and 30 percent starch like potato starch, cornstarch or arrowroot.

For this week’s recipes, I used what I had, which was brown rice flour, potato starch and cornstarch – 20 percent potato starch and 10 percent cornstarch — and that’s the basis for the nutritional analyses of this week’s recipes. I used this mix in conjunction with a gluten-free meal or flour, so the amount of pure starch in the batters is much less than 30 percent.

When you bake anything it is much simpler and results are more consistent if you use grams and scale your ingredients. This is especially true with gluten-free baking, since you are working with grain and starch formulas. Digital scales are not expensive and I urge you to switch over to this method if you like to bake. I have given approximate cup measures so the recipes will work both ways, but scaling is more accurate.

Here are five ways to bake gluten-free muffins:

Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins: These dark chocolate muffins taste more extravagant than they are.

---

Gluten-Free Cornmeal, Fig and Orange Muffins: A sweet and grainy cornmeal mixture makes for a delicious muffin.

---

Gluten-Free Whole Grain Cheese and Mustard Muffins: A savory muffin with a delicious strong flavor.

---

Gluten-Free Buckwheat, Poppy Seed and Blueberry Muffins: The buckwheat flour is high-fiber and makes a dark, richly-flavored muffin.

---

Gluten-Free Cornmeal Molasses Muffins: Strong molasses provides a good source of iron in an easy-to-make muffin.

---

Read More..

Well: Gluten-Free Muffin Recipes

For people who need to eliminate gluten from their diet, baking becomes a challenge. Beginners often find gluten-free baked goods too dense. Even the Recipes for Health columnist Martha Rose Shulman didn’t like the flavor of a commercial gluten-free flour mix, which left her gluten-free cookies and tart-shells with a strong taste of bean flour. As a result, she created her own gluten-free mix for baking muffins. She writes:

My son Liam still doesn’t know that the muffins he has been devouring all week are gluten-free.

I put together my own gluten-free flour mix, one without bean flour, and turned to America’s favorite Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna James Ahem, for guidance. I was already thinking about making muffins, and I wanted a mix that could replace the whole wheat flour I usually use in conjunction with other grains or flours. Her formula for a whole-grain flour mix is simple – 70 percent ground gluten-free grain like rice flour, millet flour, buckwheat flour or teff (the list on her site is a long one) and 30 percent starch like potato starch, cornstarch or arrowroot.

For this week’s recipes, I used what I had, which was brown rice flour, potato starch and cornstarch – 20 percent potato starch and 10 percent cornstarch — and that’s the basis for the nutritional analyses of this week’s recipes. I used this mix in conjunction with a gluten-free meal or flour, so the amount of pure starch in the batters is much less than 30 percent.

When you bake anything it is much simpler and results are more consistent if you use grams and scale your ingredients. This is especially true with gluten-free baking, since you are working with grain and starch formulas. Digital scales are not expensive and I urge you to switch over to this method if you like to bake. I have given approximate cup measures so the recipes will work both ways, but scaling is more accurate.

Here are five ways to bake gluten-free muffins:

Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins: These dark chocolate muffins taste more extravagant than they are.

---

Gluten-Free Cornmeal, Fig and Orange Muffins: A sweet and grainy cornmeal mixture makes for a delicious muffin.

---

Gluten-Free Whole Grain Cheese and Mustard Muffins: A savory muffin with a delicious strong flavor.

---

Gluten-Free Buckwheat, Poppy Seed and Blueberry Muffins: The buckwheat flour is high-fiber and makes a dark, richly-flavored muffin.

---

Gluten-Free Cornmeal Molasses Muffins: Strong molasses provides a good source of iron in an easy-to-make muffin.

---

Read More..

DealBook: Amid Bank's Legal Problems, Barclays C.E.O. Gives Up Bonus

LONDON – Antony P. Jenkins, the new chief executive of Barclays, said on Friday that he would not accept a bonus as the British bank struggles to rebuild its reputation after a series of recent scandals.

The announcement comes as British regulators investigate new allegations that Barclays failed to properly disclose to shareholders a loan to a group of Qatari investors that gave the British bank a cash infusion during the financial crisis, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Last year, the bank disclosed that British and American authorities were investigating the legality of the payments related to the $7.1 billion cash injection to Qatar Holding, the sovereign wealth fund.

Mr. Jenkins is dealing with a spate of legal headaches.

In June, Barclays agreed to pay a $450 million settlement with United States and British regulators over rate manipulation. The case forced a number of the bank’s top executives to resign, including the chief executive at the time, Robert. E. Diamond Jr.

The British firm has also set aside $3.2 billion to cover legal costs related to the inappropriately selling of insurance to consumers. British authorities recently told the bank that it must review the sale of certain interest-rate hedging products after 90 percent of a sample of the complex instruments were found to have been sold improperly. Analysts say the investigation may lead to millions of dollars of new legal costs.

In light of the controversy surrounding the bank, Mr. Jenkins said he did not want to be considered for a bonus that could have totaled up to $4.3 million, adding that many of the problems engulfing the bank were of its own making. The Barclays chief’s annual salary is $1.7 million.

“I think it only right that I bear an appropriate degree of accountability for those matters,” Mr. Jenkins said in a statement. “It would be wrong for me to receive a bonus for 2012.”

A spokesman for Barclays declined to comment about the investigation into potential wrongdoing connected to the loan to Qatari investors.

By forgoing his bonus, Mr. Jenkins contrasts with his predecessor. Mr. Diamond was in line for a $4.3 million bonus in deferred shares for 2011 despite criticism about his handling of the bank’s performance. Faced with mounting opposition, Mr. Diamond and Chris Lucas, the bank’s finance director, eventually agreed to receive only half of the 2011 deferred stock bonus if the British bank failed to reach a number of its financial targets.

Barclays, which will unveil a major overhaul of its operations when it reports earnings on Feb. 12, is expected to slash up to 2,000 jobs in its investment bank in an effort to reduce its exposure to risky trading activity, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

As part of the changes, the British bank has hired Hector Sants, the former chief of the Financial Services Authority, the British regulator, as its new head of compliance.

Mr. Jenkins, who previously ran Barclays’ consumer banking business, told employees in January that they should leave the bank if they were not willing to help rebuild the firm’s reputation.

“My message to those people is simple,” Mr. Jenkins wrote in an internal note obtained by DealBook. “Barclays is not the place for you. The rules have changed.”

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

An earlier version of the article indicated that Barclays chief executive told employees earlier this month that they should leave the bank if they were not willing to help rebuild the firm’s reputation. He told them in January.

Read More..

Syria’s Confirmation of Airstrike May Undercut Israel’s Strategy of Silence

Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

In East Jerusalem, Israelis distributed gas masks on Wednesday as worries about security spread. More Photos »

JERUSALEM — Israeli officials remained silent on Thursday about their airstrike in Syrian territory the day before, a tactic that experts said was part of a longstanding strategy to give targeted countries face-saving opportunities to avoid conflict escalation. But Syria’s own confirmation of the attack, followed by harsh condemnation not only by Israel’s enemies Iran and Hezbollah but also by Russia, may have undercut that effort, analysts said, increasing the likelihood of a cycle of retaliation.

“From the moment they chose to say Israel did something, it means someone has to do something after that,” said Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council and a longtime military leader. “Contrary to what I could hope and believe yesterday, that this round of events would end soon, now I am much less confident.”

The Iranian deputy foreign minister warned Thursday that Israel’s strike would lead to “grave consequences for Tel Aviv,” while the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that the strike “blatantly violates the United Nations Charter and is unacceptable and unjustified, whatever its motives.”

American officials said Israel hit a convoy before dawn on Wednesday that was ferrying sophisticated antiaircraft missiles called SA-17s to Lebanon. The Syrians and their allies said the target was actually a scientific research facility in the Damascus suburbs. It remained unclear Thursday whether there was one strike or two, and what involvement the research outpost might have had in weapons production or storage for Syria or Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite organization that has long battled with Israel.

Most experts agree that Syria, Hezbollah and Israel each have strong reasons to avoid a new active conflict right now: the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is fighting for his survival in a violent and chaotic civil war; Hezbollah is struggling for political legitimacy at home and battling its label as a terrorist organization internationally; and Israel is trying to keep its head down in an increasingly volatile region.

But it is equally clear that Hezbollah — backed by Syria and Iran — wants desperately to upgrade its arsenal in hopes of changing the parameters for any future engagement with the powerful Israeli military, and that Israel is determined to stop it. And Hezbollah is perhaps even more anxious to gird itself for future challenges to its primacy in Lebanon, especially if a Sunni-led revolution triumphs next door in Syria.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and his deputies said loud and clear in the days leading up to the strike that they saw any transfer of Syria’s extensive cache of chemical weapons, or of sophisticated conventional weapons systems, as a “red line” that would prompt action. Now that Israel has followed through on that threat, even without admitting it, analysts expect the country — perhaps backed by its Western allies — to similarly target any future convoys attempting the same feat.

“Once this red line has been crossed, it’s definitely going to be crossed time and again from now on, especially as the situation of the Assad regime will deteriorate,” said Boaz Ganor, head of the International Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. “They will do the utmost to gain control of those weapons. In that case, I don’t see why Israel wouldn’t have the same type of calculation that Israel had two days ago into the future.”

Mr. Ganor said the United States and Europe should be as concerned as Israel, because Syria’s chemical weapons could end up in the hands not just of Hezbollah but of jihadist organizations like Al Qaeda or its proxies. “If one organization will put their hands on this arsenal, then it will change hands in no time and we’ll see it all over the world,” he said. “We, the international community, are marching into a new era of terrorism.”

Eyal Zisser, a historian at Tel Aviv University who specializes in Syria and Lebanon, said that if there was no retaliation to Wednesday’s airstrike, “Why not repeat it? For Israel it’s going to be the practice.” The question, Professor Zisser said, “is what they will try to do next, Syria and Hezbollah, if there is another Israeli attack, whether they will avoid any retaliation the next time as well.”

Israel’s steadfast silence on the airstrike was reminiscent of its posture after it destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 — an attack it has never acknowledged, though many officials discuss it with winks and nods. But in that case, President Assad bought into the de-escalation strategy by saying the attack had hit an unused — and implicitly unimportant — military building, relieving the pressure for a response.

Reporting was contributed by Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Jerusalem, Ellen Barry from Moscow, Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.

Read More..

Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

A Cyberattack From China:
TimesCast: Chinese hackers infiltrated The New York Times’s computer systems, getting passwords for its reporters and others.

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a cyberattack that caused damage at Iran’s main nuclear enrichment plant. Evidence suggests that the United States and Israel released a computer worm around 2008, not 2012.

Read More..

STMicroelectronics May Pay $500 Million to Exit Venture

PARIS — STMicroelectronics, the biggest European chip maker, may have to spend up to $500 million this year to wind down the mobile chip-making joint venture with Ericsson that has been a ball-and-chain on its results, the company’s chief executive said Thursday.

“We’re committed to going fast,” Carlo Bozotti, the chief executive, said during a briefing in Paris. “It’s important for us to move on, to become a leaner company.”

Mr. Bozotti also said he had seen “encouraging signs” that the semiconductor market was improving this year after a rocky 2012, but “we’ll have to see if that’s sustainable.”

Shares of STMicroelectronics closed up 3.5 percent in Paris trading. Analysts said positive outlooks issued by STMicroelectronics and the company’s German rival, Infineon Technologies, helped lift the stock price.

STMicroelectronics, an Italian-French company with its headquarters in Geneva, and the Swedish mobile networking giant Ericsson bet big on chips to power smartphones. But their joint venture, ST-Ericsson, foundered as big customers like Nokia and BlackBerry were smashed by competition from Apple and Samsung, which rely heavily on chips made by Qualcomm. The venture has lost about $2.8 billion since 2009.

Negotiations to sell or close down the company, which employs more than 5,000 people, will be a delicate matter. Complicating any deal, at a time of economic stagnation and fears for the future of European industry, is the fact that the French and Italian governments own a combined 27.5 percent stake in STMicroelectronics. At any rate, a near-term closure of the company is thought to be unlikely, as ST-Ericsson has long-term supplier contracts it has promised to fulfill.

Mr. Bozotti said STMicroelectronics expected to dispose of its ST-Ericsson stake “during the third quarter of 2013,” though he gave no indication of how the company planned to do so. The cost would probably be in the range of $300 million to $500 million, he said, “including around $100 million in the first quarter.”

STMicroelectronics is one of the biggest high-technology enterprises in Europe and an industry leader in areas with strong growth prospects, like sensors and microcontrollers. Its chip-making and research and development facilities around Grenoble are at the heart of the innovation cluster that serves as France’s answer to Silicon Valley.

Mr. Bozotti spoke after STMicroelectronics announced late Wednesday a $544 million write-down of good will and other intangible assets on its share of ST-Ericsson, a charge that reduced the accounting value of the 50-50 joint venture to “a negligible amount” on its books. The charge led the company’s fourth-quarter net loss to balloon to $428 million from an $11 million loss a year earlier.

STMicroelectronics said its full-year 2012 revenue slid nearly 13 percent, to $8.5 billion, largely because sales to Nokia fell. Just four years ago, the Finnish cellphone maker accounted for about a fifth of all its sales; STMicroelectronics did not disclose the current level but acknowledged that it was far lower.

The bottom line was “horrible,” Thomas Becker, an electronics sector analyst at Commerzbank, said of the results, “but the underlying numbers were not that bad.”

He said that shares of STMicroelectronics and Infineon — which forecast a rise in second-quarter sales and operating profit on Thursday — got a lift “because some investors may be hoping to get in on the upswing in the semiconductor cycle.”

The company is refocusing its business, Mr. Bozotti said, and expects growth in 2013 to be driven primarily by sales of devices in its imaging, analog and microsensor, and microcontroller businesses. He said STMicroelectronics would cut its quarterly costs to $600 million to $650 million by 2014, from around $900 million currently.

Read More..

Syrian Opposition Leader Softens Position on Talks with Assad

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Free Syrian Army fighters ran for cover as a tank shell exploded against a wall. More Photos »

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s top political opposition leader on Wednesday expressed willingness for the first time to talk with representatives of President Bashar al-Assad, softening what had been an absolute refusal to negotiate with the government in an increasingly chaotic civil war.

The opposition leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, coupled his offer with two demands: the release of what he described as 160,000 prisoners held by Mr. Assad’s government, and the renewal of all expired passports held by Syrians abroad — a gesture apparently aimed at disaffected expatriates and exiled opposition figures who could not return home even if they wanted to.

Sheik Khatib’s offer, published in Arabic on his Facebook page, quickly provoked sharp criticism from others in the Syrian opposition coalition, with some distancing themselves and complaining that the leader had not consulted with colleagues in advance. The sheik later clarified in a second statement that he was expressing his personal opinion, while he chided critics in among his colleagues who he described as “those sitting down on their couches and then saying ‘Attack — don’t negotiate.’ ”

The mutual criticisms reflected the fractiousness that has plagued the Syrian opposition movement since its struggle to depose Mr. Assad began as a peaceful political movement nearly two years ago. Nonetheless, the offer still represented a potential opening for dialogue in the conflict, which has threatened to destabilize the Middle East.

Sheik Khatib made the offer as the United Nations was scrambling to raise money to manage the humanitarian crisis caused by the conflict, which has sent at least 700,000 Syrians into neighboring countries and left more than one million displaced inside Syria. A donor conference under way in Kuwait has produced commitments for about $1 billion of the $1.5 billion that the United Nations is seeking.

“I announce that I am willing to sit down with representatives of the Syrian regime in Cairo or Tunisia or Istanbul,” Sheik Khatib said in the offer. His motivation to make such an offer, he said, was “to search for a political resolution to the crisis, and to arrange matters for the transitional phase that could prevent more blood.”

There was no immediate Syrian government response to Sheik Khatib, a respected Sunni cleric who once had been the imam of the historic Umayyad mosque in Damascus. His unified Syrian opposition coalition, created at a meeting in Qatar two months ago, has been formally recognized by the Arab League, the European Union and the United States.

Sheik Khatib’s offer was made less than a day after the peace envoy for Syria from the United Nations and Arab League, Lakhdar Brahimi, gave the United Nations Security Council a pessimistic prognosis for negotiations.

It also followed a grisly massacre discovered on Tuesday in the contested northern city of Aleppo, from which anti-Assad activists posted videos online of scores of bound victims who had been shot in the head and dumped in a river. Some insurgents said the death toll exceeded 100, mostly abducted men in their 20s and 30s.

Both sides in the conflict blamed the other for those killings, just as they have traded accusations for other atrocities, including two major explosions a few weeks ago that killed more than 80 people at the University of Aleppo. Outside assessments based on video of the university blasts have suggested that a Syrian military missile was responsible.

Sheik Khatib did not hide his contempt for Mr. Assad’s government in his statement, saying, “One can’t trust a regime that kills children and attacks bakeries and shells universities and destroys Syria’s infrastructure and commits massacres against innocents, the last of which won’t be the Aleppo massacre, which is unprecedented in its savagery.”

But he decided to reach out, he wrote, partly because the Syrian government had publicly invited political opposition leaders this week to return to Damascus for what it called a dialogue.

Three weeks ago, Mr. Assad said in a speech that he was open to reconciliation talks but not with political opponents he described as terrorists, the government’s generic term for armed insurgents. At the time, most members of the political opposition dismissed Mr. Assad’s speech as meaningless.

The opposition’s longstanding position has been that Mr. Assad must resign as a precondition for any talks and that he cannot be part of any transitional government. Mr. Assad and his aides have said he has no intention of resigning and may even run for another term in elections next year.

Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad from Beirut.

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: 64 Gigabytes Can't Be Wrong: Elvis USB Drives

Mimoco, the company known for its Mimobot flash drives made to resemble geek-friendly characters like Boba Fett, Captain Kirk and Batman, has added a figure from a distinctly different sphere of pop culture, Elvis Presley.

Why Elvis suits the tech audience isn’t clear, but fans will have a choice between a limited edition G.I. Blues-era Elvis or a jump-suited 1973 Aloha From Hawaii Elvis.

Each Elvis is priced similarly and available in four storage sizes, from 8GB at $20 to 64GB at $70. Both are USB 3.0 capable and come with digital extras already loaded, like wallpapers, screen savers and other Mimobot Elvis icons.

There is even audio, but don’t expect to hear the King taking care of business. It’s the preferred sound-alike of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Jamie Aaron Kelley, crooning lines like, “I’m savin’ the last file fer meeee.”

There is some actual Elvis video, an interview before the 1973 concert, and one from when he mustered out of the army.

The USBs are the size of a good luck charm, 2.5 inches by 1 inch by 0.5 inch. Pop off Elvis’s pompadour to plug into a USB port.

If these USBs sell well, the company said it might produce other figures from well-known performances. Who could resist locking their data in a Jailhouse Rock Elvis?

Certainly thumb drives come in handy for many uses, but if it’s intended for backup, shouldn’t there be Mimobot Jordanaires?

Read More..

The Consumer: The Drug-Dose Gender Gap

Most sleeping pills are designed to knock you out for eight hours. When the Food and Drug Administration was evaluating a new short-acting pill for people to take when they wake up in the middle of the night, agency scientists wanted to know how much of the drug would still be in users’ systems come morning.

Blood tests uncovered a gender gap: Men metabolized the drug, Intermezzo, faster than women. Ultimately the F.D.A. approved a 3.5 milligram pill for men, and a 1.75 milligram pill for women.

The active ingredient in Intermezzo, zolpidem, is used in many other sleeping aids, including Ambien. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that the F.D.A. reduced doses of Ambien for women by half.

Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects.

“This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.”

Until 1993, women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from trials of new drugs. When the F.D.A. lifted the ban that year, agency researchers noted that because landmark studies on aspirin in heart disease and stroke had not included women, the scientific community was left “with doubts about whether aspirin was, in fact, effective in women for these indications.”

Because so many drugs were tested mostly or exclusively in men, scientists may know little of their effects on women until they reach the market. A Government Accountability Office study found that 8 of 10 drugs removed from the market from 1997 through 2000 posed greater health risks to women.

For example, Seldane, an antihistamine, and the gastrointestinal drug Propulsid both triggered a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia more often in women than in men. Many drugs still on the market cause this arrhythmia more often in women, including antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-malarial drugs and cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Clayton said. Women also tend to use more medications than men.

The sex differences cut both ways. Some drugs, like the high blood pressure drug Verapamil and the antibiotic erythromycin, appear to be more effective in women. On the other hand, women tend to wake up from anesthesia faster than men and are more likely to experience side effects from anesthetic drugs, according to the Society for Women’s Health Research.

Women also react differently to alcohol, tobacco and cocaine, studies have found.

It’s not just because women tend to be smaller than men. Women metabolize drugs differently because they have a higher percentage of body fat and experience hormonal fluctuations and the monthly menstrual cycle. “Some drugs are more water-based and like to hang out in the blood, and some like to hang out in the fat tissue,” said Wesley Lindsey, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Auburn University, who is a co-author of a paper on sex-based differences in drug activity.

“If the drug is lipophilic” — attracted to fat cells — “it will move into those tissues and hang around for longer,” Dr. Lindsey added. “The body won’t clear it as quickly, and you’ll see effects longer.”

There are also sex differences in liver metabolism, kidney function and certain gastric enzymes. Oral contraceptives, menopause and post-menopausal hormone treatment further complicate the picture. Some studies suggest, for example, that when estrogen levels are low, women may need higher doses of drugs called angiotensin receptor blockers to lower blood pressure, because they have higher levels of proteins that cause the blood vessels to constrict, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown.

Many researchers say data on these sex differences must be gathered at the very beginning of a drug’s development — even before trials on human subjects begin.

“The path to a new drug starts with the basic science — you study an animal model of the disease, and that’s where you discover a drug target,” Dr. Sandberg said. “But 90 percent of researchers are still studying male animal models of the disease.”

There have been improvements. In an interview, Dr. Robert Temple, with the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said the agency’s new guidelines in 1993 called for studies of sex differences at the earliest stages of drug development, as well as for analysis of clinical trial data by sex.

He said early research on an irritable bowel syndrome drug, alosetron (Lotronex), suggested it would not be effective in men. As a result, only women were included in clinical trials, and it was approved only for women. (Its use is restricted now because of serious side effects.)

But some scientists say drug metabolism studies with only 10 or 15 subjects are too small to pick up sex differences. Even though more women participate in clinical trials than in the past, they are still underrepresented in trials for heart and kidney disease, according to one recent analysis, and even in cancer trials.

“The big problem is we’re not quite sure how much difference this makes,” Dr. Lindsey said. “We just don’t have a good handle on it.”

---

Readers may submit comments or questions for The Consumer by e-mail to consumer@nytimes.com.

Read More..

Shell Wins 3 Pollution Suits Filed by Nigerians

In a legal dispute that had been closely watched by multinational companies and environmental organizations, a Dutch court Wednesday dismissed most of the claims brought by Nigerian farmers seeking to hold Royal Dutch Shell accountable for damage by oil spilled from its pipelines.

The decision, by the District Court of the Hague, was unusual in that it was brought in a Dutch jurisdiction against a Dutch company for activities overseas by a foreign subsidiary.

Shell, which has its headquarters in the Hague and its registered offices in London, acclaimed the decision as a vindication.

The company had argued that the oil spills were not its fault, but the result of criminal tampering.

“This ruling will enable more people to understand what is happening on the ground in Nigeria,” Jonathan French, a Shell spokesman, said. “We have this rampant problem of criminal activities: oil theft, sabotage, and illegal refining. That is the real tragedy of the Niger Delta.”

The company, which obtains 12 percent of its oil and gas from Nigeria, has long been dogged by accusations that its activities there cause serious environmental problems and human rights abuses.

In 2009 it agreed to pay $15.5 million to end a lawsuit brought under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act arising from the 1995 execution of the author Ken Saro-Wiwa, a critic of the company and the Nigerian government’s actions in the Niger Delta.

That U.S. law has been interpreted as having broad jurisdiction, even over foreign multinationals.

Shell denied that it bore any responsibility for Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s death, but said it wanted to end the litigation and move on.

In the case decided Wednesday, which was filed in 2008, four Nigerian farmers and fishermen, working with the environmentalist group Friends of the Earth, claimed that their livelihoods had been ruined by oil that spilled from Shell pipelines in their villages.

While the pollution damage itself was not in dispute, Shell argued that the spills had been caused by so-called bunkering — oil theft from the pipelines — as well as outright sabotage.

The court agreed with Shell in most of those spills, around the villages of Goi and Oruma.

But it held that in one spill, near the village of Ikot Ada Udo, the local subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Co. of Nigeria, was liable for damages — as yet unspecified — to one farmer.

In that case, the court said, “sabotage was committed in a very simple way in 2006 and 2007 by opening the overground valves with a monkey wrench,” something that “Shell Nigeria could and should have prevented.”

“I am not surprised at the decision because there was divine intervention in the court,” Reuters quoted the farmer, Friday Akpan, as saying. “The spill damaged 47 fishing ponds, killed all the fish and rendered the ponds useless.”

Joel Trachtman, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts, said that, in theory, the court’s finding in favor of Mr. Akpan meant that “multinational companies could find their foreign subsidiaries held to a higher standard, higher even than locally owned companies.”

That, he said, “conceivably could deter foreign investment in Nigeria.”

But Mr. Trachtman noted that the court also rejected any liability for the parent company. That limited the implications of the ruling. Mr. Trachtman said that facet of the decision was in keeping with global legal principles. “Usually courts around the world accept the separate existence of a subsidiary corporation,” he said. “They don’t pierce the veil to hold the parent responsible.”

Evert Hassink, a spokesman for the Dutch chapter of Friends of the Earth, described the court ruling as “mixed.” The court’s refusal to assign any responsibility to the parent company was disappointing, he said. But “we’ve succeeded in establishing the principle of going to court in the Netherlands or Europe because of what happened in another country,” he said.

Read More..

The Lede Blog: Under Attack, Cairo Hotel Sends S O S via Twitter

Video of unidentified men streaming into the lobby of Cairo’s Semiramis InterContinental hotel was shown live on Egypt’s ONTV early on Tuesday.

Last Updated, 2:56 p.m. As our colleagues Kareem Fahim, David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh report, the mayhem on Cairo’s streets briefly spilled into the lobby of one of the city’s luxury hotels, the Semiramis InterContinental, during intense clashes between riot police and protesters along the Nile Corniche overnight.

Images of a mob streaming into the hotel, shown live on Egyptian television and then posted online, raised fears of further damage to the country’s already battered tourist industry. Coming at the same time as violence in cities on the Suez Canal, this week’s unrest threatened two of the main pillars of the Egyptian economy.

Judging by a series of urgent pleas for help posted on the hotel’s Twitter feed, the raid came just after 2:30 a.m. local time.

We r under attack and several thugs have entered the Semiramis … We need help #jan25 #jan28 #Tahrir #EgyPolice

— InterContinental (@ICSEMIRAMIS) 29 Jan 13

PLEASE SEND HELP #EMERGENCY! WE ARE UNDER ATTACK! SEVERAL THUGS HAVE ENTERED THE SEMIRAMIS! #jan25 #jan28 #Tahrir #EgyPolice

— InterContinental (@ICSEMIRAMIS) 29 Jan 13

SOS If anyone knows anyone in #Military #Police #Government, please send help! Thugs in Lobby #Emergency #Tahrir #Jan28 #Egypt

— InterContinental (@ICSEMIRAMIS) 29 Jan 13

Within an hour of sounding the alarm on the social network, the staff reported on Twitter that the security forces had arrived.

Special forces are on scene and handling the situation. Thank you to everyone for your help and speedy response to our SOS!

— InterContinental (@ICSEMIRAMIS) 29 Jan 13

Guards at the hotel told Bel Trew of the Egyptian news site Ahram Online that phone calls to the police and the army initially went unheeded as about 40 men armed with shotguns, knives and a semiautomatic weapon broke into the shuttered lobby and started looting.

An Ahram Online journalist who witnessed the attack, Karim Hafez, said that protesters had stopped fighting with the police to help secure the hotel: “When they realized these groups were trying to loot the hotel, protesters shot fire crackers at them as they attacked the building and tried to push them away from the area but these groups were armed with birdshot bullets.”

This reported cooperation of the protesters with the police officers they have been battling for days on the street outside the hotel prompted bloggers like the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr to comment on the black comedy of the situation.

Protesters and police suddenly one hand at the Semiramis.

— أبو كار (@Sarahcarr) 29 Jan 13

Another Egyptian blogger, Mohammed Maree, reported on his @mar3e Twitter feed that a police captain on the scene confirmed to him that the protesters who were fighting with the security forces when the raid took place were not responsible for the storming of the hotel.

police captain named Moataz told me that the protesters stopped fighting with us and told us that there are some gunmen stormed Semiramis-2

— Mohammed Mareeد.مرعى (@mar3e) 29 Jan 13

Moataz confirmed that the protesters who clashed with them over two days on the Nile Corniche didn,t involve in storming Samiramis 3

— Mohammed Mareeد.مرعى (@mar3e) 29 Jan 13

Mr. Maree also reported that witnesses to the raid said it began after four people drove up in a car with no license plates and fired shots to scare protesters away, before storming the hotel. He later posted a photograph of some of the hotel’s guests leaving under the protection of protesters.

pic: under the protection of “protesters” ,some guests of Semiramis leave the Hotel and take a taxis to the Airport http://t.co/bwSvVJBf 10

— Mohammed Mareeد.مرعى (@mar3e) 29 Jan 13

Nabila Samak, a spokeswoman for the hotel who posted the calls for help on Twitter, told The Times that the staff members had called Egyptian television stations for help earlier in the evening, well before the attack, after appeals to the security forces for protection went unanswered.

To clarify we contacted all relevant authorise & later media to draw attention as the break in attempts increased & aid had not yet arrived.

— InterContinental (@ICSEMIRAMIS) 29 Jan 13

Ms. Samak told Ahram Online that the staff worked to secure the hotel’s guests but were not equipped to cope with the effective collapse of the police force, since, “no guards of hotels in Egypt are armed.” Later she thanked protesters for coming to the aid of the hotel’s staff and guests.

Thank you all revolutionaries that stood by us last night…You are awesome#jan2813

— InterContinental (@ICSEMIRAMIS) 29 Jan 13

A Saudi women who identified herself as a guest at the hotel, Hilda Ismail, posted updates and photographs from a shelter the guests were taken to during the incident on her Arabic-language Twitter feed.

@ehabmagdy1975 احنا بملجأ مو شايفين شي تحت ايش بيصير،بس الامن بلغونا
ان البلطجية وصلوا الدور الثالث والامن المصري وصل http://t.co/wVJeyt5O

— ღ..هيـــلدا (@Hildaismail) 29 Jan 13

In one message, she wrote: “If there is no Egyptian security, and if Morsi is sleeping, where are this country’s men!! Come get these dogs, the Semiramis Hotel is being ransacked and we are there.”

Later, Ms. Ismail uploaded a brief video clip of a man attempting to reassure guests that they were safe after the arrival of special forces officers from the ministry of the interior led by a Captain Moataz.

In the clip, the man tells the guests that the police captain wants “to assure you that the hotel is secured and it is under the control of the ministry of the interior now. Within no time you will go back to your rooms and already are in safe hands.” The police, the man added, “will make sure that such thugs will not enter the hotel again. We are sorry.”

Ms. Ismail also posted an image of the ransacked lobby on Twitter.

Intercontinental’s lobby earlier this morning (photo by @Hildaismail )
http://t.co/P8aO2v6I

— Lamia Hassan (@LamiaHassan) 29 Jan 13

Ms. Ismai’s claim to have been a guest at the hotel was supported by the fact that she had uploaded a brief video clip, apparently shot from a high floor of the hotel, showing the fighting on the Nile Corniche below.

The luxury hotel chain, which was created in 1946 by Pan American World Airways, did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but an executive in Cairo told Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Egyptian newspaper, that “more than 45 clients insisted on leaving despite the hotel’s offer to relocate them to higher floors, away from the clashes.”

Although the hotel then announced that it would be closed for security reasons, the staff posted another urgent plea for help on Twitter late Tuesday.

SOS: Same group as last night have surrounded #Semiramis attempting to breach all entrances. #Tahrir #Jan29 SEND HELP!

— InterContinental (@ICSEMIRAMIS) 29 Jan 13

Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Cairo.

---

Read More..

Google Maps’ New Target: Secretive North Korea

Google/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A still image from Google shows a before and after map of North Korea's capital, Pyongyang.

SEOUL, South Korea — Google threw open its Google Maps program for North Korea to “citizen cartographers” around the world on Tuesday, urging them to contribute whatever knowledge they have about one of the world’s most secretive countries.

The new map it published at the same time, built through crowdsourcing, provides people who normally visit the site for driving directions with a look, to the street level in some cases, of places they have previously read about only in articles about the North’s nuclear program. The map of Pyongyang, the capital, shows everything from landmarks — the tower that celebrates the country’s self-reliance doctrine of Juche and the main square where military parades are held — to hotels, schools and hospitals.

Users can zoom in for photos and even to post comments, updating a map that had previously been mostly blank. The site also marks what it says are the locations of some of the police state’s notorious gulags.

The popular mapping program is focusing new attention on the North at a time when the country is locked in a tense standoff with the United States and its allies over tightened sanctions and has promised to conduct a third nuclear test.

Google’s initiative came three weeks after its executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang in a highly publicized yet contentious trip organized by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico. Mr. Schmidt, a proponent of Internet connectivity who likes to describe the Web as the enemy of despots, said he urged North Korean officials he met in Pyongyang to let more North Koreans use the Internet.

The map is still not very detailed in much of the country, though it does include four enormous prison camps, highlighting them in gray shading. Google Maps is unlikely to provide important new information to policy makers and others who already have satellite maps, and Google Earth views, to depend on. But the crowdsourcing project provides a tool for Internet users anywhere in the world to help identify at least some features in the isolated country that the regime in Pyongyang doesn’t want the world to know. (The regime cherishes secrecy to such an extent that its propagandists liked to boast: “When our enemies try to peek into our republic, they only see a fog.”)

At the moment, the map released Tuesday is far less detailed than North Korean maps available in South Korean bookstores, or on a digital atlas using Google Earth published on the Web site 38 North.

In recent years, Internet bloggers and activists have relied on Google Earth, and defectors from North Korea, to locate several places believed to be prison camps. In each of the gulags, international human rights groups have said, thousands of political prisoners have been forced into hard labor for crimes like criticizing the ruling Kim dynasty in Pyongyang.

“So far, Google’s efforts are largely symbolic,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. “It won’t be easy to make a Google map of North Korea of the kind you see of other countries.”

Google Maps’ basic premise — Internet users filling in information about their neighborhood to help update and perfect a map — is severely limited for North Korea. The country is cut off from the Internet, except for its tiny elite, and even that group’s access is controlled.

Google can try to enlist the more than 24,000 North Korean defectors who live in South Korea, one of the world’s most wired countries. But most of them come from the north of the country and, given the tight control on people’s movements, their knowledge of other parts of North Korea before their defection is limited.

There was no immediate North Korean reaction to Google’s announcement on Tuesday.

Google said that although its map of North Korea is incomplete, it could be important to some South Koreans who originated from the North and who could now identify their old home villages.

Read More..