Microsoft Battles Google by Hiring Political Brawler Mark Penn

SEATTLE — Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

Since Mr. Penn was put in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft in August, much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.

Drawing on his background in polling, data crunching and campaigning, Mr. Penn created a holiday commercial that has been running during Monday Night Football and other shows, in which Microsoft criticizes Google for polluting the quality of its shopping search results with advertisements. “Don’t get scroogled,” it warns. His other projects include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

The campaigns by Mr. Penn, 58, a longtime political operative known for his brusque personality and scorched-earth tactics, are part of a broader effort at Microsoft to give its marketing the nimbleness of a political campaign, where a candidate can turn an opponent’s gaffe into a damaging commercial within hours. They are also a sign of the company’s mounting frustration with Google after losing billions of dollars a year on its search efforts, while losing ground to Google in the browser and smartphones markets and other areas.

Microsoft has long attacked Google from the shadows, whispering to regulators, journalists and anyone else who would listen that Google was a privacy-violating, anticompetitive bully. The fruits of its recent work in this area could come next week, when the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce the results of its antitrust investigation of Google, a case that echoes Microsoft’s own antitrust suit in the 1990s. A similar investigation by the European Union is also wrapping up. A bad outcome for Google in either one would be a victory for Microsoft.

But Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., has realized that it cannot rely only on regulators to scrutinize Google — which is where Mr. Penn comes in. He is increasing the urgency of Microsoft’s efforts and focusing on their more public side.

In an interview, Mr. Penn said companies underestimated the importance of policy issues like privacy to consumers, as opposed to politicians and regulators. “It’s not about whether they can get them through Washington,” he said. “It’s whether they can get them through Main Street.”

Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on Microsoft’s actions specifically, but said that while Google also employed lobbyists and marketers, “our focus is on Google and the positive impact our industry has on society, not the competition.”

In Washington, Mr. Penn is a lightning rod. He developed a relationship with the Clintons as a pollster during President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, when he helped identify the value of “soccer moms” and other niche voter groups.

As chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for president, he conceived the “3 a.m.” commercial that raised doubts about whether Barack Obama, then a senator, was ready for the Oval Office. Mr. Penn argued in an essay he wrote for Time magazine in May that “negative ads are, by and large, good for our democracy.”

But his approach has ended up souring many of his professional relationships. He left Mrs. Clinton’s campaign after an uproar about his consulting work for the government of Colombia, which was seeking the passage of a trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, then a senator, opposed.

“Google should be prepared for everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them,” said a former colleague who worked closely with Mr. Penn in politics and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Actually, they should be prepared for the kitchen sink to be thrown at them, too.”

Hiring Mr. Penn demonstrates how seriously Microsoft is taking this fight, said Michael A. Cusumano, a business professor at M.I.T. who co-wrote a book about Microsoft’s browser war.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to do whatever they can to halt Google’s advance, just as their competition did to them,” Professor Cusumano said. “I suppose that if Microsoft can actually put a doubt in people’s mind that Google isn’t unbiased and has become some kind of evil empire, they might very well get results.”

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

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School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians

T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination.

ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.

Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.

“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”

Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.

A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.

After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.

Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.

“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.

Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.

Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.

“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.

“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.

The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.

The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.

The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.

Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.

The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.

“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”

Ms. Eady is not convinced.

“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”

Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.

“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”

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School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians

T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination.

ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.

Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.

“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”

Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.

A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.

After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.

Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.

“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.

Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.

Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.

“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.

“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.

The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.

The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.

The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.

Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.

The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.

“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”

Ms. Eady is not convinced.

“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”

Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.

“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”

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Microsoft Battles Google by Hiring Political Brawler Mark Penn

SEATTLE — Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

Since Mr. Penn was put in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft in August, much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.

Drawing on his background in polling, data crunching and campaigning, Mr. Penn created a holiday commercial that has been running during Monday Night Football and other shows, in which Microsoft criticizes Google for polluting the quality of its shopping search results with advertisements. “Don’t get scroogled,” it warns. His other projects include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

The campaigns by Mr. Penn, 58, a longtime political operative known for his brusque personality and scorched-earth tactics, are part of a broader effort at Microsoft to give its marketing the nimbleness of a political campaign, where a candidate can turn an opponent’s gaffe into a damaging commercial within hours. They are also a sign of the company’s mounting frustration with Google after losing billions of dollars a year on its search efforts, while losing ground to Google in the browser and smartphones markets and other areas.

Microsoft has long attacked Google from the shadows, whispering to regulators, journalists and anyone else who would listen that Google was a privacy-violating, anticompetitive bully. The fruits of its recent work in this area could come next week, when the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce the results of its antitrust investigation of Google, a case that echoes Microsoft’s own antitrust suit in the 1990s. A similar investigation by the European Union is also wrapping up. A bad outcome for Google in either one would be a victory for Microsoft.

But Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., has realized that it cannot rely only on regulators to scrutinize Google — which is where Mr. Penn comes in. He is increasing the urgency of Microsoft’s efforts and focusing on their more public side.

In an interview, Mr. Penn said companies underestimated the importance of policy issues like privacy to consumers, as opposed to politicians and regulators. “It’s not about whether they can get them through Washington,” he said. “It’s whether they can get them through Main Street.”

Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on Microsoft’s actions specifically, but said that while Google also employed lobbyists and marketers, “our focus is on Google and the positive impact our industry has on society, not the competition.”

In Washington, Mr. Penn is a lightning rod. He developed a relationship with the Clintons as a pollster during President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, when he helped identify the value of “soccer moms” and other niche voter groups.

As chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for president, he conceived the “3 a.m.” commercial that raised doubts about whether Barack Obama, then a senator, was ready for the Oval Office. Mr. Penn argued in an essay he wrote for Time magazine in May that “negative ads are, by and large, good for our democracy.”

But his approach has ended up souring many of his professional relationships. He left Mrs. Clinton’s campaign after an uproar about his consulting work for the government of Colombia, which was seeking the passage of a trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, then a senator, opposed.

“Google should be prepared for everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them,” said a former colleague who worked closely with Mr. Penn in politics and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Actually, they should be prepared for the kitchen sink to be thrown at them, too.”

Hiring Mr. Penn demonstrates how seriously Microsoft is taking this fight, said Michael A. Cusumano, a business professor at M.I.T. who co-wrote a book about Microsoft’s browser war.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to do whatever they can to halt Google’s advance, just as their competition did to them,” Professor Cusumano said. “I suppose that if Microsoft can actually put a doubt in people’s mind that Google isn’t unbiased and has become some kind of evil empire, they might very well get results.”

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

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Syrians Face a Bread Shortage in Aleppo and Elsewhere

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

A bakery in Aleppo. Most of the city’s bakeries are shut down because of shortages.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Jalal al-Khanji, the closest thing the Syrian city of Aleppo has to a mayor, hopes to organize elections there within two weeks, but he fears that residents with empty stomachs are in no mood for an experiment in democracy.

Since late November, bread has been scarce, with a lack of fuel and flour shutting most bakeries in Aleppo.

“We cannot hold elections while people are hungry; we have to solve that problem first,” he said in an interview in this southern Turkish city, where many leaders of Aleppo’s civil society have sought refuge. “People are angry, frustrated and depressed. They can understand how countries like France and Britain and the United States might hold back on the issue of weapons, but not on the issue of bread and diesel.”

The revolution that erupted across Syria in March 2011 only slowly engulfed Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital. Long after major cities were convulsed by demonstrations, Aleppo’s residents still showed up in Gaziantep by the busload every weekend to scour the malls.

The armed struggle for the city began in earnest last July.

In August, the prominent doctors, engineers, pharmacists and businessmen sheltering here established the Aleppo Transitional Revolutionary Council, a kind of city government in exile for the liberated portions of the city. Mr. Khanji, 67, a civil engineer with a long history of opposing the Syrian government, serves as its president.

Dividing their time between Gaziantep and Aleppo, council members found the chaos convulsing their city worrisome. What if all the competing militias on the ground, even if nominally part of the loosely allied Free Syrian Army, continued to fight for the spoils even after the government’s forces were driven from the city?

They decided the remedy was an elected council of about 250 members who would run both the city and the province of Aleppo, roughly one representative for every 20,000 people in the liberated areas. The council would choose a smaller group to actually govern the city.

The idea is for the council to serve as a liaison between the military and the civilian populations. “If civilian life is not organized, if we cannot do anything, then the chaos will continue,” said a 29-year-old businessman who is also on the transitional council. Several members of the council declined to give their names because they still travel to government-controlled areas.

About 65 percent of the villages have already chosen their representatives, he said, but the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo forced a postponement of the choice of about 150 representatives from the city itself.

The transitional council is in the process of establishing a 500-member police force and runs a few courts, but members view the bread crisis as their first big test. “We represent a civil government to some extent, so if we cannot solve this problem there will be a lack of trust in such rule in the future,” said the businessman.

There is also competition. While about 70 percent to 80 percent of the Free Syrian Army commanders in the province have agreed to support the elected council, election organizers said, opponents include jihadi groups hostile to the very idea of democratic elections.

One such prominent group, Jibhat al-Nusra, which the United States sought to ostracize last week by labeling it a terrorist organization, has been distributing bread in and around Aleppo.

“The so-called terrorists are the ones who have been giving us bread and distributing it fairly,” said Tamam Hazem, a spokesman in Aleppo’s news media center, reached via Skype. “Free Syrian Army battalions have been trying to help, but they just don’t have the same kind of experience.”

Council members pleaded for outside help to counter the efforts of the jihadists. “They are offering bread to people to obtain their sympathy and respect,” said Mr. Khanji, the council’s president. “Prolonging the Syrian crisis will allow the extremist cells in Syria to grow and become more difficult to remove in the future.”

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Sebnem Arsu from Kilis, Turkey.

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Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

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Malcolm Harris Pleads Guilty Over 2011 March

In the end, the tweets told the tale.

After more than a year of arguing in court papers that police officers had led hundreds of Occupy Wall Street marchers on to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge and then arrested 700 of them, a Brooklyn writer’s own Twitter postings showed that he had, in fact, heard warnings from the police to stay off the road.

“They tried to stop us, absolutely did not want us on the motorway,” the writer, Malcolm Harris, posted during the march on Oct. 1, 2011, according to passages read by a prosecutor in court. “They tried to block and threaten arrest. We were too many and too loud. They backed up until they could put up barricades.”

Those postings and others by Mr. Harris, 23, were described publicly for the first time on Wednesday in Criminal Court in Manhattan as Mr. Harris pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.

The case had become a significant focus of attention for its involvement of posts to social networking sites and legal arguments over who controls that material. Mr. Harris and Twitter had opposed a subpoena of Twitter for Mr. Harris’s postings, which had been pushed off his public page by more recent postings.

In September, Twitter complied with a court order to turn over thousands of Mr. Harris’s archived postings to Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. of Criminal Court in Manhattan, who reviewed the messages himself and later turned over a few pages to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors wanted the postings because they suspected the notes would contradict what they expected to be Mr. Harris’s defense: that the police had baited people onto the roadway of the bridge. Mr. Harris’s lawyer, Martin R. Stolar, voiced that theory in motions he filed in court.

“Destined for Brooklyn, the marchers began crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on the pedestrian walkway,” Mr. Stolar wrote in court papers last year. “When their numbers grew too numerous, the police directed them onto the vehicular roadway, announcing through a barely audible bullhorn that a march on the roadway was not permitted.”

Faced with the messages that he acknowledged would be detrimental to his case, Mr. Harris offered to plead guilty on Wednesday, as a trial was about to begin, to disorderly conduct, a violation that carries a penalty of up to 15 days in jail.

Judge Sciarrino withdrew an early offer of not sentencing Mr. Harris to anything beyond the nine hours he was held after his arrest.

Lee Langston, an assistant district attorney, requested a sentence of 10 days’ community service, arguing that Mr. Stolar had wasted judicial resources by representing that marchers had not heard warnings from police officers on the bridge, something his client’s writing contradicted.

“I had no idea what was in those tweets until about a month ago,” Mr. Stolar said. “If you really want to get into it,” he continued, before being interrupted by the judge.

“Not really,” Judge Sciarrino said. “Nor are you doing any service to your client.”

The judge offered Mr. Harris a choice of three days of community service, or six days if Mr. Harris wanted to pick a program himself.

“I’ll take the latter,” Mr. Harris said.

Outside court, Mr. Stolar and Mr. Harris said the charge against Mr. Harris was not the focus of their concerns. They were more focused on appealing the ruling that approved the subpoena of material from Twitter.

“Setting the legal precedent for how this material is going to be used is much more important than six days of community service,” Mr. Harris said.

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The Lede Blog: Journalists Punched by Israeli Officers After Fatal Shooting at West Bank Checkpoint

Two Palestinian journalists working for Reuters were punched, hit with rifle butts and forced to strip by Israeli soldiers on Wednesday as they attempted to reach the scene of a fatal shooting at a West Bank checkpoint, the news agency reports. The soldiers then confiscated the crew’s camera and gas masks before letting off a tear gas canister which forced one of the men to seek medical treatment.

Although the journalists had press credentials, they were not allowed to show them by the officers, who accused them of working instead for an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, which provides video cameras to Palestinians to help document life under Israeli military occupation.

Someone who was does work with the Israeli rights group managed to record video at the checkpoint in the city of Hebron, just after the fatal shooting of Muhammad al-Salameh, 17.

Video recorded on Wednesday in the West Bank city of Hebron by a volunteer for an Israeli human rights group, just after a Palestinian was shot and killed by an Israeli officer.

The video includes a brief glimpse of the boy lying on the ground and, according to Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American founder of The Electronic Intifada, near the end of the clip, “medics can be seen attending to Muhammad as a voice calls for his father, ‘Abu Awad.’ In the final moments of the video a man, possibly Abu Awad, is heard saying, ‘Ibni, ibni’ – ‘My son, my son.’”

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, the officer who shot the boy said that she fired only after the boy attacked another officer and pulled out a toy gun that looked real. A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Captain Barak Raz, posted an image on Twitter of what he said was the toy gun in the boy’s possession on Twitter.

Pretty sure (even where I grew up in NY)realistic toy guns outlawed in many places due2 such incidents. looks real2 me http://t.co/c4CLWlMM

— Captain Barak Raz (@CaptainBarakRaz) 12 Dec 12

The dead boy’s uncle told Agence France-Presse, “The plastic gun story isn’t true and it is all fabrication,” adding that Muhammad was stopped by the officers on his way to a bakery to pick up a cake for his 17th birthday party. A photograph said to show Muhammad hours before he was shot and killed, grinning during a birthday celebration at school, circulated online after his death.

RIP Mohamed Salaymeh 17 yo from #Hebron, celebrating his last birthday at school today http://t.co/WX7RKGHo

— Mohamed Jaradat (@jaradat_m) 12 Dec 12

According to a report on the Israeli news blog +972, the dead boy’s family said that “none of those who knew Muhammad had ever seen” the toy gun in his possession. The blogger added that while the two versions of events do not match, “Luckily, the checkpoints in Hebron are monitored by Israeli security cameras, and I am sure that if her story is true, the I.D.F. will release the video, showing a 17-year-old teen taking out a toy gun and holding it to the head of a soldier.”

The young female officer who fired the fatal shots, described in Israeli media reports as a 19-year-old, told The Jerusalem Post, “I know I did the right thing. This is what they taught us, to fire at the terrorist in order to neutralize them, fake gun or not.”

The Israeli security forces in Hebron are there in large numbers to protect several hundred Jewish settlers who moved to the city of nearly 200,000 Palestinians after it was occupied by Israel’s military in 1967. The shooting took place near the boy’s home and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a site revered by Jews and Muslims as the traditional burial place of the founding fathers of both religions.

The Foreign Press Association in Israel said in a statement describing the incident that it “condemns in the strongest terms the assault by Israeli soldiers of two of our members in Hebron.” The statement continued:

Yousri Al Jamal and Ma’amoun Wazwaz, both highly experienced cameramen who work for Reuters, were stopped while driving to the scene of a shooting incident in the heart of the city. Their car was clearly marked ‘TV’ and they were both wearing blue flak jackets with ‘Press’ emblazoned on the front. The soldiers forced them to leave the vehicle at gun point, punching them and hitting them with the butts of their guns. The two men were not allowed to show their ID and were made to strip and kneel in the street with their hands behind their head. One of the soldiers then dropped a tear gas canister infront of the men and the IDF patrol ran away. More tear gas was fired as Jamal and Wazwaz tried to escape the scene. Wazwaz was overwhelmed by the fumes and needed hospital treatment.

The group also welcomed Israel’s promise to investigate the incident, but added that it is still waiting to hear the results of the Israeli military’s investigation into an attack on a journalist in another part of the West Bank four months ago.

Paul Danahar, the group’s chairman and the BBC’s Middle East bureau chief, was distinctly downbeat about the possibility of the military’s investigation in a message posted on Twitter shortly before the statement was released.

Foreign Press Association (I’m chairman) will issue statement on IDF attack. IDF will again promise investigation. Bet nothing will change

— Paul Danahar (@pdanahar) 14 Dec 12

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News Analysis: Middle Class Malaise Complicates Democrats’ Fiscal Stance

WASHINGTON — The income stagnation that has hit the middle class in the last decade is complicating the Democrats’ position in the fiscal talks, making it more difficult for them to advocate across-the-board tax increases if a deal falls through.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama visited a family in Falls Church, Va., last week to discuss extending income tax cuts for most Americans.

Many Democrats have derided the expiring tax cuts as irresponsible since President George W. Bush signed them a decade ago. Yet the party is united in pushing to make the vast majority of them permanent, even though President Obama could ensure their expiration at year’s end with a simple veto.

That decision reflects concern over the wage and income trends of the last decade, when pay stagnated for middle-class families, net worth declined and economic mobility eroded. Democrats who generally would prefer more tax revenue to help pay the growing cost of Medicare and other programs are instead negotiating with Republicans to find a combination of spending cuts and targeted tax increases for higher incomes.

If the two parties fail to come to a deal by Jan. 1, taxes on the average middle-income family would rise about $2,000 over the next year. That would follow a 12-year period in which median inflation-adjusted income dropped 8.9 percent, from $54,932 in 1999 to $50,054 in 2011.

The income and wealth trends of the last decade also create a longer-term dilemma for the party. By advocating the continuation of most of the Bush-era tax cuts, Democrats might find themselves confronting deeper-than-comfortable cuts to spending programs that aid the poor and middle class down the road.

“The goal is not just to make the tax code more progressive, but also to obtain adequate revenue to finance progressive spending programs,” said Peter Orszag, a vice chairman at Citigroup and a former White House budget director. “Making the tax code more progressive but locking into a vastly inadequate revenue base is not doing the notion of progressivity overall any favors.”

According to calculations by the independent Tax Policy Center, if Congress did nothing and all tax increases took effect at the end of the year, the hit would be broad but the brunt of it would fall on high-income households. Taxpayers in the bottom quintile of the income distribution would see a $412 bigger tax bill. For the top 0.1 percent, the average increase would be $633,946.

Only a small handful of policy voices on the left are making the case for the tax cuts to fully expire. In part, that is because the economy is still growing slowly, and tax increases have the potential to weaken it. But it is also partly because of structural changes in the economy.

“This is about math and values,” Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and the chairman of the Finance Committee, said in an e-mail. “Our first priority needs to be extending tax cuts for the middle class. At a time when we need to cut our debt and are asking everyone to chip in, we simply can’t afford to continue extending all of the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”

The Congressional Budget Office has found that between 1979 and 2007, the top 1 percent of households saw their inflation-adjusted income grow 275 percent. For the bottom 20 percent, it grew just 18 percent, and federal tax and transfer programs also did less and less to reduce income inequality over that period.

The mounting concentration of wealth is even more dramatic. A recent Economic Policy Institute study found that between 1983 and 2010 about three-quarters of all new wealth accrued to the wealthiest 5 percent of households. Over the same period, the bottom 60 percent actually became poorer.

Such figures are why some Democrats argue that even if the economy were to return to Clinton-era growth rates, its poor and middle class could not stomach a return to Clinton-era tax rates, at least not yet. Moreover, it has led Democrats to expand the “middle class” to encompass the vast majority of taxpayers, with families earning as much as $300,000 a year unlikely to see their taxes go up.

“The causes of the massive rise in inequality that we’ve seen that have caused stagnation for the middle class — stagnation at best — for the past 20 or 30 years are not likely to abate,” said Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. “If they’re caused by globalization and skill-biased technological change, they’re likely to continue or accelerate.”

Last week, President Obama visited the Virginia home of Tiffany and Richard Santana, a high school teacher and an employee at a car dealership, to make the case. “They’re keeping it together, they’re working hard, they’re meeting their responsibilities,” Mr. Obama said of the Santanas. “For them to be burdened unnecessarily because Democrats and Republicans aren’t coming together to solve those problems gives you a sense of the costs on personal terms.”

Mr. Obama’s argument for raising revenue from high-income households and keeping taxes low on middle-income households long predates the recession or his time in the White House. Aides say the position stems in part from his belief that long-term economic changes have rewarded the rich and punished many others.

But limiting tax increases to just a small fraction of households might mean raising too little revenue over the long term to finance the programs that Democrats also fiercely want to preserve — Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, education, supports for lower-income working families and infrastructure, among others, some policy experts on the left say.

“It’s perfectly reasonable for the White House to begin collecting more revenue from folks who have done by far the best in pretax terms,” said Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a former economist for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “But ultimately we can’t raise the revenue we need only on the top 2 percent.”

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World’s Population Living Longer, New Report Suggests

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are dramatic: infant mortality has declined by more than half between 1990 and 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

But while developing countries made big strides – the average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 28 in 1970 – the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries between 1990 and 2010. The two years of life they gained was less than Cyprus, where women gained 2.3 years of life and Canada, where women gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organizationfinanced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women in this country formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said.

The World Health Organization issued a statement Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differ substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others are similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries – representing about 15 percent of the world’s population – produce quality cause-of-death data.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which measured disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published Thursday in the Lancet, a British health publication.

The one exception to the trend was sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternal causes of death still account for about 70 percent of all illness. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death there rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared to a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The change means that people are living longer, an outcome that public health experts praised. But it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing noncommunicable diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “It’s not something that medical services can address as easily.”

Read More..

World’s Population Living Longer, New Report Suggests

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are dramatic: infant mortality has declined by more than half between 1990 and 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

But while developing countries made big strides – the average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 28 in 1970 – the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries between 1990 and 2010. The two years of life they gained was less than Cyprus, where women gained 2.3 years of life and Canada, where women gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organizationfinanced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women in this country formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said.

The World Health Organization issued a statement Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differ substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others are similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries – representing about 15 percent of the world’s population – produce quality cause-of-death data.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which measured disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published Thursday in the Lancet, a British health publication.

The one exception to the trend was sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternal causes of death still account for about 70 percent of all illness. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death there rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared to a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The change means that people are living longer, an outcome that public health experts praised. But it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing noncommunicable diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “It’s not something that medical services can address as easily.”

Read More..

‘Dear Friends’: Pope Takes to Twitter, With an Assist

Vincenzo Pinto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Pope Benedict XVI using an iPad to post his first message on Twitter during his weekly audience at the Vatican on Wednesday.

ROME — After struggling with the touch screen of an iPad, Pope Benedict XVI dispatched his first Twitter message on Wednesday. “Dear friends,” it read, “I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.”

Sitting at a desk in the Vatican hall where he holds his weekly audience, the pontiff, 85, touched the iPad with a wavering hand adorned with a large gold ring, as the audience applauded.

Video footage showed that the pope seemed confused and had trouble hitting “send,” forcing Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, to step in and touch the screen to send the first papal message.

Last week, the Vatican announced that Benedict, who writes in longhand, would begin posting messages on Twitter in eight languages under the handle @pontifex, a Latin term for pope that means “bridge builder.” Claire Díaz-Ortiz, the director of social innovation at Twitter, was at the ceremony.

Later on Wednesday, the pope responded to questions that included the hashtag #askpontifex. “How can faith in Jesus be lived in a world without hope?” the pope wrote in one post. “By speaking with Jesus in prayer, listening to what he tells you in the Gospel and looking for him in those in need.”

In another, Benedict said: “We can be certain that a believer is never alone. God is the solid rock upon which we build our lives and his love is always faithful.”

The Vatican has said that the pope will be using Twitter to engage with the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.2 billion followers.

The pope gained more than 200,000 followers on Wednesday alone, pushing him above 800,000 in English, more than Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, with 65,800 followers, but less than Justin Bieber, who has 31 million.

The Twitterati had a field day with the pope’s postings. “@Pontifex tweets from a tablet? Big deal: Moses had two,” wrote Jared Keller, the director of social media at Bloomberg L.P. Another user wrote, “If someone gets blocked by @Pontifex on Twitter ... does that mean they’re automatically excommunicated?”

Earlier this year, the satirical newspaper The Onion published an article that said, “Pope tweets picture of self with God.”

The Vatican has said that the pope will not follow anyone on Twitter, or retweet messages. A Vatican official has said that papal Twitter messages, as with everything written by the pope, will be part of the church’s teachings, but that they will not be infallible.

Others used Twitter to send messages to the pope criticizing the Catholic Church for the sexual abuse scandal and the church’s ban on condom use. In Italy, many sent complaints that the church does not have to pay most property taxes.

Benedict will be posting messages in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. Other languages are expected to be added in the future.

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DealBook: 3 Men Arrested in Rate-Rigging Inquiry

10:24 a.m. | Updated LONDON – British authorities made the first arrests in the global investigation into interest-rate manipulation, an inquiry that has ensnared the world’s biggest banks.

The Serious Fraud Office of Britain said on Tuesday that it had arrested three people in connection with rate rigging. Three men, British citizens aged 33 to 47, were taken into custody by the police in early morning raids at their houses on the outskirts of London.

One of the people is Thomas Hayes, a 33-year-old former trader at Citigroup and UBS, according to people with knowledge of the matter. At least one of the other two men worked for R P Martin, a British brokerage firm that previously surfaced in the Canadian investigation into rate manipulation, another person briefed on the matter said.

British criminal authorities typically make arrests at the early stages of an inquiry, and the actions do not necessarily mean the individuals will be charged with wrongdoing. A Citigroup spokeswoman declined to comment. A UBS spokesman declined to comment. A lawyer for Mr. Hayes could not immediately be identified.

The arrests signal a new phase of the sprawling rate-rigging investigation.

Regulators around the world are investigating more than a dozen big banks that help set benchmarks like the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. Such benchmark rates are used to determine the borrowing costs for trillions of dollars of financial products, including credit cards, student loans and mortgages.

In June, the British bank Barclays agreed to pay $450 million to settle charges that some of its traders attempted to manipulate Libor to bolster profits. Authorities also accused Barclays of submitting low rates to deflect concerns about its health during the financial crisis. The scandal prompted the resignations of top bank officials, including the chief executive, Robert E. Diamond Jr.

Libor Explained

Regulators are now pursuing a number of criminal and civil cases.

The Royal Bank of Scotland, which is holding talks with regulators, said it would probably disclose fines before its next earnings report in February.

The Swiss bank UBS is close to finalizing a settlement deal with American and British authorities. The bank is expected to pay more than $450 million to settle claims that some employees reported false rates to increase its profit. When American authorities announce their case against UBS in the coming days, Mr. Hayes is expected to figure prominently, one of the officials said.

Mr. Hayes built his reputation as a trader at UBS. He worked at the Swiss bank from about 2006 to 2009, before departing for Citigroup.

But his career at Citigroup was short-lived. In 2010, the bank suspended him after he approached a London trading desk about improperly influencing the yen-denominated Libor rates, a person briefed on the matter said. He was fired in September 2010, and the bank reported his suspected actions to authorities.

UBS also implicated Mr. Hayes to authorities, according to another person briefed on the matter. The Swiss bank discovered that Mr. Hayes had worked with traders at other banks to influence rates, according to officials and court documents.

Mr. Hayes emerged in court documents filed this year by Canadian authorities. The documents – collected by Canada’s Competition Bureau, the country’s antitrust authority – highlight an alleged scheme in which Mr. Hayes and other traders colluded to push yen Libor rates up and down. The Canadian investigation, which covers conduct from 2007 to 2010, also referenced traders at JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The traders, the documents said, at times corresponded using instant messages on Bloomberg machines. While the flurry of activity took place outside Canada, the trading affected financial contracts in the country that were pegged to yen Libor.

“Traders at participants banks communicated with each other their desire to see a higher or lower yen Libor to aid their trading positions,” the Canadian documents said.

The traders also relied on middlemen at brokerage firms “to use their influence” on other banks that set Libor, according to the documents. The brokers included employees at R P Martin, a person briefed on the matter said.

Under British law, Mr. Hayes and the other men can be held for 24 hours. The authorities can then apply for an extension if they need more time for questioning.

The Serious Fraud Office started a criminal investigation into Libor manipulation in July, in response to the furor over the rate-rigging scandal at Barclays. The criminal investigations by the British authorities and their counterparts at the Justice Department parallel similar civil inquiries by international authorities, including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Services Authority, the British regulator.

The arrests come as the agency tries to repair its reputation. In April, the new director of the Serious Fraud Office, David Green, pledged to overhaul the office after a series of mistakes by the organization.

Legal professionals say the appointment is a step toward rejuvenating the agency, which has lacked significant firepower to police London’s financial services sector. The Serious Fraud Office has been given extra resources by the British government to pursue a criminal investigation related to Libor.

“The S.F.O. works incredibly slowly,” said a defense lawyer representing individuals implicated in the Libor inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. “It’s not surprising that people have been arrested. But how long it will take to lead to criminal charges is another matter.”

Azam Ahmed contributed reporting.

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Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

At William H. Ziegler Elementary in Northeast Philadelphia, students are getting acquainted with vegetables and healthy snacks.

PHILADELPHIA — After decades of rising childhood obesity rates, several American cities are reporting their first declines.

The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011.

The drops are small, just 5 percent here in Philadelphia and 3 percent in Los Angeles. But experts say they are significant because they offer the first indication that the obesity epidemic, one of the nation’s most intractable health problems, may actually be reversing course.

The first dips — noted in a September report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — were so surprising that some researchers did not believe them.

Deanna M. Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas, who in 2010 recorded one of the earliest declines — among mostly poor Hispanic fourth graders in the El Paso area — did a double-take. “We reran the numbers a couple of times,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Will you please check that again for me?’ ”

Researchers say they are not sure what is behind the declines. They may be an early sign of a national shift that is visible only in cities that routinely measure the height and weight of schoolchildren. The decline in Los Angeles, for instance, was for fifth, seventh and ninth graders — the grades that are measured each year — between 2005 and 2010. Nor is it clear whether the drops have more to do with fewer obese children entering school or currently enrolled children losing weight. But researchers note that declines occurred in cities that have had obesity reduction policies in place for a number of years.

Though obesity is now part of the national conversation, with aggressive advertising campaigns in major cities and a push by Michelle Obama, many scientists doubt that anti-obesity programs actually work. Individual efforts like one-time exercise programs have rarely produced results. Researchers say that it will take a broad set of policies applied systematically to effectively reverse the trend, a conclusion underscored by an Institute of Medicine report released in May.

Philadelphia has undertaken a broad assault on childhood obesity for years. Sugary drinks like sweetened iced tea, fruit punch and sports drinks started to disappear from school vending machines in 2004. A year later, new snack guidelines set calorie and fat limits, which reduced the size of snack foods like potato chips to single servings. By 2009, deep fryers were gone from cafeterias and whole milk had been replaced by one percent and skim.

Change has been slow. Schools made money on sugary drinks, and some set up rogue drink machines that had to be hunted down. Deep fat fryers, favored by school administrators who did not want to lose popular items like French fries, were unplugged only after Wayne T. Grasela, the head of food services for the school district, stopped buying oil to fill them.

But the message seems to be getting through, even if acting on it is daunting. Josh Monserrat, an eighth grader at John Welsh Elementary, uses words like “carbs,” and “portion size.” He is part of a student group that promotes healthy eating. He has even dressed as an orange to try to get other children to eat better. Still, he struggles with his own weight. He is 5-foot-3 but weighed nearly 200 pounds at his last doctor’s visit.

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, I’m obese for my age,’ ” said Josh, who is 13. “I set a goal for myself to lose 50 pounds.”

Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. That rate, which has tripled since 1980, has leveled off in recent years but has remained at historical highs, and public health experts warn that it could bring long-term health risks.

Obese children are more likely to be obese as adults, creating a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. The American Cancer Society says that being overweight or obese is the culprit in one of seven cancer deaths. Diabetes in children is up by a fifth since 2000, according to federal data.

“I’m deeply worried about it,” said Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, who added that obesity is “almost certain to result in a serious downturn in longevity based on the risks people are taking on.”

Read More..

Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

At William H. Ziegler Elementary in Northeast Philadelphia, students are getting acquainted with vegetables and healthy snacks.

PHILADELPHIA — After decades of rising childhood obesity rates, several American cities are reporting their first declines.

The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011.

The drops are small, just 5 percent here in Philadelphia and 3 percent in Los Angeles. But experts say they are significant because they offer the first indication that the obesity epidemic, one of the nation’s most intractable health problems, may actually be reversing course.

The first dips — noted in a September report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — were so surprising that some researchers did not believe them.

Deanna M. Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas, who in 2010 recorded one of the earliest declines — among mostly poor Hispanic fourth graders in the El Paso area — did a double-take. “We reran the numbers a couple of times,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Will you please check that again for me?’ ”

Researchers say they are not sure what is behind the declines. They may be an early sign of a national shift that is visible only in cities that routinely measure the height and weight of schoolchildren. The decline in Los Angeles, for instance, was for fifth, seventh and ninth graders — the grades that are measured each year — between 2005 and 2010. Nor is it clear whether the drops have more to do with fewer obese children entering school or currently enrolled children losing weight. But researchers note that declines occurred in cities that have had obesity reduction policies in place for a number of years.

Though obesity is now part of the national conversation, with aggressive advertising campaigns in major cities and a push by Michelle Obama, many scientists doubt that anti-obesity programs actually work. Individual efforts like one-time exercise programs have rarely produced results. Researchers say that it will take a broad set of policies applied systematically to effectively reverse the trend, a conclusion underscored by an Institute of Medicine report released in May.

Philadelphia has undertaken a broad assault on childhood obesity for years. Sugary drinks like sweetened iced tea, fruit punch and sports drinks started to disappear from school vending machines in 2004. A year later, new snack guidelines set calorie and fat limits, which reduced the size of snack foods like potato chips to single servings. By 2009, deep fryers were gone from cafeterias and whole milk had been replaced by one percent and skim.

Change has been slow. Schools made money on sugary drinks, and some set up rogue drink machines that had to be hunted down. Deep fat fryers, favored by school administrators who did not want to lose popular items like French fries, were unplugged only after Wayne T. Grasela, the head of food services for the school district, stopped buying oil to fill them.

But the message seems to be getting through, even if acting on it is daunting. Josh Monserrat, an eighth grader at John Welsh Elementary, uses words like “carbs,” and “portion size.” He is part of a student group that promotes healthy eating. He has even dressed as an orange to try to get other children to eat better. Still, he struggles with his own weight. He is 5-foot-3 but weighed nearly 200 pounds at his last doctor’s visit.

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, I’m obese for my age,’ ” said Josh, who is 13. “I set a goal for myself to lose 50 pounds.”

Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. That rate, which has tripled since 1980, has leveled off in recent years but has remained at historical highs, and public health experts warn that it could bring long-term health risks.

Obese children are more likely to be obese as adults, creating a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. The American Cancer Society says that being overweight or obese is the culprit in one of seven cancer deaths. Diabetes in children is up by a fifth since 2000, according to federal data.

“I’m deeply worried about it,” said Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, who added that obesity is “almost certain to result in a serious downturn in longevity based on the risks people are taking on.”

Read More..

John Silva, Maker of ‘Telecopter’ Camera, Dies at 92

Helicopter news footage is common today. But until myriad problems in sending live pictures from a moving aircraft were solved, television broadcasters could not show an eagle’s-eye view of a forest fire, or contemplate aerial coverage of, say, a famous man fleeing the police in a white Ford Bronco.

John Silva made that now-familiar vantage possible in 1958, when he converted a small helicopter into the first airborne virtual television studio.

The KTLA “Telecopter,” as it was called by the Los Angeles station where Mr. Silva was the chief engineer, became the basic tool of live television traffic reporting, disaster coverage and that most famous glued-to-the-tube moment in the modern era of celebrity-gawking, the 1994 broadcast of O. J. Simpson leading a motorcade of pursuers on Los Angeles freeways after his former wife and a friend of hers were killed.

Mr. Silva, who later earned two Emmy Awards for his pioneering technical work, died in Camarillo, Calif., on Nov. 27. His death was confirmed by a spokesman for KTLA-TV, where he worked from 1946 until leaving to become an electronics design consultant in 1978. He was 92.

Mr. Silva, an electronics engineer trained in radar science during World War II, faced three main roadblocks to transmitting black-and-white images live from helicopters. Rotor vibrations distorted the pictures, and sometimes even cracked the transmitter’s vacuum tubes. Directional antennas went haywire when helicopters changed direction suddenly, as helicopters sometimes do. And the camera equipment weighed a ton.

With help from fellow KTLA engineers, though mainly working alone to keep the project secret from competitors, Mr. Silva stabilized onboard cameras with a system of shock absorbers and cushions, designed aluminum parts to replace heavier metals in his equipment and commissioned an antenna that would extend below the chopper and rotate to maintain uninterrupted contact with KTLA’s mountaintop transmitter. By paring and remachining a basic set of broadcast equipment, he reduced it to 368 pounds from 2,000 pounds and distributed the load with precise symmetry throughout the tiny Bell 47G2 chopper leased for the project to prevent listing.

KTLA, the first commercially licensed television station west of the Rockies, faced growing competition in the late ’50s. New network-affiliated stations were scoring scoops with mobile broadcast units like ones Mr. Silva had pioneered, and everyone was fighting to get through increasingly clogged Los Angeles freeways.

The Telecopter was intended to kill the competition.

“If we could build a news mobile unit in a helicopter,” Mr. Silva recalled in a 2002 interview for the Archive of American Television, “we could get over it all, get there first, avoid the traffic and get to all the stories before anybody in the competition.”

“It’d be a wonderful thing,” he said.

By the time he began work on his airborne live television, Mr. Silva had already achieved a landmark in ground-level television history. In 1949, he was the technical director at KTLA who rigged the electronic connections — using duct-tape ingenuity and a borrowed generator — that carried what historians consider the first live television broadcast of a breaking news event.

The 27-hour rescue operation in San Marino, Calif., to save Kathy Fiscus, a 3-year-old trapped in an abandoned water pipe 94 feet below ground, was unsuccessful; but the station’s coverage was the precursor to every wall-to-wall television event broadcast since.

The Telecopter’s first flight took place at Los Angeles City Hall on July 24, 1958. It re-established KTLA’s dominance (until competitors put their own helicopters up). And for better and worse, it brought a Hollywood-style excitement to television news.

In the archive interview, Mr. Silva was asked what the first live helicopter pictures showed. They were panning shots, he said — zooming in and out of the L.A. landscape between the station’s Sunset Boulevard studio and City Hall.

Most of what they showed, he added, “was the freeway.”

John Daniel Silva was born in San Diego on Feb. 20, 1920, the youngest of three children of a commercial fisherman, Guy Silva, and his wife, Lottie, a homemaker. He attended M.I.T. for two years, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree after two years more at Stanford.

During World War II, he was a Naval officer who positioned radar defenses in the Pacific.

After the war, he worked for Paramount Pictures as an engineer for an experimental television station, W6XYZ, that later became KTLA.

Mr. Silva’s survivors include his wife, Mary Lou Steinkraus-Silva; three daughters, Patricia Vawter, Kathleen Silva and Karen Samaha; and a granddaughter.

The Telecopter had its greatest moments, predictably, at news events of Cecil B. DeMille dimensions: The 1963 dam break at the Baldwin Hills Reservoir in Los Angeles that sent 250 million gallons of water into surrounding neighborhoods, destroying many homes and claiming five lives. The 1965 Watts riots. The 1961 brush fire that swept through Bel Air, sending Hollywood stars scrambling to their roofs with garden hoses.

In his three-hour interview with the television archive, Mr. Silva never mentioned the 1994 O. J. Simpson freeway pursuit footage he made possible. But in answering a question about the future of helicopter reporting, he made clear that he had no regrets about the Telecopter’s role in creating an increasingly graphic television sensibility.

He would just like the lenses to get longer and the close-ups tighter, he said.

“When they’re doing freeway chases, they need to have a system that can come down in front, and be able to get pictures of suspects in the front windshield,” he said, describing one improvement he hoped to see.

Smiling, he added, “To fill the screen with their wonderful faces.”

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U.S. Designates Syrian Al Nusra Front as Terrorist Group

Manu Brabo/Associated Press

Syrian Army defectors were detained by Syrian rebel fighters while their identities were investigated Monday in the village of Azaz, near the Turkish border.

WASHINGTON — The United States has formally designated the Al Nusra Front, the militant Syrian rebel group, as a foreign terrorist organization.

The move, which was expected, is aimed at building Western support for the rebellion against the government of President Bashar al-Assad by quelling fears that money and arms meant for the rebels would flow to a jihadi group.

The designation was disclosed on Monday in the Federal Register, just before an important diplomatic meeting Wednesday in Morocco on the political transition if Mr. Assad is driven from power. The notice in the register lists the Al Nusra front as one of the “aliases” of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

In practical terms, the designation makes it illegal for Americans to have financial dealings with the group. It is intended to prompt similar sanctions by other nations, and to address concerns about a group that could further destabilize Syria and harm Western interests.

France, Britain, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council have formally recognized the Syrian opposition. European Union foreign ministers met Monday with the head of the Syrian opposition coalition, Ahmed Mouaz al-Khatib, in Brussels.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that he hoped the European Union would soon grant the group full recognition.

The Al Nusra Front comprises only a small minority of the Syrian rebels, but it includes some of the rebellion’s most battle-hardened and effective fighters.

“Extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra are a problem, an obstacle to finding the political solution that Syria’s going to need,” the American ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, said last week in an appearance hosted by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a nongovernmental group.

But a growing number of anti-government groups — including fighters in the loose-knit Free Syrian Army that the United States is trying to bolster — have signed petitions or posted statements online in recent days expressing support for the Nusra Front. In keeping with a tradition throughout the uprising of choosing themes for Friday protests, the biggest day for demonstrations because it coincides with Friday Prayer, many called for this Friday’s title to be “No to American intervention — we are all Jabhet al-Nusra.”

Many Syrian fighters consider the Nusra Front a key ally because of its fighters’ bravery and reliable supply of money and arms. It has never come under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, shunning the Western aid and input that other groups have sought, but it coordinates closely with many who do.

Adding to the complication is that some groups in the Free Syrian Army have similar ideologies, follow the strict Salafist interpretation of Islam, and count among them fighters who joined the insurgency in Iraq — though they are not known to share the Nusra Front’s direct organizational connections to Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The Nusra Front celebrated another apparent battlefield achievement on Monday, declaring it had captured part of a large base outside the commercial hub of Aleppo. Activist groups and video posted online said that it had fought alongside other Islamic battalions including the Mujahedeen Shura Council and the Muhajireen Group.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that tracks events in Syria through a network of activists in the country, said that the rebels had taken control of the command center of the sprawling base and that many soldiers had fled. Videos showed gunmen taking possession of tanks and anti-aircraft weapons.

The decision to designate the group, the register noted, was made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Nov. 20, in consultation with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

The State Department appeared to delay the publication of the decision to synchronize it with the expected announcement in Morocco that the United States will formally recognize the Syrian opposition. The United States closed its embassy in Damascus in February because of escalating violence in the capital.

Because Mrs. Clinton is not feeling well, she will not travel to North Africa and the Middle East this week as planned. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns will lead the United States delegation at the Morocco meeting, an aide to Mrs. Clinton said Monday.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Washington and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.

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