Samsung Drops Action to Block Apple in Europe

PARIS — Samsung said Tuesday that it had dropped its request for a ban on sales of certain Apple phones and tablet computers in Europe, a sharp tactical turn in a patent war that the companies have been fighting on multiple fronts around the world.

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, had been seeking injunctions in a number of countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, contending that Apple, Samsung’s biggest rival in the smartphone market, had infringed on Samsung patents.

The move came only a day after a ruling in a related case in San Francisco, where a U.S. District Court judge rejected a request by Apple, which is based in California, for an injunction to block sales of certain Samsung devices. The decision followed a previous jury ruling that Samsung had violated Apple patents.

After the latest twist in the European case, Samsung said it had acted “in the interest of protecting consumer choice.” Analysts said other factors might have been in play, including a possible nudge from the European Commission.

In January, the commission opened a formal antitrust investigation of Samsung’s terms for licensing patents covering wireless technologies. Under a previous agreement, Samsung had pledged to make the patents available to competitors on “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms.

“The scope of what was withdrawn precisely matches the area in which the European Commission has been investigating,” said Florian Müller, a patent consultant in Germering, Germany. “It’s not just that the plot is thickening; in my view, there can be no other plausible view than that there is pressure from Brussels.”

The commission had said previously that it was concerned about possible abuse of patents like the ones at issue in the Apple-Samsung injunction request, those covering technologies needed for a device to function. Without some of these “standard essential patents” from Samsung, for example, phones cannot connect to high-speed wireless networks.

“Regulators have been saying, if the patent holders try to abuse these patents, then they are going to get in trouble,” Mr. Müller said.

The commission declined to comment directly on whether there might be a link between Samsung’s announcement Tuesday and the antitrust case in Brussels. “We take note of this development,” said Antoine Colombani, the spokesman for the E.U. competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia. “Our investigation is ongoing.”

Samsung, meanwhile, said it could not comment on the proceedings. It said it was “fully co-operating with the European Commission.”

“Samsung remains committed to licensing our technologies on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, and we strongly believe it is better when companies compete fairly in the marketplace, rather than in court,” it said in a statement.

There has been speculation that Samsung and Apple have been in talks to try to reach a settlement, though the broad scale of the litigation between the two companies, with lawsuits seeking sales bans or damages continuing on several continents, could make that challenging.

“We cannot comment on details of ongoing legal proceedings, but we believe a commercial resolution is achievable,” Samsung said in a statement.

Alan Hely, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment.

The announcement by Samsung does not end litigation between the two companies in Europe. Samsung said it planned to pursue lawsuits seeking damages from Apple for what it contends is patent infringement.

Apple and Samsung have also been battling over other patents, covering nonessential features of their devices, like design.

Apple, too, has previously secured bans on the sale of certain Samsung products. Last year, for example, a court in Düsseldorf ruled that Samsung could not sell one of its Galaxy tablet devices in Germany because it bore too close a resemblance to the iPad 2 from Apple.

While some analysts cited regulatory pressure as a possible reason for Samsung’s decision Tuesday, others said the company might have decided that the lawsuits were simply a distraction. Samsung’s phones, especially its Galaxy S3, have been selling well.

In the third quarter, the S3 surpassed the iPhone 4S to become the world’s best-selling smartphone, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

“Maybe the market was telling them that they were succeeding and their time was better spent promoting sales of their product,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research.

James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels.

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Influx of Cash in Asia Raises Familiar Worries

HONG KONG — To all the concerns that cloud Asia’s growth prospects next year — the fiscal measures set to take effect in the United States, the euro zone debt crisis and the uncertain growth trajectories of China and Japan — add one more: a renewed flood of cash into some of the region’s more dynamic economies.

Asia’s fast-growing economies have weathered a tough 2012 relatively well, and economists say that unless the U.S. and euro zone economies take a sharp hit in 2013, the region could pick up steam again next year.

But that good news comes with a price tag. Analysts have begun to warn recently that Asia’s relative economic buoyancy could once again attract large amounts of cash, possibly leading to a repeat of what happened two years ago.

Back then, big inflows, mostly from the West, caused many emerging-market currencies to surge and prompted talk of “currency wars” as central bankers scrambled to keep their currencies from rising too fast.

Now, with growth in Asia picking up, and central banks in developed nations stepping up their efforts to oil the wheels of their beleaguered economies, the influx of cash is again starting to have worrying side effects.

Property prices, for example, have risen across much of the region. The South Korean won has climbed more than 5 percent against the U.S. dollar since late August. The Philippine peso has risen about 4 percent, to its highest level since early 2008. The Taiwan dollar, the Thai baht and the Malaysian ringgit also have strengthened.

“We could be heading back towards where we were in 2010,” said Frederic Neumann, regional economist at HSBC in Hong Kong. “Capital is pouring back into emerging Asia.”

Next year, said Rob Subbaraman, chief economist for Asia ex-Japan at Nomura in Hong Kong, “could be a bumper year” for net capital inflows. “The stars are aligned.”

For many parts of the world, a tide of capital would be a blessing. The United States, Europe and Japan have spent much of the last four years trying to reinvigorate their economies by lowering rates and injecting cash into strained financial systems through purchases of financial assets.

More is in store.

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it would continue to buy large amounts of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities until the job market improved.

Likewise, the Japanese central bank may step up its existing asset-buying and lending program at a policy meeting this week, analysts believe.

Over the years, some of that liquidity has seeped into parts of the world where growth is faster and returns are higher. The amounts of money flowing into developing Asia have, at times, been vast. During the rush in late 2009 and 2010, David Carbon, an economist at DBS in Singapore, estimated, the region saw inflows to the tune of $2 billion a day, for example.

Economists at the Japanese bank Nomura estimate that between early 2009 and mid-2011, net capital inflows to Asia, excluding Japan, totaled $783 billion — far more than the $573 billion that came in during the preceding five years.

The renewed inflows in recent months have not been so large. Moreover, not all countries have attracted cash in equal measure. Investors have been wary this year of India’s seeming inability to push through important economic overhauls, for example. That has caused the rupee to sag more than 11 percent since February. China, meanwhile, restricts incoming foreign investments to relatively small amounts.

Elsewhere in the region, however, there are signs of renewed pressure.

An index compiled by Nomura that gauges capital inflow pressures has risen in recent months, said Mr. Subbaraman, the Nomura economist. Although it remains below where it was during the spike in 2010, it is now at its highest since May 2011.

Said Mr. Neumann of HSBC, “currencies have strengthened despite resistant central banks, real estate markets are frothing away, and lending to consumers and companies has accelerated.”

All of that has reignited the concerns that traditionally accompany major — and potentially fickle — capital inflows.

For exporters, stronger currencies are a headache, as they make the exporters’ goods more expensive for consumers elsewhere.

For ordinary citizens, rising property prices make homes increasingly unaffordable. Soaring property prices are also vulnerable to painful reversals if conditions change.

Underscoring that point, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday that a sharp rise in house prices in Hong Kong raised “the risk of an abrupt correction.”

Likewise, a big increase this year in corporate bond issuance — while a positive in that it supports growth and diversifies corporate funding — bears risks.

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Recipes for Health: Not-Too-Sweet Wok-Popped Coconut Kettle Corn

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Not-too-sweet coconut kettle corn.

I’m usually not a big fan of sweet kettle corn, but I wanted to make a moderately sweet version because some people love it and it is nice to be able to offer a sweet snack for the holidays. I realized after testing this recipe that I do like kettle corn if it isn’t too sweet. The trick to not burning the sugar when you make kettle corn is to add the sugar off the heat at the end of popping. The wok will be hot enough to caramelize it.

2 tablespoons coconut oil

6 tablespoons popcorn

2 tablespoons raw brown sugar

Kosher salt to taste

1. Place the coconut oil in a 14-inch lidded wok over medium heat. When the coconut oil melts add a few kernels of popcorn and cover. When you hear a kernel pop, quickly lift the lid and pour in all of the popcorn. Cover, turn the heat to medium-low, and cook, shaking the wok constantly, until you no longer hear the kernels popping against the lid. Turn off the heat, uncover and add the sugar and salt. Cover again and shake the wok vigorously for 30 seconds to a minute. Transfer the popcorn to a bowl, and if there is any caramelized sugar on the bottom of the wok scrape it out. Stir or toss the popcorn to distribute the caramelized bits throughout, and serve.

Yield: About 12 cups popcorn

Advance preparation: This is good for a few hours but it will probably disappear more quickly than that.

Nutritional information per cup: 59 calories; 3 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 0 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 8 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram dietary fiber; 1 milligram sodium (does not include salt to taste); 1 gram protein

 

​Up Next: Granola

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

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Recipes for Health: Not-Too-Sweet Wok-Popped Coconut Kettle Corn

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Not-too-sweet coconut kettle corn.

I’m usually not a big fan of sweet kettle corn, but I wanted to make a moderately sweet version because some people love it and it is nice to be able to offer a sweet snack for the holidays. I realized after testing this recipe that I do like kettle corn if it isn’t too sweet. The trick to not burning the sugar when you make kettle corn is to add the sugar off the heat at the end of popping. The wok will be hot enough to caramelize it.

2 tablespoons coconut oil

6 tablespoons popcorn

2 tablespoons raw brown sugar

Kosher salt to taste

1. Place the coconut oil in a 14-inch lidded wok over medium heat. When the coconut oil melts add a few kernels of popcorn and cover. When you hear a kernel pop, quickly lift the lid and pour in all of the popcorn. Cover, turn the heat to medium-low, and cook, shaking the wok constantly, until you no longer hear the kernels popping against the lid. Turn off the heat, uncover and add the sugar and salt. Cover again and shake the wok vigorously for 30 seconds to a minute. Transfer the popcorn to a bowl, and if there is any caramelized sugar on the bottom of the wok scrape it out. Stir or toss the popcorn to distribute the caramelized bits throughout, and serve.

Yield: About 12 cups popcorn

Advance preparation: This is good for a few hours but it will probably disappear more quickly than that.

Nutritional information per cup: 59 calories; 3 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 0 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 8 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram dietary fiber; 1 milligram sodium (does not include salt to taste); 1 gram protein

 

​Up Next: Granola

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

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Bangladesh Factory Fire Caused by Gross Negligence

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Criminal charges for “unpardonable negligence” should be brought against the owner of the Bangladeshi garment factory where a fire last month killed 112 people, according to a preliminary report from a government inquiry submitted Monday.

“The owner of the factory cannot be indemnified from the death of large numbers of workers from this fire,” Main Uddin Khandaker, the official who led the inquiry, said in an interview. “Unpardonable negligence of the owner is responsible for the death of workers.”

The Nov. 24 fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory, where workers were making clothes for global retailers like Walmart and Sears, has focused attention on the unsafe work conditions and low wages at many garment factories in Bangladesh, the No. 2 exporter of apparel after China. The Tazreen Fashions fire also has exposed flaws in the system that monitors the industry’s global supply chain: Walmart and Sears say they had no idea their apparel was being made there.

Mr. Khandaker submitted a 214-page report to Bangladesh’s Home Ministry on Monday, saying that the factory owner, Delowar Hossain, and nine of his midlevel managers and supervisors prevented employees from leaving their sewing machines even after a fire alarm sounded.

Mr. Hossain could not be reached for comment.

The report also stated that the fire was “an act of sabotage,” but did not provide any evidence of who or why someone might have committed arson at the factory, a finding that some labor advocates found unconvincing.

“They don’t say who did it, they don’t say where in the factory it was done, they don’t say how they learned it,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a monitoring group based in Washington. “Regardless of what sparked the fire, it is clear that the unsafe nature of this factory and the actions taken by management once the fire started were the primary contributors to the horrendous death toll.”

Bangladeshi officials have been under intense domestic and international pressure to investigate the blaze and to bring charges against those deemed responsible. Families of the victims have demanded legal action against Mr. Hossain, the owner. Labor advocates have argued that the global brands using the factory also shared in the responsibility for the tragedy.

Fires have been a persistent problem in Bangladesh’s garment industry for more than a decade, with hundreds of workers killed over the years. Mr. Khandaker said his inquiry recommended the creation of a government task force to oversee regular inspections of factories and uphold the rights of workers.

Bangladesh has more than 4,500 garment factories, which employ more than 4 million workers, many of them young women. The industry is crucial to the national economy as a source of employment and foreign currency. Garments comprise about four-fifths of the country’s manufacturing exports, and the industry is expected to grow rapidly.

But Bangladesh’s manufacturing formula depends on keeping wages at rock bottom and restricting the labor rights of workers. The minimum wage in the garment industry is $37 a month; unions are almost nonexistent; and garment workers have taken to the streets in recent years in sometimes violent protests over wages and work conditions.

Workers at Tazreen Fashions had staged small demonstrations in the months before the fire, demanding back wages they were owed. On the night of the fire, more than 1,150 workers were inside the eight-story building, working overtime shifts to fill orders for various international brands. Fire officials say the fire broke out in the open-air ground floor where large mounds of fabric and yarn were illegally stored; Bangladeshi law requires that such flammable materials be stored in an enclosed room with fireproof walls.

The blaze quickly spread across the length of the ground floor — roughly the size of a football field — as fire and toxic smoke filtered upward through the building’s three staircases. The factory lacked a sprinkler system or an outdoor fire escape; employees were supposed to use interior staircases, and many escaped that way.

But on some floors, managers ordered workers to ignore a fire alarm and stay at work. Precious minutes were lost. Then, as smoke and fire spread throughout the building, many workers were trapped, unable to descend the smoke-filled staircases and blocked from escape by iron grilles on many windows. Desperate workers managed to break open some windows and leap to the roof of a nearby building and safety. Others simply jumped from upper floors to the ground.

“We have also found unpardonable negligence of midlevel officials at the factory,” Mr. Khandaker said. “They prevented workers from coming down. We recommend taking proper legal measures against them.”

Mr. Khandaker listed a host of violations at Tazreen Fashions: managers on some floors closed collapsible gates to block workers from running down the staircases; the ground-floor warehouse was illegal and the building’s escape plan was improper; and the factory lacked a required closed-circuit television monitoring system. None of the fire extinguishers in the factory appeared to have been used on the night of the fire, suggesting poor preparedness and training.

Moreover, Mr. Khandaker said the factory lacked the required fire safety certificate. It had applied for an annual renewal but a certificate had not yet been issued.

Asked about the allegation of sabotage, Mr. Khandaker said that investigators found no evidence of an electrical short circuit, and that eyewitnesses had suggested possible foul play. He said the report recommends a full criminal investigation into the matter.

“It seems to us that it was sabotage,” he said. “Somebody set the fire.”

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Jim Yardley from New Delhi. Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting from New York.

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Nickelodeon and PBS Pursue Preschool Apps Alongside TV Shows

In 2014, the preschool cable network Nick Jr. plans to introduce a television show featuring a little boy, his miniature pet dragon and a magic stick.

But the show, “Wallykazam,” will not be new to users of smartphones and tablets. Educational applications built around it will start appearing in app stores late next year, making “Wallykazam” Nickelodeon’s first major show to be introduced as a mobile product first, said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president and general manager for digital media.

Driving the change, at Nickelodeon and other preschool television brands, are parents who are increasingly putting mobile devices into preschoolers’ hands and laps.

According to new research commissioned by Sesame Workshop, producer of PBS’s “Sesame Street,” mobile device ownership is booming as TV set ownership declines. Eighty-eight percent of the parents surveyed said they owned a television, down from 95 percent in 2010.

Twenty-one percent said their children first interacted with “Sesame Street” someplace other than television, with YouTube and PBS.org the top alternative sources. (PBS said separately that its free PBS Kids Video app, which has been downloaded 2.4 million times, reached 120 million streams of PBS Kids shows in November, surpassing 100 million for the first time.)

“On-air does still drive digital,” said Diana Polvere, Sesame Workshop’s vice president for market research, citing the 79 percent of viewers who still come to television first. But given the rapid changes, she said, Sesame’s research will now be conducted every six months instead of every two years.

Nickelodeon’s research, done in April and updated in October, shows striking growth in educational app use. In October, 27 percent of United States households with children ages 3 to 5 had an iPad, up from 22 percent in April. In those households, 40 percent of preschoolers used the iPad for educational apps, up from 27 percent in April.

The study also found that Apple device users were willing to pay 15 to 23 percent more for educational apps than for general apps.

“Parents want to feel good about what they are purchasing and downloading for their kids,” said Scott Chambers, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for digital worldwide distribution. Adding an educational element to an entertaining app, he said, “makes everybody feel better.”

Parents’ feelings aside, apps are strong educational tools, said Lesli Rotenberg, who oversees PBS’s children’s programming, including its more than two dozen apps.

While television “is somewhat of a passive experience” for children, she said, interactive apps give them immediate feedback and tailored experiences that become more difficult as they gain skills.

Though numerous producers are entering the app business, three of the top 10 paid educational apps in the iTunes store last week were Nickelodeon’s. They included the $1.99 Bubble Guppies: Animal School Day, already profitable six weeks after its introduction, Nickelodeon said. A Team Umizoomi math app was still in the top 10 after a year on the market.

Originally scheduled for August release, the Bubble Guppies app, filled with the same silly jokes as the show, was revised after focus group testing with preschoolers showed, among other things, that their small fingers had a hard time maneuvering a virtual latch and that the children wanted more control over their exploration.

“We were hearing kids say in testing: ‘I want to play with the dolphin. I want to play with the penguin,’ ” said Jordana Drell, Nickelodeon’s senior director of preschool games.

Nickelodeon’s educational apps normally take six to eight months to create and, even with lush graphics like the shimmery underwater background in Bubble Guppies, cost about half as much as a single episode of one of the company’s preschool shows, officials said.

The Bubble Guppies creators, Jonny Belt and Robert Scull, said they approached the app as they would a television episode, reading the 90-page game document aloud, technical material and all. “That really brings it to life, and you know what you’re getting,” Mr. Scull said.

A Nickelodeon rival, Disney Junior, has taken a less integrated approach to apps, developing television shows first and apps later to expand on the content, said Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney/ABC Television Group.

The free Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Road Rally Appisode, released in May, is a repurposed version of an episode of the “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” television program, reconfigured to be highly interactive.

It proved so popular that “we definitely feel there’s something here we want to invest in,” Mr. Cheng said.

Although the app had educational elements, it was not intended as such. The sprawling Walt Disney Company has published educational apps through other units, however.

Since releasing its first app three years ago, Sesame Workshop has added more than three dozen, including Elmo Loves 123s, which was introduced Dec. 10 and draws on new research for developers and parents that Sesame plans to release this week. App users, Mr. Chambers said, tend to come back regularly, a loyalty that executives have noted as they consider future expansion in the category.

The rush to apps is changing the development process for PBS, which will no longer develop television-only shows, Ms. Rotenberg said. PBS’s newest property, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” came out as an app — already the company’s third best-selling — the day of the television premiere in September.

Ms. Rotenberg said her team had “sent away” a number of producers who came to PBS with ideas for television shows with no thought-out mobile component, telling them, “ ‘Come back when you have a plan.’ ”

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Newtown has Mixed Feelings About the Media Horde in Its Midst

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Wolf Blitzer understands that his presence here is not appreciated by some local people, who wish that the TV satellite trucks, and the reporters who have taken over the local Starbucks, would go away and leave them to ache, grieve and mourn in peace.

But he also knows that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School ranks with the national tragedies he has covered: Oklahoma City, Sept. 11, Virginia Tech. So for now the most intimate and heartbreaking of catastrophes and the insatiable, unwieldy beast of global news media are locked in an awkward union in a bucolic New England town that never expected to encounter either.

Mr. Blitzer, the longtime CNN anchor, said the few exhortations to go home he had heard while working here had been far outnumbered by comments from people who thank him for telling Newtown’s story sensitively and who want the world to know what happened here. Still, he said, Newtown is providing a particularly vivid laboratory of how the media report this kind of tragedy.

“If you have people bringing dolls or flowers to makeshift memorials and they’re crying, that’s a powerful image, it’s part of this story, it’s part of our history right now, and we have to deal with it,” he said on Sunday.

This town, of course, has been transformed by unimaginable tragedy. But in a more mundane and presumably transitory way, Newtown and particularly the small community of Sandy Hook have also been transformed by those coming to report on it, a news media presence that has clogged quiet roads, established glowing encampments of lights and cameras, and showed up in force at church services and public memorials.

Nearly every newscast on CNN since Friday night has been broadcast from Newtown. The same has been true for nearly every network television morning and evening newscast. Coverage of other events has been minimized if not scrapped entirely, at least for a few days — sometimes with breathlessly inaccurate results about the massacre. On Friday, there was a succession of reports about the shooting and the gunman that turned out to be wrong: reports about the gunman’s name, about his mother’s occupation, about how he got into the building.

The confusion continued into Saturday when NBC broadcast an exclusive report that the gunman had an altercation with four staff members at the school the day before the shootings, according to state and federal officials. A revised account played down the possibility of an altercation.

Reporters like NBC News’s justice correspondent, Pete Williams, tried to be transparent about the fact that many initial details about the shooting came from anonymous and occasionally contradictory sources.

When Adam Lanza’s brother Ryan’s name circulated widely as the gunman’s name on Friday afternoon, he said “we are being told the name Ryan,” but cautioned that “at the end of the day that name might be wrong.”

Despite the errors, Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, the nonprofit journalism organization, said he was “touched and impressed by the nonstop coverage so far.” He said he had not seen any children interviewed without a parent nearby.

Some news organizations said they had specific rules about such interviews. A spokeswoman for CBS News said that its policy “is not to interview children under the age of 18 before getting permission from a parent.”

While police officials have asked — at times almost begged — the news media to respect the privacy of families that have lost a loved one, reporters and bookers do have to ask. Thus the sight of big-name anchors going door to door this weekend, seeking interviews. They said they know when no means no.

“We are always extremely sensitive to the feelings and the wishes of loved ones,” said Tom Cibrowski, the executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America.” But, he added, “There is a time when some do choose to honor their child or the victim, and we can provide a forum.”

Most moving, perhaps, was the eloquent tribute that Robbie Parker paid Saturday in front of TV cameras to his dead 6-year-old daughter, Emilie Alice. Nonetheless, in Newtown, a police officer has been assigned to keep unwelcome visitors away at the homes of the families of each of the dead children.

Some here have had gripes about individual reporters pushing cameras and microphones into the faces of unwilling residents, particularly those leaving the firehouse in grief on Friday after receiving news about what happened at the school.

Still, Michael Burton, the second assistant chief at the firehouse, who said he witnessed some intrusive reporters, also said the coverage has been a blessing beyond sharing the town’s grief.

A fire department in Texas, learning of the Christmas tree sale at his firehouse, bought the two trees that became the center of a memorial at the bridge leading up to the school. Someone in North Carolina bought another 26, one for each of the slain children and school personnel, all now adorned in a green tribute leading up to the school.

“If not for the media coverage, none of that would have happened,” he said.

On Sunday morning, Eric Mueller, an art teacher at a private school in New Haven, began hammering 27 wooden angels that he and eight friends had constructed into the ground in front of his house in Newtown. Within minutes, he was joined by more than a dozen reporters and photographers. “My wife said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t talk to the press,’ ” he said.

He said his gesture was for the residents of Newtown, not for the world. But he said he had no problem with the news media descending on the town.

“I’m fine with it right now. I’ll go back in the house and be done with it and let the angels speak for themselves.”

Peter Applebome reported from Newtown, Conn., and Brian Stelter from New York.

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Experts Say Thimerosal Ban Would Imperil Global Health Efforts

A group of prominent doctors and public health experts warns in articles to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics that banning thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines, would devastate public health efforts in developing countries.

Representatives from governments around the world will meet in Geneva next month in a session convened by the United Nations Environmental Program to prepare a global treaty to reduce health hazards by banning certain products and processes that release mercury into the environment.

But a proposal that the ban include thimerosal, which has been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in multidose vials of vaccines, has drawn strong criticism from pediatricians.

They say that the ethyl-mercury compound is critical for vaccine use in the developing world, where multidose vials are a mainstay.

Banning it would require switching to single-dose vials for vaccines, which would cost far more and require new networks of cold storage facilities and additional capacity for waste disposal, the authors of the articles said.

“The result would be millions of people, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, with significantly restricted access to lifesaving vaccines for many years,” they wrote.

In the United States, thimerosal has not been used in children’s vaccines since the early 2000s after the Food and Drug Administration and public health groups came under pressure from advocacy groups that believed there was an association between the compound and autism in children.

At the time, few, if any, studies had evaluated the compound’s safety, so the American Academy of Pediatrics called for its elimination in children’s vaccines, a recommendation that the authors argued was made under the principle of “do no harm.”

Since then, however, there has been a lot of research, and the evidence is overwhelming that thimerosal is not harmful, the authors said. Louis Z. Cooper, a former president of the academy and one of the authors, said that if the members had known then what they know now, they never would have recommended against using it. “Science clearly documented that we can’t find hazards from thimerosal in vaccines,” he said. “The preservative plays a critical role in distribution of vaccine to the global community. It was a no-brainer what our position needed to be.”

Advocacy groups have lobbied to include the substance in the ban, and some global health experts worry that because the government representatives due to vote next month are for the most part ministers of environment, not health, they may not appreciate the consequences of banning thimerosal in vaccines. The Pediatrics articles are timed to raise a warning before the meeting.

“If you don’t know about this, and you’re a minister of environment who doesn’t usually deal with health, it’s confusing,” said Heidi Larson, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project.

In an open letter to the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Health Organization this year, the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs, a nonprofit group that supports the ban, disputed the assertion that scientific studies had offered proof that thimerosal is safe, and urged member states to include it in the ban.

That it is being used in developing countries, but not developed countries, is an “injustice,” the letter said.

The World Health Organization has also weighed in. In April, a group of experts on immunization wrote in a report that they were “gravely concerned that current global discussions may threaten access to thimerosal-containing vaccines without scientific justification.”

Dr. Larson said she believed that the efforts of pediatricians and global health experts, including the W.H.O., would influence the negotiations in Geneva and that the compound would most likely be left out of the final ban.

“You can’t just pull the plug on something without having a plan for an alternative,” she said.

Read More..

Experts Say Thimerosal Ban Would Imperil Global Health Efforts

A group of prominent doctors and public health experts warns in articles to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics that banning thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines, would devastate public health efforts in developing countries.

Representatives from governments around the world will meet in Geneva next month in a session convened by the United Nations Environmental Program to prepare a global treaty to reduce health hazards by banning certain products and processes that release mercury into the environment.

But a proposal that the ban include thimerosal, which has been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in multidose vials of vaccines, has drawn strong criticism from pediatricians.

They say that the ethyl-mercury compound is critical for vaccine use in the developing world, where multidose vials are a mainstay.

Banning it would require switching to single-dose vials for vaccines, which would cost far more and require new networks of cold storage facilities and additional capacity for waste disposal, the authors of the articles said.

“The result would be millions of people, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, with significantly restricted access to lifesaving vaccines for many years,” they wrote.

In the United States, thimerosal has not been used in children’s vaccines since the early 2000s after the Food and Drug Administration and public health groups came under pressure from advocacy groups that believed there was an association between the compound and autism in children.

At the time, few, if any, studies had evaluated the compound’s safety, so the American Academy of Pediatrics called for its elimination in children’s vaccines, a recommendation that the authors argued was made under the principle of “do no harm.”

Since then, however, there has been a lot of research, and the evidence is overwhelming that thimerosal is not harmful, the authors said. Louis Z. Cooper, a former president of the academy and one of the authors, said that if the members had known then what they know now, they never would have recommended against using it. “Science clearly documented that we can’t find hazards from thimerosal in vaccines,” he said. “The preservative plays a critical role in distribution of vaccine to the global community. It was a no-brainer what our position needed to be.”

Advocacy groups have lobbied to include the substance in the ban, and some global health experts worry that because the government representatives due to vote next month are for the most part ministers of environment, not health, they may not appreciate the consequences of banning thimerosal in vaccines. The Pediatrics articles are timed to raise a warning before the meeting.

“If you don’t know about this, and you’re a minister of environment who doesn’t usually deal with health, it’s confusing,” said Heidi Larson, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project.

In an open letter to the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Health Organization this year, the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs, a nonprofit group that supports the ban, disputed the assertion that scientific studies had offered proof that thimerosal is safe, and urged member states to include it in the ban.

That it is being used in developing countries, but not developed countries, is an “injustice,” the letter said.

The World Health Organization has also weighed in. In April, a group of experts on immunization wrote in a report that they were “gravely concerned that current global discussions may threaten access to thimerosal-containing vaccines without scientific justification.”

Dr. Larson said she believed that the efforts of pediatricians and global health experts, including the W.H.O., would influence the negotiations in Geneva and that the compound would most likely be left out of the final ban.

“You can’t just pull the plug on something without having a plan for an alternative,” she said.

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In Europe, a Push for Higher Phone Fees

BERLIN — When the authorities have tinkered with European telecommunications rules, it has usually been to lower prices for consumers, whether through retail price controls on mobile roaming fees or mandatory cuts in regulated interconnection charges.

But this year, to encourage more investment in high-speed broadband networks, regulators are considering helping the biggest operators increase a main source of income: the rent they receive from rivals that lease their landline grids.

The architect of the plan, Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s digital agenda commissioner, has pitched the increases as part of a broader package to stimulate spending while preserving competition and consumer choice.

The plan, however, has alarmed operators that would have to pay the higher charges, like the British mobile operator Vodafone. Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone, said that the plan to increase the fees collected by former monopolies, including BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Télécom, KPN, Telecom Italia and Telefónica, could lead to a “re-monopolization” of the business.

Mr. Colao said he was worried that landline operators would use the additional revenue to lower their own prices and try to squeeze competitors like Vodafone.

“Increasing the incentive to invest is a good thing,” Mr. Colao said. But now Ms. Kroes must “demonstrate that these new criteria won’t contaminate the competitive arena in Europe,” he said.

Under the plan, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, would begin regulating the fees that mobile operators routinely pay to lease the grids of landline operators.

In much of the world, running telecommunications lines to homes and businesses has traditionally been the domain of a local monopoly, or sometimes a duopoly in the case of telephones and cable television in the United States. Until 1998, countries in the European Union were allowed to maintain national monopolies for this “local loop” to the consumer.

With deregulation, however, the former monopolies were required to unbundle the cost of the local loop and offer it to competitors, thus allowing companies like Vodafone to enter the market.

Despite 14 years of deregulation, and the addition of more than 100 mobile operators in Europe, the former monopolies still supply the majority of fixed-line services in their home countries. In Spain, Telefónica has more than 70 percent of this business.

Until now, these unbundling rates have been set by national regulators, and the average monthly cost per customer in the European Union stands at €8.62, or $11.35. The fee typically makes up a third or more of monthly landline phone bills in Europe and also influences wireless prices because it affects mobile operator costs. The fee ranges from €4.20 in Slovakia to €12.41 in Ireland.

Mrs. Kroes proposed to lower, not raise, unbundling fees in September 2011, to make the old landline networks less profitable for big operators and to encourage them to invest in new networks. But the former monopolies protested, and after personal appeals from executives at big operators, in some cases accompanied by their investors, she reversed course.

Ms. Kroes is proposing that each country within the European Union be required to set its fee within the range of €8 to €10 per month, according to a copy of her proposal obtained by the International Herald Tribune. The new range would most likely require 10 E.U. countries where the fee is currently below this range to raise it, in some cases only slightly, and in others, sharply.

The increases would in all likelihood be passed on to consumers. The rise in fees could be greatest in Eastern Europe, where regulators have been most aggressive in setting low leasing rates to encourage competition. The level of leasing charges could double in Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia.

Mr. Colao, the Vodafone chief executive, said Ms. Kroes needed to tighten the legal safeguards in her plan to prevent big operators from exploiting access to landline networks.

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