U.N. Court Frees Former Leader of Kosovo Ramush Haradinaj

Hazir Reka/Reuters

Ramush Haradinaj, center, being greeted by Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo at the airport in Pristina on Thursday.

PARIS — A United Nations war crimes tribunal on Thursday acquitted the former prime minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, for the second time of charges of torturing and killing Serb civilians while he was a commander of the NATO-backed Kosovo Liberation Army during its fight for independence in 1999.

Two of his associates, Idriz Balaj and Lahi Brahimaj, were also acquitted, although Mr. Brahimaj has already served a six-year sentence for torture handed down in an earlier trial. The judges ordered the three men released immediately and by evening Mr. Haradinaj, who spent almost four years in jail, had already returned to Kosovo, retrieved by a government plane. He was welcomed by the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, a longtime rival, and cheered by large crowds on the streets of Pristina, the capital.

“I have mixed feelings, because an injustice was done to me and my people,” Mr. Haradinaj said in a telephone interview after his arrival. “It took a long time and I am looking forward to helping to build Kosovo society.”

People close to Mr. Haradinaj said that with his reputation as a freedom fighter intact, he would soon return to politics.

The acquittal was bitterly denounced by Serbians, who have long believed that the Hague tribunal is biased against them.

The decision came after the court released two Croatian generals, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac, this month after an appeals chamber threw out their convictions. The generals had led a 1995 military campaign that recaptured Serb-occupied Croatian land, killed several hundred Serbian civilians and drove more than 150,000 Serbs from Croatia.

President Tomislav Nikolic of Serbia, a nationalist long skeptical of the Hague process, said in a statement that Thursday’s ruling showed that the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had evidently been “formed to try the Serbian people” for the wars of the 1990s. Now, he said, “nobody will be convicted for the horrible crimes against Kosovo Serbs.”

Amnesty International has estimated that 800 non-Albanians were abducted and killed by Kosovo rebels, and it said that few people suspected of such crimes had been prosecuted in Kosovo.

The overturning of the Croatian and the Kosovo convictions are seen as serious setbacks for the tribunal’s ability to prosecute cases. The court has said recently that it will seek a review of the Croatian appeals ruling, in which two of the five judges wrote unusually sharp dissenting opinions. One judge bluntly called the acquittal of the Croatian generals “grotesque,” saying that the findings of the majority “contradict any sense of justice.”

Inevitably, the acquittals have provoked criticism beyond Serbia that the verdicts were politically inspired, because the militaries of both countries were backed by the West. The Croatian campaign of 1995 was planned with the help of active and retired American military advisers, and the Kosovo Liberation Army was backed by NATO in the war that established Kosovo, a former Serbian province, as an independent state.

But lawyers who formerly worked for the tribunal have said that the case against the Kosovo fighters was weak from the start.

Geoffrey Nice, a former senior trial attorney at the tribunal, questioned why Mr. Haradinaj was indicted at all. Mr. Nice and others said that before Mr. Haradinaj was charged, lawyers in the prosecution office cautioned on several occasions that there was not enough evidence to build a case against him.

But Mr. Haradinaj, at the time prime minister of a United Nations-administered Kosovo, became the most senior Kosovo Albanian to be charged when Carla del Ponte, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, indicted him in 2005. She called him a “gangster in uniform” and accused him and two of his lieutenants of crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, rape and expulsion of civilians.

Mr. Haradinaj, who had just served 100 days in office, agreed to step down and surrender to The Hague to face his first trial. Before leaving, he said that he was innocent and that his indictment was “a result of the trade-off that some have made with the Serbian government” to make sure that Belgrade would extradite high-ranking Serbian war crimes suspects. Tribunal officials declined to comment.

It seemed like an abrupt end to a career for the man who had done a stint in the Yugoslav Army and spent almost a decade as an immigrant in Switzerland, where he worked as a nightclub bouncer, carpenter and martial arts teacher. By the time he joined the Kosovo separatist rebellion against Serbia, he had taught himself English and French and read books on guerrilla tactics. He soon established himself as a zone commander in the rebel army.

Mr. Haradinaj was cleared of those charges in 2008, after prosecutors had called for a 20-year sentence. But an appeals court overturned the verdict and ordered a retrial in 2010, saying that extensive intimidation of witnesses had led to a miscarriage of justice.

It was the tribunal’s first retrial, and it concluded with Thursday’s acquittal. The judges said they found that crimes had occurred, including 16 civilians abducted and mistreated in the rebels’ Jablanica prison camp and eight civilians killed there in captivity. But they said they found no evidence that Mr. Haradinaj had directly participated in the crimes or could be held criminally responsible. Rather, they said, there was evidence he had tried to prevent crimes by his underlings.

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Medicare Is Faulted in Electronic Medical Records Conversion

The conversion to electronic medical records — a critical piece of the Obama administration’s plan for health care reform — is “vulnerable” to fraud and abuse because of the failure of Medicare officials to develop appropriate safeguards, according to a sharply critical report to be issued Thursday by federal investigators.

Mike Spencer/Wilmington Star-News, via Associated Press

Celeste Stephens, a nurse, leads a session on electronic records at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Marilyn Tavenner, acting administrator for Medicare.

The use of electronic medical records has been central to the aim of overhauling health care in America. Advocates contend that electronic records systems will improve patient care and lower costs through better coordination of medical services, and the Obama administration is spending billions of dollars to encourage doctors and hospitals to switch to electronic records to track patient care.

But the report says Medicare, which is charged with managing the incentive program that encourages the adoption of electronic records, has failed to put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that information being provided by hospitals and doctors about their electronic records systems is accurate. To qualify for the incentive payments, doctors and hospitals must demonstrate that the systems lead to better patient care, meeting a so-called meaningful use standard by, for example, checking for harmful drug interactions.

Medicare “faces obstacles” in overseeing the electronic records incentive program “that leave the program vulnerable to paying incentives to professionals and hospitals that do not fully meet the meaningful use requirements,” the investigators concluded. The report was prepared by the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare.

The investigators contrasted the looser management of the incentive program with the agency’s pledge to more closely monitor Medicare payments of medical claims. Medicare officials have indicated that the agency intends to move away from a “pay and chase” model, in which it tried to get back any money it has paid in error, to one in which it focuses on trying to avoid making unjustified payments in the first place.

Late Wednesday, a Medicare spokesman said in a statement: “Protecting taxpayer dollars is our top priority and we have implemented aggressive procedures to hold providers accountable. Making a false claim is a serious offense with serious consequences and we believe the overwhelming majority of doctors and hospitals take seriously their responsibility to honestly report their performance.”

The government’s investment in electronic records was authorized under the broader stimulus package passed in 2009. Medicare expects to spend nearly $7 billion over five years as a way of inducing doctors and hospitals to adopt and use electronic records. So far, the report said, the agency has paid 74, 317 health professionals and 1,333 hospitals. By attesting that they meet the criteria established under the program, a doctor can receive as much as $44,000 for adopting electronic records, while a hospital could be paid as much as $2 million in the first year of its adoption. The inspector general’s report follows earlier concerns among regulators and others over whether doctors and hospitals are using electronic records inappropriately to charge more for services, as reported by The New York Times last September, and is likely to fuel the debate over the government’s efforts to promote electronic records. Critics say the push for electronic records may be resulting in higher Medicare spending with little in the way of improvement in patients’ health. Thursday’s report did not address patient care.

Even those within the industry say the speed with which systems are being developed and adopted by hospitals and doctors has led to a lack of clarity over how the records should be used and concerns about their overall accuracy.

“We’ve gone from the horse and buggy to the Model T, and we don’t know the rules of the road. Now we’ve had a big car pileup,” said Lynne Thomas Gordon, the chief executive of the American Health Information Management Association, a trade group in Chicago. The association, which contends more study is needed to determine whether hospitals and doctors actually are abusing electronic records to increase their payments, says it supports more clarity.

Although there is little disagreement over the potential benefits of electronic records in reducing duplicative tests and avoiding medical errors, critics increasingly argue that the federal government has not devoted enough time or resources to making certain the money it is investing is being well spent.

House Republicans echoed these concerns in early October in a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services. Citing the Times article, they called for suspending the incentive program until concerns about standardization had been resolved. “The top House policy makers on health care are concerned that H.H.S. is squandering taxpayer dollars by asking little of providers in return for incentive payments,” said a statement issued at the same time by the Republicans, who are likely to seize on the latest inspector general report as further evidence of lax oversight. Republicans have said they will continue to monitor the program.

In her letter in response, which has not been made public, Ms. Sebelius dismissed the idea of suspending the incentive program, arguing that it “would be profoundly unfair to the hospitals and eligible professionals that have invested billions of dollars and devoted countless hours of work to purchase and install systems and educate staff.” She said Medicare was trying to determine whether electronic records had been used in any fraudulent billing but she insisted that the current efforts to certify the systems and address the concerns raised by the Republicans and others were adequate.

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Cost of Brand-Name Prescription Medicines Soaring

The price of brand-name prescription medicines is rising far faster than the inflation rate, while the price of generic drugs has plummeted, creating the largest gap so far between the two, according to a report published Wednesday by the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts.

The report tracked an index of commonly used drugs and found that the price of brand-name medicines increased more than 13 percent from September 2011 to this September, which it said was more than six times the overall price inflation of consumer goods. Generic drug prices dipped by nearly 22 percent.

The drop in the price of generics “represents low-hanging fruit for the country to save money on health care,” said Dr. Steve Miller, the chief medical officer of Express Scripts, which manages the drug benefits for employers and insurers and also runs a mail-order pharmacy.

The report was based on a random sample of six million Express Scripts members with prescription drug coverage.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade group representing brand-name manufacturers, criticized the report, saying it was skewed by a handful of high-priced specialty drugs that are used by a small number of patients and overlooked the crucial role of major drug makers.

“Without the development of new medicines by innovator companies, there would be neither the new treatments essential to progress against diseases nor generic copies,” Josephine Martin, executive vice president of the group, said in a statement.

The report cited the growth of specialty drugs, which treat diseases like cancer and multiple sclerosis, as a major reason for the increase in spending on branded drugs. Spending on specialty medicines increased nearly 23 percent during the first three quarters of 2012, compared with the same period in 2011. All but one of the new medicines approved in the third quarter of this year were specialty drugs, the report found, and many of them were approved to treat advanced cancers only when other drugs had failed.

Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota, said the potential benefits of many new drugs did not always match the lofty price tags. “Increasingly it’s going to be difficult for drug-benefit programs to make decisions about coverage and payment and which drugs to include,” said Mr. Schondelmeyer, who conducts a similar price report for AARP. He also helps manage the drug benefit program for the University of Minnesota.

“We’re going to be faced with the issue that any drug at any price will not be sustainable.”

Spending on traditional medicines — which treat common ailments like high cholesterol and blood pressure — actually declined by 0.6 percent during the period, the report found. That decline was mainly because of the patent expiration of several blockbuster drugs, like Lipitor and Plavix, which opened the market for generic competitors. But even as the entry of generic alternatives pushed down spending, drug companies continued to raise prices on their branded products, in part to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of an ever-shrinking portfolio, Dr. Miller said.

Drug makers are also being pushed by companies like Express Scripts and health insurers, which are increasingly looking for ways to cut costs, said C. Anthony Butler, a pharmaceuticals analyst at Barclays. “I think they’re pricing where they can but what they keep telling me is they’re under significant pressure” to keep prices low, he said.

Express Scripts earns higher profits from greater use of generic medicines than brand name drugs sold through their mail-order pharmacy, Mr. Butler said. “There’s no question that they would love for everybody to be on a generic,” he said.

Dr. Miller acknowledged that was true but said that ultimately, everyone wins. “When we save people money, that’s when we make money,” he said. “We don’t shy away from that.”

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Peter Swire Named Mediator in Internet ‘Do Not Track’ Effort

Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts.

Andrew Spear for The New York Times

Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State, was named as a mediator by the World Wide Web Consortium. The international group is trying to come up with standards that would allow Internet users to keep their online activities private from advertisers.

The idea was to work out a global standard for “Do Not Track,” a computer browser setting that would allow Internet users to signal Web sites, advertising networks and data brokers that they did not want their browsing activities tracked for marketing purposes.

But some industry executives involved in the negotiations have questioned the agenda of privacy advocates, saying their efforts threaten to undermine an advertising ecosystem that fuels free online products and services. At the same time, some technology experts and privacy advocates have accused industry executives of stalling and acting in bad faith.

Into this rancorous battle steps a new mediator, Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official during the Clinton administration. On Wednesday, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, the international consortium that has been trying to develop technical Do Not Track standards, said that Mr. Swire would take over as co-chairman of its Tracking Protection Working Group.

While parties on both sides welcomed the move, many said they were doubtful that Mr. Swire could bring opponents to agreement, especially at a time when some industry groups are questioning whether the W3C is an appropriate forum.

On one hand, industry executives have an interest in protecting “behavioral” ads, marketing pitches that use data about an individual’s online activities to tailor ads to that person. On the other hand, consumer advocates argue that Internet users should be able to limit that kind of online surveillance.

Mr. Swire, a former chief counselor for privacy at the Office of Management and Budget, said he hoped to strike a balance that was palatable to both sides. He said he viewed a Do Not Track system as a kind of digital equivalent to the Do Not Call list, a national registry in the United States through which consumers may opt out of phone solicitations.

“People can choose not to have telemarketers call them during dinner. The simple idea is that users should have a choice over how their Internet browsing works as well,” Mr. Swire said in a phone interview. But he added: “The overarching theme is how to give users choice about their Internet experience while also funding a useful Internet.”

Still, Mr. Swire may not be able to overcome the bitterness that remains among the negotiating parties after months of public accusations, personal attacks and recriminations.

Earlier this year at an event at the White House, industry representatives publicly committed to incorporating and honoring a browser-based Do Not Track system under certain conditions. The conditions included a requirement that individual users would actively choose to turn on a don’t-track-me setting. Industry groups also said any system should still permit companies to collect information about users’ browsing activities for market research and product development purposes.

But after months of wrangling with consumer advocates, industry representatives now say the W3C is not an appropriate forum for them to work out policy details, arguing that the group’s expertise is more technical than practical.

In an online discussion forum for the working group, for example, senior industry executives have suggested that respected technology experts are out of touch with commercial reality.

“The advocacy side of the group tends to lean toward absolutist terms and solutions,” Shane Wiley, the vice president for privacy and data governance at Yahoo, wrote in a message in September to Ed Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. “The real world isn’t that easy even if it feels that way in a classroom or a small lab.”

Then there are the technologists who say industry executives are playing down the privacy risks of online data-mining.

“For want of a better metaphor: you are the climate change skeptic of computer privacy,” Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student in computer science and law at Stanford University, wrote last month to Yahoo’s Mr. Wiley. “Unlike some of the more patient members of the group, I long ago ceased pretending you’re negotiating in good faith.”

Now the industry has begun an effort to distance itself from the W3C process and promote its own self-regulatory program that allows consumers to decline targeted advertising by installing opt-out buttons from dozens of member companies.

“We’ve seen the W3C falter,” said Mike Zaneis, the general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group. “So industry is redoubling its efforts to come up with a meaningful standard for browser controls.”

As the debate rages on, newer iterations of popular browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome have already installed Do Not Track settings for their users. But in the absence of accepted global standards for these systems, ad networks and data brokers are not yet honoring the don’t-track-me browser flags. Even Microsoft’s and Google’s own ad services don’t respond to such signals coming from their own browsers.

Although Mr. Swire said he hoped to spur progress, for the moment Do Not Track browser settings have no more significance than emoticons.

“Do Not Track is a work in progress,” Mr. Swire said. “So is the Internet.”

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Hacking Report Criticizes Murdoch Newspaper and British Press Standards

LONDON — The leader of a major inquiry into the standards of British newspapers triggered by the phone hacking scandal offered an excoriating critique of the press as a whole on Thursday, saying it displayed “significant and reckless disregard for accuracy,” and urged the press to form an independent regulator to be underpinned by law.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson on Thursday with his inquiry on press standards.

The report singled out Rupert Murdoch’s defunct tabloid The News of the World for sharp criticism.

“Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility, or considering the consequences for the individuals involved,” the head of the inquiry, Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, said in a 46-page summary of the findings in his long-awaited, 1,987-page report published in four volumes.

“The ball moves back into the politicians’ court,” Sir Brian said, referring to what form new and tighter regulations should take. “They must now decide who guards the guardians.”

The report was published after some 337 witnesses testified in person in 9 months of hearings that sought to unravel the close ties between politicians, the press and the police, reaching into what were depicted as an opaque web of links and cross-links within the British elite as well as a catalog of murky and sometimes unlawful practices within the newspaper industry.

“This inquiry has been the most concentrated look at the press this country has ever seen,” Sir Brian said after the report was made public.

But in a first reaction, Prime Minister David Cameron resisted the report’s recommendation that a new form of press regulation should be underpinned by laws, telling lawmakers that they “should be wary” of “crossing the Rubicon” by enacting legislation with the potential to limit free speech and free expression.

Mr. Cameron’s remarks drew immediate criticism from the leader of the Labour opposition, Ed Miliband, who said Sir Brian’s proposals should be accepted in their entirety.

Mr. Cameron ordered the Leveson Inquiry in July, 2011, as the phone hacking scandal at The News of the World blossomed into broad public revulsion with reports that the newspaper had ordered the interception of voice mail messages left on the cellphone of Milly Dowler, a British teenager who was abducted in 2002 and later found murdered. Sir Brian said there had been a “failure of management and compliance” at the 168-year-old News of the World, which Mr. Murdoch closed in July, 2011, accusing it of a “general lack of respect for individual privacy and dignity.”

“It was said that The News of the World had lost its way in relation to phone hacking,” the summary said. “Its casual attitude to privacy and the lip service it paid to consent demonstrated a far more general loss of direction.”

Speaking after the report was published, Sir Brian said that while the British press held a “privileged and powerful place in our society,” its “responsibilities have simply been ignored.”

“A free press in a democracy holds power to account. But, with a few honorable exceptions, the U.K. press has not performed that vital role in the case of its own power.”

“The press needs to establish a new regulatory body which is truly independent of industry leaders and of government and politicians,” he said. “Guaranteed independence, long-term stability and genuine benefits for the industry cannot be realized without legislation,” he said, adding: “This is not and cannot reasonably or fairly be characterized as statutory regulation of the press.”

In the body of the exhaustive report, reprising at length the testimony of many of the witnesses who spoke at the hearings, the document discusses press culture and ethics; explores the press’s attitude toward the subjects of its stories; and discusses the cozy relationship between the press and the police, and the press and politicians.

John F. Burns, Sandy Lark Turner and Sandy Macaskill contributed reporting.

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Ex-NASA Scientist’s Data Fears Come True

In 2007, Robert M. Nelson, an astronomer, and 27 other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued NASA arguing that the space agency’s background checks of employees of government contractors were unnecessarily invasive and violated their privacy rights.

Privacy advocates chimed in as well, contending that the space agency would not be able to protect the confidential details it was collecting.

The scientists took their case all the way to the Supreme Court only to lose last year.

This month, Dr. Nelson opened a letter from NASA telling him of a significant data breach that could potentially expose him to identity theft.

The very thing he and advocates worried about had occurred. A laptop used by an employee at NASA’s headquarters in Washington had been stolen from a car parked on the street on Halloween, the space agency said.

Although the laptop itself was password protected, unencrypted files on the laptop contained personal information on about 10,000 NASA employees — including details like their names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and in some cases, details related to background checks into employees’ personal lives.

Millions of Americans have received similar data breach notices from employers, government agencies, medical centers, banks and retailers. NASA in particular has been subject to “numerous cyberattacks” and computer thefts in recent years, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, an agency that conducts research for Congress.

Even so, Dr. Nelson, who recently retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a research facility operated by the California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA, stands out as a glaring example of security lapses involving personal data, privacy advocates say.

“To the extent that Robert Nelson looks like millions of other people working for firms employed by the federal government, this would seem to be a real problem,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group which filed a friend-of-the-court brief for Dr. Nelson in the Supreme Court case.

In a 2009 report titled “NASA Needs to Remedy Vulnerabilities in Key Networks,” the Government Accountability Office noted that the agency had reported 1,120 security incidents in fiscal 2007 and 2008 alone.

It also singled out an incident in 2009 in which a NASA center reported the theft of a laptop containing about 3,000 unencrypted files about arms traffic regulations and wind tunnel tests for a supersonic jet.

“NASA had not installed full-disk encryption on its laptops at all three centers,” the report said. “As a result, sensitive data transmitted through the unclassified network or stored on laptop computers were at an increased risk of being compromised.” Other federal agencies have had similar problems. In 2006, for example, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs reported the theft of an employee laptop and hard drive that contained personal details on about 26.5 million veterans. Last year, the G.A.O. cited the Internal Revenue Service for weaknesses in data control that could “jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of financial and sensitive taxpayer information.”

Also last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission warned its employees that their confidential financial information, like brokerage transactions, might have been compromised because an agency contractor had granted data access to a subcontractor without the S.E.C.’s authorization.

In a phone interview, Dr. Nelson, the astronomer, said he planned to hold a news conference on Wednesday morning in which he would ask members of Congress to investigate NASA’s data collection practices and the recent data breach.

Robert Jacobs, a NASA spokesman, said the agency’s data security policy already adequately protected employees and contractors because it required computers to be encrypted before employees took them off agency premises. “We are talking about a computer that should not have left the building in the first place,” Mr. Jacobs said. “The data would have been secure had the employee followed policy.”

The government argued in the case Dr. Nelson filed that a law called the Privacy Act, which governs data collection by federal agencies, provided the scientists with sufficient protection. The case reached the Supreme Court, which upheld government background checks for employees of contractors. The roots of Dr. Nelson’s case against NASA date back to 2004 when the Department of Homeland Security, under a directive signed by President George Bush, required federal agencies to adopt uniform identification credentials for all civil servants and contract employees. As part of the ID card standardization process, the department recommended agencies institute background checks.

Several years later, when NASA announced it intended to start doing background checks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr. Nelson and other scientists there objected.

Those security checks could have included inquiries into medical treatment, counseling for drug use, or any “adverse” information about employees such as sexual activity, or participation in protests, said Dan Stormer, a lawyer representing Dr. Nelson.

But Dr. Nelson and other long-term employees of the lab challenged the legality of those checks, arguing that they violated their privacy rights. NASA, they said, had not established a legitimate need for such extensive investigations about low-risk employees like themselves who did not have security clearances or handle confidential information. Dr. Nelson, for example, specializes in solar system science — concerning, for example, Jupiter’s moon Io and Titan, a moon of Saturn — and publishes his work in scientific journals

“It was an invitation to an open-ended fishing expedition,” Dr. Nelson said of the background checks.

In friend of the court briefs for Dr. Nelson, privacy groups cited many data security problems at federal agencies, arguing that there was a risk that NASA was not equipped to protect the confidential details it was collecting about employees and contractors.

In 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco temporarily halted the background checks, saying that the case had raised important questions about privacy rights. But last year, the Supreme Court upheld the background investigations of employees of government contractors.

Dr. Nelson said he retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory last June rather than submit to a background check. He now works as a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute of Tucson.

NASA has contracted with ID Experts, a data breach company, to help protect employees whose data was contained on the stolen laptop against identity theft. Mr. Jacobs, the NASA spokesman, said the agency has encrypted almost 80 percent of its laptops and plans to encrypt the rest by Dec. 21. He added that he too received a letter from NASA warning that his personal information might have been compromised by the laptop theft.

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F.D.A. May Tap Experts on Energy Drinks

The Food and Drug Administration said in a letter released on Tuesday that it was likely to seek advice from outside experts to help determine whether energy drinks posed particular risks to teenagers or people with underlying health problems.

The letter appears to signal a change in the agency’s approach to the drinks, which contain high levels of caffeine.

Previously, F.D.A. officials have said that they were investigating possible risks posed by popular products like 5-Hour Energy, Monster Energy and Red Bull. But an agency spokeswoman, Shelly Burgess, said the new letter was the first time that the F.D.A. had said it might turn to outside experts.

The F.D.A. letter, which was released Tuesday by Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, follows disclosures that the agency received reports of 18 deaths and over 150 injuries that mentioned the possible involvement of energy drinks.

The filing of such reports with the F.D.A. does not prove that a product was responsible for a death or an injury. Energy drink makers have said their products are safe and were not responsible for the health problems.

The officials said a review of the drinks might be “greatly enhanced by also engaging specialized expertise” from an outside group, like the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences.

Industry analysts said the letter indicated that the F.D.A. did not plan any immediate actions on energy drinks, an interpretation that set off a rally on Tuesday in the stock of Monster Beverage, the producer of Monster Energy. Company shares closed at $51.97, up over 13 percent. Any regulatory outcome is likely to be “benign,” Judy Hong, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said in a note to investors, according to Bloomberg News.

In Canada, however, the use of an outside panel led to limits on caffeine levels in energy drinks.

In their letter, F.D.A. officials indicated that an outside review would focus on the possible risks posed by high levels of caffeine, a stimulant, to certain groups. They reiterated that daily consumption of significant levels of caffeine, which is found in products like coffee and tea, is safe.

“Areas of particular focus would include such matters as the vulnerability of certain populations to stimulants and the incidence and consequence of excessive consumption” of energy drinks, especially by young people, F.D.A. officials wrote.

In Canada, an expert panel made several recommendations, including arguing that such beverages be labeled “stimulant drug-containing drinks.”

Health Canada, that country’s counterpart to the F.D.A., did not adopt many of the group’s recommendations, but it has put in place new rules limiting caffeine levels in cans of energy drinks to 180 milligrams.

Some larger-size cans of energy drinks sold in the United States, like the 24-ounce can of Monster Energy and the 20-ounce can of Red Bull, have caffeine levels above that limit.

An eight-ounce cup of coffee, depending on how it is made, can contain from 100 to 150 milligrams of caffeine.

In the new letter, F.D.A. officials also said that studies that had examined other ingredients, like taurine, that are often used in energy drinks had determined those substances were safe. The agency also said that a survey suggested that energy drinks constitute a small portion of the caffeine consumed in this country, even by teenagers.

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F.D.A. May Tap Experts on Energy Drinks

The Food and Drug Administration said in a letter released on Tuesday that it was likely to seek advice from outside experts to help determine whether energy drinks posed particular risks to teenagers or people with underlying health problems.

The letter appears to signal a change in the agency’s approach to the drinks, which contain high levels of caffeine.

Previously, F.D.A. officials have said that they were investigating possible risks posed by popular products like 5-Hour Energy, Monster Energy and Red Bull. But an agency spokeswoman, Shelly Burgess, said the new letter was the first time that the F.D.A. had said it might turn to outside experts.

The F.D.A. letter, which was released Tuesday by Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, follows disclosures that the agency received reports of 18 deaths and over 150 injuries that mentioned the possible involvement of energy drinks.

The filing of such reports with the F.D.A. does not prove that a product was responsible for a death or an injury. Energy drink makers have said their products are safe and were not responsible for the health problems.

The officials said a review of the drinks might be “greatly enhanced by also engaging specialized expertise” from an outside group, like the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences.

Industry analysts said the letter indicated that the F.D.A. did not plan any immediate actions on energy drinks, an interpretation that set off a rally on Tuesday in the stock of Monster Beverage, the producer of Monster Energy. Company shares closed at $51.97, up over 13 percent. Any regulatory outcome is likely to be “benign,” Judy Hong, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said in a note to investors, according to Bloomberg News.

In Canada, however, the use of an outside panel led to limits on caffeine levels in energy drinks.

In their letter, F.D.A. officials indicated that an outside review would focus on the possible risks posed by high levels of caffeine, a stimulant, to certain groups. They reiterated that daily consumption of significant levels of caffeine, which is found in products like coffee and tea, is safe.

“Areas of particular focus would include such matters as the vulnerability of certain populations to stimulants and the incidence and consequence of excessive consumption” of energy drinks, especially by young people, F.D.A. officials wrote.

In Canada, an expert panel made several recommendations, including arguing that such beverages be labeled “stimulant drug-containing drinks.”

Health Canada, that country’s counterpart to the F.D.A., did not adopt many of the group’s recommendations, but it has put in place new rules limiting caffeine levels in cans of energy drinks to 180 milligrams.

Some larger-size cans of energy drinks sold in the United States, like the 24-ounce can of Monster Energy and the 20-ounce can of Red Bull, have caffeine levels above that limit.

An eight-ounce cup of coffee, depending on how it is made, can contain from 100 to 150 milligrams of caffeine.

In the new letter, F.D.A. officials also said that studies that had examined other ingredients, like taurine, that are often used in energy drinks had determined those substances were safe. The agency also said that a survey suggested that energy drinks constitute a small portion of the caffeine consumed in this country, even by teenagers.

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Bits Blog: Apple Fires a Manager Over Its Misfire on Maps

8:51 p.m. | Updated

Apple has fired a manager who oversaw its mobile mapping service, continuing to clean house after a bad stumble.

Eddy Cue, senior vice president for Internet software and services at Apple, fired the manager, Richard Williamson, according to two people briefed on the matter who did not want to be named to avoid Apple’s ire. The firing happened shortly before Thanksgiving, according to one of these people.

Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, declined to comment. Mr. Williamson did not respond to a message sent to him through the business networking site LinkedIn, which as of Tuesday evening still had a profile listing him as Apple’s senior director of iOS platform services.

Apple had been using Google’s mapping service in its mobile software, but in an update released in September it replaced Google’s maps with its own. The new service added some features, like turn-by-turn directions and sharper graphics, but it was widely criticized over incorrect addresses, misplaced landmarks and misleading driving directions.

In a rare move, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, publicly apologized for the deficiencies of the service and recommended that disappointed customers use mapping services from Apple’s rivals while the company worked out the kinks.

Some early problems with the maps have been fixed. When providing directions for travel from San Francisco to Sausalito, Calif., Apple’s maps used to say the trip required taking a ferry; now it shows a simple drive on the freeway. The Flatiron building in New York and the Washington Monument are no longer a block or two from their rightful homes. But some directions still lead drivers astray, and flaws in the 3-D imagery persist; for example, the London Eye still has no spokes.

The firing of Mr. Williamson, which was first reported by Bloomberg News, follows a management shake-up at Apple in late October, when Mr. Cook fired Scott Forstall, the former head of Apple’s mobile software development. Mr. Cook made the change after months of simmering tensions between Mr. Forstall and other executives, which were exacerbated by the map problems.

As part of that shake-up, Mr. Cook gave Mr. Cue oversight of Apple Maps, along with Siri, the company’s voice-activated assistant technology in the iPhone.

Apple prepared for years to shift to its own mapping system. It acquired three start-ups and formed a partnership with TomTom, a Dutch maker of navigation systems. Tony Costa, a Forrester analyst, said Apple’s move was a necessary one, because iPhone owners were the most active users of mobile maps.

“To leave those people in Google’s hands is just something Apple can’t do,” Mr. Costa said. “Their ability to control and evolve and innovate with maps was limited by their dependence on Google.”

While they wait for Apple’s maps to get better, some Apple customers have also been waiting for Google to release its own maps app for Apple devices. People working on the app say they are seeking to finish it by the end of the year.

Tyler Bell, a product director of Factual, a company that Apple has listed as one of its data providers for business listings, said mapping services had become extremely challenging to produce because smartphone owners demand more from maps than ever before.

Apple, or any company that provides maps, has to collect data from many different vendors and then stitch it together to overlay onto a map, he said. Often there are duplicate entries, or locations are labeled or placed differently depending on the vendor. Along with using computer algorithms to cobble together the data, human testers are needed to smooth things out.

“All these things need to be improved, and it’s a never-ending problem,” Mr. Bell said. He added that he felt Apple had the proper tools in place to quickly improve its database, like a system that allows users to report problems.

But Marc Prioleau, a managing director of Prioleau Advisors, which provides consulting services for mapping companies, said it would take Apple a long time to fix its maps fully because of the scale and complexity of the effort.

Google had a huge head start, he said, because it began doing maps for stationary computers, a less demanding task, and could gradually build on the data as smartphones and tablets emerged.

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Bombings Are Said to Kill Dozens Near Syria’s Capital

Francisco Leong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Rebels celebrated on top of a downed Syrian jet in Daret Azzeh, 20 miles west of Aleppo, on Wednesday.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Syrian state media said on Wednesday that 34 people and possibly many more had died in twin car bombings in a suburb populated by minorities only a few miles from the center of Damascus, the capital, as the civil war swirls from north to south claiming ever higher casualties. One estimate by the government’s opponents put the death toll at 47.

There were also reports from witnesses in Turkey and antigovernment activists in Syria that for the second successive day insurgents had shot down a government aircraft in the north of the country, offering further evidence that the rebels are seeking a major shift by challenging the government’s dominance of the skies. It was not immediately clear how the aircraft, apparently a plane, had been brought down.

Video posted on the Internet by rebels showed wreckage with fires still burning around it. The aircraft appeared to show a tail assembly clearly visible jutting out of the debris. Such videos are difficult to verify, particularly in light of the restrictions facing reporters in Syria. However, the episode on Wednesday seemed to be confirmed by other witnesses.

“We watched a Syrian plane being shot down as it was flying low to drop bombs,” said Ugur Cuneydioglu, who said he observed the incident from a Turkish border village in southern Hatay Province. “It slowly went down in flames before it hit the ground. It was quite a scene,” Mr. Cuneydioglu said.

Video posted by insurgents on the Internet showed a man in aviator coveralls being carried away. It was not clear if the man was alive but the video said he had been treated in a makeshift hospital. A voice off-camera says, “This is the pilot who was shelling residents’ houses.”

The aircraft was said to have been brought down while it was attacking the town of Daret Azzeh, 20 miles west of Aleppo and close to the Turkish border. The town was the scene of a mass killing last June, when the government and the rebels blamed each other for the deaths and mutilation of 25 people. The video posted online said the plane had been brought down by “the free men of Daret Azzeh soldiers of God brigade.”

On Tuesday, Syrian rebels said they shot down a military helicopter with a surface-to-air missile outside Aleppo and they uploaded video that appeared to confirm that rebels have put their growing stock of heat-seeking missiles to effective use.

In recent months, rebels have used mainly machine guns to shoot down several Syrian Air Force helicopters and fixed-wing attack jets. In Tuesday’s case, the thick smoke trailing the projectile, combined with the elevation of the aircraft, strongly suggested that the helicopter was hit by a missile.

Rebels hailed the event as the culmination of their long pursuit of effective antiaircraft weapons, though it was not clear if the downing on Tuesday was an isolated tactical success or heralded a new phase in the war that would present a meaningful challenge to the Syrian government’s air supremacy. In Damascus, the official SANA news agency said the explosions in Jaramana outside the city at around 7 a.m. were the work of “terrorists,” the word used by the authorities to denote rebel forces seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad. Photographs on the SANA Web site showed wreckage and flames in what looked like a narrow alleyway with cars covered in chunks of debris from damaged buildings. The agency said the bombings were in the main square of Jaramana, which news reports said is largely populated by members of the Christian and Druse minorities. Residents said the neighborhood was home to many families who have fled other parts of Syria because of the conflict and to some Palestinian families. The blasts caused “huge material damage to the residential buildings and shops,” SANA said.

The photographs on the Web site showed shattered windows at the Abou Samra coffee house and gurneys laden with injured people clogging what seemed to be a hospital corridor.

SANA said two bombings in other neighborhoods caused minor damage. Activists reported that there were four explosions and said they were all “huge.”

Footage broadcast on Syria’s private Addounia channel and state television showed damage scarring gray six-story apartment houses above tangles of wrecked cars as ambulances arrived to transport the wounded and rescuers spraying rubble with fire hoses. The camera panned over bloodstained sidewalks.

The blasts seemed initially at least to shift the focus of the fighting from the north, where insurgents have claimed string of tactical breakthroughs in recent days, to areas ringing Damascus.

In the north in recent days, the insurgents also claimed to have seized air bases and a hydroelectric dam, apparently seeking both to expand their communications lines and to counter the government’s supremacy in the air.

The death toll from Wednesday’s bombings was not immediately confirmed. An activist group, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, initially said that 29 people had died but revised the figure later to 47, of whom 38 had been identified. Of the 120 injured, the rebel group said, 23 people were in serious condition, meaning that the tally could climb higher.

The explosions reflected the dramatic shift since Syria’s uprising began in March 2011 as a peaceful protest centered on the southern town of Dara’a. It has since spread across the land in a full-blown civil war pitting government forces against a rebel army of Army defectors, disaffected civilians and what the authorities say are foreign jihadists.

Hala Droubi reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon.

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