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

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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.



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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

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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.



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STMicroelectronics May Pay $500 Million to Exit Venture

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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.


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Syrian Opposition Leader Softens Position on Talks with Assad

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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.



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

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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?

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The Consumer: The Drug-Dose Gender Gap

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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.

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Shell Wins 3 Pollution Suits Filed by Nigerians

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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.


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

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Cairo.

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Google Maps’ New Target: Secretive North Korea

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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.


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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

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You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

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