Attacks Resume After Israeli Assault Kills Hamas Leader

KIRYAT MALACHI, Israel — Israel and Hamas widened their increasingly deadly conflict over Gaza on Thursday, as a militant rocket killed three civilians in an apartment block in this small southern town. The deaths were likely to lead Israel to intensify its military offensive on Gaza, now in its second day of airstrikes.

In Gaza, the Palestinian death toll rose to 11 as Israel struck what the military described as medium- and long-range rocket and infrastructure sites and rocket-launching squads. The military said it had dispersed leaflets over Gaza warning residents to stay away from Hamas operatives and facilities, suggesting that more was to come.

The regional perils of the situation sharpened, meanwhile, as President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt warned on Thursday that his country stood by the Palestinians against what he termed Israeli aggression, echoing similar condemnation on Wednesday.

“The Egyptian people, the Egyptian leadership, the Egyptian government, and all of Egypt is standing with all its resources to stop this assault, to prevent the killing and the bloodshed of Palestinians,” Mr. Morsi said in nationally televised remarks before a crisis meeting of senior ministers. He also instructed his prime minister to lead a delegation to Gaza on Friday and said he had contacted President Obama to discuss strategies to “stop these acts and doings and the bloodshed and aggression.”

In language that reflected the upheaval in the political dynamics of the Middle East since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last year, Mr. Morsi said: “Israelis must realize that we don’t accept this aggression and it could only lead to instability in the region and has a major negative impact on stability and security in the region.”

The thrust of Mr. Morsi’s words seemed confined to diplomatic maneuvers, including calls to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the head of the Arab League and President Obama.

The 120-nation Nonalignmed Movement, the biggest bloc at the United Nations, added its condemnation of the Gaza airstrikes in a statement released by Iran, the group’s rotating president and one of Israel’s most ardent foes. “Israel, the occupying power, is, once more, escalating its military campaign against the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip,” the group’s coordinating bureau said in the statement. The group made no mention of the Palestinian rocket fire but condemned what it called “this act of aggression by the Israelis and their resort to force against the defenseless people” and demanded “decisive action by the U.N. Security Council.”

In his conversation with Mr. Obama, Mr. Morsi said, he “clarified Egypt’s role and Egypt’s position; our care for the relations with the United States of America and the world; and at the same time our complete rejection of this assault and our rejection of these actions, of the bloodshed, and of the siege on Palestinians and their suffering.”

Mr. Obama had agreed to speak with Israeli leaders, Mr. Morsi said.

The Thursday’ deaths in Kiryat Malachi were the first casualties on the Israeli side since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, the most ferocious in four years, in response to persistent Palestinian rocket fire.

Southern Israel has been struck by more than 750 rockets fired from Gaza this year that have hit homes and caused injuries. On Thursday, a rocket smashed into the top floor of an apartment building in Kiryat Malachi, about 15 miles north of Gaza. Two men and one woman were killed, according to witnesses at the scene. A baby was among the injured and several Israelis were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds after rockets hit other southern cities and towns, they said.The apartment house was close to a field in a blue-collar neighborhood and the rocket tore open top-floor apartments, leaving twisted metal window frames and bloodstains.

Nava Chayoun, 40, who lives on the second floor, said her husband, Yitzhak, ran up the stairs immediately after the rocket struck and saw the body of a woman on the floor. He rescued two children from the same apartment and afterward, she said, she and her family “read psalms.”

Isabel Kershner reported from Kiryat Malachi, Israel, and Fares Akram from Gaza. Reporting was contributed by Rina Castelnuovo from Kiryat Malachi; Mayy El Sheikh and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo; Gabby Sobelman from Jerusalem; Rick Gladstone from New York; and Alan Cowell from Paris.

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Major Retailers Start Selling Financial Products, Challenging Banks

On a recent shopping trip to Costco, Lilly Neubauer picked up paper towels, lentils, carrots — and a home mortgage.

While Ms. Neubauer, 27, said she was surprised to find the warehouse club selling financial products, she and her husband saved about $200 a month by refinancing there this year. She also bought home insurance from Costco, she said, again because it was cheaper there.

“It opened us up to the fact that Costco is more than toilet paper,” said Ms. Neubauer, who lives in Dallas.

As the nation’s largest banks stay stingy with credit and a growing portion of the population has no bank at all, major retailers are stepping into the void. Customers can now withdraw cash at an A.T.M. with a prepaid card from Walmart, take out a loan at Home Depot for a kitchen renovation or kick-start a new venture with a small-business loan from Sam’s Club. This year, Walmart even started to test selling a life insurance policy.

Consumer advocates are torn about the growth of this shadow banking industry. Financial products are making it into the hands of people who otherwise might not qualify for them, but these products are not always subject to the same regulations as bank products are. And to turn a profit, retailers generally have to charge more to people with poor credit or none at all.

“These products can come with high fees and few real protections,” said Norma P. Garcia, a senior lawyer with Consumers Union.

For the retailers, banking products are not huge profit centers but a business strategy, meant to put money into customers’ hands and get them buying more.

“You’ve got to remember, Walmart is intended to be a one-stop shop,” said Charles M. Holley Jr., the company’s chief financial officer.

Retailers were once interested in actually becoming banks. Sears, in the 1980s, tried a “socks and stocks” strategy that included acquiring the Dean Witter brokerage firm. And Wal-Mart Stores sought a banking charter for almost a decade before finally abandoning the quest in 2007.

While supermarket chains have leased space to bank branches for years, they are now offering their own products or teaming with small financial firms to do an end run around big banks. While the banks are likely to bristle at such competition, supporters of the retailers say the stores are stepping into areas that banks have abandoned.

“The banks kind of dropped the ball, and in my mind, and in the consumers’ mind, they left it open for different approaches,” said Robert L. Phillips, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Part of the lure is the so-called underbanked population — people who use few, if any, bank services. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that roughly 10 million households in the United States do not use a bank, up from nine million three years ago. And the agency says 24 million more households have a bank account but still use nonbank financial services, like prepaid cards.

Mr. Holley said that 20 to 25 percent of Walmart customers were unbanked.

“The more kinds of services we can offer our core customer like that, the better for them,” he said.

Last month, Walmart unveiled a prepaid card with American Express. The card operates much like a debit card except that it is not attached to a bank account. It comes with free customer-service telephone support, and fees are relatively low, but the account is not backed by the F.D.I.C.

Frustrated with the fees charged by her bank, Nancy Fry, a real estate broker in Logan, Utah, bought a prepaid card from Walmart this year. But this was even worse, she said — she was charged $3 every time she loaded money onto the card. “I really don’t have very much money and can’t afford these fees,” she said.

Consumer advocates complain that prepaid cards are loosely regulated and can cannibalize the money put on them. Consumer lawyers have pushed for greater disclosure of fees and more stringent regulation of the card providers. The government is expected to issue new rules this year.  

Walmart began to test selling a one-year MetLife life insurance policy this year, and customers can wire money or pay bills at any Walmart store.

Costco is also courting customers who are fed up with their banks. “A lot of members think their bank fees are too high, or the trust level has gone down over the years, or they’re having issues with debit and credit cards,” said Jay Smith, Costco’s director of business and financial services.

Costco sells auto and homeowners’ insurance, offers credit card processing for small businesses and began making mortgages in late 2010. It does not make money on the mortgages, which are offered by small lenders, Mr. Smith said. The idea is to get people to renew their store memberships, where Costco makes a large chunk of its profit.

Home Depot, whose customers are mainly homeowners, is trying to increase sales by extending credit to people who would otherwise have trouble getting it. Last year, the company began offering loans of up to $40,000, and this year it extended its no-interest credit card payment terms. “We have the ability to get credit to consumers in this tight credit market, and we wanted people to take advantage of that in a market where people don’t have access to home-equity lines of credit like they used to,” said Dwaine Kimmet, Home Depot’s treasurer and vice president for financial services.

Mr. Kimmet said the loans were especially useful for people who needed emergency items, like a water heater, though shoppers use them for other home décor projects as well.

They are also helpful for Home Depot, whose sales growth has been squeezed by the housing crisis.

Mr. Kimmet said the store loans, unlike home-equity lines of credit, did not require collateral, meaning Home Depot could not seize someone’s house for a failure to pay.

The interest rate on Home Depot’s credit card is higher than that on a typical credit card — 18 percent to 27 percent, depending on credit score, compared with an average of 14.59 percent, according to Bankrate. But Mr. Kimmet said the retailer offered cards to people with credit scores as low as 600, below what many lenders accept.

Other retailers are also trying to make it easier for people to qualify for financial products. Office Depot and Sam’s Club offer loans backed by the government’s Small Business Administration, and both involve quick, one-page initial applications. More than 1,000 Sam’s Club members have used the program since its introduction two years ago, the company said.  

When Kent Prater was about to open a restaurant in Lumberton, N.C., he searched online for loans backed by the Small Business Administration and found that Sam’s Club sold them. He applied online for a $25,000 loan and was approved for a $10,000 loan, with an interest rate of about 10 percent. With a bank, “I think it would probably be a little bit more difficult, because of the environment — the economy and the regulatory environment,” said Mr. Prater, who opened Thai Chili last month.

Paco Underhill, who researches shopper behavior as founder and chief executive of Envirosell, said retailers offering financial products was only the beginning.

“The banks are going to scream bloody murder when retailers try to obtain banking charters,” he said. “But it’s not hard for a retail organization to look across the landscape and say, ‘Who are my customers, and what else could I be selling them?’ ”

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I Was Misinformed: The Time She Tried Viagra

I have noticed, in the bragging-rights department, that “he doesn’t need Viagra” has become the female equivalent of the male “and, I swear, she’s a real blonde.” Personally, I do not care a bit. To me, anything that keeps you happy and in the game is a good thing.

But then, I am proud to say, I was among the early, and from what I gather, rare female users.

It happened when the drug was introduced around 1998. I was 50, but after chemotherapy for breast cancer — and later, advanced ovarian cancer — I was, hormonally speaking, pretty much running on fumes. Whether this had diminished my sex drive I did not yet know. One may have Zorba-esque impulses when a cancer diagnosis first comes in; but a treatment that leaves you bald, moon-faced and exhausted knocks that out of your system pretty fast.

But by 1998, the cancer was gone, my hair was back and I was ready to get back in the game. I was talking to an endocrinologist when I brought up Viagra. This was not to deal with the age-related physical changes I knew it would not address, it was more along the feminist lines of equal pay for equal work: if men have this new sex drug, I want this new sex drug.

“I know it’s supposed to work by increasing blood flow,” I told the doctor, “But if that’s true for men, shouldn’t it be true for women, too?”

“You’re the third woman who asked me that this week,” he said.

He wrote me a prescription. I was not seeing anyone, so I understood that I would have to do both parts myself, but that was fine. I have a low drug threshold and figured it might be best the first time to fly solo. My memory of the directions are hazy: I think there was a warning that one might have a facial flush or headaches or drop dead of a heart attack; that you were to take a pill at least an hour before you planned to get lucky, and, as zero hour approached, you were supposed to help things along by thinking beautiful thoughts, kind of like Peter Pan teaching Wendy and the boys how to fly.

But you know how it is: It’s hard to think beautiful thoughts when you’re wondering, “Is it happening? Do I feel anything? Woof, woof? Hello, sailor? Naaah.”

After about an hour, however, I was aware of a dramatic change. I had developed a red flush on my face; I was a hot tomato, though not the kind I had planned. I had also developed a horrible headache. The sex pill had turned into a bad joke: Not now, honey, I have a headache.

I put a cold cloth on my head and went to sleep. But here’s where it got good: When I slept, I dreamed; one of those extraordinary, sensual, swimming in silk sort of things. I woke up dazed and glowing with just one thought: I gotta get this baby out on the highway and see what it can do.

A few months later I am fixed up with a guy, and after a time he is, under the Seinfeldian definition of human relations (Saturday night date assumed) my official boyfriend. He is middle aged, in good health. How to describe our romantic life with the delicacy a family publication requires? Perhaps a line from “Veronika, der Lenz ist da” (“Veronica, Spring Is Here”), a song popularized by the German group the Comedian Harmonists: “Veronika, der Spargel Wächst” (“Veronica, the asparagus are blooming”). On the other hand, sometimes not. And so, one day, I put it out there in the manner of sport:

“Want to drop some Viagra?” I say.

Here we go again, falling into what I am beginning to think is an inevitable pattern: lying there like a lox, or two loxes, waiting for the train to pull into the station. (Yes, I know it’s a mixed metaphor, but at least I didn’t bring in the asparagus.) So there we are, waiting. And then, suddenly, spring comes to Suffolk County. It’s such a presence. I’m wondering if I should ask it if it hit traffic on the L.I.E. We sit there staring.

My reaction is less impressive. I don’t get a headache this time. And romantically, things are more so, but not so much that I feel compelled to try the little blue pills again.

Onward roll the years. I have a new man in my life, who is 63. He does have health problems, for which his doctor prescribes an E.D. drug. I no longer have any interest in them. My curiosity has been satisfied. Plus I am deeply in love, an aphrodisiac yet to be encapsulated in pharmaceuticals.

We take a vacation in mountain Mexico. We pop into a drugstore to pick up sunscreen and spot the whole gang, Cialis, Viagra, Levitra, on a shelf at the checkout counter. No prescription needed in Mexico, the clerk says. We buy all three drugs and return to the hotel. I try some, he tries some. In retrospect, given the altitude and his health, we are lucky we did not kill him. I came across an old photo the other day. He is on the bed, the drugs in their boxes lined up a in a semi-circle around him. He looks a bit dazed and his nose is red.

Looking at the picture, I wonder if he had a cold.

Then I remember: the flush, the damn flush. If I had kids, I suppose I would have to lie about it.

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I Was Misinformed: The Time She Tried Viagra

I have noticed, in the bragging-rights department, that “he doesn’t need Viagra” has become the female equivalent of the male “and, I swear, she’s a real blonde.” Personally, I do not care a bit. To me, anything that keeps you happy and in the game is a good thing.

But then, I am proud to say, I was among the early, and from what I gather, rare female users.

It happened when the drug was introduced around 1998. I was 50, but after chemotherapy for breast cancer — and later, advanced ovarian cancer — I was, hormonally speaking, pretty much running on fumes. Whether this had diminished my sex drive I did not yet know. One may have Zorba-esque impulses when a cancer diagnosis first comes in; but a treatment that leaves you bald, moon-faced and exhausted knocks that out of your system pretty fast.

But by 1998, the cancer was gone, my hair was back and I was ready to get back in the game. I was talking to an endocrinologist when I brought up Viagra. This was not to deal with the age-related physical changes I knew it would not address, it was more along the feminist lines of equal pay for equal work: if men have this new sex drug, I want this new sex drug.

“I know it’s supposed to work by increasing blood flow,” I told the doctor, “But if that’s true for men, shouldn’t it be true for women, too?”

“You’re the third woman who asked me that this week,” he said.

He wrote me a prescription. I was not seeing anyone, so I understood that I would have to do both parts myself, but that was fine. I have a low drug threshold and figured it might be best the first time to fly solo. My memory of the directions are hazy: I think there was a warning that one might have a facial flush or headaches or drop dead of a heart attack; that you were to take a pill at least an hour before you planned to get lucky, and, as zero hour approached, you were supposed to help things along by thinking beautiful thoughts, kind of like Peter Pan teaching Wendy and the boys how to fly.

But you know how it is: It’s hard to think beautiful thoughts when you’re wondering, “Is it happening? Do I feel anything? Woof, woof? Hello, sailor? Naaah.”

After about an hour, however, I was aware of a dramatic change. I had developed a red flush on my face; I was a hot tomato, though not the kind I had planned. I had also developed a horrible headache. The sex pill had turned into a bad joke: Not now, honey, I have a headache.

I put a cold cloth on my head and went to sleep. But here’s where it got good: When I slept, I dreamed; one of those extraordinary, sensual, swimming in silk sort of things. I woke up dazed and glowing with just one thought: I gotta get this baby out on the highway and see what it can do.

A few months later I am fixed up with a guy, and after a time he is, under the Seinfeldian definition of human relations (Saturday night date assumed) my official boyfriend. He is middle aged, in good health. How to describe our romantic life with the delicacy a family publication requires? Perhaps a line from “Veronika, der Lenz ist da” (“Veronica, Spring Is Here”), a song popularized by the German group the Comedian Harmonists: “Veronika, der Spargel Wächst” (“Veronica, the asparagus are blooming”). On the other hand, sometimes not. And so, one day, I put it out there in the manner of sport:

“Want to drop some Viagra?” I say.

Here we go again, falling into what I am beginning to think is an inevitable pattern: lying there like a lox, or two loxes, waiting for the train to pull into the station. (Yes, I know it’s a mixed metaphor, but at least I didn’t bring in the asparagus.) So there we are, waiting. And then, suddenly, spring comes to Suffolk County. It’s such a presence. I’m wondering if I should ask it if it hit traffic on the L.I.E. We sit there staring.

My reaction is less impressive. I don’t get a headache this time. And romantically, things are more so, but not so much that I feel compelled to try the little blue pills again.

Onward roll the years. I have a new man in my life, who is 63. He does have health problems, for which his doctor prescribes an E.D. drug. I no longer have any interest in them. My curiosity has been satisfied. Plus I am deeply in love, an aphrodisiac yet to be encapsulated in pharmaceuticals.

We take a vacation in mountain Mexico. We pop into a drugstore to pick up sunscreen and spot the whole gang, Cialis, Viagra, Levitra, on a shelf at the checkout counter. No prescription needed in Mexico, the clerk says. We buy all three drugs and return to the hotel. I try some, he tries some. In retrospect, given the altitude and his health, we are lucky we did not kill him. I came across an old photo the other day. He is on the bed, the drugs in their boxes lined up a in a semi-circle around him. He looks a bit dazed and his nose is red.

Looking at the picture, I wonder if he had a cold.

Then I remember: the flush, the damn flush. If I had kids, I suppose I would have to lie about it.

Read More..

Bits Blog: RIM's Chief Is Confident of BlackBerry 10 Success

Thorsten Heins, the chief executive of Research in Motion, tells his employees, developers and customers that BlackBerry 10, the company’s new phones and the software platform running them, is a very big bet for RIM. If it catches on, he has saved the company.

In a meeting with New York Times editors and reporters, he expressed his confidence. “I don’t expect things to get much worse,” he said.

It was clear from the presentation that the phone, which will have its debut on Jan. 30, will not introduce any significant hardware innovations. It has the rectangular slab look of smartphones already on the market.

The hardware varies in the absence of a home button and the inclusion of a red LED light that flashes when a message comes in. According to earlier announcements by Mr. Heins, RIM is also making a model with a physical keyboard.

On Monday, Mr. Heins focused on the integration of the usability of the software. A home button is needed on iPhones and phones using Google’s Android operating system, he said, because those operating systems require users to switch repeatedly between applications to perform different tasks. In contrast, BlackBerry 10 will consolidate bits of information and capabilities that are distributed through separate apps on current smartphones. BlackBerry 10’s messaging center, for example, can display Facebook updates, LinkedIn messages, texts and Twitter posts along with e-mails. In turn, BlackBerry 10 users will be able to use that hub, as an example, to reply to Facebook messages without opening their phones’ Facebook app.

And he says it can be done with a flick of the thumb.

Similarly, the BlackBerry 10 address book can display all recent e-mails from any contact and even pull news stories and other information related to his or her company from the Web.

“It is stress relief; it doesn’t make you look at all your applications all the time,” Mr. Heins said. “This is going to catch on with a lot of people.”

First, of course, RIM will have to show consumers how BlackBerry 10 differs and then persuade them that its features are indeed an advance.

On Monday, it look the RIM group just over 30 minutes to demonstrate only some of the new phone’s features. But Mr. Heins said that the new phone’s advantages will be so apparent to customers that it will take only “a one-minute sales pitch in a shop” to win them over.

It was clear from RIM’s presentation, however, that the company is banking on the phone’s really catching on with corporate information technology departments. Frank Boulben, RIM’s chief marketing officer, who was also at the interview, said that he believed that only about half of companies allowed employees to choose their own smartphones. Unlike many other industry observers, Mr. Boulben predicted that some companies might return to selecting their employees’ phones to reduce technology support costs.

To that end, BlackBerry 10 will allow corporations to segregate corporate data and apps from a user’s personal material. As a result, Mr. Heins said, information technology departments will be able to wipe out all of a company’s data on a phone when an employee quits, while leaving the former worker’s data, including photos, untouched.

Despite the dismal failure of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer, Mr. Heins has grand ambitions for the BlackBerry 10 phone in the corporate workplace. He said that RIM is pitching the new phone to corporations as a replacement for desktop and laptop computers in offices over time. He sketched out a situation in which BlackBerry 10 phones will act as building passes for employees who, once at their desks, will connect their BlackBerrys to keyboards and displays.

“Whenever you enter an office, you don’t have your laptop with you, you have your mobile computer power exactly here,” Mr. Heins said, patting a BlackBerry 10 phone sitting in a holster on his hip. “You will not carry a laptop within three to five years.”

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Israelis Kill Hamas Military Commander in Gaza

Reuters

Palestinians extinguished a fire after an Israeli airstrike on a car carrying Ahmed al-Jabari, who ran Hamas's military wing, on Wednesday in Gaza City.

GAZA — The Israeli military carried out multiple airstrikes in Gaza on Wednesday and blew up a car carrying the commander of the Hamas military wing, making him the most senior official of the group to be killed by the Israelis since their invasion of Gaza four years ago. Hamas announced that Israel would “pay a high price.”

The death of the commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, 52, who was on Israel’s most-wanted list of Palestinian militants, was confirmed by Hamas and Israeli officials. The Israeli military said it had ordered the airstrikes as part of a response to days of rocket fire launched from Gaza into Israeli territory.

Mr. Jabari’s death signaled a further escalation in the renewed hostility between Israel and Hamas, the militant organization regarded by Israel as a terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction. The Israeli attacks could also further complicate Israel’s fragile relations with Egypt, where the new government has established closer ties with Hamas and had been acting as a mediator to restore calm between Israel and Gaza-based militant groups.

Hamas reacted furiously, saying in a statement that it considered the Israeli attacks to be the basis for a “declaration of war” against Israel. A spokesman for Hamas, Fawzi Barhoum, said the Israelis had “committed a dangerous crime and broke all redlines,” and that “the Israeli occupation will regret and pay a high price.”

Military officials in Israel, which announced responsibility for the death of Mr. Jabari, later said in a statement that their forces had carried out additional airstrikes in Gaza targeting what they described as “a significant number of long-range rocket sites” owned by Hamas that had stored rockets capable of reaching 25 miles into Israel. The statement said the airstrikes had dealt a “significant blow to the terror organization’s underground rocket-launching capabilities.”

Yisrael Katz, a minister from Israel’s governing Likud Party, issued a statement saying that the operation had sent a message to the Hamas political leaders in Gaza “that the head of the snake must be smashed. Israel will continue to kill and target anyone who is involved in the rocket attacks.”Hamas and medical officials in Gaza said both Mr. Jabari and a companion were killed by the airstrike on his car in Gaza City. Israeli news media said the companion was Mr. Jabari’s son, but there was no immediate confirmation.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that Mr. Jabari had been targeted because he “served in the upper echelon of the Hamas command and was directly responsible for executing terror attacks against the state of Israel in the past number of years.”

The statement said the purpose of the attack was to “severely impair the command and control chain of the Hamas leadership as well as its terrorist infrastructure.”

The statement did not specify how the Israelis knew Mr. Jabari was in the car but said the operation had been “implemented on the basis of concrete intelligence and using advanced capabilities.”

Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007, a year after the Israelis withdrew from the territory captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But Israeli forces went back into Gaza in the winter of 2008-09 in response to what they called a terrorist campaign by Palestinian militants there to launch rockets into Israel. The three-week military campaign killed as many as 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and was widely condemned internationally.

Israel has long said it would hold Hamas responsible for attacks launched from Gaza on its forces and population, regardless of which group was behind them. Like the United States and Europe, Israel defines Hamas as a terrorist organization. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Mr. Jabari became the acting leader of the Hamas military wing after Israel had severely wounded Muhammad Deif, the top commander, in an assassination attempt in 2003. Mr. Jabari had survived several previous Israeli raids. In 2004, Israeli planes attacked his house killing one of his sons and three other relatives.

Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, considered Mr. Jabari responsible for what it called “all anti-Israeli terror activity” emanating from Gaza.

He was also known for having played a major role in negotiations that led to the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants in a cross-border raid in 2006. Mr. Jabari personally escorted Mr. Shalit to a handover to Egyptian intermediaries last year as part of a prisoner exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Video of the handoff to Egypt showed Mr. Jabari standing near Mr. Shalit.

Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military, acknowledged Mr. Jabari’s role in that prisoner exchange during a conference call with journalists on Wednesday announcing the airstrike on Mr. Jabari’s car. She also said Mr. Jabari had “a lot of blood on his hands.”

Fares Akram reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

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Square Feet: A Wounded Wall Street Is Expected to Stay Put

Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A businessman made his way Monday into One New York Plaza in Manhattan's financial district, where the cleanup from Hurricane Sandy was still underway.

More than two weeks after Hurricane Sandy came ashore in Manhattan, sending an 11-foot surge of seawater over much of the southern tip of the island, the financial district is still in tatters.

Dozens of office buildings that were flooded by the storm still lack power and are off-limits to tenants, and many streets are a chaotic mess of generators, work crews and pumps.

Still trying to gauge the extent of the damage, many landlords have been vague about when their buildings will reopen. And some tenants, who have been uprooted to tiny conference rooms in New Jersey or industrial spaces in Brooklyn, are weighing whether to come back to the neighborhood at all.

But despite the uncertainty and destruction, many analysts don’t expect the bulk of tenants to pack up and leave for good, nor do they think that future tenants will rule out the neighborhood over fears they might get flooded.

“I don’t think it will become an overriding factor in the location decision,” said John Wheeler, the head downtown broker for Jones Lang LaSalle, echoing other top brokers. “I guess time will tell if I’m being too sanguine about this.”Brokers add that the neighborhood remains a compelling place to locate a business. Even with some train lines hampered by storm damage, it is still amply served by mass transit, with more than a dozen subway lines and ferry service. The new apartments and condos built in recent years, along with new boutiques and restaurants, also mean that many people can now live a few blocks from their office.

Besides, rents are notably competitive with other business districts in Manhattan, at about $40 a square foot in the financial district, compared with $65 in midtown, according to Cassidy Turley, the brokerage, though the downtown figure is expected to climb when the two new World Trade Center buildings come online.

Complicating the prognosis about the neighborhood’s long-term health is the fact that getting an exact handle on the extent of damage has been tricky. Many major landlords have been reluctant to respond to even basic questions about the status of their buildings. And many brokers have refused to discuss individual properties.

And while the city’s Buildings Department declared early last week that nine downtown buildings were completely off-limits, and another 445 were partially habitable, it did not differentiate between commercial and residential structures.

Jones Lang LaSalle has been one of the few brokerages to tackle the issue. It concluded that a hefty 20 percent of all the major office buildings below Canal Street are closed, or 37 out of 183, according to data compiled as of Monday. And those shuttered buildings, most of which are east of Broadway, represent 29.2 million square feet of space, the data shows.

Anecdotal evidence, too, suggests the damage has been severe. Late last week, the Water Street corridor, which runs along the East River, appeared alarmingly hard-hit.

Men in white hazmat outfits pushed garbage bins on streets, which rumbled with the sounds of generators. Several traffic lights were still dark. Clumps of yellow hoses snaked up escalators and through lobbies. And security guards, protecting against looters, were more numerous than people wearing suits.

Among the buildings confirmed closed were: 99 Wall Street, 199 Water Street, One Wall Street Plaza and 180 Maiden Lane. Others that appear to be closed include 55 Water Street, 85 Broad Street, 7 Hanover Square and 10 Hanover Square, among others. Four New York Plaza, where The Daily News is based, could be closed for a year, though One New York Plaza, whose basement shopping center took on 30 feet of water, should reopen in two weeks, according to a spokeswoman for the building’s landlord, Brookfield Office Properties.

Going forward, some tenants are concerned that floods will become a regular occurrence; after all, just 15 months ago, the city was soaked by Tropical Storm Irene. These tenants say their fears were confirmed by comments that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo made after Hurricane Sandy about how destructive weather events are likely to recur.

“He was like, ‘If you don’t believe in global warming, wake up and see what’s happening here,’ and he was right,” said Andrea Katz, a development director for WBAI, the public radio station, which has a 10,000-square-foot space at 120 Wall Street. The lower floors of the Art Deco building, which is at South Street and owned by Silverstein Properties, were flooded by Hurricane Sandy.

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Q & A: Weighing the Evidence

Q. My husband weighs twice as much as I do, yet we take the same dose of over-the-counter medications, as recommended on the packaging. Shouldn’t weight be a factor?

A. There is little information about using weight as a factor in adjusting doses of either prescription or over-the-counter medications, said Dr. Steven A. Kaplan, director of the Iris Cantor Men’s Health Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital.

“We are beginning to study different responses by weight,” he said, but he and other researchers have reached no conclusions on recommendations for therapy.

“In my own field, urology,” he added, “my opinion is that it is more likely for the recommended dose to be ineffective in a larger person rather than to be toxic in a thinner adult.”

Some prescription drugs, like chemotherapy agents, already have their dosages adjusted for weight because of their highly toxic nature. As for over-the-counter drugs, recommended doses generally tend to be weighted in favor of safety rather than efficacy, Dr. Kaplan said.

He and other doctors emphasized the importance of following package directions. For example, acetaminophen (like Tylenol) can present a life-threatening risk if the liver cannot process a high dose. If you find that the recommended dose does not work for you, Dr. Kaplan said, speak to your doctor.

C. CLAIBORNE RAY

Readers may submit questions by mail to Question, Science Times, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, or by e-mail to question@nytimes.com.

Read More..

Q & A: Weighing the Evidence

Q. My husband weighs twice as much as I do, yet we take the same dose of over-the-counter medications, as recommended on the packaging. Shouldn’t weight be a factor?

A. There is little information about using weight as a factor in adjusting doses of either prescription or over-the-counter medications, said Dr. Steven A. Kaplan, director of the Iris Cantor Men’s Health Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital.

“We are beginning to study different responses by weight,” he said, but he and other researchers have reached no conclusions on recommendations for therapy.

“In my own field, urology,” he added, “my opinion is that it is more likely for the recommended dose to be ineffective in a larger person rather than to be toxic in a thinner adult.”

Some prescription drugs, like chemotherapy agents, already have their dosages adjusted for weight because of their highly toxic nature. As for over-the-counter drugs, recommended doses generally tend to be weighted in favor of safety rather than efficacy, Dr. Kaplan said.

He and other doctors emphasized the importance of following package directions. For example, acetaminophen (like Tylenol) can present a life-threatening risk if the liver cannot process a high dose. If you find that the recommended dose does not work for you, Dr. Kaplan said, speak to your doctor.

C. CLAIBORNE RAY

Readers may submit questions by mail to Question, Science Times, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, or by e-mail to question@nytimes.com.

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Digital Domain: Online Merchants Again Pursue Same-Day Delivery Service

IN the exhilarating, anything-is-possible days of 1998 to 2001, Kozmo.com offered an online store with a quick delivery service in a number of American cities. “Free delivery in under an hour” was its motto.

Kozmo would perish, but some online merchants and their delivery partners are inching back toward that shining vision. Though they aren’t promising free delivery within an hour, they are trying out same-day service for a fee. And in doing so, they are addressing the asymmetry that has bedeviled online purchases of physical goods since Kozmo’s demise: it takes mere seconds to find and buy goods on the Web, but often several days for them to arrive at the doorstep.

Could the wait again be shortened to just an hour? That remains to be seen.

The United States Postal Service will experiment with same-day delivery of online orders in San Francisco. It sees the new option, called Metro Post, as a way to put its delivery infrastructure to fuller use while developing a new source of revenue — a matter of pressing importance as the service’s finances go from bad to worse.

The Postal Service proposes once-a-day pickup of goods ordered online from participating retailers in the city before 2 p.m. and delivery to homes between 4 and 8 p.m.

John G. Friess, a Postal Service spokesman, says the packages won’t go through the normal processing centers, but will instead be passed directly between the Postal Service workers who pick them up and deliver them.

“This will be a new experience,” Mr. Friess says, “having a uniformed Postal Service employee knocking on your front door at this hour, delivering the package that you had ordered earlier in the day.”

A flat rate will be charged for all packages up to 25 pounds, he says, but the price has not been announced and may be adjusted as the trial proceeds.

With its fleets of trucks, United Parcel Service also has the delivery infrastructure for same-city, same-day service. But for now, the company is not set up to do both pickup and delivery in the same day, in the same city, at a modest price.

I used the online U.P.S. pricing guide to find the cost of having a one-pound book picked up at a San Francisco bookstore at 2 p.m. and delivered to a home address a mile and a half away by 8 p.m. the same day. This required U.P.S.’s “Express Critical” service, and the company estimated the cost at $226.46.

If U.P.S. decided it wanted to enter the intracity delivery business in a serious way, it could no doubt offer much more attractive pricing. In fact, it would seem positioned to offer a lower price than the Postal Service, whose market tests of experimental products are regulated by the Postal Regulatory Commission. The Postal Service’s filing with the commission to try out Metro Post is timorous in tone and lists self-applied hobbles. For example, the service says it will enlist 10 or fewer companies for the trial and limit the volume to 200 packages a day, at least until it can “further test its operational capabilities.”

The big online retailers are running their own experiments with same-day delivery in some markets.

 

Last month, Wal-Mart announced that it had begun same-day delivery of online orders in a handful of cities. A check last week of the price of two-hour delivery windows in San Francisco showed flat fees of $6 to $7. (The minimum order is $45.) Amazon also offers a same-day delivery option in 10 markets. In addition to a delivery charge of $8.99 for all orders other than gift cards, it adds a charge of 99 cents for each item in the order.

Very fast delivery of online purchases can be found in Lower Manhattan, the area served by UrbanFetch, which offers 10,000 products online that will be delivered within an hour. The speed is the same as Kozmo’s — in fact, the company was founded in 2005 by Chris Siragusa, who was chief technology officer at Kozmo — but the selection of goods is far larger.

Customers must live within an eight-square-mile service area, and all deliveries are carried by bicycle. There is no delivery fee for orders of more than $100; a $4.95 fee is charged for smaller orders.

When Mr. Siragusa set out to build an online store with home delivery — originally called MaxDelivery — he did not plan to match Kozmo’s one-hour promise. With friends and family, he first tried a service in which the ordering was done earlier in the day and the deliveries in the evening. But he concluded that late-in-the-day delivery was not compelling to customers. “It was still more convenient to walk to the store yourself,” he said.

UrbanFetch’s fast delivery is possible because its goods are physically close to its customers in a densely packed city.  In other places, online customers must be a bit more patient, as Son of Kozmo is not in sight.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 13, 2012

An earlier version of this column referred imprecisely to the Postal Regulatory Commission’s oversight of the Postal Service. While the commission regulates the Postal Service’s market tests of  experimental products, regulatory approval is not required for all its operational decisions.

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