Plenty of Theories, and Enemies, in Killing of 3 Kurds in Paris


Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


The brother of Sakine Cansiz (on poster), one of three Kurdish activists found shot on Thursday, said his family was convinced that it was a professional assassination.







PARIS — With her signature long hennaed hair, fiery resolve and olive-green military fatigues, Sakine Cansiz was a feminist, guerrilla fighter and former political prisoner as adept at wielding a machine gun as organizing political protests from a jail cell.




One day after she and two other Kurdish activists were killed in the heart of Paris, speculation abounded regarding Ms. Cansiz, 55, and whether she had been the main target.


One of her brothers, Metin Cansiz, and activists interviewed Friday said her main role in recent years was to raise money and provide political support for the separatist group she helped found, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. Ms. Cansiz may also still have been involved in providing arms for the rebels.


Echoing many analysts, Mr. Cansiz said the family was convinced that his sister had been the victim of a professional assassination. It was aimed, he said, at disrupting recently started peace talks that seek to end decades of bloody conflict between the Turkish government and the P.K.K., which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.


Ms. Cansiz was a close ally of a crucial player in the talks with Turkey, the P.K.K.’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan.


“My sister supported the peace process, and she paid with her life,” Mr. Cansiz said as family members and hundreds of mourners gathered at a Kurdish cultural center not far from the locked, unlabeled office where Ms. Cansiz and the other two women, Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez, were found fatally shot early Thursday. “Whoever did this wanted to kill the process.” 


Many Kurdish rebels said they believed that Turkish nationalists were behind the killings. But there were competing suspicions. Some rebels speculated that Iran  sponsored the attack as a way to destabilize Turkey, which has taken a stand against an Iranian ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.


Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Friday that he believed that the killings bore the signs of an internal feud. In any case, the contours of Ms. Cansiz’s shortened life suggest that she would have had plenty of enemies.


Born to an Alevi Shiite family of eight brothers and sisters, Ms. Cansiz became politically active in her early 20s, her brother said. What she saw as the impoverishment and repression of the Kurdish community led her and a small group of revolutionaries to found the P.K.K. at a teahouse near Diyarbakir, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.


In 1980, after a coup in Turkey, she was arrested and imprisoned until 1991, enduring torture, according to Rusen Werdi, a Kurdish lawyer in Paris.


Her brother, who was imprisoned with her, recalled that she was one of the only prisoners to stand up to the authorities. Activists recalled that she spit in the face of the notorious prison director.


In interviews on Friday, activists said  Ms. Cansiz continued to organize demonstrations from behind bars. They said she had initially been attracted by the Marxist ideology of the Kurdish rights movement, which allowed women to escape from the tribal structures of Kurdish society and to take up arms alongside men.


Vahap Coskun, an expert on Kurdish movements at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, said that from its inception, the P.K.K. saw that Kurdish women could provide a powerful base for political organization and on the battlefield. Of the group’s 5,500 members, he said, about a quarter are women. In the mid-1990s, some joined suicide bombing attacks aimed at military and civilian targets, sometimes deflecting suspicion by dressing as though pregnant.


After Ms. Cansiz was released from prison, her brother said, she received military training, organized clandestine meetings, traveled to P.K.K. mountain outposts in southeastern Turkey and went underground to Germany to raise funds.


Ms. Cansiz spent time in Syria, where Mr. Ocalan was based, at the group’s training camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa region and in northern Iraq, Mr. Coskun said. She was eventually sent to Western Europe to work in logistics and fund-raising after the P.K.K. incurred losses in fighting with Turkish security forces, he said.


The German authorities questioned her in 2007 but turned down a Turkish request for her extradition, her friends and colleagues said. She then moved to Paris, and believed that she was under frequent surveillance, they said.


Her brother said that the two had recently celebrated the new year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and that Ms. Cansiz had betrayed no concerns about her safety. “She was never afraid,” he said. “She was happy.”


Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul.



This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the sect of Shiite Islam of which Sakine Cansiz was a member. She was an Alevi, not an Alawite. Among their differences, the Alevis are spread throughout Turkey, while most Alawites in Turkey live along the country’s border with Syria.



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Gadgetwise Blog: Why Pixel Counts Don't Count in Cameras

With the coming of the Consumer Electronics Show, camera manufacturers will be trotting out scads of new products, but many are unfortunately falling back on an old marketing strategy.

I have been seeing manufacturers offer ever larger pixel counts for their newer models. For instance Nikon’s D5100 is still in the lineup alongside the newer and less expensive D3200. The D5100 has 16.2 megapixel sensor, the D3200 has a 24.2 megapixel sensor (there are even newer models, but I don’t have them on hand to test).

Shouldn’t that make the D3200 the better camera? Logically maybe. But in fact it doesn’t, which serves to point out why you can’t shop for a camera based on the number of pixels. It’s largely meaningless when it comes to image quality.

In recent years, many manufacturers had stepped stepped away from pushing pixel counts as the primary selling point of a camera, but it’s a measure the public seems to respond to. Now it’s back in a big way.

To demonstrate why pixels are irrelevant, I have taken an ugly but illustrative image of a corner in a darkened room. Low light brings out “noise” in photographs. It’s a kind of grainy unevenness that is generally undesirable although some artists use it for effect. Both photos are taken with the same settings and lens. You can see the grain is more pronounced in the photo from the D3200, which has the higher pixel count.

Why is that? Because at a certain point you’re better off having a larger pixel, which captures better quality information about the light it sees, rather than additional pixels capturing lower quality data.

To be clear, I am not singling out Nikon, or either of these cameras. They are terrific products, and I consider the D5100 one of the better bargains in its price range partly because of its ability to capture quality images in low light.

The point here is that when you are shopping for a camera, concentrate on the type and physical dimensions of the sensor. In that case, larger is better because more surface area means more ability to capture light. And though CCD sensors used to be state-of-the-art, CMOS sensors have largely surpassed them.

If you only remember one thing when shopping for a new camera it’s this: don’t be seduced by a high pixel count.

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Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales



The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.


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Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases





A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.




The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.


“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”


Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.


So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.


The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.


However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”


She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”


Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.


If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.


Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.


“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.


A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.


Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.


Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.


“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”


The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.


But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”


“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”


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Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases





A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.




The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.


“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”


Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.


So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.


The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.


However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”


She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”


Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.


If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.


Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.


“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.


A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.


Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.


Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.


“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”


The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.


But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”


“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”


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At War Blog: Highlights From Karzai, Obama News Conference

President Obama, after meeting with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, said Friday that the United States would be able to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in coming months because of gains made by Afghan security forces.

As the Times’s Mark Landler reported, Mr. Obama also made it clear that he contemplated leaving relatively few troops in Afghanistan after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014, saying that the mission will be focused on advising and supporting Afghan troops and targeting the remnants of Al Qaeda.

You can watch the full video here:

You can also find the joint statement, released by President Obama and President Karzai here.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Dealing With Duplicate Work on Dropbox

What happens if two people work on the same file at the same time in a shared Dropbox folder? Does one copy of the file overwrite the other?

If two people are editing the same file at the same time, Dropbox saves both versions of the file in the shared folder. The service does not merge the two different files, but adds the words “conflicted copy” to the file name of the second version so it is obvious that two different copies of the same file now exist.

The file name of the second copy also lists the date that the conflict occurred between the two versions of the file. The computer name or name of the person who was working on the file is appended to the name as well, making it somewhat easier to identify the collaborator and ensure that everyone’s changes are incorporated into one final version of the document.

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Parental Consent Rule May Proceed for a Circumcision Ritual, a Judge Says





New York City health officials may proceed temporarily with a plan to require parental consent before an infant may undergo a particular Jewish circumcision ritual, a federal judge ruled Thursday.




City officials say 12 cases of herpes simplex virus have likely resulted from the procedure, known as metzitzah b’peh, since 2000, including one Brooklyn case reported this week. Two infants died, and two suffered permanent brain damage. Most Jews no longer practice metzitzah b’peh, in which the circumciser uses his mouth to suck blood from the wound, but it remains common among some ultra-Orthodox communities.


Citing the risk of infection, health officials in September introduced a regulation that would require parents to provide written consent stating that they were aware of the health risks.


But the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, Agudath Israel of America, and the International Bris Association sued in October to stop the rule from taking effect, calling it an infringement of their constitutional rights. They also denied the procedure posed a risk and asked a federal court to put the rule on hold while the litigation proceeded.


In denying the request for a preliminary injunction, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the United States District Court for the Southern District wrote that the risks were clear.


“In light of the quality of the evidence presented in support of the regulation, we conclude that a continued injunction against enforcement of the regulation would not serve the public interest,” she wrote.


City lawyers said they were gratified by the ruling, but Andrew Moesel, a spokesman for the plaintiffs, said the groups would appeal. “We continue to believe that this case is a wrongful and unnecessary intrusion into the rights of freedom of religion and speech,” he said.


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Parental Consent Rule May Proceed for a Circumcision Ritual, a Judge Says





New York City health officials may proceed temporarily with a plan to require parental consent before an infant may undergo a particular Jewish circumcision ritual, a federal judge ruled Thursday.




City officials say 12 cases of herpes simplex virus have likely resulted from the procedure, known as metzitzah b’peh, since 2000, including one Brooklyn case reported this week. Two infants died, and two suffered permanent brain damage. Most Jews no longer practice metzitzah b’peh, in which the circumciser uses his mouth to suck blood from the wound, but it remains common among some ultra-Orthodox communities.


Citing the risk of infection, health officials in September introduced a regulation that would require parents to provide written consent stating that they were aware of the health risks.


But the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, Agudath Israel of America, and the International Bris Association sued in October to stop the rule from taking effect, calling it an infringement of their constitutional rights. They also denied the procedure posed a risk and asked a federal court to put the rule on hold while the litigation proceeded.


In denying the request for a preliminary injunction, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the United States District Court for the Southern District wrote that the risks were clear.


“In light of the quality of the evidence presented in support of the regulation, we conclude that a continued injunction against enforcement of the regulation would not serve the public interest,” she wrote.


City lawyers said they were gratified by the ruling, but Andrew Moesel, a spokesman for the plaintiffs, said the groups would appeal. “We continue to believe that this case is a wrongful and unnecessary intrusion into the rights of freedom of religion and speech,” he said.


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Blasts in Pakistan Kill at Least 88 and Raise Fears Over Elections


Waheed Khan/European Pressphoto Agency


The worst violence was concentrated in the southwestern city of Quetta, where two explosions killed at least 57 people and wounded more than 110, the police said.







ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Bomb blasts in two Pakistani cities killed at least 88 people on Thursday and wounded more than 270, offering harrowing evidence of how the country’s myriad internal conflicts may destabilize it as elections approach.




The worst violence was concentrated in the southwestern city of Quetta, where two explosions a few minutes apart in the evening ripped through a billiards hall in a neighborhood dominated by ethnic Hazara Shiites, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 110, the police said.


A suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside the hall, and a second attacker then blew up his vehicle outside the club as police officers and journalists arrived, a senior police officer, Mir Zubair Mehmood, told reporters. The television channel Samaa said one of its camera operators was killed by the second explosion after rushing to the scene. Hospitals were overwhelmed as casualties arrived through the evening.


Quetta is no stranger to sectarian, nationalist and Islamist violence. Most violence against Shiites there has been directed by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni militant group with strong ties to the Pakistani Taliban. But there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the billiard hall attack.


An ethnic Baluch separatist group claimed responsibility for another bombing earlier on Thursday, aimed at paramilitary soldiers in a commercial part of Quetta, which killed 12 people.


The Hazara, minority Shiites who migrated from Afghanistan more than a century ago, have been the target of dozens of attacks from sectarian death squads led by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in Quetta over the past year, but the billiard hall attack was by far the bloodiest.


Human rights activists said the police and the security forces failed to protect the vulnerable community. “The callousness and indifference of authorities offers a damning indictment of the state, its military and security agencies,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, the Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch.


The other focus of violence on Thursday was the Swat Valley, in the Hindu Kush mountains in northwestern Pakistan, where an explosion in the basement of a religious seminary killed at least 22 people and wounded an additional 60. It was not clear why the seminary, run by the Islamic missionary group Tableeghi Jamaat, was a target.


Initial reports said a gas leak had caused the explosion, but police and hospital officials later said that there was clear evidence of a bomb.


Doctors at a hospital in Saidu Sharif, near the site, said blast victims were being treated for wounds caused by ball bearings, which are sometimes packed into suicide bombs to make them more deadly.


“There was a smell of explosives,” Muhammad Iqbal, a senior doctor, said by telephone.


The violence underscores the fragility of state authority in parts of Pakistan as the country prepares for a general election that analysts say is likely to take place before June. Many Pakistanis worry that increasing instability could cause the elections to be postponed.


Islamist violence in Swat drew international condemnation in October after Taliban gunmen shot a teenage schoolgirl and education activist, Malala Yousafzai. The episode highlighted how Islamist fighters were slowly returning to the valley three years after a Pakistani military operation drove them away.


Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.



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City Room: Free Outdoor Wi-Fi Comes to West Chelsea

Residents of West Chelsea inManhattan who were wondering what Google had done for them lately now have their answer: free Wi-Fi service for the whole neighborhood.

Google, which houses most of its 3,000 New York employees in a massive building on lower Eighth Avenue, has invested about $75,000 to install the broadest wireless network that is open to the public in any neighborhood in the city, elected officials announced Tuesday.

The service will be available for at least two years from Gansevoort Street north to 19th Street between Eighth Avenue and West Street. It was introduced at a news conference in a garden of a city housing project, the Robert S. Fulton Houses, by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Senator Charles E. Schumer and a Google official.

No city or federal funds went into building the network, which required installation of 29 antennas on lampposts and rooftops. The service was set up through a partnership of Google and the Chelsea Improvement Company, a nonprofit neighborhood organization.

Mayor Bloomberg said free Wi-Fi service was already available in 20 parks in the city and was scheduled to be added to 32 more this year, but he could not say when his vision of a citywide Wi-Fi network would be realized. He encouraged Mr. Schumer to provide federal funding to expand the service to more neighborhoods.

“Keep in mind. somebody’s got to pay for the Wi-Fi,” the mayor said. “The question is, who?”

The total cost of setting up the Chelsea network was about $115,000, the balance of which was contributed by the Chelsea Improvement Company, said Ben Fried, Google’s chief information officer. He said the partners had committed to keeping the free service running for two years.

Dan Biederman, the president of the improvement company, also runs the Bryant Park Business Improvement District, which has provided free Wi-Fi in Bryant Park on 42nd Street for several years. He said the 34th Street Partnership, another business improvement district, which he also runs, hopes to start providing free Wi-Fi service within a year.

The officials at Tuesday’s announcement emphasized that the service would be available throughout the Fulton Houses complex. But some of those inside the senior center there were in no hurry to surf the Internet.

Taking a break from shooting a game of pool, Epi Pacheco, 65, said he did not make much use of a computer. “I got a little iPod and I could use it to go to YouTube, I think,” he said.

Still, Mr. Pacheco, who lives on West 55th Street, said Google should expand the service to his neighborhood and others as well. “They make so many million dollars, they should give something to the people,” he said.

Mr. Fried said the Chelsea network was unrelated to an ultrahigh-speed Internet network called Google Fiber that the company had begun in Kansas City.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/09/2013, on page A18 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Free Wi-Fi From Google On Streets of Chelsea.
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Chinese Firm Buys an American Solar Technology Start-Up


Alexander F. Yuan/Associated Press


The chief of MiaSolé, John Carrington, left, at the announcement of the company’s purchase by Hanergy Holding Group, for which Zhou Jiesan is an executive.







Just a few years ago, Silicon Valley investors were pouring money into solar technologies and talking about how they would bring the same kind of innovation to green energy that they had to the computer chip.




But few anticipated that prices for silicon, the main component of traditional solar panels, would plummet or that Chinese manufacturers, backed by enormous subsidies from their government, would increase solar production capacity by a factor of 17 in just four years.


The resulting plunge in solar panel prices wiped out the dream of a new Solar Valley. Despite making advances in the new technology, known as thin-film solar, the American companies just couldn’t compete.


The federal government’s imposition of steep tariffs last year on Chinese conventional panels helped, but the industry had waited so late to apply for the tariffs that balance sheets had already been crippled with accumulated losses and investors had lost interest.


Some thin-film companies went bankrupt, including Solyndra, which had received half a billion dollars in federal subsidies. Others, like Stion, licensed their technology or formed strategic partnerships with large corporations.


On Wednesday, the chief executive of MiaSolé, one of the most promising Silicon Valley solar start-ups, appeared in Beijing for the announcement that Hanergy Holding Group of China had completed the purchase of his company and its technology for a fraction of what investors had put in. Hanergy made its money building hydroelectric dams.


Hanergy’s purchase of the 100-employee MiaSolé, based in Santa Clara, Calif., follows its acquisition in September of the 400-employee thin-film solar unit of Q.Cells, an insolvent German solar company. The two deals have allowed Hanergy to acquire at low cost an array of patents developed for hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital investments.


“Going head to head against the Asian low-cost, mass-volume crystalline silicon manufacturers is not a wise strategy if you’re trying to produce an ultracheap module in the United States or in high-cost markets,” said Neil Z. Auerbach, managing partner of Hudson Clean Energy Partners, a SoloPower investor. “But if you’re adopting advanced technology, you have a niche strategy in which those incumbents do not have a competitive edge because they don’t really have a product that suits.”


The industry’s broad competitive challenges have prompted American investors to shun the sector. Last year, venture capital financing in the solar sector plummeted nearly 50 percent to $992 million in 103 deals from $1.9 billion in 108 deals in 2011, according to Mercom Capital Group, a clean-tech research and communications company.


Chinese regulators, too, have begun trying to deal with the overcapacity, discouraging their banks from making more large loans to the solar panel sector.


Li Hejun, the chairman of Hanergy, said at the news conference in Beijing that the company’s hydroelectric dams produce several hundred million dollars a year in free cash flow, so it can finance its own investments in solar, which already include six thin-film solar factories, plus three more under construction.


“Everyone knows about the overcapacity in solar energy industry in China, but for us industrial insiders, this overcapacity is but a relative one,” he said. “For those who have technology, the situation is the opposite.”


The thin-film technology championed by the Silicon Valley start-ups uses more exotic materials than conventional solar panels, which are made from crystalline silicon.


Most thin-film modules are slightly less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than conventional panels, but they are much lighter, which makes them easier to mount in locations that may not support the weight of conventional panels.


Supporters of thin-film technology contend that it has the potential for considerable further efficiency gains that may not be possible for conventional panels, which have been researched for decades. And some research has shown that thin-film can outperform conventional silicon-based panels at high temperatures, such as in deserts, where solar farms are often located.


The technology’s promise attracted the attention of the Obama administration, which provided clean-energy grants and loans to some of the companies, although not to MiaSolé.


Diane Cardwell reported from New York and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong. Patrick Zuo contributed research from Beijing.



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Recipes for Health: Tunisian Style Baked Cauliflower Frittata — Recipes for Health


Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times







In the authentic version of this frittata there is a lot more olive oil, as well as chopped hard-boiled eggs. This one is lighter and simpler. It is great for lunch or dinner and keeps well in the refrigerator.




1/2 medium head cauliflower (about 1 1/4 pounds), trimmed of leaves, bottom of the stem trimmed away


2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil


1 small onion, finely chopped


2 garlic cloves, minced


8 eggs


Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste


1/2 cup finely chopped parsley


2 teaspoons ground caraway seeds


2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan


1/2 teaspoon harissa dissolved in 1 teaspoon water, or 1/4 teaspoon cayenne


Freshly ground pepper


1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a 2-quart casserole, preferably earthenware or in a 9-inch cast iron skillet, and brush the bottom and sides of the dish with the oil.


2. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt generously. Add the cauliflower and boil gently until very tender, about 15 minutes. If you prefer, you can cut up the cauliflower and steam it for 15 minutes. Using slotted spoons or tongs remove the cauliflower from the water (or from the steamer), transfer to a bowl of cold water and drain. Cut the florets from the stem and mash into little pieces with a fork. You should have about 3 cups.


3. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the onion. Cook, stirring, until the onion softens, about 5 minutes. Stir in the garlic, stir together for about 30 seconds and remove from the heat.


4. Whisk the eggs in a large bowl. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Stir in the cauliflower, onion and garlic, parsley, ground caraway and Parmesan. Make sure the harissa is dissolved in the water if using, and stir in; otherwise stir in the cayenne. Scrape into the casserole dish.


5. Place in the oven and bake 40 minutes, or until set. Allow to cool for at least 10 minutes before serving. In Tunisia these frittatas are served at room temperature, but you can also serve it hot.


Yield: Serves 6


Advance preparation: The frittata is delicious served the next day. Bring back to room temperature or heat slightly in a low oven before serving. The cooked cauliflower will keep for about 3 days in the refrigerator.


Nutritional information per serving: 165 calories; 12 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 6 grams monounsaturated fat; 249 milligrams cholesterol; 5 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 139 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 10 grams protein


Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”


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Recipes for Health: Tunisian Style Baked Cauliflower Frittata — Recipes for Health


Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times







In the authentic version of this frittata there is a lot more olive oil, as well as chopped hard-boiled eggs. This one is lighter and simpler. It is great for lunch or dinner and keeps well in the refrigerator.




1/2 medium head cauliflower (about 1 1/4 pounds), trimmed of leaves, bottom of the stem trimmed away


2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil


1 small onion, finely chopped


2 garlic cloves, minced


8 eggs


Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste


1/2 cup finely chopped parsley


2 teaspoons ground caraway seeds


2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan


1/2 teaspoon harissa dissolved in 1 teaspoon water, or 1/4 teaspoon cayenne


Freshly ground pepper


1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a 2-quart casserole, preferably earthenware or in a 9-inch cast iron skillet, and brush the bottom and sides of the dish with the oil.


2. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt generously. Add the cauliflower and boil gently until very tender, about 15 minutes. If you prefer, you can cut up the cauliflower and steam it for 15 minutes. Using slotted spoons or tongs remove the cauliflower from the water (or from the steamer), transfer to a bowl of cold water and drain. Cut the florets from the stem and mash into little pieces with a fork. You should have about 3 cups.


3. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the onion. Cook, stirring, until the onion softens, about 5 minutes. Stir in the garlic, stir together for about 30 seconds and remove from the heat.


4. Whisk the eggs in a large bowl. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Stir in the cauliflower, onion and garlic, parsley, ground caraway and Parmesan. Make sure the harissa is dissolved in the water if using, and stir in; otherwise stir in the cayenne. Scrape into the casserole dish.


5. Place in the oven and bake 40 minutes, or until set. Allow to cool for at least 10 minutes before serving. In Tunisia these frittatas are served at room temperature, but you can also serve it hot.


Yield: Serves 6


Advance preparation: The frittata is delicious served the next day. Bring back to room temperature or heat slightly in a low oven before serving. The cooked cauliflower will keep for about 3 days in the refrigerator.


Nutritional information per serving: 165 calories; 12 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 6 grams monounsaturated fat; 249 milligrams cholesterol; 5 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 139 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 10 grams protein


Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”


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Global Update: China Moves to Prevent Spread of Yellow Fever From Africa





In a move that underlines how many Chinese citizens now work in Africa, China’s quarantine officials recently urged greater efforts to make sure that a yellow fever epidemic now raging in Sudan does not come back to China.




Local health authorities were asked to scan all travelers arriving from Sudan for fevers. Chinese citizens planning travel to Sudan were advised to get yellow fever shots. Customs officers were told that containers arriving from Sudan might have stray infected mosquitoes inside.


Sudan’s epidemic is considered the world’s worst in 20 years. Sweden, Britain and other donors have paid for vaccinations. The United States Navy’s laboratory in Egypt has helped with diagnoses.


Estimates of the number of Chinese working in Africa, many in the oil and mining industries or on major construction projects, range from 500,000 to 1 million. Experts on AIDS have previously warned that the workers could become a new means of bringing that disease to China, which has a low H.I.V.-infection rate.


ProMED-mail, a Web site that follows emerging diseases, has tracked reports about the Sudan outbreak, with its moderators adding valuable context. China’s mosquito-killing winters make a large yellow fever outbreak there unlikely, moderators said. But Sudan’s containment efforts are troubled. For example, vaccinated people cannot get cards proving they have had shots, but the cards are reported to be for sale at police checkpoints.


Australia’s now-endemic dengue fever, according to ProMED moderators, may have come from mosquitoes arriving in containers from East Timor.


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American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip


David Guttenfelder/Associated Press


Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, arrived in Pyongyang on Monday.







SEOUL, South Korea — Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, led a private delegation including Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, to North Korea on Monday, a controversial trip to a country that is among the most hostile to the Internet.








Kim Kwang Hyon/Associated Press

Bill Richardson with journalists on Monday after arriving in Pyongyang, North Korea. Mr. Richardson, who has visited the North several times, called his trip a private humanitarian mission.






Mr. Richardson, who has visited North Korea several times, called his four-day trip a private humanitarian mission and said he would try to meet with Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old South Korean-born American citizen who was arrested on charges of “hostile acts” against North Korea after entering the country as a tourist in early November.


“I heard from his son who lives in Washington State, who asked me to bring him back,” Mr. Richardson said in Beijing before boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang. “I doubt we can do it on this trip.”


In a one-sentence dispatch, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed the American group’s arrival in Pyongyang, calling it “a Google delegation.”


Mr. Richardson said his delegation planned to meet with North Korean political, economic and military leaders, and to visit universities.


Mr. Schmidt and Google have kept quiet about why Mr. Schmidt joined the trip, which the State Department advised against, calling the visit unhelpful. Mr. Richardson said Monday that Mr. Schmidt was “interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect,” but did not elaborate. Mr. Schmidt is a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness.


Except for a tiny portion of its elite, North Korea’s population is blocked from the Internet. Under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the country has emphasized science and technology but has also vowed to intensify its war against the infiltration of outside information in the isolated country, which it sees as a potential threat to its totalitarian grip on power.


Although it is engaged in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons and missile programs and habitually criticizes American foreign policy as “imperial,” North Korea welcomes high-profile American visits to Pyongyang, billing them as signs of respect for its leadership. It runs a special museum for gifts that foreign dignitaries have brought for its leaders.


Washington has never established diplomatic ties with North Korea, and the two countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.


But Mr. Richardson’s trip comes at a particularly delicate time for Washington. In the past weeks, it has been trying to muster international support to penalize North Korea for its launching last month of a long-range rocket, which the United States condemned as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning the country from testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology.


North Korea has often required visits by high-profile Americans, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, before releasing American citizens held there on criminal charges. Mr. Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Pyongyang in 1996 to negotiate the release of Evan Hunziker, who was held for three months on charges of spying after swimming across the river border between China and North Korea.


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A Bold Dissenter at the Fed, Hoping His Doubts Are Wrong





RICHMOND, Va. — Jeffrey M. Lacker, the Federal Reserve’s most persistent internal critic, does not much resemble a firebrand. He is personally cheerful, professionally inclined to see both sides of an issue and quick to acknowledge he may not be right. He says he would rather be wrong.







Steve Ruark for The New York Times

Jeffrey M. Lacker questions the Fed's tack.







But for the last several years, Mr. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, has warned repeatedly that the central bank’s extraordinary efforts to stimulate growth are ineffective and inappropriate and, worst of all, that the Fed is undermining its hard-won ability to control inflation.


Last year, Mr. Lacker cast the sole dissenting vote at each of the eight meetings of the Fed’s policy-making committee, only the third time in history a Fed official dissented so regularly.


“We’re at the limits of our understanding of how monetary policy affects the economy,” Mr. Lacker said in a recent interview in his office atop the bank’s skyscraper here. “Sometimes when you test the limits you find out where the limits are by breaking through and going too far.”


As the Fed enters the sixth year of its campaign to revitalize the economy, the debate between the Fed’s majority and Mr. Lacker — whose views are shared by others inside the central bank, as well as some outside observers — highlights the extent to which the Fed is operating in uncharted territory, making choices that have few precedents, unclear benefits and uncertain consequences.


The economy continues to muddle along, shadowed by the threat of another government breakdown, and the crisis of high unemployment is only slowly receding. But in trying to address those problems by suppressing interest rates, the Fed risks the unleashing of speculation and inflation.


It is basically a matter of disposition: is it better to risk doing too much, or not enough?


Mr. Lacker, 57, often uses the word “humility” in describing his views. He means that the Fed should recognize that its power to stimulate the economy is limited, both for technical reasons and because it should not encroach on the domain of elected officials by picking winners and losers.


As he sees it, the Fed’s current effort to reduce unemployment by purchasing mortgage-backed securities crossed both lines. He sees little evidence that it will help to create jobs. And he says that buying mortgage bonds is a form of fiscal policy, because it lowers interest rates for a particular kind of borrower.


But Mr. Lacker is at pains to emphasize that his disagreement with the other 11 members of the Federal Open Market Committee, who supported the purchases, is not about the need for help.


“It’s very unfair to think of me as not caring about the unemployed,” he said. “It just seems to me that there are real impediments, that just throwing money at the economy is unlikely to solve the problems that are keeping a 55-year-old furniture worker from finding a good competitive job.”


That sense of caution is deeply frustrating to proponents of the Fed’s recent efforts. The economists Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer wrote in a paper published last month that such pessimism about the power of monetary policy is “the most dangerous idea in Federal Reserve history.”


“The view that hubris can cause central bankers to do great harm clearly has an important element of truth,” wrote the Romers, both professors at the University of California, Berkeley. “But the hundred years of Federal Reserve history show that humility can also cause large harms.”


It also makes an interesting contrast with Mr. Lacker’s personality. His favorite escape is driving a Porsche Boxster racecar; a model sits on a shelf at his office. He jokes that the track is the only place that people don’t ask him about interest rates — although, he adds, they do care about fuel prices.


And at the Fed, an institution that likes consensus, dissenting also requires a certain amount of boldness. Mr. Lacker has now said no at 13 of the 24 regular policy meetings he has attended as a voting member, one-third of all dissents since Ben S. Bernanke became the Fed’s chairman in 2006. He voted in 2006, 2009 and 2012 as part of the regular rotation of reserve bank presidents.


Even some who sympathize with his concerns doubt the efficacy of such public stands.


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Recipes for Health: Cauliflower and Tuna Salad — Recipes for Health


Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times







I have added tuna to a classic Italian antipasto of cauliflower and capers dressed with vinegar and olive oil. For the best results give the cauliflower lots of time to marinate.




1 large or 2 small or medium cauliflowers, broken into small florets


1 5-ounce can water-packed light (not albacore) tuna, drained


1 plump garlic clove, minced or pureéd


1/3 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley


3 tablespoons capers, drained and rinsed


1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice


3 tablespoons sherry vinegar or champagne vinegar


6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil


Salt and freshly ground pepper


1. Place the cauliflower in a steaming basket over 1 inch of boiling water, cover and steam 1 minute. Lift the lid for 15 seconds, then cover again and steam for 5 to 8 minutes, until tender. Refresh with cold water, then drain on paper towels.


2. In a large bowl, break up the tuna fish and add the cauliflower.


3. In a small bowl or measuring cup, mix together the garlic, parsley, capers, lemon juice, vinegar, and olive oil. Season generously with salt and pepper. Add the cauliflower and toss together. Marinate, stirring from time to time, for 30 minutes if possible before serving. Serve warm, cold, or at room temperature.


Yield: Serves 6 as a starter or side dish


Advance preparation: You can make this up to a day ahead, but omit the parsley until shortly before serving so that it doesn’t fade. It keeps well in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.


Nutritional information per serving: 188 calories; 15 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 10 grams monounsaturated fat; 10 milligrams cholesterol; 8 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 261 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 9 grams protein


Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”


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World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Orthodox Leader Presses for More Adoptions



The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church used his Christmas address on Monday to encourage Russians to adopt orphans, as the country adjusts to a decision to bar Americans from adopting Russian children. The ban, which is retaliation for American legislation intended to punish Russian human rights violators, drew criticism, including from some government officials, largely because 120,000 children in Russia are awaiting adoption. “How important it is that our people should gladly, with a special feeling of gratitude to God, take orphans into their families,” Patriarch Kirill I said in a recorded address broadcast for Orthodox Christmas on Monday. “We should not have orphans in our country,” he added.


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Google’s Rivals Say F.T.C. Antitrust Ruling Missed the Point





WASHINGTON — One of the more surprising conclusions drawn by the Federal Trade Commission when it dropped its nearly two-year antitrust investigation into Google last week was that Google, far from harming consumers, had actually helped them.







Alex Wong/Getty Images

Jon Leibowitz, right, the Federal Trade Commission chairman, speaking last week after the decision was announced.






But some critics of the inquiry now contend that the commission found no harm in Google’s actions because it was looking at the wrong thing.


Instead of considering harm to people who come to Google to search for information, Google’s competitors and their supporters say that the government should have been looking at whether Google’s actions harmed its real customers — the companies that pay billions of dollars each year to advertise on Google’s site.


In its reports, the F.T.C. did not detail how it defined harm or what quantitative measures it had used to determine that Google users were better off.


But interviews with people on all sides of the investigation — government officials, Google supporters, advocates for Microsoft and other competitors, and antitrust experts and economists — show that many of the yardsticks the commission used to measure its outcomes were remarkably similar to Google’s own. Not surprisingly, they cast Google in a favorable light.


At issue were changes that Google made in recent years to its popular search page. Google makes frequent adjustments to the formulas that determine what results are generated when a user enters a search. Currently, it makes more than 500 changes a year, or more than one each day.


Users rarely notice the changes in the formulas, or algorithms, that generate search results, but businesses do. If a change in the formulas causes a business to rank lower in the order of results generated by a search, it is likely to miss potential customers.


What customers are now seeing reflects changes in the format of Google results. For certain categories of searches — travel information, shopping comparisons and financial data, for example — Google has begun presenting links to its own related services.


People close to the investigation said that Google had presented the F.T.C. with the results of tests with focus groups hired by an outside firm to review different versions of a Google search results page. After Google acquired ITA, a travel search business, in 2011, it began testing a new way to display flight results.


The company asked test users to compare side-by-side examples of a results page with just the familiar 10 blue links to specialty travel sites with a page that had at the top a box containing direct links to airlines and fares.


People who reviewed the Google data said tests with hundreds of people showed that fewer than one in five users preferred the page with links only. Users said they liked the box of flight results, so Google reasoned that making the change was better for the consumer.


“There is a deep science to search evaluation,” Amit Singhal, a senior vice president who oversees Google’s search operation, said in an interview on Friday. “A lot of work goes into every change we make.”


But the changes were not better for companies or alternative travel sites that were pushed off the first page of results by Google’s flight box and associated links. By pushing links to competing sites lower, Google might be making things easier for people who come to it for free search. But it also is having a negative effect on competitors, shutting off traffic for those sites.


Drawing fewer customers as a result of Google’s free links, those competitors are forced to advertise more to draw traffic. And advertisers who aren’t competitors have fewer places to go to reach consumers, meaning Google can use its market power to raise advertising prices.


“There might be no consumer harm if Google eliminates Yelp,” said one Microsoft advocate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the likelihood of further interactions with the F.T.C. “But advertisers certainly are harmed.”


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Japan’s Cleanup After a Nuclear Accident Is Denounced


Ko Sasaki for The New York Times


Bags of contaminated soil outside the Naraha-Minami school near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.







NARAHA, Japan — The decontamination crews at a deserted elementary school here are at the forefront of what Japan says is the most ambitious radiological cleanup the world has seen, one that promised to draw on cutting-edge technology from across the globe.








Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Workers reflected in the glass of the Naraha-Minami Elementary School






But much of the work at the Naraha-Minami Elementary School, about 12 miles away from the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, tells another story. For eight hours a day, construction workers blast buildings with water, cut grass and shovel dirt and foliage into big black plastic bags — which, with nowhere to go, dot Naraha’s landscape like funeral mounds.


More than a year and a half since the nuclear crisis, much of Japan’s post-Fukushima cleanup remains primitive, slapdash and bereft of the cleanup methods lauded by government scientists as effective in removing harmful radioactive cesium from the environment.


Local businesses that responded to a government call to research and develop decontamination methods have found themselves largely left out. American and other foreign companies with proven expertise in environmental remediation, invited to Japan in June to show off their technologies, have similarly found little scope to participate.


Recent reports in the local media of cleanup crews dumping contaminated soil and leaves into rivers has focused attention on the sloppiness of the cleanup.


“What’s happening on the ground is a disgrace,” said Masafumi Shiga, president of Shiga Toso, a refurbishing company based in Iwaki, Fukushima. The company developed a more effective and safer way to remove cesium from concrete without using water, which could repollute the environment. “We’ve been ready to help for ages, but they say they’ve got their own way of cleaning up,” he said.


Shiga Toso’s technology was tested and identified by government scientists as “fit to deploy immediately,” but it has been used only at two small locations, including a concrete drain at the Naraha-Minami school.


Instead, both the central and local governments have handed over much of the 1 trillion yen decontamination effort to Japan’s largest construction companies. The politically connected companies have little radiological cleanup expertise and critics say they have cut corners to employ primitive — even potentially hazardous — techniques.


The construction companies have the great advantage of available manpower. Here in Naraha, about 1,500 cleanup workers are deployed every day to power-spray buildings, scrape soil off fields, and remove fallen leaves and undergrowth from forests and mountains, according to an official at the Maeda Corporation, which is in charge of the cleanup.


That number, the official said, will soon rise to 2,000, a large deployment rarely seen on even large-sale projects like dams and bridges.


The construction companies suggest new technologies may work, but are not necessarily cost-effective.


“In such a big undertaking, cost-effectiveness becomes very important,” said Takeshi Nishikawa, an executive based in Fukushima for the Kajima Corporation, Japan’s largest construction company. The company is in charge of the cleanup in the city of Tamura, a part of which lies within the 12-mile exclusion zone. “We bring skills and expertise to the project,” Mr. Nishikawa said.


Kajima also built the reactor buildings for all six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, leading some critics to question why control of the cleanup effort has been left to companies with deep ties to the nuclear industry.


Also worrying, industry experts say, are cleanup methods used by the construction companies that create loose contamination that can become airborne or enter the water.


At many sites, contaminated runoff from cleanup projects is not fully recovered and is being released into the environment, multiple people involved in the decontamination work said.


Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.



This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 8, 2013

Earlier versions of this article misspelled the name of the construction company in charge of the cleanup of the city of Tamura. It is the Kajima Corporation, not Kashima.



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Vital Signs: Perceptions: Babies Seem to Pick Up Language in Utero

A new study suggests that babies learn bits of their native languages even before they are born.

A baby develops the ability to hear by about 30 weeks’ gestation, so he can make out his mother’s voice for the last two months of pregnancy. Researchers tested 40 American and 40 Swedish newborns to see if they could distinguish between English and Swedish vowel sounds. The study is scheduled for future publication in the journal Acta Paediatrica.

The scientists gave the babies pacifiers that counted the number of sucks they made. As the babies sucked, they listened to Swedish and English vowel sounds; the more they sucked, the more the sounds were played. The researchers inferred the babies’ interest in the sound by the amount of sucking.

American babies consistently sucked more often when hearing Swedish vowel sounds, suggesting that the infants had not heard them before, and Swedish babies sucked more when hearing English vowels.

Learning so quickly after birth was unlikely, the researchers concluded, so the babies’ understanding the difference between native and nonnative sounds could be attributed only to prenatal learning.

“Even in late gestation, babies are doing what they’ll be doing throughout infancy and childhood — learning about language,” said the lead author, Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University.



The researchers set up a system to test how well an infant recognizes vowel sounds. They measured the number of times a baby sucked on a pacifier that triggered various vowel sounds. The babies tended to suck faster on their pacifier when they heard the vowel sounds of a foreign language as opposed to the one their mother’s spoke.
Read More..

Vital Signs: Perceptions: Babies Seem to Pick Up Language in Utero

A new study suggests that babies learn bits of their native languages even before they are born.

A baby develops the ability to hear by about 30 weeks’ gestation, so he can make out his mother’s voice for the last two months of pregnancy. Researchers tested 40 American and 40 Swedish newborns to see if they could distinguish between English and Swedish vowel sounds. The study is scheduled for future publication in the journal Acta Paediatrica.

The scientists gave the babies pacifiers that counted the number of sucks they made. As the babies sucked, they listened to Swedish and English vowel sounds; the more they sucked, the more the sounds were played. The researchers inferred the babies’ interest in the sound by the amount of sucking.

American babies consistently sucked more often when hearing Swedish vowel sounds, suggesting that the infants had not heard them before, and Swedish babies sucked more when hearing English vowels.

Learning so quickly after birth was unlikely, the researchers concluded, so the babies’ understanding the difference between native and nonnative sounds could be attributed only to prenatal learning.

“Even in late gestation, babies are doing what they’ll be doing throughout infancy and childhood — learning about language,” said the lead author, Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University.



The researchers set up a system to test how well an infant recognizes vowel sounds. They measured the number of times a baby sucked on a pacifier that triggered various vowel sounds. The babies tended to suck faster on their pacifier when they heard the vowel sounds of a foreign language as opposed to the one their mother’s spoke.
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The Lede Blog: Video of Chinese Censorship Protest

A video report from Euronews on an anti-censorship protest on Monday in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province.

As my colleague Edward Wong reports, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the headquarters of a newspaper office in southern China on Monday to register their anger at the censorship of a recent editorial.

Video of the demonstration, posted online by international news organizations and Chinese bloggers, showed the protesters carrying white and yellow chrysanthemums, a flower that symbolizes mourning, and banners that read: “Get rid of censorship. The Chinese people want freedom.”

Video uploaded to a Chinese social media site on Monday showed a protest outside the offices of Southern Weekend, a relatively liberal newspaper in Guangzhou.

One video clip uploaded to a Chinese social media site and later copied to YouTube showed that the event was documented by a number of photographers, including at least one uniformed police officer.

People showed their support for journalists who had declared a strike to protest what they called overbearing censorship.

Hang Tung Chow of Labour Action China, a nongovernmental organization based in Hong Kong, posted copies of several images and video clips of the protest originally uploaded to Chinese social media accounts on her Twitter feed.

Angry journalists at the Southern Weekend newspaper have called for the removal of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong, blamed for censoring a New Year’s editorial that was supposed to have called for greater respect for rights enshrined in China’s Constitution. One video clip uploaded to YouTube on Sunday showed a lone man protesting outside the newspaper building holding a sign reading: “Tuo Step Down!”

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At Disney Parks, a Bracelet Meant to Build Loyalty (and Sales)





ORLANDO, Fla. — Imagine Walt Disney World with no entry turnstiles. Cash? Passé: Visitors would wear rubber bracelets encoded with credit card information, snapping up corn dogs and Mickey Mouse ears with a tap of the wrist. Smartphone alerts would signal when it is time to ride Space Mountain without standing in line.




Fantasyland? Hardly. It happens starting this spring.


Disney in the coming months plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors — some 30 million people a year — do just about everything.


The initiative is part of a broader effort, estimated by analysts to cost between $800 million and $1 billion, to make visiting Disney parks less daunting and more amenable to modern consumer behavior. Disney is betting that happier guests will spend more money.


“If we can enhance the experience, more people will spend more of their leisure time with us,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts.


The ambitious plan moves Disney deeper into the hotly debated terrain of personal data collection. Like most major companies, Disney wants to have as much information about its customers’ preferences as it can get, so it can appeal to them more efficiently. The company already collects data to use in future sales campaigns, but parts of MyMagic+ will allow Disney for the first time to track guest behavior in minute detail.


Did you buy a balloon? What attractions did you ride and when? Did you shake Goofy’s hand, but snub Snow White? If you fully use MyMagic+, databases will be watching, allowing Disney to refine its offerings and customize its marketing messages.


Disney is aware of potential privacy concerns, especially regarding children. The plan, which comes as the federal government is trying to strengthen online privacy protections, could be troublesome for a company that some consumers worry is already too controlling.


But Disney has decided that MyMagic+ is essential. The company must aggressively weave new technology into its parks — without damaging the sense of nostalgia on which the experience depends — or risk becoming irrelevant to future generations, Mr. Staggs said. From a business perspective, he added, MyMagic+ could be “transformational.”


Aside from benefiting Disney’s bottom line, the initiative could alter the global theme parks business. Disney is not the first vacation company to use wristbands equipped with radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips. Great Wolf Resorts, an operator of 11 water parks in North America, has been using them since 2006. But Disney’s global parks operation, which has an estimated 121.4 million admissions a year and generates $12.9 billion in revenue, is so huge that it can greatly influence consumer behavior.


“When Disney makes a move, it moves the culture,” said Steve Brown, chief operating officer for Lo-Q, a British company that provides line management and ticketing systems for theme parks and zoos.


Disney World guests currently plod through entrance turnstiles, redeeming paper tickets, and then decide what to ride; food and merchandise are bought with cash or credit cards. (Disney hotel key cards can also be used to charge items.) People race to FastPass kiosks, which dispense a limited number of free line-skipping tickets. But gridlock quickly sets in and most people wait. And wait.


In contrast, MyMagic+ will allow users of a new Web site and app — called My Disney Experience — to preselect three FastPasses before they leave home for rides or V.I.P. seating for parades, fireworks and character meet-and-greets. Orlando-bound guests can also preregister for RFID bracelets. These so-called MagicBands will function as room key, park ticket, FastPass and credit card.


MagicBands can also be encoded with all sorts of personal details, allowing for more personalized interaction with Disney employees. Before, the employee playing Cinderella could say hello only in a general way. Now — if parents opt in — hidden sensors will read MagicBand data, providing information needed for a personalized greeting: “Hi, Angie,” the character might say without prompting. “I understand it’s your birthday.”


Read More..

At Disney Parks, a Bracelet Meant to Build Loyalty (and Sales)





ORLANDO, Fla. — Imagine Walt Disney World with no entry turnstiles. Cash? Passé: Visitors would wear rubber bracelets encoded with credit card information, snapping up corn dogs and Mickey Mouse ears with a tap of the wrist. Smartphone alerts would signal when it is time to ride Space Mountain without standing in line.




Fantasyland? Hardly. It happens starting this spring.


Disney in the coming months plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors — some 30 million people a year — do just about everything.


The initiative is part of a broader effort, estimated by analysts to cost between $800 million and $1 billion to make visiting Disney parks less daunting and more amenable to modern consumer behavior. Disney is betting that happier guests will spend more money.


“If we can enhance the experience, more people will spend more of their leisure time with us,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts.


The ambitious plan moves Disney deeper into the hotly debated terrain of personal data collection. Like most major companies, Disney wants to have as much information about its customers’ preferences as it can get, so it can appeal to them more efficiently. The company already collects data to use in future sales campaigns, but parts of MyMagic+ will allow Disney for the first time to track guest behavior in minute detail.


Did you buy a balloon? What attractions did you ride and when? Did you shake Goofy’s hand, but snub Snow White? If you fully use MyMagic+, databases will be watching, allowing Disney to refine its offerings and customize its marketing messages.


Disney is aware of potential privacy concerns, especially regarding children. The plan, which comes as the federal government is trying to strengthen online privacy protections, could be troublesome for a company that some consumers worry is already too controlling.


But Disney has decided that MyMagic+ is essential. The company must aggressively weave new technology into its parks — without damaging the sense of nostalgia on which the experience depends — or risk becoming irrelevant to future generations, Mr. Staggs said. From a business perspective, he added, MyMagic+ could be “transformational.”


Aside from benefiting Disney’s bottom line, the initiative could alter the global theme parks business. Disney is not the first vacation company to use wristbands equipped with radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips. Great Wolf Resorts, an operator of 11 water parks in North America, has been using them since 2006. But Disney’s global parks operation, which has an estimated 121.4 million admissions a year and generates $12.9 billion in revenue, is so huge that it can greatly influence consumer behavior.


“When Disney makes a move, it moves the culture,” said Steve Brown, chief operating officer for Lo-Q, a British company that provides line management and ticketing systems for theme parks and zoos.


Disney World guests currently plod through entrance turnstiles, redeeming paper tickets, and then decide what to ride; food and merchandise are bought with cash or credit cards. (Disney hotel key cards can also be used to charge items.) People race to FastPass kiosks, which dispense a limited number of free line-skipping tickets. But gridlock quickly sets in and most people wait. And wait.


In contrast, MyMagic+ will allow users of a new Web site and app — called My Disney Experience — to preselect three FastPasses before they leave home for rides or V.I.P. seating for parades, fireworks and character meet-and-greets. Orlando-bound guests can also preregister for RFID bracelets. These so-called MagicBands will function as room key, park ticket, FastPass and credit card.


MagicBands can also be encoded with all sorts of personal details, allowing for more personalized interaction with Disney employees. Before, the employee playing Cinderella could say hello only in a general way. Now — if parents opt in — hidden sensors will read MagicBand data, providing information needed for a personalized greeting: “Hi, Angie,” the character might say without prompting. “I understand it’s your birthday.”


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