Egypt’s Government Apologizes After a Beating Is Televised

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

A funeral protest on Saturday in Cairo for Mohammed Hussein Korani, 23, who died Friday night in clashes with the police. More Photos »

CAIRO — Egypt’s interior minister offered a rare apology on Saturday after officers under his command were seen on television beating a naked man two blocks from the presidential palace. But under what his family said was police coercion, the victim, Hamada Saber, said in an interview later that the officers had been helping rather than attacking him.

The spectacle of the beating quickly revived fury at Egypt’s police force, whose record of brutality helped set off the revolt against Hosni Mubarak, the former president, and served as a reminder that nearly two years later, the new president, Mohamed Morsi, had taken few steps to reform the police.

Mr. Morsi’s office issued a statement saying it was “pained by the shocking footage.”

More than 50 people have been killed over the last 10 days in fighting in several Egyptian cities, in some of the worst violence since the fall of Mr. Mubarak in 2011. The beating of Mr. Saber has provoked a different kind of outrage, crystallizing for many the collapse of order and civility that has derailed Egypt’s transition from its authoritarian past.

In the shifting versions of the attack given on Saturday, it was hard to know exactly what happened.

In video images, a group of riot police officers are heard cursing at Mr. Saber on Friday night as they beat him on the ground and drag him across a street to an armored vehicle. A witness, Mai Sirry, said that when she saw Mr. Saber, his pants were around his knees. In its initial statement, the Interior Ministry said it regretted the beating and called it an “individual attack” that did not reflect police doctrine.

Later, though, in a television interview, Mr. Saber gave an account of the beating from his hospital bed in which he said the officers had come to help as he was running from a group of protesters who had stripped and robbed him. They had apparently thought he was an officer, he said, and left him alone after deciding he was “just an old man.”

“I was afraid,” he said, adding that as he ran away from the protesters, officers came to help. He ran from them too, but they pulled him back, he said, telling him he would die if he did not let them help him.

A woman who identified herself as Mr. Saber’s daughter Randa, speaking Saturday on another Egyptian channel, said her father was being prompted to lie during the interview and was “afraid to talk.”

“We were with him” when he was attacked on Friday, she said. “They took his clothes off and started kicking him, beating him,” she said, referring to the police. “They dragged him and put him in the car. All this happened. What he says are lies.”

Speaking to local news media on Saturday, the interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, said that after Mr. Saber was released from the hospital, he would invite him to the ministry’s offices to offer his apologies. He repeated Mr. Saber’s account, though he still acknowledged that the officers’ conduct was “excessive” and said he had ordered an investigation.

The latest violence deepened the sense of crisis in Egypt, and it undermined efforts by the country’s quarreling political forces to settle their differences. After the clashes, supporters and opponents of President Morsi blamed each other.

On Saturday, just days after leaders of a secular-leaning opposition coalition sat down at a rare meeting with representatives of Mr. Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, the opposition group released a statement saying it was “aligned” with those who want “to topple the regime of tyranny, and domination of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In Tahrir Square early on Saturday morning, Mr. Morsi’s prime minister, Hesham Qandil, bore the brunt of the antigovernment anger. He was forced to cut short his visit to protest tents in the square after he was heckled, according to state media. His office said Mr. Qandil left to avoid creating a “pretext” for violence.

In a speech later in the day, the prime minister acknowledged the widespread perception that both the government and opposition were losing control. “Let us admit that the government, all the political forces, all the parties failed in containing the youth,” he said. “This is something that we all have to work on.”

At least one person was killed in the clashes on Friday, which broke up what had been a peaceful afternoon sit-in, when a small group of protesters, some wearing masks, tried to ram the gates of the presidential palace, according to video of the episode.

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.

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Slipstream: Consumer Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart

OVER the years, the United States and Europe have taken different approaches toward protecting people’s personal information. Now the two sides are struggling to bridge that divide.

On this side of the Atlantic, Congress has enacted a patchwork quilt of privacy laws that separately limit the use of Americans’ medical records, credit reports, video rental records and so on. On the other side, the European Union has instituted more of a blanket regulatory system; it has a common directive that gives its citizens certain fundamental rights — like the right to obtain copies of records held about them by companies and institutions — that Americans now lack.

Even so, United States officials maintain that the divergent approaches are equal. “The sum of the parts of U.S. privacy protection is equal to or greater than the single whole of Europe,” says Cameron F. Kerry, general counsel of the Commerce Department. He is overseeing an agency effort to help develop voluntary, enforceable codes of conduct for industry groups, like app developers, whose collection and use of consumer data are now unregulated.

Europe begs to differ.

“Yes, we share the basic idea of privacy,” says Peter Hustinx, Europe’s data protection supervisor. “But there is a huge deficit on the U.S. side.”

Alas, the data-control divide appears to be widening.

A year ago, the European Commission proposed comprehensive reforms to strengthen online privacy rights — changes that could have big repercussions for American technology companies and marketers that operate in the European Union. American officials, trade groups and tech executives have responded by taking frequent treks to Brussels and other cities, where they have urged regulators and legislators to reconsider the one-regulation-fits-all-data approach. What’s at stake, American industry representatives say, is nothing less than a free and commerce-friendly Internet.

“The ecosystem of the Internet is very delicate,” says Kevin Richards, senior vice president of federal government affairs at TechAmerica, a trade group that represents companies like Google and Microsoft. “It’s not wise to have an overly broad, prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach that would hinder or undermine the ability of companies to innovate in a global economy.”

European Union members already have data protection laws in place, based on a directive from 1995 that laid out principles for the collection of personal information. The proposed new rules would strengthen some existing provisions. They would standardize data protections across the 27 member states. They would also provide some new rights, such as “data portability” — the right of consumers to easily transfer their text files, photographs and videos from one social network, or e-mail or cloud storage service, to another. And they would subject companies that violate the rules to penalties of up to 2 percent of their annual global revenue.

Asked for comment, Viviane Reding, the vice president of the European Commission and the architect of the proposed regulation, said in a statement: “The main problem is that our rules predate the digital age and it became increasingly clear in recent years that they needed an update.” She continued: “That is why I have proposed a root-and-branch reform of the E.U.’s data protection rules — currently under discussion in the European Parliament and the Council of the E.U. — that will both protect citizens’ rights and facilitate business in the digital age.”

BUT some provisions seem too rigid to United States officials and trade groups. They argue that the American approach — sector-specific privacy laws, in addition to industry self-regulation and enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission — is more nimble.

“We hope that Europe will move in the direction of those multistakeholder standards, and not standards which are not flexible and don’t move at Internet speed,” says Mr. Kerry, who has taken at least four trips to European cities in the last year to discuss these issues.

From the perspective of some European legislators, however, United States representatives seem more interested in protecting commerce than consumers. The full-court American effort may have backfired, they say, pushing some European officials toward even broader measures. Last month, Jan Philipp Albrecht, a representative of the European Parliament who reviewed the draft regulation, proposed additional rights for citizens — like the right not to be subject to consumer profiling.

“My impression is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Commerce Department are mostly just following the interests of Silicon Valley,” he says. “This leads to heavy pressure on the European regulator, I can say.”

But Mr. Kerry says the United States must make its views known if the systems are to work in concert.

“I know that some people have raised eyebrows at our involvement; I make no apologies,” Mr. Kerry says. “We in the United States and countries and businesses around the world are stakeholders in this process. This has an important impact on the global economy.”

The solution to this trans-Atlantic clash may simply be American ingenuity.

Last year, President Barack Obama proposed a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” that would give Americans many of the same baseline protections that the draft European rule proposes to reinforce. These include the right of access to records that companies hold about them, the right to correct those records and the right to have limits on the personal data that companies collect and keep. Administration officials said they would work with Congress on legislation based on those rights and to extend oversight to industries not currently covered by federal privacy laws.

A coalition of more than a dozen American advocacy groups said it would send a letter on Monday to senior Obama administration officials, seeking a meeting to ensure that American policy makers’ efforts in Europe “are not averse to the views expressed by the president.” The coalition includes the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.

“Does the Obama administration really want to be on the opposite side of the European effort to upgrade and modernize its privacy law which is at its core about the protection of a fundamental freedom?” asks Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

European officials hold out hope that Congress will enact baseline consumer privacy protections for Americans.

“This development — which is much welcomed in Europe — shows that we have much in common,” Ms. Reding of the European Commission said in her statement, speaking of the privacy bill of rights. “Convergence is springing up and synergies are possible.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the town in which Mr. Sams died. It was Fayetteville, Ga., not Lafayette, Ga.

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the town in which Mr. Sams died. It was Fayetteville, Ga., not Lafayette, Ga.

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Americans Closest to Retirement Were Hardest Hit by Recession

David Maxwell for The New York Times

Susan Zimmerman, 62, has three part-time jobs.

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Arynita Armstrong, 60, at her home in Willis, Tex. She last worked five years ago. “When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” she says.

In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.

These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.

Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”

New research suggests that they may die sooner, because their health, income security and mental well-being were battered by recession at a crucial time in their lives. A recent study by economists at Wellesley College found that people who lost their jobs in the few years before becoming eligible for Social Security lost up to three years from their life expectancy, largely because they no longer had access to affordable health care.

“If I break my wrist, I lose my house,” said Susan Zimmerman, 62, a freelance writer in Cleveland, of the distress that a medical emergency would wreak upon her finances and her quality of life. None of the three part-time jobs she has cobbled together pay benefits, and she says she is counting the days until she becomes eligible for Medicare.

In the meantime, Ms. Zimmerman has fashioned her own regimen of home remedies — including eating blue cheese instead of taking penicillin and consuming plenty of orange juice, red wine, coffee and whatever else the latest longevity studies recommend — to maintain her health, which she must do if she wants to continue paying the bills.

“I will probably be working until I’m 100,” she said.

As common as that sentiment is, the job market has been especially unkind to older workers.

Unemployment rates for Americans nearing retirement are far lower than those for young people, who are recently out of school, with fewer skills and a shorter work history. But once out of a job, older workers have a much harder time finding another one. Over the last year, the average duration of unemployment for older people was 53 weeks, compared with 19 weeks for teenagers, according to the Labor Department’s jobs report released on Friday.

The lengthy process is partly because older workers are more likely to have been laid off from industries that are downsizing, like manufacturing. Compared with the rest of the population, older people are also more likely to own their own homes and be less mobile than renters, who can move to new job markets.

Older workers are more likely to have a disability of some sort, perhaps limiting the range of jobs that offer realistic choices. They may also be less inclined, at least initially, to take jobs that pay far less than their old positions.

Displaced boomers also believe they are victims of age discrimination, because employers can easily find a young, energetic worker who will accept lower pay and who can potentially stick around for decades rather than a few years.

“When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” said Arynita Armstrong, 60, of Willis, Tex. She has been looking for work for five years since losing her job at a mortgage company. “They’re afraid to hire you, because they think you’re a health risk. You know, you might make their premiums go up. They think it’ll cost more money to invest in training you than it’s worth it because you might retire in five years.

“Not that they say any of this to your face,” she added.

When older workers do find re-employment, the compensation is usually not up to the level of their previous jobs, according to data from the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

In a survey by the center of older workers who were laid off during the recession, just one in six had found another job, and half of that group had accepted pay cuts. Fourteen percent of the re-employed said the pay in their new job was less than half what they earned in their previous job.

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Death Toll in Mexico City Explosion at 33

Ginnette Riquelme for The New York Times

Workers surveyed the damage that resulted from an explosion at the headquarters of a state-owned oil company, Pemex, in Mexico City Friday.

MEXICO CITY — Hundreds of rescue workers ended their search for survivors on Friday at the site of an explosion that tore through an office building of Mexico’s state-owned oil company a day earlier, as the death toll rose to 33. The head of the company said early indications about the cause suggested that it was an accident.

“All lines of investigation are open; we are not going to discount anything,” said Emilio Lozoya Austin, chief executive of the oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. “But what it seems like, from what experts can observe, is that it was an accident.”

Mr. Lozoya, at a news conference Friday morning and in interviews throughout the day, emphasized that the investigation was continuing, and that no clear cause had been found. Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, visiting a hospital where many of the 120 people who were injured by the explosion were being treated, asked the public to avoid speculating on the cause.

Nonetheless, in a country with little trust in its institutions, the pressure on the government to provide details is mounting as reporters and Twitter users ask pointed questions about why officials have not said what exploded or why. Rumors of bombs and of censored Twitter accounts of Pemex employees swirled online Friday, leading many to note that the blast revealed once again that when there is a lack of transparency, the void tends to be filled with imagined horrors.

“We are all into conspiracy theories,” said Gabriel Guerrero, a political analyst in Mexico City. While the government seems to have communicated relatively well so far, regularly updating the death toll, he said, “the real test will come over the next few days and weeks.”

Independent explosives experts said it often takes more than 48 hours to identify the cause of a large blast that, in this case, collapsed several floors and shattered windows across a wide area. Jimmie C. Oxley, a chemistry professor and explosives expert at the University of Rhode Island, said by telephone that while some forensic investigators may have an idea by now of what happened, it often takes more time to come to a conclusion with colleagues.

All of this is made more difficult by the amount of rubble at the site, Professor Oxley said, noting that photographs posted online showed a tangle of concrete, wires and collapsed floors.

Typically, she said, explosions at buildings are caused by one of two things: gas that is suddenly ignited, or a bomb. Bombs tend to create craters and cratered metal that point investigators to a specific location. If, for example, a basement garage was affected at the Pemex building, Professor Oxley said, investigators would look for signs of a car bomb.

“It’s hard to imagine a bomb carried by a person being very large,” she said.

Gas explosions, like the one that killed several hundred people in Guadalajara in 1992, can be harder to identify because there is not necessarily a single ignition point. Also, Professor Oxley said, since the explosion on Thursday occurred on the lower floors of a building (an administration building near the Pemex tower), “it’s important to know if you had the heating system of the building there, or how that was arranged.”

Government officials have said the blast happened in an area near the base of the building where workers checked their timecards. Before news of the explosion emerged, company officials said there was an electricity problem there, but Professor Oxley said electricity alone would lead to a fire, not an explosion, though if gas had been leaking, a small spark could have been enough to set off a colossal blast.

Still, not all investigations lead to answers. Recalling the case of an explosion at a mall in the Philippines that she was consulted on, Professor Oxley said she could not confirm that there were explosives present based on samples from the scene. “I don’t know there ever was a conclusion,” she said.

Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.

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Google Submits Proposal in Bid to Resolve E.U. Antitrust Case

BRUSSELS — European officials said on Friday that Google had submitted proposals aimed at ending a three-year antitrust case focused on its search service, but the offer did not prevent rivals from seeking to prolong its legal entanglements.

Neither the company nor European officials were willing on Friday to describe the settlement proposals. But Google has been expected to offer revisions to the way it conducts its search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that its activities were unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.

The two parties are still negotiating the terms of the proposed settlement, and a final agreement is expected in the coming week, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity while the agreement was still under discussion.

Google’s competitors did not take a wait-and-see attitude. After filing a new complaint against Google on Thursday, Icomp, an industry group backed by Microsoft, urged European regulators on Friday to approach the company’s proposal with caution.

“To be seen as a success, any settlement must include specific measures to restore competition and allow other parties to compete effectively on a level playing field,” David Wood, legal counsel for Icomp, said in a statement.

Michael Weber, chief executive of an online mapping service called Hot-map.com and a member of Icomp who is based in Germany, said he hoped Google’s offer would be “enough to restore competition,” but “if not, we will take into account all legal options we have and we won’t hesitate to use them.”

Icomp’s new antitrust complaint contended that Google was using exclusive agreements to discourage advertisers and publishers from using competing advertising platforms and search services like Bing and Yahoo.

If critics of Google in Europe remain dissatisfied, they can sue the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and accuse it of failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Final judgments in such cases can take years.

Google reached one settlement on Friday. In France, it agreed to pay 60 million euros, or $82 million, into a fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet. Publishers in France had been pushing for Google to pay them licensing fees for the headlines and summaries of articles in its search engines.

The commission has taken a tougher line with Google than has the United States Federal Trade Commission. The F.T.C. decided in January that Google had not broken antitrust laws after a 19-month inquiry into how the company operated its search engine.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and the top European antitrust official, has been formally investigating Google since November 2010. He has insisted that Google make changes to the most sensitive area of its business, online search.

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts Google’s offer, the company will avoid further investigation. Additional inquiry could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of Google’s annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding, which could restrict its activities in Europe.

“We continue to work cooperatively with the commission,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said on Friday.

Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Mr. Almunia, said at a news conference on Friday that Google had sent a detailed proposal that the commission was analyzing before taking further steps.

There is no formal timeline in European antitrust cases, so negotiations could continue.

“I can’t anticipate the timing or the substance of the analysis,” Mr. Colombani said.

Mr. Almunia could still take a far more confrontational stance with Google by sending the company a statement of objections, the European equivalent of formal antitrust charges. But that is something Mr. Almunia has been eager to avoid because he favors nonlitigious solutions to antitrust problems, particularly in the fast-moving technology field, to prevent cases from dragging on for years.

The next stage for Mr. Almunia is to assess Google’s offer and decide whether it addresses his concerns sufficiently. Then he will invite another, formal submission from the company, which would be sent to the complainants for review.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting from San Francisco.

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The New Old Age: Caregiving, Laced With Humor

“My grandmother, she’s not a normal person. She’s like a character when she speaks. Every day she’s playing like she’s an actress.”

These are words of love, and they come from Sacha Goldberger, a French photographer who has turned his grandmother, 93-year-old Frederika Goldberger, into a minor European celebrity.

In the photos, you can see the qualities grandson and grandmother have in common: a wicked sense of humor, an utter lack of pretension and a keen taste for theatricality and the absurd.

This isn’t an ordinary caregiving relationship, not by a long shot. But Sacha, 44 years old and unmarried, is deeply devoted to this spirited older relation who has played the role of Mamika (“my little grandmother,” translated from her native Hungarian) in two of his books and a photography exhibition currently under way in Paris.

As for Frederika, “I like everything that my grandson does,” she said in a recent Skype conversation from her apartment, which also serves as Sacha’s office. “I hate not to do anything. Here, with my grandson, I have the feeling I am doing something.”

Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.

“I was very depressed because I lived for working,” she told me in our Skype conversation.

Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a “Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor,” and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man’s relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas?

This Budapest-born baroness, whose family had owned the largest textile factory in Hungary before World War II, was a natural in front of the camera, assuming a straight-faced, imperturbable comic attitude whether donning a motorcycle helmet and goggles, polishing her fingernails with a gherkin, wearing giant flippers on the beach, lighting up a banana, or dressed up as a Christmas tree with a golden star on her head. (All these photos and more appear in “Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother,” published in the United States last year.)

“It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored,” said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. “Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together.”

“He thought it was very funny to put a costume on me,” said Frederika. “And I liked it.”

People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.

His grandmother was a super hero of sorts, because she had helped save 10 people from the Nazis during World War II, said Sacha. He also traced inspiration to Stan Lee, a Jewish artist who created the X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four for Marvel comics. “I wanted to ask what happens to these super heroes when they get old in these photographs with my grandmother.”

Lest this seem a bit trivial to readers of this blog, consider this passage from Sacha’s introduction to “Mamika: My Might Little Grandmother”:

In a society where youth is the supreme value; where wrinkles have to be camouflaged; where old people are hidden as soon as they become cumbersome, where, for lack of time or desire, it is easier to put our elders in hospices rather than take care of them, I wanted to show that happiness in aging was also possible.

In our Skype conversation, Sacha confessed to anxiety about losing his grandmother, and said: “I always was very worried about what would happen if my grandmother disappeared. Because she is exceptional.”

“I am not normal,” Frederika piped up at his side, her face deeply wrinkled, her short hair beautifully coiffed, seemingly very satisfied with herself.

“So, making these pictures to me is the best thing that could happen,” Sacha continued, “because now my grandma is immortal and it seems everyone knows her. I am giving to everybody in the world a bit of my grandma.”

This wonderful expression of caring and creativity has expanded my view of intergenerational relations in this new old age. What about you?

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The New Old Age: Caregiving, Laced With Humor

“My grandmother, she’s not a normal person. She’s like a character when she speaks. Every day she’s playing like she’s an actress.”

These are words of love, and they come from Sacha Goldberger, a French photographer who has turned his grandmother, 93-year-old Frederika Goldberger, into a minor European celebrity.

In the photos, you can see the qualities grandson and grandmother have in common: a wicked sense of humor, an utter lack of pretension and a keen taste for theatricality and the absurd.

This isn’t an ordinary caregiving relationship, not by a long shot. But Sacha, 44 years old and unmarried, is deeply devoted to this spirited older relation who has played the role of Mamika (“my little grandmother,” translated from her native Hungarian) in two of his books and a photography exhibition currently under way in Paris.

As for Frederika, “I like everything that my grandson does,” she said in a recent Skype conversation from her apartment, which also serves as Sacha’s office. “I hate not to do anything. Here, with my grandson, I have the feeling I am doing something.”

Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.

“I was very depressed because I lived for working,” she told me in our Skype conversation.

Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a “Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor,” and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man’s relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas?

This Budapest-born baroness, whose family had owned the largest textile factory in Hungary before World War II, was a natural in front of the camera, assuming a straight-faced, imperturbable comic attitude whether donning a motorcycle helmet and goggles, polishing her fingernails with a gherkin, wearing giant flippers on the beach, lighting up a banana, or dressed up as a Christmas tree with a golden star on her head. (All these photos and more appear in “Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother,” published in the United States last year.)

“It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored,” said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. “Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together.”

“He thought it was very funny to put a costume on me,” said Frederika. “And I liked it.”

People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.

His grandmother was a super hero of sorts, because she had helped save 10 people from the Nazis during World War II, said Sacha. He also traced inspiration to Stan Lee, a Jewish artist who created the X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four for Marvel comics. “I wanted to ask what happens to these super heroes when they get old in these photographs with my grandmother.”

Lest this seem a bit trivial to readers of this blog, consider this passage from Sacha’s introduction to “Mamika: My Might Little Grandmother”:

In a society where youth is the supreme value; where wrinkles have to be camouflaged; where old people are hidden as soon as they become cumbersome, where, for lack of time or desire, it is easier to put our elders in hospices rather than take care of them, I wanted to show that happiness in aging was also possible.

In our Skype conversation, Sacha confessed to anxiety about losing his grandmother, and said: “I always was very worried about what would happen if my grandmother disappeared. Because she is exceptional.”

“I am not normal,” Frederika piped up at his side, her face deeply wrinkled, her short hair beautifully coiffed, seemingly very satisfied with herself.

“So, making these pictures to me is the best thing that could happen,” Sacha continued, “because now my grandma is immortal and it seems everyone knows her. I am giving to everybody in the world a bit of my grandma.”

This wonderful expression of caring and creativity has expanded my view of intergenerational relations in this new old age. What about you?

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Washington Posts Joins List of Media Hacked by the Chinese

SAN FRANCISCO — The question is no longer who has been hacked. It’s who hasn’t?

The Washington Post can be added to the growing list of American news organizations whose computers have been penetrated by Chinese hackers.

After The New York Times reported on Wednesday that its computers as well as those of Bloomberg News had been attacked by Chinese hackers, The Wall Street Journal said on Thursday that it too had been a victim of Chinese cyberattacks.

According to people with knowledge of an investigation at The Washington Post, its computer systems were also attacked by Chinese hackers in 2012. A former Post employee said there had been hacking attempts at the Washington Post for at least four years, but none targeted the company’s newsroom. Then, last year, newsroom computers were found to be communicating with Web servers that were traced back to China, according to people with knowledge of the Post investigation who declined to speak on the record.

Jennifer Lee, a spokeswoman for the Post Company, said that the “company did not have anything to share at this time.”

Security experts said that starting in 2008, Chinese hackers began targeting American news organizations as part of an effort to monitor coverage of Chinese issues.

In a report for clients in December, Mandiant, a computer security company, said that over the course of several investigations it found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen e-mails, contacts and files from more than 30 journalists and executives at Western news organizations, and had maintained a “short list” of journalists for repeated attacks.

Among those targeted were journalists who had written about Chinese leaders, political and legal issues in China and the Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE.

The Times reported on Wednesday that Bloomberg L.P. was also attacked by Chinese hackers after its Bloomberg News unit published an article last June about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March.

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Hagel Offers Endorsement of U.S. Military Might

Tough Questions for Hagel at Hearing:
Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense, had some sharp exchanges with Senator John McCain.

WASHINGTON — Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense, faced sharp and sometimes angry questioning from fellow Republicans — especially his old friend Senator John McCain — at a contentious confirmation hearing on Thursday that focused on his past statements on Iran, the influence of pro-Israel organizations in Washington and the Iraq war.

Mr. Hagel, 66, a former senator from Nebraska and a decorated Vietnam veteran who would be the first former enlisted combat soldier to be secretary of defense, often seemed tentative in his responses. Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee showed him little deference, cross-examining him like prosecutors and often cutting him off.

There was dismay from Democrats and derision from Republicans about Mr. Hagel’s sometimes stumbling performance during seven and a half hours of testimony.

“I’m going to be candid,” Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat and committee member, told MSNBC. “I think that Chuck Hagel is much more comfortable asking questions than answering them.”

She added: “That’s one bad habit I think you get into when you’ve been in the Senate. You can dish it out, but sometimes it’s a little more difficult to take it.”

One Republican on the committee, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, said bluntly, “Senator Hagel did little to help himself today.”

The angriest exchange of the hearing occurred with Mr. McCain of Arizona, a fellow Vietnam veteran who was a close friend of Mr. Hagel in the Senate, but split with him because of Mr. Hagel’s skeptical views on the Iraq war. Mr. McCain was a strong supporter of the war, and like many Republicans, he still holds Mr. Hagel’s opposition against him. In 2008, Mr. Hagel did not endorse Mr. McCain for president and traveled with Mr. Obama, then a senator from Illinois, to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Hagel dodged a direct answer as Mr. McCain asked him repeatedly if history would judge whether he was right or wrong in opposing the surge in American armed forces in 2007. The escalation, along with other major factors, is credited with helping to quell the violence in Iraq at the time. When Mr. Hagel said he wanted to explain, Mr. McCain bore in.

“I actually would like an answer, yes or no,” Mr. McCain said.

“Well, I’m not going to give you a yes or no,” Mr. Hagel replied.

Mr. McCain did not let up.

“I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it,” Mr. McCain said. “And your refusal to answer whether you were right or wrong about it is going to have an impact on my judgment as to whether I vote for your confirmation or not.”

It took the next questioner, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, to draw Mr. Hagel out on the subject. “I did question a surge,” Mr. Hagel said. “I always ask the question, is this going to be worth the sacrifice?”

He said that nearly 1,200 American men and women had lost their lives in the surge and that thousands more were wounded. “I’m not that certain that it was required,” Mr. Hagel said. “Now, it doesn’t mean I’m right, doesn’t mean I didn’t make wrong votes.”

One of the most hostile questioners was Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who told Mr. Hagel to “name one dumb thing we’ve been goaded into doing because of the pressure from the Israeli or Jewish lobby.” Mr. Hagel, who in 2006 said that the “Jewish lobby” intimidates Congress, could not.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, surprised the hearing when he put excerpts from an interview Mr. Hagel gave to Al Jazeera in 2009 on a giant video screen. Although it was difficult to hear the short clips he provided, Mr. Cruz asserted that they showed Mr. Hagel agreeing with a caller who suggested that Israel had committed war crimes.

“Do you think the nation of Israel has committed war crimes?” Mr. Cruz demanded.

“No, I do not, Senator,” Mr. Hagel replied.

Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, Mark Landler and Jennifer Steinhauer.

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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

A Cyberattack From China:
TimesCast: Chinese hackers infiltrated The New York Times’s computer systems, getting passwords for its reporters and others.

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a cyberattack that caused damage at Iran’s main nuclear enrichment plant. Evidence suggests that the United States and Israel released a computer worm around 2008, not 2012.

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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DealBook: Justice Dept. Seeks to Block $20 Billion Merger of Brewers

8:57 p.m. | Updated

For more than a decade, the world’s biggest brewers have been swallowing competitor after competitor as they grapple with slowing growth in many markets. Now, the Obama administration wants to cut them off.

The Justice Department on Thursday sued to block Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $20.1 billion deal to buy Grupo Modelo, the Mexican maker of Corona beer, saying that the merger would cement Anheuser-Busch InBev’s control of the market and enable it to continue to raise beer prices. Grupo Modelo is the third-biggest beer company in the United States.

“This is the sort of product that matters to consumers,” William J. Baer, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said in a conference call with reporters. “If you have a very slight price increase that happens because of this deal, it could mean that consumers will pay billions of dollars more.”

The lawsuit is the first major roadblock in a decade of consolidation by brewers around the world, which has reduced the industry to only a few major players, primarily multinationals that own a majority of big brands.

At the top worldwide is Anheuser-Busch InBev, itself the product of a 2008 merger between a St. Louis-based icon and a Belgian-Brazilian brewing juggernaut. To compensate for slow growth in developed economies like the United States, the company has been seeking significant footholds in emerging markets like Mexico.

Since the middle of 2008, the brewer has announced more than 15 takeovers, according to Capital IQ.

The government’s lawsuit details how in California, a price war among the biggest brewers had led Anheuser to complain in internal documents that Modelo’s strategy was “eating [Budweiser’s] lunch.” According to the suit, a sales executive said that “California is a burning platform” for Anheuser.

With the lawsuit, the Justice Department is again flexing its aggressive antitrust muscle. It is the biggest deal to be opposed since 2011, when the government sued to stop AT&T’s proposed $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile USA. (Those companies abandoned the deal.)

The antitrust action is in an industry that previous administrations had allowed waves of consolidation. Anheuser-Busch InBev; the acquisitive SABMiller, which is one of MillerCoors’s parents; and Grupo Modelo have 72 percent of the $80 billion American beer market, giving them enormous power over pricing.

Despite the explosion of smaller breweries in recent years, industry analysts say that the craft beer market makes up just 6 percent of beer sales.

The biggest in the market, Anheuser — brewer of Budweiser and Stella Artois — has raised its prices with regularity every year, with MillerCoors following suit, the Justice Department said.

“Even small price increases could lead to significant harm,” Mr. Baer said.

Like AT&T, which ferociously battled the government’s case for months, Anheuser-Busch InBev has promised a fight. In a statement, the company said, “We remain confident in our position, and we intend to vigorously contest the D.O.J.’s action in federal court.”

Yet behind the scenes, the two sides will continue to try to reach a settlement.

Analysts were divided over how significant a hurdle the lawsuit posed. In a research note on Thursday, analysts at UBS wrote that the case wasn’t a “deal breaker,” expecting Anheuser to give up what they called “reasonable” concessions.

Anheuser has long pursued the benefits of consolidation, including opportunities to cut costs. Last summer, the company agreed to buy the 50 percent that it did not already own in Modelo, a deal that would give it full control of Corona, the United States’ top imported beer brand.

“In this case, there are pretty significant synergies,” said Harry Schuhmacher, the editor of Beer Business Daily. “Anheuser can afford to overpay for Modelo and is eager to.”

He added that he believed the Modelo deal was the end of beer deals for a long time, especially among the beer giants. Some consolidation could still be in store among smaller companies.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit is the first prominent antitrust action on the watch of Mr. Baer, who took over as President Obama’s top antitrust lawyer at the beginning of the year. Mr. Baer, who previously worked at the Federal Trade Commission and in private practice at the law firm Arnold & Porter, is the first permanent antitrust chief since August 2011, when Christine A. Varney stepped down.

Ms. Varney left the government to join Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where she is now leading Modelo’s antitrust defense.

The Justice Department contends that taking over full control of Modelo would give Anheuser overwhelming control both nationally and in markets like California, Texas and New York.

Mindful of potential antitrust issues, Anheuser has proposed selling Modelo’s 50 percent stake in Crown Imports, the main importer of Corona in the United States, to Constellation Brands for nearly $1.9 billion. Anheuser has said that Crown is what dictates the prices of Modelo products, and that selling the stake removes any say that it would have in the matter.

But the Justice Department called that offer a “facade,” arguing that Crown’s dependence on Modelo products makes it effectively subject to Anheuser’s wishes. The government’s lawsuit highlighted an internal e-mail from Crown’s chief executive, Bill Hackett, to employees that read, “Our #1 competitor will now be our supplier.”

Since the Modelo deal’s announcement last June, consumer advocacy groups have called for government intervention.

“Obviously, beer is different from most other goods and services because there are significant public health issues relating to alcohol,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, special counsel at the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit group that supports stronger enforcement of the antitrust laws. “But an antitrust analysis looks strictly at promoting competitive prices, product innovation and consumer choice, and this deal thwarts those objectives.”

Thursday’s lawsuit is the most prominent setback in the deal-making career of Carlos Brito, Anheuser’s chief executive. Mr. Brito helped lead the growth of AmBev, a regional Brazilian brewer, into a global giant through a successive series of takeovers.

“I’m not sure if this is the end, but Brito’s a guy who’s used to getting what he wants,” said Lew Bryson, a writer who follows the beer industry. “InBev isn’t a company that’s growing much organically. It’s grown by acquisition.”

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Transcript of Guantánamo Hearing Points to Outside Censors

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department released a transcript on Wednesday of what it said was an exchange that had been censored from the public video feed of a military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, this week. A military judge had ordered the excerpt made public.

The blocked comments came during a pretrial motions hearing on Monday in the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other detainees accused of aiding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The episode was the first public indication that censors outside the courtroom were monitoring the live video from the tribunal and that they could cut the feed, which is delayed by 40 seconds before it can be viewed by the public and reporters.

During the censored portion, according to the transcript, David Nevin, a defense lawyer, was discussing whether arguments over a motion “will turn out to be closed or secret” regarding the preservation of evidence “at a detention facility,” an issue he said was “a critical matter to Mr. Mohammed” and “central to the case as far as he is concerned.”

The lawyers then became aware that a red light had gone on, indicating that the courtroom had been closed. But the button in the courtroom had not been hit by the only previously known censor, a security officer who sits near the judge, Col. James Pohl of the Army.

Mr. Nevin was apparently referring to the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prisons in countries like Romania and Thailand where the agency once held the Sept. 11 defendants; the defense plans to argue that its clients should be spared execution because the C.I.A. tortured them. But Mr. Nevin did not mention such details, and his motion “to preserve evidence at any existing detention facility” was unclassified, Colonel Pohl said.

“If some external body is turning the commission off under their own view of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation,” the judge told government lawyers, “we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off.”

On Tuesday, Colonel Pohl read a government statement that said an “original classification authority” — apparently a reference to the C.I.A. — was also monitoring for disclosures of classified information. He insisted that the judge decided whether to close the courtroom.

It was not clear whether the offstage censors were at the base or watching remotely; the public feed is shown to reporters at Fort Meade in Maryland.

A military spokesman declined to comment.

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Facebook Beats Forecasts on Earnings and Revenue

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook made a lot of money in the last quarter. It also spent a lot. And that made investors once again cautious about the company.

After an eight-month roller coaster ride on the public markets, Facebook did well in the fourth quarter of 2012 by aggressively ramping up advertisements aimed at its users, including on mobile phones. In its financial report on Wednesday, it beat expectations, increasing revenue by a handsome 40 percent from the same period a year ago.

But its expenses also climbed rapidly as the company hired engineers and built data centers, causing profit to dip from the last quarter in 2011. With that, Wall Street lost some enthusiasm.

Facebook shares, which had closed at $31.24 on Wednesday, fell more than 3 percent in after-hours trading after the results were released.

In recent weeks, the stock had recovered much of the ground it lost in the eight months since its introduction last year.

“The quarter was a little like a cold shower after you’ve been out all night — it’s something that makes you sober up very quickly,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, adding that the numbers made it clear that Facebook intended to spend more “to go after the opportunities before them.”

In the conference call with analysts after the earnings report, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, cautioned Wall Street that profit might not grow as fast as investors would like. That, he said, was because Facebook would continue to spend money hiring people and building products for the future, like the new search tool it introduced earlier this month. “It’s important to start planting seeds,” he said.

The most closely watched part of the earnings report was how much money the company brought in from its mobile users; most people log in to the site using their cellphones. Facebook said advertising on the mobile newsfeed accounted for 23 percent of its advertising revenue, up from 14 percent in the third quarter but slightly lower than some analysts had forecast.

Mr. Zuckerberg predicted that the company would eventually make more money on every minute spent on the Facebook mobile app than on the desktop computer.

Facebook reported fourth-quarter revenue of $1.59 billion, compared with $1.52 billion predicted by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The company earned $64 million in net income, or 3 cents a share. Excluding certain items, Facebook said it had a net income of $426 million in the fourth quarter, or 17 cents a share, beating analysts’ expectations by 2 cents.

Facebook’s biggest, long-term challenge remains how to profit from the enormous piles of personal data of its one billion users without alienating them or inviting the wrath of government regulators in the United States and abroad. The company reported on Wednesday that it had 1.06 billion active users — those who log in at least once a month.

Secondarily, it must figure out a way to profit abroad. Most of its revenue still comes from North America and to a lesser extent Europe.

Despite the stock’s decline after the earnings report, it is still much recovered since last year’s slump. It opened at $38 a share last May, but shortly after that, the stock plummeted as Wall Street soured on its ability to increase profit as fast as investors wanted. Shares sank to half the public offering price last September.

But the company focused on its advertising business and released a series of new products aimed at taking on some of its biggest rivals, including Google and Apple. Mr. Zuckerberg took the initiative to reassure investors it had their interests at heart. The improvement in the share price in recent weeks suggests that the company’s charm offensive is paying off.

In the last few months, Facebook has floated several trial balloons aimed at pleasing Wall Street and, in particular, convincing investors that it can thrive in the mobile era.

It offered marketers more refined targeting options, including Facebook Exchange, which allows companies to track users as they are browsing and shopping for products around the Web and lets companies show advertisements for those products when the users log back on to Facebook.

Before Christmas last year, in a bid to step into territory dominated by Amazon, it introduced the Gifts application, which lets users buy goods and services for their Facebook friends, and in turn, share with the company an extremely valuable piece of data: their credit card numbers. The company made clear in the conference call on Wednesday that this would not be an immediate moneymaker.

Read More..

Well: Myths of Weight Loss Are Plentiful, Researcher Says

If schools reinstated physical education classes, a lot of fat children would lose weight. And they might never have gotten fat in the first place if their mothers had just breast fed them when they were babies. But be warned: obese people should definitely steer clear of crash diets. And they can lose more than 50 pounds in five years simply by walking a mile a day.

Those are among the myths and unproven assumptions about obesity and weight loss that have been repeated so often and with such conviction that even scientists like David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have fallen for some of them.

Now, he is trying to set the record straight. In an article published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine, he and his colleagues lay out seven myths and six unsubstantiated presumptions about obesity. They also list nine facts that, unfortunately, promise little in the way of quick fixes for the weight-obsessed. Example: “Trying to go on a diet or recommending that someone go on a diet does not generally work well in the long term.”

Obesity experts applauded this plain-spoken effort to dispel widespread confusion about obesity. The field, they say, has become something of a quagmire.

“In my view,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, a Rockefeller University obesity researcher, “there is more misinformation pretending to be fact in this field than in any other I can think of.”

Others agreed, saying it was about time someone tried to set the record straight.

“I feel like cheering,” said Madelyn Fernstrom, founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Weight Management Center. When it comes to obesity beliefs, she said, “We are spinning out of control.”

Steven N. Blair, an exercise and obesity researcher at the University of South Carolina, said his own students believe many of the myths. “I like to challenge my students. Can you show me the data? Too often that doesn’t come into it.”

Dr. Allison sought to establish what is known to be unequivocally true about obesity and weight loss.

His first thought was that, of course, weighing oneself daily helped control weight. He checked for the conclusive studies he knew must exist. They did not.

“My goodness, after 50-plus years of studying obesity in earnest and all the public wringing of hands, why don’t we know this answer?” Dr. Allison asked. “What’s striking is how easy it would be to check. Take a couple of thousand people and randomly assign them to weigh themselves every day or not.”

Yet it has not been done.

Instead, people often rely on weak studies that get repeated ad infinitum. It is commonly thought, for example, that people who eat breakfast are thinner. But that notion is based on studies of people who happened to eat breakfast. Researchers then asked if they were fatter or thinner than people who happened not to eat breakfast — and found an association between eating breakfast and being thinner. But such studies can be misleading because the two groups might be different in other ways that cause the breakfast eaters to be thinner. But no one has randomly assigned people to eat breakfast or not, which could cinch the argument.

So, Dr. Allison asks, why do yet another study of the association between thinness and breakfast? “Yet, I can tell you that in the last two weeks I saw an association study of breakfast eating in Islamabad and another in Inner Mongolia and another in a country I never heard of.”

“Why are we doing these?” Dr. Allison asked. “All that time and effort is essentially wasted. The question is: ‘Is it a causal association?’” To get the answer, he added, “Do the clinical trial.”

He decided to do it himself, with university research funds. A few hundred people will be recruited and will be randomly assigned to one of three groups. Some will be told to eat breakfast every day, others to skip breakfast, and the third group will be given vague advice about whether to eat it or not.

As he delved into the obesity literature, Dr. Allison began to ask himself why some myths and misconceptions are so commonplace. Often, he decided, the beliefs reflected a “reasonableness bias.” The advice sounds so reasonable it must be true. For example, the idea that people do the best on weight-loss programs if they set reasonable goals sounds so sensible.

“We all want to be reasonable,” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, when he examined weight-loss studies he found no consistent association between the ambitiousness of the goal and how much weight was lost and how long it had stayed off. This myth, though, illustrates the tricky ground weight-loss programs have to navigate when advising dieters. The problem is that on average people do not lose much – 10 percent of their weight is typical – but setting 10 percent as a goal is not necessarily the best strategy. A very few lose a lot more and some people may be inspired by the thought of a really life-changing weight loss.

“If a patient says, ‘Do you think it is reasonable for me to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ the honest answer is, ‘No. Not without surgery,’” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, “If a patient says, ‘My goal is to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ I would say, ‘Go for it.’”

Yet all this negativism bothers people, Dr. Allison conceded. When he talks about his findings to scientists, they often say: “O.K., you’ve convinced us. But what can we do? We’ve got to do something.” He replies that scientists have an ethical duty to make clear what is established and what is speculation. And while it is fine to recommend things like bike paths or weighing yourself daily, scientists must make sure they preface their advice with the caveat that these things seem sensible but have not been proven.

Among the best established methods is weight-loss surgery, which, of course, is not right for most people. But surgeons have done careful studies to show that on average people lose substanial amounts of weight and their health improves, Dr. Allison said. For dieters, the best results occur with structured programs, like ones that supply complete meals or meal replacements.

In the meantime, Dr. Allison said, it is incumbent upon scientists to change their ways. “We need to do rigorous studies,” he said. “We need to stop doing association studies after an association has clearly been demonstrated.”

“I never said we have to wait for perfect knowledge,” Dr. Allison said. But, as John Lennon said, “Just give me some truth.”

Read More..

Well: Myths of Weight Loss Are Plentiful, Researcher Says

If schools reinstated physical education classes, a lot of fat children would lose weight. And they might never have gotten fat in the first place if their mothers had just breast fed them when they were babies. But be warned: obese people should definitely steer clear of crash diets. And they can lose more than 50 pounds in five years simply by walking a mile a day.

Those are among the myths and unproven assumptions about obesity and weight loss that have been repeated so often and with such conviction that even scientists like David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have fallen for some of them.

Now, he is trying to set the record straight. In an article published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine, he and his colleagues lay out seven myths and six unsubstantiated presumptions about obesity. They also list nine facts that, unfortunately, promise little in the way of quick fixes for the weight-obsessed. Example: “Trying to go on a diet or recommending that someone go on a diet does not generally work well in the long term.”

Obesity experts applauded this plain-spoken effort to dispel widespread confusion about obesity. The field, they say, has become something of a quagmire.

“In my view,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, a Rockefeller University obesity researcher, “there is more misinformation pretending to be fact in this field than in any other I can think of.”

Others agreed, saying it was about time someone tried to set the record straight.

“I feel like cheering,” said Madelyn Fernstrom, founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Weight Management Center. When it comes to obesity beliefs, she said, “We are spinning out of control.”

Steven N. Blair, an exercise and obesity researcher at the University of South Carolina, said his own students believe many of the myths. “I like to challenge my students. Can you show me the data? Too often that doesn’t come into it.”

Dr. Allison sought to establish what is known to be unequivocally true about obesity and weight loss.

His first thought was that, of course, weighing oneself daily helped control weight. He checked for the conclusive studies he knew must exist. They did not.

“My goodness, after 50-plus years of studying obesity in earnest and all the public wringing of hands, why don’t we know this answer?” Dr. Allison asked. “What’s striking is how easy it would be to check. Take a couple of thousand people and randomly assign them to weigh themselves every day or not.”

Yet it has not been done.

Instead, people often rely on weak studies that get repeated ad infinitum. It is commonly thought, for example, that people who eat breakfast are thinner. But that notion is based on studies of people who happened to eat breakfast. Researchers then asked if they were fatter or thinner than people who happened not to eat breakfast — and found an association between eating breakfast and being thinner. But such studies can be misleading because the two groups might be different in other ways that cause the breakfast eaters to be thinner. But no one has randomly assigned people to eat breakfast or not, which could cinch the argument.

So, Dr. Allison asks, why do yet another study of the association between thinness and breakfast? “Yet, I can tell you that in the last two weeks I saw an association study of breakfast eating in Islamabad and another in Inner Mongolia and another in a country I never heard of.”

“Why are we doing these?” Dr. Allison asked. “All that time and effort is essentially wasted. The question is: ‘Is it a causal association?’” To get the answer, he added, “Do the clinical trial.”

He decided to do it himself, with university research funds. A few hundred people will be recruited and will be randomly assigned to one of three groups. Some will be told to eat breakfast every day, others to skip breakfast, and the third group will be given vague advice about whether to eat it or not.

As he delved into the obesity literature, Dr. Allison began to ask himself why some myths and misconceptions are so commonplace. Often, he decided, the beliefs reflected a “reasonableness bias.” The advice sounds so reasonable it must be true. For example, the idea that people do the best on weight-loss programs if they set reasonable goals sounds so sensible.

“We all want to be reasonable,” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, when he examined weight-loss studies he found no consistent association between the ambitiousness of the goal and how much weight was lost and how long it had stayed off. This myth, though, illustrates the tricky ground weight-loss programs have to navigate when advising dieters. The problem is that on average people do not lose much – 10 percent of their weight is typical – but setting 10 percent as a goal is not necessarily the best strategy. A very few lose a lot more and some people may be inspired by the thought of a really life-changing weight loss.

“If a patient says, ‘Do you think it is reasonable for me to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ the honest answer is, ‘No. Not without surgery,’” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, “If a patient says, ‘My goal is to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ I would say, ‘Go for it.’”

Yet all this negativism bothers people, Dr. Allison conceded. When he talks about his findings to scientists, they often say: “O.K., you’ve convinced us. But what can we do? We’ve got to do something.” He replies that scientists have an ethical duty to make clear what is established and what is speculation. And while it is fine to recommend things like bike paths or weighing yourself daily, scientists must make sure they preface their advice with the caveat that these things seem sensible but have not been proven.

Among the best established methods is weight-loss surgery, which, of course, is not right for most people. But surgeons have done careful studies to show that on average people lose substanial amounts of weight and their health improves, Dr. Allison said. For dieters, the best results occur with structured programs, like ones that supply complete meals or meal replacements.

In the meantime, Dr. Allison said, it is incumbent upon scientists to change their ways. “We need to do rigorous studies,” he said. “We need to stop doing association studies after an association has clearly been demonstrated.”

“I never said we have to wait for perfect knowledge,” Dr. Allison said. But, as John Lennon said, “Just give me some truth.”

Read More..