Markets Jump on Fiscal Deal

Global stocks kicked off the 2013 trading year with a strong start Wednesday, as investors welcomed a deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans that ended, at least temporarily, an impasse over fiscal policy that had threatened chaos in the new year.

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

People watch traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. Global stocks kicked off the year with a strong start.

The broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index leapt 2.1 percent in late trading. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 2 percent, or about 260 points, and the Nasdaq composite index climbed 2.7 percent.

The deadline drama over the fiscal impasse ended when a sufficient number of Republicans in the House of Representatives joined Democrats to back a deal the Senate had reached earlier. The deal modestly raises income taxes on the highest-earning Americans, ends payroll tax cuts and creates permanent tax cuts for others.

“There’s clearly a big relief rally,” said Christian Schulz, an economist in London with Berenberg Bank.

The Euro Stoxx 50 index of euro zone blue chips ended 2.4 percent higher, while the FTSE 100 index in London gained 2.1 percent. The euro gained 0.6 percent to $1.3270, and yields fell on Spanish and Italian government bonds.

Asian indexes also gained, with the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong rising 2.9 percent. But markets in Japan and mainland China were closed for holidays.

Still, analysts warned that the gains might not last, as the last-minute deal had only bought time.

The deal “is likely to prove only a temporary fix to address fiscal uncertainty in the U.S.,” Lee Hardman, an analyst at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in London, wrote in a research note, pointing out that “the planned sequester government spending cuts merely delayed for two months.”

Investors, he added, probably will begin to focus on “whether U.S. politicians will be able to raise the debt ceiling in the next two months to avert a technical default, and whether the delayed sequester spending cuts will now come into force on March 1.”

Mr. Schultz noted that the United States hit the debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion, or 104 percent of 2012 gross domestic product, on Dec. 31, and could it exceed it as soon as February without Congressional action.

There are also questions about how America’s new commitment to cutting the deficit will affect the economy and its credit ratings.

“The austerity they’ve imposed is very modest,” Mr. Schultz said, “perhaps 1 percent of G.D.P. So maybe the most interesting thing will be to see how the ratings agencies react.”

Analysts at DBS in Singapore wrote in a research note: “Call it breathing room, call it kicking the can down the road, call it whatever you like — come mid-February, when the decision on the legal U.S. debt limit will be needed, the fight starts afresh.”

They added, “Two more months of shenanigans and waffling/seasick markets? It certainly looks that way.”

In economic reports, the Institute for Supply Management said manufacturing in the United States expanded slightly in December. Its manufacturing activity index rose to 50.7 points in December, up from 49.5 in November.

In Europe, manufacturing activity remained in the doldrums. Surveys of purchasing managers by Markit Economics showed euro zone factories ended 2012 in poor shape, with both production and new orders declining in December. German factories posted declines in both output and new orders, according to the Markit data, while the Spanish manufacturing shrank a 20th consecutive month, with both the decline and the pace of job cuts accelerating.

David Jolly reported from Paris. Bettina Wassener reported from Hong Kong.

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Clashes in West Bank Injure Palestinians

JERUSALEM — Violent clashes broke out on Tuesday between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in a village in the northern West Bank, leaving up to 30 Palestinians injured, after an undercover Israeli force entered the village to arrest a wanted militant, according to Palestinian news reports and the Israeli military.

The military said two soldiers were wounded, neither seriously, by rocks thrown by Palestinians. A spokeswoman for the Israeli military, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under army rules, said the purpose of Tuesday’s raid on the village, Tamoun, was to arrest a resident, Murad Bani Odeh, who she said was suspected of being a terrorist. Both the military and Palestinian reports identified Mr. Odeh, who was captured by the Israeli forces, as a member of Islamic Jihad, an extremist organization.

In the raid, an undercover force, reportedly disguised as vegetable merchants, entered the village first. When youths started throwing stones and a violent riot broke out, regular forces came in and dispersed the crowd with rubber-coated bullets and tear gas. The military spokeswoman denied Palestinian reports that the soldiers also used live fire.

The confrontation was the latest manifestation of the simmering unrest and disturbances that have spread across the West Bank since mid-November, when Israel embarked on a fierce eight-day military campaign against the rocket-launching infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, controlled by the militant group Hamas.

It also comes after years of stagnation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, an issue that has re-emerged in recent days as an Israeli election issue, with Israelis scheduled to go to the polls on Jan. 22.

The fate of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — territories that the Palestinians claim for a future state — is always a core, if sometimes underlying, issue for Israeli voters. Until now, the leaders of the two largest political forces, the rightist Likud-Beiteinu joint ticket and the center-left Labor Party, had mostly avoided the subject, aware of public fatigue and skepticism about the prospects of a peace deal and preferring to refocus the debate onto security and socioeconomic issues.

But the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, a veteran politician who is now supposed to stay out of politics and play a mostly symbolic role, intervened in the election campaign on Sunday, telling a large group of visiting Israeli ambassadors that he considered the president of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to be a partner for peace.

“No one will change my opinion about Abu Mazen,” he said in broadcast remarks, referring to Mr. Abbas by his popular name, “even if they say I cannot express it because I’m the president.” Israel, he added, “must complete the task of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians without further delay.”

The remarks infuriated Likud-Beiteinu, which issued a sharp statement condemning Mr. Peres for expressing what it called a “personal political opinion that is disconnected from the Israeli public’s stance regarding Abu Mazen, the peace refusenik.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Likud-Beiteinu, who has endorsed a two-state solution under certain conditions, responded on Tuesday with a statement that called for extreme caution and an Israeli foot on the brakes.

“In Egypt, the regime has been replaced, in Syria the regime is being shaken and this could also happen in the Palestinian Authority areas in Judea and Samaria,” he said, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names. “Everyone knows that Hamas could take over the Palestinian Authority,” he continued. “It could happen after an agreement; it could happen before an agreement, like it happened in Gaza. Therefore, as opposed to the voices that I have heard recently urging me to run forward, to make concessions and to withdraw, I think that the diplomatic process must be managed responsibly and sagaciously and not in undue haste.”

There has been a palpable rise in incidents of stone-throwing and firebombing by Palestinians against Israeli vehicles on West Bank roads, and an increase in localized clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and soldiers, according to Israeli officials. On Monday night, the military said, an Israeli civilian bus traveling south of Hebron was shot at. There were no injuries.

The spike in unrest comes after four years of relative stability in the West Bank, and it has led some Israeli commentators to speculate about the chances of a third Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

Israeli and Palestinian officials say privately that they have no evidence of plans for a full-blown uprising, though nobody could rule out a spontaneous outburst triggered by some unforeseen incident. Mr. Abbas has stated publicly that he will not support an armed uprising on his watch.

In the meantime, the Israeli military says it has been trying to balance proactive counterterrorism measures — like widespread arrests of militants belonging to Hamas and other armed groups — with a policy of restraint when faced with rioters, to try to prevent Palestinian fatalities and a subsequent spiral of violence.

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Bits Blog: Big Data: Rise of the Machines

For a column that laid out some second thoughts on Big Data, one of the people I talked to was Thomas H. Davenport, who has worked in the fields of knowledge management and analytics for 15 years. Data analytics is the predecessor to Big Data. He knows the context — what’s new and what’s not with Big Data — as well as anyone.

Mr. Davenport, a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School (on leave from Babson College), has authored and co-authored several books on analytics, including “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” (with Jeanne G. Harris, Harvard Business School Press, 2007). Shortly after the Big Data phenomenon took off, Mr. Davenport said, only half-joking, that he considered simply substituting the term “Big Data” for “analytics” for updated versions of his books.

But as he looked more deeply, there really was something different in Big Data. Data volumes have been steadily increasing for decades, Mr. Davenport noted, though the pace has accelerated sharply in the Internet age. “More than the amount of data itself, the unstructured data from the Web and sensors is a much more salient feature of what is being called Big Data,” he said.

I also asked David B. Yoffie, a technology and competitive strategy expert at Harvard, who is not part of the Big Data crowd, what he thought. The Internet, he observed, has been a mainstream technology for 15 years, and so has the ability to monitor and mine Web browsing behavior and online communications, even if those skills are much improved now.

Still, Mr. Yoffie is most impressed by the rapid spread of low-cost sensors that make it possible to monitor all kinds of physical objects, from fruit shipments (sniffing for signs of spoilage) to jet engines (tracking wear to predict when maintenance is needed).

“The ubiquity of sensors is new,” Mr. Yoffie said. “The sensors make it possible to get data we never had before.”

Machine-generated sensor data will be become a far larger portion of the Big Data world, according to a recent report by IDC. The research report, “The Digital Universe in 2020,” published in December, traces data trends from 2005-20. One of its forecasts is that machine-generated data will increase to 42 percent of all data by 2020, up from 11 percent in 2005.

“It’s all those sensors, the Internet of Things data,” said Jeremy Burton, an executive vice president at EMC, which sponsored the IDC report.

The implication is that Big Data technology will steadily move beyond the consumer Internet. Industrial companies like General Electric are already making big bets on the payoff. The IDC forecast also suggests that there is a lot of substance to the vision of machine-to-machine communication and intelligence that W. Brian Arthur terms “the second economy.”

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Study Suggests Lower Death Risk for the Overweight

A century ago, Elsie Scheel was the perfect woman. So said a 1912 article in The New York Times about how Miss Scheel, 24, was chosen by the “medical examiner of the 400 'co-eds'” at Cornell University as a woman “whose very presence bespeaks perfect health.”

Miss Scheel, however, was hardly model-thin. At 5-foot-7 and 171 pounds, she would, by today's medical standards, be clearly overweight. (Her body mass index was 27; 25 to 29.9 is overweight.)

But a new report suggests that Miss Scheel may have been onto something. The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

Experts not involved in the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people. But over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.

“We wouldn’t want people to think, ‘Well, I can take a pass and gain more weight,'” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s nutrition division.

Rather, he and others said, the report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that B.M.I., a ratio of height to weight, should not be the only indicator of healthy weight.

“Body mass index is an imperfect measure of the risk of mortality,” and factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar must be considered, said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Steven Heymsfield, executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said that for overweight people, if indicators like cholesterol “are in the abnormal range, then that weight is affecting you,” but that if indicators are normal, there’s no reason to “go on a crash diet.”

Experts also said the data suggested that the definition of "normal" B.M.I., 18.5 to 24.9, should be revised, excluding its lowest weights, which might be too thin.

The study did show that the two highest obesity categories (B.M.I. of 35 and up) are at high risk. “Once you have higher obesity, the fat’s in the fire,” Dr. Blackburn said.

But experts also suggested that concepts of fat be refined.

"Fat per se is not as bad as we thought," said Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Irvine. "What is bad is a type of fat that is inside your belly. Non-belly fat, underneath your skin in your thigh and your butt area — these are not necessarily bad." He added that, to a point, extra fat is accompanied by extra muscle, which can be healthy.

Still, it is possible that overweight or somewhat obese people are less likely to die because they, or their doctors, have identified other conditions associated with weight gain, like high cholesterol or diabetes.

“You’re more likely to be in your doctor’s office and more likely to be treated,” said Dr. Robert Eckel, a past president of the American Heart Association and a professor at University of Colorado.

Some experts said fat could be protective in some cases, although that is unproven and debated. The study did find that people 65 and over had no greater mortality risk even at high obesity.

“There’s something about extra body fat when you’re older that is providing some reserve,” Dr. Eckel said.

And studies on specific illnesses, like heart and kidney disease, have found an “obesity paradox,” that heavier patients are less likely to die.

Still, death is not everything. Even if "being overweight doesn't increase your risk of dying," Dr. Klein said, it "does increase your risk of having diabetes" or other conditions.

Ultimately, said the study’s lead author, Katherine Flegal, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the best weight might depend on the situation you’re in.”

Take the perfect woman, Elsie Scheel, in whose "physical makeup there is not a single defect," the Times article said. This woman who "has never been ill and doesn't know what fear is" loved sports and didn't consume candy, coffee or tea. But she also ate only three meals every two days, and loved beefsteak.

Maybe such seeming contradictions made sense against the societal inconsistencies of that time. After all, her post-college plans involved tilling her father’s farm, but “if she were a man, she would study mechanical engineering.”

Read More..

Study Suggests Lower Death Risk for the Overweight

A century ago, Elsie Scheel was the perfect woman. So said a 1912 article in The New York Times about how Miss Scheel, 24, was chosen by the “medical examiner of the 400 'co-eds'” at Cornell University as a woman “whose very presence bespeaks perfect health.”

Miss Scheel, however, was hardly model-thin. At 5-foot-7 and 171 pounds, she would, by today's medical standards, be clearly overweight. (Her body mass index was 27; 25 to 29.9 is overweight.)

But a new report suggests that Miss Scheel may have been onto something. The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

Experts not involved in the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people. But over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.

“We wouldn’t want people to think, ‘Well, I can take a pass and gain more weight,'” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s nutrition division.

Rather, he and others said, the report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that B.M.I., a ratio of height to weight, should not be the only indicator of healthy weight.

“Body mass index is an imperfect measure of the risk of mortality,” and factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar must be considered, said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Steven Heymsfield, executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said that for overweight people, if indicators like cholesterol “are in the abnormal range, then that weight is affecting you,” but that if indicators are normal, there’s no reason to “go on a crash diet.”

Experts also said the data suggested that the definition of "normal" B.M.I., 18.5 to 24.9, should be revised, excluding its lowest weights, which might be too thin.

The study did show that the two highest obesity categories (B.M.I. of 35 and up) are at high risk. “Once you have higher obesity, the fat’s in the fire,” Dr. Blackburn said.

But experts also suggested that concepts of fat be refined.

"Fat per se is not as bad as we thought," said Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Irvine. "What is bad is a type of fat that is inside your belly. Non-belly fat, underneath your skin in your thigh and your butt area — these are not necessarily bad." He added that, to a point, extra fat is accompanied by extra muscle, which can be healthy.

Still, it is possible that overweight or somewhat obese people are less likely to die because they, or their doctors, have identified other conditions associated with weight gain, like high cholesterol or diabetes.

“You’re more likely to be in your doctor’s office and more likely to be treated,” said Dr. Robert Eckel, a past president of the American Heart Association and a professor at University of Colorado.

Some experts said fat could be protective in some cases, although that is unproven and debated. The study did find that people 65 and over had no greater mortality risk even at high obesity.

“There’s something about extra body fat when you’re older that is providing some reserve,” Dr. Eckel said.

And studies on specific illnesses, like heart and kidney disease, have found an “obesity paradox,” that heavier patients are less likely to die.

Still, death is not everything. Even if "being overweight doesn't increase your risk of dying," Dr. Klein said, it "does increase your risk of having diabetes" or other conditions.

Ultimately, said the study’s lead author, Katherine Flegal, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the best weight might depend on the situation you’re in.”

Take the perfect woman, Elsie Scheel, in whose "physical makeup there is not a single defect," the Times article said. This woman who "has never been ill and doesn't know what fear is" loved sports and didn't consume candy, coffee or tea. But she also ate only three meals every two days, and loved beefsteak.

Maybe such seeming contradictions made sense against the societal inconsistencies of that time. After all, her post-college plans involved tilling her father’s farm, but “if she were a man, she would study mechanical engineering.”

Read More..

DealBook: Crime Forfeiture Pays for U.S. Attorney's Office (Sometimes in Dinosaur Bones)

The federal government runs a multibillion-dollar business in Lower Manhattan with an unusual and diverse revenue stream.

In the last year, the government’s prosecutorial branch in Manhattan has taken in about $160 million from an online poker operation and more than $2 billion from a failed Ponzi scheme. Last week, it even secured a Tyrannosaurus skeleton from Mongolia valued at more than $1 million.

This business is the asset forfeiture unit of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. In 2012, the unit recovered about $3 billion in crime proceeds — the largest amount ever recovered by a single United States attorney’s office since the Justice Department established the asset forfeiture program four decades ago. It also accounts for 68 percent of the national total last year from the country’s 93 United States attorney’s offices, according to government figures.

“Asset forfeiture is an important part of the culture here and an example of the government being efficient and bringing home the bacon,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a recent interview.

The aggressive use of forfeiture as a legal mechanism to seize and freeze criminal proceeds has long been a hallmark of Manhattan’s federal prosecutors. Securing forfeited assets is a priority of the office in part because many of the largest financial fraud cases are centered in New York.

“To put someone in jail is very important, but equally important is to provide the crime victims with some type of compensation,” said Sharon Cohen Levin, an assistant United States attorney who has run the office’s forfeiture unit for 16 years.

The Justice Department’s program has plenty of critics. Many judges and defense lawyers say that the policies can be arbitrary and harsh. In recent decades, forfeiture powers have greatly expanded, leading to overzealous and mean-spirited conduct by prosecutors, critics say. In 2000, Congress reined in prosecutors with the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act, which instituted a number of changes.

“Congress needs to revisit the forfeiture laws to curb continuing abuses,” said David B. Smith, a defense lawyer in Alexandria, Va., and the author of a leading treatise on forfeiture. “The procedures need to be made more fair, particularly for innocent third parties whose property rights can be easily destroyed without even having an opportunity to challenge the basis for the forfeiture.”

The seized money ends up in different places. Where there are not identifiable victims, as in drug crimes, proceeds are placed in two asset forfeiture funds: one controlled by the Justice Department and the other by the Treasury Department. Most of that money is used to bolster various law enforcement initiatives.

But the majority of the forfeited assets end up back in the hands of defrauded victims.

In March 2012, for instance, as part of a settlement, the publicly held Science Applications International Corporation, the primary contractor on New York’s scandal-ridden CityTime payroll project, forfeited about $500 million in connection with its role in a fraud and kickback scheme.

More than 90 percent of that amount was given back to the city as compensation for its losses on the CityTime project. That money allowed New York to fill more than 2,500 teaching positions that would otherwise have been eliminated in the budget for the coming fiscal year, according to the city.

In certain cases, the forfeiture process can be painstaking and take years to resolve, as in the Adelphia Communications accounting fraud, which led to the largest single distribution of forfeited assets to victims in the Justice Department’s history.

Last spring, a decade after the office began its investigation of the Adelphia fraud, about $730 million was distributed to victims. Adelphia’s former chief executive, John Rigas, and his son Timothy Rigas, who was chief financial officer, are both serving prison time after their convictions and agreed along with other family members to forfeit more than 95 percent of the family’s assets to the government.

The complicated process, overseen by a court-appointed special master, Richard C. Breeden, involved setting up a victim fund and then processing more than 13,000 petitions and verifying monetary losses of the company’s shareholders.

The Adelphia distribution, though, is likely to be dwarfed by the amount of money that the government returns to defrauded investors in the Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Bernard L. Madoff. Mr. Bharara’s office has worked alongside Irving H. Picard, the trustee in the Madoff case, to secure compensation for the victims.

Virtually all of the government’s recovery for Mr. Madoff’s victims comes from the settlement of claims against the estate of Jeffry M. Picower, who died in 2009 and was one of Mr. Madoff’s original and largest investors. Of the $7.2 billion that Mr. Picower’s widow agreed to return to victims, $2.2 billion went to the Justice Department, with the rest going to Mr. Picard for eventual distribution.

Last month, the government named Mr. Breeden, the supervisor of the Adelphia case, to serve as special master to administer the forfeiture proceeds in the Madoff case.

Of the $17.3 billion of actual cash losses in Mr. Madoff’s fraud, the trustee has recovered about $9.3 billion and distributed about $3.7 billion of that to eligible victims. The $2.35 billion seized by prosecutors under forfeiture laws will be doled out separately by the Justice Department, which has said it expects the victim claims process to begin shortly.

Another substantial forfeiture case last year involved Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, two large online poker Web sites. To settle a lawsuit against the companies, Full Tilt agreed to forfeit essentially all of its assets and PokerStars agreed to forfeit $547 million — representing revenue from illegal gambling and proceeds from money laundering — that will be paid out in several installments. To date, about $160 million has been forfeited.

But last year’s most exotic forfeiture action involved the Mongolian dinosaur case. Last week, a paleontologist admitted to illegally shipping dinosaur fossils to the United States from Asia. As part of a plea agreement, the paleontologist, Eric Prokopi, agreed to forfeit a Tyrannosaurus skeleton that had been put up for auction for more than $1 million, along with five other dinosaur skeletons.

The fossils will be returned to the Mongolian government; Mr. Prokopi faces a possible prison sentence.

The reptile remnants represent just a fraction of the 2012 forfeiture proceeds secured by Mr. Bharara and his colleagues — proceeds that amounted to more than 60 times the office’s annual budget.

“As I like to joke,” Mr. Bharara said, “that’s a lot better than the investment return of any hedge fund.”

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Ruthless Smuggling Rings Put Rhinos in the Cross Hairs

KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa — They definitely did not look like ordinary big-game hunters, the stream of slender young Thai women who showed up on the veld wearing tight blue jeans and sneakers.

But the rhinoceros carcasses kept piling up around them, and it was only after dozens of these hulking, relatively rare animals were dead and their precious horns sawed off that an extravagant scheme came to light.

The Thai women, it ends up, weren’t hunters at all. Many never even squeezed off a shot. Instead, they were prostitutes hired by a criminal syndicate based 6,000 miles away in Laos to exploit loopholes in big game hunting rules and get its hands on as many rhino horns as possible — horns that are now literally worth more than gold.

“These girls had no idea what they were doing,” said Paul O’Sullivan, a private investigator in Johannesburg who helped crack the case. “They thought they were going on safari.”

The rhino horn rush has gotten so out of control that it has exploded into a worldwide criminal enterprise, drawing in a surreal cast of characters — not just Thai prostitutes, but also Irish gangsters, Vietnamese diplomats, Chinese scientists, veterinarians, chopper pilots, antiques dealers and recently an American rodeo star looking for a quick buck who used Facebook to find some horns.

Driven by a common belief in Asia that ground-up rhino horns can cure cancer and other ills, the trade has also been embraced by criminal syndicates that normally traffic drugs and guns, but have branched into the underground animal parts business because it is seen as “low risk, high profit,” American officials say.

“Get caught smuggling a kilo of cocaine, you will receive a very significant prison sentence,” said Ed Grace, a deputy chief with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. But with a kilogram of rhino horn, he added, “you may only get a fine.”

The typical rhino horn is about two feet long and 10 pounds, much of it formed from the same substance as fingernails. Yet it can fetch nearly $30,000 a pound, more than crack cocaine, and conservationists worry that this “ridiculous price,” as one wildlife manager put it, could drive rhinos into extinction.

Gangs are so desperate for new sources of horn that criminals have even smashed into dozens of glass museum cases all across Europe to snatch them from exhibits.

“Astonishment and rage, that’s what we felt,” said Paolo Agnelli, a manager at the Florence Museum of Natural History, after three rhino horns were stolen last year, including a very rare one from 1824.

American federal agents recently staged a cross-country undercover rhino horn sting operation, called Operation Crash, “crash” being the term for a herd of rhinos.

Among the 12 people arrested: Wade Steffen, a champion steer wrestler from Texas, who pleaded guilty in May to trafficking dozens of horns that he found through hunters, estate sales and Facebook; and two members of an Irish gang — the same gang suspected of breaking into the museums across Europe.

In an e-mail to an undercover agent, an Irish gangster bragged: “Believe me WE NEVER LOSES A HORN TO CUSTOMS, we have so many contacts and people payed off now we can bring anything we want out of nearly any country into Europe.”

Corruption is a huge element, just like in the illegal ivory trade, in which rebel groups, government armies and threadbare hunters have been wiping out tens of thousands of elephants throughout Africa, selling the tusks to sophisticated criminal networks that move them across the globe with the help of corrupt officials.

Here in South Africa, home to the majority of the world’s last surviving 28,000 rhinos or so, the country is throwing just about everything it has to stop the slaughter — thousands of rangers, the national army, a new spy plane, even drones — but it is losing.

The number of rhinos poached in South Africa has soared in the past five years, from 13 killed in 2007 to more than 630 this year. The prehistoric, battleship-gray animals are often found on their knees, bleeding to death from a gaping stump on their face.

“Ever seen a dead rhino?” said Philip Jonker, who works for a private security firm that has gone into wildlife protection. “It’s worse than going to a funeral.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

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Bits Blog: GitHub Has Big Dreams for Open-Source Software, and More

Software is not merely about automating every aspect of our lives anymore. Some of its makers want to change the way we all interact, spreading their supposed egalitarian excellence.

Whether this is liberation into a new and better mode of being (and yes, the people thinking about this take it to that scale) or the folly of an industry in love with its success is one of the more intriguing questions of a world rushing to live online.

GitHub is a San Francisco company that started in 2008 as a way for open-source software writers in disparate locations to rapidly create new and better versions of their work. Work is stored, shared and discussed, based on the idea of a “pull request,” which is a suggestion to the group for some accretive element, like several lines of code, to be “pulled,” or added, to a project.

“The concept is based around change: what is the right thing to do, what is the wrong thing?” said Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub’s co-founder and chief executive. “The efficiency of large groups working together is very low in large enterprises. We want to change that.”

Mr. Preston-Werner’s own company is something of a proxy for how he sees the world. GitHub has no managers among its 140 employees, for example. “Everyone has management interests,” he said. “People can work on things that are interesting to them. Companies should exist to optimize happiness, not money. Profits follow.” He does, however, retain his own title and decides things like salaries.

In his blog Mr. Preston-Werner has written about how important it is for  companies to expose as much of their inner workings as possible. Another member of GitHub has posted a talk that stresses how companies flourish when people want to work on certain things, not because they are told to.

This style and sentiment echoes those at another company, Asana, a corporate social network aiming to improve the pace of work. Founded by Dustin Moskovitz, who was a co-founder of Facebook and for many years ran its technology, Asana bases work on a series of to-do lists that people assign one another. Inside Asana there are no formal titles, though like GitHub there are bosses at the top who make final decisions.

For all the happiness and sharing, real money is involved here. In July GitHub received $100 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This early in most software companies’ lives, $20 million would be a fortune.

Companies pay to use GitHub, and it has become an exceptionally popular way for people to do all kinds of software work; in 2012 its number of users jumped to 2.8 million from 1.2 million. The number of “repositories” — containing code, its documentation, images associated with a project or other work — increased to 4.6 million from 1.7 million last year.

Many of these are open-source projects, and GitHub does not break out their revenue.

GitHub’s popularity has also made it an important way for companies to recruit engineers, because some of the best people in the business are showing their work or dissecting the work of others inside some of the public pull requests. Its founders and backers, however, want to use the GitHub model to make mobile and enterprise software applications, and possibly much more.

Mr. Preston-Werner thinks the way open source requires a high degree of trust and collaboration among relative equals (plus a few high-level managers who define the scope of a job and make final decisions) can be extended more broadly, even into government.

“For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” he said. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”

Can this really be extended across a large, complex organization, however?

As complex as an open-source project may be, it is also based on a single, well-defined outcome, and an engineering task that is generally free of concepts like fairness and justice, about which people can debate endlessly. Even on a less lofty plane, companies like GitHub and Asana will ultimately test themselves against complex corporate processes lasting years, and involving skills in both science and the humanities. Google once prided itself on few managers and fast action, but has found that getting big can also involve lots more meetings.

Still, these fast-rising successes may be on to something more than simply universalizing the means of their own good fortune. An early guru of the Information Age, Peter Drucker, wrote often in the latter part of his career of the need for managers to define tasks, and for workers to seek fulfillment before profits.

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Essay: In Pursuit of Answers One May Not Want to Know

I jogged into the Stanford Cancer Clinic with my boyfriend, the youngest people there by two decades. We stood there sweating and holding hands, a jarring sight in the sickly light.

“You are 18, right?” the receptionist asked. Behind me, a woman so gaunt that her cheekbones protruded rolled by in a wheelchair. The oncologist called me alone to the exam room, and I told her the story I had revealed to more doctors than friends: I carry the BRCA1 mutation, which gives you a 98 percent chance of developing cancer.

When my family found out that I might have inherited the mutation from my mother, we took it as a given that I would get tested. Scientists, atheists and lawyers, we are compulsively rational. Yet when I learned I carried the mutation, I felt the cruel weight of a paradox: you can never know whether you want to know until you already do.

At Stanford, I study artificial intelligence, in which math is used to resolve these sorts of dilemmas. My teachers claim that gaining information never hurts. It can be proved mathematically that a robot with more information never makes worse decisions But we are not robots. Our eyes don’t filigree the world with coordinates and probabilities, and they can be blinded by tears.

Still, we, too, display a preference for information. We dislike uncertainty so strongly that we sometimes even prefer bad news. One study of people at risk for a terminal disease found that those who learned they were going to die from it were happier a year later than those who remained uncertain about their fates. Most people have a deep intuition that a life lived cleareyed has inherent value, independent of whether the truth makes you happy. But surely this has limits.

I know there are some things I do not want to know: which other girls my boyfriend finds attractive or the day and manner of my death. The truth can hurt in two ways. It can worsen your options: you can’t live as happily with a significant other after learning of his infidelity. Or it can make you irrational: hearing about terrorists targeting airplanes may lead you to drive instead of fly, though planes remain much safer than cars.

So was I wrong to unwind my double helix?

My risks of getting cancer at 21 are too low for me to do anything differently to better my odds. The knowledge is both irrelevant and painful; it’s obsessed me and made me behave irrationally. I wake from nightmares in which I am dying from cancer. I reread the memoirs of patients with metastatic disease until I can’t see the text through my tears. In my supposedly rational pursuit of knowledge, I’ve gone a little mad.

Despite an excess of information, I pursued more, enrolling in Stanford’s cancer biology class. The professor filled his slides with dark oncological puns, lecturing with the almost robotic detachment I sometimes see in those who work closely with cancer. Maybe I, too, am becoming robotic. I can laugh at the puns, calmly press lecturers on survival rates for breast cancer, marvel at the elegant molecular mechanisms by which it eats us alive. Just as tumors eventually swell too large for their hosts to endure, will all this knowledge grow past what I can handle?

The prospect was too much for my mother, a far tougher woman than I am. When she received a diagnosis of breast cancer, she ordered the doctors to give her chemotherapy as rapidly as possible and recovered completely. But she refused to learn her chances of long-term survival or look at her medical records. I became the first in my family to read them, and when I learned her cancer had been unusually lethal, my father asked me not to tell her.

I cannot shake the thought that this mutation was given to me for a reason. I don’t believe in God. I know my chromosomes divided along a random schism, not a divine skein. But while I reject the theist’s idea of God-granted purpose, I accept the existentialist’s idea of crafting your own. The world may be only sound and fury, but we can choose to see patterns in that chaos, stories in the stars.

So I choose to believe that I have been given this mutation so that I can discover how to overcome it. Like the protagonist in “Flowers for Algernon,” I will be both scientist and patient. Even if this sense of purpose is illusory, it lets me do what I couldn’t before. Fear has sharpened me: I wake at 3 in the morning to refine biological algorithms or to read papers on ovarian cancer.

While I believe this knowledge has made me live better, I am not sure it’s made me happier. True, there was the day I dropped by Stanford’s Relay for Life, a fund-raiser for cancer research, ran farther than I ever had and walked home full of joyful purpose. There was also the night I lost it completely and sobbed for hours in my boyfriend’s arms.

In this oscillation between light and dark, one thing remains constant: I’m no longer so eager to illuminate my fate. Recently, I went to the Web site of 23andMe, a company that will read from your genome your risk of dying from a hundred diseases. I clicked through the testimonials and was unnerved by how similar our reasons were for wanting information. I looked down at my fingertips, tempted: what else in my genome waits to be found?

But then I clicked away. The Bible doesn’t tell us if Eve ate any more apples, but I have had my fill of revelations. I am 21 years old, and I want to be free to live a normal life: fate unbound by double helix, future exploding with possibility. I don’t want to know.

Read More..

Essay: In Pursuit of Answers One May Not Want to Know

I jogged into the Stanford Cancer Clinic with my boyfriend, the youngest people there by two decades. We stood there sweating and holding hands, a jarring sight in the sickly light.

“You are 18, right?” the receptionist asked. Behind me, a woman so gaunt that her cheekbones protruded rolled by in a wheelchair. The oncologist called me alone to the exam room, and I told her the story I had revealed to more doctors than friends: I carry the BRCA1 mutation, which gives you a 98 percent chance of developing cancer.

When my family found out that I might have inherited the mutation from my mother, we took it as a given that I would get tested. Scientists, atheists and lawyers, we are compulsively rational. Yet when I learned I carried the mutation, I felt the cruel weight of a paradox: you can never know whether you want to know until you already do.

At Stanford, I study artificial intelligence, in which math is used to resolve these sorts of dilemmas. My teachers claim that gaining information never hurts. It can be proved mathematically that a robot with more information never makes worse decisions But we are not robots. Our eyes don’t filigree the world with coordinates and probabilities, and they can be blinded by tears.

Still, we, too, display a preference for information. We dislike uncertainty so strongly that we sometimes even prefer bad news. One study of people at risk for a terminal disease found that those who learned they were going to die from it were happier a year later than those who remained uncertain about their fates. Most people have a deep intuition that a life lived cleareyed has inherent value, independent of whether the truth makes you happy. But surely this has limits.

I know there are some things I do not want to know: which other girls my boyfriend finds attractive or the day and manner of my death. The truth can hurt in two ways. It can worsen your options: you can’t live as happily with a significant other after learning of his infidelity. Or it can make you irrational: hearing about terrorists targeting airplanes may lead you to drive instead of fly, though planes remain much safer than cars.

So was I wrong to unwind my double helix?

My risks of getting cancer at 21 are too low for me to do anything differently to better my odds. The knowledge is both irrelevant and painful; it’s obsessed me and made me behave irrationally. I wake from nightmares in which I am dying from cancer. I reread the memoirs of patients with metastatic disease until I can’t see the text through my tears. In my supposedly rational pursuit of knowledge, I’ve gone a little mad.

Despite an excess of information, I pursued more, enrolling in Stanford’s cancer biology class. The professor filled his slides with dark oncological puns, lecturing with the almost robotic detachment I sometimes see in those who work closely with cancer. Maybe I, too, am becoming robotic. I can laugh at the puns, calmly press lecturers on survival rates for breast cancer, marvel at the elegant molecular mechanisms by which it eats us alive. Just as tumors eventually swell too large for their hosts to endure, will all this knowledge grow past what I can handle?

The prospect was too much for my mother, a far tougher woman than I am. When she received a diagnosis of breast cancer, she ordered the doctors to give her chemotherapy as rapidly as possible and recovered completely. But she refused to learn her chances of long-term survival or look at her medical records. I became the first in my family to read them, and when I learned her cancer had been unusually lethal, my father asked me not to tell her.

I cannot shake the thought that this mutation was given to me for a reason. I don’t believe in God. I know my chromosomes divided along a random schism, not a divine skein. But while I reject the theist’s idea of God-granted purpose, I accept the existentialist’s idea of crafting your own. The world may be only sound and fury, but we can choose to see patterns in that chaos, stories in the stars.

So I choose to believe that I have been given this mutation so that I can discover how to overcome it. Like the protagonist in “Flowers for Algernon,” I will be both scientist and patient. Even if this sense of purpose is illusory, it lets me do what I couldn’t before. Fear has sharpened me: I wake at 3 in the morning to refine biological algorithms or to read papers on ovarian cancer.

While I believe this knowledge has made me live better, I am not sure it’s made me happier. True, there was the day I dropped by Stanford’s Relay for Life, a fund-raiser for cancer research, ran farther than I ever had and walked home full of joyful purpose. There was also the night I lost it completely and sobbed for hours in my boyfriend’s arms.

In this oscillation between light and dark, one thing remains constant: I’m no longer so eager to illuminate my fate. Recently, I went to the Web site of 23andMe, a company that will read from your genome your risk of dying from a hundred diseases. I clicked through the testimonials and was unnerved by how similar our reasons were for wanting information. I looked down at my fingertips, tempted: what else in my genome waits to be found?

But then I clicked away. The Bible doesn’t tell us if Eve ate any more apples, but I have had my fill of revelations. I am 21 years old, and I want to be free to live a normal life: fate unbound by double helix, future exploding with possibility. I don’t want to know.

Read More..