Japan’s Cleanup After a Nuclear Accident Is Denounced

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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

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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

Label:

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..

The Lede Blog: Video of Chinese Censorship Protest

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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)

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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)

Label:




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..

Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

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Mark Holm for The New York Times


Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.







ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.




Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.


“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”


For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.


At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.


Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.


In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.


Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.


Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.


“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”


Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.


Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.


The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.


Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.


“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.


“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.


Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.


Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.


While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”


In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.


Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.


Read More..

Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

Label:

Mark Holm for The New York Times


Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.







ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.




Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.


“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”


For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.


At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.


Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.


In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.


Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.


Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.


“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”


Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.


Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.


The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.


Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.


“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.


“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.


Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.


Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.


While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”


In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.


Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.


Read More..

Ex-Officer Is First From C.I.A. to Face Prison for a Leak

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Christaan Felber for The New York Times


John Kiriakou with his daughter Kate at home in Arlington, Va., last month. He has struggled with how to explain to his children that he will be going away.







WASHINGTON — Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.





Timeline


Leak-Related Cases Prosecuted During the Obama Administration







Christaan Felber for The New York Times

Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal.






In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.


“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.


Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.


Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”


On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.


In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.


Mr. Kiriakou, 48, earned numerous commendations in nearly 15 years at the C.I.A., some of which were spent undercover overseas chasing Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He led the team in 2002 that found Abu Zubaydah, a terrorist logistics specialist for Al Qaeda, and other militants whose capture in Pakistan was hailed as a notable victory after the Sept. 11 attacks.


He got mixed reviews at the agency, which he left in 2004 for a consulting job. Some praised his skills, first as an analyst and then as an overseas operative; others considered him a loose cannon.


Mr. Kiriakou first stumbled into the public limelight by speaking out about waterboarding on television in 2007, quickly becoming a source for national security journalists, including this reporter, who turned up in Mr. Kiriakou’s indictment last year as Journalist B. When he gave the covert officer’s name to the freelancer, he said, he was simply trying to help a writer find a potential source and had no intention or expectation that the name would ever become public. In fact, it did not surface publicly until long after Mr. Kiriakou was charged.


He is remorseful, up to a point. “I should never have provided the name,” he said on Friday in the latest of a series of interviews. “I regret doing it, and I never will do it again.”


At the same time, he argues, with the backing of some former agency colleagues, that the case — one of an unprecedented string of six prosecutions under President Obama for leaking information to the news media — was unfair and ill-advised as public policy.


His supporters are an unlikely collection of old friends, former spies, left-leaning critics of the government and conservative Christian opponents of torture. Oliver Stone sent a message of encouragement, as did several professors at Liberty University, where Mr. Kiriakou has taught. They view the case as an outrage against a man who risked his life to defend the country.


Whatever his loquaciousness with journalists, they say, he neither intended to damage national security nor did so. Some see a particular injustice in the impending imprisonment of Mr. Kiriakou, who in his first 2007 appearance on ABC News defended the agency’s resort to desperate measures but also said that he had come to believe that waterboarding was torture and should no longer be used in American interrogations.


Bruce Riedel, a retired veteran C.I.A. officer who led an Afghan war review for Mr. Obama and turned down an offer to be considered for C.I.A. director in 2009, said Mr. Kiriakou, who worked for him in the 1990s, was “an exceptionally good intelligence officer” who did not deserve to go to prison.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 5, 2013

A summary that appeared with an earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the former C.I.A. operative. He is John C. Kiriakou, not Kiriako.



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Crowdfunding for Small Business Is Still an Unclear Path

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Joshua Bright for The New York Times


Candace Klein, chief of SoMoLend, in Midtown Manhattan. In starting her crowdfunding site, she sought out institutional investors that don’t face the same limits that individual investors do.







RYAN CALDBECK was stumped. A director at a private equity firm, he was taking part in a panel discussion at a consumer goods conference last summer in New York when an entrepreneur raised his hand with a question: Where could a young company with just a few million dollars in sales go for money to grow?








Librado Romero/The New York Times

Zak Normandin expanded his Little Duck Organics food company with financing found through CircleUp.






Mr. Caldbeck and his peers on the panel fumbled for a response. The fact is, most private equity investors and venture capitalists won’t touch a consumer products company until it has surpassed $10 million in sales — anything else is too small to bother with.


The best advice the panel could offer was for the entrepreneur to tap his credit cards.


“The purpose of the panel was to help entrepreneurs raise money, but we had no answers,” Mr. Caldbeck remembers. “That’s when I knew that there is a big issue here.”


That big issue caused Mr. Caldbeck to leave his job to start CircleUp, a company that aims to connect up-and-coming consumer products companies with investors.


Right now, the people allowed to invest through CircleUp must be accredited, meaning they have a high net worth. CircleUp hopes that soon not just the wealthy few, but the general public — whether friends, family members, customers, Facebook friends, or even total strangers — will be able to invest in deserving companies through a hot new area of finance known as crowdfunding.


To its advocates, crowdfunding is a way for capital-starved entrepreneurs to receive financing that neither big investors nor lenders are willing or able to provide. To others, it represents a potential minefield that could help bad businesses get off the ground before they eventually fail, and in some cases could even ensnare unsophisticated investors in outright fraud.


Those fears are partly why the Securities and Exchange Commission has delayed rules allowing crowdfunding that were supposed to take effect this month as part of the JOBS Act (Jump-Start Our Business Start-Ups), signed by President Obama last April. The S.E.C. is wary of loosening investor protections that have been in place since the 1930s.


Despite the uncertainty, the outlines of a new industry are emerging as a few crowdfunding start-ups have found ways to raise money within current rules. They include companies like CircleUp and SoMoLend, which lends money to small, Main Street-type businesses that typically wouldn’t interest private investors.


By themselves, of course, a few start-ups can’t completely democratize finance. But they begin to illuminate what the future of crowdfunding could look like, as the debate continues over a vast widening of the private investor pool.


Mr. Caldbeck formed CircleUp last fall along with Rory Eakin, a former business school classmate who was working for a philanthropic foundation. Through their start-up, the two men seek to finance food, personal care, apparel and pet-related companies, often with an environmental or social bent.


CircleUp considers applications from companies with $1 million to $10 million in revenue. Companies whose applications are accepted make their pitches to investors behind a firewall on the CircleUp Web site, offering equity stakes in return for capital. CircleUp, which helps companies raise up to $3 million, takes a small cut of the money.


Under current federal regulations, CircleUp wouldn’t be able to arrange such deals on its own. But it struck a partnership with W. R. Hambrecht, a registered broker-dealer that can handle investments from accredited, or high-net-worth, individuals whom the S.E.C. considers sophisticated enough to invest in private companies.


“Living here in Silicon Valley, a lot of people don’t understand the need,” Mr. Caldbeck says. “If you’re a tech company with a good idea, you can raise money. But it’s a different story for food, agriculture, retail and other consumer-oriented businesses.”


Mr. Caldbeck sees a big opportunity. Consumer goods companies account for a sizable portion of the nation’s businesses, yet very little capital — from private equity funds or from accredited investors — flows to them, he says.


What’s more, only a tiny percentage of those who qualify as accredited investors actually invest in private companies, he says. (These are people with a net worth of at least $1 million, not including their primary residence, or who have earned more than $200,000 — $300,000 for couples — in each of the last two years.)


Amy Cortese is the author of “Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From It.”



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