American Executive Lashes Out at French Unions, Touching Off Uproar

PARIS — “How stupid do you think we are?”

With those choice words, and several more similar in tone, the chief executive of an American tire company touched off a furor in France on Wednesday as he responded to a government plea to take over a recently closed Goodyear factory in northern France.

“I have visited the factory a couple of times,” Maurice Taylor Jr., the head of Titan International, wrote to the country’s industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, in a letter published in French newspapers on Wednesday. “The French work force gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They have one hour for their breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three.“

“I told this to the French unions to their faces and they told me, ‘That’s the French way!’ ” added Mr. Taylor, a swaggering businessman who is nicknamed “the Grizz” by Wall Street analysts for his abrasive negotiating style.

His decidedly undiplomatic assessment quickly struck a nerve in France, where concerns about declining competitiveness and the divisive tax policies of President François Hollande’s government have led some economists to ask whether the nation is at risk of becoming the next sick man of Europe.

Mr. Montebourg, who is known for lashing out at French corporate bosses without hesitation, initially seemed at a loss for words on how to respond to the American charge. “I do not want to harm French interests,” he said when asked about Mr. Taylor’s letter. Later, Mr. Montebourg released a letter to Mr. Taylor, calling the executive’s comments “extreme” and “insulting,” adding that they pointed to a “perfect ignorance” about France and its strengths, which continue to attract international investors.

French media outlets minced no words. “Incendiary!” “Insulting!” and “Scathing!” were just a few of the terms replayed on French newspaper Web sites and on the airwaves throughout the day. The French blogosphere lit up with hundreds of remarks condemning the “predatory“ American corporate culture that Mr. Taylor seemed to represent; other commentators who ventured to admit that there might be something to Mr. Taylor’s observations were promptly bashed.

And France’s main labor union wasted no time in weighing in.

Mickaël Wamen, the head of the Confédération Générale du Travail union at the Goodyear plant, in Amiens, said Mr. Taylor belonged in a “psychiatric ward.”

A spokesman for Mr. Taylor did not immediately respond to calls for comment. France’s 35-hour workweek, its rigid labor market and the influence that labor unions hold over the workplace have long been a source of aggravation for businesses. Last month, after a government report warning that French competitiveness was slipping, labor unions and business leaders struck a deal to overhaul swaths of the labor code, a move Mr. Hollande said was needed to burnish France’s international allure as a place to do business.

With unemployment above 10 percent and growth slowing, the government has also been desperate to avoid large-scale layoffs. Mr. Montebourg has even brandished the threat of nationalization to try to save jobs. PSA Peugeot Citroën, ArcelorMittal, Sanofi and Air France all announced big job cuts last year as Europe’s long-running debt crisis hit their bottom lines.

So it was no surprise that Mr. Montebourg approached Titan International last year to ask if it would take over the Goodyear factory, which was scheduled to close because of labor disputes and sagging profitability — a move that would threaten 1,173 jobs.

Titan had already considered taking over the Goodyear factory’s farm tire operations. But it dropped the plan in 2011 after union representatives opposed a deal, saying they suspected Titan would close production of passenger-vehicle tires if the group took over. Tensions between Mr. Taylor and the union were evident at the time in a Titan news release, which included Mr. Taylor’s observation that “only a nonbusiness person would understand the French labor rules.”

In January, Mr. Montebourg tried to entice Titan back to the negotiating table, saying he hoped unions would put “some water in their wine, that managers put some wine in their water, and that Titan would drink the wine and the water of both” and reach an accord.

But earlier this month, as union workers protested en masse at the Amiens site, with a large police presence, Goodyear told workers it would close the plant and cut its French work force by 39 percent.

In his letter, dated Feb. 8, Mr. Taylor explained his reasons for refusing to come back to the negotiating table. “Goodyear tried for over four years to save part of the Amiens jobs that are some of the highest-paid, but the French unions and the French government did nothing but talk,” Mr. Taylor wrote.

“Sir, your letter says you want Titan to start a discussion,” he added. “How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with the money and the talent to produce tires. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government.“

He said his company would seek to produce cheaper tires in India or China, and sell them back to the French. He predicted that Michelin, the French tiremaker, would not be able to compete with lower prices and would have to halt production in France within five years.

“You can keep your so-called workers,” he wrote. “Titan is not interested in the Amiens factory.”

In his response, Mr. Montebourg reacted strongly to what he called Mr. Taylor’s “condemnable calculation” and noted that France and its European partners were working to stop illegal dumping of imports.

“In the meantime,” he added, “rest assured that you can count on me to have the competent government agencies survey with a redoubled zeal your imported tires.”

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At War Blog: Korean War Veteran Is Buried Six Decades After He Disappeared

The passengers aboard Delta Air Lines Flight 2125 didn’t get up when the plane taxied into its gate at Baltimore Washington International Airport earlier this month. They didn’t retrieve their bags from the overhead bins. Instead, they looked out the right side of the aircraft, where an honor guard and black hearse were waiting to escort the remains of Cpl. James R. Hare home, the final portion of a journey that spanned nearly 7,000 miles and six decades.

There was applause as a staff sergeant in dress uniform, who made the trip from Atlanta, headed to the baggage and cargo unloading area. A group of pre-teenagers headed to Washington on a church trip clustered around the plane’s windows, watching the six members of the honor guard come to attention and march over to where a flag-draped coffin was coming down a conveyor belt. Some passengers went inside the terminal, where more people lined up against the windows around the gate, watching as the coffin was placed into the hearse.

Corporal Hare, a native of Cumberland, Md., was 19 when he was reported missing in action on Feb. 13, 1951, near the South Korean town of Hoengsong. Chinese forces had carried out an attack against elements of the United States Army’s Second Infantry Division and South Korean units that resulted in more than 11,000 casualties, according to an Army history. Corporal Hare’s capture and death from malnutrition was reported by an American soldier returned in a 1953 prisoner exchange, the Department of Defense reported. An obituary published in the Cumberland Times-News gave his date of death as April 30, 1953.

The process of identifying Corporal Hare began nearly 20 years ago, when North Korea gave the United States 208 boxes of commingled remains from the Korean War. The process to separate and identify remains can be painstaking and take many years to complete. In Corporal Hare’s case, military forensic scientists used mitochondrial DNA donated by a brother and sister — Corporal Hare was one of 15 children — to help identify him, although the process required additional evidence to positively identify the remains because mitochondrial DNA is not specific to an individual. Often that other evidence can come from documents or research by the Defense Department, which conducts interviews with veterans and has an arrangement with China’s People’s Liberation Army to allow access to archives that may help in the identification of missing service members. Corporal Hare was the sixth missing American soldier to be accounted for in January; five were from the Korean War, and two of those also were among the remains turned over by North Korea two decades ago.

On Feb. 13, 62 years to the day after he was reported missing, Corporal Hare was buried at Wesley Chapel Cemetery in Levels, W.Va., where his parents are also interred.

Derek Willis is an interactive developer for The New York Times, based in Washington, D.C., where he builds Web applications for nytimes.com. He previously worked as a Congressional reporter and database editor.

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Disruptions: Disruptions: 3-D Printing Is on the Fast Track

Will the future be printed in 3-D?

At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.

Yet the prediction that 3-D printers will become a part of our daily lives is happening much sooner than anyone anticipated. These printers can produce objects, even rather intricate ones, by printing thin layer after layer of plastic, metal, ceramics or other materials. And the products they make can be highly customized.

Last week, President Obama cited this nascent technology during his State of the Union address — as if everyone already knew what the technology was.

He expressed hope that it was a way to rejuvenate American manufacturing. “A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything,” Mr. Obama said. He has pushed new technologies before, like solar and wind power, as remedies for our nation’s problems, and those attempts have only revived the debate about the limitations of government industrial policy.

But this one shows more promise. The question is, can the United States get a foothold in manufacturing one 3-D printer at a time?

Hod Lipson, an associate professor and the director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell, said “3-D printing is worming its way into almost every industry, from entertainment, to food, to bio- and medical-applications.”

It won’t necessarily directly create manufacturing jobs, except perhaps for the printers themselves. Dr. Lipson, the co-author of “Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing,” said that the technology “is not going to simply replace existing manufacturing anytime soon.” But he said he believed that it would give rise to new businesses. “The bigger opportunity in the U.S. is that it opens and creates new business models that are based on this idea of customization.”

In addition to the lab that the president mentioned, a federally financed manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio, schools are embracing the technology. The University of Virginia has been working to introduce 3-D printers into some programs from kindergarten through 12th grade in Charlottesville to prepare students for a new future in manufacturing.

“We have 3-D printers in classrooms, and in one example, we’re teaching kids how to design and print catapults that they then analyze for efficiency,” said Glen L. Bull, professor and co-director of the Center for Technology and Teacher Education. “We believe that every school in America could have a 3-D printer in the classroom in the next few years.”

The education system may want to speed things up. The time between predictions for 3-D printers and the reality of what they can accomplish is compressing rapidly.

For example, in 2010, researchers at the University of Southern California said that another decade would pass before we could build a home using a 3-D printer. Yet last week, Softkill Design, a London architecture collective, announced that it planned to make the first such home — which it will assemble in a single day — later this year. The home isn’t that pretty, and will look more like a calcified spider web than a cozy house, but it will show it can be done. The price of 3-D printers has also dropped sharply over the last two years, with machines that once cost $20,000, now at $1,000 or less. That’s partly because Chinese companies are driving down prices. Yes, China sees the opportunity in these things, even though the technology may undermine some of its manufacturing advantages.

“When it costs you the same amount of manufacturing effort to make advanced robotic parts as it does to manufacture a paperweight, that really changes things in a profound way,” Dr. Lipson said.

This leaves us with one more question about the future: When will these 3-D printers be able to make us flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs?

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

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Personal Health: Health Effects of Smoking for Women

The title of a recent report on smoking and health might well have paraphrased the popular ad campaign for Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 by Philip Morris and aimed at young professional women: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Today that slogan should include: “. . . toward a shorter life.” Ten years shorter, in fact.

The new report is one of two rather shocking analyses of the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data show that “women who smoke like men die like men who smoke,” Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

That was not always the case. Half a century ago, the risk of death from lung cancer among men who smoked was five times higher than that among women smokers. But by the first decade of this century, that risk had equalized: for both men and women who smoked, the risk of death from lung cancer was 25 times greater than for nonsmokers, Dr. Michael J. Thun of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues reported.

Today, women who smoke are even more likely than men who smoke to die of lung cancer. According to a second study in the same journal, women smokers face a 17.8 times greater risk of dying of lung cancer, than women who do not smoke; men who smoke are at 14.6 times greater risk to die of lung cancer than men who don’t. Women who smoke now face a risk of death from lung cancer that is 50 percent higher than the estimates reported in the 1980s, according to Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and his colleagues.

After controlling for age, body weight, education level and alcohol use, the new analysis found something else: men and women who continue to smoke die on average more than 10 years sooner than those who never smoked.

Dramatic progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of smoking, which has fallen in the United States from 42 percent of adults in 1965 (the year after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health) to 19 percent in 2010. Yet smoking still results in nearly 200,000 deaths a year among people 35 to 69 years old in this country. A quarter of all deaths in this age group would not occur if smokers had the same risk of death as nonsmokers.

The risks are even greater among men 55 to 74 and women 60 to 74. More than two-thirds of all deaths among current smokers in these age groups are related to smoking. Over all, the death rate from all causes combined in these age groups “is now at least three times as high among current smokers as among those who have never smoked,” Dr. Thun’s team found.

While lung cancer is the most infamous hazard linked to smoking, the habit also raises the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary disease and other cancers, including breast cancer.

Furthermore, changes in how cigarettes are manufactured may have increased the dangers of smoking. The use of perforated filters, tobacco blends that are less irritating, and paper that is more porous made it easier to inhale smoke and encouraged deeper inhalation to achieve satisfying blood levels of nicotine.

The result of deeper inhalation, Dr. Thun’s report suggests, has been an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., and a shift in the kind of lung cancer linked to smoking. Among nonsmokers, the risk of death from C.O.P.D. has declined by 45 percent in men and has remained stable in women, but the death rate has more than doubled among smokers.

But there is good news, too: it’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting. The younger you are when you stop smoking, the greater your chances of living a long and healthy life, according to the findings of Dr. Jha’s international team.

The team analyzed smoking and smoking-cessation histories of 113,752 women and 88,496 men 25 and older and linked them to causes of deaths in these groups through 2006.

Those who quit smoking by age 34 lived 10 years longer on average than those who continued to smoke, giving them a life expectancy comparable to people who never smoked. Smokers who quit between ages 35 and 44 lived nine years longer, and those who quit between 45 and 54 lived six years longer. Even quitting smoking between ages 55 and 64 resulted in a four-year gain in life expectancy.

The researchers emphasized, however, that the numbers do not mean it is safe to smoke until age 40 and then stop. Former smokers who quit by 40 still experienced a 20 percent greater risk of death than nonsmokers. About one in six former smokers who died before the age of 80 would not have died so young if he or she had never smoked, they reported.

Dr. Schroeder believes we can do a lot better to reduce the prevalence of smoking with the tools currently in hand if government agencies, medical insurers and the public cooperate.

Unlike the races, ribbons and fund-raisers for breast cancer, “there’s no public face for lung cancer, even though it kills more women than breast cancer does,” Dr. Schroeder said in an interview. Lung cancer is stigmatized as a disease people bring on themselves, even though many older victims were hooked on nicotine in the 1940s and 1950s, when little was known about the hazards of smoking and doctors appeared in ads assuring the public it was safe to smoke.

Raising taxes on cigarettes can help. The states with the highest prevalence of smoking have the lowest tax rates on cigarettes, Dr. Schroeder said. Also helpful would be prohibiting smoking in more public places like parks and beaches. Some states have criminalized smoking in cars when children are present.

More “countermarketing” of cigarettes is needed, he said, including antismoking public service ads on television and dramatic health warnings on cigarette packs, as is now done in Australia. But two American courts have ruled that the proposed label warnings infringed on the tobacco industry’s right to free speech.

Health insurers, both private and government, could broaden their coverage of stop-smoking aids and better publicize telephone quit lines, and doctors “should do more to stimulate quit attempts,” Dr. Schroeder said.

As Nicola Roxon, a former Australian health minister, put it, “We are killing people by not acting.”

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Personal Health: Health Effects of Smoking for Women

The title of a recent report on smoking and health might well have paraphrased the popular ad campaign for Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 by Philip Morris and aimed at young professional women: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Today that slogan should include: “. . . toward a shorter life.” Ten years shorter, in fact.

The new report is one of two rather shocking analyses of the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data show that “women who smoke like men die like men who smoke,” Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

That was not always the case. Half a century ago, the risk of death from lung cancer among men who smoked was five times higher than that among women smokers. But by the first decade of this century, that risk had equalized: for both men and women who smoked, the risk of death from lung cancer was 25 times greater than for nonsmokers, Dr. Michael J. Thun of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues reported.

Today, women who smoke are even more likely than men who smoke to die of lung cancer. According to a second study in the same journal, women smokers face a 17.8 times greater risk of dying of lung cancer, than women who do not smoke; men who smoke are at 14.6 times greater risk to die of lung cancer than men who don’t. Women who smoke now face a risk of death from lung cancer that is 50 percent higher than the estimates reported in the 1980s, according to Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and his colleagues.

After controlling for age, body weight, education level and alcohol use, the new analysis found something else: men and women who continue to smoke die on average more than 10 years sooner than those who never smoked.

Dramatic progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of smoking, which has fallen in the United States from 42 percent of adults in 1965 (the year after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health) to 19 percent in 2010. Yet smoking still results in nearly 200,000 deaths a year among people 35 to 69 years old in this country. A quarter of all deaths in this age group would not occur if smokers had the same risk of death as nonsmokers.

The risks are even greater among men 55 to 74 and women 60 to 74. More than two-thirds of all deaths among current smokers in these age groups are related to smoking. Over all, the death rate from all causes combined in these age groups “is now at least three times as high among current smokers as among those who have never smoked,” Dr. Thun’s team found.

While lung cancer is the most infamous hazard linked to smoking, the habit also raises the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary disease and other cancers, including breast cancer.

Furthermore, changes in how cigarettes are manufactured may have increased the dangers of smoking. The use of perforated filters, tobacco blends that are less irritating, and paper that is more porous made it easier to inhale smoke and encouraged deeper inhalation to achieve satisfying blood levels of nicotine.

The result of deeper inhalation, Dr. Thun’s report suggests, has been an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., and a shift in the kind of lung cancer linked to smoking. Among nonsmokers, the risk of death from C.O.P.D. has declined by 45 percent in men and has remained stable in women, but the death rate has more than doubled among smokers.

But there is good news, too: it’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting. The younger you are when you stop smoking, the greater your chances of living a long and healthy life, according to the findings of Dr. Jha’s international team.

The team analyzed smoking and smoking-cessation histories of 113,752 women and 88,496 men 25 and older and linked them to causes of deaths in these groups through 2006.

Those who quit smoking by age 34 lived 10 years longer on average than those who continued to smoke, giving them a life expectancy comparable to people who never smoked. Smokers who quit between ages 35 and 44 lived nine years longer, and those who quit between 45 and 54 lived six years longer. Even quitting smoking between ages 55 and 64 resulted in a four-year gain in life expectancy.

The researchers emphasized, however, that the numbers do not mean it is safe to smoke until age 40 and then stop. Former smokers who quit by 40 still experienced a 20 percent greater risk of death than nonsmokers. About one in six former smokers who died before the age of 80 would not have died so young if he or she had never smoked, they reported.

Dr. Schroeder believes we can do a lot better to reduce the prevalence of smoking with the tools currently in hand if government agencies, medical insurers and the public cooperate.

Unlike the races, ribbons and fund-raisers for breast cancer, “there’s no public face for lung cancer, even though it kills more women than breast cancer does,” Dr. Schroeder said in an interview. Lung cancer is stigmatized as a disease people bring on themselves, even though many older victims were hooked on nicotine in the 1940s and 1950s, when little was known about the hazards of smoking and doctors appeared in ads assuring the public it was safe to smoke.

Raising taxes on cigarettes can help. The states with the highest prevalence of smoking have the lowest tax rates on cigarettes, Dr. Schroeder said. Also helpful would be prohibiting smoking in more public places like parks and beaches. Some states have criminalized smoking in cars when children are present.

More “countermarketing” of cigarettes is needed, he said, including antismoking public service ads on television and dramatic health warnings on cigarette packs, as is now done in Australia. But two American courts have ruled that the proposed label warnings infringed on the tobacco industry’s right to free speech.

Health insurers, both private and government, could broaden their coverage of stop-smoking aids and better publicize telephone quit lines, and doctors “should do more to stimulate quit attempts,” Dr. Schroeder said.

As Nicola Roxon, a former Australian health minister, put it, “We are killing people by not acting.”

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European Solar Importers Defend Chinese in Anti-Dumping Case

BRUSSELS — Importers of inexpensive solar panels from China said Tuesday that imposing tariffs would lead to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the European Union, the biggest export market for the Chinese equipment.

The claims by the Alliance for Affordable Solar Energy, a coalition of companies that install and service panels, were aimed at stopping the European Commission from imposing penalties in the biggest trade case of its kind in terms of value.

The association presented its evidence on Monday at a hearing with the commission, which opened a case in September to see whether the Chinese were selling solar equipment for less than the Chinese market price.

The anti-dumping case covers exports from China worth an estimated €21 billion, or $27 billion, in 2011. The commission will decide by June whether to begin imposing provisional duties in the anti-dumping case. It began a second investigation in November into whether the Chinese government was unfairly subsidizing panel makers.

The cases have bitterly split the solar sector. European manufacturers are adamant that Chinese practices are illegal under international trade rules, and they are pushing the commission to take measures to save an important component of the clean-energy industry. But installation and service companies represented by the alliance say the best way to promote clean power in Europe is to procure commodity products like panels from China and from other low-cost manufacturers.

Thorsten Preugschas, chief executive of Soventix, a German company that builds and operates solar plants worldwide, said at a news conference Tuesday that tariffs of 60 percent would lead to the loss of as many as 242,000 jobs over three years. He said Prognos, a consultancy, had conducted the study.

Underscoring his sector’s reliance on Chinese imports, Mr. Preugschas said Soventix bought about 80 percent of panels from Chinese manufacturers last year because prices were as much as 45 percent lower than those bought from some manufacturers in Europe.

Mr. Preugschas explained that Chinese factories could sell cheaply because of their size. The difference was “economies of scale,” he said, and so the “big manufacturers have a price advantage, and it doesn’t matter where in the world they are located.”

A group of solar equipment makers, including SolarWorld, a German company that is among complainants in Europe and in a separate case in the United States, fought back Tuesday, saying that unfair practices had already meant thousands of lost jobs and 30 bankruptcies in Europe.

The study carried out by Prognos “applies mathematical trickery” to reach its estimate of how many jobs would be lost once tariffs were applied, Milan Nitzschke, the president of the group, EU ProSun, said in a statement.

Mr. Nitzschke also said that prices for consumers were stable or had even decreased in the United States, and that the number of installations had grown, even after the U.S. authorities imposed tariffs on Chinese solar products.

“Only fair competition keeps jobs in Europe and leads to a development of the solar energy in the E.U.,” Mr. Nitzschke said.

The U.S authorities put duties on billions of dollars of solar products from China over the next five years to shield American producers against lower-priced imports. The E.U. case would be four or five times larger by value partly because of the scale of the industry in Europe, where many governments offer incentives to install panels in homes and offices.

John Clancy, a spokesman for Karel De Gucht, the E.U. trade commissioner, said his department would not comment on potential job losses from tariffs because the case was continuing. But Mr. Clancy said the “overall economic interests in the E.U.” would be taken into account during the investigation, including importers and industries that use imported products.

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 18

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Rise of Drones in U.S. Spurs Efforts to Limit Uses

Colin Diltz/The Seattle Times, via Associated Press

A Seattle police officer, Jim Britt, with a drone in October. Seattle later banned use of the devices.

They can record video images and produce heat maps. They can be used to track fleeing criminals, stranded hikers — or just as easily, political protesters. And for strapped police departments, they are more affordable than helicopters.

Drones are becoming a darling of law enforcement authorities across the country. But they have given rise to fears of government surveillance, in many cases even before they take to the skies. And that has prompted local and state lawmakers from Seattle to Tallahassee to outline how they can be used by police or to ground them altogether.

Although surveillance technologies have become ubiquitous in American life, like license plate readers or cameras for catching speeders, drones have evoked unusual discomfort in the public consciousness.

“To me, it’s Big Brother in the sky,” said Dave Norris, a city councilman in Charlottesville, Va., which this month became the first city in the country to restrict the use of drones. “I don’t mean to sound conspiratorial about it, but these drones are coming, and we need to put some safeguards in place so they are not abused.”

In Charlottesville, police officers are prohibited from using in criminal cases any evidence obtained by drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles. Never mind that the city police department does not have a drone, nor has it suggested buying one. The police are not barred from using drones for other efforts, like search and rescue.

Mr. Norris said the advent of new policing technologies poses new policy dilemmas for his city.

Charlottesville permits the police to install cameras temporarily in areas known for drug dealing, but it has rebuffed a police request to install cameras along its downtown shopping corridor. It has also chosen not to install cameras at traffic lights to intercept speeding cars, as is common elsewhere.

“Drones are capable of taking surveillance to a whole new level,” Mr. Norris said.

Last week, the Seattle Police Department agreed to return its two still-unused drones to the manufacturer after Mayor Michael McGinn answered public protests by banning their use. On Thursday, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors in Oakland, Calif., listened to the county sheriff’s proposal to use federal money to buy a four-pound drone to help his officers track suspected criminals — and then listened to raucous opposition from the antidrone lobby, including a group that uses the Twitter handle @N.O.M.B.Y., short for Not Over My Back Yard.

This week, members of Congress introduced a bill that would prohibit drones from conducting what it called “targeted surveillance” of individuals and property without a warrant.

A federal law enacted last year paved the way for drones to be used commercially and made it easier for government agencies to obtain them. The Department of Homeland Security offered grants to help local law enforcement buy them. Drone manufacturers began to market small, lightweight devices specifically for policing. Drones are already used to monitor movement on the United States’ borders and by a handful of police departments, and emergency services agencies around the country are just beginning to explore their uses.

The Federal Aviation Administration has received about 80 requests, including some from police and other government agencies, for clearance to fly drones, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which seeks to limit their use for police surveillance.

Law enforcement authorities say drones can be a cost-effective technology to help with a host of policing efforts, like locating bombs, finding lost children, monitoring weather and wildlife or assisting rescue workers in natural disasters.

“In this time of austerity, we are always looking for sensible and cost-effective methods to improve public safety,” said Capt. Tom Madigan of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. “We are not looking at military-grade Predator drones. They are not armed.”

For now, drones for civilian use run on relatively small batteries and fly short distances. In principle, various sensors, including cameras, can be attached to them. But there is no consensus in law on how the data collected can be used, shared or stored.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly part of the name of the federal department that offered grants to local law enforcement agencies to purchase drones. It is the Department of Homeland Security, not Services.

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Well: Dangers of Too Much Calcium

Calcium is an important nutrient for bone health, but new research suggests that older women who take large amounts may be at increased risk of heart disease and death.

Swedish researchers followed 61,433 women born between 1914 and 1948 for an average of 19 years, confirming causes of death with a Swedish government registry. The investigators also used questionnaires to record the women’s food and calcium supplement intake.

After controlling for physical activity, education, smoking, alcohol and other dietary factors, they found that women who consumed 1,400 milligrams or more of calcium a day had more than double the risk of death from heart disease, compared with those with intakes between 600 and 1,000 milligrams. These women also had a 49 percent higher rate of death from cardiovascular disease, and a 40 percent higher risk of death from any cause.

The study, published last week online in BMJ, found the increased risk only in women who consumed the most calcium — there was no gradually increased risk with gradually increased calcium intake.

The authors noted that calcium can increase blood levels of a protein associated with higher risk for cardiovascular disease.

“If you have a normal diet, you don’t need to take calcium supplements,” said the lead author, Dr. Karl Michaëlsson, a professor and orthopedic surgeon at Uppsala University in Sweden. “Calcium supplements are useful if you have a very low intake of calcium, but few women have such a low intake.”

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Well: Dangers of Too Much Calcium

Calcium is an important nutrient for bone health, but new research suggests that older women who take large amounts may be at increased risk of heart disease and death.

Swedish researchers followed 61,433 women born between 1914 and 1948 for an average of 19 years, confirming causes of death with a Swedish government registry. The investigators also used questionnaires to record the women’s food and calcium supplement intake.

After controlling for physical activity, education, smoking, alcohol and other dietary factors, they found that women who consumed 1,400 milligrams or more of calcium a day had more than double the risk of death from heart disease, compared with those with intakes between 600 and 1,000 milligrams. These women also had a 49 percent higher rate of death from cardiovascular disease, and a 40 percent higher risk of death from any cause.

The study, published last week online in BMJ, found the increased risk only in women who consumed the most calcium — there was no gradually increased risk with gradually increased calcium intake.

The authors noted that calcium can increase blood levels of a protein associated with higher risk for cardiovascular disease.

“If you have a normal diet, you don’t need to take calcium supplements,” said the lead author, Dr. Karl Michaëlsson, a professor and orthopedic surgeon at Uppsala University in Sweden. “Calcium supplements are useful if you have a very low intake of calcium, but few women have such a low intake.”

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